“Edgar, Agatha, Hammett, Glauser—and Me” (by Mary Tannert)

Posted on August 22, 2012 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Translators are the unsung heroes of the literary world. What they do requires not just knowledge of the language to be translated from but a writerly feel for the language they are translating to. Mary Tannert fits that bill. A former university teacher with a Ph.D. in German, she moved to Germany in 2000 to work first as a translation project manager for Siemens and subsequently as a freelance translator. She began translating crime fiction in 1993 and has contributed twenty-two German-language short story translations to EQMM.  In 1999, she and her research partner Henry Kratz published a groundbreaking anthology of translated historic German-language crime fiction entitled Early German and Austrian Detective Fiction: An Anthology (McFarland).  Her extensive knowledge of German (and Anglo-American) fiction and her skills as a writer make her one of our Passport to Crime department’s most valuable assets. We think a lot of eyes will be opened by what she has to say about the German tradition in crime writing.—Janet Hutchings

We translators of crime fiction straddle a fascinating divide. On one side is the Anglo-American crime fiction scene—the biggest and most competitive in the world. Nearly every foreign writer dreams of having his or her work translated and published in England or the U.S. On the other side is the richness and breadth of other crime-fiction traditions that have a lot to offer English-speaking readers. This knowledge fuels my dream, common to most crime-fiction translators, of being able to offer readers of English a brilliant translation of a really good foreign crime novel that has them beating down their booksellers’ doors asking for more. Oh, and earns me a million bucks and lets me leave my commercial translator’s existence for a life translating bestselling crime novels, being interviewed by Oprah, and letting my agent negotiate the endless stream of offers from Hollywood while I make guest appearances on this blog from an island in the Mediterranean where I work on the sunny terrace of my beach home, a caipirinha at my elbow . . .

Back to reality—and some background: I’ve been translating both historic and contemporary crime fiction from German to English since the early 1990s. And in case anyone’s thinking that in all that time I must have run out of work, at least of historic crime fiction, let me note that the German-language crime-fiction tradition is at least as old as the Anglo-American, if not older, as witness Adolph Müllner’s 1828 novella The Caliber: a crime novella that represents the very first fictional instance anywhere of the use of bullet caliber to prove a suspect’s innocence. That fact riveted me when I discovered the novella in the late 1980s, and in the process of following it up I stumbled upon a vast 19th- and early 20th-century crime-fiction tradition that would make most English and American crime-fiction writers of that time weep with envy. Novels, novellas, and a newspaper (Die Gartenlaube) that was serializing stories nearly forty years before The Strand began publication. Lay detectives, P.I.s, police detectives, even investigating magistrates. Urban crime, rural crime. Criminals of every social class from the nobility down to the peasantry. Police procedurals, courtroom dramas, psychological novels. You name it, they’d done it.

Then came two World Wars, and a lot of this tradition went up in smoke. Literally. Paper is extremely combustible, as all fans of weekend barbeques know—and when alarmed librarians and archivists scurry to hide their greatest treasures in the fireproof bomb cellar, they don’t typically think of the whodunits on their bedside tables. Hitler did his part by ordering mass book burnings of “decadent” literary genres, to which category he consigned crime fiction. And the landscape changed: The social class system prevalent in Europe, the political and dynastic divisions into principalities, kingdoms, and empires, even the early republics, all these disappeared. The fabric on which Europe’s sense of social justice, of order, of crime and retribution had been printed for centuries was torn apart—and what emerged after 1945 was so different that what had gone before must have appeared, at least as far as crime fiction is concerned, antiquated and irrelevant.

So it took a few decades for a German-language crime fiction tradition to reestablish itself, to re-grow its roots and wings. There were cities to rebuild first, and the untidiness of democracy to get used to. But people went on murdering and stealing and smuggling and spying as they always have, and pretty soon it became clear that the fictional world of European crime shouldn’t be left to non-Europeans like Graham Greene (The Third Man) or John Le Carré (The Spy Who Came In from the Cold). The crime-fiction market in those first postwar years may have relied heavily on translations from French, English, and Scandinavian crime novels (Boileau/Narcejac, Sjöwall/Wahlöö, etc.) but by the 1960s that balance had begun to shift in favor of crime novels authored in German and a tradition of socially-critical crime-writing.

Matters took a step forward when, in 1986, a handful of German crime-fiction writers, led by Fred Breinersdorf, founded DAS SYNDIKAT, the German-language crime writers’ organization and a member of AIEP since its founding. For more than twenty years now, the organization has awarded the Friedrich Glauser Prizes (named for a Swiss crime-fiction writer of the early 20th century who created a popular police detective) for German-language crime fiction in the categories best novel and, since 2002, best first novel and best short story. The prize money for the Glauser prizes is raised entirely by the authors who make up DAS SYNDIKAT and is presented to the winners at the organization’s yearly celebration, Criminale, in battered briefcases containing nonconsecutively numbered banknotes in small denominations. (No, I did not make this up.)

I’ve been to a few Criminale myself and seen the delight on the faces of the winners who’ve climbed the steps to the stage to receive that battered briefcase, gleaming under the stage lights. And as a permanent resident of Germany, I itched to participate in a small way. Partly, it’s the omnipresent internal pressure to help bridge the cultural divide between this nation and my native one, a pressure that many ex-pats experience from time to time. Partly it was my frustration with Anglo-American crime-fiction chauvinism (oh, puhleeze. Spare me the outraged look).  And to be truthful, it was also partly the dream of the Mediterranean island and the caipirinha. On the other hand, I have to earn my living, and like most translators I’ve received my share of unsolicited e-mail messages reading, “I’m convinced I’ve written the world’s next crime-fiction bestseller. Attached is the manuscript. Would you translate it for free? I would be sure to mention your name in the kindest of terms to the publisher of the English edition.” (Well, how nice of you to think of me. Excuse me a minute while I run give up my day job . . . )

An opportunity came when IACW’s Mary Frisque brought me together with Janet Hutchings around the time that EQMM’s Passport to Crime series was established. And to make a long story short, since then I have had the privilege—and the great pleasure—of translating, with only one exception, every short story that won the Glauser prize since its inception in 2002, and seeing them all published in Passport to Crime. It’s turned out to be a great deal for everybody. The authors are pleased at the prospect of being published in English without having to organize—or pay for—translation or publication themselves. For them, it’s the double chocolate icing on the cake of winning the Glauser. EQMM gets a good story for Passport to Crime. And it makes a great pro bono project for me because it’s contained—one short story, once a year—so I don’t have to worry about it taking on dimensions that would imperil my paying the electric bill. Working with the authors is rewarding, too; their excitement at seeing their stories in English is palpable. The most recent winner, Nina George, wrote that my translation of her work “… sounds like . . . wow! . . . like a writer, like a different, really good writer. It’s incredible the way you got into my story.”

I’m still waiting for Hollywood to call, and the only Mediterranean islands I see are in the Internet photos I drool over when I get fed up with the press releases, annual reports, brochures, and websites that currently make up my caipirinha-less working hours. But I know it takes twenty years to become an overnight success, and meanwhile I’ve got a whole host of new pals on both sides of the Atlantic and we’re all having a great time with really good crime fiction. Which is, after all, what it’s really about.

Posted in Editing, Fiction, Guest, Translation | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“What is it about magic? Does the paranormal belong in mystery fiction?” by Elizabeth Zelvin

Posted on August 15, 2012 by somethingisgoingtohappen
There’s been a big shift in readers’ perceptions of what belongs in the mystery and crime-fiction genre over the past decade. Here to talk about one area in which the boundaries have been expanded is Elizabeth Zelvin, who has recently made a foray of her own into the realm of the “paranormal whodunit” with a novelette that she says “features a nice Jewish girl who’s a rising country music star and a shapeshifter.” (See Untreed Reads/August)—Janet Hutchings

In the good old days, mysteries were mysteries. Sherlock Holmes, that most rational of sleuths, would cast the light of reason on an apparently diabolical phenomenon, such as the Hound of the Baskervilles, and illuminate the prosaic truth with a dismissive “Elementary, my dear Watson.” (I know, I know! He never said it. My point is that Holmes invariably deduced a rational explanation.) I can’t remember any client bringing a supposed curse to Nero Wolfe, but if one had, Wolfe’s response would undoubtedly be “Pfui!” Ghosts and curses kept to the realm of the Gothic, werewolves and vampires to horror fiction, and elves and wizards to fantasy. The heirs of Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler were strictly segregated from the heirs of Bram Stoker and Tolkien. Nowadays, many writers have taken to mixing genres in their cauldrons and coming up with some surprisingly palatable potions. Crime and the paranormal, in particular, can make surprisingly comfy bedfellows, whether the supernatural elements weigh in on the good-guy or the bad-guy side, or both.

There are surely mystery purists who would argue that magic has no place in the annals of detection, that it’s cheating to allow the sleuth to rely on powers other than reason in conducting an investigation. There have always been purists in the mystery world. During the Golden Age of detective fiction, these would have been the folks who deplored any romantic entanglements on the part of sleuths. The puzzle is all, they cried. Messy human emotions only get in the way. On the contrary, without messy human emotions, we would have no crime and therefore nothing for crime-fiction writers to write about. Magic may not be essential to every story, but it can add elements of drama, surprise, fun, and imagination to a mystery without sacrificing the essence of the plot or the credibility of its characters.

An example that springs to my mind is Charlaine Harris’s protagonist—nope, not Sookie Stackhouse, so let’s not get sidetracked into discussing the books versus the TV show or whether or not you like vampires—Harper Connelly, whose utterly believable world operates in exactly the same way as the real world, except for this little ability (being able to find the dead and know how they died) that she has as a result of having been struck by lightning. The mysteries Harper has to address come to her as a result of this ability, but she still has to use her brain to solve them. And the way the people around her relate to her is very much affected by their reaction to her ability. But those reactions, Harris’s skillful characterization convinces us, are precisely those that real-life people would have if they met someone with this ability in real life.

Growing up in a household of card-carrying rationalists—both my parents were lawyers—I always had a secret hankering for magic. I still yearn for the utterly impossible, such as being able to fly, which, like the majority of us, I’ve experienced in dreams. But beyond that, in the category of extra-rational possibility in which some people believe and others do not, I long for the magic (telepathy, acupuncture, horse-whispering, the tunnel of light when we die) to be real, even as I’m stuck with my native skepticism. In fiction, whether as writer or reader, I get to enjoy having some of those dreams come true.

Posted in Fiction, Guest | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

On Editing

Posted on August 8, 2012 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Bill Pronzini’s post on this blog, “Don’t Tell Me You’ve Got a Heater in Your Girdle, Madam!”, with its entertaining and instructive examples of bad crime writing, generated some dissenting opinions about one of the passages quoted. Several respondents felt that this sentence: “From the moment he crushed Cora’s skull, he knew it was going to be a rotten Monday” could escape the stamp “alternative classic” if put in the right context. I’d like to weigh in on this, in a roundabout way.

At writers’ conferences, one often hears this piece of advice offered to new writers: Make sure you have a great opening line. You need to grab the editor’s attention from the very beginning or your story will be tossed onto the rejection heap. My editorial hackles rise every time I hear this canard, because while it is certainly true that an experienced editor can usually tell within a few sentences whether a story is going to be worth a full read, that judgment has little to do with his or her attention having been grabbed by an artful line. I can tell you from my own experience that if an individual sentence gets my attention, it’s more often because there’s something wrong with it. That line about Cora and the crushed skull has the feel to me of an opening line—one that might have been written by someone following the get-the-editor’s-attention rule. And my advice is, leave that rule aside in favor of a more organic approach to your fiction.

One of the classic pieces of advice to writers that is worth listening to is Faulkner’s famous “Kill your darlings.” The point had been made at least as far back as Samuel Johnson, who said of editing one’s own work: “whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”

Why strike out those lines that seem “particularly fine”? Simply put, because no line in a story has value apart from all the other lines that, together with it, make up the whole. If a line or passage stands out, individually grabs our attention, it probably isn’t serving its purpose of working toward what Edgar Allan Poe called the “unity of effect” of a story. Poe thought that every line in a story has equal importance, because every line, from the very first, must be working toward the effect on the reader that is to be achieved by the story’s end.

I’m not saying, of course, that lines from fiction cannot acquire a life of their own, apart from the work in which they appear. There’s the first line of Anna Karenina, for instance—”All happy families are like one another: each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—which encapsulates a truth in such succinct fashion that it has become a cultural reference for many who may not even have read the book to which it belongs. But in such cases it’s usually not the showiness of the line—not something startling about the language or image or figure of speech—that makes it memorable; it’s its simple, plain statement of something that strikes us as at least possibly true. (Something we will find out more about as we continue into the work of fiction.)

To return to that sentence “From the moment he crushed Cora’s skull, he knew it was going to be a rotten Monday”: I’m not certain this is an opening line, but if it were the opening line to a story that found its way onto my Kindle, I would probably read a few more lines to see if the author could spin something around the attitude taken. I would see whether a certain voice—presumably humorous—was immediately established, and so forth. To that extent, I agree with those who feel this sentence belongs in a different class from the other “alternative classics” presented in last week’s blog. Nevertheless, it has the feel to me of someone trying too hard to come up with a startling line. And that creates for me (for any reader, I think) an immediate distrust of the author as a narrator. I might read on a little further, but with skepticism.

Confronted with the more blatant kind of bad writing illustrated by most of Bill Pronzini’s examples, the editor’s acquisition decision should be simple: Don’t buy the work. Nowadays such rejected novels and stories may well end up as e-books and find their way into the possession of unfortunate readers, but most bad fiction (despite the number of examples Bill has come across) will not find publication by conventional means.

What is more problematic for an editor is how to respond to a manuscript that has flaws but also merit. Publishing involves the balancing of artistic goals, commercial considerations, time pressures, and, not least, the establishment and maintenance of personal relationships. Last week’s blog commented that “there is not a writer living or dead, no matter how accomplished, how critically acclaimed, who ever failed to perpetrate a line of awkward or downright bad prose; whose work would not benefit from editorial input . . .” This I wholeheartedly agree with, and I have rarely encountered authors who are flat-out against accepting an editorial hand. But it should be understood that the editorial process too is an imperfect one, involving compromises and subjective judgments.

Different editors have different approaches, based on their experiences and the circumstances in which they work. Fred Dannay, EQMM’s founding editor, was famous for making changes to stories—most often to their titles. One of our current contributors, who’s been with the magazine long enough to have worked with Fred, told me that Fred changed the ending of one of his stories entirely. Naturally, this caused the author some discomfort, but at that time, few authors would have said no to Fred, who (as Ellery Queen) was one of the bestselling mystery writers of all time. And Fred’s judgment must have been right, because for years afterward, the author tells me, he got compliments on that story’s ending.

Eleanor Sullivan, Fred’s successor, appears to have been more likely to iron out stylistic idiosyncrasies than I am, if the edited manuscripts still in the office when I took over from her in 1991 are anything to go by.  There are different philosophies of editing, and I think mine can be partly explained by reference to a passage I frequently recall from a story by Janice Law: “Oh, the writing was good: Marvin had an easy style that rolled from one paragraph to the next without the slightest hitch, but also without the oddity and flair that can illuminate an old story and make familiar characters fresh.”

Sometimes it’s the oddities in the prose—like an attractive rasp in the voice of a singer—that make all the difference in giving life to a work of fiction, and I try to err on the side of leaving as many such idiosyncrasies as possible. (Though some, of course, may say I err too far on that side.) I had occasion to consciously consider this when I was a book editor and inherited the orphaned novel of someone who had what I considered a stylistic tic. At more than twenty years distance I can’t recall with certainty what that tic was. (I believe it was a tendency to overuse anaphora—the deliberate repetition of a phrase in successive sentences.) What I do remember clearly is the author’s reaction to my attempt to eliminate the (to me) offending instances of it.  The impassioned letter of objection I received caused me to reconsider and to conclude that although this aspect of the prose was irritating to me, it might be one of the things that gave this author’s voice a distinctive quality. I had to concede that there is an area of subjectivity when it comes to such things. The book had been bought, after all, by another editor, who presumably had no serious reservations about its style.

Beyond pointing up how divergent editorial judgments can be, what that example shows is the need for a good working relationship between author and editor. Authors rightly fear the orphaning of their fiction—especially a novel—through changes of personnel at their publishing houses. A relationship of trust is essential to the smooth working of the editorial process, because there are times when words, sentences, or whole passages just do need to be penciled out. Sometimes passages must go not because they’re grammatically or syntactically incorrect, but because they’re simply wrong for the context—or involve overwriting—or are clumsily phrased. Unfortunately, these passages are sometimes the very ones their authors think “particularly fine” and that’s where trust in the editor becomes vital.

I generally find that when an author understands that I hold his or her work in esteem, a suggestion to remove even a cherished bit of prose gets a serious hearing. A fact that new writers may find interesting is that it is often the “biggest name” authors who object the least to being edited. I like to think that’s because they’ve realized over the course of their careers that despite all the imperfections in the process (including its areas of inherent subjectivity), most editors do their best to make sure the work that goes to press is as strong as it can possibly be.

—Janet Hutchings

Posted in Editing, Fiction | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

“Don’t Tell Me You’ve Got a Heater in Your Girdle, Madam!” (by Bill Pronzini)

Posted on August 1, 2012 by somethingisgoingtohappen
There can’t be many who know the mystery field better than Bill Pronzini. His fiction has earned him the Grand Master Award of the Mystery Writers of America, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and multiple Shamus Awards. His critical/biographical work has been recognized with a Macavity Award, and he is the editor of at least a hundred anthologies. He is also a voracious reader whose observations on writing and editing are well worth reading, especially since he’s come across some of the genre’s instructive low points as well as its high points. . . . —Janet Hutchings

It always amuses me, in a wry sort of way, when I hear of writers who insist on contract clauses stipulating that their work must be published exactly as written, without any editorial suggestion or “tampering.” To me, this seems not only the height of ego-flexing, but a potential disservice to the author and his or her readers. The simple fact is, there’s not a writer living or dead, no matter how accomplished, how critically acclaimed, who ever failed to perpetrate a line of awkward or downright bad prose; whose work would not benefit from editorial input and/or judicious wielding of a blue pencil. Not even Will Shakespeare wrote perfect sentences every time he set quill pen to paper.

Consider the mystery/suspense genre.  The casual observer might think that bad writing—and I mean really bad writing—is for the most part limited to unpublished manuscripts by novices; novels and stories that no amount of expert editing can render publishable. Not so. Thousands of remarkably poor works have been bought and published over the years, many of them bearing the bylines (or pseudonyms) of well-established professionals. Most are of average awfulness, to be sure, and not a few of those might have been elevated in quality if they had been properly edited, or indeed edited at all. One can’t help but wonder if some of their authors also had “no tampering” clauses in their contracts.

There is a special breed of bad published crime fiction, however, that defies the editorial process; that not even the likes of Maxwell Perkins could have salvaged. Why these books and stories were bought in the first place is an insoluble mystery in its own right. Absurd plots, trite characters, ridiculous descriptive passages, inane dialogue, strings of fractured similes and metaphors . . . whatever their flaws, they have one thing in common: they are quotably, sometimes hilariously funny. In their own unique way the worst of the worst are every bit as distinguished as the genre’s quality classics. Yes, and they also provide a capsule study course in how not to write mystery and detective stories.

I have been reading and collecting crime fiction as long as I’ve been writing it, close to half a century, and one of my guilty pleasures is the accumulation of the consummate howlers mentioned above—what I like to call “alternative classics.” My reading tastes are eclectic, so these works span the entire criminous spectrum, from Golden Age whodunits to hardboiled detective tales, spy stories to historicals, thrillers to cozies. The quantity as well as the “quality” of them might surprise you. Not only was I able to assemble enough to fill two books some years ago, Gun in Cheek, an affectionate history of bad crime fiction, and its companion volume, Son of Gun in Cheek, but in the years since I’ve dug up enough others to fill at least a third book.

To give you an idea of just how bad published crime writing can be, following is a sampling of some of my favorite “alternative” lines and passages. As difficult as it might be to believe that some of these actually made it into print, you have my word that they did.  Attributions have been omitted in all cases to protect the guilty.

I let the edges of my eyes siphon up the pleasure of her tall, slender figure in a blue evening gown that made a low-bridge criss-cross right above where the meat on a chicken is the whitest.

It was a morning gown of blue silk, one that stressed the grace of her figure and matched her complexion.

The whites of his eyes came up in their sockets like moons over an oasis lined with palm trees.

She unearthed one of her fantastic breasts from the folds of her sheath skirt.

The next day dawned bright and clear on my empty stomach.

Below his hat were enough eyebrows to stuff a pillow.

He ran his eyes over my silence.

 One of her breasts bobbed into view like a cantaloupe rolling off a display in a fruit store.

Her lips . . . rose from her face with the vivid freshness of lovely, sparkling champagne bubbles.

Pritchard sat up like a full-grown geranium.

Judith just didn’t look like a hot urge having its fling.

She laid a hand on my arm and I knew I really had her in the palm of my hand because her face was contorted.

He put his vocalizing on arrested motion.

He nodded once, mostly with his eyes.

She was visibly excited, yet not a vestige of her features betrayed her.

Her voice had a unique deep resonance, like a cannon fired in a cathedral.

I wanted to see the murderer of that beautiful creature seated in the gas chamber. I wanted it so bad my saliva glands throbbed.

When the gentleman who had been waiting for me walked into my office, it was evident by the look of fear in his eyes that he was frightened.

From the moment he crushed Cora’s skull, he knew it was going to be a rotten Monday.

When would this phantasmagoria that was all too real reality end? he asked himself.

The realization of what all this meant exploded inside my head and shot me from the mouth of a cannon.

It was full summer in Boston and the heat sat on the city like a possessive parent.

A pitiful sigh swayed above them, and Dr. Farmingham looked upward. With frightened, unveiled eyes Eva begged him silently. The immense inner beauty of her entreaty made him delirious with wisdom.

A shy man, he had learned to do without women. Until Poppy Ames unleashed his libido and put it right up front where he could really see it.

“Somehow, I am terribly afraid out here [swimming] tonight—more afraid even than I was back there on the schooner.” “You needn’t be!” Ronald cried out buoyantly.

“Who taught you to walk in that fashion? Your steps are feline and catlike.”

 “You have been a misogynist long enough. It’s not good to remain in a state of protracted animation.”

“I think your philosophy deplorable,” Tessa murmured with a Sphinx-like groan.

“Except for that rich old bitch who is like a terrible hurricane is, and for this innocent young thing who is the period at the end of the other one’s ideas, the flood behind her thunder, the silent backing up, I would have had that money, finished the research, and be living abroad with you.”

“I wish you would not speak so loud,” she cautioned. “There is no guarantee that one of those Yard men may not be a lip reader.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve got a heater in your girdle, madam!”

Thoughtfully he dropped his eyes down at the glass in his hands. A strong highball, whose strength was already beginning to gain an affection over his brink.

He looks like a basilisk [Jean thought]. She wasn’t quite sure about it— what a basilisk was, much less what one looked like—but its sound had the feeling of his face.

There’s something about being tied up that paralyzes your sense of freedom.

Eager editors played Ellen’s trial to a fare-thee-well, while an equally avid public welcomed the concupiscent and caitiff affair as an antidote for estival doldrums.

It was a whirlwind courtship that ended in marriage at St. Malachy’s three years later.

Almost the four corners of the U.S.A. are represented: Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Kansas, New Jersey.

He poured himself a drink and counted the money. It came to ten thousand even, mostly in fifties and twenty-fives.

[Cult leader] Simeon Taylor was killed—beheaded and left to die on a roadside in a Southern town.

I looked at her breasts outlined against the soft fabric of her dress, nipples like split infinitives.

See what I mean about the need, the sometimes desperate need, for editing?

Of course, editors are no more infallible than writers. Even the best of them is occasionally guilty of overlooking a chucklesome absurdity and allowing it to sneak into print. I ought to know.

It so happens I’m responsible for one of those quoted above.

No, I won’t tell you which one. I’ll just say that it appears in my first published novel. My editor at the time, one of the very best, did quite a bit of work on the manuscript; she missed that youthful clunker, but I have no doubt that she caught and blue-penciled any number of others. I’ll be forever grateful to her for sparing me any additional embarrassment.

Bill Pronzini’s latest books are the Nameless Detective novel Hellbox and the Carpenter and Quincannon novel The Bughouse Affair (co-written with Marcia Muller and due out in January).

Posted in Fiction, Guest | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 17 Comments

“The Magical Mystery Bookstore” (by Jenny Milchman)

Posted on July 25, 2012 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Jenny Milchman is a new writer, and yet she has already influenced not only the mystery field but the wider bookselling world. Her first paid professional publication, the short story “The Closet,” will appear in EQMM’s November issue (on sale the end of August) and in January her first novel, Cover of Snow, will be published by Ballantine Books.  But the New Jersey author is already chair of the International Thriller Writers Debut Authors Program, and she is the founder of Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day. Her guest post reflects on childhood reading (especially mysteries) and bookstores.—Janet Hutchings

Once upon a time, there was a little girl, and all her friends turned on her.

On Monday, she was secure and well-liked, laughing at the helm of her sixth-grade ship. The next day she went into class, smile already mounted on her face, and nobody would talk to her. The kids moved closer together on the lunchroom benches, blocking her from taking a seat. When she looked at them, their eyes slid away, unblinking.

Are you chilled yet, as you are by a good mystery? I am. The cruelty children can wield is as frightening to me as any Stephen King story, and in fact has been put to good use by many writers—William Golding, the King himself, and others from time immemorial on.

That little girl found respite, as many children do, in a book. Do unhappy children read more than happy ones? I wouldn’t say that. But I do think that books provide an escape from the everyday, whether that everyday is noxious and needs leaving, or the child simply has an imagination that draws him or her out of the confines of the contained world of childhood.

How many lifelong loves of mystery have been kindled—to use a phrase—in a bookstore? Scores, I would say. Legions. I remember seeing the whole row of Trixie Beldens spread out along a shelf and being staggered by the riches of it all. I would never be able to finish that series! The reading could go on and on forever.

But finish I did, and was only saved from despair by the bright yellow Nancy Drews that awaited, and as my tastes grew more adult, works by Lois Duncan and Sandra Scoppettone and Katherine Paterson and others whose names I’ve forgotten, but whose books I never will.

In 2010 I floated an idea on the listserv DorothyL. What if there were a celebration called Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day? Christmas was only two weeks away. Wouldn’t it be great, I mused on the List, if we could get parents to take their kids into a bookshop to do their holiday shopping?

There’s nothing like mystery readers for word of mouth. Within an afternoon, news of Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day had gone viral across the web. It was blogged about and covered in industry publications. My IT husband quick-worked up a website and art. We mailed bookmarks, and eighty bookstores celebrated that year.

The second year, preceded by a cross-country drive we took to visit bookstores, the number had climbed to three hundred and fifty, and Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day had gone international.

Everyone pretty much agrees that children should read, and some of the mystery world’s heaviest heavyweights are targeting that goal. James Patterson. David Baldacci. Suspense great Karin Slaughter has recognized the need to support libraries, spearheading a now quarter-million-dollar campaign.

But bookstores are lesser sung, although, to my mind, they play a significant societal role. A bookstore enables children to read, but it also enables other things, which are threatened in the world our kids are set to inhabit.

In a bookstore a child can discover a portal to a whole new world—in the books, but also in the store itself. A bookstore is a unique reflection of the neighborhood in which it stands. From its physical appearance, to the staff that selects books for purchase, to the customers that wander in, no two bookstores are exactly alike.

During an age in which you can have the same dish of pasta, and purchase the same bedroom set, in Topeka and New York, that sense of individuality is worth preserving and bequeathing to our children.

So is the notion that a man or woman can dedicate his or her livelihood to an occupation with roots in the community, which goes on to feed and nourish that community. Main Street. The mom-and-pop shop. Sure, sometimes it’s necessary to one-stop shop, click a button for speed and convenience and economy. But at other times we want to physically experience a place, talk to another human being, and find something we didn’t expect. A treasure that calls to us with color and shape and tactile sensation.

We want to be in a bookstore.

Whose dim, dusty recesses or shining new ones allow a child to get lost if he or she wants to.

We all understand why children might need to get lost. We all know that child who was turned on by her friends.

She was you once upon a time, perhaps.

She was me.

Posted in Bookshops, Fiction, Guest | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

“Revisionist History” (by Jon L. Breen)

Posted on July 18, 2012 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Jon L. Breen will need no introduction to readers of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He is a fiction writer with several novels to his credit and many of his short stories have appeared in EQMM. For today’s blog, though, he draws on his thirty years as reviewer for our long-running book-review column “The Jury Box.” He retired from full-time wielding of “The Jury Box” gavel in 2011, but continues to contribute two columns per year. If anyone has a broad overview of the mystery/crime/suspense field, it’s Jon, and he has some insights that many may find surprising.—Janet Hutchings

Memory, both individual and collective, can be a tricky thing. I doubt if anybody has perused more books about mystery and detective fiction (biographies, bibliographies, critical studies, histories) than I have, and even the best of them have occasional errors, sometimes based on the writer’s reliance on memory. For example, Robert L. Gale’s recent Characters and Plots in the Fiction of Raymond Chandler (McFarland), an otherwise estimable reference book, credits Dashiell Hammett with the script for Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. While the knowledgeable author might easily have conflated the titles of two 1931 films—City Streets was the one Hammett worked on—the Chaplin reference was probably the trying-to-be-helpful contribution of a much younger editorial assistant who knew little about Hammett or Chaplin.

Not one to point fingers too cheerfully, try though I might to avoid them, I have suffered such lapses myself. In the first edition of Novel Verdicts: A Guide to Courtroom Fiction (Scarecrow Press), I mistitled Henry Wade’s The Verdict of You All as The Evidence of You All (no idea why; a mistake that has been repeated [not by me] in at least one other reference book), and in A Shot Rang Out: Selected Mystery Criticism (Surinam Turtle/Ramble House), I opined that Francis M. Nevins’s The Ninety Million Dollar Mouse was one of his best novels when I actually meant The 120-Hour Clock. (They’re both good, but as Mike Nevins himself pointed out to me, Clock is much better.)

But errors of collective memory (that is, mistaken or incomplete knowledge of the past) are much more unfortunate than individual mental slip-ups. To link the two phenomena, I’ll use the work of Headon Hill, pseudonym of Francis Edward Grainger, a prolific British mystery writer of the late-19th and early 20th century. When the learned mystery scholar Bob Adey informed me he’d compiled a couple of massive volumes collecting Hill’s short fiction, I dimly recognized the name, though I’d never read any of his work or had reason to think he was anything but a very minor and justifiably forgotten writer. One of the two new books, Zambra the Detective, leads off with the contents of Clues from a Detective’s Camera (1893), and that title did ring a bell. I was certain the book was included in Queen’s Quorum, Ellery Queen’s list of the most important mystery short-story collections. Just as well I didn’t rush into print anywhere with that statement, since a check of Queen’s Quorum turned up no Zambra. Turns out I remembered the title because it was one of the ones EQ referred to for its extreme rarity.

But the important thing about Hill is that he was pretty good. A sampling of the Zambra stories reveals a good narrative style, well constructed plots, and an early use of the camera as a detective’s tool. A story called “The Episode of the Tattooed Arm” has less actual detection but a harrowing account of a slave-ship atrocity. A comic send-up of Sherlock Holmes headlines The Solutions of Radford Shone and Other Detective Short Story Series, a well-chosen title since Shone’s solutions to some cleverly plotted and humorous-short-of-farcical mysteries are always wrong.

It seems Hill was in a class with some contemporaries who, while certainly not household names, have not fallen into quite such obscurity. Amazon’s Kindle store offers e-books of only two Hill novels and none of his collections. By contrast, you can find several collaborative collections by L. T. Meade, though you will have to wade through a lot of juvenile titles to find them, and nearly all of Rodrigues Ottolengui’s output in book form is readily available as well. By the time of Howard Haycraft’s 1941 history Murder for Pleasure, Hill was already too obscure to be included, though Meade was. Meade and Ottolengui, both represented by titles in Queen’s Quorum, also rate mentions in Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime (revised edition, 1989) and in the Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing (1999), but Hill does not.

The two compilations mentioned above run 505 pages (Shone) and 614 pages (Zambra), include period illustrations, are handsomely produced on good paper with a classy built-in Library of America-style cloth bookmark, and have excellent introductions by Bob Adey. They aren’t available from Amazon but can be procured directly, along with many other remembrances of detection past, from the publisher, George A. Vanderburgh’s The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box.

The mystery field, strong as it is on remembering, has its odd lapses, not confined to the neglect of individual old-timers, a phenomenon common to all fields of endeavor, but sometimes revising history to disrespect whole groups of writers. Consider two persistent myths about the mystery genre, both gender related, one of them to the disadvantage of male writers, the other of female.

Myth #1: Golden Age detective fiction, generally defined as puzzle-centered mysteries published between the World Wars, was essentially a British and female art form. Male and American practitioners may get the occasional nod from critics and scholars, but it’s basically all about Christie, Sayers, Marsh, and Allingham, with the borders occasionally widened to include Josephine Tey or Gladys Mitchell. Chipping away at that mistaken view is an excellent new book that celebrates in detail three male British writers who have been unfairly maligned by historians: Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart, and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961 (McFarland) by Curtis Evans. (Street wrote as John Rhode and Miles Burton, Stewart as J.J. Connington.)

Myth #2: Until the 1970s or ’80s, American women mystery writers were a downtrodden underclass, unappreciated in a male-dominated marketplace. On the contrary, through the 1940s and beyond, most major mystery book editors were women (Marie F. Rodell, Lee Wright, Joan Kahn, Isabelle Taylor), several of the major reviewers were women (Avis de Voto, Lenore Glen Offord, Frances Crane, Dorothy B. Hughes), and many of the most honored and respected novelists were women. For some reason, these writers—Charlotte Armstrong, Mabel Seeley, Helen Reilly, Margaret Millar, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Doris Miles Disney, Patricia McGerr, and Helen McCloy among them—have not received nearly the scholarly and critical attention accorded pioneers like Anna Katharine Green and Mary Roberts Rinehart or contemporaries like Mary Higgins Clark and Marcia Muller. One biographer/scholar who has somewhat addressed this imbalance is Jeffrey Marks, author of Who Was That Lady? Craig Rice: The Queen of Screwball Mystery (2001) and Atomic Renaissance: Women Mystery Writers of the 1940s and 1950s (2003), the latter discussing Millar, Hughes, Armstrong, Leslie Ford, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Patricia Highsmith (an exception to the noted neglect), and Mignon G. Eberhart.

To paraphrase an old wheeze, more harmful than the things we don’t know are the things we do know that aren’t true.

Posted in Fiction, Guest, Magazine | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Contributions from the Classics

Posted on July 11, 2012 by somethingisgoingtohappen

2012 has seen celebrations around the world of the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens (February 7, 1812—June 9, 1870). It had been my intention to blog about Dickens this week. He’s one of the great writers in history who influenced what would eventually become the crime and mystery genre—after all, he created one of the most memorable criminals in fiction, the receiver of stolen goods, Fagin (in Oliver Twist), and one of the first fictional detectives, Inspector Bucket of Bleak House.  Before I had finished gathering my own thoughts about Dickens, however, I happened on a blog by EQMM contributor Terrie Farley Moran that I think puts the case for Dickens being a precursor to modern crime writers better than I could. See Charles Dickens, Crime Writer at Criminal Element. EQMM will be marking the Dickens bicentenary in its November issue (on sale at the end of August) with a mystery by W. Edward Blain set in London’s Dickens House museum.

Dickens wasn’t the only classic European writer of the mid nineteenth century who contributed to the emergence of crime and mystery fiction. Born ten years earlier, on July 24, 1802, Alexandre Dumas, père created works with elements that can be found in both modern thrillers and the puzzle mysteries of our genre’s Golden Age. Dumas’s most famous novels—especially The Three Musketeers and its sequels Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later—are commonly described as historical romances, but if they had been written today, they would, I think, most often be shelved with “Thrillers.” This week, in New York City, the International Thriller Writers organization is holding its annual convention, which will include an awards banquet for the best work in the genre. A couple of years ago, I asked one of ITW’s members, EQMM writer Twist Phelan, one of the best modern practitioners of thriller writing, to define “thriller” so that we could determine which EQMM stories should be submitted for the awards. Most of her criteria could have come from an analysis of Dumas, they match his work so closely.  Here are a few of the characteristics she identified:

1) The hero is a member of a slightly superior social class or is otherwise distinguished from the common man.

2) The basic story is somewhat implausible; putting in a lot of facts about side issues makes the main plot seem more realistic.

3) There is danger to the hero, but also a danger to something greater than the hero; there’s always a higher cause (for example, preventing invasion of England, preventing an assassination that will have a worldwide effect).

4) The story is set in an interesting world (fancy lifestyle, foreign countries).

5) The hero must deal with authorities—there’s always a scene where the hero is contacted by someone in power (for example, the president, the prime minister, the head of the World Bank).

6) The villain is known early on; why he does what he does is disclosed over the course of the book (providing a psychological element).

And here are some of the ways these modern criteria apply to Dumas’s d’Artagnan Romances, as the books, collectively, are called.

1) D’Artagnan, hero of the series, is a nobleman by birth, but impoverished and forced to travel to Paris to make his way. His distinction from the common man is twofold: To his superior birth is added the uncommon intelligence and character required to succeed without the privileges of his class.

2) All of the d’Artagnan books are filled with implausibilities made palatable by a garnish of facts and realistic detail. Often the implausibility consists of characters coming together at improbable times and in unlikely places. D’Artagnan’s reunion with his former servant Planchet in Twenty Years After, for instance, comes when Planchet crashes through d’Artagnan’s window as part of the sequence of his escape from the soldiers of Cardinal Mazarin. But we are distracted from the near-impossibility of Planchet happening upon d’Artagnan’s window (of all the windows in Paris; the two had lost touch years before) by the relation of facts about the political situation in France at the time—the unrest of the aristocrats at the first minister’s attempt to limit their power and the populace’s near-revolt over taxes levied; the inability of the authorities to respond to a serious revolt; and details of the manipulation of the child king Louis XIV.

3) There is always danger to d’Artagnan: In The Three Musketeers, he’s pursued relentlessly by Cardinal Richelieu’s men.  But there is also danger to something (in that instance someone) greater than himself—the queen, who has given her jewels to her lover, the Duke of Buckingham, and will face exposure unless they are returned before Richelieu can prove her indiscretion to the king.  Overriding all of this is the greater cause of preventing Richelieu from starting a war with England.

4) The stories are set in an interesting world: a period of French history with colorful and important characters such as Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIV.

5) The hero is contacted by someone in power: Perhaps the most memorable scene in which the hero of a d’Artagnan romance is enlisted by a powerful person is that in Twenty Years After in which Cardinal Mazarin, also the first minister of France, lures D’Artagnan to his cause, amidst an atmosphere of universal suspicion of his motives.

6) A classic case of the villain being clear from the beginning and his motives revealed over the course of the novel is that of Richelieu in The Three Musketeers (even if Dumas’s depiction of him as evil may not seem to everyone entirely justified by history).

In all of these respects, Dumas was creating books akin to modern thrillers. Yet I have not heard him spoken of in connection with the history of the thriller. I suspect that’s because the books, while they are vigorous fun, lack the most crucial element of all to earn classification as a thriller, and that is the prevalence of fear. As Twist Phelan put it in her answer to my question: “The predominant emotion of the characters in the [thriller] story is fear, and the predominant emotion in the reader is anxiety.”  Speaking for myself, the Dumas books are anything but anxiety inducing. For me, they are too much fun to be scary—romances in the old sense—escapades combined with interesting history and political intrigue. Nevertheless, Dumas must have influenced many subsequent writers who helped shape the thriller genre, for in him we find an early use of so many of the thriller’s key elements.

The same could be said of Dumas’s influence on the classical mystery. Earlier this year I received from EQMM translator John Pugmire two chapters from Dumas’s 1854 novel The Mohicans of Paris, in which a locked-room mystery is presented and solved. I did a little research and discovered that these chapters comprise one of the first locked-room mysteries to appear in literature (at least since ancient times), which should be enough in itself to make Dumas an important figure in the history of our genre, even if the solving of a mystery never took center stage in his books. (EQMM will be featuring those chapters from The Mohicans of Paris, by the way, in Passport to Crime early in 2013.)

Not only did Dumas create one of the first locked-room mysteries, in the last of the d’Artagnan novels, The Vicomte of Bragelonne, one scene has his hero acting in a very detective-like way.  See what you think: King Louis XIV has sent d’Artagnan to the Rond-point du Bois-Rochin, telling him only that a man has been wounded there and a horse is lying dead. D’Artagnan is to observe and report to the king his opinion on the matter.

On d’Artagnan’s return, this is the first part of their exchange:

“Well, monsieur,” he said, “do you bring me any news?”

“Yes, sire.”

“What have you seen?”

“As far as probability goes, sire—“ D’Artagnan began to reply.

“It was certainty I requested of you.”

“I will approach it as near as I possibly can. The weather was very well adapted for investigations of the character I have just made; it has been raining this evening, and the roads were wet and muddy—“

“Well, the result, M. d’Artagnan?”

 “Sire, your majesty told me that there was a horse lying dead in the cross-road of the Bois-Rochin, and I began, therefore, by studying the roads. I say the roads, because the center of the cross-road is reached by four separate roads. The one that I myself took was the only one that presented any fresh traces. Two horses had followed it side by side; their eight feet were marked very distinctly in the clay. One of the riders was more impatient than the other, for the footprints of the one were invariably in advance of the other about half a horse’s length.”

“Are you quite sure they were traveling together?” said the king.

 “Yes, sire. The horses are two rather large animals of equal pace—horses well used to maneuvers of all kinds, for they wheeled round the barrier of the Rond-point together.”

“Well—and after?”

“The two cavaliers paused there for a minute, no doubt to arrange the conditions of the engagement; the horses grew restless and impatient. One of the riders spoke, while the other listened and seemed to have contented himself by simply answering. His horse pawed the ground, which proves that his attention was so taken up by listening that he let the bridle fall from his hand.”

“A hostile meeting did take place then?”

 “Undoubtedly.”

“Continue; you are a very accurate observer.”

 “One of the two cavaliers remained where he was standing, the one, in fact, who had been listening; the other crossed the open space, and at the first placed himself directly opposite to his adversary. The one who had remained stationary traversed the Rond-point at a gallop, about two-thirds of its length, thinking that by this means he would gain upon his opponent; but the latter had followed the circumference of the wood.”

“You are ignorant of their names, I suppose?”

“Completely so, sire. Only he who followed the circumference of the wood was mounted on a black horse.”

“How do you know that?”

“I found a few hairs of his tail among the brambles which bordered the sides of the ditch.”

“Go on.”

“As for the other horse, there can be no trouble in describing him, since he was left dead on the field of battle.”

“What was the cause of his death?”

“A ball which had passed through his brain.”

“Was the ball that of a pistol or a gun?”

“It was a pistol-bullet, sire. Besides, the manner in which the horse was wounded explained to me the tactics of the man who had killed it.  He had followed the circumference of the wood in order to take his adversary in flank. Moreover, I followed his foot-tracks on the grass.”

“The tracks of the black horse, do you mean?”

“Yes, sire.”

“Go on, Monsieur d’Artagnan.”

“As your majesty now perceives the position of the two adversaries, I will, for a moment, leave the cavalier who had remained stationary for the one who started off at a gallop.”

“Do so.”

“The horse of the cavalier who rode at full speed was killed on the spot.”

“How do you know that?”

“The cavalier had not time even to throw himself off his horse, and so fell with it. I observed the impression of his leg, which, with a great effort, he was able to extricate from under the horse. The spur, pressed down by the weight of the animal, had plowed up the ground.”

 “Very good; and what did he do as soon as he rose up again?”

 “He walked straight up to his adversary.”

“Who still remained upon the verge of the forest?”

“Yes, sire. Then, having reached a favorable distance, he stopped firmly, for the impression of both his heels are left in the ground quite close to each other, fired, and missed his adversary.”

“How do you know he did not hit him?”

“I found a hat with a ball through it.”

“Ah, a proof, then!” exclaimed the king.

“Insufficient, sire,” replied d’Artagnan, coldly; “it is a hat without any letters indicating its ownership; without arms; a red feather as all hats have; the lace, even had nothing particular in it.”

“Did the man with the hat through which the bullet had passed fire a second time?”

“Oh, sire, he had already fired twice.”

“How did you ascertain that?”

“I found the waddings of the pistol.”

“And what became of the bullet which did not kill the horse?”

 “It cut in two the feather of the hat belonging to him against whom it was directed, and broke a small birch at the other end of the open glade.”

“In that case, then, the man on the black horse was disarmed, whilst his adversary had still one more shot to fire?”

“Sire, while the dismounted rider was extricating himself from his horse, the other was reloading his pistol. Only, he was much agitated while he was loading it, and his hand trembled greatly.”

“How do you know that?”

 “Half the charge fell to the ground, and he threw the ramrod aside, not having time to replace it in the pistol.”

 “Monsieur d’Artagnan, this is marvelous you tell me.”

“It is only close observation, sire, and the commonest highwayman could tell as much.”

There are several more pages in which d’Artagnan displays his detective skills in this episode, but I think that should suffice to convey what Dumas was doing.  And this was penned less than a decade after the first true detective story, by Poe, was published. Dumas is said to have been familiar with Poe’s work, but even so, this is, I think, a remarkable early example of detective writing.

When the International Thriller Writers announce the winners of the short story award this Saturday night, I’ll be thinking of EQMM’s two nominees—Tim L. Williams for the March/April 2011 EQMM story “Half-Lives” and Dave Zeltserman for the September/October 2011 EQMM story “A Hostage Situation.” I’ll also be thinking of Dumas, who contributed so much to what would become thriller writing—and to the detective story as well.

—Janet Hutchings

Posted in Fiction | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

IN CASE YOU HAVEN’T FOUND THEM YET

Posted on July 11, 2012 by somethingisgoingtohappen

For nearly two years, EQMM has been producing monthly podcasts of stories from the magazine’s archives. Most often, they are readings by the authors; sometimes full or partial dramatizations are featured. A couple of authors have composed and performed music for the series, and there are some author interviews in the mix. The podcasts can be found here.

Last year EQMM launched a series of e-anthologies. First in the lineup is The Crooked Road: Ellery Queen Presents Stories of Grifters, Gangsters, Hit Men, and Other Career Crooks (volume one). A second volume will follow shortly. More information about the books is available at Amazon.com.

Last month, our sister publicaton, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, joined us in the blogosphere.  You can find their blog, called Trace Evidence, at www.trace-evidence.net.

Posted in Magazine, Welcome | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Location, Location, Location” (by Marilyn Todd)

Posted on July 5, 2012 by somethingisgoingtohappen
In my June 6th post “Taking Us There” I discussed settings from the standpoint of the character-like role they can play in a story. Marilyn Todd comes at the subject from a different angle—seeing setting as a source of inspiration. The author of books and stories set everywhere from Ancient Greece and Rome to America’s Wild West to Britain in the fifties and sixties—not to mention current-day stories set in France, England, and the U.S.—she is as versatile as anyone you can name when it comes to conveying place in fiction.  For an overview of her range, check out her website (www.marilyntodd.com).—Janet Hutchings

They say, hard work never killed anyone. I say, why take the risk? Because if, as The Troggs say, love is all around, then so is inspiration—and writing is a tough enough road without having to lay it yourself. Luckily, inspiration can strike from anywhere. A face, a gesture, a piece in the paper. A photo, a building, a song. Indeed, Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” kick-started my story “ 667, Evil and Then Some” (EQMM May 09). But some of my greatest sources of inspiration, and the ones that stayed with me, have come from places I’ve visited.

Take Jerome. Jerome, Arizona. One mile up and what feels a million miles from anywhere, it was a thriving mining town. Thriving as in three million pounds of copper a month coming out of those hills—and that’s not counting the gold, silver, and zinc. The eye of the gold-rush hurricane, Jerome promised riches, a fresh start, and perhaps most importantly freedom. But. And there’s always a but. For every miner digging out a fortune, there were a dozen or more looking to lift the financial burden from his shoulders. And this is where the balance of control suddenly shifts.

One minute, you’re mooching round a ghost town, taking pictures, bumping into another English couple who live not far from you in France, and moaning about it being ninety-eight degrees. The next, the damn place has your ankle in a vice, and you know it won’t let you go until you write its story.

And what a story, eh? Short on churches, long on bordellos, Jerome was chockablock with card sharps, saloons, and opium dens, quickly earning it the reputation of being “ The Wickedest Town in the West” (the title of one of my upcoming stories in EQMM).

Unlike the old-timers, you don’t have to dig deep for the action these days. Take the night Billy the Kid relieved Wyatt Earp of his famous peacemaker. Same night Nora “ Butter” Brown opened her brothel and gave Wyatt peace of a somewhat different kind. Booze was cheap, life was cheaper. Butter was killed by her own husband not long afterwards. Throwing acid in a girl’s face was almost de rigeur. The murder of Sammie Dean, one of Jerome’s hundred or so “ soiled doves” remains unsolved to this day.

And if that’s not enough, spare a thought for poor old Headless Charlie, still haunting the abandoned mineshafts. The ghosts of the Kiowa are rumoured to talk to anyone who walks the fields outside of town. And who knew the love of Jelly Roll Morton’s life was one of Jerome’s most famous prostitutes? Or, blush blush, what Jelly Roll was slang for…??

For those of you who haven’t dashed off to find out—and don’t worry, we all know you’re going to Google it later—another place that will stick like chewing gum to the sole of your shoe is Sicily. Not simply because of Mount Etna. Though it did spew out some spectacular lava fountains a couple of months back. Not even because of that deliciously light Limoncello liqueur, made from fat, juicy Sicilian lemons.

For an island smaller than Vermont, it packs one hell of a picturesque punch. Rugged mountains. Sun- drenched plains. Rocky coves. And oh, those infinite, golden, sandy beaches. (Research is tough, but someone has to do it.) As always, though, the brighter the sun, the darker the shadows.

When did Sicily ever belong to the Sicilians? First, the Greeks, then the Romans. For a hundred years, it served as a Muslim emirate, before the Normans effectively kick-started the Crusades by invading the island and restoring Christianity. By the 15th century, Sicily had fallen into the hands of the Spanish, who treated the islanders so badly they formed a separate society of their own, which eventually morphed into the Mafia.

All this while being rocked by earthquakes, decimated by the Black Death, showered with volcanic eruptions, and attacked by pirates from the Barbary Coast!

Then there are the myths. Possibly the most famous is that of Scylla and Charybdis. Monsters, cannibals, and just an arrow shot apart, if Charybdis didn’t suck your ship down, then six-headed Scylla was on standby to snatch sailors from the deck, crack their bones, and swallow them. Jason and his Argonauts tangled with this pair of lovelies and lived to tell the tale. Odysseus encountered them on his way home from Troy, only he was not so lucky. Scylla seized six of his men, one in each mouth. Six more job vacancies open.

Were they monsters? Of course not. Were they monstrous? I’ll say. The Strait of Messina, separating Sicily from mainland Italy, is less than two miles wide. In a tempest, strong currents would be deadly for lightweight, wooden ships, while storm-force winds could dash them against the jagged rocks in an instant. For those early seafarers, “ Watch out for the undertow and mind the rock shoals” might well be good advice. But when you’re captain of a trading mission that runs into several months, and you have to put ashore each night, in often hostile territory, certain pointers can get overlooked. “ Beware the whirlpool and six-headed she-monster” is a warning you’ll never forget.

Which is what I find so fascinating about these myths. Not just their origins, but how they evolved and were perceived.

That Mount Etna was believed to be the Gateway to Hell during the Middle Ages is understandable. On the other hand, the legend that says any flower thrown into a certain river in Greece will wash up five hundred miles away in a Syracusan spring is stretching it a bit. Or is it? When you’re a Greek settler, far from a homeland and family you know you’ll never see again, what’s wrong with thinking the flowers that grow beside the spring are from the same plant as those in your native country? Or that the river god, who causes the flow to disappear underground in Greece, doesn’t surface here, to unite with his one true love? The nymph of this lovely spring?

Such is the pull of the Sicilian landscape and its legends that I’ve written about it twice. First, in Virgin Territory (in the Claudia Seferius series set in Ancient Rome). I ha read how the Greeks and Romans used to staunch minor cuts with spiders’ webs. So who actually collected these, I wondered? How did they preserve them? All of which led to my recluse of a huntsman up in the hills. The man who collects spiders’ webs.

The second time was Blind Eye (in the High Priestess Iliona Ancient Greek mystery series), which centres on another Sicilian myth. That of the giant, one-eyed cannibal, the Cyclops. Like my huntsman, here was another lonely, misunderstood outsider, feared and reviled thanks to the “ eye” in the middle of his forehead. A tattoo of concentric circles that was the mark of the smith in Ancient Thrace. A mark which set this big, shambling man apart from society, and made him what he was.

But then I like loners. And blood. And myths. Put them together, and I’m like a kid in a sweet shop. Throw in some romance, and I’m as close to heaven as it gets. And I always, always throw in some romance!

Which brings us to the challenge. Such is the intricate balance between character, plot, and setting, that it’s often hard to decide which comes first, the chicken or the egg. Now and then, though—rare, but not unheard of—they come together at the same time.

There’s a lake in southwest France, not far from where I live, which is close to the Atlantic Ocean, but at the same time sheltered by the pine forests for which the area is famous. One still, warm summer’s evening, I was sitting on the hotel balcony with my husband, drinking wine and watching the water turn blood red in the setting sun. Wondering how it must have been for people growing up in this isolated spot, before tourists, telephones, and TV transformed their lives. From such musings, a Peeping Tom was born. Georges, in “Dead and Breakfast” (EQMM March 09). A simple man in every sense—slow learning, unassuming, harmless—but so real in my mind that I shot the second deadlock on the door that night.

And the lesson to pass on from all of this?

Don’t drink wine so bloody late at night.

The latest story in the High Priestess Iliona series mentioned in Marilyn’s blog will appear in the November 2012 EQMM (on sale at the end of July).

Posted in Fiction, Guest, Setting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“You Are What You Read” (by Jonathan Santlofer)

Posted on June 27, 2012 by somethingisgoingtohappen
A bestselling crime novelist and winner of the Nero Wolfe Award, Jonathan Santlofer only turned to writing fiction after he’d become well known as a painter. He has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts painting grants and his work is part of the collections of a number of museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Tokyo’s Institute of Contemporary Art.  He talks today about what led him to start writing crime fiction, and eventually to co-found Crime Fiction Academy.—Janet Hutchings

More and more the short story has become an important part of my writing life.

The other day I was thinking about the old Alfred Hitchcock TV show, one in particular where the housewife kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb then serves it to the police who come to investigate, and another about a restaurant where human flesh was the specialty of the house, and The Twilight Zone and Mr. & Mrs. North and Dragnet and Hawaiian Eye and Surfside Six and The Mod Squad, all of them running together in my brain, commingling with the detective and mystery stories I read as a boy, the Hardy Boys my favorite series, along with horror comics like Tales From the Crypt, and Classic Comics like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which I had no idea came from an actual book until a wise teacher pointed it out and suggested I might also like Edgar Allan Poe, and that was it, I was hooked.

Poe taught me to love short stories: The Fall of the House of Usher, which I must have read under the covers a dozen times and again recently and liked it just as much with a deeper understanding of familial love gone very wrong—or the terror/torture of The Pit and the Pendulum—and possibly the first detective story I ever read, The Murders in the Rue Morgue —and the opium-drenched ghost story, Ligeia—and, of course, the unparalleled crime and guilt story, The Tell-Tale Heart, which I still have my writing students read for its structure and pitch-perfect voice.

I don’t remember exactly when I started reading stories by Chandler, Hammett and Woolrich, the latter perhaps the least elegant prose writer of the three but his particular brand of darkness appealed to my teenage brain and still does. Even as a kid I loved noir stories where things do not work out for the best or twist and turn in such a way that the bad guys and gals get what’s coming to them—the lurid has always held me in thrall.

The thing is, I never planned to be a writer. I started as an artist and continue to paint, but a twist of fate—a gallery fire that obliterated six years of my artwork—knocked me for a loop and the next thing I knew I was writing, then having published, a crime-fiction novel, The Death Artist, successful enough to get me a contract to write more and I just kept going. Perhaps all those mysteries I’d read as a kid were just waiting for something to come along and give me the needed kick in the pants to write my own.

It took me a while to write a short story—something about the form scared me—but as soon as I did I realized it was the place a writer honed his or her craft (like drawing is to painting for visual artists), an arena in which to stretch, try new voices and POVs you haven’t tried before or don’t think you can sustain in a longer form. I (almost) always have fun writing a story, something I can’t say about a novel.

I can write a short story in a few sittings, particularly when I get an “assignment”: say, Nelson DeMille asking me to contribute to the MWA anthology The Rich and the Dead, or Joyce Carol Oates requesting a story set in the Garden State for Akashic’s New Jersey Noir, which is both flattering and intimidating because you don’t want to disappoint them.

There are times I write a story, put it aside, then come back to it months, even years later and realize what needs to be done, which is exactly what happened with a story called “The Muse,” which will be in the September/October issue of Ellery Queen, a story inspired by a tabloid headline that haunted me for well over a year before I started to write it.

A few years ago I put together an anthology, The Dark End of the Street, with my good friend, the crime-fiction writer, S.J. Rozan, in which we brought together crime-fiction and literary authors all writing crime stories. Editing anthologies can be one of the more gratifying experiences a writer can have—asking all sorts of wonderful writers to create a short story just for you!

Last year, I was asked to put together a collection of original noir stories to accompany the debut of Rockstar’s gorgeous narrative video game LA Noire. I invited a stellar group—Megan Abbott, Lawrence Block, Francine Prose, Joe Lansdale, Joyce Carol Oates, Duane Swierczynski, Andrew Vachss—to write stories set in 1947 Los Angeles (and Hard Case Crime’s Charles Ardai provided an introduction, and yes, I wrote a story too) all of us under the pressure of an eight-week deadline, but everyone came through with thrilling stories, which you can still download from Amazon for only 99 cents, a very good deal no matter how you look at it.

Ideas about writing crime fiction are often discussed at mystery writers’ conferences and conventions, and though some have seminars in the craft there is no place that deals with the subject in an ongoing way, which is how the Crime Fiction Academy came into being. It had been percolating in the back of my brain for some time but it took Noreen Tomassi, the daring and forward-thinking director of the Center for Fiction, to press me into becoming the Program Director and to actually create it. Noreen and I met over a period of months, putting our collective heads together as to what such a program should be, who it would be aimed at, and eventually we figured out what we wanted—a program devoted exclusively to crime fiction in all its glorious forms where people could finish the novel they had been trying and unable to finish, a place for unpublished writers who would become what we hoped would be the next generation of great published crime writers. Last month concluded our inaugural session—a twelve-week program that included a weekly three-hour writing workshop, a monthly historical reading seminar, a once-a-month “Master Class” with writers like Elmore Leonard, Lee Child, Joyce Carol Oates, and Harlan Coben, and evening events with leading editors and agents in the field—and it was a rousing success.

In twelve weeks I saw students learn how to self-edit and revise their novels, write brand-new heart-stopping, heart-breaking short stories, sit side-by-side with Lee Child, Elmore Leonard, and Joyce Carol Oates and talk about craft and career, and chat with editors and agents about the best way to get published (one of our students has already had a story published that was written in CFA and there are more to come).

The students came from all over, young and old and bright and determined. Many of them told me it was the most incredible writing experience they’ve ever had and it was incredible for me too. We’re starting up again in September with Dennis Lehane, Lawrence Block, Susan Isaacs, and more, and I can’t wait.

So, other than the fact that Crime Fiction Academy is sort of my baby, why am I telling you this? Because at the end of the season my CFA students surprised me with a gift, a first-edition copy of a rare Cornell Woolrich novel, and I swear I never told them that I loved Woolrich or how much his stories had meant to me or helped form the basis of my general love for crime fiction, but somehow they intuited it.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how it all comes around? I think of all those novels and stories I read as a boy—the Hardy Boys, Agatha Christie, the incomparable Edgar Allan Poe, then Hammett and Chandler and Woolrich, and I wonder who I might have been or what I might have done if I hadn’t read them. But then, I did, and they are part of me, so perhaps I never had a choice.

Posted in Guest | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments