"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," said Tallyrand, an old pol cynical about progress and change. Still, there's more than a kernel of truth in his observation, which is maybe why at a certain stage, every society seems obsessed by fashion.
Politics and human nature may resist improvement, but fashion's mysterious currents provide novelty. William Boyd's new historical spy novel, Gabriel's Moon, got me thinking about literary fashions. However creative or imaginative we are, our work seems inescapably set in our own time and in the style of the moment.
Gabriel's Moon, literate and well done, is in a very British style. Indeed, the plot owes a lot to my own absolute favorite in the genre, Eric Ambler's Journey into Fear, which itself owes big debts to John Buchan.
Even if you have not read Journey into Fear, you will recognize the outline: an innocent civilian, in this case, a well-educated engineer, is pressed into service in a dangerous foreign country. The little job he is assigned, getting a roll of film back to the UK, does not seem too dangerous, but precautions are taken, and the would-be courier is booked onto an aging freighter with a small group of passengers.
What could possibly go wrong on this small ship, surely too obscure to have attracted malign notice? Plenty, of course, and our hero soon moves from semi-complacency to a desperate search for friends, to an awareness that he is alone and must rely on his own resources absolutely.
Such a good plot! In Boyd's variant, set not in Amblers pre WW2 but in the early 1960's, Gabriel Dax, successful travel writer, is asked to buy a drawing from a reputable if not exactly famous, Spanish artist. Dax has occasionally done such little favors for his older brother, who is something in the British foreign services. He makes the purchase without trouble and returns home, because this novel is rather more expansive than Ambler's.
The modern thriller must take time to flesh out its characters and give them back stories and complexities that earlier works indicated with a few well chosen lines. Dax has a history of childhood trauma – a doozy it must be admitted; a florid literary style, and eventually an analyst, one of the more interesting characters in the novel.
He also has a girlfriend, Loretta, who works at a Wimpy Burger and whom he sees as exotic because she's working class. Loretta, in turn, introduces him as her "posh boyfriend" which gives her a certain style and very modern, too.
There was, to my memory, only one female character in Journey. Dax has not only a girlfriend and a female analyst, but his spy control is Faith Green, a chilly woman whom he rather perversely finds seductive. Both are very much 21st century women, although in 1960-62, the attitudes of male thriller writers skewed traditional.
There are other stylistic differences, too. While Ambler's novel cut straight to the chase, Boyd's has time to consider the mystery of Dax's childhood (the novel is a spy story wrapped around a mystery); the costs of secrecy and deception; and the restraints of the class system.
He explores the psychology of double agents, a reflection of his fascination with Kim Philby, the notorious British agent, and manages to first extricate Dax and then trap him in a most satisfactory manner, eventually like Ambler's hero, on shipboard.
Boyd's well done Gabriel's Moon is interesting stylistically because it presents an era that itself provided plenty of spy thrillers. Moon reads convincingly today but the novel's attitudes, timing, and style are resolutely of our time and to our taste, as a glance at any equivalent novel from the early 1960's will show.
So was Tallyrand wrong? Not entirely. At least in the literary world, some things don't change entirely but morph one way and another in fashionable variations.
****
The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.
The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:
One of the nominees for the Edgar Award for Best Novel this year was The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett, a multiple Hugo Award nominated fantasy writer. In an Empire threatened by contagion and menacing leviathans, a murder occurs, the weapon a tree sprouting from the body of the victim.
The detectives are a female Nero Wolfe who investigates blindfolded, without leaving her home, and a magically altered Archie Goodwin. Bennett won an Edgar in 2012 for Best Paperback Original for an alternate historical noir science fiction thriller.
I'm one of thousands of authors featured on www.Shepherd.com, a online book browsing site whose founder, Ben Shepherd, claims it's a more effective way for readers to find books they'll fall in love with on the web than Amazon or Goodreads and more akin to the experience of browsing a brick and mortar library or bookstore.
He may be right, because every time I've visited the site to check my own promotional material (which is the primary reason authors join—for free), I end up falling in and following links and come away with something to read.
In order to promote one of their own books, readers are asked to pick a book-related theme ("The best…") and five exemplars. The idea is to draw kindred spirits first to your favorite books and then to your own, with which it presumably has something in common. Rather than manipulate the client by trying to list the five books that were closest in nature to the first in my longest series, I decided to be honest about my five favorite books "with characters you fall in love with." That's my top requirement as a reader for a favorite book. It didn't surprise me that the list consisted solely of genre fiction, because that's 97 percent of what I've been reading for decades. It did surprise me that the whole list of five consisted of cross-genre fiction, with not a single straight mystery among them.
Here's my personal list of "The best historical, fantasy, SF, and mystery books with characters you fall in love with":
Kate Quinn, The Rose Code
Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
Naomi Novik, His Majesty's Dragon
Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
Martha Wells, All Systems Red
You can read what I said about why I love them as well as why readers of these books might also be drawn to Voyage of Strangers, the first novel in my Mendoza Family Saga, here.
I read and write mystery because it's fiction in which something is guaranteed to happen. Most literary fiction comes across to me as a dish without salt. I've always read historical fiction, and I've been writing it ever since young Diego Mendoza popped up in my head demanding that I tell the story of how he sailed with Columbus when the Jews were expelled from Spain.
I read more and more urban fantasy and occasionally high fantasy these days because it's so imaginative and so much fun. I like speculative fiction in general, but my mind glazes over when the science kicks in. I can't read the tech in a technothriller either. And whatever I read, character, character, characters I love, well developed characters I care about are a must. That's what I'm best at writing myself, along with snappy dialogue that moves both plot and relationships forward. I haven't taken my own urban fantasy mystery series as far as a novel yet, but you can read my novelette about Jewish country artist and shapeshifter Emerald Love, aka Amy Greenstein, Shifting Is for the Goyim, and the collection of stories that follow, Emerald Love, Shifting Country Star, as e-books. I've found urban fantasy mystery is as much fun to write as it is to read.
My first regular SleuthSayers post went up in late April of 2024, so I missed the opportunity to mark the occasion of my first anniversary as a member of this crew. In that first post, I somehow tried to make a connection between writing and a specific approach to baseball strategy. Since then I've talked about ShortCon, shelf shortages, musical anthologies, Walter Mitty, writing dialogue, the creation of a new Derringer Award, and a number of other topics. Hopefully, some of you out there have enjoyed reading it as much as I've enjoyed writing it, and I look forward to continuing to offer my rambles for a some time to come.
This particular month, I'm finding the shoebox of ideas a little empty. In fact, I haven't really written anything this month.
That's after writing five stories in the first four months of the year, ranging from 2900 to 5800 words. I wouldn't call what I'm going through at the moment writer's block. It's not that I want to write but can't. It's more a matter of having other things to do and no pressing need to get back to the keyboard.
There was a time when this would have bothered--even frightened--me. I would have felt like if I didn't get back to writing ASAP, I might never get back to it at all. I'd be obsessed with the opportunities I might be missing. I'd be thinking about all the interviews I've ever seen with writers who say that ""real" writers write every day. I'd be thinking about Ray Bradbury's advice to write a story every single week, on the theory that nobody can write 52 bad stories in a row.
I've never come close to hitting that mark. The most stories I've ever written in one year is 26; over the last several years, I'm much closer to a one-story-a-month pace.
OK, so I don't write as much as this guy
The difference between the earlier me, who would have been panicked at a month without writing, and the current me, who's handling it fairly well, comes down, I think, to experience. I know that I've been through periods like this before, and invariably come out of them. I know that, sooner or later, I will sit down at the keyboard again and turn something out. A little time away from writing isn't necessarily a bad thing. It might even be a good one.
I'm confident that, somewhere in the back of my head, ideas are bubbling. Sooner or later, one will break the surface. And I understand that "real" writers come in all varieties. Yes, some write every single day. Others need breaks. And that's okay.
Even if it makes for what is almost surely my shortest column so far.
How about you? Do you take breaks from writing? Do you think doing so ultimately helps you?
Anne R. Allen is one of my favourite mystery writers, plus she hosts a Top 100 Writers Digest Blog (link provided below.) Anne is always worth reading, and this post is excellent in it's entirety, but I particularly draw your attention to the comparison to Mozart. (With a name like Melodie, how can I not agree? 😄)
Why Do We Read Mysteries?
by Anne R. Allen
I once met an aspiring writer who had been forced to move in with Mom after a year of rejections and other catastrophes. He dealt with his humiliating situation by criticizing his mother to anybody who would listen.
One of her great sins? She spent every evening reading mystery novels and watching BBC murder mysteries.
Anne R. Allen, author
"It freaks me out that she's so bloodthirsty," he said. "Why does she want to focus on death every night?" He added, "They're so unrealistic. How can there be any people left in Midsomer with all those murders every week?"
I hear this kind of negativity from readers, too. "Why do you want to write about murder and death? That seems like such a downer. Why don't you write about something more comforting and uplifting?"
But here's the thing: mysteries are uplifting. The classic mystery doesn't focus on death, but what caused it. A mysterious murder causes chaos, but the sleuth finds out whodunnit, brings the culprit to justice, and order is restored. That gives us comfort, especially in times of stress.
Time Magazine reported that during the pandemic, booksellers had a hard time keeping Agatha Christie's novels in stock. People were consuming them like tranquilizers.
A Ride to Safety
I'm not saying that reading a murder mystery is entirely soothing and calm. It's also about confronting our fears. It's like going on a roller coaster ride. The ride may be terrifying at the time, but you know everything will be okay in the end.
Roller coaster riders are not thinking about real-life speeding dangers, or run-away trains, and we don't go on a roller coaster ride because we're having morbid thoughts. It's about the chaotic thrill, followed by a peaceful resolution.
The Challenge of the Puzzle
An article in The New Yorker a few years ago was highly critical of the genre, saying that we mystery authors don't have enough empathy for our victims. But mysteries are not for dwelling on gruesome or tragic deaths. They are puzzles to be solved. We aren't reading them for the emotional journey involved with rich old Aunt Augusta's demise, but to use our intellectual skills to solve a puzzle.
Reading a classic mystery is more like playing the board game "Clue" than studying a real-life killing. We don't empathize with Colonel Mustard or Mrs. Peacock any more than we do with the pawns in a chess game. We're there to solve the puzzle.
It's not a coincidence that a lot of mystery readers are also fans of crossword puzzles. They're both exercises for the mind. A lot of very highbrow literary types also enjoy mysteries. T.S.Elliot was a major fan, and wrote reviews of mysteries for the magazine the Criterion in the late 1920s.
Academics also love mysteries. I once spent a semester at the American Academy in Rome, and it had one of the best libraries of mystery novels I'd ever seen.
A visiting professor at the Academy compared the classic mystery to listening to Mozart. The form is stylized, he said, but there's lots of room for creative flights of fancy. And in the end, everything is resolved with a wonderful, pleasing piece of harmony.
Weeding Out the Bad Guys
It's our yearning for resolution - that orderly conclusion - that keeps us turning back to classic mysteries, especially in times of upheaval.
Literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote a famous article in The New Yorker in 1944 called "Why People Read Detective Stories." He was exasperated by the fact that his wife, Mary McCarthy, was always reading detective stories and recommending them to their friend, Vladimir Nabokov.
Wilson wrote that people like detective stories because : "Everybody is suspected in turn, and the streets are full of lurking agents whose allegiances we cannot know. Nobody seems guiltless, nobody seems safe; and then, suddenly, the murderer is spotted, and -relief!- he is not, after all, a person like you or me. He is a villain."
When the sleuth reveals the bad guy, everyone can feel safe again and stop suspecting Miss Scarlet over there in the library with that candlestick in her hand.
A Murder Mystery Restores Law and Order
I find I'm turning to mysteries even more in this time of political chaos. I live in a country where the principles of law and order have essentially been repealed.
People ask me why I'm "only" writing mystery stories when there are so many terrible things happening on a daily basis. They're often especially unimpressed that my ditzy etiquette expert heroine isn't "kick-ass" and doesn't carry a gun.
But when we live in a thugocracy where the smallest act of kindness or mercy can get a citizen fired, imprisoned, or deported, a show of good manners can be a heroic act of defiance.
Reading a classic mystery can take us back to a time of less chaos and more order - when the rule of law was respected by all. And even though some of us live in a country where bringing a criminal to justice may be an unrealistic fairy tale, it's a fairy tale a whole lot of us need right now.
Anne R. Allen is an award-winning blogger
and the author of 13 funny mysteries and 2 how-to books for writers. Her
bestselling Camilla Randall Mysteries are a mash-up of mystery, rom-com, and
satire. They feature perennially down-on-her-luck former socialite Camilla
Randall — who is a magnet for murder, mayhem, and Mr. Wrong. But she always
solves the mystery in her quirky, but oh-so-polite way. Anne is the former
artistic director of the Patio Playhouse in Escondido, CA and now lives on the
foggy Central Coast of California.
Recently, I listened to Richard Wright's Native Son on audio. There were a number of reasons, not the least of which being it's on a list of banned books I made two years ago. I did read up on the book ahead of time because it could easily have ended up on a list of classics.
The book, published in 1940, is a treatise on racism at the tail-end of the Depression. Little mention is made of the coming war. Instead, it depicts public relief as a trap as many of its recipients are not permitted to climb out of poverty. They're broke and less-than-citizens, and forever they will stay that way.
That's where Bigger Thomas finds himself. Living in a single room with his mother, brother, and sister, Bigger is idle but restless. He and some friends plot a robbery of a deli which falls apart when one of them provokes Bigger into a fight. Instead, he relents to his mother's pressure and takes a job chauffeuring for the Dalton family. On his first night, he is to take their daughter Mary to a lecture at the university. She has other plans, mainly meeting up with her boyfriend and going to see how those people live. Meaning Black people. Mary and her boyfriend are communists. They know Black people are being kept down and want to help. But Mary, the daughter of rich white parents, is absolutely clueless. They go back to Bigger's neighborhood and insist he dine with them at a diner where everyone knows him. They think they're doing him a favor, but Bigger is humiliated.
The real trouble begins when Bigger brings Mary home. She's so drunk she can't walk, and Bigger accidentally kills her. Now we get into noir territory. Bigger covers up by burning Mary's body in the family's enormous coal furnace and taking her luggage to the train station as she was leaving on a trip the next morning. When the luggage is returned, and people in Detroit call asking where she is, Bigger convinces his girlfriend to help him fake a kidnapping. But she panics, and he kills her, too. He's found out when one of the reporters crowding the Dalton home helps change the ashes in the furnace, and Mary's charred bones fall out.
Once Bigger is arrested and in the system, Wright seamlessly moves to making his case about systemic racism, how uncomfortable whites of the day are in acknowledging it, and how monumentally stupid the Red Scare is. But in prison, from the most evil people (Think Germany in the late 1920s) to most noble (Henry David Thoreau in jail for not paying his taxes in protest) have a lot of time to write out their grievances. Bigger doesn't write them, but he talks them through with his lawyer, who in turn interprets them for the court, sparing no one.
But is it noir?
Richard Wright said it was. In fact, he saw that as the best way to get his point across, something more than one crime writer has stated once their books have gotten meatier. Wright's work usually centers on the Black experience in the mid-twentieth century and life in Chicago of the Depression. But he also said this book was "fun" to write. He's clearly a fan of writers like James M. Cain, who delighted in how badly he cold screw over an everyman protagonist. And Wright is definitely taking sadistic glee in throwing every available roadblock in Bigger's way. Plus, at a lecture, Wright said he liked the motif of a modern (for 1940) crime novel. This from a writer who produced mostly short stories and essays. So, like Shakespeare's bewildering attempt at a blockbuster, Titus Andronicus (or... What Happens When George RR Martin actually finishes Game of Thrones), Wright is stretching himself. Naturally, some of his contemporaries, most notably James Baldwin of Go Tell It on the Mountain fame, didn't like it. Baldwin called it a protest novel, which it very much is. But so is Ellison's Invisible Man. Scratch the surface, and Baldwin likely didn't like that kind of work being done as what he considered a dime novel.
One can imagine the reactions of various readers to Native Son. Love it or hate it, you can't deny it stays with you. And it is noir as hell.
Next column, I revisit The Merchant of Venice, in which the movie version has Al Pacino stealing every scene he's in.
March 9th is my grandmother‘s birthday. It is also my sister-in-law‘s birthday.
And now, and forever more, for me, it will also be the day I got sick.
As I mentioned the last time I posted (and it’s been a few weeks), I wound up in the hospital for nearly a month. Long story short, I had an infection (as I mentioned before, it was cellulitis in my right leg below the knee), and it got into my bloodstream and then my kidneys shut down.
The pain in my leg was unlike anything I had ever felt before, and something I hope never to feel again. And as I mentioned previously, my saviors at the hospital treated my pain by doping me to the gills. Mostly with oxycodone.
Oxy. The stuff of dreams. And not just during my sleep-which is saying something, because those first couple of weeks I slept about eighteen to twenty hours a day-thanks to all of the oxy I was getting pumped into my veins, I experienced all manner of waking dreams, as well.
During this time I couldn’t help but recall the descriptions of drug-induced “trips” in all manner of literature, from classic to crime, and the analytical, always there author in me began to compare notes between what I was experiencing and what I had read.
I gotta say, if my oxy-fueled hallucinations are any indication, I must possess the id of an accountant. My hallucinations were, well, you be the judge:
1. I saw flaming writing scrolling across the ceiling tiles in my hospital room. If you’ve ever seen that scene in Cecil B. deMille’s The Ten Commandments where God carves out his commandments for Moses using heavenly fire, it sort of looked like that.
But the writing was too small for me to read. So, kinda lame.
2. Across from my bed was a wash basin with a mirror above it. Looking into it from my bed gave me an excellent view the drawn blinds on the window over my head. Oxy made this reflected set of blinds seem like the kind of big rolling door you see on loading docks. And my could even make out the blonde guy standing right to the side of the “door” and working the controls that caused it to rise and fall.
3. There were a number of nights where it seemed to me that my hospital room had morphed into the back room at a tattoo parlor, and the nurses and support staff were all tattooists who came in to check on me every half-hour or so.
Oh, and of course the mirror showed me the guy across the street, running that loading dock door up and down then, too.
So my oxy dreams were just kind of…weird and pointless.
And as soon as I could stop taking the oxy, I did.
And I don’t regret it. I don’t miss it, or the banal, beige dreams it brought me, waking or sleeping.
And I’m positive this experience will influence my fiction, going forward.
But I’ll be damned if I know how!
And that’s it for me this time! See you in two weeks!
I don't like to write bad reviews. They serve a purpose but somebody else can do that work, thank you very much. There is a reason that every week I review the best short story I read. What would be the point of attacking a story which will probably be gone from memory in a month or two?
I bring this up because of a novel I read recently. It is actually a good book and I will probably say some nice things about it at a later day.
But, boy, is the text a mess. I am talking about the Olympic prize for typos.
A friend had warned me in advance so I actually started counting them from the beginning. I counted 114 errors in 296 pages. That's a typo every 2.6 pages. And I was being conservative. For example, when two characters spoke in the same paragraph ("Hello," Larry said. "Hi," Barry said.") I didn't count it.
But what kind of goofs were there? Well, there were the typical homonyms that Spellcheck can't catch (you/you're, vile/vial, etc.) Once or twice a character changed their name and then changed back. But what really freaked me out was a brand new type of typo, one that was clearly connected to a glitch in some automated system. Look at the box to see an example I made up.
See what happened? What I assume was an editing program occasionally and randomly decided that a capitalized word in the middle of a sentence indicated a new paragraph. Rather disturbing.
Now, I am happy to say that the author of the novel got the rights back and has found a different publisher. I trust the new edition will be a lot cleaner.
I am not going to name the author or the book but I did intend to mention the publisher. I see no need to protect them. But as it turns out they went out of business last year, so we go back to the title of this piece.
So let me wish you all typo-free reading and publication.
In February of 2024, I had the good fortune of having my turn to post here on SleuthSayers fall on the very day that our first anthology, Murder, Neat, was released. The book has twenty-four short stories, all written by members of this blog. Michael Bracken and I edited it, stepping in after our original editor and fellow SleuthSayer, the late Paul D. Marks, fell ill.
Every anthology editor has high hopes their baby will be well received and that the individual stories in it will be beloved. (The authors with stories in the book hope that too, of course.) So you can imagine the smiles we all shared when Murder, Neat was named one of the six finalists a few months ago for the inaugural Derringer Award for Best Anthology. Those smiles turned to grins on May 1 when we won the Derringer, especially because the competition was stiff. (Hats off to the editors and authors of the other five anthologies. You can find a list of the finalists here.)
Then, a couple of weeks ago, Murder, Neat was named a finalist for this year's Anthony Award in the Best Anthology category. Talk about icing on a delicious cake. So this is a good time to remind you about the anthology and, if you haven't read it, entice you to do so. (I also hope you will check out the four other anthologies nominated for the Anthony Award. Bouchercon attendees, please read before you vote. You can find the names of the nominated anthologies, as well as the finalists in all the other categories, here. One of those other anthologies was edited by Michael Bracken (him again!), working with fellow SleuthSayer Stacy Woodson.)
Back to Murder, Neat. Every story takes the reader to a location where drinking happens. Bars--be they regular, college, dive, or gastropub--make an appearance, of course, as do restaurants and even a winery. What also happens in those locations? Crime, of course!
When the book came out, Art Taylor, a retired fellow SleuthSayer with a story in the book, hosted four other of our bloggers on his personal blog, The First Two Pages. There they each wrote about--no surprise here--the first two pages of their stories. I invite you to click here to read the first of those essays, by Melodie Campbell. Near the bottom of that screen, you will be able to click to read the next essay by one of the Murder, Neat bloggers, Lawrence Maddox, followed by one by David Edgerley Gates, and finally, one by Leigh Lundin.
If you haven't yet read Murder, Neat, you can purchase it in trade paperback and ebook. We all hope you enjoy it. Cheers!
Finally, before I go, a little more news: I'm honored to have been named a finalist for this year's Anthony Award for Best Short Story for my tale "A Matter of Trust," which appeared in the anthology Three Strikes--You're Dead! The other nominated authors are James D.F. Hannah, Curtis Ippolito, Gabriel Valjan, and Kristopher Zgorski. I hope you will take the time to read all of their nominated stories. You can find the names of those stories by clicking on the link in the third paragraph of this blog. And you can read my story here.
I like democracy.Churchill famously noted that it’s the worst
form of government other than all the other forms that have been tried. Yet there’s no better way to decide who should be
in charge, since people are constantly trying to undertake that responsibility
all on their own.Everywhere you look,
there’s some new effort by individuals and their affiliates to impose their
ideas and prescriptions for behavior on everyone else.
Plato, who admittedly had some pretty interesting
concepts, thought philosophers were the ideal rulers, since they knew a lot,
which he believed meant they possessed greater honor and virtue.Okay Plato, you might be right about the
first part, but not so fast on the second.While I had some excellent philosophy professors, nothing distinguished
them as particularly virtuous.I mostlyrecall bad haircuts and idiosyncratic choices in clothing. Moreover, they hardly ever agreed on anything,
and could easily come to blows over the relative merits of Apollonian vs. Dionysian
principles. Partisan battles pale in comparison.
Some
believe fervently that the government should stay out of the bedroom, which I
think is a fine idea since it’s hard enough to get a good night's sleep without
sharing the space with a bicameral legislature.But there are lots of conflicting opinions about who should be doing
what behind closed doors, and so far democracy has done a pretty good job
sorting that out.
Many,
like Jefferson, believe the best government is one that governs the least.Except for those things they think should be
governed.George W. Bush told us he was
“The Decider”, a chilling thought.Much
better to throw it open to everyone for a vote.
Since
this forum’s pre-occupation is writing and publishing, it’s important to note
that readers are the constituency.They
vote with their eyeballs and wallets.Naturally,
there are plenty of editors and publishing outfits who believe there are books
that people ought to be reading, and would love nothing more than to
enforce their preferences.Worse, there
are politicians and advocates who are heavily invested in what ought not be published.They believe they are
doing this to guard us from harmful subject matter or points of view.Well then, who is going to guard us from
them?
It's
only relatively recently that the complicated, frustrating and messy democratic
process has delivered us a reading culture that encompasses Mein Kampf, The
Communist Manifesto and Tropic of Cancer.But it’s no time to be complacent,
because that could all disappear if we let it.
If
you’ll permit me to paraphrase a line misattributed to Voltaire, I may think
your writing stinks, but no one should stop you from writing it.You might believe this a noble thought, but
it’s also the height of practicality.Censorship, either political or commercial, is the slipperiest of all slippery
slopes.Freedom of expression protects
all of us from the biases and preconceptions of some theoretical decider.To me, this is such self-evident genius, it’s
breathtaking that anyone would argue to the contrary.
I
know for some it’s a professional responsibility, but I will never give a book
a bad review, at least not publicly.To
paraphrase another bit of wisdom, if you can’t say something nice, put a sock
in it.Mind you, I think the world would
be a better place if everyone loved my books.It would certainly be a better place for me and my self-esteem.But aside from questioning a reviewer’s taste
and good sense, a one-star review is the price of doing business.I just don’t want to do such a thing myself.
As
Churchill said, democracy isn’t perfect.Mistakes happen.Hitler, Hugo
Chavez and Hamas were democratically elected. But I agree with William Buckley that “I'd
rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people
listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard
University.”Or for that matter, The
Christian Coalition of America.I also
don’t want them to decide what we should write, read or publish.Same goes for The Association of Nobel Laureates
in Literature (if it existed), or the head of the National Endowment for the
Arts.
In the final hours of preparing today’s article, I discovered my resource material had been removed from the web, having violated ‘Rule 6’, whatever that is. As I was feeding Valentine, my goffin cockatoo, I struggled to come up with a quick replacement.
I watch a lot of movies. So many, actually, that I often run out of current and recent movies and wind up re-watching those I've seen many times before. At least those are easy to find: I have three dozen boxes, each holding 26 DVDs, scattered around the house, plus God knows how many more DVDs on and underneath the bookshelves here in my home office. It's enough to make my wife scream. Thank goodness I'm a great husband in all other respects (he said modestly).
Anyhow, I recently rewatched The Quiet Man, a lighthearted John Wayne/Maureen O'Hara movie set in Ireland, which on the one hand is not my usual kind of movie and on the other hand is one that I always enjoy. And it occurred to me, when it was finished and the credits were rolling, that this well-known and award-winning film was adapted not from a novel but from a short story, first published by Maurice Walsh in The Saturday Evening Post in the early 1930s. Whoodathunkit?
That, of course, got me thinking about other film adaptations from the short stuff. And since I had an upcoming and uncompleted SleuthSayers column that needed to be completed . . .
Here are my highly-biased (and always changing) picks for the ten best movies adapted from short stories:
1. It's a Wonderful Life -- from "The Greatest Gift," Philip Van Doren Stern
2. Rear Window -- "It Had to Be Murder," Cornell Woolrich
3. High Noon -- "The Tin Star," Mark Casper
4. Bad Day at Black Rock -- "Bad Day at Honda," Howard Breslin
5. The Quiet Man -- "The Quiet Man," Maurice Walsh
6. Hondo -- "The Gift of Cochise," Louis L'Amour
7. The Killers -- "The Killers," Ernest Hemingway
8. The Swimmer -- "The Swimmer," John Cheever
9. 3:10 to Yuma -- "Three-Ten to Yuma," Elmore Leonard
10. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button -- "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," F. Scott Fitzgerald
Five runners-up: The Birds ("The Birds," Daphne du Maurier), Stagecoach ("The Stage to Lordsburg," Ernest Haycox), The Tall T ("The Captives," Elmore Leonard), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty ("The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," James Thurber), Million Dollar Baby ("Million $$$ Baby," F.X. Toole)
Continuing with this idea of short fiction to screen, the following are my picks for the ten best movies adapted from novellas:
1. The Shawshank Redemption -- from Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, Stephen King
2. Stand by Me -- The Body, Stephen King
3. The Thing -- Who Goes There?, John W. Campbell, Jr.
4. The Mist -- The Mist, Stephen King
5. Apocalypse Now -- Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
6. Silver Bullet -- Cycle of the Werewolf, Stephen King
7. Hearts in Atlantis -- Low Men in Yellow Coats, Stephen King
8. The Old Man and the Sea -- The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
9. The Man Who Would Be King -- The Man Who Would Be King, Rudyard Kipling
10. The Snows of Kilimanjaro -- The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Hemingway
NOTE: Yes, I like Stephen King.
Five runners-up: A River Runs Through It (A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean), Minority Report (The Minority Report, Philip K. Dick). The Fly (The Fly, David Cronenberg), Breakfast at Tiffany's (Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote), Shop Girl (Shop Girl, Steve Martin)
Breaking news: I was reminded, by SleuthSayer Joseph D'Agnese's column yesterday, of several more good movies that started out short: Arrival, All About Eve, Brokeback Mountain, etc. (Joe, do great minds think alike, or what?)
Okay, which ones, Faithful Readers, did I leave out? Which do you think shouldn't have been included? Have you writers had any of your short stories or novella-length fiction adapted for the movies or TV? (For me, no.) Anything pending or promising? (No.) Any near-misses? (Yes.) Sold any film options? (Yes.) Do you have cinematic hopes for future projects? Who knows, right?
Who knows, indeed. If you're like me, and none of your fictional creations have made it to the big screen, don't lose hope. Hold steady, stick to the plan, maintain the course.
I admit it: it’s a clickbaity title but work with me here. This week the issue of book-to-film rights popped up on the boards of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and it nudged me to think about the specifics of deals I’ve been privy to.Authors dream of Hollywood deals because we assume they lead to big money. Granted, everyone’s idea of big money differs, but I venture to say that these days those fantasies involve six zeroes.
I have in my possession an interesting document that confirms the fantasy is possible. Don’t ask me how I got the doc, which pertains not to one of my ghostwriting clients’ books, nor my wife’s, and certainly not one of mine. Suffice to say someone just got sloppy.
Let’s preface this by saying I’m not a lawyer, agent, or hotshot writer. But I do think that the publishing and film industries like keeping writers in the dark about how much their work is worth. So if someone was stupid enough to slip me a doc, I figure it’s okay to share, provided I don’t identify the people involved.
The document is a response to a studio option offer for a book written by a young writer who, at the time the 2024 document was written, was already a No. 1 New York Times bestselling author in one genre. This deal was for the person’s debut in another genre, which will be pubbed in 2025. No, I am not acquainted with the writer.
A year ago, the still-to-be-pubbed book must have been considered “hot,” whatever the hell that means these days, because in the push-back document the author’s book-to-film agent believed that they could get $150,000 for a 12-month initial option, with a renewal at the same rate and length. An option is the money a production company or studio pays a writer to have the exclusive rights to a work (for a fixed period of time) while the studio attempts to get the film greenlit. When talking about options, agents focus on several deal points such as:
Initial option: How much the studio or production company will pay the author to exercise their option on the work (story or book), over how much time.
Extension option: How much they will pay to renew this option on the work.
Purchase price: How much they will pay if/when the work is turned into a film or TV show.
Royalty: How they will pay per episode if the work is turned into an episodic TV show.
Backend: How much the author will participate in the gross profits of the resulting filmed project.
These are just the basics. There are a litany of other points, from the onscreen credit the author will receive, the rights the author will reserve to the project, all the way to how much creative control the author will be allowed to have on the final product, not to mention travel perks, etc.
The options I’ve seen for my ghostwriting clients, my author friends, and my wife involve a payment for a term lasting one to two years, usually with a built-in renewal clause with payments at the same rate or slightly higher. It’s safe to say that of all the contracts I’ve been involved with, I’ve never seen figures as high as the ones in this document. And yes, I’m a newb in this world.
Back to the doc in hand. If the opposing side accepted the agent’s counter, the author would earn $300,000 on the option over two years. If the production happened, the author would be paid a purchase price of $1.5 million. Already we’re at $1.8 million. This fits our six-zero dream nicely.
Remember, this is a counter-offer, so in a way it represents the agent’s wish list for the author’s book. I don’t think the agent would have been throwing around such figures if they didn’t think it was feasible. The purchase price figure seems designed to arrive at $1 million after the lawyers get involved.
In this particular document, that $1.5 million figure is thrown out as if it covers all types of productions. The memos and contracts I’ve seen tend to break out different purchase prices for, say, cable or network TV productions, major motion pictures, limited series, etc. I assume the agent wanted to send a message to the opposing side that they wouldn’t get the license for this book cheaply.
Not every literary agent has the credentials to sell their clients’ work to Hollywood. So they partner up with a book-to-film agent, who has the track record and contacts. The book-to-film agents I’ve met appear to practice the Spaghetti + Wall method of promotion. They email a glowing pitch letter with attached manuscripts or book proposals to studio heads and production companies they think might be interested, then sit back and wait.
They don’t pick up a phone to verbally pitch a damn thing—i.e., “work”—unless something in the news has suddenly made a project “hot.” (Yes, there’s that stupid word again.) Like literary agents, book-to-film agents don’t have to sell your book to make a living. They just have to sell a book. But if a name director, producer, or actor has read or heard about a book or story, then the agents can sit back, field offers, and play each bidder against the other.
Side note: My favorite movie scene of a talent agent defending his existence…
There’s always stupid additional money and perks involved in the deals these agents lock down for authors. If the book I’m discussing gets turned into a TV series, the author would theoretically be paid $7,500 per episode as a royalty, $25,000 per episode as befits the author’s proposed non-writing executive producer (NWEP) credit. (This is why everyone wants to be an executive producer.) The author will also earn a percentage of the modified adjusted gross receipts (MAGR), which is the “backend” in the laundry list above. What’s more, this particular author will be allowed to offer “meaningful consultation on all creative decisions” and be able to participate in the writers’ room if the work is turned into a TV show.
If the author must travel 60 miles from home to indulge in these bouts of creativity, the production must provide travel, accommodations, and a per diem to cover the writer’s expenses. If the film or show is nominated for awards, our author is guaranteed an invite to the award presentation, with a similar travel package and budget.
As written, every thing on this sheet of paper is a sweet deal, and I hope the writer got what the agent proposed, or close to it.
We have not discussed the impact this production will likely have on the author’s book, which, let’s remember, has not been published yet but will soon. With the kind of exposure a TV show or film is likely to generate, the book will no doubt sell phenomenally well, which is every writer’s dream.
That is the whole point of a print project going Hollywood. Movies and TV shows raise the visibility of books and authors, and have since the first moviegoer walked out of a theater hoping to snag a hard copy of Gone With the Wind. I would not have read Wicked without hearing about and later seeing the Broadway play. I’m a Baum fan from childhood, which is why I won’t be seeing the movie. Two versions of that story was enough.
So yeah—a Hollywood deal is sweet, which is why everyone wants one. It’s wonderful to have a piece of paper detailing such a juicy option in your hands—or even a complete stranger’s—except that none of it may ever come true.
Most books are never optioned by Hollywood. And the ones that are are rarely made. Notice how many times I have used the word if in discussing everything up to now. As you may have surmised from my headline, I am here to argue that sometimes it’s perfectly okay if an optioned piece of writing never gets made into a movie.
My premise is based on the experience of a friend who started in journalism and later switched to writing narrative nonfiction books. (That’s code for history that doesn’t suck.) All but one of his titles have been New York Times bestsellers. None have been made into movies. His big breakout book sold modestly in hardcover but hit its stride in paperback, when—goes the publishing biz theory—it was eagerly gobbled up by book clubbers who wanted to read a real-life story that “read like a novel.”
Decades later, his breakout book still hasn’t been made into a movie, despite being optioned way back in the early 2000s, and having a revolving door’s worth of name actors, directors, and producers attached to it over the ensuing years.
Said friend is not weeping over this state of affairs. At the time we first met him, he estimated that he had earned $100,000 from a decade’s worth of option money. That figure is now probably $200,000. The studio he signed with just kept extending the option. Again and again and again.
The writers I know who have accepted modest options on their books typically pocketed $5,000 every six months for terms that lasted 12, 18, or 24 months. Yes, that’s a small dollar figure—only three zeroes—compared to the sweet numbers and perks I detailed above, but it’s real money. The rest is so hypothetical you cannot bank on it. When you sign that contract, the option money is the only thing that’s real. Just like advance money is the only cash you’re guaranteed to receive when you sign a book contract. Royalties, if they happen, are gravy.
The most money any one of my short stories has earned—with reprints—in its lifetime is $1,220. Who am I to sneeze at a semiannual payment that is 409 percent higher?
I hope you are not reading this thinking, “Oh sure, that’s all well and good for novelists. I’m a short story writer. No one’s ever going to pay me that kind of money.”
Slap yourself upside the head right now. The films All About Eve, It’s a Wonderful Life, Arrival and tons more all started life as short stories. I am not even bothering to Google a list of the bajillion more examples that surely exist. Okay, I lied. And look at me—I keep lying. (However, in the comments, please chime in with the names of other films. I think it will warm all our hearts.) [EDIT: The day after this post appeared, fellow SleuthSayer John M. Floyd posted an entire article on short stories that became movies. See it right here!]
The real issue is learning a) to keep doing good work, and b) to be happy with so-called “small” paydays. Option only a few stories and those four-figure checks can provide an enviable income that will help you create more work. Perhaps a more accurate headline for this article might be “Getting Rich $5,000 at a Time.”
I guess the question is how you trigger that gravy train by getting your work optioned. I have seen numerous articles for writers that touch on this, and I’m sure you have too. Articles that tell you to, say, mail your work to actors and directors whose work you adore. (Don’t. I’ll explain why one of these days.) Other articles tell you to attend “pitchfests” to drum up interest in your work. (I hate talking to people, so don’t look for me at one of those things.)
Two movies I enjoyed got their start as quite obscure books. So far as I can tell, The Descendants hit the bestseller list for the first time after the George Clooney film hit theaters in November 2011. The Prestige, a marvelous science fiction novel by the late Christopher Priest, has won a respectable number of genre awards but I venture to say most of us who’ve read it did so after catching the Nolan Bros. film.
Each of these books were brought to the attention of their directors by book-to-film agents. What pushed those directors to take notice was the endorsement of someone in their circle who had read the books and loved them.
It sounds like something out of the realm of fantasy, doesn’t it? People who read books! In Hollywood! But it happens.
A producer I won’t identify used to keep an apartment in Florida so he could visit his son from a previous marriage. One morning, while riding down in the elevator of this condo building, he spied a poster for a book club meeting where attendees were slated to discuss a nonfiction book published a few years earlier. He wrote down the name of the book, bought it, read it, and later called my wife’s literary agent hoping to work out a deal.
“Wait,” I said the first time I met him. “You really read the book?”
“Cover to cover. Why, you wanna quiz me?”
Next time, if I get permission, I will share the details of a book-to-film contract.
