“Trust Me, I’m a Doctor” (by Manju Soni)

Posted on December 21, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen
An eye surgeon turned author, Manju Soni has written nonfiction for the Apeiron Review and other journals. Her debut short story, “The Game,” appears in the current issue of EQMM (January/February), in the Department of First Stories. It’s a tale that combines psychological suspense with a keen awareness of the drama of nature. In this post the author talks a little about how her two careers converge.—Janet Hutchings

It was ten o’clock in the morning and the sun was shining over the hospital gardens. The neurologist, a tall man with a receding hairline and a kindly face, approached the elderly man’s bedside. The man was not his patient, he had been asked to give a second opinion on the patient by a colleague. The senior nurse in charge of the ward, a stolid bundle of efficiency, ordered her junior nurses to draw the curtains as she scrambled to keep up with him.

The patient’s eyes were closed and he looked as if he was asleep, but he was in fact almost unconscious. His face was covered in a prickly grey stubble. He mumbled incoherently as the neurologist tried to rouse him. After he had examined the patient, the neurologist examined the CT scan and then the MRI and then the X-rays and then the twenty or so blood tests that had been done.

While he was reviewing the HIV test results, he glanced up to see the patient’s wife walking in. She was tall and well built, about seventy, the neurologist guessed. She was pretty and the turquoise saree suited her rather fair complexion, as did the large, red bindi (dot) on her forehead.

“Good morning,” he nodded briefly.

“Good morning Doctor. How is he doing?”

“I’m not sure exactly, it’s the first time I’m seeing him.” Of course he could have just said something like, “Slightly better,” but that was not him, he couldn’t lie as easily as some of his colleagues.

“Did the test results show anything?”

“Only that he has large hemorrhages on both sides of his brain. We can’t understand why he has these matching lesions. Can you please tell me exactly what happened.”

He sat her down on a chair next to the bed and pulled one up for himself.

“Start at the beginning please.”

He listened carefully as she described her husband’s mild dizziness in the morning, two days before.

“I thought it was due to his low blood sugar. He hadn’t eaten much the night before, and he had taken his sugar pill, and his baby aspirin.”

The doctor nodded.

“And then when he tried to get out of bed, he fell,” she said.

“He fell? And did he hurt himself?”

“Not really. He knocked his head against the bedside cabinet, that’s all.”

And with that, the mystery of the cause of the bilateral parietal lobe hemorrhages my father-in-law had suffered, was solved. The mild head injury combined with being on low-dose aspirin had most likely caused his bleeds. Sadly he died a year later.

Every patient has a story to tell, and every doctor becomes a repository of these stories. Doctors are uniquely privileged to be both observers and participants at the frontline between life and death, a zone where some of the greatest dramas and mysteries of the human experience unfold and reveal themselves, often to young, impressionable minds. Sometimes these stories cannot be contained and find their way out into the world, through the pen or a keyboard.

Often the stories are no longer than flash-fiction pieces. Like the time I, as a medical intern, was trying to complete my course requirement of delivering at least twenty babies. I was gloved and examining a young woman in advanced labor. I tried to assess how far dilated she was, when I felt the baby suck on my fingers! I was so startled and in fact terrified that I pulled my fingers out at lightening speed and stared at them to see if they were still intact. The nurses around me had a good laugh. The baby was a face presentation. Luckily the birth was uneventful, except for the baby’s bright red face, which matched mine.

Sometimes the stories are tragic, like physician Anton Chekhov’s story “Sleepy” about an exhausted teenage nanny who falls into that twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness while tending to her master’s son. I have no doubt the story is drawn from Chekhov’s own experience of late nights and lack of sleep as a doctor.

Sometimes the stories are well researched and beautifully written musings about history, life, and death, like physician Siddhartha Mukherjee’s exquisite Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, or New Yorker writer and surgeon Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.

And at other times they are the author warning us about the possibilities of the uncontrolled commercialization of science. A classic example is physician Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park about uncontrolled genetic engineering, made so much more compelling because we see how easily it could be true.

Of course sometimes the stories are good rollicking fun. The inimitable Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the uber-logical “consultant detective” Sherlock Holmes, ophthalmologist Robin Cook, the father of the medical-thriller genre, and physician Tess Gerritsen, one of the few women doctor-writers, are masters of the crime and suspense thriller, all of whom have delivered years of entertainment and vicarious fear to readers all over the world. Of course most of what they write would have Hippocrates turning in his grave.

I find myself writing not so much about my patients but about the brutal system of apartheid and its impact on them. Like my essay in TheEstablishment.com about a young patient who had visited a back-door abortionist, or the unpublished story about the elderly African man who had to travel hundreds of miles to have his cataract removed, and who was so happy to be able to see again he went home and returned with a cow as a gift for us. My other passion is psychological suspense, like my story, “The Game,” in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, January 2017 issue, about a young woman who is pregnant with twins, trapped on an island during a storm.

But when all is said and done, what we doctors learn during our work is that when we humans are unclothed and dressed in those annoying butt-exposing hospital gowns, we are all, rich and poor, men and women, doctor and patient, the same. And this is often most poignantly captured by doctor-writers like neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, who penned his beautiful memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, while being both a doctor and a patient undergoing chemotherapy for advanced lung cancer. He died at the age of thirty-seven. In an interview with NPR, his wife, Lucy, said, “He really returned to literature to cope.”

And, perhaps this is what so many of us do when we read.

Posted in Business, Guest, Readers, Suspense, Thrillers, Writers, Writing | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

“Of Jigsaws, Roller Coasters, Crosswords, and Mazes” (by A.J. Wright)

Posted on December 14, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Although his work appears in EQMM for the first time in our January/February 2017 issue, on sale December 20, A.J. Wright is a historical mystery novelist who already has three books to his credit, all belonging to a series set in his native Lancashire. The first book, 2010’s Act of Murder, won the Dundee International Book Prize. The second, Striking Murder, was shortlisted for the British Crime Writers’ Association’s award for best historical crime novel. A third book, Elementary Murder, is about to be released. In this post we get a glimpse of what led the former teacher to write fiction, and a hint of what we can expect to find in his novels and stories.—Janet Hutchings

We all love being fooled, hoodwinked, or deceived, but never lied to. I’m not talking about real life, of course, but in our reading of mystery stories and novels. It’s part of the unwritten agreement we have with our author when we turn to that first page, that sense of anticipation that sooner or later on our voyage through the pages we’ll be tricked in some way with a masterly stroke of misdirection.

Actually, the first time I met with misdirection was from something my mother used to say to me.

Constantinople is a very big word. Spell it.

As I struggled with the spelling of the “big word” she would laugh and point out that she had asked me to spell a very simple word—it—and I had failed.

Mind you, I was only 27 at the time.

But I reckon that’s what attracts us to mystery writing: the certain knowledge that the writer will try, and hopefully succeed, to misdirect our attention in some way. The greater the deception, the better we feel.

Lateral-thinking puzzles do it all the time. Legend tells us that the first example of lateral thinking came in ancient Greece, when the Sphinx, an evil monster, attacked and killed visitors to the city of Thebes where it stood guard. It asked them this riddle, and when they couldn’t answer, it savaged them to death:

What goes upon four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs at night?

Oedipus gave the right answer—Man in his progress through life—and the Sphinx stormed off in anger. (The four legs are a baby crawling; two legs, man walking in his prime; three legs point to his need in old age for a walking stick.)

Actually, that’s not a good example, is it? I mean, the ones who couldn’t answer the question didn’t say, Hey, what a cool riddle! It’s difficult to be positive when you’re a Sphinx’s dinner.

Seriously, though, mystery writers feed off (no pun intended) this basic human trait: the need to be faced with a problem, a puzzle, and then we can pit our wits in trying to solve it. Many of us enjoy jigsaw puzzles, where the task of piecing together all of the different sections is somehow calming and frustrating in equal measure. The similarities and differences with reading a mystery novel, especially my favourite, the whodunit—are obvious. A jigsaw puzzle gives us the answer to the puzzle—the whole picture—immediately. There’s no real mystery as we know what the end product will look like. That would be anathema to us readers if we were given all the answers in the prologue:

Colonel Theobald Fortescue will kill three people with a little-known poison, and it will take all the genius and clear thinking of Inspector Solomon to bring him to justice. It all started one evening . . .

And yet we spend days, even weeks, filling in our jigsaw to produce the picture we were presented with on the front of the box!

Still, completing them is a challenge, and we sometimes struggle to fit a piece into its rightful place. We have the visual clue as to where it should go, of course . . . and there’s that immense feeling of satisfaction in putting in that final piece and also closing that final page.

This voluntary need for confusion followed by revelation is what drives us on from one story or novel to the next. And while other genres do bring satisfaction when conflicts are resolved and relationships enhanced (or ruined), I think that the mystery novel fulfils our desire for puzzlement in a much more basic and satisfying way. Novels in other genres might occasionally balk at the structural importance of a beginning, a middle, and an end. I’ve read some novels—unnamed—where I’ve been left with a feeling very much of dissatisfaction, a sense that the author has not explained the ending with any coherence or consideration. Mind you, how many films have you watched and been left with that same What the . . . feeling?

I know the arguments that will be put forward:

But real life isn’t like that.

Novels surely need to reflect the real world where there is a sense of dissatisfaction or incompleteness . . .

Problems don’t always get solved.

Blah-de-blah.

True. But if I want the real world I can switch on the TV or walk down the street at midnight. When I pay good money to read a novel—a mystery novel, because that’s what I like and I know (hope) it will entertain me—I don’t want the real world—the real real world to intrude. I want to escape from the real world and enter a world where I can take up the author’s challenge, read the clues he/she presents and tries to hide in open view, and solve the mystery before those final revelatory pages.

That world bears a passing resemblance to the real world, of course—it has to do, to create that air of credibility—but we know that by the end, when the villain has been exposed, order will finally be restored.

I’ll hold my hand up and say, Yes, that’s escapism. Shoot me.

It’s also a matter of trust. We trust our author to play fair with us and lay down certain clues as to the identity of the murderer, but we also trust that he or she will plant those clues in such a deceitful way as to mislead us. But the key element here is trust.

In a way it’s that same feeling of trust that we place in the operator of a roller coaster. We know it’s going to be a thrilling journey with ups and downs and twists and turns and a slow pace and a frantic pace, but we have an abiding faith in the way the operator is controlling the pace of the thing, a firm belief in how the ride will end:

Safely, but with that sensation of Wow, let’s do that again!

But I’m a writer, too, and from a writer’s point of view, all of this places a great burden on my shoulders. I want to deceive honestly. So I’ll offer my reader the evidence he or she will need to solve the puzzle, but I’ll also throw metaphorical sand in their eyes to blind them.

Where else but in a mystery story would you trust someone more the more they deceived you?

Crossword compilers do this, don’t they? The cryptic ones, at any rate. They’ll offer you a clue but disguise it in such a way that you’ll either tear your hair out trying in vain to solve it, or jump three feet in the air when you get the answer! Here’s an easy clue I made earlier (but kindly refrain from looking down at the end of this blog. That’s cheating and comparable to glancing furtively at the last chapter of a whodunit when you’re only half way through!).

Golden Age writer’s story about lady on shore?*

Easy? Or frustrating? Remember, no peeking! And work it out without any indication as to number of letters. If I gave you that, you’d get the answer easily. So, tough!

Whether the story or novel is a cosy or hardboiled, historical or modern, there’s always that confidence (or should I say hope?) that the pace of the novel will match our expectations. Cosies, at one extreme, are more sedate and less shocking than noirs. A cosy is when you read a murder mystery in your own bedroom. A noir is when you read one in a motel (one of the Bates chain). When I’m reading a cosy, for example, I expect it to be like entering a maze, where I can walk through at a quite leisurely pace, follow the false trails until I get to the end, knowing that sometimes I’ll be helped by the maze attendant and sometimes I’ll make my own way out. Either way, it’s a delight to reach the end. An achievement.

It’s part of the human psyche then to relish the puzzle, whatever form it takes. When writing my mysteries, I’m in control (most of the time) and enjoy the laying of false trails and throwing that metaphorical sand in your eyes. Sometimes, though, I’m like the comic house painter who covers the floor with paint only to find he’s in a corner and can’t get to the exit. Going back and changing things is far less messy when you’re a writer, though—thanks to the Delete button, I leave no paint-stained footprints to highlight my foolishness!

Still, creating an intricate puzzle for readers to solve is a labour of love. Reading a puzzle so I can solve it is a love of labour (someone else’s!).

And finally, remember what the most famous detective of all, Sherlock Holmes, had to say about deception:

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

Keep your eyes peeled and well away from metaphorical sand. Happy reading!

* Answer to crossword clue: Dorothy L Sayers
Posted in Classic Mystery, Editing, Fiction, Genre, Guest, Readers, Story, Writers, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Every Customer Is a Story” (by Peter Sellers)

Posted on December 7, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Peter Sellers is a noted short-story writer and the 2001 winner of EQMM’s Readers Award for “Avenging Miriam” (December 2001). A few years ago, he expanded his range in the literary field by opening a second-hand bookshop in Toronto (something he talks about in this post). He is also the editor of a number of crime-fiction anthologies. It has been ten years since EQMM readers have had the pleasure of seeing a story by the Canadian author in our pages, but we expect to present a new Sellers story later this year.—Janet Hutchings

Around quarter to twelve a man came in, looked around, and asked me, “How long have you been open?”

“About forty-five minutes,” I said, not even trying to be smart.

“No. I mean how long has this store been open here?”

“About forty-five minutes,” I repeated. “Today’s our first day.”

“Ah,” he said, “I like bookstores.” Then he left.

The store is five years old now, and it almost earns me a living. I used to work in advertising, which made me a lot more money, but between the time I started, in 1980, and now, the business has degenerated. I had come to dislike everything about the ad business: the procedures, the meetings, and most of the people I worked with and for. Everything is run by money guys who know nothing about advertising, and all the creative people are kids who don’t want to work with old guys.

One of the things I learned early was that the people who come into bookstores are generally more interesting than the people who work at ad agencies.

The doorbell chimed, and a young woman approached the counter slowly. She looked nervous and excited at the same time. She leaned in close, her eyes bright and glittery. “I’m looking for a book,” she said.

“I have some of those, “ I told her.

“Do you have How to Kill a Mockingbird?”

Before I opened the store, I had three storage lockers full of books. They were costing me five hundred bucks a month, and I had to do something better with them. Opening a bookstore seemed like a good idea. I put a couple of hours into writing a business plan but got bored and stopped. After looking at four or five possible locations, I picked one in Toronto’s Little Italy. There are plenty of good restaurants in the area, a couple of appealing pubs, lots of private homes and rental units, and an abundance of people on the street almost all of the time. Some of them even come through my door. Oh, and the point of this is that, five years later and after thousands of books sold and thousands more bought, I still have three full storage lockers.

“What’s the most expensive book you have?”

I had been asked that question before, but never by a man holding a large teddy bear. Before I could answer, the man said, “I’m waiting for the clinic to open. It opens at noon. What time is it now?” Both man and bear were scruffy and looked as if they had been living rough. He was skittery and edgy and never stopped looking around.

“Eleven-forty.”

He nodded as if I had passed a test. “Do you buy books from people? If I brought some to you would you buy them?”

“That depends,” I said.

“What time is it?”

“Eleven-forty-one.”

He nodded again. “The clinic opens at noon. I have to go to the clinic to control my drug problem. If I don’t go to the clinic I’m in trouble.”

He did not explain the nature of the trouble, but I expected that it would not be something new to him.

“What’s the oldest book you have? Can I see it?’

“Well . . .”

He looked at the teddy bear and asked, “What time is it?”

The bear stayed mute so I supplied the answer. “Eleven forty-two.”

“I have to go to the clinic,” he said. “Maybe they’ll open up early. Nice talking to you.”

Sometimes talking to the customers provides me with important tools for getting through life.

“Do you know how stop a guy from shooting you with a revolver?”

I was hard pressed to imagine someone wanting to shoot me let alone knowing how to stop him.

“Do this,” he said, making a gun with his thumb and forefinger and pointing it at me. His eyes were maniacal, and I did as he asked.

“Try to pull the trigger,” he said. I must have looked puzzled because he said, “Drop your thumb.” He demonstrated.

As I tried to do so he drove his right hand forward with shocking quickness and my thumb came down on the side of his hand, on the fleshy part between his widespread thumb and fingers. “That’s what you do,” he said. “You slide your hand up against the hammer and hold it back. It hurts like a bitch, but he can’t shoot you.”

His name was Jason. He was short and wiry, with erratic teeth and glasses taped together. He cycled in all weather. He came to the store, he said, because it helped him stay calm. He had been in the Canadian navy, and he had been in prison.

“It was in the States,” he said. “I used to work for some people, collecting money. I was really good at it.”

He came into the store at least twice a week for more than a year. I hired him to do small chores such as shoveling the snow and cleaning up rubble from behind the store. He was punctual, and he worked hard. Then he vanished. He left town or went back to prison or died. I wonder about that, and I miss him.

There’s a man who explains to me repeatedly, and at great length, an idea for an elaborate, and totally incomprehensible virtual-reality game that is sure to make him a fortune. I was going to write about that, but even after having it explained in intense detail half a dozen times, I still can’t fathom what he imagines. My son was visiting me one day when this guy came in and went through his half-hour spiel. My son made polite noises and asked a few questions. When the guy had gone, though, my son turned to me and said, “Dad, what the hell was he talking about?”

The young man had been sitting in the leather club chair for some time before I spoke to him. He had come into the shop, glanced around briefly, and then taken a seat. The chair is comfortable and low and tucked behind some bookshelves, obscuring anyone sitting in it from immediate view of other customers.

“Don’t mind me saying this,” I said, “but you look like you’re trying to hide.”

Yes,” he replied.

“Do you mind if I ask from whom?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Understood.” We both carried on in silence. It was a slow, quiet day.

“I don’t mind you sitting there as long as you want,” I said after a while, “on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“Do you want a coffee?”

“Yes.”

“Here,” I handed him a five. “Get two. I take mine black.”

He brought the coffee back, and the right change, and we sat together, chatting about books. After another two hours, he rose and went to the door. “Thanks,” he said.

New stories walk into the shop every day. Financially, I’m less well off than I used to be, but my life is richer. I’ve learned that, almost as much as I like the books, I like the customers, and I have become more tolerant of their idiosyncrasies. They pop in to surprise me every day, usually in good ways and often in bizarre ones. I absolutely could not make this stuff up.

Posted in Bookshops, Business, Characters, Readers, Writers | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

HARRY KEMELMAN—EQMM PODCAST AND OPEN ROAD E-BOOK SALE

Posted on December 1, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen

In EQMM’s April 1947 issue, Harry Kemelman, creator of the best-selling Rabbi David Small series, saw print for the first time as the winner of a special prize for best first story in EQMM’s second annual worldwide short-story contest. That first tale of his, “The Nine Mile Walk,” is featured in our podcast series this month, read by another author whose first story appeared in EQMM . . . our book reviewer Steve Steinbock.

If you can’t get enough Kemelman, you’re in luck: Open Road is featuring three of his works as e-books (The Nine Mile Walk: Eight Nicky Welt Stories; Friday the Rabbi Slept Late; Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry) on sale for $1.99 each in the United States from December 1 to December 6. Visit Open Road, Amazon, BN.com, Kobo, Google Play, or Apple’s iBooks to take advantage of this deal and get started, if you haven’t already, with books one and two in the Rabbi Small series.

Posted in Digital | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

“Ellery Queen—a Website on Deduction” (by Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu)

Posted on November 30, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Since readers will learn about the careers and literary work of Dale Andrews and Kurt Sercu in their own words in the following post, I will simply note that they are among the most dedicated and knowledgeable fans of Ellery Queen, and of EQMM, to be found anywhere in the world. All of us at EQMM salute them, for without such fans it is unimaginable that EQMM would be celebrating a 75th anniversary and looking to the future.—Janet Hutchings

The presidential election has been in the forefront of public discussions this month and it therefore seems apropos that this little article should begin with a political reference, in this case a paraphrase from an unsuccessful vice presidential candidate some years back: Who are we and why are we here?

The “who” part of the question can be answered pretty simply: We are Kurt Sercu, a resident of Sijsele, Belgium, which is near the picturesque city of Brugge, who is the head nurse at AZ Alma hospital in Sijsele, and Dale Andrews, a resident of Washington, D.C., a retired lawyer who was formerly a Deputy General Counsel at the United States Department of Transportation.

Why we are here is a bit more complicated.

It is tempting to answer that question in two words: “Ellery Queen.” It is an interest in the works of Queen that we share, and it is those works that formed the basis of our friendship, and occasional collaboration. Kurt is the proprietor and founder of the website Ellery Queen—a Website on Deduction, and Dale, a lifelong fan of Ellery, is the author of three Ellery Queen pastiches, one of which, “The Book Case,” (EQMM May, 2007) was written in collaboration with Kurt, and each of which has been published in the pages of EQMM. But as the reader may suspect, that simple answer is just shorthand for a story that is a bit more complex.

This story is largely Kurt’s, and so it is with him that we begin. Kurt is a self-styled computer nerd. He bought his first computer back in the 1990s and immersed himself in the then-burgeoning library of shareware programs freely available to those willing to try them. By the late 1990s, armed with what he had learned, Kurt began to think about designing his own website.

It would be tempting, and (again) a simpler story, if Kurt’s intention had always been that his website would be dedicated to the works of Ellery Queen. But such was not the case. In fact, Kurt’s first idea was to design a site focusing on the works of Tolkien. A search of the internet, however, led him to conclude that this subject was already well covered.

So—where else to look? Kurt has always loved mysteries and one might expect that, given his nationality, he might have next explored the possibility of a site dedicated to Agatha Christie’s Belgian hero Hercule Poirot, or perhaps a site exploring the works of Belgian mystery author Simenon. But those of us who frequent this blog can breathe a collective sigh of relief since Kurt, at an early age, discovered, and was entranced by, the mysteries of Ellery Queen.

The Queen mysteries spoke to him. They were structured around puzzles, and these puzzles often revolved around underlying themes—the Bible, Darwinian evolution, McCarthyism. And the books were themselves a puzzle: an author who was also the detective, and who therefore both wrote and confronted all of those baffling situations that were always, in the end, solvable through the application of rigorous logic; where all of the clues were known but where it took Ellery to see where, together, they pointed. Why not build a website dedicated to the works of Ellery Queen?

There were already Ellery Queen websites, but unlike Tolkien, there were few such sites. Also, the sites that already existed were in many cases no more than listings and brief discussions of the Ellery Queen novels. Kurt envisioned much more—an in-depth site that would explore all aspects of the Queen canon. The Queen library, together with various articles Kurt had collected concerning Ellery Queen, formed the early foundation for Ellery Queen—A Website on Deduction. What followed was research and the gathering of information, both pictorial and narrative, from which Kurt could begin to build the type of website he envisioned. This process, and its vision, is explained by Kurt on the website:

[At first I] tried to “cut and paste” my way through what grew into a large volume of information. Too few sites, in my opinion, do justice to [Queen], who started off in the late twenties and [continued to write] into the seventies. He made maximum use of the media at that time and is now, I feel, grossly neglected. I hoped the site [would] fire up more interest in the Ellery Queen stories.

Building the website was no easy task. What Kurt envisioned was a site that would immerse the reader in details and pictures. And like the Queen books themselves, there should be mysteries woven into the fabric of the website—clickable words and icons that whisk the reader to completely different sections of the site.

So the goal from the outset was that the website should be as intricate, as Byzantine, as the Ellery Queen mysteries which it honored. There the reader should find information concerning Ellery Queen—the lives of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, who were Ellery Queen, the recurring characters, the novels themselves, the Ellery Queen movies and television shows, the comic books, even the board games. If it had to do with Ellery, well, it needed to be covered in depth by the website.

Early on Kurt decided to name the site Ellery Queen—a Website on Deduction as a tribute to the early Queen mysteries, which each contained the phrase “a problem in deduction” under the respective titles. Another early decision was that there would be two identical platforms for the site—one in Dutch and one in English. The Queen mysteries were, of course, written in English, so having an English-language site made a lot of sense. But building the English language site presented a challenge—Kurt’s native language is Dutch. Luckily, however, he is fluent in English, but still—writing extensively in one’s second language is a huge challenge.

And “extensive” is in all respects the proper word. Since its debut, on April 18, 1999, Ellery Queen—a Website on Deduction has grown to include approximately 237 pages of Queen-related information, or (collectively) 474 total pages when one includes both the English and Dutch language sites.

When the reader first enters the website it is obvious that it is in all respects an homage to Ellery Queen. And as such, it contains much information but also many surprises—lots of hidden clues that will propel the reader into different (and at times unsuspected) topics. Since our subject here is premised on the mysteries of Ellery Queen the last thing we want to do is offer up “spoilers.” That said, a “user’s guide” to the various sections contained in the site would look something like this:

“List of Suspects” takes you to detailed essays on recurring characters in the Queen library—Ellery, the Inspector, Sergeant Velie and, among others, Ellery’s infrequent secretary and near, but not quite, love interest, Nikki Porter. The reader will also find essays on Djuna, a character in early Queen mysteries, and lesser luminaries—such as coroner Dr. Samuel Prouty.

“QBI” unlocks sixteen pages in which every Ellery Queen novel and short story is discussed in detail. Kurt even provides the history of those infamous works that Dannay and Lee “farmed out” to other writers in a perhaps ill conceived attempt to keep the Queen name before the reading public. While perusing these essays be sure to click on the covers of the various volumes—this will take you to even more in-depth discussions of each work, and to the website’s ever-growing collection of international book covers.

“Kill as Directed” contains essays on every Ellery Queen movie, comic book, board game and television series. Clicking through the list of episodes of the first EQ television series, which aired on the ancient and largely forgotten Dumont television network, will lead the reader to a select few episodes that Kurt has uncovered that are available online and that can be watched, in their entirety, through the website. The section also contains a detailed and affectionate guide to the 1975 NBC Ellery Queen series, the quintessential Ellery Queen series, which (thankfully!) is now available in a re-mastered DVD collection.

“Whodunit” chronicles the lives of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. There the reader will also find shorter biographies of every other writer who ever authored a Queen work as a ghost writer. These comprise those farmed-out volumes, the Ellery Queen, Jr. juvenile mystery series, and some later Ellery works that, while outlined by Dannay, were written by others during the period in which Manfred B. Lee famously suffered from writer’s block. This section also contains information on authors who have written Ellery Queen pastiches.

The website has grown over the years, first with a section devoted to “J.J. McC,” the mysterious figure who provided the introductions to the early Queen mysteries, and more recently with the addition of the “West Eighty Seventh Street Irregulars” section, which contains essays by individuals who have been active in keeping alive the Queen name. There you will find Queen related musings by the likes of Arthur Vidro, author and publisher of the newsletter (Give me That) Old Time Detection, preeminent Queen scholar and author Professor Francis M. Nevins, Edgar-winning playwright Joseph Goodrich (author of the recent and award-winning theatrical production of Ellery Queen’s Calamity Town), critic and author Jon L. Breen, Editor Janet Hutchings (who needs no introduction), Professor Joe Christopher, and Dale Andrews.

Oh. That’s right. We should mention Dale at this stage.

Kurt and Dale met online in 2002 when Dale stumbled onto Kurt’s website. After three years of Queen-related emails between the two, Kurt and Dale finally met in 2005, when Kurt flew across the Atlantic for the first time to attend EQMM’s symposium saluting the centenary of the births of Dannay, Lee, and (consistent with the chronology set forth in Ellery’s The Finishing Stroke) Ellery himself.

And this leads us to one of the paradoxes of the internet and, by extension, Kurt’s website. Fans of Ellery Queen may be a narrow subset but they are also a deep one. They are everywhere, all over the world. But until there was a global way to reach out to each other, there was no way for any of those fans readily to connect. The virtual world Kurt has created in his website shatters that barrier. It allows Ellery Queen fans to find each other and to share their knowledge. Ellery Queen—a Website on Deduction, reflecting this, has grown, over the years, with input from interested readers all over the world.

But the internet does more than provide a basis for virtual friendships. It also sometimes provides the first stepping stone to move from the virtual to the real world. And this, in turn, can provide a catalyst for literary rebirth. The ability to download books has provided the onus for the reissuance of the Queen library by Otto Penzler. And, Kurt and Dale’s friendship, first virtual, then in the real world following the 2005 Ellery Queen Symposium, resulted in their collaboration in “The Book Case” (EQMM 2007), a pastiche that brings Ellery back, at the ripe old age of 102, for one more adventure. Kurt and Dale (we!) have also collaborated on analytic pieces available on Kurt’s website, and with this little article they (we, again!) are doing so once more.

Kurt’s website has also facilitated friendships among other fans of Ellery. Just this past September Kurt flew across the Atlantic and he and Dale attended the EQMM 75th Anniversary Symposium at Columbia University. Also attending were when four of those “West Eighty Seventh Street Irregulars,” as well as Jeffrey Marks, another virtual, and now real-world friend, who led a panel, and is the author of the upcoming biography of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. And Kurt finally had the opportunity to converse in Flemish with EQMM author and Queen fan Josh Pachter. So, in many respects, the fire is being rekindled, thanks to a virtual world that encourages those of similar interests in Ellery Queen to reach out and find each other.

At the close of that symposium, not ready, yet, to move on, Kurt, Dale and Joe Goodrich lit out together for dinner. What ensued was an evening of drinks, food, Queen-related trivia and merriment, including the travails involved when those three fans of Ellery’s adventures attempted, from memory, to list in chronological order all of the Ellery Queen books on the back of a napkin. (All of this after several Cosmopolitans had been imbibed!) We may not each remember all of the details of that evening, but we do remember enough to solemnly attest that, the value of the internet aside, that time our final list was created without resort to Google!

At the close of that wonderful evening Joe posed a question. If there were one thing out there, just one, involving Ellery that Kurt would like to have or see transpire, what would it be? Kurt had to think long and hard on this. But ultimately his answer was a pretty grand one—he wished there could be a museum, or at the least an extensive exhibition dedicated to the works of Dannay and Lee, a place where visitors could experience first hand all there is to know about the mysteries of Ellery Queen.

Dale’s response? In the real world that is simply too much to wish for. But not so in the virtual world. It’s already there. Just visit Ellery Queen—a Website on Deduction. And in the real world? Well, the closest thing you will find right now is the excellent Ellery Queen exhibit assembled in honor of the 75th Anniversary of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. It is open to the public at Columbia University’s Butler Library through December 23. Given that we are focused here on mysteries it only makes sense that it was the “Butler” that did it, right?

Posted in Characters, Conventions, Ellery Queen, Guest | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

HOLIDAY WISHES FROM EQMM

Posted on November 23, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Happy Thanksgiving from our table to yours.

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REFLECTIONS FROM A READING WEEK

Posted on November 16, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen

I’ve been immersed in submissions over the past week and it’s revived an old line of thought. . . .

Every editor receives a share of manuscripts from writers who’ve never had a word in print on which a copyright notice looms boldly at the top. This is almost always a bad sign: Most such manuscripts turn out not to be publishable. I’ve come to think that extreme authorial anxiety over the protection of content arises from a failure to notice that creativity mostly takes wing from a relatively small cluster of basic, and shared, ideas.

A decade ago, mystery writers Peter Lovesey, Liza Cody, and Michael Z. Lewin decided to test what would happen if they each wrote a story taking as a common point of departure the same newspaper account of a crime. There’s more than a thematic convergence to the tales they came up with, which were published in EQMM March/April 2007 and later became part of our podcast series, but you can read or listen to all three in the same afternoon and not get a sense of repetitiveness. The creativity there is all in the details: The characters and their social milieus, the different narrative voices, the insights and observations that come from each author, and the subtly different mood of each tale would each suffice alone to give the reader a sense of entering a different fictional world. Even the plots, in their concrete working out, turned out to diverge enough to keep the reader wondering.

Those three authors (all friends, incidentally) were inspired to perform this experiment by the question authors so often get asked: Where do you get your ideas? Most authors find that a hard question to answer: Many will tell you they don’t know, the ideas just come. I once heard a writer say, “Where do I get my ideas? They’re floating in the air.” From my perspective at EQMM that seems, metaphorically at least, a pretty good answer—because authors so frequently catch the same idea at the same time, almost as if an idea were an airborne virus. Stories with amazingly similar themes, plot lines, even character types appear on our desks all at once, then die out as mysteriously as they briefly proliferated. A couple of years ago I was so struck by the similarity of the plots and storylines of two first stories that came to us within a month (both publishable) that I wrote to the authors to ask if they could have shared a writing course; but there was no connection between them at all. Although we’ll sometimes have to choose, in such instances, which story we’ll buy and which we’ll have to send back, authors need not worry, when that happens, that they’ve been suspected of plagiarism. Ideas can’t be copyrighted for the very good reason that they’re so often picked up from no one knows quite where.

That’s not to say there are not cases of deliberate borrowing of ideas, and some such borrowings may be concerning. Writers of classical puzzle mysteries, especially those whose plots hinge on an unusual weapon, a clever contrivance, or an especially complex and clever plot, may have more legitimate proprietary concerns regarding their ideas (including their plots) than most other writers.

But most often, even when a writer consciously borrows an idea from another writer, it’s not a case of stealing. More often it would be better considered a sort of homage. Years ago, I received a wonderfully atmospheric story by a writer who’d never published in our genre before, which we proceeded to buy and publish. No sooner had the issue hit the newsstands, however, than we received an anxious and contrite letter from the author in which she revealed that she’d copied the structure of a story by one of our genre’s grand masters to help shape her own piece. My first thought was that it was a fine time to tell us. But I realized immediately that the story had been so thoroughly filtered through the author’s own viewpoint, characters, setting, and voice that, whatever its structural borrowings, it had become unique. (Besides, structure is a part of craft that nearly every writer learns from those who’ve gone before.)

Don’t get me wrong, we have no tolerance at all for plagiarism. But there’s a big difference between imitation and plagiary, and the things that can be easily imitated or borrowed are often not the things that are key to a story’s originality.

An awful lot has been written about what it is that makes a story original. The source I find most useful on this subject is Edgar Allan Poe. Here are a few lines from his essay “On the Aim and Technique of the Short Story.” He’s speaking of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work. “Mr. Hawthorne’s distinctive trait is invention, creation, imagination, originality—a trait which, in the literature of fiction, is positively worth all the rest. But the nature of originality, so far as regards its manifestation in letters, is but imperfectly understood. The inventive or original mind as frequently displays itself in novelty of tone as in novelty of matter.”

For “matter” in that last line, let’s substitute “ideas” and then we can see that for Poe, novelty of tone—the voice each author brings uniquely to the work, the distinctive atmosphere he or she creates—is as important as original ideas. And it is a quality it would be very much harder for anyone to borrow or steal.   —Janet Hutchings

Posted in Characters, Editing, Fiction, Genre, Publishing, Story, Writers, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

EQMM to Be Special Guest at Passport to Murder, the 2017 Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in Toronto, from October 12-15!

Posted on November 9, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen

A couple of months ago, in the midst of our celebration of EQMM’s 75th anniversary year, our staff received the delightful news that the magazine will be honored for “Distinguished Contribution to the Genre” at the next Bouchercon World Mystery Convention, in Toronto, Canada.

Chairs for the event, editor and anthologist Janet Costello and short-story writer Helen Nelson (both active in Sisters in Crime Canada), have given the upcoming convention an international theme, which is, of course, right up EQMM’s street. The convention’s title is Passport to Murder, an echo of the title of the department that has run in EQMM since 2003, Passport to Crime.

The Bouchercon organization itself has a tie to EQMM by virtue of our common reverence for its namesake, Anthony Boucher. EQMM’s current issue, November 2016, tips its hat to Anthony Boucher with a reprint of one of his stories, “A Kind of Madness.” But Boucher was much more than a writer for EQMM. He was the magazine’s second book reviewer, a longtime friend of Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay (a.k.a. Ellery Queen), and a translator of crime fiction from several languages, some for EQMM. Frederic Dannay is said to have told one of the great writers of the twentieth century, Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, “You are the man who made me famous.” The story may be apocryphal, but it refers, nevertheless, to an important moment in EQMM’s history, the magazine’s publication of Anthony Boucher’s translation of Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the first work of Borges’s ever to appear in English.

The fact that EQMM is to be honored not only at a convention named for Boucher but one whose theme is international is truly gratifying, and it shows how much the world of crime fiction has changed over the past couple of decades.

In 2003, when EQMM launched Passport to Crime, our monthly translation series, there was far too little crime fiction from other countries seeing print in English.

Getting up and running with the series was a challenge. Fortunately, we had the assistance of the International Association of Crime Writers, which was founded in 1986 and had, by then, established branches worldwide that could help us to identify authors, readers, translators, and literary agents in the countries they served. As in most business ventures, one connection led to another, and pretty soon we knew of translators’ organizations, yearly mystery awards similar to the American Edgars in several other countries, and Web sites that our translators could use to scout for new authors. The series remains a challenge, since we want to try to keep adding new countries and authors to the list, rather than repeating our earlier finds, and unfortunately, there are many countries that have no writers’ organizations we can tap into, though we suspect they may have a thriving literature of crime fiction. We hope the 2017 Bouchercon will afford opportunities for us to connect with writers from those less familiar crime-fiction communities.

A lot has changed on the wider crime-fiction scene since EQMM began actively seeking stories to translate. There’s been a virtual explosion of interest by English-language book publishers (especially in the U.K and the U.S.) in bringing out translations, and crime and mystery fiction seems to be a significant category. It’s easy to see why, for however introspective or character-driven a mystery may be, a strong plot is almost always present too, and such plots can provide strong hooks for marketing to a new audience. Besides, mystery fiction, with its procedural aspects (involving police and other organizations) seems uniquely positioned to give readers a sense of how other societies function.

Still, why has interest increased only now? Many non-English-speaking countries have crime or mystery writing traditions that go back at least a hundred years, and the percentage of books making it into translation for the U.S. market was, until a decade ago, negligible.

Several years ago, I posted on our Web site forum some information I’d discovered about the increase in the number of English translations being done of foreign crime fiction. A July 2, 2010 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Fiction’s Global Crime Wave” cited the share of translated books coming out in the U.S. as 3%, which was, of course, small, but it was (according to other sources) threefold what it had been only a few years earlier.

What was perhaps even more telling was the Journal article’s reference to a fall in sales of U.S. crime novels in overseas markets: down 25% in Germany, 15% in France, and 90% in Scandinavia. The reason for this was speculated to be that publishers in those countries had come to have so many good home-grown mysteries to draw from that they didn’t need as many U.S. imports. Other countries, in other words, especially in Europe, seemed to be experiencing a great upsurge in creativity in our field. And perhaps it’s the availability of so many outstanding new foreign titles that is fueling the interest of American, Canadian, and U.K. publishers in translations.

I could not find any data more recent than that for English-language crime-fiction translation. But I did chance upon a 2016 article in Publishing Perspectives, by Dennis Abrams, entitled “Translated Fiction Outsells English Fiction in the U.K.,” in which Fiammetta Rocco, administrator of the Man Booker International Prize, was quoted giving figures that show the average number of copies sold of translated literary-fiction titles as more than twice that of literary novels written in English. Since translated titles amount to only 1.5 percent of all books published in the U.K., the total number of translated books sold is, of course, much smaller than the total number of English-language original books sold, but when comparing the average sales of individual titles in each of the two categories, the translations won.

It would be interesting to know whether this remarkable development in the field of literary fiction is mirrored in crime fiction. I suspect that it is, and I hope to learn more about that and related topics at the Toronto convention, where I’m sure Janet and Helen have a revealing lineup of panels and events planned.

EQMM is being gifted with a table at this convention—a place where our authors and readers can gather and find us. We hope to see you there!

Thank you, Bouchercon, for this special opportunity!—Janet Hutchings

Posted in Conventions, Magazine, Passport, Publishing, Readers, Writers, Writing | 3 Comments

“What I Learned in Prison” (by T.J. MacGregor)

Posted on November 2, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Trish MacGregor is the author of forty novels and the winner of an Edgar Allan Poe Award for best paperback original novel. In June 2016, she appeared in EQMM for the first time, with the story “The Unit.” We have another of her riveting stories of suspense coming up in 2017.  The experiences she describes in this post are both inspiring and thought-provoking.—Janet Hutchings

For three years in the late 1970s, I was in prison. Well, actually I was a prison librarian, not an inmate. Thankfully. That probably sounds like something from that old TV show, What’s My Line?

This prison was for male youthful offenders, in South Florida. It was new, run by the state, and I think I got hired because I spoke Spanish, had taught English to students from kindergarten through college, and had a master’s degree in Library Science. And they were looking for a Spanish teacher and a librarian. Plus, I was motivated. I had just finished a couple of years of teaching Spanish to hormonal eighth graders at a private school and knew that if I did it for another year, I probably would lose my mind!

Because the Indian County Correctional Institution was new, the library hadn’t been built yet and they brought in a double-wide trailer that was placed across the sidewalk from the education building, smack in the middle of the compound. I was provided with a generous budget to stock this library with books, music, magazines, and anything that wasn’t “obviously pornographic,” like Playboy, they said, or Penthouse. I remember standing in the middle of this huge, empty double-wide and thinking, Wow, I get to build my dream library.

So one day I drove over to the local independent bookstore in Vero Beach, Florida and started ordering books. Dashiell Hammett, Agatha Christie, Mickey Spillane, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy L. Sayers. You know the list. I also got Fitzgerald, Hemingway, du Maurier, Stephen King, and Dean Koontz. I included some of my favorites—Time and Again, by Jack Finney, and several from by Richard Matheson—The Body Snatchers, The Incredible Shrinking Man.

Nonfiction ran the gamut from memoirs to self-help to New Age titles. Instead of Playboy and Penthouse, I stocked Ellery Queen, Fate, Scientific American, and in 1978 added OMNI Magazine. I’m sure the inmate population wasn’t happy about the absence of porn, but they consumed everything else. And Tom, the bookstore owner, loved seeing me when I came shopping.

Years later, after I’d sold several novels, he hosted a signing for a group of mystery writers and invited me. It was fun and particularly gratifying because I’d made the leap from prison librarian and Spanish teacher to full-time writer.

In terms of daily life on that prison compound, I was one of fifteen women. This was a minimum-security prison, far more relaxed than maximum-security prisons, like the Florida state prison at Raiford, where the electric chair—Old Sparky—was alive and well. As a youthful offender facility, it was meant for kids as young as 15 and young adults up to 21. Never mind that there were inmates much older than that. Most of the crimes were drug-related—pot and cocaine.

Some young men were doing time for serious crimes. One inmate who eventually became an assistant in the library had robbed a convenience store so he could buy drugs. Another of my assistants, whose parents both had doctorates, had gotten high on something and raped a young girl. A man in his late twenties had killed the grandson of the Chicago mayor over a drug deal. His fiancée and I eventually became running partners and I learned a lot about what’s it’s like to live as a professional drug dealer. That inside dope helped me write my first published novel.

I remember one African-American, Ake, an older man in his thirties, who was doing ninety-nine years for murder. He’d been placed in our facility because he never caused trouble. Ake was a voracious reader, one of my most loyal customers.

Several years after I left that job, I was in a grocery store in Fort Lauderdale and heard someone bellowing, “Ms. Trish!” I turned and there was Ake, a giant of a man, rushing toward me with his arms wide open. We hugged in the middle of that grocery store and he told me he’d gotten early release for good behavior. And then he thanked me for all the wonderful books my library had provided, books that had changed his life from the inside out.

The other thing I learned as an employee in this prison is that when you have power over other people, it’s easy to abuse that power. Prison employees sold dope to inmates, no surprise there. Orange Is the New Black has that pegged. Female employees had affairs with inmates. Orange addresses that, too, but not quite in the same way since the prison in Orange is a female federal prison. In the prison where I worked, several female employees seduced the male inmates. At least one of them ended up marrying the inmate when he was released. The difference from Orange, besides the gender of the inmates, was that they didn’t interact with such snappy dialogue. No scriptwriters for those guys.

Then there were other types of abuses. Guards who patted your butt. Way to go, honey. I reported that guy to the superintendent of the prison. Nothing happened to him. After an inmate hung himself in solitary, it was discovered that he’d been on an outside work crew and had been taken to the assistant superintendent’s trailer on the prison grounds. Maybe he’d been expecting a cold glass of iced tea and lunch. Instead, he was raped.

When he reported it, he was tossed into solitary confinement and that was where he’d hung himself. When it was discovered that the assistant superintendent had been raping inmates for some time, he was forced to retire. No charges were ever brought against him.

I left this job in 1979, when the rapist-in-chief himself accused me of making personal copies of my resume in the classification department, the only place at that time that had a copier. Guilty. I did it. He threatened to place me on probation. The resumes were sent to the FBI, where I applied for a job because I couldn’t stand working in the state prison system anymore.

I went through two interviews with the FBI, who had started hiring women as agents, not just secretaries, in 1975. I was offered a job, pending my medical tests. Then I failed the hearing test because I’m ninety-percent deaf in my left ear, the result of a fractured skull when I was five. I quit my job, sold my condo, and moved. Eventually, I was hired by Florida International University to teach English to Cuban refugees.

I look back on those years in prison, though, and understand how much I gained. I used to go into the classification department on my lunch hour and read inmate files. I was curious about who they were, their backgrounds, families, their psyches. They provided plenty of fodder for future novels. The guy who headed that department was a Mormon with seven children. He was just there, filling time, waiting for retirement. The man in charge of the education department was a big teddy bear of a guy who made a difference in that he set up a GED program and then a college-level program where inmates could earn actual college credits for courses they took.

In the late 1990s, Florida’s state prisons were privatized. It meant that the more inmates they have, the more money they received from the state and the federal government. It’s probably why so many minorities are in prison for petty drug crimes, such as using or selling pot.

My three years behind bars—eight hours a day—taught me several indispensable lessons:

  • Nothing is ever what it appears to be, in either life or fiction.
  • That in a prison, the lines between good guys and bad guys are often blurred.
  • Sometimes, crime does pay.
  • There are usually two sides to a story—the wrong side and the right side—and those sides are usually open to interpretation.
  • Books change lives.
Posted in Books, Guest, Readers | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

BOUCHERCON/EQMM 75TH ANNIVERSARY SYMPOSIUM PHOTO GALLERY PART 2

Posted on October 26, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen

This week we want to share some photos that were not available to us when we posted about our 75th anniversary symposium last week. Following the symposium, Columbia University hosted a reception in the space that contains the EQMM 75th Anniversary Exhibition (Butler Library, 6th Floor East).  Our videographer, Ché Ryback, took some still photos of that event. A selection of them can be found below, along with three additional photos from the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in New Orleans.

Parts 1 and 2 of the symposium video are now up on YouTube and the audio recordings for those segments are or will be available in our podcast series. We expect to have Part 3 ready by next week. We hope you’ll have a look, or a listen. And don’t forget that the 75th anniversary exhibition at Columbia is on view and open to the public until December 23!—Janet Hutchings

From the EQMM 75th Anniversary Exhibition Reception
Butler Library at Columbia University
535 W 114th Street, New York, NY, 6th Floor East
Exhibition on view until December 23

eq-4 eq-6 eq-9 eq-11 eq-14 eq-18 eq-21 eq-24

Linda Landrigan, Editor, AHMM

Linda Landrigan, Editor, AHMM

Peter Kanter, Publisher, Dell Magazines

Peter Kanter, Publisher, Dell Magazines

EQMM at Bouchercon World Mystery Convention
New Orleans, LA
September 15-18, 2016

From L to R: Charlaine Harris, Paula Wolden, Daniel Distler, Martin Edwards, Hilary Davidson, Janet Hutchings, Laura Benedict

From L to R: Dana Cameron, Janet Hutchings, Jack Chapple, Art Taylor, Dave Zeltserman, Judy Zeltserman, Twist Phelan

The Anniversary Panel, from L to R: Steve Steinbock, Otto Penzler, Janet Hutchings, Ted Hertel, Brendan DuBois, Shelly Dickson Carr, and James Lincoln Warren (moderator)

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