A Bunch of Good Mysteries

Almost every year for the past ten or so, I've picked up a copy of Otto Penzler's annual Best American Mystery Stories (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). I of course enjoy short fiction anyhow, and because this series has been around for so long, many of my favorite mystery writers have been included in its pages. I also consider it a good way for me to (1) read new stories by authors whose names I know, (2) discover stories by others I don't know but might like to, and (3) learn about what's being published currently in the leading mystery magazines and anthologies.

On October 6th, when the 2015 edition was released, I had yet another reason to buy the book: I somehow turned out to be one of the writers included. My short story "Molly's Plan," first published last year in The Strand Magazine, is one of the twenty stories chosen by guest editor James Patterson for this year's lineup. On three previous occasions (in the 2000, 2010, and 2012 editions) I was fortunate enough to make the "Other Distinguished Mystery Stories" list in the back of the book, but this is the first time I've made it to the inner sanctum. Whether I belong in such talented company is another matter--but I'm certainly grateful to be there.

My mission today is to say a few things about the BAMS series and about some of the other stories in this year's edition. I sadly admit that I've not yet read all twenty of them, but I have finished a dozen or so, including three written by friends of mine. And every one I've read so far has been outstanding. Kirkus Reviews and Publisher's Weekly seemed (thank goodness) to agree.

Backstory and M.O.

For those of you who aren't aware of this, the Best American Mystery Stories series began in 1997, and has always been edited by Otto Penzler, who owns The Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and probably knows more about mystery fiction than all the rest of us combined. The names of all nineteen of his "guest editors" so far--among them Robert B. Parker, Sue Grafton, Harlan Coben, Ed McBain, Donald Westlake, Lisa Scottoline, Scott Turow, Laura Lippman, Nelson Demille, and Carl Hiaasen--are immediately recognizable to any mystery reader, and probably to any reader, period.

How does the selection process work? Each year, according to Otto's foreword to the 2015 edition, he and his colleague (partner in crime?) Michele Slung examine between 3000 and 5000 stories, from many sources: popular magazines, short-story collections, literary journals, etc. He also says that "every word of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and The Strand are read."

From these, Otto chooses fifty stories. Those fifty are then turned over to a guest editor (Patterson, this time), who picks twenty to be published in the book. The titles of the remaining thirty stories are listed in a "Distinguished" honor roll. I'm pleased to announce that this year's "Other Distinguished Mystery Stories" list contains (alongside names like Lawrence Block and Charlaine Harris) the names of my fellow SleuthSayers Rob Lopresti, Art Taylor, and David Edgerley Gates.

Otto also mentions in his foreword that the definition of a mystery story for this series is "any work of fiction in which a crime, or the threat of a crime, is central to the theme or the plot." That seems to be a common measuring stick, and it's the reason some of the stories in this year's BAMS edition wound up coming from non-mystery publications like The Georgia Review, Glimmer Train Stories, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, etc. In case anyone's interested, three of the stories this year came from AHMM, one from EQMM, and one from The Strand.

BAMS 2015

The first story in this year's book, and one of my favorites, is "The Snow Angel," by my friend Doug Allyn. That story was also nominated for an Edgar Award earlier this year, and won the 2015 Derringer Award for best novelette. Yes, novelette--it's a long tale, covering about 33 pages, and well worth the time it takes to read it.

Another favorite of mine is "Red Eye," a collaboration by Michael Connelly
and Dennis Lehane. It features characters made famous by both authors: L.A. cop Harry Bosch travels to Boston on a case, and winds up assisted (in many ways) by P.I. Patrick Kenzie. Having read many of the adventures of both these characters, I think I was able to relate even more closely to them here. "Red Eye," by the way, was another of the stories nominated for an Edgar this year, and deservedly so.

Other excellent entries in this edition are "The Adventure of the Laughing Fisherman," by Jeffery Deaver; "Crush Depth," by Brendan DuBois; "Wet With Rain," by Lee Child; "Harm and Hammer," by Joseph D'Agnese; and "The Home at Craigmillnar," by Joyce Carol Oates. (Ms. Oates's story brought tears to my eyes, which doesn't happen often.) The truth is, I haven't come across a bad story yet, in this anthology, and I don't expect to. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of them.

Observations

One more thing. I had the great pleasure of meeting Otto Penzler in New York earlier this year, and when I saw him again at Bouchercon in Raleigh and we were talking about the size of the conference, I said to him, "You know almost everyone here, don't you." He replied, "No--but I think almost everyone here knows me." I'm sure he was right.

If you happen to pick up a copy of The Best American Mystery Stories 2015--and I hope you will--I hope you'll like my story.

I know you'll like the book.

Fresh Starts

As many of you know, Art Taylor is a busy and talented guy. He has won two Agatha Awards, a Macavity, and three consecutive Derringers, and has twice been a finalist for an Anthony. His work has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Washington Post, Mystery Scene, and many other publications, and one of his short stories (along with stories by our own Rob Lopresti and David Edgerley Gates) was named in the “Other Distinguished Mystery Stories” list in the upcoming Best American Mystery Stories 2015. His novel On the Road With Del & Louise will be released in September. This guest post is his first column for SleuthSayers, and he’ll come on board permanently next month. Please join me in welcoming him! —John Floyd

First of all, thanks to John for the introduction here and the invitation to join SleuthSayers—and to everyone here for the warm welcome!

The title above—"Fresh Starts"—gives a nod toward this post being a debut and not simply a guest outing, though there's more to it than that, drawing on thoughts sparked both by where I'm at right now (more on that in a minute) and by my forthcoming book On the Road with Del & Louise: A Novel in Stories, which was the occasion of being invited for a guest post here in the first place. In the process, maybe there are some useful reflections ahead on the novel in stories as a form or on craft generally.

As I'm drafting this post (always draft, always revise), it's the first week of the semester at George Mason University where I teach—and these first weeks of school have always held a magical sense of new beginnings, not just as a professor now but hearkening back to my own earliest school days, new classes, new teachers, new subjects—usually new clothes too, trading out well-worn shorts for a couple of pairs of stiff Levi's. January 1 may be the time for resolutions, but to me, late August and early September have always felt like the true start of a new year. And though the soon-to-be-falling leaves might suggest for some a turn toward dying and death, autumn itself always fills me with a sense of possibility and of anticipation.

As a writer, I tend to think generally in terms of narrative, I guess—possibilities, plot points, the arc of a storyline—even as I reflect on my own life. So memories for me are grounded not necessarily by calendar year or birthdays ("I was eight when....") but by school year: This happened in kindergarten, this in fifth grade, this my junior year of high school, this my freshman year of college.

Maybe other folks are somehow dominated by seasons too with their stories, whether autumn or others: holiday tales and traditions; sordid spring break or spring fling stories; or those summer romances that generally fade with the return to school. How many freshmen college students have just recently had tough talks with their high school sweethearts? And if they haven't already, many of them surely will soon. More adventures to be had ahead, more thrills, more heartbreak, more everything.

I've been thinking of "fresh starts" too with my book coming out in a little less than two weeks—and not just because it's my debut (of sorts; I've been writing a long, long time, after all) or because the title characters, small time crooks trying to go straight, talk time and again (and again) about the need to make a fresh start themselves. More to the point, it's because the novel is structured as six short stories, each with its own beginning, middle, and end—a concept that's already caused some trouble. Isn't it a collection then? because a novel is....

Short response to question/confusion: Each short story does offers its own fresh start, sometimes timed with the fresh starts that the characters are trying to make, and its own independent resolution, but together the six stories tell an overarching, evolving story of this couple's search for stability and for each other and for a sense of family and a place to call home—longer, stretchier narrative threads.

But even with that short response, I recognize that there are more possibilities for readers to stumble (one early Goodreads review complained about my "chapters" being so long) and there are aspects of such a structure that all us writers should consider as well with such a project: pacing, of course; the overlap between an individual story's narrative arc and the large story's broader arc; and—to keep circling back—the trouble of the "fresh start" for each component story.

Years ago, a friend of mine sent a manuscript for me to review—a terrific story overall, characters in crises both internal and externals, plenty of conflict, no lack of drama, but I was concerned about how the chapters always ended on a note of resolution, relief, calm. Some writers try too hard to close each chapter on a cliffhanger (need to get the readers to turn the page!), but this was the extreme opposite, and I suggested very simply that she just break up the chapters differently, slide those chapter breaks back a little on the interweaving narrative arcs of plots and subplots—makes those breaks somewhere in the rising action rather than always after the falling action.

Stole this from the internet; my own arcs would be more like a mountain range.

Del and Louise get in plenty of trouble—both with one another and with others: a series of house break-ins against a recession-addled real-estate market; plans for a wine heist; a hold-up in a Las Vegas wedding chapel, etc., along with their continuing struggles to connect, stay connected. But with each story, I was trying to draw some resolution to the tale at hand (real estate robberies, wine heist, etc.) before making those fresh starts in new directions, even as longer, larger conflicts persist.

I hope that I paced it out OK. I can't help but wonder about the potential side effects of the breaks that result by these being stories. They could look like chapters, couldn't they? And how would that work?

I can't help but think of real life, of course, as I'm maneuvering through the fictional troubles of my characters. A friend of mine told me not long ago that he needed a break from everything: job troubles, relationship troubles, other troubles—and that was the word he kept coming back to: "break." So I asked him whether he meant "break" in terms of a "taking a break" (a vacation, for example) or in terms of "making a break"? ...meaning making a break with some bad choices, bad plans, bad circumstances. There was, I pointed out, a difference.

A renewed you and a new you are two different things as well. As Louise in my book says about another character, "He couldn’t get away from who he was, I thought—then realized maybe none of us could."

New Year's resolutions, the optimism and anticipation of a fall semester's first week, the opening paragraphs of the next in a set of linked stories—even that friend's sense that catching his breath might help recharge him to deal with lingering troubles.... I keep wondering if "fresh starts" are generally illusory, arbitrary—just a matter of shifting that "section break" to a different place in the ongoing narrative.

In real life, we hope not, of course! Unlike Louise's doubts, I remain optimistic about the possibilities for change: those resolutions, that renewal...even redemption. And I hope all that for my friend, always.

But in fiction, of course, it's the conflicts we crave—continual almost, a heap of grief. For Del and Louise, each new opening fortunately leads to the next round of conflicts—life as an escalating set of troubles.

Circling back, circling back again...and having said all that, I've got high hopes for my own new beginnings here at SleuthSayers, of course! May all my essays and reflections here go smoothly—saving any challenges and conflicts for my fictional creations, out there on other pages.

Looking forward to chatting and interacting with my fellow blog mates and our readers on future posts!

The Challenges of Writing Historicals

by Brian Thornton

Just finished reading David Edgerley Gates' excellent post "The Past is Prologue", which directly precedes this one here on the Sleuthsayers blog. And while I like the post and agree with his main points regarding his preference for writing historicals (a preference I by and large share), I couldn't help but think of a few of the drawbacks inherent in writing what we write.

And since I'm writing this from a deck chair overlooking a wonderful beach fronting on the Pacific Ocean, I'll restrict myself to a few bullet points in no particular order:

• There's a certain amount of "World Building" involved in writing historicals.

As is the case with the writing of our brethren in the speculative fiction (fantasy and science fiction) end of the fiction spectrum, writers of historicals are often introducing their readers to a thoroughly alien landscape while setting the scene, be it in 17th century France, 1950s Berlin, Han Dynasty China, or Periclean Athens.

So of course this means a LOT of research. No worries, I have an MA in history, and I love this kind of stuff.

That said, it can be time-consuming. And not just the research end of it, the scene-setting can pose a challenge as well.

After all, if you have a character in a modern thriller walking down a street in a Boston suburb, you can afford to write what I call "thumbnail description." Something along the lines of:

"Susan strolled along the sidewalk behind her Fox Terrier Rufus, plastic bag at the ready. Rufus skittered from tree to tree, along manicured lawns, even pausing to sniff at an appealing looking sprinkler."

Now, because of the age in which we live, most people can easily employ visual memory short-hand and fill in that sort of image pretty quickly. After all, who hasn't seen someone fitting the general description of the character above (you know, female), out on a walk with her dog, waiting for him to poop in the last week? The last month?

But if you're writing a series set in 1840s America, as I do, this scene wouldn't work as is for any number of reasons, including, but not limited to: 1. Ladies of a certain age and social standing rarely went about unescorted, and they certainly didn't follow their dogs around doing their business. 2. Sidewalks were far less common in this era, and if they existed at all, they were likely made of wood, not of concrete. 3. The "lawn" as those of us either residing in, or refugees from, the suburbs, understand the notion, did not, by and large, exist in the walking suburbs of the nation's cities during the 1840s. You had something called a "dooryard," which was about as close as you could get (unless you owned a significant estate. They had lawns. BIG ones.). Dooryards tended to be some iteration of dirt or mud (depending on the weather), and were where visitors left their horses/carriages/phaetons, etc.

So describing the mundanity of daily life gets complicated. After all, even though human beings haven't changed all that much in their basic nature over the last few millennia, the same cannot be said about human society/technology.

• And how to shoe-horn all of that research into a narrative?

The rule of thumb is that between 60 and 80% of what you dredge up in your research about your era is going to inform your writing indirectly. In other words, you're not going to share most of what you learn while researching the Texas annexation crisis. While riveting to you, the politics surrounding the quest to make Texas a state would likely bore the bejeezus out of most of your readers. So we pick and choose and cherry-pick.

• And no matter how hard you work on your book, someone will come out of the woodwork to tell you how you got it wrong!

This one is a virtual certainty. And if anything, with the easy availability of any amount of disinformation on the Internet, this sort of thing has only gotten worse over the last couple of decades. Nearly every writer of historicals I know personally has at least one good story about a reader who contacted them to lay out a detailed list of ways in which they "got their facts wrong."

(And David, if you've got one, I'd LOVE to hear it!)

You can probably guess how productive engaging with someone with that sort of an axe in need of grinding, and any sort of time on their hands, will be for you.

• And then there's the whole "anachronistic characters" thing.

A double-edged sword if ever there was one.

There's quite a bit more to be said on this subject. And since it's a fairly thorny topic, I'll be picking it up in two weeks, when I'll be home from vacation.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a spouse waiting, and a beach in need of walking.

See you all in two weeks!

Shameless Self Promotion

Just a quick note on this Mother's Day to clue everyone in on what a fantastic and versatile group of writers who keep this site going each day. I knew there are award nominees and winners here and I thought it might be high time we tooted our own horns. So in no particular order, check out these your daily SleuthSayers.

Eve Fisher:

Her short story, "A Time to Mourn" was shortlisted for Otto Penzler's 2011 Best American Short Stories.

John Floyd:

Won a 2007 Derringer Award for short Story"Four for Dinner."
Nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize "Creativity" 1999 for Short Story
"The Messenger 2001 for Short Story and for a poem "Literary vs Genre" 2005
Shortlisted three times for Otto Penzler's Best American Mystery Stories, "The Proposal," (2000), "The Powder Room," (2010), "Turnabout" (2012), and "Molly's Plan" was published in 2015 Best American Short Stories.
Nominated for an EDGAR AWARD for the short story "200 Feet" 2015.

Janice Trecker:

Nominated for an EDGAR AWARD for Best First Novel years ago, a Lambda award for Best Gay Mystery Novel for one of the Bacon Books a year ago and a nomination for Best Local Mystery book on the History of Hampton, CT, now her home town.

Dale Andrews:

His first Ellery Queen Pastiche, "The Book Case," won second place in the EQMM 2007 Reader's Choice and was also nominated for the Barry Award for Best Short Story that year.

Leigh Lundin:

Won the Ellery Queen 2007 Reader's Choice award for his story “Swamped”.

Rob Lopresti:

Fnalist for the Derringer three times, winning twice. Won the Black Orchid Novella Award. I was nominated for the Anthony Award.

Paul D. Marks:

Won the SHAMUS AWARD for White Heat. Nominated this year for an ANTHONY AWARD for Best Short Story for "Howling at the Moon."

David Dean:

His short stories have appeared regularly in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, as well as a number of Anthologies since 1990. His stories have been nominated for SHAMUS, Barry, and Derringer Awards and "Ibraham's Eyes" was the Reader's Choice Award for 2007. His story "Tomorrow's Dead" was a finalist for the EDGAR AWARD for Best Short Story of 2011.

David Edgerley Gates:

Nominated for the SHAMUS, the EDGAR (twice) and the International Thriller Writers Award.

Melissa Yuan-Innes:

Derringer Award Finalist 2015 for "Because" Best Mystery Short Fiction in the English Language, Roswell Award for Short Fiction Finalist 2015 for "Cardiopulmonary Arrest."
Won the Aurora Award 2011 Best English related Work and her story " Dancers With Red Shoes" is featured in Dragons and Stars edited by Derwin Mak and Edwin Choi. Her story "Indian Time was named one of the best short mysteries of 2010 by criminalbrief.com
Year's Best Science Fiction, Honorable Mentions for "Iron Mask," "Growing up Sam," and "Waiting for Jenny Rex."
CBS Radio Noon Romance Writing Contest- Runner-up. Melissa has also won Creative Writing contests and Best First Chapter of a Novel in 2008 and second place for Writers of the Future and won McMaster University "Unearthly Love Affair" writing contest.

Melodie Campbell:

Winner of nine awards: 2014 ARTHUR ELLIS award for (novella) The Goddaughter's Revenge. which also won the 2014 Derringer.
Finalist for 2014 ARTHUR ELLIS award for "Hook, Line and Sinker" and this story also won the Northwest Journal short story.
Finalist for 2013 ARTHUR ELLIS award for "Life Without George." which took second prize in Arts Hamilton national short fiction.
Finalist 2012 ARTHUR ELLIS award for "The Perfect Mark" which also won the Derringer award.
Winner 2011 Holiday Short Story Contest for "Blue Satin and Love."
Finalist for 2008 Arts Hamilton award for national short fiction for "Santa Baby."
Third Prize 2006 Bony Pete Short Story contest "School for Burgulars"
Winner 1991 Murder and Mayhem and the Macabre, "City of Mississauga, 2 categories
Third Prize 1989 Canadian Living Magazine, Romance Story "Jive Talk."
Finalist for the Arthur Ellis Award for best short story for 2015 which will be announced on May 28th.

Robert 'RT' Lawton:

Nominated for the Derringer Award for "The Right Track" in 2010.
Nominated for the Derringer Award for "The Little Nogai Boy" in 2011.

Jan Grape:

Nominated along with co-editor, Dr. Dean James, for an Edgar and an Agatha Award for Deadly Women for Best Biographical/Critical Non-Fiction. 1998.
Won McCavity award along with co-editor Dr. Dean James for Deadly Women for Best Non-fiction.
Won Anthony Award for Best Short Story, 1998 for "A Front-Row Seat" in Vengeance is Hers anthology.
Nominated for Anthony for Best First Novel, 2001 for Austin City Blue.
Jan will receive the Sage Award from the Barbara Burnet Smith Aspiring Writers Foundation on May 17. This award is for mentoring aspiring writers.

We all have to admit, our SleuthSayers authors are a multi-talented group.

On this Mother's Day, one little personal note, my mother, PeeWee Pierce and my bonus mom, Ann T. Barrow, both taught me to be a strong, independent, caring woman and I was blessed to have them in my life and I still miss them. Both were able to read some of my published work and I'm glad they were.

Happy Mother's Day, everyone.

What Are You Reading?

As soon as I saw my fellow SleuthSayer, Dale C. Andrews post for Sunday, I knew I was on to something. I'd been wracking my brain for days to come up with something to write about today. Suddenly, I found myself staring at a stack of books on the lamp table next to my perch on the sofa. I'll tell you my reading pile this week and you tell me yours, Just a quick note on this Mother's Day to clue everyone in on what a fantastic and versatile group of writers who keep this site going each day. I knew there are award nominees and winners here and I thought it might be high time we tooted our own horns. So in no particular order check out these your daily sleuth sayers.

Eve Fisher: Her short story, "A Time to Mourn" was shortlisted for Otto Penzler's 2011 Best American Short Stories.

John Floyd: won a 2007 Derringer Award for short Story"Four for Dinner."
Nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize "Creativity" 1999 for Short Story
"The Messenger 2001 for Short Story and for a poem "Literary vs Genre" 2005
Shortlisted three times for Otto Penzler's Best American Mystery Stories, "The Proposal," (2000)
"The Powder Room," (2010), "Turnabout" (2012)
And "Molly's Plan" was published in 2015 Best American Short Stories

Nominated for an EDGAR AWARD for the short story "200 Feet" 2015

Janice Trecker: Nominated for an EDGAR AWARD for Best First Novel years ago,

A Lambda award for Best Gay Mystery Novel for one of the Bacon Books a year ago and a

nomination for Best Local Mystery book on the History of Hampton, CT now my home town.

Dale Andrews: My first Ellery Queen Pastiche, "The Book Case," won second place in the EQMM 2007 Reader's Choice and was also nominated for the Barry Award for Best Short Story that year.

Rob Lopresti: I've been a finalist for the Derringer three times, winning twice.

I won the Black Orchid Novella Award.

I was nominated for the Anthony Award.

Paul D. Marks: won the SHAMUS AWARD for White Heat.
Nominated this year for an ANTHONY AWARD for Best Short Story for "Howling at the Moon."

David Dean: his short stories have appeared regularly in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, as well as a number of Anthologies since 1990. His stories have been nominated for SHAMUS, Barry, and Derringer Awards and "Ibraham's Eyes" was the Reader's Choice Award for 2007. His story "Tomorrow's Dead" was a finalist for the EDGAR AWARD for Best Short Story of 2011.

David Edgerley Gates: has been nominated for the SHAMUS, the EDGAR (twice) and the International Thriller Writers Award.

Melissa Yuan-Innes: Derringer Award Finalist 2015 for "Because" Best Mystery Short Fiction in the English Language
Roswell Award for Short Fiction Finalist 2015 for "Cardiopulmonary Arrest."
Won the Aurora Award 2011 Best English related Work and her story " Dancers With Red Shoes" is featured in Dragons and Stars edited by Derwin Mak and Edwin Choi. Her story "Indian Time was named one of the best short mysteries of 2010 by criminalbrief.com
Year's Best Science Fiction, Honorable Mentions for "Iron Mask," "Growing up Sam," and "Waiting for Jenny Rex."
CBS Radio Noon Romance Writing Contest- Runner-up
Melissa has also won Creative Writing contests and Best First Chapter of a Novel in 2008 and second place for Writers of the Future and won McMaster University "Unearthly Love Affair" writing contest.

Melodie Campbell: is the winner of nine awards: 2014 ARTHUR ELLIS award for (novella) The Goddaughter's Revenge. which also won the 2014 Derringer.
Finalist for 2014 ARTHUR ELLIS award for "Hook, Line and Sinker" and this story also won the Northwest Journal short story.
Finalist for 2013 ARTHUR ELLIS award for "Life Without George." which took second prize in Arts Hamilton national short fiction.
Finalist 2012 ARTHUR ELLIS award for "The Perfect Mark" which also won the Derringer award.
Winner 2011 Holiday Short Story Contest for "Blue Satin and Love."
Finalist for 2008 Arts Hamilton award for national short fiction for "Santa Baby."
Third Prize 2006 Bony Pete Short Story contest "School for Burgulars"
Winner 1991 Murder and Mayhem and the Macabre, "City of Mississauga, 2 categories
Third Prize 1989 Canadian Living Magazine, Romance Story "Jive Talk."
Melodie is also a finalist for the Arthur Ellis Award for best short story for 2015 which will be announced on May 28th.

Robert Lawton: nominated for the Derringer Award for "The Right Track" in 2010
Nominated for the Derringer Award for "The Little Nogai Boy" in 2011.

Jan Grape: Nominated along with my co-editor, Dr. Dean James, for an Edgar and an Agatha Award for Deadly Women for Best Biographical/Critical Non-Fiction. 1998
Won the mccavity award along with my co-editor Dr. Dean James for Deadly Women for Best Non-fiction.
Won the Anthony Award for Best Short Story, 1998 for "A Front-Row Seat" in Vengeance is Hers anthology.
Nominated for Anthony for Best First Novel, 2001 for Austin City Blue.
Jan will receive the Sage Award from the Barbara Burnet Smith Aspiring Writers Foundation on May 17. This award is for mentoring aspiring writers.

We all have to admit, our SleuthSayer authors are a multi-talented group.

On this Mother's Day, one little personal note, my mother, PeeWee Pierce and my bonus mom, Ann T. Barrow, both taught me to be a strong, independent, caring woman and I was blessed to have them in my life and I still miss them. Both were able to read some of my published work and I'm glad they were.

Happy Mother's Day, everyone.

Fury

by David Edgerley Gates

Okay, so it's a Brad Pitt picture, but forget about that Quentin Tarantino nonsense, and it ain't TROY. Brad Pitt's actually a good actor, not just a pretty boy. He himself once remarked that Hollywood is full of pretty boys, and whether or not you get noticed is by and large blind luck. In other words, don't take it for granted, and show up on time for the audition.

If you've read the Max Hastings book ARMAGEDDON, you get a convincing and frightening overview of the last year of the European war, from D-Day to the fall of Berlin. It was a savage, gruesome fight, with very little quarter given, on any side. FURY, like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, is about a small engagement. It's

a platoon movie, in effect, a bunch of guys in a tight, claustrophobic space - a Sherman tank, this time around - hoping to make it through the war alive. Shermans were outgunned by the German Tigers, which had better armor and heavier weapons, and a direct hit could turn the American tanks into flaming coffins. Tanks are in fact ungainly and vulnerable, steel boxes with only a few exits, and FURY puts this across in clenched interior shots, most of which seem to be from underneath a guy's cramped knees. You don't get much in the way of omniscient viewpoint, or a sense of any larger battlefield strategy.

Are there generic conventions? I'm not sure war movies can avoid them. The hardened NCO, the green recruit who turns stone killer. The story arc with this kind of picture is usually about initiation, the learning curve, the so-called warrior mindset. I don't have a quarrel with it, but it's a narrative device. Although it rings true, it's still a contrivance, and over-familiar. And then there are things in the movie I wasn't right with. They execute a German prisoner in cold blood. Yes, no, maybe? We know there were incidents like this, even if they didn't make it into the record, or it was reported as shot trying to escape, but the way it was presented, as an object lesson, made me hesitate. Another thing that bothered me was seeing the tanks take point, with infantry creeping along behind. It seems like sound tactics - why expose yourself to enemy fire? - but I always had the impression armor and infantry leapfrogged each other on patrol, feeling out a hostile environment. Maybe somebody here with more hands-on can steer me right. Having said this, otherwise the movie felt honest. I didn't find it exaggerated or false.

Once the Allies pushed across the Rhine - and the Russians crossed the Oder from the East - Germany was finished. The question people ask is why they kept fighting. One answer is of course Hitler's insanity. Another is simply that the Wehrmacht was under discipline, even that late. And yet another is that they were hoping they could hold out for a negotiated peace in the West. Germans were terrified of what the Soviet armies would do to them, as conquerors, and their worst fears were realized, when the Russians did get there. If the Germans could hold the Eastern Front and buy time to make a deal with the U.S. and Britain, they might save themselves. It was a long shot, and never came to pass. In the end, Germany suffered total defeat, and the Russians sacked Berlin. Fury, indeed. More than enough to go around.

War pictures aren't necessarily everybody's cup of tea. The famous early ones, like ALL QUIET, are famous in large part as anti-war stories. And guys like Wellman and Ford - who weren't shrinking violets - made some ambiguous pictures between the wars. 'Between' the operative word. The movies that came out of American studios during WWII were flag-wavers, how not? Then a little doubt begins to creep in. There's a story I heard that somebody, and it might have been Wellman, told Lewis Milestone he thought A WALK IN THE SUN was fake from beginning to end, which is pretty strong. Point being, is authenticity the sell? And say it is, are you obligated in any way to watch these movies?

BAND OF BROTHERS more or less sets the bar, for my money. I own the boxed set, and I've done the whole thing three or four times. Then again, I had a girlfriend a few years back, who was a screenwriter, and she hated war pictures. Hated. I told her the screenplay for PATTON was a model of movie architecture, but she couldn't bring herself to sit down and plug in the DVD. I get it. The single most effective sequence in PATTON, to my mind, is the war prayer, the voice-over. It also happens to be the only scene where you see men stumble and die, the snow around them lit up with artillery impacts, and you count the cost. Where to draw the line? I haven't fully made up my mind.

We're saturated with images, some real, some imagined, and all of them manipulated for effect. They make us uneasy, or uncomfortable. There's a squirm factor. Robert Capa's famous photograph of a Spanish Civil War solder in the moment of his death, or the Saigon police chief, putting a bullet in the head of a

VC suspect. Do we need another one? FURY reminds us, I think, that war is a bitter business. Good men die. Sometimes they die for dumb-ass reasons, bad generalship, unnecessary objectives, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's not about the irony. It's that we seem to be hard-wired for the warrior gene. Which is still too convenient an answer, that the fault lies in our stars. Perhaps we're drawn, by instinct and muscle memory, to the elemental. To the point of no return, a place where choice determines nothing. We're in the hands of God, or mischance, and death is only the final accident of life.

The dead speak to us from a place we can't know, but we can hear their voices, if we listen for them. The lessons of war can be heard in the voices of the dead. They become interpreters. In this narrow sense, then, war stories have something to tell us. Of course, it's a mixed message.

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SleuthSayers Easter Eggs

by Leigh Lundin

This season of Passover and Easter Sunday made me think of ‘easter eggs’, lower case, not bird ovum but hidden goodies Apple famously hid in the Macintoshes (although Atari is credited as the first to conceal little secrets in their machines).

I asked my colleagues what ‘easter eggs’ they deployed in their stories and identify those of their favorite authors, hidden gems for readers to find. Some responded with actual cloaked tidbits while others took a different tack and described disguising real persons and places in a circumspect manner. I touched upon the latter in an article two weeks ago where Alistair MacLean and David Morrell obliquely refer to Sir Edmund Hillary and James Dean respectively.

Academics have argued and disputed whether or not nursery rhymes have hidden meanings. They debate whether ‘Jack be Nimble’ and ‘Four-and-twenty’ Blackbirds may or may not refer to politically sensitively controversies worded with a veil of deniability. But certainly, many classical authors deftly hid meanings to some degree. Chaucer, Voltaire, and Dante for example, touched upon people and events that educated readers were expected to recognize.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. (Hamlet, Act I, Scene IV)

Shakespeare was noted for his word play. One of his most famous easter eggs is the eponymous Hamlet, an anagram of the Danish prince Amleth.

Jan Grape points out that mystery conferences sometimes auction off the opportunity to appear as characters in novels. The proceeds typically go to a literary or library charity. Some fans have paid big bucks to be in a very well known author’s book. I believe Frederick Forsyth was one of the first authors to offer to drag a fan into one of his novels. A writer can use a person's name as a character, place or thing. Jan says:

    I’ve auctioned a character name a couple of times, didn’t get much money but I’m not a bestseller either. I asked that person if they wanted to be a good guy or a bad guy. Most want to be a bad guy, then I ask, if you want to be a bad guy… a murderer or a rapist? I don't want to make them horrible unless they agree.

In a recent David Edgerley Gates story, A Crown of Thorns, which takes place at the UNM campus in the late 1960s during the Viet Nam war protests, he gave Tony Hillerman a cameo, slightly disguised, but if you knew his local resume, you’d snap to it. Sea thriller author Clive Cussler often inserts himself as an unnamed character. One of his novels includes a cameo of an unnamed but famous British spy.

Rob reminded me that Elmore Leonard’s Up in Honey’s Room features a Nazi soldier named Otto Penzler, also the name of a famous editor and mystery bookstore owner in New York City.

I’ve set a scene in Lutz, Florida, an acknowledgement of one of my favorite writers, John Lutz.

John Floyd said John Grisham in his first novel, A Time to Kill, used a fictional setting of Clanton, Mississippi… but there is a real Canton with similar features!

Rob Lopresti lives in Bellingham, Washington as does Jo Dereske, who sets her Miss Zukas books in the college town of Bellehaven. The southwest corner of Bellingham is Fairhaven. (Our friend ABA asks if Miss Zukas might be a Polish play on words.)

Eve Fisher switches around names of South Dakota towns in some of her writing, making it obvious to locals where the action takes place.

Melodie Campbell does something similar, writing a comic caper about the Cannot Hotel.

    Anyone who lives in industrial Hamilton (The Hammer, to the locals) will know that I really mean The Connaught Hotel. The White Chapel cemetery becomes the Black Chapel cemetery.

David Edgerley Gates advised me that Dennis Lehane is known for using the names of his friends. So are our colleague, Jan Grape and John Floyd. John sometimes uses the name of a mutual friend, Billy Fenwick. Recently, John named a character in his Woman’s World series of stories Teresa Garver, the name of an East Coast fan.

Like the others, I often name characters based on people I know. I modeled and named a character in ‘Swamped’ after a high school classmate, Max. I hadn’t spoken to Max in years but once I knew that issue of Ellery Queen was in print, I phoned Max.

    Although never one to complain, he’d been having a rough time: His health was failing, his finances were in freefall, his wife had left him, and he’d downsized from a sprawling farm to a tiny apartment.
    I told Max about using him as a rascally character and he was delighted, a shiny bauble in a dark moment of time. I promised to get him a copy if he couldn’t get one at his newsstand, but within days, he died. I can imagine things going wrong when using friends’ names in stories, but in this case, those few words brought a bit of happiness.

Rob Lopresti also uses last names of friends for characters. One of his Alfred Hitchcock stories, 'Shanks Commences', uses the names of our Criminal Brief colleagues. (I've done something similar in a story I’m working on and the names are key to the solution.) The stories are clearly set in New Jersey, although he makes a point of not revealing the state.

Speaking of Jersey, Liz Zelvin slips in an actual 1990s case in this clever bit of dialogue in her latest Bruce Kohler novel, Dead Broke:

“It’s kind of mind-boggling,” Cindy said, “a rabbi having an adulterous affair with his sister-in-law, much less murdering her. What about the Ten Commandments?”
“What about them?” Natali said. “Human nature is what it is. By the time you make detective, your mind will have left boggling far behind. He wouldn’t even be the first. There was a rabbi in New Jersey who hired hit men to kill his wife.”
“Oh, New Jersey,” she said.
“It’s no excuse.”

Fran Rizer tells us a lot of what happens in the Callie books is based on real events. (I love these ‘writer uncovered’ stories.)

    At lunch today with an old friend I haven’t seen in years, the subject of a particular concrete block nightclub out in the country and its highly unusual proprietor was mentioned. We continued to chat, and then the lady sitting at a table across the aisle from us asked me point-blank.

“Did you know the place you're talking about is just like a club called June Bug’s in one of the Callie Parrish books?”
“Do you read Callie Parrish books?” I asked.
“I’ve read them all,” she said. “I’ve heard the lady who writes them lives in this area.”

    I had to confess that I’m Fran and that June Bug and his nightclub were based heavily on the place she named.

Rob relates the following.

   Donald Westlake and Joe Gores wrote the same scene into each of their books. Twice. For example, in 32 Cadillacs a DKA detective traces a car that Dortmunder’s pal Stan Murch stole. In Drowned Hopes, Dortmunder and Murch watch in amazement as the stolen car is repossessed. In Dancing Aztecs, a character stops at Coe’s garage, where she meets a mechanic named Tucker. This is Westlake’s way of explaining what his pseudonym Tucker Coe did after Westlake stopped writing about him.

Author Carolyn Jenkins hadn’t named a radio station set to appear in her recent novel Scout Out Denial. Brainstorming came up with the call letters ‘KRLN’, her name sounded out and, shy as she is, it stuck.

If anyone’s written more about easter eggs than I have, it’s Dale Andrews and I wrap this up with him.

    Ellery Queen was noted for hidden references that tied the series together in strange ways that were basically irrelevant as to individual plots. The references to Easter, for example are both rampant and unexplained anywhere. Remi Schulze, a French "Queen scholar" has devoted entire websites to numerological and other hidden references in the Queen mysteries, including Queen's repeated use of characters named either "Andrews" or a derivative of "Andrews." (I never saw that until it was pointed out to me which, given the circumstances, says something about my eye for detail!) In And on the Eighth Day, Queen's most direct mystery dealing with Easter, there is a character whose name is an anagram for a historical character. (The fact that this is an anagram is never revealed in the course of the novel.)

    From my own (limited!) works, in 'The Book Case' there are clues from which the reader can deduce that the murder in fact took place on Easter Sunday, something never mentioned in the story. This, of course, was done as an homage to Queen's bizarre fixation on that holiday. And in my most recent Queen pastiche, 'Literally Dead,' there is a way to determine (roughly) when the story occurred. When I try to breathe life back into EQ I imagine that he was born in 1905 (consistent with the 1905 birth dates of Dannay and Lee, and also consistent with what we are told in The Finishing Stroke). So that means, sadly, that Ellery is no longer with us. In 'Literally Dead', which otherwise is a contemporaneous mystery with an elderly Ellery, one character is identified as running the local Amoco station. As of 1998, all Amoco stations became BP stations. So we know, if we spend the time thinking about it, that the story is set pre-1998 when Ellery has yet to turn 100! He is 102 at the time 'The Book Case' was published, and that is likely as old as I (at least) will ever let him become!

What literary easter eggs can you tell us about?

Keeping It Real

SleuthSayers has entertained open-ended discussions by readers and writers about when (and whether) to use actual place names. This decision ultimately comes down to the rôle location plays in a story and the inclinations of the author. Recently, I came across an example where I wondered why a popular author chose not only to fabricate (or ‘re-imagine’) a real place, but real people.

A friend gave me a tattered copied of Shimmer by thriller author David Morrell, a writer admired by our own David Edgerley Gates. Suffused with a Dean Koontz-like inexplicable supernatural presence, its genre is difficult to classify– not exactly science fiction, not paranormal, not quite a crime novel.

The premise draws a reader in: without explanation, wife leaves cop husband, stops en route to her mother to visit a ‘lights in the sky’ phenomena, and subsequently all hell breaks loose. Although this mysterious phenomenon exerts an amorally moral force over people and events, it remains unexplained, which happens to work in this case.

Morrell would probably agree Shimmer isn’t his best novel, but it’s worthwhile. Initially the novel’s speech tags disconcerted me. Although I’m not overly religious about them, I’m with the group that tries to avoid speech ‘assists’. For the first few chapters, my eye stopped every time I encountered one until the plot eventually captured my attention and moved on. And that’s the hallmark: capturing a reader’s attention.

People, Places, and Things

The West Texas town of Rostov had a genuine feeling that made it seem it was based upon a real community. At times authors base locales on real settings but, because of minor liberties with details, change the names. Rostov felt like that.

The story referred to a movie ‘Birthright’, filmed in that area. By the second mention of its actor James Deacon, I began to wonder if the author was making an oblique reference to James Dean, if Birthright was actually the 1956 film Giant, and if ‘Rostov’ was Marfa, Texas. Each subsequent revelation convinced me ‘Deacon’ was a stand-in for Dean, finally confirmed in the afterword. Indeed, most of the details (except the age of Rock Hudson) appeared to be accurate.

Bear in mind these were passing mentions, not actual characters. So why invent James ‘Deacon’ when we could have learned details about James Dean himself? Why indeed?

Compare and Contrast

When I was a kid, I read Alistair MacLean’s novel, The Guns of Navarone, inspired by the actual Battle of Leros following the fall of Rhodes in the Dodecanese Campaign. One of the central characters was a New Zealand adventurer in his early 20s, a WW-II soldier and world-class mountaineer, chosen to scale the impassible south cliff and sabotage an impregnable Nazi fortress.

Not long after, I read about the conquering of Everest by Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand adventurer in his early 20s, a WW-II veteran and world-class mountaineer… Wait, Navarone… Was that character’s name the same?

I went back to The Guns of Navarone and realized MacLean had named his hero Mallory, not Hillary, but it became clear Mallory was patterned upon the gentleman from New Zealand.

Interesting, especially since I thought this ‘semi-verisimilitude’ worked better in The Guns of Navarone than it did it did in Shimmer. Why?

Unfair Comparison

At the time of MacLean's writing, Sir Edmund Hillary was still alive. While one can legitimately refer to a living public person, casting them as a full-fledged character would be a highly dubious undertaking. Alistair MacLean simply used Hillary as a prototype.

In Shimmer, David Morrell mostly alluded to Deacon in bits of semi-historical trivia. Since references to the real James Dean would have served equally well– no, better since the audience might have learned something– why didn’t the author simply name the actual person?

Writers Bloc

I can’t answer for the author, but beginning writers might find the choice confusing. A Facebook self-publishing group is convinced HUGE LEGAL BARRIERS don’t allow mention of any real person at all, not Albert Einstein nor Martin Luther King or a not-so-real Ronald McDonald, without invoking lawsuits and huge fees, and God help them if they whisper the name Elvis™ or Marilyn™, intellectual properties owned by The National Enquirer. They know this because a cousin of an aunt whose friend worked in a cocktail lounge and wrote about JFK suffered CIA reprisals and, ratted out by ‘traditional publishers’, had to pull her book off Amazon. Okay, I exaggerate… slightly.

Writers are pretty safe referring to public figures as long as they stop short of outright libel. But I also suggest keeping one’s biases in check. I recall a novel that depicted Jimmy Carter improbably abusing White House servants, a political prejudice where an author’s distaste became authorial bad taste.

So what’s your take? If an author wants to refer to historical events and persons, should they fabricate pseudonyms for real people? And if so, why?

Line-up

clip © Ioannis ‘John’ Christoforou

by Leigh Lundin

Happy New Year! We’re happy to see you survived the Chanukah and Christmas holidays and the New Year’s parties.

Our resolution for the year is to continue providing you a window into the creative (which sounds so much better than ‘twisted’) minds of crime fiction authors. Here’s what to expect:

Mon		Jan Grape, Fran Rizer Mondays represent the cosy realm featuring Fran Rizer and Jan Grape. Besides the Callie Parrish series, Fran has brought out a new thriller, Kudzu River. Jan has a number of series characters such as Zoe Barrow, Jenny Gordon & C.J. Gunn, and Robbie & Sheriff Damon Dunlap.
Tue		Jim Winter, David Dean, Paul D. Marks Jim anchors Tuesdays, appearing every other week. Among other tales, Jim is noted for this Nick Kepler series. This month also marks the final article for a while from our New Zealand author, Stephen Ross, who takes a sabbatical to work on his book. David Dean similarly took a sabbatical to sweat out his books as well and continues with us on monthly Tuesdays. Velma has invited prize-winning author and LA historian Paul Marks to join us once a month on Tuesdays starting in February. Paul is noted for his Shamus-award White Heat.
Wed		Rob Lopresti, David Edgerley Gates Rob has anchored arresting Wednesdays for many years. He specializes in short stories, especially his Longshanks series. Santa Fe writer David Edgerley Gates rounds out Wednesdays. He’s the noted author of cold war novels and the Placido Geist bounty hunter series.
Thu		Eve Fisher, Brian Thornton Thursdays, think history. Historian and social activist Eve Fisher has published an astonishing array of short stories, mostly in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Also a historian and teacher, Brian Thornton fills out our Thursday schedule. He’s the author of books on Lincoln and bastards… and more bastards. Really!
Fri		Dixon Hill, R.T. Lawton If it’s Friday, it must be tough guys, our heroes Dixon Hill and R.T. Lawton. Dixon can write just about anything, but he specializes in– what else?– mysteries. R.T. writes historical shorts such as his Asian half-brothers series and his Parisian crime historicals from the Mother Margot’s School for Pickpockets.
Sat		Melodie Campbell, John Floyd Two consummate professionals share Saturdays. First we have Melodie Campbell, award-winning author of the Goddaughter series. You don’t want to mess with her. Anchoring Saturdays, prolific Mississippi author John Floyd always brings us entertainment, whether about his abundance of short stories, movies, or his popular (in)famous list of lists.
Sun		Leigh Lundin, Dale Andrews As you noted last week, Louis Willis retired at the end of the year. Starting this month, Dale Andrews returns on the 25th to replace Louis on the last Sunday of each month. You may remember Dale from his prize-winning stories and Ellery Queen research.

We’re glad to have you join us for another year!

The School of Night

by David Edgerley Gates

The first of Anthony Burgess' novels I read, or at least finished, was NOTHING LIKE THE SUN, a re-imagining of Shakespeare's life. (I'd tried tackling A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, but found it too difficult.) Many years later, he wrote an extraordinary book called EARTHLY POWERS - which deserves a column of its own - but one of the last books he published in his lifetime was A DEAD MAN IN DEPTFORD. It revisits the Elizabethan age, one of Burgess' great passions, and looks into the mystery surrounding the murder of Christopher Marlowe. 
  
'Mystery' is an inexact word, because we know who killed him. Stabbed him above the eye, during a drinking quarrel. The question is whether it was arranged beforehand.

Marlowe

Kit Marlowe was a poet first, and then a hugely successful playwright. He and Shakespeare were born the same year, 1564, but Marlowe was a marquee name much earlier. DOCTOR FAUSTUS is probably the most famous of his plays, and the most quoted. "Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it." "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?" "I'll burn my books." FAUSTUS also attached to Marlowe the reputation of being an atheist or a heretic, a damaging accusal.

He was also a spy. This has been disputed, but he was probably in the pay of either Lord Burghley, the queen's treasurer, or Sir Francis Walsingham, her principal secretary. Walsingham, a member of the Privy Council, was Elizabeth's spymaster, a secret and dangerous man. The dates don't always work, but Marlowe was often absent abroad, and his chief mission was apparently to penetrate supposed Catholic plots threatening the queen. More to the point, various criminal charges brought against Marlowe were dismissed or nol prossed, which meant he had powerful protectors. Finally, though, a warrant was issued on the charge of sedition, involving inflammatory anti-Protestant literature. Given the climate

Walsingham

of the time, however, this could have been a deception - a provocation, in present-day vocabulary, bait to draw out suspected conspirators.

In the event, Marlowe was ordered to appear before the Privy Council. He presented himself on May 20th, 1593, but the council didn't meet. He was told to keep himself available, until such time as they did. He was murdered on the 30th, ten days later, without ever testifying.

Four men spent the day drinking at a pelting house in Deptford. Kit Marlowe, Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres, and Robert Poley. Frizer, Skeres, and Poley were dubious characters, loan sharks, confidence men, and all three of them had served in some capacity or another for the Walsinghams, either the late Sir Francis or his first cousin, Thomas, a one-time agent provocateur in the intelligence trade, now turned gentleman, and a member of the queen's court. At some point late in the afternoon, according to the inquest, Frizer and Marlowe got in a fight over the bill. Marlowe attacked Frizer, Frizer stuck him in the head with a knife and killed him. It was ruled self-defense. Kit Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave. Frizer was pardoned inside of a month.

This much is known. The rest is speculation.

Raleigh

Sir Walter Raleigh's name surfaces. Although a favorite of Elizabeth's, he had many enemies, and his star rose and fell. There was plenty of malicious gossip being passed around. One story goes that Raleigh, thought to be no respecter or religion, hosted a coven of unbelievers, known as The School of Night. Marlowe was said to attend, as were Henry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland, and the astronomer Thomas Harriot. Nothing supports this, or even that the men knew each other, but it certainly thickens the plot, if plot there was. Supposedly, should Marlowe have been tortured, he might have incriminated Raleigh. This fabrication could have been circulated by Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, another of Elizabeth's favorites and a rival of Raleigh's. Essex went to the block in 1601, Raleigh himself was executed some years later, both men attainted by treason to the crown. No evidence suggests either of them had a hand in Marlowe's death. The circumstances have remained unexplained.

Shakespeare has the last word, in AS YOU LIKE IT. "When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good with seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room." The 'reckoning' refers to an unpaid bill, the 'little room' to a shabby kennel in Deptford.

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Lee Child's Personal

by David Edgerley Gates

PERSONAL is the nineteenth Jack Reacher book in the series, and Lee Child doesn't need my help to sell it. It opened at #1 on most national lists the first week it was out, and week two, it's still there.

This post isn't about promoting the book, which happens to be a knockout - Lee certainly hasn't lost his chops, and Jack keeps getting deeper as a character - but about P.O.V.

PERSONAL is told, appropriately, in first-person. This isn't a departure for the Reacher books, but more commonly, they've been told in the third. In other words, Jack is observed, and doesn't share his confidences. This is true of thirteen books, so far. It's interesting to me why you'd decide to shift gears. Lee uses the first-person in KILLING FLOOR, PERSUADER, THE ENEMY, GONE TOMORROW, THE AFFAIR, and this book. Oh, you might think, work with the change-up pitch to keep yourself on your toes and avoid getting stale, or to keep your readers invested, over the course of a long and successful run of novels, but it seems to me there's a more calculated narrative choice involved.

Reacher's never been entirely generic - unlike, say, Travis McGee. John MacDonald, famously, never wanted to do a series character, but he got talked into it. McGee has his quirks, but he remains a flat character, until you get to THE GREEN RIPPER, and he steps outside of himself, the formula no longer able to contain him. The dynamic for Reacher, even at the beginning, allows for more expansion and contraction. Lee Child himself has said that he meant from the get-go to write books that would be accessible, and commercial, and that Reacher was a conscious construct, designed - not market-researched, but a means to an end.

He turns out to be more. This is something that happens, and not always by accident. There are other examples. We might start out to write one story, and then find it gets away from us, or a walk-on part suddenly takes center stage, and completely unexpected. But in Reacher's case, Lee Child might have intended a sort of empty vessel, a hero you could inhabit with your own devices and desires, and what he wound up with was somebody whose own devices and desires overtook the original template. 

Which brings us back to choosing a voice. In each of the books where Jack himself is speaking, he invites our confidence, and we become complicit. This is, I think, most true of THE ENEMY and THE AFFAIR, which take place in the past, when Jack is still active military. One of my favorite lines, in all of the books, is a throwaway, from THE ENEMY, a seemingly casual remark. Reacher's gone to Germany, and they're outside some big U.S. Army armor base, Baumholder or the like. In the early morning fog, they hear the tanks coming back from a live-fire exercise. The sound of tank treads on pavement, the sound of the 20th century, Reacher thinks to himself, the Wehrmacht, the Soviets putting down the Budapest revolt. One of the rare instances where Reacher is reflective. It's a very telling detail. Jack's not your average lifer.

Also, in THE ENEMY, we get to meet not just Jack's brother Joe, but their mom, with her own past history in the French resistance, something neither of the boys know about. Lee revisits this in PERSONAL. The real zinger in the book, for my money, isn't ninety pages in, with the Russian (no spoilers), but a hundred pages in, the scene afterwards, at Pere Lachaise cemetery, where Jack visits his mother's grave. This is the entire argument for using first-person. We hear Jack's thoughts. We see him revealed.

Vulnerability isn't the first word that comes to mind, with Reacher. Far from it. He's kind of a force of nature, a guy without visible weakness. Big, and certain. Nobody you want to mess with. People do, and live to regret it - or don't. Live, anyway. A hard guy, and unsentimental. A guy you believe in. A guy you want on your side.

I don't think, though, that you believe in Jack Reacher simply because he's an unstoppable force. I think what Lee Child has done, in the course of the books, is to pull off a real hat-trick. You get used to Reacher in some diner by the side of the highway, hoping he's going to get a decent cup of java, or head-butting some asshole cop who gets in his face, just being Jack. What takes you off-guard is the occasional, and sudden, moment of clarity. He assesses the background, his immediate environment, the threat potential, how not? What makes Jack different, what gives him depth, isn't that he examines himself. He doesn't. But he knows who he is.

You could say this is one in a long line. Spade, or Marlowe, Lew Archer. Spenser, and Travis McGee. Kinsey Milhone, for that matter. Lone wolves, who stake out their turf, and make it their own. I beg to differ. Reacher is somehow on another plane. I don't know how to explain it to myself. Not even Bob Lee Swagger - and I bow to none in my admiration for Steve Hunter - but Lee's done something else. He's reinvented the character, he owns Jack Reacher. he speaks with his voice.

We identify with our characters. I do with mine. Lee seems to have actually inhabited Jack. This is a gift, or a kind of magic. I think it's astonishing. We don't all manage it. Not even. Lee got a gift. It wasn't handed to him, by any means, but we take it when the tray is passed.

http://www.davidedgerleygates.com/

Resurrection Men

by David Edgerley Gates

Ian Rankin published his thirteenth Inspector John Rebus novel, RESURRECTION MEN, in 2002. The story is about a group of cops in a rehab facility - sent down in disgrace because of alcohol or domestic violence issues, or they've fallen afoul of Internal Affairs - but being Rankin, the book is of course about a lot more than that. The title is double-edged, a turn of phrase with a dark history.


In the early 19th century, medical schools relied on the dead bodies of executed criminals for anatomy studies. It was illegal, in that day and age, to leave your body to science. but the supply began to dry up, and it gave rise to a trade in fresh cadavers, and the graves of the newly buried were dug up by body-snatchers, who sold the dead for necropsies. They were known as Resurrection Men. 

Two of these entrepreneurs, Burke and Hare, resident in Edinburgh in late 1827, improved their market share by skipping exhumation and turning to murder. Their victims were the derelict, the sickly, women of the street - people who wouldn't be missed. Over the course of the next year, they killed at least sixteen people, and shopped their corpses to a surgeon named Knox, to use in his anatomical lectures. How much Knox knew, or suspected, is an open question, but certainly he turned a blind eye. After they were caught, Hare turned King's Evidence, in return for immunity, and Burke was hanged. His body, as it happens, was then publicly dissected at the University of Edinburgh. Knox, the doctor, was never prosecuted.

"A wretch who isn't worth a farthing while alive," Sir Walter Scott remarked, "becomes a valuable article when knocked on the head and carried to an anatomist." Scott was being ironic about economies of scale, but as far as I know, he never used this incident as material. Dickens wasn't so shy. One of

his characters in A TALE OF TWO CITIES, Jerry Cruncher, is explicitly a grave-robber. And in 1884, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a story called "The Body-Snatcher," which stops just short of naming Knox as a knowing accomplice. Stevenson's DR.

JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE is a reimagining of the Whitechapel murders, and there's been some conflation, in books and movies, of Burke and Hare's crimes with Jack the Ripper. The serial killer, as a figure of fear, is a mid-Victorian invention, I believe. Not that somebody might not claim many victims, but that he does it for the sick thrill.

Psychopathology wasn't well-understood, in the 1800's - the term didn't even come into general use until the early 20th century. One of the narrative engines of David Morrell's gripping recent novel, MURDER AS A FINE ART, which takes place in 1854 London, is the lack of any practical forensic approach, and the inability to process, let alone inhabit, the mindset of a serial murderer. It's not simply an unknown, but unimaginable, like an empty space on an old map, which simply states: Here Be Monsters. Burke and Hare took up their trade for the easy money, but the seeming

effortlessness of the murders gives you pause. They displayed no remorse. Burke, in fact, before he went to the scaffold, asked whether Dr. Knox would give him the five pounds he was owed for his last victim, so Burke could buy a new suit of clothes to be hanged in. 

"To know my deed, 'twere best not to know myself," Macbeth says. Burke and Hare apparently avoided any kind of self-knowledge. They denied the humanity of the men and women, and at least one child, that they murdered, but did they deny their own? Neither one of them were crazy, so far as we know, although they were probably a few cards short of a full deck. They were paid five to ten pounds for each dead body they delivered. In today's numbers, between six and twelve hundred bucks. Not too shabby, if you're desecrating a grave in the wee hours, but for a capital crime? The odd thing about these guys is that they were very far from the pathology of the Ripper. There was actually nothing out of the ordinary about them. They were simply dumb enough to get caught.

Maybe that's the thing. It isn't that Burke and Hare live on in our imagination because they were criminal deviants who've evaded detection for 125 years - is the Ripper case solved? More, perhaps,

that Burke and Hare touched a popular nerve at the time, and that a writer like Dickens or Stevenson gives them shelf life. (Burke's skeleton is still on display at the Edinburgh Medical School.) No, the dread lies in the open grave. 

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