David L. Wallace is a professor of English at Long Beach State University, and he has published a number of articles about the effects of closeting on queer people. He lives in West Hollywood, CA, where he spends as much time as possible swimming laps, hiking, running, cooking good food, reading mystery novels, and joining friends for happy hour. Here he shares his experience with a series that has captured the hearts of many: the Three Pines mysteries by Louise Penny.
I found best-selling author Louise Penny’s village of Three Pines about fourteen hours after I gave up looking for it. To be honest, the conceit of a village tucked away in a hard-to-find valley between Montreal and Vermont that is not on any map and has no cell service always struck me as a bit fanciful. But I have been willing to suspend disbelief because I like the village Penny created and the quirky characters with which she populates it.
As I drove unpaved back roads in the Eastern Townships to see the sites that inspired the Old Hadley House, Sarah’s Boulangerie, and the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-Les-Loups I kept losing cell service and hoping the directions stored in my GPS program would get me to the next village on my Three Pines itinerary. The third time my cell status declared itself SOS deep in the Quebec woods, the notion of a quaint village cut off from most of civilization just over the next ridge seemed completely plausible, and I couldn’t help but wish that it would find me worthy of revealing itself to me.
I began to understand how Penny constructed Three Pines at my third stop in the village of Sutton where I sat in a gazebo in the little town square eating a marvelous cheese and raspberry pastry from the local boulangerie. To be frank, each of my stops had been a little disappointing: The Old Hadley house is a pink Airbnb now; the long hallway of the abbey was interesting but lacked the trick of light Penny describes in The Beautiful Mystery, and the store that inspired Sarah’s Boulangerie was more a specialty grocery store with no flakey croissants at three in the afternoon.
As my teeth sunk into the pastry and I fished the Gamache mystery I was currently reading out of my backpack, I began to understand that one of Penny’s many skills as a writer is to glow things up—to take inspiration from a physical place and then add elements either imagined or from other places, making Three Pines the best of everything she has culled from the villages of the Eastern Townships.
I saved Lac Brome/Knowlton for the last stop on my tour as the fan sites identified it as the village in which Penny lives. My GPS found enough bandwidth to direct me to my hotel, and just after 5 pm I started exploring the village, crossing a stream that might be the Riviére Bella Bella, noting that I would have to come back in the morning because the cool bookstore that inspired Myrna’s new and used bookshop had just closed, and spotting a coffee shop for my next-morning writing session.
I hadn’t expected to find three tall pine trees in the square or to see a grizzled old poet walking around with her pet duck, but I had hoped that one of the two bistros in town would be something like the Olivier’s bistro with its two fireplaces and would serve a reasonable facsimile of the amazing food Penny describes in the books.
Both bistros were disappointing; I had mediocre fish and chips at the pub version (although the sangria and the view from the patio were nice). I went for a glass of wine and dessert at the other, and was one of eight customers lost in the large space. As I sipped my wine and ate very disappointing carrot cake, I realized that the aspect of Three Pines I had been hoping for was village life—the sense of familiarity and community that is a constant presence in Penny’s fictional village no matter how many times a murder threatens to tear the community apart.
After my wine, I walked along the little river, noting an abandoned building with a big exhaust fan that I decided could have once been Olivier’s bistro and house nearly overgrown by trees and shrubs that I tried hard to make into Clara Morrow’s cottage. I concluded my walking tour by climbing up a small rise to a bench overlooking the village green and imaging the retired Chief Inspector Gamache sitting there reading his father’s copy of The Balm of Gilead. I turned back toward the green and thought that just maybe I saw Myrna peeking out of a window from her apartment above the bookstore.
I gave up finding Three Pines and went back to my hotel and settled in with The Nature of the Beast, entering the Three Pines in which a nine-year old, tall-tale-telling boy is murdered because no one believes that he saw a gun bigger than a house in the woods with a monster.
I found Three Pines the next morning when I entered the coffee-breakfast-lunch-wine shop and thought immediately, “Oh, Olivier closed his bistro and opened this place.” My café au lait was served (sadly) not in a bowl but a mug, but my raspberry/cheese pastry was every bit as good as the one from the day before.
As I settled at a little table against the wall and set up my laptop to work on a scene from my own fledging murder mystery, I stopped to watch the dozen or so people who had pushed four tables together in the middle of the room. Their conversation was in French so I couldn’t figure out why they were meeting, although they each had a binder from which the flipped pages. Whatever the meeting or activity was, it broke up about twenty minutes later, and I watched as members of the group chatting in twos and threes. And there it was—Three Pines—the kind of neighborly familiarity that Penny uses as the backbone of her fictional village’s society.
An hour later I had finished sketching the scene in which all my suspects are present at a happy hour in a fictional gay bar in Los Angeles and decided it was time to visit the bookstore. As I entered the bookstore, I saw a tall woman with glasses standing to the side of the front counter and wondered, “Could it be?” I wandered through the large inviting space pretending to browse as I stole looks at the tall woman, comparing it to a picture of Penny on a poster, and decided that, indeed, it was her. When the people she had been talking to left, I plucked up my courage and thanked her for the books, and then I found Three Pines for a second time.
Penny was absolutely gracious, introducing herself even though I clearly knew who she was and laughing when I described looking for the big gun in the woods as I walked down the hill to the bookstore. When I mentioned that I was writing a piece in which I used a line of poetry attributed to her character Ruth Zardo, she walked over to a corner of the bookstore and pulled a book by Margaret Atwood off the shelf and flipped to a page so I could read the whole poem. When I mentioned that I had been working on a scene from my own murder mystery at the coffee shop, her eyes lit up and suddenly we were two writers talking about the pleasures of plotting a murder mystery. I was a bit star-struck as I floated out of the bookstore and realized that I had not thought to buy one of her books and ask her to sign it. I turned to go back but changed my mind and continued on to my car because Three Pines had found me for a couple of hours, and I didn’t want to do anything that would spoil its magic.
Dennis Palumbo, M.A., MFT is a writer and licensed psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in creative issues, primarily in the entertainment industry. His award-winning series of mystery thrillers—Mirror Image, Fever Dream,Night Terrors, Phantom Limb,Head Wounds and the latest, Panic Attack—feature psychologist and trauma expert Daniel Rinaldi. He’s also the author of Writing From the Inside Out, as well as a collection of mystery short stories, From Crime to Crime. Recently he served as Consulting Producer on the Hulu limited series The Patient, and here (in an article first published in the journal Capital Psychiatry) he tells us about how the play out of the television crime drama affected his real-life patients.
After seventeen years as a Hollywood screenwriter (the film My Favorite Year; the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, etc.), I retired from show business and have been a licensed psychotherapist in private practice for over thirty years. During this time, my writing has been confined to articles and reviews, as well as a series of mystery novels whose protagonist is a psychologist. My point is, it’s been so long since I was a dues-paying member of the Hollywood industry that I was quite surprised to hear from the team of Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg. Writers of the award-winning TV series The Americans, they’d reached out to me to act as advisor on a new show they were developing. Called The Patient, it was about a serial killer who kidnaps and holds hostage a well-known therapist, in hopes that he can “cure” the killer of his homicidal urges.
Apparently, my former career as a script writer and my current one as a therapist prompted them to see me as a reasonable person to act as consultant on the new series. Essentially, what they wanted was for me to vet each episode’s scripts for clinical accuracy and to “make sure the therapist sounded like a therapist”—or as much like one as possible given the bizarre circumstances of the show’s premise.
Over the coming months, I did my best to keep the narrative within the range of plausibility, including suggesting the occasional line of dialogue or therapeutic interpretation. Just as we were finishing the script for the last episode, it was announced that Steve Carell had been cast as the therapist. A wonderful actor, he’d been given a salt-and-pepper beard and glasses. Whether or not it was conscious on the writers’ part, he looked somewhat like me. Which, at the time, I just found amusing.
My working relationship with Fields and Weisberg was one of the most pleasant professional experiences of my life. Moreover, the two writers were very gracious about my contribution when doing PR interviews leading up to the series premiere. During one such interview, when writing up the story for Newsweek, the reporter off-handedly mentioned that Carell’s character looked like me.
It wasn’t until the series began airing on Hulu that the ramifications of this became apparent in my therapy practice. A number of patients who’d begun watching the show pointed out that Carell’s therapist character looked a lot like me, and on occasion even sounded like me. (No surprise, since I’d suggested some of the therapeutic comments the therapist made.) Naturally, I had to process this with these patients, some of whom were quite upset at seeing the therapist chained to a bed, helpless. More than one half-jokingly worried that the series’ premise would give “some crazy person” the idea of kidnapping me. Did I feel I was in danger? they asked. I answered honestly that I didn’t, while privately wondering why I’d never even entertained that idea when working on the show.
Moreover, had I been unforgivably clueless in not anticipating this reaction from my patients? I reminded myself that Steve Carell hadn’t been cast until the series’ scripts were almost finished, that I had no idea he’d be playing the therapist, and certainly no idea how they were going to make him look. Yet I still felt pangs of remorse for the distress the show’s depiction of the therapist was causing for some of my patients.
As the weeks went on, and episode after episode aired, it became obvious that seeing an avatar of their therapist was upsetting to a number of my patients. Of equal interest during sessions was the reaction of those patients who found the whole thing amusing, or at least presented it as such. They even joked with me about the series’ story-telling: why didn’t the therapist try harder to escape? Why didn’t he just refuse to talk to the serial killer? Is this how you would react in this situation, Dennis?
Of course, the narrative choices displayed on-screen were made by the show’s writers, not me. I was merely the consultant. But this didn’t matter. What did matter, and what ended up being of real clinical interest (and value) was what some patients’ transferential connection to the therapist character and the story revealed about both their own core issues and their relationship with me. As Robert Stolorow has reiterated, there is only subjectivity and context; in this unusual situation, there was a patient’s subjective experience of me in the context of our therapeutic relationship, and then a kind of meta-subjectivity/context experience through the narrative of a TV series.
(SPOILER ALERT: I’m going to discuss the series’ final episode)
For a select few of my patients, as I’d expected, it was the series’ final episode that elicited the strongest reaction. Not only does the therapist fail to escape, he’s strangled to death on-screen by the serial-killer patient. This horrible murder is hardly ameliorated by the killer’s decision to send an anonymous letter to the therapist’s family, telling them where they can find the body so it can have a proper funeral. The last time we see the serial killer, he’s the one chained to the bed, his mother holding the key to the chain’s lock. Since she’s known all along about her son’s activities, we’re left to wonder if/when she’ll release him to potentially kill again.
A couple patients revealed that they’d cried at the end, one of them pointing an accusing finger at me and saying, “You better not fucking die!” Again, said half-jokingly. And yet, not. The few others who’d stayed with the show all the way to the end were angry at both the series’ writers and at me. Their reactions ranged from disbelief (“How could they end a show like that? How come the killer gets away with it?”) to frustration (“That’s not fair to the viewers. We deserved a better ending.”) to simple creative criticism (“I hate ambiguous endings.”).
As difficult as the sessions were with these patients over the course of the series’ run (including my own guilt at having put them through it), some of the clinical work that arose from our discussions was quite beneficial. A greater understanding of the contextual nature of our therapist/patient relationship undoubtably occurred. Moreover, we often reached a deeper understanding of the dependency/resentment dynamic at work in the therapeutic dyad. And, in one or two cases, the discussion regarding the show was a springboard to a more energized, proactive engagement on the patient’s part.
Still, I have somewhat mixed feelings about my participation in the series. It was often an exhilarating experience, due primarily to the talent, receptivity and warmth of both Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg. And while I regret the distress that the lead character’s words and looks evoked in a few of my patients, I also felt this similarity led to real forward progress in our work together. A potential disjunction becoming a fruitful conjunction.
That said, if I’m ever asked to consult on another series, my only hope is that the lead character looks like someone else.
In today’s post, essayist, short-story writer, prolific reader, and often a blogger on this site Kevin Mims talks about the frustrations of watching contemporary TV police dramas. We all know the feeling of asking, “Why would they do that!?” to our screens while knee-deep in a televised procedural . . . here, the author gets specific. Share what you think about this phenomenon in the comments section!— Jackie Sherbow
Don’t read this essay if you haven’t watched A Perfect Couple on Netflix. It is full of spoilers.
I have harped on this before, but it bears repeating because the situation just keeps getting worse. The contemporary TV crime drama relies way too heavily on some extremely illogical behavior by both the cops and the suspects involved in various mystery investigations. This current rant is inspired by the Netflix series A Perfect Couple, starring Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, Dakota Fanning, and a handful of other talented and attractive people. The basic storyline is this: Kidman plays Greer Garrison Winbury, a successful author of popular crime novels. Her books sell so well, in fact, that she and her husband, Tag (Schreiber), live in a $40 million mansion in Nantucket. What’s more, she seems to be keeping most of her deadbeat relatives afloat as well. As the story begins, one of the Winburys’ three sons is about to marry a young woman named Amelia Sacks. Amelia is from a normal—i.e. working-class—background (she herself works at the Brooklyn Zoo) and thus seems almost like a fish out of water amongst the wretched excess of the Winbury family. On the night before the wedding is scheduled to take place, Amelia’s maid of honor, Merritt Monaco, is murdered on the beachfront property where the Winbury family resides. The whole family and various guests were present on the property and celebrating the upcoming nuptials, so just about everyone at the party is a potential suspect. So far, so good.
The problem is that the police who investigate the murder do very little in the way of actual sleuthing. Most of what they learn about the crime they discover while interviewing subjects in that hoariest of all TV clichés the police interrogation room. These interrogations are handled by Police Chief Dan Carter and Detective Nikki Henry. Again and again they pull members of the immensely wealthy Winbury family down to the station and subject them to thoroughly hostile interrogations. Again and again, these cops seem to believe that they have arrested the murderer, only to have to release them at the end of the interrogation. This, of course, is absolutely insane. The Winburys are fabulously wealthy and well connected. They undoubtedly have an entire team of attorneys on retainer for any sort of emergency (considering how loathsome many of the family’s members are, the Winbury’s attorneys are probably kept fairly busy). The local police would not arrest a Winbury unless they had proof positive of that person’s guilt. Otherwise, they would open themselves up to a wrongful arrest lawsuit.
What’s more, the Winbury clan would certainly be aware of their right to remain silent. And they would certainly insist on exercising that right, as well as the right to be represented by an attorney during questioning. The Winburys are not nice people They are mostly arrogant jerks. Even the innocent ones, who had nothing to hide from the cops, would never in a million years voluntarily step into a police interrogation room and allow themselves to be verbally abused by a couple of prole police officers. What’s more, the family’s attorneys would be all over the place trying to thwart any sort of investigation into the Winburys. The local yokel cops would be informed that they are not to question any member of the Winbury family without an attorney present. The attorneys would be denying the police access to the Winbury home, the Winbury cell phone records, the Winbury vehicles, the Winbury computers, and the Winburys themselves. It is idiotic to think that every one of the hostile jerks who make up the Winbury family would allow themselves to be hauled in and interrogated like a common criminal. It simply wouldn’t happen.
I’m singling out A Perfect Couple here, but this problem is widespread in contemporary crime dramas. I realize that cops do often interrogate criminal suspects in dark and scary interrogation rooms with two-way windows in them. But on TV, we see all manner of wealthy people—doctors, movie stars, politicians, investment bankers—allowing themselves to be hauled into interrogation rooms and treated like common criminals. Occasionally the writers of these TV shows provide the suspect with a lawyer, but this lawyer generally does absolutely nothing. If the lawyer does make an effort to advise his client not to answer a question, he’ll almost always be rebuffed by a client who will angrily declare, “I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m not afraid to answer the question.” A self-respecting lawyer who has been neutered like that by his own client would probably just walk away. Why sit by and watch as your client ignores your very sound legal advice and creates immense difficulties for himself by blabbing angrily to the police?
I realize that some suspects do actually spill their guts to the cops in interrogation rooms. I once served as a juror on a murder case in which a seventeen-year-old suspect was questioned in an interrogation room for eight hours. Watching even selected segments of that interrogation session was painful as hell. The child was clearly frightened and the detective was able to manipulate him into saying anything he wanted him to. The suspect changed his story over and over again at the insistence of the police officer. The suspect claimed to be in the second of three vehicles that were involved in the incident. The officer insisted that he was in a different vehicle. The officer offered no evidence to back up his claim. He just seemed to need to place the suspect in the other vehicle so that he could get him to testify as to what was said in that vehicle. The entire interrogation session was horrifying and, in the end, none of it was used in court and the child wasn’t charged with a crime. The jury was given access to a video recording of the interrogation simply because it had been entered into the evidence collected by the police. Neither the prosecution nor the defense ever used the video. It was easy to understand why the prosecutor never used it. The child was bullied into changing his statements so many times that it was impossible to know what the facts were.
But that was an impoverished minor who had no attorney and who didn’t understand his right to remain silent. Suspects like that may well sing like a canary when hauled into an interrogation room. But almost no college-educated professional is ever likely to utter a word in a police interrogation room. And if he has an attorney—which he almost certainly would—said attorney wouldn’t ever let his client be interrogated by the police. And, if the college-educated professional were a member of a fabulously wealthy and well-connected family, no cop would ever try to drag him unwillingly into an interrogation room. It’s a lazy trope of contemporary crime TV. What’s more, it usually makes for pretty dull TV.
Nearly as nonsencial is the way that cops in contemporary TV shows are able to get search warrants with such ease and speed. For about five years, the house next to mine was used as a sort of unofficial halfway house for convicts who were out on parole. The landlord apparently was making good money by allowing nearly a dozen people at a time to flop in a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house. In fact, she even parked an inoperable van in the driveway and rented it out as well. Needless to say, this was not an ideal situation. I chatted with and liked some of these ex-cons, but there appeared to be a great deal of drug dealing going on next door. The SPD spent several months observing the house from undercover vehicles parked up the street. At the end of that period, the SPD sent all of the neighbors a report indicating that they had seen plenty of behavior that appeared to be consistent with drug dealing. But the police report also noted that their investigation didn’t yield anywhere near the kind of evidence that would be necessary for them to obtain a warrant to enter the house and search for drugs. It is not easy to obtain a search warrant in America, nor should it be. None of us would want the police to be able to barge into our home simply because a neighbor suspected we might be doing something illegal.
But even before criminality moved in next door to me, I knew enough people involved in law enforcement—including a few assistant district attorney’s—to know that getting a search warrant is rarely a quick or easy process. But on today’s TV crime shows, you regularly see cops telling suspects—including well-heeled ones like the Winburys—“If you don’t willingly let me come inside and search your house, I’ll be back here in a few hours with a search warrant.”
If the cops want to search your house, you should insist that they get a search warrant first. The cops themselves would probably want to get a warrant. Anything they find in a search would be inadmissible in court if it weren’t collected lawfully. And any thinking person knows that a cop isn’t likely to be able to obtain a search warrant in a matter of hours. They probably wouldn’t be able to get it in a matter of days. Cops don’t usually appeal directly to judges for search warrants. They take their evidence to the district attorney’s office and request that the D.A. present it to a judge and then request a search warrant. This is a long and complicated process. If a cop tells you, “Let me search your house now or I’ll be back with a search warrant in an hour,” he’s probably lying to you. (I suspect that no real cop ever actually makes this statement.)
But even for a TV cop this is a stupid line of dialog. Even stupider is the fact that it often works. Why would a suspect in a murder case let a cop into his house? If he knows that he has incriminating evidence in the house, the obvious response to the cop would be, “Go get the damn warrant.” Even if the suspect has nothing to do with the murder, why would he let the cops go wandering about his house?
Usually, when the police are given a search warrant, its parameters are fairly narrow. The police aren’t allowed to search for any damning piece of evidence they can possibly find. They have to inform the D.A. and the judge of what exactly it is they are looking for in the house. And that is usually all they are allowed to look for. But if you were somehow convinced to give the police carte blanche to search your entire house without a warrant, well, God help you. Normally, people like that are only found on TV crime dramas.
If any of this sounds as if I am anti-cop, let me dispel that notion right now. I have always been an admirer of police officers in general, just as I admire doctors and teachers and firemen. These are tough jobs and I am grateful for the people who do it well. You may think that I am making this up, but at 6:30 p.m., on September 5, while my wife and I were watching A Perfect Couple in our living room, we were the victims of an attempted home invasion. The perpetrator kicked in the glass panels of our front door, sending shattered glass and splintered wood everywhere and terrifying my wife and I. We shot up out of our seats and made a beeline towards the back of the house, hoping to escape into a neighbor’s property through our backyard. I was dialing 911 while we did this. But by the time we reached our backdoor, the home invader had already gone down the side of our property and was climbing over the fence into our backyard. Terrified, we made a u-turn and bolted back through the house and out through our shattered front door. My wife was barefoot and cut up the soles of her feet. We ran across the street to a neighbor’s home and explained the situation. Unbeknownst to us, the police were already on their way, because several neighbors had already reported their own interactions.
Multiple police cars showed up within minutes of my wife and I exiting the property. Before two entered, they asked for my permission to enter the property. They also asked me if anyone else other than the intruder might be there. These cops had no idea what they would find inside. My house is small—1,235 square feet—but they spent forty minutes looking through every square inch of it. When they finally allowed us back into the house, every closet door was open and the door to the basement we never use was also opened. They had checked under the bed and behind every piece of furniture. What’s more, while they had been searching the house, their colleagues had actually caught the would-be intruder on a neighboring street, where he had gone to continue looking for a house he could rob.
Needless to say, this was an extremely unnerving experience. But it was made infinitely less traumatic than it could have been by the bravery and professionalism of the SPD. They took statements from numerous witnesses. The SPD sent a CSI photographer to our house to photograph the damage to the house. They provided me with a police report number that I could use when dealing with my homeowners insurance company. The police drove me to where the suspect had been apprehended, so that I could identify him as my intruder. And they followed up the next day with several text messages identifying the suspect and providing me with additional information.
All of the SPD officers I have ever interacted with have been consummate professionals. It burns my biscuits when I see cops portrayed on TV shows such as A Perfect Couple as buffoons, authoritarians, or both. It is highly ironic that I happened to be watching A Perfect Couple just as I found myself in the midst of a frightening police emergency. But that is exactly what happened.
As I mentioned when Sue Parman first posted on this site a month ago, she is an anthropologist by profession. In that post she pointed out how something she learned through her anthropological work turned out to be relevant to mystery writing. Here is a second post on the theme of parallels between the work of anthropologists and mystery writers. The author’s EQMM debut, the story “Gannets and Ghouls,” appears in our current issue, September/October 2024. She’s an award-winning poet, short story writer, memoirist, and artist. Recently, she won the Travelers Tales’ Grand Prize for Best Travel Tale of 2024. —Janet Hutchings
Credit: Sue Parman
To solve a mystery the anthropologist, like the detective, must decipher codes. Codes are rules, both explicitly stated and implicit in a culture. Sometimes they are written down (local building codes), sometimes unwritten but understood and shared by a group (the code of the Samurai), and often they are secret (Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code). Genetic codes, spy codes, computer codes, area codes, bar codes, Morse Code, alphabets, language, culture itself—all depend on a system of replacing one message with another, which no one understands unless they know the system.
Mystery writers have a lot of fun with codes. They play with the alphabet (The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie) or hang clues on different meanings of words (The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz). A surprising bestseller was Umberto Eco’s dense semiotic mystery, The Name of the Rose, in which his medieval Sherlock Holmes, William of Baskerville, analyzes ancient texts and wrestles with issues of interpretation and truth in order to solve murders.
As an anthropologist, I’m especially interested in mystery novels set in different cultures: Laos in Colin Cotterill’s Dr. Siri Paiboun books beginning with The Coroner’s Lunch; Botswana in Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series; Nigeria (Easy Motion Tourist by Leye Adenle and Lightseekers by Femi Kayode); Finland in Leena Lehtolainen’s Maria Kallio books; any book set in Scandinavia (Jo Nesbø, Henning Mankell, Arnaldur Indriðason, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Martin Beck mysteries such as The Laughing Policeman, Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow, and Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy). And of course Scotland, where I studied a Gaelic-speaking community in the Outer Hebrides as described in my previous blog post of August 22, 2024. In addition to the Peter May books I mentioned there, I would add Ann Cleeves’s Shetland Island Mysteries beginning with Raven Black as well as any book set in my favorite city, Edinburgh, in particular Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories and Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus books.
An anthropologist must not only learn a new language (as I had to learn Gaelic in preparation for my year and a half of fieldwork in the Hebrides in 1970-71), they must learn what is left unsaid. The organization of gaps and silences is an important principle in the structure of cultural codes. In this blog I describe three examples of things unsaid that helped me decipher an underlying cultural code called “limited good.”
Unsaid Thing #1: The Mystery of Names. In the fall of 1970, a few months after I came to live in Shawbost, a village on the west side of Lewis, I was asked to serve as the village’s Secretary of the local Youth Club. Despite Gaelic being the dominant language in the village, all meetings of the Youth Club were in English, and all the minutes were in English, including the names of the participants. One of my motives for accepting the job was to get access to the minutes so I could get an idea of who the leaders were.
Individuals in the community had at least three names: their English names with which they were baptized (John MacLeod), their patronymics (Iain Iain Murchadh, or John the son of John the son of Murdo), and nicknames (Bogey, the Ghost). But the minutes included only the formal English names; and since, unlike the diversity of urban communities, there are only a handful of first names and surnames, I found myself looking at dozens of John Macleods, Murdo Murrays, and Catherine MacLeans, with no way to distinguish Iain Iain Murchadh from Iain Chonnich Murchadh or Catriona Phluic from Catriona Dubh. The minutes were useless for my purposes. When I asked why the minutes left out the means to identify the participants, I was given vague answers, such as that record-keeping required English.
Unsaid Thing #2: The Mystery of Avoiding Praise. Around that time, I read an entry in the personal notices of the Stornoway Gazette that gave me a clue to solving the mystery of minutes that followed the rules of record-keeping and yet kept hidden the identity of the participants. It took me a while to realize its significance and connect the dots.
On the anniversary of the death of a beloved elder, families frequently send little notes of remembrance to be published in the local paper, including the curious phrase, “his voice was never heard in the community.”
I was used to obituaries that praised the dead for their significant contributions, such as winning Nobel Prizes in Medicine or being nominated for Academy Awards seventeen times. Why would a culture praise their dead by saying their voices were never heard in the community? Like the minutes of the Youth Club that listed leaders in a manner that left them invisible, obituaries both recorded and erased the people they memorialized.
Unsaid Thing #3: The Mystery of the Dancing Witches. Before going to live in the village, I contacted the local minister, schoolmaster, and Harris Tweed mill owner for help in finding a place to stay. They said they would try but warned me that they would probably not succeed because no one took in outsiders. That I found someone to take me in was a matter of luck, timing, and the curiosity and kindness of a particular woman.
After being turned away by the minister and schoolmaster, I arrived, soaking wet, on the doorstep of the Harris Tweed mill. The owner’s secretary told me she was very sorry, but the owner was away on business. It was raining heavily. I commented, in Gaelic, on the heavy rain. “You speak Gaelic?” she said, surprised.
I admitted that I had studied it at the University of Edinburgh under the Reverend Willie Matheson, which led to a detailed discussion of the family connections of the Reverend to people in Lewis, and to fundamental differences between the people of Lewis and the Uists, Matheson’s home in the Hebrides. After a long moment she said she would hate to turn me away; that she was sure the mill owner would have had something in mind for me; and invited me to move in with her until he got back.
Johnina lived with her husband, Calum, their six-year-old son, Calum Beag (Wee Calum), and Calum’s unmarried sister, Annie. The house was huge, and until recently had housed Calum’s parents and four aunts. Almost a year later, after I had settled in for good with the family, I was attending a funeral wake. As the night wore on and the singing, drinking, and telling stories died down, a man sitting beside me said abruptly, “It’s no mystery how you came to live with that family. They had witches who danced on the moor.”
Credit: Sue Parman
By this time, I had heard many stories with supernatural elements and had some idea of the functions they served. Tales of the each uisge, the waterhorse that lived in fresh springs out on the moor, kept young people from wandering (especially young women, who were the preferred victims of the waterhorse). Second sight, the dreams or visions in which close family and friends sent warnings of death or danger, helped to maintain a close sense of community even though people might be scattered across the globe. But this was the first I’d heard of witches, especially in the family with whom I lived.
“Luck always comes to that family,” he said. “Like Johnina taking you in. How much rent do you pay her?”
I told him and then asked, “How do you know Calum’s aunts were witches?”
“They kept cattle and took them out to the moor. On the shieling they danced naked, and everything they asked for they got. One of them stole my grandmother’s sweetheart. And how do you explain why Calum’s never without a tweed for the loom, whereas I have to beg for one every few months?”
That’s when I realized that the man was operating by a cultural code that the anthropologist George Foster called the theory of limited good in an article published in the journal American Anthropologist in 1965. According to this theory, there are certain communities in which all desirable objects (especially money and luck) exist in finite quantity. When one person gains, another loses. Crofting communities have access to communal memory that goes back hundreds of years. Crofters talk about the Clearances (when landlords, after traditional bonds of clanship weakened, removed small landholders from their lands to make way for sheep in the 18th and 19th centuries) as if they happened yesterday, and it’s common for someone to hold a grudge against someone else’s great-great-grandfather for a debt he never paid. What better way to explain why someone has more money and luck than to invoke witchcraft?
And the threat of these kinds of interpretations creates intense fear. If someone is seen as having more than their neighbor, they become the target of envy and suspicion. They pass up opportunities to succeed, or they engage in devious deceptions to conceal their success. The focus on “equality” that I first considered admirable took on a darker tone. If we are equal, we all have access to the same resources; we share in order to redistribute excess and avoid distrust. Someone lucky enough to afford a car always gives lifts to neighbors. Most of the catch from a night’s fishing gets shared. People keep their heads down. They lie about how many tweeds they get. They don’t brag about themselves or their children. They avoid taking credit for leadership positions, such as hiding behind their English names in Youth Club minutes, and after they die, they prefer to have their descendants praise them for their voices never being heard in the community.
When my book Scottish Crofters was published in the Holt, Rinehart, and Winston Cultural Anthropology Case Studies series, I went against the advice of the publisher. Usually the cover highlighted an individual performing some cultural act appropriate to that culture. Initially I selected a photograph of Calum bottle-feeding a lamb. And then I felt a wave of horror. To put Calum on the cover would hold him up for attack and ridicule. He would be mortified. Instead, I chose a photograph in which a group of men were gathered around their sheep, their backs to the camera. By the time the second edition of the book was published, crofting law had changed. Crofts could be taken out of crofting, and croft houses (owned separately from the land) could be sold. The community was being invaded by mainlanders, even Englishmen. This new cover shows two men with sheep that can be easily identified. Those who know them are more likely to talk about the price of wool, or the contrast between the weather in Scotland as opposed to the weather at their last vacation to Florida, than they are likely to talk about witches. The secrets that would have once torn apart a closed-mouth community now belong to a larger world: the concealed nature of the British royal Kate’s cancer, for example. The glue of forbidden knowledge that once helped a village community cohere is melting. The code of silence and limits is becoming a code of limitless possibility.
A Shamus, Derringer, and ITW Thriller award-nominated fiction writer, Andrew Welsh-Huggins has produced eight novels in a series starring P.I. Andy Hayes. The latest, Sick to Death, releases this month. The Ohio author’s three dozen-plus short stories have appeared in a variety of anthologies and magazines, including EQMM and AHMM. His latest EQMM story, “Through Thick and Thin,” is featured in our current issue (September/October 2024). In this post the author talks about a switch from the series’s usual point of view that he used to create a darker mood for the new story. —Janet Hutchings
When I first began mapping out my Columbus, Ohio-set private eye series, the one thing I knew with certainty was my chosen point of view. In keeping with the classics of the genre, I would tell the story in first person, with all action seen through the eyes of my protagonist, ex-Ohio State and Cleveland Browns quarterback turned investigator Andy Hayes. I fell in love with private eye fiction reading novels told in first person by everyone from Sue Grafton and Robert B. Parker to Loren Estleman and Sara Paretsky, and saw no reason to tinker with the trope.
Then came the day, while reading one of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers, that I realized with a bit of surprise that Child occasionally changed things up. Though I reveled in the terse, third-person narrative of most of Child’s books—epitomized by that iconic line, “Reacher said nothing”—I soon discovered that some of the best books in the series were told by Reacher himself, including Persuader and Gone Tomorrow. Intrigued, I researched this phenomenon and found that Child is hardly alone in occasionally switching from third-person to first or vice versa.
Michael Connelly, for example, wrote most of his Harry Bosch novels in third person but put the narration in Bosch’s voice when the character took a detour as a private eye in Lost Light and The Narrows. After Connelly has Bosch quit the force mid-series, he explained, “I thought I’d write about him as a private eye. And since the great private eye novels are largely first-person, I thought that would be a challenge,” according to a 2015 Los Angeles Review of Books profile. He later acknowledged that he’d made a mistake taking Bosch out of the LAPD and returned him to the force, and to third person. (By contrast, Connelly writes his Mickey Haller novels all in first-person.)
Patricia Cornwell began her long-running Kay Scarpetta series with a first-person narrative in Postmortem in 1990, switched to third-person for most of the following novels, and eventually returned to first-person. “I went to third person because I wanted the ability to take on all these other personas and show the reader things that Scarpetta doesn’t experience herself,” Cornwell told The Washington Postin 2011. Ultimately, she returned to first-person out of discomfort at inhabiting the minds of criminals.
“When I shifted back to first person, it was like returning to someone I hadn’t visited in years,” she told the Post. “It was much more comfortable, for me and for the readers. In the first person, the readers feel smart, like it’s them solving the case. And because they’re holding her hand, so to speak, they feel safe, even when bad things are happening in the story.”
For his part, Ed McBain wrote most of the volumes in his 13-book series about defense attorney Matthew Hope in the first person, including the 1976 opener, Goldilocks. But he too made the switch, writing the last volume, The Last Best Hope, in the third-person. Similarly, Archer Mayor began his novels about Vermont detective Joe Gunther in the first person, then changed to third-person because it provided more creative latitude and gave other characters a voice, according to a 2013 profile.
Mayor told me in an email that he “sweated bullets” before making the switch but was rewarded when not a single reader commented.
“I felt enormously liberated, in that I could now use my new ‘God’s eye view’ position to hover over all the characters,” Mayor told me. “I never wanted to return to First Person, as a result.” He cited the new POV freedom he experienced writing 2002’s The Sniper’s Wife, told mostly from the perspective of Gunther sidekick Willy Kunkle.
As it turns out, even Sara Paretsky tried the switch, including a six-chapter third-person narrative in Total Recall in 2001, and in the short story: “The Pietro Andromache,” which appeared in 1995’s Windy City Blues, a collection of V.I. Warshawski stories. “When I wrote that story – which was relatively early in V I’s life – I wanted to explore what she looked like to people outside her head,” Paretsky shared with me in an email. “To them she seemed confident and upbeat; they didn’t see the self-doubts that often torment her.”
Emboldened by the experimentation of writers whose work I admire, I decided to try my own hand at switching POV. The first attempt, an Andy Hayes short story titled “The Whole Story,” appeared in Black Cat Mystery Magazine in the fall of 2020. I noticed right away that the switch darkened the tone of the tale and took the edge off my character’s normally waggish narration. Despite the change, the tone felt perfect for the story, about a prison inmate whose drunken driving caused an accident that killed his daughter, but who has enough questions about that day that he hires Hayes to dig into his case.
I wrote other Andy Hayes books and stories afterward in the first-person but decided to try again in “Through Thick and Thin,” which appears in the September/October issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Once again, shifting to the third-person guided the story—about a client with a violent past he’s desperate to keep hidden—down a marginally darker path that felt perfect for the subject matter.
Here are three things I learned switching from my customary first-person to third-person:
At its most basic, the change was an enjoyable way to freshen up a long-running series and main character, not to mention a lesson in learning new things about my character by examining him from a different angle.
As I’ve already suggested, the switch subtly darkened the mood of the stories, which forced me to keep the elements of my character that readers enjoy—his sarcasm, wit, and skepticism—while sending him down slightly meaner streets.
The switch gave me newfound confidence in the character and the series, by discovering that Hayes’ story—stories—can be successfully told in a variety of ways.
And with that, Welsh-Huggins saved his work, closed the file, and shut off his computer for the day.
Jim Allyn doesn’t write a lot of fiction, but what he does write is always worth reading. Three of his last four stories for EQMM made best-of-the-year collections: see Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (“Princess Anne”) and 2017 (“The Master of Negwegon”) and Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021 (“Things That Follow”). He has a new story, entitled “Everybody Pays,” coming up in our November/December 2024 issue (on sale October 15). In this post Jim takes up a topic that has proved controversial in our culture, but he has a unique perspective on it. Fiction writers should be especially interested, since the piece touches on the effects that entertainment (including fiction) can have on society. —Janet Hutchings
When I began working on this piece, I intended to explore the short-story collaboration my son and I have undertaken, our first. My son is a federal agent currently working in Europe. He’s a walking trove of experience and information. Brodie was a four-year Marine, a city cop in Michigan, and has served as a federal agent in California, Washington DC, Florida, and South Korea, and his current assignment is in Brussels, Belgium. He’s led SWAT team raids in San Francisco and Miami.
We’ve been aware of our symbiotic possibilities for a long time. We have kicked some ideas around, and are now finally taking a serious crack at it. Which means actually writing something. I thought the give and take and the learning curve involved with our new venture might be interesting. Fantasy man says hello to the real deal. How will that work? Can we come up with a workable process? Will it be any good? Will we ever get it done? Who’s in charge here?
We had an excellent way to jump-start our project. Brodie had written an article that was published in The University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts Magazine. (We’re both Michigan grads). It was entitled “A Day in the Life: Field Notes from a Federal Agent.” I’d been aware of the article for a long time but had never thought of it as fodder. But why not? It wasn’t proprietary. It was “ours,” perfect for this deal, about his reflections upon a particularly hazardous raid on a known meth house.
The key incident in the meth house is a showdown and a twelve-gauge, sawed- off shotgun. Brodie confronts a shirtless, tatted gang member in a back hall. Between the two are several open doors, each a potential ambush. The gang member’s hands are behind his back.
“Show me your hands,” Brodie shouts, leveling his 9mm Sig Sauer at the man’s chest. The man ignores him. He writes, “His head slowly swivels back and forth as he sizes up his options. Sweat is pouring down my back underneath the accumulated weight of my bulletproof vest, equipment, and terror…Time slows. A beat passes. Two beats…” Later on he reports: “My work is mostly paperwork and procedure punctuated by moments of abject terror where a criminal’s choice can eliminate my own.”
Through long discussions, we began massaging and expanding and dramatizing that event. We were making progress. It was hard work. We added a key character and, of course, a killing. The story was taking shape and I was confident it would be an exciting, realistic tale.
But then something incredible happened. Armed with an AR 15-type semi-automatic rifle, twenty-year-old Thomas Crooks was inexplicably able to climb up on a roof and in just six seconds get eight shots off at Donald Trump. Crooks came within an inch or two of killing the former President before being killed by a single head shot from a Secret Service counter-sniper.
That event shook me a bit. It got me thinking about the omnipresence of guns in my writing, in my life, and in the marrow of America. As I thought about it, it seemed to me that I might be a bit of a one trick pony in that I’ve never written a story that didn’t involve a gun. In at least two stories, “The Tree Hugger” and “The Ozone Layer,” guns are pivotal well beyond their usual role of being used to shoot somebody.
The attempt by Crooks to assassinate a former President also brought back powerful memories of Dallas.
I was eighteen When President Kennedy was killed. It was deer season in Northern Michigan. I heard the news on the AM radio while I was driving into town in a Jeep loaded with a seven-point buck I had killed with a Model 1894 Winchester 30-30. When I rushed into the house and told my mother about the assassination, she got cross and told me not to joke about such things. It’s not funny, she said. Then she turned on the television and burst into tears. A young president dead. My mother crying in the living room.
I and my Edgar-winning, crime-fiction-superstar brother Doug, my senior by two years, grew up in the gun country of remote Northeastern Michigan on the shores of Lake Huron about 250 miles North of Detroit. It was and is hunting country… whitetail deer, black bear, a wide variety of wildfowl and small game. We lived in and around Alpena, a town of 14,000. To find a bigger town you have to drive one hundred miles. We grew up in the North Woods.
In our very early years, we were not around guns. We never saw my father with a gun. He didn’t hunt or fish or partake in the outdoor life generally. He was not a military man or a sportsman of any kind. My mother, a splendid, auburn-haired dynamo, divorced him. Doug and I lived with him for a while in a yellow New Moon trailer in a trailer park after she went on her way and we were wild kids always on the edge of trouble because he was a traveling salesman who left us alone for weeks at a time. We did what unsupervised kids are wont to do: anything we wanted.
In her second pass at life my mother won the heart of a local physician who was a different breed of cat: a deer hunter, a fly fisherman, a Jewish WWII vet who had marched through Europe. A successful man with money who wanted to live life. Living life was something my mother knew how to do but hadn’t had the chance. Together, they purchased a 200-acre hunting camp bisected by Black River, a trout stream, and, after relieving my father of his pair of juvenile delinquents, allowed the deep woods and open fields of “Camp” to become the Allyn Brothers playground for the rest of our lives. Under the occasionally watchful eyes of our new parental pair, we raised horses and hunting dogs and roses, fished the Black River, cleared forest roads, hunted deer and birds hard, and used the hell out of our own personal shooting range. In town, we lived in a modest ranch on the shores of Lake Huron’s Thunder Bay.
We went from living almost poor to living comfortably as fast as you can say “I do.” What we added to our new household was most decidedly a mixed bag.
I try not to treat guns casually in my writing because they have not been casual in my life. I try to give them their moment. Guns are not, and should not be treated as, casual things. Guns are momentous things gifted and damned with dangerous power. Beautiful. Life changing. Life ending. Life saving. Merciful. Savage. The scourge of a nation; the savior of a nation and everything in between.
My attraction to guns had a very early start. I loved and coveted toy rifles and pistols. Pored over pictures in magazines and gun catalogs. Maybe cowboys and soldiers portrayed in various media pounded something into me. Who knows? I have a feeling of nostalgia for guns that is poorly rooted, if at all, in fact. I know that, but the feeling remains nonetheless. It is a kind of longing and possessiveness that may well be typical of anybody who collects anything. I don’t fantasize about using guns but I do appreciate their function as an “equalizer.” Their defensive capability at a physical, personal level is very real. I think powerless kids are attracted to it.
My interest in guns of a unique variety certainly feeds my writing. I have no interest in assault rifles or the “black rifles” and semi-automatic pistols so common today. And neither does my brother. We have always liked guns of the past, guns with a history, guns of well-traveled wood and steel, not black polymer machines. Probably our favorite deer rifle is the 30-40 Krag that was carried up San Juan Hill by the Rough Riders in 1898. The Krag’s tenure as the official U.S. military rifle was very brief, being replaced by the M1903 Springfield, the rifle of Sergeant York, but it is an unmistakable and fine firearm.
Doug and I shot our first gun when we were around eight and six respectively. It was a compact Browning .25 semi-automatic about the size of a pack of cigarettes. My mother took us to a little-used open dump and we plinked at bottles and cans with the solid black Belgian pistol. Shooting the little Browning was a thrill; it had quite a pop. My mother wasn’t promoting guns or pushing them at us. She just believed that a boy should learn to shoot a gun as an important part of growing up.
Once, when we visited our mother’s relatives in Missouri, we found an old, rusty double barrel shotgun in the family barn. It was just lying in a corner half-buried in the dirt floor. My mother grew up in a place where guns sprouted from the earth.
As a teenager I was involved in two incidents of potential gun violence towards men, one involving a handgun and one involving a shotgun, one involving a teenage friend and one involving an adult asshole. I had the gun. Looking back, both incidents seem impossible, unimaginable. All participants had been drinking except the cops. Teenagers, alcohol, and guns. We all just squeaked by.
When you step into what became the Allyn Camp in the Michigan north woods, there is a vertical gun rack on your immediate left. It is a foundational part of the white pine entryway, built from floor to ceiling. It was expected that people would enter and exit the cabin carrying rifles and shotguns. Back in the day, it was always full.
Once upon a time, Doug stepped into that doorway. He removed my stepfather’s scoped Winchester .270 from the rack, drew the bolt back, looked down into the chamber, saw that it was empty, pushed the bolt home, shouldered the rifle and with an ear-shattering “BANG” blew out the entire glass storm door.
“What the hell are you doing?” his wife Eve cried.
“But it was empty,” Doug shouted back, bewildered.
“Obviously not,” Eve yelled.
Someone had loaded the rifle with the wrong caliber cartridge and the cartridge was jammed. It didn’t eject when Doug worked the bolt. When Doug looked down into the open chamber and didn’t see a shell, the Winchester should have been safe.
When Doug took the gun to our family gunsmith to have the stuck shell removed, he received a colorful, royal dressing down that only this particular, meticulous gunsmith could deliver. The man had a very theatrical voice and memorable mannerisms. The whole thing was comical (to us). Could it have been tragic? Not likely. We were taught to never point guns at people. Never. If someone had been standing outside the storm door, Doug wouldn’t have pointed the gun in that direction.
When you step into that Camp doorway these days, the gun rack stands empty. It is a catch-all for hats, gloves, bug spray, dog leashes, and the like. It was full when we were hunters. We’re not hunters any more. We’re part of a trend. There are 250,000 fewer Michigan deer hunters today than twenty-five years ago. A new survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service shows that only about five percent of Americans sixteen years old and older actually hunt. That’s half of what it was fifty years ago when I was an active hunter, and the decline is expected to accelerate over the next decade.
I joined the Naval Air Force Reserve while in high school and one teenage summer wound up in boot camp at the Naval Air Station in Grosse Ile, Michigan. We had only one shooting drill. Everyone in my group—mostly city boys from the Detroit area—lined up at the range, was given a Colt 1911 .45 semi-automatic, and instructed how to use it. After the instruction, we were all given live ammo and told to shoot in unison upon command at our own individual big paper targets pinned to easels in the sand trap before us.
The Drill Instructor gave the command and everybody in my squad began shooting except me. My gun didn’t work. After the shooting concluded, the DI came over. I was so nervous and self-conscious in that kind of rigid, formal, truly panoramic situation totally alien to my casual North Woods settings that I had neglected to insert the clip. With an unnecessary amount of loud ridicule, the DI loaded my Colt, handed it to me, and told me to shoot as required…all by my lonesome with everyone watching. A few were snickering. I was embarrassed and spooked all right. But a gun in my hand…That I was used to. A Colt 1911 semi-automatic holds eight shots. My first shot visibly loosened the paper target and it slipped to an odd angle. My second shot knocked it off its easel and it fell to the sand. My next six shots, rapidly and evenly spaced, danced that target around. Everyone could see the target jump and the sand splash. It was the first time I ever heard spontaneous applause for something I alone had done. The DI chuckled and slapped me on the back. The military is a gun country.
America isn’t gun country. It’s lots of gun countries. A tapestry. There’s one for the paramilitary types who dress up and play at war, one for the shadowy homicidal berserk, one for the single-gun home-defense people, one for the competition shooter, one for the cop, one for the hunter, one for the waiting-for-dystopia apocalyptic type. The criminal, the collector, the gunsmith, and likely many more. Although these states of being can be like Venn Circles, they can also be totally separate with extremely different individuals, mindsets, and intentions. To control the relatively few dangerous categories, we cast a legal net over all. That creates resistance and resentment, particularly because horrific mass killings are increasing even though the rate of overall gun violence has been decreasing. Nevertheless, the laws we have work to a degree but they are clearly not enough.
Laws with teeth requiring that guns in the home be secured have an excellent chance to reduce gun violence. Gun safes, gun locks, locked cabinets would have prevented my stupid gun tricks as a boozed-up teenager. I would never have risked my mother’s wrath and my stepfather’s wrath to, in effect, “break in,” to obtain a family gun. They were just handy, and I grabbed them. Reducing such “casual handling” will also help instill the appropriate caution and respect firearms deserve.
Red flag laws will also work if actively applied and aggressively enforced. Even a cursory review of mass shootings reveals a variety of cases where an intervention based on previous behavior was apparent and called for and could have prevented the act. They were seen coming, but nothing was done. Manpower and will and legal justification are critical.
In 2019, deaths from gun violence in the U.S. was eight times higher than the rate in Canada, just 100 miles away from our Camp on the other side of Lake Huron. It was 100 times higher than the rate in the United Kingdom.
I never threw a baseball or a football or a frisbee around with my dad or my stepdad and I love to do all three. Never played tennis with them. Never went swimming in the sweetwater sea together or shot baskets. Never played poker or horseshoes.
But with my stepfather I did carry a shotgun and hunt partridge and woodcock over wonderful German Shorthair Pointers. We walked the woods and fields of autumn together. Golden Octobers. We took target practice at clay pigeons in the fields of Camp. My stepfather saw me yearning for a used Winchester at our favorite gun shop and bought it for me. He gave me his Browning Sweet Sixteen shotgun because I could shoot better with it than he could. He bought my wife Suzanne a 20-gauge Browning shotgun. She hunted with us sometimes and he liked her. A beautiful little person carrying a shotgun that was almost as big as she was.
At Camp we hunted deer as a family, crowding together in the cabin on the night before opening day and fanning out through the woods half-asleep in the freezing November predawn. We’d sit all day, often seeing nothing. In the evening we talked about the day’s hunt over a big supper, fire roaring in the fieldstone fireplace, dogs lounging on the couch, sleeping in the chairs, begging under the table, and lying about the floor like casually tossed blankets. A small herd of German shorthair pointers and one black labrador retriever. It was all warm and lively and comfortable and peaceful and filled with tobacco smoke.
There weren’t just “guns” standing in the rack and hanging on the wall. They were all rifles. Sue’s Ruger .44 mag, Doug’s 30-40 Krag, Jac’s .270 Winchester, Eve’s 30-30 Winchester, Brodie’s 45-70 Springfield, Jim’s Sako .308. Couldn’t have had that particular ritual without them. Some of those rifles had been carried long ago by hunters we never knew in forests we had never seen. We understood that about those rifles. Liked that about them. They were history, memories, partners.
Any discussion of factors that might affect violent tendencies in America always includes violence in the entertainment media and that must necessarily include crime fiction in all its wildly different iterations. Some have called much of today’s entertainment “propaganda for violence.” It is hard to argue that it is “propaganda for peace.”
I used to live and work in Oxford, Michigan. Brodie graduated from Oxford High School during that time. In 2021 fifteen-year-old Ethan Crumbley walked those same halls of Oxford High School armed with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol. He shot and killed four of his fellow classmates and injured seven others. He was sentenced to life in prison.
His parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, were the first parents ever to be charged and convicted in their child’s mass shooting at a U.S. School. They were found guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter, one for each of the students Ethan killed. They were sentenced to ten to fifteen years in prison. The judge said the two repeatedly ignored signs that would make a “reasonable person feel the hair on the back of their neck stand up.”
The era of parents with guns as innocent bystanders is over.
Twenty-one of the thirty deadliest shootings occurred in this our new century. It is the first century of the third millennium. New heights. In 2022 the ATF reported that the annual number of firearms manufactured has almost tripled since 2000. The report revealed that since 2009, Glock-type semi-automatic handguns bought for personal protection have been outselling rifles typically used for hunting. In the last five years alone, Americans have purchased nearly 70 million firearms, 13 million more than the entire first decade of the new century.
There’s an armed populace out there that’s unlike anything that’s ever been seen before. The mass shootings are unlike anything that’s ever been seen before. They are getting closer to all of us.
We’re pouring more and more guns into our growing melting pot and some people are demanding that we do…nothing. Except arm every adult with a Glock.
Think that approach is going to help things? More guns in more hands? Really?
Every single gun is important because of the damage a single gun can do. We should support red flag laws for high-risk individuals, an assault weapons ban, gun buy-backs, safe and secure gun storage in the home, and any other practical, reasonable measure.
One evening in the 1960’s my mother was sitting at our classically rustic hunting camp table feeding a cute little mouse with bits of cheese. Tiny mice are exceedingly precious, like pixies. Sometimes you could see them basking in the sunlight on the leaves of our houseplants. Little harmless creatures. My stepfather came up behind my mother and whacked the little mouse with a heavy green Coke bottle of that era. He objected to vermin being fed at the table. Perhaps it was his medical-school training. My mother was so upset her neck turned red. My stepfather retreated to his favorite chair, lit up a Camel, and resumed reading his newspaper. I struggled with my philosophical interpretation of that incident. Initially I was in full agreement with the actions of both parties. A true conundrum. I finally decided that the mouse was being fed as an invited guest of my mother’s and therefore was entitled to protective status and so should not have been struck with a Coke bottle by a cardiologist. My stepfather should simply have asked the tiny mouse to please leave. The little mouse scampers back inside the wall and everybody lives.
SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN 