The Foot Is What You Need It to Be, and an Ox Gave You the Mile

My bookcase was in the wrong spot somehow, like a feng shui thing. Moving it across the room could open up everything. Maybe, if the spot was wide enough. I didn't have a measuring device handy, but seriously, our ancestors tamed fire and wolves using only their wits. So I measured the bookcase the old-fashioned way. 

I walked it heel-to-toe. 

And as I did, I had a thought: This is a horrible way to measure things. A Bob foot depends on how straight I step, whether I'm wearing shoes and how clunky. But that's exactly how those ancestors built up our world, by body part intervals. It's a weird and wonderful story.

Old School

A finger is a common measure across history. A Sumerian noir detective might splash a few fingers of Mesopotamian hooch. Or a hand's worth, the width of the palm. A span measures extended fingertips from the thumb to the little finger. A fathom is the length of outstretched arms, which helped sailors mark off rope for sounding lines. As a bonus, arm span approximates human height. If water is more than a fathom deep, your feet don't touch the bottom. 

The Babylonians and Sumerians were all about the arm. Specifically, the cubit, or a forearm's length from the elbow to the middle finger's tip. The Egyptians got together on a standard, the Royal Cubit (20.6 modern inches). Approved measuring devices--cubit rods and ropes knotted at cubit intervals--made sure nobody went rogue. The Royal Cubit built the pyramids. 

The cubit was the way to go until Greeks stepped in with an idea. Literally. 

To the Greeks, measuring by arms and elbows had an obvious limitation: The world is a big place. They weren't about to go around planning city-states and sea routes with arms and rope. 

"Check it out," the Greeks said. "We're walking around on measuring devices super ideal for distance." The human foot, or a Greek pous (podes in plural), the length of a foot wearing a shoe or sandal. A pace, or a walking step with each foot falling once, equaled 5 podes.

If pacing seems like a variable standard, it was. Taller Greeks took longer strides. Younger ones strode more briskly. Was the pace-taker in good health? Going uphill or downhill? What were the weather and ground conditions? Ten Greeks taking 120 paces would travel ten different distances. The local pous could be anything from 12.4 to 12.7 modern inches. Over 120 paces, that's a six-foot swing.

Still, the Greeks were stepping out distances. The critical distance was 600 podes (120 paces), or a stadion -- literally, "to stand" or "standard." The total harmonized with the Greek base-60 system for precise measurements--a Babylonian idea still around today for marking time, longitude and latitude, and celestial coordinates. The stadion also became a standard track length for footraces. Over time, those races were so popular that the length name latched onto the events and tracks themselves.

The Roman Standard

Unsurprisingly, the Romans borrowed the Greek system. A pous became a pes, and podes became pedes. But the Romans, thinking in scalable terms, used a base-10 decimal system for big stuff like bulk trading and infrastructure. A Roman surveyor stepping off distances had to keep going to a nice, round 1,000 paces--or in Latin, the mille passus. 

Variability was intolerable if you were set on marching around and expanding your influence, which the Romans were. And the Romans could organize.

In the Empire, all roads really did lead to Rome. Their road network moved soldiers and officials expeditiously along mapped routes to even the farthest outpost. Those Roman surveyors used odometers to measure and map their precise-ish distances. At each standard mile, the Romans placed obelisks or stones--millaria--notionally to mark the distance from the Forum. 

More to the point, everyone knew who was in charge. 

Rome stretched the Greek stadion to 625 paces (pedes), or a one-eighth mille. Sporting-wise, the Romans lengthened and looped their tracks for chariot racing (the circus) and more graphic sports. Like the Greeks, Romans just called the whole entertainment venue the Latinized stadium. 

It was quite a time for distance measurements. Order and function.

Well, Rome fell.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Out on their island, all post-Roman, the Old English Anglo-Saxons were getting bloody attached to land measures not based on body parts. The Anglo-Saxon idea? Oxen.

The idea focused on area. The Anglo-Saxons clustered their farmland near rivers, and crucially, they kept oxen to help out. It's no fun turning an ox team and plow. Both dynamics meant most Old English parcels were long but thin. 

A key distance became the "rod." The word had meant a pole or a perch, from the Roman pertica, a pike-ish stick of varying lengths and used for surveying land. Or, of course, for goading oxen. The Anglo-Saxons gauged a rod at fifteen feet. This was the Germanic long foot, roughly 13.2 modern inches.

The oxen couldn't have cared less about math and ratios, but they were invested in their workload. "Aha," the Anglo-Saxons said, having noted how far an oxen team usually plowed without a rest. The Anglo-Saxons dubbed that a furrow's length--a furhlang, or eventually a furlong. The acre ran one furlong long by four rods wide, or what an oxen team could plow in one day. An oxgang--15 acres--was how much an ox could handle over a whole plowing season. 

As not to give the oxen too much say, the Anglo-Saxons improved their survey tools and huddled up on a standard. Everyone decided a furlong should be 600 feet, comprised of 40 rods or 200 yards. Well done, all.

Then the Normans came along. Being the continental sort, they weren't sold on ox-based distances, not at all, and they set about implementing proper Roman distances. The main obstacle was immediate. Immovable. Everyone's property lines were measured in long-established rods and furlongs and taxed accordingly. Using the shorter 12-inch Norman foot would've recalculated each holding to more acreage, which risked a major tax hike and likely revolt. 

How, then, did the Normans solve for converting oxen steps to human paces?

They didn't. The furlong remained at its Germanic length--but it would be comprised of 660 Norman feet, not 600 Germanic ones. A rod stayed a rod--with a 10% promotion from 15 to 16.5 feet. 

Tax crisis averted. Still, England was a growing power. Having its land, sea, and economic interests measured differently left the Crown at sixes and sevens. Someone needed to sort it out.

Cut to 1593. Elizabethan decision-makers were in whatever royal planning committee, everybody stewing over how the whole realm needed global scale but was anchor-tied to rods and furlongs. Fair play to the oxen, the planners admitted. "Oy," Duke Someone said, "what about the Romans and their stadium one-eighth mile business? That was what, 600-something feet? Couldn't we just go with that?" 

They did precisely that. Elizabeth I proclaimed eight Germanic furlongs to be an English mile comprised of 5,280 Norman feet. In 1959, that distance was codified as the international mile, which was greeted with a shrug in Rome. They'd long since moved to the kilometer.

Meanwhile, in my Basement

There I was, measuring a bookcase by stepping it off heel-to-toe. In Skechers, size 8.5. The bookshelf was pretty much five Bob feet wide--too wide by half a Bob foot. For the record, a Bob foot is essentially the length they used back in Rome. 

The bookcase and its flow situation sit as they were. I'm cool with one thing, though. Even in failure, I'd joined an ancient tradition based on body shapes and imperial whim and even oxen work ethic, a tradition of measuring badly--but accurately.

The official Bob foot, shod

Behind the Scenes: Scattered, Smothered, Covered, and Chunked

On Wednesday, I learned Scattered, Smothered, Covered, and Chunked: Crime Fiction Inspired by Waffle House (Down and Out Books), is nominated for an Anthony Award for best anthology.

It is an amazing honor and privilege to have co-edited an anthology with my mentor and friend, Michael Bracken. I could not have imagined a more PERFECT moment than when we received this incredible news. 

 

Michael mentioned in a recent SleuthSayers post that he doesn’t view an anthology award as an editor’s award; he views it like the Academy Award for Best Picture because it reflects the work of an entire team of people—editors and writers, our cover designer, and publisher—to succeed. I share his view and am deeply grateful for our team of talented contributors including stories written by Alan S. Orloff, Nils Gilbertson, J.D. Allen, Mark Bergin, Bonnar Spring, Austin S. Camacho, Tammy Euliano, Ann Aptaker, Penny Mickelbury, Donna Andrews, Sherry Harris, Deb Merino, Sean McCluskey, Michael Bracken, Andrew Welsh-Huggins, Hugh Lessig, and the brilliant cover designed by Angela Carlton. 

This is my first published anthology sitting in a co-editor’s seat. How did I get so lucky? The short answer is Michael Bracken. 

Birth of an Idea

In 2018, I attended Malice Domestic for the first time and met Michael Bracken. He was my port in the speed dating storm. It was a pivotal moment in my writing career (more on that here). During the years that followed, I had an opportunity to contribute stories to several of his anthologies, including one story we co-wrote together that was short-listed for a Derringer Award. Often, we met for lunch at writing conferences, and our conversation always turned to anthology ideas. I had the best time brainstorming with him and quickly learned which anthology ideas worked and why others didn’t.

 

So, in May 2023, it wasn’t unusual that I sent Michael an email with another anthology idea, two proposed titles for one concept: The Pull, The Drop, The Mark OR Scattered, Covered, Smothered, and Chunked: Crime Fiction Inspired by Waffle House. 

 

He thought the idea was promising, suggested a revised title (featured on the cover), and asked if I would like to co-edit the project with him. I had little experience. The opportunity to learn from Michael was something I couldn’t pass up. I quickly agreed, and it has been a master class.

 

Takeaways Co-editing with the Master

Shared Vision

Both editors need to share the same vision for an anthology. This vision shapes submission guidelines, influences how stories are edited, and who is invited to contribute.

 

Workflow

Version control is critical. Mistakes are easy to make, especially when two people are editing the same project. Before the project begins, decisions need to be made on which editor communicates directly with authors, which editor communicates with the publisher, and workflow—how stories are received, labeled, stored, and move through the editing process. 

 

Deadlines

Life happens, often things we can’t predict—a death in the family, illness, home repairs, etc. It’s important to create realistic deadlines with these moments in mind.

 

Assembling the Team

Several factors determine which type of submission call works for which project. With time constraints and juggling several projects, Michael and I decided submission by invitation only had to be our approach. We reached out to authors we admired—both multi-award winning and rising stars.

 

Working with the Publisher

Understanding the publisher’s requirements and deadlines are crucial. The finished manuscript should be formatted to the publisher’s specifications, and each step in the process—checking the publisher’s copyedits, reviewing the page proofs, checking the cover copy, and collaborating on the cover image—should all happen in a prompt and professional manner.

 

Working with the Authors

Maintaining communication with contributors builds trust and respect. Michael insisted we maintain regular contact with our contributors and send updates during each step in the process. I appreciated this as a contributor to Michael’s anthologies. Now, having co-edited an anthology, I also appreciate the extra effort this requires and the importance of maintaining a professional relationship with authors.

 

Have you co-edited an anthology? Are you an author who worked with more than one editor on a project? What insights can you share?

***

Speaking of teams, we are assembling one in New Orleans! If you love waffles and crime fiction stories, we hope you will celebrate this incredible Anthony Award nomination with us, along with the awards our contributors have recently received for their Waffle House-inspired stories. 

Tammy Euliano’s “Heart of Darkness” won the Derringer Award for best short story of the year. 

Sean McCluskey’s “The Secret Menu” was selected by Otto Penzler and John Grisham for Mysterious Bookshop's anthology: The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2025.

Want to read Scattered, Smothered, Covered, and Chunked: Crime Fiction Inspired by Waffle House? Find it here.

 

Find me at Bouchercon (September 3-7), mention Scattered, Smothered, Covered, and Chunked, and receive waffle-inspired swag in honor of our talented team. Hope to see you there!

 

 

 

Mitchell and Webb say Watch Your Language

 My favorite British sketch comedians are back with  some advice for office workers.

Schrodinger's Finalist

 

"Well, Mickey, it's an exciting day here in Robert Lopresti's house."

"It sure is, Ray.  Maybe we better tell the people why."

"Good idea.  This is the morning of May first, when the winners of the Derringer Awards are announced.  And as you know, Lopresti has been nominated for best novella."

"Which of his stories was that for, Ray?"

"'Christmas Dinner.'"

"That's right! I believe it was his third story about Delgardo, the beatnik detective--"

"Beat poet, Mickey.  The character hates being called a beatnik."

"Right you are, Ray. And we are here waiting to find out whether Lopresti won the Award or bombed.  Say, isn't he usually awake by now?"

"I believe he is."

"So why is he sleeping late on today of all days?"

"Maybe because this is the big day.  I mean, he might be the winner or he might not.  As long as he doesn't check his mail you might say both states are possible. (Chuckle.) Sort of like Schrodinger's cat."

"I've always felt bad about that cat.  Somebody ought to call the Humane Society."

"There was never a real cat, Mickey.  It's just-- Wait! Here he is. Lopresti has left the bedroom.  I see he has his phone in his hand and he's scrolling down the screen."

"The suspense is incredible, Ray.  When is he going to--"

"And there it is!  You can see it in his face.  That's a man who just lost."

"You know what he'll say, Ray.  It's an honor just to be nominated."

"That's true, it is. What's he doing now?"

"It looks like, yes, he's making a cup of tea.  That's quite a bold move."

"What do you mean, Mickey?"

"If I had just lost I would be drinking bourbon."

"At seven o'clock in the morning? Are you out of your--  Well, never mind.  Go in and interview him."

"Right.  Will do.  This is exclusive, folks. The first interview after the big loss.  Excuse me, Rob, I wonder if you have a few minutes--"

"Who are you and what the hell are you doing in my kitchen?"

"I'm a fictional construct."

"Oh. Another one. I swear, I'm gonna hire an exterminator."

"The fans were hoping for your thought on losing the Derringer Award."

 "Were they? Okay.  It's an honor just to be a finalist."

"I thought you were going to say to be a nominee."

"The Short Mystery Fiction Society tries to avoid that word, because any member or editor can submit a story for consideration. Some people call that a 'nomination,' which leads to all kinds of confusion."

"I see. But about your losing, that must be a great disappointment."

"Well, sure, I'd rather win -- which I have three times, by the way -- but I am delighted that Stacy Woodson, a friend and fellow SleuthSayer, took the prize. She turned in a great story. There's no shame in losing to the best."

"That's very big of you."

"Thanks. Oh, and don't forget that the SleuthSayers book Murder, Neat won the Best Anthology prize, and that's pretty special.  And I found out today a story I submitted was accepted for the New Orleans Bouchercon anthology."

"So, you aren't retiring."

"Hell, no."

"And what's next for Robert Lopresti?"

 "Tea. Probably a Danish, too."

"And after that?"

"I have to write a SleuthSayers essay for next Wednesday."

"What will it be about?"

"No clue.  I'll think of something."

"And there he goes, folks. A true professional.  With a Danish. It's apricot, I think. Back to you in the studio, Ray."

And the Derringer Goes To…

As you may have already learned, Murder, Neat: A SleuthSayers Anthology (Level Short, 2024), which I co-edited with Barb Goffman, earlier this month received the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s inaugural Derringer Award for Best Anthology.

Unlike some of my colleagues, I don’t view an anthology award as an editor’s award; I think of it as similar to the Academy Award for Best Picture, in that it requires the work of an entire team of people—editors and writers, primarily, but the publisher as well—to succeed.

In the case of Murder, Neat, we had quite a team. SleuthSayers, as a group, selected the theme, and Paul Marks had barely begun work as the original editor before illness sidelined him. Barb and I stepped in, solicited and selected stories, and worked with all the contributors to create the final manuscript.

We were working without a net. There was no publisher attached to the project—the first and only time I’ve edited an anthology on spec!—and we pitched the finished manuscript to a handful of publishers.

Verena Rose and Shawn Reilly Simmons of Level Best Books stepped up, and Murder, Neat launched Level Short, the publisher’s new imprint specifically for anthologies.

The end result, as we recently learned, is an award-winning anthology.

So, thanks to my fellow SleuthSayers for all you did to make our group’s first anthology a success!

SLEUTHFEST AND SHORTCON

A hurricane postponed last year’s SleuthFest in St. Petersburg, Florida, and the conference was rescheduled to May 15-18. At 4:00 p.m. Thursday, I’ll present “Writing Short: How to establish and maintain a long-term career as a writer of short crime fiction.” This is a variation of my presentation at last year’s ShortCon, and I provide invaluable information about the business side of writing and publishing short stories.

Speaking of ShortCon, the one-day conference for writers of short mystery fiction returns Saturday, June 7, for its sophomore outing at Elaine’s in Alexandria, Virginia. In addition to presentations by SJ Rozan (“Short Fiction—What’s the Point?”) and Jeffrey Marks (“Crafting Your First Collection”), I’ll present “Writing for Anthologies: How to Slip Between the Covers” and Stacy Woodson will lead an end-of-day panel discussion with all the presenters. ShortCon is limited to 50 attendees and was approaching sellout the last time I saw the registration numbers, so register now if you wish to attend.

Stand up for your rights.

There’s no topic more likely to enflame people than the First Amendment.  That’s because it protects free speech, and thus the freedom to write what you wish. But there are limits that have been imposed by law over the years, and not everyone agrees on what those limits should be. 

            A classic example is the freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s just the beginning.

            I’m not going to get into all the exceptions, because it would take up the whole essay, but suffice it to say there’s a lot of speech, and written expression, that’s not protected.   Most people would agree that these limits are necessary and common sense, and thus we have prohibitions against slander and libel, hate speech and incitements to violence, though even those charges have to be proven in court, and not easily. 

            I worked in advertising and was once informed by a commercial speech attorney (the most prominent in the country, I’ll have you know) that the truth was an absolute defense against a libel charge.  Consequently, I was able to use the name of a branded product in a print ad because I simply stated something about the product the company itself had published (the list price of a new Porsche).  There was no defamation or disparagement.  Just the facts, ma’am.

            He also told me on another occasion that I could use a photo my wife took of a house, without permission, as part of a book cover design.  As long as I didn’t make a claim that the owners were doing something illegal I couldn’t prove, like running meth out the backdoor, I could do it, since it’s not against the law to use a photo of a house.

            My lawyer friend makes clear that political speech and commercial speech are different in the eyes of the law, and commercial speech is where most rules against slander and libel are enforced.

            Political speech has a much higher bar, which is why Trump and his sycophants can lie through their teeth every second of every day and be immune from prosecution, but copywriters and publishers have to be more careful.

            This is why I’ve always changed the names of restaurants and retail stores easily identified by people who live in the Hamptons, where most of my books are set.  And never use the real names of characters I’ve lifted directly from life.

            The likelihood of a lawsuit is beyond distant,but why take the chance.  No publisher wants that kind of exposure and I don’t blame them. When I worked as an editor, I made this point to a writer who insisted on naming an actual company, unfavorably, in his novel.  We said sorry, we won’t publish you.

            As a fiction writer, the possibility of getting into legal trouble is about as remote as it can get.  Your publisher will know if you’ve drifted into dangerous territory and will advise you accordingly.

            If you’re self-published, I’d run your book by someone like my lawyer friend.  The odds are very low you’ll have to make changes, but they’re not zero.

            In this political environment, legal dangers have increased, for sure. Especially for non-fiction writers.  Ironically, fiction writers can portray a public figure committing all sorts of venal and carnal sins, and be fine as long as his or her identity is disguised behind a change of name and light variation in circumstances. But if you’re representing this as truth in nonfiction, and you can’t prove it, be careful.

        

            Hysteria has begun to set in within the arts community, and I don’t blame anyone.  There are real threats to our freedom of expression. But as for now, the First Amendment is holding, and we have a responsibility to exercise it with abandon. The worst thing would be to self-censure for no good reason because of reckless threats from the benighted and dictatorial.

            I’m not a lawyer. I might be wrong about some of the things I’ve written here. I’m just sharing my experience.  Yours might be different.  So please, consult an actual attorney if you have any concerns at all about your work.

How to Dye Your Husband

Wifey Sympath-O-Meter
aka Wheel of Misfortune

I’m just Wild about Hairy

The other day, a good friend who admits her taste in men is deeply flawed, told the funniest story in her best deadpan style. Husband № 3 was ‘hair-challenged’, i.e, balding. He believed dying his hair and eyebrows jet black would make it seem he had more, fuller hair. The opposite appears to be true, but he didn’t know.

Instead of asking for advice and assistance (thus acknowledging characteristic presence of Y chromosomes), he attempted the process by himself. Soon enough, his wife heard him yelling and cursing.

Yes, boys and girls, he had dyed his flesh. His entire forehead had taken on the complexion of a Goodyear tire.

In times like this, I picture an often brutal Wheel-of-Fortune^® device called the Wifey-Sympath-O-Meter™ where ‘sympath’ may relate more to ‘symple and pathetic’ than sympathy. Wifey wheel segments might contain such phrases as: “You poor thing,” to deep Southern “Bless his heart,” to Great Northern “You nincompoop!” As if pretending it mitigates the sting, we even hear foreign phrases, such as the French inspired “nicodème,” which means, well, nincompoop, or the German “dummkopf,” literally dumbhead.

Nitrogenic Mustard Gas Formula
The situation was more dire than they realized.
Chlorine and ammonia were principal ingredients
in WW-I’s chemical warfare compound, the
vesicant (blister agent) nitrogenic mustard gas.
Naïve housekeepers have died mixing the two.

Doofus husband begged his darling to google for a solution. Unbeknownst to her, he didn't wait. A man of ill-considered action instead of patience, he applied household bleach.

Meanwhile, Google found a couple of dye removal suggestions combining ammonia and an oil. She returned and started rubbing the oleaginous solution on his head, whereupon a sizzling “Sssssssss” and a scream rent the atmosphere. The concoctions chemically reacted into a substance resembling battery acid.

God love her. At one point, she was working on future ex-husband № 5, but may have reconsidered. She’s now found a guy who treats her well and has a full head of hair.

In the meantime, may crime lovers carefully mind their household chemicals, especially in the presence of those with uncluttered minds, who have less in their heads than on it.

Well, That's a Different Story

  

Like most writers who've been at it for a while, I've gravitated toward certain kinds of stories. I wander off the path pretty regularly--any route you follow too often gets old--but I find that most of my stories these days involve (1) mystery/suspense, (2) a Southern setting, (3) a protagonist who's a regular, average person, (4) a handful of named characters (no more than four or five), (5) either a murder or a robbery, (6) a third-person POV, and (7) a plot with at least a couple of twists.

If you consider two of my latest published stories, you'd find all these elements, but you'd have to look at both to find them all. Each story veers some distance away from my norm, and that's something I didn't even realize or think about while it was being written. I only noticed it later.

Here's what I mean.

My latest story in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine went on sale a few weeks ago--"Heading West" appears in their May/June 2025 issue. In some ways, that story fits right into my comfort zone: mystery /crime, robbery, less than half a dozen named characters, third-person viewpoint, several plot reversals, etc. But in other ways I varied the template a bit. For one thing, this story is set in the Old West, which I have done often in the past but rarely at AHMM. Out of my 28 stories there, two have been Westerns.

NOTE 1: A quick word about writing in the Western genre. I've often heard writers say they like to do mystery stories because those always contain a crime. Why's that important? Because a crime story means conflict is already there--it's built right in--and we all know that conflict makes for a good story (usually the more the better). I think the same can be said of Westerns. Almost every Western story I can think of, except maybe Old Yeller, contains gunfights and violence of some shape or another, so . . . well, you see my point.

This story also contains some conflict that goes behind human vs. human. Much of the agony in "Heading West" is human vs. nature. Not only the rough environment, but the gradual buildup and arrival of a powerful tornado. (Living where I do, I know a bit about tornadoes, and the one in this story scores a 10 on the Wizard-of-Oz scale.) When you mix a terrible storm with a band of crazed outlaws who want to kill your protagonists, that makes things tough for the home team. It also makes things fun for the writer. If you happen to read the story, I hope you'll have half as good a time as I did, writing it.

The other recent publication I wanted to mention is my story "Redwood Creek" in Michael Bracken's anthology Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun: Private Eyes in the Materialistic Eighties (Down & Out Books). It appeared about the same time as my new AHMM story did, and features 13 other stories, each of them based on something memorable from that decade. I picked (naturally) "Movies of the '80s," so I dutifully made sure the early clues to the identity of the villain came directly from the movies that won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor, etc., during those ten years. Putting together a plot puzzle based on Academy Awards trivia turned out to be great fun. 

Some of the things (besides the 1980s theme) that made this story a bit different from most of my creations were that it was a PI story (I don't write a great many of those); it featured 16 named characters, which is a lot for a 5100-word story; its crime was a dognapping; and it was written in first person. As for POV, I've actually found myself writing more first-person stories than I once did, especially if there's a detective working a case that I want him/her to solve along with the reader.

I also made sure my private eye was far different from the Spenser/Mannix/Spade/Marlowe stereotype. Here's an early paragraph from the story:

    My name, by the way, is Ryan Grant, and I'm a retired private investigator. I was not, however, a movies-and-novels kind of PI. No downtown office with a bourbon bottle in the desk drawer for me, no pebbled-glass window in the door, no ceiling fan, no overflowing ashtray. I didn't even smoke. For twenty years I worked out of an office that was once the guest bedroom in our home while my college-professor wife earned most of our income. I was a liberated man.

NOTE 2: Another different--and, to me, special--thing about this particular anthology is that all the other contributors are friends that I've met in person or via Zoom. That doesn't happen often, and makes me look forward even more to reading all their stories.

How about the rest of you? Do you find yourself leaning toward the same kinds of stories, the more you write? Do you find yourself breaking the mold now and then? When you do, how much do you vary your settings, plots, POVs, characters, etc.? Do you ever hop from one genre to the other, or mix them up? How often? Has that been successful? Let me know, in the comments section below.  

As for me, several more "unusual" shorts are coming up later in May--but, hey, that's a different story.

See you then.

More Musical Legal Advice

Here are those Texas attorneys, Hutson and Harris, back with more legal advice. (Do they hire new associates based on what instruments they play?)

Criming and Dying Through History in South Dakota

From the Dakota Scout, some interesting stories from yesteryear:

March 29, 1900 - from the Madison Daily Leader, South Dakota was in the middle of a smallpox epidemic and in Ipswich, SD, schools were closed until fall to limit the spread of diphtheria.  

MY NOTE:  My mother had diphtheria as a child in the Appalachian mountains of the 1920s.  She never mentioned any vaccine (which had just finally been invented), but she did get the old-fashioned treatment for it, which included cauterizing the throat. It was so painful she hoped it would kill her.  

April 5, 1950 - State cement plant employee Ray Deig reported Rapid City's first flying saucer encounter.  He saw one on the night of March 21, but he didn't report it because he thought it "was one of Uncle Sam's secret developments" and "I thought people wouldn't believe me."  (No idea why he changed his mind about folks not believing him...)

April 19, 1900 - Five prisoners escaped the state penitentiary in Sioux Falls by breaking off the bottom of a fence during morning yard work.  

May 2, 1949 - Sioux Falls veterans tried to be first in line for the processing of their WW2 bonus forms, and pilot Joe Foss flew the paperwork overnight to Pierre, but Bonus Director J. J. Kibbe refused to accept it because it hadn't been mailed.  The forms were then mailed to the Pierre post office.  (Meanwhile, I'm sure much cursing was heard and Mr. Kibbe became the most unpopular man in Sioux Falls.) 

August 18, 1899 - the Weekly Capital reported that Manly Beaver, a 13 year old boy, saved the lives of 93 teachers taking a train ride into Spearfish Canyon, who were stuck by the wreckage of an accident on the train bridge.  Beaver ran down to flag the next train and warn them of the danger ahead.  Beaver received $10 and a "free course of education at the Madison Normal School" (now Dakota State University).

August 24, 1899 - Trainmen operating a freight engine in Hermosa had to fight off half a dozen tramps, one of whom drew a gun on the trainmen.  The workers forced the tramps into the depot and kept them locked inside until the law arrived.

September 4, 1949 - The Daily Plainsman reported that Redfield Maynard Schultz was charged with murder after getting involved in a private fight, and becoming so angry he rushed into the police station, grabbed his own .38 service pistol, and returned to the parking lot and killed Roy Sieben.  (Sadly, no backstory given, as in what was the argument about?)

September 9, 1899 - the Kimbal Enterprise reported that a customer paid a 20 cent lunch tab with a $20 bill, but no one noticed that it was a Confederate $20 until the guy left the restaurant. "When reported to federal authorities, the restaurant owner was told that the government didn't regulate the use of confederate money."  (I think they started regulating after incidents like this...  But you could always try it at a restaurant of your choosing.)  

September 17, 1999 - One hundred years later, an Alaskan man was buying rounds for the house until Sioux Falls police showed up and arrested him. Charles Cooper (don't you wish it had been D. B. Cooper?) was wanted for robbing the nearby U.S. Bank before heading straight to the bar.  Loren Bultena, who was one of those getting free drinks, commented, "He can't be all bad, he bought beer."  (Spoken like a true bar fly.)

September 13, 1924 - Mr. and Mrs. Steinbaugh and Tom McGray met with City Attorney Steinback, trying to reconcile their marriage after an affair between Mrs. Steinbaugh and McGraw. Everything went well until Mr. Steinbaugh pulled out a pistol, killed McGraw, and then shot himself to death.  (I hope Mr. Steinback gave up marriage counseling after that.)

December 4, 1924 - From The Black Hills Weekly:  Blackie Brady and Jack Wilson broke out of the Pennington County Jail and stole a Ford car.  Trouble was, it was snowing (no surprise there) and the car left tracks in the snow.  The two headed toward Buckhorn, Wyoming, and the authorities were alerted, and the two men were arrested at a nearby lumber camp.  (It really is all about winter in South Dakota.)

Now this one is out of sequence, but has modern repercussions and stories to go with them:

March 31, 1950 - An explosion at the Black Hills Ordnance Depot munitions facility in Igloo (named after the dome-shaped storage buildings) killed 3.

BHOD Landscape, taken by Vigilante Scout, Wikipedia

UPDATE: "The Vivos xPoint survivalist community was developed in 2016 on the site of the former Black Hills Army Depot munitions storage facility. More than 500 above-ground concrete bunkers are marketed for lease to those who are worried about a potential national or global disaster or who want to live mostly off-the-grid. It’s located in a remote area 8 miles south of Edgemont in southwestern South Dakota... The concrete bunkers, which look like earthen igloos, held military conventional and chemical munitions from 1942 to 1967. The town of Igloo grew up around the depot and was once home a young Tom Brokaw, a South Dakota native and former NBC anchor. The base and town are now abandoned."  Which sounds great, BUT

In 2024 "David Streeter thought abandoning his traditional life to relocate into a survival bunker in South Dakota would allow his family to retreat from the stresses, expenses and restrictions of the modern world.  The family of three also wanted to be prepared in case an apocalypse of some kind altered the course of mankind and threatened their lives and way of life.

"But 18 months after leasing a former Army munitions bunker in the Vivos xPoint residential complex south of Edgemont, the Streeters have had their dreams shattered. And they now find themselves embroiled in a situation that has brought on a level of upheaval, worry and danger they specifically sought to avoid...  In August, Streeter – an Army veteran who was injured while serving in Bosnia – shot a Vivos contract employee at close range. Streeter said the man had threatened his family and he was defending himself. No charges were filed in that case or another fatal shooting involving Streeter in Montana in 2010.

 

(Read more HERE.  You know you want to.)

Who could have predicted that a community of off-the-grid doomsday preppers could be a dangerous place to live?  

MEANWHILE:  HUZZAHS ALL THE WAY AROUND!

SleuthSayers' anthology, "Murder,  Neat" has won the Derringer Award for Best Anthology!  Thanks, Michael Bracken and Barb Goffman for a fantastic job of editing, and thanks to all of us weird and wacky SleuthSayers for writing some really wicked stories!  Huzzah!  Huzzah!  Huzzah!

REPEAT BLATANT SELF-PROMOTION:

Rabia Chaudry reads my story, "The Seven Day Itch" aloud on her podcast, Rabia Chaudry Presents The Mystery Hour with Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Listen to it here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-seven-day-itch/id1581854514?i=1000703738987

Also available in Instagram!

 

Tillie, Gertrude, and Molly

 This piece has nothing to do with crime, but it certainly is related to writing. Or one specific writer.

Back in March came Purim and so my wife was fine-tuning her recipe for hamentaschen, the cookies that are traditional for the holiday. One of the texts she consulted was the Molly Goldberg Jewish Cookbook.  I knew a little about what led to the creation of that book but I wound up doing a deep dive, and here is what I brought to the surface.

Tillie Edelstein was born in New York City in 1899. Her father, a mediocre businessman, ran a hotel in the Catskills and part of Tillie's job was writing skits for the guests to perform.  She was required to create speaking parts for every child in attendance so one of her plays was "Snow White and the Twenty-Eight Dwarfs."

Tillie married Lewis Berg, an engineer, and when the factory in New Orleans where he worked burned down they returned to the city and Tillie started looking for a job.    Or rather, she decided to create one. 

In 1928 Gertrude Berg, as she now called herself,  managed to wangle an interview with the local CBS radio station and presented a script she had created about two sales clerks at a department store - a show about working women? Pretty radical.  Effie and Laura was cancelled after the first episode because one of the clerks decreed "Marriages are not made in heaven." 

A year later she sold another idea to the NBC station. The Rise of the Goldbergs was about a Jewish family in New York. Molly and Jake were immigrants with thick accents.  Their children were typical first-generation Americans.

Berg wrote the scripts, produced the show, and was reluctantly corralled to star as Molly.   She had one week to write the scripts for four 15-minute episodes.  She wrote them - and many of the thousands more that followed - in the Main Reading Room at the New York Public Library, because her own apartment was too noisy.  The series premiered in November, 1929, just after the stock market crash.

This was long before sophisticated methods of checking who was listening to what so no one knew at first whether the show was a hit or  flop.  But three weeks into the scheduled four-week run Berg got a sore throat and the show had to be dropped.  The station received over 100,000 letters of complaint - and remember, this show was running on one station, not yet a network. NBC promptly bought The Goldbergs, as it was renamed, for the whole season. 

The show ran, on radio, live stage, and then television (starting in 1948) for more than two decades. Fortunately for Berg she had kept ownership rights to the characters.  In the beginning The Goldbergs was sometimes funny, sometimes melodramatic.  (If a female character was to be written out she got married.  A male character got sick.  When an script called for an actor to cough he would ask Berg "How long have I got?")  By the time it reached TV it was definitely a sit-com.

The show was always recorded live, leading to some bizarre adventures.  During one TV episode two of the three cameras failed so the actors, on the fly, had to revise the story to take place in only one room.  Talk about improv skills. When one of Berg's TV scripts called for a baby elephant and the critter refused to get in an elevator, they had to rebuild the apartment set on the ground floor.

Berg was loved by her audience but some people described her as ruthless.  For example, Himan Brown helped her get in the door at NBC but she canned him after a year in favor of a more experienced actor. Brown, who became a legendary producer of radio drama, never forgave her.  She was also the defendant in the first ever intellectual property case involving radio - which she won.

Glenn D. Smith, in his biography of Berg asks the reasonable question: was she more ruthless than other producer/stars like Bob Hope or Groucho Marx -- or was she just the only one in a dress?

In 1950 Philip Loeb, who played her husband on TV, was accused of being a Communist and blacklisted.  Berg did her best to defend him but The Goldbergs was cancelled.  Four years later Loeb committed suicide.

Berg's career continued in a diminished state.  She appeared in summer stock and on Broadway but, not surprisingly, was only invited to play Jewish women, usually mothers.   She died in 1966.

Oh, remember that cookbook?  That's how I got into this mess.  Because Molly was a great cook a lot of fans had requested her recipes.  The book was published in 1955 and Gertrude Berg was listed as co-author with Myra Waldo.  Waldo did the recipes because Berg was no cook.

And finally there is a sort of mystery in her autobiography which I invite you to solve.  Around 1940 the Berg family moved to Bedford, Connecticut.  She wrote about  a mystery writer who used to visit them there:

According to the writer, nothing in the whole world was right and life seemed to be a losing battle, from childhood on it was a downhill fight that we were all in except himself.  He was above the crowd, a lonely observer, born too soon or too late or something.

The writer was a short man, a little too stout, and every time he "drove by" the house it was in a different car with a different woman.  The cars he borrowed from friends, who, it seemed couldn't say not to him.  The women he borrowed also. They, too, couldn't say no, but they were all of  a pattern.   They were disappointed modern-dancer types who wanted to study with Martha Graham but never quite made the grade.

We are also told that this author didn't like Shakespeare.  "For Othello he gives Shakespeare A for effort."

Eventually a "husband who didn't agree with the writer's views on sharing the wealth (car and wife) manhandled him one night and the writer left New York for the coast."

So there is my final question for you: Who was this mysterious mystery writer? Gertrude Berg, who told so many thousands of stories, does not reveal the end of that one.

Oh, and finally....

 

Quotes and other memories from Malice Domestic

I just returned from this year's Malice Domestic convention, where I had a lovely time celebrating my friends Marcia Talley, Donna Andrews,Gigi Pandian, and Les and Leslie Blatt, who were, respectively, the guest of honor, the lifetime achievement honoree, the toastmaster, and the co-fan guests of honor. (There also were two honorees with whom I have no personal connection. Lucy Worsley was honored as the Poirot Award recipient, and Dorothy Gilman was remembered--Malice's term for honoring a deceased mystery community member.)

While at the convention, I saw many friends, made some new ones, sat on one panel, moderated another, hosted a table at the banquet, won the Agatha Award for best short story of 2024 (for my whodunit "The Postman Always Flirts Twice," from Agatha and Derringer Get Cozy), received some other good news (for myself and for a fellow author), saw a character naming I donated to the charity auction go for $500, and listened to authors speak eloquently--and humorously--on panels. It was a great time, even if I did lose my retainer.

Here are some quotes from the panels. My apologies if I didn't get some of the wording exactly right.

"Motivation for a killer is so important. You have to set it up right away." -- Tina Kashian

Marcia Talley during guest
of honor speech

"Cozies are popular because they make people feel comfortable. Sure, people are killing each other, but they're doing it in a nice way." -- Marcia Talley

In response to a question about the best advice you ever received: "Find your community. As much as writing is a solo effort, you can't get through this alone. You need your people to help you when you get a bad review or a plot hole or ..." -- Sarah E. Burr. (Sarah didn't trail off in that last sentence, but I didn't get the end written down, hence the ellipsis.)

"A hate crime, such as a swastika painted on a synagogue, is dark, but when the whole town comes together to paint over the swastika and support the temple, that is the cozy treatment. That is how to use dark social issues in cozies." -- Kathleen Marple Kalb, who also writes as Nikki Knight

During a discussion about enjoying novels set during World War I and World War II, despite how horrific the wars were, Catriona McPherson made the following analogy: "You can be nostalgic for a time--like the lockdown--without being nostalgic about Covid. It's being nostalgic for the time spent with your family."

"Cozies are for optimistic readers. Bad things happen, but everything is right in the end. Noir is for pessimistic readers because the ending gives them what they expect from the world." -- Paula Munier

If you're interested in learning about Malice Domestic, which brings fans and authors together to celebrate the traditional mystery every April in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, click here. The website has not been updated yet for the 2026 convention, but it should be soon. I hope to see you there next year, when the honorees will be:

Guest of Honor Annette Dashofy

Lifetime Achievement Honoree Jacqueline Winspear

Toastmaster Ellen Byron

Poirot Award Honoree Jim Huang

Malice Remembers Margaret Maron

Fan Guest of Honor Billy Aguiar

Opera Does It With Music

Genre fiction readers know all about plots that are tortuous and bloody. Whole genres, horror and Gothic, are devoted to terrifying the reader. On the more sedate end of the spectrum, probing the minds of serial killers and describing torture with loving precision easily become hot crime fiction trends. Readers don't mind suspending disbelief in order to admire the cannibal Hannibal Lecter who escapes prison hidden in the skin of a flayed victim in Silence of the Lambs (a book I wished I could unread) or love Dexter, the serial killer with a moral compass (first appearing in the 2004 novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter), a character any expert forensic psychologist can tell you doesn't exist and never will.

Today, good little mystery writers try hard not to plug too many coincidences into their plots. Some subgenres put limits about how over the top the atrocities will go. The revered authors of classic literature didn't worry about that. Take Sophocles, the greatest of the playwrights of ancient Greece. In Oedipus Rex, the protagonist's parents give their baby up for adoption to avoid a prophecy that he'll kill his father and marry his mother. He meets a stranger at the crossroads, quarrels with him, and kills him. Guess who? He meets a widow twice his age and marries her. Guess who? For over-the-top twistiness and gore, take Shakespeare. Titus Andronicus is the most extreme example. The Roman general Titus captures the Queen of the Goths and her three sons in war and executes one of her sons. In revenge, they rape his daughter. After a lot of reciprocal accusations of murder, killing of sons, and cutting off of hands and heads, Titus bakes the remains of the Queen's sons in a pie and serves it to her at a feast.

The plots of soap opera on modern TV are so labyrinthine and unlikely that the term itself is used to describe any sequence of events that is so excessively dramatic and complex that it beggars belief. It has become so natural to think of any melodramatic story, real or imagined, as "soap opera" that my adorable husband used the term when I read him the synopsis of Il Trovatore, the opera I was about to see at the Metropolitan Opera. I live only twenty blocks from Lincoln Center and was able to accept the last-minute invitation to the Met by a friend with front row orchestra seats whose husband couldn't make it. Giuseppe Verdi's music makes Il Trovatore one of the gems of grand opera. The story, on the other hand, epitomizes the reason soap opera was named for opera, not the other way around: a theatrical presentation with a story as ridiculous as any opera's, with the added benefit of advertising soap.

Il Trovatore, the Troubador, is the leader of the rebel forces in a 15th-century Spanish civil war. He and his principal opponent, the Count, are both in love with the same lady. The Count seeks a gypsy woman, called a witch because she looks like "a hag" (ie old and poorly dressed) and can shift shapes (the villagers saw an owl—they're a superstitious lot). Her mother "bewitched" the Count's infant brother, so they burned her at the stake. The daughter got even by throwing the baby into the fire. It turns out that the rebel leader is the son of the gypsy witch (the daughter). Of course, the lady loves him, not the Count. Four acts later, it turns out that the Troubador is actually the Count's baby brother. The gypsy woman threw the wrong baby into the fire. Oops. The lady offers herself to the Count as the price of freeing her lover. He nobly refuses, but it's too late. She's taken a slow-acting poison. The Count finds out the enemy he's imprisoned is his brother. But it's too late. He's already beheaded him. Curtain.

The music is glorious. But don't you love mysteries? We ask the reader to suspend disbelief so little compared to opera. A coincidence here, an act of heroism there. A logical conclusion.

Joe's Jukebox

Fans of contemporary short mystery fiction know that, over the last decade or so, there have been literally dozens of anthologies collecting crime fiction inspired by songs– usually those of a single artist or band, but sometimes a genre or specific era of music. In her column earlier this month, my fellow SleuthSayer Barb Goffman discussed her contribution to one of the most recent, IN TOO DEEP: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF GENESIS, edited by Adam Meyer (fair disclosure: I also have a story in this book). She shared a piece of valuable advice from another SleuthSayer, John Floyd, on how to write a story inspired by a song: not to get bogged down trying to work in every detail, but to find a piece of it to build on.

These musical anthologies started coming out at roughly the same time that I started publishing stories, and I've written for quite a few of them, so I thought I'd offer some of my own thoughts on the subject, in a scattered kind of way.

By way of credentials, I've written stories, for current or upcoming anthologies, based on songs by (deep breath) Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, The Ramones, Pink Floyd, The Allman Brothers, Waylon Jennings, The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Aerosmith, Dexys Midnight Runners, Lyle Lovett, Genesis, Timbuk3, and Elton John– plus, just to round things out, numbers from the musicals Grease, Do I Hear a Waltz?, and Spring Awakening. There's also an orphan to mention here: a story I quite liked based on a Eurythmics song, for a project that ended up being cancelled. I hope that one eventually sees the light of day somewhere.

The first inspired-by-music story I wrote was in response to Sandra Murphy's call for stories for PEACE, LOVE, AND CRIME: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF THE SIXTIES. Figuring that Sandy would be swamped by stories inspired by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Beach Boys, I used a favorite song by a different artist, one I hoped nobody else would light on: Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman." I guess writers aren't supposed to say things like this, but the resulting story, "Mercy," remains one of my personal favorites. It's a little unusual in that the lyrics do inspire specific scenes, but the record itself is also an object within the story. The central character is a young woman, Lila, whose brother is killed in Vietnam, after which their abusive father destroys his treasured record collection. The 45 of Orbison's song is the only survivor, and the story concerns what Lila is willing to do to preserve it and find her own freedom.

Most of my musical yarns take an approach much closer to what John advised Barb to do: find a few details in the song to hang a story on. Over time I've combined this with another way of thinking about the task at hand; instead of writing a story inspired by the song, I ask myself what series of events might have inspired someone to write the song. I'm not entirely sure why this seems to work for me, but it does.

As Barb noted, there can be special challenges in using a song that already has a fairly coherent narrative plot. Michael Bracken was kind enough to invite me to write the title story for his anthology JANIE'S GOT A GUN: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE MUSIC OF AEROSMITH. That song already has an explicit story embedded within it (and fleshed out in the music video, which helped to make the song a monster hit) about a girl who shoots her abusive father. I didn't want to simply retell the story, but it seemed silly to pretend it wasn't there, so I decided to make my version a kind of sequel, in which we find out what happens afterwards.

On the other end of the spectrum, many of the songs of the Grateful Dead are little more than collections of trippy images and seeming free association, allowing plenty of room for play. When I wrote a story inspired by their "The Music Never Stopped," for Josh Pachter's collection FRIEND OF THE DEVIL: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD, I chose five or six of the most vivid lines and tried to weave them (or rather references to them, as, for legal reasons, these stories generally cannot quote lyrics directly) into a story about a couple of drug dealers drawn into an act of violence at, appropriately enough, a concert.

I find writing these musical stories to be enormously fun and satisfying, and I hope I get to do a lot more of them. They offer inspiration, but also constraint: you have to evoke the original song clearly enough to amuse and engage its fans (but without making use of actual lyrics!) and at the same time craft a story strong enough to satisfy readers who might not know the song at all. Some of the best art, I think, resides precisely at this intersection of boundless freedom and rigid guidelines.

It will be interesting to see how long the current fad for these collections will last. It might seem like there have been so many of them that the trend must be nearer its end than its beginning, but on the other hand there is a long list of artists who haven't yet had inspired-by anthologies (note: it's entirely possible that some of the folks I'm about to name have inspired books I'm not aware of; if so, please let me know). Off the top of my head, I'd love to see (and contribute to!) collections based on Tom Petty, Willie Nelson, U2, Madonna, REM, The Rolling Stones, Kinky Friedman, Carole King, Fleetwood Mac, Melissa Etheridge, The Indigo Girls, Aimee Mann, Taylor Swift, or John Prine.

I also can't help but notice that the vast majority of these anthologies (again, at least the ones I'm aware of) focus on white musicians. Maybe the single most glaring omission from the list of honored artists, given the sheer volume of his output and the incredible depth and richness of his lyrics, is Prince. Or how about a collection inspired by the hits of Motown? The blues giants of Chess Records? There are great stories just waiting to be written for "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" or "Mannish Boy."

I also can't be the only one who'd love to see crime writers taking on a comic musician. Bring on DARE TO BE STUPID: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF WEIRD AL! Bring on Spike Jonze and Spinal Tap! Bring on Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem! And save me a slot on the table of contents!

Can you picture that?

What acts do you hope to see honored with one of these volumes? And if you've written for some of them, how do you approach the songs?