SleuthSayers

Six Degrees of Separation... or Less

2026-06-25T00:05:00.000-04:00

I am constantly fascinated about how few steps it takes to connect between people. For example:

June 23, 1993 - Lorena Bobbit got fed up with being abused by her husband John Wayne Bobbitt and cut off his dick with a Ginzu carving knife (turns out Ginzu knives really were as sharp as they were sold to be - truth in advertising lives!).

John Wayne Bobbitt, with his newly reattached penis* formed a band, The Severed Parts, which went nowhere, and appeared in two adult films, John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut and Frankenpenis.

*And watching newscasters around the world trying to say the word "penis" on prime-time news in the 1990s was one of the main hilarities of that simpler time - now, of course, 'Anything Goes'.

In 2003, Bobbitt proved that he was one of the world's slowest learners when he was arrested for battery on his new wife. And he hired an entertainment lawyer, Paul A. Erickson, who booked him on a worldwide "Love Hurts" media tour.

Paul A. Erickson highlights: Ran Pat Buchanan's Presidential campaign in 1992, and advised Mitt Romney in his Presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012. In 2016 - he claimed he was on the Trump Presidential transition team. He also sent an email during the 2016 NRA convention to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump with the subtle subject: "Kremlin Connection".

Also in 2016 - Was successfully sexpionaged by Russian "gun rights advocate":

Maria Butina - Red sparrow financed by Russian billionaires Alexander Torshin and Konstantin Nikolayev, both friends of Putin, to create a "pro-gun" organization whose chief purpose was to infiltrate Russian opposition groups and, later, the NRA. She succeeded in doing both. LINK

2015 - Invited to the South Dakota TARS (Teenage Republicans) Camp in the Black Hills by Dusty Johnson then working for Vantage Point Solutions in Mitchell, SD:

Johnson raved about her and introduced her to everyone he could, especially in the NRA...

In December, 2015 then-NRA Vice President (later President) Pete Brownell and former NRA President David Keene went to Moscow with Maria Butina, Torshin, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. BTW, Butina and Torshin were made life-time members of the NRA.

2016 - She did what any good Russian agent in a spy novel would do: She sexpionaged Paul Erickson and lived with him for the next to years, but... [sob]

"But this relationship does not represent a strong tie to the United States because Butina appears to treat it as simply a necessary aspect of her activities. For example, on at least one occasion, Butina offered an individual other than U.S. Person 1 [Erickson] sex in exchange for a position within a special interest organization. Further, in papers seized by the FBI, Butina complained about living with U.S. Person 1 [Erickson] and expressed disdain for continuing to cohabitate with U.S. Person 1 [Erickson]." Dakota Free Press

2018 - Butina pled guilty to to infiltrate the US conservative movement as an agent for the Kremlin and to working with Erickson to forge bonds with NRA officials and conservative leaders while under the direction of Torshin.

2019 - Butina was released from prison, and returned to Russia where she was welcomed as a hero by Vladimir Putin.

Where are they now?

(in alphabetical order)

John Wayne Bobbitt is currently living quietly in Florida, and has been married and divorced 3 times since that fateful night. Hope springs eternal.

Maria Butina is a deputy of the Russian Duma, and sits on the Committee on International Affairs as well as the Commission on Investigation of Foreign Interference in Domestic Affairs of Russia. And if that doesn't make you laugh, nothing will.

Paul A. Erickson - 2019 - Tried and convicted for an oil development scheme and wire fraud and money laundering for Compass Care, a senior living company he founded. In 2021 - Went to prison for same and was pardoned by President Trump on his last full day in office, January 19, 2021.

According to AI and my own exhaustive search - like D-Day in "Animal House" - his current whereabouts are unknown.

Dusty Johnson is South Dakota's sole US House Representative, and lost his bid this May to replace Larry Rhoden as Governor of South Dakota. His future is unknown.

Anyway, from John Wayne Bobbitt to Vladimir Putin in way less than six steps… you can't make this stuff up.

Moonlight Mile

2026-06-24T03:00:00.000-04:00

My sis sent me a copy of Lehane’s Moonlight Mile, which for some reason I hadn’t read, and although it’s a very good book, it left me for some reason unsatisfied, and I can’t quite put my finger on why. I might have been asking it to be a different book than it was.

Moonlight Mile came out in 2010, which means after The Given Day, the first of the Coughlin trilogy, and before Live by Night, the second novel, which picks up Joe Coughlin’s story as a Florida bootlegger. Moonlight Mile is the last of the Kenzie/Gennaro series, so far, and it’s also a sequel to Gone, Baby, Gone, published twelve years earlier. I had the nagging feeling Moonlight Mile was kind of an orphan.

I mean Lehane no offense, but of course if it were me, and he made a similar comment about something of mine, it would get my back up. We can’t know what impels a writer.

In any case, we’re revisiting unfinished business. Gone, Baby, Gone ends on an ambiguous and very uncertain note. Moonlight Mile is, quite explicitly, a reading of that moral temperature. I can’t say much about the plot, which takes off at right angles from Gone, Baby, Gone – not without giving too much away, if you’re unfamiliar with the previous book. We are back in the world of human trafficking, heartless as before, although not quite as horrific. And maybe the stakes simply don’t seem as high. There was an edge of nausea in Gone, Baby, Gone that’s just not present, here. A sense of the absolute is missing.

It’s not too much to say that evil itself has often been Lehane’s theme. Sometimes it’s frighteningly specific, and sometimes it’s a planetary influence, felt but unseen - Mystic River makes your skin crawl on both counts. It may be an odd complaint, but Moonlight Mile didn’t creep me out enough.

They Must Suffer!

2026-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00

I had every intention to run a column today about my favorite books that I've read in the second quarter of this year. What they are. Why I loved 'em. But sometimes life gets in the way--or rather, the lack of sleep does.

Last night, I didn't sleep one wink, and my two remaining brain cells are rebelling. Could I pick some great books to mention? Sure. Could I say why they're fab? Not in any coherent fashion. So instead, I am rerunning a column from 2018 about the importance of being mean to your characters. I hope it helps.

But first, my favorite book of the second quarter? The Book Witch by Meg Shaffer. It's part fantasy, part mystery, part romance, part adventure, and it is all wonderful. I don't have it in me to go into detail right now about why it's wonderful, but if you love books, I feel confident you'll agree with me. So, check it out. Trust me.

And now ...

They Must Suffer!

Authors in the mystery community are generally known for being nice folks. Helpful, welcoming, even pleasant. But when it comes to their work, successful writers are mean. They have to be.

An author who likes her characters too much might be inclined to make things easy for them. The sleuth quickly finds the killer. She's never in any real danger. In fact, there's no murder at all in the story or book. Just an attempted murder, but the sleuth's best friend pulls through just fine.

These scenarios may be all well and good in Happily Ever After Land. But in Crime Land, they result in a book without tension that's probably going to be way too short. That's why editors often tell mystery authors to make their characters suffer.

Yet that can be easier said than done. If you're basing a character on someone you don't like, then you might have a grand time writing every punch, broken bone, and funeral. But not every character can be based on an enemy. And sometimes characters seem to plead from the page, "Don't do that to me."

It's happened to me. I once started writing a certain story. I had a great first page, and then I got stuck. No matter how I tried to write the next several sentences, they didn't work. So I walked away from the computer. Sometimes I find a break can help a writing logjam. But not this time. In the end, I found I simply couldn't write the story I'd planned because, you see, that plan had included the death of a cat. And I just couldn't do it.

Don't do it!

The publication I was aiming the story for would have been fine with a story that included a dead animal. But I wasn't fine with it. And I knew my regular readers wouldn't like it either. Sure animals die in real life, and sometimes they die in fiction too. But those deaths should be key to the story. The Yearling wouldn't work if the deer didn't die. And Old Yeller needed the dog to die too.

But not all stories need animal jeopardy. And that's the key question: is it necessary? In the story I was writing about the cat it wasn't, and I knew it in my gut, even if I didn't know it in my head at first. That's why I couldn't bring myself to write the story as planned. Instead, with the help of a friend, I found another way to make the story work, one without any harm to animals.

It's not the first time something like that has happened to me. I once wrote a story called "Suffer the Little Children" (published in my collection, Don't Get Mad, Get Even). This is the first story of mine involving a female sheriff name Ellen Wescott. She's smart and honest and way different than I'd planned. Originally she was supposed to be a corrupt man. But as I was thinking through the plot during my planning stage, I heard that male sheriff say in my head, "Don't make me do that. I don't want to do that." Spooky, right?


Sometimes characters just have to be nice

While part of me immediately responded, "too bad,"--he had to suffer--another part of me knew that when characters talk back like that, it's because my subconscious knows what I'm planning isn't going to work. Either it won't work for the readers, as with the cat I couldn't kill. Or it won't work for the plot, as was the case with this sheriff story. So my corrupt male sheriff became an honorable female sheriff, and large parts of the plot changed. My female sheriff faced obstacles, but she was a good person. That was a compromise my gut could live with.

Readers, I'd love to hear about stories and books you've enjoyed that involved a plot event you didn't love, yet you accepted it because you knew it was important to the story. And writers, I'd love to hear about times you couldn't bring yourself to write something. What was it? And why?

Fifty years since our first date

2026-06-22T00:01:00.000-04:00

In a couple of days, on June 24, 2026, it will be the fiftieth anniversary of my first date with my husband, and I can't resist marking the occasion with a celebratory post. If you'd told us that evening that we were launching a fifty-year relationship, we'd have laughed our heads off.

We met at the Free Association, an anarchist free school on West 20th Street off Fifth Avenue long before that block's gentrification. After a few months of snappy banter and a couple of heated political disputes, he invited me out for a beer at Paula's, a lesbian bar on West 11th Street off Greenwich Avenue in the Village. Both places are long gone, but Paula's was resurrected briefly in the alternative New York of Lawrence Block's The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown (2022). As his character Bernie Rhodenbarr says, “There were guys who came there on a regular basis, and not to hit on lesbians. I guess they liked the atmosphere." We were so skeptical about the evening going well that we each invited a friend along.

We had little in common beyond our zest for political dialectic—the left’s fancy word for arguing at that time. And we both were readers. My favorite book was Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. I was also reading P.D. James, Ellis Peters, and Patricia Moyes. He was reading Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, and Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. By two years later, much had changed. In a poem titled “Insomnia,”* I wrote nostalgically about

. . . love among the leaflets and petitions
we had no place else to go
all we had then is gone
the strangeness, the friendships, the poverty
we have nothing left of that
except each other

Change is a constant in a fifty-year relationship. At the beginning, nobody thought we’d stay together, including us. Today, we’re still discovering unexpected ways in which we’re so different we’d be incompatible if we hadn’t also spent fifty years on working out how to get along. When we married, we talked about growing old together but didn't quite believe it would happen or could have imagined what it would be like. He’s retired and I’m in that liminal space between setting myself a rigorous standard of productivity and doing as much or as little as I like, happy as a bee knee deep in pollen.

He’s currently reading The Triangle of Power by Alexander Stubb, current president and former prime minister of Finland. I read a book a day or sometimes two in three days. Right now I’m particularly enjoying Sherry Thomas’s Lady Sherlock series, a riff on the Holmes canon that may be my favorite since Laurie King created Mary Russell. On our various electronic devices, I stream videos, mostly French and Korean series, also British and other English-language cop shows, rarely American. He hangs out online with global gaming friends he’s made over the years, listens to short story podcasts, and watches videos on art restoration, cooking, archaeology, and what’s going on in the world. I can’t get him to watch a movie with me, even on the rare occasion when it’s one I think we’d both enjoy. As I said, we’re different.

A lot of people ask us how we make it work. Certain aspects anyone can try at home (that’s the work). For the rest, you have to be lucky. You have to love each other (that’s the luck). It takes a lot of work, especially if you’re different: talking to each other; not always being right; letting go of expectations, including that you’ll agree on everything and do everything together. You can’t expect perfection. It doesn’t exist. You find that your beliefs and ways of doing things are not the absolutes you thought they were. What a liberating surprise, once you get used to the idea.

*included in my first poetry collection, I Am the Daughter, and in a volume of Best Poems of 1980 (Monitor)

Dadication

2026-06-21T00:09:34.471-04:00

Today is Father’s Day. While the focus is men, the country owes the holiday to women. Three in its earliest history and another four decades on are:

1908, Grace Golden Clayton organized a celebration following a West Virginia mining disaster that killed her father among many other men.
1909-1910, Sonora Smart Dodd initiated a companion to Mother’s Day in Spokane, Washington.
1911, Jane Addams, social reformer and suffrage activist, proposed a Chicago Father's Day.
1957, Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith chastised Congress for honoring one parent and ignoring the other for 40 years.

Despite their best efforts, it took nearly seven decades after Mother’s Day for a corresponding Dad’s day to become officially observed. At the presidential level,

1916, Woodrow Wilson spoke at Spokane’s Father’s Day festival organized by Dodd.
1924, Calvin Coolidge proposed a day for fathers amid strong opposition.
1966, Lyndon Johnson unofficially observed the holiday throughout his term.
1972, Richard Nixon signed recognition of Father's Day into law.
1977, Jimmy Carter issued Proclamation 4505 designating the 3^rd Sunday in June as the official holiday.

Leigh and (imaginary) offspring

Adaptive Adoption

Me, I have no children although a girl once ‘adopted’ me and still calls me ‘Dad’. We might share DNA: Like me, she’s a ruff, tuff, cream puff with a twisted sense of humor. She’s fearless and tender at the same time. That’s the closest I’ve come to fatherhood.

Gentleladies have asked why I have no children and I honestly answer that I never grew up enough. I orbit my personal planet in a cosmic haze of my own. A good companion might handle that, but can you imagine one, two, or three Mini-Me tots tugging her skirts and messing up my first grade teacher’s game of telephone as a lesson on gossip?

I’ve written about my Dad who embraced an amazing range of interests and was largely self-taught. At 6’4, he was a presence. Women and small children adored him. I still have anger issues surrounding his unnecessary death, an arrogant screw-up largely attributable to the Mayo. Nevertheless, I have good memories, especially when I was very young and learning at his proverbial knee. I count myself lucky.

Ain’t Got a Home

If you have a good father in your life, you are fortunate too. A sizable proportion of children have little or no male parenting in their lives. We owe it to our families to count our blessings.

And then there’s Clarence Frogman Henry who ain’t got no fodder, ain’t got no mudder, ain’t got no sister, not even a brudder. He’s a lonely frog, ain’t got a home.

Favorites, Genrewise

2026-06-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

FYI, today's post is sort of a continuation of--or at least is related to--a SleuthSayers column I posted a month ago called It's Still a Mystery. The subject of that post was mystery-fiction subgenres, and the subject of today's post includes all kinds of genres and subgenres. This one came about because of a discussion I had last week with several of my relatives (actually my wife's relatives) about favorite movies.

I have mentioned before at this blog that I love movies, and my discussion with our kinfolks went beyond overall favorites and into which movies are our favorites in different genres. (We focused more on movies than on written fiction because there was more common ground there--we were more likely to have seen the same movies than to have read the same novels or stories.)

So, for what it's worth, I came up with a list of my favorites, not only of mystery/crime movies but of movies across the board. Be aware, though, that in this case favorite does not always mean best. I do recognize the excellence and quality of films like Citizen Kane, Schindler's List, Rashomon, Sophie's Choice, Sunset Boulevard, and so on--but alas, those are not my favorites. My favorites are those I enjoyed the most, and that I find myself watching over and over again. (Yes, I do that, because I have all these on DVD--it's enough to run my wife crazy).

Having said that, here's my list. Please note that I've invented all kinds of subgenres to put them in, which was almost as much fun as picking the favorites.

Movies:

Crime -- L.A. Confidential (1997)

Science Fiction -- Aliens (1986)

Western -- Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Romance -- Casablanca (1942)

Horror -- The Thing (1982)

Comedy -- The Big Lebowski (1998)

Fantasy -- Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003)

Adventure -- Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Drama -- 12 Angry Men (1957)

War -- Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Sports -- The Natural (1984)

Swords & Sandals -- Gladiator (2000)

Traditional Mystery -- Knives Out (2019)

Horrific Mystery -- Psycho (1960)

Noir -- Double Indemnity (1944)

Neo-Noir -- Body Heat (1981)

Gangsters -- The Godfather (1972)

Spies -- Goldfinger (1964)

Buddies -- Lethal Weapon (1987)

Serial Killer -- tie: Dirty Harry (1971) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Prison -- The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

Heist -- Die Hard (1988)

Con-game -- The Spanish Prisoner (1997)

Medical -- Medicine Man (1992)

Romantic Comedy -- Sleepless in Seattle (1993)

Romantic Crime -- Witness (1985)

Romantic Fantasy -- Always (1989)

SF Comedy -- Galaxy Quest (1999)

Western Comedy -- Blazing Saddles (1974)

Laugh-Out-Loud Comedy -- Airplane! (1980)

Musical Comedy -- A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1996)

Australian Western -- Quigley Down Under (1990)

Neo-Western -- No Country for Old Men (2007)

Time Travel -- Back to the Future (1985)

Time-travel Romance -- Somewhere in Time (1980)

Superheroes -- Superman, the Movie (1978)

Monsters -- Monsters (2010)

Futuristic -- Escape from New York (1981)

Creature Adventure -- tie: Jaws (1975) and Jusassic Park (1993)

Kids' Adventure -- Third Man on the Mountain (1959)

Coming-of-Age -- Stand by Me (1986)

Dogs -- Old Yeller (1957)

Horses -- The Black Stallion (1979)

Animated -- Dumbo (1941)

Christmas Movie -- It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

Journalism -- Broadcast News (1987)

Disasters -- The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

Alien Invasion -- Signs (2002)

Another note: It's probably obvious that many of the above picks are cross-genre and could fit into several different categories. Some, like the following, are so genre-mixed I couldn't decide where to put them. But they're still favorites:

The Man from Snowy River (1982) -- Australian Western romance

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) -- Southern courtroom-drama coming-of-age mystery

The Princess Bride (1987) -- Comedy fantasy adventure romance

To finish off this silliness, here are my favorite TV and cable/streaming series.

Weekly network TV series:

Crime -- Hill Street Blues (NBC)

Mystery -- Alfred Hitchcock Presents (CBS and NBC)

Western -- Have Gun Will Travel (CBS)

Neo-Western -- Justified (FX)

Western mini-series -- Lonesome Dove (CBS)

Science Fiction -- Star Trek (NBC)

SF/Fantasy -- The Twilight Zone (CBS)

Drama -- Lost (CBS)

Comedy -- Cheers (NBC)

Spies -- The Man from U.N.C.L.E (NBC)

Medical -- ER (NBC)

War -- Combat (ABC)

Cable/streaming series:

Crime -- The Wire (HBO)

Mystery -- True Detective (HBO)

Western -- Deadwood (HBO)

Neo-Western -- 1923 (Paramount+)

Fantasy -- Game of Thrones (HBO)

Horror -- The Walking Dead (AMC)

Drama -- tie: Mad Men (AMC) and Landman (Paramount+)

Comedy -- Bad Monkey (Apple TV+)

Journalism -- The Newsroom (HBO)

War -- Band of Brothers (HBO)

Swords & Sandals -- Rome (HBO)

Spies -- Slow Horses (Apple TV+)

Gangsters -- The Sopranos (HBO)

I'm hoping all these might at least bring back some memories--they sure do for me. Another FYI: I'm well aware that I left out many movies that I love, like Pulp Fiction, Fargo, Shane, Chinatown, The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke, Forrest Gump, High Noon, Star Wars, Tombstone, Rocky, etc., and series like The West Wing, M*A*S*H*, Seinfeld, Frasier, Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, Better Call Saul, and Yellowstone, but I had to stop somewhere, and I wanted to try for only one entry per category. Just shoot me.

My question for you is, what are some of your favorites, for both the big and small screens, and which favorites of mine did you hate? (I won't be offended; anyone who admits that he loved Blazing Saddles and The Man from U.N.C.L.E is used to criticism. But hey, confession's good for the soul.)

Next time, I plan to stop playing and get back to the subject of writing. Stay cool!

Anyone Can Write: Be a Lion! Be a Pirate!

2026-06-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

Write like this.

If you have kids or grandchildren, you have probably encountered the animated Pixar movie, Ratatouille, about a French rat whose dream is to cook his filthy little heart out. The film’s mantra, expressed by a legendary chef who is deceased through much of the story, is “Anyone can cook.” Chef Auguste Gusteau’s egalitarian dictum drives the plot of the film, and inspires and ultimately uplifts our rodent star, Remy.

Gusteau’s words pop into my head every time I re-read Brenda Ueland’s charming book, If You Want to Write. I don’t re-read many books, especially books about writing, but I do find myself turning to Ueland every year and I get something out of it each time. For many years I kept a few extra copies in the office to share with friends.

This time I picked it up because I had re-read a short story I’d written a few years ago that I now felt certain was, as long as we are on a French theme, merde.

I can’t believe I sent this to an editor!

What was I thinking?

No wonder they rejected it!

And like that.

That’s when I knew it was time to dig out Brenda and dip into her wisdom. Her book first saw the light of day in 1938. Ueland was born to Norwegian Americans who settled the American midwest. A judge for a father, a suffragette for a mother. Ueland lived and worked in New York City in the early teens of that century, counting among her friends radical writers such as John Reed and Louise Bryant, and the playwright Eugene O’Neill. (Watch Warren Beatty’s film Reds, to get up to speed.)

I can’t tell you much about Ueland’s literary output. She wrote for the major magazines of her days such as Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, in addition to newspapers and radio shows. She married three times and had many lovers. Some of her short pieces have been published in collections. She walked nine miles a day on her best days, and treasured that time because it’s when she did her best thinking.

When she returned home to Minneapolis after Greenwich Village, she wrote a column for the Minneapolis Times, and—lucky for all writers everywhere—began teaching writing classes in 1934. Not at Iowa. Not at Harvard. Not at Yaddo. Her pulpit was the YMCA in the Twin Cities.

Her students were men and women, rich and poor, sales clerks and housewives, hopeful magazine writers, self-important men of business, and people on the edge. Many of them had grown up in farm country, and carried memories of that life. They came each night to listen and learn and try their hand at something they had always dreamed of.

It is clear that Ueland learned as much from them as her students learned from her. After giving a speech at a local writers’ conference one year, she received so many comments from admirers that she finally compiled her observations and lessons into a slim volume that lifts me every time I turn to it.

How could you not be cheered by the very first chapter, which echoes Chef Gusteau, entitled: “Everybody is talented, original and has something important to say”?

The book is eighteen chapters and only 179 pages long. She’s a fan of William Blake and quotes or references him 45 times. She has consumed all of Van Gogh’s letters, and quotes or discusses him 17 times. There are asides on de Musset, Plotinus, Mozart, Tolstoy, Kreisler, Saint-Beuve, Ibsen, Inge, and an interesting scene featuring Sandburg, about the time he visited her in Minnesota and they took a chilly stroll around her beloved Lake Calhoun.

In other words, as she warns us early on, her book is technically about writing, but she is really speaking about anything you long to do. Her true subject is the creative life, for creation, she reminds us, is at the heart of what it means to be human.

Her thesis: As children we learn to tell stories and we’re fantastic confabulists. We intuitively know how to shape a tale with a beginning, middle, and end. Then we get older and freeze up when we sit down to write. Why? By then legions of teachers have made writing seem far too serious. If we dare to set a pencil to paper, we have been schooled, we must follow rules or...we will fail.

Ueland taught her students to set down their words as plainly as possible. If they learned to get out of their own way, they would get to the heart of their stories. “Art is infection,” she says. (Another chapter title.) If the writer feels passionate about what they commit to the page, the reader cannot help to feel it too.

Her favorite Van Gogh story: At first he did not know he wanted to be a painter. He lived in London, studying to be a preacher. Sitting in his dingy flat, he peeked out his window at the rainy night. A lamppost, a star—that was all. In the midst of writing a letter to his brother, he stopped and wrote, “It is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And he proceeded to draw on the page of his letter what he saw in front of him. Ueuland writes:

[T]he moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

Why don’t we all do as Von Gogh did? she asks.

“[B]ecause we have been discouraged into thinking what we feel about the sky is not important.”

She did not critique her students’ work. No. In chapter eight, when she begins to share samples of their writing with us, she explains her process. Congratulate them. Celebrate their wins. Then, ask them questions:

I am blessed with a fascinated, inexhaustible interest in all my pupils—their thoughts, adventures, failures, rages, villainies and nobilities. “Tell me more. Tell me exactly what you feel when you tried to kill the man.”…“You say ‘his muscles rippled through his shoulders.’ Did they really ripple? Did you really see that?” Then the young novelist’s excited defense: “Yes, they did! His muscles were so big they seemed to burst the seams of his coat!” Myself: “Well say that! Hurrah! Put it that way. That’s alive, great!”

In another section, she shares the work of a young Irish woman who works in a stultifying sub-basement as a department store stenographer. The lass writes a simple essay about a trip she has taken to Wayzata, Minnesota. It’s so rich, your heart breaks reading it. Van Gogh could not have rendered Wayzata more beautifully.

Ueland then quotes passages from flashy magazine stories of her day. She singles out sections she feels have fallen short because the writers did not adhere to her first rule: be true to yourself. They got caught up in writing what they thought would sound literary, and she can sense it.

No, she says. Write from the heart. Write simply. Write what you feel or know to be true. Only that will connect with readers.

Now, look, I did not say that this was a book about how to write fiction. Yes, she does touch on the topic, and even proudly quotes a fun passage by a student who has written a mystery. But to me, every time I read the book I come away feeling that her true gift was helping students overcome their fear and craft fine personal essays.

If I were teaching a group of new writers, this would be the text I’d read to inspire myself, and them. I read Ueland to more fully understand my compulsion to embark on this insane career. If someone were just starting out and asked me for advice, I’d hand them this book, and have.

Just reading the titles of her chapters fills the room with light:

Chapter 2: “Imagination is the Divine Body in every Man”—William Blake

Yes, that is the title of the freaking chapter.

Chapter 7: Be careless, reckless! Be a lion, be a pirate, when you write

Chapter 14: Keep a slovenly, headlong, impulsive, honest diary

Chapter 18: “He whose face gives no light shall never become a star”—William Blake

I will warn you that she was also a writer of her time. When she celebrates Columbus in a footnote, calling his discovery the gift of imagination, Tonstant Reader nearly frowed up. I may be wrong, but none of the luminaries she cites in her inspirational stories are women. She does, however, celebrate the work of her female students.

She supported herself and her daughter on her writing after her first marriage ended. She knew the life of a single mother, but she urged her female students to make time for their writing, believing that committing to one’s dreams set a fine example for one’s kids.

“If you would shut the door against your children for an hour a day and say: ‘Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!’ you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.”

She describes a funny scene in which she poses for some young girls for three days while they paint her portrait. She remarks how quiet the children were while they were “playing”—and how interesting the final, unschooled works of art were.

(Sidenote: What adults can learn about art from children is the theme of a new book—Don't Call it Art, by Austin Kleon, that I've been hearing about all week. Funny that I should re-encounter this anecdote by Ueland around the same time.)

Ueland set a swimming record in her eighties. She was 93 when she died in 1985. By then, she’d been knighted by the King of Norway and written some six million words. That figure awed me once. It still does, but I now see it as a reasonable allotment for someone who supported herself her whole life by her pen. Yet I cannot help thinking that her true worth was measured by how she enriched the lives of her students and helped them to see that their voices mattered.

Judging from the number of different versions of this book found online, I surmise that it is now in the public domain. If you do seek it out, choose the editions published by Graywolf Press, the nonprofit publisher in Minnesota that has been entrusted by the Ueland estate to keep this work in print since the 1980s. You don’t want to go wrong; the book is filled with delicious footnotes that poor publishers can easily screw up. If You Want to Write is Graywolf’s bestselling book, for good reason.

My copy.

The current Graywolf edition.

* * *

BSP: My wife's new book arrives next Tuesday. I hope you check it out.

See the video on YouTube.

Learn more at Denise's website.

Check it out on Bookshop.org, not the place run by the billionaire.

See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

joedenise.com

Setting the Scene

2026-06-18T02:33:51.624-04:00

Happy June! Happy Summer!

Time for a bit of "writing craft talk."

Specifically, setting the scene.

I have written here before about using "Setting as Character," and I'll be dealing with setting again today, just a different aspect of setting.

Specifically "establishing setting," or, put more prosaically, "setting the scene." And I'll be sharing examples of authors doing so effectively in a whole host of ways.

First things first; it's important to separate short stories from novels, as, due to differences in length, short stories tend to drop their characters right into the scene fairly quickly, where novels have more space with which to work. Let's start with short stories.

Short Stories

The following scenes are written by authors who also wrote (and have been celebrated for) novels. We will revisit their scene setting in the section on novels:

Friday night is fight night at the Steiner Street house. This particular one was my first idle evening in several weeks. I had gone up to the rink, fitted myself to a hard wooden chair not too far from the ring, and settled down to watch the boys throw gloves at one another. The show was about a quarter done when I picked out this pair of odd and somehow familiar ears two rows ahead of me.

–Dashiell Hammett, "The Whosis Kid"

* * *

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry

Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

It had been open about a week and it wasn't doing any business. The kid behind the bar was in his early twenties and looked as if he had never had a drink in his life.

There was only one other customer, a souse on a bar stool with his back to the door. He had a pile of dimes stacked neatly in front of him, about two dollars' worth. He was drinking straight rye in small glasses and he was all by himself in a world of his own."

–Raymond Chandler, "Red Wind"

* * *

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this
side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.

"Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway

* * *

Three authors celebrated for both their short stories and their novels. The interesting thing? As you’ll see when we pull examples from their long form work, the approaches of these three celebrated early 20th century authors don’t vary markedly from their approaches in their short stories.

Put simply: “Drop ‘em on in it, and let the reader know right away something is 'off.'”

Hemingway especially was known for the brevity (some would call it “terseness”) of his style. Any number of literary analysts have alluded to Hemingway’s early training as a journalist while working first for The Kansas City Star, and then moving to Europe, where he went to work for the Toronto Star during the 1920s as having been incredibly influential on his style.

And that’s likely true. Hemingway himself repeated stated that the only “how-to” book he ever consulted was The Kansas City Star’s “Star Copy Style Sheet.” For his part Hemingway called it: "the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing."

Hammett, too, developed his style on the job as a detective for the Pinkerton Agency-writing up things like case files and surveillance reports. Is it any wonder then, that Hammett, like Hemingway, varied his approach to scene-setting very little in between short stories and novels?

As for Chandler, learning to write fiction "on the job" was pretty much the opposite of his experience. Graduating from Dulwich College, he received a first-rate classical education, and wrote poetry that went unnoticed, before chucking it all and moving out to California and developing an accounting system for an oil company that led to several promotions before an abrupt dismissal for drunkenness.

Novellas

Novellas, once left for dead largely as a result of the advent of television scripts, which tended to be about the same word count as novellas (and infinitely better paying), have begun a long, slow comeback thanks to the ebook revolution.

You won't see them advertised as such most of the time, but take a look at the word count on some of the indie thrillers out there and we are talking long short story/novelette/novella length. Here's a scene being set pulled from the pages of an actual novellas (and it's one of mine):

“You ain’t Clute."

I turned in the speaker’s direction. “I beg your pardon, sir?”

“You ain’t Clute,” the man repeated. He sounded as if his mouth was full, in that manner distinctive to tobacco chewers.

I looked about the makeshift train platform. A rude log cabin abutted it and everywhere the green of the forest pressed in upon it. A chalked sign above the only door read “Coal Creek.” The platform itself wholly consisted of uncured logs, cut into planks so recently the soles of my shoes were already tacky with resin. Aside from the crew tending the locomotive which had carried me up the spur line from Renton, there were only three people on it: the hatless, bald, barrel-chested man asking about “Clute,” a Chinaman in suit and tie, standing diffidently a respectful distance behind the speaker, and me.

–Paper Son by Brian Thornton

Shorter in length, so still honoring the short story's economy of language, and dropping the main character right in it, while signaling to the reader that the scene described is not 'normal.' There are novellas out there (Conrad's Heart of Darkness comes to mind) that take their time building the setting. Conrad was a hell of a writer and could pull that sort of thing off, as is attested by the continuing popularity of his writing even in this day of Tik Tok-eroded attention spans.

Novels

The final turn took me around a shielding wall of popsicle cedar trees to the forecourt of the Montgomery place where a soft pattering fountain sprayed cool water in through the car window. The mansion was an L shape with the front door in the crease of the elbow. It was a nice family home if your family was everybody in Kansas. The windows were small and many and a heavy roof hung over it all like a furrowed brow. A low row of garages stood at the side. The doors were open and identical black Packards winked and gleamed in the shade, big as trains but better kept, perfectly waxed and ready to serve, glinting side by side. I parked my dusty Olds, got out and went up the steps to the front door.

-The Second Murderer by Denise Mina

As I stated above, novels are allowed to take their sweet time. And a skilled writer like Denise Mina knows how to make use of every word, to say nothing of employing sly wit (The "Kansas" line.).

Compare the above with a similar scene penned by the great Ross MacDonald, below.

* * *

The cab turned off U.S. 101 in the direction of the sea. The road looped round the base of a brown hill into a canyon lined with scrub oak.

“This is Cabrillo Canyon,” the driver said.

There weren’t any houses in sight. “The people live in caves?”

“Not on your life. The estates are down by the ocean.”

A minute later I started to smell the sea. We rounded another curve and entered its zone of coolness. A sign beside the road said: “Private Property: Permission to pass over revocable at any time.”

The scrub oak gave place to ordered palms and Monterey cypress hedges. I caught glimpses of lawns effervescent with sprinklers, deep white porches, roofs of red tile and green copper. A Rolls with a doll at the wheel went by us like a gust of wind, and I felt unreal.

The light-blue haze in the lower canyon was like a thin smoke from slowly burning money. Even the sea looked precious through it, a solid wedge held in the canyon’s mouth, bright blue and polished like a stone. Private property: color guaranteed fast; will not shrink egos. I had never seen the Pacific look so small.

– The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald

Different rich people. Different approach to delineating the difference between their world and that of the protagonist, as stand-in for the reader.

* * *

And then you have the gritty realism of a Michael Connelly police procedural:

The patrol officers had left the front door open. They thought they were doing her a favor, airing the place out. But that was a violation of crime scene protocol regarding evidence containment. Bugs could go in and out. Touch DNA could be disturbed by a breeze through the house. Odors were particulate. Airing out a crime scene meant losing part of that crime scene. But the patrol officers didn’t know all of that. The report that Ballard had gotten from the watch lieutenant was that the body was two to three days old in a closed house with the air-conditioning off. In his words, the place was as ripe as a bag of skunks.

– Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly

* * *

And the grim winter of Ann Cleeves:

Fran Hunter had a car but she didn’t like using it for short trips. She cared about global warming and wanted to do her bit. She had a bike with a seat on the back for Cassie, had brought it with her on the Northlink ferry when she moved. She prided herself on travelling light and it had been the only bulky item in her luggage. In this weather though a bike was no good. Today she wrapped Cassie up in her dungarees and coat and the wellingtons with the green frogs on the front and pulled her to school on a sledge. It was January 5th, the first day of the new school term. When they set off it was hardly light. Fran knew Mrs Henry already disapproved of her and didn’t want to be late. She didn’t need more knowing looks and raised eyebrows, the other mothers talking about her behind her back. It was hard enough for Cassie to fit in.

– Raven Black by Ann Cleeves

Fran is a preoccupied mother trying to navigate the social maze which is elementary parenting, and Cleeves manages to set the scene queickly and deftly, leaving the point of view character preoccupied by mundane thoughts, heading toward school, and...?

* * *

Katherine Anne Porter was a writer of power and a master of penetrating imagery. As such (and as a rough contemporary of Conrad), she deftly does double duty with setting the scene below from her short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Not only does she take the long way toward describing where her main character actually is, but also manages to convey to the reader the unsettling fact that she is not where she ought to be from the very first sentence.

In sleep she knew she was in her bed, but not the bed she had lain down in a few hours since, and the room was not the same but it was a room she had known somewhere. Her heart was a stone lying upon her breast outside of her; her pulses lagged and paused, and she knew that something strange was going to happen, even as the early morning winds were cool through the lattice, the streaks of light were dark blue and the whole house was snoring in its sleep.

– Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter

* * *

And let's close with another example from Chandler's work. Setting the scene at the beginning of 1939's The Big Sleep:

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.

There were French doors at the back of the hall, beyond them a wide sweep of emerald grass to a white garage, in front of which a slim dark young chauffeur in shiny black leggings was dusting a maroon Packard convertible. Beyond the garage were some decorative trees trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs. Beyond them a large greenhouse with a domed roof. Then more trees and beyond everything the solid, uneven, comfortable line of the foothills.

* * *

A quick confession: I generated the images used in this post using a terrific graphics-proficient creative AI called Midjourney. And how did I do it?

I took each of the entries above and used them as the prompt for what eventually became the image I would use to illustrate each entry.

Good writing is descriptive. Great writing puts you right there. With or without an AI assist.

And on that note, that's all for me this time. What tricks do you use in your scene setting? Feel free to add them in the comments, and let's talk all about setting the scene!

See you in two weeks!

In The Zone

2026-06-17T00:26:31.223-04:00

I've been reluctant to bring up this topic because it smacks of woo-woo and I am a dedicated anti-woo-woo person. In fact when I ride my bike around town people point at me and whisper to each other "There goes a dedicated anti-woo-woo person." At least that's what I hope they're whispering.

I just read an interesting quote from Frederick M. Knott. He was the author of two classic plays of suspense which were made into classic movies of the same: Dial M For Murder and Wait Until Dark. Knott wrote:

There was a time when this play was becoming more and more complicated so I stopped everything and reconstructed it, which is an agonizing problem bur it has certainly paid off. A reverse process seems to have set in now and it seems to get more and more simple, and I am getting what I call the bonuses, i.e., good little things that grow naturally out of the writing, more than I bargained for and that is always a good indication that one is on the right tack at last.

What interested me was his comment about those bonuses. I believe he is describing what I think of as being in the zone. Here's a definition from Crossidiomas: "Being 'in the zone' is a term that describes a mental state where an individual is fully immersed in their task or activity. It’s a feeling of being completely present and engaged with what they are doing, without any distractions or interruptions. When someone is in this state, they may feel like time has slowed down or even stopped altogether."

It's usually used to describe athletes but it applies to writers as well. For me it is the experience when pieces of your story fit together unexpectedly, making connections you didn't expect.

A favorite example: Back in 2015 Bouchercon was held in Raleigh. They announced that they would have an anthology and I decided to send them a story. The problem was that the story I had ready, "On the Ramblas," was about a pickpocket in Barcelona. Nothing wrong with that, but I figured a story with some connection to Raleigh had a better chance of making it into the book.

The name of the Bouchercon was Murder Under the Oaks, so I thought I might increase the odds of connecting to the book if I could fit something about oak trees in.

I should explain that the first sentence of my tale was: "Tourists wandered down the Ramblas like sheep waiting to be fleeced" and there were several other places where tourists were metaphrically compared to animals.

I looked on the web for "Spain AND oak" and guess what? It turns out that that country brags that it has the best ham in the world because of pigs that forage under oak trees, living on acorns. And there was my connection between my metaphorical animal/tourists and the theme of the book. Bonus! My story is the last one in the book because the editor Art Taylor liked the ending so much he wanted it to be the last thing readers read.

Here's another example I have written about before. When my sister Diane Chamberlain began work on her first novel, Private Relations, she decided that most of the characters would live in a big house in Mantoloking on the New Jersey shore. She found an appropriate house, took photos, and used them for inspiration.

Later, looking at photo collections at our parents' house, she found a picture of herself, age 16, in front of that same home. Of course, this was part of the subconscious mind, what I call the Miner, helping her out.

And now I am working on a short story whose plot requires a bunch of characters to sit around talking for a few minutes. Problem was I had no idea what they should be chatting about. But darn it, I needed them talking. So I literally wrote FILL THIS IN and went on with the story.

A few pages later, wouldn't you know it, I realized I had another problem. I planned to send this story to a mystery magazine, which of course meant there had to be a crime in it. And there was, but it wasn't revealed until the ending. I knew that the average mystery reader, clever and sneaky, would wonder why no crime had appeared, which might lead them to suspect exactly what I was up to.

And then I saw that Problem 1 was the solution to Problem 2, and vice versa. The characters would chat about various crimes! While the readers were trying to figure out which anecdote being discussed was the one the story was really about they wouldn't notice the rabbit I had up my sleeve. Bonus!

As I've said before, sometimes writing is a hard slog, but when you're in the zone, it can be magic. Tell me about when it has happened to you...

A History Mystery

2026-06-16T00:05:00.000-04:00

Abraham Lincoln sat behind the counsel table in the Springfield, Illinois courthouse. Beside him, his clients, Archibald and William Trailor, waited anxiously. They would soon, all observers knew, be convicted for the murder of Archibald Fisher. The gallows awaited them both.

The prosecution’s case was simple. William Trailor, from Warren County, Illinois, traveled in May 1841 to Springfield to meet his brothers, Archibald and Henry. All three, described as "sober, retiring and industrious," were joined by William’s housemate Archibald Fisher, a handyman rumored to have saved a fair sum through odd jobs and frugal living.

Arriving in Springfield, they met Archibald Trailor, a carpenter. After lunch, all four walked around town. The three brothers soon separated from Fisher. That night, when Fisher did not return, the brothers searched for him.

The next day, they searched again without success. After another fruitless day, William returned home alone.

The story circulated through Warren County that Fisher had died and willed his fortune to William. The local postmaster notified Springfield of the suspicious circumstances. Within days, all three Trailor brothers were arrested.

After interrogation by the mayor and state attorney general, Henry Trailor confessed. He claimed his brothers killed Fisher and stole his money, admitting to helping hide the body. Despite the town’s efforts, Fisher’s remains were not found. Lincoln later wrote, “[E]xaminations were made of cellars, wells, and pits of all descriptions, where it was thought possible the body might be concealed. All the fresh or tolerably fresh, graves at the grave-yard were pried into, and dead horses and dead dogs were disinterred.”

The mood of the public darkened. Even though the body had not been recovered, it seemed clear that only a speedy trial followed by prompt punishment might avoid a lynching. During pretrial hearings, Henry Trailor repeated his confession. The investigators testified that they found deep buggy tracks and signs that something had been dragged through the grass. The tracks, they reported, ended near a pond, a perfect place to hide a body. Investigators further claimed they found human whiskers on a club near the tracks. Finally, a responsible local woman testified that she had seen two of the Trailor brothers walk into the woods with Fisher. Later, she saw them return from the woods alone.

The crowded courtroom felt hot on the cusp of summer, 1841. The heat must have seemed even more oppressive for the defendants. The weight of the evidence and the ire of the townspeople pressed down on them.

Lincoln called his sole witness, Dr. Robert Gilmore, a respected physician. Gilmore testified that Fisher had lived with him and, due to a head injury in his youth, was forgetful and prone to wandering. He suggested Fisher likely wandered off and lost track of where he was.

The doctor offered proof to support his theory: Archibald Fisher was still alive and recovering from illness at the doctor’s house. The ailing man had no memory of his time in Springfield and had journeyed all the way to Peoria before recovering his mind.

The charges were dropped and the Trailors released.

The day after the trial, Lincoln wrote to Joshua Speed that “[w]hen the doctor’s statement was first made public, it was amusing to scan and contemplate the countenances and hear the remarks of those who had been actively in search of the dead body: some looked quizzical, some melancholy, and some furiously angry.”

The Trailor trial explores the limits of the criminal justice system. Henry’s testimony followed three days of interrogation, prompting a false confession. This case, from before Miranda rights, should remind us of today’s constitutional protections. Confirmation bias appears—authorities let conclusions drive facts. Finally, “junk science” is evident too: the whiskers were cow hairs, and the pond grass was matted by children playing.

As a writer’s blog, however, I’d like to focus on the story. Abraham Lincoln penned a fictional tale about the murder trial and published it in the Quincy Whig on April 15, 1846, under the title, “A Remarkable Case of Arrest for Murder”. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine republished that story in March 1952 as “The Trailor Murder Mystery”. Finally, Otto Penzler included it in The Best American Mystery Stories of the Nineteenth Century (albeit labeling it a curiosity rather than an example of compelling storytelling or distinguished literary style).

Abraham Lincoln, therefore, can rightfully claim to be America’s most famous mystery author. To the list of his accomplishments: rail splitter, lawyer, politician, president, please add crime writer.

Until next time.

------------------

For more information, see Logan and Lincoln by William Townsend in The American Bar Journal, February 1933.

Spade Spawn

2026-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

The government is claiming plans to disclose all the secret information they’ve been storing for decades on UFOs (rebranded UAPs, for some inscrutable reason). So far, all we’ve seen are a bunch of fuzzy black and white images I could have concocted as a teenager in my backyard. They say there’s more to come, but I’m betting it’s the best they’ve got.

I find the idea of intelligent alien life pretty interesting, though I’m more in Stephen Hawking’s camp when it comes to actually encountering any of them. He argued,

convincingly for me, that it would be a bit like the indigenous Americans’ experience with Europeans. Not so great. (I refer you to one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes titled, How To Serve Man.)

My abiding interest in detective fiction didn’t really take off until I was in graduate school and discovered Dashiell Hammett. Then Chandler, then MacDonald, and so on. Before that, my first love was science fiction, which I devoured at such a rate I almost ran out of books. As with crime writing, there are dozens of science fiction sub-genres, some of which borrow heavily from, well, crime writing. My favorite movie is still Blade Runner, which in nearly every respect is hardboiled detective noir with synthetic humans filling in for the Maltese Falcon. (I saw it as a double feature with Outland, which is basically High Noon in space.)

Phillip K. Dick’s novella on which Blade Runner was based doesn’t bear much resemblance to the movie. All of Dick’s work was pretty exceptional, but the film

was better because Ridley Scott infused it with every noir trope in the Dashiell Hammett/Humphrey Bogart instruction manual. I even prefer the narration version the studio foisted on Scott and Harrison Ford. Ford was so furious about it he said he recorded the monologue in the flattest, most uninflected voice he could manage. It was just the right choice.

One reason English is such a successful language is it promiscuously embraces every other language it encounters, living or dead, swallowing up words and usages without shame or compunction. Crime fiction operates the same way. It’s the natural host for every other genre, the universal solvent that absorbs every literary style or subject matter, obsession or pretension. The only qualifier is that these stories must have stakes, consequences and moral dilemmas. These indispensable elements are the price of admission. In return, every other genre partakes freely of crime writing conventions, often so seamlessly hardly anyone notices.

I wrote a standalone novel, Elysiana, based on my time as a lifeguard on the Jersey Shore, which I assumed was outside my assigned genre. I asked a mystery reviewer I knew at the time if she’d take it on. “Does it have gangsters?” “Yup” “Does a gun go off?” “Yes ma’am.” “Does it kill somebody?” “It does.” “Send it to me.”

It also had stakes, consequences and moral dilemmas.

I use the reviewer’s definition to declare The Great Gatsby a crime novel, since it includes all three of her criteria. As well as a mystery solved at the end, and a decent number of moral dilemmas.

I firmly believe in these clichés: 1. In real estate, the three most import things are location, location and location. 2. Variety is the spice of life. 3. In any piece of fiction, you have to care about the characters. This is one area where the mystery form excels. Dashiell Hammett virtually invented the anti-hero, a protagonist who does everything he can to earn our distrust and antipathy. And yet, Sam Spade is and always will be a beloved hero. Hammett obviously knew his Twain and Hemingway, and any undergraduate English major can draw the through line from Huck to Jake Barnes to Spade and onward to nearly every gumshoe and gunslinger ever to stalk American fiction. But I think Hammett filled out the playbook and unleashed this prototype on the public at large.

As female and ethnic writers began moving into the field, you don’t have to look too far for a new type of Sam Spade progeny to populate the genre. My favorite is Kinsey Millone of Sue Grafton’s alphabet series. Kinsey is both anti-hero and female to her core. She checks all the boxes while never abandoning her female sensibilites, while taking her hits, and getting some in herself when called upon. Most importantly, she’s an indefatigable puzzle solver, with never a bit of lace or tea cozy in the picture.

My vote for the anti-hero who both meets and transcends the mold is Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins. He’s both a creature and a philosopher of the streets, relentlessly overcoming injustice to all concerned, including himself. Mosely is one of those authors who not only knows and reveres literature, but skillfully entangles his work in gimlet-eyed observation without ever losing control of the driving narrative.

Spade’s offspring have long spread across the globe. You can visit one of them in the person of Jackson Lamb of Slow Horses, in Mick Herron’s brilliant books and fully realized telly character.

Law and Order Toronto: Talking Canadian Style

2026-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

Many Canadians wait impatiently for each new episode of Law and Order Toronto to drop and the reason I always hear is,"It's so Canadian." While watching it the other day, I wondered what makes it so Canadian and, although many have tried to break it down, I feel they miss the certain je ne sais quoi that makes it Canadian. Since je ne sais quoi literally means something that cannot be adequately described, it made me certain that trying to write about it was useless. Never one to shrug off a challenge, here's my attempt: the part that's so Canadian is that we talk it out.

Law and Order Toronto is a spinoff of the U.S. much loved Law and Order series, Many have pointed out that is has an all-Canadian cast, is set in Toronto, is produced by Canadian crews and the episodes are drawn from Toronto crime headlines and the landmarks of the city are recognizable to all. The executive producer Amy Cameron said, "it's been "liberating" for the crew to be able to portray Toronto as itself, after spending years pretending it's another city on other productions."

Tassie Cameron, the producer and sister of Amy, identifies two other crucial, very Canadian parts of the show: in Canada, you don’t get to have a lawyer present when you’re being questioned and there isn't a lot of gun violence so the show, being realistic, has few guns. I would add that in American shows, people are described as "Black" or "White" etc. I haven't heard this on the show and this is a very Canadian way to speak.

The episode I watched was the latest one called XOXO (referring to a clue on a card) and Claire Mathews, newly elected MP, is found dead on a car below her high rise apartment. Did she jump or was she murdered? The two investigating detectives, Graff and Bateman, are a study in contrast with Graff described as a Sherlock character, who knows a little something about everything using deduction skills to solve, whereas Bateman uses great human instincts and empathy to solve crimes, but this is far too simplified.

All of the characters, from the MP's son and husband to her secret lover, are complex and peeled back layer by layer. Graff notices two crucial clues: a bunch of roses and a camera on an apartment across the way attached to a bird feeder. The camera audio proves it was a murder and the roses end up being crucial to solving the case. Graff quickly finds and focuses on her lover who happens to be his father. If this isn't complicated enough, Graff blames his father for murdering his mother even though her death was officially classified as a suicide.

When Bateman points out Graff's conflict of interest and asks him to allow her to work the case alone and 'trust her instincts' Graff attacks her by growling, "What instincts?"

As expected, Graff works the case surreptitiously and Bateman investigates Graff's mother's death surreptitiously.

When Bateman discovers Graff's mother really did commit suicide, she shows enormous empathy and understanding of what he felt like as a young boy who lost his mother and asks him to be be empathetic with that child he once was and then to be the wonderful detective he is when looking at this. When they discover the roses were brought by the son who committed the murder – here the credit goes to Bateman - the questioning of the son is done, on Bateman's insistence, by Graff who gets a confession by using their shared experience of losing a mother.

What is very Canadian is the interactions. Bateman's response to Graff's attack on her - and it's a cutting attack on her entire career - is not to attack in return. Instead she reaches out to and appeals to his empathy for the child he was and appeals to his intelligence and logic until he finally admits his mother committed suicide. Graff reaches out to the son also appealing to his empathy and understanding of his mother to get him to admit to murdering his mother. This optimistic belief – that if people use their empathy and intelligence, understanding and even justice can be attained – is very Canadian. This isn't a theoretical belief but one that is enacted our whole lives as we discuss and debate on issues from politics to raisins or no raisins in butter tarts.

Our interactions always mark a Canadian. I have traveled widely and can recognize a Canadian by the way we talk, discuss and even argue. In fact, Canada was born as a country by talking. One common comment is that Canada was not born from the clashing of swords but from the stroke of a pen but, in fact, the creation of the Dominion of Canada was from talking; talking at the Charlottetown Conference (September 1864), the Quebec Conference (October 1864) and the London Conference (December 1866 to March 1867). We're still talking to fix problems: a police officer, part of the elite crises management team, when asked whether they use the large guns he brought to a writer's talk in hostage situations, he smiled and explained in hostage situations he'd rather talk it out till everyone was bored, hungry and gave up.

Talking built Canada and is still fixing it everyday.

6 Literary Ways That a Tree Can Kill You

2026-06-13T00:45:00.000-04:00

A tree mishap can kill somebody, but maybe we don't appreciate the full danger. I was doom-scrolling recently and read about a particularly lethal tree, the pong pong (Cerbera odollam). The poison in its seeds can kill you within hours. It's deadlier than oleander. The piece had doom-links to other articles about other dangerous trees, and soon enough, I'd acquired an unhealthy amount of knowledge.

This being a crime blog, I've summarized a few literary-ish tree hazards. These might help as story inspiration, the core of an elaborate woodland murder, or basic self-preservation.

1. Thorns

The acacia tree bristles with daggers for thorns. The trunk of the silk floss tree resembles a medieval barricade. The North American honey locust grows thorns up to eight inches long. Its spikes form vicious clusters near the ground, less like defenses than personal grudges. The thorns evolved to ward off mastodons. Yes, mastodons, so what chance would we have? If the impalement doesn't get you, the bacterial infection might.

2. Poison

It's not just the pong pong tree. The chinaberry's fruit is a potent neurotoxin. The manchineel is known as the Tree of Death. Every single part of it can kill you--and probably wants the chance. You can't eat any part of the manchineel. You can't touch it or even burn it without exposure. Rain dripping from its leaves can blister your skin or worse.

The black locust brims with robin, a toxin that can damage cells and even organs in large enough quantities. Its bark, seeds, and leaves are all loaded with the stuff. Intriguingly, the black locust is also the main source of premium acacia honey. Which I have all the time, but it turns out that I can relax. The black locust's nectar stays mostly robin-free. Mostly.

Still, there is the small matter of ...

3. Air Support

Over 70 people die each year in the U.S. from bee, wasp, and hornet stings. A lawn mower whips up a swarm. Someone bumps a car into the wrong tree. Some fool pokes at a hive. None of this is a high-concept story plot, but then again, the everyday is rife with drama.

And speaking of animal drama, trees can harbor...

4. Big Cats

The silent enemy above. Is it likely that a big cat springs down on you? Statistically, the following things claim more lives: vending machines, champagne corks, hot dogs, beach sand collapses, and selfies. But the adventure and romance of big cats is fiction gold.

Snakes also climb and ambush. A snake hiding in a tree is looking for prey among the branches or small enough to drag up there. We humans are too heavy. Sorry, Hollywood. A snake that drops from a tree is careless, not cunning. Now, snakes being snakes, they will bite you straight up from up in a tree. That's strictly defensive, and the person might've had it coming. In all, any death by a tree-based snake is just terrible luck or maybe a family curse.

Iguanas dropping from trees are a whole other thing. Someone needs to write that crime story.

5. Falling Fruit and Cones

You know the Gilligan's Island setup: Something shakes a palm tree, and a coconut plonks onto some poor sap's head. This actually happens, of course. On television, it's a headache and laugh track. In real life, it's a critical injury.

Assume a palm tree that's 65 feet tall. A coconut weighing 4.4 pounds falling that distance can strike anything below at over 40 miles per hour. The coconut would land with just under 400 joules of kinetic force, roughly three times that of a major league fastball. If that coconut hits square on someone's head, a best case might be a serious concussion. Worse case? Brain trauma, severe damage to the spine and internal organs, internal bleeding. Worst case? You're canceled and picked up in heavenly syndication.

Coconuts are tiny compared to the heavy ordnance of fruits and seeds. Consider the cone of the bunya pine. The female cone weighs up to 20 pounds. It's the size of a rugby ball. The coco de mer fruit can reach 100 pounds. Keep a sharp eye upward, Gilligan.

6. Projectiles

Some dangers don't fall from trees. They're launched. Botanical shrapnel.

The dynamite tree (Hura crepitans) isn't messing around. It is so covered in spikes and spines that it's also known as the monkey no-climb. Its sap is used for poison arrows. Oh, and its fruit explodes when ripe.

You read that correctly. The fruit explodes, with a crack like a rifle. The disc-like seeds--poisonous seeds--blast indiscriminately for 100 feet or more at over 150 miles per hour. These fruit grenade fragments are about the size and speed of a paintball pellet, but this ammo is rock hard. Anyone at close range had better dive for cover.

A Thing As Beautiful as a Tree

I share this knowledge not to scare anyone off our friends the trees. They are truly things of wonder. They're also armed and dangerous. Now we know, and we have a doom-scroll to thank.

Awards, Competitions, Prizes and Honors

2026-06-12T00:00:00.000-04:00

When my first story for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine appeared in 2018, I'd long been a reader of short mystery fiction, but was only newly a writer of it. Suddenly I was hearing about a panoply of awards with confusing and sometimes similar names: Edgars, Anthonys, Agathas, Derringers…Macavitys? Wasn't Macavity one of T.S. Eliot's cats?

Barb Goffman also made her EQMM debut in this issue, with Bug Apétit, which earned nominations for the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards!

I got my first taste of glory when a story placed fifth in EQMM's annual Readers Awards - something I'd never paid much attention to. A subscriber for decades, I'd certainly never bothered to vote! Fifth, but okay! That meant somebody had read it, and liked it. Many somebodies! Then a story that is somewhat a departure for me - it could almost be classified as a "cozy," though darker than most of that genre - was suddenly in the running for a variety of prizes, from EQ's Reader Award to the Thriller to the Macavity. Schrödinger, Cat, didn't take any top honors, but I surely enjoyed the banquets and cocktail parties! And when It's Not Even Past was nominated for a Derringer, I was hooked. Derringers are awarded to short fiction writers by short fiction writers (and readers) - a true jury of one's peers!

I began to read about all the prizes, honors, and competitions open to mystery writers. There was a lot to learn, and I thought I'd take this opportunity to share some of that info with those who might also be toward the origin end of their learning curve.

A few notes before we begin: I have not included every prize category of every award here - rather, I've given an overview. If a description intrigues you, check it out - that's why God made websites. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but I've tried to include the biggies, especially those that particularly honor mystery and crime fiction. And I've focused on prizes and awards available to writers in the United States, working in English. When a prize or award requires an entry fee, I've so noted.

Any errors are my own, and I'm sure there are some! I invite you to post any corrections, and to provide additional information, insider notes, gossip, and asides in the comments.

The Agathas are awarded by Malice Domestic, an annual convention that takes place near Washington, DC. The Agathas celebrate cozy mysteries - those that do not contain explicit sex and minimize gore, violence, and foul language. Members of Malice Domestic nominate, and conference attendees choose the winners. Six categories of prizes include novels, children's, nonfiction and short stories. If you win, you get a fancy teapot and a lifetime claim to fame. Malice Domestic also sponsors grants, competitions, and anthologies that may be of interest.

Here's Ashley-Ruth Bernier with the Agatha awarded her short story Six-Armed Robbery from The Malice Domestic Anthology Mystery Most Humorous!

The Anthonys are awarded to novels, short stories, children's and young adult fiction, and nonfiction. Works are nominated, then voted on, by attendees of the annual Bouchercon World Mystery Convention. This is a highly- coveted award that can provide a nice career boost. Bouchercon moves year–to-year - the next convention will be in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

The Barry Award is conferred annually by the editors of Deadly Pleasures, honoring various categories of book, but not short stories. I was unable to get more information prior to deadline.

The Daggers are awarded by the Crime Writers' Association to books published in the UK.

The Derringer Award is presented by the Short Mystery Fiction Society, recognizing excellence in short stories of the mystery and crime fiction genres. Categories are differentiated by length - flash to novelette - and there are also specialty prizes, including The Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer, and the Silver Derringer for Editorial Excellence. In 2025, an award for best anthology was added, although collections are not eligible. (Anthologies are by multiple authors; collections are by a single author.) Membership in the SMFS is free, and members may submit one or two works, in one category or two. Medals are presented at the annual Bouchercon World Mystery Convention. The Short Mystery Fiction Society is entirely volunteer-run and their daily list-serve provides a wealth of information about writing and publishing - as well as the occasional insidery-tidbit from well-known writers.

Janet Hutchings, legendary editor-in-chief of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from 1991 to 2024, was awarded The Silver Derringer in 2025. (photo, Laurie Pachter)

In 2020, Josh Pachter became the first person to receive the Golden Derringer and win a competitive Derringer (best flash) in the same year. His story, The Two-Body Problem, appeared in this issue of Mystery Weekly Magazine.

The Edgars are presented by the Mystery Writers of America annually in New York. The Edgars are awarded in a number of categories, from short stories and book-length works of fiction and non-fiction to theatrical genres. There are also special awards; The Robert L. Fish Memorial Award honors the best first short story of the year, The Lilian Jackson Braun Award highlights a cozy mystery novel, The Sue Grafton Memorial Award is for a series novel featuring a female protagonist, and there are also the Raven, the Ellery Queen Award, the Mary Higgins Clark Award, and the much-coveted Grand Master Award. MWA confers two separate awards - with nice cash grants - for unpublished and published Black writers, in honor of the late Barbara Neely. Typically, publishers submit stories and books for consideration, but authors may also submit, and there is no limit to the number of entries one may make, nor an entry fee. However, authors in the short story categories must have been paid for their work, and all publishers must be on the MWA-approved list. Winners receive a ceramic bust of Edgar Allen Poe, but bragging rights are the real prize here - the Edgar is the most prestigious award specific to our industry.

Kate Hohl at the 2024 ceremony, where she won the Fish Memorial Award for The Body in Cell two (EQMM).

The Dashiell Hammett Prize, a bronze statuette by Peter Boiger, is presented annually by the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers. The prize, awarded to a traditional novel, nonfiction book, or graphic novel, is announced in the fall of each year. Submission is free, but authors or publishers must snail-mail hard copies of the work to various committee members. Details are given on the IACW/NA site.

The Dilys Award, presented by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association, is no longer extant. It is included here as you may see it on various resumes and websites.

The Hillerman Prize is also defunct. It is included here as you may see it on various resumes and websites.

Killer Nashville awards a number of prizes at its annual convention, notably The Claymore Prize, celebrating a work in progress, and The Silver Falchion, for published works of fiction and nonfiction, both in a variety of categories. As with most of the awards included in this round-up, there's no cash award, just a handsome medal and a very nice claim to fame. But there is a charge to submit - sixty to $100 bucks, although one free submission is included with conference admission. Killer Nashville also bestows The John Seigenthaler Legends Award upon "an individual who has championed First Amendment Rights and advocated for writers in the publishing industry."

The Macavity Awards are presented annually at the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention. Winners are nominated and voted for by fans, readers, and mystery enthusiasts who belong to Mystery Readers International or who subscribe to Mystery Readers Journal. Categories include several novel categories, nonfiction, and a short story award.

Janet Rudolph founded Mystery Readers International. The first Macavity was awarded in 1987.

The Reader Awards presented by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine are decided by readers' votes, and the top three honorees are celebrated at an invitation-only cocktail party held in Manhattan shortly before the Edgars ceremony. EQ's sister publication, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, does not offer a reader's choice award, but they do co-host The Black Orchid Novella Contest, in partnership with The Wolfe Pack, an international organization of devotees of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe. The BONA prize is a thousand dollars and publication in the magazine.

The Shamus trophy is awarded by The Private Eye Writers of America in categories that include hardcover, paperback original, first novel, short story, and a lifetime achievement award, The Eye. There is no charge to submit a novel or story, but eligibility is tricky: the Shamus is for works that feature a paid private eye who is not a police officer or in law enforcement. Lawyers and reporters who do their own investigative work qualify, but not amateur sleuths.

John M. Floyd's Mustang Sally, which appeared in Black Cat Mystery Magazine, won the Shamus for best PI Short Story in 2021.

The Thriller Awards are sponsored by International Thriller Writers (ITW) and are conferred at an annual convention held in May in New York. Prizes are awarded in several categories, including best short story and best novel. Authors who are active members of ITW may submit their work directly, but are asked to check with their publisher first to avoid duplicated submissions. (Membership is free to authors who meet eligibility requirements.) NB: ITW gets so many submissions that they stagger due dates; check their schedule. The prize is a cool trophy (and a nice fluffy feather in your cap!).

Here I am grinning madly before a poster with my name on it at The Thrillers! Catherine Steadman took the 2023 prize for Stockholm.

The "Best ofs" are not exactly prizes, but being included sure feels like one! Inclusion in Otto Penzler's The Best Mystery Stories of the Year or Steph Cha's The Best American Mystery and Suspense can provide one heck of a career boost. Both Penzler and Cha invite big-name authors to co-edit each year's volume. A new anthology, The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year, edited by Michael Bracken, has just released its first edition.

Billie Livingston says of her BMSY inclusion, "It's overwhelming to find yourself in the company of your literary heroes!"

Many small literary journals offer prizes that range from a frameable slip of paper to a significant amount of cash. Don't count them out! Yes, many do charge a submission fee, being lovingly put together on a shoestring by volunteers and interns. Professional writers have a variety of opinions about those fees. My personal view is that I don't enter any competitions I don't feel qualified to win. I don't mind a reasonable fee going to create a prize pool or even to cover publication costs. Other reputable writers have very different opinions. Regardless, winning a prize sponsored by a lit journal can lead to much greater exposure than publishing strictly "in-genre." And many lit journal editors are eager to see crime fiction and mysteries, if they are written well.

So what about the really, really big stuff? Well, the Edgars are pretty significant in our mystery world - in fact all of the prizes I've noted here are - but what about The Pulitzer, The Nobel, The Booker, et al? Don't laugh! Truman Capote was famously disappointed when In Cold Blood, though nominated, did not win a Pulitzer in 1966. (It did win the Edgar for best "fact-crime novel.") Though usually classified as "literary fiction" or "psychological fiction," Ann Arensberg's Sister Wolf could certainly be considered a mystery. It won The National Book Award for Best First Novel in 1981. Mysteries and thrillers are regularly nominated for the Booker Prize (formerly the Man Booker), but unfortunately only books published in the UK are eligible. Motherless Brooklyn took The National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1999 and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 won the fiction award in 2008. Numerous mystery and crime fiction novels have been finalists, including hardboiled noir by Michael Chabon in 2007.

Okay, but surely a mystery writer could never win (gasp) The Nobel Prize, right? Wrong. 2018 Laureate Olga Tokarczuk 's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead centers on a woman investigating murders in a Polish village, and is most definitely a mystery. The Nobel is awarded for a body of work, not a single novel, but Drive Your Plow is a significant part of Tokarczuk's oeuvre.

And a closing fun fact: you (or your publisher) can submit your book for Pulitzer consideration for only seventy-five bucks. I know this because Lightscatter Press submitted my poetry collection, Bewildered by All This Broken Sky, in 2021. (To my tremendous surprise, I did not win.)

What a thrill to be interviewed by the literary powerhouse Adriana Trigiani, a great lover of poetry!

Anna Scotti is a mystery writer, young adult author, poet, and writing instructor living in Southern California. She has been the recipient of a number of awards and honors (some noted above). She has two short stories collections coming in 2027. Find her at annakscotti.com.

Stories I Live For

2026-06-11T00:05:00.000-04:00

Yes, dear reader, I love weird tales, especially if they're TRUE. For example:

Moby Dick was based on a real whale named Mocha Dick.

In 1839 Jeremiah N. Reynolds, an American newspaper editor, lecturer, explorer, and writer, published a curious tale of a famously fierce bull whale. The article, published in The Knickerbocker; or, New-York Monthly Magazine, claimed this cetacean had foiled the murderous attacks of many whalers over the years and was notable not only for his size and pugnacity but also for his coloration: “He was white as wool!”

Herman Melville read the account and the rest is literary history...

Also, rope: "Each of a whaleship’s whaleboats carried upward of two thousand feet of rope in one or more tubs. And since each ship carried three to five whaleboats, the amount of rope needed just to conduct whaling operations on one whaleship was as much as ten thousand feet." (That's about 2 tons in the hold, BTW.) And those are whaling ships; the Royal Navy, everyone's navies, required miles and miles and miles of rope. (LINK)

"The Deadliest Fireworks Accident in the World Happened at Marie Antoinette's Wedding"

All was going well, when suddenly a gust of wind blew down among the crowd some rockets only partially exploded. Fireworks, like so many inventions of Italian origin, were still, to the mass of the French public, a comparative novelty; and this, together with the positive inconvenience and even danger of a fall of blazing missiles in the midst of thousands of excited and closely-packed spectators, was quite enough to account for the terrible confusion, resulting in many hundreds of fatal accidents, which now ensued."

"As panic descended upon the crowd, there was a rush towards the Rue Royale, and many were trampled as the crowd forced its way down the narrow street. Sutherland notes that the official government death toll was listed as 133, but many citizens felt that total massively underestimated the true number of casualties."

(LINK)

No wonder the Parisians were never thrilled by their new Queen. In fact, they're still not thrilled by Marie Antoinette…

The Earth's Largest Waterfall is in the Ocean

Specifically, it's beneath the Denmark Strait:

(LINK)

Cats helped the Persians win a battle against Egypt

"Even the most dedicated ailurophile will admit that felines can be vicious when tested, but cats didn’t help the Persians win an ancient battle because of their sharp claws. Rather, the Persians emerged victorious against Egypt in the 525 BCE Battle of Pelusium by using cats, ibises, and other animals the Egyptians considered sacred as hostages. According to the Greek historian Polyaenus, the Egyptians dared not fire their arrows when their Persian opponents held cats aloft in front of them, allowing the latter to take the city of Pelusium with relative ease. This decisive victory led the First Persian Empire (also known as the Achaemenid Empire) to take the pharaoh’s throne for Cambyses II, beginning the 27th Dynasty of Egypt under Achaemenid rule."

From Cats to Cowboys:

Read more at the link about why cowboys preferred bowler hats (not stetsons), the Great Molasses Flood in Boston, 1919, and the "Sacred Cod" that hangs in the Massachusetts State House.

Butch Cassidy, in a Bowler

(LINK)

And Back to the Middle Ages:

"Skeletal remains of Queen Elisenda, one of the most powerful rulers in medieval Europe, unearthed in Barcelona — along with several others who bore unexplained stab wounds."

And, being always in love with a good line, instantly thought of "The Lion in Winter". Eleanor of Aquitaine: "Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians!"

The sarcophagus of Queen Elisenda

in the Royal Monastery of Santa Maria Pedralbes.

(Image credit: Culture Institute of Barcelona)

Anyway, Queen Elisenda (who died in 1364 CE) wasn't stabbed, but apparently Sobirana Olzet, the monastery's first abbess, was stabbed in the face, either before or after her death.

And then in the (supposed) tomb of Francesca Saportella, the second abbess of Pedralbes and the queen's niece, researchers found the bones of at least nine people who were placed in the tomb in different time periods, including four male skulls - all stabbed - and the mummified torso of a woman with the remains of a 20- to 23-week fetus in the birth canal. (LINK)

Well, s*** happens. If you want a really lurid tale of conventual life, read about Littlemore Priory, England, on Wikipedia.

The sole remaining monastic building of Littlemore Priory, now a Pub

Well, Prioress Katherine would appreciate this.

I wonder if her ghost is occasionally having a pint on the house...

Speaking of the Middle Ages, an 800 year old notebook, in a leather case, was discovered in a medieval German latrine. Now a few facts that we know, even without knowing who the owner is: they could read and write, and they used old silk for toilet paper. In other words, they had money, honey. (LINK)

And Now On to the Future!

Don't race to the Teleporter! "Human teleportation through quantum principles raises questions about identity: Through quantum entanglement, particles have been "teleported" by measuring their state in one location and effectively transferring that state to a new location. Doing so for the particles that make up humans would destroy the state of the original particles, killing the person, and effectively creating a clone." (LINK)

Gee, science fiction writers figured this out years ago: the 1960 novella "Rogue Moon" by Algis Budrys, included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two, edited by Ben Bova, wrote about this - a mercenary, hired to clone and die his way over and over through an alien artifact. I read it when I was about 12 or so, as I did all the stories in both Volume One and Two.

BTW, in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, there's a story by Cyril Kornbluth called The Marching Morons, available here on Gutenberg, that I think may have inspired Douglas Adams' Golgafrichans... And it has two of my all-time favorites, Vintage Season, by "Lawrence O'Donnell," (Catherine L. Moore and Henry Kuttner) and The Ballad of Lost C'Mell by Cordwainer Smith.

Zombies of the Pleistocene!

700,000 years ago, these Zombies of the Pleistocene fed on "mammoths, bison, horse and other megafauna, as well as rodents, bats and birds; invertebrates, including parasitic worms; and plants such as grasses and sedges, and North American cheetah (Miracinonyx trumani)... or pumas (Puma concolor)." And what were these savagely hungry zombies? (LINK)

Ground squirrels.

And they still live among us.

Going into torpor for up to 8 months at a time.

Coming out with an insatiable appetite for flesh...

Coming soon to a theatre near you,

"The Night of the Zombie Squirrels! Be afraid! Be very afraid!"

Whatever Happened to Ötzi?

More proof that, like all scientists, nerds, and history buffs, archaeologists are different:

the Iceman, reconstructed

"Ötzi the Iceman's body is covered in ancient yeast — and scientists just used it to make a sourdough, and 'It was very very good'":

A new study cultivated four strains of cold-adapted yeasts that had colonized Ötzi's body shortly after his death 5,300 years ago in the Alps. "It worked," study first author Mohamed Sarhan, a microbiologist at the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies in Italy, told Live Science. "As a dough, it was very very good."
These yeasts could be cultivated by fermentation industries in the future, such as for making bread or beer, he added.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all in for the information, but I am NOT interested in drinking the beer... Ötzi Pale Ale... No. No. No. (LINK)

Have a great rest of the week, keep reading, and make sure you don't teleport anywhere! And check the yeast source of your beer...

Continuum

2026-06-10T03:00:00.000-04:00

I’ve been watching the Canadian SF series Continuum, which is time travel/alternate history. The Expanse it’s not. I can’t quite explain my enthusiasm. If you were to watch it, your immediate reaction might very well be, What in the name of God does he see in this? It’s just too stupid.

Here’s the premise. A cop from 2077 is blown back in time fifty years, to the present day. She’s trapped by a temporal vortex that’s also captured a gang of terrorists and sent them back. The hook is that the time travelers know the future; the terrorists plan to change it, the cop is the only one who can stop them. But the cop can’t explain any of this to the cops or the military in the present – they’d throw her in the booby hatch – so she’s on her own. (Except for some convenient plot holes.)

Now, first off, the cop from the future is adorably cute, so you forgive a lot. And then, the dude cop she partners up with in the present is beyond hunk-a-licious, so equal time. They even contrive a bit where he strips down and gets in the shower, and then the Ninja assassin sneaks into his apartment. Naked fight scene, but a reversal of the convention where it’s the actress, usually, in her birthday suit. It’s intentionally mischievous.

Now, it’s more than faintly ridiculous that nobody seriously questions the heroine’s bona fides, once she’s hacked their databases and given herself a fake ID; the police work is rudimentary and lazy; nor is there any real attempt to make the science particularly convincing. The time paradoxes are handled without fuss, though. You’re not brought up short by crippling doubts, everything is pretty brisk. (The short version of a time paradox is this, that you can’t go back in time and murder your grandfather, because then you’d never be born, and you therefore wouldn’t exist to travel back in time and murder your grandfather, etc.) The biggest dramatic irony is that the heroine wants to get back to her own time, but that time is brutally dystopian, the future ruled by corporate oligarchs, and the cop herself more thought police than criminal investigator – the crimes themselves political – and the “terrorists” an underground devoted to overthrowing that hegemony. Why would you want such a future? Your sympathy should be with the insurrection, if it weren’t for Liber8’s sociopathic violence, which toxifies them.

Generally speaking, the concept is better than the execution. So we’re back to the first question, what’s holding my interest? I think it’s notional. I’m attracted to the framework. I like the way they work out the difficulties. The most obvious precursor is Terminator, but there are quite a few SF/alternate history models. The Man in the High Castle, still startlingly original,

China

Miéville’s The City & the City, Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and, of course, Fatherland. These last three, also, are police procedurals. This makes for an interesting sub-genre. Using the ordinary detail, not the alien, but the commonplace. Gorky Park, and Martin Cruz Smith’s other Arkady Renko novels, use the same method, the accretion of specifics, the forensics, and the lab work, pounding the pavement, looking at surveillance video, the institutional rivalries and the office politics: this is what makes it credible, when the environment is itself foreign, and speaks a different language. This is very much evident in The City & the City, which presents a deeply imagined but enormously slippery idea as settled reality, shape-shifting as a metaphor, but all too complete in its physicality, and our psychological accommodation.

Science fiction, as my pal John Crowley points out, is usually at right angles to the present, shown on the oblique. It’s no secret that Rod Serling and Gene Roddenberry were using Twilight Zone and Star Trek to bring social commentary to a mass audience. A novel like The City & the City, or The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, are clearly speaking to violence, and authority, and the coping mechanisms we adapt, individually and as herd protection.

It’s interesting to me, too, that the books have more room to breathe than their movie or TV versions. This isn’t about the literary vs. mass market, I don’t mean the movies or the TV series are dumbed down, that’s a contrived distinction, and it’s condescending. My point here is that film or video, as a medium, is very literal: you see something in front of you, even if it’s hallucinatory. But it’s hard to convey possibility, or adaptive psychological structures. You can show the fact, for example, of Fascist authority; the inner effect, the self-policing, is out of visual reach. The Lives of Others comes close. I think also De Sica’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis. In both cases, the claustrophobic framing squeezes perspective, and smothers you with a sense of airlessness.

In the novels, The Man in the High Castle a good example, your POV expands and contracts. But in the recent TV adaption, for all its strengths, you can only see what you’re shown, you don’t have a sense (or at least I didn’t) of a world outside the frame of the camera. In this context, the specificity narrows your engagement. The material surfaces are hard, and cold, and reflective. They have no depth. Metaphorically, we bounce off.

I’m probably reading more into Continuum than it plausibly merits, but then again, it was the catalyst that sent me off along this line of inquiry. I think it’s entertaining, although I don’t think it’s terribly deep, but I think that’s in the eye of the beholder. I think the people who put the show together take it seriously, which is in itself a good thing. Credit where credit is due.

Wish Upon a Crime

2026-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

On June 2, Level Short released Wish Upon a Crime: Crime Fiction Inspired by Fairy Tales, an anthology I edited with Stacy Woodson. Though it’s the second published of the three anthologies we’ve co-edited, it was the first we delivered to a publisher. The path from concept to publication was a long and torturous road, but that’s a story for another day.

Stacy and I have collaborated on various projects over the years—a Derringer-nominated short story, classes and presentations for Outliers Writing University and The Back Room, ShortCon, and more—so adding an anthology or three to the list wasn’t much of a stretch.

The anthology’s concept was Stacy’s, I helped her turn concept into submission guidelines, we made a list of writers to invite, and we worked together to edit the resulting stories.

MY CONTRIBUTION

The stories range from light-hearted to deadly serious. My contribution—“Three Billy Goats Gruff”—leans toward the lighter side.

The three Gruff brothers run a marijuana dispensary, and their cannabis crop is infected with Hop Latent Viroid, which doesn’t kill the plants but does cause dudding—the plants are shorter, have smaller leaves, and have tighter node spacing—and the Gruff brothers are losing customers to the Trolls.

The cannabis plants at Troll Bridge Farm, located in a small valley accessible only via a single one-lane bridge, seem immune to the disease, and the Gruff brothers want access to the higher-quality product.

Well, if you’re familiar with the fairy tale, you know all three brothers have a go at crossing that bridge.

I don’t write much that would be considered light or humorous, so it was fun to explore the lighter side, to bury Easter eggs throughout, and to model human characters after goats.

THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

“Hansel and Gretel” by Joseph S. Walker
“Goldilocks and the Three Bears” by John M. Floyd
“Rapunzel” by Adam Meyer
“The Emperor’s New Clothes” by Laura Oles
“Three Billy Goats Gruff” by Michael Bracken
“Beauty and the Beast” by James A. Hearn
“The Bremen Musicians” by Debra H. Goldstein
“Jack and the Beanstalk” by Andrew Welsh-Huggins
“Cinderella” by Donna Andrews
“The Frog Prince” by Josh Pachter
“Little Red Riding Hood” by Barb Goffman
“The Briar Patch” by Tom Milani
“King o’ the Cats” by David Dean
“The Gingerbread Man” by Stacy Woodson

These probably aren’t bedtime stories for your children, but you’ll enjoy them all. So, go Wish Upon a Crime.

Sara Paretsky and Me

2026-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00

I met Sara at either the first Edgars Awards Banquet I attended, in New York City or maybe it was the first Bouchercon I attended in San Diego. Anyway, it was way back in the 1900s sometime. I'd read her first two or three V.I. Warshawski books and since I was trying to write a female private eye novel I was thrilled to meet Sara in person. I probably said something like "I'm so thrilled to meet you, will you autograph my copy of your book?" Except it most likely sounded like "gluoompargoondetoosly."

I am a very out-going person, easily speaking to a stranger or standing up to speak to a crowd, full of known or unknowns but as an aspiring writer with a couple of barely published short stories to my name, I was suddenly tongue-tied. Yet, somehow she forgave me. Perhaps I did manage to say I owned a mystery bookstore in Austin, Texas, so maybe the gobbety-goop,the oh so flustered me, had blurted out, was normal when I mentioned the store.

Sara's V.I.Warshawski was the kind of female PI, that I was trying to write. Smart, tough but with a touch of smartassery and maybe a bit of the romantic thrown in.

I also admired Sara for helping to push women mystery writers forward in the world by founding Sisters In Crime. The first organization to call out the genre's lack of reviews of women's mysteries in major magazines & newspapers. Helping show publishers that women wrote strong best selling, enjoyable books, most as good, if not better than some males. And pushing for women to get paid in line with male mystery writing contemporaries. This was in the 1990s, you understand.

I've learned through the years of our friendship of her wonderful 48 years of marriage to Courtenay Wright. He was a Canadian born man with an intriguing life as a physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. The two personalities meshed into one special couple (united as only true love can be.)

Sara came from hardy Jewish ancestors who barely got out Europe ahead of Hitler. Her family eventually landed in Kansas in farm country although her father was a scientist, not a farmer, and her mother was a librarian. She was the only girl with four brothers and learned quickly that women's voices or opinions didn't count

Sara's first V.I. Warshawski novel, INDEMNITY ONLY, was published in 1982. V.I. always manages to be involved in current social issues which endears her to many female readers who might not otherwise read mysteries.

I always loved that V.I. would fight anyone, male or female in order to save herself or her downstairs neighbor Mr Contreras or the two golden retrievers Mitch and Peppy, who live with her or stay wih Mr. Contreras when she's on a job. Definitely for someone who's hired her services because she's one tough woman Private Eye.

She's also has a funny bone which shows up in each book without fail. However a posting on FB in 2020 really cracked me up.

Sara posted this:

A few days ago, Alafair Burke raised a question on Twitter about whether knowing a writer has lied on her (his? their?) bio should affect your view of their work. I don't know the answer to that - there are writers whose horrible personality flaws affect my view of their work and maybe that's not fair.

However, as I thought over Alafair's question, I suddenly remembered my mother's obituary. Three weeks before she died in 1998, she asked me to write it for her. She had a funny bone, and also dreams of glory, so I wrote one for her that celebrated her role as an advisor to General de Gaulle during WWII. I said she had worn not only the Order of the Garter but also the Order of the Garter Snake, that she had the Nobel Peace Prize - I can't remember the rest of it now.

One of my brothers had moved in to care for her in her last difficult months (I flew in once a month from Chicago). I typed it on his computer. When she died and he called the funeral home and they asked for an obituary, he saw the file labeled "Mother's Obituary" and sent it to them without reading it. They in turn sent it to all the newspapers in eastern Kansas (1998 - still a lot of local newspapers). The Topeka and Lawrence papers printed it as was, without any questions.

My mother came from a small town in downstate Illinois, and their local paper picked it up from the wires, since I mentioned the town - Roodhouse - by name - it was where she spent the war while my dad was overseas, and it was there that (allegedly) General de Gaulle had visited her. For months after her death, old friends from her childhood wrote, saying, "We always knew Mary Ellen was special, but we never knew how very special she was." When I got the first letter, I wrote back, trying to explain, but after that, I thought - it's making people happy to think they grew up with an unsung heroine, so I let it lie. Hmm - I don't know if that counts as lying about my bio - after all, how many people have ever had a mother who was entitled to wear the Order of the Garter Snake? Only me and my four brothers.

My friend, Sara Paretsky, has a new book coming out, titled BAD COMPANY, due on November 10th starring a new character, an ex CIA agent named Lily. An older or what may truly be called a senior lady. Wanna bet she has a bit of the smartassery in this one? You can preorder BAD COMPANY now.

— respectfully submitted by Jan Grape

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

2026-06-07T00:20:00.000-04:00

Heresy to be sure, but I’m at best ambivalent about Ernest Hemingway stories. Despite grand wordsmithing, I find ‘The Killers’ deeply unsatisfying. To me, it’s part premise, part vignette, but I found some solace that it built on one of his very earliest stories, which explained a lot.

Days ago, I stumbled upon a Hemingway story I hadn’t read, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’. The tale wraps up with a tragic accident… or was it? At least one protagonist doesn’t buy it and the other two ain’t talking.

The title capping this terrific little crime story is brilliant, not meaningful until the final paragraphs. I can’t discuss it further without revealing the plot, but I trust you, the reader, to discover how cleverly applicable is the title.

The story isn’t perfect– I had to reread a peculiar head-hopping passage more than once until I caught on to a switched PoV within a paragraph from a human to a lion. Weird. On the other hand, it’s a prime example of starting a story as near the end as possible.

Like other Hemingway tales, a major theme is cowardice that gathered around the American hunter like a fog of gnats. Arguably he behaved within sound tenets of self-preservation, perhaps to retreat and live another day. That was insufficient for his wife and their seasoned guide, her lover.

By the way, lemon squash is British English for lemonade. And now, here is…

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

by Ernest Hemingway

It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.

“Will you have lime juice or lemon squash?” Macomber asked.

“I’ll have a gimlet,” Robert Wilson told him.

“I’ll have a gimlet too. I need something,” Macomber’s wife said.

“I suppose it’s the thing to do,” Macomber agreed. “Tell him to make three gimlets.”

The mess boy had started them already, lifting the bottles out of the canvas cooling bags that sweated wet in the wind that blew through the trees that shaded the tents.

“What had I ought to give them?” Macomber asked.

“A quid would be plenty,” Wilson told him. “You don’t want to spoil them.”

“Will the headman distribute it?”

“Absolutely.”

Francis Macomber had, half an hour before, been carried to his tent from the edge of the camp in triumph on the arms and shoulders of the cook, the personal boys, the skinner and the porters. The gun-bearers had taken no part in the demonstration. When the native boys put him down at the door of his tent, he had shaken all their hands, received their congratulations, and then gone into the tent and sat on the bed until his wife came in. She did not speak to him when she came in and he left the tent at once to wash his face and hands in the portable wash basin outside and go over to the dining tent to sit in a comfortable canvas chair in the breeze and the shade.

“You’ve got your lion,” Robert Wilson said to him, “and a damned fine one too.”

Mrs. Macomber looked at Wilson quickly. She was an extremely handsome and well-kept woman of the beauty and social position which had, five years before, commanded five thousand dollars as the price of endorsing, with photographs, a beauty product which she had never used. She had been married to Francis Macomber for eleven years.

“He is a good lion, isn’t he?” Macomber said. His wife looked at him now. She looked at both these men as though she had never seen them before.

One, Wilson, the white hunter, she knew she had never truly seen before. He was about middle height with sandy hair, a stubby mustache, a very red face and extremely cold blue eyes with faint white wrinkles at the corners that grooved merrily when he smiled. He smiled at her now and she looked away from his face at the way his shoulders sloped in the loose tunic he wore with the four big cartridges held in loops where the left breast pocket should have been, at his big brown hands, his old slacks, his very dirty boots and back to his red face again. She noticed where the baked red of his face stopped in a white line that marked the circle left by his Stetson hat that hung now from one of the pegs of the tent pole.

“Well, here’s to the lion,” Robert Wilson said. He smiled at her again and, not smiling, she looked curiously at her husband.

Francis Macomber was very tall, very well built if you did not mind that length of bone, dark, his hair cropped like an oarsman, rather thin-lipped, and was considered handsome. He was dressed in the same sort of safari clothes that Wilson wore except that his were new, he was thirty-five years old, kept himself very fit, was good at court games, had a number of big-game fishing records, and had just shown himself, very publicly, to be a coward.

“Here’s to the lion,” he said. “I can’t ever thank you for what you did.”

Margaret, his wife, looked away from him and back to Wilson.

“Let’s not talk about the lion,” she said.

Wilson looked over at her without smiling and now she smiled at him.

“It’s been a very strange day,” she said. “Hadn’t you ought to put your hat on even under the canvas at noon? You told me that, you know.”

“Might put it on,” said Wilson.

“You know you have a very red face, Mr. Wilson,” she told him and smiled again.

“Drink,” said Wilson.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Francis drinks a great deal, but his face is never red.”

“It’s red today,” Macomber tried a joke.

“No,” said Margaret. “It’s mine that’s red today. But Mr. Wilson’s is always red.”

“Must be racial,” said Wilson. “I say, you wouldn’t like to drop my beauty as a topic, would you?”

“I’ve just started on it.”

“Let’s chuck it,” said Wilson.

“Conversation is going to be so difficult,” Margaret said.

“Don’t be silly, Margot,” her husband said.

“No difficulty,” Wilson said. “Got a damn fine lion.”

Margot looked at them both and they both saw that she was going to cry. Wilson had seen it coming for a long time and he dreaded it. Macomber was past dreading it.

“I wish it hadn’t happened. Oh, I wish it hadn’t happened,” she said and started for her tent. She made no noise of crying but they could see that her shoulders were shaking under the rose-colored, sun-proofed shirt she wore.

“Women upset,” said Wilson to the tall man. “Amounts to nothing. Strain on the nerves and one thing’n another.”

“No,” said Macomber. “I suppose that I rate that for the rest of my life now.”

“Nonsense. Let’s have a spot of the giant killer,” said Wilson. “Forget the whole thing. Nothing to it anyway.”

“We might try,” said Macomber. “I won’t forget what you did for me though.”

“Nothing,” said Wilson. “All nonsense.”

So they sat there in the shade where the camp was pitched under some wide-topped acacia trees with a boulder-strewn cliff behind them, and a stretch of grass that ran to the bank of a boulder-filled stream in front with forest beyond it, and drank their just-cool lime drinks and avoided one another’s eyes while the boys set the table for lunch. Wilson could tell that the boys all knew about it now and when he saw Macomber’s personal boy looking curiously at his master while he was putting dishes on the table he snapped at him in Swahili. The boy turned away with his face blank.

“What were you telling him?” Macomber asked.

“Nothing. Told him to look alive or I’d see he got about fifteen of the best.”

“What’s that? Lashes?”

“It’s quite illegal,” Wilson said. “You’re supposed to fine them.”

“Do you still have them whipped?”

“Oh, yes. They could raise a row if they chose to complain. But they don’t. They prefer it to the fines.”

“How strange!” said Macomber.

“Not strange, really,” Wilson said. “Which would you rather do? Take a good birching or lose your pay?”

Then he felt embarrassed at asking it and before Macomber could answer he went on, “We all take a beating every day, you know, one way or another.”

This was no better. “Good God,” he thought. “I am a diplomat, aren’t I?”

“Yes, we take a beating,” said Macomber, still not looking at him. “I’m awfully sorry about that lion business. It doesn’t have to go any further, does it? I mean no one will hear about it, will they?”

“You mean will I tell it at the Mathaiga Club?” Wilson looked at him now coldly. He had not expected this. So he’s a bloody four-letter man as well as a bloody coward, he thought. I rather liked him too until today. But how is one to know about an American?

“No,” said Wilson. “I’m a professional hunter. We never talk about our clients. You can be quite easy on that. It’s supposed to be bad form to ask us not to talk though.”

He had decided now that to break would be much easier. He would eat, then, by himself and could read a book with his meals. They would eat by themselves. He would see them through the safari on a very formal basis — what was it the French called it? Distinguished consideration — and it would be a damn sight easier than having to go through this emotional trash. He’d insult him and make a good clean break. Then he could read a book with his meals and he’d still be drinking their whisky. That was the phrase for it when a safari went bad. You ran into another white hunter and you asked, “How is everything going?” and he answered, “Oh, I’m still drinking their whisky,” and you knew everything had gone to pot.

“I’m sorry,” Macomber said and looked at him with his American face that would stay adolescent until it became middle-aged, and Wilson noted his crew-cropped hair, fine eyes only faintly shifty, good nose, thin lips and handsome jaw. “I’m sorry I didn’t realize that. There are lots of things I don’t know.”

So what could he do, Wilson thought. He was all ready to break it off quickly and neatly and here the beggar was apologizing after he had just insulted him. He made one more attempt. “Don’t worry about me talking,” he said. “I have a living to make. You know in Africa no woman ever misses her lion and no white man ever bolts.”

“I bolted like a rabbit,” Macomber said.

Now what in hell were you going to do about a man who talked like that, Wilson wondered.

Wilson looked at Macomber with his flat, blue, machine-gunner’s eyes and the other smiled back at him. He had a pleasant smile if you did not notice how his eyes showed when he was hurt.

“Maybe I can fix it up on buffalo,” he said. “We’re after them next, aren’t we?”

“In the morning if you like,” Wilson told him. Perhaps he had been wrong. This was certainly the way to take it. You most certainly could not tell a damned thing about an American. He was all for Macomber again. If you could forget the morning. But, of course, you couldn’t. The morning had been about as bad as they come.

“Here comes the Memsahib,” he said. She was walking over from her tent looking refreshed and cheerful and quite lovely. She had a very perfect oval face, so perfect that you expected her to be stupid. But she wasn’t stupid, Wilson thought, no, not stupid.

“How is the beautiful red-faced Mr. Wilson? Are you feeling better, Francis, my pearl?”

“Oh, much,” said Macomber.

“I’ve dropped the whole thing,” she said, sitting down at the table. “What importance is there to whether Francis is any good at killing lions? That’s not his trade. That’s Mr. Wilson’s trade. Mr. Wilson is really very impressive killing anything. You do kill anything, don’t you?”

“Oh, anything,” said Wilson. “Simply anything.” They are, he thought, the hardest in the world; the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory and the most attractive and their men have softened or gone to pieces nervously as they have hardened. Or is it that they pick men they can handle? They can’t know that much at the age they marry, he thought. He was grateful that he had gone through his education on American women before now because this was a very attractive one.

“We’re going after buff in the morning,” he told her.

“I’m coming,” she said.

“No, you’re not.”

“Oh, yes, I am. Mayn’t I, Francis?”

“Why not stay in camp?”

“Not for anything,” she said. “I wouldn’t miss something like today for anything.”

When she left, Wilson was thinking, when she went off to cry, she seemed a hell of a fine woman. She seemed to understand, to realize, to be hurt for him and for herself and to know how things really stood. She is away for twenty minutes and now she is back, simply enamelled in that American female cruelty. They are the damnedest women. Really the damnedest.

“We’ll put on another show for you tomorrow,” Francis Macomber said.

“You’re not coming,” Wilson said.

“You’re very mistaken,” she told him. “And I want so to see you perform again. You were lovely this morning. That is if blowing things’ heads off is lovely.”

“Here’s the lunch,” said Wilson. “You’re very merry, aren’t you?”

“Why not? I didn’t come out here to be dull.”

“Well, it hasn’t been dull,” Wilson said. He could see the boulders in the river and the high bank beyond with the trees and he remembered the morning.

“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s been charming. And tomorrow. You don’t know how I look forward to tomorrow.”

“That’s eland he’s offering you,” Wilson said.

“They’re the big cowy things that jump like hares, aren’t they?”

“I suppose that describes them,” Wilson said.

“It’s very good meat,” Macomber said.

“Did you shoot it, Francis?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“They’re not dangerous, are they?”

“Only if they fall on you,” Wilson told her.

“I’m so glad.”

“Why not let up on the bitchery just a little, Margot,” Macomber said, cutting the eland steak and putting some mashed potato, gravy and carrot on the down-turned fork that tined through the piece of meat.

“I suppose I could,” she said, “since you put it so prettily.”

“Tonight we’ll have champagne for the lion,” Wilson said. “It’s a bit too hot at noon.”

“Oh, the lion,” Margot said. “I’d forgotten the lion!”

So, Robert Wilson thought to himself, she is giving him a ride, isn’t she? Or do you suppose that’s her idea of putting up a good show? How should a woman act when she discovers her husband is a bloody coward? She’s damn cruel but they’re all cruel. They govern, of course, and to govern one has to be cruel sometimes. Still, I’ve seen enough of their damn terrorism.

“Have some more eland,” he said to her politely.

That afternoon, late, Wilson and Macomber went out in the motor car with the native driver and the two gun-bearers. Mrs. Macomber stayed in the camp. It was too hot to go out, she said, and she was going with them in the early morning. As they drove off Wilson saw her standing under the big tree, looking pretty rather than beautiful in her faintly rosy khaki, her dark hair drawn back off her forehead and gathered in a knot low on her neck, her face as fresh, he thought, as though she were in England. She waved to them as the car went off through the swale of high grass and curved around through the trees into the small hills of orchard bush.

In the orchard bush they found a herd of impala, and leaving the car they stalked one old ram with long, wide-spread horns and Macomber killed it with a very creditable shot that knocked the buck down at a good two hundred yards and sent the herd off bounding wildly and leaping over one another’s backs in long, leg-drawn-up leaps as unbelievable and as floating as those one makes sometimes in dreams.

“That was a good shot,” Wilson said. “They’re a small target.”

“Is it a worth-while head?” Macomber asked.

“It’s excellent,” Wilson told him. “You shoot like that and you’ll have no trouble.”

“Do you think we’ll find buffalo tomorrow?”

“There’s a good chance of it. They feed out early in the morning and with luck we may catch them in the open.”

“I’d like to clear away that lion business,” Macomber said. “It’s not very pleasant to have your wife see you do something like that.”

I should think it would be even more unpleasant to do it, Wilson thought, wife or no wife, or to talk about it having done it. But he said, “I wouldn’t think about that any more. Any one could be upset by his first lion. That’s all over.”

But that night after dinner and a whisky and soda by the fire before going to bed, as Francis Macomber lay on his cot with the mosquito bar over him and listened to the night noises it was not all over. It was neither all over nor was it beginning. It was there exactly as it happened with some parts of it indelibly emphasized and he was miserably ashamed at it. But more than shame he felt cold, hollow fear in him. The fear was still there like a cold slimy hollow in all the emptiness where once his confidence had been and it made him feel sick. It was still there with him now.

It had started the night before when he had wakened and heard the lion roaring somewhere up along the river. It was a deep sound and at the end there were sort of coughing grunts that made him seem just outside the tent, and when Francis Macomber woke in the night to hear it he was afraid. He could hear his wife breathing quietly, asleep. There was no one to tell he was afraid, nor to be afraid with him, and, lying alone, he did not know the Somali proverb that says a brave man is always frightened three times by a lion; when he first sees his track, when he first hears him roar and when he first confronts him. Then while they were eating breakfast by lantern light out in the dining tent, before the sun was up, the lion roared again and Francis thought he was just at the edge of camp.

“Sounds like an old-timer,” Robert Wilson said, looking up from his kippers and coffee. “Listen to him cough.”

“Is he very close?”

“A mile or so up the stream.”

“Will we see him?”

“We’ll have a look.”

“Does his roaring carry that far? It sounds as though he were right in camp.”

“Carries a hell of a long way,” said Robert Wilson. “It’s strange the way it carries. Hope he’s a shootable cat. The boys said there was a very big one about here.”

“If I get a shot, where should I hit him,” Macomber asked, “to stop him?”

“In the shoulders,” Wilson said. “In the neck if you can make it. Shoot for bone. Break him down.”

“I hope I can place it properly,” Macomber said.

“You shoot very well,” Wilson told him. “Take your time. Make sure of him. The first one in is the one that counts.”

“What range will it be?”

“Can’t tell. Lion has something to say about that. Don’t shoot unless it’s close enough so you can make sure.”

“At under a hundred yards?” Macomber asked.

Wilson looked at him quickly.

“Hundred’s about right. Might have to take him a bit under. Shouldn’t chance a shot at much over that. A hundred’s a decent range. You can hit him wherever you want at that. Here comes the Memsahib.”

“Good morning,” she said. “Are we going after that lion?”

“As soon as you deal with your breakfast,” Wilson said. “How are you feeling?”

“Marvellous,” she said. “I’m very excited.”

“I’ll just go and see that everything is ready.” Wilson went off. As he left the lion roared again.

“Noisy beggar,” Wilson said. “We’ll put a stop to that.”

“What’s the matter, Francis?” his wife asked him.

“Nothing,” Macomber said.

“Yes, there is,” she said. “What are you upset about?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Tell me,” she looked at him. “Don’t you feel well?”

“It’s that damned roaring,” he said. “It’s been going on all night, you know.”

“Why didn’t you wake me,” she said. “I’d love to have heard it.”

“I’ve got to kill the damned thing,” Macomber said, miserably.

“Well, that’s what you’re out here for, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But I’m nervous. Hearing the thing roar gets on my nerves.”

“Well then, as Wilson said, kill him and stop his roaring.”

“Yes, darling,” said Francis Macomber. “It sounds easy, doesn’t it?”

“You’re not afraid, are you?”

“Of course not. But I’m nervous from hearing him roar all night.”

“You’ll kill him marvellously,” she said. “I know you will. I’m awfully anxious to see it.”

“Finish your breakfast and we’ll be starting.”

“It’s not light yet,” she said. “This is a ridiculous hour.”

Just then the lion roared in a deep-chested moaning, suddenly guttural, ascending vibration that seemed to shake the air and ended in a sigh and a heavy, deep-chested grunt.

“He sounds almost here,” Macomber’s wife said.

“My God,” said Macomber. “I hate that damned noise.”

“It’s very impressive.”

“Impressive. It’s frightful.”

Robert Wilson came up then carrying his short, ugly, shockingly bigbored .505 Gibbs and grinning.

“Come on,” he said. “Your gun-bearer has your Springfield and the big gun. Everything’s in the car. Have you solids?”

“Yes.”

“I’m ready,” Mrs. Macomber said.

“Must make him stop that racket,” Wilson said. “You get in front. The Memsahib can sit back here with me.”

They climbed into the motor car and, in the gray first daylight, moved off up the river through the trees. Macomber opened the breech of his rifle and saw he had metal-cased bullets, shut the bolt and put the rifle on safety. He saw his hand was trembling. He felt in his pocket for more cartridges and moved his fingers over the cartridges in the loops of his tunic front. He turned back to where Wilson sat in the rear seat of the doorless, box-bodied motor car beside his wife, them both grinning with excitement, and Wilson leaned forward and whispered,

“See the birds dropping. Means the old boy has left his kill.”

On the far bank of the stream Macomber could see, above the trees, vultures circling and plummeting down.

“Chances are he’ll come to drink along here,” Wilson whispered. “Before he goes to lay up. Keep an eye out.”

They were driving slowly along the high bank of the stream which here cut deeply to its boulder-filled bed, and they wound in and out through big trees as they drove. Macomber was watching the opposite bank when he felt Wilson take hold of his arm. The car stopped.

“There he is,” he heard the whisper. “Ahead and to the right. Get out and take him. He’s a marvellous lion.”

Macomber saw the lion now. He was standing almost broadside, his great head up and turned toward them. The early morning breeze that blew toward them was just stirring his dark mane, and the lion looked huge, silhouetted on the rise of bank in the gray morning light, his shoulders heavy, his barrel of a body bulking smoothly.

“How far is he?” asked Macomber, raising his rifle.

“About seventy-five. Get out and take him.”

“Why not shoot from where I am?”

“You don’t shoot them from cars,” he heard Wilson saying in his ear. “Get out. He’s not going to stay there all day.”

Macomber stepped out of the curved opening at the side of the front seat, onto the step and down onto the ground. The lion still stood looking majestically and coolly toward this object that his eyes only showed in silhouette, bulking like some super-rhino. There was no man smell carried toward him and he watched the object, moving his great head a little from side to side. Then watching the object, not afraid, but hesitating before going down the bank to drink with such a thing opposite him, he saw a man figure detach itself from it and he turned his heavy head and swung away toward the cover of the trees as he heard a cracking crash and felt the slam of a .30-06 220-grain solid bullet that bit his flank and ripped in sudden hot scalding nausea through his stomach. He trotted, heavy, bigfooted, swinging wounded full-bellied, through the trees toward the tall grass and cover, and the crash came again to go past him ripping the air apart. Then it crashed again and he felt the blow as it hit his lower ribs and ripped on through, blood sudden hot and frothy in his mouth, and he galloped toward the high grass where he could crouch and not be seen and make them bring the crashing thing close enough so he could make a rush and get the man that held it.

Macomber had not thought how the lion felt as he got out of the car. He only knew his hands were shaking and as he walked away from the car it was almost impossible for him to make his legs move. They were stiff in the thighs, but he could feel the muscles fluttering. He raised the rifle, sighted on the junction of the lion’s head and shoulders and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened though he pulled until he thought his finger would break. Then he knew he had the safety on and as he lowered the rifle to move the safety over he moved another frozen pace forward, and the lion seeing his silhouette flow clear of the silhouette of the car, turned and started off at a trot, and, as Macomber fired, he heard a whunk that meant that the bullet was home; but the lion kept on going. Macomber shot again and every one saw the bullet throw a spout of dirt beyond the trotting lion. He shot again, remembering to lower his aim, and they all heard the bullet hit, and the lion went into a gallop and was in the tall grass before he had the bolt pushed forward.

Macomber stood there feeling sick at his stomach, his hands that held the Springfield still cocked, shaking, and his wife and Robert Wilson were standing by him. Beside him too were the two gun-bearers chattering in Wakamba.

“I hit him,” Macomber said. “I hit him twice.”

“You gut-shot him and you hit him somewhere forward,” Wilson said without enthusiasm. The gun-bearers looked very grave. They were silent now.

“You may have killed him,” Wilson went on. “We’ll have to wait a while before we go in to find out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let him get sick before we follow him up.”

“Oh,” said Macomber.

“He’s a hell of a fine lion,” Wilson said cheerfully. “He’s gotten into a bad place though.”

“Why is it bad?”

“Can’t see him until you’re on him.”

“Oh,” said Macomber.

“Come on,” said Wilson. “The Memsahib can stay here in the car. We’ll go to have a look at the blood spoor.”

“Stay here, Margot,” Macomber said to his wife. His mouth was very dry and it was hard for him to talk.

“Why?” she asked.

“Wilson says to.”

“We’re going to have a look,” Wilson said. “You stay here. You can see even better from here.”

“All right.”

Wilson spoke in Swahili to the driver. He nodded and said, “Yes, Bwana.”

Then they went down the steep bank and across the stream, climbing over and around the boulders and up the other bank, pulling up by some projecting roots, and along it until they found where the lion had been trotting when Macomber first shot. There was dark blood on the short grass that the gun-bearers pointed out with grass stems, and that ran away behind the river bank trees.

“What do we do?” asked Macomber.

“Not much choice,” said Wilson. “We can’t bring the car over. Bank’s too steep. We’ll let him stiffen up a bit and then you and I’ll go in and have a look for him.”

“Can’t we set the grass on fire?” Macomber asked.

“Too green.”

“Can’t we send beaters?”

Wilson looked at him appraisingly. “Of course we can,” he said. “But it’s just a touch murderous. You see, we know the lion’s wounded. You can drive an unwounded lion — he’ll move on ahead of a noise — but a wounded lion’s going to charge. You can’t see him until you’re right on him. He’ll make himself perfectly flat in cover you wouldn’t think would hide a hare. You can’t very well send boys in there to that sort of a show. Somebody bound to get mauled.”

“What about the gun-bearers?”

“Oh, they’ll go with us. It’s their shauri. You see, they signed on for it. They don’t look too happy though, do they?”

“I don’t want to go in there,” said Macomber. It was out before he knew he’d said it.

“Neither do I,” said Wilson very cheerily. “Really no choice though.” Then, as an afterthought, he glanced at Macomber and saw suddenly how he was trembling and the pitiful look on his face.

“You don’t have to go in, of course,” he said. “That’s what I’m hired for, you know. That’s why I’m so expensive.”

“You mean you’d go in by yourself? Why not leave him there?”

Robert Wilson, whose entire occupation had been with the lion and the problem he presented, and who had not been thinking about Macomber except to note that he was rather windy, suddenly felt as though he had opened the wrong door in a hotel and seen something shameful.

“What do you mean?”

“Why not just leave him?”

“You mean pretend to ourselves he hasn’t been hit?”

“No. Just drop it.”

“It isn’t done.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, he’s certain to be suffering. For another, someone else might run onto him.”

“I see.”

“But you don’t have to have anything to do with it.”

“I’d like to,” Macomber said. “I’m just scared, you know.”

“I’ll go ahead when we go in,” Wilson said, “with Kongoni tracking. You keep behind me and a little to one side. Chances are we’ll hear him growl. If we see him we’ll both shoot. Don’t worry about anything. I’ll keep you backed up. As a matter of fact, you know, perhaps you’d better not go. It might be much better. Why don’t you go over and join the Memsahib while I just get it over with?”

“No, I want to go.”

“All right,” said Wilson. “But don’t go in if you don’t want to. This is my shauri now, you know.”

“I want to go,” said Macomber.

They sat under a tree and smoked.

“Want to go back and speak to the Memsahib while we’re waiting?” Wilson asked.

“No.”

“I’ll just step back and tell her to be patient.”

“Good,” said Macomber. He sat there, sweating under his arms, his mouth dry, his stomach hollow feeling, wanting to find courage to tell Wilson to go on and finish off the lion without him. He could not know that Wilson was furious because he had not noticed the state he was in earlier and sent him back to his wife. While he sat there Wilson came up. “I have your big gun,” he said. “Take it. We’ve given him time, I think. Come on.”

Macomber took the big gun and Wilson said:

“Keep behind me and about five yards to the right and do exactly as I tell you.” Then he spoke in Swahili to the two gun-bearers who looked the picture of gloom.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“Could I have a drink of water?” Macomber asked. Wilson spoke to the older gun-bearer, who wore a canteen on his belt, and the man unbuckled it, unscrewed the top and handed it to Macomber, who took it noticing how heavy it seemed and how hairy and shoddy the felt covering was in his hand. He raised it to drink and looked ahead at the high grass with the flat-topped trees behind it. A breeze was blowing toward them and the grass rippled gently in the wind. He looked at the gun-bearer and he could see the gun-bearer was suffering too with fear.

Thirty-five yards into the grass the big lion lay flattened out along the ground. His ears were back and his only movement was a slight twitching up and down of his long, black-tufted tail. He had turned at bay as soon as he had reached this cover and he was sick with the wound through his full belly, and weakening with the wound through his lungs that brought a thin foamy red to his mouth each time he breathed. His flanks were wet and hot and flies were on the little openings the solid bullets had made in his tawny hide, and his big yellow eyes, narrowed with hate, looked straight ahead, only blinking when the pain came as he breathed, and his claws dug in the soft baked earth. All of him, pain, sickness, hatred and all of his remaining strength, was tightening into an absolute concentration for a rush. He could hear the men talking and he waited, gathering all of himself into this preparation for a charge as soon as the men would come into the grass. As he heard their voices his tail stiffened to twitch up and down, and, as they came into the edge of the grass, he made a coughing grunt and charged.

Kongoni, the old gun-bearer, in the lead watching the blood spoor, Wilson watching the grass for any movement, his big gun ready, the second gun-bearer looking ahead and listening, Macomber close to Wilson, his rifle cocked, they had just moved into the grass when Macomber heard the blood-choked coughing grunt, and saw the swishing rush in the grass. The next thing he knew he was running; running wildly, in panic in the open, running toward the stream.

He heard the ca-ra-wong! of Wilson’s big rifle, and again in a second crashing carawong! and turning saw the lion, horrible-looking now, with half his head seeming to be gone, crawling toward Wilson in the edge of the tall grass while the red-faced man worked the bolt on the short ugly rifle and aimed carefully as another blasting carawong! came from the muzzle, and the crawling, heavy, yellow bulk of the lion stiffened and the huge, mutilated head slid forward and Macomber, standing by himself in the clearing where he had run, holding a loaded rifle, while two black men and a white man looked back at him in contempt, knew the lion was dead. He came toward Wilson, his tallness all seeming a naked reproach, and Wilson looked at him and said:

“Want to take pictures?”

“No,” he said.

That was all any one had said until they reached the motor car. Then Wilson had said:

“Hell of a fine lion. Boys will skin him out. We might as well stay here in the shade.”

Macomber’s wife had not looked at him nor he at her and he had sat by her in the back seat with Wilson sitting in the front seat. Once he had reached over and taken his wife’s hand without looking at her and she had removed her hand from his. Looking across the stream to where the gun-bearers were skinning out the lion he could see that she had been able to see the whole thing. While they sat there his wife had reached forward and put her hand on Wilson’s shoulder. He turned and she had leaned forward over the low seat and kissed him on the mouth.

“Oh, I say,” said Wilson, going redder than his natural baked color.

“Mr. Robert Wilson,” she said. “The beautiful red-faced Mr. Robert Wilson.”

Then she sat down beside Macomber again and looked away across the stream to where the lion lay, with uplifted, white-muscled, tendon-marked naked forearms, and white bloating belly, as the black men fleshed away the skin. Finally the gun-bearers brought the skin over, wet and heavy, and climbed in behind with it, rolling it up before they got in, and the motor car started. No one had said anything more until they were back in camp.

That was the story of the lion. Macomber did not know how the lion had felt before he started his rush, nor during it when the unbelievable smash of the .505 with a muzzle velocity of two tons had hit him in the mouth, nor what kept him coming after that, when the second ripping crash had smashed his hind quarters and he had come crawling on toward the crashing, blasting thing that had destroyed him. Wilson knew something about it and only expressed it by saying, “Damned fine lion,” but Macomber did not know how Wilson felt about things either. He did not know how his wife felt except that she was through with him.

His wife had been through with him before but it never lasted. He was very wealthy, and would be much wealthier, and he knew she would not leave him even now. That was one of the few things that he really knew. He knew about that, about motor cycles — that was earliest — about motor cars, about duck-shooting, about fishing, trout, salmon and big-sea, about sex in books, many books, too many books, about all court games, about dogs, not much about horses, about hanging on to his money, about most of the other things his world dealt in, and about his wife not leaving him. His wife had been a great beauty and she was still a great beauty in Africa, but she was not a great enough beauty any more at home to be able to leave him and better herself and she knew it and he knew it. She had missed the chance to leave him and he knew it. If he had been better with women she would probably have started to worry about him getting another new, beautiful wife; but she knew too much about him to worry about him either. Also, he had always had a great tolerance which seemed the nicest thing about him if it were not the most sinister.

All in all they were known as a comparatively happily married couple, one of those whose disruption is often rumored but never occurs, and as the society columnist put it, they were adding more than a spice of adventure to their much envied and ever-enduring Romance by a Safari in what was known as Darkest Africa until the Martin Johnsons lighted it on so many silver screens where they were pursuing Old Simba the lion, the buffalo, Tembo the elephant and as well collecting specimens for the Museum of Natural History. This same columnist had reported them on the verge at least three times in the past and they had been. But they always made it up. They had a sound basis of union. Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him.

It was now about three o’clock in the morning and Francis Macomber, who had been asleep a little while after he had stopped thinking about the lion, wakened and then slept again, woke suddenly, frightened in a dream of the bloody-headed lion standing over him, and listening while his heart pounded, he realized that his wife was not in the other cot in the tent. He lay awake with that knowledge for two hours.

At the end of that time his wife came into the tent, lifted her mosquito bar and crawled cozily into bed.

“Where have you been?” Macomber asked in the darkness.

“Hello,” she said. “Are you awake?”

“Where have you been?”

“I just went out to get a breath of air.”

“You did, like hell.”

“What do you want me to say, darling?”

“Where have you been?”

“Out to get a breath of air.”

“That’s a new name for it. You are a bitch.”

“Well, you’re a coward.”

“All right,” he said. “What of it?”

“Nothing as far as I’m concerned. But please let’s not talk, darling, because I’m very sleepy.”

“You think that I’ll take anything.”

“I know you will, sweet.”

“Well, I won’t.”

“Please, darling, let’s not talk. I’m so very sleepy.”

“There wasn’t going to be any of that. You promised there wouldn’t be.”

“Well, there is now,” she said sweetly.

“You said if we made this trip that there would be none of that. You promised.”

“Yes, darling. That’s the way I meant it to be. But the trip was spoiled yesterday. We don’t have to talk about it, do we?”

“You don’t wait long when you have an advantage, do you?”

“Please let’s not talk. I’m so sleepy, darling.”

“I’m going to talk.”

“Don’t mind me then, because I’m going to sleep.” And she did.

At breakfast they were all three at the table before daylight and Francis Macomber found that, of all the many men that he had hated, he hated Robert Wilson the most.

“Sleep well?” Wilson asked in his throaty voice, filling a pipe.

“Did you?”

“Topping,” the white hunter told him.

You bastard, thought MaComber, you insolent bastard.

So she woke him when she came in, Wilson thought, looking at them both with his flat, cold eyes. Well, why doesn’t he keep his wife where she belongs? What does he think I am, a bloody plaster saint? Let him keep her where she belongs. It’s his own fault.

“Do you think we’ll find buffalo?” Margot asked, pushing away a dish of apricots.

“Chance of it,” Wilson said and smiled at her. “Why don’t you stay in camp?”

“Not for anything,” she told him.

“Why not order her to stay in camp?” Wilson said to Macomber.

“You order her,” said Macomber coldly.

“Let’s not have any ordering, nor,” turning to Macomber, “any silliness, Francis,” Margot said quite pleasantly.

“Are you ready to start?” Macomber asked.

“Any time,” Wilson told him. “Do you want the Memsahib to go?”

“Does it make any difference whether I do or not?”

The hell with it, thought Robert Wilson. The utter complete hell with it. So this is what it’s going to be like. Well, this is what it’s going to be like, then.

“Makes no difference,” he said.

“You’re sure you wouldn’t like to stay in camp with her yourself and let me go out and hunt the buffalo?” Macomber asked.

“Can’t do that,” said Wilson. “Wouldn’t talk rot if I were you.”

“I’m not talking rot. I’m disgusted.”

“Bad word, disgusted.”

“Francis, will you please try to speak sensibly,” his wife said.

“I speak too damned sensibly,” Macomber said. “Did you ever eat such filthy food?”

“Something wrong with the food?” asked Wilson quietly.

“No more than with everything else.”

“I’d pull yourself together, laddybuck,” Wilson said very quietly. “There’s a boy waits at table that understands a little English.”

“The hell with him.”

Wilson stood up and puffing on his pipe strolled away, speaking a few words in Swahili to one of the gun-bearers who was standing waiting for him. Macomber and his wife sat on at the table. He was staring at his coffee cup.

“If you make a scene I’ll leave you, darling,” Margot said quietly.

“No, you won’t.”

“You can try it and see.”

“You won’t leave me.”

“No,” she said. “I won’t leave you and you’ll behave yourself.”

“Behave myself? That’s a way to talk. Behave myself.”

“Yes. Behave yourself.”

“Why don’t you try behaving?”

“I’ve tried it so long. So very long.”

“I hate that red-faced swine,” Macomber said. “I loathe the sight of him.”

“He’s really very nice.”

“Oh, shut up,” Macomber almost shouted. Just then the car came up and stopped in front of the dining tent and the driver and the two gunbearers got out. Wilson walked over and looked at the husband and wife sitting there at the table.

“Going shooting?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Macomber, standing up. “Yes.”

“Better bring a woolly. It will be cool in the car,” Wilson said.

“I’ll get my leather jacket,” Margot said.

“The boy has it,” Wilson told her. He climbed into the front with the driver and Francis Macomber and his wife sat, not speaking, in the back seat.

Hope the silly beggar doesn’t take a notion to blow the back of my head off, Wilson thought to himself. Women are a nuisance on safari.

The car was grinding down to cross the river at a pebbly ford in the gray daylight and then climbed, angling up the steep bank, where Wilson had ordered a way shovelled out the day before so they could reach the parklike wooded rolling country on the far side.

It was a good morning, Wilson thought. There was a heavy dew and as the wheels went through the grass and low bushes he could smell the odor of the crushed fronds. It was an odor like verbena and he liked this early morning smell of the dew, the crushed bracken and the look of the tree trunks showing black through the early morning mist, as the car made its way through the untracked, parklike country. He had put the two in the back seat out of his mind now and was thinking about buffalo. The buffalo that he was after stayed in the daytime in a thick swamp where it was impossible to get a shot, but in the night they fed out into an open stretch of country and if he could come between them and their swamp with the car, Macomber would have a good chance at them in the open. He did not want to hunt buff with Macomber in thick cover. He did not want to hunt buff or anything else with Macomber at all, but he was a professional hunter and he had hunted with some rare ones in his time. If they got buff today there would only be rhino to come and the poor man would have gone through his dangerous game and things might pick up. He’d have nothing more to do with the woman and Macomber would get over that too. He must have gone through plenty of that before by the look of things. Poor beggar. He must have a way of getting over it. Well, it was the poor sod’s own bloody fault.

He, Robert Wilson, carried a double size cot on safari to accommodate any windfalls he might receive. He had hunted for a certain clientele, the international, fast, sporting set, where the women did not feel they were getting their money’s worth unless they had shared that cot with the white hunter. He despised them when he was away from them although he liked some of them well enough at the time, but he made his living by them; and their standards were his standards as long as they were hiring him.

They were his standards in all except the shooting. He had his own standards about the killing and they could live up to them or get someone else to hunt them. He knew, too, that they all respected him for this. This Macomber was an odd one though. Damned if he wasn’t. Now the wife. Well, the wife. Yes, the wife. Hm, the wife. Well he’d dropped all that. He looked around at them. Macomber sat grim and furious. Margot smiled at him. She looked younger today, more innocent and fresher and not so professionally beautiful. What’s in her heart God knows, Wilson thought. She hadn’t talked much last night. At that it was a pleasure to see her.

The motor car climbed up a slight rise and went on through the trees and then out into a grassy prairie-like opening and kept in the shelter of the trees along the edge, the driver going slowly and Wilson looking carefully out across the prairie and all along its far side. He stopped the car and studied the opening with his field glasses. Then he motioned to the driver to go on and the car moved slowly along, the driver avoiding warthog holes and driving around the mud castles ants had built. Then, looking across the opening, Wilson suddenly turned and said, “By God, there they are!”

And looking where he pointed, while the car jumped forward and Wilson spoke in rapid Swahili to the driver, Macomber saw three huge, black animals looking almost cylindrical in their long heaviness, like big black tank cars, moving at a gallop across the far edge of the open prairie. They moved at a stiff-necked, stiff bodied gallop and he could see the upswept wide black horns on their heads as they galloped heads out; the heads not moving.

“They’re three old bulls,” Wilson said. “We’ll cut them off before they get to the swamp.”

The car was going a wild forty-five miles an hour across the open and as Macomber watched, the buffalo got bigger and bigger until he could see the gray, hairless, scabby look of one huge bull and how his neck was a part of his shoulders and the shiny black of his horns as he galloped a little behind the others that were strung out in that steady plunging gait; and then, the car swaying as though it had just jumped a road, they drew up close and he could see the plunging hugeness of the bull, and the dust in his sparsely haired hide, the wide boss of horn and his outstretched, wide-nostrilled muzzle, and he was raising his rifle when Wilson shouted, “Not from the car, you fool!” and he had no fear, only hatred of Wilson, while the brakes clamped on and the car skidded, plowing sideways to an almost stop and Wilson was out on one side and he on the other, stumbling as his feet hit the still speeding-by of the earth, and then he was shooting at the bull as he moved away, hearing the bullets whunk into him, emptying his rifle at him as he moved steadily away, finally remembering to get his shots forward into the shoulder, and as he fumbled to re-load, he saw the bull was down. Down on his knees, his big head tossing, and seeing the other two still galloping he shot at the leader and hit him. He shot again and missed and he heard the carawonging roar as Wilson shot and saw the leading bull slide forward onto his nose.

“Get that other,” Wilson said. “Now you’re shooting!”

But the other bull was moving steadily at the same gallop and he missed, throwing a spout of dirt, and Wilson missed and the dust rose in a cloud and Wilson shouted, “Come on. He’s too far!” and grabbed his arm and they were in the car again, Macomber and Wilson hanging on the sides and rocketing swayingly over the uneven ground, drawing up on the steady, plunging, heavy-necked, straight-moving gallop of the bull.

They were behind him and Macomber was filling his rifle, dropping shells onto the ground, jamming it, clearing the jam, then they were almost up with the bull when Wilson yelled “Stop,” and the car skidded so that it almost swung over and Macomber fell forward onto his feet, slammed his bolt forward and fired as far forward as he could aim into the galloping, rounded black back, aimed and shot again, then again, then again, and the bullets, all of them hitting, had no effect on the buffalo that he could see. Then Wilson shot, the roar deafening him, and he could see the bull stagger. Macomber shot again, aiming carefully, and down he came, onto his knees.

“All right,” Wilson said. “Nice work. That’s the three.”

Macomber felt a drunken elation.

“How many times did you shoot?” he asked.

“Just three,” Wilson said. “You killed the first bull. The biggest one. I helped you finish the other two. Afraid they might have got into cover. You had them killed. I was just mopping up a little. You shot damn well.”

“Let’s go to the car,” said Macomber. “I want a drink.”

“Got to finish off that buff first,” Wilson told him. The buffalo was on his knees and he jerked his head furiously and bellowed in pig-eyed, roaring rage as they came toward him.

“Watch he doesn’t get up,” Wilson said. Then, “Get a little broadside and take him in the neck just behind the ear.”

Macomber aimed carefully at the center of the huge, jerking, rage-driven neck and shot. At the shot the head dropped forward.

“That does it,” said Wilson. “Got the spine. They’re a hell of a looking thing, aren’t they?”

“Let’s get the drink,” said Macomber. In his life he had never felt so good.

In the car Macomber’s wife sat very white-faced. “You were marvellous, darling,” she said to Macomber. “What a ride.”

“Was it rough?” Wilson asked.

“It was frightful. I’ve never been more frightened in my life.”

“Let’s all have a drink,” Macomber said.

“By all means,” said Wilson. “Give it to the Memsahib.” She drank the neat whisky from the flask and shuddered a little when she swallowed. She handed the flask to Macomber who handed it to Wilson.

“It was frightfully exciting,” she said. “It’s given me a dreadful headache. I didn’t know you were allowed to shoot them from cars though.

“No one shot from cars,” said Wilson coldly.

“I mean chase them from cars.”

“Wouldn’t ordinarily,” Wilson said. “Seemed sporting enough to me though while we were doing it. Taking more chance driving that way across the plain full of holes and one thing and another than hunting on foot. Buffalo could have charged us each time we shot if he liked. Gave him every chance. Wouldn’t mention it to any one though. It’s illegal if that’s what you mean.”

“It seemed very unfair to me,” Margot said, “chasing those big helpless things in a motor car.”

“Did it?” said Wilson.

“What would happen if they heard about it in Nairobi?”

“I’d lose my licence for one thing. Other unpleasantnesses,” Wilson said, taking a drink from the flask. “I’d be out of business.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“Well,” said Macomber, and he smiled for the first time all day. “Now she has something on you.”

“You have such a pretty way of putting things, Francis,” Margot Macomber said. Wilson looked at them both. If a four-letter man marries a five-letter woman, he was thinking, what number of letters would their children be? What he said was, “We lost a gun-bearer. Did you notice it?”

“My God, no,” Macomber said.

“Here he comes,” Wilson said. “He’s all right. He must have fallen off when we left the first bull.”

Approaching them was the middle-aged gun-bearer, limping along in his knitted cap, khaki tunic, shorts and rubber sandals, gloomy-faced and disgusted looking. As he came up he called out to Wilson in Swahili and they all saw the change in the white hunter’s face.

“What does he say?” asked Margot.

“He says the first bull got up and went into the bush,” Wilson said with no expression in his voice.

“Oh,” said Macomber blankly.

“Then it’s going to be just like the lion,” said Margot, full of anticipation.

“It’s not going to be a damned bit like the lion,” Wilson told her. “Did you want another drink, Macomber?”

“Thanks, yes,” Macomber said. He expected the feeling he had had about the lion to come back but it did not. For the first time in his life he really felt wholly without fear. Instead of fear he had a feeling of definite elation.

“We’ll go and have a look at the second bull,” Wilson said. “I’ll tell the driver to put the car in the shade.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Margaret Macomber.

“Take a look at the buff,” Wilson said.

“I’ll come.”

“Come along.”

The three of them walked over to where the second buffalo bulked blackly in the open, head forward on the grass, the massive horns swung wide.

“He’s a very good head,” Wilson said. “That’s close to a fifty-inch spread.”

Macomber was looking at him with delight.

“He’s hateful looking,” said Margot. “Can’t we go into the shade?”

“Of course,” Wilson said. “Look,” he said to Macomber, and pointed. “See that patch of bush?”

“Yes.”

“That’s where the first bull went in. The gun-bearer said when he fell off, the bull was down. He was watching us helling along and the other two buff galloping. When he looked up there was the bull up and looking at him. Gun-bearer ran like hell and the bull went off slowly into that bush.”

“Can we go in after him now?” asked Macomber eagerly.

Wilson looked at him appraisingly. Damned if this isn’t a strange one, he thought. Yesterday he’s scared sick and today he’s a ruddy fire eater.

“No, we’ll give him a while.”

“Let’s please go into the shade,” Margot said. Her face was white and she looked ill.

They made their way to the car where it stood under a single, widespreading tree and all climbed in.

“Chances are he’s dead in there,” Wilson remarked. “After a little we’ll have a look.”

Macomber felt a wild unreasonable happiness that he had never known before.

“By God, that was a chase,” he said. “I’ve never felt any such feeling. Wasn’t it marvellous, Margot?”

“I hated it.”

“Why?”

“I hated it,” she said bitterly. “I loathed it.”

“You know I don’t think I’d ever be afraid of anything again,” Macomber said to Wilson. “Something happened in me after we first saw the buff and started after him. Like a dam bursting. It was pure excitement.”

“Cleans out your liver,” said Wilson. “Damn funny things happen to people.”

Macomber’s face was shining. “You know something did happen to me,” he said. “I feel absolutely different.”

His wife said nothing and eyed him strangely. She was sitting far back in the seat and Macomber was sitting forward talking to Wilson who turned sideways talking over the back of the front seat.

“You know, I’d like to try another lion,” Macomber said. “I’m really not afraid of them now. After all, what can they do to you?”

“That’s it,” said Wilson. “Worst one can do is kill you. How does it go? Shakespeare. Damned good. See if I can remember. Oh, damned good. Used to quote it to myself at one time. Let’s see. ‘By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.’ Damned fine, eh?”

He was very embarrassed, having brought out this thing he had lived by, but he had seen men come of age before and it always moved him. It was not a matter of their twenty-first birthday.

It had taken a strange chance of hunting, a sudden precipitation into action without opportunity for worrying beforehand, to bring this about with Macomber, but regardless of how it had happened it had most certainly happened. Look at the beggar now, Wilson thought. It’s that some of them stay little boys so long, Wilson thought. Sometimes all their lives. Their figures stay boyish when they’re fifty. The great American boy-men. Damned strange people. But he liked this Macomber now. Damned strange fellow. Probably meant the end of cuckoldry too. Well, that would be a damned good thing. Damned good thing. Beggar had probably been afraid all his life. Don’t know what started it. But over now. Hadn’t had time to be afraid with the buff. That and being angry too. Motor car too. Motor cars made it familiar. Be a damn fire eater now. He’d seen it in the war work the same way. More of a change than any loss of virginity. Fear gone like an operation. Something else grew in its place. Main thing a man had. Made him into a man. Women knew it too. No bloody fear.

From the far corner of the seat Margaret Macomber looked at the two of them. There was no change in Wilson. She saw Wilson as she had seen him the day before when she had first realized what his great talent was. But she saw the change in Francis Macomber now.

“Do you have that feeling of happiness about what’s going to happen?” Macomber asked, still exploring his new wealth.

“You’re not supposed to mention it,” Wilson said, looking in the other’s face. “Much more fashionable to say you’re scared. Mind you, you’ll be scared too, plenty of times.”

“But you have a feeling of happiness about action to come?”

“Yes,” said Wilson. “There’s that. Doesn’t do to talk too much about all this. Talk the whole thing away. No pleasure in anything if you mouth it up too much.”

“You’re both talking rot,” said Margot. “Just because you’ve chased some helpless animals in a motor car you talk like heroes.”

“Sorry,” said Wilson. “I have been gassing too much.” She’s worried about it already, he thought.

“If you don’t know what we’re talking about why not keep out of it?” Macomber asked his wife.

“You’ve gotten awfully brave, awfully suddenly,” his wife said contemptuously, but her contempt was not secure. She was very afraid of something.

Macomber laughed, a very natural hearty laugh. “You know I have,” he said. “I really have.”

“Isn’t it sort of late?” Margot said bitterly. Because she had done the best she could for many years back and the way they were together now was no one person’s fault.

“Not for me,” said Macomber.

Margot said nothing but sat back in the corner of the seat.

“Do you think we’ve given him time enough?” Macomber asked Wilson cheerfully.

“We might have a look,” Wilson said. “Have you any solids left?”

“The gun-bearer has some.”

Wilson called in Swahili and the older gun-bearer, who was skinning out one of the heads, straightened up, pulled a box of solids out of his pocket and brought them over to Macomber, who filled his magazine and put the remaining shells in his pocket.

“You might as well shoot the Springfield,” Wilson said. “You’re used to it. We’ll leave the Mannlicher in the car with the Memsahib. Your gunbearer can carry your heavy gun. I’ve this damned cannon. Now let me tell you about them.” He had saved this until the last because he did not want to worry Macomber. “When a buff comes he comes with his head high and thrust straight out. The boss of the horns covers any sort of a brain shot. The only shot is straight into the nose. The only other shot is into his chest or, if you’re to one side, into the neck or the shoulders. After they’ve been hit once they take a hell of a lot of killing. Don’t try anything fancy. Take the easiest shot there is. They’ve finished skinning out that head now. Should we get started?”

He called to the gun-bearers, who came up wiping their hands, and the older one got into the back.

“I’ll only take Kongoni,” Wilson said. “The other can watch to keep the birds away.”

As the car moved slowly across the open space toward the island of brushy trees that ran in a tongue of foliage along a dry water course that cut the open swale, Macomber felt his heart pounding and his mouth was dry again, but it was excitement, not fear.

“Here’s where he went in,” Wilson said. Then to the gun-bearer in Swahili, “Take the blood spoor.”

The car was parallel to the patch of bush. Macomber, Wilson and the gun-bearer got down. Macomber, looking back, saw his wife, with the rifle by her side, looking at him. He waved to her and she did not wave back.

The brush was very thick ahead and the ground was dry. The middle-aged gun-bearer was sweating heavily and Wilson had his hat down over his eyes and his red neck showed just ahead of Macomber. Suddenly the gun-bearer said something in Swahili to Wilson and ran forward.

“He’s dead in there,” Wilson said. “Good work,” and he turned to grip Macomber’s hand and as they shook hands, grinning at each other, the gun-bearer shouted wildly and they saw him coming out of the bush sideways, fast as a crab, and the bull coming, nose out, mouth tight closed, blood dripping, massive head straight out, coming in a charge, his little pig eyes bloodshot as he looked at them. Wilson, who was ahead, was kneeling shooting, and Macomber, as he fired, unhearing his shot in the roaring of Wilson’s gun, saw fragments like slate burst from the huge boss of the horns, and the head jerked, he shot again at the wide nostrils and saw the horns jolt again and fragments fly, and he did not see Wilson now and, aiming carefully, shot again with the buffalo’s huge bulk almost on him and his rifle almost level with the on-coming head, nose out, and he could see the little wicked eyes and the head started to lower and he felt a sudden white-hot, blinding flash explode inside his head and that was all he ever felt.

Wilson had ducked to one side to get in a shoulder shot. Macomber had stood solid and shot for the nose, shooting a touch high each time and hitting the heavy horns, splintering and chipping them like hitting a slate roof, and Mrs. Macomber, in the car, had shot at the buffalo with the 6.5 Mannlicher as it seemed about to gore Macomber and had hit her husband about two inches up and a little to one side of the base of his skull.

Francis Macomber lay now, face down, not two yards from where the buffalo lay on his side and his wife knelt over him with Wilson beside her.

“I wouldn’t turn him over,” Wilson said.

The woman was crying hysterically.

“I’d get back in the car,” Wilson said. “Where’s the rifle?”

She shook her head, her face contorted. The gun-bearer picked up the rifle.

“Leave it as it is,” said Wilson. Then, “Go get Abdulla so that he may witness the manner of the accident.”

He knelt down, took a handkerchief from his pocket, and spread it over Francis Macomber’s crew-cropped head where it lay. The blood sank into the dry, loose earth.

Wilson stood up and saw the buffalo on his side, his legs out, his thinlyhaired belly crawling with ticks. “Hell of a good bull,” his brain registered automatically. “A good fifty inches, or better. Better.” He called to the driver and told him to spread a blanket over the body and stay by it. Then he walked over to the motor car where the woman sat crying in the corner.

“That was a pretty thing to do,” he said in a toneless voice. “He would have left you too.”

“Stop it,” she said.

“Of course it’s an accident,” he said. “I know that.”

“Stop it,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “There will be a certain amount of unpleasantness but I will have some photographs taken that will be very useful at the inquest. There’s the testimony of the gun-bearers and the driver too. You’re perfectly all right.”

“Stop it,” she said.

“There’s a hell of a lot to be done,” he said. “And I’ll have to send a truck off to the lake to wireless for a plane to take the three of us into Nairobi. Why didn’t you poison him? That’s what they do in England.”

“Stop it. Stop it. Stop it,” the woman cried.

Wilson looked at her with his flat blue eyes.

“I’m through now,” he said. “I was a little angry. I’d begun to like your husband.”

“Oh, please stop it,” she said. “Please stop it.”

“That’s better,” Wilson said. “Please is much better. Now I’ll stop.”

Goldie Locke and the Three Barretts

2026-06-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

There are several reasons for my post today. One was the release of a new crime anthology this past Tuesday; the second was a SleuthSayers column about that anthology posted the same day by my fellow SleuthSayer Barb Goffman; and the third was my belief that it's never a bad idea for a writer to copy Barb Goffman.

The anthology is Wish Upon a Crime: Crime Fiction Inspired by Fairy Tales, edited by Michael Bracken and Stacy Woodson, and my story in the anthology is "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." I might point out that the title of today's post is different from the title of my story--but hold on: it does name four of the characters in my story. Goldie Johnson Locke is a competent but bored police officer in a small town in south Alabama, and the three Barretts (Grennen, Sugar, and Teddy) are fairly new residents of the town. But there's been some suspicious activity at the Barrett home, and Goldie is asked by a colleague (who is also the Barretts' next-door neighbor) to unofficially investigate it. This turns out to be less than wise in terms of safety to Goldie's body and her job, but it does lead to a bit of mystery and fun and suspense (I hope) for the reader.

I should also mention that the other three active characters in this story have, alas, names that are also a little odd, though more normal than those of Goldie and the Barrett family. One is Goldie's partner, Officer Joe Bob Finkter; the second is one of her friends at the police station, file clerk Precious Everett; and the third is the police chief, the stonefaced Captain Stonecipher. (I used to work at IBM with a Doug Stonecipher--a truly nice guy--and I've been intending for years to use his cool last name in one of my stories.)

A lot of the fun in writing this goofy story came from the fact that it is goofy, and also from the theme of the anthology--fairy tales are great sources of inspiration. I also enjoyed the process of working the main points of the classic Goldilocks tale directly into the plot, while also putting together a fair-play mystery about what possible illegal activity these three Barretts are up to. I've often said, about several of my favorite novels--The Stand, Pillars of the Earth, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lonesome Dove--that I hated to read the final page because I loved the characters and wanted the story to go on and on--and while I don't mean to compare my writing to that of those novels, I did wind up feeling the same way when I wrote the final page of this story. I didn't want to stop. If you read it, I hope you'll get half as much pleasure out of it as I did.

I suspect that many of the contributors to Wish Upon a Crime had the same feelings as I had, when writing their stories. This stuff can be fun. I look forward to reading the whole book.

Now, since I seldom write a SleuthSayers post without asking a question or two, here are today's:

To those of you who have written for anthologies . . . what are some of the themes that you found to be the most fun, and maybe the most challenging? Do you find that writing to those themes is easier than writing a story from your own idea(s)?

Personally, I've had a change of heart, on that final question. I used to always prefer to come up with my own ideas for my stories, and found it hard to do otherwise. The change in my way of thinking happened several years ago, when the aforementioned Barb Goffman edited a Wildside Press anthology about time travel, called (appropriately) Crime Travel. I had such a good time coming up with and writing my story for that book, I found myself looking forward to the occasional invitation to contribute to, or just to submit to, a themed anthology. I won't name them now, but there are several of those scheduled to be published soon that I greatly enjoyed writing for, and that I'm sure I'll enjoy reading.

So, one more time: Do you share my enthusiasm for writing for themed anthologies, or would you rather stick to stories that don't come from such specific outside inspiration?

Whatever the case, keep writing, and have a great June! I'll be back here on the 20th.

Stone No More - The Strange Case of Brian Jones

2026-06-05T00:00:00.000-04:00

Around midnight on July 3, 1969, Brian Jones was found in his swimming pool. Common consensus suggested the Rolling Stones founder get high and fell in. The coroner called it "death by misadventure," a common cause of death for rock stars. (See Bonham, John; Scott, Bonn.)

Then the rumors began. Actually, Jones lived in Sussex, so the rumours began. Mick and Keith had him rubbed out by the Krays. Jones was sacrificed by devil worshipers. The pool had it in for him. (Okay, that one only makes sense with a chemical assist.)

Then in the early nineties, a worker renovating Jones's house confessed on his death bed that he killed Jones over money. Frank Thorogood claimed to have argued with Jones of the fee for some construction on the property. Thorogood said he wanted more. Police reopened the case, but decided the original death ruling stood.

That leaves two questions. If Jones was some random guy found in his swimming pool, wuld anyone believe he was murdered? Second, if Thorogood murdered Jones, why was his confession simply tossed aside?

There is the possibility Thorogood, dying of cancer in 1993, might have wanted the notoriety before he died. The confession appeared close enough to his own death that authorities couldn't do anything about it. Getting away with murder even if you didn't commit it.

The other piece is celebrity. Read any Stephen King novel and you see how rumors spread just through small towns. The Stones are still iconic. Drummer Charlie Watts died with the press covering his illness. At this level of fame, a few rumors can become gospel all over the globe. Jones famously bolted the Stones, so Mick Jagger and Keith Richards could become the top suspects for the conspiracy minded.

Setting as Character

2026-06-04T02:44:08.183-04:00

I have been working through a final draft on my latest long-form piece, and it's had me thinking a lot about setting. As a result I've begun drafting a post for Sleuthsayers on the importance of scene-setting and the need to get it right. I'll be running that one out next time around. As a table-setter on this topic I've pulled a previous post about "Setting as Character."

This particular post is from 2013, and I think it's aged well if I do say some myself, so I'm reposting it here, in hopes it proves helpful to authors out there wrestling with setting. In two weeks, I'll be back in two weeks to expand further on this topic. - Brian

* * *

Setting. Everyone knows about it. Few people actively think about it.

And that's a shame, because for writers, your setting is like a pair of shoes: if it's good, it's a sound foundation for your journey. If it's not, it'll give you and your readers pains that no orthotics will remedy.

Nowhere is this more true than with crime fiction. In fact strong descriptions of settings is such a deeply embedded trope of the genre that it's frequently overdone, used in parodies both intentional and unintentional as often as fedoras and trench coats.

Used correctly a proper setting can transcend even this role–can become a character in its own right, and can help drive your story, making your fiction evocative, engaging, and (most importantly for your readers) compelling.

Think for a moment about your favorite crime fiction writers. No matter who they are, odds are good that one of the reasons, perhaps one you've not considered before, is their compelling settings.

Just a few contemporary ones that come to mind for me: the Los Angeles of Michael Connelly and Robert Crais. The Chicago of Sara Paretsky, Sean Chercover and Marcus Sakey. Boston seen through the eyes of Robert B. Parker. Ken Bruen's Ireland. Al Guthrie's Scotland. Carl Hiassen's Miami. Bill Cameron's Portland.

And of course there are the long gone settings highlighted in the gems of the old masters. These and others read like lexical snapshots from the past.Who can forget passages like:

The city wasn't pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters' stacks.

—Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest

Then there was Hammett's most ardent admirer (and in many ways, his successor) Raymond Chandler, a writer of considerable scope and power, was never better than when describing the sun-blasted neighborhoods of 1940s Southern California, the desperation of the region's denizens, and and black tarmac byways both connecting and dividing them in Farewell, My Lovely:

1644 West 54th Place was a dried-out brown house with a dried-out brown lawn in front of it. There was a large bare patch around a tough-looking palm tree. On the porch stood one lonely wooden rocker, and the afternoon breeze made the unpruned shoots of last year's poinsettias tap-tap against the cracked stucco wall. A line of stiff yellowish half-washed clothes jittered on a rusty wire in the side yard.

And no one did it better than Ross Macdonald:

The city of Santa Teresa is built on a slope which begins at the edge of the sea and rises more and more steeply toward the coastal mountains in a series of ascending ridges. Padre Ridge is the first and lowest of these, and the only one inside the city limits.

It was fairly expensive territory, an established neighborhood of well-maintained older houses, many of them with brilliant hanging gardens. The grounds of 1427 were the only ones in the block that looked unkempt. The privet hedge needed clipping. Crabgrass was running rampant in the steep lawn.

Even the house, pink stucco under red tile, had a disused air about it. The drapes were drawn across the front windows. The only sign of life was a house wren which contested my approach to the veranda.

— Ross Macdonald, Black Money

In each of the passages excerpted above the author has used a description of the setting as a tip-off to the reader as to what manner of characters would inhabit such places. Even hints at what lies ahead for both protagonist and reader.

With Hammett it's the stink of the corruption that always follows on the heels of a rich mineral strike. With Chandler, it's a life worn-out by too much living. And with Macdonald, it's a world and its inhabitants as out of sorts as those hedges that need clipping.

Brilliant thumbnail sketches each. If you haven't read them, you owe it to yourself to do so. And each of them was giving the reader a glimpse of a world they had experienced first-hand, if not a contemporary view, then at least one they could dredge up and flesh out from memory.

With the stuff I write it's not that simple.

In his kind note introducing me to the readers of this blog, our man Lopresti mentioned that when it comes to fiction, my particular bailiwick is historical mystery. In my time mining this particular vein of fiction I've experienced first-hand the challenge of delivering to readers strong settings for stories set in a past well before my time.

How to accomplish this?

It's tricky. Here's what I do.

I try to combine exhaustive research with my own experiences and leaven it all with a hefty dose of the writer's greatest tool: imagination.

"Counting Coup," the first historical mystery story I ever wrote, is about a group of people trapped in a remote southwest Montana railway station by hostile Cheyenne warriors during the Cheyenne Uprising of 1873. I used the three-part formula laid out above.

While pursuing my Master's in history, I'd done a ton of research on the western railroads, their expansion, and its impact on Native American tribes in the region, including the Cheyenne.

I've visited southwestern Montana many times, and the country is largely unchanged, so I had a good visual image to work from.

Imagination!

An example of the end result:

Wash and Chance made it over the rise and and into the valley of the Gallatin just ahead of that storm. It had taken three days of hard riding to get to the railhead, and the horses were all but played out.

The entire last day finished setting their nerves on edge. What with the smoke signals and the tracks of all the unshod ponies they'd seen, there was enough sign to make a body think he was riding right through the heart of the Cheyenne Nation.

Stretching away to north and south below them lay the broad flood plain of the Gallatin. The river itself meandered along the valley floor, with the more slender, silver ribbon of rail line mirroring it, running off forever in either direction. The reds of the tamarack and the golds of the aspen and the greens of the fir created a burst of color on the hills that flanked the river on either side, their hues all the more vivid when set against the white of the previous evening's uncharacteristically early snowfall.

"Suicide Blonde," another of my historical mystery stories, is set in 1962 Las Vegas. Again, the formula.

I did plenty of research on Vegas up to and including this time when Sinatra and his buddies strutted around like they owned the place.

I lived and worked in Vegas for a couple of years and have been back a few times since. I am here to tell you, Vegas is one of those places that, as much as it changes, doesn't really change.

Imagination!

Which gets you:

Because the Hoover boys had started tapping phones left and right since the big fuss at Apalachin a few years back, Howard and I had a system we used when we needed to see each other outside of the normal routine. If one of us suggested we meet at the Four Queens, we met at Caesar's. If the California, then we'd go to the Aladdin, and so on. We also agreed to double our elapsed time till we met, so when I said twenty minutes, that meant I'd be there in ten. We figured he had a permanent tail anyway, but it was fun messing with the feds, regardless.

The Strip flashed and winked and beckoned to me off in the distance down Desert Inn as I drove to Caesar's. It never ceases to amaze me what a difference the combination of black desert night, millions of lights, and all that wattage from Hoover Dam made, because Las Vegas looked so small and ugly and shabby in the day time. She used the night and all those bright lights like an over-age working girl uses a dimply lit cocktail lounge and a heavy coat of makeup to ply her trade.

Howard liked Caesar's. We didn't do any of the regular business there, and Howard liked that, too. Most of all, Howard liked the way the place was always hopping in the months since Sinatra took that angry walk across the street from the Sands and offered to move his act to Caesar's. Howard didn't really care to run elbows with the Chairman and his pack, he just liked talking in places where the type of noise generated by their mere presence could cover our conversations.

You may have noticed that in both examples used above I've interspersed description of the setting with action, historical references and plot points. That's partly stylistic and partly a necessity. I rarely find straight description engaging when I'm reading fiction (in the hands of a master such as Hemingway, Chandler or Macdonald that's another story, but they tend to be the exception), so I try to seamlessly integrate it into the narrative. Also, since I'm attempting to evoke a setting that is lost to the modern reader in anything but received images, I try to get into a few well-placed historical references that help establish the setting as, say, not just Las Vegas, but early 1960s Las Vegas. Doing so in this manner can save a writer of historical mysteries a whole lot of trying to tease out these sorts of details in dialogue (and boy, can that sort of exposition come across as clunky if not handled exactly right!).

So there you have it: an extended rumination on the importance of one of the most overlooked and powerful tools in your writer's toolbox: setting. The stronger you build it, the more your readers will thank you for it, regardless of genre, regardless of time period.

Because setting is both ubiquitous and timeless. Easy to overdo and certainly easy to get wrong. But when you get it right, your story is all the stronger for it.

And that's it for me. Tune in next time for more on making setting work for you.

See You in Two Weeks!

Fourth Wall Down

2026-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

I have been reading Montalbano's First Case And Other Stories, (2016) Andrea Camilleri's collection of tales about a Sicilian police officer. I've enjoyed it a lot but there is one that I want to discuss. I suppose I should issue a spoiler alert but since the surprise is mentioned on the back cover I won't feel too guilty.

One of the stories stands out from the others because it is much bleaker in subject than the rest. It shocked me and I was not the only one because Salvo Montalbano stops everything and makes a phone call to a "seventyish man striking the keys of a typewriter in the Roman night."

The author informs his character "I'm just trying to bring myself up to date, Salvo. A little blood on the page never hurt anyone."

That's called breaking the fourth wall: characters acknowledging that they are indeed characters.

Since then I have been trying to think of other examples in mystery fiction. I think the most famous occasion comes in John Dickson Carr's novel The Hollow Man (1935) when his detective Dr. Gideon Fell provides "The Locked Room Lecture." While listing every possible variation on the impossible crime the good doctor explains "we are in a detective story and we don't fool the reader by pretending we're not. Let's not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories. Let's candidly glory in the noblest pursuits possible to a character in a book."

I did a web search looking for more examples and most of what I found were something different than I was thinking, namely examples of authors writing themselves into their books as characters. Examples include S.S, Van Dine, Kinky Friedman, and Anthony Horowitz.

But getting back to the self-aware characters, Edmund Crispin's detective is Gervase Fen. In The Moving Toyshop (1946) when he seems to be announcing random phrases he explains that he "was making up titles for Crispin."

I think there are more examples of writers playing this game outside of their fiction. For example, Marjorie Allingham wrote an essay of sorts called "What to do With an Aging Detective" in which she chats with Lugg, the assistant to her protagonist Albert Campion about the difficulty of the great man getting too old to star in action novels.

The newsletter of the Private Eye Writers of America, Reflections in a Private Eye, often features authors interviewing their own characters.

And I have had a few out-of-story chats with my character Shanks.

But how do you feel about characters, especially series characters, admitting they know what's going on? Does it damage the suspension of disbelief?

And They Lived Happily Never After

2026-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00

When I was little, before I learned how to read, my dad used to read fables and fairy tales to me before I went to sleep. We had a big book, and each night I would pick a story. Some of them scared the crap out of me (I'm looking at you, "Jack and the Beanstalk"--grinding bones into bread; no wonder I grew up to write crime stories). I wasn't scared just because of the stories themselves but because my dad was good at voices. I loved them.

These days, I think when people think of fairy tales, they picture the Disney version. A poor child with a wicked stepmother wakes up to find that mice cleaned the house for her, then birds tie ribbons in her hair before a fairy godmother turns a pumpkin into a carriage and she's whisked off to a ball and, eventually, the good guys live happily ever after. It's wonderfully fantastic--unless you have musophobia, ornithophobia, or curcurbitophobia. What's curcurbitophobia? Fear of pumpkins. You've now learned your new word of the day. You're welcome.

But the earlier tales by the brothers Grimm and others were far darker. And not animated! Cinderella's stepsisters chopped off their heels and toes to shove their bloody feet into the glass slipper, then birds plucked out their eyes at the royal wedding. Hansel and Gretel escaped cannibalism by fooling the witch with poor eyesight and then pushing her into the hot oven. Rapunzel's prince fell from the tower into a thorn bush, ending up blind. (Too bad there were no eye surgeons in these tales. Those docs would have made a mint.)

It's these darker versions that I expect inspired many of the stories in a new anthology releasing today, Wish Upon A Crime: Crime Fiction Inspired by Fairy Tales. The book was edited by fellow SleuthSayers Michael Bracken and Stacy Woodson. Its description says in part that the authors "reimagine familiar classics where the line between good and evil isn't always clear, dreams don't come true, and there are no happily-ever-afters."

That is true (sort of) for my story in this book, "Little Red Riding Hood." My tale involves a blind date, a hopeful woman, and one very charming man. Lest you think this suave guy should be in a Cinderella-inspired story (and we have one of them, written by Donna Andrews), don't forget that even wolves can clean up well. My story has some fun Easter eggs I worked in that I hope readers will find and enjoy.

Wish Upon A Crime is available in trade paperback and ebook from the usual online sources, including Bookshop.org. Author Tara Laskowski (who doesn't have a story in the anthology), has called it "Gritty and tense [...] The crime authors here blend a modern, stark reality with the magic lore of old, and as a result bring a new meaning to the word 'grim.'"

The end. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

A Bias Against Biases

2026-06-01T00:00:00.013-04:00

Given the crazy political environment we’re in, I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to the evil bias twins: negativity bias and confirmation bias. As with most of our psychological afflictions, these tendencies are rooted in biological evolution. We tend to overemphasize the bad in life because it made survival more likely. Worrying about the saber tooth tiger that almost ate us was more beneficial than spending a lot of energy admiring our cave art.

Confirmation bias is trickier, but it did help us stick with smart choices, like keeping our hands out of the fire, while ignoring the advice of the shaman who thought a little fire cleansing was good for general health. On the other hand, the shaman who agreed you shouldn’t move your settlement to the valley next door as you depleted the available resources confirmed the wrong thing.

Of the two, I think negativity bias has hobbled more of my family members and social reference groups. This penchant is significantly reinforced by the media, for whom negativity is mother’s milk. A bottomless well of attention and renewed subscriptions, of clicks and likes. I think being aware of imminent or emerging threats is wise, but wallowing in all the bad news distorts reality and undermines the ability to have a little joi amidst all the ennui.

Historians will tell you that everyone has nearly always thought that life has degenerated, if not gone to hell in a hand basket, and that we’re all doomed. That each successive generation has also been wealthier, healthier, less subject to horrific wars and chronic deprivation never enters into it. That doesn’t mean every little thing has improved, or that some things in the past weren’t arguably better, or that progress doesn’t come with a fair amount of regression. You just have to look at the declining number of free-range children, or the obesity epidemic, or the decrease in pop tunes that feature key changes, to support that view.

As to confirmation bias, I’m more attracted to commentators who agree with me than those who don’t. I read the educated opposers anyway, because I think that’s good mental hygiene, and sometimes I stumble on an argument that shifts my point of view. But I have a diminishing number of years left on this planet, and I’d rather spend this precious time with convivial associations than a bunch of chuds who just make me want to assert my second amendment rights and reach for the nearest cudgel.

To confess my biases, I feel the mystery/thriller genre is as good, or better, than ever. I think the form has been dramatically improved by all the women and people of various ethnicities who have come on the scene. It reminds me of the fifties and sixties when the publishing industry (and academia, and advertising, not coincidentally) started admitting Jewish writers, who revolutionized American fiction.

The rising tide of diversity in mystery/thriller writing has risen all boats.

Yet now, when it comes to what we’d generally call literary fiction, I’m just not feeling it. I’ve tackled some of the leading fiction writers of recent times, and with the exception of Amor Towles, I’m generally disappointed. To be more specific, it’s as if they’ve forgotten that plots matter more than obsessive introspection. That beautiful language can transcend the mundane activities of daily living (maybe go back and review James Joyce), that there’s greater meaning to be perceived from simple human interaction than thwarted expectations.

I’m not alone in this. David Brooks did a whole column on the matter. https://tinyurl.com/eypvzzx5 I don’t necessarily agree with his political thesis, but the numbers underlying the argument are availble from Neilsen.

At the same time, maybe I’m not giving literary fiction enough of a chance; like Brooks, I’ve only been peaking into the current literary world. Maybe I should just push through and be pleasantly surprised. Stop letting bias creep into my prehistoric brain. (Anyone eager to set me straight with recommendations are urged to comment.)

It could be that literary fiction has gone the way of poetry, ballet, symphonic music and opera. Settling in as a marginal art form, yet enduring with a hard core of devotees who will keep it alive into the foreseeable future. I hope that's true, because I want all art forms to survive and thrive, even those I'm not very partial to. Art tends to evolve toward and away from you, in big, barely noticeable cycles. The important thing is to keep it all alive.

Unlike Timothy Chalamet, I adore ballet. Since my mother was a ballet dancer, as is a niece I’m particularly close to, perhaps that formed a positivity bias. I love a handful of operas, though like hip-hop, some of which I really enjoy, I don’t seek it out as a general rule. Call it ambivalence bias.

As I wrote in a prior post, keeping an open mind is really difficult. You’re constantly warring against biological determinism – not succumbing to negativity or huddling in comfort with your collection of favorites. I remember as a younger man telling myself that I wouldn’t be like the old curmudgeons I knew at the time. That I’d fight, fight against the dying of a flexible mind, the elasticity of a healthy consciousness.