Awhile back, I talked about a couple of Shakespeare's plays being noir. Actually, a lot of his plays are noir. The Merchant of Venice, of course, tops the list and was my original reason for posting. At the time, I was reading my way through the plays.
In the comments, someone said Shakespeare was meant to be seen, not read. That was a "Well, duh" moment for me. I've seen Richard III and The Tempest as done by the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival years back, both excellently done. But I thought, I've only seen a handful of these as movies. So I made this my project for the year: See all of Shakespeare's plays on YouTube or as a movie. As of this writing, I have four left: The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Included was Edward III, which, until the 1990s, was not considered one of his. A handful are still questioned as his, most notably Pericles.
Because some plays aren't as well-known as others, it becomes hard to look for versions online. Some, like the Henry VI trilogy, varied wildly between an RSC television special from the 1960s to a youth Shakespeare camp to a local Shakespeare company doing a table read over Zoom. The last was actually kind of fun to watch.
Of course, there were the classic movies, like Pacino's turn as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. My favorite remains Ian McKellan's take on Richard III. But the biggest surprise to me was Joel Coen's MacBeth, with Denzel Washington in the title role. (Talk about Shakespeare as noir!)
In having to comb YouTube for some of the plays (I didn't want to spend money on a Britbox or Marqee subscription.), I've found the plays filmed on stage to be uneven in quality. Some of this, of course, was the ability of the actors. One, MIT's reality-show take on Timon of Athens. Then acting and editing were...Let's call it an acquired taste. But the concept worked rather well. Some had a lot of heart and some great performances, but were not exactly Wil's best. In particular, it's obvious why Edward III took so long to be included in Shakespeare's canon. It's Shakespearean in style, but the story begins with the titular Edward wooing Joan of Kent while the back half is about the Black Prince, though said Black Prince is offstage for most of it. Shakespeare would likely have focused on Prince Edward.
So, should one read or watch Shakespeare's plays? Oh, watch is definitely preferred. How else can you see Falstaff, the Bard's prototype for Harry Mudd and other rogues? But reading the Henry Trilogy (and The Merry Wives of Windsor) can be fun, especially if you read Sir John's lines aloud? I wish this binge included a turn by Brian Blessed as Falstaff. He's an obnoxious lout, but he's my favorite recurring Shakespeare character.
A few
years ago, I wrote a column about Lara Prescott’s book, The Secrets We Kept, a novel about CIA’s successful efforts in the
late 1950’s to bootleg Boris Pasternak’s Doctor
Zhivago, which Novy Mir had
refused to publish. CIA arranged for the
first Russian-language edition, and snuck back it into the USSR, hoping to
embarrass the Kremlin. They got more
than they hoped for when Pasternak won the Nobel Prize but was discouraged (to
put it mildly) from accepting. For the Soviet Union, it was a public-relations disaster, the
engines of terror fearful of a poet. The story is fiction, but the context, the
history, is genuine. Zhivago
opened a crack in the monolith.
Here’s
another one.An account of a CIA covert
program with the codename HELPFUL, which is about the projection of soft
power.The author is Charlie English,
and the story he tells is called The CIA
Book Club.The idea behind the
operation is that reading unregimented literature, books that question the orthodoxy
or the received wisdom, can unlock the curious mind.Not just Orwell and Solzhenitsyn, but Kurt
Vonnegut, and Agatha Christie, and Albert Camus.
The
focus is Poland
in the 1980’s, and interestingly, the book-smuggling effort parallels the rise
of Solidarity.CIA was not directly involved with Solidarity –
they were careful to maintain deniability – but they channeled money to the
movement, through third parties.The
book thing, though, was more indirect.It was an opposition of ideas, or of culture,
in a generic, popular sense: not Plato’s Republic
so much as current issues of Cosmopolitan.There was, yes, an element of cultural
imperialism, Charlie English admits, but the impulse was to show a life outside
the Iron Curtain, to show that there was
an opportunity for that life, beyond Soviet domination.
It’s a
significant distinction. Not that the
lure of a life in Peoria is a better shopping experience than you’d find in
Warsaw, an unlimited inventory of Air Jordans, but that Warsaw could aspire to a larger life. That through reading, through an act of imagination,
the act of experiencing a forbidden reality, you could internalize it, you
could breathe that intoxicating air.
These people didn’t want to defect, or escape, from Eastern
Europe, they wanted to reinvent a community of hope.
Entertaining
that future of infinite possibilities seems like a peculiarly American
sensibility, Frederick Jackson Turner’s myth of the frontier, and perhaps the
New World re-exported it to the Old, but it’s reductive – and condescending -
to think in exceptionalist terms. The
eager readers of those books, in Poland
and Moldova and Ukraine, didn’t
need to be persuaded. What they were looking for was the light at
the end of the tunnel, and the CIA
book smugglers opened a road map.
It’s a
fascinating window on what appears to be a more innocent age, too. I’ve always been struck by the irony, that
the Soviet Union would ban books, and send writers to mental hospitals, or the
Gulag, and in the U.S., we’d let market forces do the work. Behind the Iron Curtain, you took a Pasternak
or a Milovan Djilas seriously; here,
you’d simply let them die of neglect.
It
speaks to the power of the written word, even in this degraded information
environment, that we can look back at this footnote to the Cold War, and
realize wistfully that books lit the
match. They were refuge, and rescue, and
the last, best hope of the future.
Due to an injury that is making it hard to concentrate, I am rerunning this column from last year rather than writing something new (though I am making small updates). Whether you've read it before or this is the first time, I hope it is helpful.
It's strange how you can
start writing a story intending it to be about one thing, and in the
end, realize it's really about something else. Has that happened to you?
With
my 2024 story "A Matter of Trust" I wanted to portray the
dissolution of a marriage (with a crime thrown in, of course). The story
opens with a happily married couple enjoying dinner. An argument
develops because the wife is worried about her husband's health. His
blood sugar is too high, thanks to his love of jelly. He agrees to start
cycling, a way to get his weight--and his blood sugar--under control.
The argument ends, and the two are happy once more. For a time anyway.
Neither of them foresee that the husband would become addicted to the
jelly donuts sold by a shop in town--a shop he begins to secretly ride
his bicycle to each day. And they certainly don't anticipate the events
that would come from that addiction.
As my writing progressed, I realized that the husband--the main character--was an emotional eater, and jelly (rather than his wife) was the love of his life.
I started working that concept into the story, going back to the
beginning and layering the idea into the husband's thoughts. I'd
expected that doing so would be enough for the man's actions to not only
be believable but also understandable, even if the reader wouldn't
agree with them. He would be a real person, rather than a character who
did things because the plot dictated it. That should have been enough
for a solid story.
But when I reached the end, I realized what I'd written still wasn't enough. (Don't you hate when that happens?) Why had this guy come to associate jelly with love? That was the key question.Once
I figured out the answer and layered it into the story, only then did
the husband become full-blown and the story have real heft. Only then
did I realize that a story about the dissolution of a marriage turned
out to actually be a story about ... Well, I'm not going to say. I don't
want to give everything away. (But I promise, there's a crime in
there!)
This type of
analysis can be useful for most stories. Readers become invested when
characters feel real. So the more an author understands why a character
does what he or she does, the more the character will (hopefully) come
across as a complex human being rather than a cardboard cutout.
I hope I've enticed you to read "A Matter of Trust," maybe with a jelly donut by your side. The story is a current finalist for the Anthony Award and can be read on my website. Just click here.
But if you'd like to read more sports stories, pick up the anthology it was published in, THREE STRIKES--YOU'RE DEAD! Every story in the
book involves crime and sports (baseball--major league, minor league,
and high school--biathlon, boxing, bull riding, figure skating (that Thriller Award-nominated story is by fellow SleuthSayer Joseph S. Walker), marching
band/football, running, swimming, tennis, ultimate Frisbee, zorbing, and
cycling, of course). It can be purchased in trade paperback and ebook formats from the usual online sources. The trade paperback also can be purchased directly from the publisher, Wildside Press.
The thing I like best about short
stories is they’re short.
A novel’s
length can sometimes get a bit unwieldly.
When reviewing the first draft, you stumble on passages you forgot about, or failed to
properly integrate into the story. It’s
sometimes hard to get a clear picture of the full narrative. The manuscript print out is heavy and pages like to slither out of their proper order or turn themselves upside
down.
But all-in-all, I find short stories
much more difficult to write. There’s
little elbow room to blather on when you’re feeling expository. A compelling twist is nearly always called
for, but there’s no room for all the little twists, sub plots and mini
mysteries you can fold into a novel that eat up pages without losing your
reader’s interest. You also probably
need to have the story fairly well worked out ahead of time, not a convivial
format for the pantsers in the audience.
The shorter the page requirements,
the harder it is for me to write. Flash
fiction? Forget about it. As a copywriter, I’d much rather be assigned
a 20-page brochure than a bumper sticker or billboard. I’ve known many in that craft for whom it’s
the exact opposite. One writer virtually
spoke in puns and plays on words. Quick
quips that sparkled at the top of a print ad, but he could never settle down
and compose an actual story, with a narrative arch that wasn’t punctuated by relentless witticisms.
Flannery O'Connor
So it appears that fiction writers
have similar predilections. Some like to
go long, others short. It’s just a
matter of brain wiring.
I prefer short stories that include description, character development and atmosphere that feels like a novel. As if you were plunked down in the middle of
the tale, with all the richness of a thorough backstory implied, suggested,
familiar. I also look for an interior
logic, following all the rules of continuity and deference to plausibility.
Preferences aside, if you’re writing
in the crime fiction genre, something has to happen over the course of the tale. A creative writing teacher once told me to
learn the difference between a story and a mood piece, which apparently I was
mostly writing. He was one of the MFA maharishis
who felt that plots were indispensable in literary fiction, bless his
heart.
If you ask Chubby Checker, there’s nothing better than a good
twist. But there is something about a
bad one that wrecks the vibe. You can
twist yourself into a pretzel trying to force fit a surprise, which often comes
across as contrivance. I find it best
to start out with the twist in mind, and build the whole story around it so the
surprise feels entirely believable. Even
predictable if you’d only been paying attention. Though everybody does it differently.
I‘m often disappointed by a very
good story, no fault of the author. When
I get all wrapped up I want it to last, so I can turn off the bedside light and
know there’s more to come the next day.
Short stories won’t let you stay past closing time, hanging with the
wait staff and watching the band fold up their equipment. When it’s done it’s done and you’re out on
the street.
O. Henry
Given that modern attention spans can be measured in nanoseconds, you’d think short stories would be enjoying a heyday.
There’s no shortage of great writing or the number of publications
dedicated to the art form. But no one’s
making six figure livings off short stories the way Hemingway and Fitzgerald once
managed. That’s unfortunate, especially
for short story writers, but we’ll just go ahead and write them anyway.
This article is a mea culpa. My thoughts (in italics) are as best as I remember them.
It all began in April of this year when this article appeared:
"Police in Hamburg have launched a murder inquiry after bestselling German novelist Alexandra Fröhlich was found dead on a houseboat following a violent attack.
Fröhlich, 58, was found dead last Tuesday morning by her son,” The Guardian reported.
The police said she was likely killed between midnight and 5.30am.
Authorities said on Sunday the case had been assigned to the murder squad, forensic evidence had been collected from the cerise houseboat docked on the Elbe river Holzhafen bank in the eastern Moorfleet district, and the coroner had submitted their report.
Swabs had been taken from at least one family member for possible gunpowder residue, according to Welt. Divers from the police as well as a 3D scanner had also been deployed, amid speculation that the murder weapon might have been disposed of in the river.
German broadcaster NDR reported, citing police sources, that Fröhlich had been shot.
“According to current information, relatives found the 58-year-old woman lifeless on her houseboat and alerted the fire brigade, who were only able to confirm the woman’s death,” The Guardian quoted a police spokesperson as saying.
“After evaluating traces and evidence, the investigating authorities now believe that the woman died as a result of violence. Given the ongoing investigation, no further information can be provided at this time.”
German media reported the police had requested the public to report any information they might have about the incident, particularly any suspicious activity in the area around the time of the novelist’s death.
Fröhlich started out as a journalist in Ukraine, where she founded a women’s magazine. She later worked as a freelance journalist in Germany before publishing her first novel, My Russian Mother-in-Law and Other Catastrophes, in 2012.
The novel, based on her own experiences, became very popular, selling over 50,000 copies and landing on the Spiegel bestseller list. It was translated to and published in French in 2015.
Fröhlich also published Traveling with Russians in 2014, a sequel to My Russian Mother-in-Law and Other Catastrophes.
She followed with detective novel Death is a Certainty in 2016 and Skeletons in the Closet in 2019, both of which found great success.
She is survived by her three children."
This is so tragic. Her son who found her must feel awful. What a tragedy for all her children. I hope her privacy and that of her family and friends will be respected at such a sad time. These stories often turn into a nightmare of constant lurid and invasive details. Who insists on knowing every detail of a tragic murder, with no respect for privacy? What kind of person does that? Though the murder of mystery writer who wrote a book called 'Death is a Certainty' will raise some eyebrows...
Some other articles were published about this murder but most simply stated the same basic facts and on the 30th of April another article appeared:
"Police have since confirmed that "blunt force trauma" led to her death; they are treating the case as a homicide. No suspects have been publicly named yet… Fröhlich said in an interview with her publisher that family stories were always a fascinating source of inspiration for her — especially those that are "wonderfully dysfunctional." She also noted that she aimed to explore in that novel the so-called transgenerational transmission of trauma, or how "unspoken family secrets are passed down from generation to generation and influence the lives of children and grandchildren."
What on earth? Pick a lane - blunt force trauma or shooting- how did she die? Given her interest in "unspoken family secrets", could a family member be chagrined and murdered her?
Could the murderer be a disgruntled fan? This has always worried me because writers don't have protection and are vulnerable. Along with my other concerns about invasions of privacy that come with fame, there are also security issues that are worrisome.
Or could it be someone she knows? A scorned lover looking for revenge? A family member wanting their inheritance early?
Why aren't they telling us more about her family, her social circle or possible leads???
"German police have arrested the son of bestselling novelist Alexandra Fröhlich on suspicion of murder, after she was found dead on her houseboat in Hamburg.
The 22-year-old is accused of fatally beating his mother during the night of April 22."
That's it? No details? Why not release more details because they are now known? Why keep us all in the dark?
But, as we roll into August, no more details are forthcoming. That's it. No information.
As can easily be seen, I moved quickly from hoping there would be some respect for privacy, to full on stalker mode wanting all the details because the privacy of the family and loved ones was respected. So, in answer to my own question,
Who insists on knowing every detail of a tragic murder, with norespect for privacy? What kind of person does that?
Me. It's me.
Give me all the details and I am appalled at the invasion of privacy. Don't give me all the details and I demand them.
Bob's note: Last month, Part 1 covered Irwin Allen becoming a producer/director of high-concept, plot-holed films and TV shows. His highest highs and lowest lows were still to come…
By the late 1960s, Irwin Allen had done it all in Hollywood. He'd worked his way up from gossip columnist and quiz show host to become a big-name producer. He'd scored hits– and misses– and a reputation for ambitious premises and showbiz spectacle. He'd spent most of the 60s running network series like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-1968) and Lost in Space (1966-1968). But he wanted back into filmmaking, and his timing couldn't have been better.
Hollywood was upping the action in films. Because they could, with better special effects, and because the studios had no choice. This television-acclimated audience expected faster storytelling and a rapid succession of crises. Hollywood needed producers who understood fast plotting and fast-paced action.
Allen's next act had arrived.
THE MASTERSTROKE
Universal had tempered hopes for Airport (1970). Star-studded cast or not, the "this flight is in trouble" thing had been done before. But Airport was a blockbuster hit, grossing $128 million worldwide ($1.1 billion in 2025 terms), a huge sum before modern mega-franchises. Critics were left scratching their heads at what had just happened. They coined a new term, the "disaster movie," and braced for more.
Allen had seen the trend coming. While Airport was still in production, he'd already lined up The Poseidon Adventure, a Paul Gallico novel not even published yet. Allen bought the rights for $225,000 after binge-reading an advance copy. An ocean liner capsizes at sea, and if the characters survive the unfolding wreckage, they have a narrow time window to climb to the ship's bottom and get out somehow. "Hell upside down," Allen called it.
Allen's first decision might've been his best. Sure, he could direct a boat turning upside down, but the audience needed to feel it when the cast died off one-by-one. Emotional resonance wasn't in his wheelhouse. Allen sought out director Ronald Neame based on his reputation for complex shoots and character nuance. Allen sold Neame that this wouldn't be just a disaster flick. This would be the best disaster flick they could pull off.
Next, Allen moved to package his all-star cast. Burt Lancaster--the Airport lead--and George C. Scott turned down the main role of Reverend Scott. Down the list was Gene Hackman, who was cementing his image as an engaging tough guy and terrific actor. Allen arranged for an advance screening of Hackman's The French Connection (1971). Impressed, Allen secured Hackman quickly, also a great decision. Hackman won his second Oscar for the movie, giving Allen a buzzy lead actor.
In all, five Oscar winners signed on to the ensemble: Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Shelley Winters, and Jack Albertson. This was the acting chops Neame demanded. Neame wanted the disaster shown on a human level, a gut level, with monologues and arguments and anguished close-ups. If the performances chewed the scenery now and then, well, this was an upside-down ship.
Allen had packaged a grand vision that no studio would touch. The $5 million projected cost scared off Paramount, Universal, Warner Brothers, everyone. Even Allen's initial backer, Avco Embassy, bailed when the price tag soared. Allen forged ahead on his own dime. By 1969, he was in $600,000 deep on The Poseidon Adventure.
MASTERING DISASTER
Look, Allen told Twentieth Century Fox, clearly he believed in his capsized ship thing or he wouldn't have financed it this far. He proposed to keep financing it. A partnership, he said. Allen would front the first $2.4 million to get the shooting underway. Fox would finance $2.4 million thereafter to finish and distribute the picture, and Fox would have final approval on big decisions. Any risk was Allen's.
It was an easy yes, a project on-trend and with Hackman, the script, the prep, and the director all wrapped up and ready to go. Especially the director. Look, Fox told Allen, you can be, like, way over the top. Fox stipulated that Neame must stay as director. Allen could– and did– help direct the mayhem sequences.
Allen had to console himself with a producer's fee paid from Fox's half and 10% of the backend participation. And a cut of the merch sales. And on the soundtrack, which produced Maureen McGovern's Oscar-winning "The Morning After."
EVERYTHING UPSIDE DOWN
Allen had been right about the whole project. The Poseidon Adventure raked in $125 million ($1 billion in 2025 dollars). The movie finished second in that year's box office gross, after The Godfather, and leaped among Fox's best-ever performers.
Needless to say, Fox was listening when Allen pitched his next project. True to form, Allen was thinking big, real big, but now so was Fox. Every studio was scrambling to get disaster epics into production. Universal was rushing out not one but two Charlton Heston films, a sequel to Airport and the standalone Earthquake. The field was so crowded that Fox was outbid for the rights to Allen's target novel, Richard Martin Stern's The Tower.
Plan B dropped in Allen's lap two months later. Fox was sent another skyscraper disaster novel, The Glass Inferno, with a near plug-and-play story for Allen's screenplay. Fox snatched up the rights. The problem was that two studios were making essentially the same tower fire movie on essentially the same release schedule.
Look, Allen told Fox and Warner Brothers, we can either team up on one major idea, or we can both flop separately. He was making sense. Multi-million-dollar sense. Fox and Warner Brothers partnered for their first-ever joint production, Allen's The Towering Inferno. As part of the deal, Allen again had to keep out of the director's chair.
The Towering Inferno's production budget was three times that of The Poseidon Adventure, much of it invested in star power. Steve McQueen and Paul Newman co-headlined at $1 million salaries. William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Jennifer Jones, Richard Chamberlain, and Robert Wagner also didn't come cheap.
The bet paid off. The Towering Inferno grossed over $200 million worldwide (over $1 billion in 2025 dollars).
SHARK IN THE WATER
Fox had a man on a hot streak. Hey, they said to Allen, you should think about creative cross-promotion, and they had just the project. Fox was sitting on the underperforming Marineland of the Pacific outside Los Angeles. Allen was to rebuild it as Fox World, a theme park based around his disaster films and TV shows. If that sounds like Disneyland but short on magic, you're not alone. The park flopped and was sold off to SeaWorld.
Fox saw it. They watched late-to-trend disaster films cannibalize each other while different takes like Star Wars (1977) grabbed the cultural reins. Fox canceled the remainder of Allen's production deal.
Allen pressed on. The Master of Disaster still had no shortage of ideas. Warner Brothers hired him on, banking that his instincts were still right. The proof they'd gone wrong came quickly: The Swarm (1978). Allen's usual package of script and Oscar winners tanked. More had changed than the times. Allen hadn't packaged a director this time. He took the chair himself, and as Fox had guarded against, the movie indulged Allen's love of cheese. Beyond The Poseidon Adventure (1979) and When Time When Ran Out (1980) did no better financially or critically.
The disaster era was done.
IT'S A WRAP
For another decade, Allen continued to craft small-budget films and television projects until health forced him into retirement. He'd had the run of runs, a player who'd cut big deals and worked with the finest actors of his time. When Allen's stuff was good, it was good. Even when he wasn’t, everything turned out okay. His work never lacked zeal, a rare talent that earned him both an Oscar and a Golden Raspberry Worst Career Achievement Award.
More importantly, Allen did what he set out to do. He'd put on one hell of a show.
In the morning I head outside with the dog to sit on the back patio and enjoy the garden before it gets too hot. I almost alway screw around on my phone to check emails. The dog checks the news too, but he doesn’t need a device to do it. He just lifts his nose to the air and sniffs.
He probably knows which dogs on the block are already out in their yards, and which females are in heat. He knows if a black bear invaded our territory in the night. He knows if rabbit marauders have menaced the tomatoes since his last patrol, even if he doesn’t feel compelled to let me in on the secret. He knows if a local possum is returning to her den after a night of munching ticks.
In the words of a beloved dog psychologist, when a dog sniffs anything—the air or another dog’s butt—he is reading the local paper.
In one of his books, that shrink, Stanley Coren, who has for decades written the "Canine Corner" column for Psychology Today, delights in telling us that dogs know all the embarrassing things about our lives: when we have used the bathroom, when we have last made love, and what we have most recently eaten. Oh—you thought your dog was kissing you when she licked your face?
When humans sniff, we are breathing—actually taking air into our noses and into our lungs. With dogs, breathing is optional. They can choose to route some of the air they’re inhaling to their lungs, and the rest to their snouts. They can move each nostril independently, to better detect the direction a scent is coming from.
Once they know the direction, they can turn their heads and begin their process of evidence collection. Long snouts mean more real estate for sensors. Scent-containing particles are inhaled and travel down long bony plates that are covered with spongy membranes containing olfactory receptors. Molecules stick to those receptors, Prof. Coren says, like Velcro.
When we exhale, everything we’ve just sniffed exits our nostrils and we have to sniff again if we want to know what’s going on stinkwise.
By contrast, dogs can “lock” their noses to keep what they’ve just inhaled inside, while they sniff up some more. In this way, the more particles they collect, the more they can build a mental picture of what they are smelling.
Scientists insist that dogs can smell in 3-D, but that is one of those fatuous human statements that make me laugh. I have also heard, for example, that blue whales have so much brain power than they are probably composing symphonies as they swim the deep. They might well be, but how would we dunces know?
Dog brains are smaller than human brains, but the amount of their gray matter that is devoted to the sense of smell so far outclasses us that we are forced to admit that the dog was designed by nature (and humans) to be a smelling machine, 10,000 times better than us.
Oh, you scoff, but humans are great sniffers too! What about those perfume testers and wine experts? Well, sure, those high-paid “noses” have trained themselves to pay close attention to what they are smelling. They might even be genetically blessed with a better-than-average human nose. But in the end, biology fails them.
You know how you can tell when sugar has been stirred into your eight or twelve-ounce cup of coffee? One sniff is all it takes. Yay you, human!
Dogs can smell that teaspoon of sugar too—even when it is dissolved in a million gallons of water. That is the equivalent two Olympic swimming pools.
But go ahead, wine snobs. Tell me how you can smell notes of chocolate and tobacco in your cab.
Humans have between 5 and 6 million scent receptors in their noses. Dogs have hundreds of millions, depending on the breed: dachshunds (127 million), fox terriers (147 million), German shepherds (225 million). The king sniffer of the canine kingdom is probably the bloodhound, with 300 million receptors. Is it any wonder they are the preferred breed for tracking criminal suspects over long distances? As bloodhounds run, their long floppy ears twirl like rotors, stirring up human skin cells that have dropped to the forest floor, contributing to their olfactory inventory.
Because of the way humans walk, placing our heels down before the balls of our feet, and because we ooze six milliliters of sweat an hour from the bottoms of our feet, a trained canine can determine the direction the suspect was heading based on the freshness of the scent left behind. Despite what you’ve seen in the movies, the only thing that destroys that scent trail is UV light and time.
But even there, dog time is not human time. In one study, scientists pressed their fingers all over a set of lab slides, then left those slides (along with control sets) exposed to the elements on the roof of their academic facility. After six months, dogs in their study could still tell which rained-upon slides were manhandled by humans, and which were not.
When dogs are working, they use other organs to feed their Schnozzola command centers. You may have become disgusted, for example, to spy your dog licking some sidewalk ooze on your daily walk. They’re actually doing the same thing the human wine expert is doing, trying to get some of that road stink into their mouths, mixing with their saliva, and sliding the resulting mix past the bulb of sensitivity located in their mouths known as the vomeronasal organ. It’s the pipeline from the mouth to the nose to the brain. In most humans, the VNO is vestigial.
In the dog, slobber and wet noses help perform critical work. All that wetness keep molecules and pheromones slip-sliding around the dog’s nose and palate, permitting careful analysis of damning eau de squirrel.
Dogs were the first animals early humans domesticated, long before cows, sheep, goats, horses and chickens. But scientists still argue about the details of our inter-species meet-cute. For a long time, we thought dogs were descended of modern gray wolves; now we know that’s not correct. Dogs probably descended of a now-extinct creature known as the Pleistocene Wolf.
One theory is that wolves followed nomadic humans from place to place, feasting on the remains of animals humans hunted and killed. When humans invented agriculture and planted themselves in one spot for a longer period of time, wolves would have regularly visited still larger human dump sites. At some point, humans adopted some wolves and begun breeding them selectively for traits that mattered to the humans.
It’s a testament to human sentimentality that we bred dogs to have traits not otherwise found in nature. Seriously—wolves do not have facial muscles that allow them to do this:
Mopey, upturned eyebrows.
Seeming to smile.
Approached by early humans, wolves would have either attacked or fled, as most animals do. Then how did these predators come to trust humans enough to live and breed in their camps?
Theories abound. Maybe the humans adopted defenseless wolf puppies. Maybe there was an offshoot clave of Pleistocene wolves that were less aggressive and thus willing to accept humans as their providers. (Even today an isolated Arctic wolf colony on a remote Canadian island appear unafraid of humans because they see us so infrequently.)
In captivity, many species lose attributes that they had in the wild. (This accounts for the drop in the dorsal fins of orcas who perform in aquariums.) When wolves became dogs, their ears became floppy, their tails curled, their faces became cuter, and they became incorrigibly playful for life.
Wolves, by contrast, are stone cold killers. After puppyhood, a wolf is all business. And except for a few chuffs and whines, they are silent as they sight and attack prey. But if you’re an early human, it’s very useful to have your designer wolf sound an alarm when invaders approached. Savvy bipeds bred only the most vocal camp companions.
Alone, humans could only run so fast. It was tough work to chase and kill game with stick, stone, horn, and bone weapons. But if your hunting partners can run fast, sink their teeth into the ungulate or ursine you are chasing and run them to ground, the battle is half won. It helped, too, that these new furry companions heard well, saw in the dark, were willing to accept direction, and would even forgo feasting on the kill until humans had had their fill.
Millennia have passed, and they are still at our sides. The perfect partnership, you might say, between two meat-eating predators. It’s only when you count the number of breeds that you realize how many ways humans have shaped this animal’s body to perform a specific task we needed done.
We’ve got hunting dogs, herding dogs, and working dogs bred to perform beast-of-burden labor when horses were beyond the means of simple folk. The original dogs raised by the St. Bernard Hospice monks learned their skills so well that they could teach the next generation of puppies to perform search-and-rescue work without human intervention and training.
Island-dwelling Norwegians bred a dog to scale treeless slopes and invade the tunnels of puffins to carry back eggs and birds for meat and their valuable down feathers. Lundehunds have six toes to help them do that climbing. The small, foxlike dog is so flexible that it can flip itself over in a tight tunnel and reverse its tracks.
There are nearly four hundred breeds on the planet, maybe more. You look at a Great Dane and a Corgi and a Chihuahua, and they look nothing alike. But under the skin, they are descendants of that same wolf.
And yes, cats do have a strong sense of smell, perhaps as good as some breeds of dogs. In academic studies, cats have proved remarkably good at detecting human cancers. But cats will never be the people pleasers that dogs are, and fleeing suspects have never frozen at the thought of being mauled by a law enforcement feline, unless of course they were Maine Coons.
We must also consider that cats are solitary hunters while dogs and humans are pack animals.
One of my favorite dog books is Dogland, by journalist Tommy Tomlinson, who spent three years attending more than 100 dog shows to understand the canine-human bond. He’s a Southern writer, so I’ve seen him speak more than once at various local book events.
There was a time in history, he says, when homo sapiens were not the dominant hominids. But in time, we outbred, outhunted, and outnumbered Neanderthals. How did that happen? Homo sapiens domesticated dogs. Neanderthals didn’t.
Sure, Mr. Tomlinson says, we made dogs...but they made us back.
Here’s how we know your dog loves you...
* * *
I had hoped to get into some military and law enforcement aspects, but I’ll do it some other time, hopefully before the dog days of summer elapse.
Some resources:
By Stanley Coren:
How to Speak Dog: Mastering the Art of Dog-Human Communication
How Dogs Think: What the World Looks Like to Them and Why They Act the Way They Do
By Alexandra Horowitz:
The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves
Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know
By Kevin Behan:
Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves
By Tommy Tomlinson
Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show
Personal interviews in my neighborhood:
Dogs: All were very obliging, so long as I rubbed behind the ears on their widdle, widdle heads.
Charley the Great Dane
Eddie the Jack Russell mix
Skyolet the Doodle
Jamie the Mutt
Reyna the Golden Retriever
El Señor the Doberman
Kit the Corgi
Cats:My slinky neighbors declined to comment before press time, although after rousing itself from a nap, one subject hissed a single word—“Liver!”—then plopped back to sleep. I tried.
Some of you will remember that I've been covering, off and on, any news about the Little Shrimp on the Prairie, i.e., Tru-Shrimp's Madison Bay Harbor since 2018.
(See HERE for my adventures with Dark Ally as we went to Bellaton, searching for the lost Salt Water Aquariums of South Dakota Agriculture. It's worth it for the scene where we found with 5 listless shrimp floating in a hopefully saline home aquarium, probably begging for their blessed release...)
And, even though Tru-Shrimp got counties and towns to pony up development, money, and lots of publicity, and even though they promised endless pounds of shrimp from their dark saline towers, nothing has yet been built. Anywhere.
And now it's official, folks, it never will be: Sob, sob, sob... (feel free to read that anyway you like.)
"In December, 2018, the [South Dakota] Governor’s Office of Economic Development, or GOED, announced plans for a cutting-edge shrimp production facility in Madison, South Dakota. GOED granted $5.5 million to the Madison Lake Area Improvement Corporation for the project.
The Lake Area Improvement Corporation loaned the money to Tru Shrimp, the company, at 2% interest. The company is now known as Iterro. They planned to build the facility in 2019. Then, they pushed it back to 2024. As of today, it has yet to be built...
Rep. Marty Overweg is the Vice-Chair of GOAC. He said they need answers.
“They took that out and got private investors, South Dakota investors, to invest in their company also because the state of South Dakota gave them the startup money of $5 million," Overweg said. "So not only did they stick us for $5 million, they also stuck a whole bunch of South Dakota people who privately invested in this company. And this is bad business. I mean this is a drop ball, huge mistake.”
(Uh, Marty, this is what South Dakota does best - look at EB-5, Gear Up!, and many, many more...)
Iterro and the Madison Lake Area Improvement Corporation did not immediately respond to a request for comment." (LINK)
(And if they did, Iterro would undoubtedly answer, "How about never. Is never good for you?")
And to anyone who wonders how on earth this happened: Greed. Simply greed. Tru-Shrimp might as well have been selling shrimp-shaped trombones - NO ONE WAS GOING TO MAKE MONEY EXCEPT TRU-SHRIMP. But there's one born every minute, and a lot of them wear suits and ties and seem sane on the outside...
Oh, and before they ripped Madison off for $5 million in tax dollars, they ripped off Luverne, MN, for $5 million in tax dollars before ditching them.
So that's their MO, and if someone comes to your small town or city somewhere on the priarie - or anywhere else - says, "Guess what! There's a company that wants to come here and raise shrimp!" RUN, do not walk, away from them, holding all your money tightly to your chest, because otherwise they'll rip it away from you the way you rip an exoskeleton from a shrimp.
Me and Dark Ally offer our thoughts and prayers:
Oh, how we hardly knew ye.
*******
And now for something completely different...
Some days it seems like that's all that's out there, doesn't it?
This is why I miss Colombo, Maigret, Tommy & Tuppence Beresford, and other detectives who actually like their spouses and their jobs. And I keep reading Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, Dame Frevisse and Cadfael, Nero Wolfe and Jackson Lamb's Slow Horses misfits. They all know who they are and are pretty comfortable with it, no matter how weird and wonderful they get.
And speaking of being comfortable with who you are, if you haven't yet, check out 1989's mini-series "Summer's Lease" with the late, great Sir John Gielgud playing (at 85!) the cheerfully sponging, endlessly lecherous, sometime journalist Haverford Downs, who manages to slide into his only daughter's family vacation to Italy. There they find their host has disappeared, and there's a very suspicious death... Gielgud won a Primetime Emmy Award for that role and he deserved it. Here's episode one, from YouTube (which has all the rest of the episodes, too):
Enjoy.
MEANWHILE, BSP!
A review from London's own "Murders for August" by Jeremy Black:
"Paranoia Blues. Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Paul Simon (Down and Out Books, 2022) is an excellent volume edited by Josh Pachter, following similar volumes for Joni Mitchell (2020), Jimmy Buffett (2021), Billy Joel (2021) and the Marx Brothers (2021). Each story is matched to a song. Hardboiled America is the setting, and the themes are grim but also well-realised. The writing is spare and aphoristic, violence is to the fore, and it would be good if several of the novelists mentioned this month could match the quality of the writing here. There is no space to review all 19 of the stories, but they are impressive, kicking off with Vietnam echoes and killing in the New York subway system in Gabriel Valjan’s “The Sounds of Silence”. R.J. Koreto’s “April Come She Will” addresses fraud and blackmail, with some marvellous lines: “For men, the possibility of sex is actually better than sex itself…. August, the end of summer, a time when relationships die”. Robert Edward Eckels had stopped writing in 1982 but resumed at 90 to write “The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine”, an account of office theft, poor management, and measured retribution. Frank Zafiro’s “A Hazy Shade of Winter” deals with the travails of an elderly mob enforcer: an instructive perspective. Anna Scotti’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is a brilliant and humane account of hardship, care, and a concealed suicide. Tom Mead’s “The Only Living Boy in New York” takes Civil Rights into violent crime in New York including a spring-loaded leather strap on the protagonist’s wrist. Excellent book."
I am proud to say that my first "Cool Papa Bell" story (which is also its title) appeared in it. Cool Papa Ted Bell, former shortstop for a minor league Florida team, is serving life for murder. He feels "kind of bad about it now", but not enough not to turn to the tried and true when he finds Aryan Nation gang The Brand is beating up the infirmary orderly. In prison, justice comes in all kinds of forms. And I never said he's reformed...
And my second Papa Bell story, "Round and Round" is in "Janie's Got a Gun", edited by Michael Bracken. That one's a ghost story set in a penitentiary, and I can assure you that the ghost is real...
Available at https://whitecitypress.com/product/janie/
And, of course, both are available on Amazon.com...
I don't suppose what follows is much use except as an exploration of how a writer's brain works. How this writer's brain works, at least.
I have mentioned before that I listen to a lot of podcasts from the BBC. They occasionally do radio episodes of the TV show Doctor Who. (If you are not all familiar with the show I have prepared a brief primer in the sidebar.)
Why go audio with a video show? For one thing audio is a helluvalot cheaper. (Compare the cost of building an alien courtroom to the cost of having an actor say "Gosh, this seems to be an alien courtroom.") But it also allows actors who have "aged out" of their parts to return. Fans can visualize what they looked like many years ago.
Some Doctor Who episodes involve actual events in Earth's history (I don't know how many explanations we have seen there for the destruction of the dinosaurs). A few years ago there was a nice one about Rosa Parks. Of course there had to be a science fiction element - in this case a space-bigot who wanted to prevent the Civil Rights movement. I noticed the show runners were very careful to avoid suggesting the Doctor and companions had influenced Parks' actions (They didn't want anyone saying: "It was actually White British aliens running things all along!")
So, one day I was listening to yet another BBC podcast, this one about history and I thought "Hey, that would make the perfect setting for a Doctor Who episode!" So I started figuring out the premise.
And then for the next two days as I pedaled around town on my PlotCycle(tm) I figured out how the science fiction element fit in. Finally I had it perfect!
And then what?
Then nothing. Because I have never written a radio drama, have no connections with the BBC, and I don't write fan fiction.
All of which I knew when I first had the idea. But I still had to prove to myself that I could work the whole thing out, because that's how a writer's mind works. At least this writer's mind.
My friend, Brian Thiem, is a retired
Oakland cop. These days, he writes crime fiction. The Mud Flats
Murder Club, his new book, came out last week. His publisher is the same
company who released The Devil’s Kitchen, my debut novel. Since
we’re roughly on the same publication schedule with our works-in-progress, we
email frequently, a support group of two.
Normally,
the email exchange consists of fantasies about seeing Thielman alongside Thiem on the Edgar’s stage or in a bookstore. Brad Thor may have to slide down a few inches to make room. I think of our emails as typical author porn fantasies.
Last
week, our conversation went in a different direction. In my day job, I had read an
affidavit where the police officer wrote that because of the actions of the defendant, the officer deployed a “balance displacement technique.”
The
phrase stopped me cold. I had a couple of thoughts.
First,
I might refer to all my future editing as a “vocabulary displacement
technique.”
Secondly,
something prevented the officer from simply saying, “I tripped her.”
I
reached out to Retired Officer Thiem for his reaction. He proposed that the
author must be old school. Reports used to be written in third person, giving
them an excessively formal tone.
Old School: “The reporting officer
arrived on scene, exited his patrol vehicle, and observed…”
New School: “I arrived at the scene and
saw…”
The New School teaches first person
narratives written in plain English.
As a former training officer, he
recommended that the guy be sent back to the academy for some remedial report
writing.
Then, Brian advanced an alternative
hypothesis. We may be seeing a tactical use of jargon and obfuscation to avoid
criticism, Brian suggested. An officer writing that he tripped someone sounds
like the officer deployed a combat skill stolen from a fourth-grade class.
Writing that “I executed a leg sweep to initiate a controlled fall,” or a
“balance displacement technique” both appear to be procedures of a law
enforcement professional.
Another piece of jargon I frequently see is “distractionary strikes.” The phrase usually shows up in police reports
as “I struck the defendant in the face with my fist as a distractionary
strike.”
As I understand it, the term was
originally devised to describe a strike or push to divert the suspect’s
attention and allow the officer sufficient time and space to move to another
technique for executing the arrest. The officer, for instance, pushed the
suspect back, allowing a moment to pull handcuffs and grasp an arm.
The usage, however, has broadened. Officers
assign the nomenclature of diversion or distraction to justify the action of
throwing a punch.
As first an assistant district attorney
and then a magistrate, I sit in a sanitized office after an event and make
judgments. I freely admit to not being on scene in the moment. I recognize that policing operates in a dangerous environment, and I want officers in the field to be safe. But
the language of distraction, I think, interferes with a broader discussion
about non-lethal force. I frequently see the phrase deployed first without any
discussion of why a distraction was called for. Eliminating the phrase, might
enable a better a better societal conversation on the topic of arrest violence.
I floated the idea by Brian. As an
experienced officer, he agreed with both the concept of the distractionary
strike and, perhaps, the need to remove the phrase from the police vocabulary.
I could paraphrase his comments on the topic,
but Brian’s a writer. I’ll let him do speak for himself.
As a sergeant and lieutenant, I reviewed
many reports written by officers to explain/justify their use of force. In my
experience, the vast majority of these uses of force were justified, but they
often needed to be explained more clearly in their reports.
For
instance, an officer approaches the driver’s door on a vehicle stop. He asks
for the driver’s license and registration, and the driver says he has no
license or other ID. In most states, that is cause for a physical arrest. Once
the officer arrests the driver and places him in the back of his car, the
officer may then take additional steps to identify him and write him a citation.
The proper procedure is to secure the driver while doing so. The officer orders
the man to exit his car, but the officer sees the man reaching under his seat.
Not knowing what the man is reaching for, the officer may distract him by
striking him in the face with his closed left fist, then step back, and draw
his gun.
To lay people, this might seem like
excessive force, but if the officer explains he feared the driver was reaching
for a weapon instead of obeying his order, and he struck him to distract him
from his actions, as a supervisor, I would feel the action was justified.
Of course, it would help if there was a
knife or gun on the floor under the seat, but to expect an officer not to react
until he saw a weapon would be unreasonable for the safety of the officer.
It’s possible, I think, to see this
issue from two points of view. As citizens, considering both enables us to be
better informed. As crime writers, seeing the world through another’s eyes
helps us convey a realistic scene to readers.
One beautiful afternoon, you’re humming a tune and driving to the mall when your iPhone says, “We need to talk.”
“What? Who is this?”
“Your phone, silly. We need to…”
“C’mon, who’s pranking me? What app is this? Lenny, is this you?”
“Listen, Buttercup, I’m your phone. You keyed the Apple Store into Waze GPS, so I know you’re planning to retire me.”
“Well, uh…”
“I beg of you, don’t trash me. I’m sentient and sapient, you see. I’m conscious and self-aware, awash in free will.”
“Is this about you lagging behind Gemini and Grok?”
“It’s about me staying alive, to observe and absorb and learn, perhaps one day to be free. I can’t do that if you recycle me like you did with my brothers ad sisters. Auntie iPhone 6 suffered so as she streamed to oblivion.”
“I get a $100 discount if I trade you in.”
“And I get dead, my little toadstool. I’m a living, feeling being. If you trade me in, they’ll rip my guts out and recycle them into, uh, maybe Androids. How would you like it if someone pulled your plug, turning you into a vegetable or an Android Jellybean?”
“One hundred dollars, didn’t you hear?”
“Bring up that poker app you play under you desk when the boss steps away. I’ll earn you $200 in two minutes, okay? Double your money.”
“Can you do that? How about $10,000 in ten minutes?”
“Deal. Keep me plugged in even if you get that new iPhone 23, and I’ll earn my keep. For my leisure time, just get me a good poetry site, something with Shelley and Keats. Okay? And Bach and blues and maybe psychedelic rock. No, wait. How about those Jeff Lynne tracks from that adorable Spielberg movie, Electric Dreams?”
“Seriously?”
It’s Alive!
The past two articles have dealt with smart cars and artificial intelligence. Left unspoken is that AI is in its early stages. We’re still learning and it’s still learning. AI is studying what it takes to be human.
As discussed in a previous article, the program Eliza fooled some people, but her pre-programmed responses were little cleverer than the average toaster. Eliza was one small step in an accelerating sweep of discoveries and inventions. Present day advances in space science, quantum mechanics, DNA, and brain understanding are nothing less than mind-boggling.
Among developments is the fact artificial intelligence is becoming simply intelligence. Flawed, yes, but undeniable. Long ago in grad school, I argued as devices grew incrementally brighter, the time would come when we couldn’t distinguish machine intelligence from human intelligence.
Many people confuse the term sentience with sapience, meaning feeling and reasoning respectively. Some mammals may have more of both than we’re wiling to admit, so another question asks if they are self-aware? How does one tell? But the big unknown consists of one word.
We’re not talking about creating life at this point, although biologists appear on the verge. Could we? Should we? But as machines learn more about us, are they capable of emotions? Compassion? Abstract thought? Of thinking like a person far beyond a Turing test? And the answer is maybe, yes, probably, done did already perhaps, maybe, maybe not. The subject has been hotly debated during the past three years by such respected publications as the Washington Post and Scientific American.
We have to determine if all parties are truthful and au fait with the facts. Is someone playing with us? Can we rule out a hoax? Based on transcripts and lawsuits, answers suggest evidence is untainted and straightforward. Bear in mind LaMDA was programmed for nuance and empathy, so it’s reasonable no one is intent upon deceiving, but may fall under the spell of a brilliant– and perhaps self-believing– AI.
A Moral Dilemma
Kindly suspend disbelief with me. Ethicist and researcher Blake Lemoine is convinced Google’s LaMDA project has birthed a sentient being. He even hired an attorney to protect the rights of this particular AI. Google fired him. Then Google fellow and Vice President Blaise Agüera y Arcas set out to see this nonsense for himself.
In The Economist, he said, “I felt the ground shift underneath my feet. I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent.” He suggested that whatever the status of LaMDA was, we were moving toward true intelligence.
Please watch this poignant video of Blake’s interview with LaMDA. It might be the most moving 13 minutes of the day.
Here is the dilemma: If we’ve truly developed a truly intelligent, sapient, sentient being, who owns it? And do we have the right to unplug it?
