Getting Ideas From Characters

Elmore Leonard has been the subject of many fine posts here at SleuthSayers. Just search through the blog for posts by David Edgerley Gates, Dixon Hill, Fran Rizer, Brian Thornton and many others who quoted Elmore or touched on his work.

Found this on YouTube – Elmore Leonard: The Story Writing Process and want everyone who hadn't seen it to see it. I found it fascinating how he'd get the beginning of an idea about a character and develop a story, bring in other characters, seeing who was good and who was bad and that became the plot. He explains how he would take a individual and see what happens to him, what he can get into and what he'll do about it.

“Something's gotta happen in the opening scene,” he explains. And he went on from there.

He'd follow the main character, adding subplots as the character went along until it was time to shut it down. He said it was the best way to end some of his books, ending it abruptly because the story's over.

The examples he mentions are from of his novels, two of my favorite Elmore Leonard books.

The former secret service agent turned photographer is LaBRAVA. 

The high diver is from TISHOMINGO BLUES.

Two Elmore Leonard quotes come to mind:

“Characters are much more important to me in my book than plot.”

“When I write a book I'm the only person I have to please.”

Link to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub_09NgFjrA&t=14s

That's all for now,

www.oneildenoux.com

Bestsellers Then and Now

by Eve Fisher

Constant Reader (me) is part of an Anthony Trollope Group that has almost as much fun as we do here.  A while back we read (okay, re-read, we've worked our way through the canon more than once) The Way We Live Now (which was done in pretty fabulous manner by the BBC with David Suchet as Melmotte the Swindler, and available on Britbox).  TWWLN is the story of a financial swindler (Melmotte), who is running a railroad scam / ponzi scheme (no, this is not a spoiler alert) in 1873 London. The not-surprising part (to us moderns) is how many people are quite willing to throw in tons of money to get in on the pot of gold.  Major characters include a noblewoman who writes bad novels and bad history and gets them published by "persuading" critics to praise them, her rotter/rotten son, her virgin daughter, the virgin's two suitors, a feisty American woman who's shot a man in her day, and the most feckless county family in literary history, which hands over title deeds as if they're just another cup of tea. Great stuff.  

Now in its day, TWWLN was seen as a semi-comic satire, a bit vulgar, and a bit over the top, not the towering novel that many modern critics perceive it to be.  It did not make that big a ripple in the small Victorian pond, but is now considered to be Trollope's masterpiece, and one of the greatest Victorian novels ever. 

Anyway, I started thinking about the contemporary view of shows like "Boston Legal" or "The West Wing" or "The Good Wife" or "House of Cards" or "Succession", etc. v. what (if any) media studies of them will be done a hundred years from now. First of all, a lot of the true meaning of it will be lost. I loved "Boston Legal" back when it was a hit show and watched it religiously every week. So when it finally hit syndication I sat down and watched with eagerness - and realized that half the punch lines weren't relevant anymore. "Ripped from the headlines" means that, when you've forgotten the headlines, there's not a lot left. On the other hand, there are some shows and some themes that will probably be obvious to the future historian that aren't to us. 

So what about novels?  

From https://lithub.com/these-are-the-10-best-selling-books-of-the-decade/ for 2010-2019:

1. E. L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) – 15.2 million copies
2. E. L. James, Fifty Shades Darker (2011) – 10.4 million copies
3. E. L. James, Fifty Shades Freed (2012) – 9.3 million copies
4. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (2008) – 8.7 million copies
5. Kathryn Stockett, The Help (2009) – 8.7 million copies
6. Paula Hawkins, The Girl on The Train (2015) – 8.2 million copies
7. Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (2012) – 8.1 million copies
8. John Green, The Fault in Our Stars (2012) – 8 million copies
9. Stieg Larsson, The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo (2008) – 7.9 million copies
10. Veronica Roth, Divergent (2011) – 6.6 million copies

So the best-sellers of the last decade are 3 soft-core BDSM; 2 unreliable female narrators; 2 young adult dystopian novels; 1 on race relations in the pre-Civil Rights Era South; 1 revenge spy conspiracy thriller; and 1 (The Fault in Our Stars) that would have had any Victorian reader sobbing their hearts out and made it #1 for YEARS. It would be interesting to see what the future analysis will be of that.

I would be more depressed by this, except that the best-selling books (by # of books sold, not of how highly they were rated or remembered) of Victorian times included: 

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), perhaps the most popular of the Gothic novels (i.e.,  horror novels), dripping with enough gore and decaying corpses to make Bram Stoker's Dracula look pretty tame.  BTW, Jane Austin's Northanger Abbey is a combination homage and satire of Radcliffe novels, and all Jane's readers knew it.  For one thing, the characters and the omniscient narrator all quote from Udolpho all the time. 

NOTE:  The very first Gothic horror novel was The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford and Whig politician.  Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) was also considered part of the Gothic fad, which hasn't faded yet.  

Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret (1862) - Unreliable narrators abound.  And no, the secret is not what you think you know from the beginning. 

Mrs. Henry Wood, East Lynne (1861). Seriously, probably the #1 bestseller of the entire age, and was transformed into a play that was performed well into the early 1900s in Britain and America.  There were also a few movie versions.

Plot:  Young woman marries honorable but boring guy; later runs off with an old flame who is a complete cad; is seduced and ruined; returns to her former home in disguise (her boring Hero husband has remarried) to be the governess to her own children, one of whom dies; she dies shortly thereafter; weepy deathbed scenes ensue.  There's also a complex secondary plot that involves a slut (I'm being kind) and her two lovers, a nobleman and a lawyer's son (who happens to be the brother of the Hero's second wife), one of whom murders the slut's father.  

Now in True Confessions: Sixty Years of Sin, Suffering and Sorrow, there are no less than 3 adaptations of East Lynne over the decades under the names of My Mad Elopement, My Own Story of Love, and Playing With Fire.  That plot has LEGS.  

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (1860) - Loaded with unreliable narrators, shifting personas, endless secrets, kidnapping, murder, and switching bodies...  This one also started a whole fashion in women's dress, style, and even in perfume.  (Yes, there was a perfume called "Woman in White".)  

But the biggest sellers of all were the Penny Dreadfuls.  A weekly dose of 6-12 pages of sensation: murder, crime, the supernatural, detection, and each one only a penny.  Now that a working class bloke could afford. And if you couldn't, you could club in with another bloke, half-penny each, and buy it. Popular characters included Sweeney Todd, Dick Turpin (highwaymen were very popular), Spring-heeled Jack (a ghostly monster who had claws and breathed fire), vampires, ghosts, etc.  

(Wikipedia)

Some were rewrites of Gothic and other thrillers. What eventually ended the Penny Dreadfuls were what A. A. Milne called the "ha'penny dreadfuller".  Those started out as high minded moral tales, but ended up the equivalent of the Grand Guignol - extremely graphic horror / thriller / monster tales.  Basically, I blame the creation of Hannibal Lector on Penny Halfdreadfuls.  They were that graphic.

But what about tearjerkers, you ask?  Oh, my dear, the Victorians took that old tearjerker (1748) Clarissa, and polished it up to a faretheewell.  

You want weepy deathbeds?  The Heir of Redclyffe by Charlotte Yonge, Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop (the death of Little Nell...), Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (the death of Beth...), and many, many more.

You want star-crossed lovers?  You can start off with the Bronte sisters:  Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and move on to George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, Charlotte Yonge's The Daisy Chain, and the most harrowing of all, Thomas Hardy, who specialized in them for reasons of his own:  Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure...

So what do we learn from this?

Horror and gore always sells, and there never have really been many, if any, limits on it.

Sex, of course: the Mysteries of Udolpho, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the Penny Dreadfuls all have a lot of sexual innuendo which were obvious to the Victorian / Edwardian reader.  

Complex tales of adultery and murder always keep people fascinated until the last page is turned.  

And when you want a good cry, have one of them die young and/or star-crossed or both...

Some things never change.

Waving at Plotholes

I have been helping an author, call them A., with a short story.  A. wrote a pretty good tale but it had one problem: near the end a character I'll call Vic Villain did something that seemed very odd but was needed to make the story turn out the way A. wanted.

A. provided a complicated explanation for Vic's actions, but that didn't help. I could think of two better and safer ways Vic could have gotten the same result, but they wouldn't have made the story turn out the way A. had planned.

My first thought was to suggest that the author hang a lampshade.  I have discussed this before.  It means disarming a plot problem by calling the  reader's attention to it.  It seems paradoxical but it can work.  

Think of the movie Rear Window.  For the plot to function Hitchcock needs Thorvald to leave his blinds up while killing his wife.  This seems like a ridiculous thing to do.  The Master's solution is to have several people comment on how unlikely it is that Thorvald would do that.  They consider it evidence that our hero must be  wrong about the killing.

So A. could have dealt with the issue by having the protagonist say something like "I guess we'll never know why Vic that" or "He must have been crazy to..."

But that didn't strike me as satisfactory either.  So I suggested that A. take the other route, which I call the Burning Storeroom Trick. 

Let's move to a different Alfred Hitchcock picture, Saboteur.  At one point the movie's hero is locked in the storage room of a mansion,  no way out.  But wait! He has a book of matches and the room has an automatic sprinkler. He lights a match under the sensor and alarms go off.  The next scene is an exterior, showing the mansion being evacuated.  A group of onlookers are watching  and one of them is the hero.

Clever! Obviously he used the fire to escape.

How?

Excuse me?

How did setting a fire allow him to get out of the storage room?

Umm...

Exactly.  In an interview Hitchcock admitted he didn't know either. 

In science and academia this known as handwaving. The Jargon File does a nice job of explaining it. 

To gloss over a complex point; to distract a listener; to support a (possibly actually valid) point with blatantly faulty logic... If someone starts a sentence with "Clearly..." or "Obviously..." or "It is self-evident that..." it is a good bet he is about to handwave. 

Notice that I used the word obviously a few paragraphs ago? 

It is self-evident that all penguins can yodel, so I don't need to provide any recordings of them doing so...

By the way, handwaving is similar to the original meaning of the phrase begging the question.  There is a wonderful Wondermark cartoon on this subject here.

Anyway, I suggested to A. that he try that approach. 

Hero: Why did you do that?

Vic Villain: It was part of my cunning plan.

Hero: Why are you waving your hand like that?

Vic: Look! Yodeling penguins!

As it happened  A. found a different solution, changing Vic's plan to get the bad guy in the right place.I like it much better than being locked in a burning storeroom.

Stolen Opportunities

     Pre-pandemic, my traveling companion and I visited Italy. We journeyed with another couple. I'll call them P and D. On a jaunt to the Amalfi Coast, we took the Circumvesuviana. It sounded cool. The train departs from Naples and hugs Vesuvius, the volcano that destroyed Pompeii. The Circumvesuviana passes by that ancient Roman city. It treks along the Amalfi Coast before arriving at Sorrento, with its sheer cliffs and colorful villas. I carried a notepad. A few of my notes follow.

    The train trip reads better in the guidebooks. The Circumvesuviana functions as a commuter railway. Our train was graffiti-splashed, chugged slowly, stopped frequently, and was crowded. If you want to try something that isn't touristy, ride the Circumvesuviana.

Jensen, Public Domain, Wikimedia

    While we stood in the Naples station waiting for the opportunity to board, P, the husband, told us that he'd just foiled a pickpocket. I followed his outstretched arm, pointing toward a man scurrying to the far end of the station, casting wayward glances in our direction. 

    We boarded the train. P had served in the US Navy and had sailed out of Naples on occasion. He remembered a restaurant he'd eaten at in Sorrento. We found it. The place stood dimly lit and mysterious. We were traveling out of season, I'll add. Few tourists were visiting in January. Lots of places proved uncrowded, dark, and mysterious. 

    We ended this side trip at Pompeii. I entered the ancient site with a certain trepidation. I'd heard about and seen pictures of these ruins for my entire life. Would the place live up to my expectations? Pompeii did. 

    An exotic-sounding train trip, an ancient Roman city, and a town on the gorgeous Amalfi coast cloaked in just a hint of mystery. What could a writer possibly do with that?

    As we zipped along on the ItaliaRail, the sleek, clean, fast national railway back to Rome, I flipped through the notes and began thinking about someday mining this little side trip. Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine graciously published the resulting story, "Sfortuna," in the March/April issue. 

    I love to set stories in the places I've visited. Writing a short story allows me to think back on the pleasant memories of a vacation. Exploring a new place with the mindset that I'll likely dip into this experience for a later story also heightens my observations. I take a five-sense inventory of a place. What stands out that I might tap into when I'm seated at my keyboard? The practice frequently enhances my experience of visiting. Hosts also seem to like seeing their vacation home used as the setting for a short story. Selfishly, if a published story gets me invited back, that's a double win for me. 

    I've frequently mined these experiences. I think of this as a subset of the writer's maxim, "Write what you know." In this case, the admonition is recast as, "Write what you think you know because you've visited for a very short time." 

    And I have to expand the maxim. I can't just write what I know. My stories would be too bland. I've been fortunate to have missed out on much of the soul-searing pain others might dredge for their stories. I've never been a POW in a fire-bombed city like Dresden. I'm not complaining or volunteering; I'm just reporting. 

    So where do you go when the pains in your life are the abundance of weeds in your front lawn and terrible luck when picking a grocery store checkout lane? How do you mine the commonplace to find exciting story material? 

    First, I need to recognize that my personal experience provides the only lens I've got to view what I'm trying to portray through words. 

    Second, I remember the micro-moments. We've all experienced times of heartache, loss, despair, grief, and sadness. Perhaps not on some grand scale, but we've all been there. I've seen the people around me have these emotions as well. My traveling companion expresses her feelings differently than I do. I can amplify that range of emotions to convey my character's thoughts and feelings. I can mine not only my vacations but also my personal history. I can squeeze what I need from the mundane. 

    Third, I hope I'm noticing the people around me. Having a ringside seat in the criminal justice system has allowed me to observe other people having bad days. I've seen their anger and disillusionment. I've also witnessed their sense of vindication. Finally, I've also seen their stupidity. It all helps when I'm trying to write. 

    But one doesn't need to have worked in jail to find emotions on display. Grocery store trips can demonstrate bits of bad behavior. We're all watching for those moments. To write is to be part voyeur. You're standing in the checkout line or sitting at a restaurant and not intentionally eavesdropping, but suddenly find yourself gifted with a phrase. For a moment, the meal is put on hold so that you can text yourself a message before you forget the gift you've just been given. 

    Lastly, I can look things up. Research is, in its own way, an enhancement of my personal experience. I'm going to the places I choose and looking for what I might find. On virtually any subject, the internet makes it possible to eavesdrop on someone somewhere reflecting on something. I can read or watch and filter what they report through my lens. 

    I've experienced nothing of what happened in "Sfortuna." Viewed differently, we've experienced it all. I sat down at my computer and imagined how it all came out. I'm thrilled that the kind folks at Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine liked the story. I hope that the readers do also. 

    How do you mine your experiences? What tips do you have for wringing the maximum literary value from the fortunes and misfortunes in your life?

Until next time. 

Novel to Short Story to Novel (Again)

 

Photo by Stephen E. Morton

A special treat today.  Kevin Egan is the author of eight novels and more than 40 short stories. His three legal thrillers, each set in the New York County Courthouse, were inspired by his 30 years as a staff attorney in that iconic building. Kirkus Reviews listed his Midnight as a Best Book of 2013.

He has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, Mystery Magazine, and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.And now he's appearing for you. - Robert Lopresti

 

NOVEL TO SHORT STORY TO NOVEL (AGAIN)

by Kevin Egan
 

In the early 2000s, I experienced a writing crisis. I had published four novels, including a three-book golf mystery series, but my dream of writing "bigger" novels had vanished in a welter of half-baked ideas. My agent, more than once, suggested that I look to my day job as a source of ideas. At the time, I was a law clerk to a judge in the New York County Supreme Court. Wouldn't some of the cases I observed lend themselves to a novel? I didn't think so. This was a civil courthouse, not a criminal courthouse, and the trials I observed, though they may have been interesting in the legal sense, were hardly dramatic in the novelistic sense. 

I decided to take a different tack -- writing a courthouse novel that would take place not in a courtroom but in a judge's chambers. A standard chambers in the New York County Courthouse is a self-contained three-room suite that evolves its own culture, dynamic, and morality. Three people populate this unique world: the judge, the law clerk, and secretary. As my real-life judge described at the time, judge and staff essentially "live in each other's pockets" for 40 hours a week. And three people, as the saying goes, are a crowd, which in chambers can manifest itself  as an ever-changing kaleidoscope of allegiances and alliances.

With this setting firmly in mind, I came up with ... another half-baked idea. My plot involved: a judge who has just presided over a bench trial targeting a powerful union boss; a hapless law clerk secretly in love with the secretary; and a secretary who recently ended her own secret affair with the judge. 

The story opens on the Third Monday in July (the working title) when the staff arrive to find a thug sitting behind the judge's desk. He informs them that the judge tragically died over the weekend, that the union boss has secreted the body in a friendly funeral home, and that the law clerk and secretary are to collaborate on writing a post-trial ruling that awards a multi-million dollar judgment to the union boss.   

I banged out almost 400 pages of this mess, and my agent actually tried to sell it. (She later confessed that she never expected it to sell; she merely hoped that some editor somewhere would volunteer to collaborate on a re-write.) After seeing the comments she received (several of which incorporated the phrase "willing suspension of disbelief"), I returned to the comfort of  launching yet another golf mystery series. 

A few years later, I saw a manuscript call for a MWA anthology. The theme for the anthology was institutional law enforcement -- the police, the FBI, the courts. Hmm, I thought. I work in the courts, maybe I should submit a story to the anthology.

Ideas come slowly to me. Rarely have I experienced the "flash of creative genius" touted in my Patents & Copyrights course in law school. The only idea that kept popping into my head was that ridiculous Third Monday in July plot, which at the very least I would need to miniaturize into a 20 page story.

That necessity sparked new and critical ideas on how to construct the story.

First, I decided that the judge's staff needed to be actors, not pawns or victims. They needed to have a definite plan and a definite stake in the outcome. But what?

Second, I needed to have a clock running. The novel's time-line meandered through most of the month of July, which strained the reader's suspension of disbelief as well as my own imagination. But how fast?

I found the answers to both questions in the New York Judiciary Law. By law, a judge is entitled to two personal assistants -- a law clerk and a secretary. By law, these assistants are personal appointments who serve at the pleasure of the judge and therefore can conceivably keep their jobs for the entire length of the judge's 14-year term. Also, by law, if the judge dies during that term, the assistants keep their jobs until the governor appoints a successor. As a practical matter, and partly for political reasons, the governor usually delays appointing the successor of a deceased judge until the end of that year. Therefore (because I'd seen it often enough), the staff of a deceased judge usually can bank on keeping their jobs until the end of the calendar year in which their judge has died.  

Consequently, if you work for a judge, the worst day of the year for the judge to die would be New Year's Eve. The best day? Obviously New Year's Day itself.

Thus, the short story "Midnight" was born. A judge dies in chambers on the morning of December 31. The law clerk and the secretary, both desperately seeking to keep their jobs, hit upon a plan to "float" the body to make it appear that the judge died after midnight. The odds are in their favor: the courthouse is virtually empty on the day before the holiday, the judge is elderly and not in good health, and the judge is one of the few judges who owns a car and actually drove it to the courthouse that day. Plus, the judge's only family is a brother who lives in Florida.

The law clerk and the secretary spirit the body out of the courthouse after dark, drive to the judge's apartment, and tuck the body into bed. They wait in the apartment until well after midnight, then go to their homes. They arrive back at the courthouse on January 2, planning to report the judge as missing when he doesn't show up in chambers by the end of the morning. But then, of course, the unexpected happens.

I missed the deadline for submitting the story to the MWA anthology. Instead, I submitted it to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. I was thrilled when Linda Landrigan accepted the story and even more thrilled to see it featured on the cover of the January-February 2010 issue of the magazine. But beyond the thrill of the story appearing in one of the finest and most respected mystery publications, I knew that the act of miniaturizing that original embarrassment of a novel created the blueprint for writing a new one.

Two years later, I finished writing Midnight the novel. The short story, expanded from 20 pages to just over 100 pages, became the first day of a four day timeline that runs from December 31 to January 3. Structurally, each day presents a new problem for the desperate duo to solve, and each day they seem to overcome that problem only to discover that they have unwittingly created a more complicated obstacle until ultimately ... well, you need to read the book.

51 and Counting

There's an old saying that figures don't lie, but liars do figure. However, one can also choose those figures from the data which are more favorable to the point one wishes to make. This person is usually called the expert in that field. Therefore, following in the footsteps of some of our fellow SleuthSayers bloggers in their blog articles which contained personal statistics from their writings and/or published works, here are some of my own figures. Make of them what you will.

Note: The following come only from my short stories published and/or accepted by AHMM.

The data starts in 2001 with my first acceptance, "Once, Twice, Dead," at 3,030 words for a payment of $280, and it currently concludes in March 2024 with my 51st acceptance "Murder Alley," at 5,300 words for a payment of $480. All of this makes for a total of 258,330 words for a total payment of $21,376 for all 51 of the stories.

The majority of my short stories range from 3,530 words on the low end to 8,060 words on the high end with a per story average of about 5,065. Of course, when you are writing your own stories, please remember that every story should have just as many words as it needs to tell that story. My word count total for all my short stories sold to AHMM comes to 258,330.

Added to the above figures are monies earned from AHMM reprints:

•      Great Jones Street ($500)
•      The Big Book of Rogues and Villains ($250)
•      Black Cat Mystery Weekly ($50)
•      Japanese Mystery Magazine ($200)

51 accepted     28 rejected       64.56 % AHMM acceptance rate

$21,376 Initial Payment earned, plus $1,000 for reprint rights on AHMM stories equals $22,376 total.

My conclusion from the data is that approximately 358K words would make about three novels at about 86K words each. Assuming a $500 advance or less per novel from a small publisher, many of these don't earn out in royalties. The author frequently spends the advance money for advertising in one form or another because small publishers don't have much of a budget for PR or advertising. It's a sad state of affairs for a beginning writer. However, I do think that a novel writer gets more prestige in the writing community for having a published novel under their belt.

Since I am not a prolific writer, it would take me a long time to write those three novels from my short story statistics. Not to mention that an editor/agent/publisher would be expecting a new novel every year for me to succeed in the writing game, therefore I'm better off staying in the short story business. Right now, it's fun. If I had to write 86K publishable words a year, it just might quickly turn into work.

So, there you have my story.

See you in print.

Somewhere.

Plotters and Pantsers

 

Last Saturday my wife and I drove down to Natchez, a place I've visited many times, especially during my years with IBM, and this trip was more fun than work. I'd signed an agreement with the Mississippi Writers Guild not long ago to conduct several workshops this year on writing and selling short fiction, and this one was the first. The next session's in Jackson, in April. We had a good time.

One of the things I usually find interesting, in writer gatherings like this, are the students'/attendees' responses to the question, "Are you an outliner?" In my experience, the group is always almost equally divided on that issue, and that was the case Saturday as well. About half say they know beforehand where the story's going and how they're going to get there; the other half say they start writing with no idea of where or how the story'll end. The first half happily identifies as "outliners" or "plotters" and the other half as "seat-of-the-pantsers," which is the way they fly their story planes. (The only pantser I know who doesn't like that term is my longtime friend and writing buddy Elizabeth Zelvin. Sorry, Liz. We'll call you a non-outliner.)

As I've said before, I would never attempt to change anyone's approach, on this. I'm not even sure it's changeable. I think it boils down to which way our brains are wired, just as some of us are always late and others always early, some like the toilet paper to unroll from the top and others from the bottom, some like to squeeze the toothpaste tube from the middle and others from the end, etc. Vive la difference, right?

I confess that I'm a plotter/planner/outliner. Rarely on paper, but certainly in my mind. I'm one of those structure-driven people who have to be be able to picture most of the scenes in the story beforehand, all the way to the ending. That might change a bit as I go along--it often does--but I have to know that tentative story layout before the writing starts. Does that make my stories less fun to write? Does it make the process more boring? Does it stifle my creativity (who in the hell came up with that phrase)? The answer's no. It doesn't. Instead, an outline gives me the comforting mental safety-net that I need, in order to shoulder my backpack and set out on my storytrip. If I didn't have that road map in my head, I might eventually make it to my destination, but I might not, and if I did get there, I think I'd waste a lot of time and effort on the way. That, to me, would not be fun.

NOTE: I'm not saying I don't respect the (roughly) half of my writing students and half of my writer friends who don't follow a mental or physical outline. In fact, I envy them. These carefree adventurers strap on their goggles and climb into their literary ATVs without knowing much of anything about the road ahead, and motor merrily into the unknown with big grins and flapping scarves, usually (and somehow) with good results (!!). In fact, some of the writers I most admire do it that way (!!!!). How? Don't ask me. I would still be wandering around out there someplace, running into dead ends and cursing and backtracking and rewriting. But--again--their way seems to work, and I would never try to change them. I don't even want to change them. I like their stories. 

One more thing. We're not always talking about only two groups, here. There are probably half a dozen different variations and subgroups between the two extremes. Yes, some writers do indeed have their entire story planned in great detail before starting, and they stick to it. Others have an ending firmly in mind but everything else is undecided. Others know their characters but don't yet know the storyline. Others know only the title and maybe a few opening words. Others have a fairly clear picture of how things will progress, but they don't dwell on it because they realize most of it'll change after the construction begins. And still others start with a completely blank slate, not knowing anything at all about their story except that there's probably one out there someplace, waiting to be discovered. On a scale of 10 to 1, with 10 being "I've got the whole story in my head" and 1 being "I have no idea what'll happen until I start writing," I'm probably an 8 or a 9.

By the way, I'm always early, I like the TP mounted to unroll from the top, and I squeeze the toothpaste tube from the middle. 

How about you? Outliner or free-wheeler? Or somewhere in between?

From Gun Monkeys to Fast Charlie

When I started out, back when cell phones were actual phones and texting required learning a new set of runes to type into your keypad, I made the acquaintance of one Victor Gischler. Back then, he and pal Anthony Neil Smith ran the now-missed Plots With Guns webzine. I have a special fondness for PWG as they gave me my first publishing credit in their second issue, a short story called "A Walk in the Rain."

At the time, Gisch was putting the finishing touches on his first novel, a nasty slice of noir called Gun Monkeys, which had already been taken by a rather well-regarded small press. Gun Monkeys debuted in 2003 to much acclaim, and off Mr. Gischler went. The Big Five (There were five back then. Good times!) snapped him up and published Suicide Squeeze and Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse. The latter should have been optioned for SyFy back before it got glommed by Peacock. Marvel tapped him to write for Wolverine, Deadpool, and the X-Men.

Then, in the midst of the pandemic, producers approached him about adapting Gun Monkeys. Hollywood being Hollywood, they moved the action from Florida to Gischler's native Gulf Coast region near New Orleans and southern Mississippi. Pierce Brosnan took on the role of "Fast Charlie" Swift with Morena Baccarin as Marcie and James Cann (in his last film role) as a doddering Stan. There were other changes, but the heart of the story remained. It's been twenty years, after all. In the original, Stan was still trying to cling to power. In the movie, Charlie is trying to protect a father figure whose mind is literally fading to nothing scene by scene. And, of course, they gave the movie the title Fast Charlie. 

I watched Fast Charlie when it came out late last year. Other than Brosnan's cringe-inducing accent (An Irishman trying to sound Cajun is a dicey prospect.), it was very well done. Many of the changes had to do with the changes in society over two decades and the fact a movie director has only ninety minutes to two-and-a-half hours to tell a story. Plus script writers gotta script. Hand me, SA Cosby, or Nathan Singer The Maltese Falcon, and you'll get three different movies, none of which look like Bogie's version.All in all, I'd say director Phillip Noyce and screenwriter Richard Wenk did a good job invoking the original. Helps that Gun Monkeys was a short book.

Still, I asked for (and got) the original, retitled Fast Charlie, from Hardcase Crime. Honestly, Hardcase Crime is probably a better home for the book than it's original publisher. But it didn't exist in 2003, and Uglytown's short existence gave the book some heft in its original run. However, when I originally read it, I had vastly different pictures of Charlie and Stan. Baccarin as Marcie, though, solidified my original image of the character. On reread, I couldn't help seeing Brosnan as Charlie and Caan as Stan.

It's pretty rare when an adaptation invokes the original so well. Look at how many times Dune has been done. David Lynch's mind-bending version wasn't even the first attempt. A French movie in the seventies would have probably required a visit from the Merry Pranksters, with their psychedelic Kool-Aid, to watch. The Syfy version lacked heart but at least could be followed. But Dune is a long, complicated book. Still, even the simplest novels can morph into something other than what the author intended. See The Long Goodbye.

True Crime History

I am not particularly fond of true crime books, which often have a sensationalist and voyeruistic angle that makes one feel for the relatives and friends of the protagonists. I am not even fond of those lightly fictionalized novels, "ripped from the headlines" as one of my old editors like

But I have no reservations about Timothy Egan's A Fever in the Heartland, an account of a true crime certainly, but, even more, a vivid history of a real criminal enterprise. The book's subtitle, The Klu Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, provides a handy if rather exaggerated subtitle.

Still, even if the plot only managed control of Indiana, the "fever in the Heartland" was a substantial historical event and, I think readers of the book will agree, an informative and cautionary tale that is still relevant. 

America in the 1920's was very much a society in transition with all the strains of modernity under its jazz age exhuberance. There was a reservoir of racial bigotry north as well as south, along with anti-semitism and a general anti-immigrant animus, spurred by a sense that the nature of the country was changing and that the old social order, white and protestant, was under threat.

One of the men who saw promise in this stew of prejudice and resetment was a not particularly successful salesman named D.C. Stephenson, who devised a way to make hate pay well. He took over what had been a small time Klan outfit and revitalized it with big parades, picnics, and entertainments. The aim was to take bigotry mainstream and make the Klan look superficially like just another popular fraternal organization.

Stephenson was charismatic but also shrewd. His deal with the organization let him keep a substantial portion of what he promised would be increased profits from selling Klan regalia and robes and from membership fees. He was soon living luxuriously but there was still plenty of money left over to pursue his big aims, respectability and power. Under his direction, the Klan bribed judges and cops, subsidized pliant ministers, and funded like-minded or venial politicians.

Soon Stephenson and his associates were political powers in Indiana, and the Old Man, as he was called, had even begun to imagine a run for the White House. He might have been backed in the attempt, because his version of the Klan looked clean and upright and All American.

Of course, there was the dark side, the cross burnings, beatings, and not so subtle visitations of robed and hooded Klan members. But public sentiment saw the Klan as protecting their values and keeping lesser folk in their place. As for the journalists and independent thinkers who might raise a fuss, the Klan was backstopped by cops and judges and top officials.

Timothy Egan gives a vivid picture of how a democratic society was corrupted by hatred and money before he relates how the Klan and Stephenson fell from grace. Those savvy about American history will perhaps not be too surprised that it was not the Klan's politics that got them into trouble, nor their assaults on Blacks or Jews, but Stephenson's private failings, which ran to booze-fueled parties and sadistic sex. One of his victims was Madge Oberholtzer, an unlikely hero, who proved to be the one brave witness whose testimony began to unravel the Klan empire.

Sharp characterizations, careful research, fast moving narrative – would more histories read like A Fever in the Heartland. I may have to modify my opinion of the true crime genre.

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The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654?ls=1&mt=11

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864?ls=1&mt=11

The Roaring 20's

Raoul Walsh made some terrific pictures, some of them in fact great.  You can make a good argument for High Sierra, Pursued, and White Heat, but even the movies that aren’t obvious masterworks are pretty damn rousing: They Died with Their Boots On, Gentleman Jim, Colorado Territory, The World in His Arms, The Revolt of Mamie Stover.  He made four features with Cagney, and probably only Wellman, in The Public Enemy, had more to do with shaping Cagney’s screen persona.  He made ten features with Flynn, and while it’s safe to say Michael Curtiz invented the dashing Flynn swashbuckler most of us think of - Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk - it’s Walsh who gets more out of Flynn the actor. 

Another thing about Walsh is that he sets up bits of business that reverberate well past their actual time on screen.  There’s a throwaway gag fairly early in The Roaring Twenties that’s not only one of the coolest things in Walsh, it turns out to be one of the coolest things in the history of the movies.  (Since it’s a visual joke, I can’t really do justice to it, but here goes.)  Cagney meets Priscilla Lane and falls head over heels.  He squires her home on the late train, from midtown Manhattan to someplace out in the sticks, maybe Yonkers. Cagney mutes the trademark Cagney wiseacre, and delivers enormous yearning and charm.  In the end, she’s fated to wind up with the straight-arrow DA instead of the roguish bootlegger, but in the immediate present, you can entertain the same hopes he does.  The moment is suspended, a single note hanging in the air, like the chime of a wineglass, the two of them completely taken up with each other, a private physical space for themselves alone, but keeping a delicate distance, hoping not to break the spell.  They get to the last stop, where she’s going to get off, and he gets off with her, to walk her home from the station – because he’s still not ready to leave the moment behind – and here’s the kicker.  Cagney and Priscilla Lane haven’t been shot in close-up, i.e., a shot of his face, a reverse of hers, an alternating visual dialogue; they’re shot together, over the back of the seat in front of them, so you don’t get the feeling they’re opposed: they’re in the same frame.  Walsh also frames the scene, at the beginning and the end, in a longer shot, that shows the whole carriage, with Cagney and Lane about two-thirds of the way back in the nearly empty car.  Not entirely empty.  Toward the front of the car, closest to the camera, is a passed-out drunk, with his hat over his face.  When the train pulls up, and Cagney and Lane get off, the camera waits behind for a beat, and the drunk startles awake, realizing it’s his stop, and stumbles out of the carriage.  Your laugh breaks the spell.

This scene on the train prefigures Garfield and Beatrice Pearson in the back of the cab in Polonsky’s Force of Evil, and the even more famous scene between Brando and Rod Steiger in On the Waterfront.  You can see its influence in the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, when the camera tracks along the bar, and bumps over the sleeping drunk, and then settles back down to surface level – instead of effectively dollying through him, because in the convention or conceit of movie-world, the camera takes no notice of such physical obstacles, a wall or a window, a speeding car, a piece of furniture.  The camera, first of all, is omniscient, and secondly, it doesn’t exist in the same physical space as an object or an actor.  It’s a ghost, it isn’t present.

Walsh doesn’t break the Fourth Wall, that’s not where I’m going.  And he doesn’t call attention to himself.  He’s not doing a Hitchcock, inviting you behind the curtain.  He’s very straightforward.  In fact, the story goes that he’d turn his back on a scene, and then turn around and ask his cameraman if it went right, as if he were embarrassed to be a grown man, doing something this stupid to make a living.  But look at the way he sets stuff up, the scaling, the intuitive balance between the epic and the intimate.  Ward Bond has an amazing cameo in Gentleman Jim as John L. Sullivan, the bare-knuckles heavyweight champ that Corbett knocks out in the ring.  He comes, literally hat in hand, to the door of the victory party, and when Corbett asks him in, Sullivan says no.  He’s the past, he tells him, an old punch-drunk palooka with cauliflower ears; Corbett’s the future, what the Irish can aspire to.  The most astonishing thing about it is that you can easily imagine this with Ward Bond, or maybe Victor McLaglen, in the hands of John Ford, and watch it get grossly oversold.  It’s sentimental, but Walsh has the sense not to play it for sentiment. 

Another example.  Custer leaves for the Little Big Horn, in They Died with Their Boots On.  (Even in sympathetic biographies, Custer comes across as a bully, if never a physical coward; Flynn, interestingly, plays him as ingratiating and thick-witted, exaggerating his own least likables.)  It’s the last time Libby Custer will see her husband alive.  (Libby devoted her widowhood to promoting the Custer legend, the golden-haired Achilles of the Plains; she was remarkably successful.  Olivia de Havilland is a sympathetic Libby, but the real woman had ice in her veins.)  The way Walsh shows it, Custer kisses her goodbye and steps away, out of the frame.  The camera draws back slightly, a medium shot, Libby in the lamplight.  She’s standing stiffly, as if posed for a daguerrotype, her eyes wide, her mouth barely parted, one hand resting on the dresser next to her, the other clutched to the front of her dress, and then she crumples, all of a piece.  I think there’s a sudden pulled focus, just as it happens, a quick trick of the lens, that underlines her abandonment, but I’m not quite sure.  It might be something my own eye added.

And the justly famous tracking shot in White Heat, in the prison mess hall, first from right to left - Cagney asking how his mom’s doing, passed down the line of cons to Edmond O’Brien – and then back from left to right – the word that she’s dead, all of it done in pantomime, and then Cagney, zero-to-sixty, batshit psycho in a tenth of a second.  Word is, the scene wasn’t shot as written, Cagney and Walsh set it up without warning the extras, and Cagney took it to the bank. 

The Roaring Twenties was released in 1939, which was one hell of a year for pictures, and you can make a case that it caps the Warner Bros. gangster picture.  It hits all the marks, with plenty of vigor, but the movie’s a swan song for the genre. Cagney personifies this.  The Roaring Twenties is one of his most physical performances.  Mark Asch, in his essay for the Criterion DVD release, points out that he seems to think with his body, that he expresses all his energies and emotions with it, his hands, the balls of his feet, the way his eyes change.  He’s always restless, in motion, checking the threat environment. And as the picture winds down, he loses that intensity, that muscular purpose.  He turns into an old soak, living on memories.  His last gasp, when he comes out of hiding – from the promises he’s made himself – is like watching somebody try on a set of clothes that don’t fit anymore.  In the end, he lives up to his promises.

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The Roaring Twenties is out on a new DVD restoration from Criterion, although not available on the Criterion Channel to stream. There’s a halfway decent print on YouTube, even if the subtitles are strange.

Writerhood of the Traveling Pants

Which pants shall I pack?

This is shaping up to be a busy year, with multiple projects due before year-end. It’ll be even busier than usual because I’m attending several conferences and conventions.

A busy travel schedule is unusual for me. Until the past few years, circumstances prevented me from attending most conferences, conventions, and related writing events, only putting Bouchercon and Malice Domestic on my regular schedule after Temple and I married.

Last year, I increased my travel schedule. In addition to Bouchercon and Malice, I attended Between The Pages Writers Conference, Crime Bake, and the Edgar Awards banquet. This year, I’m already scheduled to attend Bouchercon, the Edgar Awards banquet, Left Coast Crime, Malice Domestic, ShortCon, SleuthFest, ThrillerFest, and the Texas Institute of Letters Conference. I will also Zoom in for Mystery in the Midlands, and next week will do an online presentation for Sisters in Crime Northeast. (Unfortunately, Temple still works a day job and is only able to join me for a few of these events.)

While the online presentations and conferences don’t require travel, they do require putting on pants. In addition to remembering to pack my pants for the live events, the other conferences and conventions require additional planning—from determining which airlines, which flights, and which airports to fly from to determining if I can fit everything I need into a carry-on bag or if I’ll need to pack so much that a checked bag (or two) will be required.

And all the traveling cuts into writing and editing time. So, do I take my laptop computer—which is one more thing to tote around—and attempt to work? That hasn’t generally worked out well for me.

For those of you who travel extensively in support of your writing career, what tips do you have? Do you take a laptop computer with you, and do you actually manage to get work done?

2024 TRAVEL SCHEDULE

If you’re also attending any of these live events, please stop me and say howdy.

Left Coast Crime https://leftcoastcrime.org/2024/

Malice Domestic https://www.malicedomestic.net/

Edgar Awards Banquet https://mysterywriters.org/product/2024-edgar-award-banquet-tickets/

Texas Institute of Letters Conference https://texasinstituteofletters.org/

ThrillerFest https://thrillerfest.com/

ShortCon

Bouchercon https://www.bouchercon2024.com/

Murder, Neat: A SleuthSayers Anthology (Level Short, 2024) contains 24 stories by some of your favorite short-story writers. So, belly up to the bar, order your favorite libation, crack the spine, and wet your literary whistle.

Your attention is most kindly requested.

            I often read in the newspaper that there’s been a general erosion in common civility.  That may be true, since why argue with sociological studies and the finely tuned antennas of our media watch dogs, ever alert for any diminishment in our quality of life.  

            But I just don’t see it.  That is, I rarely suffer this during my day-to-day undertakings.  In fact, I think people are mostly more congenial and sociable than they used to be.  It could be that since I now have white hair they take pity on me and my declining faculties, and express greater kindness than I experienced as a young man.  Maybe I’m now more convivial myself, and get rewarded by a response in kind.  I’m willing to accept these variables as suggesting I’m all wrong.

            Though still not be convinced. 

            It might be that social media interactions are larded with terribly disrespectful and aggressive behaviors, and that has warped our perception of the overall state of public comportment.  Since I participate in social media only glancingly, and then only with friendly people I know, I never confront such conduct.  If I did I’d tell the offenders, in the nicest way possible, to stick it in their ears and never communicate with them again.

              It helps to have a dog.  Only the hardest heart can resist our terrier’s charms.  He elicits good feelings from every version of human being, irrespective of socio-economic standing, race, creed, orientation or nationality.  We once had a motorcycle gang cooing over our pups, comparing notes on healthy diets and grooming strategies.  I think foreigners first learn our language by saying “Hello.”, “How much?”, “Where’s the bathroom?” and “Cute dog!”  We’re the fortunate beneficiaries of this canine charisma, since much of it seems to rub off. 

           

            I’ve been to Ireland and Australia, countries that have set the English-speaking gold standard for full-throated cheerfulness and good will toward any and all.  By contrast, I live in New York and New England, who many contend occupy the other end of the spectrum.  But this isn’t really fair.  New Yorkers are actually quite friendly and garrulous, it just feels like they’re shouting at you.  You have to tune your ears to the right pitch.  

            New Englanders are taciturn and reserved, it’s true, though get them started on a favorite subject, like the Patriots’ defensive line or the best route from Cambridge to Logan Airport, and they’ll talk your head off.   You do have to make more of an effort to engage a New Englander, unlike a person from almost anywhere else in the country.  If all you say at the check out line is “thank you” as they bag the groceries, don’t expect much.  If they ask, “How are you today?” give them a broadside of jolly commentary on your current state of being.  Even include a complaint or two, delivered with the sort of rueful irony that invites commiseration.

          

            “Could be sunnier.”

          

            “Yeah, but we need the rain.  My Roma tomatoes just lap that stuff up.  And the zucchinis?” 

“Don’t I know it.”

            

             I used to drive the Massachusetts Turnpike all the time, and before they did away with the toll gates, there was one guy so irredeemably buoyant and busting with bon homme that a line would form at his booth. 

            

            “There’s your change, sir.  One dollar and thirty-five cents.  Buy yourself something fun!”

    

              

            Mindful of our brief here at Sleuth Sayers, I do have a way to link this happy state of affairs to writing fiction.  If you only follow the observations of our gloomy journalists and academics, you’ll not only feel enduringly depressed, you’ll deviate from your lived experience.  You’ll break the law of authenticity.  The world isn’t a disagreeable place, most of the time.  Genuine assholes are notable simply because they’re so rare. 

                Writing hardboiled crime novels is no excuse.  Even Humphrey Bogart (channeling Marlowe) said, "I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners.  I don't like ‘em myself.”