Role Models

           "...the magnificent Spade, with whom, after reading 'The Maltese Falcon', I went
           mooning about in a daze of love such as I had not known for any character in
           literature since I encountered Sir Launcelot at the age of nine.  (Launcelot and
           Spade - they're pretty far apart, yet I played Elaine to both of them, and in that
           lies a life-story.)"  Dorothy Parker, The New Yorker, April 25, 1931, p. 92

Me and Dorothy have a lot in common.  I, too have mooned after Sam Spade, Simon Templar, Nick Charles, James Bond (I'm a Sean Connery gal), Lord Peter Wimsey, Sir Gawain, Prince Valiant, Rhett Butler, and Thomas Hewlitt Edward Cat.  See Robert Loggia below - I loved that show.  I watched every episode for its two year run.  Besides the fact that I thought Mr. Loggia was pretty darned hot, it was set mostly at night, with lots of cool jazz music - he owned his own jazz bar - and references to gypsies and jewel thieves, and I thought that was pretty much the kind of life I wanted to lead.  Note to Netflix:  get this show on DVD!

But none of these were role models.  For that I needed women, and strong, interesting women were hard to find back in the 1960's, when Donna Reed et al were still vacuuming wearing high heels and pearls.  Here are some of the women whom I admired and modeled myself after when I was a child:

Elizabeth I.  The original great leader, sharp and witty, supremely well educated, steely, manipulative, able to get and keep her throne in an age of beheadings, able to keep her country out of almost all wars, dignified, bawdy, athletic, musical, and poetic.  Do not even get me started on her antithesis, Mary, Queen of Scots.  Anyone stupid enough to marry the chief suspect in her husband's murder deserves whatever she gets.  Elizabeth had the good sense to stay single, both because it was to her taste and because she knew that no husband would ever please her countrymen.  "I would rather be a beggar woman and single than to be a Queen and married." (But I personally don't believe she was a virgin...)

Anyway, she managed to keep her country free, her ministers subordinate, and live pretty much as she wanted to live for almost 50 years.  On top of that, she was one of the first to realize that religion was a lousy excuse for burning a man, and pursued the first "don't ask, don't tell" policy (re religion) in history.  "I have no desire to make windows into men's souls."  (Eventually she did have to send some people to the fire, but they did keep trying to kill her.)  Yes, she was overdressed.  Yes, she was vain.  Yes, she was an autocrat.  But she also said, and I believe she meant it, "There will never Queen sit in my seat with more zeal to my country, care to my subjects and that will sooner with willingness venture her life for your good and safety than myself. For it is my desire to live nor reign no longer than my life and reign shall be for your good. And though you have had, and may have, many princes more mighty and wise sitting in this seat, yet you never had nor shall have, any that will be more careful and loving."  She made GREAT speeches. 

Okay, on to pop culture.

Emma Peel.  In an age when most women were running screaming from villains and tripping at the first available opportunity, or huddling in fear, waiting to be rescued, Mrs. Peel was the first woman I ever saw who rescued the guy.  She was beautiful, well-educated, athletic, musical, stylish, witty, and could kick some serious butt.  And she had class.  Whatever happened between her and Steed or her and anyone else was private.  The double-entendres were subtle (and oh, how I miss those days!). I admit that the plots of "The Avengers" ranged from clever to just plain stupid, but I never missed an episode.


Harriet Vane.  I hear that some people feel about her the way I feel about Susan Silverman although I don't understand why.  To me, Harriet was an intelligent, well-educated, witty, musical, athletic woman who could solve a murder just as well as her would-be lover and future husband, Lord Peter Wimsey.  I also liked that she wasn't physically beautiful - not all of us are - and it didn't matter, to Peter or to herself.  She had a wonderful voice, could look striking, was passionate and intellectual and liked a good wine.  And she had a successful writing career, supporting herself so that she was dependent on no one but herself.  I liked all of it.

Nora Charles.  (Note to Dorothy, I changed my mind:  I'll take Nick over Sam any day.)  Fun.  Smart.  Witty.  Great marriage.  Good times.  Can't ask for much more than that...



NOTE:  During the next 3-4 weeks, my husband and I will be moving to the bottom floor of an old school in Madison - lots of room, so we're not downsizing too much.  Anyway, this means chaos, heartburn, aching backs, and not too much writing.  I've logged ahead my blog posts for the month, but I may not be checking in as much as usual.  Forgive me, and I will say hi when I can!

A story about a story in a story

'Tis a time for great joy and merry-making, at least around my house, because the April issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine has arrived, bringing with it "Shanks' Ride."  This is my twentieth story in AHMM, and  the eighth published tale about Leopold Longshanks, a curmudgeonly mystery writer who occasionally finds himself reluctantly thrust into the position of crime-solver.

What makes this particular story special to me (although I love all the little darlings equally, of course) is that it belongs to a specific subgenre:  one character relates a story containing a puzzle and another character solves it.  It is the first Shanks story of that type I have gotten published, though not for lack of trying.

Here is the opening scene:

            “I don’t think my alcohol level is over the legal limit,” said Leopold Longshanks.  “I could probably drive home all right.  But I figure there’s no point in taking chances.”

            “I know,” said the taxi driver.    “You’ve told me that three times.”

            “Oh.”  Shanks considered.  “Then maybe I do need a ride.”

            “Hop in.”

You can probably guess that the taxi driver is the one with the story to tell.

The earliest example of this story type of which I am aware is "The Tuesday Night Club," (1927) by Agatha Christie.  It is also the first appearance of one of literature's great detectives, Miss Jane Marple.  In this story a group of friends gather and discuss a genuine crime.  To everyone's surprise the elderly spinster solves the crime.  Christie published a series of stories about this club, published as The Thirteen Problems and The Tuesday Club Murders.

Another great example is (are?) the Black Widower stories of Isaac Asimov.  He acknowledged Christie as his inspiration for them, by  the way.  These short tales featured a group of men whose meetings were enlivened each month by a guest who, inevitably, had a puzzle in need of solving.  After all the clever and sophisticated members had picked the problem to pieces Henry, the waiter, would provide the solution.

You'll notice that both of these series are not only stories-within-stories, but examples of the least-likely-detective syndrome, since Miss Marple and Henry would appear to be the least qualified members of their groups to solve a mystery.

My friend Shanks doesn't qualify for that, of course.  He is a reluctant, but highly logical choice for detective. He is so logical, in fact, that he complains the concept is ridiculous: no one could possibly get enough information from a tale-teller to figure out whodunit.  Alas, I am cooking the books so he has no choice but to succeed.

 And I think I will leave it there.  If you want to know more, you know where to find the rest of the tale.

The Art of Detection

    When I was in high school, back in the 1960s, I stumbled onto a paperback book entitled Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street.  The book, which was published in 1962, was not written by Arthur Conan Doyle.  The author of this “biography" of Holmes was W.S. Baring-Gould.  As a mystery fan I immediately purchased and then devoured the volume.

   Baring-Gould, as I later found out, was a Baker’s Street Irregular who had devoted much of his life to the study of Sherlock Holmes.  Among the things that interested me about the book were “facts” set down by Baring-Gould concerning the life of Holmes that were not elsewhere reflected in the Arthur Conan Doyle canon.  To wit, Holmes, according to Baring-Gould, was born on January 6, he lived to the ripe age of 108, and in his 108th year he completed an omnibus retrospective on his own life and work, The Art of Deduction. 

    As I have discussed at some length previously, I am a big fan of hidden alignments that seem to pop up in the world around us, facts that square up in ways that break the boundaries of coincidence and thereby hint at an underlying order.  And we now have yet another example of exactly such an alignment. 

    According to Ellery Queen’s 1957 novel The Finishing Stroke, Queen was born in 1905, the same year that his creators Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee were born.  So this year, 2013, would be Ellery’s 108th year.  And commemorating that event Professor Francis M. Nevins, the world’s preeminent Queen scholar (and a man whose own birthday, January 6, is the same as Holmes’) has published a true magnum opus on Ellery, entitled Ellery Queen:  The Art of Detection.  

     I shared a cup of coffee with Mike Nevins in St. Louis over Christmas (well, actually he drank soda) and he laughed off all of the Holmes/Queen alignments set forth in the previous paragraphs as mere coincidence.  The most he will get from me on this is a wink and a smile.  Unwitting or not, to my mind it is kismet that is playing with us here.

    Of course, the comparisons between Holmes at 108 and Queen at the same age, and between the works of Baring-Gould and Nevins, are not perfect.  For one thing, while Holmes’ The Art of Deduction never in fact existed, Nevins’ The Art of Detection, by contrast, is wonderfully real, all 351 pages of it.  But before getting to this encyclopedic tribute to all things Queen, let’s tarry just a moment and talk about Mike. 

Mike in St. Louis, December 23, 2012

    Mike Nevins  is Professor Emeritus at St. Louis University Law School, and is a magna cum laude graduate of St. Peters College and a cum laude graduate of New York University School of Law.  For many years he taught law, specializing in copyright law, in St. Louis.  But as all Queen aficionados know, Mike’s interests run well wide of legal matters.  He has written definitive literary analyses on subjects as disparate as Cornell Woolrich and Hopalong Cassidy.  Mike has also published six novels, two collections of short stories, several books of non-fiction and has also edited more than 15 mystery anthologies and collections.  More importantly, and, luckily for us, he is, without question, one of the world’s leading authorities on Ellery Queen and the collaborative team that was Queen:  Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee.  Mike has twice won  Edgar Allan Poe Awards for critical works, once for an earlier study of Ellery Queen and once for his volume on Cornell Woolrich.  Mike is also the author of one of the finest Ellery Queen pastiches ever written, Open Letter to Survivors. Who better to offer the reading public the definitive analysis of the works of Ellery Queen?

    As noted above, Mike’s 1974 Royal Bloodlines has already garnered an Edgar for its treatment of the Dannay and Lee writing team.  In the introduction to The Art of Detection the basis for his new second take on the same subject is explained by Mike as follows:

I think I just heard a question.  “Hey, didn’t you do that book already, back in the Watergate era?  Well, sort of.  But as I got older I became convinced that I hadn’t done all that good a job.  Fred Dannay was the public face of Ellery Queen, and in the years after we met he became the closest to a grandfather I’ve ever known, but I never really got to know the much more private Manny Lee.  He and I had exchanged a few letters, and we met briefly at the Edgars dinner in 1970, but he died before we could meet again.  Because of his untimely death, Royal Bloodlines . . .  inadvertently gave the impression that “Ellery Queen” meant 90% Fred Dannay.  One of the most important items on my personal bucket list was to do justice to Manny.

    That concern (notwithstanding that prior Edgar award) is completely addressed and fully remedied in The Art of Detection, which painstakingly traces the lives, times and collaboration of the two cousins who invented Ellery the detective and Ellery the writer and editor.  No matter how familiar you are with Queen, you will take away new knowledge when you finish reading The Art of Detection.  

    Like Joe Goodrich’s excellent volume from earlier this year, Blood Relations, which focused on the drafting of three of the best Queen novels in the late 1940s, much of the background material in The Art of Detection, notably including the legendary feuding between Dannay and Lee, is premised on the words of Dannay and Lee themselves, as forth in their letters, which are extensively quoted throughout the new Nevins work.  Also included are correspondence between Nevins himself and Dannay, and between Lee and legendary critic and writer Anthony Boucher, who famously opined that "Ellery Queen is the American detective story," and who contributed plotting to the Ellery Queen radio shows during times that family illnesses kept Dannay from performing that task.  The resulting narrative of the lives of these two writers, much of it in their own words, and of Queen, is a wonderfully detailed portrait.

    As already noted, The Art of Detection is encyclopedic in its coverage.  Beyond biography, the reader finds detailed discussions of all of the Queen books, as well as the various ventures into other media, including  the various radio shows featuring Ellery, the (often unsatisfying) Ellery Queen movies of the 1940s, the early television series, and the 1975 NBC series featuring Jim Hutton.  Mike has even offered detailed analyses of the infamous “ghosted”  Queen paperbacks, farmed out to other authors and then edited by Lee, which were commonplace on the paperback shelves of the 1960s.  In short, there is basically nothing about Ellery that is not addressed and answered by this fine work. 

    As any Ellery Queen fan is well aware, the Queen library, at least in the U.S., has teetered on the edge of extinction over the last few years.  Near the end of his book Mike comments on this as follows:

When the author dies, the work dies.  That is almost always the reality, and certainly it’s the rule in genre fiction.  There are always a few exceptions, like Agatha Christie and Louis L’Amour, but those authors are rarae aves.  I took it for granted that Ellery Queen was one (or two) of them.  I never thought I’d live to see the falling off into near oblivion of what had been a household name for more than a decade before I was born and for at least the first thirty years of my life.

    It is certainly true that it takes an historical perspective such as that provided by The Art of Detection to fully appreciate how much a part of mystery fiction Ellery was in the past, and how diminished his role is today.  But hopefully there is still time and space for resurgence.  Certainly excellent works such as The Art of Detection and Blood Relations, each of which has been offered to the reading public in the course of the past year, and Jeffrey Marks’ projected biography of Dannay and Lee, which should be out in 2015, contribute toward resurrecting the works of Queen.

    And speaking of kismet, another real indication of renewed interest in the works of Ellery Queen is evident on the very day this article is being posted.  Today, January 29, Calamity Town, a new play written by Joe Goodrich and based on the 1942 Queen novel that first introduced the upper New York State town of Wrightsville, has a "first reading" performance at the New Dramatists playhouse on West 44th Street in New York City.  Let's hope this is just the beginning for this latest Queen opus by Joe.

   There is also a new Ellery Queen pastiche (modesty compels me to not include the author in the foregoing list) coming out in EQMM sometime in the coming year.  And particularly eagerly awaited is the imminent re-issuance of 23 original titles in the Ellery Queen library, as reported by Janet Hutchings, editor of EQMM, in her editorial note following publication of Mike Nevin’s article End Time for Ellery? In the January 2013 issue of EQMM.  As Janet observed there, thanks to efforts such as Mike’s “Ellery Queen may soon enjoy a renaissance.”

    The once and future Queen?

The Next Big Thing Blog Hop

My good friend, Taffy Cannon posted this the other day and it just tickled me so I requested and got permission to post it here.  Intriguing idea, don't you think?

The Next Big Thing Blog Hop

by Taffy Cannon

This is kind of a blog chain letter, wherein one writer answers a specific set of questions about a work-in-progress, and then tags five other writers to answer the same ten WIP questions on their blogs—and so on and so on until there aren’t any more writers left on the earth.

Of course I am a rebel by nature and so I have switched around the order of the questions to make them more to my liking. Also because this book is unlike anything I’ve written previously.

What is the working title of your book?
The Baby Boomer’s Guide to SibCare

Who or what inspired you to write this book? Where did the idea come from for the WIP?
Five years ago, my younger brother’s health, which had been problematic since a malignant brain tumor in 1994, took a serious nosedive. My sister and I were suddenly immersed in major issues and decisions related to his deteriorating health. She was in Seattle and I was in San Diego. Our brother, a former cop who lived alone with a minimal support system, was in Chicago and wanted to stay there.

We faced a lot of medical crises, bureaucracies, and financial messes. We made mistakes and followed false paths and spent a lot of time with our fingers in our ears, singing lalalalala very loudly. We learned to live by a maxim our mother, gone now for 41 years, used often: “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

We had some great help from friends and relatives and even bureaucrats. We also were blessed with a true deus ex machina that changed everything in the family equation fairly early on. But most of the time we were banging around in the dark, trying to figure out what to do next. My mantra became:
“Now what?”

I met other folks my age having similar sibling-related medical experiences and got some useful tips and advice from them. And I tried to find some kind of handbook about the particular joys and challenges of helping a sibling with a serious medical problem.

I came up empty.

My brother passed away last March. And I decided to write the book that I had looked for and couldn’t find.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
The baby boomers are getting old, and when your body turns on you and you don’t have a strong local support system, the default is likely to be family.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
I wrote about what was happening quite a bit while it was going on, in narrative fashion. When I looked at this narrative, I realized there was a lot of practical material in there that could be very helpful to other people taking on medical bureaucracies, bill collectors, stubborn patients, unexpected crises, and sometimes other relatives as well. I decided to make it more accessible by putting it into handbook form.

Every family’s situation is different, and so is every sibling relationship, even within a single family. There are, however, common problems and challenges. My intention in The Baby Boomer’s Guide to SibCare is to point people in the right direction to find out more about how to meet their particular family needs.

I danced around getting started with the handbook itself for a while, writing bits and pieces here and there. I wrote outlines and arranged multi-colored Post-Its on pieces of foam board. I did some research and labeled a lot of file folders. In fact, I was researching studies of adult sibling relationships (Newsflash: there are precious few) when my brother went into his final decline.

Is your book self-published, published by an independent publisher, or represented by an agency?
Since my agent handles only fiction, I anticipate working with a former agent who represents nonfiction.

What genre does your book come under?
Self-help, I guess. Health. Caregiving. It’s a hybrid.

Let’s see. Maintaining equanimity in the face of uncertainty. Standing up to unforeseen challenges. Laughing at adversity. Have I missed any clichés?

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Ain’t none. See above.

There are certain similarities to books about taking care of aging parents, but the sibling relationship is really quite different from that. There is also a limited literature about siblings disabled from birth, a group with many overlapping elements.

Here’s why it’s different: Your siblings are the people you’re likely to know for the longest time in your life.

Your parents are around for the first part and with luck you’ll have a family of some sort with you during the middle-to-last parts. But your siblings march in lockstep beside you throughout your entire family history.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Ten thousand baby boomers become eligible for Medicare every single day. That’s a whole lot of people getting old at a very rapid rate, people who genuinely believed they would remain forever young.

Nobody’s been talking too much about the boomers for a while, but there plenty of us and we share an important collective history. We were young in a period when it sometimes seemed as if everything was changing at once. We caused or participated in in a lot of important societal movements, events, and changes—sometimes from more than one side. Vietnam, of course, is the classic generation-splitter.

But despite many differences, the baby boomers share a lot of common ground and have left an important cultural legacy. It all kind of blended together over time:
Rock and roll. Vietnam. Protest. Civil Rights. The Women’s Movement. The Sexual Revolution. Exercise for adults. Environmental Awareness.
And did I mention rock and roll?

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
As a general rule self-help books don’t get made into movies, or even get development deals. And a lot of this material is drawn from personal experience, which means it’s about the Cannon family. It’s hard for me to picture us as anybody but us.

However, I would be satisfied to have Meryl Streep play me. She’s also a blonde baby boomer and I think she can get the accent.

Chekhov Wrote Crime Stories?

by Louis Willis

From the preface of A Night in the Cemetery and Other Stories of Crime & Suspense:  “In the villages where he practiced, Chekhov accompanied local police on criminal investigations and performed autopsies.”

I never thought of Chekhov, one of my favorite short story writers, as a writer of crime or mystery stories. Of course, if writers use their experiences as material for stories, then it shouldn’t be a surprise that Chekhov tried his hand at writing crime stories. I decided to buy the book after reading the review by Otto Penzler in the New York paper The Sun back in 2008.

The name of the editor who selected the stories for the book is not shown. The name of the translator, Peter Sekirin, is, so I assume he was also the person who selected the stories. Why he included the essay “What You Usually Find In Novels” in which Chekhov lists the elements that go into a novel– character, setting, conflict– is a mystery. Why he chose some of the stories is also a mystery since they are not, properly speaking, crime stories. 

Anyway, for this article, I analyzed what I think are two crime stories and two mystery stories.

“Evildoer” captures the mind of the Russian peasant and Russian officials. Since the crime has already been committed, the story is more a court room drama told in short form. A fisherman is on trial for the crime of unscrewing the nuts that hold down the railroad tracks. He explains to the judge that he uses the nuts as weights for his fishing lines. His explanation baffles the judge who can't believe it and tries to explain to him that unscrewing the nuts causes train wrecks. The fisherman doesn't believe the judge’s explanation and doesn't understand why he is being sent to prison. I like this story because it shows a good story doesn’t always need a surprise ending, only a satisfactory one.

”Misfortune,” one of the best stories in the book, shows Chekhov’s storytelling genius. In a few words, he captures a disastrous moment in a man’s life due to his lack of understanding that signing reports makes him legally responsible for their accuracy. A merchant is a member of the town bank's auditing committee. After the director, accountant, his assistant, and two members of the board are sent to prison for embezzlement, a later investigation reveals the merchant signed the reports. He admits he didn't understand them. He also doesn't understand that signing the reports made him complicit in the embezzlement. Again, no surprise ending but a great story.

“The Swedish Match” is a true locked room mystery with a surprise ending. A retired police officer is missing from his room and believed to have been murdered, but the body cannot be found. It appears the killer entered the room through a window and that the dead man was taken from the room through the same window. Suspects are his sister, his mistress, his butler, and his manager who reported the murder. The surprise ending is not exactly starling but it works.  

The detective story “The Drama At The Hunt: From Notes of A Police Detective” is an abridged version of what seems to be a novella that has a good surprise ending. It has all the ingredients of a good murder mystery: a promiscuous woman, three men who are involved with her, and jealousy: a 19-year-old woman is hit on the head and stabbed several times. Her husband is tried and convicted for the murder.

In the last chapter, which is somewhat confusing, the narrator changes from the investigating detective to a book editor to whom he has submitted the manuscript of a novel based on what he claims is a true story. The abridgment of the novella makes it choppy and at time confusing. Nevertheless, it is the best story in the book, if only it hadn’t been abridged.

I liked some of the stories, but I was disappointed overall in the selection of tales. I’m no linguist and certainly can’t read Russian, but at times I felt the translation wasn’t quite right. Still, I enjoyed those few good stories.