Transformations

Back in the dark ages when I was first writing, most mysteries from the major houses appeared in hardback, destined for what was called the "library trade." Libraries were huge consumers of mysteries, and their book orders guaranteed a modest but reliable profit for the writer. 

Back then, our hope was to go into paperback, the new mass market offerings that promised a wider audience and, possibly, real money. Of course, this market was competitive, and even more competitive for women writers, because the big publishing houses were leery of supporting too many female authors.

With a few sterling exceptions, mysteries and thrillers were thought to be male territory, and I remember my then agent reporting that a major New York house had turned down my work on the grounds that "they already had their female mystery writer."

Times change. Now there are vast numbers of notable – and published – women writers, and ebooks, print on demand, self published, and trade paperbacks have joined mass market paperbacks. While the big movie deal remains as elusive as ever, the voracious streaming services have provided new possibilities.

In the process, outlets like Netflix and HBO have come up with a new way of delivering mystery entertainment: serials consisting of six to eight - or more- episodes that the producers hope will be binge worthy. I have enjoyed several of these lately, but significantly, all were based on unfamiliar authors and books.

The Netflix series, The Survivors, was a different matter. I have admired Australian writer Jane Harper for her clever plotting and efficient style. She also has a real mastery of setting, especially in her descriptions of the devastating fires that ravage the continent. As I had somehow missed the novel when it was released, I was eager to see the series.

I lasted two episodes. Had I not been familiar with the author, I think I would have found the video series diverting. The sea off Tasmania looks suitably threatening, the cast is attractive, and the actors are decent, with Robyn Malcolm and Damien Garvey doing especially good work as the protagonist's parents. Long happily married, Brian is slipping into dementia, leaving Verity, his devoted wife, grieving and raging and unable to stop blaming their visiting son, Elliot, for his adored older brother's death. 

Malcolm and Garvey have been given meaty rolls, and they dominate every scene they are in. They get the big emotions and the sometimes outrageous behavior, while the central characters, Elliot and his partner, Mia, come off as rather passive and colorless.

I was curious about that and when I secured the novel from our local library, I understood why. In the novel, Elliot, returning to the island after a number of years away, is our window into events. He is our observer and also, because of a grim past history, the catalyst for reminiscence, nostalgia, hostility, and grief. In print, with a slow but relentless build up of unease and unpleasantness, he works fine. 

The video is another matter. A series, just like the old time Perils of Pauline, needs an eye-catching opening, preferably for each episode. I must admit the initial scene in The Survivors, a swimmer trapped in a sea cave, is impressive. A successful serial also needs a cliff hanger at the end of each installment, dual requirements that give the episodes their characteristic rhythm.

This is perhaps why I found The Survivors, and a number of its competitors, a curious mixture, at once faster and slower than print. On the one hand, the action and the emotions are ramped up, on the other, the pacing often seems slow, with scenes needlessly elongated or clearly inserted as filler before some twist or revelation.

Of course, visibility on a major streaming service opens up a range of possibilities for a mystery writer, but at the risk of sounding terminally old fashioned, I suspect some books–and some writers– are better served by print.

Want a Story Prompt? Deliver the Mail

Jim Thomsen is a writer and editor—and mail carrier—who lives in a small town in western Washington state. He edited the Seattle-centric crime-fiction anthology The Killing Rain. This is the second time he wrote a piece on Facebook that was so fascinating I asked him to expand it for SleuthSayers. Enjoy.

— Rob

---

Want a Story Prompt? Deliver the Mail

by Jim Thomsen

I rang twice.

She opened the door, wrapped in a towel with not much beneath but a bathing suit.

“Good morning, ma’am,” I said. “I’m your mail carrier. I have a certified letter that needs a signature.”

I showed her the screen on my blue USPS handheld scanner and handed her the stylus attached to it.

She reached for the scanner as well, but the towel started to slip, and she snatched at it.

“Could you hold it for me? I’ve only got one hand free.”

The towel? I almost blurted out.

“The screen thing, I mean,” she said with a self-conscious laugh.

I did so, meaning that I had to stand less than two feet away from her.

She scrawled, and sighed in frustration as the combination of slippery stylus and small screen teamed to make her signature less than legible. Every now and then, she looked at me. At last, she handed it back. “I’m not sure that’s very good,” she said. “I might have to do this inside.”

“I can wait,” I said from the doorway.

“You can come in.”

“Um. I’ll wait here.”

She gave me a long look, then sat in a living-room chair, re-tucking her towel, and bent over the scanner. A moment later, she got up again and handed it back to me.

“Sorry about that,” she said.

I looked at the scanner. Illegible scratch, but the signature field was filled. I smiled. “That’ll do.”

I turned to go, sensing that she was watching me as I started to retreat down her porch steps and back toward where my mail van was idling.

“Wait,” she said.

I turned back, heart beating a little bit faster.

“My letter?”

***

I am a mailman. I don’t particularly want to be. But, much like Stephen Starring Grant, author of the recent hit memoir Mailman, I’m forced into it by financial circumstance. For the last sixteen years, I’ve made my living as a book editor, following twenty-five years as a newspaper journalist. At least, I did, until my business abruptly collapsed at the time of last November’s election. I spent months trying to revive it, but after sputtering along and slowly draining my modest savings along the way, it was, sadly, time to find a “job-job.” It was dismaying to find that there wasn’t much I could do—or would want to do, a few months shy of my sixtieth birthday. I briefly explored taking a part-time newspaper gig, but the company wouldn’t budge off its barely-above-minimum-wage wage. The job listings on Indeed were bleak—lots of openings, but mostly for Amazon delivery drivers, night security personnel, and home healthcare workers.

Then I came across an Indeed listing for mail delivery workers in my small town on Puget Sound and, with a heavy sigh, filled out the application. I soon got a call. The job was not with USPS, but for a contractor called USA Mail, with an offer for a job with a flat daily wage: $150 a day, whether the day was six hours long (rare, but it happens once in a great while) or nine hours (less rare).

But the work had some appeal. I could come into the post office as late or as early as I wanted (within reason, though I usually show up between 6:45 a.m. and 7:15 a.m.). And from then on, there was a comforting routine: case the mail, sort the packages, load everything in a battered minivan repurposed with-right-hand-wheel drive, and deliver along the route. When I’m done, I’m done, and every next day is a new day. I don’t much have to deal with office politics, and I can dress as shabbily as I want (and I want).

Plus, it’s a profession that was practiced by some of our finest creative minds. Charles Bukowski delivered mail in LA, and even wrote a novel about it, Post Office. So did one of my favorite musicians, John Prine, not coincidentally one of our finest observers of the American human condition. Walt Disney did it, as did William Faulkner. Maybe this would be the salt-of-the-earth experience that would get my own novel off the ground. As Bukowski wrote in his novel: “Well, you had to work somewhere. So you accepted what there was. This was the wisdom of the slave.”

So, after passing a drug test—after being told, told my relief, that they were more worried about meth and heroin use than the CBD gummies I take to help me sleep—and a criminal background check, I started work in mid-April of this year. (Apparently, passing those tests is a high bar here, and my supervisor regularly laments not being able to scrape up recruits of sufficient pristinity.)

It’s been … not bad. A little stressful, as the bar is high for accuracy of service—tracked by the aforementioned scanner, which must be used on every package I deliver, and god help you if there’s a discrepancy between what the scanner thinks you should have delivered and what you actually delivered, which can lead to long and sometimes sharp discussions after the route with whoever sits in the postmaster’s seat.

It speaks to a baseline sense of pride in doing the job right, which I share with my coworkers; the same pride I take in catching every error in a client’s novel manuscript. It’s a big deal, and no less than a national trust: Getting what people want and expect into their hands when they want and expect it, and never letting them see how elaborately that particular sausage is made along the way.

But mostly it’s mundane, soothing routine.

***

What I like best about the job, as someone who works in the creative writing world, is how each day is a well-primed firing pin for the storyteller’s imagination. The route itself sets that particular table: my town has a dual nature, not unlike that of good and evil, and it’s easy to see only the good until you scratch beneath that shimmering surface. The waterfront is packed with high-end homes with highly serendipitous views. My mail route touches on a sliver on that, and a larger slice of sightly-above-middle-class basic-suburban neighborhoods. But, go inland a few miles, and I enter a Pacific Northwest edition of Deliveranceville: a world of long twisting dirt lanes, deep woods, dead vehicles, flapping tarps, sagging fences, lichen-crusted sidings, and dogs whose vicious barks may not be worse than their bites. There’s always stacks of lumber and mechanical parts. Rusting appliances. Aggressive PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. And American flags. Always. Lots and lots of American flags.

In addition to The Bath Towel Woman, I’ve encountered:

• A man who always jogs out to my mail van the minute I pull inside a fence and holds up a hand—go no farther!—and takes his packages before I can step out of the truck for an approach to his porch. There’s always the squalling of compressors and saws and pressure hoses in the deep background, and he aways seems to position himself in a way that seems meant to minimize what I can see. After taking the packages, he always points to a dirt-track turnaround so that I don’t advance an inch further onto his land. What he’s doing—and what he doesn’t want me to detect—are open questions that pinball around in my brain pan the remainder of the route. I always get images of the meth lab being built beneath the industrial laundry in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
• A farmhouse that always makes me think of the Clutter family home from In Cold Blood. It’s shabby but well-kept in a way that calls to mind a vacuum-sealed corpse. I deliver packages here maybe twice a week, and every single time, as I approach the weathered porch steps, I see a curtain twitch in an upstairs window, but never a face or even a silhouette. It brings to mind a line from a 1970s horror movie: “Why is Grandma’s room locked from the outside?” Or maybe, I think, it’s a real-life Flowers in the Attic. Should I try to break in and rescue the children?
• The Hamptons House. At the very end of one of those deep dark winding lanes is a tall, ornate wrought-iron gate, with a locker for parcels off to one side to which I deliver perhaps every other day. The approach passes almost nothing but tarpatoriums, as I call them. But, by peering through a tiny break in the evergreens, I catch a glimpse of a sprawling manor on at least twenty acres that wouldn’t look out of place on a Kennedy compound in Kennebunkport. Who are these people? What do they do? And why did they build here in my county’s version of West Virginia?
• The War of the Roses House. I rarely deal with actual residents on my route, which I understand—why come out to make excruciating small talk with a stranger on your front steps?—but on one occasion, the door flew open as I delivered a package and the next thing I knew, I was almost nose-to-nose with a man who was almost purple with rage, who looked like a cyst ready to rupture. For the next few minutes, I’m slowly backing away from a man who thrusts a pile of mail in my face, screaming that his ex-wife doesn’t live here anymore, g**dammit, and it’s very upsetting to get mail addressed to that f***ing c**t, and why am I rubbing his nose in his pain?

Tell me that line isn’t a launching pad for at least a million suspense-story permutations.

***

Like Stephen Starring Grant, I may not last a year in this job—if that. My book-editing business is coming back, and my days—and nights and weekends—are loaded with work. But can I trust that it will be sustainable? I can’t, at least not yet. So I will probably stick with the route and its guaranteed monthly check at least until after the holidays, a stretch of the year that my post-office colleagues speak about in a roundabout way in singularly intimidating tones.

But I’ll admit that, however long it lasts, when I finally stop delivering the mail, I’ll miss it in many ways. I’ll miss getting paid on a regular timetable, miss getting to listen to audiobooks for the five or six hours a day I’m on the road. I’ll miss the soothing properties of pure routine, and the mentally sonorous feeling of getting to surrender the critical-thinking part of my brain to the perfection of pure process execution. And I’ll miss getting a rare window into how others live, where they live, and how they can’t help but reveal something of their most genuine selves in a way you wouldn’t get from seeing these people in public.

Home is where the heart is, but hone is also, perhaps, where the heart is darkest. Especially if I ring twice.

I like that. As, I imagine, any storyteller would.

Living the HI Life

This one may ramble a bit, folks, and the connection to writing mystery fiction may be a bit oblique--except in the sense that what I'm concerned about is, in part, the state of essentially all reading and writing. Earlier this month I had the chance to take a scenic train ride through the Rocky Mountains. It was breathtaking, and inspiring (in no small part because of the stories of the fierce, ongoing efforts by a lot of dedicated people to minimize and mitigate the ecological damage humans have done in that region).

One of my favorite things about it? The parts of the trip when the train was remote enough from any town, or deep enough in some canyon, that there was no Internet service. This seemed to cause some of my fellow travelers a touch of consternation, but I found it to be an almost physical relief. Being online started out as a luxury, then became a convenience, then a necessity, and now it's basically, for most people most of the time, an obligation.

For me, it was a pleasure to just sit back and watch the world go by, unconcerned with the digital "life" I was mercifully cut off from.

This experience got juxtaposed, in my mind, with the growing evidence that the use of AI is actively making people dumber. A lot of people are getting very concerned about this; there's more and more reason to think that becoming dependent on AI substantially reduces people's critical thinking and creative skills, and that it does so pretty quickly and pretty substantially. If you need a connection to writing, that's a pretty good one. People need critical thinking and creative skills to write. They need them to read, too, and the last thing we need right now is yet another reduction in the ever-shrinking percentage of the population interested in (or capable of) reading for pleasure.

I'm fifty-five years old. It seems to me that these have been, and continue to be, the dominant political and cultural trends of my lifetime, the things that have transformed the world I was becoming aware of fifty years ago into the world (and most specifically the US) that exists today:

• A massive redistribution of wealth upward, at the expense of education, healthcare, the environment, workers' rights, social mobility, infrastructure, and the arts.
• A movement away from direct engagement with the world and toward engagement with computer-driven simulations--first video games, then the internet (particularly social media), now AI, and, looming on the horizon, virtual reality.
• Skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness, particularly among young people.

These aren't really separate things. They reinforce and magnify each other. Depression and anxiety can start to seem like awfully rational reactions to a world in which your chances for real economic success are severely limited and you spend basically your entire life staring at screens.

I don't think there will be any real effort to mitigate the intellectual cost of AI. There's too much money to be made.

More importantly, the fact that it actively makes people stupider is, from certain points of view, awfully convenient. Critical thinking skills are inherently threatening to those who benefit from manipulating and exploiting the populace. Critical thinkers are less likely to vote against their own interests– or to choose not to vote at all. Critical thinkers don't support policies that further enrich the obscenely wealthy because they anticipate, for no coherent reason, someday being among them. Critical thinkers don't blame their problems on others because of their racial, political, sexual, or national identities.

Critical thinkers understand that fascism is not the same thing as patriotism. I'm as guilty of falling into the traps as anybody else. I, too, have the nasty habit of reaching for my phone in any idle moment. I have to actively resist buying video game systems because I know how addictive they can be for me. I know the endorphin rush of social media– something else I've learned to try to avoid, with only partial success.

Some days I swear I can feel my attention span shrinking. There's nothing I can really do to reverse all this on a cultural or collective level. All I can do is try to make decisions and take actions that move me, personally, in a different direction. All any of us can do is, whenever it's possible to do so, choose HI– Human Intelligence– over Artificial Intelligence.

So I'll go for a walk instead of falling into YouTube rabbit holes. I'll reach for an actual, physical book instead of my phone. And I'll keep writing, and have faith that there are people out there who still want to read things written by actual people. I'll try to choose, as much as I can, to lead a HI life.

I'm Pretty Sure This Book Tried to Kill Me: Writing the second book in a series

What is it about second books?  Anne R. Allen and I got musing about that, and this blog post was the result:

The second book of the Merry Widow Murder series, The Silent Film Star Murders, came out this year.  I'm pretty sure this book tried to kill me (some might say, rather appropriate for a crime series...)

It's not as if I'm a virgin to series.

 (Probably, I should reword that; I am a happily married woman, after all.) 

What I mean is,  I've done this before.  The Merry Widow is my 4th series.  The first three didn't kill me, so why should this darn book?

The trouble with second books is four-fold:

1.  The Expectations are HUGE.

We all dread the following review: "It was okay, but not as good as the first book."   

Everyone - and I do mean everyone -expects the second book will be just as good or better than the first.  In fact, they demand it.  You've set their high hopes with the first book.  If you didn't, then they wouldn't buy a second book in the first place.  And if they don't buy a second book, your publisher won't want a third.

I was lucky with the Rowena Through the Wall series.  The second book (Rowena and the Dark Lord) garnered better reviews than the first.

And I was even luckier with The Goddaughter's Revenge.  That novella (part of The Goddaughter series) won the Derringer and the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence.  Several more followed.

But will that luck hold?  I have no idea how Silent Film Star will do, compared to the first book, and the suspense may just kill me.

2.  You have to be a bit of a magician.

Meaning, you have to weave in enough backstory about the first book so that people who read this book without having read the first will not be lost. At the same time, you have to weave backstory in a way that is quick and lively, so as not to bore the people who read the first book.  

It's a learned skill you get better at with practice.

 3.  You lose an important suspense element of stand-alone books.

The trouble with a crime series is your protagonist must survive to be in the next book.  Whatever happens, your protagonist must live through it.  And if your reader knows this is a series, they know this part. 

 For some readers, it's why they like series books.  They WANT the reassurance that they are not reading for four hours, just to find out their beloved protagonist kicks the bucket in the end.  I'm in that category.  I don't like books that end badly for the main character.

BUT - it also means an important element of surprise has been eliminated from the story.  In a stand-alone, when you start reading, you won't know the reason it's a stand-alone.  Could be the main character didn't survive to be in another story.  That adds suspense.

4.  What about Character Arc?

If you study how to write a novel, you will probably come across the concept of Character Arc.  Basically, it means that by the end of the book, your protagonist should be changed in some way by his experiences in the story.  

A classic example would be:  A woman is a very nice, kind, unassuming mother.  But then her child is kidnapped and she becomes a fierce fighter in his recovery, finding violence in her that she didn't know possible.

That's an extreme example. You can probably remember a popular sci-fi movie with this theme.  

Our problem with series books: some lit courses teach that every book should have a character arc.

Trouble is, if you have six book series, is your character going to change six times in six different ways?  That becomes impossible, if not darn silly.

So in a series,  I try to make my characters become even more what they are.  As the series grows, they become even more determined in their goals, more devoted to their individual causes.  And in The Merry Widow Murders series, more determined to see justice done, whether inside or outside the law.

 SO WHY DO WE DO IT?

By now, any reasonable person must be wondering why anyone would want to write a series, taking into the account above.

For that, I can come up with two reasons:

1. We're insane.
2. We cannot leave our beloved characters behind.

I don't know about the first, but the second is me.  I'm a suck.  I love my characters like wayward children.  They stay in my mind for years and years, begging me to write more about them.  I've had readers tell me that reading the next book in The Goddaughter series was like revisiting old friends.

So forgive me now if I leave this post.  I'm just finishing up book 3, and my characters are calling.
 

 

Compared to Agatha Christie by The Toronto Star, Melodie Campbell hopes to survive book 3. In the meantime, you can see how she survived the above by ordering book 2, The Silent Film Star Murders.  Available at all the usual suspects (Barnes&Noble, Chapters/Indigo, Amazon, etc.)

I'm Only Here To Steal Your Stuff

20th Century Fox

Everyone remembers the burglars from the Home Alone movies. Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern scope out a tony Chicago suburb to see who's going to be gone at Christmas. Pesci even disguises himself as a cop stopping by to warn neighbors of a burglar in the area. This is a clever variation on the murderer who joins the search party for his victim. Of course, little did they realize one eight-year-old boy would get left behind and have to fend for himself. Macaulay Culkin is an early Millennial, raised the same as most Gen X'rs. As a Gen X'r myself, I must warn potential criminals how we were raised on a lifetime of Warner Brothers cartoons, specifically Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the Roadrunner. You, oh would-be felon, are not even Elmer Fudd in this equation. You are Wile E. Coyote. This is the part where you hold up a sign that says, "Yikes!"

Up until Joe and Daniel get their asses handed to them by a Warner Brothers-trained kid who's already had to fend for himself for a week, they're actually quite the professionals. Joe brazenly impersonates a police officer to get potential victims to reveal their holiday plans, and they methodically hit a list of homes on the list. But...

Burglars aren't always the brightest bulbs in the bunch, both in fiction and in real life. Daniel Stern decides to stop up the kitchen sink in each house and leave the water running. He says it's their calling card. "We're the wet bandits!" Uh huh. You're leaving a trail of evidence, my friend. Never mind the kid in one of your target houses who would grow up to have a fine career in Acme's R&D department. All they needed was the attempt to clog little Kevin's kitchen sink before the kid unleashes cartoon Armageddon on them, and police can go back to every house with flood damage in the neighborhood.

But it seems to be a regular occurrence. Full crews of burglars work with amazing precision. Recently, Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow was burglarized while he was playing. Here in Cincinnati, where he lives. I've been by his house before, long before he owned it. The houses in that particular neighborhood are not easy to get to nor easy to penetrate. But penetrate they did. And this crew worked methodically. They had already gone through homes in Indian Hill, where Cincinnati's wealthy live. Burrow was a ripe target because it's a big house. But...

Joe Burrow is a high-profile target. Rob the vice president of marketing for Proctor & Gamble, and while the Indian Hill Rangers will do their best to catch the culprits, it's not going to make the news. Rob a Bengals player who played in a Superbowl and is frequently featured nationally on ESPN and Fox Sports, and all four local news stations and probably national news outlets, and suddenly you find out why La Cosa Nostra has a strict code of silence. Attention brings the law. 

Worse, we are in an era hostile to foreigners. The burglars in question were from Chile. Make of that bit of nonsense what you will. But now, in a case that might have involved a state bureau of investigation or a sheriff's department to coordinate among difference forces, and probably the FBI, you have now attracted ICE. Good or ill, that's most definitely unwanted attention. 

And then they took selfies with all the swag they stole from Joe Burrow. Nice. Because posting to social media means you don't have to pay for all that flood damage. 

I'm currently working on a short story where a drywall crew is robbing homes in a tony lakeside village. They have access to their victims' homes, so they use the victims' own tools to raid the houses, then lock the doors behind them. But...

Most of the victims have Costco memberships, and a lot of recent hauls from the warehouse store disappear, along with all the beer in the fridge. It unravels when one crew member tries to disable an electrical substation on the night of a thunderstorm to cover their shutting off the power to the houses. Unfortunately, there's this thing called arc flashover that can reduce a person to a blackened cinder while another is pulled over with boxes of snacks in nice Costco-sized boxes and several cases of beer. Oops.

Burglary is proof clever and smart are not exactly the same thing.  

Crime Scene Comix Case 2025-09-035, Spaced Out

Once again we highlight our criminally favorite cartoonist, Future Thought channel of YouTube. We love the sausage-shaped Shifty, a Minion gone bad.

Yikes! In this Crime Time episode, only one outcome is possible.

 

 

 

 

© www.FutureThought.tv

 

That’s today’s crime cinema. Hope you enjoyed the show. Be sure to visit Future Thought YouTube channel.

Seize the Day

I changed my regular morning take-out order the other day, after many, many mornings of exactly the same, and it reminded me, out of the blue, of the opening of Heinrich Böll’s postwar novel, Billiards at Half-Past Nine.  The new guy in town, an architect, goes to the local café for breakfast, and since it’s his first time, orders something a little eccentric, trying to make an impression.  But this act of daring comes back to haunt him, because now he’s expected to get the same damn thing for breakfast for the next sixty years.  Böll also goes into a very funny sidebar about how Germans will never ask the price, when it’s not listed on the menu, for fear of embarrassing themselves.  And a common daily routine offhandedly becomes a reflection on the national character. 

Billiards at Half-Past Nine is in some ways an analog of Irwin Shaw’s novel Voices of a Summer Day.  Böll published his book in 1959, Shaw published his in 1965.  Böll was born in 1917, Shaw in 1913.  Both served in the war, Böll with the Wehrmacht, Shaw with the U.S. Army.  Both of them wrote about their experiences in the war, Böll with The Train Was on Time, Shaw with The Young Lions, and both had critical and commercial success.  (Shaw, of course, had enormous commercial success later on, with an extra helping of critical schadenfreude.)  Billiards at Half-Past Nine and Voices of a Summer Day are mid-career novels, the two writers stretching their legs but not showing strain, using a comfortable voice but not falling into lazy habits of mind.  Structurally, very similar, both books generational, but the narrative arc a single day, told in flashback and multiple POV.  In other words, very fluid and fluent, with a lot of grace notes - Dickensian, even, meant very much as a compliment, and not to imply cluttered.  The books are actually terrifically clean, tight and exact and effective, like a good pitcher in the sixth inning. 

Böll is also that generation of German writers who lived through Nazism and the war, and wrote what might be called stories of atonement, although the Germans call it die Trümmerliteratur, literature of the rubble.  Günter Grass is another – born in 1927, Grass was 17 when he was drafted into the Waffen-SS, an admission he made long afterwards – and German historical guilt is his subject.  Hans Hellmut Kirst, author of Night of the Generals, was born in East Prussia in 1914, and was not only in the military, but was a Nazi party-member.  Nobody wants to admit they’re in a club of murderers, he later said.  His books are often comically horrific, with fervent wartime Nazis effortlessly putting on sheep’s clothing for the gullible Yanks. 

 

I’ve talked about German “atonement” before.  We’d do well to remember that an entire generation of younger Germans wanted nothing whatsoever to do with regret, or war guilt, or the whole concept of collective responsibility.  They thought the Nazis were their parents’ problem, not theirs.  In the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s, when Baader-Meinhof was active, the young German Left accused the government of being riddled with Nazis – the chancellor, Kurt Kiesinger, had in fact been a party member, so the Left wasn’t all that far wrong.  My point here, is that those kids indulged their own unexamined moral superiority.  We have a similar blind spot in white America about the legacy of black slavery.  The sentiment is expressed the same way, I was never a Nazi, or I never owned slaves.  It’s got nothing to do with me, in other words.  But white Americans are the residual legatees of slavery; we’ve benefited from a system of apartheid and class warfare.  And black Americans have carried the burden of Jim Crow and race hatred.  You can’t wish it away.  American writers like Twain and Faulkner have made the case that slavery is our Original Sin, and I think much the same can be said about the historical weight of Nazism.  Writers like Böll, and Grass, and Kirst have made it their central concern to put it front-and-center in contemporary German consciousness. 

Speaking of Baader-Meinhof – I’ve said this before, too - it’s a sign of maturing political health in the German social psyche, that the toxic hand-me-downs of that era, crocodile tears over the Red Army faction, the culture of betrayal encouraged by the Stasi, the self-satisfaction of bourgeois West Germans and their condescension to Ossis, is all fair game.  I was startled when the movie Downfall was released, about Hitler in the bunker, and even more so by The Lives of Others, about the brute surveillance regime in East Germany.  In a less reflective national mood, they never would have been made.  Germans aren’t much given to inner curiosity or self-doubt, any more than Americans are. 

Only the weak accommodate history.  The bold march on. 

The Extra Voice

Author Sherry Harris is a good friend (and editing client) of mine. Recently, she mentioned how my prior edits continue to influence her to this day, and we realized it might be helpful for Sherry to share some of my past comments/concerns in case any of you have the same writing issues. So I invited her to be our guest blogger today. Take it away, Sherry!

— Barb Goffman

 

The Extra Voice

by Sherry Harris

All writers have voices in their head, but I have an extra one. It's Barb Goffman's. She edited twelve of my thirteen published books, one that isn't published, and all the short stories I've written. So, trust me, when I'm writing, Barb is right there with me. Below are some of the things she's saying:

Not enough sleuthing – What, Barb? I write mysteries; of course there's sleuthing. But apparently, in every third book or so, there isn't! I get distracted by a relationship or a subplot and forget the main point of the book--that my protagonist has a mystery to solve. Here's a comment Barb made when she edited Rum and Choke: "I've already mentioned this, but to flesh it out, a large majority of the book (at least it felt like a large majority) involved Chloe helping Ann search for the treasure. The rest of the book had a lot of subplots, and sleuthing into Enrique's murder felt like one of them. Obviously, that's a problem."

Are you writing a travelogue? – Apparently, I was. In an early book, I sent Sarah from her little town of Ellington, which is about fifteen miles northwest of Boston, to the North End of Boston. I love Boston. I love the North End. It took Sarah two pages to make it from the T by the Government Center in Boston to the North End, which is about a ten-minute walk. In the original version I waxed on about the history of Faneuil Hall and its famous golden grasshopper weather vane. Sarah stopped at the Holocaust Memorial and at Union Oyster House. She padded across the cobblestone street and went by Mike's Pastries before she arrived at her destination. In the final version of the book, her walk was one paragraph, as much as it pained me to delete so much detail about my beloved Boston. Sigh, Barb was right. Now when I'm waxing on about something in a first draft, it gets axed by the second one.

She needs to react – I'm reacting to this voice. Both of my series have female protagonists, and this bit of advice has made a huge difference in my writing. Find a dead body? You need a reaction. Someone say something startling? Your protagonist has to think something or say something or make an expression that gives away their thoughts to the reader. This seemingly simple statement is key to writing a book with more emotional depth. Now, it drives me nuts when I read a book where the characters don't react.

Slow down – but the pace...  It's one of those rules of writing to slow down the fast-paced (action) scenes and speed up the slow ones. While my logical brain knows that, apparently my writing brain forgets it. BTW, reactions work in the fast scenes too.

Make it a full scene – all too often when I'm writing early drafts I jump to the next scene and start it with a line that summarizes something that happened since the last scene. It's fine to do it if what happened isn't anything important. However, in the book I just wrote, I found myself hearing Barb's voice telling me that the summary deserved its own scene. She was right. Again. 

When was the last time she ate? – I don't know. If your protagonist has kids or a pet, you can add fed/took care of them to the above. Ah, yes, meals. My protagonists can apparently go days without eating. And it's not that each meal needs to be a scene (see paragraph on description above), but characters can grab something as they go out the door, or stop for something, or it can be a scene if something important happens.

I could probably write ten more pages of examples of things Barb's voice is saying. Like, why is your character doing something, or why is that scene in there–just because the writing is pretty doesn't mean it has a place in the story. Thanks, Barb. Sigh. But if you have to have an extra voice in your head, I hope it's Barb's! 

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Sherry Harris (https://sherryharrisauthor.com) is the Agatha Award-nominated author of the Sarah Winston Garage Sale mystery series and the Chloe Jackson Sea Glass Saloon mysteries. She's published short stories in Edgar Allan Cozy, The Beat of Black Wings: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Joni Mitchell, Black Cat Weekly, Three Strikes--You're Dead, and Scattered, Smothered, Covered & Chunked: Crime Fiction Inspired by Waffle House. Sherry is a past president of Sisters in Crime and a member of Mystery Writers of America.

Ready, Set, Go.

You often hear, “The setting was so good it was another character.”

I get what they mean, but the pedant in me objects. No matter how well rendered, setting can never be a character, because a setting is a setting.

You can write a novel that could be set anywhere.

Some are simply vessels to contain all the other elements. Yet most fiction lives somewhere, and some settings can have an indispensable influence on character development and behavior. Paris in the 1920s. Needles, California. Mars.

I have this notion that culture and gravity are essentially the same.

Mighty forces so dominant and pervasive they go unnoticed during the day-to-day. Settings serve the same role. Below conscious thought, yet inescapingly shaping the outcome.

We know you can fail with a character, but can you screw up a setting?

It’s not easy, but one sure way is to overdo it. When a story is set in a tough part of town, I hate being constantly reminded just how bad it is. Everything smells foul, the food rotten, every guy’s a bad guy, the nuns spit tobacco and third graders keep .38s tucked in their Mary Janes. It’s worse when the characters trapped in these overwrought environments start reflecting on the ugliness of their situation. "Geez, Mick, this sure is a tough town.”

As with characters, settings benefit greatly from nuance.

As Paul McCartnery reminded us “There’s good and bad in everyone”, even if the ledger is lopsided one way or the other. If the characters stuck in the tent during a blizzard on Everest can’t snuggle into their sub-zero sleeping bags, at least once, I’ll let them complete the adventure without me.

If I write about a place, I have to have been there long enough to get a feel for all the sights, sounds and smells. I hear writers blithely declare that’s unnecessary when we have YouTube and video travelogues. This strategy’s doable, but it produces writing that’s phonier than a black wig on an octogenarian. Especially to those who live in your chosen location.

I edited a book once that had the protagonist spending some time in Hartford, Connecticut, a place I’ve hung around for about 40 years. Everything was off, including our major east-west highway that he had running north to south. I told him to fix all that stuff, which he found insulting.

“But it’s fiction!”

“Then don’t call it Hartford or we’ll have the insurance industry coming after us with pitchforks.”

My greatest admiration in this regard is for fantasy and science fiction of the world-building variety.

No one’s managed to travel to world for research, though a master of the form will really make you feel like they did. I’m far from expert in understanding this, but I think the key is having a basic frame of reference (Arrakis is really hot and dry, sort of like Saudi Arabia, Earthsea is wicked wet) that the authors extrapolate out to the extremes without slipping their moorings. It seems the most successful settings of the fantastical are also the most believable.

A lot of literary novels are set in academia, because lots of these writers are academics.

You can chart just how self-involved they are by the degree of blindness to their surroundings.

I’ve visited many serenely beautiful college campuses, often wondering how you can concentrate on organic chemistry when you have all these stately buildings and smoky little watering holes.

Literary academics, however, seem to be a hard lot, their aesthetic beings shriveled by existential angst.

Sure, you’re tormented because your wife is sleeping with a grad student and the dean of admissions, but you never noticed all that ivy?

Most of my books are set in the Hamptons, which means their characters are inevitably shaped and influenced by the distinctive social ecosystem in which they dwell.

You might have heard we have a lot of rich people out here. If you went by the The New York Times, whose panting devotion to the quirks and dispositions of these folks is a nearly daily obsession, you’d never know about our fire fighters, vacuum repairmen, cops, nurses, carpenters, bartenders, trans sexual abstract expressionists, fishermen, day laborers and auto mechanics, of which we have aplenty. As with the fashionable coterie, whom I mostly ignore, they are all characters who can only be entirely who they are because they live in the Hamptons.

If you’re going to plop your reader down somewhere, I think it’s fair to feed the imaginary senses a little bit, even in passing.

If you want to be reminded how even spare writing can fix you firmly into place, Hemingway’s short stories are worth another look. If lush abundance is more your cup of tea, I’d refer you to Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. Pretty strong tea – more like a witches brew concocted by Sheherazade.

Like Olympic figure skating or cutting dovetail joints, creating an effective setting is harder than it looks. Especially if your goal is to develop a work that doesn’t lazily fall back on convention and cliché.

Though I guess you could say that about anything

The Digital Detective, Pay the Piper II

Last episode saw our hero (cough, cough) under threat. We continue with…

Fury © Piper Aircraft

Escape from Loch Haven

Piper’s corporate director was psycho. The rat bastard was enjoying himself.

I turned on my heel and left his office. The programming staff took one look at my face.

“Oh, my God. What did he do?”

I told them. “I think he physically threatened me or at least wanted me to believe it.”

The staff stared at one another. “He’s ƒ-ing mental. Regular people don’t talk to one another like that. That stuff about the forests, probably just wants to scare you. He doesn’t have enough friends to pull off a mur– a threat.”

Jennifer said, “He wouldn’t dare, but why take a chance? God, this is so embarrassing. Welcome to the Chamber of Commerce.”

He wasn’t merely uncivil, he was uncivilized. “Your boss is a psychopath.”

Lock Haven, Pennsylvania

“How do we get you out of here?” one of the guys said.

Jennifer dialed the airport and spoke only a minute. “Manny wasn’t kidding. He’s informed the airport to turn you away on sight. He put the word out for company pilots not to help you.”

“Okay,” I said as implications began to sink in. “Surely some sensible VP will stop this.”

The staff said, “On a holiday weekend? All the executives are in Vero and spend less and less time here. You might not see one for a week or two. At the moment, he’s the on-site top dog. He’s got you.”

I couldn’t conceive a way to involve law enforcement or the court, a kid up against the largest employer in the area, especially on a holiday weekend. “Judge, O Judge, willfor thou issue an emergency order to force Piper to return me to my doorstep?” In my head sounded Bill Cosby’s voice: “Right.”

Phoning Rich, my old boss, proved fruitless, never mind my investigation absolved his product. “You’re on your own,” he said coldly. “You’ll figure it out.”

I fantasized about a special place in The Ninth Circle for the principals in this case.

My door at Piper’s rooming house stood open. Inside, a woman was stuffing my suitcase.

© Piper Aircraft

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I don’t know, sir. Someone told management you’re not staying.”

“Is there a motel within walking distance?”

“Not even close.”

“I’m going to place a call.”

“Not long distance, okay?”

The reality of spending a homeless night on unfamiliar streets set in. I phoned Jennifer and told her the residence considered me persona non grata. Bumped from the bunkhouse, as Jennifer put it.

“I’m glad you called,” she said. “Nobody has heard of anything like this, but no one dares oppose an executive director. Yet if we’re careful, I think I’ve found a way to get you home.”

Bless her. Out of sight hadn’t meant out of mind. She’d been working overtime on my behalf.

“My heroine, thank you. Will you get in trouble?”

“Maybe. Screw ’em. I feel kind of responsible getting you here. No one guessed how insane he is.” I could picture her thin-lipped smirk. “If they fire me, I’ll file an ADA case naming Manny personally. They won’t want that. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

She directed me to leave my suitcase behind with a promise Piper would ship it after the holiday. I didn’t want to abandon my flight case with my discs, tapes, and listings.

“Take it, that’s a bonus. It enhances the plan. Let’s have an early dinner; you are going to need it.”

© Artisan DeLand
Skydive University

As we sampled Dutch sausage, she slipped me a ball cap with a logo that read ’SkyDive DeLand’.

“It’s in Florida a few hours from Vero,” she said. “Here’s the deal. Jerry, my jump master, has agreed to sneak you out of Dodge. We’ll wait until evening shift change, hoping Manny hasn’t spread the word to them. As we sail in, your ball cap and flight case should suggest you’re one of the brethren. Jerry will file a flight plan heading west rather than east in case someone is looking at eastbound flights. He will fly you only to the next light aviation airport, no farther. No need to expose him to additional risk.”

“Whew. I’m grateful as long as he doesn’t airdrop me from ten thousand feet.”

© Piper Aircraft

She chuckled. “You’ll take a hill hopper to the next town and after that a commuter link. Eventually you’ll come to an airport with real jets, which will get you to Philly, Newark, or LaGuardia. From there, you can book to Boston Logan, and find transportation to Plymouth. It’s grueling, but will that do?”

“Wow, thank you, clever one. You are brilliant.”

“I hate what Manny’s done to you and done to the company. Unfortunately, he stands a good chance of getting away with it.”

“But so many people know.”

“The executives are out of town and when they finally return, they’ll have bigger tasks than look into the unlikely abandonment of a consultant. But maybe, who knows? He’s certainly abused his authority and burned through karma.”

rescuing damsels

Return on Investment

Jennifer waved at the airport attendants and smiled at the security guard. Staff paid no attention to me, another jump junkie lugging a flight case.

We trudged onto the tarmac. I didn’t relax until we were in the air beyond recall. What would I have done if their impromptu human smuggling operation hadn’t worked out?

The trip worked exactly as Jennifer planned. I arrived exhausted in Boston well after midnight where my girlfriend picked me up. My car in Plymouth could wait. As we drove to our apartment in beauteous Brockton, she pumped me for details.

She laughed way too riotously when I told her about Jennifer.

“Leave it to you to arrange rescue by a fair damsel.”

Charon, ferryman of the River Styx
“Find your own way back.”

Aftermath

Rich, my old boss, damn his dark soul, had bebuffed requested help of any kind, even a brief drive to Chelsea to pick me up at the airport. He refused to pay his portion of the bill despite my investigation getting him off the hook.

Of course Manny saw to it Piper didn’t pay either, avoiding a dent in his precious budget. Outgo exceeding income is not a way to run a consulting business, and the chain of flight fees left me well in the hole.

UPS dropped off my suitcase. I gathered Willy found a job on the West Coast. Jennifer left Pennsylvania after which we lost touch. Piper shifted most operations to Vero Beach.

Manny, the crooked salesman turned crooked manager continued some months until I lost track. Somewhere Karma awaits. I like to picture him ferried across the River Styx where Charon boots him off and says,

“Find your own way back.”

A Letter to the Editors

I'll start this off with two statements for those who want to write fiction for publication. It's sort of a good news/bad news observation:

- The bad news is, you're going to have to deal with editors.

- The good news is, that's not really bad news. Most of those dealings are PPP: pleasant, painless, and productive.

As I've gotten older and more stubborn, I guess I probably argue with editors more than I used to, but it's still not often. The main reason I don't argue is that almost all the editors of short-fiction publications I've dealt with are competent and kind and open-minded, and certainly know more than I do about their job and their readers and what they want. 

A second reason is, I'd like to try to please them as much as possible. All editors strive to publish the best stories and writers they can find, and they're especially happy when those writers are easy to work with. If an editor and I disagree on something in one of my stories, I always ask myself whether it's something worth arguing about. If it is, we discuss it, but if it's not (and it's usually not), I salute and do it the way the editor wants it done. Why not? After all, he (or she, in most cases) is the boss, and--to quote someone wiser than I am--"Those who play too hard to get, don't get got."

Besides, losing an editorial argument about something in the content of your story isn't always a complete reversal of what you wanted. It can be a compromise. Just rewrite that part until both of you can agree.

I realize that what I'm saying here isn't anything new; it's mostly common sense. But I'll try to illustrate some of it with ten examples from my own so-called writing career. And I'd love to hear about some of your experiences as well. 

1. I once wrote, in a submission to a mystery magazine, that a character "cut his eyes at" another character. The editor of that story pointed it out, and asked what I meant by that expression. I explained it, because Southern folks have been cutting their eyes at each other for as long as I can remember, but the editor was still in doubt, so I happily surrendered and changed the wording to "glanced at" or something equally anemic. That satisfied her. (But I did cut my eyes at that email several times before sending it.)

2. In a submitted story to a time-travel anthology in 2019, I wrote something about the current value of a treasure-trove of money that had been stolen many years earlier. I've forgotten the specifics, but I was dead wrong in the calculations, and the editor of the anthology caught my error, and I corrected it. In fact I very thankfully corrected it. It's bad enough to show one's ignorance and carelessness to an editor--Barb Goffman, in this case--but at least Barb was a longtime friend. It would've felt a lot worse to have made a fool of myself in front of the readers, which I would've done if Barb hadn't caught my mistake.

3. In the Weird Things That'll Never Happen Again department, the editor of a weekly magazine phoned me one morning and said she needed a July Fourth holiday-mystery story, and needed it fast. When I asked how fast, she said, "The deadline for the new issue is tomorrow." I didn't know if I could do it, but I also knew that if I could, I'd have an "in" at that magazine for the foreseeable future. I wrote the story, submitted it that night, and it was published three days later. I'm not sure how many brownie points I earned, or if I earned any at all, but it never hurts to go the extra mile if you can. I try to do the same for anthology editors who find they need a story at the last minute to cover an author who dropped out of the project.

4. I long ago submitted a mystery story about a robbery and kidnapping, caught on camera, of a character I had named Ron McGraw, and I titled the story "Take the Money and Ron," which I modestly thought was brilliant. As it turned out, the editor didn't like my title--but she didn't tell me so. She just changed it, to "Candid Camera." I still think my title was a lot better, but hey, sometimes that's just how the mop flops. I kept my silence and cashed my check. 

5. I think I've told the following story before, but it shows how flexible and cooperative editors can be. The first mystery I ever submitted to Strand Magazine featured a revenge-murder caused by a poison which I said was "a fluid from the oscolio blossoms of eastern Africa." Shortly after submission, I was surprised to receive a phone call from editor Andrew Gulli. He said they were considering my story, but no one on their staff was familiar with that poison, and were wondering where I had found out about it. I told him, very honestly, "I made it up." He said, "You what?" I said, again, "I made it up." There was a long, long silence on the phone, and finally he said, "Okay." And they published the story a month later.

6. Editor Linda Landrigan at AHMM once suggested that I change the ending of one of my submitted stories because it was "too abrupt." She was exactly right. I agreed with her and added a final plot twist, essentially creating a second ending on top of the first, and both of us were happy. That story, "The Blue Wolf," appeared in their February 2000 issue, and since then I've sold a lot of stories--some of them to AHMM--that featured a second or even a third ending after what appeared to be the first ending. That helpful technique is only one of the many things I've learned from Linda over the years.

7. In one of my stories in the print edition of The Saturday Evening Post, I mentioned that a character's horse was a mare and, about three pages later, I said something like "he unhitched him and rode away." Him? Rode him away? Unfortunately, the Post editors didn't catch that inconsistency any more than I did, and the first I heard of it was when one of my writer friends read it in the magazine and emailed me to point out my error. It was too late to fix it, and I still remember my reaction, which was something like Good God what was I thinking? I hope confession really is good for the soul, because it hurts to admit I made such a stupid mistake. It's one of those cases where I wish the SEP editors had been harder on me.

8. Back in the early 2000s, Woman's World published a story of mine under the wrong byline. I found out about it when a guy on the East Coast contacted me via my website to say he had read a lot of my mystery stories, and the one in the latest WW issue sounded like my writing, but the published byline said it was written by someone else. "Do you also write under the name Elizabeth Hawn?" he asked me. I assured him that I had never used a pseudonym of any kind, and when I contacted the editor about it--the late Johnene Granger, she said the person who put together the issue screwed up and inserted a previous author's name. She was clearly upset about the mixup, but I told her it didn't bother me--I had already been paid and it wasn't that big a deal. The funny thing was, it happened again about a year later (can you spell "Rodney Dangerfield"?), and again the story was credited to Elizabeth Hawn and the editor apologized profusely. (I've always intended to search the mysterious Ms. Hawn out and tell her about the switcheroo, but I never got around to it.) The point of all this is, publishing mistakes happen, and sometimes it's just pilot error. What good would it have done to complain about it?

9. About ten years ago, not long after I had preached to the students in my fiction-writing class about the dangers of overusing substitutes for "said" and explanatory "ly" adverbs during dialogue, a certain magazine published a story I had submitted to them that included the sentence "Of course not," he said. Except that in the final, printed version they had changed that sentence, without telling me, to "Of course not," he protested sharply. Again, I didn't bother to complain to the editor about it--the horse was already out of the barn--but I was tempted to. What they'd done was take a perfectly good sentence and turn it into a piece of truly bad writing. (Picture Tony Soprano sighing, shrugging, and saying "Whattayagonnado?")

10. I once wrote a long Western story that featured a group of masked bandits robbing a stagecoach. In one part of the story, a deaf passenger who could read lips "heard" something important that was said by one of the bandits. A sharp-eyed editor pointed out that the passenger couldn't possibly have read the guy's lips because of the bandanna covering his nose and mouth--which was of course correct. I was embarrassed enough to crawl under my writing desk, but when I came out, I corrected the story as needed and it was published--in fact it was serialized in three consecutive issues. All because of a good editor.

FYI, I listed these experiences because most of them are unusual enough to stand out in my memory, but in truth, almost all my contacts with editors have been short and uneventful and pleasant. Because most editors are themselves pleasant. They work in different ways: Some are extremely "hands-on," getting down into the trenches with (usually) helpful opinions on everything from structure to grammar to punctuation, etc.--and others are not. Both AHMM and EQMM have always surprised me in that almost all my stories there have been published with no edits at all, at least none that I was aware of, and with little or no discussions between writer and editor. The Strand, to a certain degree, is that way also. My takeaway from that, which might or might not be correct, is that if these three magazines receive a story that does require a great deal of editing, it's likely to be rejected on the spot. Which is even more incentive to us writers, to try to send them only our very best work.

I'll close with one more observation. As mentioned, I've had many conversations about content with the editors of publications, sometimes resulting in changes and sometimes not. But in every case, whether I won or lost the argument, I appreciated the editor's attention to and questioning of those kinds of things. Once again, these editors want the same thing I do, and that is to make a particular story as good and believable as it can be.

What about the experiences, good and bad, that you've had with the editors of anthologies, collections, magazines, and such? Or, for that matter, novels? Were you always satisfied with the result of your discussions with the editor? Are you usually in agreement? Did they usually help your story? Can you recall any really wild situations? Were differences ever extreme enough to lead to your withdrawing a story or other project from consideration, or to your not submitting work again to that publication?

 

Here's to a successful, profitable, and edit-free fall and winter!