16 December 2023

Putting Faces to Names



If you're a writer, you already know--before, during, and after your story--what your characters look like. But do you ever wonder what they'd look like in a movie or TV adaptation? And if you're a reader who likes (and yes, knows) certain characters from a novel or a story, do you eagerly anticipate seeing how they'll wind up looking on the big screen?

Sometimes those portrayals don't turn out the way we'd imagined. I once had a writer friend who was honestly worried about what her characters might look like if one of her stories ever happened to be made into a movie. (My advice to her was to file that under Needless Stress. We should all be so lucky.)

Believe it or not, I was almost that lucky a few times. One of those projects earned some modest income from options and option renewals, and another one, an indie production, actually came within several weeks of filming; locations were selected, the script was finalized, a score was composed and recorded (I still have the CD), actors and crew were ready, I'd even been told to invite friends to the set. But then the financing fell through--or so I was told--and everything stopped. The whole production packed up and went home. I learned a lot, though, from all the things that happened before that, one of those being an open casting call during which actors and actresses tried out for the parts. It was quite a thrill for me to attend the auditions and sit there and hear real people saying lines of dialogue I had written, and to put faces to the names of those characters. (Or what would've been those characters, if the project hadn't died a sudden and undignified death.)

Anyway, I got to thinking again about all this the other night, after (re)watching the first season of an Amazon Prime series called Reacher. You're probably familiar with Lee Child's character Jack Reacher--he's a huge ex-army guy, six-five and two-fifty or so, who hitchhikes around the country with no luggage except a toothbrush and spends all of his time righting wrongs. He's been portrayed in two feature films so far starring Tom Cruise, who's a great actor but stands about five foot seven, and for me he just didn't fit the part at all. Apparently I'm not the only one who felt that way, and maybe as a result of that, this streaming series features a guy I'd never heard of before--Alan Ritchson--who does look the part. The plot was okay, too, but I think the big reason the show succeeded was the casting.

Sometimes even two or three different actors are believable for the same character. I used to watch The Adventures of Superman on TV as a kid, and to me Supe was always George Reeves. Later, I also liked Christopher Reeve in Superman: The Movie (so did the judges for the Oscars, that year), and much later I liked Henry Cavill as The Man of Steel in The Man of Steel. TMoS wasn't a great movie, but Cavill--like Ritchson as Reacher--looked like he belonged in the story. Same thing happened with the different actors who have played Sherlock Holmes and The Lone Ranger and Spiderman, over the years. They were all believable to me. 

Which leads to the rest of my sermon for today. The following list, in my opinion and in no particular order, include some roles I can remember that seemed either exactly right or badly wrong, for the story:


25 Good Matches:


Dunaway and Beatty as Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Newman and Redford as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

Fess Parker as Davy Crockett (1954-1956)

Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter (2001-2010)

Gal Godot as Wonder Woman (2017-2020)

Matt Damon as Jason Bourne (2002-2007)

Tom Selleck as Jesse Stone (2005-2015)

Sean Connery as James Bond (1962-1971, 1983)

Michael Keaton as Batman (1989)

Morgan Freeman as Alex Cross (1997-2001)

Al Pacino as Michael Corleone (1972-1990)

Warren Beatty as Dick Tracy (1990)

Jeff Bridges as Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski (1998)

Alec Baldwin as Dave Robicheaux (Heaven's Prisoners, 1996)

Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs, 1991)

Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly (The Devil Wears Prada, 2006)

Robert Duvall as Augustus McCrae (Lonesome Dove, 1989)

Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh (No Country for Old Men, 2007)

Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes (Misery, 1990)

Alan Rickman as Dr. Lazarus (Galaxy Quest, 1999)*

Ed Harris as Virgil Cole (Appaloosa, 2008)

Michael Clarke Duncan as John Coffey (The Green Mile, 1999)

Keith Carradine as Wild Bill Hickok (Deadwood, 2004-2006)

Andre the Giant as Fezzik (The Princess Bride, 1987)

Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens (Justified, 2010-2015)


*Alan Rickman was also perfect as Hans Gruber in Die Hard, Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series, Elliott Marston in Quigley Down Under, and many other roles. I miss him.


25 Not-So-Good Matches:


Kevin Costner as Robin of Locksley (Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, 1991)

Adrien Brody as Jack Driscoll (King Kong remake, 2005)

Mark Wahlberg as Spenser (Spenser Confidential, 2020)

Jamey Sheridan as Randall Flagg (The Stand, 1994)

Eriq La Salle as Lucas Davenport (Mind Prey, 1998)

Colin Farrell as Alexander the Great (Alexander, 2004)

Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau (The Pink Panther remake, 2006)

George Clooney as Batman (Batman & Robin, 1997)

Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor (Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, 2016)

Pierce Brosnan as Sam Carmichael (Mamma Mia!, 2008)

Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett (The Alamo remake, 2004)

Tyler Perry as Alex Cross (Alex Cross, 2012)

Cameron Diaz as Jenny Everdeane (Gangs of New York, 2002)

Adam Sandler as Paul Crewe (The Longest Yard remake, 2005)

Marlon Brando as Sakini (Teahouse of the August Moon, 1956)

James Garner as Wyatt Earp (Hour of the Gun, 1967)

Russell Crowe as Inspector Javert (Les Miserables, 2012)

Johnny Depp as Tonto (The Lone Ranger, 2013)

Dean Martin as Matt Helm (1966-1968)

Nicolas Cage as Johnny Blaze (Ghost Rider, 2007)

Laura Dern as Vice Admiral Holdo (Star Wars, Episode VIII--The Last Jedi, 2017)

Shia LaBeouf as Mutt Williams (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, 2008)

Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates (Psycho remake, 1998)

Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi (Breakfast at Tiffany's, 1961)

John Wayne as Genghis Khan (The Conqueror, 1956)


Funny thing is, sometimes I think actors are miscast and then, later, they grow on me. At first I didn't think Robert Downey Jr. would be a good Iron Man, but I eventually accepted him. Same goes for Alan Ladd as Shane in the movie of that name; I remembered reading Jack Schaefer's novel in high school, and when I finally got around to seeing the movie, I just didn't think Ladd, who was even more vertically challenged than Tom Cruise, fit the deadly gunfighter picture I had in my head. After a while, though, I changed my mind. Other examples: Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings, Daniel Craig as James Bondand Leonardo DiCaprio in The Great Gatsby. I didn't like either of them at first--I kept seeing Leo as Gilbert Grape--but I came around. 

What do you think? Have you ever had characters firmly in your head after reading a story or novel and then been surprised by the person picked to play the role on screen? Which of those matchups were most disappointing to you? Which ones do you think were perfectly cast?

I must mention this, in closing. Since we're talking about casting choices, I think the best actor/character match in cinematic history was James Gandolfini in The Sopranos. Not only can I not imagine anyone else in that role, I later saw him in movies like True Romance and The Mexican and he just didn't seem at home there. To me he's Tony Soprano and always will be. If you agree, watch this.

Whattayagonnado?



15 December 2023

All I Want for Christmas Is This Post on Your Author Website


One of my pet peeves is a question that pops up often at this time of year: Where can I get your books? Granted, publishing is an opaque business, but I don’t think people ask the same sort of question when they are contemplating the purchase of automobile tires or mayonnaise.

Often, the question is framed as if the asker is genuinely concerned about my financial welfare: “What’s the best place to buy your books?” they’ll ask, implying that they want me to get the best bang for their buck.

This one, I sort of understand, and appreciate. “Well,” the only correct response is, “if you buy my book at the local bookstore, I’ll get ten bucks more than if you bought it online.”

Only writers laugh at that one.

Once, at a book event in a historic gift shop, a dimwitted paterfamilias suddenly announced: “Oh! You guys are the authors of the book!” Folks, he said this minutes after my wife and I signed and inscribed a book to his entire family, at the request of his two kids. Dad was standing there the whole time, beaming but apparently oblivious to what was happening.

I wanted to say: Sir, do you routinely let strangers scrawl their names on your purchases? If so, break out your automobile tires and mayonnaise jars right now because I’d be happy to Sharpie the heck out of them for you!

All this to say that when it comes to books, you cannot assume civilians know a damn thing. Which is why, when Denise and I first moved to this town, we made friends with booksellers at the local bookstore, and then promptly inserted a paragraph on the contact pages of our websites saying that if anyone wanted autographed copies of our books that they should contact that store. We gave them the link, the 800-number, and explicit instructions for ordering. In other words, we made it stupidly simple. You have to.

At this time of year, it is wise to remind yourself that you are marketing your books not to readers but to buyers. Many of the books bought during the holidays will never be read by those buyers; they are intended for other people entirely. Thanks to a shadow career as a ghostwriter, I have witnessed business people who have not cracked a book since The Catcher in the Rye buying stacks of signed business books to dole out to their compatriots, thinking it makes them look smart. Non-reading grandparents routinely snap up books for their grandchildren, regardless of the season. 

So, thanks to that paragraph on our website, the local booksellers at Malaprop’s will occasionally shoot us an email if they get an order, and we have grown accustomed to stopping by the store to sign/inscribe when running errands. Predictably, Denise is summoned far more often than I do. I get maybe two or three requests a year, but that’s still cool. Those sales live forever in the store’s system, gently reminding the store that my books are worth keeping in stock.


Simple instructions on our websites have also helped short-circuit the creepy thing that was happening, where strangers would mail a book to our home asking my wife to sign and return it. (I need not comment that privacy does not exist; you know that already.)

Another idiot shipped one of my wife’s books—in an Amazon box—to our local bookstore, with a note asking her to sign and send it back. This triggered a hilarious phone call from the Hungarian-born founder of this legendary indie store, which has been in business 41 years. “Come pick up this disgusting box,” she said in her thick accent, “before I vomit on it!” When we arrived at the store, we found that she had draped a paper bag over the box, neatly hiding the Amazon logo.

Now the note on Denise’s contact page says that any books shipped this way—to our home or the store—will be donated to charity. People must follow the rules.

Some years ago, I spotted another clever book-signing post that we have since stolen and made our own. John Scalzi, the bestselling SFF author, posts an annual message on his blog—believed to be the world’s oldest—with instructions for getting his books for the holidays. He urges fans to order his books from his local bookstore, Jan & Mary’s Book Center, in Troy, Ohio. Chuck Wendig, another well-known author, has started doing the same thing in his own wacky way, sending buyers to the indie store near him in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Study the language in their posts, and maybe also have a look at mine. You’ll notice that I avoid the word “signed” in favor of “autographed.” I do that because, given my experience with Doofus Dad (mentioned above) and others on the road, I think some buyers need things spelled out much more explicitly. I’ve also noticed that some buyers don’t quite understand what “inscribing” a book means. I stole the word “personalized” from Scalzi, but I still go to lengths to describe what that means. (See No. 2 in my instructions.)


Every year, I duplicate the same holidays blog post I’ve been using for nearly a decade, tweak the language slightly, and repost it. (During Covid, the language reflected the bookstore’s contactless ordering policies.) Beyond that, the most important information to give readers is the drop-dead order date.

This year, for example, the store told me that for books in stock, they could have orders gift-wrapped and shipped to U.S. addresses with a guaranteed Christmas arrival if the person ordered by December 14th, and we signed no later than 11 a.m. the following day. If the store did not have the book in stock, they preferred people order by December 7th.

Unfortunately, unless the indie bookstore’s website robustly reflects their inventory, the person calling or placing an online order won’t necessarily see if the book they want is in stock. Which is why it’s important to stress in your blog post that people a) pick up the damn phone, and b) order as early as possible. My post goes up on the website as early as possible in November, and lives on the front page of my site until January 2, when it’s replaced with a link to the non-holiday how-to-get-my books instructions.

Having said all that, I know that some of you will regard this effort as futile. This wouldn’t work for me, you’re thinking, for reasons such as:

  • I’m not a well-known writer. 
  • No one cares about my books. 
  • There isn’t a bookstore for 50 miles in every compass direction of my home. 
  • Or there is, and the crank who runs the place hates me because my books are self-pubbed or whatever.
I totally get it. I used to think along these lines, and still do in trying moments. But these days I regard these sort of posts as the easiest marketing I can do. It costs nothing to post this note on your site, and you never know how it’s going to play out.


I continue to be surprised by how such a simple effort helps my cause. One Christmas a buyer ordered a dozen signed copies of my children’s book. I was flabbergasted and asked the booksellers for the person’s name, thinking it must be a friend or colleague. The bookseller who took the order over the phone told me that the buyer was a former librarian. That, and the woman’s out-of-state address, was all we knew. No matter. I have since built a shrine to this obviously perspicacious stranger in my basement.

If you cannot envision a similar relationship with a store in your area, you could try…

  • Offering signed bookplates in exchange for a SASE. (The authors of Freakonomics did this via their website years ago, so now I do it too.) 
  • Selling signed books directly to readers via your website. That typically boils down to a PayPal link, and you driving to the post office to ship orders.
  • Selling signed books and other merchandise via a Shopify store. (This is the hot new thing everyone’s talking about in the indie-pub world.) It boils down to a website that practically runs itself, taking orders, printing books and other merch, and shipping it out without requiring any effort on your part after you’ve set it up. (You would probably not have the ability to offer signed, inscribed books this way unless you have really nailed your game.)

In the two days it took me to write and tinker with the post you are reading, another buyer—a professor who teaches screenwriting—ordered 10 copies of our personal finance book to gift to students of hers graduating in December. I can’t imagine why she would want signed copies, but who am I to argue?

On that note, I’ll share the following: At the arts school in North Carolina that my wife attended in her youth, a professor famously told his students—aspiring musicians, actors, dancers—that the world was filled with benevolent, often wealthy people who have money to spend on the arts. Your job, he told them, was to help them spend that money on your work. The first rule, he counseled, was educating them. He meant learning to write grants, but I have since come to see it differently.

Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year to You All.

Notes: 

  • To create the images in the holiday post on my website, I used Book Brush, which is a paid service. You could easily use Canva, Adobe, or whatever design software you like. 
  • To create the one-page list of all my books, I used Books2Read, which is completely free and created by some very nice author-loving people in Oklahoma.
  • As long as we are celebrating imagination and creativity, I might mention that the images in this post are photos I took of displays of the winners of the annual Gingerbread competition held at the Omni Grove Park Inn in my town. Everything you see is theoretically edible.
See you in three weeks!

Joe
josephdagnese.com


14 December 2023

An Early Christmas Present: Florence King on Lizzie Borden


[Posted by Eve Fisher]

This column by the late great Florence King originally appeared in the National Review, August 17, 1992.  I'm posting this in anticipation of the Christmas season because you might watch The Man Who Came to Dinner, one of my favorite Christmas movies, in which Harriet Stanley's past saves Sheridan Whiteside's bacon:  


If you want to understand Anglo-Saxon Americans, study the Lizzie Borden case. No ethnologist could ask for a better control group; except for Bridget Sullivan, the Bordens’ maid, the zany tragedy of August 4, 1892, had an all-Wasp cast.


Lizzie Borden

Lizzie was born in Fall River, Mass., on July 19, 1860, and immediately given the Wasp family’s favorite substitute for open affection: a nickname. Thirty-two years later at her inquest she stated her full legal name: Lizzie Andrew Borden. “You were so christened?” asked the district attorney.

“I was so christened,” she replied.

Lizzie’s mother died in 1862. Left with two daughters to raise, her father, Andrew Borden, soon married a chubby spinster of 38 named Abby Durfee Gray. Three-year-old Lizzie obediently called the new wife Mother, but 12-year-old Emma called her Abby.

Andrew Borden was a prosperous but miserly undertaker whose sole interest in life was money. His operations expanded to include banking, cotton mills, and real estate, but no matter how rich he became he never stopped peddling eggs from his farms to his downtown business associates; wicker basket in hand, he would set out for corporate board meetings in anticipation of yet a few more pennies. Although he was worth $500,000 in pre-IRS, gold-standard dollars, he was so tightfisted that he refused to install running water in his home. There was a latrine in the cellar and a pump in the kitchen; the bedrooms were fitted out with water pitchers, wash bowls, chamber pots, and slop pails.

Marriage with this paragon of Yankee thrift evidently drove Abby to seek compensatory emotional satisfaction in eating. Only five feet tall, she ballooned up to more than two hundred pounds and seldom left the house except to visit her half-sister, Mrs. Whitehead.

Emma Borden, Lizzie’s older sister, was 42 at the time of the murders. Mouse-like in all respects, she was one of those spinsters who scurry. Other than doing the marketing, she rarely went anywhere except around the corner to visit her friend, another spinster named Alice Russell.

Compared to the rest of her family, Lizzie comes through as a prom queen. Never known to go out with men, at least she went out. A member of Central Congregational, she taught Sunday school, served as secretary-treasurer of the Christian Endeavor Society, and was a card-carrying member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

What did she look like? Like everyone else in that inbred Wasp town. New York Sun reporter Julian Ralph wrote during the trial:

By the way, the strangers who are here begin to notice that Lizzie Borden’s face is of a type quite common in New Bedford. They meet Lizzie Borden every day and everywhere about town. Some are fairer, some are younger, some are coarser, but all have the same general cast of features — heavy in the lower face, high in the cheekbones, wide at the eyes, and with heavy lips and a deep line on each side of the mouth.

Plump by our standards, she had what her self-confident era called a good figure. She also had blue eyes, and like all blue-eyed women she had a lot of blue dresses — handy for changing clothes without appearing to have done so. The case is a vortex of dark blue dresses, light blue dresses, blue summer dresses, blue winter dresses, clean blue dresses, paint-stained blue dresses, blood-stained blue dresses, and an all-male jury struggling to tell one from the other.

Now they were even-steven and everything was settled — except it wasn’t.

Five years before the murders, the Bordens had a family fight when Andrew put one of his rental houses in Abby’s name. Lizzie and Emma were furious, so they said politely: “What you do for her, you must do for us.” That’s the Wasp version of a conniption and Andrew knew it, so he took refuge in our cure-all fair play, buying his daughters houses of identical valuation ($1,500) to the one he had given his wife.

Now they were even-steven and everything was settled — except it wasn’t. Having failed to clear the air, everyone started smoldering and brooding. Emma and Lizzie stopped eating with the elder Bordens, requiring the maid to set and serve each meal twice. They never reached that pinnacle of Wasp rage called Not Speaking — “We always spoke,” Emma emphasized at the trial — but she and Lizzie eliminated “Abby” and “Mother” from their respective vocabularies and started calling their stepmother “Mrs. Borden.” What a cathartic release that must have been.

Lizzie ticked away for four years until 1891, when she committed a family robbery. Entering the master bedroom through a door in her own room (it was a “shotgun” house with no hallways), she stole her stepmother’s jewelry and her father’s loose cash.

Andrew and Abby knew that Lizzie was the culprit, and Lizzie knew that they knew, but rather than “have words,” Andrew called in the police and let them go through an investigation to catch the person the whole family carefully referred to as “the unknown thief.”

The robbery launched a field day of Silent Gestures. Everybody quietly bought lots of locks. To supplement the key locks, there were bolts, hooks, chains, and padlocks. Abby’s Silent Gesture consisted of locking and bolting her side of the door that led into Lizzie’s room. Lizzie responded with her Silent Gesture, putting a hook on her side of the door and shoving a huge clawlooted secretary in front of it.

The best Silent Gesture was Andrew’s. He put the strongest available lock on the master bedroom, but kept the key on the sitting-room mantelpiece in full view of everyone. Lizzie knew she was being tempted to touch it; she also knew that if the key disappeared, she would be suspect. In one fell swoop, Andrew made it clear that he was simultaneously trusting her and distrusting her, and warning her without saying a word. Wasps call this war of nerves the honor system.

Since Emma was a Silent Gesture, there was no need for her to do anything except keep on scurrying.

The Borden house must have been a peaceful place. There is nothing on record to show that the Bordens ever raised their voices to one another. “Never a word,” Bridget Sullivan testified at the trial, with obvious sincerity and not a little awe.


Bridget, 26 and pretty in a big-boned, countrified way, had been in the Bordens’ service for almost three years at the time of the murders. A recent immigrant, she had a brogue so thick that she referred to the Silent Gesture on the mantelpiece as the “kay.”

Bridget adored Lizzie. Victoria Lincoln, the late novelist, whose parents were neighbors of the Bordens, wrote in her study of the case: “De haut en bas, Lizzie was always kind.” Her habit of calling Bridget “Maggie” has been attributed to laziness (Maggie was the name of a former maid), but I think it was an extremity of tact. In that time and place, the name Bridget was synonymous with “Irish maid.” Like Rastus in minstrel-show jokes, it was derisory, so Lizzie substituted another.

Anyone who studies the Borden case grows to like Lizzie, or at least admire her, for her rigid sense of herself as a gentlewoman. It would have been so easy for her to cast suspicion on Bridget, or to accuse her outright. Bridget was the only other person in the house when Andrew and Abby were killed. The Irish were disliked in turn-of-the-century Massachusetts; a Yankee jury would have bought the idea of Bridget’s guilt. Yet Lizzie never once tried to shift the blame, and she never named Bridget as a suspect.
Scurrying Away

Aweek before the murders, Emma did something incredible: she went to Fairhaven. Fifteen miles is a long way to scurry but scurry she did, to visit an elderly friend and escape the heat wave that had descended on Fall River.

That same week, Lizzie shared a beach house on Buzzards Bay with five friends. At a press conference after the murders, they showered her with compliments. “She always was self-contained, self-reliant, and very composed. Her conduct since her arrest is exactly what I should have expected. Lizzie and her father were, without being demonstrative, very fond of each other.”

They got so caught up in Wasp priorities that they inadvertently sowed a dangerous seed when the reporter asked them if they thought Lizzie was guilty. No, they said firmly, because she had pleaded not guilty: “It is more likely that Lizzie would commit a murder than that she would lie about it afterward.”

The most puzzling aspect of the case has always been Lizzie’s choice of weapons. Ladies don’t chop up difficult relatives, but they do poison them. A few days before she was due at the beach house, Lizzie tried to buy prussic acid in her neighborhood drugstore. The druggist’s testimony was excluded on a legal technicality, but it establishes her as, in the words of one of her friends, “a monument of straightforwardness.”


Picture it: In broad daylight in the middle of a heat wave, she marched into the drugstore carrying a fur cape, announced that there were moths in it, and asked for ten cents’ worth of prussic acid to kill them. The druggist was stunned. Even in the casual Nineties, when arsenic was sold over the counter, it was illegal to sell prussic acid. “But I’ve bought it many times before,” Lizzie protested.

Even in the casual Nineties, when arsenic was sold over the counter, it was illegal to sell prussic acid.

The druggist’s astonishment mounted in the face of this stouthearted lie. “Well, my good lady, it is something we don’t sell except by prescription, as it is a very dangerous thing to handle.”

Lizzie left, never dreaming that she might have called attention to herself.

At the beach, her friends noticed that she seemed despondent and preoccupied. They were puzzled when she suddenly cut short her vacation, giving as her excuse some church work, and returned to Fall River.

Back home in the stifling city heat, she sat in her room and brooded. Somehow she had found out that Abby was about to acquire some more real estate; Andrew was planning to put a farm in his wife’s name and install his brother-in-law, John Morse, as caretaker. This last was especially infuriating, for Lizzie and Emma were Not Speaking to Uncle John. He had been involved, so they thought, in that other real-estate transfer five years before. Now he was back, plotting to do her and Emma out of their rightful inheritance.

Something had to be done, but what? Lacking lady-like poison, Lizzie did what every overcivilized, understated Wasp is entirely capable of doing once we finally admit we’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it any more: She went from Anglo to Saxon in a trice.
Miss Borden Accepts

On the day before the murders, Lizzie joined Abby and Andrew for lunch for the first time in five years — an air-tight alibi, for who would do murder after doing lunch? That evening, she paid a call on Alice Russell and craftily planted some red herrings. If Machiavelli had witnessed this demonstration of the fine Wasp hand he would have gone into cardiac arrest.

“I have a feeling that something is going to happen,” she told Alice. “A feeling that somebody is going to do something.” She hammered the point home with stories about her father’s “enemies.” He was such a ruthless businessman, she said, that “they” all hated him, and she would not put it past “them” to burn down the house.

When she returned home, Uncle John had arrived with plans to spend the night. Since she was Not Speaking to him, she went directly to her room.

The next day, August 4, 1892, the temperature was already in the eighties at sunrise, but that didn’t change the Bordens’ breakfast menu. Destined to be the most famous breakfast in America, it was printed in newspapers everywhere and discussed by aficionados of the murders for years to come: Alexander Woollcott always claimed it was the motive.

If Lizzie had only waited, Abby and Andrew probably would have died anyway, for their breakfast consisted of mutton soup, sliced mutton, pancakes, bananas, pears, cookies, and coffee. Here we recognize the English concept of breakfast-as-weapon designed to overwhelm French tourists and other effete types.

Bridget was the first up, followed by Andrew, who came downstairs with the connubial slop pail and emptied it on the grass in the backyard. That done, he gathered the pears that had fallen to the ground.

After breakfast, Andrew saw Uncle John out and then brushed his teeth at the kitchen sink where Bridget was washing dishes. Moments later, she rushed out to the back yard and vomited. Whether it was the mutton or the toothbrushing or something she had seen clinging to a pear we shall never know, but when she returned to the house, Abby was waiting with an uncharacteristic order. She wanted the windows washed, all of them, inside and out, now.

Here is one of the strangest aspects of the case. Victoria Lincoln writes of Abby: “Encased in fat and self-pity, she was the kind who make indifferent housekeepers everywhere.” Additionally, the Wasp woman is too socially secure to need accolades like “You could eat off her floor.” Why then would Abby order a sick Bridget to wash the windows on a blistering hot day?

Around nine o’clock, Abby was tomahawked in the guest room while making Uncle John’s bed.

Because, says Miss Lincoln, she was getting ready to go to the bank to sign the deed for the farm, and she feared a scene with Lizzie, who, knowing Abby’s hermit-like ways, would immediately suspect the truth. The mere thought of “having words” in front of a servant struck horror in Abby’s heart, so she invented a task that would take Bridget outside.


That left Lizzie inside.

Around nine o’clock, Abby was tomahawked in the guest room while making Uncle John’s bed. Andrew was to meet the same fate around eleven. Lizzie’s behavior during that two-hour entr’acte was a model of Battle-of-Britain calm. She ironed handkerchiefs, sewed a button loop on a blouse, chatted with Bridget about a dress-goods sale, and read Harper’s Weekley.

Andrew came home at 10:30 and took a nap on the sitting-room sofa. Shortly before 11, Bridget went up to her attic room to rest. At 11:15 she heard Lizzie cry out: “Maggie! Come down quick! Father’s dead. Somebody came in and killed him.”

Somebody certainly had. The entire left side of his face and head was a bloody pulp; the eye had been severed and hung down his cheek, and one of the blows had bisected a tooth.

Lizzie sent Bridget for Alice Russell and Dr. Bowen, then sat on the back steps. The Bordens’ next-door neighbor, Mrs. Adelaide Churchill, called over to her and got a priceless reply: “Oh, Mrs. Churchill, do come over. Someone has killed Father.”

Mrs. Churchill came over, took a quick look at Andrew, and asked, “Where is your stepmother, Lizzie?”

The safe thing to say was “I don’t know,” but the people who invented the honor system are sticklers for the truth. “I don’t know but that she’s been killed, too, for I thought I heard her come in,” Lizzie blurted.

Bridget returned with Miss Russell and Dr. Bowen, who examined Andrew and asked for a sheet to cover the body. Lizzie told Bridget to get it. Whether she said anything else is in dispute; no one present testified to it, but the legend persists that our monument of straightforwardness added, “Better get two.”

Bridget and Mrs. Churchill decided to search the house for Abby. They were not gone long. When they returned, a white-faced but contained Mrs. Churchill nodded at Alice Russell.

“There is another?” asked Miss Russell.

“Yes, she is upstairs,” said Mrs. Churchill.

The only excited person present was Bridget.
By the Way. . .

By noon, when Uncle John returned for lunch, the cops had come, and a crowd had formed in the street. Knowing of the hatred between Lizzie and Abby, Uncle John must have guessed the truth, but he chose to exhibit so much nonchalance that he became the first suspect. Instead of rushing into the house yelling, “What’s the matter?” he ambled into the back yard, picked up some pears, and stood eating them in the shade of the tree.

Meanwhile, the police were questioning Lizzie, who claimed that she had gone to the barn and returned to find her father dead. What had she gone to the barn for? “To get a piece of lead for a fishing sinker.”

It was the first thing that popped into her head, less a conscious deception than an ink-blot association triggered by her seaside vacation. She was playing it by ear. It never occurred to her that she could have stalled for time by pretending to faint. Women often fainted in those tightly corseted days, but she even rejected the detective’s gallant offer to come back and question her later when she felt better. “No,” she said. “I can tell you all I know now as well as at any other time.”

A moment later, when the detective referred to Abby as her mother, she drew herself up and said stiffly, “She is not my mother, sir, she is my stepmother. My mother died when I was a child.” Before you start diagnosing “self-destructive tendencies,” remember that the English novelists’ favorite character is the plucky orphan, and she had just become one.

Miss Russell and Dr. Bowen took her upstairs to lie down. Lizzie asked the doctor to send a telegram to Emma in Fairhaven, adding, “Be sure to put it gently, as there is an old person there who might be disturbed.” It’s all right to disturb your sister as long as you don’t disturb strangers; Wasps haven’t kithed our kin since the Anglo-Saxon invaders wiped out the Celtic clan system.

Dr. Bowen must have sent the gentlest wire on record, because Emma did not catch the next train, nor the one after that, nor the one after that. She didn’t return until after seven that night.

When Dr. Bowen returned, Lizzie confided to him that she had torn up a certain note and put the pieces in the kitchen trash can. He hurried downstairs and found them; he was putting them together when a detective walked in. Seeing the name “Emma,” he asked Dr. Bowen what it was. “Oh, it is nothing,” Dr. Bowen said nonchalantly. “It is something, I think, about my daughter going through somewhere.”

Before the detective could react to this bizarre answer, Dr. Bowen, nonchalant as ever, tossed the pieces into the kitchen fire. As he lifted the stove lid, the detective saw a foot-long cylindrical stick lying in the flames. Later, in the cellar, he found a hatchet head that had been washed and rolled while wet in furnace ash to simulate the dust of long disuse.

Lizzie had been in the barn, but not to look for sinkers. The barn contained a vise, black-smithing tools, and a water pump. Blood can be washed from metal but not from porous wood. She knew she had to separate the hatchet head from the handle and burn the latter. She did all of this in a very brief time, and without giving way to panic. Victoria Lincoln believes that because she really had been in the barn, her compulsive honesty forced her to admit it to the police. Then she had to think of an innocent reason for going there, and came up with the story about looking for sinkers. “She lied about why and when she had done things, but she never denied having done them,” writes Miss Lincoln.

Alice Russell displayed the same tic: “Alice’s conscience forced her to mention things at the trial, but not to stress them.” The Wasp gift for making everything sound trivial, as when we introduce momentous subjects with “Oh, by the way,” enabled Alice to testify about a highly incriminating fact in such a way that the prosecution missed its significance entirely.

On one of Alice’s trips upstairs on the murder day, she saw Lizzie coming out of Emma’s room, and a bundled-up blanket on the floor of Emma’s closet. What was Lizzie doing in Emma’s room? What was in the blanket? Victoria Lincoln thinks it contained blood-stained stockings, but the prosecution never tried to find out because Alice made it all sound so matter-of-fact. The same technique worked for Dr. Bowen in the matter of the note; we happy few don’t destroy evidence, we just tut-tut it into oblivion.

Some students of the crime think she committed both murders in the nude, but Victoria Lincoln disagrees and so do I. Murder is one thing, but . . .

Everyone who saw Lizzie after the murders testified that there wasn’t a drop of blood on her. How did she wash the blood off her skin and hair in a house that had no running water? What trait is cherished by the people who distrust intellectuals? Common sense told her to sponge herself off with the diaper-like cloths Victorian women used for sanitary napkins and then put them in her slop pail, which was already full of bloody cloths because she was menstruating that week.

Now we come to the dress she wore when she murdered Abby. Where did she hide it after she changed? Some students of the crime think she committed both murders in the nude, but Victoria Lincoln disagrees and so do I. Murder is one thing, but . . .

Where would any honest Wasp hide a dress? In the dress closet, of course. Like most women, Lizzie had more clothes than hangers, so she knew how easy it is to “lose” a garment by hanging another one on top of it. Victoria Lincoln thinks she hung the blood-stained summer cotton underneath a heavy winter woolen, and then banked on the either-or male mind: the police were looking for a summer dress, and men never run out of hangers.

She got no blood at all on the second dress. Her tall father’s Prince Albert coat reached to her ankles, and common sense decrees that blood on a victim’s clothing is only to be expected.
Mistress of Herself

After her arrest Lizzie became America’s Wasp Princess. People couldn’t say enough nice things about her icy calm, even the Fall River police chief: “She is a remarkable woman and possessed of a wonderful power of fortitude.”

A Providence reporter and Civil War veteran: “Most women would faint at seeing her father dead, for I never saw a more horrible sight and I have walked over battlefields where thousands were dead and mangled. She is a woman of remarkable nerve and self-control.”

Julian Ralph, New York Sun: “It was plain to see that she had complete mastery of herself, and could make her sensations and emotions invisible to an impertinent public.”

To ward off a backlash, Lizzie gave an interview to the New York Recorder in which she managed to have her bona fides and eat them too: “They say I don’t show any grief. Certainly I don’t in public. I never did reveal my feelings and I cannot change my nature now.”

I find this very refreshing in an age that equates self-control with elitism. If Lizzie were around today she would be reviled as the Phantom of the Oprah.

Wasp emotional repression also gave us the marvelous fight between Lizzie and Emma in Lizzie’s jail cell while she was awaiting trial. Described by Mrs. Hannah Reagan, the police matron, it went like this:

“Emma, you have given me away, haven’t you?”

“No, Lizzie, I have not.”

“You have, and I will let you see I won’t give in one inch.”

“Emma, you have given me away, haven’t you?’

Finis. Lizzie turned over on her cot and lay with her back to Emma, who remained in her chair. They stayed like that for two hours and twenty minutes, until visiting time was up and Emma left.

When Mrs. Reagan spilled this sensational colloquy to the press, Lizzie’s lawyers said it was a lie and demanded she sign a retraction. Doubts arose, but Victoria Lincoln believes Mrs. Reagan: “That terse exchange followed by a two-hour-and-twenty-minute sulking silence sounds more like a typical Borden family fight than the sort of quarrel an Irish police matron would dream up from her own experience.”
The Last Word

After her acquittal, Lizzie bought a mansion for herself and Emma in Fall River’s best neighborhood. Social acceptance was another matter. When she returned to Central Congregational, everyone was very polite, so she took the hint and stopped going.

She lived quietly until 1904, when she got pinched for shoplifting in Providence. This is what really made her an outcast. Murder is one thing, but. . .

In 1913, Emma suddenly moved out and never spoke to Lizzie again. Nobody knows what happened. Maybe Lizzie finally admitted to the murders, but I doubt it; the Protestant conscience is not programmed for pointless confession. It sounds more as if Emma found out that her sister had a sex life.

An enthusiastic theatergoer, Lizzie was a great fan of an actress named Nance O’Neill. They met in a hotel and developed an intense friendship; Lizzie threw lavish parties for Nance and her troupe and paid Nance’s legal expenses in contractual disputes with theater owners. Nance was probably the intended recipient of the unmailed letter Lizzie wrote beginning “Dear Friend,” and going on to juicier sentiments: “I dreamed of you the other night but I do not dare to put my dreams on paper.” If Emma discovered the two were lesbian lovers, it’s no wonder she moved out so precipitately. Murder is one thing, but. . .

Lizzie stayed in Fall River, living alone in her mansion, until she died of pneumonia in 1927.

Emma, living in New Hampshire, read of Lizzie’s death in the paper but did not attend the funeral or send flowers. Ten days later, Emma died from a bad fall. Both sisters left the bulk of their fortunes to the Animal Rescue League. Nothing could be Waspier, except the explanation little Victoria Lincoln got when she asked her elders why no one ever spoke to their neighbor, Miss Borden. “Well, dear, she was very unkind to her mother and father.”

13 December 2023

1st Person Familiar


  

I went looking for a book I hadn’t read in 60 years – a novel called The Golden Warrior, that I was assigned in the 8th grade or thereabouts – and for whatever reason, I was curious to read again, or at least leaf through.  Something about it had stuck in my mind.  They didn’t have it at the library, and I found it on the internet.  For nine bucks, I was thinking trade paper, but it’s a hardcover, from 1950.  It came from a mail-order outfit called ThriftBooks, highly recommended.  https://www.thriftbooks.com/

The Golden Warrior is about the complicated political and dynastic struggle between Harold, last Saxon king of England, and William, duke of Normandy, that ends in 1066, with the Conquest.  It picks up the story fifteen years earlier, when William visits England to talk some turkey with then-king Edward.  Edward the Confessor is known for his piety, which unhappily means his marriage is without issue.  He has no heir, and Duke William wants to be named.


The first thing I noticed was that the dialogue seemed a little strained, at least to my ear, and theatrically archaic.  I don’t mean like Sir Walter Scott, and Ivanhoe, where the flourishes are exaggerated to the point of parody – think Danny Kaye, in The Court Jester – but you find yourself thinking, Did these people actually speak like this?  You understand the need for a certain formality, or discretion, or indirection, and plain speaking could invite a rain of troubles.  Still, the elevated speech patterns push you away, they don’t ask you in, they make you all too aware that it’s artificial, a construct. 

Historical fiction is, of course, tricky.  There’s a higher bar to clear, the suspension of disbelief.  It’s easy to make fun of Sir Walter Scott, but the books that are closer in time to his own, Old Mortality, say, or The Antiquary, ring less false, for the simple reason that he can actually imagine or conjure up how those people talked, whereas the speech of a 12th-century Crusader is beyond him.  (I’d think it was pretty much beyond anybody.)

If you look at Patrick O’Brian’s work, though, or Mary Renault, they somehow get around this problem.  Renault, in particular, uses a device you could call the First-Person Familiar, or the First-Person Intimate.  Think about it for a second.  I recently read Tana French’s In the Woods, and liked it a lot, but the way she chooses to tell the story is unreliable: the first-person narration is as much about concealment as it is about peeling away secrets.  The buried past, the buried present.  See, instead, how Renault opens The Last of the Wine, or The Mask of Apollo.  It’s a sleight of hand, which appears transparent; she seems to withhold nothing.  “When I was a young boy, if I was sick or in trouble, or had been beaten at school, I used to remember that on the day I was born my father had wanted to kill me.” 

It’s so matter-of-fact.  It might remind you of Dickens, Copperfield, maybe.  The later Dickens is slyer, more oblique, sliding up into the story from below.  This, the beginning of Last of the Wine, starts with the boy being born, but in fact in the middle of the story, the war with Sparta already a decade old.  Renault gives us an immediate present, nothing that smells of the lamp.


Actually, that’s not accurate.  It does smell of the lamp.  Not in the metaphorical sense, from Plutarch, meaning labored, but in the literal sense: you can smell the oil in her descriptions, see the light flickering on the wall. 

I’ll get past my initial resistance to The Golden Warrior.  I’ll accommodate the rhythms, the storytelling, the manners of speech.  You learn the beat, the time signature.  Some writers are more easeful than others, is all.  Renault can be deceptive; it goes down so smoothly, you never taste the hemlock. 

12 December 2023

Parenting Choices Can Drive Crime Fiction Involving Minors


I've addressed before the benefits of writing crime stories involving children and teenagers. Simply because of their age, they could lack good judgment, be more willing to engage in risky behavior than an adult would, and not have sufficient experience to foresee the consequences of their actions, among other issues. As such, they could be useful for a crime-fiction author.

But parents can play a large role in what minors do, and this also opens a lot of opportunities for authors. You've probably heard the terms helicopter parents (for parents who take an overly active interest in their children's lives) and free-range parents (for parents who take a more laid-back approach to parenting). Depending on what you want your child/teenage characters (and your parent characters) to do in your story, you might give the adult a parenting style that is more controlling or more easy-going or somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. 

Helicopter parents
 
For instance, imagine parents who keep their son home on weekends to keep him away from a bad crowd. The boy could rebel, which opens up many opportunities for crime stories. Or the boy could follow the parents' rules and become a victim of bullying by kids who make fun of him for being so obedient, which also opens up crime-story opportunities. Or the boy could pretend to follow his parents' rules but sneak out and wind up in a whole different kind of trouble than the parents were trying to prevent. Again, crime-fiction opportunities galore. (Of course, the boy also could stay home and study a lot and earn a full college scholarship and live happily ever after, but that's not really useful for crime fiction.)

Free-range parents
 
On the other end of the spectrum, picture parents who are easygoing with their children. They give their kids slack, thinking overly protected children could rebel (see the prior example) or could fail to learn how to deal with problematic situations because they never got the chance. These parents could want their kids to learn self-reliance. They could want their kids to have the carefree childhood they remember themselves. Or they could be bad parents who simply don't care what their kids do. Or they could care but be overwhelmed by life and unable to oversee their children as much as they should or as much as they'd like. There are many reasons a parent could have a laid-back parenting style--good reasons and bad ones--and there are just as many potential consequences for the child/teenager characters. Once again: crime-fiction opportunities galore. (And once again, kids of free-range parents could exercise good judgment, never get in trouble, earn full college scholarships, and live happily ever after. I'm not saying one parenting style is better than another. But stories in which nothing goes wrong don't sound like crime fiction.)

My use of free-range parenting
 
I've made use of easygoing parents in several of my stories. In "Wishful Thinking," I have tweens explore a haunted house. They needed parents who didn't micromanage them for that plot to work. Similarly, when I was writing my newest short story, "Real Courage," I needed certain things to happen for the plot to work (including an unsupervised party), things that wouldn't be believable if the teens weren't given freedom to screw up, so I created a neighborhood of free-range parents. I also made use of free-range parents in my story coming out next, "Teenage Dirtbag." That story I set in the 1980s, when (it at least feels to me) teens could often get away with a lot more than they can today.
 
So if you're considering writing a crime story involving children/teenagers, keep in mind that what the kids do can largely be influenced by the kind of parenting style at work in the minor's home. Parents can make just as many mistakes as children can. We crime writers should take advantage of it.
 
I'll write more about "Teenage Dirtbag" when it comes out. For now, if you'd like to read "Real Courage," you can buy issue 14 of Black Cat Mystery Magazine or, for a limited time, you can read "Real Courage" on my website. Just click here.
 
As this is my final post of 2023, I wish you all happy holidays.

11 December 2023

The Sheer Pleasure of Writing


What is the moment of greatest satisfaction for a writer? What's the carrot, the prize, the gold at the end of the rainbow? I’m not talking about the lottery win that most of us never get, like an Edgar or the New York Times bestseller list. Some will say it’s the moment when they get an acceptance letter or when they see their work in print. For others, it’s the magic of holding in their hands a book or a prestigious journal with their name on the cover. But I’m talking about a moment long before that, when we're actually plying our craft.

For me, the rush comes at the end of a session when the writing is going well. When I lift my hands from the keyboard after an intense few hours working on a piece of fiction, a poem, or even an inspired blog post, I feel suffused with satisfaction. It’s a physical feeling of delight that runs along my arms from my fingers to my shoulders and down my legs all the way to my toes. It’s a marvelous feeling. Often, it comes as a surprise. And it reminds me why I go on writing.

I’ve heard many times about the athlete’s high. Although I ran for many years and still walk every day, no sport or exercise has ever left me flooded with endorphins. I used to call myself the slowest runner in New York, and I wasn't kidding. No, it's writing until the wave subsides that leaves me tingling all over and ready for a nap with a big smile on my face.

Most of us know we'd be idiots to claim we do this for the money or the fame. So tell me, writers, what is it about our métier that turns you on?

10 December 2023

Peace and Order


At a dinner party I was once told by an American, that while Americans strive for 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’, Canadians get the very unsexy ‘Peace, Order and Good Government’.

At the risk of sounding dull as dishwater, I’m a big fan of peace, order and good government. It’s reassuring. Although peace and order in the Constitution Act of 1867 refers to large issues, most of us understand it as it’s exemplified in everyday life. The quiet way we line up to take our turn or stop our cars at a crosswalk to let children cross. The peace of quiet walks and stopping at a favourite store and getting some food. The way all my neighbours wave and chat.

Since the October 7th Hamas attack against Israel, we are hearing more and more about Canadians being shouted at on the subway by mobs, shootings at schools and defaced places of worship. The places we shop owned by Jews and Muslims are being targeted by mobs and vandalized. Many Canadians are frightened by how the peace and order of everyday life has been shattered by violence and disorder.

People are saying that they simply aren’t safe anymore and where is the legal punishment for this? 

There are three separate hatred-related offences in Canada: advocating genocide, publicly inciting hatred, and willfully promoting hatred.

For all three offences, there is no minimum punishment. Imprisonment, probation, or fines are possible. 

However, a provision in the Criminal Code addresses crimes motivated by hatred and allows increased penalties when an offender is sentenced for any criminal offence “if there is evidence that the offence was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression.” So theoretically, these crimes should carry harsher punishments. 

Interestingly, and applicable to today’s crises, “In 2009, the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism was established by major federal political parties to investigate and combat antisemitism - particularly what is referred to as the new antisemitism. It is argued that this form of hate targets Israel, consisting of and fed by allegations of Israeli "war crimes" and similar claims. Anti-Israel actions that led to the formation of a Parliamentary Coalition included boycott campaigns on university campuses and in some churches, spilling over into attacks on synagogues, Jewish institutions and individuals.”

So, how is this playing out? Police forces are asking people to come forward and report, and many are increasing the officers dedicated to hate crimes. In Toronto, Chief Myron Demkiw said there has been a "staggering" increase in hate crimes since the Hamas October seventh attack,  most of the hate crimes - 40% of them - are antisemitic hate crimes and “the force's hate crime unit has been expanded from a team of six to 32. And that since Oct. 7th, the unit has made 22 arrests and laid 58 charges.” This type of communication with the public, encouraging reporting as well as communicating that arrests and charges have occurred, goes a long way to making people feel safer and it needs to be communicated more. 

Perhaps part of the problem is that many hate crimes are shared on social media but without follow-up, so there appears to be no accountability. A widely shared video showed an Indigo store with posters and red paint, the posters depicting an image of the company’s Jewish CEO Heather Reisman and accusing her of “Funding Genocide.” There were, however, consequences for those involved. So far, eleven people have been arrested, charged and the investigation remains open. We have yet to hear what their punishment will be and if there will be jail time.

This dramatic rise in hate motivated crime is testing our laws, our police response, legal system and things may have to change to meet the challenge. We haven’t seen this level of hate crimes before and just like police forces are adding officers trained to deal with hate crimes, perhaps we need to finally ask if our legal system can properly charge those involved? Will the punishment serve as a deterrent to others who might want to embark on similar hate crimes? Will the police response to arrest people be swift enough to make people feel safe or are more tools needed?  Do we need strict minimum sentences to serve as a future deterrent? 

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions – just a fan of peace, order and good government who is very worried.

09 December 2023

Character Tests and Conference Rooms


Last summer, I did a Killer Nashville panel on character contrasts, and I got stumped on a question. Now, and this is important, I knew the question was coming. It was there in the panel leader's planned topics emailed around beforehand. I'd read those questions and agreed that these were great ideas. And I think a lot about characters and how to characterize. A whole lot. But these are the sorts of thoughts writers often think alone in our lairs. Suddenly, I had to verbalize my inner conjuring in front of a conference. With examples from my own stuff.

The question was how character interactions reveal each other's psyche and values. It's a sharp question. It frames a simple fact: No protagonist or antagonist or supporting cast shines alone. Other characters must test them, vex them, find common cause with them, and ultimately shape them. These characters need not be human. Places, weather, a monster brought to life by lightning. A proper story tests mettles and motives and echoes the tests throughout.

Most in that crowd were seeking tips to polish their novel manuscripts. My lens worth sharing is short fiction. If anything, though, a short story's hyper-compression presents this character interplay in teachable chunks. And what are good stories if not echo chambers for their compressed worlds? Extraneous character interactions in a story stick out worse than, I don't know, say a writer mulling over examples in front of a conference room crowd.

I think I stalled well enough while finding my answer. By panel rules, the examples were to come from recent work. The recent work in reach was my "Spirits Along the One North Road," in AHMM this last summer. "Spirits" has a train ride scene where the main character, a corporate embezzler guy hiding in Quebec, meets the other primary character, a middle-aged woman who becomes the embodiment of the new Canadian life he seeks. Their first scene together is all brief exchanges and awkward silences. What small talk the guy elicits cuts to their parallel core: family relationships and belonging.

That scene also shapes their very different takes on those things. He is newly divorced after his wife can't take being with a crook. He's in a lousy headspace of suppressed guilt and sees Quebec as an overromanticized sanctuary. The local lady already has a normal family life and a peaceful Canadian existence. To her, it's humdrum, too boring even for chitchat. He treasures his every-other-weekends with his kids. She's a good mom but despises her older kid's life choices.

They engage each other differently, too. He's expansive and carrying the conversation. She answers tersely, in clear signals to shut him down. His bad mojo vibe creeps her out a little. This initial meeting sets up their end-of-story parting moment, where it comes out that they ultimately share not just desires and disillusionments but also self-destructive greed. At core, they both think that somewhere else in this world life offers a release. He tried it and struck out. He'll circle home or die alone. Her shot at escape is just starting.

One strategy on character contrast I've picked up magpie-like goes like this:

Forgive me a Venn Diagram and also any missed credit for the construct. I've found this triad to be a great baseline for character inner selves, and there are endless ways to riff off it. "It" might be a McGuffin or a place or an emotional state. Maybe Character D doesn't want this thematic thing at all. The point is the connecting echoes among the characters. It's the third perspective that for me brings magic. Two characters arguing simply shows an argument.

But characters should argue. They should want to argue. Characters should raise old grudges and talk around each other and misunderstand because of their personal filters and motives. Character values come alive in the ground they hold, the ground they cede, when they get angry, when they deflect, when they go silent. Especially when they go silent. In that silence is deep truth.

Which is way better articulated than I managed in that conference room. Months later, that panel question still has me thinking about these nested character interactions and how to get better at it as I grow. And any question that leads to wonder is a gift.

08 December 2023

About books


 Reading Chris Knopf's December 4th SleuthSayer's Column "Book, books, books. And more books." took me back to how I became a prolific reader.

In 1960, my army father was assigned to the Southern European Task Force (SETAF) in Verona, Italy, which began a three-year adventure for me in Italy. I was ten and wish I had been older to better appreciate the experience of living in Europe. I've so many vivid memories of the red tile roofs of Verona, the Bolla vineyards, the castles, the heart-wrenching battlefields of San Martino and Solferino, the art in nearby Florence, the canals of Venice, the magnificence of Rome and the Vatican, the narrow streets of Naples.

 Camp Passalaqua, Verona, Italy 1960s


Verona, Italy

L'Arena, Verona, Italy

Beyond those wonders came an everlasting wonder for me. Books. Coming from TV America, there was no TV for us in Italy. There was Italian television shows but we didn't even have a TV. I went to see a lot of moves at the post theater (went into that in my SleuthSayer's July 26, 2019 post "Movies 1960-1963)

However, it was the libraries which drew me. The post library and especially the school library.

I attended a wonderful school in 5th, 6th and 7th grade – Verona American Junior High & Elememtary School. We called it Borgo Milano School as it was on the street Borgo Milano. The teachers were first rate and the classes inspiring.

My fifth grade class in 1960. I'm first row. Fifth from the left. Teacher was Mr. Gamberoni.


The playground in 1960s

The librarian was a New Zealander or maybe Australian, with a cool accent. She guided me to so many great books for youngsters and I fell into the spell of reading and reading and reading. When school was closed for the summer, the post library at Camp Passalaqua had great books, more adult books and I kept on reading. It became a life-long love. Reading.

Juliet's balcony, Verona, Italy

Nice short film about Verona:

https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/8342267643627569800/7341328071451990743

That's all for now,

  www.oneildenoux.com 

06 December 2023

It Seems There Was This Irish Policeman...


 Foil Arms and Hog are three very funny Irish sketch comedians.  They have dozens of videos available on the web but the first one I spotted happens to relate to our favorite genre.  Enjoy.