23 October 2024

The Long Goodbye


 

Jackie Winspear’s new book, The Comfort of Ghosts, is her eighteenth Maisie Dobbs mystery, and the last.  You wonder why, and the author says she imagined a narrative arc to the series, as well as the storyline in each novel, and she felt that she’d closed the circle.

I say, God bless.  I’ll miss Maisie, as will huge numbers of other readers, but there comes a time.  I’d rather make the choice myself.  All too often, you don’t get to.  I’m still sorry Philip Kerr died, when there were many more Bernie Gunther stories to come; and Bruce Alexander stood us up, before his blind 18th-century magistrate, Sir John Fielding, was ready to step down from the bench – what will happen to young Jeremy, ever on the prowl for that sinful Turkish brew, haunting Lloyd’s for both the coffee buzz and the maritime gossip?


The other side of the ledger, we have Conan Doyle famously trying to kill off Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, and Agatha Christie wanting to rid herself of the “insufferable” Hercule Poirot, but market demand kept them going.  Speaking of, Tom Clancy shuffled off this mortal coil eleven years ago, but he keeps manufacturing product. 

I’m not a huge fan of publishers profiting off dead guys, although Ace Atkins has done a good job with Robert B. Parker’s legacy (plus the blessing of Parker’s widow Joan). Ace gets Spenser’s rhythm right.  You can’t say the same about Parker himself, and Raymond Chandler.  Poodle Springs isn’t a bad book, on its own; it is, however, dreadful as Chandler.  Parker clearly admires the master – Spenser, Marlowe, get it? – but he doesn’t have Chandler’s lapidary and Byzantine habit of mind, or Chandler’s precise and mischievous ear for language (to wit, “a couple of streamlined demi-virgins went by caroling and waving,” from The Long Goodbye).  I happen to be a big fan of Islands in the Stream, too, if only the first fifty pages or so, which I’m actually confident Hemingway himself wrote. 


I know this sounds mean-spirited, but the most specific thing about any writer is voice.  This is usually different from story to story, sometimes inviting and intimate, sometimes chilly, or arm’s length.  Homely and domestic can open out into the epic.  Larry McMurtry and Jim Harrison are very unalike, but Lonesome Dove and Legends of the Fall share an almost Arthurian scale of delivery.  On the other hand, A Narrow Grave, McMurtry’s essays, would seem to have nothing in common with Letters to Yesenin, Harrison’s poetry.  Two writers who are utter strangers to each other. 

Probably not, though, if they meet in heaven.


There’s an originality to any writer.  We have the dictum, write the book only you can write, which can be taken in more than one way, but for the moment, let’s say it means, this book, at this moment, couldn’t be written this way, by anybody else.  Somebody else could write a story about a nurse, in a combat surgery, behind the trenches, in the Great War.  But only Jacqueline Winspear is going to use her character, Maisie, to speak to the trauma of Jackie’s own grandfather, still picking shrapnel fragments out of his scarred legs in his seventies.  The specificity is everything.  War is never over, a character in one of the Maisie books says, it lives on in the living, in the guilt of the survivors.  The arc of Maisie’s story, in eighteen books, is a map of grief, and the consequences of loss.  It has a shape, like something stuck in your throat.  Maisie can’t be imitated, because she’s invented herself out of a certain, particular piece of the past – I mean Maisie, as a character in her own story, is self-invented, and Maisie, the character that Jackie the writer has invented, can only have become this Maisie. 


Jackie Winspear says Maisie will always be taking up space in her head, even if she’s longer writing about her.  I’d suggest that’s because Maisie is partly a vehicle, like any character – your characters are a way into the story – but also because she’s taken on, over time, the burden of responsibility.  You might say it’s a necessary plot device, which it is; Maisie, though, has become necessary to the author.  Not an avatar, or a second self, but a physical metaphor, for the gravity of hope.  Maisie carries the weight.  Jackie has lightened her own heart, and ours.

22 October 2024

Dialogue to Die For ... Again


Due to a medical issue, I am rerunning a column from 2017. If you love dialogue, it is worth reading--even if you read it seven years ago. After all, great dialogue is one thing that lures readers and viewers back over and over and over ...

Remember the TV show Name That Tune? The idea was to see how few notes of a song a person could hear and correctly name that tune. I don't know how well I'd do on that show, but if there were a Name That Movie show, I would clean up--assuming they asked about movies I've seen. Spoken dialogue, I've found, sticks with me. I adore snappy and heartfelt dialogue in books too, but for whatever reason, I don't retain it the way I do dialogue from movies and TV shows. (You'd think, then, that I would have good recall for dialogue from audio books, yet not so much.)

Anyway, I started thinking about ear memory the other day when I turned on the TV. I wasn't looking at the screen. All I heard was, "Always," and I knew it was the late Alan Rickman as Professor Severus Snape in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II. (I might have seen that movie a few times.) That one word transported me back right to the exact scene in the movie. Rickman delivered it perfectly, revealing so much about Snape's character. Even now, recalling the scene breaks my heart a little all over again.

Alan Rickman 
Of course, Rickman had help. His dialogue was written for him. Great dialogue depends on the team of great writers and great actors working together, as well as the folks who add the background music that adds drama or tugs at your heart. When done right, dialogue can be magical. I only need hear certain words or a sentence in the right voice, with the right rhythm, and I know the film. I'm transported in my mind right back to that scene.

Here are a few examples. They may not be the most well-known from each movie, but they certainly stand out:

"I want the truth!" "You can't handle the truth." Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men

"You can't kiss her!" Sally Field in Soapdish

"Why can't I write shit like this?" Whoopi Goldberg in Soapdish

"Shall we play a game?" Joshua (computer) in War Games (even a computer can make dialogue memorable)


More Alan Rickman

"There was more than one lobster present at the birth of Jesus?" Emma Thompson in Love Actually

"Oh jeez. I'm getting pulled over. Everybody just pretend to be normal." Greg Kinnear in Little Miss Sunshine

"I guess it comes down to a simple choice. Get busy living or get busy dying." Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption

 

"And for what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don'tcha know that?" Frances McDorman in Fargo

"You don't really know how much you can do until you stand up and decide to try." Kevin Kline in Dave

"Here's looking at you, kid." Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca

"A toast to my big brother, George, the richest man in town." Todd Karns in It's a Wonderful Life (It's interesting that one of the most memorable lines in the film is from a minor character.)

And even more Alan Rickman
"I'll have what she's having." Estelle Reiner in When Harry Met Sally (another minor character who steals the scene)

"By Grabthar's hammer, by the sons of Warvan, you shall be avenged." Alan Rickman in Galaxy Quest

"Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." Mandy Patinkin in The Princess Bride


"You're going to the cemetery with your toothbrush. How Egyptian." Robin Williams in The Birdcage

"Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?" Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark

"It was like ... magic." Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle 

"I'm not crazy. I've just been in a very bad mood for forty years." Shirley MacLaine in Steel Magnolias

"But I don't want to be a pirate." Jerry Seinfeld in Seinfeld

"I'm not insane. My mother had me tested." Jim Parsons in The Big Bang Theory

Alas, not Alan Rickman
but still wonderful



"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." Gordon Jump in WKRP in Cincinnati

Inspired to go watch a great movie or to try to write your own memorable dialogue? Great. But before you go, please share your favorite movie or TV show line(s) of dialogue. The lines that stick with you, that you remember sometimes out of nowhere. The words that transport you and make you smile. And if you know how to make dialogue on the page stand out in memory the way spoken dialogue does, please let me know. I'm open to any and all tips.

 

21 October 2024

Goin’ places that I’ve never been, seein’ things I may never see again


 I heard a philosophy professor on the radio, Agnes Callard, who famously wrote a piece for The New Yorker called “Against Travel”.  Her basic premise is that the actual, long-lasting benefits of travel are delusional.  All you’re doing is disturbing the lives of people who speak another language, spoiling the very places you profess to admire, while retaining nothing of any enduring value.  That discussing your travels is a type of virtue-signaling that pleases your ego and bores your listeners

Rarely have I disagreed with a person more than Professor Callard.   She has the right to her

opinion, and her feelings, which are hers and fairly held.  One of my best friends hates traveling.  He’s a brilliant, erudite, accomplished man.  We just don’t share the same convictions on this matter, just as I hated the original “Top Gun”, which he loved, and he heaps scorn on my cherished “Independence Day”. 

Callard maintains that “tourist” is a term you use to describe other people with suitcases who go running around the world, but not yourself.  Fair enough, since tourist is clearly a pejorative, often for good reason.  The assumption is these are people who travel badly: dress like slobs, hog scenic overlooks, yell at shopkeepers as if volume will overcome a language gap, gorge on unhealthy snacks and cheap tchotchkes, and fall off cliffs trying to take shareable selfies.  They clump together in their tour group, rarely mingle with the natives, pine for hometown meals and remain blissfully unaffected by the foreign country’s physical and cultural charms.  They’re dumb jerks over there, which means they’re likely dumb jerks over here, too. 

Asked if she’d give a pass to creative people, such as Gauguin in Tahiti, or Picasso in Paris, Professor Callard grudgingly gave an inch.  The thing is, the question itself is fraught with a certain elitist presumption.   A professional accountant, not encouraged to be overly creative, can be utterly entranced and enriched by visiting a new place.  I know this because my brother-in-law was a partner at Deloitte and Touche and was positively glowing after returning the other day from a cruise around Scandinavia.  He doesn’t have to be transformed into a different person, nor would he expect to be, but he now has a mind that’s fuller and more aware than before he hopped on that boat.

My wife spent a few weeks in Africa on safari in four different countries.  She thinks about it every day, and is always moved by the recollections.  Is she a different person?  Not exactly, but she would say she is more of a person, an expanded version.

Entranced, expanded and intellectually refreshed is how I’ve felt after visiting strange new lands.  Notably Japan, Australia, Alaska and Budapest.  You can only really grasp these places, however superficially, by going there.  Driving around the Australian state  of Victoria, I felt like I’d been dropped onto a different planet.  Vast grasslands punctuated by gigantic Eucalyptus, waves of Kangaroo streaming through the grass at startling speeds, a mountainous rainforest where you half expected a Tyrannosaurus to burst out of the tangled tree limbs and vines. 

You might not care to know that on one side of the River Danube is the city of Buda, and on the other side Pest.  By I do.

My wife and I always make a point of talking to people wherever we go, which mostly means conversations with bartenders, waiters and waitresses, cab drivers, bell hops and store clerks.  But these are people who live in their places, and they have a lot to tell you if you ask.  You don’t have to move in with a family to get the basic lay of the land.  People love talking about their lives and their homes.  You just have to engage. 

For creative people, the benefits of travel are self-evident.  James Joyce moved to Paris (along with Picasso, Dali, Hemingway, Stein, Pound, etc., etc.).  Orwell, John Singer Sargent, Joyce Cary, D.H. Lawrence and artists you’ve never heard of journeyed and lived all over the place.  Critics agree that their art was hugely influenced by the changes in venue.

Brain science can explain some of this.  When you’re in familiar surroundings, your mind can sort of relax and shove many basic mental functions down and away from the most cognitive, and energy consuming, portions of the brain, like the pre-frontal cortex.  When you’re in an entirely new environment, your survival instincts kick in, and you become hypervigilant.  Your brain literally gets extra busy.  You also instinctively compare your immediate experience with the well-known, which has the effect of bringing perspective to your life back home.  This is why James Joyce sat in a room in Paris and wrote about Dublin, why Lawrence wrote about English people in Italian villages and an adobe hut in Mexico. 

I love writing in places where I don’t speak much of the language. I’m in the midst of people having a pleasant time with no danger of being distracted by neighboring conversations.  All I have to say is café Americano et croque monsieur, or cervesa y patatas bravas, and I’m good to go.  I once wrote half a book over less than a week in joints hanging off the cliffsides of Positano.  It just gushed right out of me. 

Faulkner muddled through rarely leaving Oxford, Mississippi, my favorite philosopher Immanuel Kant barely budged from Königsberg, and Emily Dickinson basically never left her room, and they all did fine, though I still think those smart folks should have travelled more.  Dickinson’s poetry might have taken a different trajectory had she consumed a Philly cheese steak or punted on the Cam.  Kant’s belief in the tenuousness of objective reality might have been bolstered by meeting a platypus. 

As with all literary pursuits, there are prosaic travel writers who can recommend great hotels and ticketing hacks, and geniuses who happen to like a good amble.  For that, you can’t do better than Bill Bryson.  Or Paul Theroux, who I think went everywhere on the planet without ever relaxing his keen eye or joie de vivre.  Even Mark Twain, the Innocent Abroad who was anything but. 

Sorry, Professor Callard.  I’m sure you have other fine qualities, but on this issue you’re just dead wrong. 

20 October 2024

Autumn's Poet, part 2


Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie

What connects poetic Halloween tales of terror, Little Orphan Annie, and Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls?

An Indiana poet and an actual little orphan nicknamed Allie. You’ve heard James Whitcomb Riley’s poem, famous for the iconic lines intended to be read aloud,

    The Gobble-ums will get you
    If you don’t watch out.
Little Orphant Annie
by James Whitcomb Riley

Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay,
An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away,
An’ shoo the chickens off the porch, an’ dust the hearth, an’ sweep,
An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-an’-keep;

An’ all us other childern, when the supper-things is done,
We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun
A-list’nin’ to the witch-tales ‘at Annie tells about,
An’ the Gobble-uns ‘at gits you
   Ef you
      Don’t
         Watch
            Out!

Orphant Annie illustration by Ethel Franklin Betts
Orphant Annie illustration
by Ethel Franklin Betts

Annie was based upon a real orphan, Mary Alice ‘Allie’ Smith, a childhood companion of Riley. At age ten, James’ parents brought Allie into their house to clean, cook, and help their mother. She quickly became part of the family, which found her real talent was telling horror stories while sitting around the fire after dinner.

Riley’s ‘Frost is on the Punkin’ hinted at the supernatural, but the real Annie (Allie) happily tore into tales of terror replete with beheadings and other murders, according to Riley’s recollections. The children loved them.

Riley incorporated some of her tellings into poems and tales of his own. His muse didn’t realize she was his inspiration until her 60s, which she visited him. The girl certainly had an effect upon him.

Wunst they wuz a little boy wouldn’t say his prayers, —
An’ when he went to bed at night, away up-stairs,
His Mammy heerd him holler, an’ his Daddy heerd him bawl,
An’ when they turn’t the kivvers down, he wuzn’t there at all!

An’ they seeked him in the rafter-room, an’ cubby-hole, an’ press,
An’ seeked him up the chimbly-flue, an’ ever’-wheres, I guess;
But all they ever found wuz thist his pants an’ roundabout: —
An’ the Gobble-uns‘ll git you
   Ef you
      Don’t
         Watch
            Out!

Until the 1900s, children were often treated as undersized adults. In line with that view, children’s stories were written as cautionary tales, ‘who’s naughty or nice’ morality plays. Many times children’s stories featured blood and guts, horrible events, and murder.

The poem is surprisingly complex for a children’s work. It utilizes alliteration, dialect, onomatopoeia, ordinary rhyme, parallels, and phonetic intensifiers brought together in iambic meter.

The work went by several titles including ‘The Elf Child’ before an accident changed the name to Orphant Annie. A typesetter spelled the title wrong. Riley initially wanted it corrected to Orphan Allie, but the poem’s reception and increasing popularity persuaded him to leave it alone.

An’ one time a little girl ‘ud allus laugh an’ grin,
An’ make fun of ever’ one, an’ all her blood-an’-kin;
An’ wunst, when they was “company,” an’ ole folks wuz there,
She mocked ‘em an’ shocked ‘em, an’ said she didn’t care!

An’ thist as she kicked her heels, an’ turn’t to run an’ hide,
They wuz two great big Black Things a-standin’ by her side,
An’ they snatched her through the ceilin’ ‘fore she knowed what she’s about.
An’ the Gobble-uns‘ll git you
   Ef you
      Don’t
         Watch
            Out!

actual orphan Mary Alice ‘Allie’ Smith
The actual orphan muse
Mary Alice ‘Allie’ Smith

‘Little Orphan Annie’ became a silent movie. A reading was cut on early phonograph records. It provided inspiration for songs, musicals, films, television and radio broadcasts.

  • In 1911, American composer Margaret Hoberg Turrell composed an arrangement for choir.
  • Harold Gray’s comic strip, Little Orphan Annie with the trademark hollow eyes, and the Broadway show, Annie, based their titles and initial plot premise on Riley’s poem.
  • Johnny Gruelle’s Raggedy Ann and Andy characters and part of the story line were based on Riley’s poem.
  • The 21 September 1972 second episode (S01E02) ‘The Carnival’ of the CBS television series The Waltons featured John Boy Walton reading Little Orphant Annie to Jim Bob and Elizabeth.
  • Other television programs have referenced ‘Little Orphans Annie’ including Cracking Up: The Darrell Hammond Story and the series Getting On.
  • Little girls in Texas Killing Fields recited the poem whilst skipping rope.
  • Dean Koontz’s 2004 novel The Taking featured the same premise as the previous stanza written 140 years ago.

An’ little Orphant Annie says, when the blaze is blue,
An’ the lamp-wick sputters, an’ the wind goes woo-oo!
An’ you hear the crickets quit, an’ the moon is gray,
An’ the lightnin’-bugs in dew is all squenched away, —

You better mind yer parunts, an’ yer teachurs fond an’ dear,
An’ churish them ‘at loves you, an’ dry the orphant’s tear,
An’ he’p the pore an’ needy ones ‘at clusters all about,
Er the Gobble-uns‘ll git you
   Ef you
      Don’t
         Watch
            Out!

Gray's Little Orphan Annie

And that, my young friends, is the story behind the story. Remember,

The Gobble-ums will get you
If you don’t watch out!


19 October 2024

Adventures in Strandland



Three things prompted me to write this column today. One was a kind email last week from a writer in the Balkans saying he had read one of my SleuthSayers posts about mystery markets and asking if I had any updated advice about those, the second was a conversation I had the other day with old friend Rob Lopresti about mystery publications, and the third was the recent announcement that the wonderful Mystery Magazine was calling it quits.

All this got me to thinking about how relatively few mystery markets are still out there these days, and which of those have been the most helpful to me, over the years. Now that Mystery Magazine is no more, those are (again, in my case) AHMM, EQMM, Strand Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Weekly, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, and (if you consider them a mystery market) Woman's World. For that matter, Black Cat Weekly isn't solely a mystery magazine either, but that's what almost all my BCW stories have been.

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to today's post. A few weeks ago, my story "Welcome to Armadillo" was published in the new issue of Strand Magazine. It's a private eye story, but a bit different, in several ways. For one thing, my PI spends far more time in this story running from killers than he does in detecting anything, although the skills of his job do help him to survive the tale. Another thing is, one of the people intent on killing him is his own wife. (Have you noticed that very few fictional private detectives are happily married?) Also, though I guess it doesn't matter, this particular guy is new, and not one of my series PIs. 

Much of the fun I had in writing this story came from the four or five major plot reversals that happen in the course of the story and from a number of characters I grew to like so much I hated to leave them when I wrote END. The story features betrayals, shootings, stabbings, marital infidelity, political corruption, a bomb threat, a cross-country bus ride, killers for hire, rattlesnakes, drug trafficking, a birthday celebration, a jailbird bent on revenge, a guy abandoned in the middle of the desert, and a roadside cafe. (For some reason, several of my recent stories have featured diners and other restaurants; never let it be said that I allow my hardworking characters to go hungry.) 

This story also marked sort of a "first" for me: This was my sixth story in a row to be published by the Strand. I'm not sure I've ever had stories in six consecutive issues of a magazine before, and I would like to think this is the beginning of a trend. With most of the magazines I submit stories to, I'm more accustomed to having half a dozen issues published in a row without one of my stories in them. So I'm enjoying that while I can.

My other most recent publication was a short story that had appeared in Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2024 and then showed up a week or two ago in that anthology's UK edition Best Crime Stories of the Year. That story, "Last Day at the Jackrabbit," also has ties to Strand Magazine--it first appeared in their Spring 2023 issue.

Back on the subject of current mystery markets, I would encourage you to try submitting to them all, including some that I didn't list. I often find that a story rejected at one market can later be accepted at one of the others. I'll close with two tips: (1) don't spend too much time trying to make sense of the selection process--that way lies madness--and (2) don't worry if your story isn't a traditional whodunit mystery. Very few of mine are. If your story contains a crime, that's all you need, for these markets. 

Questions: If you're a short-story writer, which mystery magazines do you submit to most often? Which ones do you tend to try first, second, third, etc.? Which magazines have proven to be the best match for the kind of stories you write? Do you--as I do--find yourself writing less for magazines nowadays, and more for anthologies? I welcome you to share your experiences and thoughts on all this, in the comments.

Meanwhile, keep writing!


18 October 2024

My Resiliency Bucket Needs a Refill


 

Dog and Denise by candlelight.

My friend Tom, who lives a somewhat eremitical existence in a rural part of our North Carolina mountains, woke the morning after Tropical Storm Helene to find that the gravel road at the end of his property was blocked by downed trees and bisected by two raging gullies of water. He and his neighbors were cut off from civilization. If they didn’t do something to help themselves, they knew it would be days, possibly weeks, before city workers cut them out.

Tom cobbled together a brigade of can-do folks with chainsaws to get the job done. His A-Team consisted of characters I would hesitate to put in a fictional narrative because they would seem too far-fetched. Tom, a wild-eyed building contractor and the scion of a Texas oil family, was assisted in his endeavors by a puppeteer, a falconer, a nonagenarian bison herder, and a guy everyone on that road calls “the friendly hermit.” As the men worked, they were kept happily fed by an 80-year-old neighbor who fried up savory helpings of Spam out of her pandemic pantry. You can’t make this stuff up.

My wife and I were safely out of town at a three-day book event when the storm passed through, so I cannot share any anecdotes of those harrowing days and nights. I only know that since chainsaw-slinging puppeteers are in short supply, most of my neighbors closer to our little city of Asheville, North Carolina, were trapped in their homes as tree after tree fell and utilities gave up the ghost, and were forced to wait for help.

Our friends Jimmy and Heather found their college-aged daughter’s car squashed flat in their driveway under a massive tree. A few other trees dropped on their property, none on the house. They were the lucky ones.

Most of the neighbors on my cul de sac were equally lucky. A few trees down here and there, but their homes high, dry, and intact. Inez, the inveterate gardener at the end of the block, lost a beautiful magnolia, which fell toward the road, damaging nothing but itself. When I asked how she was, she said that after hearing how others in the surrounding region had fared, she felt “Lucky, and heartbroken.”

She did not know it, but she was speaking for many of us in Western North Carolina.

Denise and I had been in Charleston, four hours south. We returned three days after the storms to find a massive tree on our roof, and about a dozen trees down on the property, several of which smashed through the wooden privacy fence that keeps our dog from tearing after squirrels in distant yards.

For a few days I walked around measuring these behemoths. The smallest diameter I encountered was 16 inches. The tree removal estimates alone were close to $20,000, before we entertained the notion of repairing the roof, gutters, and fences, replacing the dog’s invisible fence line and the spoiled food in our fridge. In other words, we too were lucky.

We and the older couple next door have since become the de facto rulers of the street, because as soon as Good Samaritans cut the trees blocking their way out, many of our neighbors fled to places rumored to possess electricity, Internet, mobile phone coverage, and copious hot water. I don’t blame them. Some of those neighbors have kids, some are older, and some simply don’t like to be inconvenienced.

For a few nights we roamed our home with flashlights, cooked on the gas stovetop, listened to news on a hand-cranked radio, and went to bed to the sounds of sirens, chainsaws, Chinook helicopters, and humming natural gas generators. Gasoline was scarce, so we walked a few miles everyday to a guardrail near the highway that for some reason had great cell coverage. From that strange spot, we wrote everyone we could think of to assure them that we were okay.

On those cool fall mornings, when the nabe was silent, nature returned. A flock of wild turkeys traipsed through everyone’s yard. Three deer, tails twitching, skipped along the lawn across from us. And a mother bear arrived one afternoon with two cubs to investigate the trash people had left behind in their haste to bug out. For several nights, successive waves of bears feasted while our dog went nuts.

It is a mistake to think, as humans often do, that we are the masters of all we survey. No—we’re just the ones stupid enough to pay for it.

Family and friends insisted that we too consider fleeing for our own safety as soon as we could procure a full tank of gas. We have been offered guest rooms and cottages in Knoxville, Chapel Hill, Brooklyn, Idaho Falls, D.C., and Sleepy Hollow. And much as I would LOVE to spend Halloween in the reaping grounds of the Headless Horseman, we have chosen to stay.

My brother, in particular, took me to task. Denise and I were safely out of town! Why on earth would we return?

Here’s why. We felt compelled to check on the house, to see just how bad the damage was. And we needed to retrieve our dog, who was staying at the home of a trainer who worked at the kennel we normally use. This wonderful person and her family were safely out of harm’s way, not in a flood zone, but it was too much of an imposition to leave the pooch in their care indefinitely. They had a motorcycle dealership on one of the rivers to muck out. They didn’t need the extra hassle of our dog while doing so. (The grounds of the dealership have since become a staging area for helicopter search and rescue operations.)

The kennel, I should mention, had been evacuated two nights before Helene’s arrival, and is now completely wrecked.

The French Broad River that flows through our mountains is the third oldest on the planet. (Yes, I know that strains credulity. Look it up.) It is 340 million years old, four-and-a-half-times older than than the Nile.

Pardon my French, but when the old Broad gets angry and swollen, she lashes out. Nearly every business on that stretch of road near the dog kennel was erased. The brewery we’d never had a chance to visit. The artisanal tea company that formulated a brew to celebrate the launch of my wife’s Thanksgiving book. The glass company that installed our shower doors. The plumbing supply company that sold me parts for my various DIY jobs around the house. The legions of antique places. The FedEx store where we’ve shipped editorial projects. The restaurants in the historic village outside the Biltmore Estate that we adored and championed. The one-man auto body shop that repaired the dings I keep putting in my fenders. All gone. Washed from the face of the earth. That’s only one stretch of road along a tributary of the French Broad.

The River Arts District, where artists maintained studios and sold to the public, is a moonscape of twisted sheet metal, upended vehicles and trailers, scoured terrain, and toppled trees festooned with fluttering plastic. We used to call this area the RAD, but now the D in that acronym stands for debris. When we drove down to take a look, I felt numb. Tears sprung to my eyes.

The people who lived and worked here, the ones I know and the ones I don’t, are the legions of the unlucky. Their homes and livelihoods were destroyed, and they are in shock. Rescue workers continue to pull the bodies of humans and livestock from waters in the region.

I could go on. There are tons of these stories, and the list will only grow because as I write this, the news tells me that there are still—three weeks after the storms passed—600 impassable roads in the state. In a mountainous region with challenging terrain, that means people are still trapped, hungry, ill, or even dead in or near their homes, and no one will know until the roads that lead to their doors are rebuilt, or someone helicopters in to check on them. The body count keeps climbing. Power restoration efforts will take time because in so many of these areas, workers must rebuild roads or else hike into an area on foot and hand-dig holes before new electrical poles can be erected and strung.

We are proud of these mountains and their history, but they have a distinct disadvantage when dumped with excess water. On flat terrain, rainwater has a whisper of a chance to seep into the earth. When it lands on slopes, rain doesn’t so much seep as it rushes downhill, seeking the lowest point. This process happens with alarming speed. This simple concept had never occurred to me until it was explained to me by a climate scientist I interviewed when I first moved here twenty years ago. As a species, we should cultivate the habit of shutting up and listening to scientists speak more often.

That’s another reason why we remain in our home. We are safe. We have a roof over our heads. Electricity, Internet, and cell coverage work but remain erratic. As long as I can communicate, I will do so. We were trained as journalists. Stories are important to us. Someone’s got to collect them, and share them with others. I don’t own a chainsaw. I don’t keep an excavator on my property like my pal Tom. But I do what I do. They also serve who sit and write.

Now that utilities are less crappy, and gasoline is easier to come by, we have the luxury of moving on to other chores. Every morning, we get up and make a run to grab some non-potable water with which to flush our toilets. On the drive back home, we roll past a gauntlet of friendly strangers who offer us everything from free drinking water, free MREs, free ice, free cereal, free baby supplies, free bananas. It’s the bananas that kill me. Free bananas—seriously? Bananas are part of the reason we’re in this mess.

Saturday we went to the farmer’s market, where growers sell food that was coaxed from local soil, not shipped in from the tropics. Since this was the first market since the storms, the gathering was about so much more than buying groceries. A lot of hugging, a lot of swapping of stories.

My favorite farmer, the dude who always teases me with the term paisan, was not there. He, like me, is an Italian American guy from New Jersey. Earlier this spring, I texted him to ask when was the best time to get my meatball starts in the ground. He reminded me to mulch mine deeply with lasagna noodles. He’s got a beautiful sense of humor, and a smile that lights up hearts.

Why wasn’t he there? As soon as I could get back home and in range of our temperamental Wi-Fi, I dug around the web. I learned that Gaelan and Nicole’s farm was largely destroyed by Helene. Her brother-in-law had a GoFundMe site up to help them rebuild. The photos of their collapsed barn, shredded hoop houses, gullied-out crops, and upended farm equipment were horrifying.

A few days ago, my friend Steve wisely observed that everyone has a small bucket of resiliency that typically serves us in good stead, but it is surprising how quickly that bucket empties. Sitting on my patio Saturday, surrounded by piles of shattered tree limbs, a few feet from my patched roof, I broke down and wept. Can’t even call the guy to say how sorry I am about his farm. He’s out of touch until they erect temporary cell towers in his town, which is about an hour from me.

I turned 60 that weekend, and while I didn’t feel like celebrating, I certainly felt like stewing. I have literally become the old dude who shouts at clouds because they are blocking the tiny solar generator in his driveway.

Because I’m lucky does not mean I am not angry. Angry at climate change deniers. Angry at corporations who refuse to take a temporary hit to their profits to ensure that we live safely on this planet for a few more centuries. Angry at the billion-dollar corporate dickheads who own our severely understaffed local hospital, and whose rapacious greed has invited the scrutiny of our state attorney general and the feds. (This is the same hospital you may have heard about in the news, whose emergency room is so screwed right now that staffers were instructing patients to “go in buckets” that would later be emptied by nurses. The city’s lack of water means surgeons cannot easily scrub in, so please don’t need surgery, folks…)

I am angry at politicians who keep texting me to offer their thoughts and prayers during my hour of need, to tell me that they are “with me,” only to remind me a sentence later that they’re counting on my vote on November 5th.

I am angry at the jerks who jacked our local postal workers in the early days of the recovery to steal Amazon packages. Angry at the narcissists who so badly needed gasoline that they felt it necessary to threaten their neighbors at gunpoint at the pumps, then—as in one instance—run those poor people over as they drove away.

And let’s face it, I am angry because I could really use water in my damn pipes. In recent years I have become a profligate drinker of water. The cancer treatment I had back in 2022 robbed me of fully functioning salivary glands, so even the slightest physical effort leaves me parched. After a day of hauling wood and buckets of water, I am desperate to guzzle whatever is handy.

Okay, true, I sometimes slake my thirst with beer. But my tipple of choice is mostly FEMA’s bottled water. I feel increasingly guilty about the rising tide of plastic in my recycling bin.

My attorney neighbor, who grew up here, tells me that the mayor and city council have fought for seventy-five years about doing something about our rickety and woefully outdated water treatment facility. Successive administrations kept passing the buck on upgrades, because no one had the balls to come clean about the costs and probable property tax hikes, nor did they have the political will to inconvenience citizens and tourists with what could be a months-long process of interruptions at the tap. Well, guess what? The plant flooded, must now be rebuilt from scratch, and our much-vaunted tourism economy is destroyed. Great work, guys.

As the lady says, I am lucky and heartbroken. I have dry mouth and I must scream.

* * *

Apologies for the long post, and the paucity of photos.

I can only share my experience, but I’d remind visitors here that these storms impacted much of the American southeast. If you are moved to donate on the national level, the Red Cross and the Salvation Army are good options.

If you want to help my city specifically, two good organizations are Manna Food Bank and BeLoved Asheville.

Since we’re a literary blog, I’m posting links to bookstores in the region. If you’re contemplating buying books online, I’m sure that they would appreciate your business. (Before you buy, check websites to see if they are able to fulfill orders.)

Malaprop’s - Asheville, NC
Firestorm Co-op - Asheville, NC
Bagatelle Books - Asheville, NC
Plott Hound Books - Burnsville, NC
Blue Moon Books - Canton, NC
Blue Ridge Books - Waynesville, NC
Sassafrass on Sutton - Black Mountain, NC
Sassafrass on Main - Waynesville, NC
City Lights Bookstore - Sylva, NC
Little Switzerland Books & Beans - Little Switzerland, NC

Two wonderful local sources for used and rare books are:
Biblio - Asheville, NC
Irving Book Company  - Asheville, NC

Hopefully, I’ll see you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com










17 October 2024

Sir Edmund Backhouse, or How to Destroy an Empire


by Eve Fisher

Back when I was first studying Chinese history, I kept running across two men who together wrote books that were almost impossible to obtain (pre-internet days), but were one of the primary references for many, many other books, especially textbooks:  

These memorialized the life of the Empress Dowager, Tzu Hsi (now spelled Cixi - 1835-1908), and the Manchu Court during her reign (1861-1908), a life of total power, decadence, curious ceremonies and customs, and fairly constant murder.  Fascinating.  Obsessive to those who read them back in the 1910s, because China was a closed country to almost everyone.  There were very few non-Chinese who could actually speak and read the Chinese language, and of those who could, most were eccentric British.  One of the most eccentric was Sir Edmund Backhouse (1873-1944).

Backhouse was one of those who was a failure at home, but a roaring success in China.  Fleeing to China after a nervous breakdown at Oxford, he learned Chinese and became a translator for (London) Times correspondent George Morrison.  Morrison had been sent to report on a country whose language he didn't know.  (This happened more often than one might think, especially back then.)  This meant that Backhouse could feed Morrison pretty much anything he wanted about the Court and the Dowager Empress, especially if it was negative.   


Dowager Empress Cixi and women of the American Legation

NOTE:  No one in Britain really wanted China to have a strong ruler, for the simple reason that after winning the two Opium Wars, Britain had China in a vise.  The Treaty of Tientsin forced the Chinese government agreed to pay war reparations, open almost all ports to European commerce, legalize the opium trade, and grant foreign traders and missionaries rights to travel within China. It also gave the British the right to preside over the Chinese Customs Office (i.e., taxes and tariffs).  The British got the first slice of all that money, which meant a tidy profit, and no one wanted that to stop.

SECOND NOTE:  The British had long been propagandized about how primitive, barbaric, and decadent the Chinese, with their sophisticated 3,000+ years of culture, language, and civilization, were.  After all, it excused ramming opium down their throats, and taking all the land, power and money they could grab. Some of the other foreign translators contributed to the propaganda, most notably Karl Gutzlaff (See my old SleuthSayers article "The Drug Smuggling Missionary of the Pearl River"), whose writings and later speeches back in London (attended by Karl Marx) showed how desperately the Chinese needed missionaries and help.

Backhouse, who claimed to know many influential people in the Forbidden City, provided the Times with a Dowager Empress who was "a woman and an Oriental... on the one hand... imperious, manipulative, and lascivious" and on the other "ingenuous, politically shrewd, and conscientious."  And a lot of emphasis was put on the imperious.  For example, in The Secret Annals as the Dowager Empress and the Guanxu Emperor fled the palace during the Boxer Rebellion, the Emperor begs to have his favorite concubine, Precious Pearl, come with them, but the Dowager Empress has the eunuchs throw her down a well.  

NOTE:  There is no proof that this ever happened.  In fact, it's much more likely that it was Backhouse's retelling of the classic poem The Song of Everlasting Sorrow about the Tang Dynasty Consort Yang Guifei, forced to commit suicide by the Imperial Guard for her cousin's leadership of the An Lushan Rebellion.  One of the most famous star-crossed lovers stories in Chinese history, Yang Guifei's story has been told over the centuries as poetry, operas, plays, films, television series, and even a video game.

But we cannot forget the lascivious, either.  Backhouse's Empress had plenty of sex, and not just with other Chinese but with supposedly Backhouse.  In China under the Empress DowagerBackhouse claimed she called him to the Forbidden Palace for sex "between 150 and 200 times.”  You will, I hope, not be surprised that it was thoroughly debunked, and its major source, the Diary of His Excellency Ching-Shan, was proved to be a Backhouse forgery.  Sadly, that did not happen for fifty years, and Cixi's reputation was a muddy swamp in Western eyes and historiography.  

He was also a conman. In 1916 he presented himself as a representative of the Imperial Court and negotiated two fraudulent deals with the American Bank Note Company and John Brown & Company, a British shipbuilder. Neither company received any confirmation from the Imperial Court. When they tried to contact Backhouse, he had left the country. After he returned to Peking in 1922 he refused to speak about the deals, and nothing apparently ever happened to him. (Wikipedia)

By WW2, he'd become actively fascist, collaborated with the  Japanese occupation, and hoped for an Axis victory. Sadly, he died before he could discover how poorly he had chosen sides.

Whew.

Forgery, fraud, fascist:  so why did his name keep coming up in the bibliographies and notes? 

Well, for one thing, by 1923 Backhouse had shipped eight tons of Chinese manuscripts to the Bodleian Library (the main research library of Oxford University). The Library described the gift: "The acquisition of the Backhouse collection, one of the finest and most generous gifts in the Library's history, between 1913 and 1922, greatly enriched the Bodleian's Chinese collections."  And since these ms. were in the Bodleian, they must be true, and so were repeatedly cited by other historians.  It took about twenty years for people to really question them, and it wasn't until 1991 that historian Lo Hui-min proved conclusively that China Under the Empress Dowager and the diary it was based on were Backhouse forgeries.  No wonder Western views of the Dowager Empress and China were so negative for so long.  

There's a long history of various diplomatic corps members sent to foreign lands to represent, negotiate, placate - whether they knew the language or not.  It still happens, leaving the diplomats in the hands of translators.  Who knows how much of the history we think we know was conjured up by translators who had their own views?  After all, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Ambassador to South Vietnam, did not speak Vietnamese.  He did speak French, which meant he could communicate with the South Vietnamese elite, but did that really give him the true picture of what was going on?  And George H. W. Bush spoke no Chinese when he was appointed Chief of the US Liaison Office in China (1974-75), which made him the de facto Ambassador.  

Oh, there's also the dicey history of missionaries' histories of places they went to convert.  Perhaps the most obvious one to question is that of St. Gregory of Tours (538-594 AD), Bishop of Tours in the Frankish Merovingian world.  He and one other person, Fredogar, are the only sources for Frankish history during that period, and what a period it was:  rampant violence, Arian heresy, regular miracles by true Catholics, constant war, fratricide, and of course, an evil queen, specifically Fredegund, Regent for Clothair II, who gives poisoned daggers to two clerics with which to assassinate Clothair's rivals, Childebert and Brunehild, and orders the successful assassination of Bishop Praetextus of Rouen while he is praying in his church.  She is evil, through and through...  Yes, The History of the Franks holds the attention:  but the question is, is it true?   

Meanwhile, time for some true BSP!

The latest Michael Bracken anthology, Janie Got A Gun, is available for preorder at the publishers HERE.  In my "Round and Round", lifer Cool Papa Bell tells how Mildred, the penitentiary ghost, showed up for the holidays and took care of a lot of people's business... including a particularly nasty corrections officer.  


Happy to share space with Steve Liskow, Joseph S. Walker, John M. Floyd, Jim Winter and many more!

Also, coming soon, my latest story, "Lady With a Past" in Black Cat Mystery Weekly Issue #167!

"We’re back in Laskin, South Dakota, where police officer Grant Tripp is involved with the sexiest, most beautiful woman he’s ever known. But Megan’s a Davison, an ex-con is stalking her, and her ex-boyfriend wants Grant out of the picture. And then there’s the question of where she got so much money…"





15 October 2024

Crimes Against Nature: The Anthology



I don't know if you noticed that the world changed on Monday, October 7, but I did. Down and Out Books published Crimes Against Nature: New Stories of Environmental Villainy. It is the first anthology I have edited.  

As I hope the title makes clear, each story relates crime to some ecological issue: climate change, wildfire, environmental justice, invasive species, recycling, overtourism, etc.  The types of stories cover the (polluted) waterfront: noir, police, caper, comic, psychological, even one inspired by comic books!

This book  has been a long time coming.  I remember telling my buddy S.J. Rozan about the idea at the Bouchercon in Raleigh and that was, heaven help us, 2015.  

Why did it take ten years? Because I'm not the most efficient go-getter in the writing trade and because it took a while to find the right publisher.  

Once Down and Out said yes my first move was to go back to S.J. and remind her of her enthusiasm for the project a decade ago.

She replied approximately that she had no time and couldn't possibly do it,so of course she would.  As I have said before, S.J. is a mensch.  She even provided what I had hoped for but did not dare to request: a story about Chin Yong-Yun, the wonderful mother of Lydia Chin, who stars in many of Rozan's novels.  Like all the shorts about Mrs. Chin, this one is a treat.

As for the other authors, some will be very familiar to the SleuthSayers readers: Michael Bracken, Barb Goffman, R.T. Lawton, Janice Law, and (ahem) Robert Lopresti.

Then there is a category of some of the best names in the short mystery field: Josh Pachter, Gary Phillips, and  Kristine Kathryn Rusch,

Some authors I consider newcomers, although that may only be because I suspect I was first published before they were born: Sosan Breen, Sarah M.Chen, Karen Harrington, and David Heska Hanbli Weiden.

Finally we have Jon McGoran and Mark Stevens, whom I chose because their excellent writing has centered on the environment.

It's a stellar cast and I can't wait for you to discover what dirt they have dug up.