It Was a Dark & Stormy Night...

Happy Halloween! 

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

                            –Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford

Ah, yes. The cliched opening to end all cliched openings! "It was a dark and stormy night..." much parodied, and the author cited above, Edward Bulwer-Lytton ("Lord Lytton" to his friends, you peasants!) is more infamous for this tortured opening line than he is for helping establish the Canadian province of British Columbia, for turning down the crown of the Kingdom of Greece, or for coining such time-honored turns of phrase as "the pen is mightier than the sword," "the almighty dollar," and a host of others. 

Funny story: Bulwer-Lytton didn't even coin this line. He just used it about twenty years after Washington Irving (Of "Sleepy Hollow" fame) actually coined it in his famously satiric work, A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, in 1809.

And it was used over and over again throughout the 19th century (and in fact Paul Clifford, the novel in which Bulwer-Lytton employed it, was a runaway best-seller until literary tastes began to veer away from this sort melodramatic description). And what did Bulwer-Lytton get for his trouble?

Well, there's a yearly writing contest sponsored in his name by San Jose State University's English Department, with the avowed goal of writing "an atrocious opening sentence to a hypothetical bad novel."

For all of Bulwer-Lytton's opening being widely panned for generations, it does definitely accomplish one essential goal: it sets the scene quickly and vividly. The reader is dropped right into the middle of the action, and has a clear image of what is happening right away.

I had this on my mind in the run-up to this evening's blog post, especially in light of the fact that my turn in the rotation this year lands on Halloween. So I got to thinking on the idea, looked around for good examples of opening lines/scene-setting so effective that in some ways they served as almost another character.

I've written on this sort of thing before. If you're interested in my own unfiltered thoughts on this subject, you can find them here.

So since I've offered my thoughts on this topic before, I decided to solicit opinions from writer friends–all of whom are smarter than yours truly–and was thrilled by the response I got. I've recreated them below, completely unfiltered. 

Some respondents gave a great opening line. Others cited an effective opening paragraph. Still others offered examples of what worked as well as holding forth articulately and compellingly as to why they found said examples so effect.

In other words, on this Samhain, the eve before that Feast of All Souls, I offer you a veritable smorgasbord of considered opinions on this subject. 

And once you've finished with their opinions, go buy their books!

Read on...

Matthew Quinn Martin:  

“Where’s Papa going with that ax?”

(First line from Charlotte’s Web)

Curt Colbert:

"I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul."

                                                             – Bram Stoker, Dracula                   

  

Eve Fisher: 
I have always loved this opening (From Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest).  Talk about scene as character...

"I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn't think anything of what he had done to the city's name. Later I heard men who could manage their r's give it the same pronunciation. I still didn't see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better...

"The city wasn't pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters' stacks."

Nothing that goes on in this town is going to end well, is it?

Sam Wiebe: 

"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."

                                                –Raymond Chandler, "Red Wind"

Stacy Robinson:

"The night was clear and fine above us. The stars shone cold and bright, while a

half-moon bathed the whole scene in a soft, uncertain light. Before us lay the dark bulk of the house, its serrated roof and bristling chimneys hard outlined against the silver-spangled sky. Broad bars of golden light from the lower windows stretched across the orchard and the moor. One of them was suddenly shut off. The servants had left the kitchen. There only remained the lamp in the dining-room where the two men, the murderous host and the unconscious guest, still chatted over their cigars.

"Every minute that white woolly plain which covered one-half of the moor was drifting closer and closer to the house. Already the first thin wisps of it were curling across the golden square of the lighted window. The farther wall of the orchard was already invisible, and the trees were standing out of a swirl of white vapour. As we watched it the fog-wreaths came crawling round both corners of the house and rolled slowly into one dense bank on which the upper floor and the roof floated like a strange ship upon a shadowy sea. Holmes struck his hand passionately upon the rock in front of us and stamped his feet in his impatience.

                     –Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles           

Bill Cameron:

I have a problem with authority, especially writing authorities. I don’t care how illustrious they are. When Stephen King says don’t use adverbs then by golly I’m gonna adverbly adverb till the turgidly adverbial cows homely come.

So it may come as no surprise that one of my favorite openings to one of my favorite books breaks a rule by another illustrious writer. It literally opens with a dark and stormy night.

"The gray day ended as it began, too cold for May, and threatening a storm. Now the wind swept out of the east, lashing the sea. It drove the tide up through the harbor and past the town, into the great salt marsh beyond."

Today, The Mystery of the Witches’ Bridge would be called a middle grade book, though that category didn’t exist as such in 1967 when it was first published. I first read it in fourth grade, and return to it at least once a year. The opening continues, still quite stormy and nighty:

"Here, for half the course of the clock, the sea would invade the land. The black tide, branching and rebranching into its creeks and waterways, would fill and overflow the ancient beds of salt hay. It would hide, for a time, the treacherous salt ponds. Then around midnight the tide would halt, and slowly draw back into the sea.

"But all night long the wind and the rain, like powers of darkness, would turn this wasteland into a wild witches’ sabbath."

You could never get away with opening a book like that nowadays. An editor would Track Changes all that weather into oblivion, and if you indie-pubbed it, the first Amazon review would be a 1-star rant citing Elmore Leonard. (To be sure, Leonard offered exceptions to his “don’t open with weather” one sentence after declaring it, and Stephen King uses plenty of adverbs. Not even these literary deities suggested their rules were absolute.)

In a way, I sorta get it. I mean, we don’t even meet our first person, the main character Dan, until page two—after yet another paragraph following that witches’ sabbath bit. Certainly in this impatient era, many folks wouldn’t bother reading to page two, though they might take the time to make a Facebook post or tweet about it. To paraphrase another book opening (one far more famous), it is a truth universally acknowledged that people on the internet will assert their literary pet peeves are, well, universal truths.

And yet, for me, this book and this opening probably did more to make me a writer than any other single work. Is it florid and melodramatic? Yes. So am I. Is it a rebranching tidal meander that takes its own damn time? Absolutely. And so do I. Would it be declared unreadable, overwrought dreck by many self-appointed writing geniuses on the internet? . . . Well, you see where I’m going here.

What this particular dark and stormy night does for me is set a tone and establish a sense of place such that when we finally meet Dan, we already understand and feel the sense of dread that infuses him as he enters this turbulent landscape. And I’m not ashamed to say I love the hell out of it.

Renee Patrick:

California is the true protagonist of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels, as Archer would be the first to admit. In The Drowning Pool, Archer takes a dip in the ocean because the Pacific "was as close as I ever got to cleanliness and freedom, as far as I ever got from all the people ... There was nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn’t cure." Macdonald could anatomize the Golden State like few others. Also from The Drowning Pool, here's Archer pulling into a suddenly prosperous burg: "The oil wells from which the sulphur gas rose crowded the slopes on both sides of the town. I could see them from the highway as I drove in: the latticed triangles of the derricks where trees had grown, the oil-pumps nodding and clanking where cattle had grazed. Since 'thirty-nine or 'forty, when I had seen it last, the town had grown enormously, like a tumor. It had thrust out shoots in all directions: blocks of match-box houses in raw new housing developments and the real estate shacks to go with them, a half-mile gauntlet of one-story buildings along the highway: veterinarians, chiropractors, beauty shops, marketerias, restaurants, bars, liquor stores. There was a new four-story hotel, a white frame gospel tabernacle, a bowling alley wide enough to house a B-36. The main street had been transformed by glass brick, plastic, neon. A quiet town in a sunny valley had hit the jackpot hard, and didn't know what to do with itself at all."

Macdonald lovingly crafted an entire fictional California geography. Several of his books are set in Pacific Point, which "rose from sea level in a gentle slope, divided neatly into social tiers, like something a sociologist had built to prove a theory" (The Way Some People Die). In the penultimate Archer novel Sleeping Beauty, the town is under threat from a man-made ecological disaster. Archer is returning from a getaway to Mazatlan when he spies oil out of the airplane's window: "It lay on the blue water off Pacific Point in a free-form slick that seemed miles wide and many miles long. An offshore oil platform stood up out of its windward end like the metal handle of a dagger that had stabbed the world and made it spill black blood."

Instead of driving home he heads to Pacific Point to witness the destruction firsthand. "From the hill above the harbor, I could see the enormous slick spreading like premature night across the sea. At its nearest it was perhaps a thousand yards out, well beyond the dark brown kelp beds which formed a natural barrier offshore. Workboats were moving back and forth, spraying the edges of the spill with chemicals. They were the only boats I could see on the water. A white plastic boom was strung across the harbor entrance, and gulls that looked like white plastic whirled above it." Archer joins the handful of people at the shore's edge, their mood grim. "They looked as if they were waiting for the end of the world, or as if the end had come and they would never move again."

Things get worse from there.

Jay Stringer:

Setting as character? I always come back to the idea that character is something that is revealed. A trait. The nature of a person. Can a location have a nature all of its own, or is it given one by the people who inhabit the space? How can writers reveal the character of a setting?

My favourite example, by far, is from the Josh Stallings heist novel Young Americans:

“One hundred feet past the Humboldt County line was a liquor store/gas station. She did not buy skunk weed from the kid selling it out of his wizard-painted van. She did make a phone call.”

That passage puts you in the moment. You know that place. You know how it feels, and how the air smells. Not really menacing, I guess? That depends on your relationship to weed, wizard-painted vans, or the guys who inhabited them. I’m not here to judge.

If I’m going to try and play by the rules and share an example that gives the

reader a sense of menace, I point you to the pure fear I felt during a recent re-read of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. As a teenager, the part that put my pants in the washing machine was Matt hearing the sound of a bedroom window opening down the hall. Coming back to the book as an adult, in the current political and social climate, I had to put the book down for a good long while after this:

“They walked slowly from room to room, as if their bodies had become glassy and fragile, and they turned on all the lights, and they did not look out their windows. That above all else. They did not look out their windows.”

By this point in the book, the vampires have started taking over the town, walking the streets at night. The passage might not give you a single description of the setting, but it reveals the hell out of the town’s character.

 And there you have it, something for everyone looking for input on the importance of setting in great storytelling. Thanks to all of my friends who chimed in. You guys are the best.

One last thing: this week Down and Out Books published the second of a pair of crime fiction anthologies I collected and edited. Both are inspired by the music of jazz-rock giants Steely Dan, and are thematically linked, but more than stand on their own as superb works of fiction. So if you get a chance, consider getting a copy of A Beast Without A Name, available wherever you go to get your crime fiction fix.

Thanks, and Happy Halloween!

The Last Lesson: Queen vs Hitchcock

Two weeks ago I reported that I had been invited to speak to the Northwest branch of the Mystery Writers of American on the subject: "Ten Things I learned Writing Short Stories."  I listed nine of them and promised to deliver the last one this week.  Here goes!

10.  What's the difference between Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine?  That's the second-most common question I hear about my writing.  (The first is the dreaded WDYGYI?)

For many years my reply was simple: AH buys my stories and EQ doesn't.  But since EQ has surrendered to my dubious charms several times I have to come up with some better distinction.  So here are a few.

Origin stories.  I mean the origins of the magazines themselves.  I think they are useful in thinking about how the editors think: What is in the magazine's DNA, so to speak?  Because as the old saying goes "What's bred in the bone, comes out in the flesh."

EQ was started in 1941 under the editorship of Frederic Dannay, one half of the author Ellery Queen.  Besides being an author and editor, Dannay was an anthologist and a historian of the mystery field.  He was determined to cover all aspects of the field (as opposed to Black Mask Magazine, for example, which had focused on hardboiled) and to stretch the definition of the mystery as well.  Therefore it was not unusual for him to print stories from around the world, stories from "literary" authors who were not considered mystery writers, and reprint stories that had been forgotten or that no one had previously thought of as belonging to the crime field at all.  EQ, for example, was the first American magazine to publish the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.  EQ retains a keen sense of the history of the mystery field, which leads to publishing parodies and pastiches.

AH, on the other hand, was founded in 1956.  The film director had no direct role in the magazine, simply licensing the use of his hame and likeness.  For many years the introduction to each issue was written in his voice.  The magazine was not inspired by his movies as much as by his very popular TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which actually filmed some stories that had originally appeared in the magazine.  Like the TV show, the magazine leaned toward suspense, twist endings, and a macabre sense of humor.  It still does.

Distinctions today.  EQ has regular departments.  Going all the way back to Dannay's day it has featured the Department of First Stories, which has premiered the work of up-and-coming artists who went on to fame such as Harry Kemelman, Henry Slesar, Stanley Ellin, and Thomas Flanagan.  Every issue features Passport to Crime, a story translated from another language.  EQ also owns the rights to the Black Mask name and often features a story in that magazine's hardboiled style.

My description of the beginnings of AH may have left you with the impression that their selection of story types is narrow. In fact, the opposite is true.  You can find examples of westerns and science fiction in its pages, as long as crime is front and center. Fantasy elements  may slip in.  (The rare ghost story can show up in either magazine; for some reason ghosts are the one bit of woowoo that is allowed in the mystery world.)

And some more quick generalizations.

EQ seems to lean more toward the grim, the longer, and the fair-play detection stories.

AH appears to favor the lighter, the shorter, and the twist ending.

It is important to be clear that everything I am saying here is about tendencies, not absolutes.  You can find exceptions in every issue, but if you are trying to decide which magazine to submit a story to first, this might help you.

One thing both seem to insist on, is high quality, which may explain why my overall sale record at AHMM is only about 33% and much worse at EQMM.

Your mileage, needless to say, may vary.

Bouchercon Bound!

Though I am writing this more than a week before it posts, the day after it posts Temple and I will head to Dallas for Bouchercon 2019, our fourth consecutive Bouchercon, which, as a point of reference, occurs less than a month before our fourth anniversary.

Michael with Rebecca Swope at the 2002 Shamus Awards Banquet.
(Photo courtesy of Rebecca Swope.)

I’ve attended science fiction conventions off-and-on since the first Archon in St. Louis, Mo., forty-three years ago, but the 2002 Bouchercon in Austin, Texas, was my first mystery convention. I was lucky to be a panelist (discussing my private eye novel All White Girls), I met and spent time with several writers I had only known online or via snail mail prior to the convention, and I attended my first Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Awards Banquet that year. Unfortunately, financial constraints prevented me from fully experiencing the convention. I commuted each day from Waco because I could not afford a hotel room, my food budget was negligible, and I had no money to spend in the dealer’s room.

My second mystery convention was the 2011 Left Coast Crime in Santa Fe, N.M., where I participated in a short story panel, met more writers I had only known online, and met one editor to whom I’ve since sold several short stories. Unfortunately, I spent much of my time in Santa Fe suffering from altitude sickness, and I thought my head was going to explode the entire time I was there.

My experience with mystery conventions took a positive turn in 2016, with Bouchercon in New Orleans. Less than a year earlier I had the good fortune to marry a mystery fan born in New Orleans, so I had no difficulty convincing Temple that we could combine a mystery convention with sight-seeing. Receiving a lifetime achievement award at the convention was a bonus.

In addition to meeting many of my writing friends during the convention, Temple had a book signed by Michael Connelly (she claims Connelly’s her second-favorite mystery writer named Michael, but I’ve seen the gleam in her eye every time a new Connelly novel is released or a new season of Bosch airs), and she had a close encounter with Sara Paretsky at the Shamus Awards Banquet. Before the convention ended, Temple was making plans to attend Bouchercon the following year in Toronto.

We added Malice Domestic in North Bethesda, Md., to our convention schedule in 2018 and had hoped to attend Left Coast Crime in Vancouver earlier this year. (Unfortunately, the unexpected need to replace my car saw us using our travel savings for a down payment on a new vehicle, causing us to cancel our trip.)

But Temple fangirling over her favorite mystery writers and us spending time with friends both old and new are only a few of the many benefits of attending mystery conventions together. I’ve walked away from each of the last three Bouchercons and two Malice Domestics with writing or editing opportunities I likely would never have had had I not attended.

At Bouchercon this week, I’ll be participating in “Short and Sweet but Sometimes Dark,” a short story panel at 4:00 p.m. Thursday, moderated by Barb Goffman and featuring panelists Mysti Berry, John M. Floyd, R. T. Lawton, and James Lincoln Warren.

I will also be presenting a brief introduction to Texas private eyes at the Shamus Awards Banquet Friday evening.

And, though there’s no formal event scheduled, Murder By The Book will have copies of The Eyes of Texas: Private Eyes from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods (Down & Out Books) available for sale and many of the contributors and I will be wandering around the convention ready and willing to sign copies.

I can’t predict what else may come from this week’s convention or from future mystery conventions, but even before this year’s Bouchercon has begun, Temple and I are already making plans to attend both Bouchercon and Malice Domestic next year.

My story “A Cling of Koalas” appears in A Murder of Crows (Darkhouse Books).

My story “Sex Toys” appears in Knucklehead Noir (Coffin Hop Press).

My essay “Lifecycle of a Fanzine Fan,” about how I now do professionally all the things I did as a teenaged fanzine editor, appears in Portable Storage Two.

Playing Fair, or the Death of Logic

A few weeks ago, I was reading a novel I'm supposed to review, and I encountered a dialogue exchange that brought me to a screeching halt. The protagonist and his sidekick were talking abut a new discovery in the case, and the sidekick said, "Well, that proves that we've been right all along and X did Y."
I re-read the previous few pages three times because I thought I must have missed something, but no, the passage proved nothing of the kind. That conclusion couldn't possibly come from the information in the scene. It was the third or fourth time that happened in the book, and I'm going to mention it when I post the review. I see this problem and the ever-popular Deus ex Machina more and more in recent novels, and it bothers me.

 What bothers me even more is the frequency with which it's creeping into my own life. And maybe yours, too.

I try to keep my personal politics out of this column even though my leanings are no secret. Last month, a very conservative musician I've known for years made a comment and I disagreed. He brought up a point I'd never heard before and I asked for his source. He replied, "Clinton."

"No," I said. "You say that Clinton did A, but that's not your source. Where did you get the information?" Bad mistake. He went off on a rant that added more information that was so obviously false that I walked out of the open mic without playing. Back home, I browsed for two hours, looking for confirmation of his claim, and the closest I came was a site labelled by Media Bias as "A propaganda site that uses false or misleading data to promote a far-right agenda." The post in question used the key words from the musician's assertion, but didn't make the claim he repeated. And that post was over a year old.

This is the level of discourse we have reached. Large segments of the population no longer treat science, mathematics, history or other intellectual disciplines as valid, and it has damaged--if not eliminated--rational discussion.

When I was in high school, several friends were on the debate team, with an adviser who was respected throughout the region as an exemplary teacher. I didn't take the class because I was so shy, but I learned second-hand about reductio ad absurdum, begging the questions (Which does NOT mean "motivating or giving rise to the question"), ad hominem arguments, false premises, and many other specious rhetorical techniques. Years later, I presented those techniques in my composition classes as faulty was to support a thesis.

I even used to tell my kids that the best class I ever had in learning to support an argument was plane geometry. We used axioms to prove theorems and theorems to solve equations, and we could support every statement we made. We also learned how to build the sequence concisely and clearly.

All that is fading. Too many people now invent data or facts on the spot to win an argument that may not even be worth having. It has infected fiction writing, too. More and more, I see language used poorly by major writers, and they can't build a logical argument/plot to lead to the solution of their mystery. Rex Stout used to drive me crazy with Nero Wolfe's passionate love of inductive instead of deductive reasoning, but it was a supportable discipline. Now, far too often, I know you walk to school because the tissue paper is orange on Tuesday.

We need to go back to teaching rhetoric and insisting that our students say what they mean, mean what they say, and understand the difference. Dreyer's English, Garner's Modern American Usage, a good dictionary and a good grammar book should be on every writer's desk. When Humpty Dumpty said he used a word to mean what he wanted it to mean, it used to be a joke. Now it's a fact of life.

And it's dangerous. Ask Greta Thunberg.