It's Black and White

The Cliburn Competition has Fort Worth feeling artsy.

For those who missed my city's numerous press releases, the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition is a quadrennial event that showcases the future of classical pianists. The world’s top 18–30-year-old pianists gather in my city and perform before live and worldwide streaming audiences.

One of the unique aspects of the Cliburn competition is that the organizers house the visiting pianists in local homes during the event. Many neighborhoods have a competitor staying in them. While you don't necessarily see them when you're out walking the dog, you know they're there. (Every host family is loaned a Steinway grand piano, the same instrument used in the Cliburn, so that the competitors can practice.) Rover and his companion human might hear some next-level music through the window of a house down the street. The Russian/Israeli pianist becomes our neighborhood competitor. Most of us are homers and we're cheering for our local kid.

I tend to drop the arts into one big bucket, a different bucket from my sports bucket or my business bucket. Although I recognize the differences between the creative arts, I typically see writers, painters, musicians, and filmmakers as kindred spirits. Like fiction writers, these other art practitioners harness their creative energies to make fresh and new things. We all use our talents to entertain and to comment, directly or indirectly, on the world around us. When we are at our best, we unite people across a spectrum of humanity.

I've been forced to rethink my position on concert pianists. I might need to move them to my athletic bucket.

This none-too-deep thought should have occurred to me before. The competitors, after all, are performing another composer's work. But each of them is creating. The Dallas Morning News's review of Vitaly Starikov's performance (our local guy) noted that [i]n addition to fastidious attention to dynamic and coloristic nuances, he demonstrated the magic that can come of stretching and contracting rhythms, lingering over melodic high points and poignant harmonies.”

As a non-musician, I don't pretend to understand everything in that sentence. My takeaway is that Vitaly is doing more than hitting the notes Chopin scribbled down. He is creating.

Painters might scrape away and paint over. Writers can Find and Replace. We get the ability to edit our work. Not so with the piano benches at the Cliburn.

There is a hair-breadths difference between a great and a good performance, between an advancing recital and a return flight home. The immediacy of performance art made it seem more akin to athletes.

The local college baseball team's season ended abruptly in the NCAA tournament. In the moment, the excellent season melted away. Pitchers missed the strike zone or alternately found too much of it. Accomplished hitters missed the ball at critical times. Well-practiced skills that had been honed throughout the season failed under the pressure of the NCAA tournament. Both baseball and piano competitions were co-occurring. It was hard not to see the parallel.

But on the other hand, ball players are competing directly against their opponent. The pianists were playing their best, hoping that their individual efforts would be judged among the best. And that seems comparable to our efforts. When I craft a story for submission to an anthology, I’m not really competing against Rob Lopresti or the other submitters. I’m submitting my best work and hoping it's deemed worthy of inclusion. If Rob's ends up in and mine out, I don't see it as a competition between us.

But maybe we should. Consider this modest proposal. The next time Michael Bracken assembles an anthology, perhaps rather than submitting our 12-point Times New Roman, double-spaced work, we could read it to a live-streaming audience. As Michael judges, Stacy Woodson might offer hushed-voice commentary and insider analysis.

                "He confused ‘blond’ and ‘blonde.’ That could be a fatal error. Michael feels very strongly about blondes."

                "Clearly, to stay under the word limit, she elected to tell rather than show," Stacy offered disapprovingly.

As we read, submitters might close our eyes, sway back and forth, and occasionally throw our heads back for emphasis, like the piano competitors. The anticipation might build through quarter, semi, and final rounds with eliminations along the way. The downside, of course, is that having heard the selected stories read three times, no one may want to buy the anthology. 

And that's a problem. I might need to keep thinking through this concept. But Vitaly is about to play a Mozart piano concerto backed by the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra as part of the semi-finals. I've got a live stream to watch.

Until next time.

Being alone and together.

      Writers are some of my favorite people. Along with tradespeople and musicians. When I was first published, I knew nothing about the mystery subculture, but once introduced, I was very pleasantly surprised that it was rich, supportive, collegial and far-flung. After about twenty years in the mystery writing game, I can attest that hanging out in this community is just as rewarding as publishing the books and short stories that grant me entry.

      You wouldn’t think that people who spend so much time in a room by themselves, and living all day inside their heads, would be very good at social interaction. But it turns out that writers can be the most cordial of companions. They have liberal views regarding a drink or two, which doesn’t hurt. It’s also because writers are thinkers, people who know a lot about a lot of things, and it’s fun for them to exchange deep, wide-ranging and arcane information.

      Of course, there’s also our shared experience. All affinity groups exist because of this. Whether you drive Harleys or run extreme marathons (I do neither, nor ever wanted to). It’s easy to conceive of writers locked up all day in their writing rooms, emerging around cocktail hour to trade bits on how the day went and their expectations for tomorrow’s production.

      But I think more importantly, writers are people who trade in human emotion. They’re by definition empathic and all tangled up in the intrigue and confusion of human existence. It’s only natural that we’d want to hash things out with people engaged in the same endeavor. Woodworkers and musicians are the same way. When we get together, there’s a shorthand in the conversation, since everyone knows what everyone else is talking about. As the stories circle the table, we naturally fill in the unsaid parts.

      My wife often points out that I’m drawn to solitary pursuits. This is certainly true of writing and woodworking. Music is a bit different, since you need a group to really experience the enterprise. Though you also have put in alone time practicing and ruminating over your part in the performance, which only those inclined to spend hours by themselves can achieve. So it’s a bit of both.

      Tradespeople also belong to an ensemble. I might frame and trim out the house, but others have to sheetrock the walls, run the wiring, install HVAC and plumbing, lay the tile and counter tops – and we have to work as an efficient, orchestrated team to pull it all off.

      Advertising, another thing I did, is also a lot like this. You start out a project together, setting goals and blocking out objectives. Then the copywriter (me) and the art director would go off together and make stuff up. This is the equivalent of a writers room on a TV series. We’d both batt around ideas, write headlines, come up with visuals – contriving a bunch of creative options. Then we’d return to our individual work stations and do our solitary thing – writing copy, doing layouts, sampling visuals, etc.

      Then all the other elements of the agency – account managers, media buyers, production, finance, who had also been strategizing together, then laboring alone over their specialties, would join us to pitch the client our ideas.

      I love this ebb and flow between individual and collective effort. For me, it’s life best lived.

      Writing about writing is a little like dancing about architecture. There’s no way you can fully describe the experience. So maybe that’s why writers like to hang around with other writers. You don’t have to explain to them what you’re going through, because they already know.

      Writing is hard and impervious to easy explanation, but that’s okay. You just have to order another round of drinks and relax for a little bit before going back and doing it again.

Prep School

Most of us develop our sense of grammar and vocabulary listening to others, be it good grammar or spellings or not. Our language skills aren’t necessarily based upon intelligence, but a product of our environment. If we’re fortunate, persistent, and surround ourselves with bright people, we correct grammar and expand our vocabulary, presupposing an awareness. John Clayton, the Viscount Greystoke, a student of Mangani comes to mind. Okay, he’s fictional, but you understand.

I needed to up my game. For far too long, I’ve wondered about the difference between toward and towards, while and whilst, amid and amidst. Curiosity often strikes when I’m in the middle of writing and not wanting to interrupt myself at the risk of my ADD losing the narrative thread. By the time I finish, I’ve quite forgotten my mental note until the next time.

amid/amidst

among/amongst

beside/besides

toward/towards

while/whilst

But I finally looked them up, prepositions with optional ’S’s. That led to a myriad of adjectives and adverbs ending in ‘-ward(s)’: inward/inwards, upward/upwards, aft/aftwards, etc. Almost always, -ward(s) implies direction, e.g, looking inward, tossing skyward, sliding downward– any which may bear a discretionary S. Unsurprisingly, a number of terms come from marine navigation and others from biology. A partial list includes:

afterward/s

backward/s

bucalward/s

coastward/s

distalward/s

dorsalward/s

downward/s

earthward/s

eastward/s

elseward/s

forward/s

frontward/s

heavenward/s

henceforward/s

homeward/s

inward/s

landward/s

leeward/s

lingualward/s

mesialward/s

moonward/s

netherward/s

northeastward/s

northward/s

northwestward/s

onward/s

outward/s

polarward/s

rearward/s

rightward/s

seaward/s

starward/s

sunward/s

shoreward/s

sideward/s

skyward/s

stemward/s

southeastward/s

southward/s

southwestward/s

sternward/s

straightforward/s

sunward/s

thenceforward/s

toward/s

upward/s

vanward/s

ventralward/s

westward/s

windward/s

With or without an S, meaning is almost always the same. Variants may have stylistic implications, often in the ear of the beholder. ‘Amongst’ might seem old-fashioned, ‘whilst’ might sound classy, ‘toward’ more North American whereas ‘towards’ more British– or not. Context is important.

What are your thoughts?

In the mortal words recorded on Theodore Cleaver’s birth certificate, JuneWard!

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

  

I'm not a huge fan of network television. Except for the nightly news, our TV's always off unless I'm watching a DVD or streaming a movie, which I admit does happen a lot. But in the old days, when network shows were all we had, I sat there pop-eyed and hypnotized almost every night, mostly watching cowboys or cops, but some comedies, too.

Most of the sitcoms were bad. Badly written and badly acted, although I didn't know it then, and if I did know it, I probably didn't care. I watched 'em anyway, unless I was reading. Now, in hindsight, I wish I'd only been reading.

But a few of the sitcoms were good, years ago, and I now realize they were good because they were well written. A couple of the best were The Bob Newhart Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which I think I remember aired back-to-back on Saturday nights, back in the mid-'70s. What struck me about those two was they weren't just entertaining, they were funny--laugh-out-loud, slap-yo-mama funny sometimes, and yes, part of it was because of the great characters (some of them I'll remember forever). But mostly it was because of the writing. Not just the jokes, but the whole thing, and the dialog was sharp and cool and witty.

The TV version of M*A*S*H was another example. I had already seen the movie and loved it, so when I watched the TV pilot it was with low expectations--but I was pleasantly surprised. Certainly more folks today will remember Hawkeye Pierce as Alan Alda than as Donald Sutherland, right? (Funny story, though, about the movie version: I was a green 2nd lieutenant in the Air Force when the movie came out, and it arrived at one of our two base theaters at the very same time that Patton arrived at the other theater. At first, most of us flocked to see Patton, mostly at the urging of our superior officers. But after the first night, the word got around, and for the rest of that week EVERYone was packing in to see M*A*S*H while the other theater, showing Patton, was almost empty. The base commander was not pleased and told us so, which of course secretly pleased us even more--my little group found Hot Lips Houlihan a lot more interesting than George S. Patton. Ah, those good old days of military service . . .)

Sorry--back to the main point. Around that time and in the years shortly afterward, several other good sitcoms came along as well--All in the Family, WKRP, Taxi, etc., and a little gem no one remembers called Wings. And, much later, Friends, The Simpsons, and Seinfeld. But my all-time favorite TV comedy series was, and always will be, Cheers. Even back then, I had noticed that the very best shows had a well-planned setting--MTM had a TV newsroom, Bob Newhart a psychiatrist's office, M*A*S*H a mobile army hospital--but Cheers had maybe the most promising location of all: a friendly neighborhood bar. That setting ensured that all kinds of crazy characters would be coming in and going out all the time, and with its absolutely top-notch cast, this show couldn't go wrong. I loved it from the get-go. Even after the series had been running awhile, every decision the producers made seemed to turn out right. Who would've thought the beloved character Coach, when he passed away, could ever be replaced?--but Woody turned out to be just as appealing a bartender, if not more so. And I wound up liking Rebecca as much as I liked Diane. Is it any surprise that the Frasier spinoff was funny and successful as well?

My fond memories of Cheers were the reason I felt such sadness a few days ago, when I heard of the passing of George Wendt, who played the lovable Norm Peterson in all 275 episodes of the series. I saw an old interview of him the other day, in which he was asked why his character was so popular. Part of his answer was something like: "I just said the lines the writers gave me to say." Again, the fine writing was a giant part of Cheers's lasting success. Anyone who thinks we fiction writers can't learn something from shows like that--well, they're fooling themselves. If you pay attention, you'll easily see the brilliance there. The timing, the delivery, the way every line of the script deepens the characters and delights the viewer and keeps things moving.

Maybe it's me, but I just don't see that kind of thing often anymore, in our current TV offerings. Even the camera work doesn't seem as professional. Some of the shows are good, sure, but many, many are not.

What are your thoughts, on this? Do you watch much network TV, and specifically the sitcoms? Did you watch them in the past? What were your favorites, back then? Have you now given up on them, like me? Do you agree that the writing is worse, in recent years, for that kind of programming? Has our collective sense of humor changed? All observations are welcome!

Meanwhile, I think I'll go find a YouTube episode of Cheers to cheer me up. As an example, here's an exchange I saw the other day:

Coach: "What's shakin', Norm?"

Norm: "All four cheeks and a couple of chins."

God, I loved that show.

Robbing the Inconvenience Store

Foil Arms and Hog report an alarming rise in crime in Ireland.

The Gods of Power and Money Are Back…

Well, actually, they never went away.  

A lot of people seem to be incredibly surprised by current capers by certain billionaire(s) (especially the guy with the chainsaw), and how/why so many corporations and other billionaires are backing these capers with all their might.  Well, my first response is, "They don't want the chainsaw to come for them."  

So I am going back to the past, about 9 years ago, to an old blog post I wrote called "Gods and Demi-Gods":  about how money and power are the real gods of America. Not only does it currently seem that they still reign, but now it's on steroids. So I've updated it:

• The first thing to understand is the term oligarchy: "a small group of very powerful people that controls a government or society." (Cambridge English Dictionary)  Generally these people are very wealthy and own corporations.  Currently, there are 13 billionaires in our current administration's cabinet, which isn't exactly attuned to the problems of a country in which the majority - 60% - are barely making enough to live on.  
• 
  
• Here are some of the rules of an oligarchy: 

• ALL corporations must make constant profits:  the modern economic doctrine - "maximizing shareholder value" - says that a corporation has no purpose but to make profits for its shareholders. This means that employer/employee loyalty and customer service/satisfaction are both irrelevant.  Pensions and/or health benefits can and must be cut whenever it's expedient to the bottom line. Jobs must be outsourced to the lowest bidder, taxes must be avoided by offshoring or secret, perpetual trusts, and whenever possible, lobbying and promoting certain politicians.  
• NOTE:  The fact that unemployed people do not buy much other than food is ignored.  Also ignored is that the United States is no longer the preferred customer of many corporations. Tesla's largest manufacturing plant and latest market is in China.

• Everything must be privatized, i.e., put into the hands of corporations and the wealthy.  At the same time, the corporations are no longer national, they are global, in order to maximize shareholder value (see above).   Government - on any level - is an impediment to profit, so it must be made as small and neutralized as possible, except when needed to bail out the corporations (see below).  (Only profits are privatized, losses are passed on to the public.)
• NOTE:  I am constantly amazed at how, in one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in history, our government (a democracy, where the government is "we, the people") has been presented as a dangerous waste of resources, while the "private sector" would be much more efficient. Sure, the corporations will make a lot more money, but it will hurt the hell out of most of us who are not wealthy.  Once the Postal Service (which is in the US Constitution) is privatized, then the cost of shipping will go sky-high.  They are trying to eliminate the Department of Education:  setting up public schools was one of the first things that every community prior to today did. And who is going to monitor air traffic, build the bridges, provide health alerts, weather alerts, disaster relief... (oh, that's right, these are all being cut even as I'm writing this...)

• Corporate profits must be maintained, at all costs, including military. Eisenhower recognized the beginnings of this in his Military Industrial Complex Speech.  Since the end of the Cold War, there has almost always been an economic rather than political reason why troops are sent where they are, why outrage is expressed over certain international incidents and not over others.  (This is why, for example, the entire international community joined the United States to invade Iraq in 1990-91's First Gulf War, a/k/a the 710 War, but everyone stood on the sidelines and watched as 800,000 people were slaughtered in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994.)  And many aspects of war - supplies, security, etc. - are now routinely privatized to corporations which make a hefty profit with almost no oversight, including Bechtel (which was accused of  war profiteering), Halliburton, and Blackwater (which was brought before Congress in 2007 for "employee misdeeds," among other things).  
• NOTE 1: In the run-up to the Iraq war, Halliburton was awarded a $7 billion contract for which 'unusually' only Halliburton was allowed to bid (Wikipedia - Halliburton)  It might not have hurt that Dick Cheney had been Chairman and CEO from 1995-2000.    
• NOTE 2:  The current war, of course, is the war on immigrants.  This has caused an increase in spending on detention facilities, ICE employees, etc.  The current Big Beautiful Budget has $45 billion for immigration detention and related services, which would significantly increase ICE's budget for detention. And the private prison industry (in which Tom Homan, the current border czar, has investments) is salivating over future detainees - who become slave labor for whoever needs them.  

• Weapons industries must also make constant profits, and sales must be constant, and thus the NRA preaches the complete and total ownership of any firearm of any kind by anyone at any time.  No license, no training, and in many places, no age limit.  In some states, blind people can carry guns (looking at you, Iowa!, and sadly, I'm not kidding). That's why each new shooting must be propagandized in whatever way that will increase sales:

1. there are crazy people out there with guns, buy more guns now;
2. the terrorists / immigrants are coming to kill you, buy more guns now;
3. the government is coming to take away your guns, buy more guns now. 

• Also, to ensure constant profits for the weapons industry, (plus keep the complaints down about how life is going for everyone), our entertainment and news media must be saturated with ever-increasing levels of threats and violence. BTW, never forget the very important, very underestimated product placement. Every prop / weapon / outfit / drink you see on any screen is there in order to sell one to you.

• NOTE 1:  If you don't believe that media has any effect on people's behavior, then why do corporations spend billions on advertising?  If the constant barrage of news feeds, hour-long TV show, binge-watching television shows, and movies, or unlimited video games has no effect on our minds and behavior, then why should corporations pay millions for a 30-second ad spot?  Why do politicians and super-PACs do the same?  Are they all stupid?  

• NOTE 2:  If you don't believe that violence in media has increased, watch an episode of Gunsmoke on RetroTV some time, and note how seldom Matt Dillon (or even the bad guys) used a gun.  Some day count the number of weapons on display in previews during the morning news.  (The average child will see 8,000 murders on television before finishing elementary school:  Link).  

• NOTE 3:  The quantity of violence not only has increased, but, as the public becomes more jaded, it has become more and more perverse.  On the news, "When it bleeds, it leads!"  Literally.  As for entertainment, in the 1980s, Law and Order SVU was considered fairly hard-core, with story-lines of children being abused and murdered, women and children being raped, tortured, etc.  Not any more. Criminal Minds, Dexter, Hannibal, and other shows upped the ante with on-screen cannibalism, eye-gougings, etc.  Back on "Game of Thrones" human beings were castrated and flayed alive. Live, to-the-death gladiatorial contests cannot be far behind.  (But it's all in jest, they but do poison in jest, no harm in the world...)

When money and power are gods, and corporations are their high priests, there are real world consequences.  And one of those is that the poor - collectively and individually - are sinners, and must be punished by any means at the disposal of the powerful.  The results are:

Propaganda:  The poor are "losers", "moochers", "lazy", "worthless", "stupid". Social Security and Medicare - both fully taxpayer funded, i.e., paid by us - are called "entitlements", which implies that they haven't been earned, but are something we moochers wrongly feel "entitled" to. (Damn straight I feel "entitled" to Social Security - I paid into it for 40 years!)  

        The Truth:

• The truth is, 90% of the economy in this country is done by the people called "the working class" and/or the "middle class".  These are the people who do the actual work in factories, schools, restaurants, grocery stores, any store, who are construction workers, electricians, plumbers, landscapers, teachers, janitors, who pick up the garbage, repair everything from lamps to cars to rockets, etc., and who buy most of the goods, pay almost all the taxes, and keep this country actually working.  
• NOTE:  Again, unemployed people don't buy very much except food and the  gasoline needed to try to get a job.

• The top 10%, which hold most of our country's wealth, spend a lot of money, but for relatively few goods, because what they buy is often maniacally expensive. On purpose. After all, how else are we going to know they're rich if they don't have that $6 million yacht (middle range, actually) or that $499,999 Birkin bag? Or a rocket to take you on a trip to outer space?  And they rarely "shop local".  I remember a very wealthy lady in a small town in South Dakota who wanted to donate art to the library and rather than buy anything from one of the local artists, bought some artwork from New York City and had it installed.  It was not appreciated.  They avoid taxes by offshoring or secret, perpetual trusts, and leave it all to their children, who do the same.  

The most successful and constant propaganda story in history:  "You can't give poor people money or aid of any kind, because they'll waste it on trivial stuff (food, clothing, drink, etc.).  So you have to incentivize the poor by denying them any social services or tax breaks. They just need to work harder. Meanwhile, the rich are incentivized by giving them endless tax breaks, if not eliminate their taxes completely."  

And give them government grants - which they promptly invest in themselves and their trusts.  But of course, this goes back to Victorian times and their version of Catch 22:  "there are the deserving poor (who would never dream of asking for a handout, even if they were starving) and the undeserving poor who ask for handouts, because they are starving, and thus don't deserve it..."  People really need to read more Dickens...

Political restrictions:  Between gerrymandering, voting restrictions, Citizens United, lobbyists, etc., the powerful have done an excellent job of ensuring that the votes/interests/representation of the working class and poor are rendered irrelevant to the political process.  (13 billionaires in one administration...) My own congress people respond to my e-mails and letters with form letters.   

***

The consumer society.  When money and power are gods, individual human life has no meaning other than to make money and consume goods and services, and nothing else. Allegiance must be mindless, generated by carefully crafted advertising, propaganda, and sound-bites. Mental processes must be carefully controlled by endless social media and other distractions, so that no one ever considers that there might more to life than making money, shopping, sports, and/or the latest entertainment craze.  Considering that the average video on Tik-Tok is under a minute, it's amazing any of us have any ability to concentrate at all.

But fear counts above all.  No one must ever question why - living in the richest, most privileged, most free society on earth, the "home of the free and the brave" why people are so afraid, all the time, everywhere.  And like the people in Orwell's "1984", they must never notice that the object of fear constantly changes.  In my lifetime I have watched the enemy - THE ONE WHO WILL DESTROY US AT ALL COSTS - change from Communist Russia to the Axis of Evil (some combination of China/Russia/Iran/Iraq/North Korea, it changed with the President at the time) to Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein to Radical Islamic Terrorism, with a pretty constant drumbeat of fear and horror of blacks, the Black Panthers, drugs, hippies, urban thugs, illegal immigrants, illegal immigrant children, immigrants of any kind, legal refugees, anyone wearing a turban, and anyone with dark skin.  Deep breath.  And, of course, LGBQT+, and the ultimate horror, a transgender person using a public bathroom.  

Speaking of how propaganda works, to many politicians and their followers these days, Putin is now a hero, a strong promotor of Christian and family values... This would have been inconceivable up until twenty years ago. And I am stunned and disgusted by how Nazi salutes and catchphrases have been rehabilitated, to the point where Texas Republican Congressman Keith Self quoted Joseph Goebbels - ‘It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion,’ - at a Congressional subcommittee hearing. (LINK)

• NOTE:  So far, America is still here. So far…

Meanwhile, here are the facts:

• Money and power are abstractions, i.e., fictions, a belief system rather than a reality, to which we daily sacrifice real human beings, not to mention real air, real water, real food, real life.  It's really all about greed.

• No matter how much money and power is worshiped, acquired, accumulated, fought for, praised, and sacrificed to, life will never be 100% safe, and 100% of all people will all still die. Including the wealthiest of the 1%.  The gods of money and power, the church of celebrity, sports and entertainment, the priesthood of politicians, lobbyists and televangelists, none of them will save any human being from that fate.  

This is the truth about the gods that America - or at least a certain portion of America - has chosen.  Like any pagan deities, they require regular human sacrifice.  And they are getting it.  

Dennis & Dutch

I read two books recently, back to back, and as dissimilar as they are, what they had in common was voice.  Dennis Lehane’s World Gone By, from 2015, and Elmore Leonard’s The Hot Kid, 2005.  I’d never read either book before, clearly an oversight.  I must have been looking in the other direction.  I’ve also never thought of Lehane and Leonard as being much alike, as writers.  Not that they’re unalike, completely, but they’re very individual. 

Here’s what.  Both novels are period pieces, World Gone By the 1940s of wartime Tampa, The Hot Kid the tail-end of the Roaring 20s, and the rise of celebrity gangsters like Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd.  Lehane’s book is the third in the Coughlin trilogy, and if you know the back story, you won’t be surprised by black comedy or the heartbreak of Fate.  Leonard’s book isn’t exactly a sequel, but his hero is the son of a Marine blown up when the Maine goes down in Havana harbor – witnessed in Cuba Libre, from 1998. 

There’s a natural process of myth-making in both novels, slightly more self-conscious in the Leonard, because some of the boneheads in his story are trying to manufacture themselves as public enemies, and make the front page – Joe Coughlin, in World Gone By, is trying to live down his previous lifetimes.  The Hot Kid is relaxed, and sort of ballad-like, which makes a certain sense, when you’re reminded Woody Guthrie wrote a song about Pretty Boy Floyd, and turned him into a Robin Hood of the Dust Bowl, but Leonard’s book isn’t romantic, even if some of the supporting cast are fueled by romantic delusion.  Lehane’s book is melancholy, but that’s a different thing, nostalgia it ain’t.  Joe Coughlin understands the distinction. 

The word I want to avoid here is elegaic.  Neither of these guys is composing a swan song.  And whatever’s going on is very much of the moment.  All the same, the voice they’re using is what you might call the Epic Familiar.  I know I’ve tried to explain this previously, as a narrative method.  It’s the voice Jim Harrison uses, in Legends of the Fall, or Larry McMurtry, in Lonesome Dove.  Maybe, to a degree, T.H. White, in The Once and Future King.  I think it imposes itself – or you can’t avoid it – because of the largeness of story.  You scale up; you fall into cadences that evoke the Homeric.  Interestingly, you don’t hear those echoes in Don Winslow’s current City trilogy, which is drawn directly from the Iliad and the Aeneid.  He keeps it intimate.  It’s an intentional choice, and I think in Winslow’s case, more a matter of dialing it down.  Dialing it up, is what Lehane and Leonard are doing.

Lehane has done it before.  Mystic River has that quality, of seeing the characters against a horizon line.  But in Leonard’s case, less characteristically.  Even going back to his earlier Western stories, you see him not glamorize the bad guys, and even less so the good guys.  “3:10 to Yuma,” or Valdez Is Coming.  Not that Leonard’s characters, or Lehane’s, don’t rise to the occasion, and bring the Furies home to roost, but they don’t posture, or turn to see how they look in profile.  Their lack of self-consciousness is in part why they appear heroic.  But in Classic times, if we look at Hector or Achilles, they’re actually defined by submitting to Fate.  The heroes in Homer are too well aware of destiny, and fated meetings.

Achilles is offered the choice, also.  To die young, and have undying glory, or to live into old age, and sit by the hearth, to be forgotten by the sons of men.  We know which fate he chooses.  You could contrast Joe Coughlin, in World Gone By, and Carl Webster, in The Hot Kid, by pointing out that Carl is young, and tempted by fame, while Joe’s been there, and done that, and knows better.  They’re not overly familiar, or generic, but like Homer, on the windy plains of Troy, we know the landscape, we see the figures, thrown into relief along the horizon, the contesting wills, the naked warriors.  And the sisters, spinning out the threads, as pitiless as bronze. 

Fashion

"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:

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

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

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

A Passion for Cross-Genre

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.

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A Year In, A Month Off

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?

Why Do We Read Murder Mysteries?

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.

Blog: https://annerallen.com/

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Is It Noir? Native Son by Richard Wright

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.