Snow Day

 by Dixon Hill

A snow day where you live might be a day when kids don’t have to go to school because a heavy snowfall made the roads too treacherous for safe driving.

We don’t get those kinds of snow days here.

In The Valley of the Sun, where I live, a snow day is one of those rare days when white stuff actually falls out of the sky overhead -- something that’s happened only about seven times since 1917. Yesterday would make it eight times.

Some local TV weathercasters, however, tell us that most of what fell on The Valley, yesterday. wasn’t really snow; it was “Graupel” (sounds like: graw - pull)

These TV weather actors (They’re certainly NOT meteorologists!) are from what folks around here call ‘Back East’. So, they don’t understand a basic tenet of desert life: Here in The Valley, graupel counts as snow!

The word “Graupel” does not appear in my rather antiquated unabridged dictionary, I’m afraid, which makes me want to claim that it isn’t a real word. But, unfortunately, it is. And, no, graupel is not the past perfect tense of the word grapple -- which is a shame. Instead, graupel is a word of German origin, meaning “soft hail” or “snow pellets,” according to my online research.

Erbe, Poole: USDA, ARS, EMU

Further research indicates that graupel is created when falling snowflakes come into contact with super-cooled water droplets on the way down. These droplets freeze around the snowflake, forming a sort of icy crust, or sometimes a ball of rime. On the left, you can see a magnified photo of graupel -- courtesy of the US Department of Agriculture, via Wikipedia Commons -- in which said water droplets froze on the ends of a column-shaped snowflake crystal.



Which illustrates why I claim the TV weather actors are wrong.

See, if it can be called “snow pellets,” then we call that “snow” here in a place where it almost never snows. I mean, this is a desert valley where a paper-thin coating of white, which melts within hours, makes front page headlines with multiple color photos.

Add to this: the fact that, by it’s very definition of formation, graupel contains a snowflake at the approximate center of each “snow pellet.” Then, cross index the snow in the center of that pellet, with the fact that we seldom get snow in the center of anything around here, and I think you’ll see why I think Phoenicians have earned the right to call graupel “snow.”

Maybe graupel isn’t snow in New York, Maine or Vermont (not to mention places such as Alaska), where the real white stuff can pile up in deep drifts and banks. But, these are places where they get enough precipitation that folks find it handy to categorize the types.

In Scottsdale, however, we don’t get enough precipitation to categorize. In fact, when we get any at all, my kids run out to experience the rare phenomenon of water (frozen or thawed, it doesn’t matter) falling from the sky. This is an arid land, where what usually comes down from the sky are rays of burning sunlight that spear down to cook your skin lobstershell red (not that we have any lobsters around here, outside of a seafood restaurant).

So, Graupel be damned! If there’s a snowflake in there somewhere, we call it SNOW around here.

And, while we don’t get Snow Days, when I was a kid we used to get something else.

Rain Days

To explain what this means, I’ll have to give you a quick rundown on some of the local geography, so you can understand why Rain Days occurred.

The city of Scottsdale sits just north of Tempe, the town that houses Arizona State University. A long, wide (up to a half-mile in width!) dry wash bed runs from the north to the south, right through the middle of Scottsdale, and empties into the Salt River, which used to separate Scottsdale from Tempe.

The Salt River was dammed up, east of The Valley, early in the 20th Century, to create the reservoir system of the Salt River Project (SRP), a water/power project similar to the Tennessee Valley Authority, which resulted in the Salt River running dry before it ever hit town.

Up until the 1980’s, the Salt River was normally crossed between Scottsdale and Tempe by driving along one of the many roads that ran across the dry river bottom. Only one bridge existed, back then, across the Salt River bed. This bridge, located on Tempe’s Mill Avenue, was known as the (you guessed it) Mill Avenue Bridge.

But, remember: This is the desert, a place of flash floods, where dry washes suddenly run with water five, ten, twenty feet deep -- or even deeper. And, if those reservoirs east of town got too full, SRP had to open the flood gates and let water run down through the old Salt River, in order to reduce the stress on the dams. 

Being a desert, of course, this didn’t normally cause problems, because it doesn’t usually rain very often most years. Some years, however, we get torrential downpours. And, these wet years tend to come along every three to seven years.

I grew up, and attended school, in Scottsdale. But, most of our teachers lived in the lower-rent college town of Tempe. So, when it rained for a couple of days straight, or when the snows melted up north, that big wash ran deep with water through the middle of Scottsdale, and SRP tended to open the flood gates on the Salt River, reducing traffic between the two cities to the single umbilical of the Mill Avenue Bridge, resulting in miles long traffic snarls. Consequently, most of the teachers called in to report that they couldn’t get to school on time. At which point, the Scottsdale Unified School District would call a “Rain Day,” canceling all classes.

And, my friends and I would rejoice!

Teen Fun

In high school, a friend and I used to take his truck out to one of the local washes and tow in stranded motorists. Our pay scale for the work was simple:

 (A) If the person graciously thanked us verbally, there was no bill. My buddy, who was also a mechanic, would even help motorists get their cars running if an engine had stalled.

 (B) Those who thanked us, but complained that there needed to be better signage warning people about the hazard, had to pay the bill of listening to a quick, gentle and kindly education of the many natural signs present in the area, which the driver had overlooked, in hopes s/he would see them next time and avoid a repeat occurrence.

In the belief that someone ignorant of the dangers inherent in desert washes was also ignorant of the dangers of dehydration following a breakdown in the desert, we’d usually also make sure the driver knew to carry a couple of gallons of water in the trunk, along with a jack and some 2x4’s in case they ever got stuck in the middle of nowhere -- the thought here being that we’d save a snowbird, in two cases, with one explanation.

 (C) People who seemed to take our assistance for granted, and railed against a backward place where they let wealthy motorists drive expensive cars into such deep water, were told that our towing fee was twenty bucks.

On two occasions, the driver refused to pay, at which point we explained we would then be happy to push his car back to where we’d found it, and he could hike to the nearest gas station to call a tow truck, after which he could pay a towing bill that would probably cost significantly more than twenty bucks. (In both cases, we got the twenty bucks, so I never really discovered if my buddy and I could have brought ourselves to push somebody’s car back into the water.)

Today

Sadly, for my kids, Rain Days came to an inglorious end in the late 80’s, after a rash of bridge-building broke out, and several substantial bridges spanned the Salt River bed. This, combined with the Scottsdale Greenbelt project, which turned that long, wide wash into an interlinked series of parks and golf courses with bridges across it on all major roads, made it possible for teachers to get to school -- even on the rainiest day.

My ten-year-old son finds this all very unfair. And, to add insult to injury, yesterday, when it snowed just a few blocks away, he was spending his third day home from school, sick. So, this kid who’s never seen snow, didn’t get the chance to go play in the white stuff.

The boy who has never seen snow.

To tell you the truth, I would have let him go anyway. After all, this is the desert! But, he was just about well, and I needed to be sure he’d be well enough to go to school today, because I knew I had to take my dad (who is undergoing radiation treatment, and can’t really be around sick kids right now) to two different doctor appointments.

I made the decision, to keep my son from getting his first look at snow (even if it was just graupel), so my dad could keep his appointment with the doctor who was scheduled to remove two areas of skin cancer from his back.

So, maybe you can understand why I miss the simple joys of the old Rain Day.

On a more positive note: I told my son I thought there are still enough unmarked washes around that he and his friends can go tow people out during floods, when they’re in high school.

See you in two weeks,
--Dix

I owe it all to Rilke

It is my pleasure to introduce our new blogger, Brian Thornton.  As you will learn, he is the author of several books, but I thought of him for this spot mostly because of his short stories, which include two of the best I have read in recent years: "Paper Son" in SEATTLE NOIR, and "Suicide Blonde" in AHMM.  I hope that in months to come he will write about the art of writing historical mysteries, among other topics.  And now, a big SleuthSayers welcome for the man of the hour!
— Robert Lopresti 

by Brian Thornton

First things first, I'd like to thank my new colleagues here among the SleuthSayers for their exceedingly warm welcome. It's nice to be invited to contribute, and an honor to be asked to do so here of all places. So, thanks all!

For my inaugural contribution to this blog I thought I'd talk about the power of networking. Oh sure, it's hardly a revolutionary concept that if you hope to succeed in the Brave New World of 21st century publishing you're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't get out there and meet people, make contacts, get yourself some name recognition, etc.

And over the past few years I have watched a plethora of writers work this angle with the sort of single-mindedness usually reserved for I.R.S. auditors and bomb squad technicians; all with varying degrees of success. First I hear it's about name recognition, then about platforming, then about leveraging your contacts, and then of course, the networking magic bullet du jour seems to be creating something known as a "street team."

But hey, keep checking back. I'm sure it'll be something different, some other angle, some other hook, in a month's time.

Look, I get it. With the current on-going technological revolution, publishing is undergoing a centuries-overdue market correction, and, to steal a line from Daryl Hall talking about the music industry's not dissimilar growing pains of a few years back, "There are no more gatekeepers."

So this begs the question: how do emerging authors shout loud enough to be heard among the myriad other voices in publishing's ever larger, ever louder gymnasium?

I don't have a magic bullet. What I do have is some experience, a track record, and a working theory. And since this blog is all about writing, and the craft, and (at least in part) the whole publishing game, I thought I'd share it with our readers.

So here goes: get out there, go to writing events, whether they be signings, conventions, or workshops. Once there, meet people, and be yourself.

Rinse and repeat as necessary.

That's it.

 Simple, right?

But wait, you say, I live nowhere near the big cities where these sorts of things happen, or I can't afford to go to one of the big conventions, etc., etc., etc., and so on, and so forth.

Point taken.

If you can't get out there literally, then get out there figuratively, using the tool you're currently using to read this post.

After all, that's what I did. And it lead to my first book deal. What's more, I couldn't have done it without the assistance of Rainer Maria Rilke. More on him in a bit.

Here's how it worked:

Just about a decade ago I had finally finished my first novel: an amateur sleuth piece set in a law school in the Pacific Northwest. I was quite excited to have it complete and ready for...what, I had no idea.

A friend of mine who worked in marketing told me that I needed to market my book. "I'm the author," I scoffed. "It's someone else's job to market the book."

I was, of course, incredibly naive.

A bit of research revealed a summer writers' conference, as well as several national writing groups with local presences in my area (I live in Seattle). When I signed up for that first writers' conference I was between jobs, the entrance fee wasn't cheap.

But that's another story, for another post.

Since I had written a mystery novel, I decided to join the Mystery Writers of America. Luckily they held meetings in my area, and I began attending them. I met people and was myself. I made friends. I had a good time. I networked.

One of the best-kept secrets about membership in Mystery Writers of America is its email list, EMWA. In the years since I first joined the organization EMWA has been somewhat eclipsed as a networking tool by Facebook and other forms of social media, but for me it proved invaluable.

About a year after I joined MWA, I saw a post on EMWA by someone who, in the course of responding to someone else's email to the list, remarked how much she loved the work of a German poet you likely never heard of, named Rainer Maria Rilke.

This guy:

 Interestingly enough, I also happen to be a fan of the work of Rainer Maria Rilke (In translation, I don't speak or read German). So I did what you do when you meet someone who shares an uncommon interest with you.

I struck up a conversation, and made a friend.

This new friend turned out to be an acquisitions editor for an east coast press. She's still a friend (flew out from Boston a couple of years ago to attend my wedding), and she was the person who offered me my first book deal. And my next, and then introduced me to other editors at her press, who in turn offered me still more work.

It was all nonfiction, and at first it was work for hire. But it paid pretty well (better than most mid-listers bring in these days), and most of the work was writing about things that interested me. Eventually I even worked out royalty-based deals for original ideas of my own.

 As a direct result of that first friendship I am now the author or co-author of seven books, the ghostwriter of another one, and collection editor for two vastly different anthologies.And that first editor friend? She's now my agent.

I guess what I'm saying is that time spent searching for a "magic bullet" to get you published is time wasted. I made that friendship hoping to compare notes with someone else who enjoyed "Autumn Day" and the Orpheus sonnets, not angling to meet someone who could do something for me.

So the moral of the story: get yourself out there and let those connections happen. You never know where they'll take you!

A Smelting With The Senator

by Robert Lopresti

Oh, you will laugh.  It is 4 hours before deadline and I just slipped in to make one tiny change to this blog, which I finished a week ago.   I apparently hit the wrong key because the entire damned thing just disappeared.  So I am recreating it from what I laughingly call "memory."  Wish me luck.

Note: The illustrations are, in order, a buggy, a smelter, and  a senator.  Thank you.

Last month I finished the first draft of the novel I have been working on since July.  I spent the next two weeks running it through spellcheck.  That may seem excessive, so let me explain.

I am a very slow writer.  Therefore on a first draft I don't stop for nothin'.  I see typos, glitches, malaprops, and worse but I ignore them so as not to cut what flow there is.  That means there is plenty for spellcheck to catch later.

Worse, I wrote part of the draft on my iPad.  I hate writing on my iPad because the on-screen keyboard feels all wrong and I still don't know how the Pages program wants me to do certain things. For example, I still haven't learned to  turn off the autocorrect.  As a result of that I discovered one of my characters announcing that it would be no buggy to arrange a smelting with the senator.

I think he actually meant to say it would be no biggy to arrange a meeting with the senator.  But what do I know?  I'm just the author. 

And then there is the unforgettable scene in which my hero is chased by "two guys with nuns." 

But now I am doing a fast read-through of  the book and I have discovered I love  proofing on my  iPad.  For some reason it goes much faster than on my other computers.  Maybe because the machine is designed for reading text?

Soon I will be done with the read-through and then all I will need to do is edit.  And edit.  And edit...

Readers Choice

by David Dean

In spite of earlier reports of my departure, which resulted in much joy and merry-making, I'm still here.  And, as I've warned those that have ears to listen (okay, eyes to read...but you get the point), I'm not leaving till I'm done--I need help and your going to give it to me, and even after you do, I've still got one more posting for you to get through on March 5th.  Sorry, but those are my terms.

Being a sucker for punishment, I intend to write another novel and would like to begin very soon.  I am not satisfied that I should write only one (how should I put this?) non-bestselling book, but am determined to produce another.  My theory is that I should continue to throw novels against the wall until one sticks--it's worked for others; why not me?  But that's where you come in--what should I write next?

Having outlined four different stories, I thought you might get a kick out of helping me pick one to get started on.  I like them all (though I have my favorites), but can't seem to settle on which one might be the best bet out of the chute.  So what follows are brief synopses (teasers really, as I'm withholding the conclusions) of my ideas for your consideration.  As I know we are all drawn to mystery first and foremost, I must ask you to remain open-minded about my offerings as they span four genres--consider also the commercial potential--this is a subject of which I've had very little experience.  Up until now, I've written whatever I felt like writing.  But, as I would also like for a few folks to actually read what I've written, I ask for your help.  To paraphrase Rod Serling, consider the following offerings:

Mystery Novel:  A fourteen year old girl, and her two younger siblings, arrive home from school one day just in time to save their father from hanging himself.  It is the anniversary of their mother's unsolved murder.  The eldest girl determines that she will get to the bottom of the mystery of her mother's death and enlists the aid of her eleven year old sister and nine year old brother in the cause--commands them really, as she has stepped into their mother's empty shoes.  Using the newspaper stories that covered the murder, which occurred only blocks away near the railroad track that runs by their home, as well as possible clues of a secret life that she gleans from her father's intended suicide note, she maps out an investigative strategy.  The suspects range from their father to their mother's employer, a doctor; a yet undiscovered lover (and potentially his wife), a nun who may have disapproved of mama's extracurricular activities, a violent tramp that was the police's original and favorite suspect, their grandma (dad's mom), and finally a completely unknown person.  It doesn't take long for the children to start rattling some cages, and soon, it appears that they have garnered some very unwelcome attention from a stalker with violent intentions.  But they can give as good as they get, and the culprit is eventually uncovered.

Horror Novel: A man is awakened in the middle of the night by a great sound, as if the world is cracking.  This is followed by screams, then silence.  Discovering that his wife and children are missing, he scours the house, then the neighborhood, but soon realizes that most people, and all children, have vanished.  In short order, he also discovers that those remaining are not alone; that something(s) is in the dark with them--killing them.  Over the next few days, as he struggles to survive in a world populated by demons, giants, phantoms, and monsters, he begins to understand that Judgement Day has come and gone, and that earth has been given over to hell to rule.  In a world where one can be endlessly terrified, tortured, and horribly killed, only to live again to suffer the same torments, he searches for salvation and release.  When he stumbles upon hell's only weakness, he begins to fight back, and little by little to regain his humanity, and his hope.

Speculative Fiction Novel: With a nod to Beowulf, this story centers on a young Norse Viking named Thorfinn Ratspiker.  So called because he lives in his father's barn where he excels at spearing rats with short javelins known as "darts"--a talent he picked up from their Irish slaves.  He is the illegitimate child of one of these captive women, and is small and slender, and thought to be slow-witted .  When his father, the Viking chieftain, warns him of his half-brother's impending return from raiding and his intention to remove Thorfinn from any chance of inheriting the throne, Thorfinn takes the hint and flees north.  After slaying a gigantic wolf that was terrorizing an impoverished village, he is told of a kingdom still farther north, whose king and populace are living in fear of a cannibal giant.  This bloodthirsty monster is only kept at bay by a steady sacrifice of slave children to sate his appetite.  Thorfinn, buoyed by his recent victory, and unable to return home, continues on to this kingdom to try his luck at freeing the people and to be hailed a great hero and richly rewarded.  What he discovers is that there is far more to the monster than meets the eye and that something even more sinister lies at the core of this kingdom.

Thriller Novel:  A young police officer finds out that his ne'er-do-well little sister and her sketchy boyfriend have vanished while sailing in the Bahamas.  Their boat has fetched up on a small cay in the Exuma chain without them or any clue as to what happened.  Taking a leave of absence, the officer charters a sailboat out of Miami, intending to recreate his sister's voyage based on what he knew of the couple's sail plan.  The captain, a tough old Haitian, agrees to his plan and they set off, only to discover that a large tiger shark follows in their wake--not a good omen according to the captain.  After meeting with the police in Nassau, and being assured that nothing new has been learned, they go to find the boat.  While doing so they pick up a new follower, a large black yacht, that neither draws closer nor stands farther off when they challenge.  His sister's derelict sailboat reveals nothing, but the locals assure them that it arrived on a northerly current and must have been abandoned to the south of their island.  Continuing on they stop over at a cay rumored to be a drop-off point for South American cocaine, prior to its being flown to the U.S.  Here they encounter not only only the crew of the black yacht, but a beautiful island girl in their company.  Having convinced them she is being held captive by drug-runners they help her to escape and flee southward with the yacht in pursuit.  But during the voyage, they grow suspicious that the girl may know something about the young man's missing sister, and is leading them to a similar fate on a deserted island known as Starvation Cay.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, there you have it--these are the horses in the race!  Make your pick and place your bet!  The winners will recieve an autographed copy of the book upon publication (if, and when, that ever happens)!  How can you go wrong?  But you can't win if you don't play, so think it over and let me know your thoughts in comments.  Thanks one and all!

Fast Times

By Fran Rizer

In my youth (a hundred years ago), no young lady wanted to be labeled as "fast," and I wasn't.  Yet, looking back, I did seem to always be in a hurry.  I started school a year ahead, finished high school in three years and my first college degree in three years, which put me in a high school classroom teaching senior English at age nineteen.  The older I grow, the more I realize how truly little I knew back then.

For my newest "baby" to be delivered around October since it's a Christmas story, it needs to be completed by June.  This didn't scare me because books two and three were written and edited in six months each, but it did start me thinking about how long people spend writing a book.




Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell spent from 1926 to 1934 writing Gone With the Wind, working steadily except for brief periods of discouragement in 1927 and 1934.  Harper Lee devoted three years to producing To Kill a Mockingbird.  More recently, Heidi Durrow says she worked on The Girl Who Fell from the Sky for thirteen years.

Anthony Burgess

What's the other extreme?  Who are the writers who claim to have churned out best sellers in very little writing time? 





Anthony Burgess said that A Clockwork Orange was "knocked off for money in three weeks."  But more impressive than that is the backstory.

In 1959, Burgess was told that he had an inoperable brain turmor and would be dead within a year.  Hoping to provide for his wife after his death, Burgess wrote five novels in the next twelve months. A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962.  Burgess lived another thirty years (died in 1993) and left more than thirty novels.

Mickey Spillane wrote his best seller I the Jury in nine days.  It sold seven million copies in three years.

It's said that The Running Man  took Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman) only three nights.  There are some claims though that a lot of it was lifted from previous manucripts King wrote.

Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac's actual writing time for On the Road  is touted to have been three weeks, but he'd spent seven years traveling the USA and making notes.  Another interesting fact about On the Road is that Kerouac wrote it on a 119-foot long scroll of paper so that he didn't have to keep inserting sheets into his typewriter.  The scroll  has been exhibited in museums and libraries around the world.

On the end of the scroll is a note in Kerouac's handwriting.  He states that a cocker spaniel ate the last lines, so no one knows the original final words.  That sounds an awful lot like some Colonel Parker business to me, and if you believe it's the gospel truth, please let me know because I've got a bridge for sale in New York, and I'll give you a real deal on it!

Until we meet again, take care of . .  .you! 

The Reappearance of Ellery Queen

by Leigh Lundin

Today we bring you announcements. Two fine writers are joining SleuthSayers: Terence Faherty and Brian Thornton. You'll be learning more about them in the coming weeks, but they are taking center stage as Deborah Elliott-Upton and David Dean take sabbaticals.

David has asked for time off to write another novel. If his first is a clue, it's going to be terrific. As you probably know, David stepped down as a Jersey Shore police chief to join our fabulously highly paid staff of authors. We've all benefitted from his experience and his kind and gentle professional manner.

Deborah has been with John, Rob, and me since the beginning, the early years of Criminal Brief. She's finally taking time off for classes, but rumor has it she's been seen around town driving a fancy sports car. We've enjoyed the lessons she's shared with us as a teacher, as a writer, and as a friend. We're going to miss Deborah and David, but expect them to return from time to time.

Ellery Queen

I've always preferred fair play mysteries. To me, all mysteries should be fair play. This brings me to Emma Pulitzer of Open Road IntegratedMedia who sent me a gracious note asking SleuthSayers to mention they are republishing Ellery Queen novels in eBook form. Says Emma:

According to Otto Penzler of the Mysterious Press, “Ellery Queen clearly is, after Edgar Allen Poe, the most important American in mystery fiction.”

The master of the “fair play” mystery, Ellery Queen’s classic whodunits, starring the mystery author/sleuth of the same name, made the character the most famous fictional detective of the 1930s and 1940s.

Written by two Brooklyn-born cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, the stories were an instant hit and adapted into radio, television, film, comics, and games.

Open Road Media and MysteriousPress.com are pleased to announce the release of twelve of these important titles, including The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934), The American Gun Mystery (1933), and The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1940).

We have created an original mini-documentary about the crime-writing duo, featuring Dannay and Lee’s sons and Otto Penzler. The video can be viewed here and on YouTube. We hope you enjoy it!

Ellery Queen is the pen name of two cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, as well as the name of their famous fictional detective. Legendary editor Otto Penzler of Mysterious Press believes, "After Poe, I think it's true that Ellery Queen was the most significant and important writer of mystery fiction in America." In this video, Penzler and the authors' sons, Richard Dannay and Rand Lee, speak about the lasting influence of the Ellery Queen "fair play" mysteries.

Ellery Queen novels republished thus far include:

• The Chinese Orange Mystery
• The American Gun Mystery
• The Dutch Shoe Mystery
• The Egyptian Cross Mystery
• The Siamese Twin Mystery
• The French Power Mystery
• The Greek Coffin Mystery
• The Spanish Cape Mystery
• Cat of Many Tails
• Ten Days’ Wonder
• And on the Eighth Day
• The Adventures of Ellery Queen

Bear in mind one of the advantage of digital books is that most are searchable. If you're preparing an article, dissertation or term paper on the subject, these eBooks are the way to go.

Warning

I like Ellery Queen but my friend, colleague, and Dannay/Lee expert Dale Andrews loves Ellery Queen. If you spot him whilst visiting the eBookstore, I recommend clearing a path. Happy reading!

And the Beat Goes On

As most of you know, author Robert B. Parker passed away in 2010. Parker was a prolific writer, turning out some 68 novels in two different genres--three, I suppose, if you count Young Adult (Edenville Owls). But the crime novel was his forte, and three of his four "series" were in the mystery genre. The protagonists of two of those three series--Spenser and Jesse Stone--successfully made the transition to TV, and the first installation of his Virgil Cole/Everett Hitch Western series was adapted into the critically-acclaimed feature film Appaloosa.  (Parker's third mystery series featured female P.I. Sunny Randall and included half a dozen novels, none of which has yet been adapted to either the big or small screen.)

The purpose of this column, though, is not to discuss Parker's work. At least not specifically. What I'd like to talk about today are three recent efforts to extend his work, and to keep alive most of the beloved-by-millions Parker characters.

To this date, three authors have been given permission to continue writing novels based on Parker's characters and settings: Ace Atkins for the Spenser series, Michael Brandman for Jesse Stone, and Robert Knott for Cole/Hitch. It would appear they are all well qualified for such a task. Atkins is a journalist and bestselling mystery/suspense author, Brandman co-wrote and co-produced (with Tom
Selleck) the Jesse Stone TV episodes, and Knott co-wrote and co-produced (with Ed Harris) Appaloosa. Since Parker's death, there have so far been four Parker-inspired novels published by the new authors, the first three of which were Lullaby (Atkins), Killing the Blues (Brandman), and Ironhorse (Knott).

I, for one, was thrilled to learn that these wonderful characters had been granted a new lease on life. The question, of course, is Are the new novels any good? Well, I just finished Ironhorse last night, so I've now read all of those first three--and here are my humble opinions on each.

Lullaby

In this novel Spenser winds up helping a kid, which has worked well in the past--and it works here too. I won't dwell further on the plot; let me just say that Ace Atkins did what I thought was a great job with Parker's writing style. The almost-entirely-dialogue scenes, the spare and simple language, the action sequences, the fast-paced narration--all of this was well done. Spenser's strange relationship with Hawk rang true, his personal code of honor came into play on several occasions, and even though Susan Silverman was featured, she was--thank God--less nauseating than usual. This was a darn good book. I remember reading someplace that Atkins doesn't sound like someone copying Parker; he sounds like Parker.

Killing the Blues

While this one didn't impress me quite as much as Lullaby did, I enjoyed it nonetheless. The only things I found a bit jarring were that (1) it was a little more violent than most of the Stone novels, (2) it involved a lot less "thinking" on Jesse's part (which is one of the things he's really good at), and (3) Jesse didn't seem to carry around quite as much emotional baggage as he usually does. Jesse's faults--his brooding over his now-distant ex-wife, his drinking problem, etc.--aren't something I particularly like, but they do help make him what he is. Even so--as I said--I found the novel interesting and entertaining, and Brandman writes a smooth story. I will happily buy the next one in the series when it comes along.

Ironhorse

I really liked this novel. I'm a sucker for Westerns anyway--I'd probably write more Western stories than mysteries if there were a market for them--and I thought this one was intelligent, authentic, and great fun to read. The terse conversations between Marshal Cole and Deputy Hitch were done extremely well, and the settings were so real I felt I was riding beside them, both on the trail and along the railroad tracks that run throughout this tale. The action scenes were understated but effective, and the keynote of the novel was--as in the others--the rock-solid friendship between the two leads. A good effort, I thought.

Question for you mystery (and Western) fans: are any of you Parker fans as well? Have you read any or all of these "additional" books? If so, did you enjoy them?

NOTE: While researching this column, I learned that the second of Michael Brandman's Jesse Stone novels, Fool Me Twice, is now available--and I understand the second of Ace Atkins's Spenser novels, Wonderland, will be out in May. I look forward to reading both. 

I still remember how sad I felt when I first heard about Parker's death, almost exactly three years ago. Part of that was purely selfish, since I figured his creations had died with him. Nobody's happier than I am that his characters are still around. 

I cannot, however, say that I envy any of the three authors who've agreed to carry on. Bob Parker left some big shoes to fill.

BY THE WAY . . . Here are the answers to my Mystery Trivia quiz, posted two weeks ago:

1. What was the full name of Sherlock Holmes's landlady?

Mrs. Martha Hudson

2. In what magazine did Dashiell Hammett's first Continental Op story appear?

Black Mask

3. What was Evan Hunter's best-known pseudonym?

Ed McBain

4. Who killed Richard Kimble's wife in TV's The Fugitive?

The one-armed man

5. What's the name of Bill Pronzini's famous detective?

The Nameless Detective (Okay, it was a trick question.)

6. Who played the gangster who carved up Jack Nicholson's nose in Chinatown?

Roman Polanski (a cameo by the director)

7. What fictional series character hitchhikes across America carrying only a toothbrush, an ATM card, and the clothes on his back?

Jack Reacher

8. Where did Nick and Nora Charles stay when they were in New York?

The Normandie Hotel

9. What mystery (and former Western) author wrote the novel Hombre and the short story "3:10 to Yuma"?

Elmore Leonard

10. What Poe story is considered to be the first "locked-room mystery"?

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

11. What was taken in John Godey's novel The Taking of Pelham One Two Three?

A New York subway train

12.  Who played a judge in the final episode of Perry Mason, telecast in 1966?

Erle Stanley Gardner

13. In what city was Spenser based?

Boston

14. How do you pronounce Ngaio Marsh's first name?

Ny-O (rhymes with Ohio)

15. In North by Northwest, what is Cary Grant's reply when Eva Marie Saint says, "Roger O. Thornhill. What does the O stand for?"

"Nothing."

16. Who shot J.R., on TV's Dallas?

Kristin Shepard (Sue Ellen Ewing's sister, played by Mary Crosby)

17. What was the basis of many of the titles of Martha Grimes's detective novels?

They were names of English pubs

18. What was Mike Hammer's secretary's name?

Velda

19. What did Bullitt, Vertigo, The Maltese Falcon, and Dirty Harry have in common?

San Francisco

20. Who lived on a houseboat called The Busted Flush?

Travis McGee

21. Edgar Box is the pseudonym of what writer?

Gore Vidal

22. Who always includes a number in the titles of her mystery novels?

Janet Evanovich

23. Who played the murderer in Rear Window?

Raymond Burr

24. In Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd--how did he die?

He was stabbed in the back

25. How did Nero Wolfe finish the following line: The only safe secrets are . . .

. . . those you have yourself forgotten

26. What TV character's name was taken from the British film industry expression "man-appeal" or "M-appeal" (which is what the series producers were looking for)?

Emma Peel

27. What was Robert B. Parker's middle name?

Brown

28. What was Dick Francis's only collection of short stories?

Field of Thirteen

29. Who was the voice of Charlie in TV's Charlie's Angels?

John Forsythe

30. How did Hitchcock manage to do his trademark cameo in the cramped setting of the movie Lifeboat?

He appeared in an ad for a fictional weight-loss drug, shown in a newspaper aboard the lifeboat

31. What's the name of the bog that borders the Baskerville estate?

Grimpen Mire

32. In Richard Diamond, Private Detective, who played Sam (RD's answering service)?

Mary Tyler Moore

33. What mystery writer is actually Dr. Robert William Arthur?

Robin Cook
(This was my mistake. The real name is Dr. Robert William Arthur Cook. Nice way to keep you from guessing the correct answer, right?)

34. In which of the Thin Man movies did James Stewart play a suspect?

After the Thin Man

35. Who had to turn down the role of Indiana Jones because he was tied up filming a P.I. series?

Tom Selleck

36. What's unique about the settings of Nevada Barr's mystery novels?

They're all set in National Parks

37. In The Maltese Falcon, what was Sam Spade's partner's name?

Miles Archer

38. Who were the two cousins who used the pen name Ellery Queen?

Frederick Dannay and Manfred B. Lee

39. What Ben Gazzara/Chuck Connors TV series had the following format: the first half was spent catching the crook and the last half was spent convicting him?

Arrest and Trial

40. What do P.D. James's first two initials stand for?

Phyllis Dorothy

41. Who writes mystery novels starring sports agent Myron Bolitar?

Harlan Coben

42. Who was the producer's first choice to play Lt. Columbo?

Bing Crosby

43. The movie Heavenly Creatures was based on a crime actually committed by what popular mystery writer, when she was in her teens?

Anne Perry

44. What musical instrument did Sherlock Holmes play?

The violin

45. What TV private detective frequented a bar called Mother's?

Peter Gunn

46. What was used to simulate blood in the Psycho shower scene?

Hershey's chocolate syrup

47. What do Robert B. Parker's Jesse Stone series and Steve Hamilton's Alex McKnight series have in common?

The Stone series is set in Paradise, Massachusetts; the McKnight series is set in Paradise, Michigan

48. What did the dying man tell James Stewart in The Man Who Knew Too Much?

That someone would be assassinated 

49. What is romance author Nora Roberts's mystery-writer pseudonym?

J.D. Robb

50. Which Agatha Christie novel featured Alice Ascher, Betty Barnard, and Carmichael Clarke?

The ABC Murders

A Day for the Heart

Okay, so it's the day after Valentine's Day, which means that my turn for an article comes up one day late to land directly on the 14th, but I hope you'll allow me a little leeway here. See, Valentine's Day is my wedding anniversary, so just pretend that everything is correctly aligned. Naturally, I'm supposed to be sentimental during this holiday of the year and thus, shall we say, exposing my softer side to my significant other. One further fact to know, if all goes according to plan, she and I should be lounging in Maui for the umpteenth time even as you read this. (I strongly suspect that Kiti slipped that little clause into the fine print of our marriage contract when I wasn't looking.)

Anyway, Valentine's Day speaks of lovers, romance, flowers, chocolates, roughly anything that melts the female heart and makes it go all gooey. At this point, you, the reader, will have to reflect back into your own Valentine's Days of the past and dwell pleasurably for a couple of moments on whatever worked for you.

In my case, my wife has a little red book stashed away in the lingerie drawer of her dresser. This particular hard-bound book is filled with hand-written poems composed by yours truly whilst gripped in the all encompassing embrace of infatuation. I'm sure most of you have been in some form of that condition at one stage or another of your life. To that end, I wrote all these poems in order to win the hand and heart of my lady love, and in the process filled up every page in that little red book. And no, you can't read it.

Most of the poems are very personal and/or have meaning only to the two of us. Realize that these scribblings aren't exactly sonnets by Shakespeare. Furthermore, need I remind you that when I returned to college shortly after my twelve month tour of Southeast Asia, I took my war poems into the WSU English Department seeking further guidance along these lines and was promptly not encouraged to continue any efforts in the field of poetry. But due to persistence (some would politely suggest hard-headedness) it turns out that the heart likes what the heart likes.

As a sample of my beginning strategy in this win-the-heart endeavor, here's part of an early poem during the courtship:

Please forgive my muddled mind,
it's seldom on the path.
It's not so good in English
and even worse in math.

But as I recall the contract
or the game as it is played,
one poem for one kiss
was the bargain that we made.

*  *  (okay, skip to closing)  *  *

I have no fear about the debt
for as I can plainly see,
you are a lady on your honor
and would not a debtor be.

Oh yeah, working on getting that kiss. Okay, so you had to be there. Shelley or Byron, it's not. Probably not even as good as the first recorded Valentine poem written by Chaucer in 1382 for King Richard the Second to give to his intended bride, and that one was composed in the language of Middle English, but mine are at least a step up from the "Roses are red, Violets are blue..." category. My main point being, hey, give the love of your life some personal hand-written poetry and watch their eyes light up. Go ahead, it's not too late even if Valentine's Day was actually yesterday. It doesn't need to be a professional job, it just needs to be from you, from your heart.

Yep, you can bet I got kissed with them poems. A lot. A whole book full, you might say.

References, Anyone?

I know that you can get everything on the internet any more, but I still think it's handy to have a shelf of reference works.  I still have a big fat dictionary, a Roget's thesaurus (the on-line ones are awful), Bartlett's Quotations (the on-line ones are almost all modern), a Dictionary of Science, of Language, of Foreign Terms, of Japan, of various other things, as well as the following foreign languages:  Spanish, French, German, Gaelic, Greek (Demotic and ancient), Latin, Chinese, Japanese, and (my personal favorite) Colloquial Persian. 
There are history textbooks, of which I have shelves, and also certain history books that I consider mandatory for giving you the real flavor of a time and place (what I call time-travel for pedestrians"). 

Liza Picard has written a whole series (and I have them all) about London:  "Elizabeth's London", "Restoration London", "Dr. Johnson's London", "Victorian London." 

Judith Flanders has written many works on Victorian England, of which I have:  "Inside the Victorian home : a portrait of domestic life in Victorian England", and "Consuming passions : leisure and pleasure in Victorian Britain."   What she doesn't tell about Victorian daily life isn't worth telling.  Her most recent work - just out, which I have got on order even as I write - is "The invention of murder : how the Victorians revelled in death and detection and created modern crime."  Woo-hoo!

Speaking of every day life, there's the "Everyday Life in America Series", which includes "Every day Life in Early America," "The Reshaping of Every Day Life 1790-1840", "Victorian America", "The Uncertainty of Everyday Life 1915-1945", etc. I have them all. 


As some of you may remember, I used to teach Asian history at SDSU.  I have TONS of books on Japanese and Chinese history, and making a list of them...  Well, what do you want to know?  Let's just hit some highlights about Japan for today:

The first thing to read is Ivan Morris' "The World of the Shining Prince", about Heian Japan, specifically the 11th century Heian Japan of the Lady Murasaki Shikibu, author of "The Tale of Genji" (Note about Genji - there are 3 good English translations, and I have them all.  I LOVE THIS BOOK.  Feel free to e-mail me any time to discuss it; it's one of my obsessions.)

"Legends of the Samurai" by Hiroaki Sato - from the 4th century to the 19th, these are the stories the samurai told about themselves, building the mythos of the samurai - slowly - over time.

"Japan Rising:  The Iwakura Embassy to the USA and Europe 1871-1873" compiled by Kume Kunitake. See the USA and Europe through the eyes of Japanese who had never been West before - and weren't particularly impressed.  (And who foresee the need for Japan to oversee the Pacific Ocean.)

"Memories of Silk and Straw:  a Self-Portrait of Small Town Japan" by Dr. Junichi Saga - Japan before WW2.


John Gunther (1901-1970) wrote a series of "Inside" books in the 1930s and 40s which are snapshots of Europe and Asia.  I am the proud possessor of two:  "Inside Asia - 1939"; "Inside Europe - 1938".  I consider these priceless because they were written, fairly objectively, before World War II:  and not all the portraits are recognizable by today's standards, especially those of Hitler and his gang. This is BEFORE the world was willing to accept that they were crazy.  Did you know that Mussolini was considered an intellectual?  Did you know that Putzi Hanfstaengl played piano to put Hitler to sleep every night? 

Don't forget diaries.  St. Simon's diary of the Versailles under Louis XIV and Louis XV; the diary of Colonial midwife, Martha Ballard; Lady Murasaki and a host of other upscale women of Heian Japan all kept diaries, and let us never forget Sei Shonagon's "Pillow Book"; Parson Woodforde's diary of 18th century rural Britain; Samuel Pepys, of course; and any others that you can get your hands on for the period/time/place you're interested in.  WARNING:  what I've found is that reading a diary of a period/time/place I'm not particularly interested in can generate a whole new passion...

And then there are maps.  Besides collecting all this other stuff (and I didn't even get to the Chinese daily life histories, etc.) I have atlases galore, including a couple that are very old.  (One came with a church insert that explained the League of Nations, which in itself was worth the price of the book!)  I have regular atlases, an Atlas of World History, of the British Empire, of the Middle Ages, of War, of Ancient Empires, etc.  And a bunch of plain old road atlases.  If nothing else, when I'm really stuck, I can pull them out and plan my next road trip...
I'm not sure where it is, but I'm interested in going there...

Herbert O. Yardley: The American Black Chamber

by David Edgerley Gates

Herbert Yardley was never a household name, but among his peers, he was almost godlike.  He was, in effect, the father of American codebreaking.  (He was also, it happens, one hell of a poker player. You do the math.)

Yardley started out as a code clerk at the State Dept., in 1912.  His first significant coup de theatre came when he intercepted a coded message to President Wilson from Wilson's close personal aide, Colonel House.  This was before America entered the European warm and House had been sent to meet the Kaiser: here was his confidential report.  On a dare, we might say, Yardley broke the encrypted traffic in two hours, and realizing just how vulnerable American diplomatic cipher systems were, he took the results to his boss.  The fuse was lit. In 1917, with America now in the war, Yardley got a commission and went to work for the War Dept., heading up MI-8, codes and ciphers, and eventually turned it into the first real U.S. cryptographic intelligence operation.  1918 found him at Versailles for the peace conference, and his shop encoded American traffic, while secretly decoding those of their Allies.  Of course, the French and the British were doing the same thing, and Yardley by this time was no innocent in duplicity.

The war over, Yardley headed home, assuming he was out of a job.  But meanwhile, Military Intelligence and the State Dept. had decided to pool their resources, and establish a full-time clandestine eavesdropping organization, with a black budget, hidden from the Comptroller General.  Yardley was given the mandate.  They were up and running by May of 1919, and in December, Yardley hit the jackpot, when he cracked the Japanese encipherment protocols, and opened up their coded military and diplomatic cables.  This was a big deal, and it gave the American negotiators at the 1921 disarmament conference an enormous advantage.  The object of the conference, between the five major naval powers, the U.S., Britain, France, Italy, and Japan, was to stabilize the ratio of seapower tonnage.  Basically, each navy would agree to a limit on warships, relative to the navies of the other countries.  Japan was aggressively pursuing a higher limit for the Imperial Navy, and even at this stage, U.S. and British military strategists were disturbed by Japanese ambitions in the Pacific.  But what Japan's admirals said publicly at the negotiating table was undercut by their secret instructions from Tokyo, which conceded political realities.  Yardley, knowing his way around a game of stud poker, compared this to knowing your opponent's hole card, and in the end, the Japanese caved.  It was high-water mark for American intelligence capacities, and for Yardley, personally, who never minded the attention.

There were, however, clouds on the horizon. Wartime cable censorship was over.  Communications were supposed to be private.  Yardley, or high-ranking military surrogates, approached the major telegraph companies, and strong-armed them into continuing to supply their cable traffic.  This was, of course, completely illegal, unless you got a search warrant, and Yardley couldn't blow his cover by doing any such thing.  His operation flew under the radar.  He turned to the Signal Corps, but State spiked the idea of setting up Army listening posts. Yardley had started his operation with fifty people, and expanded with the heavy demand.  By 1929, with the Depression, his staff was down to seven, and badly demoralized, their astonishing successes forgotten.  Times had changed.  Hoover was president, now.  Yardley gambled it all on one last throw of the dice.  He went to the Secretary of War, the newly-appointed Henry Stimson, and put his chips on the table.  Here, for example, are the recent Japanese decrypts, he told Stimson.  And perhaps as a joke, or just to show off, Yardley said he could read the Vatican's private communications.  Exaggeration for effect?  We don't know.  The joke apparently fell flat.  Yardley had bet into a stronger hand.

We imagine a moment of stony silence.

Stimson then comes up with a next to legendary line, in the clandestine world.  He looks at Yardley, and says---wait for it---"Gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail."  And with this, Yardley is put out to pasture, his operation dismantled, and their efforts ignored, if not disgraced.

Yardley, in his uppers, writes a book, THE AMERICAN BLACK CHAMBER.  Published in 1931, it's a sensation.  Washington hunkers down.  William Friedman, another big-time cryptologist, now chief of Codes and Ciphers, is in a fury, because Yardley's book gives up sources and methods.  He has a point, since the Japanese immediately change their encipherment programs.  Friedman won't break the Purple Code until late in WWII.  But the government can't embargo Yardley's book.  He's not in violation of any existing security laws.  And it's something Yardley's thought about.  He himself wonders if he's letting the genie out of the bottle.  But, he decides, men like Stimson have their heads in the sand.  He goes ahead with publication, in spite of his own doubts, and the ship pushes slowly back against the iceberg. Inertia bows to necessity. 

Yardley works for the Canadian government, and later the Nationalist Chinese.  He writes another book.  Suppressed, for whatever reason, by the U.S. government, but afterwards declassified.  Not exactly a victim, like Alan Turing, but sort of forgotten.  Yardley was a tireless self-promoter, a guy who never shunned the limelight, and maybe took credit for other people's labors, but for all that, he's still the man behind the curtain. 

NSA is the largest of the American intelligence agencies, dwarfing CIA.  National Reconnaissance had the bigger budget, because they put satellites in orbit, but Ft. Meade has the personnel, and the brute mainframes, and the black budget.  They can suck the air out of a room.  This is perhaps Herbert Yardley's legacy.  Not that he thought of it that way.  I doubt if he imagined a world where they can read all our mail.

He would have preferred to read all the cards.

[Many of the specifics here are taken from David Kahn's book THE CODEBREAKERS, and James Bamford's THE PUZZLE PALACE, two excellent resources.]

Gone South (with Travis McGee)

Sunset, Gulf Shores Alabama

    Just like last year, this month finds my wife and me transplanted from Washington, D.C. to the sunny south.  February, despite those limited number of days, is clearly the longest month in the year when spent in North Eastern climes, a fact that Boston has recently seen underscored.

    It always seemed to me that whoever made February the month with the fewest days was on to something.  Better still, it should have had 21 days – allow it three weeks and no more.  Then slip that extra week into June where it would be  appreciated instead of cursed.

    Anyway, when Pat and I retired back in 2009 we vowed to never spend February in the District of Columbia.  That is why on this “Shrove Tuesday” (or “Fat Tuesday,” as it is more popularly referred to) we find ourselves ensconced in a rented condo unit on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama. 

John D. MacDonald

    As in the past I try to keep my every-other-Tuesday from becoming a travelogue simply because I am away from home.  But I also try to find inspiration in locale, and that is particularly easy to do as I look out onto the Gulf and think one state (and one shore) to the left.  What first got me thinking about the Florida Atlantic shore this year was an article by Jonathon Yardley that appeared in the Washington Post back on January 13 reporting (joyously) that virtually the entire John D. MacDonald library is being re-issued this year.  This includes all 21 of MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels, each of which is being offered by Random House in brand new, handsome trade-paperback editions. 

    Two weeks ago in my article on Francis Nevin’s new Ellery Queen work The Art of Detection I quoted Mike Nevin’s observation that as a general matter “when the author dies, the work dies.”  In a similar vein, Jonathan Yardley’s article in the Washington Post noted that while

[t]he McGee novels have remained in print in mass-market editions . . .  most of the other books by this prodigiously proficient writer long ago vanished. . . .  To be sure, some characters in suspense fiction have long outlived their creators – think Lord Peter Wimsey, Sam Spade, Miss Marple and Philip Marlowe – but mostly they just fade away, a fate that surely seemed in store for Travis McGee.

What a shame that would have been.  Kurt Vonnegut once predicted that  “[t]o diggers a thousand years from now . . . the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen.”

    And what has been the catalyst for this MacDonald (and McGee) revival, saving us (at least in the near term) from such excavation?  Well, according to Random House it is (counter-intuitively) the blooming e-book market.  The anticipated new appetite for e-book versions of the McDonald library is projected to be strong enough to propel new issues of e-books and paper versions as well.  So this rising tide appears to be enough to lift all boats.

    And that happily  includes the Busted Flush.  For any of you unfamiliar with the series, the Busted Flush was Travis McGee’s 52 foot houseboat, on which he resided at Slip F-18 in the Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  The ship’s name is derived from the poker hand that allowed McGee to win the Busted Flush from its previous unnamed owner.

    And Travis McGee?  Well, McGee advertises himself as a “salvage consultant.”  He recovers otherwise hopelessly lost property for a fee of one-half the value.  As McGee explains it in The Deep Blue Good-by, the first volume in the series, “I like to work on pretty good sized [projects].  Expenses are heavy.  And then I can take another piece of my retirement.  Instead of retiring at sixty, I’m taking it in chunks as I go along.”  As McGee also explains, there is always a need for the services he offers.  We live, McGee notes, in “a complex culture . . . .  The more intricate our society gets, the more semi-legal ways there are to steal.”  His simple role is putting things back to right.

    What made these novels such great reads?  Well, principally the taut writing and prolific imagination of John D. MacDonald.  The books follow a formula, but a pretty wild one.  All the reader really knows is that the hero, our friend Travis, will prevail and will still be around by the last page.  This is also true of his sidekick, Meyer, an economist who lives (first) on his neighboring ship the John Maynard Keynes and later on the successor vessel, the Thorstein Veblen.  But aside from those two compadres, all bets are off, and virtually every other character struts and frets the pages in danger of extinction.   

    The success of the series also rests on the likeable shoulders of the characters MacDonald created.  Some writers leave their central character to the imagination of the readers (Ellery Queen, for example, unraveled mysteries for decades virtually un-described; Bill Pronzini’s hero doesn’t even have a name.)  By contrast, we know a huge amount about Travis McGee, including what he looks like and how he thinks..

    McGee, we are told, is a shambling brown beach bum with a 33-inch waist, who wears a size 46 long jacket, and a shirt with a 17½" neck and 34" arms.  He is likely to rail against anyone abusing the fragile ecosystem of his beloved Florida, and he wears his views on his shirt sleeve.  MacDonald, writing for the first-person narrator McGee, describes our hero’s views as follows in The Deep Blue Good-by:

 I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary of them. And I am wary of a lot of other things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny.

I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.

. . . .

I am also wary of all earnestness.

We get the picture.

    The Travis McGee series spanned 21 volumes, beginning in 1964 with The Deep Blue Good-by and ending in 1985 with The Lonely Silver Rain.  Each volume sported its own color.

     Rumors persisted for years that a final volume, usually titled A Black Border for McGee, had been completed and that the book would kill off McGee.  MacDonald himself alluded to the volume in several interviews, saying that it would be published following his own death.  Almost certainly no such volume was ever written, and McDonald stated in later years that he would never kill off McGee since this would create a brooding ending hanging over the heads of new readers discovering the series.  We do know, according to letters written by McDonald to Mickey Spillane and to Stephen King that at the time of MacDonald's death following heart surgery in 1986 he had completed four chapters of what was to have been the 22nd Travis McGee adventure.  MacDonald also said that the story would be in two parts, spanning twenty years, and that it would end with with McGee still very much alive but slipping the lines off the pier and moving the Busted Flush to new moorings.  The completed chapters alluded to by MacDonald have never been found.

    Since MacDonald’s death in 1986 various offers to otherwise end the series, including one from Stephen King, have been rejected by MacDonald’s heirs.  Just last year MacDonald’s son Maynard explained this decision to leave the series at the 21 volumes written by MacDonald:

[T]he offers to extend my father's work have run from a tacky, blatant, commercial knock-off to a respectful, professional postscript to his work by a true friend [i.e., King]. And between those extremes there have been many well-crafted manuscripts that were done with warm regard and sincere admiration for my old man.

As these offers and manuscripts continued, and the enthusiasm from Random House snowballed, I was forced to finally define and face my own personal resistance to the idea of a sequel.

Given that I am not immune to the money, why refuse?

It is because I have never seen a really good imitation, be it art, literature, or music, that carries that poignant echo of the original artist- as a man. Even if the work itself is excellent, there is an inevitable flatness on that most intimate level, the level where the artist reveals himself.

To me, a work of art is a souvenir of the artist. It is a reflection of his inner and outer experience. It represents who he is and where he has got to at that moment of his life. In this sense, the creative process defies copying. I enjoy my father's work immensely. Part of him is still there, present on each page. Trying to echo that by imitating it is like trying to paint like Van Gogh by cutting off an ear. It also strikes me as a question of fairness. The dead cannot answer back and I feel it is presumptuous and disrespectful to play with their work.

    As someone whose published mystery output consists solely of pastiches I have some perhaps understandable quibbles with Maynard’s view.  But hey, it’s not my decision.  So while we can expect no new McGees, we, in any event, will soon have new editions of all 21 existing McGee novels.  As for what might have eventually happened to McGee, we are left to our own musings and those of others, including Carl Hiaasen:

Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Ft. Lauderdale

[P]ossibly the old houseboat is tied there still; McGee on deck, tending to fresh bruises, sipping his Boodles; watching the sun slide from the sky over Las Olas Boulevard.  Anyway, that's what I want to believe. If he's gone, I prefer not to know.

Welcome back, McGee!