SleuthSayers

Some Stats on Willingness to Commit a Crime

2026-10-24T00:30:00.000-04:00

Some readers know that for several years, this mystery writer was disguised as a bank manager. (Ha! Do I look like one in this recent photo?)

Yes, I managed a branch in one of the biggest metropolitan areas (8 million) in the Western World. This involved meeting a lot of interesting people who would not regularly come into your social circle - people like bank robbers and con artists.

And just as I was disguised as a bank manager, these criminals were disguised as average, everyday people. Yes, I got pretty good at determining who might be less than honest in their business dealings.

Lots of stories there. However, today I want to talk about something specific - that being the stats on how many of the population have the potential to join this minority population. (Note this research is approximately 20 years old. I fear it may be too optimistic for today.)

Here they are, as per my training and later teaching in college:

75% of people will be honest on a handshake.

20% of people may try to cheat you if they think they can get away with it. (In banking terms, we say you need their signature to hold them to their word.)

And 5% of people will try to cheat you, even if you have their signature.

I've always found this fascinating. Like many people in that 75%, honour - integrity - is important to me, and I was taught that cheating is dishonorable. (That's how I see it. Others may see it differently.) I don't cheat, even when there is little to no chance of being caught. I would find it hard to live with myself.

This is the ultimate test, of course. Do you cheat if you think there is little chance of being caught?

The 5% of people - often sociopaths - are something I take for granted now, after years in banking. They will do what they like if it is in their favour, without much care as to how it hurts other people. They are perhaps the least interesting of the criminal class, from the point of view of this writer. Our laws and prison penalties are necessary to manage their behaviour. The stick as opposed to the carrot, so to speak.

What I find fascinating is the 20%. On a mild level, I can use the example of people who will park in handicap spots when they aren't handicapped, because they think they can get away with it. Also, people who might cheat on exams or essays. I have heard someone who might fit into this category say, "I like to see if I can beat the system."

It's this 20% that I find most interesting to write about. People who would normally not take the risk of doing something against the law, but - occasionally if they think they could get away with it - might, if the gain is great. Again - speaking as a mystery author - this category is where the most interesting murders take place.

I am fascinated by motivation. What would convince someone to murder another person, when I wouldn't, given the same situation? What would push them over the edge?

Now, there are always exceptions. I expect a parent - even one basically honest and in the 75% - would be compelled to act against someone who threatened their children. These situations could push most anyone over the edge.

But murder for monetary gain? That is a very interesting motivation for a mystery writer, and I'm no exception.

Um...caveat here. I murder people regularly in my books for monetary gain (thank you for that nice publisher advance!) But only in books. Honest.

Melodie Campbell can honestly say she's never murdered anyone, except on paper. After 22 books and 60 short stories, that's a lot of crime! Pizza Wars is her latest madcap comedy, available on Amazon from Gemma Books (Boston.)

Monster In My Mind

2026-10-23T00:00:00.000-04:00

When Halloween rolled around in 1975, I was in sixth grade and still making friends at the new school my parents had transferred me and my brothers to earlier that fall. We had long been public school kids, but when I graduated fifth grade, my parents suddenly decided to move all three of their sons to the Catholic school across the street. This would be my academic home for the next three years. After years of dressing in street clothes to go to school, I now wore a hideous blue-plaid uniform daily. And I had to mind my manners in the presence of nuns.

Halloween that year fell on a Friday, which is a school day, which is why I feel certain the events I’m about to describe took place on that Saturday, the first of November.

I’d been invited to a classmate’s home for a Halloween party. No costumes, just fun, food, frivolity.

My new friend Christopher lived on the other side of town, the nice side. And as my mother drove me to his home in the car, we passed the town’s nature center, which was dominated by a giant pond that was the site of the town’s annual trout-fishing contest. The pond was enveloped by several acres of woods that thinned out at one point and opened upon a baseball diamond.

Traffic slowed as we approached the baseball field.

Police officers spoke to each driver in turn, peeked into the cars, asked a few questions, then waved us on.

The baseball field itself was crawling with cops. State troopers and plainclothes officers in windbreakers. The ones in blue windbreakers marched along the edge of the woods with German shepherds on leashes. Radios squawked, and everyone spoke loudly to be heard over the sound of the helicopter whirling overhead.

I asked my mother what was going on. She had no clue.

When we reached Christopher’s house, she told me to wait in the car while she spoke with a few other moms who had congregated on the porch to consult with Christopher’s mom, who we kids called Mrs. C.

The council of moms took their sweet time. Heads nodding. Hands gesturing.

When Mom came back, she popped the car lock and told me to get out.

“It’s okay,” she said, “You’re going to play in the backyard and inside.”

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Nothing.”

“But the police—”

“It’s okay,” she reassured me. “They’re looking for somebody. He was working in somebody’s house over here. Then he ran away, and they’re looking for him.”

I was what, eleven years old? That year I had begun methodically reading adult mystery novels. My imagination and my capacity for anxiety exercised themselves nightly as I gobbled up these books. (A story I have partially related here.)

Mom was being vague intentionally, I’m sure, but I did not have to be a Baker Street Irregular to know that if this many cops and dogs were looking for this person, he was no saint.

I couldn’t tell you what we kids did for fun that afternoon. It was Halloween, for Pete’s sake. We didn’t need a campfire or the cover of darkness with which to embroider our ghost stories. We had the perfect, homegrown plot points to fashion a far more terrifying tale.

Even as we played, we traded bits and pieces we’d gleaned from our moms as we were dropped off.

Here is what the adults had told us: The object of the quarry was a man who showed up to work as a house painter at one of the homes in the area. He’d erected a ladder outside some lady’s home and commenced painting. When she returned from running errands, she was startled to find him inside the house, rifling through her possessions. Surprised by her sudden entrance, he bolted. His description matched that of someone police were already looking for crimes we kids could not comprehend.

Nevertheless, we tried.

He was a robber!

He did bad things to people!

He was a murderer!

No—he was not actually human, but half-man, half-monster!

Moreover, we felt certain that he could not have committed these heinous crimes in New Jersey, where we lived and which was, as everyone knew, an oasis of tranquility. No—he must have done these bad things across the river in New York City. Where else?

Would they catch him?

He had fled into the woods. Maybe he was too far gone to be stopped now. Maybe the dogs would not pick up his scent. God knows what he would do if the cops didn’t find him in time! What if it got dark and he was still on the loose? Did his monster side come out at night?

By the time Mrs. C called us inside to eat, our minds were inflamed with dark tales of the fugitive’s past.

The house smelled delicious. They had a real-life fireplace, something I’d always been curious about. The decor was autumnal and wonderful.

As I shoveled spoonfuls of mac and cheese and franks and beans into my mouth, Chris’s mom explained the afternoon activities. Before things had gone awry, she had planned a grand scavenger hunt.

Her original party plan called for each of us kids to split into teams of two and wander the neighborhood, knocking on doors to ask homeowners if they could provide us with any of the innocuous items on a long list Mrs. C had probably copied out of a book of kids’ games.

But now, in light of the current neighborhood situation, she thought it was best if we worked the neighborhood in larger groups, led by Christopher’s older siblings.

Chris was the youngest of six. His was a family of Brady Bunch proportions. There were more than enough big kids to go around in that household. We would be fine.

I’ve since learned that I have the ability to magnify minuscule details until they occupy a space in my mind as big as a locomotive. Something Mrs. C said had captured my attention.

It grew and grew and grew.

Terror seized me.

Then I did what nervous kids have always done when they became anxious. I barfed into my lap. Quietly, you understand. Delicately. And quickly, probably fluttering an oversized orange Halloween napkin as camouflage for my sudden action.

Then I sat trembling in my seat, afraid that someone would find me out. I might have been content to sit there for all eternity, and never get up.

When I was finally outed, Mrs. C was more than kind. In that family, she was no stranger to barf. She whisked me to a bathroom, where I changed into a pair of Christopher’s jeans. (What a slender fellow he must have been, relative to me! I can still feel the denim digging into my hips.) My clothes descended to the basement for a wash.

And off we went on the scavenger hunt. It was as safe as safe can be, though in retrospect I wonder if the people who answered those doors wondered at the wisdom of sending gaggles of little kids around the neighborhood that afternoon in the company of high schoolers.

I had never been on a scavenger hunt before then or since. Here’s what I can tell you. The list they gave us was not written in stone. More like a suggestion, really. When the list commanded us to extort a stale dinner roll from a neighbor, we felt certain a toasted slice of bread would do nicely instead.

Sometime late in the afternoon, we learned that the police manhunt had concluded with success. A great evil had been plucked out of our midst. It was just another cool fall evening in the suburbs of Jersey again.

When she arrived to pick me up, my mortified mother was presented with my washed and dried wardrobe, and an all-too-compassionate story shared by Mrs. C.

“Well, with everything that was going on,” she told my mom. “Can you blame the poor boy? He must have felt terrified.”

And for years after, that was the explanation my mother trotted out when the memory of that messed-up Halloween was dredged up. A bad man who did bad things to women—my parents always employed that phraseology—had spread terror throughout the borough. And in his quaking heart, Joe did what he always did when he got a case of the jitters. And who could blame him, really?

Christopher and I went on to high school and college together. We worked in Manhattan as young creatives, and saw each other often. And when the spirit moved him, he regaled acquaintances—usually women to whom I was attracted—with the tale of that creepy Halloween.

Only, his story differed from his mother’s on one point. Gleefully, he told people that Little Joey barfed not because a rampaging murderer was on the loose but because he was a little Italian American kid whose belly knew only the taste of lasagna and manicotti, and rebelled when pumped with the likes of American fare such as mac and cheese.

But you know what?

They were all wrong. Mrs. C, my mom, even Christopher.

No. After fifty-one years, let the facts be admitted to a candid world:

It was not the ax murderer in the ’hood that did me in. Nor was it the copious amount of American food on tap that afternoon.

Friends, what really struck terror into my heart was the soon-to-be-launched scavenger hunt. I did not know what that was, and it frightened me to no end.

I did not understand why they wanted me to knock on doors and ask complete strangers for things such as six inches of kite twine, a rubber ball, and a tarnished penny.

Why would I want these things? For what purpose? I didn’t need them! Why would I bother people I did not know in order to get them?

A murderer I could stomach. Surely, they would get him in the end. But the thing that lurked in my mind was far more terrible. I could not stomach the thought of making strangers go out of their way for me. It was bad enough knocking on peoples’ doors for candy each year, but at least the culture had paved the way for such intrusions.

My constitution drew the line at a scavenger hunt.

It was all too much, and it still is. Happy Halloween.

* * *

See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

joedenise.com

Robert Altman and The Sisters of Mercy

2026-10-22T00:05:00.000-04:00

Last week my husband and I watched McCabe and Mrs. Miller - first time for him (and he really loved it), probably second or third time for me.

I first saw it in 1972 or 1973, not sure which. Not long after I got off the streets and got legal. So when I saw it, it punched a hole in my gut for so many reasons. The Leonard Cohen soundtrack especially: I went straight out and bought that album and played it over and over again. Especially The Stranger Song:

It′s true that all the men you knew were dealers
Who said they were through with dealing
Every time you gave them shelter
I know that kind of man, it's hard to hold the hand of anyone
Who is reaching for the sky just to surrender...

He was just some Joseph looking for a manger
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger

And (back then) I realized that yes, that was exactly what my life had been for a very, very, very long time – and was probably instrumental in finally, a year later, dumping my "Joseph looking for a manger". Because that was him. And I didn't want that kind of man or that kind of life any more.

But enough of that meandering down very old paths, I want to talk about the dynamics of McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Meet wandering gambler McCabe (played by Warren Beatty) who comes to what is barely a town (Presbyterian Church) in the wooded mountains of Washington State. He gambles, drinks, and opens up its first whorehouse, but he has no idea how to run it. Not that he'll admit that when he's confronted by Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie) telling him to hire her as the madam because she knows what she's doing:

"What do you do when one girl fancies another? How do you know when a girl really has her monthly or is just taking days off? What about when they don't get their monthlies? Cause they don't. What do you do then? I suppose you know all about seeing to that? An what about the customers? Who's gonna skin 'em back and inspect 'em? You gonna to do that? If you don't, this town will be clapped up inside of two weeks, if it's not already. What about when business is slow? You just gonna let the girls sit around on their bums? I'll tell you something, Mr. McCabe, when a good whore gets time to sit around and think, four out of five times she'll turn to religion 'cause that's what they was born with. And when that happens, you find yourself fillin' the bloody church down there, instead of your own pockets. Now, I haven't got a lot of time to sit around and talk to a man who's too dumb to see a good proposition when it's put to him. Do we make a deal or don't we? Well?"

No, McCabe doesn't know how to do any of that, he didn't even know about any of that, so he hires her. She also handles the bookkeeping because McCabe's arithmetic is about as good as his grasp of the business. Any business.

The result is, instead of damp tents by a muddy road, Mrs. Miller gets the whorehouse built, complete with a bathhouse and regular inspections for all, girls AND their clients. It is hugely popular, the men of Presbyterian Church are clean and fairly happy, and word spreads throughout the territory.

Basically, it's the women – the "sisters of mercy" - who literally clean up the town.*

*I will bet money that Altman's fictional town was based on Pendleton, Oregon, who back in the 1800s was a mining town with lots of Chinese workers, bars, and whorehouses, much of it (literally) underground.

"Discover the secrets of Pendleton’s Underground tunnels"

The truth is, antihero McCabe is a Dunning Kruger idiot, who knows he's the sharpest card in the deck, babbles bullshit, and can never admit he's wrong about anything. (Sounds terribly familiar, doesn't it?) The only thing he's really good at is gambling. And drinking. And going along with anything that might make him look good. Including being mistaken for "Pudgy" McCabe—a supposedly dangerous man who once killed someone named Bill Roundtree.

And then there's the stuff he says that's supposed to prove him smarter than the average bear. One line he repeats over and over is

"If a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass so much, follow me?"

That kind of patter works with the men of Presbyterian Church, sort of, but it cuts no ice with Mrs. Miller, nor with the mining company that wants to take over his businesses, and especially not with the gunslingers they send after him when McCabe stupidly refuses to sell his "businesses" for the whopping price of $5,500 (worth the equivalent of $150,000 in today's money).

Sigh... We've seen one too many McCabes (social media and television have a lot to answer for) but it is a brilliant performance, probably Beatty's best.

BTW, the sisters of mercy like McCabe - but they don't count on him. They count on Mrs. Miller, who does indeed know what she's doing. And that dynamic reminded me of 3 Women, which I've blogged about before. One thing about Altman, he knew how to write and direct women. Pinkie, Millie, and Willie are each unique, strange, powerful. Edgar thought he had all the power, but he never had a chance. Same with McCabe.

Mrs. Miller, Lily, Kate, Alma, Ida... they all know how to survive in a man's world. Stay alert. Stay aware. Know the difference between nice guys like Cowboy (an unbelievably young Keith Carradine) and most of the townsmen... and stone cold killers like Butler, Kid, and Breed. McCabe doesn't, and doesn't think he has to.

John McCabe: I know what I'm doing. I know what I'm doing.

Constance Miller: What's he [Butler] carrying around that bloody blunderbuss with him for?

John McCabe: I don't know. Maybe he come up here to hunt possum.

Much later, McCabe says, "I just don't want to get killed."

Well, nobody does, my friend. But in a world of cutthroat businessmen and guns for hire... you have to pay attention and just once in a while, believe the sisters of mercy, not your own bullshit.

As one reviewer put it on IMDB, "the next time someone tells you that Clint Eastwood reinvented the western with his masterpiece Unforgiven, remember: 21 years before, Altman had experimented and succeeded on that with his McCabe & Mrs. Miller."

"Robert Altman has made a dozen films that can be called great in one way or another, but one of them is perfect, and that one is McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)." - Roger Ebert.

I agree.

Advice for Writers Events

2026-10-21T00:00:00.000-04:00

Recently our own Joseph Walker posed an interesting question on the Short Mystery Fiction Society list:

In a few weeks I'm going to have a table at a local author event in my town. Specifically, I'll be one of 25 authors in the parking lot of the (awesome, btw) local indie bookstore, for four hours.

I've certainly heard many horror stories from writers about attending such events and selling no books, or just one or two. So, any advice? How do I make the most out of this? I'll have about 20 copies of my collection, and I've got a little banner to display on the table and bookmarks to give out. What else can I do?

I thought it was a great question, and of particular interest to me because I will be at a similar event next month. Joe got many responses and with his permission and that of the other writers, I am sharing some with you.

Chris Dreith: Since it's going to be held outside, have a patio umbrella or a tent constructed over your table. If it's an umbrella, make sure it's a bright color. They are a hassle to set up, but make sure it's weighted at the base so it won't blow over.

If it's a tent, bring something to hang from it, like a colorful flag, ribbons, or even a wind chime. Print the cover of your book on a sheet to hang behind you. Make yours different. (Don't forget to bring tools. Stapler, plastic ties, cords, carabiners, whatever you need.)

Bring heavy items to hold down papers, etc if it is windy. These items could also be used as conversation starters. Maybe a heavy brass dog holding down a K9 book or a piece of granite for a mountain based mystery.

Position your table so it is in the shade, but also you and possible buyers are also in the shade.

If you need to stay seated, bring a tall stool to park on so you are at more eye level with people who pass by.

Get away from the back of the table often to view it from the passerby's viewpoint. Keep it clean and organized (that shows pride in your work).

If you have someone seated at your table with you, don't spend your time talking with them. It's off-putting to try to get the salesperson's (in this case, the authors) attention if they are deep in conversation with someone else seating behind the 'barrier' table.

Wear something comfortable for the weather but make it unique and memorable. Top hat? Colorful vest? Print the cover of your book on a T-shirt.

Wear a name tag.

Smile. Look folks in the eye. Talk to them. You don't have to ask the same opening questions that everyone else does. (What do you like to read?) Take into consideration the person's facial expression and body language. For example, you might find something different to say to a young parent pushing a baby carriage and another kid stuck in a backpack compared to an older person pushing a cart carrying a poodle with a bow.

Have a bag ready for trash. Keep your table and space around it clean.

You can have the cover of your book printed on candy wrappers. (Contact me for info). A friend of mine prints a cookie recipe on a card with her book cover on the opposite side, puts said cookie and card in a clear bag with a ribbon to close the top. I somehow don't see you doing that (she has help from her daughter's Girl Scout troop. LOL) but if you do decide to bring any type of food, make sure it is approved by the organizers.

Make sure your swag is unique enough to keep.

Understand what your goal is. If it is to sell many books, you will need to cause enough of a stir that folks will buy from you instead of wandering around to buy from someone else or going into the bookstore. Maybe reduce the price of your books (slightly) than what the bookstore charges? Offer a 2 for 1? Offer to appear at a local bookclub for free (they don't need to know you might not charge anyway). Cause some action.

If your goal is to get known, consider printing up a calendar of where you might be appearing. A library, a zoom presentation, etc. Have a sign up sheet for your newsletter.

Susan Oleksiw: The tables I’ve seen (and done myself) that have the most traffic (if not the most sales) have a table cloth, candy, and even flowers—something to draw people in and give them something to ask about or look at before they remember it’s about books and writing. You can even invite people to sign up for your newsletter or enter their name in a jar for the chance to win one of your books (a freebie!).

Linda Kay Hardie: Stay alert and interested. Engage with the folks walking by. Like, "Hi, what do you like to read?" or "Hi, we're all local authors, signing and selling our books," or "Hi, this is my collection of short mystery [or crime, whatever] stories. Would you like a free bookmark?"

Many people don't know what's going on, no matter how much publicity the authors and the bookstore have done.

Chat with anyone who slows down. If they stop at your table, hand them your book. Tell them a funny [or strange or interesting] anecdote about how you came to write/publish one of the stories.

If they answer your question about what they like to read, pitch one of your stories. "You like westerns? My story in here called [title] is a western murder mystery set in Pahrump, Nevada."

And this time of year: "Books make great gifts. It's not too early. Do you know a reluctant reader? Short stories are good because they're quick to read." And then pitch. If their teen grandson doesn't read much, mention a story he might like ("Thieves use video games to plan a bank robbery."). Or granddaughter. Or brother-in-law.

Kristen Gibson: Try to take a few minutes before the event to meet the bookstore staff and other authors, chat or ask visitors about their interests to see if it matches something you've written or even another author's at the event-others may then be encouraged to send someone your way.

Bobbi Chukran: Make sure they know you’re local. Put a little sign on your table “Signed Copies by Local Author.”

Steve Liskow: I prefer to join events with no more than five or six other authors (preferably in different genres so there's less competition) but that's no guarantee. Last month, I was at an outside event with 80 (yes) authors and sold eight books.

I have my bio and author picture in a picture frame.

I wouldn't have candy or flowers because your books aren't cozy or children's books. It's the wrong tone.

Since you're going to be outside for four hours, wear a hat and bring sunglasses. Bring a few hard candies or a protein bar, and maybe a water bottle.

When you arrive, be sure to find out where the bathroom is.

You should have a chip reader and Venmo or PayPal on your phone. Also bring lots of dollar bills for change. I price my books at a dollar amount including tax so nobody has to deal with coins.

Noreen M. Cedeño: I have been at events where authors displayed a QR code leading to purchase links with the URL to their website listed beneath the code. A certain percentage of people will take a photo of the link or will use the QR code to buy the book online. I was surprised by the number of people who pulled out their phones for the QR code.

All you have to do is print a sheet of paper with your QR code and website link and place it on the table (or in a clear plastic flyer stand if you have one).

Kevin R. Tipple: If you are doing the QR code thing, have something that announces your actual internet link. Many of us do not QR anything.

James H. Lewis: I found at my last event that keeping people at my table who were NOT buying my books created interest in others. ("If there’s someone always at his table, his books must be interesting.")

James M. Jackson: Before things start, get to know a bunch of authors placed near you, so when you ask what people like to read, and it isn't something you write, you can point them in the right direction -- some authors will get the idea and point people your way (also you get to know someone to watch your table when you have to use the facilities).

I rarely sit down, except to inscribe a book. It's easier to engage people if you are standing at their level. If I can catch their eye, I have permission to speak.

Dave Zeltserman: Bring your Edgar Award nomination certificate. It will be a good conversation starter and should attract some attention.

Be friendly, talk to people, but don't be pushy.

Teresa Inge: I keep small swag bags on my table, bookmarks, a table runner with my logo, and my books on a table top book rack from Amazon. I also keep my table items simple since it’s just easier for me. One note, sometimes anthologies and short stories are a hard sell but I never let that deter me. I have a standard response when readers tell me they either don’t like or have never read a short story. I let them know with short stories they can read a couple in one setting, get to know the characters and outcome, and discover new authors that they might have never read before! They usually buy from me but I think it’s also a connection between the author and reader.

Judy Penz Sheluk: Sometimes you'll sell a lot of books. Sometimes you'll sell none. As long as you've made connections with readers, networked with other authors, consider it a success. You never know where a chance meeting will lead. Case in point. Many moons ago, starting out, I did Word on the Street (huge event) in downtown Toronto. It took me 90 minutes to get there (no train service on Saturdays from the town I lived in at the time). Paid $35 for parking. Sold 1 book where my profit was about $10. But the author next to me was Nate Hendley, who later became a multiple award-winning true crime author. I won't say we became friends, but we made a connection that lasted. Fast forward 8 years and Nate offered to blurb my true crime coming out later this month.

John A. Tures: 1) Bookmarks are great. I designed my own! Make sure you have that QR code on them, and that it works.

2) For my table display, since I am writing about a fictional third-party movement, I display political ties and buttons. I have patrons come over just to check it out, for politics interests and because it's unique. Having something different does catch peoples' eyes,

3) Just tell yourself "I am here to sell three books, finding three devoted fans." Your chances of selling 10 are better that way. If you tell yourself "I won't be happy unless I sell at least six," you'll be lucky to sell 1-2.

4) Keep track of their contact info, with their permission. It's good for selling sequels.

5) I ask about taking selfies with buyers. I get a lot of takers. But I'm a shameless extrovert.

6) As always, remember why you're doing it all. My wife, who has stuck with me throughout this, and is very supportive of my writing and a great helper, is now mostly wheelchair-bound. I hope to make enough from sales to take her on one last vacation abroad, before it's too late. So each time I pack up my 2004 Chrysler at 6am with a load of boxes of books, I remember what it's all for, let her sleep in, and do my best to make some readers happy too in the process.

MB Dabney: It doesn't hurt to have a bowl of candy. But always tell kids they must ask their parents before they can have any.

Roger Johns: (1) try to get a position on what will be to the customers' right, as they approach the selling area. Most people are right handed and tend to look to their right as they enter a space, so you're likelier to engage readers from a position on their right, as they approach. And near the door—it's a natural stopping point—where you'll have a chance to engage them, before they've made their purchase decisions.

(2) Have a short, interesting pitch you can deliver while you’ve got their attention, and a closer to help them decide in your favor, if they haven’t made a decision by the time you sense the contact is coming to an end, such as: “If you have a friend/loved one who reads ——-, an autographed book makes a great gift”.

(3) Don’t sign your books with the same signature you use to sign your checks. And if they want the book inscribed to a particular recipient, ask how the name is spelled, before you write it in the book. Bring a narrow point Sharpie, breath mints, and hand sanitizer. Consume liquids sparingly.

(4) Some folks like to talk to authors, but don’t buy books, so if a long talker is keeping others from approaching you, have a polite way to move them along.

Robert Lopresti: Does all this good advice make you want to join the Short Mystery Fiction Society? It's free! Click here to sign up. And when you get up to a certain level of popularity, you can do this at author events:

That's a Question

2026-10-20T00:05:00.000-04:00

Last week, the local university’s library had an open house of its special collections. My traveling companion and I attended. It felt nice to act erudite and sophisticated without writing a big donor’s check for the privilege.

The library displayed a series of illuminated manuscripts. I couldn’t read a word. Sadly, I’ve let my classical Latin lapse. But I did enjoy looking at the vivid colors and intricate designs on the page. At the end of one line, I noticed a small mark, resembling a Spanish tilde. The docent explained that the medieval writer used this squiggle to indicate a question.

Feeling erudite and sophisticated, I nodded. Of course I knew that. When I got home, I looked it up. I immediately fell down a rabbit hole.

As punctuation, the question mark has one of the more straightforward histories. We all know what a question is. In her 1932 lecture, “Poetry and Grammar,” Gertrude Stein certainly believed this. “A question is a question, anybody can know that a question is a question and so why add to it the question mark when it is already there…Therefore I never could bring myself to use a question mark. I always found it positively revolting…”

While I admire Stein’s passion, “revolting” seems a strong word for a punctuation mark. The sentence also overlooks a central debate in all things punctuation. Who is the mark intended to benefit? The question mark began, according to grammarian David Crystal, as a way of giving preachers a useful graphic cue about when to adopt a questioning tone of voice during a public reading.

We know that early written text was frequently unspaced. Scriptura continua reflected the way people speak—we don’t normally pause between words. But this mashup made reading challenging, so marks that separated words gradually emerged. Dots, slashes, and spaces began to appear. Reader marks followed. Some grammarians believe that our system of punctuation has its roots in ancient Egypt and the chief librarian of Alexandria.

Virtual Manuscript Library-Switzerland, Wikimedia Commons

On the specific origin of the question mark, most experts look to the Romans and their European heirs. In the 8^th Century, King Charlemagne invited the English scholar, Alcuin of York, to join his court. Grammarians credit him with creating the punctus interrogativus, or interrogative point. The mark signaled that an oral reader should add inflection to the end of the sentence. (The half note before tamen in the third line is a punctus interrogativus)

In 1582 Richard Mulcaster published The Elementarie, a stab at standardizing English writing. On the matter of the question mark, he wrote,

Interrogation: two points one aboue another, whereof the vpper is sometime croked which both in writing and reading teacheth us, that a question is asked there, where it is set.

The short explanation reveals that English speakers still struggled in the 16^th Century to settle on what to call this inflection mark. They tried out “asker,” “erotreme,” “mark of interrogation,” “quaestio,” “interrogative point,” and “question stop,” before settling on the term “question mark.” Crystal cites the OED for authority that we didn’t finally agree on this term until the dawn of the Twentieth Century.

Grammarians also wandered a bit before settling on the question mark’s shape. Sources vary on how we arrived at the present form. Some suggest that the curved body mimics the bend of a cat’s tail when a feline becomes inquisitive.¹ While the cat-tail tale makes a good story for a Halloween blog, it lacks real academic support. Alcuin of York deployed the tilde shape, the outside end rising slightly like a lightning bolt. (a good design for prompting readers to employ an upward inflection.) Others wrote the word quaestio at the end of the sentence to signify a question. Over time, quaestio got reduced to a “q” above the “o.” Draw it out on a piece of paper. The shape is not far from a modern question mark.

Printers also may have influenced the design of our current interrogatory symbol. The theory goes like this. Most of the early printed publications were Bibles and other religious texts. Generally, they don’t contain many questions. Therefore, the number of question marks in a printer’s inventory of type was relatively small. When plays began to be published, the need increased. Plays are often full of questions.

Think Shakespeare. "To be or not to be?"

English grammar and spelling remained fluid. Printers improvised. Some flipped a semicolon to extend their stock of moveable type.

Finally, writers and grammarians puzzled through when to use a question mark. Although Gertrude Stein may think the question is obvious, rhetorical questions, in particular, pose an issue. What to do when someone is using the question form but not really asking a question? We’ve all likely experienced times when we’re simultaneously asked and told.

“You’re doing the dishes, aren’t you”

Can a question not be a question? And if it isn’t, how should it be punctuated?

In 1962, an American advertiser, Martin K. Speckter, proposed the interrobang (or interabang) as the solution, a punctuation symbol combining the question mark and the exclamation point. ‽ The interrobang was intended to indicate questions for which no answer was expected, or questions posed with excitement or disbelief. (Rejected names for the interrobang included ‘exclarogative’ and ‘consternation mark.’ After a flurry of interest, the symbol faded. As writers we’re back to the classical toolbox of punctuation marks. The question of how to properly punctuate these sentences remains.

How do you think we should handle them?

Do you have a punctuation mark you find positively revolting?

Until next time.

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

1. Thanks to the Burbank Leader and Wikipedia for this feline tidbit.

Anyone up for horseshoes and hand grenades?

2026-10-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

When something is called a simple truth, it isn’t always a contradiction in terms. Some truths are simple. If you jump from the top of a mature oak tree without a means for arresting the fall, you will hit the ground. Irrefutable. However, the underlying mechanism involved in this event is gravity, and there is nothing simple about a fundamental force of nature. Ask any physicist.

I’ll go out on a limb of that oak tree and propose there is no truth that is simple, for the simple reason that a truth itself is nearly impossible to establish absolutely in all its particulars for every observer assembled for the task.

I’ll creep further out on the limb, testing its tethering to the trunk, and propose that mystery stories, in all their dazzling variety and genre distorting forms, are all essentially about people seeking the truth, in competition with other people and circumstances aligned in opposition.

Truth has always been under threat, yet today is a time of particular advantage for the powers of concealment and obfuscation. There is a cultural trend of people “speaking their truth.” This is a triumph of solipsism, since it affords deference to the notion that everyone’s version of reality is equally valid. It’s also in direct contravention of Daniel Patrick Monihan’s maxim that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” If one abandons Moynihan’s proscription, then there’s really no point in trying to understand anything. In such a world, we would have no use for people like Sam Spade or V.I. Warshawski.

I spent many years in close enough proximity to the media, often thoroughly involved in the matter being reported upon. In all these cases, I never observed the story to be 100% accurate. And none of these slight variations (some not so slight) would I attribute to malicious intent. The principal culprit was time. It just wasn’t possible for any reporter, editor or factchecker to pin down every nuance and particular with total precision in the time required to get the story written/published/distributed. The majority of these imperfections were incidental, though not all. Journalism has its share of sloppy performers, but by and large, they strive for an accurate and dispassionate recording.

Still, biases have a way of creeping in. This is always true for everybody. They’re often manifest in how information is interpreted. One of the wonders of language, and the cognitive process overall, is the bounty of ways one can express any given thought or observation. Within these multitudes, there’s little chance that something can be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

What can be agreed upon is that everyone try to get close. For this endeavor to work, we rely heavily on cynics, skeptics and imperturbable analytics. Their counterparties are those committed to deceit, duplicity and guile, people actively striving to obscure the truth. These folks are the bread and butter of the genre we celebrate, and thus indispensable. What’s more interesting to me, however, are those who have decided the truth is their truth, a conclusion arrived at usually through a tortured, circuitous psychological voyage.

They don’t have to be patently delusional. There are plenty of historical heroes who simply understood something the rest of humanity considered absurd. Though sometimes they are, they just don’t know it. When this condition inhabits a brilliant or powerful mind, or a collective of capable people, things get really interesting.

The action and adventure in the mystery genre are fun, though the appeal wanes over time. What endures for me is the effort involved in uncovering the truth, however approximate it might be. This dynamic achieves its fullest expression with the unreliable narrator, though any narrator’s reliability is also suspect for the reasons outlined above. My favorite books are those that relish ambiguity and uncertainty while still managing to arrive at a satisfying conclusion.

We know that massive social and political movements can be premised on monstruous untruths. It’s unsettling to contemplate. At least we have mysteries and their adjacent narratives, where in one messy entanglement someone was able to get close to something resembling a true thing.

Día de los Muertos Vivientes

2026-10-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

Today's essay serves one purpose only, to lay the foundation for our 1^st of November's Día de los Muertos / Day of the Dead article and persuade you to catch the most brilliant ghost story of our time. And, unbelieveably, it’s free. You may remember one of our authors whose life was cut short. Allow us to reintroduce…

Fran Rizer
(12 Dec 1944 – 24 Dec 2019)

Andrew Wyeth: Ghosts

On a Christmas eve nearly seven years ago, our colleague Fran Rizer left us a gift, which we share today. Harking back to the golden age of horror, it’s one of the finest classic paranormal stories ever written. So why haven’t you heard of it?

It was published not in the US, but in a short-lived Canadian publication, Ficta Fabula. Rather than try to shop an already published story, Fran placed it in our SleuthSayers queue. Following damage to its MS Word file and to capture most recent publication edits, she turned to me for help.

We copied text from the publication’s PDF, which turned out a mess, suffering breaks at the end of every line instead of every paragraph. Italics and bolds disappeared. Little could be automated, paragraph by paragraph, it had to be reassembled by hand. She never anticipated it would take so long, nor that she wouldn’t be present for publication. Shaking off the ghost of Fran’s hand, so to speak, took a while, but the result is one of the most artfully ingenious stories you’ll likely read.

Fran and I became friends at an MWA gathering where she was giddy her first novel had been accepted for publication. Some thought her excitement was unseemly, but why not? We began to chat, partly about wrting, partly about everything. She liked to say after retirement she could move to Florida and quietly fade away, or live out her dream to write.

She sometimes phoned in the middle of the night to chat about nothing in particular. Fran was warm, witty, and wildly inappropriate. She entered her teens in the latter 1950s and I imagine young Fran was a trip and a handful. Even in her 70s, she was an incorrigible flirt. She loved men and could read XY chromosomes as readily as a Vanity Fair article. She had an uncanny knack of peering into the mind, perhaps learned from years of classroom experience and knowing herself. It wasn’t a bad thing.

Fran admired Mickey Spillane, loved bluegrass banjo, enjoyed cooking, and she appreciated American fine art. She claimed she watched sports for one reason only, to gaze upon players’, erm, male Sitzfleisch, that is to say derrières, tochus, hindaments, bums, buns, butts, booty patooties– you get the idea. That was Fran, unapologetic.

She also suffered great tragedy. Linda, Fran’s cousin, best friend, neighbor, and organizer of Fran’s Callie Parrish fan club, was brutally murdered in a home invasion. Fran swore she’d never write again. In our wee hour chats, I quietly listened. Slowly she returned to the notion of her writing again. That took a year. Her fourth novel wasn’t the same, but she’d taken the step. Over time, Fran once again found her footing.

Fran died on a Christmas Eve, her wonderful story suspended in the æther of the otherworld. For a long time, it occupied a pending spot in SleuthSayers files. Earlier this year, I readied it for the Halloween season as a holiday gift.

I cannot emphasize how much I admire this many layered story. You’ll discover why I illustrated today’s article with the Wyeth painting above. Take a moment on El Día de Muertos, the 1^st of November, to read her brilliant tale, Emily’s Ghost.

— Leigh

Since the Ball's in My Court

2026-10-17T00:00:00.000-04:00

NOTE: We'll be traveling on the day this is posted, so I'll be late in responding to any comments. In other words, the ball will probably sit there awhile before being hit back.

Do you ever wonder where we Sayers of Sleuth get the ideas for these columns? (No, mine are not from those bowls of chili I eat just before going to bed.)

The idea for this post came from an interview I watched the other night following a college football game. A coach I will leave unnamed said to the press and the TV audience, "Our team came to play tonight and gave 110%, but it was a game of two halves, and at the end of the day the other side wanted it more."

Yes, I admit I'm paraphrasing that, but the real thing wasn't much better. After a lot more talk about momentum shifts and gut-checks and physicality and athleticism, he closed by saying they're taking it one game at a time, which if I'm not mistaken is the only possible way to take it.

On the one hand, I'm used to hearing this kind of mumbojumbo, because I like college football. On the other hand, I consider myself to be a writer and to know at least something about words and word usage. So, since I needed a subject for this column anyway, I put together the following list of 100 sports-inspired cliches that have made their way, God help us, into the English language and our everyday speech.

Fasten your chin-strap; here we go:

Keep your eye on the ball

It was a slam dunk

Par for the course

Step up to the plate

Full-court press

He talks a good game

It's time to play hardball

Don't pull any punches

Monday-morning quarterback

Go for the gold

Knock it out of the park

They control their own destiny

Put on your game face

In a league of their own

Out of left field

In my wheelhouse

Batting a thousand

On the rebound

Four-down territory

Hit a home run

The ball didn't bounce our way

They've moved the goalposts

A hail-Mary pass

We got the W

A team player

They brought their A-game

He's their go-to guy

Watch from the sidelines

Snap the ball

Pass the baton

Tee it up

Rein in

Jump the gun

Run interference

Take a rain check

We're on the home stretch

They left it all on the field

Go down swinging

Hit the ground running

A whole new ballgame

We're home safe

Warm the bench

Go the distance

Hit the bulls-eye

Home-field advantage

A must-win situation

Make the cut

The gloves are off

The ball's in your court

A photo finish

On any given Sunday

He ran the table

Nothing but net

Get the ball rolling

Take it on the chin

Just under the wire

Touch base

Move the chains

A team effort

Pinch hitter

Heavyweight/lightweight

Out of the starting gate

It's a marathon, not a sprint

False start

Kick off

Go to bat for

Throw in the towel

Behind the eight-ball

Two-minute warning

Cross the finish line

Top of the ninth

Stick to the game plan

Back up and punt

Saved by the bell

They threw us a curve

Keep the drive alive

Bring home the gold

Call the play

Goal-line stand

They dropped the ball

He drained the three

She hit a hole-in-one

A dark horse

A low blow

A chip shot

A bad call

A tight race

A gutsy play

There's no I in team

They won't play ball

Split the uprights

In the red zone

Game, set, and match

Three strikes against you

Depends on where they spot the ball

The crowd went wild

Down for the count

Third and long

Fourth and goal

Take one for the team

. . . and many more

He took one for the team

Do you recognize all these sports-related phrases? Do you use some of them? Cringe when you hear them? (I especially hate "draining" those three-pointers. Draining?) Can you think of any cliches I left out? Did I think of way too many? (My wife says YES.)

Although I try hard to avoid using cliches--sports or otherwise--in my fiction writing, I confess that I use them a lot in speech, and also as a part of story dialog. Why? Because it feels and sounds natural to do, I guess, and because they're used so often almost everyone gets the meaning.

But I'll only take it so far. I promise that you'll never again hear me say or see me write the words athleticism or physicality, or use the letter W instead of the word win. I do try to maintain at least some dignity in my life.

A closing note: I'm not criticizing all sports broadcasters or coaches or others who regularly spew these kinds of words and phrases. Some make informative observations. NFL analyst and former quarterback Joe Theismann once said, "Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein."

On the subject of writing, Norman would probably say . . . Take it one story at a time.

Book DNA – is it for you?

2026-10-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

This is my penultimate SleuthSayers post, and I hope you'll find it helpful if you have a book to promote - or if you just like to read and discuss books!

When I was seeking publicity opportunities for It's Not Even Past a year ago, Liz Zelvin steered me toward Shepherd, a "book discovery platform" similar in some ways - but not all - to

Goodreads. In 2026, Shepherd rebranded as Book DNA, which is certainly a more informative name for a book-finding service! They've got an interesting concept. Book DNA allows readers to find curated reading lists (if you like books by Jane Doe, here's what other Jane Doe fans recommend). It categorizes books by genre, and provides "author profile pages" that let you meet an author, learn about his or her book, and explore a list of five books that author recommends.

Well, why not? At the basic level, it's free to both readers and authors, so I hit "contact" and a pleasant, enthusiastic person named Cathy got back to me quickly, inviting me to fill out a form describing my book and listing five of my own faves. I was only sixty-five percent certain she was a real person and not an AI assistant, but - she turned out to be for real.

Listing my top five books was a tough assignment, because my purpose was to steer traffic toward my book, which is gritty crime fiction, perhaps could be called noir, and is technically a story collection, though the stories are interlocked, chronological, and - read together - form a novel. But many of my favorite writers are entirely outside those genres: Colson Whitehead (The Nickel Boys, The Underground Railroad), Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kittredge), Ann Patchett (Bel Canto), George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo), Jim Fergus (One Thousand White Women), Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex). And don't get me started on kids' books. I read the entire Little House, All of a Kind Family, and Miss Bianca series straight through every few years. I still dream about Lois Lenski's Indian Captive and Ruth Archer's A Candle in Her Room. So I narrowed my focus to the best books that had something in common with my own - a dark premise, one or more murders, an element of mystery - and I still had a very, very hard time narrowing the list.

I knew Elizabeth George and Ruth Rendell would make the cut. I wasn't sure which book in either case, but I finally decided by thinking, well, you love all their books, but which do you remember best? And that gave me What Came Before He Shot Her - George's tour de force follow-up to her own With No One as Witness, in which Inspector Thomas Lynley's fiancee, Lady Helen Clyde, is murdered by a child of twelve. What Came Before He Shot Her is heartbreaking, moving, terrifying - as good as any of George's novels, but in some regards, entirely different. For Rendell, I was tempted by The Veiled One - I love Inspector Wexford - but I finally decided on a Barbara Vine title, A Dark-Adapted Eye, a masterwork of secrets and family dysfunction. (Vine is one of Rendell's pseudonyms.)

I had the same problem with Kate Atkinson, and I sort of thought I should list her twice - once for Jackson Brodie (I chose Case Histories, almost solely because it's first, but they're all great) and again for her more literary (and weird, and wonderful) Life After Life. I finally went with Jackson because it's closer to what I write - he's a semi-amateur sleuth with a predilection for trouble - and also because how do you choose Life After Life without its equally stunning companion novel, A God in Ruins? Haven't read those? Get thee to Bookshop.org. You are in for a life-changing read. I promise.

Well, speaking of life-changing, I've listed three books and haven't gotten to Sarah Waters yet, although she's probably the best contemporary writer going. Fingersmith, remember? But I went with The Paying Guests. Oh. My. God. Just read it, if you haven't yet. It's got everything: Depression-era London, class warfare, forbidden lesbian sex, murder…

I sat up late arguing with Emma Donaghue (Room, Frog Music) and Paulette Jiles (have mercy! she has written some amazing books: Enemy Women, News of the World). Finally, I realized I cared a lot more about my list than either of them do (also, they weren't actually there) and I went with Jiles' phenomenal The Color of Lightning. It was tough because I dream about News of the World, but Lightning taught me so much about the American West and about fine, fine writing. It's the fictionalized story of Britt Johnson, a free Black cowboy who rescues his family from Comanchees during the Civil War.

When I'd turned in my list, along with a blurb about my own book, I heard back from Cathy and crew almost immediately. They'd made some small cuts for space and some edits to break up lengthy blocks of text. I didn't really notice anything missing, but I certainly appreciated being asked.

The next step takes us to my only quibble with Book DNA - the buy button. Although readers can buy from Bookshop.org, Amazon is the default. One must click on a very small arrow on the Amazon button to see that there's an option.

I clicked through on both sales platforms to check my book, and found that there was no "preview" or "look inside" option on Amazon - something that many readers use prior to making a purchase. It turns out that Amazon doesn't post previews until a book is actually released. And once again, Book DNA came through with flying colors, offering to hold off posting until the release date - October 20.

As Dad often reminded us, "there's no such thing as a free lunch." But no one at Book DNA had asked me for a dime. So - how do they make money? In two ways, as it turns out. One, Book DNA receives a commission on sales that accounts for about twenty percent of their revenue. The other eighty percent comes from reader and author memberships. But the "freemium" model means that the basic membership level is free for both writers and readers. Authors can - and many do - pay a bit more to get special promotion and increased visibility, but the curated lists are free for real.

There are plenty of happy writers engaging with the site, but it's always informative to know what folks don't like. So I asked Uncle Google what dissatisfied authors had to say about the platform, and the answer was revealing: authors didn't like the effort required to choose five favorite books and write a paragraph about each. These are writers. Writers trying to promote a book. A book they have written. Go figure. Ben Fox, co-founder of Book DNA, says that it should take authors thirty to 45 minutes to write something that will "deliver a lifetime of steady promotion. This isn't a blog where it posts and then readers never see it again; your recommendations plug into our entire platform, and every reader who visits looking for a book has a chance of bumping into your book and your book recommendations as they explore."

If you read my last SleuthSayers post, you know that I'm willing to work hard to take advantage of small promotion and publicity opportunities, and that some of these "little ponds" have really paid off for me. So I've little time for writers who claim to want to sell books but are not willing to make the effort to do so.

I'm excited about the Book DNA opportunity, and I'm interested to see what happens on October 20th. Stay tuned.

Anna Scotti's work appears frequently in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. It's Not Even Past will be released by Crippen & Landru on October 20, followed by They Look Like Angels, a collection of stand-alone stories, early next year. Scotti is the Chautauqua Journal's nominee for Best of the Net (fiction) this year for her story, The Intruder.

Scotti is also a poet, with recent inclusions in Chautauqua, Nimrod, The Women Artists Datebook, and in Women in a Golden State (Gunpowder Press). You can read and hear some of her poems without a paywall on her site or at The New Yorker.

A Very Special Character Study

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

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

***

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

Realistic (and often contradictory) personality traits.

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

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

Smoothies!

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

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

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

And for relaxation, he taught himself to crochet.

Interesting, right? Unexpected?

And even better because it's real life.

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

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

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

Enjoys gardening. LOVES Bruce Springsteen's music.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love you, Mom! Hope this is pleasant surprise!

Bruce Alexander

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Self-Taught Writer

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

Recently rereleased by
Crimson Gate Books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

So here we are on that ambiguous holiday again

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part One: Might Makes Right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Halloween Specials Gap

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

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

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

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

And yes, I think about these things sometimes.

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

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

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

Something with commercial breaks to sell you stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Halloween, everybody!

Before Las Vegas, There Was… Newport, Kentucky?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Jerry Springer Show.

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

Seriously, Trigger Warnings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Monica Hesse said on WaPo:

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTE: This transcript included the direct statements:

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

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

Anyway, Van Houten said,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PLUS

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

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

OK. A couple of suggestions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Writing Life?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Books I Recommend

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

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

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

So without further ado ...

The Women in White by Sarah Pekkanen

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

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

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

A Cute Little Murder by Molly Harper

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

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

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

The Primrose Murder Society by Stacy Hackney

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

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

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

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

And now for a little BSP:

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

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

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

Oops

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what I’d call a happy accident.

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

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

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

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fraudulent Færies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Mouths of Babes

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

1^st Cottingley photo

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

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

Back in England

5^th Cottingley photo

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

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

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

No fairies were harmed in the making of this article.

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

Boo-hoo, Wow, and Hooray

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Surprise

Poltergeist: TV people

The Usual Suspects: The greatest trick the devil ever pulled

12 Angry Men: It's a very unusual knife

Romancing the Stone: Together, forever

Dead Poets Society: O captain, my captain

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

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

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

2. Sadness

Cool Hand Luke: He was smilin'

Somersby: God bless you, Jack

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

Lonesome Dove: Hell of a vision

The Last Sunset: Primroses

Old Yeller: Travis, bring your gun

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

3. Tension

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

Goldfinger: What kept you?

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

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968): Left early

Star Trek II: Here it comes

Aliens: Punch it, Bishop

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

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

4. Happiness

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

Flashdance: What a feeling

Witness: He'll need his city clothes

Forrest Gump: Run, Forrest, run

Rocky: Ain't gonna be no rematch

The Graduate: Elaine!

An Officer and a Gentleman: Way to go, Paula

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

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

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

Go ye and do likewise.

The Strangers Who Came to Dinner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My backyard, late July 2017, 7 AM.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe I was not loud or annoying enough?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The system is far from foolproof.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

joedenise.com

My Father & the Big A

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

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

At least until recently.

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

My dad has Alzheimer’s.

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

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

Don Johnson and James Gammon

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

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

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

This is no mean feat.

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

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

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

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

James Garner and Gena Rowlands in The Notebook

Old Myths, New Stories

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

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

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

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

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

Gate of Hades

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

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

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