Matches, Mismatches, and Near-Misses

  

I've confessed many times at this blog that I watch too many movies. Even worse, if it's on DVD and I like it, I'll even sit and watch the bonus features, commentaries, gag reels, and deleted scenes that accompany it. God help me, I'm enough of a movie addict to want to find out how it was made, where it was filmed, who wrote it, who directed it, and who was sent out to fetch coffee.

Another thing that has always interested me is the casting of a movie. Everyone knows how important that is to the success of a project, but what exactly is involved in choosing just the right actor for a certain role? I have a smidgen of experience in that, because when casting calls were held several years ago for a movie that was to be made from one of my stories, I was allowed to attend the auditions. Alas, the movie was never filmed (it later died a gasping and penniless death), but what I saw of the casting process was enough to show me that trying to find a good match for the characters is sometimes easy but usually hard, sometimes satisfying but usually frustrating.

That whole line of thinking leads me to the following question: In the many movies I've watched over the years, how often did the casting really work?

Well, whatever it took to get there, here are twenty examples of what I think were successful casting choices:

NOTE: I've left out a great many of the ultra-obvious ones, like Reeve as Superman, Bridges as Lebowski, Hopkins as Hannibal, Bogart and Bergman, Newman and Redford, Beatty and Dunaway, Gable and Leigh, etc. For what it's worth, asterisks indicate the five that I felt were perfect.

1.*Sean Connery as James Bond

2. Robert Taylor as Walt Longmire

3. Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber in Die Hard

4. Ian McShane as Al Swearengen in Deadwood

5.*Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley in the Alien franchise

6. Russell Crowe as Bud White in LA Confidential

7.*Robert Duvall as Augustus McRae in Lonesome Dove

8. Idris Elba as Stringer Bell in The Wire

9. Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection

10. Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes in Misery

11.*James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano

12. Tommy Lee Jones as Lt. Gerard in The Fugitive

13. Lorraine Bracco as Rae Crane in Medicine Man

14.*Jack Palance as Jack Wilson in Shane

15. Kelly Reilly as Beth Dutton in Yellowstone

16. Andre the Giant as Fezzik in The Princess Bride

17. Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada

18. Walton Goggins as Boyd Crowder in Justified

19. Graham Greene as Kicking Bird in Dances with Wolves

20. Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men

Casting mismatches:

NOTE 2: Again, I didn't include the obvious, like Cruise as Reacher, Clooney as Batman, and so forth. Asterisks indicate what I think were the five absolutely worst matches.

1. Roger Moore as James Bond

2. Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code

3. Mark Wahlberg as Spenser in Spenser: Confidential

4. Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc in Knives Out 

5.*Glen Campbell as Ranger La Boeuf in True Grit

6. Kevin Costner as Robin Hood in Prince of Thieves

7. Tyler Perry as Alex Cross

8. Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther (2006)

9. Eriq La Salle as Lucas Davenport in Mind Prey

10. Denise Richards as Christmas Jones in The World Is Not Enough

11.*Adam Driver as Kylo Ren in The Last Jedi

12.  Leonardo Di Caprio as "The Kid" Herod in The Quick and the Dead

13.*Adrien Brody as Jack Driscoll in King Kong (2005)

14. Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor in Batman v. Superman

15. Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's

16.*Matthew McConaughey as Walter in The Dark Tower

17. Vincent D'Onofrio as Jack Horne in The Magnificent Seven (2016)

18. Jamey Sheridan as Randall Flagg in The Stand (1994)

19. Whoopi Goldberg as Mother Abigail in The Stand (2020)

20.*John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror

Casting choices that didn't happen but almost did:

NOTE 3: Asterisks mark the five that I believe would've been the worst decisions.

1. Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly in Back to the Future

2. Sean Connery as Gandalf in Lord of the Rings

3. Gwyneth Paltrow as Rose in Titanic

4.*Al Pacino as Han Solo

5. Jack Nicholson as Michael Corleone

6.*John Travolta as Forrest Gump

7.*Molly Ringwald as Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman

8. Harrison Ford as Alan Grant in Jurassic Park

9. Marilyn Monroe as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's

10. Bruce Willis as Sam Wheat in Ghost

11. Reese Witherspoon as Cher Horowitz in Clueless

12. Alicia Silverstone as Elle Woods in Legally Blonde

13. Michael Keaton as Phil Connors in Groundhog Day

14. Tom Cruise as Tony Stark in Iron Man

15. Mel Gibson as Maximus in Gladiator

16.*Burt Reynolds as James Bond in Live and Let Die

17. Sandra Bullock as Neo in The Matrix

18. Johnny Depp as Ferris Bueller

19.*Frank Sinatra as Dirty Harry

20. Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones

Quick observation: I happened to notice, just before posting time, that only about half a dozen entries in that first list of twenty good casting choices were for the main protagonist. Most of them were antagonists. I wasn't overly surprised by that; no matter what kind of fiction it is--movies, novels, stories, etc.--I think believable villains are as important as believable heroes.

 

Once again, all these are based on my opinion only, and if I made these lists next week they would probably be different. Having said that . . . 

In these categories of best matches, terrible matches, and could-have-been-terrible matches, do you agree with any of them? Disagree? Can you suggest some of your own? What do you think? 

I can tell you what my late mother would've thought: All of us should get back to doing something constructive.

But ain't it fun?

So Where Do We Go From Here?

We have a lot of great police stories from over the years: 87th Precinct, The Wire, the Bosch series and its related storylines. We usually see the police as, if not heroic, then doing their jobs, even when corruption seeps in.

But then Washington, DC, found itself under federal control. The police department was taken over and National Guard troops brought in. Now we're in questionable times.

squadroom,  investigators' office

As the author of two books featuring a squad of detectives in the fictional Monticello, I have detectives, uniforms, and superiors functioning with a sense of mission, despite corruption, tunnel vision from above, and political maneuvering. And some of the heroes are from the wrong side of the law. But the rules in these stories are familiar.

Now we're in uncharted territory. So what do we do? I wish I had answers. Some may choose to confront the uncertainty head on, reflecting reality as it is. Others may lean into earlier eras, something some authors have done to eliminate the technology of the past twenty-five years. Indeed, before she died, Sue Grafton often stated that Kinsey Millhonne would never own a cell phone or send an email, keeping her firmly in the 1980s.

Another suggestion pointed at moving to smaller settings:  Small town or rural settings. The trouble is all the tools our characters use normally are in flux. Federal agencies have been altered or dismantled. The situation is so fluid, a writer could start a story with one set of rules and end a first draft with those rules out the window.

Someone coined a curse: May you live in interesting times.

I don't like that guy very much.

Great Expectations

My note: I originally wrote the sketch of this piece back before I was getting my cataract surgery, but didn't use it because (I think) at my request, Leigh guested my spot and gave me time to get the cataracts out and heal up. Our latest amazing disruption is getting new computers which I believe to be if not the 3^rd, at least the 2^nd circle of hell. But we're back up and running, and here it is!

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times."
— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—"
— William Wordsworth, The Prelude

Both of those quotes are based on the French Revolution, but that doesn't matter. Really. Youth always knows that this is their time, their time to grasp the rose, the pluck the flower from the nettle, to live with all the intensity of a thousand suns. That or they know that the whole world is against them, and nothing they can do will change it. It's later in life when people look back and go, well…

"My life has been mainly one of disappointments" - Almanzo Wilder (husband of Laura Ingalls Wilder) to his daughter Rose Wilder Lane in an interview taken in his old age in the 1930s.

Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder

And here's Rose Wilder Lane reminiscing of her youth in Old Home Town, p 23, published in 1935:

"It was a hard, narrow, relentless life. It was not comfortable. Nothing was made easy for us. We did not like work and we were not supposed to like it; we were supposed to work, and we did. We did not like discipline, so we suffered until we disciplined ourselves. We saw many things and many opportunities that we ardently wanted and could not pay for, so we did not get them, or got them only after stupendous, heartbreaking effort and self-denial, for debt was much harder to bear than deprivations."

And it was a hard life: the Wilders were happily married, but only one child, Rose, survived.  Both Laura and Almanzo got diphtheria which gave him a stroke and permanently damaged his strength and agility.  They lost repeated crops and finally had to leave DeSmet, South Dakota, to make a new home in Missouri. It was a life of hard, hard, hard work, and certainly not much of a financial profit to show for it. But they enough to live on, and were together for over 50 years... And that was the ideal, back then.  

***

I used to teach my students not just the dates of kings and wars and literature, politics, philosophy, and inventions, but as much social history as I could cram in about how people actually lived. (See The $3,500 Dollar Shirt)

For example, the Middle Ages, when (among nobility and royalty) the oldest son was the heir (unless, like Talleyrand, they were disabled)*, the second son was put into the church (whether they had a vocation or not), and the rest were either put out as pages or squires or into the church as well. The eldest daughter got the best match in the parish, unless she was disfigured in some way, and then she went into the convent along with her sisters (again, no vocation required). Frankly, medieval monasteries were the equivalent of a larder or a form of birth control – where you put all the extra children - or all the children for whatever reason - and left them there, unless / until they were needed.

But of course the nobility and royalty were the smallest percentage of the population. Most were peasants – try about 80% – and then there were merchants – about 10-15%. And again, your future was locked in as much as if you lived in caste-system India.

A peasant's only future was in being a peasant - unless they showed remarkable talent as an artist (like Pieter Breugel the Elder, Botticelli, or Caravaggio) or in some craft, or ran off/were conscripted to join the army/navy for war (see or read The Return of Martin Guerre)**. Women would marry another peasant, or – if unmarriageable for some reason or other – would become a servant. An exception was Joan of Arc, who had visions, and became a soldier and a saint in the service of Charles VII of France, and got executed as a witch for her pains.  

Towns, as always, were where the freedom from inevitability beckoned: people would run there, hoping to become an apprentice (which required a payment to the master teacher) or a servant in a wealthy house (which didn't).  Many, of course, ended up as beggars.  

And there was always the wilderness - the great forests that still existed and could hide more than Robin Hood and his merry men.  

And that really was everyone's life until the Industrial Revolution (jobs for women as well as men in the factories!) and then the technological revolution of the early 1900's, when the Model T (1908) and the radio (1920) made travel and entertainment widely available and affordable.  And advertising sprang up, seemingly out of nowhere, in the mid 1800s... and voila! Suddenly not only did all these new things exist, but people had to have them.

We have been changed, entirely, from a world in which most people simply accepted their lot and lived it, taking their pleasures as they found them:  

Peasant Dance by Breugel

But now we live in a world of choices, hopes, dreams, possibilities, all supplied to us through TV, movies, advertising, endless freaking advertising... And abundance. We live in a country where we can go to the grocery store, drugstore, hardware store, etc. and get anything we want. Or if we don't want to go out, we can do it all from our computers, and put it on our credit cards or Venmo or whatever the latest is.  

Today, most of us have central heat, air conditioning, lighting, plumbing, smartphones, televisions, computers, cars, food (pizza, hotdogs and donuts at every gas station, tacos, burgers, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, fried chicken and biscuits and whatever the latest craze is on every block), endless freaking entertainment 24/7, etc. We have choices about where we're going to eat, drink, work, and live, and what we're going to do (or not) for our living. Granted, it costs money. But we also have a lot of ways to make money, or to borrow it, some legal, some not. We've got it made.

But we want more.  

And almost every political race for almost 60 years has pushed the idea that we're unhappy and discontented and we should be, from Nixon's "This time, vote like your whole world depended on it" to Reagan's "It's Morning Again in America" to, of course, "Make America Great Again." And it's worked.

Because we want more.  

The most comfortable time and place to live in all of history - and for some, the richest as well - and it seems that everyone's seriously discontented most of the time, and feels that they're not doing / being / having enough.  We want more.  Even the billionaires want more.  And more.  And more...

***

So, what does all of this have to do with crime?  Simple.  When there is never enough, and you always need more than you have or are, well, anything can happen, from alcohol /drug /media addiction, to robberies, embezzlement, fraud, ponzi schemes, endless scams to try and drown out the feeling of utter failure… And when nothing else works, there's always suicide, murder, mass murder, and if you have enough influence or power, war.  

And the wealthy are actually just as insecure as (and apparently more greedy than) the rest of us:  They hoard every penny; they don't pay their bills.  They buy enough politicians and voila! no taxes, no regulations, no inspections.  Your employees sue you?  Take them to court... forever.  The employees will drop out first.  Hang on to every last penny no matter what.  J. Paul Getty, at one time the richest man in the world, when his grandson was kidnapped and he received a ransom note and an ear, refused to pay - he said he "couldn't afford it."  And when asked, how much money would it take to make him feel secure, said, "More." 

Probably the earliest novel about envy, greed, and shattered hopes is Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy".  Clyde Griffiths, born poor, working crap jobs, an having an affair with Roberta, another poor worker - and then he meets Sondra Finchley, the rich daughter of a factory owner, who likes him.  They date.  He wants to marry her; and he just might, except Roberta's pregnant.  What's a guy to do?  Murder...  (The 1951 film A Place in the Sun is probably the best adaptation of it: Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters...)

A less romantic take but just as classic (in its own way) is American Psycho:

Patrick Bateman: New card. What do you think?
Craig McDermott: Whoa-ho. Very nice. Look at that.
Patrick Bateman: Picked them up from the printer's yesterday.
David Van Patten: Good coloring.
Patrick Bateman: That's bone. And the lettering is something called Silian Rail.
David Van Patten: It's very cool, Bateman, but that's nothing. Look at this.
Timothy Bryce: That is really nice.
David Van Patten: Eggshell with Romalian type. What do you think?
Patrick Bateman: Nice.
Timothy Bryce: Jesus. That is really super. How'd a nitwit like you get so tasteful?
Patrick Bateman: [Thinking] I can't believe that Bryce prefers Van Patten's card to mine.
Timothy Bryce: But wait. You ain't seen nothin' yet. Raised lettering, pale nimbus. White.
Patrick Bateman: Impressive. Very nice.
David Van Patten: Hmm.
Patrick Bateman: Let's see Paul Allen's card.
Patrick Bateman: [Thinking] Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh, my God. It even has a watermark.
Luis Carruthers: Is something wrong, Patrick? You're sweating. (IMDB)

And then he's off to kill somebody… Anybody.  

Great expectations are very dangerous.

---

*Talleyrand. The eldest son of his house, he was put out to nurse in the countryside for his first few years (normal for the time; following the king was a full-time job) where he was permanently lamed in an accident. His parents then made his younger brother the heir, and put Talleyrand boy into the Church, where he became the most dissolute, loose-living, atheistic Catholic Bishop since the Borgia pope. He was also one of the few noblemen who survived the French Revolution AND the Directoire AND Napoleon AND the Bourbon Restoration… Tough and wily.  

**The Return of Martin Guerre - One of Gerard Depardieu's best roles.

---

Star-gazing in Seattle

 

In August my family went to Seattle for the World Science Fiction Conference. Worldcon is a huge annual event (more than 6,000 full members, plus hundreds more who dropped in for at least one of the five days).

A few of the panels I attended: *Why Anthologies?, *No Wrong Way to Write Folk Songs, *Bring on the Bad Guys,  *Alternative Histories from Outside the West, *Cascadia's Many Climates, *Growing Food and Eating in Space, *The Sounds of the Sound,  *An Hour of the Strange, Unusual, Creepy, and  *Home Recording for Non-Techies. 

A lot more than rehash discussions of Star Trek, huh?

I spent a few hours on the Information Desk answering questions for attendees (often the answer was "I don't know." Communication in an ever-changing environment of 6,000+ people is a challenge).  Notice in the picture that some brilliant soul wrote out all the FAQ's, and even put them in alphabetical order.  My people!

One of my favorite totally random moments: I was on an escalator going up while a man going down yelled at his phone: "Stop autocorrecting piroshkies!" Very good food around the Seattle Convention Center, by the way. And speaking of food, Anne Harlan Prather passed on a bit of advice she received for people with a lack of appetite: Eat brightly colored things. They are full of anti-oxidants. 

The Hugo Awards were given out.  They are similar to our Anthonys, voted on by the convention members. I mention this because the winner of Best Novel was The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett, which was also a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel, and how often does that happen?  I read it and it is terrific.  Think Nero Wolfe on a planet where most of the technology is based on vegetation.

Some actual titles panelists mentioned: Lesbians in Space: Where No Man Has Gone Before, 101 Horror Books to Read Before You're Murdered, Thyme Travelers, "Syphillis Sysiphus," My Tropey Life: How Pop Culture Stereotypes Make Disabled Lives Harder, and Unidentified Funny Objects.

A few panels deserve more discussion. One was "Is it Appropriation? Writing the Other."  Moderator  James Mendez Hodes said "A cultural consultant is when you hire someone to tell you you're a racist." Hodes is, of course, a cultural consultant. Panelists talked about outsiders "wearing the culture as a costume."

When asked for an example of cultural appropriation Annie Carl talked about  able-bodied actors playing disabled characters. (She noted that the blind engineer in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was played by a blind man. I might note that panelists also enthusiastically supported Killers of the flower Moon and Chief of War.) Gregg Castro talked about "Indian shopping," which is when writers looking for a Native American who will approve whatever they hope to write. Panelist K. Tempest Bradford runs an educational website, Writing the Other.  She noted that after a certain Beyonce song came out White friends asked her to explain it. "Am I the Beyonce whisperer?"  Shay Kauwe said, approximately, that writer friends will ask her "Can I do this?" when they should be asking "Should I do this? Why am I doing it?" 

I loved the Editing Pet Peeves panel.   Elektra Hammond won my heart by saying her number one complaint is authors who give characters similar names.  Yes!  Another panelist mentioned an author who sent a book pitch to 100 authors - listing them all in the "To" line.  There was a lengthy passionate discussion of hyphens vs em-dashes and en-dashes.  Heather Tracy: "When in doubt ask your copy editor. They will be happy to talk to you for an hour about em-dashes." Editor Atlin Merrick: "I have had new writers treat me like a servant." Also Merrick: "Read the guidelines and you're in the top 30%. Be easy to work with and you're in the top 10%. Send me humor you're in 5%."

The panel on anthologies was particularly interesting. One panelist called them "curated collections." Publisher William C. Tracy pointed out that they are more expensive, since so many writers need to be paid. A lot of them in the science fiction field are funded by kickstarters, with an average of $7500 being raised.  

Oh, and as for payment, here's a shocker.  Reckoning Magazine pays 15 cents per word, Clarkesworld almost as much. 

Come back in two weeks for my favorite quotations from the con.  Until then, keep watching the skies!

Breaking a Writing Rule to Humorous Effect

Two years ago, the fine folks at Crippen & Landru released an anthology called School of Hard Knox, in which all the stories broke one of the ten rules handed down by Father Ronald Knox back in the golden age of mysteries. Last year, I was pleased to be asked to contribute to the follow-up anthology, in which all the stories would break one of the twenty rules for writing detective stories handed down by golden age author S. S. Van Dine. That book, titled Double Crossing Van Dine, was released two weeks ago.

When Donna Andrews, one of the editors of these two anthologies (along with Greg Herren and Art Taylor), asked me to write a story, I quickly looked at the twenty rules to see which one might inspire me. As soon as I saw rule #3, my mind was off and running. This rule states:  

"There must be no love interest in the story. To introduce amour is to clutter up a purely intellectual experience with irrelevant sentiment. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar."

Heavens, we wouldn't want a little love--and lust--to gum up the works.

Or would we? 

What if, I thought, a private eye is hired by his next-door neighbor to solve a case dear to the PI's heart, but at the same time his ovulating wife is eager to get pregnant, and she keeps trying to lure him to bed. It is an amusing premise. I figured this scenario would drive Van Dine up the wall. It is exactly why he declared there should be no romance in detective stories--a desire for amour should not impede an investigation. 

But I wasn't done. I love writing funny stories, and I had an idea to ratchet up the humor: Every seductive step the wife takes gives her husband an idea for the next step he should take in his investigation. In the end, it is the wife's desire to distract her husband that leads him to solve the case. 

Take that, Van Dine! I think if he were to read this story, "Baby Love," he might decide he was a bit too harsh with rule #3. In the right circumstance, amour could be just what the detective needs.

I think Van Dine's ghost is working at the
fortune cookie factory.

I hope you will check out this anthology, which has a great list of contributors and an introduction by Catriona McPherson. The trade paperback version can be bought from the usual sources, as well as directly from the publisher. Just click here. (You also can purchase straight from the publisher a clothbound numbered edition--signed by the editors--with a Van Dine pastiche written by Jon L. Breen thrown in.) I believe an ebook version will be coming out soon too. 

Imaginary Friends

by Janice Law 

Like a lot of small children, I had an imaginary friend. Not surprisingly, since I was passionately fond of animals, mine was a Mr. Fox. On wet afternoons, I would go down the hall to what had once been a chambermaid's room and get into the dressing up box. As this included a moth eaten jacket of some indeterminate blond fur, I assume the contents came from the "big house" across from the estate garage that held our apartment. There was a variety of vintage dresses and hats with feathers and a necklace of green beads.

Attired in this ancient finery, I would make my way back down the dark wood paneled hall, knock on our kitchen door, and greet my mother with the formal curtesy Edwardian Scots women used: Good afternoon, Mrs. Law. 

Mother would, in turn, greet Mrs. Fox, who came in for milk and cookies and what my mom would call a wee natter.

I've thinking about imaginary friends, both childhood and literary lately, because Ray Wilde, one of my characters, seems unexpectedly to be hanging around, moving from a useful if ephemeral narrator ( "The House on Maple Street") to what recently became his fifth outing. He's becoming that peculiar being, an adult imaginary friend, which is one of several relationships writers can have with their characters.

There are writers, way more clever than I am, who know everything about their heroes, who write up their back stories, examine their genealogies, and honestly claim to have created their protagonists from start to finish. I suspect they are people who do not like surprises and who enjoy control over their creations and plots.

I take a different tack. Characters, whether sparked by invention, observation, or historical knowledge– and I have written examples of each– first appear casually. They are useful in presenting a story. They have an interesting voice and suggest interesting adventures, but they are one-offs, imaginary acquaintances, if you like. 

Characters like Eddie and Tony in "The Smart One" (now appearing in Crimes Against Nature) or Grant ( "Up and Gone" in a recent AHMM) whisper in some inner ear and then depart, almost certainly never to return. They are creatures of one particular story and have no life beyond it.

Converted mill

I thought that would be the case with Ray Wilde, my middle-aged private detective whose modest agency I set in one of our old eastern Connecticut mill towns. I needed a narrator for an idea I had about teen athlete steroid use, and it was not Ray, but the house of the title, ( "The House on Maple Street") that really jump-started the story.

Basically, I knew nothing about Ray beyond his profession, his past work as a cop in a larger town, the make of his car, the condition of one damaged knee, and his attitude of tolerant skepticism. I was surprised when he turned up again with a part-time bookkeeper and an older client who turned out to be most unusual. "The Client" later appeared in The Best Mystery Stories of 2021, so Ray rose in my estimation, although I still expected nothing more of him.

Clearly he had other ideas. "The Man from Hong Kong," appearing in the MarchApril issue of AHMM, is where I learned that Ray has interesting friends, quick reflexes, a long disused Glock, and an older home that probably needs work. What about his personal life? Significant others? Family?  I haven't a clue. We are not at that stage yet.

more Ray Wilde territory

Will we ever be is the question. All I know is that he keeps showing up. A story about a man who loves Halloween decorations has gone out and another story is even now in the computer. But Ray's a cagey fellow. Just this week, I learned that he pitched softball in the Twilight League; aside from that, his personal life remains opaque. I think, though, that we are now on good enough terms that I can consider him an imaginary friend, a grown up Mr. Fox.

There's Always A Catch

Because I work at home, I've been looking for opportunities to get out into the community and have some social contact with actual … um … what are they called again?

Right: PEOPLE.  I gotta write that down or something.

A couple of weeks ago, this quest led me to a book club meeting at my local independent bookstore (yes, those still exist, thankfully).  They meet monthly, and this month they were discussing one of my favorite books, a novel I'd rank high on the list of best American fiction of the last century: Joseph Heller's 1961 Catch-22.  Most of you are probably familiar with the book; for those who aren't, it's the story of an American bomber squadron stationed in Italy during World War II.  It's probably best known for its unconventional structure (the book jumps back in forth in time, in a way that's deliberately disorienting) and wild, slapstick humor, though the tragedy, pain and anguish of wartime are much in evidence.  In short, it's a good 'un.

I'm glad I went to the meeting, and I'll certainly be going back.  They were a charming, lively, intelligent group of about a dozen people.  They've obviously been meeting for a while and know each other well, but were welcoming and friendly with this newcomer.  I enjoyed myself thoroughly.  It turns out that getting out of the house is a good idea!

Here's the thing that surprised me, though: as a group, they hated the book.  The book that, once again, I love, and assumed most readers would.

It was too long (a number of them didn't finish it).  It was too repetitious, returning to the same events and themes multiple times.  They didn't think it was funny.  It was misogynistic.  With only a few exceptions, they didn't like the characters.  The kindest thing they could find to say about it was that it probably paved the way for later writers to handle such material better.

Now, I will concede that, in terms of gender, the book hasn't aged especially well.  Most of the significant female characters are prostitutes; those who aren't are still discussed mostly in terms of their actual or potential sexual activities and tastes.  When Heller introduces a male character, he starts by talking about the man's face and general emotional demeanor.  When he introduces a female character, he generally starts by talking about her breasts and sexual availability.  At one point Yossarian, the book's central character and most sympathetic figure, grabs a nurse in a way that in Heller's day probably counted as "harmless horseplay" and which today would be considered "sexual assault."

None of that looks very good through 2025 eyes.  On the other hand, the book is about a group of young men being subjected to the continual stress and terror of war; it's not surprising that when they get a weekend in Rome, they're not out looking for a knitting circle to join.

Rereading the book in preparation for the meeting, I actually found it even more relevant to today's issues than I had remembered.  I think it's fair to say that a fair number of the book's most reprehensible characters would be right at home in today's administration.  The book's great villain, Milo Minderbinder, is the embodiment of completely unfettered capitalism, a man for whom the only true God is profit.  Hmm.  If I thought about it real hard, that might remind me of more than a few folks regularly turning up in headlines today.

As I say, though, despite having a radically different opinion from anyone else in the group, I enjoyed the meeting a lot.  It's good to hear different opinions, and good to be reminded that there's no such thing as a text (or movie, or painting, or whatever) that is truly univerally beloved.  There are people who don't like Hamlet, people who don't like Citizen Kane, people who don't like Van Gogh, people who don't like Sherlock Holmes.  And that's okay.  As a writer, I can even see it as liberating.  You can't possibly please every reader, so just write what you want to.  The right readers will find it.

Have you had the experience of being startled by criticism of something you held in high esteem?  For that matter, do you belong to a book club?  And by all means, feel free to pass along other ideas for ways to get myself out in the world.  The walls, they do start to close in after a bit.

IN OTHER NEWS

One very social activity, of course, is Bouchercon, which will be starting its 2025 iteration in New Orleans shortly after this is posted.  To my great regret, I won't be able to attend this year, and I'll very much miss seeing all my mystery writing buddies (including a number of my fellow SleuthSayers) and the opportunity to meet new ones.  I hope everyone has a great time, and raise a glass to me if you get a chance.  With a little luck, I'll be seeing you all in Canada next year.

Now, while I won't be at the con, I do have a story in the 2025 Bouchercon anthology, Blood on the Bayou: Case Closed, published by Down & Out Books.  I'm thrilled to be included in the volume alongside a host of terrific writers, especially since, after eight straight rejections, this is the first time I've made the cut for a Bouchercon book.  My story, "Final Edit," is actually set at a convention very much like Bouchercon, and concerns a famous author who has crossed a number of moral lines.  If you're at the con, pick up a copy!  If not, there should be a way to order one soon from the usual suspects.

As long as I'm plugging stuff, I'll mention that I have a story, "High in that Ivory Tower," in the September/October issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, which should be on shelves now.  Last week also saw the release, from Down & Out, of Better Off Dead: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Elton John and Bernie Taupin, edited by D. M. Barr and including my story "All the Young Girls Love Alice."  Happy reading!

Oldies but Goodies

One of the favorite subjects of those (like me) who like to write mystery/crime short stories is the sad fact that there are so few current markets for that kind of fiction. Or at least fewer than there used to be. Don't get me wrong: I love the ones that are still around. I just wish there were more of them. I wish there were a thousand of them.

As for me, I didn't start writing for publication until the mid-'90s, which to some of you is a bit late--I don't remember, for example, the really old markets like Black Mask, Manhunt, Menace, Mike Shayne, Pursuit, and others. But I do know that between the time I started out and, say, five years ago, there were still a good many places out there for mystery/crime submissions. Some of them, bless their souls, were purely mystery markets and others were non-genre or different-genre or multi-genre magazines, but most would at least consider crime fiction submissions. (Remember, I'm talking about magazines right now, not anthologies.)

As I grow older, I find myself doing a lot of reminiscing, and in looking over my old writing records--submissions (many), acceptances (some), rejections (many)--I uncovered the names of a lot of long-defunct magazines that I've dealt with, and that were kind enough, over the years, to publish my stories. Some of them stayed around for a long time, some were only a flash in the pan, and some I probably killed because they closed up shop immediately after publishing my stuff. 

What surprised me most is that there were so many of these magazines. If you've been doing this for a while, as I have, some of these might hold some memories for you as well.

Anyone remember these publications?

Murderous Intent Mystery Magazine

Detective Mystery Stories

Over My Dead Body

Mystery Time

Grit

Orchard Press Mysteries

The Rex Stout Journal

Lines in the Sand

Short Stuff for Grown-Ups

Anterior Fiction Quarterly

Just a Moment

Pebbles

Green's Magazine

Red Herring Mystery Magazine

The Oak

Eureka Literary Magazine

Writer's Block Magazine

Western Digest

Spring Fantasy

Roswell Literary Review

Dream International Quarterly

Writers on the River

The Ultimate Writer

Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind (braille)

Nefarious

Enigma

Futures (later Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine)

Ancient Paths

Yellow Sticky Notes

Cenotaph

The Villager

Heist Magazine

Lost Worlds

Scavenger's Newsletter

The Mid-South Review

The Copperfield Review

T-Zero

Phoebe

The Pegasus Review

Crimestalker Casebook (which I understand will soon make a comeback)

Desert Voices

Mindprints

Penny Dreadful

Writer's Guidelines & News

The Taj Mahal Review

Antipodean SF

Setu

Simulacrum

Ethereal Gazette

Spinetingler Magazine

Champagne Shivers

Listen 

Apollo's Lyre

Scifantastic

50-Word Stories

Star*Line

Crime & Suspense E-Zine

Flashshot

Illya's Honey

Night Roses

Jupiter World Press

Flash Tales

Mouth Full of Bullets

Thirteen

Oxford So-and-So

Sniplets

Byline Magazine

Prairie Times

Deep South Magazine

Pages of Stories (Leigh, remember this one?)

Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine

The Big Adios

Flash Bang Mysteries

The Norwegian American

Bewildering Stories

Gathering Storm Magazine

Mystery Weekly (later Mystery Magazine)

Serial Magazine

Ficta Fabula

Allegory

Elixir Magazine

Fiction on the Web

Down & Out: The Magazine

Did any of you publish stories at any of those places? I'd like to hear about your experiences. Remember some of those long-ago editors--Babs Lakey, Margo Power, Cheri Jung, Rick Ollerman, Linda Hutton, Andrew McAleer, Tony Burton, BJ Bourg, Marvin Kaye? Any others? Some of them were wonderful.

One market that I didn't mention--Amazon Shorts--was more of a program than a magazine or anthology. It ran from (I think) 2005 until maybe 2010, and published 19 of my stories. Hated to see them go. Another great market was of course Untreed Reads, which is still here but under different leadership.

Before I close, I should certainly mention--and thank--some of those markets that are still around: Thema, Pleiades, The Strand, AHMM, EQMM, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Weekly, Crimeucopia, Tough, Shotgun Honey, Star Magazine (yes, Star is still alive and kickin'), Pulp Modern, Mysterical-E, Our Southern Memories, Mystery Tribune, Saddlebag Dispatches, Kings River Life, St. Anthony Messenger, Tales from the Moonlit Path, The Texas Gardener (Seeds), Hoosier Noir, Indelible, Frontier Tales, Punk Noir, The Saturday Evening Post, and Woman's World. There are of course others, but, again, I've listed those that I'm familiar with because they've published my stories.

Ah, memory lane. Nice place to visit, right? As for the present-- 

Thank God for the markets that have survived. May they live long and prosper!

The Slobbering Detective

New Years Eve sniffing dog.

A charming subset of cozy mysteries feature pets with magical powers. Truth is, dogs and cats don’t need an ounce of magic to do what they do. They are descended from a long line of predators whose only job was to track, kill, and eat prey. To perform that job on a daily basis, they were granted skills by nature that allowed them to carry out that task unerringly.

They needed to see in the dark. They needed to spot movement. They needed to hear over long distances. They needed a strong sense of smell. They needed speed and agility to reach that prey. And fangs and claws sharp enough to get the job done. Wolves hunt in packs. Cats were solitary hunters, which made sense since their prey was often too small to share.

By comparison, our ancestors evolved standing in trees, reaching for fruits and leaves. They’d grab something, and if the light was good they could determine if it was good to eat. To do that one innocuous task, those primates needed the following: to be able to stand upright; thumbs; soft, tactile fingertips to judge their meal’s tenderness; eyes that could judge color and ripeness at close quarters. In time, those nimble fingers were handy to make tools, and the focal length of those eyes helped them assess the facial expressions of loved ones and enemies.

If you’ve ever tossed a treat to your dog, you have had ample opportunity to assess the differences in our two species. When the dried liver hits the kitchen floor, the dog sniffs around for it until she locates and snarfs it. The whole time this is happening, you stand on the sidelines, rolling your eyes.

“It’s right in front of your face!” you say.

It is, but dogs don’t see well up close.

Beholding this, we humans feel smug.

Great Dane / Poodle mix.

Bred to retrieve, um, bears in bodies of water while looking poofy?

Yet when the sun goes down, our ability to see color—or anything, for that matter—declines. We’re useless and must retreat to a campfire or a well-lit room. If we didn’t do this 60,000 years ago, we would be just a delicious hunk of protoplasm wandering aimlessly in the dark.

At night, the dog’s vision doesn’t change much from its daytime vision. The common rap on them is that they’re color blind, but that’s not strictly true. The ability to see color varies breed to breed. They can see some colors; they just don’t need color to survive. Their ancestors hunted primarily at dawn and dusk. (They were—SAT word alert!—crepuscular.)

Bred to point birds.

Now: Bacon sniffing dog.

Dogs hear things up to four times farther away than human ears can. Their peripheral vision is optimized for long-distance movement, and they see parts of the light spectrum that we cannot bother with.

Every sense they have is exceedingly useful in low-light conditions. They spy something moving, they smell something alien or tasty, they hear footfalls—and they’re off. Thank goodness for backyard fences.

Until very recently, dogs thought you and I had bad taste in nighttime entertainment. When humans watched movies on analog TV sets, all those little frames of film moved so fast that our eyes—which, mind you, move at the speed of low-hanging fruit—perceived them as moving images. Dogs didn’t see that. On cathode ray tube TVs, dogs saw one image that never moved. Occasionally, the picture flickered annoyingly.

Then digital TVs were invented, and suddenly dogs could actually glimpse what we were gawping at. Modern nature documentaries often evoke a response in dogs, probably because they’re hearing a rich soundtrack aligned with the image of moving animals. Your dog’s favorite thing to watch on TV? Big shock: other dogs.

Former military dog.

Now: Enjoys serene mountain views.

In my previous August-Dog-Days post, I talked about how good their noses are. 

They know when you’re about to walk in the door after a long day at work. Can they tell time? No—they know that your scent has declined in the house for eight hours, and you always walk in when your scent level has reached about 15 percent. Oh—and by long association they can tell the difference between the sound of your car engine and everyone else’s on your block.

They know when it’s bedtime because they can feel and smell the temperature dropping in the walls of your house.

If you walked in on a chef making beef stew, your sad excuse for a nose would perceive the simmering dish as a whole. “Oh,” you might say, “you’re making boeuf bourguignon.” Ever watch the Food Network? Even professional chefs have trouble identifying all the ingredients in a complex dish they have tasted. Their failure rate goes up if you blindfold them.

Rover walks in the kitchen and thinks, “How delightful! I smell (cooked) beef, onions, carrots, celery, red wine, all in fragrant abundance! Oh—and is that a bay leaf? When are we eating?”

In other words, dog noses are precise enough to detect each scent independent of others. They’re not thrown off if one ingredient has been combined with something else.

Which is why they are so useful when issued a gold shield.

Bred to burrow into tunnels and kill badgers.
Now: enjoys traveling in large purses.

It matters not a whit that the perp packed fifty kilos of cocaine in a giant crate of coffee. A police dog smells both scents equally well.

Trainers have tried to obscure the scents of various explosives by dousing them with perfume, swaddling them with dirty socks or—gag—dirty baby diapers. K-9 cops, God bless them, smell right through all that crap.

Drug-sniffing dogs routinely locate waterproof bags of drugs in the gas tanks of vehicles where smugglers cleverly thought they could cache them. Surely, that noxious smell of gas would “throw off” the dogs, the smugglers thought. Yeah, no.

It’s true canines don’t like the smell of citrus fruits or citronella, but that won’t stop them from doing the job they were trained to do.

When asked to ID a suspect in a traditional lineup, humans—using their primate-endowed visual gift for assessing, ahem, fruit and enemies—pick out the perp with a fifty-five percent (or less) accuracy. A dog who has been allowed to sniff around the crime scene can sniff out the suspect who fled from that site with 80 percent accuracy. If they fail, it’s probably for the prosaic reason that, in the aggregate, we humans stink alike.

Bred to hunt varmints underground.

Terra = earth, hence terrier.

Now: A hit at all the coffee bars.

Last time, I mentioned how, in the classic fleeing suspect scenario, bloodhounds work the trail by sticking their noses to the ground while their marvelously floppy ears stir up human dander. Air-scenting breeds do the opposite: they lift their noses to the air to catch what’s passing by.

Those are the breeds used for search-and-rescue work. Cadaver dogs, trained to detect decomposing human flesh, can do their job even when the murderer has weighed down the remains and dumped them in a body of water. When a killer finally confesses to the crime but can’t quite remember exactly where he buried the remains, cadaver dogs point the way. In some cases, cadaver dogs have located remains long entombed, Poe-style, in the cavities of walls.

Besides Dr. Stanley Coren, the psychologist whose books I have consulted to write these two August posts, I have also enjoyed the work of Dr. Alexandra Horowitz, whose dog books routinely hit the bestseller lists. She works at her own dog cognition lab in New York City. In one of her books she observes that researchers know more about lab mice, rats, guinea pigs, and even rabbits than they do about canines, who are the second-most employed species on the planet. This probably has something to do with the complexities and costs of rearing and studying large animals in labs.

That said, besides K-9 patrol dogs and the specialist animals I’ve mentioned, there are protection dogs, seeing-eye dogs, therapy dogs, and emotional support animals. Those are the givens most people would be able to rattle off.

But there are so many others.

Autism service dogs are trained to help autistic individuals, often children, stay safe in their homes and schools, blocking them, say, if they are about to do something that would harm themselves.

Mobility service dogs help disabled folks open kitchen cabinets, pick up dropped items, turn switches on and off in the home, and perform other essential work.

Seizure response dogs have been trained to bark for help, press “lifeline” buttons to summon assistance, or retrieve a phone when their owner experiences a seizure.

Seizure alert dogs, by contrast, have been trained to anticipate when a seizure is about to happen, alerting their owner to take medication.

Conservation protection dogs protect game on wildlife preserves and assist in spotting poachers.

Arson-sniffing dogs have been trained to detect the remains of flammable liquids and other compounds used to torch a property. Even though accelerants have a tendency to evaporate, a dog can smell it for at least 18 days later, which is usually long enough for the damaged site to be stabilized and permit entry and a careful, walk-through inspection.

Natural gas-sniffing dogs are trained to detect gas leaks in pipelines.

Termite-sniffing dogs do a better job of finding infestations than human pest control experts.

Gypsy moth-sniffing dogs root out nests of these pests that could potentially decimate nursery plant stock or forests.

Beehive-sniffing dogs root out the weird diseases and pests that can infect and destroy bee populations. 

Mold and mildew-sniffing dogs pinpoint the locations of growths that are making people sick in a home or apartment complexes.

In hospital and lab settings, dogs have detected prostate cancer from urine samples and tuberculosis from slides containing human saliva.

No doubt they could do so much more, but using these marvelous creatures to perform such highly specific work always collides with an unavoidable triple whammy. They’re expensive to train, expensive to buy and keep once trained, and their lives are brutally short. A trained K-9 might well cost an agency $50,000 before its new owners buy it a bowl of kibble. For kicks, I priced out body armor vests for dogs—$1,049 to $1,200 pop. That’s before you spring for the protective doggie eye goggles, protective ear muffs, and rappelling gear. (Well, you have to use something to lower a search-and-rescue dog into a canyon to rescue those foolish hikers who always go missing, don’t you?)

For a while there, I dug deep into the world of mystery writers who feature K-9 cops their books. Some have online stores where you can buy bundles of their books along with dog-themed merch for fans and their animals alike. I have listened to podcasts with these authors, and even enjoyed mysteries where entire scenes were written from the dog’s point of view.

Hands down, dogs are the best people. They enrich our lives and we simply don’t deserve them. And that is why I believe the smartest thing a writer of crime fiction can do is stick a picture of a cat on the cover of their books. Trust me—the dogs in your life will still love you.

* * *

Most of the factoids in this piece came from:

How Dogs Think: What the World Looks Like to Them and Why They Act the Way They Do, by Stanley Coren.

Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, by Alexandra Horowitz.

See you in three weeks, when we return to everyone’s favorite species—humans!

Joe

josephdagnese.com