“Last Minute Thoughts on Millennials, Acronyms, and Bullets” (by Carl Robinette)

Posted on April 13, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Carl Robinette made his professional fiction debut with “The Hard Rise,” in the Department of First Stories of EQMM’s September/October 2014 issue.  Since then, several more of his short stories have been published in print and online and he has recently sold another story to EQMM. He tells us he is currently putting together a collection of his short fiction, while continuing to work in local community news. He’s a contributing reporter for the Star News in Chula Vista and several other publications in San Diego County. His predicament as a multitasking Millennial is the subject of his first post for us.—Janet Hutchings

Monday (2:00 P.M.) Time for some high-velocity writing for EQMM’s blog. I’m starting at the last minute due to procrastination on my part and plenty of it. Real high-test putting-offery for nearly a month.

But like the wise woman says, “If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute.” This happens to be one of my guiding principles because in all honesty there’s no helping it. The last minute is my sweet spot as a reporter (such as I am), as an author (agree to disagree), and as a Millennial (only grudgingly so).

I’m thirty-four but I was a minor in the new millennium for sixteen days before I turned eighteen in January 2000. This apparently qualifies me as a Millennial by about two weeks.

As the youngest of four siblings, with my brothers and sisters all Generation X’ers, I don’t really know what it means to be a Millennial, but it seems to have a lot to do with short attention spans, The Cloud, acronyms like DIY, and a general abstinence from the printed word.

So how do you write for people who don’t like to read more than 160 characters at a time?

Hell if I know. What I do know is that a picture is worth a thousand words, video is worth about fifteen to twenty pictures per second, and a meme is worthless.

But enough about Millennials. My short attention span is telling me it would be cooler to write something about the rigors of being a working author with a day job or two.

Monday (3:30 P.M.) I’ve just done some quick online research and discovered that having a bunch of different jobs is pretty common among Millennials. Go figure.

It seems that as a generation we’ve turned our backs on the trades and instead pushed the total U.S. student-loan debt above a trillion bucks.

Funny thing about debt; it doesn’t pay itself back. Funny thing about jobs; there are not enough good ones to go around for all the unskilled young people with state-sponsored degrees in the humanities. (I love the smell of debt bubbles in the morning.)

But we refuse to be discouraged. As Millennials we believe in social welfare, being environmentally responsible, eating goji berries, and paying back our debts. So we get jobs in lieu of careers. We ride bicycles to those jobs. We cook weird food and form heartfelt and short-lived social movements.

Truth is, we don’t have time for books. We barely have time for e-books. Sorry, David Foster Wallace, but it looks like infinite brevity is the hot ticket for this generation.

Monday (5:30 P.M.) I’ve now taken to calling Millennials “Millies” (four-syllable words are so twentieth century).

One of my gigs is doing marketing part-time for an IT firm in Del Mar, California. I can tell you that the tech industry is all about shortening words and creating sloppy acronyms that didn’t need to be created. OS, SEO, SaaS, IaaS, CIO. Heck, the industry calls itself “IT” which used to stand for information technology. Now it doesn’t stand for anything but IT.

Likewise, cops tend to use a lot of alphabet soup in their day-to-day work. B&E, DOA, RHD, SWAT. I must go now and exploit the succinctness of police jargon for my own literary gain.

Monday (10:30 P.M.) When writing for a generation of socially conscious people with heavy Dadaistic tendencies, it’s hard not to question the relevance of crime, gunplay, and straight-ahead violence in literature. But I think I’ve got it figured out.

You can get away with the hardest of hardcore violence so long as you make it silly, utterly tragic, justified, or use it to make a statement about social inequalities. You have to murder your characters with a purpose, a purpose that goes deeper than plot or character development. Otherwise you run the risk of offending the manic sensibilities of the Millies.

Tuesday (11:45 A.M.) I’ve put off writing this blog post yet again and I’d like to wrap it up with a salient point, but I’ve just received an e-mail from Janet Hutchings, editor at EQMM, asking for this here post.

So I’ll leave it at this: It is easy to LOL at Millennials, because there is a real shift happening—a generational gap in thinking as stark as anything we saw in the 1960s or even the 20s (so I say). We may be dumbing down the written word, bastardizing tradesmanship, and running amuck with meta-everything, but the reality is that we’re experiencing what James Ellroy might call a half-assed renaissance.

We are the generation that will decriminalize marijuana, put a human being on Mars, and cure cancer. So that’s all pretty cool, I guess.

As for me?

I’m not quite Gen-X and not quite a Millie. I won’t be curing cancer, going to the moon, or advocating legalized grass. All I can do is eat bullets for breakfast and spew them out as words that will hopefully take a chunk out of my readers . . . both of them.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go finish writing a socially responsible and hyper-violent short story that I’ve been meaning to get to for a while.

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“Of Bradshaws and Bonafides: Building a Better Pastiche” (by Keith Hann)

Posted on April 6, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Keith Hann debuted in EQMM’s Department of First Stories (in this year’s February issue) with a Sherlock Holmes pastiche that turns on some real historical events. The Canadian author is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Calgary, studying military and diplomatic history. He tells EQMM that it was his interest in Sherlock Holmes that prompted him to try his hand at fiction-writing. He has other interests in the mystery field too, having discovered, in copies of old pulp magazines, the work of writers such as Cornell Woolrich and John D. MacDonald.—Janet Hutchings

What makes a compelling Sherlock Holmes story? Not an easy question to answer—really, not a question that possibly can be answered with any authority. Why? Because we’re dealing with two separate elements:

  1. The needs of a “proper” Holmes story
  2. The needs of a good Holmes story

What makes a “proper” Holmes story is a matter of the fiercest contention, and the one more usually tackled. Should Holmes ever find love? Can we introduce elements of the genuinely supernatural? How valid is the appearance of the real-life special guest star? Can we place Holmes and Watson in a different time? Should gender remain a fixed point in a changing age? (I would like to pause for a moment of silence here over the many lives lost in the great “is Sherlock / Elementary a proper take on the canon” flame wars).

However, for all the passion it engenders, I can’t say I find arguing over what makes a proper Holmes tale very interesting: It usually just feels like two sets of subjectivities, bashing at each other like a pair of bighorn sheep. As such, today I’d like to talk instead about what makes a good pastiche—a structurally sound example of the Doyle-style traditional Sherlock Holmes tale. I’m not talking about the basics required by any bit of fiction, such as scintillating prose (though there is a bit of crossover). Nor am I referring to non-traditional Holmes tales (such as those with a supernatural bent): These can be as engaging as any traditional one, but the very strength of the non-traditional tale—the ability to dodge convention—makes it much harder to talk about the ways in which such stories should be constructed. So, without meaning any disparagement, I’m going to focus on how the best stories specifically modelled on the classic Holmes are fashioned.

I’m not claiming to be any great authority on the Holmes pastiche. This merely comes, like so many of you, from having read the canon a few times, with many pastiches in between, and developing my own particular prejudices. When first sitting down to write my own traditional-style stories, I thought about what my favourite tales—canonical and not—have in common. To me, these are the six structural elements featured in most (but not all) of the finest:

  1. A proper problem
  2. A plausible plot
  3. A good reason for Holmes to be confused
  4. A good reason for Watson to remain in the dark
  5. Judicious use of canonical elements
  6. Judicious use of period elements

1) A proper problem

. . . which, at least, presents those unusual and outré features which are as dear to you as they are to me.

To Holmes, regular crime was boring: He wouldn’t investigate everyday pickpockets or jaywalkers unless every last other criminal was in jail and the cocaine had run completely dry. He preferred problems involving the likes of coded messages, spectral hounds, and men walking into houses and never being seen again. One in six of the canonical cases actually have no crime committed at all: That they were merely unusual was enough for Holmes. On the other hand, 37 of the 60 stories feature murder or attempted murder. But even then, murder is not always the central feature of the case. The best of them play with this, so that the murder is but a gateway to a more perplexing matter.

What I’m getting at is that the central premise around which one constructs their story is the problem and that, in many Holmes pastiches, the problem is pedestrian. The plans/painting/famous jewel-encrusted Dingus McGuffin has been stolen. Someone straightforwardly has been murdered, and Scotland Yard can’t figure out who did it. Someone straightforwardly has been murdered, and Scotland Yard has the (falsely accused) suspect in hand. I think I’ve just described a good three-quarters of all pastiches ever written. Most of these are dull.

Let’s take a quick look at Doyle’s most beloved Sherlock tales. I’ll use the 1999 Baker Street Irregulars Top Twelve short stories list as the sample group, ranked from highest to lowest:

  1. The Speckled Band
  2. The Red-Headed League
  3. A Scandal in Bohemia
  4. Silver Blaze
  5. The Blue Carbuncle
  6. The Musgrave Ritual
  7. The Final Problem
  8. The Empty House
  9. The Dancing Men
  10. The Six Napoleons
  11. The Bruce-Partington Plans
  12. The Man with the Twisted Lip

What makes The Final Problem and The Empty House truly great is in many ways beyond the pastiche writer, as these stories achieve much of their power through manipulation of the canon, and only Doyle truly had that ability. There is a lively subgenre of Holmes end-of-life stories dealing with the last days of Holmes, Watson, or both, but I would argue that a pastiche, even if written just as well as those two—no mean feat!—could not connect with the reader in the same way, because we know that the story never “really” happened. Scandal uses a bit of that power, too, in proclaiming Irene Adler the woman. At the same time, none of these three wholly relies on this power; each has an entertaining problem at the root of things and Professor Moriarty would be a memorable character in any tale.

Of the remaining nine, only one—The Bruce-Partington Plans, coming in near the bottom of the list—is centred around one of those generic plot elements that drives so many pastiches. Instead of the attempt to recover a jewel, The Blue Carbuncle hands one over at the start, and the puzzle is how in the blazes it wound up in a Christmas goose, not merely who stole it. Silver Blaze features an apparent murder, but dresses it up with an additional, unusual theft (and ultimately it’s not really murder). The Speckled Band gives us a death to start, but we don’t know what caused it, and it happened two years prior to the story’s opening. The Musgrave Ritual ultimately might have a murder, but we never do know for sure, and it certainly doesn’t drive the story.

Note that when I say a good Holmes tale needs “a proper problem” that I don’t literally mean a mystery in need of cracking. Instead, I simply refer to anything that confronts Holmes with appreciable difficulties. A Scandal in Bohemia, one of the most beloved canon tales, has no mystery element in it, other than perhaps us attempting to discover just what Holmes has planned. It is more of an adventure story; Doyle wrote before the “rules” of detective fiction were codified, which meant that he had more flexibility than later authors, who often pigeonholed themselves into tight genre boundaries. Similarly, pastiche writers today should feel free to tell a crackling suspense or adventure tale featuring Holmes, even if there is no mystery, just as Doyle did. That does not mean the stakes need be high; all too often today we see Holmes faced with threats to the monarchy, Britain, or civilization itself. Doyle largely avoided such and did just fine.

I am also absolutely not saying that a murder or theft plot is automatically a bad one, or even incapable of producing a great tale. Three of the tales on the list feature a Scotland Yard detective with an apparent murder, after all, though I think it’s telling that most would probably not frame those stories—Silver Blaze, The Six Napoleons, and The Bruce-Partington Plans—in such a fashion. Doyle does a superb job draping these pedestrian elements in colourful fabric. Too many others do not.

2) A plausible plot

Conan Doyle made mistakes which completely invalidated some of his stories, but he was a pioneer. . . .

Conan Doyle and Poe were primitives in this art and stand in relation to the best modern writers as Giotto does to da Vinci. They did things which are no longer permissible and exposed ignorances that are no longer tolerated. Also, police art, itself, was rudimentary in their time.

The above comments by Raymond Chandler made some sixty-five years ago are of vital importance to the pastiche writer. It’s bad enough that Doyle was a better writer than most of us; we’re also held to a far higher standard than he ever was. Up here on the shoulder of giants it’s just a given that we will see farther, and the price of having the sum of human knowledge at one’s fingertips via the internet is that, sadly, we are expected to use it. You’ll note that The Speckled Band is ranked as number one on the 1999 list of the twelve stories most beloved by members of the BSI (and has been since its polls began back in 1944). If it was to be published today, it would be consigned to the ash heap as a well-told bit of utter implausibility, for snakes don’t really hear and don’t like milk and don’t climb ropes and aren’t especially trainable and— But it’s Doyle, and it’s damn good aside from those logical impossibilities, so we exalt it. Modern writers will never enjoy the same luxury.

3) A good reason for Holmes to be confused

Holmes shook his head like a man who is far from being satisfied.

“These are very deep waters,” said he; “pray go on with your narrative.”

This is closely related to the first point. Some might ask, “well, isn’t it the same?” No: Something might be a proper problem to us, but that doesn’t mean Holmes would necessarily have any trouble solving it. If a proper problem is the frame on which a good story is constructed, why Holmes doesn’t immediately figure it out is why we keep reading as it’s built out. It is very easy to squander a good dilemma with a pedestrian investigation of it.

That a good story generally needs something that actually challenges Holmes doesn’t mean that it only requires some simple bit of investigation, either. Holmes has access to vast resources in the form of his index, his Irregulars, his brother Mycroft, people like Shinwell Johnson and Langdale Pike, Watson’s medical and military expertise, and his own broad base of knowledge. If the problem only requires Holmes to go to the scene and have a look around, or ask the right people the right questions in the right order, before bringing that enormous arsenal of information to bear to crack it, then the tale will again lack tension. There needs to be pushback: people who argue with or fight him, all manner of coloured herrings and other aquatic life, and seeming impossibilities that must be puzzled out by Holmes, not his network (which at best should only assist), and we need to see this. The police, if involved (and sometimes Scotland Yard can have the day off), should be baffled for a good reason—the excuse of incompetence is another bit of luxury Doyle enjoyed that the modern pastiche writer does not.

Finally, having Holmes confused, the best stories avoid solving a perplexing problem by simply plopping the solution in his lap at the end. This is in part just a matter of embracing that detective story notion of the rules of Fair Play, the idea that you can’t just have the solution show up at the finale with absolutely no way for the reader to have known about it. Doyle did not always abide by this because, again, he wrote before these “rules” were codified, and so a Holmes pastiche has a bit more leeway here than other forms of detective story (to its advantage). However, I’ve definitely noticed a tendency for writers to abuse this. I’ve seen a great number of Holmes tales unnecessarily resolve the matter at hand via some bit of deus ex machina info delivery, a source the reader would never have expected and could never have known about, and which absolves Holmes (and the writer) of the need to do any deep thinking on the matter. One of the major rewards of a Holmes tale comes from watching that amazing mind do the work.

As an aside, oddly enough I’ve seen several pastiches fail by having it unapologetically obvious who the villain is and then the story primarily being about how Holmes brings about their downfall. Seeing as how this is Holmes we’re discussing (Irenes and Norburys aside), this tends to be painfully anti-climactic, as without a challenge there’s only the mechanical process of inevitable entrapment.

4) A good reason for Watson to remain in the dark

“A telegram for you, Mr. Holmes,” said he.

“Ha! It is the answer!” He tore it open, glanced his eyes over it, and crumpled it into his pocket.

“That’s all right,” said he.

“Have you found out anything?”

“I have found out everything!”

Almost inevitably, Holmes will eventually piece together what has occurred. However, at some point Watson (and thus us) needs to learn this as well, and as any reader of the canon knows, this often does not happen simultaneously. Long before the end of the story, Holmes regularly has a solid suspicion as to what has occurred, or even certitude, and only requires formal legal proof. Watson is essential to the success of the canon in many ways, but most significant is how he provides a filter through which we may be distanced from Holmes’ process of deduction, keeping us in the dark in the reasonable way that a good mystery requires. But this is easy to handle poorly. The staple of Holmes announcing that he merely prefers not to discuss things until all is perfectly ready can work on occasion, but is somewhat unsatisfying at best, ham-fisted at worst, and painfully overused regardless. When Holmes obviously knows what’s going on but is refusing to let Watson in on it, for apparently arbitrary means and for any significant length of time, the reader becomes removed from the story—dangerously passive and unengaged. Being along for the ride is fun, whereas if we can only watch on the sidelines as things pass us by then we’re liable to get bored.

Many authors have found better ways. In some cases the final reveal happens naturally near the end, with both Holmes and Watson learning the truth together in an organic fashion. Other tales might have the knowledge arrive somewhat sooner, but have the pacing of the story so tight that Holmes simply does not have the opportunity to announce to Watson what is happening until the very end; an attempt to introduce a lengthy explanatory scene in the middle of things would actually feel wrong (“There’s no time for this, Watson! Even now the hideous red leech races towards its final victim!”). Still others might have Holmes run off on some vital (and often time-sensitive) side quest, though while this removes his ability to spoil the story, it also threatens to derail it by separating our two main protagonists and having us feel we are viewing some unimportant sideshow.

Even if a story paces the reveal correctly, a common failing (in my mind, at least) is creating an inappropriate parlour scene for Holmes to deliver it, that time-honoured trope of detective fiction wherein all relevant parties are called to the parlour or other convenient place of assembly so that the detective can lay out his brilliance and publically expose the culprit. While sometimes the method makes sense to employ, there are two problems with it: one, it was last fresh when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a going concern, and two, it’s a staple not of the Holmes stories but of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, largely post-dating Doyle (The Bruce-Partington Plans and The Golden Pince-Nez have something similar, but there are twists, the results I think are more interesting than is usually the case, and the stories are the exception rather than the rule in the canon besides).

I’m not saying to avoid anything that any other writer has ever done (for God’s sake, we’re writing Holmes knockoffs here). However, employing the tropes of other detectives and sub-genres introduces a strong “meta” element into your story, risking you inadvertently pulling the well-read reader out of your tale and all the while not really giving you anything new to work with: you’re merely opening up a new box of clichés. The risk of making Holmes look like a poor-man’s Poirot or Dr. Fell rarely outweighs the reward.

5) Judicious use of canonical elements

“It was elementary, Watson,” said he, brushing past Mrs. Hudson, “for as I attempted to persuade Inspector Lestrade here, any analysis of the tobacco ash present at the scene of the crime would have told the examiner the same.” He fetched his deerstalker and pipe. “But now we face a singular matter; these are deep waters indeed. Come, gentlemen. Summon the Irregulars! Cocaine for everyone!   The game is afoot!”

I didn’t have to think at all in writing the above paragraph and, I suspect, neither would most readers, were they called upon to create the same. Some of the power of the Holmes stories lies in those familiar elements in the canon we have come to cherish: poor, put-upon Mrs. Hudson; sallow, perennially unobservant Lestrade; Wiggins and his fellow scamps; Moriarty cackling from the shadows. Unfortunately, many writers wield these elements not as a scalpel but as a club.

It is easy to see how this happens. At times the writer is looking to make their tale more authentic, and one of the best ways to do that is to bring in those elements that that Doyle himself fashioned. Other times, the writer, carried away by their love for the canon, simply cannot resist the opportunity to play with such storied elements.

However, overdoing this risks a pastiche straying from loving tribute to unintentional parody. Almost all of us know about the deerstalker and pipe; I won’t bother going into those here. The canon uses some form of the phrase “the game is afoot” exactly twice; Holmes says it but once, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it was his favourite. Most of us are aware of how one can use “elementary” improperly, but it is not required to use it at all. The Irregulars only appear in three stories, and are only prominent in the two earliest. Mycroft is busy, lazy, and a creature of habit; Moriarty plans, rather than executes—pastiche writers have both lofty figures directly involve themselves in Holmes’ life and the business of everyday crime with amazing regularity. Holmes’ deductions in Baker Street at the beginning of a tale are more central, but still, they do not appear in every tale and are not required either.

I suspect this will prove controversial, but I feel the introductory deduction scene in particular has lost any power it might have had. Any author can do it, given enough time to think one out, and oh so many have, but it is fundamentally a flavour or show-off piece that does nothing to really help your story. The advanced version, as seen in The Cardboard Box/The Resident Patient, is trickier to pull off and thus more impressive, but ultimately fails for the same reasons. If we’re reading a pastiche, we know who Holmes is and what he can do; the time spent on a deduction intro would be better spent thickening your plot or giving your characters some life. There are so many other elements that can establish one’s Holmesian bonafides in much shorter a fashion, and as far as deduction scenes go, one that winds up placing the criminal in the docket is much more useful.

6) Judicious use of period elements

Every Holmesian pastiche writer knows of the challenge of capturing the flavour of an increasingly bygone age, a time not just of Empire but of gasogenes, pince-nezs, the bimetallic question, and other bits of antiquity. There’s little to say on this, for a writer knows that anachronisms are to be avoided and makes the best effort they can. Whether or not one fails is not objective, but a determination made separately by each individual reader, based on their own individual base of knowledge.

A less considered problem is overfaithfullness to the period, an excess of fidelity. This is a problem common to genre fiction as a whole, where authors perform a pile of research to ensure they get the details of their fantasy setting, sci-fi story, or detective piece right, and then cannot resist the temptation to show their work. But any bit of info that doesn’t assist your story should be excised, no matter how fascinating you personally think it is. For one, it’s often not as interesting as the author believes. For another, for every story where I found the pointed use of period detail smooth and of some interest, there have been twenty more where it just sat like a lump of lead, even when fascinating still interrupting the story’s flow. In particular, I have never seen a single pastiche improved by a digression on authentic period train times. What does it matter if Holmes and Watson catch the 2:15 or the 2:30 at the satellite station in Lesser East Ludenshire-on-the-Moor? All I think when a story has Holmes break out his Bradshaw is that the author managed to track down a copy, and thus felt compelled to use it. Characters should move at the speed of plot, bound only by reasonable limits, and without exception any space spent on an incidental exploration of train timetables would have been better used fleshing out the plot or characters instead.

****

Again, I don’t claim this to be the one true path to the perfect Holmes pastiche; it’s more of a what-not-to-do, rather than a how-to-do-it. Just because something is structurally sound doesn’t mean it can’t flounder in a host of other ways. For instance, even if it passes muster as a sound story, you might feel it fails as a proper one. And of course a sound story might still suffer from leaden prose or any number of other basic blunders. Lastly, there’s always the exception that proves the rule, that superb story built out of the most basic or even hackneyed plots, archetypes, and the like.

In closing, I’d be particularly interested in hearing from any reader out there of Holmes stories that in your mind stumble over one (or better yet, several) of my points above and yet still wind up being wonderful. I would start the game off by suggesting J.R. Campbell’s “Lord Garnett’s Skulls,” as found in volume II of The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories. There’s been a theft, and a Scotland Yard investigator has told us of it: rather basic stuff. But the pacing is excellent, the missing materials out of the ordinary, we have a kidnapping quickly ladled on top, and the solution is provided in a fresh and delightfully ghoulish way. What comes to mind for you?

Posted in Adventure, Books, Characters, Fiction, Genre, Guest, Historicals, Holmesian, Writers, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

ONE WORLD

Posted on March 30, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen

“The outstanding development of last year’s Prize Contest,” wrote EQMM editor Frederic Dannay in his introduction to our magazine’s August 1948 “All Nations” issue, “was the unexpectedly large number of stories sent in from foreign countries and their remarkable range of geographical representation. Manuscripts were submitted from Canada, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Argentina, China, Japan, the Philippines, Australia, Union of South Africa, Algeria, Southern Rhodesia, England, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Portugal. This united effort on the part of detective-story writers proved that while we still have a long way to go politically, the planet Earth is truly One World detective-storywise.”

Yesterday, EQMM’s second All Nations issue, May 2016—containing stories from twelve different countries and six continents—went on sale. Lamentably, sixty-eight years after our first All Nations issue, the world continues to have “a long way to go politically” before it truly becomes one in the sense editor Dannay envisioned. The recent terror attacks in Belgium brought that home to us as little else could, for seven of the authors EQMM has recently published in translation (Bob Van Laerhoven, Bram Dehouck, Hilde Vandermeeren, Herbert DePaepe, Els Depuydt, Bavo Dhooge, and Pieter Aspe) live in the midst of that terror.

EQMM’s first All Nations issue was conceived just two years after the first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, a time when many had hopes of achieving unprecedented international harmony. But it was also born under the shadow of a recently ended, devastating world war. In my From the Editor’s Desk piece in this new All Nations issue, I allude to a comment made by one of the contributors to the first All Nations issue in 1948, H.T. Alfon. “Your magazine,” he said, “finds many readers even as far as here, Manila—EQMM has grown known that fast, that far.” Although EQMM’s quickly extended worldwide reach surely had much to do with the quality of the publication, I think it probably also has to be explained as part of a more general outward flow of American culture all over the globe at the end of the war—and, as a result of the magazine having been shipped to troops all over the world throughout the war.

EQMM is a publication born during war, just weeks before the entrance of the United States into the conflict. As well as allowing the magazine to travel, circumstances of the war shaped EQMM by providing an influx of talent. As critic Marvin Lachman points out in an article for EQMM’s upcoming July issue, a number of the new writers EQMM published in the early years “date their ambition to be published to . . . their spare time when in military service. In the 1940s and 1950s, writers of EQMM first stories were often World War II veterans taking advantage of the G.I. Bill of Rights.” Persecution by the Nazis of creators of what they called “degenerate art” also brought new talent to the U.S.’s shores, and one of the most notable of those refugees was EQMM’s first cover artist and art director, George Salter. Widely considered one of the most important book designers of the 20th century, Salter had a distinctive “modernist” style that made him much sought after for the covers of books by the greatest writers of the time in the U.S. That EQMM was launched under his art direction was one of the magazine’s significant early advantages. It’s interesting to note, in this connection, that one of the stories contained in our new All Nations issue is by a Japanese author, Ōsaka Keikichi, who had to give up writing detective stories in the late 1930s due to state censorship. He was killed in the war, but his output of detective stories was not altogether lost. We publish in English, for the first time, in this May issue, his 1936 classic “The Cold Night’s Clearing.”

Sadly, in many parts of the world today, writers and artists continue to have their ideas and artistic aims suppressed. But at least the “global village” we now live in makes their plight better known than would have been the case in previous generations. If there’s one thing our new All Nations issue brings out, it’s how small and closely connected our world has become. Absorption of elements of various cultures into one another has become so ubiquitous that by pure coincidence this issue’s two independently commissioned stories from Asia both turn on the holiday of Christmas. The geographical merging of peoples from vastly different cultures through displacement is another reality of our time that, for many, reinforces the sense of our world having become small and village-like, at least in the sense that we all share the consequences of actions taken in any part of it. Swiss writer Petra Ivanov explores the plight of the refugees of conflict in her contribution to the issue; it’s a story written before the major migration to Europe of refugees from the war in Syria, but it might as easily have been their story.

It’s thanks partly to the communications aspects of our modern global village—especially the easy electronic flow of information—that some of the best traditions in our genre have survived, and that’s illustrated by this issue’s selections. Three of the stories, none of them American, are impossible-crime tales. This classical form of the mystery, which reached its height under American masters such as John Dickson Carr but which infrequently finds favor with American authors nowadays, has endured primarily through its assimilation into other cultures. The case is quite different for the detective story-writing traditions of Latin America, where the great classical authors of the form continue to be emulated by writers of today. Our 2016 All Nations issue begins with a story from our archives by Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, and is followed by a story that pays direct homage to him from two of his modern-day compatriots. In a speech last week in Argentina, President Obama said, “. . . in the spirit of renewed friendship, partnership and engagement, I’d like to close with the words of one of Argentina’s great gifts to the world, Jorge Luis Borges, who once said, ‘And now, I think that in this country we have a certain right to hope.’”

As people around the world display the Belgian flag and pledge to stand with Belgium, and any other country similarly attacked, I think that in this global village of ours we have a certain right to hope too. Our All Nations issue gives me that feeling: Though differences in perception separate our various nations, you’ll find these pages full of humor and intelligence and many commonalities of mind and heart.—Janet Hutchings

Posted in Classic Mystery, Ellery Queen, Fiction, History, International, Magazine, Passport, Translation | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

“How to Write Killer Flash Fiction” (by Tara Laskowski)

Posted on March 23, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Tara Laskowski is the author of the short story collections Bystanders and Modern Manners For Your Inner Demons. She has been the editor of SmokeLong Quarterly since 2010, and her flash fiction has been featured in the Norton anthology Flash Fiction International and many other publications. Her story “Ladies Night” won first place in the KYSO Flash fiction-writing challenge. Tara will make her EQMM debut in our special “All Nations” issue (May 2016), on sale next week; in it, she represents the United States with a haunting flash fiction tale that illustrates well the points she makes about writing flash fiction in this post.—Janet Hutchings

Great crime flash fiction is hard to come by. It’s tough to write a satisfying story in 1,000 words or less. It’s even harder to incorporate a compelling crime or mystery.

I have been the editor of SmokeLong Quarterly, an online flash-fiction literary magazine, for six years now. During that time, I’ve read more than ten thousand submissions (we get an average of 90-100 stories each week). The majority of what we publish is not crime fiction—we tend more toward general fiction or experimental flash—but we do occasionally publish crime fiction, and we’ve seen a lot of it come our way in the submission queue.

So what makes for a good one? That is a more elusive question. Each time you say not to do something, someone comes around and shows you how that rule can be broken. But I do think there are guidelines you can follow to make your flash fiction more compelling. Here are a few.

1. Don’t try to do too much. Flash fiction works best when it’s focused. This doesn’t mean it has to be simplistic, but it should be streamlined. Don’t worry about trying to fit in the plotting of a crime, the execution, and the aftermath, all while trying to juggle a love interest. Focus on one small thing and tease it out, play with it, have fun.

2. Cut, omit, skip, delete. Some of the best flash writers are the ones who know when to omit details, how to say the most in the least amount of space. Flash is an art in economy—economy of language—and that brevity makes everything else seem fuller and richer. “The Drive” by Gabrielle Sierra in Issue 44 of SmokeLong Quarterly, for example, focuses on the moments after something brutal has happened. We don’t ever learn what the crime is, and it doesn’t matter, because what this story is interested in is how these two characters are going to survive what comes next.

3. Stay away from surprise or punch-line endings. Your story’s only purpose should not be a surprise reveal at the end. That leaves the reader feeling cheated. I once read a submission that detailed a person methodically killing someone in a bathtub. There were grim descriptions of blood and gore and how the murderer was feeling while they were killing, and a lot of it was done well. But then at the end, you discover that the “person” in the bathtub was really a chicken.

Don’t get me wrong—chicken is delicious. But that story would’ve been much more effective as an exploration of a killer’s feelings rather than an elaborate set-up for the writer to jump out from behind that shower curtain and say, “Gotcha!”

This is not to say that you can’t have interesting twists or reveals at the end of flash fiction. When it does work, it’s brilliant—but the story cannot weigh entirely on it or it will collapse. The best stories are the ones in which that twist is inevitable, in which, when you read it, you realize that the writer was taking you purposefully on this journey. It’s a satisfying and inevitable turn, not an out-of-the-blue trick that the writer purposefully hid from you.

Here are two examples. Annabel Banks does a fabulous job of building up tension in the story “Payment to the Universe,” published by matchbook last year. We follow a maid, seemingly going through an ordinary night of cleaning an office building. But the odd details about the place make you realize that something’s not quite right. The mood of the piece sets you up for the ending, so that when it happens, it creeps you right to the bone. It stays with you because the story prepared you for it, not because of a weak plot trick.

The same rings true for Art Taylor’s recent flash “The Blanketing Snow” published at Shotgun Honey. If you’ve read any of Art’s longer stories published in EQMM, you know he’s a master of traditional storytelling. He takes his time. Usually this might not work well with a form like flash, but it does in this story because Art focuses so closely on one moment. He’s also retelling a well-known fairy tale, which helps with subtext. But what works best about the chilling ending—which I won’t spoil for you—is that, like Annabel, Art has already woven it carefully into the narrative. The loss, the burdens, the chill in these characters sinks in thoroughly and completely.

4. Pay attention to language. This one’s a little squishier. At SmokeLong, one of our biggest critiques about stories is that they don’t feel like flash. They are more like short stories that happen to be…well, short. Or they feel like scenes from a longer piece.

Flash has what I like to call a magic rhythm to it. They can be like songs, with a unique melody, and when they start, the good ones are pushing you along, daring you to stop reading them. They have a purpose and an urgency.

At SmokeLong, the flash we publish—whether crime or fantasy or literary—tends to have an attention to language and description that makes it rise above the plot. Check out “The Final Problem“ in our latest issue, as an example.

Very short fiction needs to have some action going on at the sentence level. It needs to be beautiful, even if it’s about ugly things. I believe that’s what makes brilliant flash fiction. The story might be short—but if it’s done correctly it won’t be the crime on the page you remember so much as the way the story cut you to the bone, shred your heart into a million pieces, and punched you in the gut. That’s the kind of brutality I’m looking for.

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“Seventy-two Years and Counting” (by Donald A. Yates)

Posted on March 16, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen
On the 29th of this month, EQMM’s special “All Nations” issue, a tribute to the original All Nations issue of August 1948, will go on sale. It opens with a story EQMM has always been proud of having been the first to publish (in August 1948), “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the first work in English translation of the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. All of the other stories in the issue—which represents twelve countries and all continents except Antarctica—will be new to English-language readers, and one of them is the result of the collaborative effort of EQMM’s highly valued veteran translator Donald A. Yates. Don is Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University. In recent years he has provided EQMM with translations from Cuba and Italy as well as from Argentina, the country with which his work as a mystery-fiction translator began. His own short story “A Study in Scarlatti” appeared in EQMM in February 2011, and he has also contributed many poems to the magazine over the years.—Janet Hutchings

Looking back now at my collection of correspondence with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, I see that my first exchange was with Mildred Falk, then the managing editor, who wrote me on January 12, 1944, to reply to my question about one of the Queen novels that I sent to the magazine, not knowing where else to look for an answer. I had discovered the early nationality-keyed Queen stories in 1943 and had been genuinely disturbed by a footnote that appeared at the foot of page thirty-one of the 1935 first edition of The Spanish Cape Mystery. It referred to a “peculiarly baffling murder case” that Ellery had failed to solve and was considerably “annoyed by his failure.”

In no time at all, Ellery had become a true hero of mine and it distressed me that there had actually been a case that he had not been able to crack. In response to my query, Mildred Falk, taking dictation, do doubt, from editor Ellery Queen wrote:

“Yes, ‘The Case of the Wounded Tyrolean’ is the only case which has baffled the great man. So you will understand, we know, when you learn that the case doesn’t exist.

“Seriously, it was a tongue-in-cheek little game we played while writing The Spanish Cape Mystery. Doyle, you know, did it often in the Sherlock Holmes stories—referring to Holmes cases which thereafter sent Sherlockians screaming into the night hunting for the reference source and finding only a ghostly chuckle.

“Forgive us. There is no such case, and therefore no clues and no facts. Might be a good idea to build one some time at that!”

I was quite flattered that my question had elicited such a friendly response. I was only thirteen years old at the time.

Three years later, with a suitcase filled with my lovingly accumulated first editions of Queen books, I left from my parents’ home in Ayer, Massachusetts, and took a bus to New York City where on one glorious afternoon I got Ellery Queen, in the person of Frederic Dannay, to sign and inscribe every one of them. But that is another story, which I have described in detail elsewhere.

In the years following, Fred Danny and I enjoyed an uninterrupted friendship that lasted until his death in 1982 and that in time took on the character of a father and son relationship. In 1947 I graduated from high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan and in 1951 I finished my B.A. degree with a major in Spanish at the University of Michigan. That was followed by a two-year stint in the U.S. Army. My correspondence with Fred during these years consisted mainly of my offering him books that I thought he would want for his extensive collection of detective short stories—and trying repeatedly to write a story for him that he would accept for EQMM.

With some free time on my hands during the months I spent at Fort Custer, Michigan, I remembered Mildred Falk’s observation that it would be interesting to try to fashion a short story that could carry the title “The Wounded Tyrolean” and be so perplexing that even Ellery himself had not been able to solve it. I decided to take on the challenge and thought that the classic “locked-room murder” problem would serve my purposes and that I would do my best to come up with a new solution that had never been devised before. By the time I had ended my military service and returned to the University of Michigan in 1953—now with the support of the G.I. Bill—for a graduate-school degree in Spanish, I had finished the job. Fred didn’t think it was right for EQMM.

One of the professors I studied with in Ann Arbor was the Argentine critic and author Enrique Anderson Imbert, who I soon found out was as interested in mystery fiction as I was and had himself written and published detective stories in Argentina. Eventually, we determined that the topic of my doctoral dissertation would be the Argentine detective story. While gathering material for the thesis, I found a recent collection of ten Argentine detective stories, edited and published in Buenos Aires by Rodolfo Jorge Walsh. I wrote to Walsh and found him to be very knowledgeable on the subject and eager to help me in documenting my study. I sent him my “Wounded Tyrolean” and he liked it. He translated it and it appeared in the Argentine magazine Leoplán in July of 1955.

I started translating some of the stories in his anthology and the first of these began appearing in The Saint Detective Magazine in the mid 1950s. The Argentine author whom Walsh never ceased to praise was Jorge Luis Borges and I considered that a writer of his stature deserved to appear in EQMM. Fred agreed and the short piece titled “The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths” appeared in the April 1962 number. Actually, a Borges short story had already appeared in EQMM, in the April 1948, “All Nations” issue, in the translation of Anthony Boucher, for many years the crime-fiction reviewer for the New York Times, and the first person to write about crime fiction in Spanish America. His essay “It’s Murder, Amigos” appeared in the April 19, 1947 issue of Publisher’s Weekly. Borges, little known and less read in Argentina at that time, eventually became a celebrated literary innovator and a long-time candidate for the Nobel Prize in the literature category. The Boucher translation was the first instance of a Borges English translation appearing in a wide-circulation U.S. publication. (I have a copy of that issue, in which Fred has written “So this is the story that has made me famous!” And Borges later signed it for me, too.)

I had become intensely interested in Borges’s fiction while studying with Anderson Imbert and signed a contract with New Directions in 1960 to bring out a selection of his writings in English translation. A fellow graduate student at Michigan, James E. Irby, had also become interested in Borges’s writings and had been translating some of his essays into English for the purpose, he told me, of getting a feel for his literary style. He showed me some of them and I thought they were excellent. I invited him to join me in preparing the anthology, which appeared in 1962 with the title Labyrinths: Selected Writings of Jorge Luis Borges.

Looking back again, since 1962 I have contributed nearly a score of translations to EQMM, accepted first by Fred, then by Eleanor Sullivan who succeeded him as the magazine’s editor, and most recently by Janet Hutchings, who can be credited with having established the monthly feature titled “Passport to Crime,” which introduces new translations into English of crime stories from many foreign countries.

For the May 2016 number, which is soon to appear, I thought it might be interesting to try something different, a first of sorts in the line of translations. During a 2007 visit to Buenos Aires, I had invited my Argentine friend Fernando Sorrentino, whose fiction has been translated into a dozen foreign languages, to write an original crime story for the pages of EQMM. He agreed and said he had something unusual in mind. What he sent me was a story written in collaboration with his friend Cristián Mitelman. The idea, he said, was to honor the collaboration that produced the Ellery Queen novels and also the literary collaboration—not at all common among authors in general—of Borges and his fellow Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, who together in 1942 published a volume of stories titled Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, which satirically featured a detective who was strictly limited in the amount of traveling about that he could do while solving the crimes brought to him: Don Isidro was locked up in cell 273 of the Buenos Aires penitentiary! Their story was titled “The Center of the Web” and it appeared in the June 2008 issue of EQMM under the pseudonym of Christián X. Ferdinandus. When they sent me another story, titled “For Strictly Literary Reasons,” I thought I’d join the party and do the translation in a collaboration with an old friend from U. of M. graduate days, John B. Dalbor, now retired as Professor Emeritus at Penn Sate University. Our first collaborative project had been a second-year, college-level Spanish reading text, Imagination and Fantasy: Stories from Spanish America, published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1960. We very much enjoyed working together again.

So there you have it—something new under the sun, featuring a tetralogy of literary collaborations.

A closing note. Persistence paid off. Finally, fifty-seven years after appearing in Spanish in Buenos Aires, my “Wounded Tyrolean” appeared in its original English version in the Fall 2012 issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review, published in Ann Arbor, the very setting where the action of the baffling locked-room murder had been situated.

Posted in Books, Characters, Ellery Queen, Fiction, Genre, Guest, History, International, Passport, Translation, Writers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

“And Not Forgetting, ‘Wow!’ ” (by Mat Coward)

Posted on March 9, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Mat Coward is an extraordinarily versatile writer. He’s the author of many excellent mystery short stories and novels, and has also been widely published in the field of science fiction and fantasy. He has written children’s books, humor, even a long-running gardening column for a daily newspaper. His post today concerns his recent nomination for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best short story, for “On Borrowed Time” (EQMM June 2015). The winner will be announced at the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Awards banquet on April 28 of this year. This isn’t the first time Mat has received such an honor: His January 2000 EQMM story “Twelve of the Little Buggers” was also a nominee for the coveted Edgar. New stories by the British author are coming up soon in both EQMM and Crimewave.—Janet Hutchings

Nine things that went through my mind after I heard that I’d been nominated for the Edgar.

1. I wonder if anyone has ever refused an Edgar? Probably not—it doesn’t seem like that sort of award—but lots of people have turned down lots of honours over the years. The artist L.S. Lowry is thought to be the all-time British record-holder, having declined an OBE (in 1955), a CBE (1961), a knighthood (1968), and a Companion of Honour (1972 and 1976).

The socialist writer and broadcaster J.B. Priestley said no to a Life Peerage in 1965—but accepted Pipe Smoker of the Year in 1979. Every man has his own special vanities, after all.

2. And then I remembered the story I was told years ago about a bibulous novelist who arrived home drunk one night to find a letter awaiting him from Buckingham Palace, informing him that he was to be knighted. He immediately scrawled an intemperate reply on the back of the original, explaining that as a lifelong proponent of republicanism he could not imagine any greater insult, and went straight out to post it. When he awoke sober the next morning he immediately remembered that, far from being a republican, he was in fact an enthusiastic supporter of the monarchy. But by then it was too late.

3. It occurred to me that I don’t know exactly how the Edgar committee arrives at its selection, but I do know how the FBI fills a vacancy on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. First of all you have to be nominated by the local field office. Those nominations are then scrutinised by a panel at FBI headquarters, before the winning candidate is submitted to the deputy director, and ultimately the director, for final approval. It’s a very slow process. You can’t help feeling that the FBI should take a tip from the MWA and hold a banquet for nominees; just see who turns up, you never know your luck.

4. I realised that I am still furious about the second place my Jack Russell terrier, Dot, received in the “Dog With the Most Beautiful Eyes” category at a village fete in Kent in 1970. Most days I can deal with the anger, it’s not as if I’m going looking for the judges all these years later, but all I’m saying is: That dog had very nice eyes. If you want to think there was, genuinely, a dog with nicer eyes in that competition, that’s fine. That’s your business. That’s up to you. I happen to know you’re mistaken; we’ll leave it at that.

5. I did that thing that I’m sure you’ve done at some time or another in your life. I waited for a few hours before telling anyone about the nomination, just in case I got a follow-up email saying “OMG, look, this is so embarrassing! Turns out I was reading from the wrong piece of paper! You’re actually on the list for ‘Dullest Short Story of the Entire Year, No Kidding,’ which is really just a bit of fun we were having here in the office when we were snowed in one weekend and it was never really intended for public consumption. Lol! Hope you don’t mind!”

Even then, when I finally posted about the nomination online, I was careful to write, “I have apparently been nominated for an Edgar,” so that if it still turned out not to be true, I wouldn’t look such an idiot. “Yeah, right, you’re like the 100th person to tell me that! Duh! I already knew—I mean, which part of ‘apparently’ don’t you understand?”

6. I wished I’d come up with a less dull title for my story. More meaningful, more original, cleverer, more insightful, more memorable. Though, to be honest, I have such a struggle with titles these days that, as it is, it took me only slightly longer to write the story than it did the title. For my next EQMM story, I came up with the title first, and then built a story to fit it. That’s a much better system: get the difficult bit out of the way before you start.

7. “Nomination” isn’t that easy a word to drop into conversation casually. “Oh, actually, you know what? You talking about nominations reminded me, I’d almost forgotten, I had an email this morning . . .” People just don’t use that word very often. In the end, I had to resort to mishearing. “Abominations? Oh, sorry, I thought you said nominations! I’m an idiot, forgive me. All I was going to say was, nothing very interesting, just that I had an email this morning, while we’re on the subject of denominations, and . . .”

8. I wonder what this news will do to my number of Twitter followers? Well, that was soon answered: The number dropped by several dozen. I think there are three hypotheses that might explain this. Firstly, it was part of an organised protest against the criteria, qualifications, morality, and general common sense of the nominating panel.

Second possibility: A lot of people saw the message and thought, “I wonder who this guy is and why I’m following him?” and took the opportunity to stop following me. It’s very easy to follow people you have no interest in on Twitter, but set against that is the considerable satisfaction gained by unfollowing them sometime later. Not in a hostile way; just for the small burst of satisfaction which follows any successfully completed housekeeping task.

And thirdly, it may just be because I almost never tweet anything, and when I do it’s almost always late at night, and what I tweet is almost certain to cause lasting offence on grounds of political or sporting allegiance to roughly thirty percent of those who see it, whilst being of actual interest to around five percent. I have often noticed that when I don’t tweet anything at all for weeks on end my number of followers grows steadily. And every time I do tweet something (anything) the number starts falling. You can only admire the brains that came up with this brilliant model of twenty-first-century communication.

9. I reminded myself to be pleased. Short-story writing brings very few days of joy: the day the story is accepted, the day the cheque arrives, the day you finally come up with a title, especially if this isn’t eight months after the story was published; that’s about it. So it’s important to notice them when they happen.

Which is why, as I fell asleep on the day I found out my name was on the list of Edgar nominees, I was thinking about the Olympic gold medal winner whose name does not appear on any lists.

The Netherlands team, in the Coxed Pairs rowing event at the 1900 Olympic Games in Paris, made it through the semis, but feared that their cox was too heavy for them to triumph in the final. So they kicked him out and replaced him with a child, a little French boy, picked at random from amongst the spectators. They won, in a tense, tight finish with the French. But to this day, nobody has ever been able to discover that child’s name.

And the thing is, he quite probably didn’t care: He’d had a nice time watching the boats, and then to top it all he’d even had a ride in one of the boats. I’ll bet that was a great day out, and I’ll bet he remembered it from time to time all his life, and I hope he had many more. I hope we all do.

 

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“The Juggling Act of Writing Novels and Short Stories” (by Brendan DuBois)

Posted on March 2, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Brendan DuBois’s fiction-writing career began in 1986 in EQMM’s Department of First Stories. As he mentions in this post, he’s had more than 150 short stories published since then, all while also pursuing a successful career as a novelist. Brendan’s considerable and distinguished output spans more than the mystery field. 2016 will see three new DuBois novels added to his body of work. Dark Victory, published in January, is his first science-fiction novel (Baen Books). This month, Midnight Ink released his standalone thriller Night Road, and in November, Storm Cell, the eleventh novel in his mystery series starring Lewis Cole, is due from Pegasus. Brendan is the recipient of many honors for his fiction, including two Shamus awards from the Private Eye Writers of America. Most recently, he tied for second-place for the 2015 EQMM Readers Award, for his story “The Lake Tenant” (EQMM November 2015).—Janet Hutchings 

So you’re a writer.

Yep.

Have I ever read anything you’ve written?

(Pause) Next question, please.

Okay, then. What have you written?

At this particular point in time, I’ve written twenty novels and more than 150 short stories. Most of my fiction has been mysteries and thrillers, although I’ve decided to go play in the world of science fiction as well.

Wow! That’s an impressive output.

I guess. When you grow up in New England with its Puritan background, combine that with a Catholic school education and working as a journalist, when a deadline means a deadline, working constantly and diligently is something that comes naturally to me.

But why so much?

So much what?

So many novels, so many short stories. Why don’t you just focus on writing your books? Wouldn’t that make sense?

But I enjoy doing both. Why should I give it up?

But there has to be a real problem in going from a novel to a short story. I mean, isn’t there a difference in writing a short story and writing a novel?

That’s right, about three hundred pages difference.

Please.

Sorry, couldn’t help myself. There’s a world of difference between writing a novel and a short story, but there’s also a world of misunderstanding.

Like what?

It’s pretty clear to everyone that when you write a short story, space is at a premium, and so every piece of dialogue, every description, every piece of the plot has to make a difference, has to count. But that doesn’t mean that when you start working on a novel, you’re given free rein to go on and on and on… just padding the story with excessive description and scenes that don’t propel the story but make the author feel good.

Are you sure about that?

Pretty sure.

But there are lots of authors who are known for padding their novels, for making their books hundreds of pages longer than need be. You know, authors like [redacted], [redacted] and especially [redacted].

Well, that’s when I have to bring my mom in to render an opinion. “Just because your friends are going to jump off a cliff, does that mean you have to?” And just because some authors get away with padding their novels doesn’t mean you have to follow their lead.

Your mom sounds like a pretty smart lady.

Well, she did bring up six sons without any of us being arrested or burning the house down, so yeah, I’d say you’re right.

So what you’re saying is that short stories are a good way to prepare for writing a novel.

In some ways, yes. In a short story, you should be able to crisply and cleanly tell a story in a limited amount of space. And when it comes time to start your Great American Novel (or perhaps your Somewhat More Than Adequate American Novel), use what you’ve learned in the short story field to your advantage. Don’t think that you’re in the midst of telling a sprawling tale that’s going to run hundreds of pages and go up to 100,000 words. Look at each chapter like it is its own self-contained short story. You’ll find you’ll write better, and that each chapter will have a clear and succinct impact.

Okay… but it seems like even with twenty novels under your belt, you’re still writing short stories, am I right?

That’s right.

But why? What do you have to prove?

I don’t have to prove a thing. Writing a short story is like taking the afternoon off to drive to Boston. Writing a novel is like driving from Boston to Los Angeles. Different experiences, different formats, different types of enjoyment. I just love the style of the short story, the possibility of exploring new things, for experimenting with style and other parts of writing.

But wait a minute… on a purely financial basis, aren’t writing novels more profitable? I mean, take what you put into a short story, compare the payout to what you’d get if you spent that time working on a novel.

You’re probably right.

So why don’t you stop writing short stories?

(Pause) What makes you think I have a choice?

Posted in Books, Business, Characters, Fiction, Genre, Guest, Novels, Story, Writers, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Confessions of a Literary Safecracker” (by Joseph Goodrich)

Posted on February 24, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Joseph Goodrich will make his EQMM debut in this year’s issue in tribute to our magazine’s previous editors (August 2016). The star of his tale is EQMM‘s founding editor, Frederic Dannay, who joins forces with Dashiell Hammett to solve a crime in 1950s Manhattan. Even mystery fans who have yet to be introduced to this author’s fiction will likely know him from his work for theater. He is an actor and an Edgar-Award winning playwright whose work has been produced across the United States. He’s an alumnus of New Dramatists and a former Calderwood Fellow at the MacDowell Colony. Joe’s love for mysteries, and for the work of Ellery Queen in particular, goes back many decades; he’s a frequent contributor to Mystery Scene magazine and an active member of the Mystery Writers of America, and, as he explains in this post, he was inspired to write his current play (adapted from and of the same title as the Ellery Queen novel Calamity Town) after multiple readings of Ellery Queen’s Wrightsville novels.—Janet Hutchings

2016 marks the 75th Anniversary of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. It also marks the 74th anniversary of Calamity Town. Mike Nevins, grand explicator of all things Queenian, has divided Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee’s work into four distinct periods. Calamity Town opens Queen’s third and arguably greatest era, the years from 1942 to 1958. This period, Nevins writes, “saw Dannay and Lee at the peak of their powers and popularity, selling millions of copies a year, praised as highly by critics and their fellow writers as by their immense audience.”

Calamity Town is the first of Queen’s novels set in the fictional New England town of Wrightsville, ten thousand souls in the shadow of the Mahoganies. Give Me That Old-Time Detection’s editor Arthur Vidro has proven that Claremont, New Hampshire is the real-life model for Wrightsville, right down to the town square (which is round).

The novel is one of my very favorite EQs. I vividly remember the first time I read it. The year was 1976, and I’d checked out The Wrightsville Murders omnibus from my local library. My affection for the book has only grown over the last forty years. I never had the opportunity to meet Dannay or Lee, but I feel I know them. I’ve read their books and I’ve read their letters. I got to know them even better when I decided to adapt one of their novels for the stage.

Turning a book into a play involves the deepest kind of study and sympathetic magic. One becomes a literary safecracker, seeking the combination to unlock a book’s secrets and transpose them into another medium. A successful work of art is like a successful crime; it is an accomplished fact, something as beautifully constructed and functional as a Chase Manhattan bank vault.

Given its place in the canon, Calamity Town would seem like the natural choice for an adaptation. However, I’d originally been drawn to the second Wrightsville novel, The Murderer Is a Fox, in which Ellery reconstructs—and finds the real solution to—a murder that took place over a decade before. The book has a dual time frame that struck me as very theatrical, with the past and the present existing at the same time.

But there was also Calamity Town, a novel I knew well. I must have read it a dozen times over the years. Repeated exposure to the book fostered a greater appreciation of Frederic Dannay’s brilliant use of seasonal celebrations as an organizing principle. Patty Wright tells Ellery near the end of the book: “Every last awful thing that’s happened—happened on a holiday!” Dannay contrasts the warmth and nostalgia we feel for the holidays with cold-blooded criminal behavior.

Manfred B. Lee’s evocative prose captures the look and feel of the town and the emotional highs and lows of its characters. Lee often felt he was the undervalued half of the EQ team, and with some justification. Although Dannay’s awe-inspiring ability to conceive brain-busting plots attracted a great deal of attention, the books wouldn’t exist without Lee. At his best Lee was a fine writer, equally capable of making a Grand Statement and selecting the telling detail.

While I was contemplating which novel to adapt, I saw the Broadway production of The 39 Steps. The show is a very amusing, ninety-minute in-joke about Alfred Hitchcock’s film. I was taken with the unabashed way the production used narration, multiple casting, lighting shifts and an ever-changing, non-realistic setting. What if that approach were used to tell a more serious story? Wrightsville is a town torn apart by murder. Calamity Town presents a panoramic portrait of a town, and it made sense to me to use overtly theatrical devices to characterize Wrightsville and its inhabitants. A theatrical model existed long before The 39 Steps that used similar techniques. I’m speaking of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a play of simple means and dark truths. My adaptation would be Our Town—with murder.

Vertigo Theatre in Calgary, Alberta, recently produced Calamity Town. Co-directors Craig Hall and Nathan Pronyshyn staged the play masterfully. On a raked stage of a blood red-brown, the nine-member cast moved light, specially made chairs and tables to indicate various locations. A sensitive soundscape provided period music and ambient sounds: train stations, crickets, ambulance sirens, the crackle of a tube radio warming up for one of FDR’s fireside chats. Stunning state-of-the-art projections transported the spectator from courtroom to jailhouse to moon-drenched midnight lawn; the effect was highly cinematic. The period-perfect costumes and, above all, the superb acting ensemble, made Wrightsville as real and familiar as your own backyard. Ellery and Patty Wright, dancing to Glenn Miller on the porch of Calamity House . . . John F. Wright’s understated and deeply moving graveyard recitation of Christina Rossetti’s poem “When I Am Dead, My Dearest” . . . Ellery, panama hat on head, suitcase in hand, silhouetted against a vivid blue sky of farewell. . . . These and dozens of other moments and images still resonate with me.

Directly or indirectly, every mystery reminds us that actions have consequences, time is on the wing, death is inevitable, and life is precious beyond belief. Near the end of the novel, we find Ellery looking at the old elms before the new courthouse.

The old was being reborn in multitudes of little

green teeth on brown gums of branches; and

the new already showed weather streaks in its

granite, like varicose veins. There is sadness,

too, in spring, thought Mr. Queen.

Reading the Wrightsville novels and short stories that followed Calamity Town, one is saddened by the changing physical landscape of the town and the surrounding countryside and by the deaths of characters one has come to cherish. The truth of Ellery’s observation is unmistakable.

Calamity Town, the novel, is dear to me. It cemented my affection for Queen’s work. I grew up in a town just about Wrightsville’s size and, even though my hamlet was in southwestern Minnesota, I saw its darkness and light reflected in Ellery’s New England.

Calamity Town, the play, is a labor of love, my tribute to two cousins from Brooklyn whose work is once again finding new readers and admirers. To those who are making their first visit to Calamity Town, I say:

Welcome to Wrightsville, my friends. Ten thousand souls in the shadow of the Mahoganies . . .

Posted in Books, Characters, Ellery Queen, Fiction, Genre, Guest, History, Story | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

“Analog Ellery and the Paperback Hoarder” (by Joseph D’Agnese)

Posted on February 17, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Award-winning journalist Joseph D’Agnese has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other papers, but the dream of writing fiction was born for him in childhood. His first short-story submission, at age twelve, was to EQMM.  It wasn’t until 2012, however, that he began writing short stories regularly and submitting them for publication. Since 2012, he has won a Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society and had a story selected for the Best American Mystery Stories series. Bringing things full circle, last year he submitted a story to EQMM that will appear in our March/April 2016 issue, on sale next week!—Janet Hutchings

There’s a beautiful moment in the life of any reading child when he or she transitions from reading primarily children’s books to reading grown-up books. For me that switch came when I was about ten years old. I arrived one morning at school to find one of my classmates reading a paperback copy of The House of Brass by Ellery Queen. My first thought was, “Oh, so they make books about him, too?”

The fall of 1975 was the year I was in sixth grade. Every Thursday night, I had grown accustomed to watching actor Jim Hutton play Ellery Queen on TV. That short-lived series was just the sort of TV fare a family could watch together. The content was safe, the characters endearing. I loved that moment near the end of every episode when Ellery broke the fourth wall, telling us that we were now in possession of all the clues. Did we know whodunit? Watching from the comfort of our wood-paneled basement in New Jersey, my parents, my brothers, and I took this as our cue to start shouting solutions at the TV.

I loved that show. And although my father had probably mentioned that he used to listen to Ellery Queen on the radio back in the day, I assumed that Ellery was a new creation. That’s why I was so surprised to discover that there was, in fact, an author named Ellery Queen. I asked my friend to loan me his book when he finished, but he couldn’t. He’d promised it to another kid. Apparently everyone was reading Ellery Queen! What kind of friends were these, anyway, not to have mentioned this to me?

No matter. Our school library had a single Queen—a brown-leafed edition of The Siamese Twin Mystery. I read it over the next few days. Oh, it was so good! It was a moderately creepy tale that found Ellery and his father trapped in a country house with conjoined twins, their dead physician father, and numerous suspects. The Ellery in those early books was a little affected, but I don’t recall that bothering me much. Every time I read about Ellery and the inspector, I pictured Jim Hutton and David Wayne.

The local library had more Queen books, but before I borrowed a single one, I found myself struggling with what would develop in my lifetime as a fascination with book cover art and an incorrigible penchant for collecting. The hardcovers in the library were nice, but they were too heavy for my book bag, and the library would expect them back eventually. Plus, I really, really, really loved the look and feel of those shiny paperbacks. Another friend had come to school toting a red-and-pink edition of Face to Face, which I’d instantly coveted.

There was one way out. My brothers and I shared a newspaper route, which entitled me to a third of our profits. To this, my parents kicked in a $1-a-week allowance, which was doled out in most capricious manner, depending on my mother’s mood and our behavior in the previous week.

Suddenly I became the best-behaved, most competent paper boy the world had ever seen. Our local bookstore sold Queen novels for about $1.25. This meant that on my earnings, I could swing one, maybe two books a week. In this way I would satisfy my desire for pristine, colorful paper, and I would supplement my reading with books from the library until the next infusion of cash. Along the way, since this was my first encounter with series fiction, I would pester librarians and the bookseller for some clue as to the chronology of the series.

There were two species of Queen paperbacks in those days. The covers of the ones put out by Ballantine featured an original painting, typically of Ellery in a scene from the book. I liked that Ellery; he seemed like a soulful fellow. He wasn’t Jim Hutton, but he would do. The books published by Signet/NAL featured stylized photography.

At some point in the following year my bookseller informed me that I had read nearly everything she could order for me. The remaining Queens were out of print, a phrase I could not comprehend. If I had managed to lift my head out of my obsession, I would have read the writing on the wall. The TV show was dead in the water. My classmates had moved on to other diversions. It looked like I alone was still committed to Ellery.

With hindsight I can say that I liked the books for various reasons, some immature, some not. Ellery lived with his dad. I lived with my parents. He solved crimes with his dad. Hadn’t I attempted to solve crimes with my parents on those nights in front of the TV?

I came to cherish the Queen hallmarks. The dying clues. The anagrams. The visits to quaint Wrightsville. The scrupulous, fair-play logic. And most of all, the technique of revealing a provably false solution, followed shortly after by a far more diabolical (and correct) solution.

Beyond that, those books offered a compelling yet safe view of the adult world. Specifically, a safe view of Manhattan, the real-life city just across the river from where my family lived, and which would terrify me for years to come. Ellery’s solving of the murder in each book was an attempt to solve a puzzle, but wasn’t it also an act of profound decency? Without knowing it, I was unconsciously absorbing the code of traditional mysteries. As a nervous little kid, I must have found that message comforting.

It would be many years before I realized how strongly those books shaped my own writing. The narrative prose was conversational, detailed, engaging. Queen the writer was unafraid to break the very rules of grammar my teachers were trying to instill in me at the time. There’s one such broken rule in the opening lines of Cat of Many Tails. Which I loved.

The strangling of Archibald Dudley Abernethy was the first scene in a nine-act tragedy whose locale was the City of New York.

Which misbehaved.

But I soon found it increasingly difficult to complete my set of Queens, which pushed me to ridiculous lengths. In the back of the Signet/NAL paperbacks were order forms for titles that I could order directly from something called the New American Library, located in Bergenfield, New Jersey—only a few miles down the road!

I cobbled my money together, cajoled my father into writing a check, and sent my order off. It bounced back to me in a matter of days. A terse note said that they were unable to fulfill my order.

One afternoon when my parents and brothers weren’t around, I dug out my parents’ phonebook, looked up the number, and rang them up. I described my problem to the woman who answered. Why had they not sent me my books?

“We just don’t have them in stock anymore,” she said.

“Where are you located? Can I come visit your store?”

“We’re not a store. We’re a warehouse.”

This threw me. Their name was confusing enough. First, they were a library claiming to sell books. Now, they weren’t a store at all. I hung up, bewildered.

For a couple of years, I’d walk into bookstores, go directly to the mystery section, search the Q’s, and walk away dejected. I’d prowl flea markets and used book sales in search of those missing Q’s. Years later I would read how the dearth of Queen novels had lasted for decades, and has only recently been corrected by the issuing of e-books of the old titles. But this is how that long malaise felt to me, a fan on the ground. I was trapped in an analog world without the power of the Internet to broaden my search, and I lacked the savvy (and deeper pockets) to enlist the help of a rare book dealer.

One day I was seized by a highly original thought: This was crazy, but I could try reading one of those other books in the mystery section, couldn’t I? By then I was in high school, studying both Latin and Italian. I’d begun noticing a series of books whose covers almost cried out to be translated with my newfound skills in those languages. Let’s see, I thought. Rex means King, and Stout means fat. Nero means black, and . . .

Let’s just see what this kingly, fat, black wolf book was all about.

Posted in Books, Ellery Queen, Fiction, Genre, History, Novels | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

“Playful Ghoulishness of a Crime Queen: The Short Fiction of P.D. James” (by R.T. Raichev)

Posted on February 10, 2016 by somethingisgoingtohappen
R.T. Raichev is a lifelong fan of English crime fiction, even writing his university dissertation on the subject. His own fiction, which includes nine books in a classical whodunit series starring crime writer Antonia Darcy and her husband Major Payne, has received wide critical praise and comparisons to Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, and P.D. James. R.T. (Raicho) grew up in Bulgaria but has lived in London since 1989. He debuts in EQMM in our current issue (February 2016) and we have another of his stories coming up. Readers also won’t want to miss the latest Darcy/Payne novel, The Killing of Olga Klimt.—Janet Hutchings
R. T. Raichev; photo courtesy of the author

R. T. Raichev; photo courtesy of the author

The journalist Barbara C. Sealcock from the Chicago Tribune tells a story about interviewing P.D. James back in March 1985. As the two women were leaving James’s Boston apartment after tea, the famous author paused in the vestibule at a large black carved chest, lifted the lid and peered in. “This,” she said, “is where the bodies would be found.” Sealcock describes the moment as “pure Hitchcockian.”

I quote this mildly amusing anecdote because it suggests a kind of ghoulish playfulness on the part of Baroness James, of the kind not often found in her novels. Indeed British journalist Polly Toynbee has described James’s oeuvre as “sombre and scientific.” James—who died in November 2014—wrote twenty distinguished novels, an account of a Victorian real-life murder case, a play, a memoir, and an incisive analysis of the detective story. She has earned special praise for her psychological acuity, for transcending the limitations of the pure detective puzzle and moving into the realm of the novel proper, for being a serious writer worthy of a Booker nomination. She has been hailed as the mistress of the moral conundrum. But James also wrote a dozen short stories, all of which demonstrate a “lighter” side—a delight in experimentation, grotesquery and a mischievous penchant for bamboozling as well as shocking the reader.

I personally prefer James lite to the novels, most of which tend to be too “baroque” for my taste. The short stories James wrote between 1967 and 2006 manage to be at once sparklingly clever and darkly entertaining while the prose is what aficionados and cognoscenti have come to expect from her novels: extremely sophisticated, evocative, and inventive. I can’t resist giving an example of the latter. This is how a seemingly nondescript woman manages to startle the narrator of A Very Desirable Residence: “She gave me a swift elliptical glance . . . as astonishing as turning over an amateurish Victorian oil and discovering a Corot.”

What follows is an annotated list with my own very personal ratings of all of James’s 11 available short stories. There is a twelfth, “The Death of Memories,” published in something called The Red Book, which I haven’t been able to track down.

“Moment of Power” 1968, in EQMM

James’s first published short story, six years after her debut novel Cover Her Face. It won the 1st prize of the CWA contest sponsored by EQMM. An elderly man, “seedy . . . with his air of spurious gentility . . . neither a pilgrim nor a penitent”, revisits the place of a terrible event “under some compulsion he hadn’t even bothered to analyse.” If this description brings to mind Graham Greene—a writer whom James greatly admired—what follows is pure Hitchcock. (Think Rear Window crossed with Norman Bates watching Janet Leigh through a hole in the wall in Psycho.) The event in question is a murder that took place 16 years earlier. The elderly man is called Ernest Gabriel (“an odd name, half common, half fancy”) and it turns out he had been playing Peeping Tom, spying from his window on a couple in the building opposite. James offers a fascinating exploration of the murkier and more chilling instincts of the human mind. 5/5

“The Victim” 1973, in Winter’s Crime 5, London, Macmillan (first U.S. publication EQMM, 1984)

An “inverted” detective tale, as pioneered by Francis Iles, and the first of two stories of obsession and revenge. (“I couldn’t go on living in a world where he breathed the same air. My mind fed voraciously on the thought of his death, savoured it, began systematically and with dreadful pleasure to plan it . . . . Once a week as a special treat I would sharpen the knife to an even keener edge.”) The killer, a librarian by profession, is a strange and disturbing blend of the banal and the outlandish. In loving detail he informs the reader exactly how he set about killing the man who stole his bewitchingly beautiful wife from him. (Born a mere Elsie Bowman she later becomes Princess Ilsa Mancelli.) After the murder the wronged husband feels “drained of thought and energy . . . as if I had just made love.” One can’t help remembering Hitchcock’s words, “I shoot murder scenes as if they are love scenes and love scenes as if they are murder scenes.” The Victim would have made a good Hitchcock film. 4/5

“Murder 1986” 1975, in Ellery Queen’s Masters of Mystery, New York, Davis

A standalone and something of a curiosity as it is set in the bleakest of futures. It bears a number of similarities to James’s 1992 dystopian novel The Children of Men. (Both story and novel end with a tense confrontation between two men each pointing a gun at the other. This predates Tarantino.) The story was clearly inspired by Orwell (a Big-Brother-like “Leader” has a regular slot on TV) and Huxley (an embittered character spits out the words “brave new world”). In James’s 1986, society is divided into two groups: the superior Normals and Ipdics, carriers of the deadly “Disease,” which has destroyed most of the world’s population. The Ipdics are “inferior, unorganised, easily cowed.” When it comes to the murder of the title, its unravelling is pleasingly old-fashioned, made possible by Sergeant Dolby’s acute observational skills and the power of his grey cells. And there is a final devastating revelation in the very last paragraph of the story. NB Practically all the other of James’s short stories are about murder in the past. 4/5

“A Very Desirable Residence” 1977, Winter’s Crimes 8, Macmillan, London (first U.S. publication EQMM, 1991)

Murder of a schoolmaster—‘a middle-aged, disagreeable and not very happy pedant”—or what amounts to murder—to disclose more would be to spoil the surprise of the rather Machiavellian murder scheme. Shades of Roger Ackroyd—and another darkly ironic ending, in some ways similar to the one of The Victim, reinforcing the idea of the female of the species being deadlier than the male. The motive for the crime is in the title and it is not so dissimilar to the killer’s motive in Agatha Christie’s After the Funeral. NB While admiring Christie’s “conjuror’s art” James was far from enthusiastic about her writing skills. 4/5

“Great Aunt Allie’s Fly-Papers” 1979, in Verdict of 13, A Detection Club Anthology, London, Collins (first U.S. publication EQMM, 1991, retitled “The Boxdale Inheritance”)

A historical whodunit, the only short story to feature James’s regular detective Commander Adam Dalgliesh, my own favourite and one of the very best. Dalgliesh, like Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant, investigates a murder in the distant past (pre-1914). The murder method is arsenic from fly papers soaked and used as beauty treatment (possibly inspired by the Madeleine Smith case). The interaction between the characters and the intricate plot show James at her most masterly and adroit. Dalgliesh manages to formulate a theory as to what happened at that fatal Edwardian Christmas party—but then he discovers there is a survivor—one of the participants is still alive, albeit very, very old, very ill, and in hospital. (“Here in the silence of the aseptic corridor Dalgliesh could smell death.”) The actual solution is completely unexpected as the killer turns out to be “the one person nobody considered.” And there is a last rather wonderful twist when a linen handkerchief is produced, “still stiff and stained with brown”, and placed in the Commander’s hand. 5/5

“The Murder of Santa Claus” 1983, in Great Detectives, New York, Pantheon Books

The first of two stylish takes on the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. A house-party murder that takes place in 1939, in the first months of the phony war. A villainous host (a bully, a cad, and a blackmailer) is stabbed on Christmas Eve while wearing a Father Christmas costume after receiving a threatening rhyme in a Christmas cracker. It is tempting to mention that 1939 was the year Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot’s Christmas was published. James’s story also brings to mind not only Ngaio Marsh’s 1961 Tied Up in Tinsel, in which the murder victim (a Colonel’s valet) was also dressed up as Santa Claus, but several other Marsh novels, in which a series of malicious pranks are a prelude to murder. The narrator is a crime writer remembering the time he had witnessed a real-life killing. Atmospheric and scrupulously clued, the story could easily have been expanded into a full-length novel, had Baroness James put her mind to it. Contains several post-modern and slightly parodic self-references—at one point the narrator says, “I was not an H.R.F.Keating nor a Dick Francis, not even a P.D.James . . .” NB By setting five of her stories when capital punishment was still practiced in Britain, James manages to ratchet up extra suspense and tension. 5/5

“The Girl Who Loved Graveyards” 1983, Winter’s Crimes 15, London, Macmillan (first U.S. publication EQMM, 1991)

As creepily Gothic as the necrophiliac title suggests, though there is an extremely interesting and entirely plausible reason for the main character’s obsession with graveyards. (“She made the cemetery her own . . . it was to remain a place of delight and mystery, her habitation and her solace.”) A disturbing event back in 1956 has caused “the girl” (we never learn her name) to suffer loss of memory and develop a morbid taste for “the earthy tang . . . as if the dead were breathing the flower-scented air and exuding their own mysterious miasma.” In later life she goes on a quest to find out what exactly happened. Did her father and “toad-like” grandmother really die of flu? The story has some affinity with Hitchcock’s Spellbound in which an amnesiac adult also seeks obsessively for what lies behind his fear of sharp objects. But the ending of James’s story is infinitely more shocking than that of Hitchcock’s film! Watch out for the cat Sambo and its role in the gruesome event. 5/5

“The Mistletoe Murder” 1991, in The Spectator magazine, London

Another whodunit set at Christmas and the narrator is again a crime writer—a female one this time, a young widow who, one suspects, has something of P.D. James about her. The year this time is 1940 and the War is very much on. (Blackout window curtains are important to the plot.) A small house party at Turville Manor in Hampshire ends in murder. The victim is again—in the best Golden Age tradition—highly unsympathetic, a greedy and ruthless blackmailer. The snowbound country estate, a uniformed cousin and references to battles raging off stage bring to mind Ngaio Marsh’s 1942 Death and the Dancing Footman. The solution is contained in the very last sentence. (Shades of Christianna Brand.) NB It is interesting that four of James’s murders take place during the season of cheer and goodwill. Perhaps Poirot is right when he says in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, that it is a time when “. . . there will occur a great deal of strain . . . great pressure . . . to appear amiable . . . under these conditions it is highly probable that dislikes and disagreements that were trivial suddenly assume a more serious character . . .” 5/5

“The Man Who Was Eighty” 1992, The Man Who . . . , London, Macmillan (first U.S. publication EQMM, 1993)

The story was written for a celebratory collection on the occasion of Julian Symons’s 80th birthday. (Symons, at the time the doyen critic-cum-commentator of English detective fiction, had written several novels with The Man Who . . . in the title.) Here we see James at her most surprisingly skittish. The title of another Symons novel The Criminal Comedy of the Contented Couple could easily be given to this James story—though here the contented couple are not a husband and wife but a prosperous brother and sister who enjoy a Daimler-and-Poulilly-Fusse lifestyle. During a visit to their father at his luxurious nursing home, the impossible old man—who had driven away ‘a succession of housekeepers, except those who had been alcoholic, mad or kleptomaniac’—now confesses to murder. His name is Augustus Maybrick and he claims to have used arsenic to poison his brother—which suggests another post-modern joke. (Mrs. Maybrick was the notorious Victorian poisoner.) In Bloody Murder, his history of the detective genre, Symons says of James, “She would have been a distinguished representative of the Golden Age, to set beside Marsh and Allingham. It is the pressures of the times that has made her a modern.” 3/5

“Hearing Ghote” 2005, in The Verdict of Us All, London, A&B

James wrote this story for another tribute collection, commemorating fellow crime writer and critic H.R.F. Keating’s 80th birthday this time. It is Christmastime and an unpopular prep school master (a Mr. Michaelmas) is pushed off a cliff. The murder is witnessed by the pupil whom the master was accompanying on his journey to the manor belonging to the boy’s grandmother. The boy is the narrator and he is reading an Inspector Ghote mystery—one of H.R.F. Keating’s offerings—and decides not to give away the killer—whose action seems justified. Does Ghote stand for making controversial moral choices and erring on the side of kindness? For those unfamiliar with the Indian detective, that seems to be the implication. I personally thought Ghote’s formative influence on the boy—who grows up to be not only a detective story writer but a man of compassion as well—somewhat forced. Surely the story would have had a broader appeal without the boy “hearing Ghote”? NB This is the third James story in which a crime writer tells the reader of journalists asking him whether he has ever witnessed a murder at first hand. 3/5 (3 Minus)

“The Part-time Job” 2006, in The Detection Collection, London, Orion

One must mention the remarkable fact that what is surely James’s short story masterpiece was written when she was in her 85th year. (Compare to Christie’s sadly muddled last short story “The Harlequin Tea-set” written when Dame Agatha was 80.) “The Part-time Job” starts with the tantalising line, “By the time you read this I shall be dead.” What follows is an unsettling account of obsession and long-drawn-out revenge (a favourite theme with James, it would seem) told once more in the first person, by the killer. The narrator makes up his mind to commit this particular murder when he is 12 and he never changes his decision over the next 25 years. (This one puts you in mind of Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.”) It is the 1950s and the victim is the man who bullied the narrator at school, though the actual lethal revenge is not quite what you might think. Even when we believe we know what is going to happen, even after we have seen it happen, James delivers a staggering coup. The clue is in the title. The nature of the part-time job is revealed in the final paragraph. (So simple, so subtle, so chilling.) Baroness James’s last story, like her first, was deservedly awarded the CWA’s first prize—one can imagine James approving of the full circle, of the symmetry, of the neatness of the pattern. NB Given that she was a devout Anglican, a Conservative peer, and for a time a Magistrate in Middlesex and London, it is curious that ten out of her eleven murderers are, for various reasons, allowed to remain unpunished by the Law. 5/5 (Alpha Plus)

It seems incredible that her short stories haven’t been yet collected and published in one volume.

Actually, Baroness James did have a dead body discovered in a freezer—which comes very close to a chest—in her 2008 novel The Private Patient.

Posted in Characters, Fiction, Genre, Guest, History, Story, Writers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments