The traditional or “cozy” mystery seems to be enjoying something of a resurgence. At EQMM, we are currently seeing a slight uptick in that type of mystery in our short-story submissions, after years of it being a rarity. Novels in the cozy genre also seem to be garnering more attention, if recent articles in the Atlantic and at CrimeReads are anything to go by. It’s also notable that for the first time in a long time this year’s best-short-story Edgar nominations include a story that not only falls into the cozy genre but into the more specialized “impossible crime” subgenre of the cozy. I’m referring, of course, to Gigi Pandian’s “The Locked Room Library” (EQMM July/August 2021).
What constitutes a traditional or cozy mystery is open to discussion, and I think everyone would acknowledge that the understanding of the boundaries of the category have changed over time. Malice Domestic, the convention held each April in the Washington D.C. area, began as an event pretty sharply focused on the work of writers in the so-called “Golden Age” tradition, with its awards called “Agathas” and its “ghosts of honor” writers whose very names were enough to tell a prospective attendee what the gathering was all about. The Malice website still says, “The genre is loosely defined as mysteries that contain no explicit sex, excessive gore, or gratuitous violence, and would not be classified as ‘hard-boiled.’” Ellery Queen was incontestably an author of traditional mysteries, and I think if Frederic Dannay (one of the two cousins who wrote as Ellery Queen) were still alive, his definition of a traditional or cozy mystery might still include “fairness to the reader.” Maybe he’d also want to include a few of the rules for the form famously laid down by Golden Age writer Ronald Knox in his Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction, one of which was: “No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.”
Even at the time Malice was launched, in 1989, there were young writers in attendance and emerging on the mystery stage who would stretch the existing understanding of the genre’s borders. There was a ferment of creativity taking place, and rules such as Knox’s would soon be seen as too restrictive and artificial. Writers such as Nancy Pickard, Margaret Maron, and Sharyn McCrumb were marrying stories about contemporary life, with fully fleshed characters, to whodunit plotting. And in real life, of course, things such as intuition and accident play a role.
If we want to get a quick insight into how far the cozy genre has evolved in the thirty-plus years since Malice Domestic began, we can take a look at this year’s guest-of-honor list, which includes the celebrated author Walter Mosley, who would be argued by many to be one of the great literary descendants of Raymond Chandler—an ideal representative, therefore, of the school of crime fiction with which the cozy genre is usually contrasted.
What is really happening, I think, is not only that category definitions are expanding but that many writers, of both once-opposing schools, are now embodying elements of all different sorts of crime fiction in their work. One thing that I think must be maintained as part of our understanding of a “cozy,” however, is that the story take place in an ambiance in which order is pretty much the norm and violence at least a relative aberration. It’s hard to imagine a true “mean streets” crime story, where completely random violence can be expected, satisfying either the community of cozy readers or the demands of a complex whodunit plot. In the genre’s early years cozies were often set in a closed environment such as an isolated country house in order to limit suspects and narrow possible solutions to the crime sufficiently to allow deduction. Partly because of the artificiality of such settings, the books were considered escapist fiction, meant entirely to entertain, and often romantic subplots and humor were included. We don’t consistently find all of those elements in modern cozies, but we do, I think, still expect the crime in question to stand out—to be anomalous.
In June of 2020, in my post “Reading in a Time of Crisis,” I noted that fiction of an escapist nature had proved popular during previous crises, such as World War II. Readers had wanted, and writers provided, stories that did not directly confront the hardships or violence being endured. I will not be entirely surprised, therefore, if it turns out that the cozy genre has in fact gained ground during the years of COVID. But I have a concern about how the period in our history that we now seem to be entering may affect the genre. The world of cozy fiction may, even today, be somewhat more artificial than what one finds in hard-boiled or noir fiction, but no fiction can remove itself too far from the reality of the society it depicts without becoming unconvincing. In order to entertain readers and afford some escape from reality, it’s necessary, first, to get readers to believe in the fictional world being created. And the post-COVID world is becoming so astonishingly—and randomly—violent that I’m beginning to wonder how it will be dealt with by upcoming writers of the traditional mystery.
It’s not just the amount of violence we’re currently experiencing that has got me thinking along these lines: Murder rates in the U.S. are still way lower than they were forty years ago. It’s that we’re starting to see more violence reported in places such as private homes and on means of transportation and so forth (settings often employed by cozy writers) and that there seems to be more brazenness and less discernible motivation for many of the crimes. These are trends that I suspect it will be hard to reflect in the context of a cozy, but we’ll see. The genre is constantly being reinvented!
Jameson Trahearne is a pseudonymous new writer whose pen name, first and last, is taken from characters in the novels of James Crumley. In this post, one of Crumley’s great novels, The Last Good Kiss, is examined in detail. We must warn readers in the strongest way, however, that the post is not intended for those who have yet to read the book. Key elements of the plot are revealed! We can’t tell you much about Jameson Trahearne himself, other than that he is a Cincinnati native who is fascinated by his city; he is scrupulous in maintaining his pseudonym. His fiction debut, “Rising Sun,” appears in the Department of First Stories in our current issue (March/April 2022). —Janet Hutchings
In 1978, James Crumley published his second private eye novel, The Last Good Kiss. Like his other works, it was a modest seller. Or, as some like to say, it had a cult following. But its standing in the pantheon of hardboiled private detective novels is manifest. Many of the greats, including Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Craig McDonald, and others, cite Kiss as both a huge influence on their own career, and revere it as one of the very best examples of the genre. Consider Pelacanos’s words on the subject: “If you asked us to name one book that got us jacked up to write crime novels, it would be The Last Good Kiss. It showed us a crime novel could be about something bigger than the mystery itself.” Unlike other influential entries in the genre, however, Kiss has never been adapted for television or film. Why? The answer is as simple and straightforward as could be, and if you haven’t read it, you’ll hate me for telling you why.
First, some context. Born in Three Rivers, Texas to an oil-rig worker, Crumley spent his early adulthood in R.O.T.C. programs and playing football for various colleges before a three-year stint in the U.S. Army. A few years later he bartended his way through the Iowa Writers Workshop, the result of which is his sole non-private detective novel, the often-overlooked war story One to Count Cadence. Set in 1962 in both the Philippines and Vietnam, Crumley’s protagonist steadily loses faith in America and its romantic myths, a theme the author would continue to mine for the rest of his career.
Then, as the story goes, the poet Richard Hugo gave Crumley some advice: read Raymond Chandler, if not for the private detective stories, then for the quality of his sentences. Partake of just one chapter of any Crumley novel and you can see he took that advice to heart. Throughout his works, Crumley’s sentences are as poetic and beautiful as any a reader will find in the genre. Consider the opening of The Last Good Kiss, what some regard as the finest first sentence of any private detective novel:
When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
In Kiss, via a series of events we find out later were carefully orchestrated by Trahearne—a famous novelist—Crumley’s protagonist C.W. Sugrue agrees to search for the long-disappeared daughter of the owner of the “ramshackle joint.” Sugrue is given only a few pieces of information to work with to find Betty Sue Flowers: the time and place of her disappearance, the names of her then boyfriend and drama teacher, and a copy of her high-school yearbook photo. The quest initially plays out like a road-trip buddy comedy, where Sugrue and Trahearne traipse around the American West, pulling on years-old threads of Betty Sue’s tragic tapestry as they booze and brawl from one faded memory to another.
At the same time Sugrue’s employer, Trahearne’s ex-wife, is expecting her ex-husband back at their homestead in Montana, where a troubled marriage to his current wife, Melinda, awaits him. Each clue to Betty Sue’s whereabouts not only reveals that the men she encountered became intensely infatuated with her, but now—many years later—the resulting obsession has fairly well ruined their lives. She has that effect on every man she meets—a group that now includes Sugrue.
I won’t give away the rest of the story (or at least, not too much of it), but if you haven’t read Kiss, please stop reading this blog now and go buy the novel, because (Unforgivable Spoiler Alert!), I am about to give away the climax of the second act, which also reveals why The Last Good Kiss is unfilmable.
I will pause for a few sentences to give you a chance to think about it. Otherwise, what awaits is that particularly terrible experience where someone gives away the secret to films like The Sixth Sense or The Crying Game—both happened to me, by the way—where a reveal so monumental awaits that to hear it beforehand will truly spoil your experience of the story.
(No doubt I will burn in some kind of Jim Thompson-esque hell for writing this blog entry, but I do have one justification: Kiss has nigh on disappeared from the crime/mystery marketplace. I think it’s worth risking the secret to bring the novel to the attention of the readers of this blog.)
Last chance . . .
Eventually Sugrue catches up with Betty Sue only to discover he had been played all along. Betty Sue turns out to be Melinda, Trahearne’s second wife. Trahearne is so insanely jealous—so absolutely convinced Melinda has been cheating on him, that he not only has become impotent and unable to write any more, but he concocted this entire plot so he could ride along with a P.I. to discover everything about Melinda’s past. The reunion at the homestead doesn’t go well, and…well, I won’t spoil the rest of the novel. I’ve done enough damage as it is.
Through the lens of his post Vietnam war jaded romanticism, Crumley repeatedly explored what he called “human foolishness,” especially the foolishness of men. Nowhere does he do it as well as in the pages of this story. All the men are not only infatuated with Betty Sue, but the resulting impulse to control her invariably led to tragedy befalling her or the people she is close to. Betty Sue just wanted to live her life as she saw fit, but these men simply could not allow it.
Only Sugrue narrowly avoids this misogyny trap—Crumley’s way of intimating there might be some small hope for foolish men, including, one might infer, the men reading the novel.
At this point you might wonder: if Kiss is so great, why haven’t we seen it on screen? By now the answer should be obvious: Anyone reading the descriptions of Betty Sue wouldn’t make the connection to the descriptions of Melinda. The fact that they are one and the same person is a terrific reveal. The clues are there, to be sure, and I haven’t encountered anyone who feels cheated by this aspect of the story. It works. It really works.
Any contemporary television or film audience, however, wouldn’t be fooled so easily. Even if the director took great pains to make the actress playing Betty Sue appear remarkably different than Melinda, it’s easy to understand how the risk would be considered too great to take. If the viewing audience were to figure out beforehand that Betty Sue and Melinda are the same person, the film or television show would no doubt come off as either condescending or dumb. No one wants that.
So, where does that leave Kiss, now and in the future? As a writer who has taken his pen name (first and last) from characters in Crumley’s novels, I experience no small amount of melancholy thinking this story will likely never see the screen. I am sad not so much that I won’t be able to see it, but that this seminal private eye story is unlikely to reach a much broader audience, and thus won’t bring what many believe to be some of the best crime fiction in existence to the hearts and minds of new generations.
A writer from the island of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Ashley-Ruth Bernier has had stories published in the distinguished literary journal The Caribbean Writer. She’s a teacher at a local elementary school who manages to write in her spare time while also raising a family. Her EQMM debut story, “Rise,” appears in our current issue (March/April 2022). In this post she talks about a very early inspiration for her interest in the mystery genre. —Janet Hutchings
It was a school night, and a Monday night, at that—a school night at the beginning of an entire week full of them. It was right at the heels of a long day of learning and teaching, of play practices and band and homework. I broke the rules anyway. I picked up dinner. Left my 2nd grader at home with his dad (and Minecraft), and loaded my older three kids into the car. Our destination? The movies. This lifelong Agatha Christie fanatic was headed for a full-circle kind of moment: I was taking my kids to see the newly released movie version of Death on the Nile.
While we stood in line for popcorn and candy, I told my kids about the winter I’d discovered Ms. Christie’s magic—”winter” being a purely technical term, as Decembers 23 degrees north of the equator are more short sleeves and sunshine than sweaters and snow. I told them about pulling the novels off the shelves of the only bookstore on island and eagerly bringing them back up the hill to my grandmother’s house, where I’d read them at night by candlelight. This is when my 5th grader raised an eyebrow at me. “So . . . candlelight?” He’d asked. The look on his face was somehow skeptical and smug at the same time, like he’d realized a truth he’d always known but never thought I would admit. “No electric lights, Mom? Is that what things were really like way back in the 90s?”
Oh, I contemplated not buying that kid any popcorn. Instead, I reminded all of them that during the fall and winter that I was 13, everyone on St. Thomas was reading by candlelight. Cooking, doing homework, paying bills; all of it. Our island had been slammed by Hurricane Marilyn that September, which had destroyed homes and power lines along with everyone’s sense of security and routine. By December, everyone was in rebuilding mode. My mother fretted about hiring a contractor to reconstruct our home, which the hurricane had completely totaled, while I worried about the reconstruction of something far more pressing: my book collection. Sure, there were some books I wanted to replace outright, but it seemed like a perfect time to discover something new . . . something with more nuance and depth than Goosebumps and Fear Street, but with themes that weren’t too explicit for a kid who was barely old enough to watch PG-13 movies. One afternoon at Dockside Bookshop, my mom suggested a book by an author she’d enjoyed decades before. The book was And Then There Were None, and the author, of course, was Agatha Christie. That was all it took. Within those first few chapters, I was hooked.
Everyone wanted a break from the heat and darkness of post-hurricane life, and over the next few months, those books gave me exactly that—they took me away to sinister manors in the English countryside, mysterious train rides, and deadly cruises on the Nile. I read book after book, as fast as Dockside could stock them. I learned the beats of a “cozy” and studied the quirky characters essential to stories like these: lazy heirs and heiresses, dusty colonels, nosy spinsters; and the sharp-witted detectives (I liked Ms. Marple better than Tommy and Tuppence, but loved Poirot best of all) who unpacked their crimes and desires so neatly for everyone at the end. I wanted nothing more than to create that kind of magic myself. My first attempt at writing a cozy of my own the summer I was 15—creepy old guest house, a crotchety old woman with a ton of money, and a teenage detective—was spectacularly awful. But oh, I thought it was something. I’d followed Ms. Christie’s formula perfectly. How could “Peril in Livingstown” be anything but a success?
I believe I know the answer to that question now. Why that story, and so many of my early attempts at writing cozies; were . . . um, less than stellar. Ms. Christie’s stories worked so well because she wrote about who, what, and where she knew. Her novels were filled with the settings and character types she encountered in her circles and travels abroad. There weren’t major appearances by people like me (young, Black; a little bit absentminded and dreamy), and I’m fine with that now—the novels were written for a different society, a different zeitgeist. But maybe, back then, I’d wanted to see myself on those pages. I tried for so long to write what she knew, when, as it turns out, what I needed to do was follow her example in a different way. I needed to fill my pages with the personalities and settings I knew best: dark-skinned men and women with thick curls and neat braids, clownish politicians, womanizers in huge gold chains, and strong, gifted young people with a reserve of quiet confidence. Beaches. Carnival. An old parochial school in the heart of historic Charlotte Amalie. Maybe a post-hurricane landscape, in one of my future drafts. Ms. Christie’s magic lay in the way she made us believe in the truth of the stories she wrote. By putting myself on the page, as she always did, I hope I’m approaching even a fraction of that gift.
As for our night at the movies? Well, it was everything my heart had hoped for, watching my kids fall right into the trance of that story . . . marveling at the setting, shrieking at every murder, pouncing on every clue; sharing their theories about who the murderer was. Watching the shock on their faces as Poirot laid it all out for them. Hearing their excitement as we left the theater, not just about how much fun the movie was, but about the diverse cast; about seeing Black and Brown and LGBTQ characters with quirks and agency and power. Listening to my sons devise the plot of their own mystery story on the ride home was perhaps the very best moment of that night, however—a moment that truly did complete the circle that had started so long ago in the tiny mystery section of an island bookstore. We got out of the car, still full of popcorn and under the spell of a master storyteller. Those stories still do it, even this many years after their debut. They sweep us away from the present, back to the outsized personalities and majestic settings of the world Ms. Christie created. They still contain the best kind of magic.
They still inspire so many of us to create magic of our own.
Ralph Hornbeck is a new writer for EQMM whose short story “Strangler Fig” is in this month’s Department of First Stories. Though he’s new to us—in fact, “Stranger Fig” is the first piece he’s ever published—he isn’t new to mystery fiction, as he graces the board of the Florida chapter Mystery Writers of America. In today’s blog post, Ralph distills 14 rules of writing from the advice of many great authors. — Janet Hutchings
Ever wanted to write a mystery but found your prose lacked pop? Was the best thing anyone could say about your first novel was it had occasional flashes of mediocrity? Don’t you get tired of articles that try to create suspense by asking a series of questions instead of using simple declarative statements? Don’t we all? Although I have never written a best-seller or even read many “books,” I have done the next best thing—I have read lists of writing advice by authors whose names I have heard other people say out loud: Edgar Allan Poe, Elmore Leonard, and Stephen King, among others. Like me, you may have even seen some of these author’s books on the shelves while on your way to the water fountain in the public library. I like their lists because they are much shorter than their novels, so I am less likely to be distracted by a squirrel before I am finished. The titles also helpfully tell you just exactly how many rules you need to know: “10 Rules for Good Writing,” “6 Questions/6 Rules,” “8 Rules of Writing.” Sadly, these self-described experts disagree on which rules you need to know. They can’t even agree of the number of rules, though apparently it’s even. Lucky for you I am here to help. I have read all the rules and picked out the 14 best ones for your consumption. I have taken the liberty of improving them where I thought it was needed. You’re welcome.
Ration your exclamation marks. You are only allowed to use 20 exclamation marks your entire life. Save them for extremely important occasions! Be judicious!
Be clear when using pronouns. Pronouns are confusing and confusion is the devil’s workshop. Stay out! Bad: “Bob knew he should stop using pronouns.” Is “he” referring to Bob or someone else? Unclear! Better, but repetitive: “Bob knew Bob should stop using pronouns.” Best: “Bob knew the face in the bathroom mirror should stop using pronouns.”
Don’t confuse similes and metaphors. Similes are comparisons that use “like” or “as” to allow you to show a familiar object in a new light, or quickly describe a place or person. Feel free to sprinkle them throughout your writing. Metaphors, however, are similes’ evil twins. Shun them like a nerd at a frat party punch bowl.
Be subtle. Subtlety in fiction writing is good, but it can be hard to maintain. When you first start driving the vehicle of Subtlety down the two-lane highway of Fiction, sometimes you will drift into the breakdown lane of Obscurity, before jerking the steering wheel back and plowing into the oncoming tractor trailer of Obviousness. Stay between the lines!
Avoid adverbs. You can usually find a better verb that means the same thing as your verb/adverb combination. For example, don’t write “he ran fast,” write “he sprinted.” Likewise, you should stay away from adjectives, as you can usually find a strong noun that is better than your weak adjective/noun combination. For example, instead of writing “dried meat”, say “jerky.” Prepositions are also kind of lame, and interjections are stupid. “Oof?” “Phew?” Who says these words? And don’t get me started on conjunctions. To play it safe, only use nouns and verbs in your stories.
No weather. Don’t write about the weather. Unless it’s raining in your story, then you can write about the weather. But it has to be raining really hard—the Statue of Liberty should be holding an umbrella instead of a torch.
Show, don’t tell your character’s emotions. It’s tempting to tell the reader what emotions your characters are experiencing. For example, “When Jane said she was pregnant, Bob was surprised.” The word “surprised” does all the work for the reader and leaves them no room to use their imagination. Instead, paint a vivid word picture of how the character’s body is reacting so readers can feel the emotion themselves. Better: “When Jane said she was pregnant, Bob’s eyebrows flew up his forehead, but like the swallows returning to Capistrano, they eventually resettled in their customary home above his eye sockets.”
Don’t use the word “suddenly”. If a story was dragging and needed some excitement, writers could use the word “suddenly” to start a sentence. It was like sprinkling salt on a bland piece of pork shoulder. Instant drama! Sadly, editors have caught on to this trick and will rip it right out of your paragraph. Instead, use the word’s more upscale cousin, “all of a sudden.” The editors don’t seem to be wise to that yet. You’re welcome.
Vocabulary isn’t everything. Parents sometimes tell their babies to “use your words.” But it’s not enough to find the right words. It’s also important to get them in the right order. Wise Yoda may have been, a good writer was he not.
Murder your darlings. Darlings are the sentences that writers fall in love with but don’t belong in their manuscript. By all means, remove them if they don’t fit. But don’t delete those precious gems. Instead, collect all your darlings and put them together in their own story. A story that is made up only of darlings. That story, my friends, will absolutely rule.
Avoid controversial words. You never know who you might offend when you use loaded words, like “trigger,” “cancel,” and “moist.” I had the following sentence in a story—he canceled his order for Glock triggers because they were moist—and an editor’s head literally exploded.
Don’t misuse “literally.”
Avoid the passive voice. Passive voice is weak. “A good time was had.” The subject of the sentence is unclear—who had a good time? However, aggressive voice is also bad. “Have a good time or else.” But the worst is passive-aggressive voice. “If you really loved me, you would know what I think a good time is.”
Don’t underestimate the intelligence of your readers. After all, if they can afford to spend money on your book, they probably have disposable income from a real job with good dental benefits. Unlike writers, who spend months creating a book for which we will be lucky to clear a few hundred bucks after we pay for the ads.
I hope that these maxims help shorten your journey from solitary scribbler to esteemed author. Remember, use your words! You’re welcome!
Michael Caleb Tasker was born in Montreal, raised in New Orleans, and now resides in Australia, where he was a staff writer for Look, the Sydney-based fine arts magazine, for a number of years.Tasker’s writing has won the Saturday Evening Post Great Fiction Contest as well as the Ernest Hemingway Flash Fiction Prize. In today’s blog post, Tasker ponders the lonely lives depicted in the mystery fiction of Ray Bradbury and Patricia Highsmith. Tasker’s story “Another Saturday Night” appears in our current issue (March/April 2022) — Janet Hutchings
Last year I bought a collection of Ray Bradbury short stories. It was his collected crime stories, packaged as Killer, Come Back to Me, and I keep coming back to it. Boy, did he ever have style. Soft touches, simple touches, that end up as so much more. But, for my money, the best part of his work is the terrific sense of loneliness that he conjures up. I first found this many years ago in his story “The Pedestrian” (which isn’t in the collection), wherein a solitary walker wanders through an empty night in what turns out to be a fairly dystopian world. But it is the sense of solitude, the treasure trove of loneliness, that drew me in and I was glad to see this same sense in quite a few of the stories in Killer, Come Back to Me.
In stories like “At Midnight, in the Month of June” (which first appeared in EQMM in 1954), “The Whole Town is Sleeping,” or “The Smiling People,” Bradbury really digs into the solitude, both in mindset and environment. Take the opening of “At Midnight”: “He had been waiting a long, long time in the summer night, as the darkness pressed warmer to the earth and the stars turned slowly in the sky . . . Standing alone, watering the flower bed, he imagined himself a conductor leading an orchestra that only night-strolling dogs might hear.” This is the most peaceful introduction into the mind of a murderer I can remember reading. Better still, the environment speaks to character and character speaks to environment; the glimpse into this man’s psyche, with its night-strolling dogs, well mirrors the quiet midnight town. The story is something of a companion piece to “The Whole Town is Sleeping,” which centers on a town under the constant threat of a murderer (dubbed the Lonely One). Here, our hero, our victim, Lavinia, lives in a town seemingly cut off from the rest of the world, a town “kept to itself by a river and a forest and a meadow and a lake,” but in Bradbury’s hands, this isolation comes across not as anything sinister but as something wonderfully bucolic. And this wealth of loneliness is mirrored by Lavinia, who when asked if she gets lonely says: “Old Maids love to live alone.”
“At Midnight” revolves around “Whole Town’s” killer, the Lonely One, and it’s his POV we are put in, while he lies in wait for, and then almost peacefully murders, Lavinia. Reading the two stories back to back, as they are in Killer, Come Back to Me, really emphasizes Bradbury’s take on solitude, presenting loneliness in a positive light through the town, Lavinia, and even in the Lonely One. “At Midnight” ends as both the stories began, with a sense of loneliness, with a scene that appreciates the relief of isolation: “He pushed the door wide open and stepped into the Owl Diner, this long railroad car that, removed from its track, had been put to a solitary unmoving destiny in the center of town. The place was empty.” In many of Bradbury’s stories, in my favorite stories, for transgressors and victim alike, loneliness is not a burden, not something to be understood or overcome or dealt with, rather loneliness is the world as it should be.
Writers need solitude. I’ve read that a lot and I agree. In his Nobel acceptance speech Hemingway said that “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life,” while in Green Hills of Africa he wrote: “Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then.” Henry Miller suggested, “What the buddings artist needs is the privilege of wrestling with his problems in solitude.” Over 150 years ago Kierkegaard wrote: “In ancient times as well as in the Middle Ages people were aware of the need of solitude and had respect for what it signifies. In the constant sociability of our age people shudder at solitude to such a degree that they know no other use to put it to but (oh, admirable epigram!) as a punishment for criminals.” I like that: “constant sociability.” If only Kierkegaard could see us now. But it’s not just writers who need solitude, their characters do as well. And, by and large, these characters are far more fun to read about than writers.
In many of my favorite novels, in the works of giants of crime fiction like Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, and, more recently, Walter Moseley and James Lee Burke, people spend a lot of time, often the best of times, alone. I don’t mean to say this is unique to crime fiction, but solitude does take up a lot of space in a genre that by necessity requires social interaction. Highsmith’s cast of fairly sympathetic, sometimes accidental psychopaths, often give the impression that if they could just have a moment to themselves, a moment alone, to think, then such terrible events might not follow. In This Sweet Sickness, the lovelorn psycho David Kelsey spends much of his time alone, under an assumed name, setting up house for a woman who doesn’t want him. Of course, deadly hijinks ensue, but it is those moments where Kelsey sets up his house, almost literally building castles in the air, that not only go toward building sympathy for a dangerous stalker but, in their lonesomeness, provide a peace that Kelsey—and likewise the reader—won’t find again. And Highsmith does these moments of loneliness so well that when the action starts, I, for one, start to lose a small amount of interest.
Philip Marlowe’s lonesomeness was very much by design. In one of his letters, Chandler wrote of Marlowe: “he is a lonely man, a poor man, a dangerous man, and yet a sympathetic man . . . he will always have a fairly shabby office, a lonely house, a number of affairs but no permanent connection . . . I see him in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated.” In short, isolation is Marlowe’s natural habitat. And it benefits the detective in much the same way in does the writer. Many writers (and perhaps most people) need time, alone, to think, to build castles in the air, to follow threads and dead ends: uninterrupted hours to invent and solve problems, to create and understand characters. And the same can be said for Marlowe.
As Johann Hari put it in his recent book on attention and concentration, Stolen Focus, “when your mind wanders, it starts to make new connections between things—which often produces a solution to your problems.” Hari and Dr. J. Smallwood, a professor of psychology Hari interviewed, don’t specifically mention the importance of being alone, the value in loneliness. However, Hari let his own mind wander while taking long walks, not unlike Charles Dickens who walked twelve or fourteen solitary miles a day while working on David Copperfield. For Hari, I gather the solitude is implied, as he hammers home the point that mind-wandering would be a little difficult with outside interruption.
When left alone, the mind is free to wander, to plot, to understand. And all his time alone lets Marlowe do exactly that. In almost all of the Marlowe novels, these moments spent mind-wandering in isolation are my favorite parts. Climax and revelation be damned, I’d rather re-read chapter thirteen in The Little Sister, where Marlowe drives around Los Angeles alone and lets his mind wander. That is all that happens in the entire chapter, driving and mind-wandering, alone. Yet, as Marlowe says “There was nothing lonely about the trip.” However, he puts things together, he adds up what he knows so far about the case (which isn’t much), he lays out the threads that he can eventually tie together. Naturally, it is mostly through conversation that he gathers information, but it is in those moments alone that he so often puts things together. They are often small moments, like in The Big Sleep, where after talking with a woman in a bookstore, digging for information, Marlowe returns to his car to sit in the rain: “I sat there and poisoned myself with cigarette smoke and listened to the rain and thought about it.” The chapter ends there, with Marlowe alone and thinking, letting his mind wander. But I get the feeling that Marlowe might have liked to have stayed there, alone in the car during a storm, a very long time.
Similarly, throughout the Marlowe novels, the small moments he spends alone, in his apartment or office, making coffee, shaving, thinking alone, come as welcome respite from his time spent with the outside world. When Marlowe is alone, there is no violence, there is no threat, there isn’t even the awkward difficulty of trying to make a friend, like Terry Lennox in The Long Goodbye. Instead, there is relief, some sense of stability, momentary though it may be, and castles being built in the air. Maybe it’s the combination of peace and rarity—that moment of calm in the eye of the storm—that make them so appealing, but, like with Bradbury, these small moments of loneliness are my personal favorite. Whether it’s sitting alone in a car, or having a solitary scotch in an empty office, or setting up a life for someone who isn’t there, or just talking a walk alone in the night, these moments of loneliness are killer, and I’ll keep coming back to them.
Lou Manfredo’s latest story for EQMM, “Sundown,” appears in our current issue (March/April 2022). In it he brings back some characters who featured in a series of stories published in this magazine between 2009 and 2013. Those five previous tales starred Gus Oliver, constable and later unofficial private investigator in the small town of Central Islin, Long Island, with cameo appearances by his grandson Jo-Jo. The new Central Islin story in our current issue fast forwards nineteen years from 1960 to 1979 and finds Gus retired and Jo-Jo on the local police force—but consulting his grandfather on cases. Lou Mandredo is also the author of the Joe Rizzo series of novels and stories. His honors include having a story chosen for The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories: The First Ten Years, edited by Otto Penzler. In this post, he connects the urge to write to a passion for reading. —Janet Hutchings
So—what have you been up to these past couple of years? Doing some traveling, visiting old friends, making new ones, seeing new places? Or, maybe, not so much. Yeah. I get it.
But here’s our silver lining: we are readers. Each and every one of us, readers. And so, yes, we have been traveling, we have been seeing old friends and making new ones, visiting new places—often via a newly arrived issue of EQMM. I’ve also been spending lots of days and nights in Boston with my old buddies, Spenser and Hawk, and a new bestie, Sunny Randall. And, being so close to Paradise, Massachusetts, I naturally dropped in on Jesse Stone a time or two. And thanks to my local public library, most of the expenses for such prolonged travel have been quite negligible. Nil, in fact.
And while engaged in this binge reading, I was reminded of something, a very important moment in my life. It was on a long-ago Sunday afternoon in December, and I had just seen “From Russia, With Love” at my neighborhood movie house. I rushed home to immediately report my astonishing discovery of James Bond to my father, giving a glowing review of the film and the embodiment of all things Bond, Sean Connery.
“Bond?” my father said, then led me to the stack of paperbacks piled beside his bed and rummaged through it. “Here,” he said, handing me a book, “it’s one of the novels the movies are based on.”
It was Dr. No. Remember that one? I have good cause to never forget it. Not yet even a teenager, I was being entrusted with a real -life, grown-up novel. No more Hardy Boys. Bond, James Bond. Although too young at the time to fully realize it, a torch had been passed.
And so I reflected on all that as I read my way through these current times. You see, way back on that long ago December Sunday, I was even then facing a demon beyond my control: Seventh grade French class and Florence McBaron, school teacher. The remembrance of irregular French verbs, combined with the steely-eyed glare of ol’ Flo, still stirs my nape. Yikes. But with the help of musings from Ian Fleming, all that paralyzing terror could be erased, temporarily at least, and replaced instead with an energizing excitement as Bond and I flew off to face dangerous adventures and, best of all, meet yet another beautiful heroine.
So, okay, I now thought. Bring it on, COVID. Spenser will rescue me, just as Tom Sawyer had after a particularly tragic Little League strike-out with the bases loaded; just as Huck Finn had when a nose pimple threatened my social standing at school; just as Henry Gregor Felson and his hot-rodding teenage creations had on a rainy, dismal vacation day at my grandmother’s summer bungalow. Me and a good read. Tough combo to defeat.
Is any of this sounding familiar? Of course it is. Dedicated readers know exactly what I’m talking about.
All this factored heavily into why I first began to write. Over the years, I have been honored to meet many writers, some famous, some not so much, but all talented and conscientious purveyors of finely crafted alternative realities for us to laugh or cry in, play or tremble, love or hate, find tragedy or joy and maybe, sometimes, take solace in. No small task. It occurs to me that despite meeting so many writers, I don’t recall asking or being asked, what actually motivates anyone to face that dreaded blank page and dig in their heels to fill it. What indeed.
But maybe I’ll save that for another time and simply say this much, and I suspect it would apply to every writer everywhere throughout history. Sometimes in the small, dark hours before dawn, I find myself stirring and wondering: Is someone, somewhere in the world, at that very moment, reading a novel of mine, a short story, perhaps an essay such as this one? And is it possible that read, despite the often-dark tones of my work, is somehow distracting or easing some of that reader’s grief or pain, boredom or loneliness, fear or anxiety?
I’ve come to view my writing as payback, probably equally owed by all writers. Payback of my part of a debt due the Hardy Boys, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Holmes and Marlowe, Wolfe and Spade, Mason and all the Robert B. Parker boys and girls of Boston, with a special duty of debt owed to Salinger and Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, and William Goldman.
Yes, it’s a massive debt, and one I realize I can never fully repay. But I intend to do my best to put a very large dent in it.
So, in retrospect, maybe that’s why writers choose to face that daunting blank page.
One of the things that struck me most forcefully within my first few months as the editor of EQMM was the dedication of our magazine’s fans. The 1991 Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in Pasadena, California occurred during EQMM’s fiftieth anniverary year and included a very well-attended panel devoted to EQMM and its history. As a newcomer only four months on the job, I was astounded to look out from the table where we panelists were seated and spot several fans holding small stacks of file cards which they used throughout the hour to make notations or to reference stories published in the magazine decades before. I was astounded by this—I’d never before experienced fandom of such fervor firsthand. And I was entirely unable to answer the majority of the questions that wonderful audience posed. Fortunately, everyone else at the table was a true EQMM expert—including two people who will be mentioned later in this post, Edward D. Hoch and Marv Lachman. They fielded everything thrown at us with assurance and grace.
The event left a lasting impression on me, so much so that when we put together this eightieth anniversary trivia contest, my main concern was to make sure it was hard enough to challenge the most committed fans. As it turned out, I think we made it a little too difficult. For one thing, thirty more years of issues have come out since that anniversary panel of 1991, making it magnitudes more unlikely that any one reader would be familiar with all of our decades of content. Our decision to include questions not only about EQMM but also about the magazine’s founders, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, added yet another layer of challenge. We also went into this contest with four of the top EQMM experts—Francis M. Nevins, Marvin Lachman, Josh Pachter, and Dale C. Andrews—unable to enter, since it was from them that we obtained the contest questions.
All of that said, we had some very worthy entries to the contest: No one got all of the answers right, but our first-place winner, with whom our second-place entrant very nearly tied, had only two incorrect answers. Which brings me to something revealed by the entries: A couple of the questions were ambiguous in ways we did not foresee, and the answer to another question is, in truth, a matter of opinion. We’ve tried to clarify the equivocal questions in the answer key below, and we hope you’ll enjoy picking up bits of EQMM trivia you likely did not know. As for me, after thirty-plus years at the magazine’s helm I still would not presume to call myself an EQMM expert, but I would have been able to answer all but a couple of this contest’s questions without looking anything up (had the answers not been supplied along with the questions!). That’s a long way to have come from that 1991 panel, on a journey that has been, and continues to be (thanks to our incomparable writers and fans) full of variety and fun.
And now, congratulations to (imaginary drum roll, please) the winners . . .
First Place:
Alexander Zapryagaev
Runners-up (in order):
Kurt Sercu
Arthur Vidro
Joe Meyer
Thanks to you all!—Janet Hutchings
80th Anniversary contest QUESTIONS and ANSWERS:Which of the following celebrated authors did NOT make their professional fiction debut in EQMM’s Department of First Stories?
A. National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez
B. MWA Grand Master Edward D. Hoch
C. Multiple Agatha and Anthony Award winner Nancy Pickard
D. MWA Grand Master Stanley Ellin
Answer: B
2. Who is the only person to appear in EQMM’s Department of First Stories twice?
Answer: Josh Pachter: first in 1968 with the story “E.Q Griffin Earns His Name” and again forty-one years later, in 2009, with “History on the Bedroom Wall,” cowritten with his daughter, Rebecca Jones.
3. In a 1936 review of Ellery Queen’s Halfway House (Revista Hogar, October 30, 1936), Jorge Luis Borges praised the credibility of Ellery’s logical solution, noting that in good detective stories the solution cannot be premised on devices such as “hypnotism, telepathic hallucinations, elixirs of evil operation, witches and warlocks, real magic and recreational physics.” However, a magician in fact played a crucial role in the history of EQMM. Who was that magician?
Answer: Clayton Rawson, who was EQMM’s managing editor from 1963 until his death in 1971, was also a professional magician. Rawson was the author of four detective novels featuring his magician/detective “The Great Merlini.”
4. The town of Wrightsville provides the locale for five Ellery Queen novels (six, if you count The Last Woman in His Life, where the town is featured in one chapter). Wrightsville was also the locale for seven Ellery Queen short stories published in EQMM between 1953 and 1967. The town of Wrightsville does not, in fact, exist. But what New England town is Wrightsville almost certainly modeled after?
Answer: Claremont, New Hampshire Claremont shares with Wrightsville the singular distinction of having a town square that is in fact a circle, from which emanate the town’s streets like spokes in a wheel. And Claremont was the hometown of Manfred B. Lee’s wife Betty. (Manfred B. Lee was, of course, the coauthor, with Frederic Dannay, of the Ellery Queen novels and stories.) Lee’s daughter Patricia Lee Caldwell has stated “I remember clearly that my mother told me that Wrightsville was based on Claremont.” During the course of a visit to Claremont Lee himself confirmed the same, as reported in the July 10, 1959 edition of the local newspaper, The Claremont Eagle.
5. EQMM editor in chief Frederic Dannay, together with Manfred B. Lee, authored a wealth of Ellery Queen novels and short stories. What other editor, while serving on EQMM’s staff, used the Ellery Queen characters in detective fiction?
Answer: Janet Hutchings, whose pastiche “Change of Scene,” featuring Ellery and Nikki Porter in 1934 Chicago, is included in the recent anthology The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen, edited by Josh Pachter and Dale C. Andrews (Wildside Press, 2020). Or, we’ve accepted the answer Jon L. Breen. When his EQ pastiche “The Gilbert and Sullivan Clue” was published in the September/October 1999 EQMM, Jon was the EQMM columnist for The Jury Box—so a member of our staff. And he is also an editor, having compiled anthologies in the field.
6. An early mystery concerned the division of labor for the writing team of Dannay and Lee. That mystery has largely been solved, and it is now common knowledge that the Ellery Queen stories, while plotted by Frederic Dannay were drafted by Manfred B. Lee. In addition to his gift for creating prose, what other hidden artistic talent did Lee possess?
Answer: Manfred B. Lee was an accomplished violinist. According to his daughter, Patricia Lee Caldwell, he led a small band in the mid 1920s that played in various locales and on cruises.
7. Dannay and Lee wrote the first Ellery Queen novel, The Roman Hat Mystery, as an entry in a writing contest sponsored by McClure’s Magazine. When they were informed that they had won the contest, what did the cousins do to celebrate?
Answer: They went to Dunhill’s Tobacconist and bought each other meerschaum pipes with the initials EQ engraved on the stems.
8. EQMM was launched in the fall of 1941 and has now been around for 80 years. But EQMM was not the first mystery magazine launched by Dannay and Lee. What magazine holds that honor?
Answer: Dannay and Lee’s first mystery magazine was titled Mystery League, and was launched in 1933. A total of only four issues were published. To quote Manfred B. Lee: “Mystery League Magazine was the child of the Queen imagination and early ambition. It was published on the proverbial shoelace . . . Fred and myself were the entire staff. We did not even have a secretary. We selected the stories, prepared copy, read proofs, dummied, sweated . . . and almost literally swept out the office as well.”
9. Why did Dannay and Lee adopt a pseudonym?
Answer: The primary reason a pseudonym needed to be decided upon was that the McClure’s Magazine contest for which TheRoman Hat Mystery was written required, for fairness’ sake, that all submissions be made under a pseudonym. There are many theories as to why the name Ellery Queen was decided upon. One is that the name was inspired by the face cards in a deck of cards during a game the cousins were playing.
10. What was the worst typographical blunder involving an author’s name in EQMM’s history?
Answer: Opinions differ on this. Many (like your current editor) would say the worst typographical blunder was the misspelling of Agatha Christie’s name on a cover from the fifties or sixties (due to a boxing of issues, we are currently unable to give the issue date). Others would argue that the mistake on the cover of the very first issue of EQMM was worse. Anthony Abbot (a mystery-writing pseudonym for Fulton Oursler) was misspelled. EQMM mistakenly added an extra t to the last name.
11. What author has had the most stories published in EQMM in the magazine’s history?
Answer: MWA Grand Master Edward D. Hoch. For more than thirty-five years he had a story in every issue of EQMM. We’ll leave the math to you!
12. During its eighty years, EQMM has had six outstanding reviewers of crime fiction. Can you name them?
Answer: Howard Haycraft, Anthony Boucher, John Dickson Carr, Allen J. Hubin, Jon L. Breen, Steve Steinbock.
13. In 1948, Anthony Boucher translated a story by Jose Luis Borges into English—the first story by that eminent Argentine author to appear in English. Since EQMM launched its Passport to Crime Department in 2003, many stories originally in other languages have been translated into English for EQMM. Which translator has translated the most stories for Passport to Crime?
Answer: Mary Tannert
14. What do the following four authors have in common?: Lillian de la Torre; Harry Kemelman; David Morrell; Susan Dunlap
Answer: They each had their first story published in EQMM.
15. A “series character” is one (usually a detective) who appears in two or more stories or books. Name the series character(s) who appeared in EQMM by the twelve authors listed here. (Note: Some of the authors created more than one character. Try to name any or all of their series characters.)
a. Ngaio Marsh — Inspector Roderick Alleyn
b. Ross Macdonald — Lew Archer
c. Ian Fleming— James Bond
d. Raymond Chandler — Philip Marlowe, Carmady (another, earlier name for Philip Marlowe; 2 Carmady stories were published in EQMM), and John Dalmas (another earlier name for the same character—one story in an EQ anthology)
e. Edgar Rice Burroughs — Tarzan
f. Agatha Christie — Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, Tommy and “Tuppence” Beresford, Parker Pyne, Harley Quin and Mr. Satterthwaite
g. Lillian de la Torre — Dr. Sam: Johnson
h. William Dylan Powell — Billy Raskolnikov and his monkey Ringo
i. John Lantigua — Willie Cuesta
j. Amy Myers — Auguste Didier, Tom Wasp, Parson Pennywick, Jack Colby, Sherlock Holmes
k. Charlaine Harris — Lily Bard, Anne de Witt
16. What’s the longest time span between an author’s first appearance in EQMM and their most recent, and who is the author?
Answer: William Link. He debuted in 1954 with a story cowritten with Richard Levinson. The pair went on to create classic TV series such as Columbo, Mannix, and Murder, She Wrote. William Link (who died at the end of 2020) continued to write solo short stories for EQMM until 2015.
This new post by Kevin Mims, essayist, short story writer, and frequent contributor to this blog, addresses again a subject he discussed in his September 2, 2021 post “A Semiforgotten Masterpiece of Short Fiction”—the short stories of Frederick Forsyth. If you love short fiction, I think this review will make you want to try to find a copy of the Forsyth collection Kevin focuses on this time, a book that first saw print twenty years ago. —Janet Hutchings
Last September, I wrote an appreciation of No Comebacks, Frederick Forsyth’s excellent 1982 short story collection. I ended the essay by writing, “It is a shame that Forsyth hasn’t written more short stories, because he has a real knack for it.” Fortunately, Jon L. Breen, who knows more about crime and mystery fiction than almost anyone alive, contacted me to let me know that Forsyth had continued writing short stories even after the publication of No Comebacks, and five of them had been collected in The Veteran, published by St. Martin’s Press back in September, 2001. I got hold of a copy of TheVeteran in September of 2021.
No Comebacks was such a brilliant collection, published during the author’s heyday—a fourteen year period (1971-1984) during which he brought forth The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, The Shepherd, The Devil’s Alternative, No Comebacks, and The Fourth Protocol—that I assumed The Veteran, a much later production, would prove to be a bit of a letdown. Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong. If anything, The Veteran may be an even better collection of stories than No Comebacks. The paperback edition of that earlier collection contained ten stories in 289 pages, for an average of about 29 pages per story. The paperback edition of The Veteran contains half as many stories spread across 344 pages, for an average of nearly 70 pages per story. Longer stories are not necessarily better than short ones. Oftentimes, they are worse. But that is not the case with those in The Veteran. It is a cliché when reviewing a collection of good longer stories (novellas, novelettes, whatever you want to call them) to say that each story has the heft of a novel. That is what many reviewers said of the four stories in Stephen King’s collection Different Seasons, which was published in hardback by Viking Press in August of 1982. The cliché is not always warranted but it was definitely true of Different Seasons, and it is equally true of The Veteran. Each of the five stories feels as if it could easily have been expanded into a full-length novel.
The book’s title story starts out as a straightforward police procedural about the search for the young thugs who brutally beat to death a disabled war veteran in a seedy part of London. This is a gritty cop story and fans of darker British crime dramas such as DCI Banks, Scott & Bailey, Happy Valley, Broadchurch, and the like will be sure to enjoy it. I said that “The Veteran” starts out as a straightforward drama. This is true of most Forsyth stories. They always start out as if they are going to proceed predictably from Point A to Point B and eventually to Point Z. But no Forsyth story I’ve read ever remains on the straight and narrow path. Every one of his stories contains at least one jaw-dropping twist to it, and many of them contain multiple such twists. It takes the police detectives quite a while to discover the identity of the victim of the brutal beating that is at the heart of “The Veteran.” Eventually, however, we learn his name and that he was a member of a close-knit band of British military brothers who fought valiantly together in a foreign war. The reader gets his first major jolt when, after the two thugs who committed the killing are arrested, another member of that band of military brothers, now a highly regarded London barrister, agrees to defend them. The police were originally confident in their case, even though much of it is circumstantial. But when they learn that the eminent James Vansittart is going to be arguing for the defense, their confidence completely vanishes. Vansittart’s firm is wealthy and has much greater resources at its disposal than the public prosecutor. But why would Vansittart agree to defend such miscreants? Suffice it to say that Forsyth has plenty more twists in store.
The second story in the collection is called “The Art of the Matter,” and it is a much cozier mystery, involving art theft and forgery and some rather unexpected reversals of fortune. After the grittiness of the title story, this one comes as a bit of a palette-cleanser, but it is nonetheless a fully-fleshed-out crime story that could easily have been stretched out to novel length without much effort. It is a somewhat comic heist caper that will satisfy anyone who enjoys a good revenge tale.
The third tale in the book is called “The Miracle.” In his fiction, Forsyth often likes to weave together events from different timelines. “The Miracle” is a story that operates on three different timelines. The framing story is set in Siena, Italy, on July 2, 1975. It concerns a middle-aged Topeka, Kansas, cattleman and his wife who have traveled to Italy to witness the Palio di Siena, a horse race that takes place there every summer and attracts roughly 40,000 spectators. These two Americans have arrived late. They failed to book a hotel room on time and thus had to stay at an inn far from the city. Their rental car overheated on the drive to Siena, and now, traveling on foot, the wife has twisted her ankle just a quarter mile away from where the race is set to begin. She sits down in a cobblestoned courtyard. A foreigner who speaks English takes a look at her ankle. He informs her that it is not broken but that it needs to be wrapped. He offers to tear up a shirt into strips and wrap the ankle for her. The husband asks the stranger who he is, and the stranger responds that he is a gardener. He is actually being modest. He is a trained doctor. In fact, he was a Nazi surgeon during the Second World War. He was stationed in Italy and exactly 31 years earlier, on July 2, 1944, he witnessed a miracle in that courtyard that changed his life. At this point we get our first story-within-a-story, as the gardener/doctor tells his wartime tale. He tells this story in the third person, not acknowledging that he himself is the doctor at the center of the tale. Siena was in the middle of an area being hotly contested by both the Allied and Axis powers. The courtyard where the American couple now sit peacefully was, in July of 1944, a makeshift emergency field hospital for wounded German soldiers and Allied prisoners of war. As American General Mark Clark and his troops advanced into Siena, the Germans evacuated, leaving behind soldiers and POWs too wounded to be moved. All of the medical staff are evacuated with the retreating German Army except for a young German surgeon and an even younger Italian girl who has been pressed into service as a nurse. The German surgeon cannot speak Italian and the Italian girl cannot speak German. The young surgeon and his nurse have been left in charge of 220 men, all of whom are near death. He assumes that by the time the Allied troops arrive, nearly all of his patients will have expired. In fact, three days later, when the French and American troops arrive in the Sienese courtyard, all 220 patients are alive and on the mend. The surgeon attributes this miracle to the ministrations of the mysterious nurse. To explain this miracle, he goes back even further in time, to 1540, when Siena and the surrounding countryside were “a vision of hell,” wracked by plague and famine and riots and revolts and clashing clans. To look after the community’s most wretched sufferers, a young noblewoman named Caterina established a sort of makeshift hospital in the same courtyard where, years later, in 1944, the Germans would set up their own makeshift hospital. Forsyth spends the rest of the story tying his three timelines together in surprising and entertaining ways.
The fourth story in the collection is called “The Citizen” (Forsyth often gives unaccountably bland titles to thrilling stories, a habit he—thankfully—doesn’t extend to the titles of his novels). This is a gripping story about a British Airways 747 Jumbo Jet that is traveling, full of passengers, from Bangkok to London. Midway through the flight, one of the stewards finds a note that a passenger has left in the galley. The anonymous note is addressed to the captain and informs him that two of the passengers appear to be smuggling drugs from Bangkok into London. The captain finds all this a bother. He’d prefer to ignore the note and let British Customs find the drugs (or not) on its own. But aviation law requires him to radio ahead to Heathrow and let the authorities know about the note. And when he does, the tension ratchets up and the plot, naturally, takes some odd twists.
Which brings us to the final story in The Veteran. Writers and their editors often like to begin a story collection with the second best story in the book and conclude with the best. You want a very strong story to lure the reader in. You want an even stronger one with which to send the reader and (especially, perhaps) the book reviewer off. If the middle stories are of a slightly lesser quality, a good final story will often help the reader/reviewer overlook that shortcoming. None of the stories in The Veteran are less than riveting. But “Whispering Wind,” the final story in the collection, is an absolute masterpiece, one of the most inventive fictions Forsyth has ever written. At 140 pages it is the longest story in the book and the one that seems the most novel-like. In fact, it essentially is a novel. It begins in Montana in 1876, just a few days before General Custer’s foolhardy attack on the Indians at The Little Big Horn. The main character is a Scottish-American frontiersman named Ben Craig, whom Custer’s Army has enlisted as a scout, both because of his knowledge of the terrain and his ability to speak the language of the Cheyenne Indians. Here is another case where Forsyth’s status as a conservative ex-military man who is generally quite fond of America and Americans may cause the reader to entertain false expectations of how the author will treat this historical subject. In this story Forsyth evinces no fondness whatsoever for the American military. His sympathies all lie with the Indians (Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho). Early in the tale Ben Craig witnesses an appalling massacre of Indian women and children by some of Custer’s military officers in the days prior to Custer’s Last Stand. They shoot a beautiful young girl named Whispering Wind through the leg as she tries to escape the slaughter. Ben Craig ministers to her wounds, but he is ordered by Custer’s men to keep her tied up. They plan to return later to gang rape her and then kill her like the rest of her tribe. Craig, who is disgusted by what he has seen of the American Army, sets her on a pony and allows her to escape. Custer will sentence him to death for this. Fortunately, Custer delays Craig’s execution until after the planned raid on the Little Big Horn. He wants the Indian-loving Craig to watch as the General and his men slaughter the warriors gathered there. Craig does get a front row seat to the slaughter, but not the one that Custer was promising.
This story goes through more permutations (a favorite word of Forsyth’s) than any other Forsyth tale I have read. It starts out as a Western tale and pretty much remains one until the end. But it also manages to satisfy the requirements of many other pop-fiction genres —the fantasy tale, the romance, the time-travel tale, the revenge tale, the chase story, etc. It is also a pretty good example of The Hero’s Journey, as defined by Joseph Campbell.
I’m not exactly sure why The Veteran never became as popular as No Comebacks. The advance review that ran in Kirkus Reviews was headlined “Big Pro Shows His Stuff. Boffo.” As it happened, however, the book was released just a few weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, a time when readers across the globe were still obsessed with nonfiction accounts of the attacks and their aftermath. Few paid any attention to Forsyth’s story collection with its bland-sounding title. Thanks to Jon Breen, I was made aware of this underrated collection, and I’m glad I was. Anyone who loves thrilling stories ought to seek it out as well. And if, after reading No Comebacks and The Veteran, you’re in the mood for more Forsyth short stories, well, I’ve got good news. You can find them in two more books. The aforementioned volume The Shepherd, published in 1975, was given the stand-alone treatment, but it’s a very slim book, heavily illustrated, and it contains a single short story, written as a Christmas present for his wife Carole. And then there is Forsyth’s 1991 book The Deceiver. This book has always been marketed as a novel but it is in fact a collection of four discrete stories all of them featuring a British spymaster named Sam McCready. The stories began as episodes of a British TV series called Frederick Forsyth Presents, which debuted in 1989. Forsyth himself introduced each episode of the TV series, a la Alfred Hitchcock or Rod Serling. A total of six episodes were produced. After all of the episodes had aired, Forsyth collected four of the stories into The Deceiver. The McCready character seems to have been inspired, at least in part, by TV’s Lieutenant Columbo. Throughout the book he is variously described as “a crumpled fellow,” “quirky” and “irreverent,” “somewhat scruffy,” and “a diamond in the rough.” At one point he is described as “the medium-built, rather rumpled man with thinning brown hair in a gray raincoat.” Like Columbo, he is forever being underestimated by those around him. Each story can stand on its own, and each story is thrilling. If there are any other Frederick Forsyth short stories out there, I am not aware of them. But perhaps Jon L. Breen is.
All regular EQMM readers know who Steve Steinbock is: He took over the chief reviewing position in our distinguished book-review column The Jury Box in 2011, he became a published fiction writer in EQMM’s Department of First Stories in 2010, he’s done special-feature interviews and articles for the magazine over the years, and (starting in our July/August 2021 issue) he’s become one of our translators from Japanese. The latter is the topic of this fascinating post. —Janet Hutchings
A few years ago at a Malice Domestic conference in Bethesda, ten of us were gathered around a dinner table. Josh Pachter was a few seats away from me. Since the mid 1980s, Josh has been translating stories, articles, and books from Dutch into English. In recent years, he’s also translated from Flemish, Spanish, Italian, Afrikaans, Romanian, and Chinese.
Someone at the table asked Josh how many languages he spoke.
“Only English and Dutch,” he said.
We all stared at him.
“These days,” Josh continued, “with Google Translate, you don’t need to speak a language to translate it. You just need to know how to adapt a Google translation into coherent English.”
“Josh,” I said. “Maybe you can do that with French or Spanish, but it won’t work with Japanese.”
“In my experience,” Josh said, “it works with every language.”
Josh is my friend and mentor, and he’s the greatest EQMM translator since Anthony Boucher. But with regard to Japanese, relying on Google Translate is problematic.
On a daily basis, I use Google Translate and other machine translation tools like DeepL and Yandex. They make my job as a language learner, and a translator, much easier. If you copy a paragraph of Danish, Dutch, French, or Spanish into Google Translate’s webpage, you will get a perfectly sensible, more than adequate translation of that paragraph into English. Chances are you’ll also have good luck translating a text of Azerbaijani, Malaysian, or Urdu into English.
With Japanese, however, if you rely completely on Google Translate, most of it will sound awkward, half of it will be confusing but ultimately understandable, and about ten to twenty percent will be bafflingly incomprehensible.
Below, for example, is a paragraph from the Japanese Wikipedia page for “Detective Novel” translated into English using Google Translate:
The name “mystery,” trees Takataro is Ondorisha in science fiction broad sense, including the mystery when supervised the Monographs, Ranpo Edogawa and Mizutani quasi reportedly those named have been proposed in. There are also other names such as detective novels, mystery novels, and suspense novels, but the former name is because the character “Detective” is restricted to this kanji. It is no longer used. There are some overlaps with crime novels, but they are not completely synonymous.
(Keep in mind that Google Translate, like nearly all machine translation tools, uses artificial intelligence. Every time a human being uses it and makes a correction, the software “learns” and improves. If you enter the same paragraph tomorrow, your mileage may vary).
The problem is not with Japanese, or with English, or even with Google Translate. The problem is that the syntax, word usage, idioms, and literary conventions of Japanese and English are so different from each other that no piece of software (let alone most human brains) can decipher and convert an intelligent text from one language into an intelligent text in the other. As technology advances, the situation will get better. In the field of computer science, there’s been a fair amount of research into developing algorithms that can parse the grammar of both languages. But at this point it’s still a work in progress.
There are many reasons why Japanese is so difficult to translate. I’ll outline a few of these below. But it’s important to keep in mind that translation between any two languages is never a simple matter of substituting words from one language to corresponding words of the other.
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice examined the mirror mounted above her fireplace and imagined the world on the other side. She wondered if “looking-glass milk” tasted different, or if objects would operate by different rules. How would a chessboard knight move on a looking-glass chessboard? She managed to climb through to the other side of the mirror where she discovered a world that indeed operated by a different set of rules. When Alice tried to read a book, she realized “it’s all in some language I don’t know.” She held the book up to a mirror so she could read the words—but found it was all “Jabberwocky.”
To translate is to experience the world from both sides of a looking glass. Languages operate differently on the other side.
What Makes Japanese so Difficult?
Just to be clear, my intention isn’t to bash the Japanese language (or English, or Google Translate). But the fact is that both English and Japanese are complicated languages, and it’s those complications that make translation between the two so complex, while at the same time so satisfying. The very things that make Japanese linguistically incompatible with English are what makes it exciting for me. A difficult Japanese paragraph is like a crossword puzzle. I can stare at one clue for hours. But as soon as I solve another clue, everything fits into place.
Below are some of the curious characteristics of Japanese that make English translations so complex.
1. Syntax. There are several aspects of Japanese syntax that make translation challenging. First is the use of particles—single characters or short words that are attached to the end of words, like suffixes in English, and which serve the same functions as English conjunctions, interjections, and prepositions, or serve as markers of case, phrase functions, subject, object, or topic of a sentence. A second characteristic of Japanese is that there are no spaces between words, making it hard to tell where one word ends and the next begins, or whether a particular character is a particle or an actual word. A third challenge is that Japanese word order is more or less the opposite of what it would be in English. Below is an example of a sentence in English followed by the same sentence in Japanese, then a word-for-word translation with the particles included in parentheses:
I want to try on a suit I saw in the shop the across the street from the hotel.
ホテルの向かいにある店で見たスーツを着てみたいです
Hotel (of) opposite (to) store (at) saw suit (direct object) try-on want.
Not a very pretty sentence in English, but it makes perfect sense in Japanese. I found a similar, simpler example in the DuoLingo language app. One of the quiz questions was to translate into Japanese:
“I put flowers in the vase.”
The answer, translated word for word with grammatical particles in parentheses, is
“Vase (in) flower (object marker) put in (past tense ending)”
You might have noticed something missing from the Japanese sentences. Nowhere do they contain the first-person pronoun (“I”). Which brings us to the next big difference . . .
2. Dropped subjects and missing pronouns. Japanese grammar is often very economical. If anything can be understood from the context, there’s no reason to say it. This is especially true with first- and second-person pronouns, as well as subjects that were named earlier in a text. Regarding pronouns, it’s generally considered rude, abrupt, or arrogant to use “me” or “you” (or any other first- or second-person pronoun) in speech or writing.
To illustrate this, below is a paragraph I came across in a discussion on Quora:
Here’s what I got when I ran the above paragraph through Google Translate:
I had asthma when my child was small, so I sent him to a swimming school. At first she was all about putting her face in the water, she couldn’t do just one thing in the lesson, and she came home crying. But she never said she would quit. She is still in high school. He has been on the stone for three years, but this year he will finally be competing in the national competition.
An astute reader can figure out the writer’s meaning, but it’s confusing. The Japanese paragraph doesn’t contain a single pronoun, so Google randomly inserted pronouns (usually incorrectly) wherever English grammar required one. Regarding the remark “on the stone for three years,” it’s an ancient idiom about patience. The meaning is that when the writer’s child (we’re never sure from the context whether s/he is male or female) was young, that child had asthma, and didn’t like swimming. But the parent was patient, and the child eventually became a competitive swimmer in high school.
3. Words with different ranges, nuances, and definitions. Translations are approximations, at best, since very few words in any language have exactly the same meaning as the corresponding word in another language. You may have heard of the blue/green distinction in Japanese traffic lights. Throughout the world, “red” means “stop” and “green” means “go.” But for a variety of reasons—mostly having to do with history of color words and where the Japanese draw the line on a color map between blue and green, a Japanese traffic light signifying “go” is referred to as “blue.” In English, we use “blue” idiomatically to mean “sad” (“I’m feeling blue”). But in Japan, referring to someone or something as aoi (blue) implies that it is young, unripe, or unskilled. Infants and people who have had too much to drink are referred to as “red.”
Japanese uses a lot of English words, but in Japanese they take on new meanings. Manshon (from “mansion”) refers to any high-rise apartment building. Eyakon (from “air conditioner”) refers to heat pumps, whereas an air conditioner is called a Kūrā (from “cooler”). A smorgasbord or all-you-can-eat buffet is called a Baikingu (from “Viking”). In English, we draw a distinction between comedy and drama, but in Japan, Dorama (from “drama”) is any TV series, be it a tear-jerker or a situation comedy. An electric outlet in Japan is called a Konsento (from “consent”) and I have no idea why.
Since I’m in the book business, literary terms are important to me. But divergent definitions had led to confusion more than once. In English, we make a clear distinction between novels and short stories. But if you translate “novel” into Japan, you get shōsetsu (小説), which in Japanese can mean both novel and short story. On the other hand, translate “story” into Japanese and you’re likely to get either monogatari (物語), which usually refers to a classical story or an epic, or hanashi (話), which is a tale told in spoken conversation.
In English, “maybe” and “probably” have different meanings. No one has ever quantified it, but most English speakers would say that “maybe” means anywhere from 0% to 60% likelihood, whereas “probably” describes something with a likelihood of 80% or greater. The Japanese word tabun (たぶん), however, is translated as both “maybe” and “probably.” A similar issue occurs with the word “omoshiroi” (面白い – which literally means “white faced”). This word describes something as being “amusing” or “comical” as well as “fascinating” or “intriguing.”
Everything is relative, especially when it comes to relatives. I recently read a story in which the crime victim’s only living relative was his twin brother. So I was confused when the police went to interview the victim’s little brother. I thought at first that I was missing something. I must have either gotten “only living relative” or “twin” wrong. I finally remembered that Japanese uses specific words for siblings based on relative age: a male sibling is either an older brother (ani) or a younger brother (otōto), even in the case of twins.
Japanese adds the prefix “gi-” (義) to family words signifying that the relationship is legal rather than biological. This leads to confusion for Western readers since, for example, gibo (義母) can mean both “stepmother” and “mother-in-law.”
Family terms aren’t limited to family members. I pointed out earlier that using a second person pronoun (meaning “you”) is disrespectful. One polite workaround when speaking to someone who is older than oneself – even when they are complete strangers – is to address them as “older brother,” “older sister,” “uncle,” “auntie,” or if they are significantly older, “grandfather” or “grandmother.” A male restaurant, bar, or shop owner is often referred to as a danna (旦那), which also means “husband.”
A daughter isn’t always a daughter. In Awasaka Tsumao’s “Fox’s Wedding” (EQMM July/August 2021), the victim of a traffic accident was, according to Google Translate, “a Judo instructor’s young daughter.” Upon careful reading, I figured out that the victim was actually “a young female Judo instructor.”
The word for male offspring is even more problematic: musuko (息子) literally means “son,” but it’s often used euphemistically for “penis.”
4. Name-games. Japanese names are descriptive. The characters that make up a person’s name have specific meaning. Remember the “Judo instructor’s young daughter” who was the victim of a traffic incident? (Incidentally, she survived). The cause of the accident was a drunk red bear. At least, that’s what I learned from Google Translate. It turned out that the drunk driver was very human but was named Higuma (緋熊) which translates as “scarlet bear.” This happens often with Japanese names. When an artificial intelligence like Google Translate sees a common name like Tanaka (literally “amidst the field”) or Yamaguchi (literally “mouth of the mountain”), it has no problem recognizing it as a proper name. But less common names are tricky, and are often translated literally. The hero of a mystery series by Arisugawa Arisu is named Himura, which Google usually translates as “fire village.” The author of “Fox’s Wedding” is Awasaka Tsumao, which Google translates as “bubble slope wife husband.”
5. Idiomatic Idiosyncrasies. Idioms almost never translate from one language to another. This doesn’t just go for Japanese and English, but for all languages. In fact, idioms are often so mired in history and misinterpretation that most of us would be hard pressed if we had to explain them. I understand things like “walking on eggshells” or “throw a wrench in the works” but what does it really mean to “beat around the bush?” And why do we say “pardon my French” when nearly all English curse words have Anglo-Saxon and not French origins?
Japanese uses a lot of idioms and idiomatic phrases in everyday speech. There are even some elements of Japanese that are not idiomatic, but just sound so, because they are culturally unique to Japan. For example, to this day, the size of a room or apartment is not measured in square meters or square feet, but in tatami mats. In traditional Japanese buildings, the floor is made up of straw mats measuring approximately 3 by 6 feet. Thus, a hundred-square-foot bedroom would be a “six mat room” and an apartment measuring seven hundred square feet would be referred to in a real estate advertisement as being “forty tatami mats.”
In a mystery story I recently read, I encountered a truly baffling measurement. A lethal dose of cyanide was described as “an earpick’s worth.” It turns out people of East Asian heritage tend to have drier, almost crystal-like earwax (in contrast to the goopy, yellowish wax in the ears of people of African and European ancestry). Rather than cotton swabs, Japanese traditionally clean their ears with a special tool, usually made of metal or bamboo, with a tiny spoon-shaped scoop at the end. In Japanese recipe books, instead of a “dash” of salt, you’re likely to find “an earpick’s amount” (耳掻き一杯).
Many idiomatic phrases were imported from China over a thousand years ago. A majority of these are called yojijukugo (four-word idioms) because they are each comprised of four Chinese characters. For example, for “everything is going well” you might say jun-pū-man-pan (“gentle winds full sail”). An over-the-top billboard or TV advertisement is referred to as yō-tō-ku-niku (“sheep’s head dog meat”).
If you’re getting impatient with my long-winded explanation, you might ask, soko ga miso nandaro? (roughly meaning, “what does that have to do with miso?”)
Japanese employs hundreds of mimetic words in everyday speech. These are slang words, usually a doubled sound, that describe noises, feelings, textures, conditions, and anything else you can think of. “Waku-waku” means “excited.” “Niko-niko” is a bright smile. “Jiro-jiro” is the act of gaping. If you ever find yourself translating a hot love scene, don’t be surprised if you encounter something like:
He held her nyurun-nyurunpai-pai. The munyun munyun body was all pika-pika and kira-kira with beto-beto sweat. She said, “Uncle, your chin-chin is so bikun-bikun.” It really was jin-jin. His heart was doki-doki and his head was guru-guru. And then . . . dopyo-dopyo. Afterwards he was boro-boro, and when she heard him goo-goo, she knew he was suya-suya asleep.
I won’t translate that. But I trust that your imaginations can get the idea.
K.L. Abrahamson’s story “Paleolithic” appears in EQMM’s current issue (January/February 2022). I cannot think of any recent EQMM story that relies more heavily on setting and atmosphere than this evocative suspense tale. I was therefore not surprised to see that the Canadian author had chosen setting as the topic for this post. Her novels include the Detective Kazakov series and the amateur sleuth Phoebe Clay series (see the upcoming Within Angkor Shadows). She also writes in the fantasy and romance genres, and her short fiction, which includes a story that was nominated for Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award, has appeared in numerous anthologies. —Janet Hutchings
I’ve been reading a lot of stories and novels lately by newer authors. They always remind me of the three key elements of a story that my mentors repeated again and again. Character, setting, and problem (plot) are necessary for a story to be a story—at least to meet the expectations of anyone who has grown up in western civilization. While new authors seem to be fully aware of the need to have a character that the reader will (hopefully) care about, and also have absorbed the need to have something happen in the story (the plot), the importance of setting seems to have eluded many of them. Setting seems to be the unsung hero of the story.
In many of the stories I’ve been reading, I find myself dropped into a character’s head with no idea of where I am. A farmhouse, I’m told. Or a restaurant. Or a forest. But what farmhouse? What restaurant? What forest? As readers we bring our own expectations and experiences to a story. For example, I’ve seen a lot of farmhouses and lived in a few. Is it the farmhouse I knew? Does it look exactly like the one I have in my head with the same chipped white paint and sagging front porch? Does it have a summer kitchen off the back? Is it surrounded by lush gardens or overgrown lawn? Is there a dark pine forest behind it or rolling, sunlit canola fields?
As readers, when we sit down to read, we are relinquishing control of our imagination to the writer, so that we can be transported to the place and time of the writer’s story. The writer needs to provide the setting clues that ensure the reader can place the character in context. Otherwise, in the story I’m reading the farmhouse is my farmhouse, while the character could be visiting a very different farmhouse for the next reader.
So, being clear about setting helps ground the reader so they experience the story as the writer intended. The best writers take control of our imagination and place us exactly where they want us in the story. That’s a talent writers should aspire to because as readers, that’s what we want to read. We want to be transported. But setting can be so much more than simple description.
I started my adult life working in the criminal justice system. As a probation officer responsible for supervising offenders, I also prepared in-depth pre-sentence reports for the court about those offenders. The court had found these individuals guilty, but the judge was uncertain about the most appropriate sentence. The judges requested assessments to provide a better sense of the guilty party and to provide insights into an appropriate sentence.
In my reports I delved into the individual’s history from birth to present day. I tried to provide clarity about their upbringing and attitudes to help the judge understand them and what might be the most fitting sentence. You might suggest that this is all about character, not setting, but what was critical to this understanding was knowledge of the person’s past and current environment, their family, friends and community. Why? Because all of these things provide the context—aka setting—that explains the offender, who they are now, and who they might be in the future.
The same thing goes for characters. The context—aka setting—and the character are constantly interacting, thus getting to know the character requires readers to see how they act and react to their setting. The reader has to understand the character’s environment, family, community and even country. Why country? Because different nationalities have different ways of seeing the world and of presenting themselves. So understanding your character’s background setting helps illuminate their perspective on the world of the story. For instance, someone who grew up in a wealthy household in the city would probably have a far different perspective of my old farmhouse than the nostalgia I feel.
In my own Detective Kazakov mystery novels, starting with After Yekaterina, grounding the reader is doubly important because these novels are set in an alternate history where what remains of holy mother Russia is a small country trapped as a buffer between the Chinese Empire of the Sun and the Ottoman Empire. Detective Kazakov’s country is snared in dreams of Russia’s past greatness, and in the mystique of Catherine the Great. This perspective colors everything, including the crime, the detective, and the investigation.
At its best, setting can be far more than something the character reacts to and interacts with. Setting can be a character in the story and/or a metaphor for the story as a whole. Taking a step away from mystery for a moment, surely no one can argue with the fact that Shirley Jackson’s Hill House is a character in her famous horror/gothic novel, The Haunting of Hill House:
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
Wow. That is setting. It fills the reader with dread and clues the reader into the less-than-sane story to come. The house and how it affects those within its influence has moved beyond the sphere of setting and become the story. Wonderful.
Within mystery, strong setting abounds. James Lee Burke’s New Orleans-set Detective Dave Robicheaux series positively oozes with sweltering humidity and Louisiana mud—a wonderful metaphor for the underbelly of crime in the South and for the way that the relentlessness of crime and darkness can threaten everything light and good and beloved—including our souls.
In my mystery novel, Through Dark Water, the roiling dark ocean that threatens the heroine during a kayaking trip off the west coast of British Columbia is very much a metaphor for the heroine’s overwhelming guilt at surviving a horrific school shooting.
The setting of each of Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache mysteries echoes the theme of the current novel, but all of them bring us back again and again to the small town of Three Pines, a place ‘you can stumble upon if lost, but rarely find on the way to somewhere else.’ A place aptly described as ‘on the road to nowhere.’ But readers of the Gamache books remember Three Pines for its peace, its small community of characters, its gardens and for the fact that it is surrounded by a less-than-tamed wilderness at the edge of the US/Canada border. Readers remember the quiet times before the bistro fire, the food, the parties, and the way darkness and danger threaten beyond the wavy-glass windows of this modern-day Shangri-La. People die in Three Pines, and yet Louise Penny has built a setting so replete with Norman Rockwell-esque images of life well lived that we trust the town and those who live and visit there—to our peril.
Setting becomes more critical when mysteries take us beyond the familiar world of our country, state or province. Jane Harper does a stand-out job of dropping us into the heat of drought-stricken Australia in The Dry. Her opening prologue immediately sets the tone of the place:
It wasn’t as though the farm hadn’t seen death before, and the blowflies didn’t discriminate. To them there was little difference between a carcass and a corpse.
The drought had left the flies spoiled for choice that summer. They sought out the unblinking eyes and sticky wounds as the farmers of Kiewara leveled their rifles at skinny livestock. No rain meant no feed. And no feed made for difficult decisions as the tiny town shimmered under day after day of burning blue sky.
“It’ll break,” the farmers said as the months ticked over into a second year. They repeated the words out loud to each other like a mantra, and under their breaths to themselves like a prayer.”
We haven’t got any characters yet, other than the generic farmers, but we still feel the overwhelming heat and hopelessness of the dry and hear the buzzing of the flies over the carcasses. We may never have been in a drought before, or experienced the horror of having to destroy our livestock or watch them starve to death, but Jane Harper has taken us there, to that dark place. Now we just need to watch the characters interact with such a bereft place.
Jackson, Burke, Penny and Harper are all masters of their craft. They take us, through their use of specific details, to places we haven’t been before and make us squirm with more than a little discomfort at the heat, the humidity, the dry and the darkness. They make places—settings—come alive both through the character’s eyes and by presenting setting as a character itself. Reading any one of these wonderful writers is a reminder of the heroic nature of setting and why it is one of the trinity of writing elements.
SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN 