SleuthSayers

A Very Special Character Study

2026-10-15T00:02:41.651-04:00

Reposted for reasons that will become obvious by the end of the post.
Happy Ides of October!

***

Sooooo… Character. It's not plot. It's the only other thing aside from plot that can drive a story. And what makes for interesting characters?

Realistic (and often contradictory) personality traits.

I've been thinking about this very thing quite a bit lately, as I wrap the final draft of a long-delayed novel that will be finished and off to my agent before the end of this year!

Of all things, it was a vacuum cleaner commercial that gave me my own particular epiphany about how to write great, interesting, realistic characters. This one, to be exact: 

Smoothies!

A biker who's a neat freak? Another who does needlepoint?

Interesting characters because they subvert expectations. Just like real life.

I have a cousin who is outdoorsy as hell: hunting, fishing. Sells cars for a living. A real man's man.

And for relaxation, he taught himself to crochet.

Interesting, right? Unexpected?

And even better because it's real life.

The best fictional characters mirror real life. Let's talk about one.

A woman, early eighties, married over fifty years, outgoing, friendly, caring, compassionate. A good friend, great sister, terrific mother and grandmother. Unironically loved Barry Manilow back in the '70s.

Once won enough money playing the slots on a visit to Vegas that she was able to buy herself a new floor for her kitchen (Including what it cost to have it installed). Not an isolated occurrence. This woman has a system. Every time she goes to Vegas, she wins thousands.

Enjoys gardening. LOVES Bruce Springsteen's music.

Was the queen of her high school's "Senior/Junior Ball" during her senior year.

Is strictly a social drinker. And yet, once, as a young woman, she stayed up late with her in-laws, drinking. By morning she had matched her father-in-law drink for drink, and the two of them had drunk every other adult member of the family under the table.

Slipped on the ice getting the morning paper one New Year's Day, and broke her ankle. Was able to laugh about it that same day (there's a "great pain meds" joke in there, somewhere!).

While in her thirties, once drove across the Columbia Basin from Yakima to Spokane with her eldest son, then in his teens. Drove for an hour shortly after sunset with the domelight in her car on so her son could finish a book he was reading.

Loves the color yellow. Hates surprises. Has a very close relationship with her daughter-in-law.

Started taking piano lessons last year. (That's all you get on this one. There's a ton of backstory there that the reader doesn't need to know for this tidbit to work, especially with the writer keeping it in mind while writing about it).

Possesses one of the most subversively bawdy sense of humor you'll ever encounter.

Is one of the kindliest souls I've ever known.

Okay: confession time. This character is a real person. My mother, Berniece. And it's her birthday today. Please join me in wishing her a happy one!

Love you, Mom! Hope this is pleasant surprise!

Bruce Alexander

2026-10-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

Bruce Alexander, who died in 2003, wrote eleven period mysteries featuring the 18^th-century justice, Sir John Fielding. (The last book in the series, Rules of Engagement, was published after his death.) You can make a good case, that along with Ellis Peters, who wrote the Cadfael novels, they set a high bar. Left Coast Crime, my own regional mystery con, has an award for historical fiction named in Bruce Alexander’s memory, which has been won by Jackie Winspear, Ann Parker, Catriona McPherson, and Naomi Hirahara, among others.

I thought I’d read all the Alexander books, but happily not. It turns out I missed his next-to-last, The Price of Murder. This is one of the more disturbing books in the series, a story about the disappearance and sexual traffic of children, along with a fair amount of GBH and literal throat-cutting. It’s also got a road trip to Newmarket and a lively portrait of the horseracing scene, and an odd, somewhat aimless sidebar, which although it casts shade on suspected white slavery, and mob violence, doesn’t really go anywhere. Its main purpose seems to be as an Easter egg, a real-life case involving the justice Henry Fielding, brother of Sir John, and author of Tom Jones. Henry was appointed a magistrate first, and then John succeeded him. The two of them, both historically, and in the novels, established the Bow Street Runners, which eventually became the Metropolitan Police.

One of the issues, for a reader, when you invest in a writer, and a series, and then they die on you, is that you’re left with the longer story arc unresolved: what happens with the characters beyond the books? Philip Kerr and the Bernie Gunther novels, for example – he was only 62. I remember being very upset when Bruce Alexander died, for the selfish reason that I’d never know how life was going to turn out for young Jeremy Proctor, the narrator of the stories. There are hints and foreshadowings, but it’s not the same. We do know, from the record, that Fielding himself died in 1780, five years after the story in the last book is told. But this isn’t internal evidence. It’s something you might look up, if you’ve a mind.

The thing that’s cool, in any event, is that revisiting Georgian London with Alexander - the Blind Beak, and Jeremy, Seven Dials, and Covent Garden, and Lloyd’s coffeehouse – is so vivid. It doesn’t smell of the lamp. Or rather, it does, but not in the sense of being overstudied; rather, in the sense of you smelling the guttering candles and the spilled beer, gin and sweat and bad teeth. The best historicals, Mary Renault, Patrick O’Brian, Bernard Cornwell, don’t show off. They use detail sparingly, and let it settle, like ash. You feel your way in. Alexander does the same. And there’s a trick to the language. You can do a lot with word order. I mentioned I was reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. You’re very aware, at first, that you’re reading prose written in the late 1700’s – which is, of course, exactly the era Alexander is effectively reproducing in the Fielding novels – and you could do worse than imitate Gibbon. Not self-consciously, which is only going to be brittle and artificial, but if possible, to relax into those rhythms and speech patterns. And you can use older literary conventions, had I but known and so forth, as long as you don’t lay it on too thick.

I’m reminded of John le Carré’s comment, which I’ve found helpful in more than one context. It doesn’t have to be authentic, it has to be convincing. Bruce Alexander makes it seem effortless, but we know different. He put a lot of effort into making it look easy.

The Self-Taught Writer

2026-10-13T00:00:00.000-04:00

Recently rereleased by
Crimson Gate Books.

In the September/October 2026 issue of Poets & Writers, Uttama Kirit Patel describes herself and other writers featured in her article “The Self-Taught Writer” as being, well, self-taught. The point of the article is that an MFA is not required to establish a successful writing career, and it does support that thesis.

On the other hand, I do wonder if the writers in this piece had advantages that truly self-taught writers do not have, including high socio-economic status and advanced educations. The author, for example, “holds an MPhil in psychology from the University of Cambridge.” Another writer “came to fiction writing after a law career dedicated to social justice” and “years of education as a classical violinist.” The author “moved to New York City” and “took classes with the Gotham Writers Workshop,” and another writer “took writing workshops while pursuing a degree in political science at Yale University.” The author even “spent eight weeks disconnected from technology, writing chapters in the natural beauty of New Zealand.”

While I do not make light of anyone’s journey to publication, because all paths are valid, these experiences do not align with my experience.

I came to writing as the child of blue collar parents eking out a living somewhere in the middle class. Advanced education was not an option, and the thought of attending Cambridge or Yale was beyond the pale. Giving up everything to move to New York City or spending eight weeks writing in New Zealand was never (and still isn’t) an option.

I suspect I am much closer to being a self-taught writer than Patel or the writers in her article. Without high income, social connections, or advanced education (even if not specifically for writing), I had to build a writing career the way pulp writers of the early 1900s did: by pounding the keyboard and collecting rejection after rejection until something finally stuck.

My writing education came from reading everything I could and from Writer’s Digest and the various how-to books the company published. I attended my first writing conference—a small, regional conference—in the early 1980s. By then I was already selling professionally.

The one writing group in which I participated—made up of people I met at that conference—did not last long. We were mismatched, with poets, fiction writers, and non-fiction writers unable to help one another because our needs were so different.

In addition to a creative writing class I took in high school, I attended three college-level creative writing classes and one journalism class during my on-and-off (mostly off) college career, and I finally earned a BA in Professional Writing at the age of 48. By then I had already sold many hundreds of short stories, articles, essays, and other writing.

Throughout the years I did have periods of time—similar to Patel’s eight weeks in New Zealand—where I concentrated on writing. Those periods were called unemployment. So, even though I was writing, I was also spending time seeking steady paychecks.

For all these reasons and more, my education as a writer came primarily from reading what others had written, from pounding the keyboard, and from submitting work to every publication imaginable. I learned all that I could from rejections and from acceptances. And I continued to improve.

And that is a more accurate description of a self-taught writer.

* * *

“In-Country,” a horror story, appears in Flash of the Dead: Halloween ’26 (Wicked Shadow Press), edited by Parth Sarathi Chakraborty

Prohibition Peepers, first published by Down & Out Books, has been rereleased by Crimson Gate Books.

So here we are on that ambiguous holiday again

2026-10-12T00:01:00.000-04:00

Ever since I started writing my mystery and adventure series, the Mendoza Family Saga, I've been writing about Christopher Columbus, the Genoese who led a motley crew of Spanish and Catalan soldiers and sailors across the "Ocean Sea" in 1492 (appointed Admiral by King Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, who united Spain by conquering Muslim Granada and expelling all the Spanish Jews in the same year); the indigenous Taino people Columbus and his forces encountered in the Caribbean; and Diego and Rachel Mendoza, my fictional Jewish brother and sister caught between them.

In the first story, "The Green Cross," published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and nominated for an Agatha Award for Best Short Story, the Admiral is Diego's mentor and protector. But once he plants the Green Cross banner on the first Caribbean isle, claiming it “in the names of their most Christian Majesties and the Savior” (in the first Mendoza novel, Voyage of Strangers), the lines are clearly drawn.

Wherever the Mendozas go, Christians are the bad guys. The good guys are Jews and indigenous peoples, Muslims in the Ottoman Empire where the family eventually settles, and others whom today we would call marginalized peoples, such as the Roma, whom Diego and Rachel encounter in their travels. In writing about the genocide of the Taino, I’ve learned that today, surviving descendants in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic who carry their DNA are reconstructing their cultural heritage and language. It's hard to wipe a people out completely. (Thanks to DNA matching services, I've learned that, in spite of the Holocaust in the 20th century, segments of Ashkenazic Jewish DNA identical to mine are walking around in relatives in forty-eight different countries.) In "A Matter of Perspective," a novelette published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, I enjoyed telling the story of Suleiman the Magnificent's conquest of Rhodes in 1522 as a victory. If you google the two-year-siege, you'll find it in our Eurocentric sources as the defeat of the Knights of Rhodes, which led to their becoming the Knights of Malta. This is not to say that Suleiman the Magnificent was a pussycat or that all Christians were bad guys even in the era of the Inquisition. But as survivors, the Mendozas are adaptable. As outsiders, they have a fresh perspective. And it is not surprising that, as intelligent people, they are cultural relativists.

In a few weeks, I'll be guest speaker at a lit class at the famed 92nd Street Y in New York. The professor is a guy I've known for seventy-five years (since third grade, if you must know). This time around, he's chosen the theme of "gallows humor" in Jewish mystery short stories, using examples from the anthology Jewish Noir II, edited by Ken Wishnia and Chantelle Aimée Osman, to which I contributed my Mendoza story, "The Cost of Something Priceless." It has a bit of a sixteenth-century frame story involving Rachel, a necklace she's bringing from the Ottoman Empress to the Queen of France, and bandits. But the heart of the story has my protagonist, one of Rachel's twentieth-century descendants, saying everything I always wanted to say about sexism and anti-Semitism in the 1950s, woven into a tale of theft, intrigue, and revenge.

All of my Mendoza Family Saga stories can be found in Rachel in the Harem. Voyage of Strangers is available for Kindle. Journey of Strangers is available in both paperback and e-book editions.

Part One: Might Makes Right?

2026-10-11T00:00:00.000-04:00

Anyone who enjoys mysteries and crime novels has a passion for justice and, when laws are broken, we want to know whodunit, know they have been stopped from committing further crimes and even got their comeuppance. The backbone of justice is our laws and the courts that enforce those laws.

Lately, there have been articles, conversations around tables with coffee and croissants, in articles and online about justice. It's top of everyone's mind these days and, inserted in these conversations, is the question about human nature and whether humans are naturally lawless, ruled by might makes right, or whether humans gravitate to creating laws because we are driven by altruism and cooperation.

A uniquely 2026 thing is the how loud the debate has become about international laws, many brought in after world war two to prevent the rise of countries hell bent on taking over other countries by using force that, eventually, start wider wars and even world wars. Some are arguing international laws and the courts that enforce them should be eliminated because only might makes right.

Just last week, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the imposition of sanctions against the International Criminal Court, by a singularly shocking statement: "The United States and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC."

This week, the International Criminal Court responded to sweeping U.S. sanctions by stating, "It is an assault on the rule of law and on the very foundations of the international legal order which strikes at the simple principle that no one stands above the law."

These sanctions are the tip of the iceberg; what is being attacked, debated, argued about is the very nature of international justice and underneath that, human nature itself.

In January, 2026, Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Trump, took upon himself to describe his vision of human nature that defines his country's foreign policy:

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world...that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

The beginning of time? That's one heck of a statement; how does Miller know what humans have been since the beginning of time? Has he been around that long? No, he's referring to the belief that humans are designed to claw at each other to climb the evolutionary ladder.

Evolution - explained by those who don't understand it - is seen as the survival of the fittest and the fittest are strong and aggressive so, we are governed by the iron fisted rule that might rules. Evolution has never been that - it is the survival of some genes and the elimination of others, forging the nature of species. Some babies lived long enough to have their own babies, those who didn't survive haven't contributed to the nature of our species. It's a numbers game – those who survive in larger numbers and have more offspring – shape the nature of humanity.

Modern humans have been around for about 300,000 years and our written history is about 5,000 years old, so to understand much of our history we rely on fossil evidence. Given how long humans existed without written history, those early years have weighed heavily on how our genes were crafted and they are studied by Prehistoric Archaeologists and Paleoanthropologists, using bones, ours and the animals we ate, artifacts like tools, clothing, and decorations to piece together who we were. What these scientists don't do is pick a theory out of thin air and pretend it's true. The narrative that the strong survive by aggression and dominance is absolute - you know where I'm going with this - two words, begin the first one with a B and end the last one with a T. It's made up by people who have never studied or understood our prehistoric past, the lengthy past that forged our genes.

In his groundbreaking book The Makings of Mankind, Richard Leaky, the famous paleoanthropologist (the son of famous paleoanthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey) presents evidence that cooperation and sharing were crucial for human evolution and not an cute accident. Through carefully documented human remains, he showed that, as our cooperation and altruism increased, so did the numbers of early humans, as evidenced by bones of those who had been injured or disabled even from birth, and who survived because of the care of others. This is when our human numbers increased, skewing our genes to altruism.

Anthropolgist, Sarah blaffer Hrdy, in Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, shows how cooperation and empathy were necessary for human survival because human babies are immature, requiring long periods of care and those who survive rely on attentive mothers and a bevy of helpers. With scarce resources and threats to their safety; it is not the aggressive that survive but the cooperative - the ones who work together and this is how natural selection sorted us out - those who survived passed on their genes, crafting the human race. She doesn't do all this by making up stuff, she uses evidence and numbers to back up what she posits.

What about the raging strong man beating up others? His survival is neither here not there in the evolutionary scheme of gene survival - he only matters if he has offspring that survive. Some have argued that fighting off animals that threatened his babies ensured their survival, and eating those animals have fed his babies so yeah, might makes genes survive. A great deal of research has shown that prehistoric humans were sorely lacking in the ability to fend off large animals by themselves and even hunt them successfully by themselves. Picture hand to large paw combat. Picture the same hands trying to strangle an animal.

Evidence shows that what allowed success in hunting and in defence were tools like spears, created cooperatively, and groups of prehistoric humans hunting together. Evidence also shows that only 20% of early human diet was meat and the rest was from gathered plants, gathered collectively because of the time-consuming nature of the task. And let's not forget the baby who, left on their own, would die and take their genes with them. So the baby needed people who cared enough, to altruistically watch over them while others gather and hunt for food and collectively defended said baby so its genes could survive. It all boils down to altruism and cooperation. The raging guy who refused to cooperate and work with others? His baby was unlikely to survive, making his genes irrelevant. When we see the modern version of this guy, he is an outlier and often destined for jail.

What about the "the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time”?

Humans haven't been there since the beginning of time and the earliest humans died before telling us much about their existence, so we rely on what they did tell us with their bones and the other evidence of them that remains. All the evidence points to an increase in survival through cooperation and altruism. If we argue international laws are just the organic outgrowth of human nature, it's best to listen to evidence about how our nature was created rather than make up stuff. Are we a completely altruist cooperative species? Obviously not. Are we a species driven by aggressive genes? Obviously not. Rewriting our history, misunderstanding our evolution, is being used to prop up political actions.

We are not a lawless species. We are a species who created laws because of our genes and our laws restrict those among us who try to play the might makes right card over the cooperation, altruism and fairness that allowed humans to survive in large numbers. The restriction of those who think might makes right is the very core of our national and international laws. The guy who thinks he can beat you up in the street and grab your valuables using his might, is the guy who our local laws send to jail. The country that uses force to take over other countries is the country that our international laws seek to restrain because, without that restraint, our history tells us a world war is in the making.

The Great Halloween Specials Gap

2026-10-10T00:45:00.000-04:00

It starts each November, the relentless march of Christmas specials. It'll march all the way to January. To be clear, I don't mean movie classics or theme episodes. I mean variety show or cartoon specials done just for the holiday: How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, A Year Without Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman, and so forth, and so forth. And so forth. We still get new specials each year. Most fade quickly, but the hits stick forever, and the big studios won't stop trying. There's too much money to be made.

Contrast that with Halloween. It isn't like Halloween is unpopular. I'm writing this before Labor Day, and the stores are already loaded up with decorations and candy. And yet, the years have given Halloween almost nothing by way of enduring TV specials. And franchises have tried: Disney, Bugs and Daffy, Garfield, and yes, the Grinch.

Of course, one Halloween special has lasted, the one with plenty of merch online and on those aisle shelves: It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966). It's the exception that proves the specials gap rule.

And yes, I think about these things sometimes.

My theory: Christmas comes from a story. A rather famous story, as it happens, and the base themes and characters are baked in and widely known. Centuries of folklore expanded Christmas into a season, with ever-deeper narratives and recurring characters. A team writing a Christmas special need not explain flying reindeer. That team can threaten Santa's workshop or the family gathering from limitless angles. If the script has snow at the end, it's a viable pitch.

Not so with Halloween. Now, we've been scaring each other about ghosts and ghouls since oral storytelling first began, and we've threatened to come back and haunt our families for even longer. The origin themes of Halloween are the coming of winter and the thinning veil between our world and the next. What unites Halloween as a narrative engine are common experiences and common symbols. We've all passed a murky cemetery or felt the unexplained shiver down our spine. These are powerful appeals to our inner fears and primal instincts, not broadcast television-bankable TV specials.

At Christmas, we're all supposed to gather together as a family. Sooner or later, probably sooner, the family will need something to do, usually something to watch together, something warm or at least neutral enough to pause the squabbling. Something that Grandma can't argue is born of the devil.

Something with commercial breaks to sell you stuff.

This is the exact point A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) tried to drive home, that commercialization ruins the spirit of Christmas. It's my single favorite Christmas special, probably because it nailed this message with humor and innocence. Between sponsor acknowledgements, that is. Coca-Cola bankrolled the whole thing.

Charlie Brown might have hated it, but Christmas specials are a racket, one that can hawk more than soft drinks. Consumer brands can flog the latest toys, gift ideas for that special someone, and reminders that your neighborhood retailer has your essential this-and-that. And they can do it again next year.

Halloween is more an event and experience. A popular event, and a lucrative one for many a business, but the customers are buying specific things: fun-size candy, Power Ranger costumes, animatronic hobgoblins, Count Chocula. Even with Halloween's retail boom, the Christmas market operates on a scale geometrically larger in terms of annual U.S. sales. Gifts, travel, decoration, office parties, and the money keeps flowing.

The Great Pumpkin was the third Peanuts special, commissioned only after the franchise scored big with A Charlie Brown Christmas and Charlie Brown's All-Stars. The Great Pumpkin would deliver another hit if it stuck to the formula and made Halloween playfully safe for family hour, a Christmas special in a costume.

It had to be thus. A ghost story delivers an unsettling lesson, if it delivers a lesson at all. Put in Charlie Brown terms, a proper ghost story wouldn't have a beagle rising up out of the pumpkin patch. It would've been a ghost, and Linus would've either learned to dread the Great Pumpkin and never return, or it would've dragged him down into the vines forever, leaving poor Sally in utter dread. This too cometh your way, home viewers.

That is a flat-out terrible Charlie Brown special, but it has the bones of a solid horror tale. The Halloween spirit never made the jump to broadcast specials, but the time-honored horror story is hardly in ill health. Haunts and monsters continue to thrive in movies, in series television and October bingeathons, in theme parks and around campfires.

Okay, so Halloween specials may not have caught on as with Christmas. We can enjoy the experiences and movies and the ghost hunting shows. And maybe another seasonal classic like The Great Pumpkin might come along some day. As Linus said, there is always next year. Just you wait.

Happy Halloween, everybody!

Before Las Vegas, There Was… Newport, Kentucky?

2026-10-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

Ah! Prohibition. Fortunes were made on both sides of the law. It gave rise to Elliot Ness and J. Edgar Hoover. Every large American city had pockets of Mafia and Mafia-adjacent activity. And it put one Cincinnati suburb on the map. Across the river lies Newport, Kentucky, reachable today by a freeway, the Taylor-Southgate Bridge, and the Purple People Bridge, which formerly carried US 27 and the Louisville &Nashville Railroad. It's now a pedestrian and bike bridge and frequently hosts events.

[Photos sourced from The Northerner to the best of my knowledge.]

But during prohibition, a man named George Remus, called the King of the Bootleggers, ran his criminal empire in Cincinnati from Newport. But a funny thing happened to George. Just as Prohibition came to an end, he got arrested for… Well… Bootlegging.

At the same time, Cincinnati was as mobbed up as any city in Ohio. The city fought back by creating Charter government, run by a city manager. What's a poor mobster to do? They packed up their casinos and dens of ill repute and moved over to Newport, now open territory. Soon, two types of joints opened: knock-out joints, your typical hole in the wall with some rooms upstairs where "hostesses" would entertain gentleman clients, and carpet joints, illegal casinos and, sometimes, brothels that operated in the open and would not be out of place in Las Vegas of the 1950s through the 1970s. One such carpet joint, located between York and Monmouth Streets near what is now the Newport Aquarium, later became a Jeff Ruby restaurant and now a mob-themed event center called The Syndicate. Since Ruby's days as owner, the Syndicate has kept its carpet joint motif. Many celebrities from Frank Sinatra to Marilyn Monroe frequented the more glamorous establishments. On the other hand, a young blackjack dealer and singer from Steubenville, Ohio, named Dean Martin, dealt at a knockout joint later occupied by a bar owned by Reds legend Tom Browning.

There was no Cincinnati mob to speak of. Newport wiseguys answered to the Cleveland mob, who in turn answered to what's now the Genovese crime family in New York. But others had a hand in the boom times, specifically Bugsey Siegel and Meyer Lansky had money in Newport. It became a proof-of-concept for what they would build in Las Vegas.

But the good times ended in the 1960s. A man named George Ratterman ran for Campbell County sheriff as a reform candidate. At the same time, Robert Kennedy received a mandate from his brother Jack to crack down on organized crime. So RFK (Sr.) set his sites on Newport. The mob, afraid Ratterman would mean the end of the mob in Newport, drugged him and tried to frame him by having a stripper named April Flowers (not her real name) pose with the unconscious candidate in an effort to derail his candidacy. Everyone saw the picture as a fake. By 1970, the operation was in tatters.

A few remnants lingered on after that. Larry Flynt bought a famous strip joint on Monmouth known as the Brass Ass. Flynt later sold it. The Brass Ass became a local tourist trap and only closed last month. The Syndicate, of course, exists as a mob-themed event center after hosting the Rat Pack and the like back in Newport's sin-and-vice heyday. But it's a, like, a respectable joint.

But if you want to know what drove the final nail in the coffin, look no further than the Bevery Hills Supper Club in neighboring Southgate. The Club was the areas most famous carpet joint, still open long after gambling operations had been run out of Northern Kentucky. If the police raided, the gambling gear would be shoved into another room until the police did their business. And again, celebrities frequented the place as both performers and guests. But one night in 1977, a fire swept through the club, killing 165 people and injuring 200 more. The club was never rebuilt, and a memorial now stands on the site.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention one of the most infamous post-mob vice incidents in Newport. A Cincinnati City Council member drove over the late, lamented Central Avenue Bridge to Newport for a massage. As in one with a "happy ending." He wrote a check. It bounced. It became a running joke in Cincinnati for years. But...The councilman returned to Council next term, got elected mayor, and later became a well-respected anchorman on WLWT. Then he had his own talkshow.

The Jerry Springer Show.

But his most infamous episode came about because the vice of Newport outlived the mob.

Seriously, Trigger Warnings

2026-10-08T00:05:00.000-04:00

In 1989, I started graduate school at a university that I'll call The U because three decades have passed. Maybe things have changed. Anyway, there was a serial rapist working the campus, striking at night in certain parking lots and various locations around town where students and teachers lived.

And quite a few of the graduate level history classes took place at night, including one in a professor's home. In fact, once a rape occurred less than a block away from that house while we were in class. So that worked out quite well for the professor, but it made for disturbing walks to and from the car for the rest of us.

Yes, we female students including me always asked one of the guys in the class to escort us to our cars, and they always cooperated, so leaving class wasn't a problem. The tough part was parking at night, when you got out of the car with your books and notebooks, trying to breathe normally, keep walking, while looking around like your eyes were on swivels... One of the parking lots had had four assaults, and that's where I had to park for one class because it was the closest to the building, and anywhere else would have meant that I'd have to walk through two other parking lots which were just as dangerous, because the rapist struck randomly.

The administration never admitted that the rapes were going on. They did send out a "safety memo" that women should seek escorts at night, just as a matter of common safety. No mention of the rapist. And the campus police (more on them later) were never around at night. A huge number of students signed a petition asking for campus police to monitor the parking lots - but the university said there simply weren't the resources to do that. Just seek someone to escort you and stay out of dark spaces. Ignoring the night classes. The dark parking lots, where sometimes a light went out and wasn't replaced for a few weeks. The dark street where the professor lived. And back then, no cell phones…

Hell, I'm getting triggered just writing this. Because that was a long stretch to live under constant tension and fear, and even after two years on the streets of L.A. as a teenager. I guess I'd hoped life would get safer, especially at the posh university I'd been lucky enough to get accepted by. Wrong.

So I have a few comments about the Cornell 7 and the handling of Jane Doe's case.

Especially after reading what's been made available of the group text among the guys that started off with “Free p---y” in the house, continued with a discussion where one fraternity brother responded to that piece of information by writing “I f---ing love Chi Phi”; and another either sought or provided clarification, “Like you can walk in and whip it out,” and yet another, “Shop still open?” at 1:42 AM on Oct. 19, 2024.

As Monica Hesse said on WaPo:

“Shop still open?” is a kind of wordplay that requires a little brainpower, especially when made at 1:42 a.m. Your mind may be fuzzy with alcohol or ketamine, but not so fuzzy that you cannot dig out your phone and add a question mark.

The question mark is needed because you do not know whether the woman — a student, just like you — is still there. You are not there, after all. You are in a different room. You are making a premeditated inquiry as to whether you should bother traveling to another part of the house in order to have sex with a woman you have identified as a shop. You have to think about it. You have to press send.

You do not know whether she is conscious or consenting. You are not texting her to find out. She could probably be a better judge of whether she was conscious or consenting, but you have instead decided to group-text your fraternity brothers, entrusting them to be the judge of whether the shop should be open. If you text the shop, you might learn that maybe it never wanted to be open in the first place.

The presence of a group text is both gobsmacking and banal. It conveys that whatever was happening in that room — however drunk or drugged everyone was in that room — several people still thought to document the evening in real time. To make it a bonding experience. To make it a party. To make sure everyone got to the shop before the shop woke up or tried to hide under covers or started crying or wished to get out of that room or did whatever else it is that shops do.

“Shop still open?” wrote one young man, and another wrote back, “Yeah.” (LINK)

Now let's get to the Tompkins County DA, Matthew Van Houten, who said that his decision not to bring charges was based on the contents of Jane Doe's signed 2024 statement. But he told CBS News New York's Saeidi on Tuesday that he had never seen the transcript of what Jane Doe told campus police before his office decided not to bring charges.

NOTE: This transcript included the direct statements:

“I can say with 100% percent confidence I was raped.”

"And then, of course, I was being hit at the same time. Physically hit very, very hard."*

Anyway, Van Houten said,

"I'm going to follow up on this because this is news to me," he said.

When told Jane Doe had said she was confident she was raped, Van Houten said, "That wasn't information that I had, first of all. Second of all, that is a legal conclusion."

"If she had said those words, we certainly would want to have explored that more," Van Houten continued. "Like I said, that wasn't provided to me." (LINK)

Now the Cornell Police Department reports ONLY to the Cornell CFO (Chief Financial Officer). And the victim only talked to the Cornell Police Department (remember what I said about university "police departments"?), who condensed 100+ pages of interview to 6 pages that "omitted some of the more forceful and definitive language she used. And it was missing her unequivocal statement that she had been raped." (LINK) The Cornell Police Department sent the condensed version to the CFO of Cornell University, and then it was sent to DA Van Houten, who did what is the standard thing you do for the university that keeps the city in business. Bury it.

“I can say with 100% percent confidence I was raped.”

"And then, of course, I was being hit at the same time. Physically hit very, very hard."*

Anyway, the Ithaca Police Department NEVER SAW THE STATEMENT, NEVER WAS TOLD ABOUT THE CRIME, AND SO NEVER INVESTIGATED, even though Jane Doe and her family thought they were involved in the investigation.

PLUS

The night before she was gangraped, a student had overdosed from ketamine at that very Cornell frat house.
A recent campus climate survey at Cornell University found that 35% of undergraduate women reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact.

Guess what? Nothing was done about any of these! Wow! What a surprise!

OK. A couple of suggestions:

(1) Do not let universities and colleges handle their own sexual assault investigations ever again. Ever. Anywhere. Campus police are basically there to break up street fights and keep things quiet. They ignore the rich frat houses and mop up bad situations. Bury things. They may be called "police departments" but they're not qualified. They certainly weren't back at The U and they apparently weren't at Cornell.

(2) Ban fraternities. I don't care how much money they have, or how they're conduits to "good futures". There's too much bad shit that goes on, from hazings that end up killing students to alcohol and drug overdoses to sexual assaults. And even though I realize doing this is like closing the barn door after the cattle escape, I really am sick of rapists, alcoholics, and drug addicts reaching high levels of power and influence. At least the geyser might turn into a trickle.

"Records show that from 2018 through 2024, more than 1,200 incidents of sexual assault, dating and domestic violence and stalking were reported to Cornell University’s Title IX office, USA TODAY has reported." Read more at: (LINK) I'm sure that NONE of them were publicized.

(3) Quit the rhetoric that it's the woman's fault. (I know, that's a dream...) Young men can do stupid things, commit crimes, brag about it online, and the general rap is still, "Do we really want to ruin a young man's life over 20 minutes of action?"

(Quote from the father of Brock Turner - at the time in a frat at Stanford - who violently raped an unconscious woman and got six months in jail.) BTW, fun fact - the two men who stopped Brock Turner in mid-rape, chased him down, and held him until the police arrived were Two Swedish graduate students, Peter Lars Jonsson and Carl-Fredrik Arndt, may praise be to their names forever. So immigrants saved her. None of the frat brothers.

ANSWER: Yes, we do want to destroy a young man's life over 20 minutes "of action". Because certain kinds "of action" destroy a young girl's life forever.

(4) Recognize that in an authoritarian world, the real definition of power - unprettied, unsoftened - is the ability to do whatever you want and get away with it. And one of the absolute proofs of power, to sociopaths, psychopaths, and pack mobs, is the ability to do anything you want to someone subordinate/inferior to you and get away with it. Especially sexual dominance. That's why rape is a standard weapon in war, gangs, prisons or anywhere else where someone has to prove they're the ones calling all the shots.

*BTW, when Jane Doe said “I can say with 100% percent confidence I was raped.” "And then, of course, I was being hit at the same time. Physically hit very, very hard."
This is exactly what Andrew Tate & his scumbag brother, and every other pimp has been doing since the dawn of time: get the woman back to the pad; drug her; rape her; beat her; share her around; humiliate her; repeat.
Drug, rape, beat, abuse, humiliate. That’s the pattern. Time for that shit to STOP.

The Writing Life?

2026-10-07T00:00:00.000-04:00

The rest of my year is shaping up with a lot of writing-related events. Or is it?

When I attend Left Coast Crime I try to arrange to give a brief talk about the Brubaker case. (The nutshell version: This guy stole tens of thousands of publications from 100+ libraries and my university was the one that caught him, after more than a year of investigating.) Chris Dreith attended the chat I did this year and invited me to speak, via zoom, to the Sacramento chapter of Sisters on Crime on October 17, 4 PM Eastern time.. It's free to the public, if you are interested. You can register here.

Then in November I will have a table at Open Book, an event sponsored by Whatcom County Library System. If I'm lucky I might sell a few books there. In any case it will be fun. I have attended it twice, but never as an author. I always learn something there.

Every month the Wolfe Pack has a monthly zoom discussion of Rex Stout's books. This December the subject is Gambit and I have been invited to talk about it because I wrote an article about it in the long-gone journal The Armchair Detective. (My only published literary criticism, actually.)

I'm looking forward to all of these events but I recently realized: all of these are writing-related, but none of them are writing.

These days if you want to have what I will laughingly call a career in writing you have to spent as much time promoting your stuff as you do creating it. The time I am spending perfecting my speech on Brubaker is time I am not spent putting words onto an electronic page.

When I started planning to write this piece (which, ahem, is also not going to earn me any money) I thought it would be a complaint. However...

Whenever I give a talk about the Brubaker theft someone always asks: Have you written any fiction about it? I have always replied: No, I don't want to give that bad man any more room in my skull.

But this week I thought of a way to write a short story based on the theft. So, sometimes the publicity machine can crank up the writing machine. And so the great circle of life is maintained. Hoping you the same.

More Books I Recommend

2026-10-06T00:24:00.000-04:00

How did it get to be October already? The months seem to fly, don't they? Well, having just finished the third quarter of the year, it's a great time to share the mystery/crime books I enjoyed most during the last three months.

They all happened to have been published this year. While none of them are perfect reads (what books are?), I did enjoy them and do recommend them.

So without further ado ...

The Women in White by Sarah Pekkanen

This is a dual-timeline story. The earlier timeline occurs in 1964 at a fictional college (that I understand was based on a real one). This college has a famous professor who is conducting parapsychology research. He finds four women with ESP and runs experiments on them. The professor is sadistic and treats the women poorly, but they all have reason to put up with it. (Being a woman in 1964 wasn't easy.) Then, one day, the four women disappear.

The second timeline is set in the current day, when a young woman is hired as the caregiver of a recently widowed elderly woman, Betty, who was one of the four test subjects. Betty lives in a house that could have been plucked right out of the 1960s (think no modern conveniences). She doesn't know what she's missing, however, because she's rarely left her home in the last sixty years. Why? And what happened to the other three women? The newly hired caregiver is determined to find out.

I found this to be an intriguing page-turner. The insights into ESP research was fascinating (and disturbing). The author did a good job of showing how the women became found family for each other and how they coped as the professor used their friendships to manipulate them. I wish the author had shown more of a range in the personalities of the men in the story (though I understand that the story dictated otherwise) and that she'd let the reader know more about what happened to the professor in the end. Nonetheless, this is a strong book. If you like psychological thrillers, I think you'll like this book.

A Cute Little Murder by Molly Harper

And now for something a little lighter. This book opens with prologue set fifteen years ago, as two teenage girls who run a true-crime podcast (based on crimes in their small town) are in the midst of busting their principal for a number of felonies. They're their high school's version of Veronica Mars, and the author really succeeded in capturing the vibe.

Then we fast-forward to present day. One girl has grown into a big-league true-crime podcaster. The other has become a forensic accountant. They aren't in touch (it turns out they weren't such good friends after all), until the podcaster needs the accountant's help solving a 1920s cold case in a soon-to-close hotel on a small island in the Great Lakes. As you can imagine, the original case might be old, but that doesn't mean there isn't someone who wants to stop the current investigation.

I found this to be a well-plotted story with fun twists, amusing characters, interesting sleuthing, enjoyable romance, and a good voice. The pacing was a little slow at times in the middle, and the main character (the accountant) reminded herself way too often that she was doing this for the money, but it still was a good read. I wish this were the beginning of a series, but it appears it's a standalone.

The Primrose Murder Society by Stacy Hackney

After her husband goes on the lam for white-collar crime and the government takes her house and money, Lila and her precocious, Murder She Wrote-obsessed daughter, Bea, age ten, need a safe place to land. They find The Primrose, an upscale fifty-five-plus building. They're allowed to move in temporarily, rent-free, because they promise to clean out the apartment of a recently deceased hoarder.

Then a rich man in the building dies, and he's left $2 million to whoever solves the cold case of his granddaughter's death in that very building. What's a woman in need of cash to do but to take on the case, especially when her daughter keeps pushing her to do it? Heck, Bea would handle the investigation herself if Lila would stop reining her in.

The novel is filled with a strong mother/daughter relationship, fun (if sometimes annoying) secondary characters (the neighbors--including a retired police detective who thinks he wasn't good at his job), a well-plotted mystery, and a bunch of amusing moments with witty dialogue. It's a solid series starter. As one reviewer said, it's a "delightful story about perseverance, overcoming odds, found family, friendship, and believing in oneself." It's this author's first mystery, and she did a good job. I'm looking forward to the next book in the series, coming next spring.

************

And now for a little BSP:

Three weeks ago I wrote about the new anthology Hooked on Urban Legends--and Murder!, which I edited with Donna Andrews and Marcia Talley. This fun anthology has seventeen stories involving ghosts, monsters, human bad guys, and, of course, crime. (You can read that blog post here.) On Tuesday, October 20th, at least a dozen of the authors with stories in the book will appear on a zoom where they'll talk about their stories and share tips for writing short stories.

The authors scheduled to appear are: Donna Andrews, Ellen Byerrum, Barb Goffman (yes, that's me), Kathryn Holland, Smita Harish Jain, Meghan Lewis, Jane Limprecht, Alan Orloff, Pat Remick, Daphne Silver, Robin Templeton, and Marcia Talley. We're still hoping a few more might be able to attend.

The event will begin at 7 p.m. Eastern Time on 10/20. You can register to attend by clicking here. We hope to see you there.

Oops

2026-10-05T00:00:00.000-04:00

Mistakes, I’ve made few, but then again, too many to mention. And more, much more than this, I did it any way I could figure out.

When people ask me how I’m able to make a certain piece of wood working, the only honest answer is, “A series of mistakes, randomly interrupted by moments of good fortune.” I think the only difference between a person who succeeds at a craft, and one who doesn’t, is

the willingness to try. Failure is not an option, it’s inevitable. A completed project is the result of winnowing the number of mistakes down to a tolerable, and amendable, few. Thus, making mistakes is not as important as knowing how to reorganize the flaws.

For this, the most important ingredient is humility. When it comes to craft, we are all born sinners. Accepting this is the road to endurance and faith that persistence, seasoned by patience and presence of mind, will see you through.

Some mistakes achieve an unexpected good. We’ve heard about Velcro, Post-it notes and microwave ovens, but I have experienced a number of occasions when a colossal blunder resulted in a far better outcome. This usually happens when I’ve made my intended effect impossible, so I’m forced to redesign the whole thing, turning a repair into a pleasing improvisation.

Architects have known about this for a long time, probably because buildings are so big and take so long to put together that learning how to glorify a goof was an important strategy.

Not unlike building a novel. I’m sure this is how many of you write. Perhaps it’s the only way to write anything halfway decent. Anne Lamott’s shitty first draft is actually an exercise in dispensing thousands of mistakes that call for ingenious corrections. Our most inventive writers are probably people who generate mistakes at scale, writing themselves out of one pitfall after another.

The Grand Master of fortuitous mistakes is nature herself. For every living thing, reproductive success is a numbers game. The reason an individual produces far more eggs or sperm than needed to complete the transaction is it increases the odds for an acceptable match. A byproduct of these multitudes is that little errors creep into the genetic scheme. It’s regrettable that the word “mutation” has a vaguely negative connotation. Truth is, without mutation, we wouldn’t have evolution, since natural selection needs a toolbox of mis-made parts from which to select the preferred attribute for continued survival.

If you really want to go large on the value of error, whatever existed before the Big Bang contained tiny quantum fluctuations, deviations from the norm. This meant the universe didn’t start off perfectly configured, but instead, what cosmologists charmingly describe as slightly lumpy. This meant that when expansion created the universe we ended up with galaxies, stars, and planets, one of which is our current residence.

This is what I’d call a happy accident.

I’ve recently mentioned the delusion of perfectionism. Nothing is perfect, and if it was, it wouldn’t do us much good. It would just sit there in a smooth slab of static nothingness. It wouldn’t grow, change, evolve or adapt. This doesn’t mean there’s no point in trying to make things better. You just can’t make them perfect, and neither should you try.

Say what you will about the advanced technology we live with today, it mostly works. It’s all pretty much based on quantum mechanics, which everyone applies, though no one really understands. If you could boil down the unfathomable complexity of quantum theory, the remaining nugget would be probability. Probably. Outcomes are not predetermined, but rather the consequence of infinite, unknowable and evanescent interactions. Heisenberg proved that “here and now” is ultimately an approximation.

This wouldn’t happen in a perfect world, but lucky for us, irregularity and imprecision makes the whole thing operational. It’s been built into the system since the first nanosecond. You might regret a mistake, but there’s no shame in it. So have at it. That’s why we have copy editors, imperfect as they are.

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fraudulent Færies

2026-10-04T00:00:00.000-04:00

Subject: A Conan Doyle, circa 1920.
Genuine, for certain real, not fake,
Lumière KinemaColour fauxtograf™
on loan to SleuthSayers, courtesy
British Museum archive collection.

Doyle and Houdini and science and such,
Séance and fairies concern overmuch.

The words physics and psychics come to us from Greek via Latin. The spellings might seem similar, but physics in Greek related to physical things, especially nature, whereas psychics suggested soul. Forgive me, but I'm in the former camp.

My classmate Lela with kindness told me I was a ‘rational bigot’. She’s not wrong and I cherish her evaluation. When it comes to psychic phenomena, I side with the Amazing Randi: provide evidence, unambiguous proof. Unlike, well, the most highly regarded icon in our profession.

Embarrassingly, when it came to spiritualism and the supernatural, the wonderful and prolific Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was dismayingly gullible. He was so unlike Sherlock Holmes that it hardly seems credible he could so superlatively depict his coldly rational protagonist.

I mentioned the magician Randi, but Doyle was, you might be surprised to learn, once a close friend of Harry Houdini. The famed magician went to lengths to dissuade the author from his utter belief in the occult, efforts that eventually broke their friendship.

From the Mouths of Babes

Thus we set the stage for a pair of Yorkshire cousins who, aided by flitting fairies, fooled much of the adult world, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. For proof, they proffered photographs of petite figures hovering in the air.

1^st Cottingley photo

To be sure, young girls have fooled adults before. The Fox sisters, Leah, Maggie, and Kate, introduced the world to séances in 1848. After a hundred eighty years and an eventual admission of fakery by one of the sisters, séances still have believers. Simply visit Cassadaga, Florida, a town of soothseekers.

Much earlier in 1692, the Salem witch trials began with antics and accusations by three pre-teen girls, 9yo Elizabeth (Betty) Parris, her cousin 11yo Abigail Williams, and Ann Putman, age 12. The latter child became a prolific inculpater who, along with a number of teenagers, over time denounced nearly half the village of practicing witchcraft. And adults believed them.

Back in England

5^th Cottingley photo

The Christmas 1920 issue of The Strand carried photographs of fairies photographed by two young cousins in Cottingley, West Yorkshire, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. There were doubters, but skeptics were few and believers were many.

A few months later, the same magazine published a followup by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was couched as a reasonable exploration of the subject, but it’s clear Doyle not only accepted the evidence of fairies, but also supernatural phenomena in general. (As a side note, Doyle was also taken in by the Piltdown Man hoax.)

Without further ado, here’s the original article and here’s Doyle’s defence.

No fairies were harmed in the making of this article.

Even though I don’t believe in fairies, I’m setting out a dish of cookies. Just sayin’.

Boo-hoo, Wow, and Hooray

2026-10-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post here at SleuthSayers called "Whoa, Look at THAT," about current YouTube channels showing moviewatchers' reactions--fright, sorrow, delight, shock, etc.--to what they see on the screen, and how those emotion-charged scenes can be an inspiration to us, as fiction writers. After all, we want to make our readers feel those same things.

Anyhow, since watching a few of those channels told me what movies and parts of movies the "reactors" liked most, I've been doing some thinking about which movie scenes triggered the biggest reactions from me. And the funny thing is, those reactions didn't only happen the first time I saw these movies, some of them many years ago; the feelings are rekindled every time I see them. And I re-watch a lot of movies.

So think of this post as "Whoa, Look at THAT, Part 2." I have listed, below, thirty scenes that always, even now, keep me glued to the screen. I'm sure you won't agree with me on all of them--some aren't even scenes from great or well-known movies--but for me they're all entertaining and bring forth truly strong emotions.

NOTE 1: I'm including links to the videos, instead of embedding functional clips. Otherwise this post would be a mile long. (Besides, the Blogger program, for some reason, wouldn't allow me to.)

NOTE 2: I'm NOT including the Bates Motel shower scene, Rhett leaving Scarlett, requests for a bigger boat, San Francisco car chases, songs in the rain, napalm in the morning, Sam playing the piano, etc., because most of us have seen those scenes many, many times. Some of the following you actually might not know about. And a warning: big spoilers ahead!

1. Surprise

Poltergeist: TV people

The Usual Suspects: The greatest trick the devil ever pulled

12 Angry Men: It's a very unusual knife

Romancing the Stone: Together, forever

Dead Poets Society: O captain, my captain

The Sixth Sense: They don't know they're dead

Superman (1978): All those powers--and I couldn't even save him

The Natural: Awright, Hobbs, knock the cover off the ball

2. Sadness

Cool Hand Luke: He was smilin'

Somersby: God bless you, Jack

Shane: There aren't any more guns in the valley

Lonesome Dove: Hell of a vision

The Last Sunset: Primroses

Old Yeller: Travis, bring your gun

Dances with Wolves: Do you see that I am your friend?

3. Tension

For a Few Dollars More: Try and shoot me, Colonel

Goldfinger: What kept you?

The Black Stallion: There's some problem with the Mystery Horse

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968): Left early

Star Trek II: Here it comes

Aliens: Punch it, Bishop

Raiders of the Lost Ark: Throw me the idol, I throw you the whip

Once Upon a Time in the West: You bring a horse for me?

4. Happiness

It's a Wonderful Life: Every time a bell rings

Flashdance: What a feeling

Witness: He'll need his city clothes

Forrest Gump: Run, Forrest, run

Rocky: Ain't gonna be no rematch

The Graduate: Elaine!

An Officer and a Gentleman: Way to go, Paula

Something I didn't mention earlier: For me, music plays a big part in how I'm affected by movie scenes. For example, think about how different that final shot in Gone with the Wind would be, as the camera tracks back from Scarlett to show the live oak tree beside her and Tara in the distance, if it weren't for that fantastic Max Steiner score. That, of course, and visual elements like lighting, colors, and camera movement, is something we writers can't create on the page; we have to work a little harder at causing those emotions. But it can be done. I still remember the tears that came to my eyes when the little boy died in the hot car at the end of the novel Cujo (in the movie version, he lives), and when Boo Radley is finally revealed to Scout in the final pages of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Now, a question for you: Which movie scenes do you recall affecting you the most, emotionally? Happiest, saddest, most surprising, most suspenseful? Are any of them the same as those I've remembered? Have you been influenced by any particular scenes, for your own writing?

I think I'll go see if I can find some more (and yes, Honey, it's still research).

Go ye and do likewise.

The Strangers Who Came to Dinner

2026-10-02T00:00:00.000-04:00

Still life with kibori kuma.
(Japanese hand-carved sculpture of bear with fish).

When we bought this house in the mountains of North Carolina, I foolishly thought that this tiny parcel of land was all ours. Wrong. We were merely the only organisms living on the property dumb enough to pay for it. I learned that the first time a flock of turkeys traipsed through our vegetable garden with thirteen of their waddling poults, pecking at every single one of our tomatoes for whatever sustenance they could provide.

When one of our neighbors attached a night vision camera to a tree in the woods behind our houses, it became clear that when the sun dropped a menagerie held court: opossum, fox, deer, and bears.

The latter have become the unofficial mascot of our city. Local artists have given us and the tourists tons of bear chic decor to fill our homes with. We ourselves display two paintings of bears on our walls. (The bear carving predates our marriage.)

If traffic slows on our approach to the mall, we know chances are good that a black bear is crossing the road. If tourists are standing around pointing their phones at a tree in the downtown shopping district, it’s because an adolescent ursine is napping in its branches. Every summer we hear sad stories of bears euthanized for entering peoples’ homes, or tales of idiots “not-from-around-here” who think it’s a good idea to hug and then selfie with a bear cub on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

“He died for Instagram” is not a phrase I’d like to have on my tombstone.

My backyard, late July 2017, 7 AM.

We know why they’re in our midst. (See our friend Amy Cherrix’s children’s book, Backyard Bears, if you really need a primer.) Every passing second, we humans consume more of their habitat. If you’ve ever watched a Yogi Bear cartoon, you know the other reason. We make it easy for them to get food.

Hardware stores in the region sell bear-resistant trash bins and straps, but the bears have such an smorgasbord to choose from, they can easily find a snack a few doors down from those selfish homeowners who lock up their goods.

And—gotta say it—a warming climate means that the bears are increasingly confused by parameters of their annual nap. How dare Nature wake them on a 70-degree day after three weeks of frigid weather, and not provide them with something to eat? The effrontery! Wait—are there any of those bipedal meat sacks around? These boneheads always leave out something good to eat.

I was one of those dopey meat sacks one year. Normally, I don’t put out trash until the morning of pickup. If I have an abundance, I stash the plastic bags in our locked garage until the designated day. But a three-day weekend altered the trash calendar, and the sanitation department did not, for some reason, phone me immediately to let me know.

I walked out of the house, intending to do some yard work or drive to a store, and discovered a bear rooting through my toppled bin. I closed the front door, and quickly ticked off all the things I was supposed to do to scare bears off.

Timorous beastie flees in the presence of ruggedly handsome writer.
In other news: a great year for lavender.

In the wild, you are supposed to play dead if attacked by a grizzly. If attacked by a black bear, you are advised to loudly fight back. (Who comes up with these suggestions?) Yes, thought I, loud noises could work. After all, every creature in the peaceable kingdom fears human clangor.

I dashed to the kitchen, grabbed a pot and a steel serving spoon, and did my best impression of a clangorous scribe, while hiding behind my cracked front door.

Nothing. The bear did not lift its head, let alone budge.

Maybe I was not loud or annoying enough?

Back to the kitchen. I rooted in a cabinet for the portable Bluetooth speaker we use in the yard. I booted the thing up, and scrolled through my phone in search of Music to Frighten Bears. I nudged the speaker onto the porch with the steel spoon.

Folks, I am here to tell you that bears are not at all terrified of the Hamilton soundtrack.

You know what finally did the trick? Me, standing on the porch, stamping my feet and screaming at the top of my lungs.

It was the last thing I wanted to do, but it worked!

My wife has never let me forget that I attempted to scare off a bear with show tunes. I mean, could I not summon some Whitesnake in a hurry?

Another time, I returned from the market and was getting groceries out of the car when I looked up to discover that a mother and two cubs had just entered my driveway from our backyard.

Mother and I locked eyes, and I swear, my brain played tricks on me.

My first thought was, “Who is this now? Did someone invite themselves over unannounced?”

Yes, for a few moments, I thought I was peering into the pinched, narrowed eyes of an irritated person. That’s how human its gaze was.

After a bit, my brain coughed up another possibility: “Wait, are they dogs?”

Finally, I comprehended the truth. I flung the groceries back in the car, jumped in myself, locked the doors, and prayed that they had not packed their glass cutters.

I waited twenty minutes while they explored the front yard, climbed up and down our front cherry tree, and finally wandered off.

That memory came back to me when I read a review of Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s book, A Libertarian Walks into a Bear, about a New Hampshire town that is taken over by a group of freedom-loving activists who ignore such basics as taxes and city sanitation, only to have their Utopia trampled to pieces by black bears. A woman who survived mauling tells the author, “If you look at their eyes, you understand that they are completely alien to us.”

I once thought that. But the longer I’ve been here, the more I’ve become sympathetic to their plight. A painter doing work on our house one year put it all in perspective. He had stepped out our front door to wash his brushes, and beheld the sight of a mother bear strolling up the road with three cubs in tow. A furry parade that did not make eye contact with him.

“Can you imagine the stress that mother is under?” he told me later. “She’s got to find food every day to feed all four of them.”

Our neighborhood keeps a running mobile phone text thread to keep everyone in the loop on bear sightings. Usually, the texts arrive after the neighborhood dogs have raised the alarm, so it’s never a surprise. But we do want to know where exactly the bears were last seen, in whose yard, how many, and how big. For these reasons alone I’m never without the phone in my pocket.

The system is far from foolproof.

There was the morning the dog barked endlessly in the lower part of our yard. When I finally walked over to see what the deal was, I spotted an adolescent bear marching away from us, like a tightrope walker, over the top of the privacy fence. Denise came down to look. I grabbed the dog and pulled him back to the house. In my absence, the bear somehow reversed course, faced Denise, and hissed. She backed away and rejoined the dog and me.

I still don’t understand how he was able to make a U-turn on a narrow fence top. They look blubbery and ungainly, but they’re incredibly nimble.

One night in late summer, my wife alerted me to a bear tearing down our bird feeder. (We have since banished feeders from the yard.) It was dark, and I had trouble seeing the culprit. When I finally discerned his shape, I gasped.

Hoping to explain my behavior, I blathered, “Well, I mean, first I thought it was a chubby man in a black raincoat. Then…I realized it was a bear—and I got scared!”

Thirty minutes later, after the bear left and we removed the attractant, she pounced on my words. “Oh, but a chubby man in a black raincoat…in our backyard, at night, was not at all scary to you?”

In May 2021, when she was out, a mother and cub surprised me in the yard. I scampered into the house and bolted the sliding doors of the den. My guests were not in a hurry to go. In fact, they settled in for a sweet siesta in the shadiest part of the yard. From the safety of an upstairs bathroom window, I filmed the interaction. The footage runs 90 seconds. (I put it on YouTube.) It’s the most tender mother-and-child scene I’ve witnessed outside of a nature documentary. Nat Geo, call me.

All these creatures want is space, peace, and to be left alone.

A hilarious book by William Kotzwinkle, entitled The Bear Went Over the Mountain, imagines a world in which a black bear in the woods of Maine discovers a completely finished book manuscript lying in a briefcase under a tree. Naturally, he lands a literary agent and passes the work off as his own. Zaniness ensues. It’s a clever satire about all the things wrong with publishing and Hollywood. And the bear, long a symbol of strength, protection, and seasonal renewal, becomes instead an unwitting player in a sordid drama of literary fraud.

Makes you think: They already eat our food and make themselves at home in our spaces. Would it really be so strange if they stole our livelihoods? Better them than AI. Vincant ursi.

My neighbor John gets bears who long to style their hair.
Photo copyright 2026 Gordon John Gilbart.

* * *

See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

joedenise.com

My Father & the Big A

2026-10-01T00:41:22.439-04:00

All my life my old man has been known for his extensive vocabulary and his remarkable memory.

At least until recently.

These days it’s pretty much just his vocabulary that’s left.

My dad has Alzheimer’s.

He’s been suffering from it for years. At first my mom thought he had Parkinson’s. Not sure how that worked.

It sure seems that Alzheimer’s, and the dementia associated with it, are fodder for popular culture these days. As with a lot of brain disorders, people who suffer from mental issues are coming out of the dark, and being seen for who and what they are. This is all commendable.

Don Johnson and James Gammon

But I’m not sure that fictional treatments can actually do justice to the horror show that is Alzheimer’s. I can remember back in the 90s Don Johnson’s TV show Nash Bridges featured veteran character actor James Gammon as Nash‘s father who suffered from Alzheimer’s. And it was the most convenient Alzheimer’s you’d ever see. When he needed to be lucid, he was, and when it served the plot for him to be goofy, he was. My dad‘s Alzheimer’s isn’t like that.

Alzheimer’s has gradually, minute by minute, hollowed my father out. So much so that every day he resembles the man I’ve known my entire life a little bit less. He went from being initially forgetful to being forgetful and easily confused to being absolutely out of the loop and constantly needing to be reminded of what was going on around him.

But he hasn’t taken this journey alone. Even as his Alzheimer’s is isolate him more every day, my dad is surrounded by a family that loves him. That supports him. And occasionally can still find it in themselves to like him.

This is no mean feat.

There are certain things my father can no longer bear. One of them seems to be me. Sometimes just my very existence.Especially if I’m redirecting or disciplining my son around him. My father gets very protective of his grandson, it starts to yell at me. Within the last week I’ve been told to shut up. I’ve been told I don’t know what I’m doing, I’ve been told that I’m picking on my kid. None of that is true. And I did not stand still for the shut up part. That’s a story for another time. And it’s hard not to take it personally. Except that in three minutes, he won’t even remember that he did it. I’ve watched a man with a memory for names, dates, places, style trends, sports statistics, exotic words, you name it lose all of that piece meal.

My dad can still tell you who won the 1969 Super Bowl. But he can’t tell you what I said to him five minutes ago. Or yesterday. Or two months ago. Right now his existence seems to consist of walking a precarious tight rope, completely unmoored. And needing help to become grounded back in the moment if only for a moment.

I’m not writing this For any other reason than to express how it’s been feeling to deal with Alzheimer’s in our family. It’s taken the worst toll on my father. It has taken a knot insignificant toll on those who love him.

And just once I’d like to see Hollywood get that right.

James Garner and Gena Rowlands in The Notebook

Old Myths, New Stories

2026-09-30T00:00:00.000-04:00

If you read this space regularly you may be aware that I am a fan (is that the right word?) of mythology, especially the Greco-Roman variety. I think I was probably six or seven when I discovered d'Aulaire's book of Greek myths and switched from drawing dinosaurs to gorgons and Pegasus.

But what does that have to do with mystery fiction? Well, there are, of course, gazillion mysteries set in the classical period. More importantly, it is easy to argue that Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex is the first mystery, beating Poe to the post by a couple of millennium. It contains: a murder, a detective, a Watson, the interrogation of suspects, and the "least likely" murderer.

Our first trip to Greece a few years ago inspired me to write a fantasy-crime story called "The Gate of Hades," which involved the legendary cave through which Theseus, Orpheus, and Heracles all snuck into the underworld It appeared in the late lamented Mystery Magazine two years ago.

More recently I began thinking about Charon, the ferryman who takes souls across the river Styx. Specifically I pondered one question I had always had about the gentleman. I wrote a story in which my question got answered but several fantasy magazines turned it down.

Gate of Hades

Hmm. My forte has always been mysteries so could I somehow move the story into that genre?

I did. I actually left the beginning and end of the story almost untouched but in the middle Charon helps one of the passengers solve his own murder. The result is "The Crossing," which appears in Crime Before Our Time, which was published yesterday.

But I have a complaint. I've made three trips to Greece but have only gotten two stories out of it so far, which doesn't seem fair. And none for the trip to Egypt! Perhaps I need to make a sacrifice or two to some deities. Where did I leave that ceremonial ax?

Quirks

2026-09-29T00:05:00.000-04:00

I'm typing this blog on game day. I sincerely hope I’m wearing the right shirt.

My wife and I pull out our college T-shirts, whether we’re attending the game or watching it on television. It’s an idiosyncrasy we share with fans around the globe. There’s a Pascal’s Wager element to our wardrobe choices. I don’t know whether it makes a difference in the outcome, but since I’m putting clothing on anyway, why not try to align the mystical forces on my team’s side. It’s a quirky thing we do together. We think it’s fun.

We wore the right T-shirts last Saturday. Our team won big.

The other day, I was talking with a friend about this habit. As conversations sometimes do, my family’s wardrobe choices led to a larger discussion about idiosyncrasies. “Have you ever noticed,” my friend asked, “that when people in public must walk between you and something you’re looking at (an airline monitor, a grocery store shelf, etc.), they do this slight shoulder hunch? As if by reducing their height an inch or two, they become transparent?”

Now that the seed has been planted, your grocery store run may be forever changed. And that’s how it goes with quirks. We’ve all got them. They may be intentional, or we may be unaware of their existence. Strangely, even though many of us may share the same ones, they still make us unique. Even universal ones provide small variations. Let’s return to the grocery store. The next time someone cuts across your bow in the canned goods aisle, notice how many not only hunch slightly, but also splay their arms, elbow-level, palms down in a gesture that signals they’re trying to press themselves lower. Myriad variations on the shrinking maneuver.

Because quirks are fun things to observe about people, they serve us well as writers. These peculiar and memorable idiosyncrasies help transform a character. They help a character evolve from a creature that looks good on paper and does all the right things into someone with life, form, and vibrancy. Quirks help a character feel like a person. Quirks are at once universal and unique.

Several elements help to make a good quirk for fictional characters.

· -Uniqueness. A true quirk helps fix the character in the readers’ minds. They associate the quirk with that character alone.

· -An Idiosyncrasy should have a reason to exist. In fiction, there are no random coincidences. The quirk should help to say something, positive or negative, about the character.

· -Observe quirks in the wild. Go to the grocery store. See how people interact in public. Hopefully, you’ll notice characteristics in people that you hadn’t considered.

· -Be sparing about their use. Too many quirks and a character will transform from memorable to weird. The means test, asking what the quirk says about the character, should help restrain the temptation to bog the character down with unique tics.

· -The quirk should be a reflection of the character’s overall disposition. A character who obsesses about safety, for instance, shouldn’t like to discharge firearms randomly.

· -Be creative. Avoid tropes. Look for ways to package the quirks we all have in unique ways.

Cormac McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men, illustrates the value of a quirk better than anything I’ve read recently. Early on, Chigurh, the villain, flips a coin and has the victim guess heads or tails. This idiosyncrasy appears throughout the book. Life or death gets decided by the flip of a coin.

Not everyone who has read the book remembers the villain’s name. Everyone, however, remembers “the coin-flipping guy.” The gesture fixes Chigurh in the reader’s mind even after they’ve finished the book.

The flip is purposeful. It propels the action. As readers, we know the victim’s fate hangs on the outcome. He doesn’t. The victim only knows that a stranger insists he choose whether the coin shows heads or tails. The tension mounts while we all wait for McCarthy to reveal whether the outcome.

The coin flip speaks to fate versus free will, a theme of the book. Chigurh insists each victim call heads or tails, making them participants in their own demise. As a character reveal, the coin flip is a masterclass in “Show, Don’t Tell.”

Coin flipping is a common gesture. Every football game starts this way. In No Country for Old Men, the flip is repackaged from a simple way to decide minor questions into a life-defining act. The quirk becomes one of the most memorable parts of McCarthy’s novel.

Chigurh’s coin toss successfully uses each of the elements of a good idiosyncrasy. McCarthy transforms the quirk into a narrative tool. It shows the power of a small gesture.
What example comes to your mind when you think about literary characters and their quirks? I’d like to hear. Now, however, I’ve got a game to watch. Go team.

Until next time.

Good Timing

2026-09-28T00:12:49.297-04:00

Timing is the key to success in everything from stand up comedy to sport to writing careers, to, it turns out, TV viewing. For the last decade or so, I have been enjoying the crime dramas and mysteries that the UK turns out on an industrial scale: Vera, A Touch of Frost, Morse and Lewis and Endeavor, Inspector Lynley and Foyle's War, all good, all entertaining.

At the same time, I am very glad I came late to them, because a steady diet of crime in the hinterland would have spoiled a good many charming summers in Scotland. From the early 70's through the late 80's, we spent those summers in St. Andrews. My husband covered the British Open golf and the start of the football ( soccer) season and thanks to the cheap student housing we rented, I had a desk and a place to write. We visited my many relatives, saw football, and got very fit cycling. Wonderful.
Eden river

Particularly enjoyable, though, was the birding. Fife is quite rural; it has a spectacular seacoast, an excellent estuary, and various lochs (lakes) in the interior, all unspoiled by TV programs. For example, I used to visit Morton Lochs, a pair of ponds with an excellent range of waterfowl on the edge of Tentsmuir Forest. To reach this birding spot, I either walked or cycled to the St. A's bus station and took the bus for Dundee. The driver would let me off at the farm track that led to the loch. I returned on the same route, waiting at the side of the deserted road.

In fair weather, this was an enjoyable junket, and it never crossed my mind that I was possibly in mortal danger. I did not then envision mysterious dark vans, homicidal drivers or motorcyclists, and I certainly never looked at the dark waters of the lochs and imagined police divers or sinister floating objects.

Another venue that remained unspoiled in those vacation days was the Eden estuary. The River Eden separates the famous golf courses from Leuchars RAF base. The extensive mudflats before the water reaches the North Sea is an outstanding site for waders and waterfowl. I spent many happy hours tramping across the mud in high boots. Admittedly, I had to watch for the turn of the tide, which is rapid, but being ignorant of the many mud flat and seaside fatalities of UK drama spared me a lot of anxiety.
Old Course

The celebrated Old Course offers a similar case. This venerable athletic ground, shaped in part by grazing sheep and bad weather, is neither the property of some entitled billionaire nor of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club. It is owned by the people of St. Andrews who jealously maintain their access. On Sundays there is no golfing on the Old Course; she is a strict Sabbatarian and on the seventh day, she rests, and the townspeople walk the course and let their dogs run. I thought this was a charming custom.

Now I realize that the local canines must have had singularly poor noses never to have turned up a single corpse in the thickets of gorse or the mighty sand traps. I was blithely ignorant of many other hazards and pitfalls of rural British life. How many folk have tumbled down the steep slopes past the harbor or met a violent end on the deserted beach at the Rock and Spindle, a geologic curiosity so convenient to a secluded walking track? How many have fallen into crime or disaster at the holiday caravan site, another television sink of iniquity.

In those days, too, I could regard the summer garden fetes, popular Scottish fundraising events, as a harmless diversion. Now, of course, I know that the teas and pastries and even games of skill and chance like "Beat the Goalie" where our small son won a tea towel, are just covers for internecine feuds that rival the Game of Thrones.
Fife coast

Truly, Sherlock Holmes was right when he declared the rural world more full of crime and evil than any big city – as least as far as TV goes. The convenience of open fields, uncluttered roads, and big beaches clearly outweighs reality when it comes to fictional crime venues for folks with big trailers and trucks and buses full of actors.

Just the same, I'm glad that I was not yet burdened by vivid scenes of rural murder and mayhem while rambling all those lovely but isolated mud flats, beaches, and country walks.

Pulling Threads: The Dalrymple Mystery and Editing the Dead in the Age of AI

2026-09-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

This month, I'm honored to turn over my column to author, critic, scholar, and all-around swell person Angelic Rodgers. Angel has been one of my closest friends for more than twenty years, dating back to when we were both adjuncts at Auburn University. Of late she's been working on a project that I think will be of considerable interest to SleuthSayers readers, one that has a lot to tell us about the history of our genre--and in particular, one of the many women who made significant contributions to it, but are too often forgotten today. I've invited her to tell you about it, so take it away, Angel!

Angelic Rodgers

Pulling Threads: The Dalrymple Mystery and Editing the Dead in the Age of AI

by Angelic Rodgers

It’s not that I don’t read mysteries, because I long have. As a kid, I watched Scooby-Doo every day after school. Once I started reading chapter books, I gravitated toward Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, Encyclopedia Brown, and Cherry Ames. My sister, our friend Will, and I used to play detective. I was the secretary of their detective agency, a classic younger-sibling assignment. Through undergrad and grad school when I wanted to read recreationally, I often opted for mystery series. Writers like Westlake, Cornwell, Grafton, Highsmith, and Vin Packer offered me an escape from the work of literary analysis.

But I never took up mystery as anything other than recreational reading. That changed as I worked on preparing Octave Thanet’s The Dalrymple Mystery for release in November. The Dalrymple Mystery was originally serialized in The National Magazine from October 1913 to March 1914. It also ran as The Unterrified Citizen in Joseph Chapple’s Newsletter the year before. It is one of the writer’s few magazine stories that was never released in book form. Many of her short stories were collected and reprinted in bound volumes. Three of her novels, Expiation (1890), The Lion’s Share (1907), and By Inheritance (1910), for example, were first serialized.

The project fascinated me from multiple angles—not only was Dalrymple never republished as a stand-alone, but it also was a full-blown mystery. While some of her other novels included mystery elements, Thanet has never (as far as I’m aware) been considered a mystery writer.

When Joseph Walker suggested I do a guest post about my experience with editing and annotating Dalrymple, I wasn’t sure. My first reaction was that I don’t write mystery, crime fiction, or detective fiction. I’m a specialist in nineteenth century women’s fiction typically described as “domestic” or “local color” by training, and my fiction might be categorized as chick lit or lesfic.

I first came across the name Octave Thanet while reading Lilian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men. Faderman identifies her as a lesbian writer who lived part of the year with her partner in a small town in Arkansas. Faderman also pointed out that Thanet was one of the highest-paid and most successful writers for a thirty-year span.

Faderman’s brief mention set me on a quest to find out who Thanet was. Her real name is Alice French. Born in 1850 (the year of The Scarlet Letter) to a well-connected family, Alice took a pen name for her first short story, “Hugo’s Waiting,” which appeared in 1871 under the name “Frances Essex.” Such androgynous pen names, of course, were common for female writers at the time. By 1878, when her “Communists and Capitalists: A Sketch from Life” appeared in Lippincott’s, she had switched to the pen name she would use for fiction until her death in January of 1934. “Octave Thanet” was supposedly chosen from the word “Thanet” that Alice saw on a train car once and from the name of her Abbott Academy roommate Octavia Putnam.

The young Alice French

Despite my area of specialty being examining literary works by three-named American women writing between 1865 and 1914 who might or might not have been what we categorize as queer women today, I’d never heard of Alice French or Octave Thanet. Her contemporaries certainly had, though. Theodore Roosevelt was one of her biggest fans, and they wrote letters to each other. He reportedly traveled with a copy of her Stories of a Western Town (1893) in the “pigskin library” that he took on African safari (according to McMichael). He visited her at Thanford, the Arkansas plantation where she and her companion Jane “Jenny” Allen Crawford spent part of the year. She was well-regarded by contemporaries like W.D. Howells, Susan Glaspell, Sarah Orne Jewett, and other literary figures we are familiar with today.

How is it possible such a successful writer, who lived a chunk of her life in the same state where I grew up, wasn’t covered in any of my undergraduate or graduate seminars?

I became determined to learn more about her. What was it like living and writing as a queer woman in Arkansas at the turn of the century? Also, how could this woman-loving, cabinet-building, cross-genre best-selling author who carried a flask and a pistol everywhere she went be against women’s rights?

Alice French, it turns out, was a complex woman.

Her writing as Octave Thanet is most often categorized as local-color writing that sold well but is not considered valuable or of interest to modern readers. The idea that what was popular in the past is mere pulp today likely rings bells for fans of crime fiction, as well. I probably don’t need to convince crime writers that there’s gold in those pulps and dime novels just waiting to be mined.

George McMichael’s biography, Journey to Obscurity: The Life of Octave Thanet, isn’t truly a critical biography. Crafted from his dissertation, the book largely focuses on the business side of her life as the public persona of “Octave Thanet.” He glosses over the really interesting stuff. After reading the work, I felt I knew more about her family’s socio-economic status and how they came to live in Davenport, Iowa, but many of the details of who Alice French was, what she thought, and how she lived a rich, full life are absent. He set out only to write about Octave Thanet’s life, not Alice French’s.

But Octave Thanet was merely one facet of French’s identity.

McMichael’s biography left me with plenty of threads to pull.

One of the threads I decided to pull first: to locate the “unpublished and unlocated works” listed at the end of the book. McMichael’s discussion of Thanet’s actual writing is surface-level plot summary with details about where she submitted and the result (royalties, advances). Given the era the slim volume was written in and that it was originally McMichael’s dissertation, this surface-level analysis is not surprising.

Like any good detective, though, I started looking for connections and unturned stones.

While The Dalrymple Mystery isn’t designated as an unlocated or unpublished text, a story titled “The Mystery of the Red Hand” appears on the list. This led me on to McMichael’s index, where I found “The Red Hand.” McMichael mentions a short mystery story titled “The Red Hand” in 1909 and that the story was rejected by publishers twice. When checking for other mysteries mentioned, I found The Unterrified Citizen. McMichael does note that text was retitled and published as The Dalrymple Mystery. I suspect it is likely “The Red Hand” and “The Red Hand Mystery” evolved into the text published serially in The National Magazine as The Dalrymple Mystery from October 1913 to March 1914.

Of Thanet’s foray into detective fiction, McMichael only states that in 1909, when she attempted to sell “The Red Hand Mystery” to magazines, she was simply trying to cash in on the trend started by Arthur Conan Doyle, Anna Katherine Green, and others.

That didn’t lead me to expect much of the work.

The process of compiling the text was fairly simple once I located it in a scanned volume of The National Magazine. Internet Archive has a treasure trove of periodicals digitized, and recovery (as long as the volumes are complete) is a matter of searching the massive PDFs for the installments. I’m a Mac user, so Preview makes whittling the massive digital file down into the serial installments relatively easy. Then, I used the Adobe Acrobat PDF to Word tool to get the manuscript in text form. With a bit more cleanup to get rid of text carried over from half pages Thanet’s work shared with other contributors, I was ready to begin the real editing work.

I approached the work first as cleanup and fixing all of the scanning and conversion errors, and I kind of expected that to be the most time-consuming aspect of the project. I didn’t expect the work to have much value or interest, as Thanet is not known for her mystery writing, and McMichael had nothing to say about it beyond that it was serialized.

I should have known better—Dalrymple features numerous threads to pull.

Anyone who has studied American literature between 1850 and 1920 may be familiar with Hawthorne’s 1855 lament about the “damned mob of scribbling women” who were outselling him. Mark Twain likewise struggled with sales and control over his content to the point that he became an early adopter of self-publishing in 1884 when he established Charles L. Webster and Company. While male writers of the time–Hawthorne, Melville, Twain–are well-known, the women who outsold them are often absent from reading lists. This creates a false sense of those texts being unworthy of study. And, I fell into that trap of thinking that because only one biography existed about Alice French and her work as Thanet, there wouldn’t be much heavy lifting to do.

National blurb touting the story

Specifically, I assumed editing this text would largely be a mechanical exercise of my editing skills. I expected to fly through the edits and say some bland words about how this was a fun project.

What I found was something far more exciting and engaging—the world of domestic mysteries and detective fiction written by women.

Alice French’s work goes far beyond local-color writing about quaint old ladies with anxiety about marriage and family. French was well-read on the news of the day, both locally and nationally. Her nonfiction works include essays on Arkansas and on issues like losing her leg to diabetes as well as topics like labor strikes, suffrage, photography, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, and the 1898 Trans- Mississippi and International Exhibition. She had a finger to the pulse of America.

Her fiction, likewise, often focuses on reform. One of her stories condemning the practice of convict leasing in Arkansas, “Trusty, No. 49,” (1890) developed as a result of her interest in court cases. She subscribed to a weekly paper so she could track court cases that sounded interesting. She would then make the trip from Clover Bend to Walnut Ridge and observe cases in court.

While there aren’t court scenes in The Dalrymple Mystery, the story does involve crime and two older women, the Dalrymple sisters, who are witness to a mystery and its resolution. The Dalrymple sisters awaken on an ordinary morning to find a corpse in their library. By the time the police arrive, the body has vanished and the game is afoot. Upon searching the property, in an attempt to locate the body, they come across a bloody handprint:

Plain and ominous on the cement walk running past the porte cochére to the side door was a big red hand, the dexter finger pointing to the words above, “No. l,” daubed in the same blood red. There were faint footprints, but so trampled that it was not easy to distinguish them, and all about were flecks and splotches of blood.

With a tiny bit of help from the police, the Dalrymple sisters and their friends—a female newspaper reporter, two teen boys, and a physician critical of the justice system—set out to uncover the victim’s identity, as well as that of the murderer.

Without revealing a lot of spoilers, I can tell you I pulled a lot of tiny and some very large threads from a text I expected to just clean up and reprint. Some of these threads ranged from minor things like clocked stockings to major crime syndicate issues like the early mafia’s Black Hand extortion schemes. Colonial Revival architecture, early electric cars, kimonos as fashion in the nineteenth century, and Sheraton dining room furniture are just a few of the other threads I followed.

Thanet in later years

Thanet also left a clue about early American mystery novelists—Anna Katherine Green, in particular.

Green has been discussed on this blog before, notably in Louise A. Willis’ “Three Firsts” in December of 2013 and in Leigh Lunden’s “Women in Mystery History” in March of 2014.

In Chapter Ten of The Dalrymple Mystery, she drops names: “Radcliffe was a devoted reader of Gaboriau, Doyle, Anna Katherine Green and all the newer workers of detective marvels in fiction.” I knew Doyle’s name, of course, but Anna Katherine Green’s name was new to me, so I knew that needed a note. First, I turned to McMichael’s biography to see if he mentioned Doyle or Green. And he had–Doyle is mentioned four times, Anna Katherine Green (as “Ann Katherine Greene”) once.

Contrary to McMichael’s claims that Thanet was merely trend hopping and never completed a successful mystery for Bobbs-Merril, she did finish and successfully publish a mystery story. The Dalrymple Mystery was not only completed, but it is rich with cultural and historical references.

We just have to pull the threads.

One of the most interesting threads I pulled in annotating Dalrymple is William J. Flynn’s 1919 book The Barrel Mystery. Considered one of the first true crime books in the United States, the work focuses on the Black Hand and its role in a series of murders in 1903. Thanet would have read the 1903 newspaper coverage of the murder of Benedetto Madonio, whose body was found stuffed in a barrel on a Manhattan street in The New York Times and other outlets. Even though her story appeared before Flynn’s book, she was harvesting story ideas in real time from the same newspaper articles that covered his investigation.

I never could have imagined that a forgotten serial by Octave Thanet would lead me to a foundational true crime account of forgery and Mafia killings.

Not only were women writing serial mysteries and selling to magazines (Dalrymple was never published as a stand-alone novel in Thanet’s time), but many of the writers we do know from the time were writing thrillers and mysteries. Louisa May Alcott is a prime example. Even though it’s been decades since Stern & Rostenberg discovered Alcott’s “blood and thunder” thrillers published under her pen name of A.M. Barnard, the work Alcott is most known for is Little Women. Alcott, though, was far more cutting-edge, and her V.V. or Plots and Counterplots, an 1865 parody of Poe’s detective character C. Auguste Dupin, is now considered an important part of American mystery history. For more discussion of their work, see “Rostenberg & Stern: An Appreciation.”

Text recovery and analysis like that done by Stern and Rostenberg is important work. The impulse to find and fully appreciate works by women in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century is what drove my work as a graduate student and early scholar. It’s what motivated me in 2004 to learn who Alice French was and to try and understand how Octave Thanet has been dismissed as just another quaint female author despite her clear interest in politics, crime news, penal system reform, and court cases.

We live in a horrifying age of fast fiction and digital literary schemes. In the post-Kindle era, public domain reprints have flooded the retail market. I’m often confused by people paying top dollar for texts that are ripped from Gutenberg or Internet Archive and reproduced with little to no editing, no annotations, and no introductory essays with context. From the beginning of KDP eBook publishing, simply repackaging public domain texts with eye-catching covers has been touted as a way to financial freedom.

Basic preservation is also important work. We should be doing basic conservation and digitization of texts. And, I totally applaud the work of Standard eBooks. We should support the curation, editing, and formatting of works from the past. But we need to go further.

In the early days of working on Dalrymple I kept telling myself that I was merely flexing my editing and annotation muscles. I had gotten lost in the sea of technology as king. I had to remember the basics. It’s easy to get lost in the speed that digitization and AI scraping have created. But in doing so we drown in the shallows. After all, the book market is flooded with reprints. Now, we can just feed public domain texts to AI bots and have it spit out books in the style of Octave Thanet or Anna Katherine Green.

We’ve lost our ability to pull threads and reveal the patterns underneath the surface. We get lost in the “look what I found” moment and forget to answer why what we found matters.

Now when I think about this edition of The Dalrymple Mystery, I think about work of recovery and exploration, rather than simply producing reprints with pretty covers. While university press editions like Duke’s 2003 The Dead Letter and The Figure Eight attempt to reintroduce foundational works to modern readers, those editions are often not truly accessible. Specifically, those reprints often are not palatable to a modern audience. While I enjoy a pithy essay about domestic detective fiction that is heavily footnoted and rooted in literary criticism I might be able to track down on J-Stor, a lot of readers don’t. A university press imprint with a “critical introduction” written in academese often signals “boring” to a reader.

Not everyone is willing to mine that introduction for the one or two golden nuggets it might provide.

In addition, reprints from university and scholarly presses are not affordable to laypersons or even graduate students or contingent faculty. Some eBook editions, like Cambridge’s 2023 edition of Ganor’s Susan Glaspell in Context, cost $126 for the Kindle edition and $120 in hardcover. Even the original edition from University Press of Michigan sells for $33 in eBook, $35 in paperback, and $85 in hardback. The Duke reprint of Meta Victoria Fuller Victor’s novels is more affordable right now, but they still ring up at over $17 for eBook, $33 for paperback, and over $90 for hardbacks.

It’s not hard to see why folks aren’t buying those versions that provide some background and context for public domain texts. And, even though projects like Standard eBooks do a great job at providing beautiful digital reprints for free, they don’t tend to provide any context or analysis.

Proofreading and repackaging is only the first step. If we’re going to combat the literacy crisis, we have to go further—we have to provide affordable reprints with enough context and analysis to make readers’ fingers itch to the point they start their own thread pulling.

After all, true text recovery is detective work when done well. Once you start pulling threads, the text opens up and sends you on a million side quests. We live in an age where we can have a bot go out and put feelers across the internet looking for information. Despite the virtue signaling we see online about AI, we’re inundated with AI flyers, cartoon versions of photographs, deepfake videos, and even AI-authored novels. Tons of texts (some contemporary and some public domain) are likely entered into LLMs daily by giants like Anthropic and by individuals, looking to cash in somehow by training AI to output “books” that will make them rich.

We can’t leave this kind of work to the bots. Bots have been trained on materials like McMichael’s biography that dismiss or ignore the connections.

To fully engage with the texts, we must pull at the threads. Only then can we bridge the gap between the digitized versions of texts we can find in public domain sites like Gutenberg and the high-priced reprints put out by academic presses.

In the beginning I worried my efforts to annotate and publish The Dalrymple Mystery would matter to anyone else. I told myself the process was the thing and kept going. And, I’m so glad to report that the process led me back to my roots as a literary detective.

Angelic Rodgers is currently exploring the Lake Chapala area of Mexico when she’s not chasing down obscure and largely forgotten tidbits of writing by women in America. She is an editor, writer, and founder of The Octave Thanet Project. Her edition of The Dalrymple Mystery is set to release in mid-November from Thanet House Press. The cover for the upcoming reprint is seen here. This cover is from a lino-cut Angel's sister, Renee Rodgers, designed for the book. They researched cover designers of the time and after discovering Margaret Armstrong was in vogue (and designed covers for some of Octave Thanet’s works), Renee moved forward with a design inspired by Armstrong’s style. And, yes, that is the same sister mentioned in the piece.

In addition to her work on Thanet, she also writes fiction and creative nonfiction. You can find her most recent updates on her Substack and on her website at http://www.angelicrodgers.com.

AND NOW BACK TO JOE:

Thanks, Angel! Readers, once The Dalrymple Mystery is available for purchase, I'll include a reminder in my following column. I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to see this important piece of our history,

IN OTHER NEWS . . .

Another of the anthologies that was orphaned when Down & Out Books was shuttered has returned to shelves, this time with a very snazzy new cover! Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun: Private Eyes in the Material World, edited by Michael Bracken, collects tales of PIs at work in the 1980s. My story, "The Right Size of Favor," about a threatened shakedown of the Hands Across America charity event, was selected by fellow SleuthSayer Rob Lopresti as his "best mystery story I read this week" in May of last year, and was also chosen for the upcoming volume Best Private Eye Stories of the Year. Many thanks to Crimson Gate Books for getting this dynamite collection back out into the world!

I'm also in love with the cover for Hooked on Urban Legends--and Murder!, the new anthology from Wildside Press, edited by Donna Andrews, Barb Goffman, and Marcia Talley. Crime stories based on urban legends--it's a fantastic idea for an anthology, and I can tell you the writers here really came through on the assignment. My entry, "The Things We Remember," kicks off the book with a tale about the grisly legends on one college campus--and the even more grisly origins of one of them. Fun fact: the story mentions several campus legends, all of which (save the central one the story revolves around) are actual stories told on campuses where I studied or worked.

Thanks again to Angel. See you all next month!

How Important is Plot?

2026-09-26T00:37:27.413-04:00

Earlier this month, Liz posted a compelling blog about Standalone Characters. This made an almost uncanny introduction to the post I had written below, for September. I always re-examine my life in September - remnants of having taught college for over 25 years, no doubt.

So I ask today:

How important is plot?

I work hard on plot. I don't start writing until I know the end of my crime novels. Blame it on my short story training, perhaps, where every word must matter. In a novel, I design every scene so it moves the story forward. If it doesn't, out it goes.

Not only that, but I work hard to write a plot readers haven't seen before. And after 60 short stories and 22 crime novels, that's not easy! It takes me at least a year to imagine and write a 75,000 word mystery book.

So I was somewhat taken aback recently, when I asked a number of my readers which books of mine they liked best, and why.

WHAT READERS SAID:

Almost everyone said some version of, "The Pharaoh's Curse Murders. I like the banter between Lucy and Elf, her maid." Or "The Goddaughter books. They're so funny!"

When I tried to pin them down to an actual book, and an actual plot, that got harder. One said, "The book where The Lone Rearranger was introduced." Another, "I really like Nico in The Goddaughter books." Another - "I loved the fashions in The Silent Film Star Murders."

No one mentioned the plot of any of the books.

To say I was surprised is an understatement. All that time creating plots with unique spins? Plots where an astute reader might come to the same conclusion as the protagonist, at the very same time?

But never too soon. The clues must be clever enough, so a reader isn't disappointed. We don't want them to figure out the mystery too soon.

WHAT ABOUT CRIME WRITERS?

And then I talked to some noted crime-writer friends of mine. I asked them the same question. Which of my books did you like best? The answers came fast and furious.

"The one where Lucy shoots the snake. Clever reveal."

"Your latest, the Egyptian one. I loved the unusual and daring ending."

(There were more, but to list them here would be spoilers.)

But they all had one thing in common: they said something about the plot.

So here's what I came away with: Readers remember and fall in love with characters.

Writers love characters too. But they are more apt to point out a clever plot, because they know how hard it is to pull off.

My conclusion: Of course, the best books have both. Good Characters and good plots. I expect readers would notice if the plot was ho-hum. I certainly do.

I write the books I wish someone else would write, so I could read them. I feel blessed when readers like them too.

What about you? How important is plot to your writing? Is plot more important in a short story than a novel?

Compared to Agatha Christie by The Toronto Star, and “Christie-meets-Wodehouse” by Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Melodie Campbell is the winner of 10 awards. Her publications include 22 novels and over 60 short stories. The Pharaoh's Curse Murders, from Cormorant books, has just been released. http://www.melodiecampbell.com

The Horse Latitudes

2026-09-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

More than a few years ago my sister-in-law gave me her copy of The Horse Latitudes, Robert Ferrigno’s first novel. Knowing I wrote crime fiction, she thought the book would appeal to me.

The setup is on the surface straightforward. Former anthropology professor and former drug dealer Danny DiMedici returns to his apartment from a night swim, when he’s confronted by two detectives, whom he believes are from Narcotics. It turns out they are homicide detectives, who want to question him about his ex-wife’s blood-spattered beach house. There are no bodies at the scene, which convinces Danny that Lauren Kiel, his ex, is still alive.

The book is full of quirky characters:^*

Detective Holt—“She was the best dressed cop Danny had ever seen, and wore a tailored gray suit too clingy for Sunday mass and too conservative for a good table at Trumps. Her thick red hair was bound by an ornate antique gold clip. She looked like old money, the kind that got a Yale law degree but felt it was her civic duty to spend a few years with a good PD on the way to a federal judgeship” (p. 15).
Detective Steiner—“His tie had a yellow ‘I Love Grandpa’ pattern on a black background” (p. 16).
Dr. Reese—“More gristle than meat, Reese was a tough little bantam with a cropped bullet skull and a look of intense calculation.…Reese was a burnt-black and unforgiving as a Ubangi shaman or a Yaqui medicine man—the very people who had contributed so much to his success” (pp. 45–46).
Boyd and Lloyd, twin nephews of Dr. Reese—“The twins were his greatest achievement and his most bitter failure. They were raw power, totally obedient, but their performance was erratic. Throw a stick into a boiling volcano, and they’d fetch it. As long as they remembered what it looked like.…What a waste of DNA. They didn’t even dream” (p. 78).
Michael Kiel, Lauren’s brother: “Michael stood in the front yard wearing baggy madras Bermudas and a white letter sweater, a Pebble Beach Country Club golf cap rakishly tilted back on his head. His ancient jungle boots were spit-shined and laced halfway up. Even with his question-mark posture, he was huge: six feet six, with a wide, flat chest and spindly legs” (p. 88).

And that’s just for starters.

Despite how much I like the book, it took me a long time to understand that what made it stand out in my mind is how it undermines the tropes of the crime fiction hero. Why is Danny swimming to exhaustion every night? Because he’s still in love with his ex. Why did she leave him? Because after he witnessed the murder of friends of his, he lost his edge and got out of the drug business. Lauren’s response? “‘God hates a coward’” (p. 12).

Filled with nonlinear narrative and told from multiple points of view, it’s not a conventional crime novel and it doesn’t have a thriller’s pacing, but despite all that, or maybe because of all that, it’s one of my favorites.

Robert Ferrigno’s path to fiction writing reads like one of his novels:

I was born in Florida, growing up on the last paved street of a small town, spending my youth cutting secret passages through the palmetto thickets with a machete and occasionally burning down those palmettos for the simple pleasure of seeing the fire trucks arrive, sirens blaring.

After earning a college degree in Philosophy and a Masters degree in Creative Writing, I thought that I would be happy being a college professor, writing dense, literary novels which I would assign to my students. I found, however, that being a professor was mostly a matter of going to meetings, and instead went back to my first love, poker.

I spent the next five years gambling full-time and living in a high-crime area populated by starving artists, alcoholics and petty criminals. After a time, I got restless and used some of my winnings to start a punk rock magazine called “The Rocket.” The success of “The Rocket” got me a job as a feature writer for a daily newspaper in Southern California, where I took the adventure-and-new-money beat. Over the next seven years I flew with the Blue Angels, drove Ferraris and went for desert survival training with gun nuts. Great job but I wanted to write novels. I quit my day job and started work.^†

When he was a journalist, Ferrigno got to interview Elmore Leonard, one of his literary heroes. Ferrigno had been writing fiction on the weekends but making little progress on his novel. Leonard gave him some life-changing advice:

You get up at five and you start work, said Mr. L., no messing around making coffee or buttering toast. You sit down and start writing. At 7 you stop, if you’re in the middle of a sentence, you stop, and then you make coffee, take a shower, have breakfast, whatever you normally do. You’re done working on the novel for the day. You do that every day and at the end of a year, you’ll have a novel. Then you send it out to an agent and you start on the next one.^‡

Leonard later offered to blurb Ferrigno’s The Horse Latitudes, if he liked it. Which he did, much to Ferrigno’s and his publisher’s delight. Later, after the book had gone on to some success, Ferrigno let Leonard know that he hadn’t exactly followed his advice:

I told him I had lied to him when I said I would get up every day at five a.m. as he had suggested. Yeah? His voice on the line tense now. Yes sir, I told him, I got up at four a.m. every day for the last year and a half. You’re a better writer than I am, so I figured I needed the extra hour. It made him laugh, a dry cackle that kind of hung up at the back of his throat. A beautiful laugh.^‡

I’ve read The Horse Latitudes many times, and even now, I’ll open it up at random and reread a few pages. How inspiring has Robert Ferrigno been to me? I gave Erin Ferrigno, my female PI, his last name. What books or stories inspire you? Let me know in the comments.

Finally, thanks to Stacy Woodson, Robert Lopresti, and Leigh Lundin for bringing me onboard SleuthSayers. I’m thrilled to be here.

Tom Milani’s (www.tommilani.com) short fiction has appeared online and in several anthologies. His stories have been selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2026 and The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2026. Places That Are Gone, his debut novel, was published May 2025 and is being republished this October by Open Road Integrated Media.

Notes:

^* All page numbers for quotations from The Horse Latitudes are taken from the paperback edition, published in 1990 by William Morrow and Company.

^† “About the Author,” Crime Pays, accessed August 12, 2026, https://web.archive.org/web/20060220135533/http://robertferrigno.com/bio.html.

^‡ Robert Ferrigno, ”Thanks, Mr. L.,” National Review, August 24, 2013, https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/08/thanks-mr-l-robert-ferrigno/, accessed August 12, 2026.

Crime Scene Comix Case 2026-09-039, Gold that Glitters

2026-09-24T00:05:10.130-04:00

Once again we highlight our criminally favorite cartoonist, Future Thought channel of YouTube. We love the sausage-shaped Shifty, a Minion gone bad.

Yikes! In this Crime Time episode, only one outcome is possible.



	© www.FutureThought.tv

That’s today’s crime cinema. Hope you enjoyed the show. Be sure to visit Future Thought YouTube channel.

John Irvin's TINKER TAILOR

2026-09-23T00:00:00.000-04:00

“In my jungle, you’d be just another asshole.”

The director John Irvin died last month. He wasn’t a brand name, and he wasn’t identified with any particular genre. His best-known picture is probably Hamburger Hill, from 1987. But he made two indelible stories: le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Frederick Forsyth’s Dogs of War.

The Dogs of War was Forsyth’s third novel, and it has a convoluted back story. The plot involves a mercenary-led coup against a corrupt African dictatorship, and Forsyth created a legend that he was prepping a coup himself, against Equatorial Guinea – which got him inside the world of guns for hire, and gives the book its nuts-and-bolts authenticity - but also suggested to the wrong people that Forsyth’s invented coup was the real deal, and there was later an actual coup in Guinea, similar in many ways to the paramilitary operation mounted in Forsyth’s novel.

The movie streamlines the story considerably, without making it less morally ambiguous or any less savage. The preparation is in itself fascinating – Bill Goldman once said the trick to a good heist movie is that you show the audience how it’s done, and the story arc is much like a robbery picture, the pitch, the recon, the score – and then the moral reckoning. Forsyth is said to have disliked the picture, which may be because of the necessary compressions in the script, but there’s no wasted motion.

The mini-series adaption of Tinker Tailor takes a far more circular approach, with a lot of breathing room, none of which lets any of the air out of its tires. It’s consistently nerve-wracking. Le Carré, it should be admitted, doesn’t suffer from the long-form. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Deadly Affair (Sidney Lumet’s 1967 movie of Call for the Dead) are very good pictures, both with a runtime of just under two hours, but generally speaking, le Carré is better when you don’t cut corners. The Little Drummer Girl is a terrific book, and it turns in on itself, winding the clock. The 1984 movie with Diane Keaton is an honorable attempt, but the 2018 adaption, with Florence Pugh, is a masterpiece. The same can be said of Tinker Tailor and its sequel, Smiley’s People. Each of the television versions run a full six hours.

Tinker Tailor is very much script-driven, and Arthur Hopcraft’s screenplay is labyrinthine without becoming unnecessarily tortuous. It also has an extraordinary cast, beginning with Guinness, but with Bernard Hepton as Toby Esterhase and Beryl Reid as Connie Sachs, Joss Ackland, Ian Bannen, Hywel Bennett, Patrick Stewart (in a cameo), Nigel Stock, Sian Phillips, and the incomparable Ian Richardson as Bill Haydon.

Tony Pierce-Roberts’ other cinematography credits include The Remains of the Day and one of my own secret enthusiasms, A Private Function. But managing this herd of cats was John Irvin’s job description. It was a five-month shoot, complicated by logistics issues and the threat of strikes. Alec Guinness reportedly had cold feet about playing Smiley, at the outset, but Irvin wouldn’t humor him. Asked later what he thought about the director, Guinness said, “Balls behind the camera.”

“Being a director is the most privileged existence there is,” Irvin remarked of his career. "It's the best table in the restaurant."

House of Creativity

2026-09-22T00:00:00.000-04:00

One of many paintings by Temple’s mother
we have hanging in our home.

Temple and I live in a home filled with the creativity of others.

Temple’s mother and my mother were artists, and their paintings adorn the walls, as does a painting by Temple’s great-grandmother on her father’s side. Temple’s father crafted our dining room table, two end tables in our living room, and other furniture throughout the house. We have several quilts sewn by our mothers and other family members. We have original art and limited edition prints we’ve collected over the years, some by friends and acquaintances and some by strangers. Additionally, though I have none of his work, my mother’s stepfather was a photographer who also created and sold jewelry.

Our own contributions pale by comparison: A few shelves contain books I wrote, edited, or contributed to, and many of Temple’s tiny sketches and watercolors peek out from shelves in several rooms.

Temple and I both come from decidedly hard-working families, none of whom ever made a living from art, but they found time to create it, just as we do now. The attitudes they passed along, though, were markedly different.

As a child and as a young man, I drew and took photographs and created nothing but a drawer full of sketches, drawings, and photographs that demonstrate no particular skill at visual arts. My musical attempts led to a collection of instruments sufficient to outfit a rock band but which serve to remind me I have no particular musical skills.

When I was young, my mother encouraged my attempts. Though she could never afford lessons, she gave me my first guitar, and my first drum sticks and practice pad. She also gave me a Brownie camera. More importantly, when I told her I wanted to be a writer, she gave me my first typewriter and later gave me my second. Though she never made a dime from her art, my mother never told me I needed something to fall back on.

Though her mother and great-grandmother were artists and her father crafted furniture, Temple’s parents did not encourage her. They emphasized the need to get a job and earn a living, so her path to art was a much tougher one. Rather than being in the forefront of her life—as it has been in mine—Temple’s pursuit of art was squeezed into the tiny scraps of time between her adult responsibilities. Only in the last few years has she felt free to explore her artistic calling. Now, just as I have a room where I write, she has a room where she paints.

I wish Temple had not had to battle her upbringing to find her way to art—especially because of her family’s artistic legacy—but, if nothing else, it proves that artists will find a way.

Pencils down

2026-09-21T00:00:00.000-04:00

Among the common laments of struggling writers is the problem of getting started. Writing that first sentence, paragraph, chapter. Personally, I like that part. If all I had to do was start a project, my batting average would soar. The difficulty for me is starting something good. That’s a whole n’other kettle of fish. And a consistent ravager of averages.

There’s an opposite problem, which is knowing when to stop. Both these issues are

dealt with by Issac Newton, who basically said getting something moving takes some effort, though stopping it can be even harder, or actually impossible, without the intervention of an opposing force.

Technically, the best treatment for this affliction is to have thought out the structure of your book in advance. If you have a beginning, a middle and an end, presumably you’ll know when it’s time to stop. This gets us into the tiresome debate over who’s a pantser and who’s an outliner. If you believe the beleaguered panelists at a writers conference, we’re either one or the other. Of course, the truth is usually somewhere in the middle, though when it comes to wrapping up a mystery novel, it’s pretty helpful to have a destination in mind as you’re writing along.

Another trope of the writing commentariat is E.L. Doctrow’s bit, "Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” That’s a lovely bit of poetry, but the most likely outcome of this approach is hitting a tree, or running over your next-door neighbor. Employing a purely Doctrowian strategy, you might find yourself driving from Oxford, Mississippi to the Upper Peninsula, and not have a clue about how to find your way back. If all that driving is a stand-in for work product, that means you‘ll be throwing out a lot of pages, and this I find

inexcusably wasteful. I’m more in Reed Farrel Coleman’s camp, who says something like, “I know how to get started, and where I want to end up, and then I figure out how to get there along the way.”

There are believable reports from the conference stage of writers who find their plots revealing themselves as they write, with the finale popping into view at just the right moment, that is, when they’ve reached about 100 thousand words and everything suddenly makes a lot of sense. I know this happens, and for some, it’s the only way it can happen, but I suspect their genius lies in the subconscious, which has been ably managing navigation while the driver is at the wheel wearing out her pants.

Newton did stipulate that the force needed to arrest motion is external, but this needn‘t apply to automobiles (which have brakes) or disciplined, experienced writers itching to write “Finis”. Though in support of Newton’s proviso, we also have editors, armed with book contracts, underpinned by production costs and sales forecasts. I worked for a publisher once, and I got to say, “We love your book. Please cut forty pages.” I think this always made for a better novel, and importantly, one we could afford to print.

Have you ever had a big chunk of writing get gobbled up by the computer, and been forced to recreate it all from scratch? And then somehow come across the original pages? In my case, the reincarnated version was always better, though some nice bits were invariably lost. I copy these down and squirrel them away for future use.

This might give you the idea that you can always improve your book if you have the time to constantly fiddle. Though there’s a subset of the sin of overwriting, which is over rewriting. In woodworking and car mechanics, two pursuits that have a lot in common with banging out novels, this is called “Fixing it till it breaks.” It’s the delusion of perfectionists that refining will always elevate the product, not knowing when they’ve crossed into

sabotaging the messiness that actually creates something fresh and notable. Whether inflicted by a heavy-handed editor, or ones internal arbiter, it amounts to a crime against art. It's not just about when to stop, but how you do it.

By far my favorite form of ending is one that really isn’t. The reader thinks he’s idling around in a denouement, when all of a sudden he’s back in the soup. Or a final twist pulls it all into a more satisfying conclusion (e.g. Presumed Innocent, my personal crime writing GOAT.) James Cameron, undoubtedly inspired by Rasputin, built about five climaxes into the original Terminator, which my young son at the time renamed The Determinedator. This technique is a lot of fun, but not that easy to pull off without seeming contrived. I admire the writers who do.

Our most recent terrier, who died having outlived all his successors, always looked like he was eager to get on to the next thing. He didn’t know what it was, but he was sure it was going to be great. He might have been possessed by eternal optimism or just some fundamental drive; it wasn’t exactly joy, but certainly the sublime fulfillment that comes from never being entirely fulfilled.