“Inspired to Travel!” (by Joan Richter)

Posted on January 29, 2014 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Not many mystery writers can claim to have had Ellery Queen as their writing instructor, but Joan Richter was not only a student but a star pupil of Frederic Dannay (half the Ellery Queen team). He liked her work so much that he published two of her stories in a single issue for her EQMM debut. Joan’s stories in subsequent years often took place in foreign settings, and it’s easy to see why as she recounts her travel experiences here. In 2011, a collection of seventeen of her short stories, set in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the U.S., appeared under the title The Gambling Master of Shanghai and Other Tales of Suspense. Her latest story for EQMM will appear in our September/October 2014 double issue. —Janet Hutchings

With the recent anniversary of JFK’s death I was reminded of that fateful November 1963, the month that my family moved to Washington, D.C., from New York City where we had lived all our lives. My husband, Dick, who had been with CBS News as a writer for Walter Cronkite and other anchors, resigned to join the Peace Corps. He was to be an evaluator of their overseas programs. His first trip was to Somalia, a country not so well known then. He flew from Dulles airport to Nairobi with plans to continue to Mogadishu the following day. At midnight there was a knock on his door. Another American staying at the New Stanley Hotel had come to tell him that our president had been assassinated.

There were no cell phones in those days, so it was only after my husband’s return that we were able to talk about the tragedy that had affected so many. He stayed with the Peace Corps as an evaluator for two years, visiting eight other countries, among them Afghanistan and Kenya. During that time I took my first overseas trip and met him in Dakar, Senegal, flying from D.C. to London, Paris, Venice, and Rome and from there to Dakar. It was a heady, informative trip.

At the end of his two years, what we wanted most was to be together as a family. Since we were still captivated by the idea of the Peace Corps, we set out for Kenya where Dick was deputy director of the program for the next two years, 1965-67. Up until then my only publishing credits were two short stories I had written in a creative writing class in a New York City suburb, given by EQMM’s first editor, Frederic Dannay. They appeared in 1962 in the section of EQMM called the Department of First Stories.

During our time in Kenya, I wrote a novel, Dawn in Dakar, which never made it into print, but I gathered ideas for short stories, which I later wrote. Life was pleasant in Kenya. It was a safe and secure period, with the Mau Mau uprising a thing of the past, and the country eager to establish itself. We had a modest house in a suburb of Nairobi, with a large garden, abundant with flowers that were exotic to me then. There were bottle brush trees and jacarandas and bougainvillea of all colors cascading over stone walls. There was an avocado tree outside our kitchen door.

We had two servants. Stephan had worked for Europeans before, spoke English fairly well, also Swahili, and knew how to cook and take care of a house. Mosoto was of the same tribe as Stephan and worked in the garden. I had learned some Swahili and so with a little bit of patience we were able to communicate. I published two stories that were sparked by our time in that house.

We enrolled our boys in Hospital Hill School, a short drive from our house. It was formerly British, but when Kenya gained its independence from Britain in l963 it switched from admitting only Europeans to including African and Asian students. Our boys had friends of all nationalities and colors. Picking them up at the end of the school day, I often stopped at Westlands, a small shopping center that had a bakery that sold oatmeal cookies, samosas, and sausage rolls. There was also a barbershop where our boys got their haircuts. Long after we were gone, this tiny shopping area became a high-end mall, and in 2013 was the brutal target of Al Shabaab. Times have changed, in ways we could not have imagined.

We learned to drive on the left-hand side of the road and traveled throughout East Africa, which embraced Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. At that time the three countries shared the same currency, the same postal system, and the same airline. On weekends we went to a game park close to Nairobi, where herds of zebra roamed free, along with wildebeest, a variety of gazelles, giraffe, lion, and leopard. Longer journeys took us up-country to visit volunteers and to larger game parks where we found elephants and herds of Cape buffalo.

We had been in Kenya less than a month when a Peace Corps Volunteer was reported missing. He had come to Nairobi from his post far up country to have four wisdom teeth extracted. After recuperating for a few days he was to meet my husband at the airport and they were to fly to where the volunteer was stationed. The volunteer never showed up. A manhunt was organized. I was assigned to go with a volunteer who knew the area we were to search and we set out in a Land Rover, north towards Lake Nakuru, where thousands of pink flamingoes rimmed the shore. We followed a route the missing volunteer often frequented, checking likely stops along the way. We were gone most of the day, but returned with no news, as was the case with others involved in the search. Then two days later a scientist interested in the rock hyrax, a small animal the size of a guinea pig and related in some odd way to the elephant, had been searching a rocky wooded area and came upon torn pieces of clothing, a book by Ian Fleming, and the lower jaw of a human being. Because of the recent dentist visit, the remains were identified. The cause of his death remained a mystery, but the supposition was that he might have taken too many pain pills, passed out, and became the victim of jackals and hyenas.

Having had one experience with a volunteer’s death, it seemed unlikely that there would be another. Then out of the blue, the Peace Corps director of a neighboring country cabled a request for a coffin and the recommendation of a pathologist. What followed was a complicated trial, charging one volunteer with the murder of another. After many months of testimony and deliberation the verdict of not guilty was issued.

At the end of our two-year term, we returned home to suburban New York City, Dick to continue with his television career, our boys to reenter American schools. I began working as a writer, and in 1967 Intruder in the Maize, a short story set in Africa was published in EQMM. I became a stringer for the New York Times Metropolitan section, and wrote an occasional feature article, which led to a job at The Trib, a start-up newspaper in Manhattan, where I became the assistant Travel Editor. I was sent on a trip to Tunisia, where I met Jack Connors, the president of American Express Publishing and publisher of Travel & Leisure. He asked me why I had taken a job with a paper that was doomed to failure. My answer was that my sons were now in their teens and I was eager to go back to work. “Smart move,” he said and gave me his card, telling me to call him when The Trib folded, which turned out to be less than a month away.

I was with American Express for ten years. During that time I was Director of Public Affairs. One of my assignments was to work with the Africa Travel Association, which took me to Gabon, Gambia, Senegal, Togo, and Zambia. Gambia was the source for an op ed piece I wrote for the New York Times and a short story, The River’s Child, which appeared in EQMM in 1999. I represented the company at the United Nations World Tourism Organization and attended conferences in Manila, New Delhi, Spain, Bulgaria, Paris, London, and China. A special assignment sent me on a five-week trip through Asia, beginning with Australia, then on to Bali, Thailand, and Taiwan.

There is no question that our time with the Peace Corps had a major influence on our family. The years we spent in Africa opened the world to us, spurred us to travel further, and begin to think of ourselves as internationalists. Our older son, Dave, is fluent in Mandarin, lived in China for ten years, and continues to use his knowledge of Asia in his business. Our younger son, Rob, works in the creative arts field, travels to international festivals to find artists and arrange for them to come to the U. S. to perform.

In 1996 my husband was appointed president of Radio Free Asia, created by the U. S. Congress and charged with broadcasting to those countries in Asia which had no freedom of expression and no access to objective news about their own countries – Burma, Cambodia, China, Tibet, Laos, Vietnam, and North Korea. RFA opened up another part of the world to us and we traveled extensively throughout the region during the ten years he held that job.

In 2009 we left the East Coast and moved to a retirement community in Issaquah, a suburb of Seattle. We can see the snowcapped Cascade Mountains from our living room windows and at night often hear the high-pitched howls and yelps of coyotes. I hear this as a prompt for me to set a story in the wild Northwest.

Posted in Adventure, Books, Ellery Queen, Fiction, Guest, History, International, Setting, Writers, Writing | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

WHAT’S IN A WORD?

Posted on January 22, 2014 by somethingisgoingtohappen

This is my first post since the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, and that day always seems to bring to mind for me some of the ways that words, both in literature and ordinary life, can impact social change. In the 1990s, MWA, through the vote of its membership, compiled a list of the “Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time.” Number sixty on the list was Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel that belongs, of course, to the mainstream of American literature as well as to crime fiction. Although it proved to be one of the bestselling novels of all time, that book was banned from many schools and libraries as soon as it began to enter curriculums in the mid 1960s. Objections to the book ranged from its depiction of an interracial attraction to its racial slurs. And it certainly isn’t the only classic of American literature tugged at by such opposing forces for censorship. In 2010, Huckleberry Finn was reissued in an edition expurgating offensive racial terms, but when it was first published, it was its use of words perceived inappropriate to polite society, like “sweat,” that kept it off shelves.

Partly as a result of the Civil Rights Movement, over the past fifty years most Americans have become more sensitive about the use of words that could insult or offend. Speaking of her childhood reading of Huckleberry Finn and her encounter with its use of what is almost universally referred to now as the ‘N word,’ author Toni Morrison has said: “Embarrassing as it had been to hear the dread word spoken, and therefore sanctioned, in class, my experience of Jim’s epithet had little to do with my initial nervousness the book had caused.” She describes being at times “embarrassed, bored, and annoyed” by the word’s use, but never fazed by it. Children sometimes seem to grasp better than adults that the power of a word lies in its context and intention, and it seems to me that this is one of many arguments that could be put forth for leaving a masterpiece of children’s literature like Twain’s as written—especially since that particular book aimed to expose not sanction the racism of its day. We can understand, though, why adults would want to protect children from the impact of words with a long history of intent to wound, and for that reason I doubt this issue with regard to literature will ever be laid to rest. The fact that it has become entirely unacceptable throughout most of our society to use words that involve racial or ethnic slurs not only in business and government but in private discourse has probably helped to make our country more tolerant. But what do we say about a work of literature that seeks to represent society as it is, that aims to capture the way that people really speak? How does one balance the desire to deprive corrupting and offensive speech from having continued currency with the need to portray what is—or in the case of an historical work was—really there?

A number of years ago, I received a cancellation letter from a subscriber who was the mother of a deaf child. We had just published Florence Mayberry’s “The Secret,” a tale told from the point of view of a young girl. Speaking of neighbors for whom she clearly has affection, the child narrator says, “ . . . you had to look right at them and move your lips slow, or use deaf-and-dumb talk with your hands like Miss Abbie did.” Our subscriber wrote that she was reduced to tears on reading that expression “deaf-and-dumb talk” and others like it in the story. For fear that her daughter might pick up the issue and read it, she destroyed it and informed us she could no longer trust what we might send to their home.

It’s easy to forget how different the use of language pertaining to all sorts of minorities, not only racial and ethnic ones, was prior to the Civil Rights Movement—to forget that other groups, based on gender, disability, and sexual orientation, were inspired by the struggle for racial equality to demand not only changes in laws but in language. The word “dumb” (in the sense of “mute”) had so thoroughly disappeared from accepted usage by the 1990s, when this story was published, that I felt it necessary to point out, in my reply letter to our subscriber, that the story had a historical setting that dated back to a time when this was the widely accepted way of referring to someone without oral speech—and that it had not been intended, in most contexts, to insult. Certainly not in the way that racial epithets are intended to insult.

This was to me a clear-cut case of potentially hurtful language being necessary for the story—and it was a story I thought deserved to be published—to be believable. But that didn’t mean I didn’t sympathize with the reader or that I failed to take the implied point that there is a relationship of trust that must exist between the editor of a subscription-based magazine and his or her readership. Had Florence Mayberry’s story been published in a book rather than a magazine, the reader, if disturbed, could simply have taken the decision never to buy a book containing work by the offending author again. Readers of a subscription magazine, however, are not making their own buying decisions. They don’t know what’s going to be coming up in the next issue; they have to trust the buyer of the fiction that’s being delivered to their door—and that, of course, is the editor. I had violated this reader’s trust, and it was something that bothered me even though I thought I’d made the right decision in publishing the story. It’s possible that at the more “literary” end of the fiction spectrum, this sort of problem of balancing readers’ sensitivities and the artistic demands of the fiction itself occurs less frequently. With a broad-based popular-fiction magazine like EQMM, it comes up often, and it causes me to think that we may have become over-sensitized to the potential derogatory connotations of expressions that most often are actually used in a purely descriptive way.

Curiously, that hypersensitivity about the use of language in some areas of our culture coexists with what I find to be some very reckless and harmful uses of language in the current political realm. Think of the way the word “evil” has reemerged in the past couple of decades. Politicians have come to savor this word, using it in reference to one foreign regime after another, and to denounce those on the other side of all sorts of important issues (“evil Obamacare” and “evil cuts to unemployment benefits” are two instances I’ve seen recently). But it’s not just politicians and cable news commentators with whom that word is becoming more popular. It may seem odd for a mystery editor to object to careless use of that particular word. After all, crime fiction often turns on an uncompromising division of the world into good and evil. An article in the New Yorker a couple of years ago about Swedish crime writer Stieg Larsson speculated that one of the reasons for the phenomenal popularity of his books is precisely that, morally speaking, he acknowledges no shades of gray: “the truly innocent at the mercy of the truly evil . . . the absolutist morals of Larsson’s books . . . may be a powerful selling point,” the article’s author, Joan Acocella, remarked. But why, I wonder, is that kind of moral absolutism proving so popular in fiction now? Could it be that the kind of language that prevails in a culture solidifies a type of thinking? The belief that it does was, after all, the reason people fought so hard to change the way minorities were referred to.

I find moral absolutism, and therefore the kind of language that entrenches it, disturbing. Moral perspectives that admit no shades of gray take us further from King’s dream of transforming “the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood,” since absolutists obviously do not all agree on what is black and what is white. Words matter. Had Dr. King been less eloquent, less attuned to the many shades of meaning words carry, he might not have been able to transform our nation the way he did. If only more of our current public figures remembered that.—Janet Hutchings

Posted in Books, Business, Editing, Fiction, History, Magazine, Politics, Writers, Writing | 6 Comments

MAGZTER FLASH SALE ON E-EDITIONS

Posted on January 17, 2014 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Magzter FLASH SaleStart your weekend off right with the Magzter FLASH Sale! Get 50% off a one-year subscription from now through January 20th.

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“The Writer Cop” (by O’Neil De Noux)

Posted on January 15, 2014 by somethingisgoingtohappen
O’Neil De Noux has been a regular contributor to EQMM for more than twenty years. He’s written both historical mysteries and contemporary police procedurals for us, and his wider work includes science fiction and mainstream historicals. His superb sense of place is often noted by critics. An example of it can be found in his December 2012 story for EQMM, “Misprision of Felony,” which was selected for that year’s volume of Best American Mystery Stories. In the course of his career, the Louisiana author has also won a Shamus Award for best short story and a Derringer Award for best novelette. He is the author of sixteen novels, many of them featuring the characters who appear in his short stories. This long list of literary accomplishments goes side by side with a full-time career as a police detective, and in this post, O’Neil discusses how his two careers come together. —Janet Hutchings

There are advantages and disadvantages to being a cop-turned-writer.

Advantages? We know the life. We know how a cop thinks, how a cop talks, what a cop will do, and we write from there. We are eyewitnesses who must learn how to write good fiction to get the stories out there. So we start a little ahead, but until we learn how to write all we have are anecdotes.

Disadvantages? It’s hard for us to cut corners, just like in real life. We have to solve the crimes as real cops do and sometimes it isn’t that interesting. That’s why learning to be a good fiction writer is paramount. We have to know how to add excitement to mundane procedures. The dean of our field, Joseph Wambaugh, taught us this lesson we should never forget.

Another disadvantage is publishing’s perception of police officers in fiction. Some agents and editors think television cops are real, that cops beat up prisoners all the time, violate people’s rights, shoot everyone they can. Real cops like that end up in the penitentiary. Then again, a good story outranks reality. We are writing fiction, so when I read about a cop who’s over the top, well that’s fiction. It’s just a little harder for us to write. We need to learn how to do this effectively. My recurring character John Raven Beau is larger than life and has shot far too many people in my fiction. It took awhile, but I learned.

The reaction of the first agent I approached when I finished my first novel Grim Reaper surprised me. The agent told me if I was going to write police novels, I needed to brush up on police procedures. I thought grammar was my problem. After all, I’d been a police officer for over a dozen years, including three hard years as a homicide detective next door to the murder capital of America at the time—New Orleans.

I wrote back and the agent told me there were no chalk marks around the bodies in my book, no descriptions of super-forensic techniques that lead the police to catch the criminal. My detectives did not even use deductive reasoning.

That’s because real police detectives do not draw chalk marks around bodies, dig bullets from walls with pen knives, or alter a crime scene at all. Super-forensic techniques are TV and movie magic and a homicide detective who uses deductive reasoning isn’t going to solve many murders. We use inductive reasoning, conclusions from observations of facts to arrive at a solution that fits all of the evidence. Amateurs, including many fictional detectives, use deductive reasoning, arriving at a specific conclusion from a general assumption. In other words, inductive reasoning involves relying on facts and only facts until only one conclusion is possible.

Now this does not mean a writer cannot have a detective use deductive reasoning or draw a chalk mark around a body. Fiction outranks reality in a short story or novel. It’s hard for writers like me to do this because, frankly, we know better. I’ve yet to find an emergency room doctor who liked ER, or a homicide detective who likes CSI.

A distinct advantage of being a cop-turned-writer is how we have witnessed human cruelty first hand. We’ve smelled gunpowder at crime scenes, along with the coppery scent of fresh blood. We’ve seen unspeakable carnage. We’ve felt that bruising of the spirit, the deadening of emotions necessary to be able to do the job. There’s no psychiatric term for the cumulative effect on those of us who work the long blue line. My buddies call it “the purple side of blue.” I wrote a story with that title once, then realized I’ve been writing about the purple side of blue in most of my novels as well. This insight is something unique we bring to the story.

We cop writers must remember the basics:

A Good Plot Is the Backbone of the Police Story. A well-plotted scenario will allow the writer to create memorable characters, unforgettable scenes, uniquely described settings—so long as the writer does not forget to follow normal police procedures. Deviation from the norm removes credibility from your story. Strive for believability.

Keep it Action Oriented. Although real police investigations include long, sometimes grueling days of unending canvasses, surveillances, and dead-end leads, you should be selective in order to keep your story moving forward. Short scenes featuring crisp dialogue can streamline the most mundane parts of an investigation. Leave out the boring parts.

Create Well-rounded Characters. As in all fiction, character is the heart of the story. Although the hero of the police procedural is usually a police officer, they are real people existing in a familiar world. What happens to them is extraordinary.

Create a Distinctive Setting. The setting is the skeleton your story is built around. It is more than just the description of a place or time period. It is the feeling of that place and time. Give the reader a distinct, well-rounded setting stressing sensory details: the sharp smell of gunpowder, the salty taste of blood, the tacky feeling of rubber grips on a .357 magnum when the hero’s hand sweats.

Accurate Language Adds Credibility. Through dialogue, you have an excellent opportunity to create emotion, from scintillating nails-on-the-blackboard passages uttered by creepy serial killers, to hard-nosed talk between overworked detectives.

Be Realistic. Make sure of your facts. Revolvers do not have safeties, nor can a silencer be used on one. Detectives take notes. How many times have you seen a movie or read a book showing a detective taking notes? I’ve been a detective for sixteen years. I never shot anyone, but I certainly killed a lot of pens. A pen is the detective’s most useful tool and mightiest weapon. Every killer on death row began his or her long trek through the criminal justice system with a homicide detective taking notes at a crime scene.

A Definite Resolution Helps. Don’t cheat the reader out of an ending to your story. Police cases end, usually with an arrest and trial, sometimes with a shootout. This is a natural climatic event. Even cases that are suspended or closed without a solution have a climatic moment, when the investigators come face to face with the nightmare of someone getting away with murder. In your resolution, you should remember that something is usually affirmed. Good triumphs over evil, or at least goes the distance.

Posted in Characters, Editing, Fiction, Genre, Guest, Police Procedurals, Setting, Story, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

“What Happens Next Is F-Sharp” (by Stephen Ross)

Posted on January 8, 2014 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Stephen Ross made his fiction debut in EQMM’s Department of First Stories in June 2006. Since then, he’s gone on to write many fine stories in the mystery and science fiction genres, including one for AHMM in 2010 (“Monsieur Alice Is Absent”) that earned a nomination for the Edgar Allan Poe Award. His latest short story for EQMM will appear in our September/October 2014 double issue. The New Zealand author is currently working on a short film, which he describes as a “sci-fi/psychological thriller.” He is not only writing and directing the movie, he is composing its music. But as you’ll see, music and writing are both central to Stephen’s life.—Janet Hutchings

When I was thirteen, every Tuesday afternoon after school I had piano lessons. My piano teacher lived about two miles away, and to get to his house, I had to ride my bicycle down an alleyway that connected streets. The alleyway was a long, narrow strip of concrete lined with overgrown grass and the high wooden fences of suburban backyards.

One day, during the summer, I noticed a dead man in that overgrown, sun-baked grass. I came to a stop, one foot on the pavement, one foot on a pedal, and stared at the body.

“Hey, Mister,” I shouted.

This was Henderson, in the west of Auckland, New Zealand, in the summer, in my childhood. Dead bodies were not a typical occurrence.

After what seemed like forever, the dead man rolled over and regarded me with drunken contempt. He told me, with a hearty gust of fricative enunciation, to go forth from that place.

The other significant event of that day was that I learnt to play Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette. As I picked out the melody, my piano teacher explained that it was most recognizable as Alfred Hitchcock’s signature tune.

I didn’t readily know the piece, but I certainly knew Hitchcock. For at least two years (and since my father’s acquisition of a Super-8 movie camera), I had wanted to be a film director. Hitchcock was my God.

Stephen Ross with movie camera, age fifteen.

Stephen Ross with movie camera, age fifteen.

I immediately seized upon the incident in the alley as an idea for a movie. I even thumped out some themes on the piano for my intended musical score.

Thumping out film music had long been a hobby of mine. I used to play along to TV shows (mystery shows, mostly, like the Jim Hutton series of Ellery Queen), improvising an accompaniment like a silent movie pianist. My record collection at that point consisted primarily of soundtrack records, and I’m 99% certain I was doing the menacing semitone repetition at the bottom end of the keyboard at least a year before John Williams used it for Jaws.

So, I had an idea for my directorial debut and a few keyboard riffs for the music. But then I hit a bump in the road. What happened next? A kid on the bicycle discovers a dead man in an alley . . . and then what?

What I had was merely a setup. Nothing more.

I had the startling realization that a plot was:

  1. Something happens
  2. Something else happens after that

What I had discovered for myself was the tip of an iceberg—the storytelling iceberg. The biggest iceberg in the ocean, on whose icy walls many a story had been dashed and many a writer marooned.

And before the iceberg analogy melts, may I add that every story we ever begin sets sail with the name Titanic bolted to it. Until we learn to alter course somewhere in its journey. And let me tell you, I have enough chunks of ice on my desk to supply every bar in Manhattan at New Year, and that my stock of cubes shows no sign of diminishing.

The infinite possibilities of what could happen next made my thirteen-year-old head spin. Anything at all could happen.

  • The kid could find the dead body in the alley and realize that it’s his father, or his brother, or his math teacher, or Richard Nixon, or the Pope.
  • The murderer might have dropped his wallet at the scene of the crime and, returning to retrieve it, come face-to-face with the kid.
  • The kid might wake up and realize it was just a dream, but then while riding his bicycle to his music lesson that day . . .
  • The dead man could really be alive, and it was just a trap to lure the kid.
  • The dead man could spring to his knees and belt out Al Jolson’s “I’m sitting On Top of the World,” while a row of alley cats line-dance behind him in top hats and tails.

I had nightmares. I walked for days like a zombie. Deep inside my kid brain I was searching for what should happen. Curiously, I found the answer on the piano keyboard. What happened next was F-sharp (F#).

I had been whacking the piano keyboard for years, picking out tunes, practicing, and improvising. I had acquired an instinctive feel for the logical structure of music. I had a feel for what sounded right and what sounded wrong.

Play one note on a keyboard and it can be followed by any other note at all. Play the second and you have limited the possibilities for the third. Play the fourth, fifth, and sixth, and so on, and the range (or key) for the subsequent notes has been set. Play the “wrong” note, and it won’t sound right. And let me emphasize, I’m talking about tonal music, the kind you’ll make on a piano keyboard (atonal music is its own private Twilight Zone).

As a kid, my music practice began each day with scales. The eight notes of a scale are the purest sequence of notes you’ll find in music (they’re like a strand of musical DNA). I would start with G major (it’s always been my favorite). The scale of G major is straightforward. Start on the note of G, and then play all the white notes above it, with the exception of the second to last, until you wind up on the next G (an octave above).

The exception is where you play a black note. It’s F#. Play F natural (the white note) and the scale sounds wrong. It’s jarring, a bum note, and everyone knows what it sounds like when a singer goes off key and hits one of those.

I stared at the piano keyboard. That exception had answered my question. What should happen next is what feels right.

And “feel” is the operative word, because above the organization and notation of the notes being played, it’s the mood that is being conveyed by the music to the listener. For example, the scale of G minor is a vastly different beast to G major. You ride into town ready to raise hell with G major; you limp out of town the next morning with a mule of a hangover to G minor.

So what “felt right” for the body in the alley? What was the mood? I answered that easily. Dread. That had been the emotion I had felt spying the inert body in the long grass. As a thirteen-year-old I was aware of death, but I had never been confronted with it right up close and in person.

Dread was the key. So I played a few notes in that mood, and this was what I came up with:

  1. The kid on the bicycle recognizes the body in the alley as that of Mr. Banks, his math teacher. But the kid does nothing. He rides on and attends his music lesson.
  2. The music teacher tries to teach the kid a new tune, but the kid is distracted. The kid looks grim. He’s remembering a conversation he overheard in the hall at school that day. The principal accused Mr. Banks of having an affair with his wife. He threatened to kill Mr. Banks.
  3. The music teacher shuts the lid of the piano and asks the kid if anything is wrong.
  4. The kid doesn’t answer. He’s remembering a scene at the dinner table the previous evening, where his father told him he should always tell the truth, no matter what. Good fatherly advice.
  5. The kid is near panic stricken. His father is the school principal.

The “notes” felt right. Looking back, it’s not a bad start to a story, and you could kind of guess where it might go. You could generate a lot of suspense answering the question: Did the principal/father kill the math teacher? And there’d certainly be a twist ending.

The capacity to learn music is an innate skill, the same as learning a first language (I sit in Chomsky’s Universal Grammar camp). In my opinion, the language of storytelling is no different. And for me, the music analogy for storytelling is just right. Each plot point in a story is a musical note. Play the right notes and you’re halfway to a decent story. Play a wrong note, and it won’t feel right. The story will be “off tune” or “out of key”.

Well, it works for me.

By the way, I never got any further with that plot about the dead body in the alley. I was thirteen. A bright, shiny object came along and distracted me.

Posted in Characters, Editing, Fiction, Guest, Setting, Story, Writers | Tagged , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

Posted on December 23, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen

All of the staff at EQMM would like to wish our readers joyful holidays and a happy new year! We will not be posting again on this site until Wednesday, January 8, 2014. We hope the following cartoon, by EQMM contributor  Joseph Farris,  will add a humorous note to your festive season. . . .

C20

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DIGITAL-EDITION SALE

Posted on December 20, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen

From now until January 3rd, receive 60% off a year’s digital subscription at Magzter.

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“Translating is Gezellig” by Josh Pachter

Posted on December 18, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen
The last time Josh Pachter posted on this site he talked about his lifelong love affair with EQMM. This time he provides a fascinating look at the process of literary translation. He is himself a writer of fiction, with some four dozen stories in print, but we never realized prior to reading this post what a creative hand he has in the stories he translates for this magazine and other publications. —Janet Hutchings

From 1979 to 1982, I lived in a tiny little apartment in Amsterdam, just outside the city center. (When I say “tiny,” I mean tiny. The place was so small that we—I was married to a Dutch woman at the time—didn’t even have a bathtub or shower. Three or four days a week, we’d bike over to the public bathhouse, where for one guilder—about 40 cents American—we got a sliver of hotel soap, the loan of a towel, and 15 minutes of hot water in a cramped shower stall.)

Although most Dutch people learn English in school and Lydia’s was perfect, her parents and younger brother struggled with my native language, so I decided to learn theirs. I subscribed to the Dutch edition of Donald Duck comics and, once a week, I’d settle down on the tiny little sofa in our tiny little living room and read it aloud. Because the stories were simple and illustrated, and because Lydia was there to help with the harder words and correct my pronunciation, it wasn’t long before I could read and speak (and eventually even write a little) Dutch.

I really like the Dutch language. Where English’s idiosyncrasies are primarily pronunciation based (“tough/though/through”), Dutch’s are more commonly spelling based. I mean, show me another language that includes such amazing words as gaaieeieren (“the eggs of a jay,” with its seven consecutive vowels) and angstschreeuw (“a cry of anguish,” with eight consecutive consonants) and zeeën (“oceans,” with a triple vowel) and Churchilllaan (“Churchill Lane,” with a triple consonant).

Lydia, meanwhile, was a rabid Beatles fan, and through her I met Har van Fulpen and Piet Schreuders, who were both active members of the Dutch National Beatles Fan Club. Har, it turned out, owned a company that published comic books and was interested in American underground comix, and Piet, it turned out, was a graphic designer with an interest in American pop culture.

pachter2Har soon asked Lydia and me to translate several Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton comix from English into Dutch, and Piet asked me to translate Paperbacks, U.S.A., his 250-page nonfiction study of the cover art used on American paperback books during the 1940s and ’50s, from Dutch into English. And then Har hired me to translate his 175-page Beatles Diary, and Piet’s friends Guus Luijters and Gerard Timmer pachter3brought me in to translate their 160-page Sexbomb: The Life and Death of Jayne Mansfield . . . and all of a sudden I seemed to be a professional translator.

By 1984, I was divorced and living in what was then still West Germany, but I was editing short-story collections for Loeb Uitgevers, a small Dutch publishing house. Peter Loeb was releasing trade-paperback editions of the works of internationally popular Dutch crime novelist Janwillem van de Wetering, and somehow I wound up getting asked to translate two of Janwillem’s Grijpstra and de Gier stories for EQMM. “There Goes Ravelaar!” appeared in the January 1985 issue, followed almost immediately by “House of Mussels” in April, and the next year “There Goes Ravelaar!” was nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Best Short Story Edgar.

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And then in 1986 my daughter Becca was born, and suddenly I didn’t have time for writing or editing or translating any more. Instead, my days were filled with changing diapers, and my evenings were spent teaching for the University of Maryland’s European Division on US Army bases in Bavaria.

It was 20 years before I returned to translation.

In 2002, EQMM editor Janet Hutchings launched the magazine’s monthly “Passport to Crime” feature. Janet invited me to locate and translate a Dutch story, and I contacted my old friend Theo Capel, who long ago edited and published a glossy Dutch fanzine called Thrillers & Detectives for which I wrote a regular column about the American crime scene. Theo sent me one of his own stories and steered me to René Appel, “the king of the Dutch psychological thriller,” and all of a sudden I was a translator again.

Since 2004, I’ve translated stories by Dutch authors Capel, Appel, Carla Vermaat and Tessa de Loo, and more recently by Belgians Bavo Dhooge, Bob Van Laerhoven, Bram Dehouck and Pieter Aspe. Bavo talked me up to his fellow writer Toni Coppers, and during the summer of 2013 I translated my first novel, Coppers’ Stil Bloed, which will hopefully be published in the US as Dead Air in 2014.

There are, I think, three basic types of translation: literal, idiomatic, and creative. To explain what I mean, imagine a Dutch story in which a character is served a meal in a restaurant and, when the food is placed before him, says, “Het water loopt me in m’n mond.”

Literally, that translates as “The water walks me in my mouth”—but only a particularly poorly programmed piece of software would translate the sentence that way. Any human translator worth his salt would know that the sentence actually means “My mouth is watering,” and would almost certainly translate it that way, idiomatically.

To me, though, “My mouth is watering” sounds clichéd and stale. I can’t remember ever having heard a living human being use that expression, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never used it myself. So I’d probably want to translate it creatively as “That looks great!” or, simply, “Beautiful!,” or words to that effect.

Creative translation by its very nature requires that the translator take liberties with the original text, and it’s for that reason that I’ve only ever translated works by living authors—and, in fact, by authors who were willing to be consulted during the translation process and to read and comment on a “finished” draft before I’m ready to take the quotation marks off the word “finished.”

In my own writing, I’ve always felt that a good title is essential. Most of the dozen Mahboob Chaudri stories I wrote for EQMM and AHMM in the late ’80s, for example, actually began with their titles. (The last night of Ramadan, for example, is called Eid al-Fitr, which means, “the Night of Power.” I heard that phrase and thought, Ah, that’s a Chaudri title! It seemed obvious that the story had to be set on the last night of Ramadan, and it had to have something to do with power . . . and, sure enough, “The Night of Power” appeared in the September 1986 issue of EQMM and was reprinted the next year in Walker & Co.’s The Years’ Best Mystery and Suspense Stories.)

Similarly, I’m always eager to find attention-grabbing titles for my translations. Sometimes a literal translation seems appropriate. Carla Vermaat’s “Een Lang Gekoesterde Droom” easily became “A Long Cherished Dream” (June 2009), for example, and Bavo Dhooge’s “Stinkend Gips” became “Stinking Plaster” for the September/October 2011 double issue.

Sometimes, though, I’ve had to be more creative. René Appel’s first “Passport to Crime” story, “Bloody Hot,” appeared in August 2006. A few months ago, he sent me a lovely piece titled “Heterdaad,” which is a word that doesn’t really ever get used by itself in Dutch. Instead, it almost always occurs in the phrase “op heterdaad betrapt,” which means “caught in the act.” I thought about calling the story “Caught in the Act,” but René consciously and purposely contracted the Dutch title to a single word, and I wanted to capture that contraction in English. I thought about using “In the Act,” but that seemed awfully bland. Another way to say “caught in the act” in English is “caught red-handed,” though, and, when my translation of “Heterdaad” is published in EQMM sometime within the next year, it’ll be titled “Red-Handed.”

Also coming up in “Passport” is a story by Pieter Aspe, who is currently the best selling crime novelist in Belgium. The story’s called “Vrienden,” which translates literally as “Friends.” Now, I don’t mind recycling a title that someone else has previously used—and titles can’t be copyrighted, so the recycling doesn’t raise any legal issues. Back in 1987, I co-opted the title of a 1957 novel by Australian Nevile Shute for one of my own stories, which appeared in Espionage as “On the Beach.” And, for yet another of my upcoming “Passport” translations, I changed Bram Dehouck’s ponderous “De Redder en de Dood” (“The Savior and Death,” which sounds like it could be a Woody Allen parody of an Ingmar Bergman film) to “After the Fall,” which was the name of a 1964 play by Arthur Miller.

I didn’t like the idea of giving Aspe’s tale of murder the same name as the name of a long-running American sitcom, though, and, since the story is ultimately a story of friendship betrayed, I decided to call it “Friends Like You,” which fits the first-person narrative voice and gives, I think, a nice little foreshadowing of the betrayal and counter betrayal which lie at the core of the piece.

Occasionally, the process of coming up with a good title can lead to changes in the story itself. Last year, Bob Van Laerhoven, another Belgian crime writer, sent me a Flemish story that already had an English-language title, “Chimbote Blues.” I thought the story was great, but explained to Bob that I thought his title was too evocative of the title of Elmore Leonard’s 2010 novel, Tishomingo Blues. I asked Bob if he could suggest an alternate title, but he couldn’t come up with anything he liked. The title “Checkmate in Chimbote” popped into my head, but unfortunately the story didn’t have anything whatsoever to do with chess. I asked Bob if he could “chess it up” a little, and he wound up inserting four or five chess references. I dropped one of them that I felt was a little far-fetched, added one of my own, and “Checkmate in Chimbote” is scheduled for publication in the June 2014 EQMM.

Added one of my own? Yep. One of the things which attracts me to what I call creative translation is that it’s more than “just” translation. A creative translator is also an editor and, at times, even a writer. “Josh isn’t just a translator,” Bavo Dhooge wrote, “but also an editor who dares to participate in the creative process.”

I’m not sure I can explain exactly how that creative process operates, but I can tell you what my goal is. When the original author reads my translation, I want her to think not just “Yes, that’s what I wrote” but “Yes, that’s what I wanted to write.” It’s not enough for me to move the author’s words from one language to another—I want the end result to be a better story than it was originally. And that, again, often involves taking liberties I can only take with the original author’s permission and cooperation.

When Carla Vermaat sent me “A Long Cherished Dream,” for example, I loved the story . . . but was completely disappointed by its ending. I emailed Carla and explained to her that, in American fiction, the “suddenly he woke up and realized that it had all been just a dream” finale has been done to death. Instead, I suggested, why not have the murder be real and not a dream? Carla took my advice and let me rewrite the ending myself, so the original Dutch story and the translation, which appeared in EQMM, aren’t just in different languages but really turned out to be very different stories.

Translation presents the translator with some fascinating challenges.

What, for example, do I do when the Dutch or Belgian author makes a cultural reference that will mystify American readers? In Toni Coppers’ novel Stil Bloed, there’s a moment when a character refers to Canvas, a C.S.I.-like forensic-investigation show which, despite its English-language title, is produced in Belgium and popular on Belgian television. From the title, though, it sounds like it’s an art-history program, which in the context of the scene wouldn’t have made any sense. I did a little research and discovered that C.S.I. itself is popular on Belgian TV—and, with Toni’s permission, simply substituted C.S.I. for Canvas.

In the same novel, on the other hand, there’s a passing reference to Father Damian, a name which every Belgian would instantly recognize but which most American readers wouldn’t know. In this case, there’s nothing equivalent to substitute, but the reference itself was too important to simply drop. So I added in a line of explanation, changing “brought home the body of Father Damian” to “brought home the body of Father Damian, the Belgian missionary who’d spent two decades ministering to lepers in Hawaii before dying of leprosy himself in 1889.” Enough explanation, I hope, to prevent the reference from being distractingly cryptic, but not so much as to interrupt the flow of the narrative.

And what about jokes that are funny in Dutch but simply not funny in English, and brand names of products that exist in Europe but are unknown in the US, and those moments when a Dutch or Belgian character suddenly inserts a word or phrase of English into her dialogue, which is something that Dutch and Belgian people often really do? And what about gezellig?

Each of these situations requires a decision on my part. I may need to look for an alternate joke which American readers will laugh at. I might want to use the Dutch brand name to preserve a sense of foreignness but need to quickly and unobtrusively explain what the heck the product is. When a Flemish character switches briefly to speaking English, maybe I’ll switch instead to French.

Fortunately, I haven’t yet had to deal with gezellig. If you should ever get invited to a Dutch home for a drink or a meal, the word is almost guaranteed to come up in the course of the evening. “Ah,” your host will sigh happily, “isn’t this gezellig!” Ask him what he means, and he’ll probably say “cozy”—and that’s the way the word is normally rendered into English. But it’s not quite right, and the Dutch state of gezelligheid is famously, notoriously, untranslatable. The closest I can come is to say that it’s the feeling of complete comfort you get when you’re as at home in someone else’s house as you would be in your own, except you’re allowed to feel that way in your own home and not just in someone else’s. Can you imagine having a character in a story turn to his dinner guests, though, and say, “Ah, don’t you just feel as comfortable in my home as you’d feel in your own?”

I mean, eeuw.

I think the biggest challenge of translation—for me, anyway—is the capturing not just of plot and character but of auctorial voice. Just like Bill Pronzini’s work sounds different from Robert Barnard’s, Tessa de Loo’s work sounds different from Bavo Dhooge’s—and neither of them sounds anything at all like me. So my job is to get inside the original authors’ heads and figure out how they would have written their stories if they were only fluent enough in English to write them in English.

Since the Dutch and Belgians all study English in school, they can read it fairly easily. And the highest praise I can get from a story’s original author—the praise I’m always shooting for—is when, say, René Appel emails me after reading what I’ve done with his work and says, “The story gives the impression of having been originally written in English and only coincidentally taking place in The Netherlands.”

Way back in 1976, when I was twenty-five years old and had seven EQMM and six AHMM stories to my credit, Writers Digest Books published a volume called Mystery Writer’s Handbook, edited by the wonderful Lawrence Treat. On page eight of that volume, Larry quoted me as saying “I hate the act of writing, but I love having written something.”

Today, almost 40 years later, it’s translation that allows me to enjoy the feeling of having written something without having to go through the agonizing act of actually writing.

Posted in Books, Editing, Fiction, Guest, International, Magazine, Passport, Publishing, Translation | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

“Discovery” (by Mike Cooper)

Posted on December 11, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen
 The pseudonymous Mike Cooper has been published several times in EQMM. His new post is timely in that a lot of people may be having the very experience he describes as they search for books as gifts or for reading over the holidays. This would be a good opportunity for readers to reply with book recommendations—not only in the category in which Mike laments not being able to find what he’s looking for, but in the mystery genre. Mike Cooper’s latest thriller novel, from Viking, is Full Ratchet.—Janet Hutchings

There are two million books out there. Why can’t I find anything to read?

At least two million—that’s just a rough estimate of what’s available on the Kindle, in English. Read one a day for fifty years and you’d get through fewer than one percent. But of course by the end of fifty years there would be another ten or twenty million titles, or more. We’re a long, long way from the chained libraries of the Middle Ages, where a diligent monk could easily work his way through all the written texts in his world.

And yet, with all this selection, I still find myself, all too often, staring at the stack of books near my desk thinking, “Naahhh . . . nothing there I really want to pick up now.”

Naturally, most of the problem is me. For example, I like great, universe-spanning science fiction grounded in known physics—“hard SF,” I suppose—which seems to be largely out of style. PI novels, sure, you can find a few now and then, but the mystery world has moved on. Swashbucklers? Pirates? Adventure stories? Good luck trying to find one without vampires, or ancient gods, or some other supernatural element.

Conversely, having read widely and enthusiastically for decades, here are a few sorts of novels I’m really, really tired of: serial killers. Sadistic murders of attractive young women. Military thrillers where every politician is a spineless appeaser, every civilian a hopeless rubbernecker. Dark, headbanging noir with too much booze and cigarettes, a few torture scenes, and no sense of humor whatsoever.

Even granting that I’m an irredeemable crank, there just don’t seem to be very many good books being published.

But that’s nonsense. Of course there are great books. The supply has expanded enormously, and in that vast ocean any reader’s tastes can be satisfied. The problem is how to find them—or, in the jargon, “discovery.”

In the old days we had reviewers. Lots of them, in newspapers and magazines and even on radio (not so much on television, Oprah notwithstanding). Paid a modest but livable wage, they performed a public service, pointing readers to worthy new titles. But cost-cutting, the death throes of print journalism, and, more than anything, the rise of customer reviews on the internet have together decimated the professional reviewers’ ranks.

In theory, crowdsourcing should easily replace all the book reviewers who’ve been laid off. The wisdom of crowds should lead to unbiased, broad-based evaluations, with a broader reach and a genuine sense of what most readers think.

It hasn’t worked out that way.

One reason is that even honest reviewers tend to rate high. The average Amazon review is 4.3 stars. YouTube? 4.6. It’s like Harvard, where anything less than an A- is below average. Lake Wobegon ratings don’t help much.

Second, sock-puppetry is, if not rife, definitely present. Some authors create their own fake personas, others get their friends involved; either way, some books are notorious for the blatantly absurd nature of their five-star reviews.

More discouragingly, people have figured out that if you want good reviews, you can simply buy them. The going rate for a 5-star Amazon review is still five dollars, which you can easily see at the online microlabor site Fiverr. And while it might strike some as a dubious practice, even unethical, paying for reviews is apparently now widely accepted. The president of the Florida chapter of Mystery Writers of America(!), quoted in The Third Degree, recommends Fiverr “if you need a quick review [or] blurb.”

Why five dollars? Why aren’t the Chinese gold farmers offering fake reviews at, say, ten cents? Partly because bad English would be a tip-off, but more because Amazon now requires “verified” status before letting you post a review (i.e., you need a legitimate account and a purchasing history).

Amazon knows they have a problem.

Five dollars a pop adds up fast, however. What’s a poor author to do? Well, especially on the self-published side of the business, the practice of “exchanging” reviews is far from unknown. You review my book—five stars, maybe?—and I’ll review yours. Everyone understands there’s no expectation of actually reading either one.

It’s difficult to say how widespread this practice is. Amazon, which knows it’s crucial that their ratings at least be seen as objective, will shut you down immediately if they find out, so people tend to be discreet. Still, I’ve been approached more than once; and simply reading the reviews of certain books is a giveaway.

Furthermore, Amazon is apparently in the business of trading favors for good reviews of the books it publishes itself:

Amazon is looking to revolutionize the process of getting author blurbs: provide a review for a book on an Amazon imprint and Amazon will give the reviewer—and his or her book—extra promotion as a thank you.

I haven’t even mentioned the various “legitimate” paid-review services like PW Select—legitimate in the sense that everyone understands the content is bought, but hardly legitimate in their exploitation of authors, readers and the process generally.

E-publishing has certainly smashed the gates open; anyone can now publish their work. Smashing the existing infrastructure of reviewing has not been so helpful. On the results, internet reviews are simply not providing a reliable substitute.

But we are in a transitional period, and there are—finally!—some signs that even a pessimist like myself might find hopeful.

For one thing, the decline of independent bookstores is leveling off. It turns out many readers still appreciate the browsing, the selection, and the personal advice from real people. Perhaps booksellers can take advantage of the need and leverage themselves into a larger “review and recommend” role.

Second, communities of readers keep popping up online. Goodreads has been subsumed into Amazon, so the jury remains out there, but how about Biblionasium? LitLovers? Some will be publisher fronts, many will fade away, but eventually someone will figure it out.

Finally, we may simply all end up reading more of the same books. Anita Elberse argues in Blockbusters that the long tail hasn’t worked out, that for all the micropublishing, sales continue to be dominated by a few mega-sellers. Which means that millions of authors can sell a few copies, and a few authors will sell millions.

And maybe that’s no bad thing. The loss of shared community, of collective interests and common pursuits, is part of a dangerous fragmentation of public life—especially in this country, which depends on knitting together a single polity from exceptionally diverse strands. Four hundred television channels lets everyone splinter off into their own interest groups, so to speak.

But if we’re all reading the same popular novels, or histories or Malcolm Gladwell or whatever—maybe we’ll draw back closer together.

And meanwhile, I continue my search for a good space opera.

Posted in Books, Business, Digital, Fiction, Guest | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

HISTORY AND MYSTERY

Posted on December 4, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Historical fiction has always had a powerful appeal for me, and it’s probably partly because of my love of mysteries. Didn’t Voltaire say that history is “little else than a picture of human crimes and misfortunes”? Think of the poison plots of the Borgias, the murder linked to Mary Queen of Scots, or the treachery of Rasputin.

The historical mystery novel is relatively new on the scene, at least as a recognized genre. But mainstream historical fiction, a centuries-old form, has always contained elements of mystery. Think of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which turns around extortion, kidnapping, and treason. What justifies the classification of a work as an “historical mystery” is usually the centrality to the plot of a murder that must be solved.

Scott’s Ivanhoe employs some real historical figures, as do several notable novels that belong inarguably to the mystery genre. Perhaps the best of them all is Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, which deals with the question of whether Richard III was really the murderer of his nephews, the little princes in the Tower. Ellery Queen thought such mysteries the most difficult of all to write. “It is really a monumental task,” he said. “. . . The historical figure has to be convincing as well as authentic, and the theme, time, speech, and manners have to be projected with equal authenticity.”

In our submissions, I rarely come across real historical figures with more than cameo roles; the viewpoint character is usually conjured from whole cloth. I have, however, more than once received submissions in which Benjamin Franklin featured as sleuth, not a surprising choice given the curiosity and inventiveness for which the real Franklin was known. (For those interested in seeing a skillful use of Franklin as detective there are the books by Robert Lee Hall.) At least one other real figure is an obvious choice for mystery writers. Edgar Allan Poe is not only the father of the mystery; his life held many genuine elements of mystery, not least the lack of a known cause for his death. He was discovered delirious on a street in Baltimore and died soon afterward. The best mystery novel I know of that casts Poe in a starring role is Louis Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye, which deals with Poe’s days at West Point.

Whether a historical writer uses real characters or not, the difficulty remains that the world being recreated has to come across as something so real the reader could step right into it; it must therefore relate in some way to the contemporary reader’s experience, and yet it can’t deviate too jarringly from known historical fact.

The historical writer’s task may get easier the closer a work comes to our own time, but even stories that involve a retrospective look at an earlier period in the author’s own lifetime require skills all good historical writers have: the ability to convey things that no longer exist without weighing the story down with explanation; the avoidance of anachronisms both technological and cultural; and a talent for conjuring the spirit of a bygone time. I consider mysteries set in the fifties and before historicals. This may seem an arbitrary cutoff point, but so many of the attitudes and mores of the 1960s and ahead are still with us today that I’m less inclined to include stories set in those decades in the category.

The differing values of societies preceding ours present a particular challenge for historical mystery writers, it seems to me. It’s important in our genre—more so than in other areas of fiction, I think—that readers are left with a sense that justice has been served. I was struck by this problem as I read Marilyn Todd’s submission of “Cover Them With Flowers” (EQMM November 2012) a couple of years ago. It’s a tale set in ancient Sparta, where male children judged not to be physically strong were disposed of by being thrown into an abyss. The heroine of the story risks death by torture to rescue the potential victims of this policy—a course that makes her very sympathetic to modern readers, but involves attributing to her attitudes probably not very likely in someone of her time. I think the author made the right decision in breaking with historical realism here: telling a story that readers can enter into emotionally comes first, and we get a strong sense of what Sparta was like despite the importation of contemporary points of view. But it’s a fine line to walk. An author who too often veers too far from what is commonly known about the attitudes and values of a bygone culture won’t be able to pull us into the story either.

Historical settings have advantages as well as disadvantages for writers, of course. For one thing, as Mary Jane Maffini pointed out in her post about Golden Age mysteries on this site, taking a step back into the past can make it easier to tackle certain elements of plot. Go far enough back and you won’t have to research either forensics or police procedure, for forensic science only became significant to the solution of crime around the 1960s, and there were few organized police forces anywhere in the world prior to the mid 1800s.

Not having the distraction of all that scientific detail can be a blessing for the reader as well. If you like reading tales painted with a broad brush, opening wide vistas to the mind, what can be better than a genre that brings to life past cultures, where by necessity the reader must fill in much of the detail with his or her own imagination? How different that is from the kind of modern mystery that employs expert knowledge in excruciating detail, on subjects the ordinary reader knows nothing about. I certainly enjoy learning the things modern forensic mysteries can teach, but often what I want more than that kind of information is a place for my imagination to roam, and I find that historicals offer that space more reliably than most other forms of the mystery.—Janet Hutchings

Posted in Books, Editing, Fiction, Genre, Historicals, History, Setting | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment