SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN

THE EQMM FAMILY

Posted on June 22, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen

For a number of EQMM’s contributors, writing for our magazine has become a family business, so to speak, stretching as far, in at least one case, as three generations. We’ve had husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, even a father-daughter-granddaughter in a single family all providing us with top-notch stories over the years. Lovesey is a name we always think of in this regard, for Peter Lovesey is a winner of the EQMM Readers Award and his son Phil began his career as a published writer in our Department of First Stories, giving them each a special place in the EQMM family of writers.

Peter Lovesey is, of course, one of the most celebrated of contemporary crime writers. His novels and stories have won innumerable awards, including Gold and Silver Daggers from the U.K. Crime Writers’ Association, and he is a recipient of the Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement. Phil Lovesey is the author of seven novels, four of them crime fiction, and many short stories, one of which, first published in EQMM, won the U.K. Crime Writers’ Association’s best-short-story Dagger.

It has been one of our goals in this year marking EQMM’s 75^th anniversary to pay tribute to the many fine writers whose work has enriched our pages. We never expected two of those writers to celebrate EQMM in the extraordinarily original way the Loveseys have. Apparently, when the family sits down to dinner in Phil Lovesey’s house these days, it is at a table whose surface is a laminated collage of pages from EQMM. I was speechless when I saw this, and I cannot think of anything that better encapsulates the spirit we’re trying to convey in this anniversary year. EQMM has survived and thrived because of the love and loyalty of its readers and writers. In that sense, we truly are a family, and from our hearts we thank the Lovesey family for sharing with us this photo of their table (tipped up so that the camera could better capture its surface).—Janet Hutchings

Phil and Peter Lovesey (L to R)

Posted in Ellery Queen, Magazine, Writers | Tagged family, generation, lovesey, mystery, short story writers, writers, writing | 3 Comments

“The Role of Place in Creating Suspense” (by Sheila Kohler)

Posted on June 15, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Sheila Kohler is the author of fourteen books, and the winner of the Willa Cather Award and two O. Henry Prizes for her fiction. Born and raised in South Africa, she has lived in the U.S. for many years and teaches at Princeton University. She has been contributing stories characterized by a strong evocation of place to EQMM for nearly a decade; readers will find the most recent of them, “Nothing Matters but Matter,” in the upcoming December issue. Those who’d like to see more of Sheila’s blog postings should visit Psychology Today’s Dreaming for Freud, where her pieces appear regularly.—Janet Hutchings

We have just arrived in St. Petersburg, Russia: my daughter Cybele, my granddaughter Masha, and I. I have not seen Cybele, who lives in Berlin, or Masha, who is at university in England, for a year, and was very fearful of missing them at the airport in St. Petersburg. I had to fly from New York to Paris to change planes there, and I was afraid of delays, strikes, or simply summer crowds on my end or theirs from Berlin. When I stood in the hall of the airport in St. Petersburg looking around at the crowd and saw neither one of them or even the man who was supposed to pick us up, I was in an extreme state of anxiety. With what joy I heard a glad cry, “Gogo!”, the name my granddaughter calls me, and saw a beautiful girl with pink cheeks and brown curls come flying through the crowd. Soon we were all embracing happily.

There was a fourth person present, however, at our reunion, the ghost of Dostoevsky. I am here thanks to the university where I teach with the intention of walking in Dostoevsky’s footsteps. I am in the process of writing a book much inspired by his Crime and Punishment. (I don’t want to give too much away, so I won’t tell you more than that.) We are even staying at the Sonya Radisson hotel. You will remember the saintly prostitute in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Sonya Marmeladov, who will save Raskolnikov, the murderer, with her love. There is a quote from one of Dostoevsky’s books up outside of every room in the hotel.

The three of us—or should I say the four, will take a train from St. Petersburg to Moscow and on from Moscow to Omsk in Siberia where Dostoevsky was imprisoned, after his mock execution in 1849.

On December 22, the members of what was known as the Petrashevsky Circle, a Russian intellectual literary group, were taken from their cells in the fortress of Saint Peter and Paul and sent to Semyonov Square. With the soldiers lined up and pointing their rifles, fingers resting on the trigger, the first three prisoners were tied to a stake, black hoods over their heads. They waited for imminent death. When a messenger rode up waving a white flag, they were told that in a “show of mercy,” Tsar Nicholas I had supposedly spared the men. This was actually a means of fostering terror, and gratitude, something Dostoevsky would use in various ways in his subsequent great novels, including Crime and Punishment. He would always remember that moment of terror and how precious life suddenly seemed to him.

What struck me, though, on arriving here, after the first moment of great elation at the airport—is how different the city seems to me from Dostoevsky’s dark description in Crime and Punishment.

I will admit we have only been in this city built by Peter the Great in the eighteen century for less than a week, and all has been colored by our joyous reunion and exceptional sunshine. Together we have taken a boat on the canals, admired the great works of art in the Hermitage, and visited the fortress where Dostoevsky was imprisoned. We have seen the houses where he lived and the one Raskolnikov was supposed to inhabit and the place where he was to murder the pawnbroker.

Obviously, St. Petersburg has changed much since 1866 when Dostoevsky wrote his famous book. It was then, as he describes it, flooded with the newly freed serfs who flocked here in search of work in the factories and the budding industries of the great city. Yet, the wide boulevards, the orderly layout of the city, and the baroque buildings which line the Neva, as well as many of the churches with their glittering onion-shaped domes, date from the eighteen century, and must have looked much as they do today, and surely the weather has not changed that much.

Still, in the book, which starts in the summer like our visit, the city is dusty, filled with dank odors which rise from the polluted water of the canals; drunkards, who stagger down the sweltering narrow streets, or youthful prostitutes who wander precariously, half-clad in the summer heat followed by dangerous predators. Dostoevsky writes, “It was terribly hot out and moreover it was close, crowded, lime scaffolding and bricks, dust everywhere and that special summer stench known so well to every Petersburger who cannot afford to rent a summer house.”

Here, on the contrary, on my arrival from a scorching New York city, I have found cool, breezy boulevards with gaily painted eighteenth-century baroque buildings which must have existed in 1866 though they have surely been repainted and renovated.

“I have never seen such a clean building,” my granddaughter said remarking on the bright yellow and white of the Russian Museum which looks as if it were painted yesterday. The well-dressed population strides past us with confident step, the little girls with their blond hair neatly braided down their backs, the mothers pushing prams purposefully dressed in high heels and silky skirts; the dowagers in smart suits. We have lingered in the leafy gardens with the scent of lilac in the air; or sat out in shaded terraces for a delicious dish of borscht with a dollop of sour cream.

Obviously, like the history portrayed in the fortress of Saint Peter and Paul, where Dostoevsky was imprisoned, the city can be seen in many different guises and disguises, and the way it is appears in Crime and Punishment serves the author’s purpose. He uses the place so skillfully to echo and evoke concretely the emotions of his troubled and conflicted hero as well as to provide motivation for his crime, and ultimately to create suspense.

Though our hotel room is certainly not palatial it has large deep windows, and the sun continues to stream in until late at night. I am writing this at eight-thirty without one light lit in the room. The enamel basin and bath shine with cleanliness, and the towels are fluffy and white, whereas poor Raskolnikov, Dostoevsky’s murderer, in Crime and Punishment lingers on in a stifling closet of a room that Dostoevsky likens to a “coffin.” It has yellowing wall paper (all the rooms seem to have yellowing wallpaper) and an accumulation of dust on the books which he can no longer bring himself to read, sunk so deeply in the lethargy of his depression.

It is at least partly this dire poverty which drives Raskolnikov to stumble down the stairs and slink surreptitiously past his landlady’s quarters (he owes the rent) and out into the stifling streets in the first pages of the novel in a sort of “rehearsal” of the crime he will ultimately commit.

In the streets he will come across the young girl who seems destined to prostitution in her drunken and disorderly state. Someone, Raskolnikov fears, has taken advantage of an innocent girl and a predator who follows her will bring about her ruin. This chance encounter in the streets of the city will again echo Raskolnikov’s inner dilemma: his own loving sister Dunya who is contemplating a disastrous marriage with a pompous and dastardly man, Luzhin, in order to obtain the money her brother needs for his education—surely, a prostitution of a respectable kind.

Dostoevsky gives us precise details which serve the author’s purposes exactly. The reader sees, tastes, and smells this concrete world and feels, with increasing terror, for this young man with his generous impulses to help the Marmeladov family, as well as to rise above the circumstances of his life. We fear he will commit murder, and then we tremble that he may confess and be caught. We are brought by the verisimilitude of the descriptions of place to believe this young student could kill the old, avaricious, and cruel pawnbroker brutally with an axe and steal her money. The reader both understands rationally and also feels emotionally that this young man with his impulses to both give away all he has and to grasp what is not rightfully his own might actually strike not only a defenseless elderly woman with an axe but her innocent step-sister who happens to walk in on the crime.

The place, here, St. Petersburg with its crowded and claustrophobic atmosphere, its courtyards and dank back staircases, the police office which smells mysteriously of new paint, all of this drives the murderer onward first to commit his absurd and senseless crime and finally, thanks to Sonya Marmeladov’s love and devotion and the detective Porfiry’s skillful questioning, to confess to what he has done, and ultimately to redemption. The inner conflict, the split in his mind—the reasonable thoughts about his family, his relationship with Sonya, and the irrational desire to rise above the law—is echoed by the world outside of him: good and evil abounds around him. In this place where I have come to find my darling daughter and my dearest granddaughter, a place so filled with light and, it seems, love, I have found a new understanding of Dostoevsky’s art and mind.

Posted in Books, Characters, Editing, Fiction, Genre, Guest, History, International, Setting, Story, Suspense, Writers, Writing | Tagged character, crime, crime and punishment, dostoevsky, history, location, novelist, russia, setting, suspense, writer | Leave a comment

“Sisters in Crime and ‘A Currency of Generosity’” (by Leslie Budewitz)

Posted on June 8, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen

It’s been several years since Leslie Budewitz’s fiction has appeared in EQMM. In the intervening time she’s had stories published elsewhere, including in our sister magazine, AHMM, and she has two novel-length series running. She tells EQMM that she “blends her passion for food, great mysteries, and the Northwest in the Seattle Spice Shop Mysteries and the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries, set in Jewel Bay, Montana.” Leslie has also written nonfiction in the genre; she is a practicing lawyer and her book Books, Crooks and Counselors: How to Write Accurately About Criminal Law and Courtroom Procedure was a critical success, winning an Agatha Award in 2011. In fact, Leslie is the first author to win Agatha Awards for both fiction and nonfiction. She has recently taken on yet another role in the mystery field as president of Sisters in Crime—the subject of today’s post. If, after reading her tribute to this ground-breaking organization you’d like to learn how to join, visit www.SistersinCrime.org.—Janet Hutchings

Writers new to the mystery community are often amazed at the generosity they experience, unable to explain how people who kill on the page give so much so readily to other writers, no matter their level of craft and accomplishment. Nowhere have I seen this more than in Sisters in Crime. Since becoming president of SinC in October 2015, it’s been an almost daily experience, and I think I finally know why.

This observation from Amy Wheeler, Executive Director of Hedgebrook, the amazing writing community in western Washington, nails it: “Here’s the beautiful thing about creating a currency of generosity as a community’s economy: Everybody who receives wants to give back.”

“A currency of generosity.” That’s it. That’s what Sisters in Crime has been to me since the day I first read about the organization and sent in my dues, nearly twenty years ago.

That’s the spirit that led SinC to start a new campaign this spring, We Love Short Stories. It’s a sibling to our long-running program, We Love Libraries, which every month gives a library a $1,000 grant to buy books, and our year-old baby, We Love Bookstores, which every month gives an independent bookstore a $250 grant for promotion.

Many SinC members, including me, got our first publishing credits with short mysteries. They remain a tremendous avenue for new writers to break in; for published authors, they provide an opportunity to tell stories that would not support a novel or to hold reader interest between books. Other authors simply prefer the form. They’re fun to write, and fun to read.

Starting this month, InSinC Quarterly is publishing articles on the craft of writing short stories, finding markets, promotion, and creating anthologies. We’re interviewing short story publishers and editors, starting with the best—Ellery Queen’s Janet Hutchings.

We also believe that writing well in a form requires reading it. SinC members now receive healthy discounts to Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Mystery Scene, and the Strand. Other publishers are stepping up to join the program. Thanks to Deborah Lacy, Debra H. Goldstein, and Art Taylor for doing the hard work.

That spirit of generosity was celebrated in May when Sisters in Crime received MWA’s Raven Award, given for “outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside the realm of creative writing.” Nearly thirty years ago, our founding mothers, led by Sara Paretsky, envisioned an organization that would advocate for women crime writers. Over the years, we’ve monitored the number of reviews given books by women, and helped prompt a notable increase, reaching parity in many publications. We’ve advocated for better placement on panels and in the leadership of other organizations. We’ve worked late into the night, sharing shameless tips for self-promotion and advice on breaking and entering. Sisters—including many brothers—have worked together to form chapters, giving members support and opportunities for education and promotion. We’ve created one of the best regular publications for writers, regardless of genre, in InSinC, and a multiple-award winning anthology of inspiration and advice, Writes of Passage.

MWA’s The Raven Award.

MWA 2016: Leslie Budewitz with Catriona McPherson and Sara Paretsky (L to R)

The Edgars 2016: Leslie Budewitz with Catriona McPherson and Sara Paretsky (L to R)

We have, as our mission statement says, promoted “the advancement, recognition, and professional development of women crime writers.”

Our vision is even broader: “To be the voice of excellence and diversity in crime fiction.” Many writers face additional obstacles to publication because they are writers of color, are LGBTQ, or have disabilities. The 2017 edition of our annual Publishing Summit report, to be published later this summer, will look at those obstacles, advise the mystery community on possible changes, and note the changes we’ve begun in our own house. Our annual SinC into Great Writing Workshop will focus on the craft aspects of working with the amazing diversity in our world, in setting, plot, character, and dialogue. “Writing Our Differences—Doing Diversity Right,” with keynote speaker, Walter Mosley, will be held September 14, 2016, in New Orleans, the day before Bouchercon begins.

Not all SinC members are writers. We welcome readers. I can almost guarantee that anyone who walks into a chapter meeting and identifies herself as “just a reader” will instantly be the most popular person in the room! Seriously, brothers can be Sisters, and so can readers.

It’s an old maxim that you get what you give. Never before joining SinC—and nowhere since—have I been part of a community that so made me want to contribute, as thanks for what I’ve received. And every project I’ve been involved with has given me back even more than I’ve put in.

It’s that “currency of generosity,” and it multiplies with every act of kindness to another writer, no matter how small the act, no matter who the writer is or where they are on their own writing journey.

It’s the spirit of Sisters in Crime. And we’d love to share it with you.

Posted in Fiction, Guest, Publishing, Readers, Writers | Tagged bookstore, crime, diversity, equality, fiction, genre, library, promotion, readers, sisters in crime, writers, writing | 10 Comments

“In Defense of Dan Brown and Bad Sentences” (by Michael Noll)

Posted on June 1, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Michael Noll debuted in EQMM in the July 2015 issue with “The Tank Yard,” a story that was subsequently selected for the 2016 volume of Best American Mystery Stories. He is the program director at the Writers’ League of Texas and the editor of the craft-of-writing blog Read to Write Stories. His short fiction has also appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Chattahoochee Review, Indiana Review, and The New Territory. His book In the Beginning, Middle, and End: A Field Guide for Writing Fiction is due out next year. In this post he takes a critical look at the work of one of the most popular thriller writers of our time and shares some of the advice he gives his writing students.—Janet Hutchings

Dan Brown hasn’t published a book since Inferno in 2013, but Facebook apparently has a grudge against him. Recently, an old review of Inferno from England’s The Telegraph showed up on my news feed, and it tears into Brown in order to make a succinct argument: Dan Brown can’t write a sentence.

In my writing community, most people would probably agree with this assessment, but I found myself wondering if it’s actually true.

As evidence of Brown’s lack of skill, the review offers this sentence: “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” Of course, almost any book can be ransacked for poorly worded sentences, and so it might be tempting to think this example was cherry picked. But this review is part of a longer history. Another review by Clive James highlighted the particular horror of other sentences: “Sienna changed tacks” and “Pandora is out of her box.” James’ retort: “Dan, she was never in it.”

This is comically bad prose, like something Yogi Berra might have said. After all, is “Pandora is out of her box” really so different than “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”? Neither makes logical sense—and yet we know exactly what both statements mean. The same is true of “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” Sharks aren’t white—or, if they are, they start that way and don’t change color (though how cool would that be?). Even if you grant Brown a zoological waiver, there isn’t much logic to be found. If sharks did change color, wouldn’t it be to disguise their attack? Or perhaps to frighten their prey? Surely we can agree that a shark would not change color out of fear while attacking.

Yet such writing doesn’t mean Brown’s books aren’t any good. I read The Da Vinci Code while in college, studying Creative Writing and Journalism. Like writing students everywhere, I disguised my lack of skill by trashing the weaknesses of other writers, and so I was primed to detest a book that everyone around me adored. But I didn’t. I devoured it the same as I consume Pringles potato chips, figuring I’m not going to be capable of thinking of anything else so I might as well finish the whole thing. The day after I started The Da Vinci Code, I drove home to visit my parents and hid away in a bedroom at their house where no one would bother me as I raced to the thrilling conclusion.

The Da Vinci Code is undeniably entertaining. But is it well written? The fact that I even ask the question will bother some readers. After all, how can a book be badly written if so many people enjoy it? It’s like saying that Pringles are badly designed because they achieve the exact effect they’re aiming for: You can’t eat just one. And yet the question is important for writers to consider: Why is the novel so good when its writing is so demonstrably bad?

One answer can be found on the opening page:

Louvre Museum, Paris

10:46 P.M.

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.

Skip down the page, and this happens:

He crawled out from under the canvas and scanned the cavernous space for someplace to hide.

A voice spoke, chillingly close. “Do not move.”

On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.

Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars.

That’s a lot of logical and spatial incoherence. The gallery is cavernous, but Saunière somehow doesn’t see the “mountainous silhouette” that is “chillingly close.” And, for Brown, “chillingly close” is a matter of interpretation; would everyone define it as fifteen feet away, beyond a gate? The novel goes on to describe the attacker, down to the color of his eyes—which ought to be impossible. Saunière saw the man’s silhouette. Silhouettes are outlines or general shapes and, by definition, not detailed.

So, yes, the prose has some problems. It’s also captivating. Why?

The question has implications for writers of every genre, not just mystery thrillers. I once wrote a novel that received many effusive rejections from editors, all with the same judgment: Beautiful prose, but I’m afraid I have to pass. When I asked my agent what lesson I should draw from this experience, he thought for a moment and then said, “Story matters.”

The British writer Hanif Kureishi said something similar at a literary festival a couple of years ago: “A lot of my students just can’t tell a story. They can write sentences but they don’t know how to make a story go from there all the way through to the end without people dying of boredom in between.”

So, let’s examine the story of The Da Vinci Code. A man is tearing paintings off the walls of the most famous museum in the world—not standard behavior. It’s natural to ask, “What has possessed him to do it?” Someone is trying to kill him. Again, we want to know why. Brown gets readers wondering these things in a single page, in part because of his sentences.

Take the first five words of the novel: “Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered . . .” Renowned and staggered aren’t often found together, and this incongruous pairing is an example of what Friedrich Nietzsche talked about in his essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” We structure language in order to create meaning, he argued. Imagine a monument: on top are words like love and God, and on the bottom are words like tapeworm and gutter and every naughty word for a body part or bodily function. As children, we quickly learn that these words occupy different parts of the monument and supposed to be kept apart. As a result, if someone were to say, “I love tapeworms,” we’d be disgusted. How can anyone love something so horrible?

This is where writers can’t be like regular people. No one besides scientists loves tapeworms. But, for writers, the question “How can you love a tapeworm?” invites a story, just as “Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered” causes us to wonder, “Why? What’s going on?” Renowned and curator exist together on the Nietzsche’s monument. Staggered does not, just as love and tapeworm do not. A basic rule of language, and therefore our understanding of the world, has been broken. Our interest is piqued.

But what about that shark sentence? Surely it’s indefensible. Well, maybe not.

On one hand, it makes no literal sense. Eyes can’t go white. They can, perhaps, go wide, or, at least, that is a cliché most of us recognize. White and wide aren’t the same, but it’s a distinction that most readers might not notice. Plus, white echoes the famous words of the Bunker Hill colonel who told his troops, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.” As a result, “eyes went white” begins to resemble common but incorrect phrases like “stock and trade” and “on tender hooks.” The flubbed versions are used so often that we understand what they mean, even when, to a literalist, they mean nothing.

None of this has anything to do with sharks, but the pairing of white eyes and shark does make a kind of archetypal sense—the sort that happens all the time in a writer’s subconscious. They’re all located in the same part of Nietzsche’s monument of language, and so the reader, moving quickly to find out what happens next, focuses on the concrete words in the sentence (eyes, white, shark, attack), barely sees other words that hold everything together, and intuitively grasps the meaning: the character is terrified.

The entire first page of the book ignores the literal definitions of the words it uses but still creates meaning because, on a sentence level, it’s conveying the characters’ emotions and the mystery to be solved. Nothing else is as important to a storyteller. Even Homer himself might agree. His Iliad (as translated by Robert Fagles) begins this way:

            Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
            murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaens countless losses,
            hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
            great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion . . .

Homer’s tools are the same as those wielded by Brown: clear emotion, strong verbs, and incongruous pairings (“great fighters’ souls” and “carrion”). Will Dan Brown’s novels last as long as the work of the man whose stories were so good that Plato wanted him barred from the city? Doubtful. But they’re entertaining for the same reason: the sentences tell a story.

Hook the readers, Homer and Brown might say, and worry about the finer points later.

Posted in Editing, Fiction, Genre, Guest, Story, Writers, Writing | Tagged craft, da vinci code, dan brown, fiction, inferno, prose, sentence, syntax, thriller, writers, writing | 3 Comments

“Fleshing Out Mysteries” by Sharon Hunt

Posted on May 25, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Sharon Hunt’s short stories had already appeared in a variety of literary magazines before her EQMM debut in August 2015 with “The Water Was Rising.” That story is currently nominated in the best-short-story category for Canada’s most prestigious award for crime writing, the Arthur Ellis, and for an International Thriller Award. In this post the talented Ontario author lets us in on how her interest in mystery and suspense was born.—Janet Hutchings

A woman sits alone in the dark.

Who is she?

Where is she?

Why is she there?

What will happen next?

The first sentence generates the germ of a story while answering the questions that follow flesh it out into something memorable (at least, for me).

My mother loved a good scare. She loved suspense and mystery, delighted in working with gumshoes or the upper crust, uncovering clues, making deductions, bringing the guilty to justice.

As Sherlock Holmes played his violin to help him think and Philip Marlowe plied people with liquor to get them to talk, my mother had her rituals, too. She sat in our rec room with the lights out and the blinds drawn. Once a movie began there were no interruptions, unless someone had severed a limb or the house was burning down. There was no talking. I think she would have made notes had that not seemed foolish to her.

Besides, she didn’t need notes since she never forgot anything—a less than enviable trait in a mother when you become her teenage daughter, but a longed for one later, when you are a writer—and never missed a thing, including every Hitchcock cameo.

In place of more traditional detecting garb—fedoras and trench coats or deerstalkers and tweed jackets—she wore a nightgown, robe and slippers but, despite this, when the mystery unfolded, she was all business.

Some nights she watched just one movie and was in bed before midnight but other nights she watched two or three and didn’t come upstairs until the witching hour had passed.

At dinner she would warn my sister and me to stay in bed and not sneak downstairs to try to watch things that were inappropriate for us. My sister was usually “dead to the world” by ten, along with my father, but I was a night owl and curious like my mother and the warning was really directed at me.

In addition to not wanting me to watch movies I shouldn’t, she didn’t want to be interrupted because she might miss a valuable clue (this was before VCRs or DVDs were common).

She hated not being able to figure out who was guilty. When this happened, it was either because a scriptwriter or director had tried to be too clever or thrown in “ridiculous” coincidences that infuriated her or because she had to shoo me back upstairs from my hiding place (never very good because I was always seen).

It was a mystery why she loved these movies. As a girl, she had been scared of the dark and avoided conflict and menace, shielded from much of it by her twin sister, but yet there she was, my mother, alone in the night, relishing murder.

She watched any movie that sounded good, but those by Alfred Hitchcock were favorites. She loved Rear Window not only because of Jimmy Stewart (who could do no wrong) but also because of how his character, initially watching his neighbors because he’s broken his leg and is bored, becomes convinced that one of them has committed murder. The slow-simmering suspicion complemented the sultry courtyard setting.

In Vertigo, she suspected beautiful Madeleine (Kim Novack) from the beginning because perfection was always a mask and felt Scottie (Stewart, again) should have been more suspicious, too, while North by Northwest’s simple premise of “wrong place, wrong time” worked into a story so satisfying she never tired of watching it. Hitchcock might have missed the bus in that cameo, but he didn’t miss anything else, she thought.

Psycho left her shaken but less over the shower scene than when Mrs. Bates runs out and attacks the private investigator at the top of the stairs, confirming something my mother believed; the unexpected can work when it’s done right.

The Maltese Falcon also confirmed that in Humphrey Bogart’s hands, Sam Spade would sort things out, while the cursed beast in The Hound of the Baskervilles was no match for the deductive powers of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, the quintessential Holmes and Watson (the modern, high-functioning sociopath and his blogging sidekick would have paled for her next to the Rathbone and Bruce duo, but she would have loved the pure, glorious evil of Andrew Scott’s Moriarty since without great villains, great mysteries fall apart).

The mysteries did fall apart a bit the summer I was eight. We had moved to a gloomy two-storey house in the country while my parents looked for a suburban bungalow. The attic was home to creatures my mother refused to name, although she feared she knew what they were, the staircase creaked unless you hugged the loose, right banister and crept down, and the lights flickered on and off as if possessed.

Still, her movie rituals continued, although in the living room as that basement was too frightening, even for her. The movies she watched that summer didn’t wrap up as neatly as she liked but were suspenseful just the same.

Alfred Hitchcock put in an appearance with The Birds and their unexplained attacks and then Bette Davis came along, first as an actress tormenting her crippled sister in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, and then as a southern belle with a lover whose hand and head are cut off.

Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte was definitely not for children, my mother warned and so, of course, hugging the loose, right banister in the dark, I crept down the stairs until I could see the television in the living room, right at the moment the cleaver fell.

I ran back up to my room, not caring about the creaking, and the next morning, my mother suggested I wait until I was a bit older for “good scares like that.”

I did and a few years later, joined her in the rec room of the house we now owned. Although most of the rituals stayed the same—dressed for a bed that would have to wait and eagerness to put things right—one thing changed. When the two of us were together, we talked while the movie played, trading information and conferring, our own version of Holmes and Watson.

It wasn’t until after she died and I started writing mysteries that I realized how much those movie nights influenced my writing. It wasn’t the plot or the characters or the settings of any particular movie, it was what she said about them that mattered. She was a reader, too, like me, but she didn’t analyse books the way she did movies.

With them, she instinctively knew why a story lagged and where an unexpected event would help. If she figured out the killer’s identity too quickly or too easily, that was a problem. If the killer ended up being the last person either of us would have thought, that was a bigger problem because it wasn’t fair.

She saw cardboard characters for what they were, window dressing, and quickly ignored them. It didn’t matter, though, if characters were bad, as long as they were real.

“Why would he do that? It doesn’t make sense,” she complained if someone acted out of character.

“That setting doesn’t work. She wouldn’t be there.”

I still hear the things she said and although I didn’t realize it then, I was making notes.

A woman sits alone in the dark. A girl joins her.

The germs of so many stories were being fleshed out for later.

Posted in Fiction, Genre, Guest, Noir, Setting, Story, Suspense, Thrillers, Writers, Writing | Tagged cinema, film noir, hitchcock, horror, movies, private eye, suspense, thriller, whodunit, writers, writing | 1 Comment

“Ballet, Law, and Mystery” (by V.S. Kemanis)

Posted on May 18, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen

V.S. Kemanis’s first story for EQMM appeared in our September/October 2013 issue. At that time she was already the author of many published short stories and the first novel in her Dana Hargrove legal-mystery series had appeared to strong reviews. Her third Hargrove novel, Forsaken Oath, was released this past spring. The series was inspired by her own career as a lawyer. She is also a ballet dancer en pointe, however, and she drew upon her dance experience for her upcoming EQMM story, “Journal Entry, Franklin DeWitt,” which will appear in the August 2016 issue. For this new post, she has creatively fused her experiences as writer, lawyer, and dancer.—Janet Hutchings

Before writing fiction, I was a dancer and a lawyer. Still am, both. Oxymoron? You’d be surprised how many attorneys I meet in ballet class. Maybe it’s because law books and toe shoes are both hard—dancing attorneys are gluttons for punishment. On a positive note, ballet and the law share many nicer attributes. An idealized world, perfectionism, intellectual puzzles, exacting discipline, technical precision, and personal expression. The expressive medium of ballet is the more artistic, you might say, but I could debate the point (sounding like a lawyer here, even if we swap “point” for “pointe”).

My experience in the courtroom informs my fiction more often than my experience in the dance studio (although the protagonist in my novels, prosecutor Dana Hargrove, does take a weekly dance class with her sister Cheryl, a Broadway performer). With pleasure, I dove into the world of professional ballet in writing “Journal Entry, Franklin DeWitt,” for EQMM. Memories from the time I owned a dancewear shop came in handy for this story. It could take hours fitting those potential instruments of torture, pointe shoes, on the feet of persnickety ballerinas—always a Cinderella-esque exercise in frustration.

As for this blog piece, I thank Janet Hutchings for humoring my obsession and allowing this small offering, a short-short mystery. The style is not my usual, but like every word buff, I look for any excuse to have fun with language—here, the beautiful language of ballet. Consider, for example, this direction for a lovely petit allegro enchaînement: “Glissade précipitée en avant, temps levé, tombé, saut de chat.” If the ballet instructor were to say it like this—“Quick steps forward, hop, fall, and leap like a cat”—I might just walk out of class.

You will find, at the end of the story, a glossary of the less obvious ballet terms.

Doctor Coppélius Meets an Untimely Death at the Opera House

As the only child of two physicians, Sylvia Musette was destined for a future in the healing arts. So it seemed, until destiny took a detour on the occasion of her eighth birthday, when she was treated to a matinee at the National Ballet. From that moment, every step she took was a chassé toward her dream.

At seventeen, she signs with the company. Passion is no guarantee of talent, and Sylvia’s passion falls short of artistic distinction, her grand jeté an inch below soaring, her port de bras heartfelt but uninspiring. Ever hopeful, she languishes in the corps, one of many cygnettes, sylphs, and Wilis.

In her fifth spring season, the light of good fortune shines upon her. Ballet master Stanislav Gliadilev, towering over the diminutive Sylvia, twirls a waxed end of his mustache and declares: “Friend!” She fights to remain à terre. It’s her first supporting role! One of Swanilda’s six Friends in the comic ballet Coppélia. Her heart nearly sautés from her leotard before the impresario qualifies the offer: “Understudy!” Sylvia wilts.

An exhausting rehearsal schedule fails to wilt Les Amies, who remain remarkably healthy and uninjured while Sylvia shadows them, unnoticed, a fly on the studio mirror. With too much time on her hands, she is, quite unintentionally, on a gradual pas de bourrée couru toward her true calling in life. Nothing escapes her eye.

She studies the principals: prima ballerina Peony Torne in the role of Swanilda, Enrique Dagloose as her fiancé Franz, and Morton Avunculario as Doctor Coppélius. Peony is known for the delicacy of her petite batterie, Enrique for his ballon, and Morton for his danse de caractère. What is the secret of their success? They’re strong and beautiful, Morton the most powerful, a favorite of Gliadilev who always gives him what he wants. Fifteen years older than the others, Morton is made to look 85 on stage with a painted face and a wig of scraggly gray hair, stooped and teetering with the aid of a cane.

Hmm, Sylvia thinks, did this help Peony make it to the top? Perhaps if I cozy up to Morton the way she does, gazing droopingly at him while Enrique scowls with glints of daggers in his slitty eyes . . . ? The whole thing is backward from the story in the ballet. Swanilda isn’t attracted to that crotchety, diabolical inventor, Doctor Coppélius, a disturbing figure with a toyshop full of spooky, life-size mechanical dolls. And Swanilda is the jealous one, not the faithless Franz. He’s duped and smitten by the lifelike doll Coppélia, sitting on the balcony of the toyshop, reading a book.

On the eve of opening night, an hour before full dress, company class is held on stage with portable barres. Peony, Morton, and Enrique plié center stage, and the others fan out from center, the Friends, the Dolls, the townspeople, and finally the understudies, lining the dark edges. Sylvia is a useless appendage, she feels. At least she would like to observe the greats, but they’re barely visible behind all the bodies executing les exercices à la barre: tendus, dégagés, ronds de jambe and finally, battements en cloche.

A small commotion erupts. Rats! What’s happening over there? Enrique mutters something to Morton, who gives an audible harrumph and stumbles away in the hunched posture of Doctor Coppélius, hand at the back of his neck. The dancers disperse to dressing rooms, wishing each other “merde.” The maître de ballet spies the understudies and shrieks: “Get off the stage!” In the midst of chaos, Sylvia slithers behind a wing, unnoticed.

Second act, it’s the dead of night, and something is astir, a menace of unknown origin. Swanilda and Friends break into the toyshop, setting the mechanical dolls to life. The Troubadour executes a stiff tour en l’air, the Spanish Doll a sharp coupé fouetté raccourci, the Scottish Doll a nervous pas emboîté en tournant. The Doctor bursts in! Friends scatter, Swanilda hides, Franz sneaks in through a window and is caught! Intending mockery, Doctor Coppélius produces two tankards, and they drink heartily to Franz’s love for Coppélia.

Franz is passed out when Swanilda appears, impersonating the mechanical doll Coppélia. But the Doctor is not quite himself. Deathly pale, he staggers off stage, totters and collapses behind the façade of the toyshop. With a brisk brisé volé, Swanilda runs to him. The music stops. “Morton, darling!” She cradles the gray-wigged head in her lap and looks up, searching blindly. “Please, somebody, help!” The Doctor needs a doctor. The maître drops to her knees, frantically feeling for a pulse. It appears that Morton est mort.

From center stage, Gliadilev quiets the crowd. “Remain calm! I’ve called for an ambulance.” From behind the curtain, Sylvia discerns, in the tensing of muscle, the pain that the impresario feels for the loss of his friend. Or maybe he’s remembering the inferior quality of Morton’s understudy. Opening night will be a disaster.

“How can this be?” The tear-stained Peony stands, bras croisé, mindlessly stabbing piqués en croix with her right foot. “There!” She points to the tankards. “He’s been poisoned!” She whirls in renversé. “He did it!” Enrique is fingered. But Peony pirouettes anew, unable to make up her mind. “No . . . it has to be him!” She points at the mousy little props man, scratching his head in confusion.

“Wait! You’re wrong.” Sylvia chaînés swiftly out from the wing. Quickly, before Gliadilev can banish her, she grabs the tankards, one at a time, and drinks from each. “It’s water.” She licks her lips. “Maybe a bit of iron oxide.”

Dumbfounded, the company awaits Sylvia’s next move. Like magic, a path to the body is cleared. Sylvia kneels, removes the wig, and palpates gently. “Basilar skull fracture, occipital bone, subdural hematoma likely. Suffered a blow with a blunt instrument. He’s been dying slowly before our eyes.”

There’s a communal gasp amid darting, wary glances. Was it the Troubadour’s lute, the Scottish Doll’s bagpipes, the Spanish Doll’s fan, or that little hardcover book Coppélia was reading? Maybe the assailant used the Doctor’s own cane, or a dismantled section of the barre? Sylvia examines the shape of the injury, mentally calculating height and velocity. She stands to face Enrique, his head drooping en bas. For weeks now she’s been studying him, getting to know every habit and quirk of technique. “You were standing behind Morton at the barre. It was your battement en cloche, wasn’t it? Directed straight to that nice little groove between neck and skull.”

“But,” Enrique protests, “I didn’t mean for him to die!” The suspect attempts an échappé sauté, but Gliadilev seizes him before he can run.

Intentional, reckless or negligent? A question for another day, a question for a jury. With a joyfully sissone fermé, the case, for now, is closed. Sylvia is arisen from the corps.

A Literally Figurative Glossary of Ballet Terms

ballon: lightness, the ability to remain suspended in the air.

battements en cloche: beats like a bell. Basically, you swing your leg front and back, very high, like the clapper of a bell; it’s fun and relaxing.

bras croisé: arms crossed.

brisé volé: broken, flying. A beautiful light step with a small beat of the legs.

chaînés: chains, links. These are fast turns in a line, spotting your destination. Really fun to do and a good way to get dizzy if not done properly.

chassé: chase. Slide forward, one foot chasing the other.

coupé fouetté raccourci: literally cut, whip, and shorten. Does this give you any sense of what it looks like? Too difficult to explain.

échappé sauté: escape leap. As you jump, the feet “escape” from fifth position into second.

merde: I don’t need to tell you what this really means. It’s a dancer’s “good luck” wish.

pas de bourrée couru: a series of tiny rapid steps on pointe. When ballerinas look like they’re floating across the stage, this is what they’re doing.

pas emboîté en tournant: a springy, boxed-in step in a circle.

petite batterie: small battery in the sense of beating. There’s a lot of beating in ballet terminology, although it’s far from a violent art form.

piqués en croix: sharp piercing taps with the toe, front, side, back, in the shape of a cross.

renversé: reversed. You wouldn’t think this word is enough to describe the actual movement. It’s a turn with a pitched body and a high, circling leg.

sissone fermé: a leap from two feet into a split, landing on two feet in a closed position.

tour en l’air: turn in the air. Jump straight up, do a full revolution like a pencil, and land. Harder than it looks.

Posted in Characters, Fiction, Genre, Guest, Setting, Story, Writers, Writing | Tagged ballet, crime, dance, giselle, literature, mini story, mystery, story, whodunit, writers, writing | 2 Comments

2016 EDGARS/MALICE PHOTO GALLERY

Posted on May 11, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen

It’s hard to believe that another awards season has come and gone. As always, the five days that encompassed the Edgar Allan Poe Awards in New York City and the Malice Domestic Convention in Bethesda, Maryland were jam-packed. It all began for us on Wednesday, April 27, when EQMM’s Robert L. Fish Award winner Russell W. Johnson and his wife Michelle stopped in at our offices on Wall Street to record a podcast of Russell’s winning story, “Chung Ling Soo’s Greatest Trick,” which you can listen to through a link on our website beginning June 1.

The EQMM Readers Awards are given each year on the same day as the MWA’s Edgar Allan Poe Awards, at a Dell Magazines cocktail party preceding the Edgars banquet. The Dell party was at a new venue this year, the beautiful, historic library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen. Our guests included three of our 2015 Readers Award winners, all of whom we congratulate: Margaret Maron (1^st place for “We on the Train”), Brendan DuBois (tied for 2^nd place for “The Lake Tenant”), and Lou Manfredo (3^rd place for “Rizzo’s Good Cop”). William Hallstead (who tied for 2^nd place for “No Cabs After Midnight”) was unable to make the trip from Florida, but the longtime EQMM contributor’s many decades of contributions to our field (starting with his penning of the 31^st book in the Hardy Boys series!) were remembered in his absence.

In a surprise twist for your editors and the rest of the EQMM staff, EQMM itself received an award at this year’s cocktail party. We knew that EQMM’s book review columnist, Steve Steinbock, had accepted an award on the magazine’s behalf from the Baker Street Irregulars (the world’s oldest Sherlockian organization) at their annual banquet this past January. But as the honor was, at least in part, for the reviewing of books of Sherlockiana, we thought the award had found its proper home with Steve. When he crossed the country with it at the end of last month to present it for permanent housing at our offices we were truly touched. Our thanks go to both the BSI and Steve; the plaque will have pride of place in EQMM’s space.

This year’s Edgar Allan Poe Awards banquet marked the 70^th anniversary of the presentation of the awards in Poe’s name. It was not, however, the 70th year in which the coveted busts of Poe that we’re all so familiar with were given. That small treasure, designed by Peter Williams, didn’t appear until 1948, the third year of the awards. This year’s best short story Edgar went to Stephen King, for “Obits,” from Bazaar of Bad Dreams; we want to give a big shout out to him and also to Mat Coward, whose EQMM story “On Borrowed Time” was one of five stories (out of 600 or more submitted) to receive an Edgar nomination.

No sooner were the Edgar Awards festivities over (for some in the wee hours of the morning) than it was time to get ready to board trains for Washington, D.C. to join the annual Malice Domestic Convention in Bethesda. One of the most welcoming and relaxed of all the events on the mystery calendar, Malice this year was a great way to conclude several days of reconnecting with friends in the mystery community. At the Agatha Awards banquet, EQMM’s latest Readers Award winner, Margaret Maron, took home the Agatha Award teapot for best novel for the last book in her very popular and long-running Judge Deborah Knott series, Long Upon the Land. Two other authors with strong ties to EQMM took home awards this season that I want to mention. One is the current president of the U.K.’s Detection Club, Martin Edwards. A writer who got his start in EQMM’s Department of First Stories, Martin has become not only a leading fiction writer but a noted scholar in our field. His book The Golden Age of Murder claimed both the Edgar and the Agatha in the best critical category. Taking home the Agatha Award for best first novel was EQMM’s frequent contributor Art Taylor. Art also got his start in our Department of First Stories, and his winning book, On the Road With Del and Louise, is actually a “novel in stories,” including a couple of stories that first saw publication in EQMM.

At the Agatha Awards banquet I had the privilege of sitting at a table hosted by this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award winner Katherine Hall Page. There I had the pleasure of catching up with Terrie Farley Moran, EQMM’s nominee for the Agatha Award, for her November 2015 story “A Killing at the Beausoleil.” The short-story Agatha went to Barb Goffman for her AHMM story “A Year Without Santa Claus?”—congratulations, Barb and AHMM!—but an enthusiastic hats off is also due to Terrie for a story that reflects the best in the classical tradition!

Finally, the winner this year of the Malice Domestic Convention’s Amelia Award, for contributions to the field, was Douglas Greene, the founder and owner of Crippen & Landru Publishers, the genre’s most distinguished line of single-author short-story collections. Doug has been a stalwart friend of our magazine, and many of his collections have been drawn largely from EQMM. Doug’s wife Sandi, who worked side by side with him at Crippen & Landru for many years, was with him to enjoy the celebration of Doug’s achievements, which include his definitive biography of John Dickson Carr.

Credits are given for all of the pictures in this season’s photo gallery, but a special thanks is due to one of the photographers, EQMM and AHMM’s wonderful senior assistant editor, Jackie Sherbow. —Janet Hutchings

The crowd at the Dell Magazines Pre-Edgars Party at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, NYC. (Photo courtesy of Jackie Sherbow)

Dell Magazines’ Peter Kanter presents Lou Manfredo with EQMM Readers Award certificate (photo courtesy of Jackie Sherbow)

Brendan DuBois accepts his Readers Award (photo courtesy of Jackie Sherbow)

Margaret Maron accepts her Readers Award. (Photo courtesy of Jackie Sherbow)

Steve Steinbock presents EQMM with the Baker Street Irregulars’ Tip of the Deerstalker Award. (Photo courtesy of Jackie Sherbow)

Dell Magazines staff relaxes at the Yale Club between the Dell Pre-Edgars party and the Edgars banquet. (Carol Demont, Janet Hutchings, Christine Begley, Linda Landrigan, Abigail Browning, Emily Hockaday. Photo courtesy of Jackie Sherbow)

Janet Hutchings, Brendan DuBois, Linda Landrigan at the Edgars. (Photo courtesy of Jackie Sherbow)

Janet Hutchings, Jackie Sherbow, Linda Landrigan. (Photo by Michelle Johnson)

At the Edgars: Russell Johnson, Michelle Johnson, Dorothy Cannell, Margaret Maron, Janet Hutchings, Linda Landrigan, Carol Demont, Abigail Browning, Lou Manfredo, Joanne Manfredo, Brendan DuBois. (Photo courtesy of Jackie Sherbow)

Breakfast during Malice: First row L to R: Sandi Greene, James Lincoln Warren, Margaret Warren, Steve Steinbock. Second row, L to R: Art Taylor, Laurie Pachter, Martin Edwards, Janet Hutchings, Josh Pachter, Doug Greene. (Photo courtesy of Josh Pachter)

Agatha nomination certificate. (Photo courtesy Terrie Farley Moran)

Agatha nomination certificate for “A Killing at the Beausoleil.” (Photo courtesy of Terrie Farley Moran)

Art Taylor and Terrie Farley Moran. (photo courtesy of Terrie Farley Moran)

Martin Edwards and his Agatha Award. (Photo courtesy of Terrie Farley Moran)

Posted in Awards, Ellery Queen, Genre, Writers | Tagged awards, convention, edgars, editors, eqmm, malice, Malice Domestic, MWA, readers award, the edgars, writers | 3 Comments

“1962: The Savoy Party Photo” (by R.T.Raichev)

Posted on May 4, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen

R.T. (Raicho) Raichev’s previous post for this site examined the short stories of P.D. James. Raicho is a lifelong fan of English crime fiction and wrote his university dissertation on the subject. In this new post he examines and compares some of the work of two stars of mystery’s Golden Age, Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. Two new stories in Raicho’s critically acclaimed Antonia Darcy and Major Payne mystery series are coming up in EQMM soon; the latest novel in that series is The Killing of Olga Klimt. This post goes up on its author’s birthday. From all of us at EQMM, Raicho, happy birthday!!—Janet Hutchings

Solutions revealed: Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d, Endless Night

At a party at London’s Savoy Hotel two ladies are chatting amiably. One is in her late sixties, tall and hawk-nosed, wearing an elegant black dress and broad-brimmed black hat, elbow-length satin gloves, a chunky cameo brooch, and a single row of pearls. She brings to mind a stage duchess. Her companion is seventy-two, large and jolly, her white hair in a bun; she is clad in a dress of floral design and carries a mink stole across her left arm. She sports three strings of pearls and glasses in frames of the Cat-Eye variety (recently made fashionable by Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn). The two ladies couldn’t have been anything but English. Indeed, they might have come out of a novel by Agatha Christie or Ngaio Marsh. One thinks of Lady Selina Hazy in At Bertram’s Hotel and Lady Angkatell from The Hollow—or of Miss Prentice and Miss Campanula, both rivals for the attention of the Pen Cuckoo vicar, in An Overture to Death. (No, that would be unkind.)

But appearances can be deceptive—as aficionados of the formal detective story know only too well. It is highly doubtful whether Miss Campanula or Lady Selina would have been able to write the books in which they appear—they wouldn’t have had the ingenuity, the devilish plotting skills, the unorthodox ideas, narrative drive, or, for that matter, the stamina of their middle-aged creators. The perception of Englishness in not quite right either: the lady in the eccentric Cat-Eye glasses has an American father whereas her be-hatted companion is in fact an Anglo-centric New Zealander.

It is to the civilised exploration of the most uncivilised act, murder, that Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh had devoted their creative lives and in 1962 they were at the height of their fame. They had already been dubbed, respectively, “The Queen of Crime” (The Observer) and “The Empress of Crime” (The Sun). The Savoy Party which both attended had been organised by the CWA and the meeting between Christie and Marsh was captured for posterity in a black-and-white photograph. They had met once before, in 1937, but that encounter doesn’t seem to count as there is no record of any exchanges between the two, certainly no photos. The occasion then had been A.C.Bentley’s initiation as a member of the Detection Club and the only interesting detail of that event is that Agatha Christie arrived late, which might have been on purpose, to avoid the invited speaker, an Inspector Kennard, who had been associated with her traumatic disappearance in 1926.

Even though in 1962 Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap was celebrating its ten-year anniversary and her floruit period was to continue till 1973, her Golden Age was all but over. The paradox is that the shakier and more rambling Christie’s novels became, the more her celebrity grew: according to a Unesco report published at the time she was the most widely read British author in the world, with Shakespeare coming a poor second. However, the only truly original and most accomplished novel she wrote in that decade was The Pale Horse (1961). Genuinely mystifying and unsettling, it concerns a sinister Murder Inc. organisation which specialises in “human removals.” (A similar idea was used by Dorothy Sayers in a short story called The Leopard Lady, published in 1939.) Other critics of the genre consider the 1967 Endless Night her best—”splendid late flowering” (Robert Barnard)—”final triumph” (John Curran). Christie certainly manages to performs a superb ventriloquist act when she assumes the voice of a working-class young man as her unreliable narrator, but her recycling of a famous trick from a much earlier novel, is not, in my opinion, entirely convincing. And the excess of homicide at the end tends to irritate rather than terrify.

In contrast, the advent of old age didn’t seem to have caused Ngaio Marsh any diminution of her creative powers—quite the contrary. In the period between 1962 and 1972 she produced some of her most sophisticated and entertaining murder mysteries, among them some of my own personal favourites: Clutch of Constables, When in Rome and Tied Up in Tinsel. In Clutch of Constables (published in 1968), Marsh experiments with narrative form by introducing each chapter with a section in which Alleyn is telling the story of the hunt for a highly dangerous international criminal called “the Jampot” to a class of police cadets—the chapters themselves follow the chronological order of the events in which Alleyn’s wife Troy, completely by accident, had become involved with “the Jampot” while on a canal cruise in an Arcadian part of England known as “Constable” country. (The book’s alliterative title is in fact a clever pun.) Each portion of Alleyn’s account ends with an enigmatic statement or a cliff-hanger and this creates a good deal of suspense and tension, thus making the novel compulsively readable. Marsh was seventy-three at the time. And she was well into her eighties when she wrote the unusual thriller-cum-whodunit Black as He’s Painted (1974) and the intricately plotted Grave Mistake (1978), set in an archetypal English village.

But how did the two First Ladies of Fictional Felony fare in the year of the Savoy party? Coming across the photo made me take another look at Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d and Marsh’s Hand in Glove, both published in 1962.

If you are familiar with Peril at End House (1932) and A Murder is Announced (1950) you can’t fail to rumble the killer in The Mirror Crack’d. Not only is the murder conundrum easy to crack, but Miss Marple, despite her passion for intrigue and unholy curiosity, plays a disappointingly sedentary, almost peripheral, part in the unravelling. (Very much like Poirot in The Clocks.) It is only in the last chapter that she meets some of the suspects. Still, the novel is worth reading as it has a number of interesting and unusual features. It is the last of Agatha Christie’s mysteries to be set entirely in an English village. It brings Hollywood to St. Mary Mead. The murder takes place at Gossington Hall, which is also the crime scene in the 1942 Body in the Library. It is one of two Christies inspired by real-life tragedies involving children (actress Gene Tierney’s giving birth to a mentally disabled daughter after a fan had infected her with rubella—the Lindbergh kidnapping in Murder on the Orient Express). And last but not least, it has a fascinating, truly fantastic central idea: The murder is committed on the spur of the moment, with lighting speed, as a result of the killer’s sudden realisation that one of her party guests, a complete stranger, is in fact the person who deprived her, albeit unknowingly, of her chances of happy motherhood. . . .

We are never told what exactly goes on in the killer’s mind, yet we can’t help speculating about the dreadful darkness inside it, about the torment and despair the celebrated actress must have been living with for most of her life. Where Christie succeeds is in suggesting disturbing psychological depths, which can be as effective as any detailed psychological analysis. (She uses the same method in the thoroughly satisfying Murder is Easy and Towards Zero).

Apart from the killer, the one other character in Mirror the reader will remember long after finishing the novel is Marina Gregg’s film director husband Jason Rudd whose striking appearance hints at unconventionality and unpredictability:

He had interesting eyes. They were . . . more deeply sunk in his head than any eyes she had seen. Deep quiet pools, said Mrs Bantry to herself. . . . The rest of his face was distinctly craggy, almost ludicrously out of proportion. His nose jutted upwards and a little red paint would have transformed it into the nose of a clown. . . . He had too, a clown’s big sad mouth. Whether he was at the moment in a furious temper or whether he always looked as though he were in a furious temper she did not quite know. His voice when he spoke was unexpectedly pleasant.

So much for Agatha Christie not being able to ‘do’ character.

Like Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d, Ngaio Marsh’s Hand in Glove is set at an archetypal English village—the quaintly named Little Coddling, “decorous and rather pretty in the spring sunshine.” In both novels parties figure prominently—a garden party to meet a famous Hollywood actress in Mirror, a Treasure Hunt, complete with “amusing clues” in Glove. In an odd way the murder motive in Glove resembles that in Mirror in that it is linked to a woman’s thwarted maternal instinct. But this is where the similarities end. Christie is a conceptual artist, Marsh is the better stylist and, generally, the much better writer. Marsh’s dialogue sparkles with lively wit and drollery, her various descriptions of places and people remind us that she was a gifted painter as well. And her mastery to mislead, mystify, and bamboozle rivals Christie’s. All the characters in Hand in Glove are interesting and memorable. Nobody is a caricature or a stereotype, yet everybody is full of quirks. Snobbish but endearing Mr. Percival Pyke Period harbouring a dark yet ultimately ridiculous secret (aggrandising himself with a bogus ancestral lineage), much-married Desiree Lady Bantling with her “ravaged face with its extravagant make-up, and her mop of orange hair,” Connie Cartell, “large, tweedy, middle-aged . . . with a red face, a squashed hat and a walking stick,” who shouts rather than speaks and laughs too often in a braying manner . . .

Every scene in Glove is choreographed with the kind of theatrical virtuosity Marsh displays in all her novels (we mustn’t forget that she got her DBE for her contribution to the Theatre). For me the best part of the story is the comedy-of-manners lead-up to the discovery of the body and Chief Inspector Alleyn’s subsequent appearance (on page 99). Marsh has been accused of snobbery but she has always displayed an acute sense of the absurd when dealing with her upper-class characters. She makes them say some very funny things. Here is Mr. Period in a flap talking to an outrageously amused Lady Bantling:

“It’s plain to be seen that this frightful person, the Leiss, is an out-and-out bad ’un. And indeed, for your ear alone, we most strongly suspect—” Mr Period looked about him as if the boudoir concealed microphones and began to whisper the story of the cigarette-case.

“Oh, no!” Desiree said with relish. “Actually a burglar! And is Moppet his con-girl, do you suppose?”

And this is Alleyn interviewing “society secretary” Nicola Maitland-Maine:

“Leonard really is a monster.”

“What sort? Beatnik? Smart Alec? Bounder? Straight-out cad? Or just plain nasty!”

“All except the beatnik. He’s as clean as a whistle and smells dreadfully of lilies.”

The actual killer, as it happens, turns out to be outside the circle of murder suspects which we have been persuaded to consider—it is someone presented so cleverly as a comic figure that the reader never suspects them properly. Marsh employs psychology as a strategy of deception—while giving us all the material clues we need. The investigation in Glove is also a much lighter and more palatable affair compared to Alleyn’s interminable questioning of suspects with its emphasis on who-was-where-and-when in earlier novels.

One last note—the respective ages of Miss Marple and Alleyn are bound to cause some readers’ eyebrows to rise and lips to purse. In 1962 Miss Marple—who started as an “elderly lady” in 1927 in the short story The Tuesday Club published in the Royal Magazine—must be at least a hundred. Gentleman sleuth Alleyn, on the other hand, is precisely 67 (his creator-age—he was said to be 40 in Marsh’s first novel, A Man Lay Dead, published in 1934). Yet in Mirror, Miss Marple gives the impression of being no more than a sprightly seventy-five, her almost supernatural intuition undiminished, her deductive skills very much in evidence—and she walks unaided. Alleyn doesn’t display any signs of senescence either—he will continue to be referred to as “handsome Alleyn” by a series of impressionable society ladies till his very last investigative triumph in Light Thickens (1981).

Posted in Books, Characters, Classic Mystery, Fiction, Genre, Guest, History, Writers, Writing | Tagged christie, classical mystery, history, marsh, suspense, whodunit, writers | 6 Comments

“Love Your Characters Before You Kill Them, and Other Strategies for Fledgling Crime Writers” (by Katia Lief)

Posted on April 27, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Katia Lief’s most recent story for EQMM, “The Orchid Grower” (November 2015), was a finalist for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Derringer Award for best long story. The Brooklyn author has also been recognized for her novel-length fiction, with nominations for the Mary Higgins Clark Award and the RT Reviewers Choice Award. Her latest novel is The Money Kill (HarperCollins 2013). She shares her experience writing both short and long fiction with students at classes she teaches at The New School—online in the fall and in the classroom in the spring. In this post she provides a few important tips for aspiring writers.—Janet Hutchings

Have you ever started reading or watching something that opens with a chase scene and found yourself muttering, “What the @#*% is going on?” The next sound, for me, is always a plunk (book being put down) or click (channel switching). Opening a story in any form with a scene of action before the audience knows what’s at stake and for whom is a bit like when your friend takes a bite of something, makes a face and says, “This is terrible, want some?” Why would you?

Along with being a writer, an avid reader, and a consumer of movies and television, I’ve also taught fiction writing for more than two decades. About five years ago, it made sense to me to add a new focus to my long-running fiction workshop with a course that specializes in writing suspense. I say “add a new focus” because when you set out to write mysteries and thrillers your goal is to integrate new tools to a skillset that already needs to be multi-faceted and strong—or none of it will work. (Plunk. Click.) There is no such thing as powerful crime fiction that isn’t woven into a bedrock of good, solid fiction writing. So in my classes we study the elements of fiction first and suspense second, with the goal of twining both into a knockout story or novel.

I always start by asking my students, “Why are you here?” In other words, what are their goals in committing time and money to participating in a fiction workshop. The reasons are always varied. Sometimes it’s because they need other-imposed deadlines. Or they’re struggling with how to write beginnings, or maybe it’s endings that bedevil them. Or they’re stumped by how to get a character up and off the page. Or building and controlling a plot eludes them. Or the meaning of voice is a total mystery. Sometimes it’s an overall sense that they have no idea how to get started at all . . . how fiction works . . . what it is that makes a story addictive.

So I lay out how we’re going to crack it: by investigating craft, one element at a time. As for art—talent, the rhythms of language, gorgeous imagery that pops a scene to life—they’ll have to discover that on their own by experimenting and by paying close attention when they read the work of writers they admire. But as for what forms the bedrock of a potentially excellent story or novel, there are some basics that every writer needs to master.

We begin with what I call “First Pages,” in which each writer is tasked with establishing character (who), context (where) and conflict (what) all within a single page. For some, this will be an exercise to get them jump-started; for others, it will turn out to be the beginning of a longer piece. For me, the goal is to demonstrate that it requires consciousness and care to win a commitment from your readers to accompany you on the journey you propose to take them on, and that in today’s world of short attention spans you’ve got to learn to do it quickly.

After that, the real work begins.

When I started this blog post I thought: I’m going to lay it all out here, explain point by point what we cover in a fifteen-week semester. Then I realized that that idea is about as sharp as starting with a chase scene. And so, instead, I am going to leave you with a few bullet points that cover the basics:

Character: Every character is as deep and nuanced as you are; she carries with her an enormous, complex universe. But when she walks into the room, don’t tell me everything about her; show her to me with selective brushstrokes of visual detail that make her come alive in my (the reader’s) mind.

Context: Show me where she is so that I can get my bearings. I don’t need every detail laid out, but I do want to know whether she’s on a train or in a field or on the moon.

Conflict: Give me a sense of what matters to her, what she wants. If there’s a nickel in her pocket that will play into the story later, let me feel it with her fingertips so that I can experience that nickel and its particular value along with her. Or, if someone’s just broken into her house in the middle of the night (as in my story “The Orchid Grower,” EQMM November 2015) she might hear a sound that puts her on alert.

Dialogue: When she speaks, let me hear her voice, and make sure that she tells me something I don’t already know; in other words, she shouldn’t repeat something you’ve already expressed in the narrative.

Point of View: Decide who is narrating the story and how. If it’s being told from within the depths of the protagonist’s mind, then you may want to choose a first person “I” narrative voice. If you want more distance and the ability to switch between different characters’ voices, try third person “he/she.” If you really know what you’re doing and you want a ton of flexibility and narrative power, the omniscient voice allows you to weave in and out of every character’s mind and viewpoint and also to know the past and the future—heady stuff. (In mysteries and thrillers omniscient narrators are tricky because their very nature is an argument against the necessary parsing of information that makes those genres so suspenseful.)

Tense: It’s essential to decide whether past or present tense best suits your story. Past-tense allows for more narrative insight. Present-tense lends itself to building suspense as the action unfolds in what feels like real time. Either way, commit to one and stay with it.

Voice: The quality of language, the feel of it, as expressed through the narrative point of view. This is the glue that sticks all the parts together and makes it fluid and flexible and strong.

And one more thing. For writers who are just starting out, I highly recommend (and if you’re my student, I require) the following books:

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, second edition, Renni Browne and Dave King
How to Write Killer Fiction: The Funhouse of Mystery & the Roller Coaster of Suspense, Carolyn Wheat
Now Write! Mysteries, edited by Sherry Ellis & Laurie Lamson
The Collector, John Fowles

Read them and you’ll see what I mean.

If you’ve reached the end of this post and you’re thinking that you already know all that but you haven’t yet read the fourth book on the list, then get your hands on John Fowles’ The Collector. It’s not a new novel, but it demonstrates how it’s done when a master pulls you right in, holds you close, and scares the pants off you.

Posted in Books, Editing, Fiction, Genre, Guest, Writers, Writing | Tagged advice, character, conflict, context, craft, crime, fiction, mystery, suspense, thriller, writers, writing | Leave a comment

“The Hawthornden Castle Fellowship Experience” (by William Burton McCormick)

Posted on April 20, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen

William Burton McCormick’s fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, and elsewhere. A four-time Derringer Award finalist for the year’s best short mystery fiction, he is also a novelist whose historical work set in the Baltic States, Lenin’s Harem, was published in both English and Latvian and became the first work of fiction ever added to the permanent library at the Latvian War Museum in Rīga. William’s first story for EQMM, the Derringer-nominated “Pompo’s Disguise,” appeared in March/April 2015. It starred the ancient Roman thief Quintus the Clever. Quintus appears again in his new EQMM story “Voices in the Cistern,” coming up in August of this year. He is also cowriting the financial thriller KGB Banker with businessman and author John Christmas. A native of Nevada, William has lived in seven countries including Latvia, Estonia, Russia, and Ukraine. As you will see, he was elected a Hawthornden Writing Fellow in Scotland in 2013.—Janet Hutchings

Hawthornden from the River. All photos courtesy of William Burton McCormick.

Imagine if you will six strangers, all professional writers in one sense or another, assembling in a medieval castle in rural Scotland. They are to live in this wild, eternal place for a full month at no cost to themselves, their every need met by the castle’s charming and obedient staff, their only task to work on their various literary projects within the keep’s silent stony walls. But as the days pass, the guests become more adventurous, leaving their writing desks and slipping out of their cozy, fire-lit rooms to explore. They discover great halls, haunted libraries, twisted dungeons, and a beautiful, mysterious dining room overlooking the river gorge which passes just beneath the castle. These strangers, becoming friends, have the run of the entire estate, except, of course, for one ever-locked room kept for their unseen, unmet benefactor.

Dining Room Drawing Room

All goes well for a time. But on the last night a crime occurs.

Is this the plot of some Agatha Christie novel? A classic British drawing-room mystery? Or perhaps something more sinister? A slasher film where the authors are mowed down one by one Ten Little Indians style?

No, this is a real place and real events. It happened to me. And, if you wish, it could happen to you too. I would highly recommend it. (Though you might want to skip the “crime” part, but we’ll get to that in the end.)

But let’s back up a bit. How did I come to spend a month writing in a Scottish castle with five strangers? As an American living in eastern Ukraine at the time, I already had quite enough adventure in my daily life, no need for further travel or expectations of living in castles. One fateful night, however, I was reading an Ian Rankin short story collection and discovered in the author biography that he had been “elected a Hawthornden Fellow.” I didn’t know what this was, but given the many distinguished accomplishments of Mr. Rankin over his career, the fact that he (or his publicist) thought it worth mentioning in his official bio piqued my interest. As a crime writer you could do far worse than adopt the motto “Do what Rankin does,” and after a little research I discovered a postal address associated with the fellowship. I wrote to the director and requested further information.

I’ll save the details for an addendum at the end of this article, but in short the Hawthornden Fellowship is an award for professional writers of all types which consists of a month’s full room and board in a castle in Lasswade, Scotland about eight miles outside of Edinburgh. The writers must pay their own way to Edinburgh but after that everything is covered by the fellowship. The only thing asked in return is a small acknowledgement of Hawthornden in any work produced during the stay. Everything written during the fellowship remains the author’s own.

As someone who perhaps played too much Dungeons and Dragons in his youth, I was captivated at the idea of living and writing in a castle, and, if I’m honest, the price was certainly right. The application was simple enough, the key parts being publication credits, letters of reference, and a writing sample. For the last of these I submitted a thriller short story called “Blue Amber” which had been published in AHMM and had been a finalist that year for a Derringer Award. A few months later I received an acceptance, my designated slot was mid-February to mid-March. I found a roundtrip flight from Kharkov (via Kiev and London) to Edinburgh for less than $200 and I was off.

I arrived a day or two early as Edinburgh is one of my favorite cities in the world and I love to walk around and soak up the atmosphere, historic, literary and otherwise. On the first day of my fellowship the castle’s director, a man named Hamish, was kind enough to pick me up from my hotel in Edinburgh and transport me out to Hawthornden. Hamish is a busy guy during the first days of a new sextet of authors, driving about the city to the airport, train station, and various hotels to assemble the latest group. In my particular ride was historical suspense novelist Lucretia Grindle, author of The Nightspinners and Villa Triste among several other excellent books. I was quite glad to see another MWA writer among the guests. I’d harbored a slight fear that my fellows might be strictly literary-fiction types, looking down upon those of us who spend our days imagining murder for fun and profit. As it turns out, this was not the case. Everyone was wonderful.

So, Lucretia, Hamish, and I set out to Hawthornden. Though only a short distance from Edinburgh it feels like another world. The large buildings of the city disappear, replaced by little towns, open fields filled with horses, sheep and cattle, and quaint little roadside pubs and groceries. The castle itself is invisible from the main road, hidden back on a large estate behind a gated entrance and screens of ancient trees. You arrive at the back of the castle, its size initially seeming much smaller than it will from all other angles (especially the river gorge below). Hamish introduced us to a staff consisting of several maids, a gardener, and a professional chef, then showed us to our rooms before setting off to pick up more arriving fellows.

Hawthornden from the Road

I should say at this point something about the history of Hawthornden and how it came to be a writers retreat. The original castle dates from the Middle Ages with additions being made in the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Under the castle and elsewhere nearby are caves that are said to have been dug by the Picts, and later to have hidden William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, and Bonnie Prince Charlie. Queen Victoria visited both the castle and the caves in 1842. A picture commemorating this event now hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Renowned cavalier poet William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585 to 1649) composed his poetry here and entertained Ben Johnson and other literary figures of the age at the castle. At some point, I believe in the twentieth century, the castle was purchased by the Heinz family (of ketchup production fame) and it was under them, honoring the creative spirit and goodwill of William Drummond, that the castle began to invite writers to compose their works here. The idea is to provide refuge free from the distractions and duties of daily life where authors can concentrate wholeheartedly on their writing. Four months a year, the Heinz family maintains Hawthornden as a residence, the other eight it functions solely as a writers retreat.

Hawthornden Day Time

By the evening all the authors have assembled. Besides Lucretia and myself, there was an English poetess, a Scottish short story writer, an American playwright from California, and an American poetess who specialized in work in French translation. In all, four women and two men ranging in ages from early twenties to (I think) mid fifties.

We had very comfy private bedrooms each with a writing desk, fireplace, and open window view over the estate. Painted on the doors of the bedrooms were the names of authors who had stayed in the rooms previously. (Note: To get yourself listed on the door you had to a) have published what you composed in Hawthornden; b) acknowledged the fellowship in the work; and c) sent a copy back to be added to one of the castle’s three libraries. Still, what small price to pay for Scottish castle immortality?!)

The first night we dined together with Hamish in the large dining room which was heated by a roaring fire and decorated with paintings and drawings of various Scottish lords and clans on the walls. The first meal was haggis (the only time we had it), though all later dinners would include a wide range of excellent cuisines. During the meal Hamish welcomed us and explained the rules. Breakfast was served in the smaller dining room and afterwards there was no talking permitted in the castle until dinner. No internet, no cell phones, nothing to disturb the writing of your fellows. The staff prepared lunch from a menu provided to the writers at breakfast, and delivered in to the authors’ rooms in charming wicker baskets between twelve and one. We had the run of the entire estate, the libraries, the gardens, the paths down by the river (where the castle looks both foreboding and impressive), everywhere except the locked rooms of the absent Heinz family. At six the silence was lifted and dinner served. (It should be noted this rule of silence was only strictly enforced in the main building—on the grounds I had plenty of conversations during the day.)

Hawthornden is, quite simply, the perfect environment to compose creative works. I found the castle atmosphere conducive to any sort of writing (though historical fiction and horror fiction came naturally to me here. I kept thinking of The Turn of the Screw . . .) The fellowship’s staff provided everything needed to eliminate distractions and get work done. In addition to the three meals, there was a food station on the authors’ floor with a ready supply of coffee, tea, and biscuits (cookies) twenty-four hours a day and a printer available to produce hardcopy of your drafts. The maids cleaned your rooms and did your laundry. As William Drummond might have imagined it five hundred years ago, modern Hawthornden is a haven for creativity

The long hours of silence, however, meant the six of us were glad to speak when the daily moratorium ended. After elegant multiple course dinners, the writers and Hamish retired to the castle’s main drawing room, a comfortable place with large cushioned chairs, an endless variety of British literary magazines, all overseen by life-size paintings of George Plimpton and Truman Capote. Here, over wine or sherry, the authors would discuss everything under the sun into late in the evening (and sometimes morning). Hamish also proved to have a wry sense of humor, passing on amusing or adventurous tales of the castle, Lasswade, or previous fellows.

Over thirty days we didn’t exclusively stay focused on our writing, of course. There were occasional trips into Edinburgh or the local villages. Explorations through the gorge below the castle and along the river North Esk were common. One evening prior to dinner, Hamish took us down into the tunnels below Hawthornden. Here in the twisting, turning passageways we found, among other things, a series of pens where carrier pigeons had been kept centuries ago. Used for communication in those olden days, these birds were also seen as a food source reserved for when the castle fell under siege. (Fortunately, it never did according to our host).

My time in Hawthornden was productive. (Among many other works, I drafted the opening scenes of my first EQMM story “Pompo’s Disguise” on a stone bench carved out of a boulder down near the river.) I spent most of my time writing in the new library which rests on a hillside near the castle’s main entrance. There are two older libraries, one off the drawing room, where the books of past fellows are kept, and another, still older one in a separate stone structure that hearkens back to the castle’s original medieval foundations. This later library, snug, dark, with a thin staircase winding up to a tiny attic, is the perfect atmosphere for those who want to compose anything with a Gothic or horror flavor. But the most mysterious event happened to me in the new library.

Let me preface this to say I know there is a scientific explanation for what I am about to describe. I am an Ivy League educated man. Both my parents were mathematics majors who instilled their logical thinking into me from birth. I am not superstitious. I do not believe in the supernatural. Yet, that afternoon as I worked alone on “Pompo’s Disguise,” the door to the new library slowly opened. There was no one in the doorframe and no discernible gusts of wind or drafts present to push it open. A moment later the light bulb above me burst, raining glass down on the floor at my feet. Then that door slowly closed. Again, no breeze. A rational twenty-first-century mind knows the cause to be a change in atmospheric pressure which opened and closed the door and destroyed a flawed light bulb unable to contain its expanding gas. Yet, I can only tell you my impression at that moment sitting in the library alone. It felt very much like something had entered, found me in its favorite spot, angrily destroyed my lamp, and left in a huff.

Silly me.

I spent the rest of the fellowship writing in my room.

On the last evening our crime occurred. In anticipation of the authors’ final gathering in the drawing room, Lucretia had bought two bottles of very fine champagne. As we didn’t have access to the kitchen, she had placed them in the cool of the garden under some hedges until after dinner. It seemed a safe enough place. Alas, two trespassers crossing over Hawthornden grounds stole the champagne that afternoon. When Lucretia went to retrieve the bottles for our final banquet they were long since gone. The authors, bless them, had to make do with sherry and wine their final night.

Forgive me if the crime is a bit anticlimactic but I had to draw you in with the classic mystery analogy. The journey is always better than the destination isn’t it?

No, not in the case of Hawthornden. The destination is fabulous. If you’re a writer, go. If you’re not a writer, become one. Get your name on that door. I want to see it when I go again. Fellowship rules say an author can reapply after five years have passed if they have published the work written at the castle and given appropriate acknowledgment to Hawthornden.

The publication is easy, acknowledgment easier. Only two more years to wait. I may try writing in the new library again.

And bring a spare bulb this time.

If you are interested in applying for the Hawthornden Fellowship please write:

Hawthornden Castle
International Retreat for Writers
Lasswade
Midlothian
EH18 1EG
United Kingdom

They do not accept correspondence via e-mail. They may accept a request for information by fax at +44 131 440 1989

The retreat is open to any published writer whether short story authors, novelists, poets, screenwriters, playwrights, nonfiction writers, journalists, etc. At the time of my application in 2012 the admission committee strongly preferred traditional publication credits to self-publishing and print-on-demand. As previously mentioned, references, writing samples, and award credits were also factors in admission.

Posted in Fiction, Gothic, Guest, History, International, Setting, Story, Writers, Writing | Tagged castle, craft, drafting, fiction, mystery, retreat, scotland, writers, writing | 24 Comments