SleuthSayers

The Tell-Tale Heart

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

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

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

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

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

Verbal Cues

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

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

Cullen 328 Creative Commons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until next time.

School Daze

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dumb Kids

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

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

But also… her article inspired today’s article.

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

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

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

Easy: I had no idea what I was doing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lesson

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

The Old Man and the Sand and Sea

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

Ever met anybody famous?

I suspect you have. Most of us, I think, have experienced--or know folks who have experienced--unique contacts with "well-known" people. Examples: When one of my writer friends was a child, his babysitter was Sharon Tate. (Seriously.) Another writer friend once did a major-movie love scene with Clint Eastwood. My former literary agent talked Robert Bloch into writing Psycho. My father's best friend flew missions with pilot Gene Autry in World War II. And so on and so on. I myself have sat next to several of my favorite movie actors on commercial flights during my IBM years, and pestered a few of them all the way to baggage claim.

Another memory is of a night when my vacationing family and I were eating dinner in my dad's brother's seaside restaurant in Pensacola, Florida. I was twelve years old, and because it was my sister's fifth birthday, my uncle (who had no children) secretly arranged for all the cooks and waiters to march out with a cake and sing "Happy Birthday" to her. As it turned out, two of the cast of the then-hit TV show Gunsmoke--Amanda Blake and Milburn Stone--were among the diners that night, and afterward the two of them came over to our table, wished my sister a happy birthday, and sat and visited with us for half an hour. This was long, long ago, but such a thing was unusual even then, and I still remember being thrilled.

My favorite story, though, of a chance meeting with a famous person came from one of the students in my writing classes.

Here's the background . . .

The student in question, the late Nick Adams, lived in Mendenhall, Mississippi, about half an hour south of Millsaps College in Jackson, where for many years I taught two night courses on writing and selling short stories. Nick was a good writer and an all-around good guy, and I grew to know him well. We worked together on a number of his stories, and he honestly enjoyed the process of writing--he wrote both fiction and poetry.

The funny thing is, he never said anything, during all our weeks of classes, about the story I'm about to tell you. He revealed it to me only afterward, at a dinner held to celebrate the end of our two courses. (Celebrate is the correct word; my students were probably glad to be rid of me.)

. . . and here's the story:

In the early spring of 1959 Nick Adams was a freshman at Del Mar Junior College in Corpus Christi, Texas. He was a student reporter for the school newspaper, The Foghorn, and his family owned a restaurant in a Corpus hotel called The Sand and Sea Resort, on the Gulf of Mexico. After classes Nick waited tables, washed dishes, made room-service deliveries, mopped the floors, and did whatever needed doing at both the restaurant and the hotel.

One day that year he looked up from his duties and saw, standing there in the hotel lobby . . . Ernest Hemingway. The author was there with his wife Mary and his old friend and fellow author A.E. Hotchner. An avid reader, Nick recognized Hemingway immediately. Since Nick was in the vicinity, the desk clerk asked him to take the three guests's luggage up to their rooms, and Nick--in a quick whisper--asked the clerk if she realized who these people were. She said no--she'd never heard of them.

Nick took the bags up, they tipped him well, and he rushed back to the restaurant to tell his mother what had happened. She listened as Nick blurted out his story, then said, "Go call him. Now."

"What?"

"You're studying journalism, right? You write for the school paper. Call him on the phone and ask him if you can do an interview."

Nick realized that made sense. He beat feet back to the hotel lobby, phoned Hemingway's room from the front desk, and--trying to keep his voice from shaking--made the request. He did not, however, reveal his name. He was afraid that if he mentioned his name they would think he was pulling some kind of hoax, or making a joke. (As a longtime fan, he was familiar with all the Nick Adams short stories Hemingway had published, mostly in the 1920s and '30s.) To his amazement, he was told by the wife, "Sure. Come on up."

Mary Hemingway welcomed Nick into the room just as her husband was stepping out of the shower. He smiled and shook Nick's hand as he stood there naked and dripping, and in fact continued to stand there chatting until his wife fetched him a bathrobe. Then they sat together at a table, and for the next twenty minutes Nick asked questions and scribbled the replies in a notebook he'd brought along. Hemingway was gracious and helpful throughout the interview. When it was over, he asked Nick not to let anyone from the local media know he was there until after he'd left the next day, and Nick agreed to keep the secret.

The following morning the three travelers had breakfast at the family restaurant before leaving. Nick was away and in class, but his mother introduced herself to Hemingway, and he asked her what her son's name was so he could leave a card. When she told him Nick Adams, Hemingway was both surprised and pleased. The note he left said, "To Nick Adams, who will make a good reporter."

Some years later, Hotchner wrote a book called Papa Hemingway, and the Sand and Sea incident is recorded there. He got some of it wrong--I've read the book and found the account--but the essentials are there, right down to Hemingway's reaction to finding out the boy's name.

Again, Nick never mentioned this during our many references to Hemingway's writings during the classes--he told me about it only at the final dinner, when all of us were sitting around talking about old times. And maybe the funniest thing of all is that Nick Adams (the real one, not the character) never became a reporter. He became a successful businessman instead.

And a part-time writer. I still have a signed book of his poetry. Is that wild, or what?

NOTE: Last week I googled the hotel for the first time, and found this, among other info: In March 1959, renowned author Ernest Hemingway was interviewed at the Sand and Sea Resort Hotel by a college journalism student.

My question for today is, have you ever met, either accidentally or intentionally, a famous writer--or, for that matter, a famous politician, actor, musician, etc? Was it a normal meeting, or unusual in some way? If it was an author, did that at all inspire or influence your writing? Did the meeting result in any fictional versions of it?

Before closing, I'll share one more story of my own. I once ran into the American pop singer Billy Joe Royal, just before one of his college concerts in the late 1960s. (Yes, I know--you younger folks won't remember him.) Anyhow, he and his group were turning a corner going one way and I was walking the other way, and I ran into him, literally--Royal was a short guy and I'm not--and knocked him flat on his back right there in the hallway outside the ballroom of the Student Union. His entourage went nuts, but I apologized and helped him to his feet and all was well. I still think about that every time I hear an old recording of "Down in the Boondocks."

Hopefully your celebrity encounters went better than that one.

Whatever it is or was that inspires you, find or remember it and keep writing! See you in two weeks.

Going After Publicity for Your (small, precious) Book

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

So you've got a novel coming out? If you are with one of the Big Five publishers - Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, or Hachette - there will be a publicity machine at work for you. Your editor, or the publicity department, will let you know what they want your role to be. They may ask you to update your website, open social media accounts, or to provide a mailing list of friends, family, and fans.

If you are with a smaller press, say a university press or a small independent publisher - you should inquire, when you are offered a contract, what your role will be in gaining publicity for your book. Most small presses welcome your involvement and will be delighted if you submit your work to reviewers, arrange for readings and signings on your own, and so forth. But check! You do not want to overstep, duplicate their efforts, or - eek - embarrass your publisher.

I'm not familiar with every aspect of self-publishing, but I'd imagine the tips I'm about to offer will apply nicely to self-published authors as well.

If you are about to release a book, be reachable via a website. The primary purpose of publicity is to sell your book, and the secondary purpose is to get your name out there so that you can be contacted by fans, publishers, agents, and sponsors of events and projects you may find appealing.

Your website can be extremely simple - your name, your picture, your book cover, a release date, and a contact form so people can reach you (don't post your personal email address). A fuller website with lots of pictures and info about all of your publications is better, but at least have the minimum. You can hire someone to do a bang-up website, but that costs. Or you can do it yourself, nearly for free. My website is perpetually under construction and is never up-to-date, so don't come at me after you take a peek - but the point is I am findable. I do get a lot of spam. I also get fan letters, invitations to paid speaking engagements, requests for interviews, offers to contribute to journals and anthologies, and - since my novel-in-stories It's Not Even Past was orphaned last year when the publisher closed - inquiries from publishers.

You need some kind of social media. Something. Facebook has developed a reputation for being mostly for seniors, but their largest demographic (worldwide) is actually young adults 25 - 35. So you can reach young readers with a facebook page (and paid ads, if you want to go that route). But don't be too quick to write off the oldsters, either - seniors buy a lot of books! If you are already on Facebook, open a separate author page you are comfortable setting to "public." Keep this page for business. No pictures of lunch, cats, craft cocktails, precocious toddlers, thrifting expeditions or politics - unless applicable to your book.

Yes, cute. No, website.

A lot of writers promote their work on Instagram. Since the mass exodus from X (formerly Twitter), many use Threads. Bluesky is also popular. My advice is go to the websites of authors you like and admire, whose work is in some way similar to your own, and see what social media platforms they use. If you are new to all this, choose one - you don't have time to manage them all. (If you have that much time on your hands, you should spend more of it writing.)

Reviews on Goodreads and Amazon can be critical to a book's success. They are primary platforms for "book discovery." However, these platforms can be frustrating. Trolls may give your books bad reviews just for fun, or because they don't like you. If you do see negative reviews of your work - legit or troll-generated - ignore them. Remember the adage Never wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

Next up: go after publicity opportunities, large and small. Ask friends and family to help spread the word about your book by putting the book cover on their social media, and by mentioning it to their book club, local librarian, and local bookstore. Include a purchase link to make it easy for them to buy your book! Consider pushing your publisher's site and bookshop.org, which allows readers to purchase online while supporting local bookstores!

If you live in L.A. or New York, it's nearly impossible to get a reading or signing at a bookstore - there are just so many writers, most more famous than you (or I). But if you live in a smaller city or town, you've got a good shot. Walk into bookstores and greet the manager. Buy a book. Tell them you're available for a signing or a reading and that you can "fill the room." If you have a friend in college, ask them to mention your book to their English professor. But don't put people on the spot - ask once, and take no - or no answer - for an answer. No everyone will want to read your book, and not everyone who does read it will enjoy it. That's life.

Your college alumni newsletter is a great place to publicize your work. Your local newspaper editor might be interested, too. Again, highly unlikely if you live in New York or LA, but far more promising if you live in Smallburg, North Dakota or Tiny Town, Georgia. Ask!

Your publisher should provide you with ARCs, or "Advance Review Copies." These are typically electronic (PDF or epub). Some publishers will also provide hard copies, but these are expensive and must be distributed judiciously. Electronic ARCs increase the likelihood that your work will be "pirated" – that is, circulated to unauthorized readers for free… but there are worse things. No one wants to be pirated, but the truth is all circulation builds word of mouth and it could result in your finding paying readers. It's important that you discuss distribution of ARCs with your publisher. They may have a do and don't list to help control unauthorized access.

These days, when writers talk about "reviews," they are often referring to individual reader reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, or on reviewer platforms like NetGalley or Booksprout. But "real" reviews - those written by professionals that appear in journals and newspapers - are the Holy Grail, and you should go after them. Thirteen million people read The New York Times each day. You probably won't get reviewed there. But a small-town newspaper, even a freebie, can easily have 5,000 daily readers, up to as many as 13,000. That's a lot of potential to sell books!

Think about books you like that are similar in some way (e.g. genre) to your own. Figure out where the books have been reviewed using your good friend google. Then contact the reviewer and ask if you can send them an ARC. Nota Bene: the more prestigious the periodical, as a rule, the earlier they want your ARCs. Many will request them four or five months ahead of publication, and your small publisher simply may not have them ready that far in advance. Wing it! If an editor agrees to read an ARC, send them a meticulously edited PDF - along with information like release date, cover price, ISBN, and whether bookstores will carry your book.

Your publisher will probably ask you for an email list - and even if not, you should have one for your own use. Way, way ahead of time, prepare a list of every single person you know who might conceivably be interested in you or your book. Have names and email addresses current, proofread and up to date. Be sure there is a purchase link (preferably, a pre-purchase link) included so that people can order your book on impulse, while they are thinking of it. If you end up sending out the email yourself, include a request that readers review you on Amazon or Goodreads.

Go after the little guys - and the medium-sized guys, too. Before It's Not Even Past was released, I hit up everyone I could think of to run a review or at least a mention. A lot of folks ignored my request, a few said no - and quite a few said yes! My alma mater asked me to teach a class. Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (where many of the stories first appeared) invited me to blog for Something Is Going to Happen. Art Taylor asked me to blog for The First Two Pages, too! Dru's Book Musing ran a cover reveal and A Day in the Life feature, Victoria Leigh reviewed, and Roger Johns ran an interview on Murder Books.

Paul O'Connor interviewed me for Hourglass Author, and Bonnar Spring invited me to an interview on Crime Wave Podcast (mine aired right after Anthony Horowitz's!). And there were more.

John Loyd posted a comprehensive review of the collection. Book blogger Anne Van Doorn ran a terrific review, and Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier included It's Not Even Past in a round-up of crime short story collections published on Crime Reads. Jeremy Black of The Critic accepted a review copy and gave it a stellar review! Then he passed the book along to David Brown, a book blogger who loves mysteries, and David ran a review and invited me to an interview!

Janet Rudolph of The Mystery Readers Journal offered me a spot in Mystery Fanfare, and King's River Life, a magazine that really supports mystery writers, told me they no longer run reviews of collections – but asked me to do a guest blog! Crime Fiction Lover ran a nice mention, and Killer Nashville and International Thriller Writers both invited me to contribute to their journals! Some of these outlets are small and some are huge. But they all have readers who love mysteries and buy books, and I went after every single opportunity I could. And then…

Down&Out Books closed and my book went out of print, right after it was released. So all that work was a big waste of time, right?

No! Decidedly not! Because a couple of months later, I got an email from a guy who'd tracked me down via my website. He had heard about the book but couldn't find a copy online (of course). Seemed like a nice guy, so I offered to sell him one of the six remaining author copies I'd been hoarding for posterity. That night, I sat bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night, struck by an epiphany. Doug Greene. Douglas Greene. I know that name.

Sure enough. Mr. Greene is the (semi-retired) founder of Crippen&Landru, a highly respected publisher of mystery collections, classic and contemporary. And he loved my book! I asked him to put in a good word for me with the editor-in-chief, Jeff Marks, and a couple of weeks later, we had a deal! Crippen & Landru will release It's Not Even Past with a new cover and a new introduction in October, and are currently negotiating foreign rights for the book on my behalf! They'll release a second collection, They Look Like Angels, early in the new year. This happy ending would absolutely not have happened had I not gone all out to get publicity for my book. That is how Doug Greene found me, and it's how the foreign publishers found me, too.

Christian Gibson's cover!

So you spent a year – maybe more – writing your book, and you worked hard to get it out to potential publishers. Now spend some time ensuring that your book reaches the fullest complement of readers possible! Good luck!

Anna Scotti is delighted to have the next in her "librarian-on-the-run" series, When Bright Angels Beckon, included in the 85th anniversary issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (September-October '26), along with a personal essay, Sisters Reading Sisters. Bright Angels is the thirteenth story in the librarian series, and the eleventh to appear in EQMM. The next in the series, I Shall Wear Purple, will appear in an upcoming issue. Learn more at AnnaKScotti.com . Purchase It's Not Even Past direct from the publisher, at your local bookstore, or online. It will be available from bookshop.org soon!

Everyone - Big Five kahunas, small press authors, self-published writers and "gettin' there" authors - is invited to post comments, questions, corrections and additions in the comments. Please do!

AI Slop Slop Slop

2026-09-03T00:10:00.000-04:00

Doing research so you don't have to, I've been taking a look at some of the AI Slop that's out there, and… it's worse than you think. And they're charging out the whazoo for it.

For example, on Facebook - FACEBOOK (!) - there's a series of "alpha werewolf shapeshifters romances". Tropes: Heroine - special, graced, chosen, white werewolf. An emotional / brutal betrayal and/or sexual excerpt. Then

"Click to read this spicy bestseller."

And if you click, and I highly recommend that you don't, basically it's the story of a pack of misogynistic alpha werewolves who proceed to reject, lock up, beat up, torture, throw out, kidnap back, etc. the heroine until she finally escapes and is found by someone who recognizes she's the future hope of the world (although she's never told that because plot reasons): and then it all starts over again, because... The exact same plot, same dialog, same everything... only the alpha's name changes. And this same chapter, same story, shows up under at least a dozen different hosts, so many, that it's almost impossible to block all of them, though I am getting close. Also, they charge by the chapter. WHAT a waste of money.

This is AI slop at its least fine, tarted up with… well, not tarted up at all.

This same marketing formula for human alpha romance novels is spreading all over Facebook too, whether "Blood Mafia" or "Billionaire Bosses" or "Dominant Dukes", etc. Think Harlequin or Mills & Boon, etc. but more graphic (and I'm not talking comics).

Now it is true that romance novels have always leaned towards the alpha male. Go look on Kindle, which provides cover illustrations - classic Shirtless Silks & Satins cover (often with a hint - or more than a hint of B&D). There you can see alpha dukes (why are they always dukes? There have never been that many dukes in the history of England!), or Scottish lairds (extremely popular right now, probably because of Outlander), the (hellion / orphan / widow / heiress) he weds (or not) because (insert trope here), their fraught relationship until…

"Click to read this spicy bestseller".

BTW, how long have millionaire / billionaire cowboys been trending?

And on Kindle, of course, there's many the author who (?) posts a new book every week, if not more, more than any human being could ever write in that short a time. Romance, Westerns, Mysteries, Thrillers, Spies, Sci-Fi...

And it's all AI Slop.

Now, it's not slop because it has a formula. We all know there's a formula. Murder mysteries have to have a murder, clues, and someone has to solve the damn thing. Romance has to have a couple who meet, and then it's either friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, or instant love & a villain's getting in their way. Thrillers have constant suspense, twists and turns, and (generally) a villain who always manages to get away with everything until the very last minute. Etc.

No, it's not that it has a formula, the giveaway is that it has the SAME DAMN FORMULA in every single book: often the same stilted dialogue, and so many typos and irrational, unnecessary jumps in time/space - all mixed together as if there's an AI blender whirring our brains to mush, and all ignored as if they hadn't happened.

Thank God for delete buttons.

More satisfying than reading the damn stuff.

And before you think it's all the sex that gets me angry - I love a good smutty book. I have quite a few.* And I think more of today's young men should read them, because they might learn a few tricks.

*If you'd like my list of hot authors, send a message via Velda either at the bar on the corner or in the dark alley behind it, and I'll get back to you.

No, it's not the sex, what I HATE is misogyny & sexual assault & rape passed off as "spicy". It's not. Not in my world.

And there's a lot of it in AI slop, which makes we wonder if the algorithm used to produce it is from the Tate Bros, or Mad Men, or any other current alpha male influencer, especially those who are apparently promoting pheromone maxxing. No showers, no brushing teeth, no wiping? Dudes, you're never gonna get a date. Except with your alpha male influencer, and he charges money.

Anyway, back in the early 1970s I read and enjoyed, God forgive me, Dan Jenkins' Semi-Tough, a satirical novel about the NFL which was full of raunch, n-words, racism, sex, drugs, and some stories that were damn funny. Twenty years later, I threw it on the give away pile and got rid of it. I literally hadn't noticed before how misogynistic and racist the book is. As an incredibly accurate review from Goodreads says:

"Shake Tiller and Billy Clyde Puckett - and Shake’s girlfriend, Barbara Jane Bookman. Barb is the daughter of the richest man back in Fort Worth, Texas. She's described – by both guys – as almost perfect, sexy, beautiful, flawless body, smart, and always knows how to be “one of the guys”. Barb, the ultimate fantasy girlfriend, who never sleeps with anyone but Shake, but is always cool with everything the boys do, whether getting blow-jobs in a bathtub by a hired hooker or drinking themselves silly or spending the pre-Superbowl night at a party where there’s drinks, drugs, and endless girls, and of course Barb never worries about get STDs or anything like that. Just cool with the guys. And in the end, after putting up with all Shake's adolescent crap, she's still dumped by Shake, who literally leaves her to Billy Clyde."

Basically, Barbara Jane Bookman was the 1973 version of Gillian Flynn's "Cool Girl" (Gone Girl) (LINK). Making women be perfect or else for over 50 years.

BTW, once streaming became possible, my husband and I watched some old 1960s and 1970s movies, and wondered what the hell we'd seen in them.

Examples:

A Woman Under the Influence – considered John Cassavetes' directorial masterpiece, where both the husband (Peter Falk) and the wife (Gena Rowlands) are insanely heavy drinkers and fighters, but she's the one put into a mental hospital. By him.

Five Easy Pieces, in which every single woman in the movie (except for the two lesbians headed to Alaska) is for nothing but sex, and even then the guy's a jerk about it. For that matter, same with the movie M.A.S.H. – all the nurses are for sex, and the scene where "Hot Lips" Houlihan, showering, is exposed naked, wet, and crawling on the floor of the shower to the entire camp is probably one of the least funny, most humiliating moments in movies I've ever seen.

It is not, however, the most violent towards women. That is still reserved, imho, for 1973's The Long Goodbye (starring Elliot Gould as Philip Marlowe), because of the scene where the bastard Marty smashes a coke bottle in the face of his beautiful mistress, "the most important woman in the world to me" and says, "Now, that's someone I love! And you I don't even like! You got an assignment, cheapie: find my money!" Worse, later Marlowe's back at Marty's, and there she is, black eyes beneath the bandages – still with Marty. I think that's the most shocking act of violence that's ever been filmed, because nothing happens to Marty. Even Philip Marlow just walks away, and she just sucks it up and stays.

Things got better, of course. All sorts of wonderful movies have been made with and about women who can hold their own: Three Women, Fried Green Tomatoes, The Hunger Games, The English Patient, Arrival, Nomadland, etc.

And The Return, which is the reason I don't need to see The Odyssey: the whole last chapter done by Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche as Odysseus and Penelope, directed by Uberto Pasolini. Amazing. Hypnotic. Available for streaming.

But the AI Slop has got to stop.

First Impressions

2026-09-02T00:00:00.000-04:00

They say we only get one chance to make a first impression.That got me thinking about the great characters in our genre. What is the first thing we learn about them? Here are the introductions to some of them. They are in alphabetical order by the name of the character. The answers are at the bottom. Good luck.

1. He threw soup at the wall in an Italian restaurant.

2. She jumped a pothole in Canal Street as she dashed between honking cars and double-parked ones.

3. He sat with his pint of Bass East India moodliy watching the froth disperse.

4.He was in a chemistry lab bemoaning that he could not get someone to go halves with him in some nice rooms he had found, and which were too much for his purse.

5. One of his core beliefs is that eventually all the New Empire restaurant will offer will be egg-fried rice and sweet-and-sour pork.

6. He was wearing a powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks, with dark blue clocks on them.

7. Her parlor was an old room with broad black beams across the ceiling, furnished with good furniture that belonged to it.

8. When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, he told him to go to hell.

9. When she first set eyes on Evelyn Barton-Forbes she (Evelyn) was walking the streets of Rome.

10. He was a little man who kissed a friend on both cheeks upon seeing him for the first time in years.

11. He was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy's bar.

12. He was arrested in Eno's diner.

13. His jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth.

14. He thought maybe he should have worn a tie to the office of the university president.

15. As she drove south along Lake Michigan she could smell rotting alewives like a faint perfume on the heavy air.

16. He left the catalogue at home.

17. He never hesitates to send his assistant running down to Murray Street for a can of shoe-polish if he happened to need one.

1. Father Brown. Chesterton, "The Blue Cross."

2. Lydia Chin. Rozan, China Trade.

3. Sergeant Cribb. Lovesey. The Detective Wore Silk Drawers.

4.Sherlock Holmes. Doyle. A Study in Scarlet.

5. Jackson Lamb. Herron. Slow Horses.

6. Philip Marlowe. Chandler. The Big Sleep.

7. Miss Jane Marple. Christie. "The Tuesday Night Club."

8. Parker. The Hunter.

9. Amelia Peabody. Peters. Crocodile on the Sandbank.

10. Hercule Poirot. Christie. The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

11.Easy Rawlins. Mosley. Devil in a Blue Dress.

12. Jack Reacher. Child. Killing Floor.

13. Sam Spade. Hammett. The Maltese Falcon.

14. Spenser. Parker. The Godwulf Manuscript.

15. V.I. Warshawski. Paretsky. Indemnity Only.

16. Lord Peter Wimsey. Sayers. Whose Body?

17. Nero Wolfe. Stout. Fer-De-Lance.

Writing Changes

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

At the Merrion Hotel in Dublin
last year, telling James Joyce
how a real writer works.

As I write this, my wife and I are packing for our second trip to Ireland; when it posts, we will be wrapping up and heading home. We plan overnight stays in two locations from our previous trip—the Merrion Hotel in Dublin and Ashford Castle in Cong—but all other overnight stays and stops along the way will be new to us.

What won’t be new is how I mix travel and writing: I don’t.

Unlike many writers who adhere so strongly to the “write every day” mantra that they carve out time during their travels to pound out a few pages every day, I use travel to get away from writing, to cleanse my brain, and, to the best of my ability, to live in the moment

Oh, if I happen to have a brilliant idea—which does happen on rare occasion—I might dictate a few notes into my phone and email the file to myself, but I don’t carry pen and paper or my laptop computer with me.

STORY BLOCK

I’m uncertain when I first began separating writing time from travel time, but it has worked well the past several years, and I usually return to my computer refreshed and ready to write.

Other life events, though, sometimes conspire against me.

Late last year, for example, Down & Out Books closed up shop, leaving many of my anthology projects in limbo. I spent the last of 2025 and the first of 2026 scrambling to find new homes for projects that were finished but not yet published as well as many published projects that were ripe for republication.

(So far Audecyn Books has rereleased Jukes & Tonks and Scattered, Smothered, Covered, and Chunked, and Crimson Gate Books has rereleased Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun. Other titles are forthcoming from White City Press and Crimson Gate Books, and Level Short has some original titles in their queue that were edited specifically for them.)

What this meant is that much of my available time was spent dealing with the fallout of D&O’s closure and was not spent writing.

When I finally returned to the keyboard in earnest, I found a disconnect in my writing. I wrote good sentences, good paragraphs, and even good scenes, but the first few stories didn’t gel. In each case, the whole was decidedly less than the sum of the parts.

I was frustrated. That’s not what’s supposed to happen.

I set those stories aside—maybe I’ll return to them in the future—and I floundered around the house for several days wondering what had gone wrong. I clearly didn’t have writer’s block—which I don’t believe exists—because I was clearly capable of writing good sentences, good paragraphs, and good scenes. I had—if such a thing exists—story block, the inability to assemble scenes into a coherent whole.

A PAGE A DAY

Then, more by accident than intention, I started writing one good page a day, asking nothing more from myself than that. Each page built on the previous day’s work, and each page worked to move plot forward until I had finished drafts of stories that worked.

Between the time I stumbled into this process and now, I have produced four stories. One has been submitted, two are complete drafts which I will reread, edit, and submit after we return from Ireland, and the fourth is a nearly complete draft. (All the elements are in place but some of the scenes are rough, and I will not be able to fix them before we head to the airport.)

Is this my new process, and I’ll return to it upon return from Ireland? Is this just a temporary approach, and I’ll return to my prior, sloppier way of banging out pages? Or will I find yet a third way of writing?

AN ASIDE

One interesting—to me, at least—connective tissue these four stories share: all were begun in response to calls for submission. The submitted story was written for an invitation-only anthology and submitted well before the deadline. One I had started a few years ago in response to a submission call but set aside unfinished. One was written in response to a submission call, but I’ll not meet the deadline because we’ll be in Ireland. And the last was written in response to a heads-up about a potential anthology. (The editor is waiting on thumbs-up or thumbs down from the publisher.)

THE WAY

Regardless of which approach I take to writing in the future, one thing remains true: As a writer, I will always find a way.

* * *

Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun was rereleased by Crimson Gate Books on August 10. If you missed the anthology when it was first released, now’s your opportunity to pick up a copy.

The Dream of Pure Reason

2026-08-31T00:20:47.466-04:00

Mysteries and their close relative, thrillers, form a complicated and diverse genre, with fashions and tastes changing every few decades. Hard drinking guys prowling mean streets give way to feminist gals with cynical eyes who are displaced by tormented souls who interrupt existential angst for a little criminology. We have golden age cozies that return, sometimes in curious forms with clever pets, and we currently have some super rational detectives, those descendants of Sherlock in his scientific mode.

What procedural is without its forensic crew with their microscopes and chemicals, their fingertip searches and studies of fibers and dust and bodily fluids? Electronics, the net, social media, and video surveillance provide clues even the great Holmes never imagined. Detection is going scientific with, at least for consumers of mystery fiction, mixed results.

After all, how exciting are screens full of phone numbers or fuzzy CCTV footage or test tubes slowly turning colors? Fortunately one aspect of forensics remains as dramatic as it was when it made its Renaissance debut. I refer to the autopsy and to the forensic pathologists, like Dr. Quirke, the TV crew of Silent Witness, and now Dr. Cuthbert, who recently made his American debut in Allan Gaw's The Silent House of Sleep.

Cuthbert learned his trade in Edinburgh, which can claim to be instrumental in both forensics and mysteries, the university's famous Dr. Joseph Bell having been Conan Doyle's inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. Cuthbert's fictional mentor, Dr. Littlejohn is very much in Bell's mold, emphasizing careful observation, meticulous preparation, and detailed records.

Littlejohn also emphasizes the forensic pathologist's precise role: to provide police with information. He is to discover scientific information, not to solve crimes or conduct investigations outside the laboratory.

A nice division of labor, and one that suits Dr. Cuthbert, who suffers from what his contemporaries called "shell shock" and what we know as post traumatic syndrome. He certainly has his reasons, having served in the trenches at Ypres on the Western Front. Gaw interweaves scenes from this devastating experience with Cuthbert's life fourteen years later as a senior pathologist in London.

I found this structure a bit disruptive initially, but I must admit it results in a fine payoff later in the novel, and both the horrors of the trenches and the exceedingly nasty case that becomes Dr. Cuthbert's focus are vividly presented and thematically related.

The novel's important characters are well delineated, too, and I can see them forming the nucleus of an interesting mystery series. (Gaw has written three others, and Mysterious Press promises to issue another Cuthbert mystery in '27.) We have the originally hostile, but very capable, Chief Inspector Mowbray; the considerably friendlier D.S. Baker, Cuthbert's formidable housekeeper, Marie Smith, a former war refugee from Belgium, and his eager assistant, Simon Morganthal.

Cuthbert and his police colleagues need all their resources when they are presented with two bodies that have been tied together and buried, naked and without identification, in a London park. Dr. Cuthbert begins extremely detailed postmortem, and it looks for a while as if the pathologist will be able to stick to his science.

But his own troubled mind, the memories of the trenches and of the man he loved, and the whole messy human dimension of the case intrude. Dr. Cuthbert proves to be equally observant outside the mortuary, and he is soon employing all his considerable intellectual, educational, and personal resources on the case.

Just as well. The mortuary and the doctor's increasingly well-equipped laboratory can reveal a sequence of events. But human motivation and the monstrosities of human imagination are much harder to measure or understand. Pure reason is a dream and for many of the characters there is no escape from the disasters of the Great War nor for confronting the human dimension of forensic puzzles.

The Silent House of Sleep is easy to admire in many ways, but the truly horrible crime and the even greater horrors of the war do not make for enjoyable reading. Gaw, himself a doctor, clearly knows forensic pathology and he is an effective writer. It will be interesting to see how much Dr. Cuthbert can recover from the war and what sort of cases he will handle in the future.

Dr. Allan Gaw

See You in the Funny Pages

2026-08-30T00:00:00.000-04:00

I started collecting comic books when I was about eight, and for many years took the hobby very seriously indeed--witness the twenty or so longboxes in my basement. Keeping up with the weekly grind of new issues eventually got to feeling too much like work, but by that time collected editions had become more popular, and many of the shelves in my home are filled with them.

My first comic

For several years, however, I barely read comics, for one reason: my eyes. They had deteriorated to such a degree that reading anything required bright light and a lot of concentration, and comics--where the text is often hand-written and cramped--presented especially acute challenges. Several months back, though, I had cataract surgery, and while my eyes will never be perfect, they're good enough that I can again read comics with pleasure, which has led to me revisiting a number of old favorites--some of which belong very much to the crime genre.

Comics and crime have a long history, of course. Dick Tracy remains one of the most popular comic strip characters ever created (and his adventures were penned for many years by superstar mystery writer Max Allan Collins). Batman first appeared in a periodical called Detective Comics, which was mostly about PIs and cops. And of course the lurid crime comics of the 1950s, particularly those from EC Comics, were so heavy with sex and violence that they helped usher in the Comics Code Authority. Today, though, I want to mention a few of my more contemporary favorites (keeping in mind that, as noted above, I've missed a lot of the most recent stuff). If you enjoy crime fiction, maybe you'd like checking out a few of these.

TOP 10. Created by the legendary Alan Moore, this short-lived title was about the cops of the tenth precinct in Neopolis--a city where everyone, including children and many animals, has super powers and alter egos. The streets of Neopolis are alive with aliens, robots, mutants and gods, and it's up to the overworked men, women and beasts of the tenth to keep order. The series balances a lot of elements that shouldn't work together, but do. The art, especially in crowded street scenes, is filled with comic book in-jokes and cameos. The cases, as you might expect, are often bizarre. The cops who make up the central cast, though, and the often fraught relationships between them, are presented with the depth, complexity and nuance of Hill Street Blues or the 87th Precinct novels of Ed McBain--even if the sergeant is a hyperintelligent dog in an exoskeleton and one of the main detectives a dark elf from another dimension. There were only twelve issues of the regular series, plus a prequel graphic novel and a five-issue spin-off, Smax (about the aforementioned elf visiting home) before Moore left, and you can safely ignore the attempts to continue it without him.

GOTHAM CENTRAL. In a somewhat similar vein, Gotham Central was an 87th Precinct-style series about the police officers in Batman's Gotham City, from writers Ed Brubaker (who wrote about the night shift) and Greg Rucka (who handled the day). This one lasted forty issues. It's a solid, gritty police procedural, with the added element of dealing with a masked vigilante and the maniacs he battles. Brubaker and Rucka keep the material grounded, and there's some really great character work done throughout the series. Despite its brief run, it's been very influential on later series, and some of the characters continue to play prominent roles in the DC universe today.

SIN CITY. Not for the faint of heart. Sin City is writer/artist Frank Miller's love letter to noir and pulp fiction, heavily indebted to writers like Mickey Spillane and Jim Thompson. The black-and-white artwork is frequently stunning; the sex is usually graphic; and the violence is brutal and explicit. There's a large cast of characters, with different ones taking center stage for specific story arcs. The fact that those arcs have titles like "A Dame to Kill For" and "That Yellow Bastard" should give you an idea of the playground Miller is working in. There have been two movie adaptations. Avoid the second.

CRIMINAL. Today this is probably the best-known contemporary crime comic, and it's earned a number of awards and a devoted readership. Like Sin City, Criminal, from writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips, is a series of interconnected story arcs with many recurring characters and settings. This is a much more realistic and emotionally layered piece of work, however, and at its best it can stand alongside the novels of people like Richard Stark and Lawrence Block. Absolutely fantastic character development and dialogue, with inventive plots. Start with the first collection, Coward, about the disgraced son of a legendary crook getting dragged into a big job.

STRAY BULLETS. This doesn't get the attention Criminal does, though it started earlier and, I think, was probably a significant influence on the later work. The creation of writer/artist David Lapham, the series once again is made up of a series of stories starring an overlapping set of characters, with special attention to some of the innocent (well, mostly innocent) victims of the mayhem the criminals in the series unleash. The series started in 1995, but there was a long hiatus from 2005 to 2014 with hardly any new material. Be warned: while the series is great, there's some pretty rough stuff in some issues, up to and including child abuse.

So--do you read crime comics? What are some of your favorites? What are some newer titles I should be seeking out?

If You Don't Know Your Burro from a Burrow

2026-08-29T00:00:00.000-04:00

For today's post, I'm updating and expanding a column I wrote for the Criminal Brief mystery blog many moons ago. If you never saw that post I'm not surprised, and if you did see it and still don't remember it, I don't blame you. I barely remember it myself, and I wrote it. But some of the points it illustrated seem to be as applicable to our writing and to our use of language now as they were back then, and I look forward to seeing what you might think of them. So here goes:

Two guys are sitting in a tavern, sipping their beers. One says to the other, "See that girl at the end of the bar? I think I'll ask her for a date."

The second guy takes a look and says, "Forget it. She won't be interested."

"How do you know?"

"Because she's a lesbian."

"So?" the first guy says. "It won't matter. Watch this."

He stands, struts over to the young lady, leans on the bar, and says, "Hi, darlin'. How are things in Beirut?"

Yes, I know, it's an old joke, and dumb too. But I think, as mentioned above, it makes a point. The point is, most of us don't have very good vocabularies.

With the assistance of several books and articles on the subject, I have attempted to list a few word-choice and style mistakes we writers often make--and how to avoid them. Among my references are Lapsing Into a Comma and The Elephants of Style by Bill Walsh, "Words That Wound" from the now-defunct Byline Magazine, and Woe Is I by Patricia T. O'Conner.

NOTE: Some of the following are firm rules, and some are informed opinions. Others are my own opinions, which are usually uninformed. As an example, I have writer friends who insist that T-shirts should be tee shirts, or just tees; I don't agree, but I do think it's good to hear and consider others writers' and readers' observations on that and on other matters of word usage. I ain't no grammar policeman, but I do know people who is.

Continuous/continual -- Continuous means without interruption. Continual means frequently or often repeated. The entire film was made up of one continuous scene. The bill died after continual objections.

Historic/historical -- Historic means something that's famous or important. Historical just means something that happened in the past. My book launches were historical events; the Apollo launches were historic events.

Hone in/home in -- You can hone your knife or your skills, but you can't hone in on something. The investigator homed in on the fact that Judy was in town the night of the murder. Think homing beacons.

Till -- The word till is an informal version of until, not a contraction ('til), and is perfectly acceptable. We'll stay here till you get back.

Minuscule -- Spelling hint: When something's minuscule, it's minus (lacking) size.

May/might -- Sometimes they mean the same thing. Often, though, may involves permission and might involves possibility. Jimmy may go to the movies (his mom's allowing him to). Jimmy might go to the movies (he hasn't decided).

Data and media -- These are collective nouns, and should be treated as singular. The data is conclusive. The media has arrived. Bill Walsh of The Washington Post said writers who use them as plurals are educated but misguided, and Patricia O'Conner noted that data seems to have gone the way of agenda, opera, and insignia--technically plural words than have become singular nouns. By the way, as an old IBMer I prefer the pronunciation dayta instead of datta. But that's just me.

Ringer/wringer -- I've recently seen many writers refer to someone under pressure as being "put through a ringer." I think that should be wringer, because I think the expression refers to a squeezing device like the wringers on old-timey washing machines. I think of a ringer as either a lookalike, a secret substitute into a competition, or the guy who pulls the bell rope. Same thing applies to wracking/racking my mind for an answer. I vote for the w.

Toward/towards -- They mean the same thing. Toward is preferred in American English, towards in British English. So I lean toward toward.

Hung/hanged -- Unless capital punishment is involved, hung is the correct past tense of hang. Anyone who thinks otherwise should be hanged. Where are the grammar cops when you need 'em?

Flammable/inflammable -- They mean exactly the same thing. Both describe something that can easily catch fire and burn quickly.

Invite -- This is a verb that shouldn't be used as a noun. You didn't receive an invite to Jane's party; you received an invitation to Jane's party.

Winch/wench -- A winch is a mechanical device used for pulling/lifting. A wench is an old-fashioned and insulting term for a woman, often in a tavern. I've seen this misused many times in beginners' manuscripts.

Fellowship and dialogue -- These are among those nouns that should not be used as verbs. We'll fellowship at the church at seven p.m. Should we dialogue about that? No, you shouldn't. By the way, I'm also not wild about using impact as a verb. Our weatherman said we might be impacted by rain today. If it were an asteroid I might agree, but rain? As I've mentioned before, we have a lot of doctors and nurses in our family, and to me, anyone who's impacted is having some serious bathroom issues. (Picture that the next time a news anchor mentions it.)

Accommodate -- Spelling hint: It's big enough to accommodate two c's and two m's.

Ensure/insure -- The way I remember this is, use insure if money or finance is involved. If not, ensure that you use ensure.

Imply/infer -- A speaker implies; a listener infers.

Into/in to -- You get into your car and drive in to your office. If you drive into your office, it's time for new brakes, or new glasses.

Peaked my interest -- Should be piqued my interest.

For all intensive purposes -- Should be for all intents and purposes.

Give them free reign -- Should be give them free rein. I suspect this misuse is because the word reign involves a king or a ruler.

With baited breath -- Should be with bated breath. Unless you've eaten a can of worms.

T-shirt/tee shirt -- T-shirt is correct. Hint: When it's spread out, it looks like the letter T.

Nauseated/nauseous -- Nauseated means you're sick. Nauseous means you're making me sick. Consider this before telling someone your wife is nauseous.

Momentarily -- It means for a moment. It doesn't mean soon. When he saw Judy, he hesitated momentarily. But if the pilot says, "We'll be in the air momentarily," get off the plane and take a bus.

When choosing whether to use a or an, the pronunciation of the following word--not the spelling--is what matters most. An hour and a half. A European vacation. Please include an SASE.

Convince/persuade -- Convince involves thought; persuade involves action. She convinced him she was right. He persuaded her to drive him home.

All right/alright -- All right is the preferred and accepted usage. Just remember, alright is not all right.

Ironic -- A tornado during your wedding ceremony might be tragic, but it's not ironic. Getting run over by a Budweiser truck on your way to an AA meeting is ironic.

Fewer/less -- I'm sure you know this already, but fewer involves units, less involves amounts. I have fewer bills and fewer coins in my pocket, so I have less cash in my pocket.

Articles, prepositions, and conjunctions used in the titles of books, movies, etc., are usually capitalized if they contain four or more letters. Wait Until Dark, From Russia With Love, The Night Before Christmas. But I go back and forth on this one, when the preposition is only four words. Sometimes I use Gone With the Wind and sometimes Gone with the Wind.

Between/among -- We all know the rule here--but between can also be used for three or more units when talking about physical relationships. Sand gets between your toes, not among them (even if you have more than two toes).

Everyday/every day -- Everyday is an adjective, period. You don't get out of bed everyday. You get out of bed every day, and put on your everyday shoes.

Blond/blonde -- I've always agreed with Michael Bracken's submission guidelines on this one: Blond is an adjective, blonde is a noun. The blonde has blond hair.

Straitjacket and straitlaced -- There's no gh in either one. Strait comes from the Latin strictus, which means constricted or tight. Think Strait of Hormuz.

Ingenious/ingenuous -- Ingenious means brilliant (it has the pronunciation of the word genius built in). Ingenuous means candid or innocently open (ingenue is a word for an inexperienced girl).

Loath/loathe -- Loath is an adjective meaning unwilling. Loathe is a verb meaning dislike. I am loath to tell you how much I loathe the misuse of these words.

Comprise/compose -- Comprise means to include, and compose means to make up. According to The Elements of Style, a zoo comprises animals, but animals compose a zoo.

If you're adding ed or ing or er to a verb, double a single final consonant only if the accent is on the final syllable. Canceled, traveled, patrolled, controlled. Words like transferred and kidnapped are exceptions because (I assume) they might otherwise be mispronounced. This is another of those rules that I sometimes obey and sometimes ignore, depending on which way the wind happens to be blowing at the time. I know, for instance, that either traveled or travelled is acceptable.

Some words, like irregardless, utilize, orientate, preplanning, preregister, and preventative, probably shouldn't be used at all. I'm fairly certain anyone who speaks or writes the word utilize just wants to sound more intelligent than he is, because use always means exactly the same thing as utilize, and is four letters and two syllables shorter. And I love this quote from The Elephants of Style regarding the phrase per se: "It means 'in itself.' But beware: Even when used correctly, it identifies the speaker or writer as a geeky, pretentious high-school student." And don't even get me started on OVERuse. I'm sick and tired of overused words and phrases like breaking news, stunning video, due diligence, deep dive, journey, amazing, paradigm, chapter, awesome, synergy, and, yes, impacted.

What are your thoughts on all this? Do you agree with any of them? Disagree? Do they make you either nauseated or nauseous? Can you think of other words/phrases often misused or overused?

I'll close with a wise note from The UPI Stylebook: "A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. As a writer you are expected to know the difference."

Fleming. Ian Fleming

2026-08-28T00:00:00.000-04:00

Sketch of Bond by Ian Fleming
for the Daily Express

Bond. James Bond.

He is one of the most iconic characters in both cinema and English literature. But many speculate who was Bond really? Some say Ian Fleming himself. Some say Sydney Reilly, a legendary operative for SIS in the years between both World Wars. Some have even suggested Christopher Lee, Fleming's cousin and MI6 operative during World War II. The truth is he's a composite with some of Fleming's traits, including a few embarrassing warts, in the mix. As to Fleming's role in British Intelligence, many have suggested he was, in fact, Bond before he created Bond. Others have speculated Fleming actually was M and transferred his crustiness to his fictional Admiral Miles Messervy. That honor actually goes to Fleming's original boss in Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral John Godfrey. In truth, Fleming's role was closer to that of Bill Tanner, Bond's friend and M's chief of staff, much neglected in cinema until the Judi Dench years.

I recently finished the audio version of Ian Fleming: The Complete Man by Nicholas Shakespeare (No obvious relation.) Shakespeare traces Fleming's lineage from Robert Fleming, a poor Scotsman who traveled to London and became a railroad magnate and, at one point, the richest man in Britain. Ian's father was Val Fleming, a World War I hero who died in action. His brother was noted author Peter Fleming. And like Ian, he also worked in intelligence during the war. Ian himself was a rebellious second child and an aimless young man before he joined Reuters as a foreign correspondent, nearly snagging an interview with Stalin.

But he also was an unrepentant womanizer. His overbearing mother banished his first love, a Swiss woman named Monique, because she wasn't the right kind of woman. He came close to marrying a fellow operative during the war only for her to be killed in the Blitz. Eventually, he married Anne Charteris, a well-known socialite who had an on-again, off-again affair with Fleming. As illicit lovers, they burned brightly, sharing...Let's call them kinks, and somehow those stayed out of the Bond novels. Probably so they wouldn't get banned. Once married, they were miserable. It was expensive being Anne Charteris-Fleming, and Fleming neither cared for her circle of friends and craved solitude.

Fleming's "day job," so to speak, was with the Sunday Times. Not only was Fleming a newspaperman at heart, but many former intelligence operatives--like Evelyn Waugh, Roald Dahl, and Len Deighton--all found themselves tapping into their old wartime networks.

What becomes apparent in Shakespeare's biography is that James Bond is actually an act of mourning. Fleming grieved for the loss of Britain's empire. Bond, with his ties shared with Fleming with American intelligence and knowledge of Soviet tactics and people, was a way to make the UK relevant again. While Bond himself was never an apologist for colonialism, many of Fleming's generation missed it. The feeling even turns up in a Pink Floyd song, "Waiting," from The Wall. ("Would you like to see Britannia rule again, my friend?") Of course, Waters paints it as a farce, but I have two substacks, editing work, and a day job to attend to, so I won't be breaking down Roger Waters's neuroses down here.

A friend of Fleming's told him he might consider his books thrillers, but James Bond had become one of Britain's most enduring and influential characters, along with Falstaff and Sherlock Holmes. The thought horrified Fleming. He might have gotten along with Evelyn Waugh, but he could not stand hanging out with literary types, mainly because Anne forced him to.

REPOST: This Is The Way We Avoid Writing...Avoid Writing...Avoid Writing...

2026-08-27T00:01:27.020-04:00

Dear Sleuthsayers faithful - today was the first day of the new school year (hey, I don't make the rules, or set my district's calendar to this absurdly early date to begin the new school year), and so I'm re-posting a favorite I originally published here back in 2018. Hope you enjoy it, and before you ask, as a matter of fact, NO, I DIDN'T get any writing done today, thankyouverymuch!

* * * * *

This time it all started with Ezra Meeker.

The guy it all started with...THIS time.

A pioneer Northwesterner, an Oregon Trail settler who became famous for enriching himself by cornering the world's hop market during the late 19th century, Meeker, was an early and enthusiastic booster of Washington, first as a growing territory, and later as a new state.

I have a project set around the time that Washington became a state (1889) which involves an "Immigrant Inspector" assigned to the Puget Sound area by the INS. As such he has run-ins with illegal immigrants (mostly at this point Chinese), sex slave trafficking rings, drug (mostly opium) smugglers, railroad labor wranglers, railroad labor agitators, and a whole host of others.

With Meeker playing such a prominent role in the early history of the region, I decided that I wanted to dedicate a portion of this on-going project to the South Sound region, and doing research on Meeker and his large extended family seemed like a great starting place for historical evidence that might be used to dress up my germ of a story.

Several rounds of ever-expanding Google searches about Meeker and his extended clan helped lead me to Asa Mercer.

Asa Mercer after he'd left Washington for Wyoming

Poking around in the back yard of the Meekers brought me around to a ton of information on another prominent Washington family: the Mercers, specifically the younger of the original two Mercer brothers, the restless, energetic Asa Mercer.

Now, I write historical mystery. I have a Master's degree in history, and I am a native of the Pacific Northwest, so I've had research-based encounters with both the Meeker and the Mercer families before. This is not new ground for me.

This time, however, I was doing historical research for a fiction-based purpose. So tidbits I might have not bothered pursuing previously, when I was still writing predominantly nonfiction, struck me as worth pursuing, this time around.

This included Asa Mercer's connection with the nascent University of Washington (as a young man he helped build the school's original building, and also served as both its first president, and its first teacher), and his subsequent much more pop-culture friendly association with the so-called "Mercer Girls."

Young Asa Mercer: Check out that pompadour!

For those unfamiliar with the Mercer Girls, here's the short version of the story:

Mercer understood that the majority of settlers in Washington Territory were young, single (and overwhelmingly white) men. Recognizing an opportunity, Mercer headed east to New England, where, during the height of the Civil War, he convinced a significant number of young, unmarried women to travel to the Puget Sound area, luring them with the promise of "honest work" such as teaching jobs, and the greater likelihood of them finding eligible bachelors who could make good husbands.

These intrepid young women all went on to work in the region as schoolteachers. Nearly all of them would later marry, have children, and serve as the human roots of any number of current Northwest family trees.

Nearly a century after their initial arrival in Puget Sound the Mercer Girls went on to serve as the inspiration for a "comic western" television series produced between 1968 and 1970.

I'm talking about Here Come the Brides, of course.

A sappy TV show which has not aged well, Here Come the Brides featured three young actors, two of whom spent considerable time during the '60s and '70s as "teen heart-throbs": Bobby Sherman and David Soul.

These two.

Sherman would go on to a moderately successful career as a pop singer/songwriter, and Soul went on to play Hutch in Starsky & Hutch, then to England, where he was still acting as late as 2014. (UPDATE FOR 2026: both of these guys have since passed on: Sherman in 2025 at age 81, and Soul in 2024, also aged 81.)

And the third guy?

He's Robert Brown.

He's the guy on the right, Those are some sweeeeet gloves.

Here Come the Brides was pretty much the high-water mark of Robert Brown's career, name-recognition-wise. (UPDATE FOR 2026: Mr. Brown has also passed away in 2022, aged 96.) And of course when I came across his picture in the course of digging deeper down into this particular rabbit hole, I recognized him right away.

But not for his work on Here Come the Brides.

Nope.

There's a Star Trek connection.

Yep, I'm a Trekkie.

Nope, not a "Trekker." I don't dress up or go to conventions, or speak Klingon. I just LOVE Star Trek, and have since I was four (the year the original series was canceled).

So of course I recognized Robert Brown from his guest-starring role in the Star Trek episode "The Alternative Factor." As the time-traveler Lazarus, he played a dual role (same guy, two universes. In one he's sane. In the other, he's not.).

He was great.

And he gets to rock a fake beard that looks waaaay worse than either Ezra Meeker's or Asa Mercer's!

Now, I have a rule when it comes to researching for my writing. If I come across anything remotely relating to Star Trek, the writing of Ross MacDonald, the music of Miles Davis, Stevie Ray Vaughan, or Ryan Adams (this reference has not aged well!), or the poetry of William Butler Yeats, I am required to cease all research, get away from the computer, and go do something which might be remotely productive.

Because given the excuse, I will dig down that particular rabbit hole all the way to China!

So there you have it:

Ezra Meeker. Asa Mercer. Mercer Girls. Here Come The Brides. Robert Brown. Star Trek.

This is the way we avoid writing today.

(But tomorrow is another day!)

See you in two weeks!

Decline & Fall

2026-08-26T01:40:00.000-04:00

I mentioned in my last column that I’d been reading Gibbon’s famous history of the Roman Empire, Decline and Fall, which I’d never tackled before. I’ve never read Herodotus, either, on the Peloponnesian War, or Xenophon’s Anabasis, two other celebrated histories. I know them only by reputation. There was a time, of course, when both of them were regularly taught, and in the original. It was the mark of a classically educated scholar to be conversant in Greek and Latin, and construe his Homer and his Cicero.

I’m reminded that when my dad got older, and retired across the Massachusetts border into New Hampshire, he took up Trollope. Trollope was enormously popular in his lifetime, a contemporary and rival of Dickens, but Trollope hasn’t worn as well as Dickens. You suspect this is because Trollope has a narrower focus, the Barchester books (which my dad was particularly fond of), for example, are about the internal politics of the Anglican church, while Dickens had more of a roving eye, so to speak.

After my dad died, I myself fell into a binge of Sir Walter Scott. Quite a few of us might have read Ivanhoe in high school, but not much else, and I discovered that Scott – another guy who was a huge celebrity as a writer, while he was alive – wrote some significantly better books, Old Mortality one of my personal favorites. St. Ronan’s Well is an attempt to cash in with Jane Austen’s public - the novel of manners not Scott’s strength - and Austen has far outdistanced him in readership mileage. I remember also wondering aloud about this new-found attachment to a neglected 19^th-century writer, and my friend Ellen Hawkes telling me it seemed entirely natural, that in the wake of my father’s death, I was falling into the past, being pulled by historical gravity, and revisiting his history by proxy. (She knew the story about my dad and Trollope.)

I don’t mean to suggest that I’ve gravitated toward Gibbon in my dotage, but there’s some comfort in reading a book so unselfconsciously old-fashioned. Gibbon’s mannerisms aren’t assumed, they’re entirely natural to the man, and the age he wrote for. Decline and Fall was published, in six succeeding volumes, between 1776 and 1789. As it happens, the years of the American and French revolutions, respectively. Gibbon isn’t a synthesizer, he isn’t summarizing other histories, really, because he’s not that confident he can trust earlier sources. A lot of the Latin was written to curry favor with whoever was newly risen to power. Gibbon is weighing the evidence, and he’s not afraid to voice his opinion. Much of the experience of reading Gibbon has to do with his cadences. Once you get familiar with the grammar, and the peculiar punctuation, it swings right along. He doesn’t sound dated, to my ear.

Writers used to insert themselves into the story. And now, dear Reader is a common trope that we’ve abandoned, as a too-obvious cliché. You can hark back to it with the first-person narrative, had I but known, but it’s labored, or clunky. When you see it in a Regency writer, like Austen, though, or one of the Victorians, you don’t cringe. You see it, almost, as period detail.

There are conventions, unavoidably, in Gibbon, that bring you up quite sharply, sometimes. It is a time capsule, two hundred and fifty years old. But what seems right, to a modern reader, and which must have entertained his contemporaries, are his asides, and sly bits of business. Here, the assassination of the emperor Caracalla, a capricious incompetent, murdered by his Praetorians. “He was attended by a body of cavalry; but having stopped on the road for some necessary occasion, his guards preserved a respectful distance, and Martialis approaching his person under a pretence of duty, stabbed him with a dagger. The bold assassin was instantly killed by a Scythian archer of the Imperial guard.” In other words, he got a knife between his ribs while he was taking a leak. The second point being that Martialis was quickly silenced before he could rat out any of the other plotters. Gibbon doesn’t underline that. He leaves it to you to fill in the blanks.

There’s a whisper, in Decline and Fall, of the unreliable narrator. Gibbon will tell you, the sources contradict each other - but here’s my best guess, and here’s why. The other thing, is that he often speaks in a conversational tone, as if we already know the story, and he’s confiding extra detail that was left out before. This has the effect of treating us as colleagues, and of making his history a dialogue, not a lecture. He invites us to share his table, and does us the compliment of filling the glasses.

My main takeaway from Gibbon, stylistically, is that you can feel your way into a relaxed and amiable speech pattern that mimics common language, even if it’s not entirely natural, but rehearsed - something you might call demotic by design. I don’t mean that it rings false, but it’s calculated. Decline and Fall is going to run to a million and a half words, before he’s done, and he needs to find the rhythm. Somewhere between the unmediated first-person and an omniscient third, Gibbon settles on a kind of public reveal, cautiously artless, as if presenting us with a display of many shiny distractions, some of which may prove to be treasure. In a word, the book is fun to read.

The lesson, if we need one, is that a little charm goes a long way. A lot depends on voice. Part of it is probably the 18^th- or 19^th-century locutions, and what we might say are anachronisms, but I think the appeal is simple. Gibbon is approachable. We should be so lucky.

You Don’t Need to Commit Murder to Have a Fabulous Author Website!

2026-08-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

Last fall I realized my website was nearly a year out of date. How did this happen? Well, after many years of using a software program that I found easy to use, my website company had discontinued it, and I'd had to "upgrade." The new program, I was assured, would be simple to use. Ha! It was so not simple (at least for me) that I let my website languish. Eventually, I reached out to a member of my local Sisters in Crime chapter who I'd heard created websites. I told her I needed a system that was intuitive for me so I could easily update my site as needed after she moved everything over to my new host and improved the design. She delivered. That helpful person is Elise Kress, and she's here today to offer her insights to you.

— Barb Goffman

"Every author should have a website."

— Juliet Grames, International bestselling author, Editorial Director at Soho Press

by Elise Kress

Is your website a sleuth or a victim?

The Sleuth:

Your website is out there working hard every day, helping readers find you and discover your books, and showcasing your style.

The Victim:

Call the coroner! Your website has been lying suspiciously still for years and needs immediate attention.

The good news is: whether your website resembles the meticulous Hercule Poirot or the messy Columbo, you can use these five easy steps to brush it up.

1. Buy your given name as a domain name.

Your domain name is your home; your unique address on the web. It’s what you type into the search bar to land on your website and how people search for and find you. (i.e., agathachristie.com)

If you haven’t yet bought your given name as a domain name, please stop reading and do it right now.

Be sure to buy your domain from a well-known and trusted company like GoDaddy or Namecheap. The cost is between $10 - $20 per year.

Or, you can buy your domain through your website host/builder. Squarespace, Wix and Showit all allow you to purchase your domain through their platform. You can then link your domain easily to your website on those sites.

I recommend that you put your domain name on auto-renew so that when your breakout novel comes out you, won’t lose your domain if it’s renewal time and your mind is on other tasks.

.Com is still the most popular suffix, but there are a lot of others. You’ll find this out when you purchase your domain because you’ll get a list of related domains that you can buy. It’s not necessary to own every iteration of your name. Choose one that’s easy to remember, repeat and type. You’ll be typing it a lot, and hopefully others will be too.

I do recommend buying any pen names you use; any name that is specifically and directly related to you.

Is your name already taken? You can add a descriptive word like colindexterauthor.com or colindexterbooks.com. Also, the .net suffix is widely used.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) allows over 1,000 suffixes. So if you crave a domain name with a suffix of .ninja or .noir, go for it! Just keep in mind that you will be repeating that name over and over again.

Should you buy the domain name of your famous recurring character? Perhaps. Domains don’t cost much and that keeps your character’s name out of the hands of scammers who might try to sell it back to you when you’re on the best sellers list.

Don’t have a website yet? BUY YOUR GIVEN NAME DOMAIN RIGHT NOW. You can own a domain without having a website. When you launch yours, it’s easy to attach the domain you bought.

Image by rawpixel.com

Please do not buy your domain from an unknown source. I worked with a client who got her domain through a small web site design company. They set up everything for her. Then when she wanted to move to a different designer, they refused to release her domain for over eight months, while trying to sell her more products. Avoid this by getting your domain through recognized sources. Unfortunately, unscrupulous people abound. That’s good for our stories, but not for our websites!

2. Make it easy for visitors to stay in touch

You might use a pop-up window, a contact button or a form, maybe all of the above. You need visitors to stay in touch. They are your self-selected audience. Add several ways to sign up for news from you.

When someone gives you their information, they’re telling you they like your work. These are the people who will come to your events, buy your books, and tell their friends. Repetition in this case works well. Don’t be afraid to give people different ways to stay in touch, even on your home page. Maybe they don’t like pop up windows. Maybe they never click on your contact button. Give them various chances to be your supporter.

Once people start sending you their email addresses, you’ll need a place to store them and a program to send out news. That’s where an email marketing program comes in. Programs like Mailchimp, Kit (formerly Convertkit) and MailerLite will work with your website to automate mass mailings. Squarespace and Wix now offer integrated email marketing if you have your website on their platform. They may not have every feature that the dedicated programs have, but they’re easy to use and set up.

You can use your email list for newsletters, blogs, and announcements. If you happen to have a good-sized list, you’ll be happy, and your agent and publisher will be charmed.

Do you have another company that you use for email marketing? Please let me know in the comments!

3. Make it easy for visitors to buy your books

Okay. You have your expressive website. It evokes tension and talent. You have a great headline and a killer review. You’ve got a dynamite photo of yourself smiling slyly, holding your latest book with an enticing description. Your visitor is enchanted. They’re ready to buy. But how?

Be sure to put a button or link near the top of your home page to take your visitor directly to your preferred bookseller. Do not make them guess or hunt for it.

Of course you’re not limited to one bookseller button/link. Somewhere on your site you’ll want to give visitors a selection of retailers that carry your book. Maybe the button/link on your home page takes the visitor to a list of your preferred sellers. You want to make it as easy as possible for the visitor to do what you want--join your email list and buy your book.

*Note: Be sure that links to any other websites, such as booksellers, open in new tabs so the viewer can’t close your site without realizing it.

4. Make sure your website looks great on a phone

If Columbo’d had a cell phone, he’d be texting “one more thing” every minute! The average person spends four hours on their phone every day.

What does your site look like on a phone? On a tablet?

Take time periodically to check that your website looks just as dazzling on other devices as it does on your desktop. Some website builders allow you to edit your mobile site separately from your desktop view. Given how much we are glued to our phones these days, that’s a big plus. Squarespace, Wix and Showit all allow separate editing functions for your mobile site.

Here is a short check list for you when you check your website on a phone:

Does the site title and main image resize appropriately?
Is the navigation easy to find?
Do all the buttons/links work?
Is it easy to find where to buy your books?
Do all the pages look good?

Your readers and future readers will thank you.

5. Update your website every three months

DON’T PANIC! You don’t need to redo your entire website design every three months. Updates can be as simple as a new photo, a new article, a new event or a new blog post. But if your languishing website hasn’t been updated in years, readers will stop checking in. Add something new a few times a year to reassure your readers that you are active and flourishing.

One simple thing to keep up-to-date is your website copyright. Update it annually or include the current year in a date range (i.e., © 2022-2026). Nothing says I haven’t been tending my website like a 2011 copyright.

BONUS TIP: Refrain from posting the cute photo that your friend took that is just a little bit out of focus. Everything on your website speaks to who you are as an author. Make sure your photos are high resolution that draw the viewer’s eye.

Do you have a favorite tip for brushing up your website? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Elise Kress is a website designer, specializing in authors’ sites. She plays Celtic music and is working on her first mystery novel. www.ekwebdesign.net

As time goes by

2026-08-24T00:00:00.000-04:00

I made the mistake of going back to read some of my favorite hard science fiction novels, most of which had been published in the late 20th century. Brilliant, inventive works as they are, the writers got some of the science wrong. Not their fault, the updated information had yet to be discovered. Sadly, some of the undergirding plot lines depended on these false predictions, which caused the books to fall apart faster than a reflecting pool renovation.

The dangers of anachronisms lurk within literature as a whole, though not usually with the dire consequences of forecasting an event that hasn’t yet taken place. Much of the absurd quibbling over the Odessey movie revolves around controversial moral and social updates, though the basic scaffolding remains intact and easily accessible by our tender 21^st century sensibilities. This is largely true of most of the historical novels I’ve read, mysteries and otherwise, a credit to the authors’ disciplined research.

(A shout-out here to Jim Benn’s Billy Boyle WWII mysteries, focusing on an era I’ve taken an interest in, which never disappoint, or have me reaching for Wikipedia.)

When the question arises at writers conferences on how to deal with the assault of advanced technology, in particular the ease with which you can now instantly harvest information about nearly everything without leaving your parents’ basement, some authors breezily say they just set their books before all that happened.

However, if you chose to start the timeline even a couple decades in the past, you better be on your toes. You might say, yeah, but I was there! To which I’d reply, how’s that long term memory working? Brain scientists will tell you not as good as you think. Never has the term “trust but verify” been more true. Nor the value of border collie-like fact checkers of greater value.

One thing’s for sure. It’s a lot more interesting to follow Phillip Marlowe – as he drives around in his jalopy, intrudes on people’s privacy, drops dimes into payphones and hectors reliable sources in the LAPD or Los Angeles Times – then to describe a lonely guy tapping out commands to Gemini or ChatGPT.

If there ever was an existential threat to the business of murder mysteries, this is it. Having your hero hook up with a tech nerd helps – I’ve got one myself – though this has now become such a tired trope, I wish I hadn’t succumbed to the temptation. On some TV shows, the humans in the operation are reduced to performing the few tasks left to them, such as punching bad guys in the face, or appreciating a nice sunset. It’s worse when equally clever geeks are on either side of the good vs. evil divide, trying to out-tech each other. Why not just have Hera and Athena duke it out with lightning bolts, like they did in the old days? At least the pretense of human agency is not an issue.

Science fiction, ever resilient despite the risks, has some solutions. In one book, alien bacteria have eaten all the insulation around electronic conductors, collapsing the whole edifice. In another, there’s a super cyberintellience, but it turns out it likes to lie, just for fun. Alien lifeforms are often good for mixing it up, especially when the author has the sense to grace the other worlders with entirely different sets of urges and motivations.

Chaos Theory (interestingly named, since it actually delineates order within seemingly chaotic dynamic systems) features the state of phase transition, such as the frenzied condition of liquid H2O right before it turns into steam. We’re living in such a thing ourselves, caught between past experience and the hurtling uncertainties of the future.

A friend of mine, a retired stockbroker, has a healthy catalog of aphorisms that helped guide his career. One of my favorites is, “People have a tendency to extrapolate current circumstances indefinitely into the future.” Science would agree this is entirely fallacious, since the only constant in the universe is that everything has a cycle, that current circumstances will always change, you just don’t know exactly how. There is no Steady State, even though Einstein once tried to prove there was, an effort he later abandoned, somewhat sheepishly.

Perhaps the most reliable constant informing literature is that people are infinitely complex, and that love, vulnerability and death play havoc with every being’s emotional and intellectual composition. The human factors may vary with the sociology of the era, but the fundamental things apply.

Maybe not forever, but for now, that’s good enough.

On-The-Nose Dialogue

2026-08-23T00:00:00.000-04:00

One of the most iconic lines of dialogue in movies is from Jaws, 1975.

"You're gonna need a bigger boat."

Sheriff Brody's retort reveals his sense of humour in the face of terror, and his understatement as to the size of their adversary. Brody isn't literally suggesting they head back to shore and procure a larger vessel.

"That's a big shark. We're going to have a lot of trouble catching that."

Had Brody said this line of on-the-nose dialogue instead, the scene would have had no spark, nothing about his character would have been revealed, and people certainly wouldn't be quoting it half a century later.

Why is that line on-the nose?

Because it's too literal, too explicit. It's so direct and free of ambiguity or subtext, stating exactly what the character is thinking, that the character may as well be a robot.

Etymology: The expression "on-the-nose" originated at the track in the early 20^th century. Bettors would wager “on the nose,” meaning on a horse to win outright, not place or show. This usage meant directly, exactly, no hedging.

Dialogue is the fuel that runs a story. It moves the story forward, reveals character, delivers information, and gives a story its identity. Think of movies like All About Eve, written by Joseph Mankiewicz, or Pulp Fiction, written by Quentin Tarantino, or books like The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, written by Raymond Chandler. The dialogue in these works has a certain flavour and sparkle that is distinctive and memorable – goals for any writer.

At the other end of the scale is on-the-nose dialogue. It has no sparkle or uniqueness. It states literally what a character thinks, feels, or intends, with zero subtext, tension, or ambiguity. It's the weakest form of dialogue because there is nothing for the reader to infer or learn about the character saying it.

On-the-nose dialogue:

Tells instead of shows	"I'm angry."
Names emotions instead of dramatising them	“I’m so happy you are my friend”
Explains motives instead of revealing them	“I don’t love him anymore.”
Removes tension by stating the truth directly	“I did not hit her. I did not!”
Feels like the writer speaking, not the character	"This is about building trust."

The failure of on-the-nose dialogue is its lack of dramatic subtlety. It's artificial. People don't talk like that in real life. And when they do in movies or books, they are merely "devices" for the author to convey information or exposition, not three-dimensional characters with which we want to invest our time and interest.

Real people almost never articulate their emotions, especially when they’re hurt or under pressure. They dodge, joke, stall, contradict themselves, or circle the truth without touching it. So, when a character says, “I’m angry because you betrayed me,” the line may be factually correct, but it lands flat. The audience already feels the anger from the situation; saying it out loud drains the moment of tension and robs the scene of its dramatic charge.

Three ways you can avoid on-the-nose dialogue:

Subtext
Behaviour instead of explanation
Misdirection

Subtext is the invisible layer beneath what's said and what's meant. It's the emotional or psychological truth that characters don’t say outright. Write about what the character wants in the moment, not what they feel. A character who wants reassurance might say, “Are you coming home tonight?” instead of “I’m afraid you’re pulling away from me.” The first line carries need, insecurity, and tension in its unspoken subtext. It lets the audience do the interpretive work.

Behaviour instead of explanation. Let your characters reveal emotion through actions like hesitation, interruption, sarcasm, and silence, rather than expressing that emotion directly. A snarky "Whatever" can communicate someone's hurt more effectively than a paragraph about feeling dismissed. Two characters arguing about what movie to go and see may actually be arguing about trust or resentment.

Misdirection. Let your characters talk about something trivial and mundane when something important is at stake. This creates tension and realism. Remember that scene in Pulp Fiction (Royale with cheese) where hitmen Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield are driving to confront a group of young men in an apartment? They don't talk about the violence they're going to unleash; they talk about hash smoking, hamburgers, and putting mayonnaise on French fries. This is just another day at the office for these two. Killing people is no big deal.

On-the-nose dialogue is fine in the first draft. The writer is still discovering the emotional architecture of the scene, and once the structure is understood, the writer can return to the dialogue and replace literal statements with gestures, contradictions, or lines that reveal character through voice rather than exposition. Remember the golden rule: The key to writing is rewriting.

The real key to avoiding on‑the‑nose dialogue is trusting the reader. Drama lives in the space between what’s spoken and what’s actually meant. Give your dialogue moments of silence, suggestion, and ambiguity. That space – the part the reader fills in themselves – is where your story comes alive.

www.StephenRoss.net

www.Mean.City

The Human Condition

2026-08-22T00:30:00.000-04:00

This month, I'm pleased to welcome one of my fellow Mesdames of Mayhem, Hope Thompson, to this blog. I was particularly intrigued by the topic today, The Human Condition. You'll see how this post complements my post for next month, How Important is Plot?

Take it away, Hope!

The Human Condition

by Hope Thompson

Do you ever read books and immediately forget the plot? As the weeks and months and years pass after reading a crime or mystery novel, I often cannot recall all or even any of the twists and turns of a particular story. But something that always stays with me are character details - qualities as in British author Ruth Rendell's famous Wexford series set in the fictional Sussex town of Kingsmarkham. In these books, her protagonist, Detective Reginald Wexford was deeply troubled by one fact: he loved one of his daughters more than the other. Why did this exquisitely sorrowful detail stick with me? Through her detective's painful admission, the author reveals a precious detail of the imperfectness of love. In a story about death, she makes us think about life.

In the fifth book of the American author Patricia Highsmith's wonderful Ripley series, Ripley Under Water, readers find its dubious hero, Tom Ripley, living a luxurious life with his wife, Heloise, in the French countryside. However, when a peculiar American couple show up and rent a nearby house and appear to be in pursuit of Ripley, he lies to his wife about the threat. He is a master of the lie. And his wife seems to know that he's lying but chooses not to question him. While she seems to suspect something about the strange couple, in particular, and about Tom's dark deeds, in general, she says nothing. Her stability is worth more to her than the truth. Like Reginald Wexford, this secondary character stays with me. In this finely drawn portrait, Highsmith holds up a mirror to all of us. In how many ways do we turn away and choose not to see and to know, to preserve the peace and stability of our own lives?

In his treatise on suspense writing, the great noir master, Raymond Chandler wrote that, "...the detective story, even in its most conventional form, is difficult to write well. Good specimens of the art are much rarer than good serious novels. Second-rate items outlast most of the high-velocity fiction, and a great many that should never have been born simply refuse to die at all. They are as durable as the statues in public parks and just about as dull."

I agree with Chandler. Writing crime fiction is difficult to do well. For me, the best stories start and end with characters whose thoughts, words and actions pull back the curtain and give readers a glimpse into the frailty and complexity of the human condition.

Hope Thompson’s debut noir short story collection is Dark Thoughts & Other Stories, and is available on AMAZON

https://hopethompson.net/

Angry Joe Writes A Letter

2026-08-21T00:00:00.000-04:00

Months ago, my wife and I were invited to a community fundraiser event that would take place sometime this fall. At the beginning, the emails were somewhat vague because the people organizing it were just feeling everyone out. If they could get a group of writers to commit, would we consider attending to this quasi-literary, quasi-fundraiser thingie for a good cause?

We said yes.

Throughout the summer, emails came and went. The list of local writers grew. Fine. Great. That’s what happens. I stopped paying attention because while the emails were always wordy, actual details were sparse. At some point, a local bookstore agreed to send a staffer to sell the books of any writers attending this event. The evening had morphed into a book event and community fundraiser. I had never heard of such a thing.

About a week ago, a pair of emails arrived that struck me as incoherent. In the same graf, organizers asked writers to bring copies of their own books to give as gifts to VIP donors. And they reminded us that the bookstore would be on hand to sell copies as well.

Well, thought I, which was it?

If the bookstore will be on site, why would I need to bring my books? The way I saw it, there are too many ways such a thing can go south.

Writer A brings three books. Writer B brings 50. These “offerings,” if I may so describe them, would be lopsided.
Just because an author wrote a book does not mean that someone they are schmoozing with wants to take home a copy of said author’s book.
Unwanted gifts suck.
Not everyone is a reader.
Even if a person is a heavy reader, their tastes are bound to differ from the next guy. Offering a book to someone who has no intention of reading it falls into creepy, unwanted gift territory. It also makes writers look desperate.
Writers may indeed have their books lying around their homes. But chances are they paid something for them, and hope to sell them or offer them to someone who will appreciate it.

By the time I reached this point, I was angry. (Yes, folks—it happens.) Naturally, I sat down to write an email. Boy, was it satisfying. Spleen vented, I knew immediately that I also would never send that letter.

Because I’m chicken? No—because I am like Abraham Lincoln.

I know it’s a stretch, but work with me here.

All his life Lincoln had a practice where, if someone pissed him off, he’d write a letter to get those feelings off his chest. Then he’d stick the letter in a drawer and never send it. He called them “hot” letters.

His most famous hot letter was one he wrote in 1863 to Major General Meade right after Gettysburg. It was, you recall, a terrible, three-day battle that left 50,000 dead. About the same number of casualties on each side, but the battle was still considered a victory for the Union. Its conclusion came when troops under the command of Robert E. Lee retreated. Meade could have pursued them, crushed them, and taken prisoners. But he and his men were exhausted, and he declined to take that action.

In the letter Lincoln wrote but never sent, he said:

“…[M]y dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape-- He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with … our other late successes, have ended the war-- As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. If you could not safely attack Lee last Monday, how can you possibly do so South of the river, when you can take with you very few more [than] two thirds of the force you then had in hand? It would be unreasonable to expect, and I do not expect you can now effect much. Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it--

“I beg you will not consider this a prosecution, or persecution of yourself-- As you had learned that I was dissatisfied, I have thought it best to kindly tell you why.”

I think we can all agree that if this is Lincoln when he was angry, maybe his practice of writing hot letters in the course of his life had served him well.

I myself have never told someone that I was “immeasurably distressed.” I have never been that, um, measured about anything. That’s why, in certain circles, I have earned the nickname Angry Joe.

I encountered my first hot letter as a kid, though I did not know it at the time. Working on a school project on the life of Benjamin Franklin, I came across this doozy, dated July 5, 1775, about three months after Lexington and Concord:

Mr. [William] Strahan:

You are a Member of Parliament, and one of that Majority which has doomed my Country to Destruction. You have begun to burn our Towns, and murder our People. Look upon your hands! They are stained with the Blood of your Relations! You and I were long Friends; You are now my Enemy, and I am, Yours

B Franklin

I was in eighth grade when I came across that letter in a book. I loved it so much, I committed it to memory.

As with Lincoln, Franklin never sent his letter to Strahan, though he shared it with others as a way of letting his feelings be known and exorcising his rage.

Going on the assumption that this might well work for me, here’s the email I didn’t send.

Dear J—,

We haven’t met, so forgive me if this sounds rude. It is unclear to me why the writers invited to this fundraiser are being asked to bring copies of their books as “donations” for the major donors.

According to the link you shared, VIP donors are those who can afford to donate $500 to $3,500 per person to the cause. If this is a night to celebrate local writers—and considering the local bookstore will be on-site with books for sale—I am sure the VIPs can inspect and purchase whatever they like. Given what the VIPs will have paid to attend, our books are a steal at only $15 to $30 a copy.

Unless, of course, this is actually an evening where local professionals are gathering to offer their services for free to everyone in attendance.

If that is the case, then count me in!

If there is a physician offering free medical consultations, I have an elbow that needs looking at. If attorneys are offering free legal advice, I’ll take that too. And I am happy to accept any interest-free loans local business owners wish to extend.

Please understand that when you ask a writer to give something for free, you are implicitly devaluing their work and reducing them to the status of an organ grinder’s monkey.

Here is a link to one of the greats, Harlan Ellison, explaining this simple concept.

I said good day, sir.

Cordially,

Joe D’Agnese

And yes, SleuthSayers, I will attend the event. But I’ll arrive empty-handed.

* * *

See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Enemy

2026-08-20T00:05:00.000-04:00

When you read / write enough literature, you realize that almost all of it involves overcoming an enemy. So pick a good one.

There's the villain, the betrayer, the bully, the sociopath, the serial killer (of whom I am sick unto death), the false friend, the false lover, the rival, the Cain to one's Abel, and all the variations on the theme. The enemy is the source of tension, that keeps everyone's attention on what the enemy will do next, and the reason why it matters for the hero to win - or lose.

BTW: it helps if you pick a good hero, too.

Sometimes the enemy is even more interesting than the hero, and thus the anti-hero is born. And then the writer has to come up with a new enemy, because even an anti-hero has to have someone to outfight and outwit.

Sometimes the new enemy is inside the hero / anti-hero: addiction, PTSD, vampirism (the basis of the whole Twilight series), fear, past crimes, loss, obsession... Or just self.

Of course, sometimes you don't know who the enemy is:

Disturbing confession found in abandoned house:

"We found this baseboard in a closet of an abandoned house that recently sold and we were there to give owner an estimate for renovation. The house in an old gated lake community. Everyone there knows everyone and all people’s pasts. The HOA is calling the sheriff to see if they need to investigate further with cadaver dogs at “17” which is a vacant lot where a house once stood.... The HOA board decided to involve the sheriff’s department and 5 deputies and a detective showed up to take a look and collect the board." (reddit)

There are rumors that this has been entirely made up, and if so, I think that Hollywood should track the person down and put them to good use, either writing or manufacturing sets for thrillers.

AND SOMETIMES YOU FIND OUT THE HARD WAY:

Irish Holiday Home Owner:

SOMETIMES THEY TAG TEAM:

Mothers and Sons:

NON-ALIVE ENEMIES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN POPULAR:

DATA CENTERS

And sometimes, a very unlikely hero:

"Former Playboy Playmate Audra Christiansen told Hefner in 2005 that she had allegedly been sexually abused and trafficked by Epstein, leading to a legal complaint in a Florida court which, sadly, was ignored until now.... The documents allege Hefner subsequently contacted the FBI several times with information about Christiansen’s claims. Yet, according to the legal complaint, the agency did not follow up with her until October 2020, which is roughly 15 years after the initial report." (LINK)

As one commenter said: "When Hugh Hefner thinks you’re dodgy…"

I can see it now... someone's going to start writing Hugh Hefner Investigates novels. They'll sell a ton of them, too...

You Are Entitled to Read My Story

2026-08-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

I am pleased as punch to report that the September/October issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine features "Was That So Hard?" my 45th story there. And since my first appearance in that august journal was in 1981 I can boast an average of exactly one story a year. (We won't discuss how many years I submitted stories there before they bought one.)

The idea for this story came from Not Always Right, a website I have mentioned before. People anonymously submit reports on horrible customers. I enjoy the site so much I use it as a reward: I won't touch it until I have written my quota for the day. It is a huge time sink but I have pulled three short stories out of it.

"Shanks Has Reservations" (Black Cat Weekly #158) was inspired by a genuine scam that happened in a hotel. "Shanks Gets Lost" came from many tales of customers being rude to fast food clerks. (Black Cat #193)

And now "Was That So Hard?" was inspired by many reports on rude customers, mostly in grocery stores. (The title is something an entitled customer says, or more likely sneers, after some underpaid employee goes miles out of their way to be helpful.) My protagonist is in charge of a high-end grocery store which, just before closing time, is invaded by a mob of the rudest, most entitled customers you could dream up. Naturally there is a crime involved.

Finally, I want to examine a word I have used twice in this little piece: entitled. When did it change its meaning? It used to mean that someone has the right to do something. Now I hear it more often being used to mean that someone feels they have that right.

I checked Oxford English Dictionary and found that they traced that meaning back to Robert Coles' Privileged Ones, published in 1977.

It is a matter of feeling 'entitled.' A child who has been told repeatedly that all he or she needs to do is try hard does not feel inclined to allow himself or herself much skeptical self-examination.

Took a few decades to get into the mainstream but now we're stuck with the new meaning and, worse, the people it refers to.

I hope my story makes you feel a little better about it.

Double Dealing

2026-08-18T00:05:00.000-04:00

One reason I always liked going to the courthouse was the snippets you'd see or hear while passing down any random hallway. Pick a floor, get off the elevator, and wander. Think of it as trolling for dialogue.

Or sometimes it's handed to you. A while back, I was looking at a probable cause affidavit. A PC affidavit, is a document in which a police officer sets out the reasons why the officer believed he lawfully took a defendant into custody. They aren't intended to be works of literature. This one, however, led with the sentence, "I found the defendant, highly intoxicated, standing outside his trailer along with his mother and both his girlfriends."

Setting and conflict immediately apparent. I had an opening line that compelled me to keep reading. I wanted to know more about the defendant's double life.

Yesterday, while looking up something else, I took an internet detour and discovered the following story about an old trial. In a roundabout way, it reminded me of the affidavit.

William Brodie lived as a respectable citizen in Edinburgh, Scotland, circa 1786. His grandfathers were lawyers, his father a deacon (president) of the Wrights and Masons Guild. William, as the eldest son, learned his father’s trade: repairing and building cabinets.

William Creech, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

When his father died, William inherited a tidy fortune and became Deacon Brodie, leader of the Guild. With this position, he also became a member of the Edinburgh City Council.

Sadly, William possessed an uncontrolled passion for gaming and cockfighting. He kept two mistresses in separate houses where they raised the children they bore him, but were, apparently, unaware of each other. (Here, perhaps, you see the tangential connection to my PC affidavit.)

His expenses outstripping even his successful business dealings, Deacon Brodie turned to burglary. With access to customers’ houses for his cabinet work, he would make wax impressions of their keys and return at night to steal their possessions. He personified the double life, by day a leading citizen, by night, a cunning thief. His exploits grew, and William added accomplices, including a locksmith, George Smith, an escaped thief, John Brown, and a third man, Andrew Ainslie.

In March of 1788, he conceived a plan for the big score. He schemed to burglarize the national tax office. The plan, however, failed when, by varying accounts, Brodie fell asleep, or his nerves failed him. He fled to a mistress’s house to establish an alibi.

One accomplice, Brown, snitched on Smith and Ainslie. Brodie, however, unaware that he had been left out of the confession, skipped the city. Once he ran, all three confessed against him.

Brodie escaped to Holland but sent letters back to his mistress (not the alibi, the other one). These letters were discovered, traced, and he was arrested. While in Holland, Brodie had been taking forgery lessons and making plans to slip off to America.

At trial, the prosecutors had a problem. By law at the time, a felon could not give testimony, thereby rendering Brown legally unavailable. The Crown cleared this evidentiary hurdle, however, by pardoning Brown of all crimes. The prosecution also agreed to use Ainslie as a witness and prosecute only Brodie and Smith.

The trial began on August 27th, 1788. As if Brodie didn't have enough trouble, the presiding judge was Lord Braxfield. In the book Some Old Scots Judges by W. Forbes Gray, published in 1914, Lord Braxfied is described as:

He came dangerously near being destitute of principle and character. Unscrupulous, tyrannical, coarse, dissipated, illiterate, he was morally almost featureless. He had a hard heart, a tainted mind, a cross-grained, domineering nature, and an uncouth exterior. A noble aspiration or a lofty motive he was incapable of appreciating. Without faith, without hope, without charity, he moved continually in a world of sordid interests and ignoble purposes.

One defense attorney, John Clerk, emboldened himself for final argument by drinking a bottle of claret. He then vigorously attacked “the villain of a witness [Brown] who I tell your lordships is not worth his weight in hemp.

Against the weight of the accomplice’s testimony, the flight, the letters and evidence obtained from the search of Brodie’s home, a wine-soaked argument proved insufficient. Brodie was found guilty.

Accounts vary, but as a city father, Brodie had either personally redesigned Edinburgh's gibbet or, at the very least, approved its construction. Either way, it was upon the gallows he helped build that both aspects of his double life came together. William Brodie was hanged on October 1st, 1788.

Public Domain

Robert Louis Stevenson found inspiration in the tale of Deacon Brodie’s duplicitous life. Stevenson wove elements of Brodie’s life and nature into his story of a divided human, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Incidentally, Stevenson’s father owned furniture made by Brodie.

Crime, sex, literature, and law—Deacon Brodie’s case was too cool to ignore. I am therefore making it my Trial of the Month for August.

How does my garden grow?

2026-08-17T00:01:00.000-04:00

I think often these days of the famous closing line of Voltaire’s 1759 novella Candide: Il faut cultiver notre jardin. (“We have to cultivate our garden.”) Candide is a satire better known to modern Americans from Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 operetta of the same name. Its protagonist, a naive young optimist, learns through horrific life experience that he can do nothing about war, famine, plague, rape, slavery, torture, earthquakes, religious persecution, financial ruin, betrayal, hypocrisy, and a host of other ills. The survivor he becomes concludes that he must accept the futility of trying to sway these uncontrollable forces. He must also stop wasting his time theorizing about philosophies that claim to have answers that will vanquish suffering and evil. All he can do is make his garden grow.

We’re living through times when all the ills that Candide and his sweetheart Cunegonde experienced are still at large in the world. Of those most likely to touch me personally, natural disasters are on the rise, and global anti-Semitism is at a higher level than at any time since the Holocaust, which was still going during my infancy. In July, there was a tornado watch in New York, and we had three days of Hazardous air quality (500 AQI at its worst) in the Hamptons due to Canadian wildfires. Voltaire, who died in 1778 (during America’s revolution, before that of France), did not mention the collapse of systems of government, but that’s another force that’s spinning out of control.

So here’s my garden, twenty-five square feet in pots on my deck at the modest end of East Hampton. It’s given me enormous pleasure and peace of mind this summer. I go out first thing in the morning to talk to the flowers and deadhead a few spent blooms. In late afternoon or early evening, I give them some water if they look thirsty and feed them every couple of weeks if they aren’t as floriferous as I’d like. It sure beats watching the news.

The Power of Prepositions

2026-08-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

The Power of Prepositions

by Leigh Lundin

Aladdin, getting along in years, found he was unable to pitch a tent as he had done in his youth. Smart as well as lucky, Aladdin still kept his magic lamp and, frugal with his wishes, one remained.

He rubbed his lamp. When the genie appeared, he begged him. “My camel can no longer thread the needle. Can you cure my erectile impotence?”

Genie said, “I can whisk away your problem.” With that, he rubbed his hands, evoking a puff of billowing blue smoke. Genie said, “I’ve dealt you a powerful spell, but at your age, you’ll be able to invoke it only once a year.”

“How do I use it?” asked Aladdin.

“All you have to do is say ‘one two three’ and it shall rise for as long as you wish, but only once a year.”

Aladdin asked, “What happens when we’re exhausted and no longer want to continue?”

Genie replied, “All you or your woman has to say is ‘one two three four,’ and it will go down. But be warned: the spell will not work again for another year.”

Aladdin galloped home, eager to try his new powers of the flesh. That evening, Aladdin bathed and scented himself with oil of exotic myrrh. He climbed into bed where his wife lay on her side.

Aladdin took a deep breath and said, “One two three.” Instantly, he became more aroused than he ever had in youth, a magnificent happenstance of tree-trunk proportions.

His wife, hearing Aladdin’s words, rolled toward him and said, “What did you say ‘One two three’ for?”

And that, dear readers, is why you should not end a sentence with a preposition.