SleuthSayers

Old Myths, New Stories

2026-09-29T20:12:00.000-04:00

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.

Timmy the Greek

2026-09-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

As mentioned once before, during the pandemic, I began sketching cartoons. Eventually, I became addicted and couldn’t stop.

Not everyone loves ’em. My friend Thrush claims he hates them, they’re obscene he says, they’re unfunny. But he dislikes all animation and cartoons, so perhaps I shouldn’t read too much into it.

But that is a problem… I can’t always tell if something’s funny or not, and I definitely lean toward dark humor, less a product of Covid than wicked imagination. Are they any good? I don’t know, I’m an amateur, not a pro, but they’re fun and I’m improving.

What I do know is that a great many cartoons of today either aren’t amusing or rely upon a 5^th grader’s sense of humor. On the flip side, it must be tricky to come up with a funny comic every day or even once a week.

Because of the coronavirus, the majority of my efforts were either medically tied or came from wandering, peripatetic thoughts. Virtually none related to crime. This past week corrected that. What can be more criminal than mobsters having a pleasant chat in a warehouse?

The Interrogation

Influences

Dick Tracy’s Chester Gould suggested the stylized geometry, angular lines, the period, and zoot suits. I debated a 3-D look, but decided against it. Squat characters found at any number of sources finished the cast. The warehouse setting is like a fourth character, silent but menacing. So step back into the dark as we bid hello and goodbye to Timmy the Greek.

Funny or not? Dish it out. I may not have a career in cartooning after all.

The Way I Do It

2026-09-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

The other day, as I sat here wondering what to post for my SleuthSayers column, I received an emailed request from an editor for an interview about the way I write short stories. I agreed, he sent me the questions to answer, and one of them was How often do you revise and edit your work? The day after, before writing more of the piece--or do you complete the work, then go into revision mode?

I dutifully responded to that question (and to the others), and only afterward did it occur to me how good a question it was, because I know a number of writers who approach editing and rewriting in many different ways. And--full disclosure, here--I also realized that this was handy fodder for a SleuthSayers post.

Another thought that struck me was something I heard years ago: A good teacher doesn't say, "This is the way you do it." A good teacher says, "This is the way I do it."

So . . . (though I'm no longer a teacher) what do I do, with regard to writing and revising a manuscript?

The whole process, for me, happens in three steps:

Step 1: Planning. I get an idea and--since I'm an outliner--I put the whole story together in my head, start to finish, mostly visualizing separate scenes. It might change a bit later, during the actual writing, but I have to have the entire story, including an ending, in mind before the writing begins. And yes, I know that's not the only way to create a story. But it's what works for me.

Step 2: Writing. I write (type) the first draft of the story, from beginning to end, in all its rough and unedited glory. During that draft, I sometimes substitute letters or abbreviations for characters' names--H for husband, W for wife, N for neighbor, V for villain, and so on--and insert brief notes in certain places like "come up with with a reason for this" or "add detail," or "add background," etc. In other words, I write down the flow of the story, all the way through, and leave out anything that might slow me down.

So no, I do not "edit as I go."

NOTE: I know many, many writers who do. They write, let's say, an opening to a story, and when that's done, they carefully edit that opening, making sure that section of the story is as perfect as they can make it--and only then do they go on to the next section. They write a few pages of, let's say, the middle of the story, and then edit that part, again making it as perfect as it can be. Then they write the next part, and edit and revise that. And on and on, all the way to the ending. The result is, when those writers are done writing the story, voila!--the story's finished. I mean, completely finished--there's no need to edit or rewrite further. They're ready to send that story out into the world and have it make something of itself.

Step 3: Editing. When I've finished writing my rough draft, I go back to the beginning and edit the entire story.

3a: I often use a triage approach. By that I mean, I might address the most important things first, like plot holes, continuity problems, timeline differences, weaknesses in structure, etc. I also, during this "step," try to plug the needed information into the place-holders I had put in during the first draft: explanations, clarifications, background details, names of characters, whatever.

3b: Then I move on to matters of style: strengthening sentences and paragraphs; correcting errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, etc.; making the dialogue snappier, weeding out unneeded words, and finding and fixing really minor issues like typos, backward apostrophes, and so forth. During this step I read and re-read the story, trying to do it through the eyes of a reader and not a writer. The last thing I do here is run the whole thing through SpellCheck and then read it one more time, looking for things SpellCheck won't catch, like typing "doe snot" when what I meant was "does not."

3c: Finally, I take a hard look at the formatting of the whole manuscript. Spacing, margins, indentations, italics, scene break designations, fonts, page numbering, other header information, etc.

I should point out, here, that I actually have two reasons for doing all this the way I do, rather than "editing as I go."

Reason #1: Doing that info-dump first draft gives me the feeling that I've put a safety net in place. I like having the whole framework down on paper (well, on my hard drive) before I start editing anything. That probably goes back to being a plotter instead of a pantser. I need that reassurance. And having that ending securely in place, even though I might change it later, keeps me from wandering off the path during the middle of the story.

Reason #2: I sometimes, during the rewriting stage, I think of new things that might change and improve the flow, or even the outcome, of the story. If I edited each section "as I went," these later changes in the plot would probably require me to go back and change things earlier in the story to make my later changes work. I might need to add all kinds of foreshadowing info. If so, I would be forced to completely re-edit sections that I'd already spent a lot of time editing. That's extra work. I don't want to have to go back and add and decorate another room on the bottom floor of the house I'm building when I have already begun building the second and third floors on top of it.

One final note: I don't do multiple drafts of a story. I write a first draft and save it with the story name as the file name, and when it's done and I start editing it, I type the edits directly into the first draft. So when I finish, I have one and only one file of the story. And these days, I usually don't print the story out at all. Everything--the writing, the editing, and the submitting to a market--is done electronically. I do, however, have an automatic backup of everything, both on- and off-site. I should also mention that I'm one of those odd people who actually enjoys the rewriting and the polishing of a manuscript. I know lots of people hate that part of writing. What can I say?

So, good or bad, that's my process. How do you do it? Do you edit as you go? Edit every page before starting the next? Write a certain number of pages or words a day? Stop writing with a cliffhanger so you'll be inspired to continue the next day?

Whatever it is, if it works, great. Do whatever's best for you. And vive la difference!

Luke Nickle Fights AI

2026-09-18T00:18:44.528-04:00

A Resurrection of Poe and Baudelaire

2026-09-17T00:00:00.000-04:00

On September 9, David Edgerley Gates wrote "The Tell-Tale Heart", about Edgar Allan Poe's creating "dread through a very calculated use of echoes and repetition, foreshadowing and false narratives. What he’s struggling to write, in effect, is psychological horror. Even though that term, or even the concept, didn’t exist at the time." (LINK)

I'm not sure that the concept of deliberately creating dread through various means wasn't around in Poe's time is entirely true - there were a lot of Regency Gothic Novels (which Jane Austen made splendid fun of in Northanger Abbey): 1764's The Castle of Ontranto (Horace Walpole),

“and then the figure, turning slowly round, discovered to Frederic the fleshless jaws and empty sockets of a skeleton, wrapt in a hermit’s cowl. “Angels of peace protect me!” cried Frederic, recoiling. “Deserve their protection!” said the spectre.”
― Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto

1796's The Monk (Matthew Gregory Lewis), 1794's The Mysteries of Udolpho (Ann Radclyffe),

“You speak like a heroine,” said Montoni contemptuously, “we shall see if you can suffer like one.”

― Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho

and many more which centered around decay, corruption, sex, dark romance, supernatural forces, wickedness, innocence, and a whole lot of gore.

But going back to Poe - he was a poet before he was ever a prose writer, and it shows. Which is undoubtedly the reason why Charles Baudelaire (considered by many to be the modern French poet, and the French poet of modernity) was obsessed with him.

“A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.”
― Edgar Allan Poe
“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire

"In...1847, I came upon a few fragments of Edgar Allan Poe, and felt a strange sort of shock…[.] I discovered, believe me if you will, poems and stories that I had already thought of, but of which I had only a vague, confused and disorganised idea, and which Poe had managed to pull together and perfect...." (Source)

And Baudelaire promptly dropped (almost) everything, and spent his most productive years (1856-1865) translating Poe’s works into French. Now he wasn't the first to translate Poe, but he was the one who made Poe's work sing in French. (Baudelaire's Translations at Gutenberg Press for free.) And his translations became the standard throughout Europe.

First note: Despite his obsession with Poe, when Baudelaire named his poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal -- Flowers of Evil in English -- it was in homage of Nathaniel Hawthorne's highly appropriate Rappaccini's Daughter. (Link here to read on-line)

Second note: In Memoirs of a Drudge, James Thurber reminisces about working at the Riviera edition of the Chicago Tribune in Southern France. (And why didn't my guidance counselor ever tell me about this job?) Anyway, there were regular printers' strikes, and after one of them, the whole press room, half-tanked, got on a train for Cannes. Promptly another argument broke out, this time over which was better, the original or the French translation of Poe's The Raven? And would a real raven be more likely to say, "Jamais plus" or "Nevermore"? "He returned with the claim that our fellow-passenger to a man were passionately on the side of Jamais plus." Betcha the translation was Baudelaire's...

Another person whom Poe influenced was, of course, H. P. Lovecraft.

In my early teens, I read most of Poe, most of Lovecraft, and got warped accordingly. (I'm in good company: Apparently, so did Stephen King.) I still say that two of the scariest stories I've ever read are Lovecraft's "The Picture in the House" and "The Shadow Out of Time".

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be left alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
― Stephen King

“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
― Stephen King, Skeleton Crew

“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”
― Stephen King

Shirley Jackson must have had a very good memory. From The Lottery to The Haunting of Hill House to (my favorite) We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson was one of the great horror / thriller writers.

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

True horror stories are mostly about language, aren't they?

“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...” ― Stephen King

"Ye get a hankerin'..."

"I'm going to let my boy in!"

"Whose hand was I holding?"

BTW, Two other horror stories that will scare the sleep from your eyes are ""'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'" (M. R. James) and, of course, "The Monkey's Paw" (W. W. Jacobs).

By Way of Introduction

2026-09-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

Back in July Joseph Walker wrote a piece on an interesting subject: Which book would you choose to introduce a new reader to a favorite author? Not which is the best novel, or which is your favorite, but which book should a reader start with?

Here is my take on it. I will start with two where I agree with Joe.

Agatha Christie. And Then There Were None. As Joe suggests, anyone who thinks Christie=Cozy has never read this book. It actually leans toward horror as you realize that 1) all the characters are nasty ranging to evil, and 2) all are doomed. It is a masterpiece.

Sue Grafton. A is for Alibi. Along with Sara Paretsky and Marcia Muller, with this novel Grafton birthed a thousand female private eyes. Few are as good as Kinsey Milhone. Grafton said she wrote this book to kill off an ex-husband, which may explain some of the passion in it.

Next we move on to authors I love but from whom I selected a different book than Joe.

Rex Stout. The Doorbell Rang. Is it his best? Maybe. It is certainly my favorite. The book lifted both Stout and Nero Wolfe to a new level with the sheer audacity of the concept. At a time when half the politicians in the country were terrified of J. Edgar Hoover our heroes announce: "On behalf of a client we're going to push his nose in. Just a routine chore, but he's touchy and will try to stop us. So futile." The nose was a metaphor, by the way. The plot is not his strongest, but plot is not why we reread this guy's books. The dialog and characterization (a bottle of milk comes to mind) are unforgettable.

Donald E. Westlake. The Hot Rock. Joe chose Drowned Hopes and I admit that what I call the middle- period Dortmunder books are wonderfully complex, but why not start where it all began? John Dortmunder is an incredibly unlucky (don't call him incompetent!) thief and in this book he has to steal an emerald, then free the associate who got caught with it, then break into the place it was hidden it, etc. etc. As one character says "I have heard of the habitual criminal but never the habitual crime." Hilarious.

Richard Stark. Butcher's Moon. Stark=Westlake, although Westlake said the Stark books only used part of the keyboard. Dortmunder is in effect the reverse of Parker and in this novel we see a bit of the thief's philosophy. Gangsters catch Parker's associate and threaten to dismember him if our antihero won't play along. He does, but not for the reasons you might expect. A very gory introduction to the amoral thief.

Lawrence Block. Eight Million Ways to Die. Joe picked When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, a choice I fully understand, but I would jump back one novel. To my mind, these two, plus the last book in the series A Drop of the Hard Stuff, (published 25 years later!), form a trilogy and are the strongest of the novels. Together they show ex-cop, sometime-private eye Matt Scudder at the end of his drinking days, the beginning of his sobriety, and at the difficult first anniversary.

I would include Ed McBain except, truth to tell, I have trouble telling the books apart in my memory. My favorites are the ones where minor character Fat Ollie Weeks - good detective and lousy human being - starts on a remarkable journey of self-discovery.

Moving on to authors Joe did not include...

Thomas Perry. Dance For The Dead. Ooh, this was a hard one. To my mind his best novel, and my favorite, is Island, a hilarious book about con artists who accidentally create a sort of utopia. But it is not a fair introduction to Perry's work since most of his work is much more grim. Naturally I turned to his series about Jane Whitefield who is a sort of anti-detective: she doesn't reveal criminals, she hides them "not if the police are gonna put you in jail, but if the police are gonna find your head in a dumpster." The first book is not quite up to par, but by number two he nailed it.

Dick Francis. Reflex. This was an easy choice. It is a good example of Francis's formula while showing how a writer can create magic with a formula. Philip Nore is a jockey, grimly struggling with the fact that his career is almost over. When he reluctantly agrees to investigate a mystery in his own family he discovers a past he didn't know he had, and the possibility of a future he never imagined.

Tony Hillerman. Skinwalkers. Hillerman wrote three novels about older, modern-thinking Navaho Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn. Then he wrote three about younger, more traditional Officer Jim Chee. The legend says that a fan asked him why he had changed the name of the character, since she saw no other difference between the two, and that led Hillerman to writing this book, the first of many in which the two men work together. I find that hard to believe because Skinwalkers feels like he was building up to it since his first novel. And the ending... wow.

G.M. Ford. Who the Hell is Wanda Fuca? Jerry Ford (not that one) wrote a series of terrific novels about Leo Waterman, a Seattle private eye whose secret weapon is a team of homeless people (they can spy anywhere because no one ever notices them). His masterpiece is Cast in Stone, but start with the first book. Witty and gritty in equal measures.

Elmore Leonard. Bandits. Truth to tell I have the same problem with Leonard as I have with McBain. I enjoy his books but have trouble telling them a part a year after reading them. But the ex-nun in this book is a standout in his vast collection of scheming crooks and reluctant heroes.

S.J. Rozan. China Plaid. Most of Rozan's books feature young Lydia Chin and older Bill Smith, both New York private eyes and semi-partners. . Half of them are narrated by her and half by him. All are a delight. Start at the beginning.

Mixing Urban Legends and Crime Stories

2026-09-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

Coming up with anthology themes isn't always so easy. Ideally a good theme is at least a little different from what's already been done (unless readers are clamoring for more of a theme you've already used--hey, it happens). In our field, a theme also needs to work well with crimes/mysteries, of course. And most important, (at least for me), the theme should be fun. Something that will excite writers and readers.

When Donna Andrews, Marcia Talley, and I came up with what ended up being the theme of our newest anthology, we knew we'd hit the trifecta. Crime stories with graveyards, ghosts, and monsters--mixed in with human baddies? Yes, please! The result became Hooked on Urban Legends--and Murder! It was released last week by Wildside Press.

Urban legends easily lend themselves to being used by crime writers because so many urban legends involve creepy things. The Hook legend is a perfect example. You remember the tale, right? A guy and girl go parking, and while they're steaming up the car windows, a news alert comes on the radio. A deranged man with a stainless steel hook for a hand has escaped from the asylum for the criminally insane that is right in their town. The couple break apart. The guy floors it and drives the girl home. Because he's a gentleman, he gets out of the car, walks around to her side to open her door for her, only to find ... a bloody stainless steel hook hanging on the car door handle!

That classic story has crime built in. But not all of them do. The legend of the Phantom Hitchhiker is a good example. One variation is that a guy is driving down a dark foggy road at night when he spots a teenage girl walking. Knowing it's not safe for her to be out on a night like that, he offers to drive her home. She accepts. The next day, he realizes she left her jacket in his car, so he drives back to the girl's house to return the jacket. But when an old woman answers the door, her eyes widen. It turns out her daughter was wearing a jacket just like that on another foggy night thirty years ago--when the girl died in a car crash on the same road the driver found her on.

These types of spooky tales--stories people swear happened to a friend of a friend of a friend--are perfect starting points for coming up with crime stories. When we put out our call for stories, we told the authors they could riff off actual urban legends or come up with their own. In the end, we have an anthology with a good mix of each.

All the authors' names are listed on the back cover, but in case you can't read them clearly, they are: Donna Andrews, Ellen Byerrum, Ginny Fite, Barb Goffman (yes, me), Shari Held, Kathryn Holland, Smita Harish Jain, Meghan Lewis, Jane Limprecht, Alan Orloff, Pat Remick, KM Rockwood, Daphne Silver, Shannon Taft, Marcia Talley, Robin Templeton, and fellow SleuthSayer Joseph S. Walker.

The back cover

My story in the book is "Into the Woods." I riffed off the Bigfoot legend, though my fabled creature is a foxsquatch--an eight-foot-tall vulpine creature that supposedly lives in the woods. Women and girls are his favorite meals, which is why this town forbids females from ever going into the forest. But one day, two rogue librarians sneak into the woods ...

Four of the authors with stories in the book have crafted essays that Art Taylor is running on his First Two Pages blog. Two weeks ago, he ran an essay by Pat Remick about the opening to her story "Screaming Jenny," based on a real urban legend set in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Last week, he ran an essay by Shannon Taft about the beginning of her story "The Cave Man," which is a legend she built from scratch. Another essay should be running today and the last one, next Tuesday. You can find them on Art's blog here: https://arttaylorwriter.com/the-first-two-pages/.

The book is available in ebook and trade paperback formats from lots of online bookstores, including indie bookshop.org.

Donna, Marcia, and I are going to be hosting a Zoom one weekday evening in October with as many of the anthology authors as can make it. The authors will talk about their stories and maybe offer tips for writing short stories too. The event is still in the planning stages. I'll share more details when I post again in three weeks.

In the meanwhile, enjoy Spooky Season--and make sure to always check your backseat before getting into a car. You never know when a deranged killer will be hiding back there ... waiting for you.

Standalone Characters: Making Each Brief Encounter A Night to Remember

2026-09-14T00:01:00.000-04:00

I thought I would write something different: a literary short mystery in the third person. I got one paragraph out, a description of the lush North Florida setting of my fictional writers’ workshop. Then the tart voice of a menopausal woman remarked, “At least the little literette could write.” And my protagonist Hester was born. By taking over the story and telling it in her unique first-person voice, she brought it to life. The “little literette” was the trophy-age grad student who’d stolen Hester’s aging husband. What was Hester going to do about it? I don’t outline, and neither does Hester. But Hester was workshopping her novel, The Bigamist’s Wife, and I had five thousand words.

Character and voice are my greatest strengths as a writer. I have two long-running series, one contemporary and one historical. Its protagonists and strong supporting characters have been talking on the page and in my head in the Bruce Kohler Mysteries since 2003 and in the Mendoza Family Saga since 2008. But a character in a standalone short story, as Shakespeare put it, “struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.” Making standalone characters count is both a challenge and an opportunity that I’ve met in a variety of ways. Some of the results appear in my new collection, Rifts & Reprisals:Collected Stories II.

How Hester deals with her husband’s infidelity with the “little literette” appears in “A Work in Progress,” which originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Another betrayed wife finds a very different solution elsewhere in the collection.

Andy is the first-person protagonist of “Who Stole the Afikomen?” The story first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and was selected by Rob Lopresti as the “best story I read this week” on his blog Little Big Crimes on April 4, 2021. It's also in Rifts & Reprisals. Andy’s the Irish Catholic fiancé of a Jewish lawyer who’s taken him home for Passover to meet her family. Rob thought it was hilarious. He quoted some of my own favorite lines.

Uncle Manny kept saying, "Focus, people, focus. We've got a goal here."
"To get the Jews out of Egypt?" I whispered.
"To get past the rabbis to the gefilte fish," Sharon whispered back.
"Is that the Promised Land?"
"The pot roast is the Promised Land."

My own family was less eccentric than Sharon’s and didn’t have Yiddish accents, but in some respects I based the fictional Seder on memories of ours, of my Irish Catholic husband who was once such a newcomer, and on the anomalies of a mixed marriage. I wrote a serious “Passover” poem about the real-life first Seder in 1978. This time, I wanted to have fun.

“Never Again,” first published in the anthology Me Too Short Stories, had two protagonists: Valerie, a teenager whose father had molested her since the age of four, and Frances, the obese survivor of childhood abuse by the son of her church’s pastor, now married to an abusive alcoholic. Both of these characters’ experiences are not uncommon in real life, as I know very well from my work as a therapist. Sure, to some extent I was going for shock value. But that wasn’t the point. Valerie’s and Frances’s stories carry a powerful message. They are crying out to be heard. I wanted readers to get that and empathize—and cheer when...you can find out in Rifts & Reprisals.

Here's Valerie:
Once, when she was seven, Valerie tried to tell her mom what her dad was doing to her. The sex ed teacher talked about that: "Tell a trusted adult what's going on. You don't have to deal with this alone." Not that they taught sex education to kids that young. It wasn't appropriate, even though it happened to four-year-olds.

And here’s Frances:
She’d had a neighbor once, a thin neighbor, who’d become sort of a friend. Sitting over coffee at Ivy’s kitchen table one morning, she tried to explain what it was like to be invisible. Because she was so fat, no one ever looked at her as if they wanted to do what the preacher’s son had done. But the fat also blotted out Frances. Sad Frances. Mad Frances. Frances who might want to scream or even crack a joke once in a while. Ivy didn’t get it. “But you’re very visible!” she said. “No,” Frances said. “I’m conspicuous.” Ivy moved away soon after that, and Frances never tried again.

“Vice Cop,” first published in Black Cat Mystery Magazine, is the story in Rifts & Reprisals that comes closest to a police procedural. The two protagonists are a vice cop dad and his teenage daughter, who sets out to help by trapping an online predator she’s sure she can outwit. I not only had to make each of them memorable, but I also had to distinguish them from one another within the relatively brief span of 7,000 words and the confines of a complicated plot. To emphasize that the all-important voice was different for each of them, I wrote fifteen-year-old Gracie in the third person present tense, as well as doing my best to have her think like a kid with an irrational belief that she’s invincible. I alternated her POV with that of the first person narrator, juggling the incompatible roles of ace detective who finally has the bad guy in his sights and worried dad in a situation that’s spinning out of control.

There are a couple of flash stories in Rifts & Reprisals and a few more in its companion volume of standalones, Breaches & Betrayals: Collected Stories. I’ve lived with some of my characters for twenty years, as I have with Bruce, Barbara, and Jimmy of the Bruce Kohler Mysteries. I’ve met others only for the space of five hundred words, like the young Sixties woman in “Don’t Think Twice” who is getting sick and tired of all those guys in Cambridge, MA who keep singing that damn Dylan song. Either way, I love them all.

True North Strong and Free: a lighthearted take on a deadly serious issue, because we sure need it.

2026-09-13T00:00:00.000-04:00

Like many Canadians, I love our anthem and, since childhood, have proudly belted out our anthem whenever asked and sometimes, even when not asked. Word of advice: the latter is less appreciated in elevators than it should be.

These lines have always been my favourite:

With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free. 
From far and wide, 
O Canada,
we stand on guard for thee. 

To paraphrase Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye, the True North part slays me.

For those who haven’t been following (but really, who would that be?) Canada’s sovereignty has become a heated issue and, for reasons not often stated (translation: they want to rob us of our natural resources, from critical minerals to water), Canada's sovereignty is now the punching bag for constant late night rants.

My recent research into the issue of Arctic sovereignty on Ellesmere Island in the early 1900s was a refreshing change from internet scrolling and really made me sigh; that was a gentler time. And a funnier time, at least in retrospect - my apologies to the wonderful Canadians who did the work of standing up for our north so we could all sing about it, even in elevators. I appreciate your noble work and my silly take is not meant to take away from the immense respect you all deserve.

Let me set the stage: in the early 1900s, people communicated through mail, telegraph, newspapers and a few landline telephones in urban areas. So, how were threats handled when no one was able to type into their phone to reach wide swaths of the population through the internet? If you were sending threats, you could submit them to a newspaper, wait for them to be published and those who read the threats, if throughly inflamed, could rapidly write a letter (by long hand or, for high tech aficionados, with a typewriter) and fire it off into the mailbox to arrive in days or weeks. All this tends to slow down the rage baiting from an incessant drum beat to, at most, a slow tapping or scribbling noise.

How did the 1900 sovereignty threats to Ellesmere Island play out?

Ellesmere Island is Canada's northernmost island, almost abutting Greenland. There is archeological evidence that Ellesmere island was occupied about 4,000 years ago, and ancestors of the Inuit, the Thule peoples, lived there around the 12^th century. Interestingly, numerous Norse artifacts, including knife blades and a shipwreck have been found. So, this remote island has had its share, albeit small, of inhabitants and attention.

In the 16^th century, Britain claimed the far north, but in 1880 Britain gave to Canada her title and claims in the Arctic, including Ellesmere Island.

There were even then, concerns about Arctic sovereignty. I'd like to ignore, for the purposes of this article, the many interesting historical details and pare it down to the absurd parts, because these were a lovely respite for me and I hope you will find it a relaxing stroll.

To counter early American and European threats to its sovereignty in the north, Canada … wait for it… affirmed its title with an 1895 Order-in-Council. That really should have done it, eh? What can be clearer than an Order-in-Council? Surprisingly though, despite this throw down of a hefty gauntlet, in the early 1900s, things got heated.

“American sponsored explorations were apparently in the offing and it was reported that a recently published American atlas showed Ellesmere in the same colour as Alaska—an ominous sign to concerned Canadians.” This is the 1900 equivalent of the inflammatory maps we are now seeing posted online but, rather than using AI, a mapmaker was summoned, swiftly drew a map that was instantly submitted to an atlas that was sent to the printers post-haste and promptly printed and mailed out. I suspect the process was completed within the short span of months. Or years. Canadians were upset, naturally, and their retaliation was swift (or swiftish, because, the 1900s). The Department of the Interior formed a small group of senior civil servants into the Advisory Technical Board in 1919.

Take that you brutes.

The threats to our north did not stop there and swiftly, (again, swiftish) by 1920, the Danes , who viewed Ellesmere Island as a no man’s land, began hunting on the island. Canada took this threat to its sovereignty seriously and retaliated by forming a committee.

That will teach you.

It’s obvious that Canada doesn’t play around with our True North, has dealt with all threats fiercely and the threats actually went away, until now, when we find ourselves in 2026, with a foghorn blasting in our ear.

Should we retaliate, early 1900 style, with a committee or, given the constant threats and insults, a committee and an Advisory Board and, if needed, the dreaded Order-in-Council?

Should we send letters ASAP (typewritten for speed) to newspapers, and insist they take a telegraph poll of Canadians to assess the support for these rather drastic actions?

If only these would work, but a Canadian can dream...

The Louvre Heist, One Year Later

2026-09-12T00:45:00.000-04:00

SUNDAY MORNING, 19 OCTOBER 2025:

Two masked men parked a truck-mounted furniture lift along Quai François Mitterrand, cut through a Louvre window, and climbed into the Galerie d'Apollon. Less than eight minutes later, the crew was speeding across Paris with an estimated €88 million in crown jewels. Almost a year later, it's becoming clearer that the crew wasn't necessarily all skilled professionals. But the French response wasn't bumbling, either. Arrests began within a week.

THE RECAP

Inside the Galerie, the two-man crew was methodical--careful, sort of. They stayed near their window exit and cut into display cases within easy reach. Some accounts speculate their movements were rehearsed, and surely that can't be dismissed. They'd have known their time window and tools available and slow-grind escape route.

The guys also seemed clueless about the collection's true value. In that sense, they bagged an amazing haul: three pieces from the sapphire set of Queen Marie-Amalie and Queen Hortense, three emerald-laden pieces from Empress Marie Louise's set, and two pieces belonging to Empress Eugénie. They also tried bagging Eugénie's crown. It was essentially crushed during the theft.

Valuable, absolutely. But other pieces in the Galerie's collection are more famous--and reportedly more valuable. Maybe the guys were behind schedule, or maybe they just didn't know.

THE RESPONSE

You might call it flat-footed. Louvre security spotted the truck lift outside, but this was the Louvre. There are always contractors around. Worse, the Galerie's security cameras pointed away from the window, and the security systems were badly outdated, a problem noted in a 2014 audit. Only after evacuating the crowd and inspecting the Galerie did they confirm that a theft had gone down.

Things went better quickly. The Police Secours arrived within minutes. Seriously, the Prefecture was only a half-kilometer away. The big guns, the Brigade de Répression du Banditisme (BRB), arrived soon after. Detectives collected a treasure trove of evidence: Eugénie's broken crown, discarded gear and clothing, shoe impressions indicating the crew's size, and even the stolen truck lift the thieves had tried — and failed — to torch.

In short order, French prosecutors assembled a swarm of investigators, forensic scientists, art theft experts, cyber cops, and anyone else a furious government could muster. Traffic camera footage showed the crew taking the A6 south, and hours of social media videos captured the crime from start to finish.

By June 2026, the French had reportedly charged five alleged members of the crew.

THE INSIDE MEN

Well, there was a lot of DNA recovered, and the police quickly matched some of it in the law enforcement databases. The people linked to those matches allegedly lived in the same north Paris arrondissement. And two of the matches maybe pointed toward the inside guys.

One early arrest was a guy with a minor record. News reports said that DNA evidence linked him to cutting tools recovered from the Galerie. According to those reports, the guy claimed to have been recruited only days before the heist and told that they would hit a jewelry store. In his statement, he said that he'd never have signed on if he'd known the target was the Louvre. His reported cut was €20,000.

Another early arrest was the alleged other inside man, an unlicensed taxi driver believed to be the smash-and-grab guy. That had been his literal instruction, the guy said according to French media, to smash and grab what he could. Investigators reportedly found his DNA on the display cases and the discarded equipment. His alleged cut was as little as €15,000.

After speeding off, the crew blended in with Paris traffic and circled a northerly route to Aubervilliers. Investigators retraced the drop route thanks to traffic and private cameras, witness accounts, and phone metadata. The guys, it seemed, held onto their burner phones. Both guys arrested reportedly mentioned the same lead contact, who berated them for not smashing and grabbing more.

THE LIFT GUYS

The two guys working and watching the truck lift weren't hard to track down, apparently. Reports say that the lift had been their one job--and it remained outside the Louvre, allegedly along with their DNA on the lift and gear. Oui, said the lift rental company, these were the same guys who jacked their truck off the lot days earlier.

According to news reports, the lift crew had done their work in their own silo. They were only connected with the inside guys in the hours before the job.

FIELD SUPPORT

Another cell reportedly handled communications and logistics. Supply teams garnered scooters, and scouts buzzed around the Louvre, scouting the area and relaying go signals from burner phones. Reportedly, this cell didn't know anyone else involved in the job, sometimes even their fellow scouts.

The French rounded up several potential suspects based on their past connections and cell phone signals during the heist and possible DNA found on recovered scooters. Three of these arrested have been charged as conspirators.

THE MASTERMIND

The inside guys seemed to know what to do and did it, mostly. The lift guys lifted, and the scouts scouted. Mistakes or not, conflicting statements or not, this was an operation. Coordinated.

The suspects awaiting trial all mention such a ringleader, if neither named nor described, but it follows that a mastermind intent on controlling risk and communications would likely use intermediaries for recruitment and training. Just as plausibly, a serious organization combined expertise and a network of neighborhood relationships.

THE RECRIMINATIONS

No one does outrage like the French, and this wounded the national pride. The thieves had needed only glass cutters and a furniture lift, pour le Dieu. At the Louvre.

Public and media criticism was withering. French ministries harrumphed over the fiasco and no doubt thanked the stars that the core failures weren't theirs. Even the truck lift manufacturer got in on the action, with an ad touting the lift's reliability.

The Louvre director, Laurence des Cars, reportedly offered her resignation in the immediate aftermath. The Minister of Culture refused it. Instead, des Cars was kept on while the investigation and security reviews swirled, which was important leadership continuity--and perhaps also a fate worse than termination. Critics insinuated that des Cars pursued other priorities instead of aggressively closing known security gaps.

By June 2026, des Cars had moved on. "A planned transition," the Ministry of Culture said.

THE FUTURE

The Galerie remained closed off and locked down for weeks. After the forensics team left, the Louvre installed a sweep of high-tech devices in the Galerie and throughout the museum. Other reported enhancements tightened the contractor loophole and improved coordination with the police. Today, the Louvre is a harder target. But more upgrades will go on for years.

And for even longer, much about this heist will remain a mystery. The mastermind may never be found. Jewels--even crown jewels--can be stashed indefinitely, or dismantled, or cut into untraceable pieces.

One thing is abundantly clear: The heist, like the Louvre itself, has found its place in history.

I Remember Everything—and Nothing

2026-09-11T00:00:00.000-04:00

Erie Lackawanna tower, Hoboken.

I can’t believe it’s been 25 years. I can remember how it felt, sure, but at this remove I need a historic timeline to assemble the pieces correctly. So I have used that to help me remember.

I worked from home in those days, freelancing for a string of magazines. I don’t remember my morning routine, but I know that my browser home page was set to the front page of The New York Times.

That morning, when I woke my desktop, above the NYT headline was a tiny sentence in red or black announcing the breaking news: a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center. The plane had struck at 8:46 AM.

I immediately assumed the aircraft was something small, like a Piper Cub. I imagined a young, inexperienced pilot making the most egregious of errors. But I couldn’t confirm that because one sentence was all the newspaper knew at that point.

I wasted time poking around other sites, hoping to glean more than that single sentence. I came up empty at the Associated Press and a few other news sites before I turned on the television. I did so just in time to watch the second jet hit the second tower. That happened at 9:03 AM.

By then, everyone knew what was going on.

I don’t know when I called Suzanne. She was an old college friend who had recently moved to Hoboken, our little river town across the Hudson River from Manhattan. She was the only other freelance journalist I knew in town.

I don’t remember when she came over my place. Before, or after 9:37 AM, when the third jet crashed into the Pentagon? I know we were in my apartment watching TV, worrying about friends we knew who worked in the vicinity of the towers, when one of the broadcasters announced that the south tower had fallen.

Such a thing seemed unfathomable.

I had grown up watching those towers being built. For what seemed like forever, my family had passed the construction site every time my father drove us to Brooklyn to visit our grandmother. As an adult I’d spent a long winter night at the rooftop restaurant, Windows on the World, during a lavish Christmas party thrown by my then-employers at the children’s publishing house, Scholastic, a firm enriched by franchises such as Harry Potter, Goosebumps, and The Babysitters Club. Hell, I had been in one of those towers as recently as last Friday, taking the escalator down to the PATH station for my ride home after meeting with some editors.

But now, watching that morning, Suzanne and I could not believe that a building could be toppled so quickly. Were they absolutely sure? After all, there was all that smoke…

Only one way to find out.

I lived in an old five-story tenement building several blocks west of the river. We stepped out the back doors of my apartment, and scampered up to the roof.

It was was a Tuesday. A beautiful clear day. I do recall that.

I saw the river. I saw the smoke. I heard sirens emanating from the city below me.

But for the life of me, I cannot remember the color of the smoke. Black? Gray? White? Today I need the photos as badly as the timelines to fix those images securely in my mind.

While we were on the roof, the north tower collapsed. And yes, even with the smoke, it was obvious. There one second, gone the next.

Only minutes ago on TV, we had heard the voices of family members telling the on-air broadcasters just where in those towers they believed their loved ones were trapped. In elevators. On stairwells. On the roofs.

Had those people gotten out?

Suzanne and I hugged briefly, then went back to scanning the scene across the river.

Then, honestly, I don’t remember the next few hours.

I know that phone and mobile phone service were disrupted regionally. When I couldn’t connect with my parents, who lived about 20 miles north of me, I made the foolish decision to drive home to check on them. Foolish, because the traffic was insane, and my drive took forever.

They were fine, but of course they were. I spent a few nights sleeping in my old bedroom. I heard that my young cousin—who had a heart condition and worked in the Wall Street area—had joined the long line of dust-spackled commuters who trudged back to their homes over the Brooklyn Bridge. Her husband, then a school teacher at one of the public schools, had done the same.

By Friday, a group of us Scholastic alums carpooled to south Jersey to attend the wake of the brother of one of our colleagues. The drive down, on the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway, to a funeral home at the Jersey Shore, is associated in my memory with the sight and sounds of vehicles flying American flags and honking in soldarity to each other.

On the car radio, actor Henry Winkler was telling a DJ that going forward, our mourning nation would have to learn to take better care of each other and better care of ourselves. Why he stressed those words, I don’t know.

I don’t remember much of the wake. In, hugs, out, then dinner somewhere before the somber ride back north. Our colleague’s family were lucky only in the sense that their loved one had escaped to the presumed safety of one of the tower roofs. When that building pancaked on itself, his remains were among the first to be discovered and identified. Or so we were told. And thus one family was permitted the closure denied to so many others.

One of my other cousins, who then worked as a U.S. attorney, requested, nay, demanded, my presence over the weekend. Over the years, she had gotten chummy with the firefighters who worked at the firehouse near her office in downtown Brooklyn. They had invited her to a wake and pot luck gathering in honor of their fallen members.

“You gotta come with me,” she said. “It’s going to be too painful.”

Did she bring food for the pot luck? Did I? She was (and still is) the type who can be counted on to make a giant crockpot of meatballs, but I just don’t remember.

I do remember us standing outside that firehouse, pouring ourselves plastic cups of beer from kegs literally positioned on the sidewalk.

I remember how congenial the firefighters were. How dry-eyed they were as they told us of the friends they had lost.

One man stands out in my memory for his wordplay. He talked about how, once they were allowed to search the rubble for bodies, they found so few.

“You know why?” he said “They were gone. Poof.”

Then he launched into a litany of words which all rhymed, and which all have roughly the same meaning: Decimated! Obliterated! Annihilated!

Over the years, I have tried to recall many of the other things people said and did doing those first few days, and I take myself to task for not taking the time to write much of it down.

You were a reporter, I tell myself. You should have known to capture what you were witnessing. Where was your pen? Where was your notebook?

I do remember walking to the water’s edge in Hoboken over the next week to watch smoke rising from Ground Zero. I remember the flowers and photos and tokens people left by the railing on the southernmost corner of that riverside park. And in the weeks that followed, I remember seeing posters of missing people fluttering on every surface throughout the city. Families holding out hope that their loved ones made it out alive.

At the time, I was researching a medical story for a science magazine about a family of physicians located in Massachusetts. On one of those phone interviews, the eldest sibling told me how Mass General in Boston had leapt into action, preparing their emergency room to receive potentially hundreds of patients who might be airlifted from New York City to Boston for care.

“But no one came,” he said. “They didn’t need us.”

Eventually, yes, I did write a short story based in part on what I saw that day and what came after. It’s the story of a former tough guy from Hoboken who has escaped his previous life until 9/11 forces him back into the fold.

“Back to the Boke” was written about ten years after the fact. By then, I was married and had left Hoboken for good. I based the piece mostly on the old-timers I remembered populating the city. Guys who played endless rounds of cards at the social club across the street from my apartment building. The guy on our block who earned money hauling scrap metal in his rusted-out pickup. The Italian American grocers, butchers (aka “meat-cutters”), bakers, and cheesesteak vendors who lamented the loss of families in a town made famous by Sinatra and Brando, and who ceaselessly excoriated the inevitable ascendance of Wall Street yuppies.

The story found a home at Beat to a Pulp, which kept it available until the site closed. It holds the distinction of being my first “long” story to be published at a mystery venue.

I still beat myself to a pulp wishing I had kept a better record of those days. A solid paper trail in my own hand would be far more valuable to me now than my recollections.

Once, at a book festival, I met an author who wrote a couple of books on the fragility of human memory. How what we think happened often turns out to be untrue when meticulously fact-checked. I recall being so impressed by the reporting in The New Yorker after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans. Those writers had fanned out into the city looking for stories, they had carefully recorded them, and then they had rushed back to file their pieces. Maybe I would have done better if I myself had been on deadline. Who knows.

But hey—if there’s any lesson to be learned after 25 years, it’s to keep a notebook and pen handy, to know when to use them, when to tuck them away, and when to look, listen, and feel instead.

Hoboken days:
Visiting Sinatra’s birthplace.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

joedenise.com

[REPOST] When Character Development Meets "The Real World"

2026-09-10T00:12:21.967-04:00

Flat characters are two-dimensional in that they are relatively uncomplicated and do not change throughout the course of a work. By contrast, round characters are complex and undergo development, sometimes sufficiently to surprise the reader.

Stock character, a character in a drama or fiction that represents a type and that is recognizable as belonging to a certain genre. Most of the characters in the commedia dell'arte, such as Columbine and Harlequin, are stock characters.

– Both quotations courtesy of The Encyclopedia Britannica

I have written at length in this space about the importance of character development in your writing. (If you're interested in reading some of my previous work on character, feel free to click here, here, here, and here.) And lately, I've returned to the well, and begun to consider the importance of the delicate balance of character development versus character continuity.

Take John Updike's Rabbit series of four novels, all featuring the same central character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. The series takes place over a span of thirty years, taking Rabbit from his mid-twenties to his death in retirement. Updike released the various novels an average of ten years apart (1960, 1971, 1981 and 1990). The final two novels (Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Over the course of the series Updike kept his character restless and angsty, while also showing both physical and mental changes in the character as he grew older. He did this against an evolving social backdrop (the early '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s, respectively) that dovetailed pretty seamlessly with the character's arc (see my post on the effective use of setting as another character in your work). And, obviously, "Rabbit" Angstrom would be an example of the "round character" defined above. Taken as a whole, the books are well worth your time.

Where Updike's series presents a collective masterwork of balancing development and continuity, it has in many ways presented an outlier bucking the last few decades of writing marketplace trends. This seems especially true in crime fiction.

Don't get me wrong. There are lots of great writers currently out there developing their characters, working their collective tails off, and producing really unforgettable stuff.

However.

The last few decades have seen the rise of the so-called "airport thriller." And where early practitioners of the art of thriller writing (then, as now, a sub-genre of crime fiction), such as Robert Ludlum and the immortal Elmore Leonard were masters equal to Updike in writing characters who showed growth, they have proven the exception rather than the rule. The emphasis in thrillers is on fast-paced plotting, and with the market growing more and more lucrative, publishers have shown a preference for thrillers as part of a series of books, rather than the stand-alones most favored by so many masters of the sub-genre.

I'm not giving examples because I'm not looking to call anyone out. Plus, were my agent to tell me tomorrow that a top five publisher was offering me a multi-book contract adorned with a whole lot of zeroes to write thrillers that adhered to these standards, I would not hesitate to dive into this end of the writing pool. Character development tends not to be a hallmark of thriller writing. It's delightful to see when you find it, but truth be told, thriller fans (my brother among them) tend to read thrillers for the action, first and foremost.

What I'm saying is that I have begun to see this "light" character development crop up more and more in other types of crime fiction, especially in any number of series. The character has a benchmark, and even in a series that runs for years, tends to vary little from said benchmark. In so doing, series lead characters which ought to be "round" tend to take on the aspects of so-called "stock characters."

Rather than give examples of this, let me go in the opposite direction, using a real world example.

There's this guy I used to know. We grew up on the same block. Neighbors and friends for years and years. We eventually lost touch (as people often do), and a few years ago, I happened across his social media presence. Here's a thumbnail of the "character" I found there:

My old friend worked in radio, eventually helming his own talk radio show. From here he took a quick detour into StartUpLand at one of the pioneer startups where he made a pile, then eventually found his way back into talk radio. Now in his fifties, his political and social positions seem to rely heavily on the foundation of his deep spiritual faith, and the importance of his family in his life.

And I say good for him. He was a great guy back then, and I have little doubt he still is.

What makes this thumbnail so interesting is the set of fundamental differences I see between the guy I knew back in early-to-mid '80s and his current self. When we were teenagers growing up together, my old friend was practically a socialist. And for all intents and purposes heavily agnostic (not irreligious so much as indifferent to religion). Something that hasn't changed at all is that he was a brilliant, and opinionated conversationalist then, as he still seems to be. One huge difference was that he loathed Ronald Reagan more than I did (I still do. If anything I loathe Reagan more in retrospect). Not sure what's changed there, but needless to say, my friend isn't exactly "anti-Reagan" (or anti-his memory, I guess) these days.

Some other things: he went on a family vacation with myself and my extended family, and developed his first real crush on a girl who came on the trip with one of my cousins. It was amusing to watch this most opinionated of guys basically abandon several of his previous opinions based on what his new love interest thought.

And yet I never saw him in love again during the time I knew him. If anything I saw him protecting his heart, flirting with girls, never dating, plenty of "hanging out," but never making himself "available."

Here's the funniest part, though. I had another friend back in my teens. Conservative, grew up with a strong church background, also opinionated. Loved Reagan.

I've stayed in touch with this friend. He's got grown kids, a thriving career in a union construction job, climbs mountains and he frequently uses his free time helping build schools in Sub-Saharan Africa. I have no idea how feels about politics these days. We don't talk politics when we talk. We talk music. And it's always great.

That funny thing? My first friend back in the day heartily disliked this second friend. And nowadays my second friend reminds me of my first friend in his youth and that first friend reminds me much more of my second friend in his youth.

Heyyyyy I think I might have the germ of a story idea here....

See you in two weeks!

The Tell-Tale Heart

2026-09-09T01:21:40.442-04:00

We went down to Albuquerque last week for an Edgar Allan Poe theatrical, which was entertaining in itself, and got you thinking about Poe beyond the confines and conventions of theater. It was billed as a “speakeasy,” and they did indeed serve themed drinks in the intervals. Carole had seen a previous production, up in Farmington, and loved it, the event put on in different venues by different casts.

You open on a set that could be a garret, or a study, and Poe enters to introduce himself, and talk a little about his work, his themes and obsessions - death of course a big one – and then slips into the shadows as another actor comes on to dramatize the story, first up, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Curiously, they were musical interludes, sung-spoken, so it helped if you were already familiar with the plotlines, because they were really riffs or attitudes toward the stories, not staged readings. “Usher” was efficiently creepy, followed by “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Gold Bug,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” the two of the more famous poems, “Annabelle Lee” and “The Raven.” So it was a highlight reel, with drink breaks. I liked the actor who played Poe a lot, but I thought the rest of the cast was less successful. Mostly, I think, because of the material they were given. The trouble with condensing Poe, or any writer, isn’t just that you lose the words themselves, but the sense of the words - the rhythm, and the pace. Poe creates dread through a very calculated use of echoes and repetition, foreshadowing and false narratives. What he’s struggling to write, in effect, is psychological horror. Even though that term, or even the concept, didn’t exist at the time.

David Morrell has suggested that Thomas De Quincey, in his series of essays, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, is actually engaging in psychological analysis – Morrell has now written three period thrillers about it - although that concept was unknown to the Victorians. Freud and the Vienna school were sixty years away. Poe is, for one thing, influenced by De Quincey, but it seems pretty clear to a modern reader that Poe is trying to describe a phenomenon he doesn’t have the vocabulary for. Roderick Usher is deeply weird and wicked, his sexual mania left to the reader’s imagination, but the house cracking at its foundations and collapsing into the dark lake is vivid and literal. Sure, it’s metaphorical, but it’s illustrative of psychological collapse. Roderick is coming apart at the seams, because he can’t stand the idea that his dying sister’s body might be stolen, to be dissected by medical students in an anatomy class, so he buries her alive to prevent it. The whole thing reeks of what was diagnosed in the 19^th century as hysteria, a peculiarly female malady.

Poe is readily characterized as Gothic, and I think there’s more going on here than that. Not that there has to be more, for Poe to be taken seriously, but that he’s actually even odder than we imagined. My main takeaway from our recent evening with Poe, down in Albuquerque, is that it’s past time I revisited his writing. His influence is widely recognized, and he certainly deserves to be read.

Verbal Cues

2026-09-08T00:05:00.000-04:00

I’m currently editing a story that needs some help. The tale lacks energy. It could use a verbal kick in the pants.

Cullen 328 Creative Commons

I culled out some of the crutch words—just, really, a lot, very, slightly—I’ve got a slew of them. They fill up the story without doing anything to advance it. They sneakily leaked in while I composed. When I pulled them out, the story became more efficient. The reader arrived at the point more quickly. But the piece still lacked vibrancy.

I blame the verbs. I’ve got some bland ones tucked into the tale. And I compensated by jacking up the adverbs. “But it’s not my fault,” he said defensively. “I think it’s in my biology,” he added genetically.

Stephen King, in his craft memoir, On Writing, should have taught me this. He reminds me of the elementary lesson that verbs come in two types—active and passive. With an active verb, the subject is doing something. With a passive verb, the subject is just letting it happen. Even when my subject is active, she sometimes moves into a room instead of gliding or stomping. Stronger verbs, like specific nouns, help the readers form a better picture.

As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, I’m not sure the blandness is entirely my fault. As a species, I believe that we have more trouble with verbs. Humans want to name things. We like to slap labels on stuff we see. If we name it, we’re on our way to understanding it. We give ourselves control. Linguist Jess Zafarris says that English has three times as many nouns as verbs. We’re skilled at naming things.

Down the road, Zafarris says, we back-form and create verbs from the pre-existing nouns. “Evaluation,” and “regurgitation,” for instance, both existed long before the verbs “evaluate,” or “regurgitate” came into existence. Our English verbs are always playing catch up.

William Shakespeare gets credit for inventing a host of new English words. Many of those were verbs that emerged from pre-existing nouns. Among the back-formed verbs he created are “negotiate” from “negotiation,” and “metamorphose” from “metamorphosis.”

We’re hardwired for the naming of things. The more analytical process of describing action, however, proves harder for humans. Motion is less tangible. Across languages, processing verbs in sentences is more neurologically demanding than processing nouns. From an evolutionary biology standpoint, our species wants to preserve that brain power. We may need those little gray cells suddenly to scheme our way out of becoming prey. Self-preserving authors, like me, tend to rely on forms of “to be,” and other simple, unimaginative verbs. Then when we need a little zest, we succumb to the temptation of adding adverbs.

That’s my story for the rough draft. I’m blaming Darwin and evolutionary biology.

Having identified the problem, the solution emerges—edit. I’ll live with getting the wrong words down initially. I can’t edit a blank screen, to paraphrase Jodi Picoult. Once something tumbles onto the page, I’ll test the verbs, asking if this is the best choice for the situation being described. Would it reinforce character if he “lumbered” rather than merely “walked”? Almost certainly.

The “be” verbs are easy fixes. They can reliably be traded for more interesting options.

“The body was in the den” becomes “The body lay in the den.” At least with “lay,” I’m describing the body doing something, as much as a dead body can reasonably be expected to do. Perhaps it morphs into “Sluggo carried the body into the den.” The focus gets changed off the body and onto the actor.

I’ll work through the short story and send it off. Someday, I hope, readers will see it. I don’t know where or when. All I know is that the version that eventually surfaces won’t look anything like the version I’m working through now. The nouns you might recognize, but the verbs will look very different.

I'll be traveling when this posts, on the hunt for good nouns and better verbs.

Until next time.

School Daze

2026-09-07T00:00:00.000-04:00

As far as I can tell, I was admitted to Dickinson College, a small, scholastically rigorous institution in Pennsylvania, on the strength of my swimming prowess. Certainly not my academic record, which should have prompted an admissions scandal. I was tipped off when I found the college swim team in my dorm room soon after I arrived. There were no athletic scholarships offered at Dickinson, but the coaches had a cozy enough relationship with the gatekeepers that the occasional standout was snuck through (someone with better high school preparation would have written “was sneaked”).

It helped that my father was prepared to pay full boat, so I opted for a different college path, one mostly involving beer, cigarettes, procrastination and rock ‘n’ roll, none of which were on the curriculum, though individual excellence in these areas was rewarded by allowing you to return every year, provided the maintenance of a shaky C average.

My basic impediment was the theory of school itself. I could never grasp the concept of sitting together with people my age at little desks all day while someone at the front of the room told us things. That alone would have tried my patience, but they required you to

regurgitate their words at some later time, with rather harsh penalties for imprecise recollection. Worse still, once liberated at the ring of a bell, we had to use precious TV-watching and horsing around time to recapitulate much of the day’s proceedings, and even add to the burden with supplemental labor. The whole thing seemed entirely medieval.

They hadn’t yet identified ADHD in the 50s and 60, but I had such a ferocious case that my parents had to resort to drugs to keep me still in kindergarten. Thus afflicted throughout my school career, I thought “isn’t realizing his potential” was my middle name. Though I did have an ace in the hole. As with many things in my young life, it was provided by my big brother, who was an excellent student, but also an omnivorous, indefatigable reader. He caught the habit from my mother, so our house was crammed stem to stern with books.

Since I did everything my brother did, I read every book I fell over, and then some. As compulsions go, this was a lucky one to succumb to. Unsupervised as it was, my pool of knowledge was quite deep in some areas, and barely a puddle in others. My subsequent test performances had lots of hills and valleys, which evened out to around, well, a shaky C average.

The psychological lesson for me was that information I read tended to stick, whereas anything delivered from the metaphorical pulpit sounded like Charlie Brown’s TV parents. This led more than one teacher to ask my mother why a student who aced the test on Ancient Greece (didn’t every kid devour Edith Hamilton?) could barely add and subtract (still largely true.)

Although my math SATs never rose above the statistical probability of correctly guessing at least some of the answers, I did okay on the English side of the house, maybe just well enough for Dickinson to retain its accreditation. I’m not sure how much I learned in public school, but there’s an awful lot of information available when you have access to your mother’s Book of the Month subscription.

Most relevant to this platform, my bibliophilia soon blossomed into full blown hypergraphia. This not only saved my scholastic bacon, it provided the template for my entire life. When things were looking dire, I could always write myself out of trouble. In college, there was nothing more exhilarating than the option of a term paper versus a final exam. Somewhere within those ivy walls, I’d heard some critics regarded form as important as content. This theory was sorely tested across a variety of disciplines, but I made it through.

My roommate not only shared my general strategy, he honed it to perfection. A professor wrote at the bottom of one of his papers: “You write well, which is good, since you have very little command of the material.” He clinched a B in Russian Literature by using the liner notes of the Dr. Zhivago movie soundtrack as his sole reference. This is the stuff of greatness.

Since so little time was committed to slaving over The Brothers Karamazov, or door-stop biology texts, we had ample in reserve for 8 ball, making midnight grinder runs or destroying our hearing with electric guitars. Whatever was left on the schedule for actually writing those papers was usually reserved for about ten hours before the deadline. This was also, for me, an invaluable life lesson.

It wasn’t until my Creative Writing MFA program, when the focus was entirely on matters of interest to me, that I discovered the pleasing embrace of a classroom, stimulating professors and the novelty of academic achievement. Since I had to pay for it all out of my own pocket, that might have enhanced my focus. But I came to regret being such a lousy student and all the stuff I could have learned had I been paying attention. Among my screwball college friends there are a few lawyers and corporate executives, along with a stockbroker, CEO and Dean of the Boston Cathedral. There’s no evidence that a decent grade point average distracted from their attention to the extra-curricular.

Trinity College once asked a cross-section of professionals to come speak to their students about proper career preparation. I was the designated advertising copywriter.

“First,” I told them, “don’t even buy the textbooks until about halfway through the semester. Take a passing glance when you get a chance, in case your parents come to visit and ask what you’re studying. On the night before your paper is due, get some pizza and sample the keg in the dorm basement, play a lot of pool, or basketball, if that’s your preference, until everyone’s gone to bed, then slip page one into the typewriter. Think desperately of something to write that will sound even remotely persuasive. Then you have to actually write something down, if you can stay awake.

“If you pass, they won’t kick you out, and you’re able to preserve your lifestyle (and in my case, stay out of the draft.) This is the life of a copywriter. Working with scant information, often exhausted, forced to produce a compelling argument under extreme pressure in a very short amount of time. Oh, and the stakes are pretty high. Just ask your kids, if you’re lucky enough to have them.”

They never asked me back. Don’t know why.

Dumb Kids

2026-09-06T00:02:02.350-04:00

SleuthSayers relies on Google’s Blogger platform. Over a couple of decades, we’ve discovered a thousand thorns amid its bed of roses, bugs, errors, and omissions. This past week has been particularly harrowing with lockouts and outages affecting and infecting our outbound news feed and comments. It particularly affected Anna on Friday, so for writers especially, I recommend taking in her promotional suggestions.

But also… her article inspired today’s article.

In reading Anna Scotti’s guide, it dawned on me when I was 15-16, I came up with smart and more innovative ideas than what I use now. It began with a statewide scholarship competition sponsored by foods companies, e.g, American Dairy Association, Wonder Bakeries, Kraft, producers and canning companies– the food chain of farm to family table. They selected 200 of us, put us up in hotels, arranged lectures, arranged tours, fed us well, and even sponsored a night of music and dancing.

Participants were expected to chat up their local community about nutrition and sponsored interests in the middle of food-growing rural Indiana. The program was divided into boy and girl programs, one boy and one girl per county, one hundred girls, one hundred boys, vying for scholarships and monetary prizes. I came from a tiny rural school without a county library, so this was new to me. I appreciated being a part of it, even if I didn’t stand a snowball’s chance at a prize.

City students might wonder how dumb kids from the middle of nowhere farm country could compete with Indianapolis, population a million, or Chicago surrounds, another quarter million or more, Cincinnati bedroom communities, or university brain silos in Terre Haute, Bloomington, and Lafayette.

Easy: I had no idea what I was doing.

I started small and I owe that initial toehold to women. Gentleladies of that area and era belonged to numerous clubs– book clubs, cooking clubs, craft clubs, knitting clubs, lodges, and social clubs. Mom connected me with a couple of her societies, where I gave brief talks and the ladies politely listened.

I branched out, 4-H, Scouts, and local church groups where I spoke about matzo and manna. The mad scientist in me built a robot, not unlike R2-D2, which accompanied me to some presentations. By then, I’d acquired Albert the Alligator, who stole the show at other events and garnered more girl attention than I did.

In the meantime, I discovered local newspapers were hungry for articles. I listened and complied. Our county had no library, but the neighboring county’s library didn’t mind my taking up space where the sun warmed from a particular window. I researched, scribbled, I even dared send an essay to the Indianapolis Star which, to my surprise, printed it. (Much later I learned public cable channels thirsted for content.)

Media investors planted a radio station literally in the middle of county cornfields. Early one morning, I threaded back roads to the three towers of WSVL. They gave me a short tour before sitting down for an interview. I returned a second time for my own broadcast.

Susan, our county’s female entry, and I didn’t really interact. She was smart and pretty, and to this day, I picture Nancy Drew looking exactly like her. She was a full year older than me, an insurmountably huge age gap. She was sufficiently elderly to qualify for a driving permit; Mom drove me in her pink Rambler. Susan attended a large city school, I underwent a one-hour bus ride to a small rural 1-12. Her father ran a well regarded hardware, mine farmed and sold insurance to make ends meet. In retrospect, we could have– perhaps should have– collaborated, but the thought never occurred to either.

Meanwhile, I documented, documented, documented, every article, every talk, every presentation. At the end of summer, I packaged everything, submitted it to the committee, and gave Albert time off. I’d worked my tail off for a 1% chance at the prize. The promoters had gotten their money’s worth.

And then a letter arrived and a package. The letter announced Susan had won the girls’ division. Well done.

And winner of the boys’ division and overall winner… me! Seriously! Program directors noted both winners came from the same county. All that work had paid off.

Today, outlets have changed. The internet gutted newspapers and perhaps journalism. Gen Alpha has little use for radio and television. Substack and Reddit and Tim Tok make money in entirely different ways. We have to learn and adapt and perhaps adopt.

In a broader sense, Poe’s pendulum swings both ways. People were patient with me who might not have been as lenient with an adult, whereas a different station or magazine might have no time for dumb kids. Never know until we try.

Lesson

Thanks to Anna’s article that not only inspired today’s essay, it reminded me of what one can accomplish with few resources. Without knowing what he was doing, a dumb kid validated a couple of Anna’s ideas as achieveable and well grounded. That should serve as a lesson for me.