SleuthSayers

Sherlock Holmes Actors

2026-05-11T00:00:00.026-04:00

Recently I have been thinking about immortality, not the human and aspirational kind, typified by one of our billionaires who apparently wants to sleep his way to eternity, but the curious immortality of certain literary creations. What mysterious secret ingredients has kept folks like Oedipus and Antigone, David and his rival Goliath, Medea, and Orpheus, and the notables of the Hindu epics evergreen and ever present?

New Young Holmes series

Sure, a strong connection to an historic religion is a big help, but not essential, considering the continuing presence of our genre's Sherlock Holmes. Not content with retelling his adventures in every medium except dance and opera, we have retired him, married him, gifted him with a daughter and saddled him with multiple bee hives.

He's been treated for addiction – by Sigmund Freud, no less; brought into the 21st century with Sherlock, and just recently restored to callow youth by Young Sherlock, wherein he works as domestic help in Oxford, crashes parties with a louche undergrad named Moriarty, and gets acquainted with a Chinese princess who is a master of both armed and unarmed combat.

Is anything new possible? Well, yes. In The Final Problem, Arturo Perez-Reverte has come up with an angle that I confess I exploited nearly a decade ago: a mystery employing not the great man himself, but one of his impersonating actors. Together, The Final Problem and my own Holmes Impersonator stories provide two more ways to exploit the great detective.

I did not have ambitions to enlarge Sherlock's already expansive realm when I ventured into Holmes territory. I had hopes of breaking into a lucrative weekly supermarket tabloid, and I had come up with what I thought was a clever plot. In the service of this idea, I needed a detective and for reasons unknown, the Holmes Impersonator arrived.

A journeyman actor, employed by regional theaters and the dinner circuit with occasional voice- over or advertising work, my detective makes some extra cash with a regular gig at The Sherlock Holmes Museum, a small private Connecticut outfit with a slim budget and a constant need for donors. I thought he was ideal; the tabloid editors thought differently.

But the Impersonator was resilient. He found a home at Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine where he proved to be a clever guy, a useful narrator for six outings, and surprisingly observant. His flaw is his appearance. As child visitors to The Sherlock Holmes Museum invariably observe, he doesn't look like Sherlock. Indeed, tapped for a PBS revival of Sherlock Holmes, the famous play that made star William Gillette rich enough to build Connecticut's one and only castle, he gets cast as Watson.

The Profile

No such troubles for Perez- Reverte's Basil Osmond, who has the hawk nose and elegant physique of the famous Sidney Paget illustrations. Basil has instant credibility, because he not only looks the part but has played it in over a dozen immensely popular films.

Clearly based on Basil Rathbone, the famous 20th century Sherlock, Perez- Reverte's detective comes with an encyclopedic knowledge of Conan Doyle stories, an almost instant recall of Holmes' famous lines, and the savoir faire of having temporarily been rich and famous and on intimate terms with both London's West End and Hollywood royalty.

Such a character clearly deserves a mystery, and The Final Problem soon sets one for him. Basil has been sailing with a producer who may cast him in an upcoming television series. A storm strands them on a Greek island, one conveniently equipped with a luxury hotel inhabited by other temporarily stranded visitors.

Long time mystery fans will recognize that this setup is far from the atmospheric fogs of Baker Street. We are, in fact, in Agatha Christie territory with nine visitors, the hotel proprietor and three in staff, and very soon we have a corpse, a lot of questions, and no way to get help from the police.

Granted the authority to conduct an investigation, Basil, at first reluctantly and then with considerable flair and enthusiasm, sets to work, assisted by a fawning Spanish mystery writer and fellow Holmes buff.

The plotting, more clever than plausible, gives Basil scope, even if the somewhat awkward epilogue makes clear why Agatha Christie favored dramatic revelations before the assembled suspects.

So, here are our two alternative performers. The low- budget Holmes Impersonator, modest but effective in the compass of short fiction and a small locale, and a famous Sherlock in a luxury setting and the Christie- type plot suitable for a full length novel. Are there room for more such characters? I suspect so.

And what of the secret ingredient, the source of such characters' longevity? I am still far from a solution, but part must be the presence of what the great Scottish philosopher David Hume declared essential to knowledge: a clear and distinct idea.

Sherlock provides that in spades: the pithy phrases, the investigative dictums, and, of course, the instantly identifiable costume. Put a dog or a cat in a deer stalker and an Ulster, hand them a meerschaum pipe and either is instantly recognizable as a detective of this very special type. With a brand like this, no wonder other writers are tempted to enlist him in their literary ventures.

When AI Dunnit.

2026-05-10T00:00:00.015-04:00

AI is being promoted as a tool to reduce human error in criminal investigations and healthcare but, I assert AI creates a serious harm by its very nature; AI cannot be held accountable and accountability is how we mere humans fix mistakes for fear that we will be humiliated, be disciplined, lose our jobs - none of this applies to AI who merrily trots along even when people are harmed. Further, the real benefit of accountability is not punishment but, rather, preventing the same mistakes in the future and how do we do that with AI?

Angela Lipps, a grandmother from Tennessee, was falsely identified by the facial recognition software (FRT) Clearview AI, as part of a bank fraud scheme in Fargo, North Dakota. Angela was living a quiet life, caring for her family when she was arrested, jailed first in Tennessee and then in Fargo for almost six months until she was released. By then she was traumatized and had lost her home. The Fargo police chief Zibolski said, “We’re happy to acknowledge when we make errors, and we’ve made a few in this case, for sure.” His happiness is unlikely to be shared by Angela, and the promise of an an 'overhaul' of its AI policy shouldn't hide the fact that no one was held responsible for the harm to Angela - a vague wave at AI is not the same as true accountability.

Angela's false arrest is not unique; there have been many documented false arrests. Harm from errors of false positive FRT, like in the case of Angela are one problem, but what about false negatives when a true criminal is let go - who knows how many times that has happened unless the are finally apprehended and an analysis is done showing FRT was inaccurate. Research also shows that AI is "more prone to false positive errors when applied to people of color."

Police officers are trusting algorithms that they did not create and, quite frankly, don't understand. When reasons for false positives come to light, such as low image resolution, officers can use this as a warning but, how low is too low and what about people who aren't white, when is FRT reliable? I obviously have no answers, only questions and a discomfort with people being harmed only to have people in power vaguely wave at an algorithm rather than holding someone responsible but, who can they hold responsible?

The use of facial recognition is growing not just because it *may* help correct errors (while certainly engaging in errors) but because it's a big money maker, so the answers of accountability matter:

"The global face recognition market was almost nine billion dollars in 2025, with projected growth to over 30 billion by 2034. Over a third of this market is in the U.S., but there is wide adoption of FRT around the world... Ten percent of U.S. police departments use FRT. The NYPD made 2,878 arrests resulting from FRT in the first five years of its use. The Metropolitan Police in London report 100 arrests using FRT in conjunction with mounted security cameras, including a suspect accused of kidnapping. Police in New Delhi used FRT to identify almost 3,000 missing children, and FRT has been used to identify refugee children who have been separated from their family. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has used a tool called Spotlight, which makes use of FRT, to identify children who are victims of sex trafficking. In 2023, the FBI worked with NCMEC to identify or arrest 68 suspects of trafficking."

AI in healthcare is also big business, according to a 2025 report by Research Insights: "The global AI In Healthcare Market size is projected to be valued at USD 26.6 Billion in 2024 and reach USD 187.7 billion by 2030."

AI is used in many clinical tools and embedded in medical devices - it's the latter situation that gives rise to this story:

"In June 2022, a surgeon inserted a small balloon into Erin Ralph’s sinus cavity at a hospital in Fort Worth, Texas. According to a lawsuit filed by Ralph, Dr. Marc Dean was employing the TruDi Navigation System, which uses AI, to confirm the position of his instruments inside her head.

The procedure, known as a sinuplasty, is a minimally invasive technique to treat chronic sinusitis. A balloon is inflated to enlarge the sinus cavity opening, to allow better drainage and relieve inflammation.

But the TruDi system “misled and misdirected” Dean,.. A carotid artery – which supplies blood to the brain, face and neck – allegedly was injured, leading to a blood clot...After Ralph left the hospital, it became apparent that she had suffered a stroke. The mother of four returned and spent five days in intensive care [and] a section of her skull was removed “to allow her brain room to swell.” She finds it, "hard to walk without a brace and to get my left arm back working, again.”

Who is to blame?

Matt Baxter, Director, Professional Liability, states, “From an insurance standpoint, AI is not really changing the exposure, because the liability still stands with the healthcare professional,” Baxter said. “They still have the same responsibility, whether they are using AI or not, to make sure the information is correct.”

One group of researchers cited the concern that puts who is responsible in question, because AI is a “black box”, "with no way to understand the AI's algorithm. This is problematic because patients, physicians, and even designers, do not understand why or how a treatment recommendation is produced by AI technologies. … Due to the black box feature, medical AI systems might make incomprehensible mistakes."

So, the doctor who does not understand the algorithm is held responsible for AI mistakes and, worse, holding him/her liable does nothing to protect the next patient from this algorithm.

Mistakes are common so the question of responsibility is crucial: "A new study from researchers at Stanford and Harvard found that even today’s best artificial intelligence (AI) models make serious errors in a significant portion of medical cases … with the top-performing AI models producing 12 to 15 errors per 100 cases and the worst-performing models making mistakes in 40 out of 100 cases."

Would suing the AI company responsible make things safer? Maybe the loss of money would make them revisit their tech and pull those that aren't safe.

Whatever the answer, the question must be asked: when, not if, AI makes a mistake, how are the right people held accountable and what is being done to ensure the mistake doesn't happen again?

There is a reason that AI in law enforcement and healthcare are big business: they are two of the largest institutions we have because civil society, in the Aristotelian sense, has been organized around collective survival where individuals can fulfill their potential. Derived from our empathy and ethics, our laws are designed to protect us as a society and healthcare is designed to protect us as individuals, so no wonder they are fodder for making big bucks. Do we want AI - that's devoid of empathy and ethics, causing harm without an ounce of remorse - seeping into the two institutions that we created to keep us safe or do we want a way to use our ethics, our humanity, to keep AI in check?

A Bold Preposition(al Phrase)

2026-05-09T00:05:00.001-04:00

If sentence construction is a story's tactics, then grammar is the rules of engagement. I'm no grammarian, mind you. I just want my words to count. That brings me to this particular sound-off and sometimes my almighty struggle: the prepositional phrase.

For the grammatical record, a prepositional phrase is:

The preposition (about, before, down, except, for, in, near, on, off, under, with, etc.);
Its object -- a noun, pronoun, or something functioning as such;
Any modifiers to the object.

No prepositional phrase exists in a vacuum. They modify something higher up the grammatical food chain, either a noun or a verb. Preferably, an important one. This is nerdy but essential. Too often, no small amount of my editing dwells on fixing my prepositional phrases--including whether I needed them at all.

But I'm also talking about more than grammar. When I'm moving those prepositions around, I'm calculating punch, timing, mood, and sentence variety. I'm fine-tuning the action and thus the characters. Not surprisingly, I've developed a few guidelines to help minimize editing blood pressure spikes.

Guideline: Stay Active

"The sound of laughter" is a complete grammatical phrase. "Sound" is the subject, "laughter" the modifying prepositional object. A complete thought, but indirect enough to invite the passive voice. "Was heard by all" feels almost inevitable to follow.

What's more important here? The "sound" or the "laughter?" It could be either. "Laughter" is more specific and more powerful than "sound." If laughter is the key action and heaviest hitter, then it should be the sentence subject with an equally powerful verb. "Sound of" seems unnecessary.

Guideline: Drunk and Disorderly

If you read a fair few legal documents, it's not uncommon to encounter mass pile-ups of prepositional phrases. A lawyer on a roll can chain four, five, eight prepositional phrases together in a single, sprawling clause. Boring, but it's doing its job. Those prepositions stack needed qualifiers to the core provision.

Well, we're not writing legal documents here. A traffic jam of prepositions makes things blocky and turns reading comprehension into a slog. An example:

Conversation ground to a halt when McGillicuddy shot me the stink-eye that he usually did before breaking tough news in his office on the penthouse floor with the full view of the city behind him.

To avoid things getting out of hand, I self-imposed a cap of two in a row max. Two keeps me focused on key actors and actions. Any further details can be worked into a later sentence.

Conversation ground to a halt. McGillicuddy shot me the stink-eye that he usually did before breaking tough news. We were drinking Old Sasquatch in his penthouse office, the city below spreading to the horizon.

Not great, but at least these sentences behave. Once I cap the pile-up, the next problem is ordering the survivors.

Guideline: First Things First

The English language has developed many ordering rules for modifiers--except for prepositional phrases. We writers are largely left to our wits. But there are two north stars to guide us.

A phrase functioning as an adjective follows the noun (sentence subject). Think: Her photo on the wall stood watch over the parlor.

A phrase functioning as an adverb follows the verb. Same sentence: Her photo on the wall stood watch over the parlor.

Easy enough. My headache comes with ordering my chains of two or (shudder) three. Flipping them--and maybe flipping them back--bites me more often than I care to admit.

WRONG: Dave shoved the evidence in the drawer ahead of the cops under his socks.

RIGHT: Dave shoved the evidence in his sock drawer ahead of the cops.

The first example fails its adverbial duty. The cops are not under the socks. Also, shoving is the important action, so the modifier belongs where the socks were shoved. The second example lands the sentence on that small matter of the cops.

Let's get more complicated.

WRONG: The pirates debated their heading in the galley for raiding Port Arghh with the captain.

RIGHT: The pirates debated the Port Arghh raid over rum with the captain.

The first example is all over the place. Is the captain connected to Port Arghh or the pirate crew? The second example won't win any awards, but it keeps the thought line straight. The construction immediately cuts to the central rum-soaked debate and Port Arghh, giving both more primacy. Ending on "with the captain" sets the blackguard up to decide the next move.

Guideline: Proper Introductions

In fiction, some sentences just work better with an opening preposition. Take that last sentence. The opening "In fiction" grounds the reader, and there isn't a better fit later on. This is a flow thing, phrase by phrase and sentence by sentence. I know it when it works--and I pick up on it when reading a manuscript aloud.

I default to opening sentences with the subject. English is designed that way, and I'm not going to fight that. But guidelines are just that.. Inverting prepositional phrases to open things can change the feel in critical ways:

Traditional: "The truth looked a lot different under the streetlamps." That's effective in showing the narrator shifting as they have time to think, with "streetlamps" as a stark and atmospheric closer.

Inverted: "Under the streetlamps, the truth looked a lot different." This time, we get the mood before we get the truth. Ending on "different" sets up an emotional or revealing next sentence.

Done judiciously and well, the humble prepositional phrase is powerful, flexible--or ruinous fluff leading to blood pressure checks.

A Library of One's Own

2026-05-08T00:00:00.081-04:00

Books I have not read.

In the beginning they were all library books, and they were manageable. At the library across the street from the public school, a kid could borrow up to five books, max, which was good, because those early selections were short picture books that I breezed through quickly, often in the car on the way home. Typically, I chose books our teacher had read to us in class. Now I wanted to turn the pages myself and take as much time as possible to digest them.

After I absorbed the story, I’d start over again, this time studying every single image and imagining how the illustrators had done their work. Think about the crosshatching in books by Maurice Sendak. You could get lost in those lines.

One of the books from those days—Stupid Marco by Jay Williams, about a moronic prince who cannot tell his right hand from his left—was beautifully illustrated by a Dutch illustrator named Friso Henstra. Scritchy-scratchy lines galore. Can you imagine anyone permitting a kid to read a book today whose protagonist is labeled stupid on the front cover?

Eventually, I’d bring the books back and get a whole new stack. I could do this as many times as I wanted, and no one ever gave me guff about it. It cost nothing, and in the end the books went back where they belonged.

Neat. Tidy.

When I started buying paperbacks at the local bookstore, I bought to fill in the gaps in the library’s collection. But I still followed the same logical process: buy, read, buy another.

Neat. Tidy.

In other words, books were borrowed or purchased in order to be read now. They never came home and stayed untouched. This was the greatest of all rules. I read what I bought, and I read what I borrowed.

There was no such thing as unread books.

I continued this practice well into college and slightly beyond. Then, for some reason, the Neat-Tidy system broke down. Books entered my apartment and stayed unread for a good long time. They stacked up on the bookshelf. Or in piles near the couch. On my bedside table. On my desk. I rationalized their acquisition because I knew I would get to them in time, because I always had.

Soon books entered the dwelling unread and stayed that way for years. For some reason, I was okay with this. I did what anyone in my position would do: I blamed Otto Penzler.

When I was fresh out of college, somehow I learned of the Crime Collector’s Club (CCC) that Penzler operated out of his Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, the location with the charming spiral staircase. You signed up, you sent him money, and every month he mailed you a new hardcover book.

These were special. They were autographed by the author. I had never heard of such a thing. It was the most marvelous thing ever. When I finally got around to reading the book, it didn’t matter that there were no pictures; I could ogle the writer’s handwriting on the title page as I read. Wow.

Sometimes you could opt for a second book on Otto’s monthly offer! Holy smokes. More books to paw over and stack up for future reading.

Thank you, authors. Thank you, publishers. Thank you, Otto.

A friend once asked about Otto’s CCC and marveled that I was willing to spend a princely $17.95 a month on hardcover books. “That’s expensive!” she spluttered. She was right. We were journalists living on crappy incomes. In my defense, I wasn’t yet married, nor did I have the mouths of babes to feed. What was I going to do with my meager earnings anyway? Eat? Pay rent?

The Japanese have a word for this bookish behavior: tsundoku. It means piling up reading materials that go unread. Apparently no judgment is implied when a case of tsundoku is diagnosed. The situation just is.

I have developed coping mechanisms over the years. I had to. I am not an animal. Pound for pound, unless you have taken up a side hobby like blacksmithing, welding, or the letterpress arts, books are apt to be the heaviest things you will ever own. A single move will impart a critical lesson: you are, in effect, paying twice for all the books you have and haven’t read. From time to time, I painfully pick my way through the stacks and decide: Am I ever really going to read this? If the answer is no, out the door it goes.

I have given away books, lent them, donated them. The piles still grow. Nowadays, when I pick them up, they come with stories their makers never intended. This copy of Irish short stories is the one I bought for my Irish lit class in college. I remember how charming the professor was when he read Yeats aloud in a pleasing Irish brogue. By chance is he still alive, I wonder? Here, also, are countless copies of signed books by friends. Looking back, I should not have been so impressed by the signed books Mr. Penzler sold. If you write, in time you amass friends who also write. You amass their books as well. Now, fully a third of my living room bookshelves are devoted to signed copies. And yes, I have to admit, many of those are unread too.

Once, while walking the dog, I happened upon one of those Little Free Libraries, and discovered a first edition of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and nearly wept. Ages ago, while living in Hoboken, I once had my own first of that book. I’d bought it when it first came out. (Tom and I go way back. In journalism school, we were taught that he was a god, and for a while I subscribed to this notion.) I had enjoyed the book the first time around, but I had donated it after some years and always regretted it. Here it was, in North Carolina, in a perfectly fine dust jacket. What was I supposed to do, not take it home and stick it on a pile?

For a while there, my wife and I eagerly consumed Marie Kondo’s classic, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and dutifully followed its prescribed steps. We decluttered our kitchen! We decluttered our clothing closets, our garage, the outdoor shed. Kondo’s system was brilliant. Pick up an item and ask yourself, “Does this spark joy?” If the answer is no, you know what to do.

She instructed you to carefully purge your way from objects of little sentimental value to the most. (Family heirlooms and photographs are the last thing you purge.) We never applied her principle to books. My wife refused to. She insisted that Kondo, a Japanese author who had once worked at a shinto shrine before becoming a professional organizer, didn’t actually understand books. It seemed as if tsundoku, in her personal cosmology, came loaded with judgment. At that stage in our process, we donated Kondo’s book and never looked back.

I have learned over time to not gratuitously add to the pile. I feel a helpful wave of shame when I attend bookstore events. Such lovely authors! (But I simply cannot buy another book, can I? No! You have too many! More than you will ever read in the time remaining!) Then comes the other voice: You can’t support another writer? What kind of writer are you?

I used to be appalled when I saw how many people departed bookstores, empty-handed, after a reading. Now I understand.

In 2022, when my father died in California, my brother asked if I wanted Dad’s multi-volume set of Popular Mechanics guides for the practical handyman. If I Venmoed him some money, my brother would pack all sixteen volumes in a box—

“Absolutely not!” I shouted into the phone.

I was outvoted by my wife, who thought it might be hilarious to have such books.

Great. I squeezed them in among the cookbooks in the den, and flip through them when I need to repair a faucet or refurbish a crappy cabinet, as I did last weekend. Why would I use the internet to research how to remove decrepit hardware, and to sand, buff and carefully pound in finishing nails when I had a perfectly good book on my shelf—which predated the internet and possibly the invention of television—that demonstrated the precise steps necessary to turn another inherited piece of crap into an exquisite, eye-catching piece upon which to store more piles of unread books?

There is a moment in many of those country house mysteries where the inspector interviews an insomniac suspect who says he came downstairs in his bathrobe at 3 a.m. to get a book out of his host’s library, and encountered another suspect who was descending the servant’s staircase to fetch a sandwich.

Bull, I used to think, when I encountered such characters. Who wakes up at 3 a.m.? And who goes into someone else’s private library to borrow a book? And while we’re at it, Inspector, do you not find it at all odd that Lord Squidgecombe packed a bathrobe to visit someone’s country house for the weekend? How convenient! Almost as if he were expecting to need an alibi!

But you know what? Decades later, I get it. Not the bathrobe part, but the reading of new, enticing, strange books in the middle of the night. It certainly beats tossing and turning. If you have a sandwich handy, so much the better.

Five decades after I entered my first library, the one across the street from the public school, I have built my own. Amid the occasional duds and tripe, it’s filled with wonders, most of them forgotten or unappreciated by me. When I happen upon one of these, I’m a kid again and feel as if I’ve just picked out another gem. Please say you understand.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Unintended Benefits of Reading Nonfiction

2026-05-07T03:20:00.005-04:00

As readers of this blog may recall, my recent posts here at Sleuthsayers have carried a heaviness to them: my recent discussion of my father’s experience of Alzheimer’s, and how it is impacting his loved ones, and the one about plagiarism down through the centuries, fine, fine times, for sure.

So I felt the need to change things up this go-round, and here’s what I did. I queried several writer friends and posed them the following question:

"I’m writing a blog post about 'How It’s the Non-Fiction You Wouldn’t Expect to Help Make You a Better Fiction Writer That Does In Fact Make You a Better Fiction Writer,' and so would LOVE your input. So maybe your pen name, title of the book and why it so helped your fiction writing?"

First, here are a few of my own favorites:

1. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The gold standard. Shirer served as CBS Radio’s “Man in Berlin” during the 1930s, getting out of town one step ahead of an SS arrest warrant in December of 1940. And after the war he pointed out who did what, where the bodies were buried, and brought receipts. And he did it all in a way that spoke directly to an American audience predisposed to disregard “just more European politics.”

2. Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why

Bloom, a well-respected literary critic, was a master prose stylist in his own right. Reading this slim volume helped remind me that language can be so much fun to play with.

3. Barbara W. Tuchman, Stillwell and the American Experience in China

Much better known for her two Pulitzer Prize winning works (The Guns of August, about World War I, and A Distant Mirror, about “the Calamitous Fourteenth Century,” Tuchman cut her teeth working for the Associated Press in Japan before World War II. As such she was deeply steeped in the goings on in China, and the perspective she brought to the conflict there was decades ahead of its time.

4. Diana Cooper, Darling Monster: the Letters of Lady Diana Cooper to Her Son John Julius Norwich (1939-1952)

Lady Diana Cooper knew everyone from the Mitford sisters to the most respected clerics in the nation, to Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. Her candid, incisive, funny character sketches addressed to her son, historian J.J. Norwich (see below) are not to be missed.

5. John Julius Norwich, Byzantium (3 vols.)

Three volumes, eleven hundred years. Norwich is a master of the narrative voice. Each volume is a graduate course in writing compelling narrative while not losing sight of the larger stories

6. Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

Once called a cross between James Bond, Indiana Jones and Graham Greene, Fermor lived a restless, adventurous life, and documented it entertainingly. At 18 he trekked from Dover to Constantinople. It was 1933, and A Time of Gifts documents the first one-third of that trip through a world that was already beginning to vanish under the pressures of Nazism, modernism, socialism, etc.

7. William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India

I picked this one about the role romance played in the cultural syncretism ongoing during the early years of the British Raj, but honestly, anything by Dalrymple, the greatest travel writer of this or any age, is worth your time.

8. Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

Tey was a terrific novelist. And she was also a passionate defender of the reputation of King Richard III. As such, her panegyric raising the question of whether or Richard Crouchback bore any culpability in the disappearance of his nephew the so-called “Princes in the Tower.” She says no. The historical record is far more damning. Tey is so good she almost convinced me!

9. Ross King, Brunelleschi's Dome

Turns out the greatest Renaissance genius might not have been a Leonardo or a Michelangelo, but rather an irascible builder who studied the interior dome of Rome’s Pantheon to unlock the secret of constructing an apparently unsupported dome. Short, quick and riveting.

10. Steven Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

The ancient Roman poet Lucretius theorized the existence of the atom in a poem written two thousand years ago. But that’s only half the story. How Lucretius’ poem was lost for centuries and then found again, and preserved for modern audiences, now THAT is quite a story!

And on that note, on to the thoughts of my writer friends!

Writer and Editor Extraordinaire Jim Thomsen:

Top of mind is Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, by Caroline Fraser, the recent true-crime Edgar winner, about the possible links between serial killers and being raised in the shadow of lead smelters (like the one in Tacoma). While I’m not sure I buy all her arguments, and I might have wished for less Ted Bundy and BTK rehash, I find myself rereading this book over and over because of the audacity of its originality — a wild mashup of science, true crime and memoir. Fraser, who was raised on Mercer Island, plays with the rules and breaks them all in dizzying but energizing fashion, veering page to page from wonky exposition to irreverent editorializing, and not being afraid to sound silly or sophomoric. Consider this quote: “During his five years on McNeil Island, virtually everything Charles Manson eats and drinks comes out of the earth, where particulates from the Ruston plume have been drifting down to the ground since 1890. He’ll live on McNeil Island longer than he’s lived in any place in his life. Later studies on McNeil find lead in soil ranging from a low of 19 parts per million (ppm) to a high of 190. Helter smelter.”

Murderland is such a wild original that I found myself pleasantly helter-skelter with the possibilities of widening the aperture of narrative in ways I’d never imagined. And with the idea that it’s OK to look a little silly in doing so in the service of a strong writing voice.

Fellow Sleuthsayer Eve Fisher:

Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, the Calamitous 14th Century - impeccable research, amazing stories (truth really is stranger than fiction), and a prose style to die for.

Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange - The book that made me see ecosystems in a whole new way. And how they affect(ed) our daily lives today. Very important. And very applicable to us on the micro as well as macrosystem.

Steven Mithen, After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC. - Humans are humans, no matter how far you go back. The emotional / mental / spiritual ideas are always there. But it sure is interesting what we do with them!

I guess what I'm saying is that all of these showed me the important fact that no matter where you are, or what time you're in, the styles will change, but the stories remain the same.

As far as the language - oooh, I grew up reading Shakespeare, all kinds of poetry, and I discovered Bruce Chatwin (supposedly non-fiction but he did make some stuff up) and Peter Matthiessen and Henry Thoreau, who could describe a place and a feel and a spiritual experience with such beauty...

So yeah, reading non-fiction has great rewards!

Kat Richardson:

I started out as a journalist, so non-fiction has had a big impact on my fiction writing. There were a lot of books and lectures within that study and my early career that made an impact, not to mention the journalists dictum "write tight." Prof. Lawrence Meyer, my Course Advisor at CSULB, compiled a collection of historically significant journalism, from 17th century British authors Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, to the "new journalists" of the 1970s, including Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Dunn, and Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem. For copyright reasons it was never published, but we used it as our primary study text in his "Journalism as Literature" course. I learned a lot about writing with style and impact while keeping fact intact and prose tight

I also read a lot of narrative non-fiction, and the work of writers like Erik Larson (whom I do not care for, but owe respect for his ground-breaking approach), Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook, and Mary Roach's book Stiff. While these authors' narrative style is occasionally flawed in terms of absolute fact and completeness, they taught me a lot about drawing the reader into a longer, realistic story while maintaining an accessible and engaging tone. They also reminded me to check my sources and not rely on the veracity of any one source or author, if I'm writing about anything outside of my personal experience, be it fiction or non-fiction.

* * *

What about you, dear readers? Let us know what you think, or add your own favorites in the comments. And on that note, that’s it for this go-round.

See you in two weeks!

Emptying Pockets

2026-05-06T00:01:00.000-04:00

My MMPB mysteries

The news may have slipped past you but last year the media was announcing the death of a familiar part of publishing. It isn't exactly that the mass-market paperback is dead but that ReaderLink, the major distributor of paperbacks, has decided to stop dealing with them. Which is not so much a killing blow as a recognition that the format is fading away.

The mass-market paperback (MMPB) has been a staple since the 1930s. I am putting up pictures of the oldest ones I own. One of the major publishers of them was Pocket Books, which tells you exactly what they were designed for: to fit into a man's pocket. (Women were very lucky if their clothes had any suitable spaces.) These were the books GIs took to the front. (My copy of Pocket Mystery Reader belonged to Sergeant Lawrence E. Hough in 1943.)

By the way, you may notice that three of the books I include here say Complete and/or Unabridged on the cover because in those early days an MMPB often was a shortened version. When I worked at a public library in the 1970s I had a hard time convincing an older patron that the paperback I had found her was complete.

MMPBs were so-called because they were sold in mass markets: grocery stores, drug stores, and so on. Their competition was the trade paperback, typically the same size as a hardback, and only found in the trade, that is to say, bookstores. Trade books are still around although ebooks continue to eat into their sales.

I have a special fondness for MMPBs, and here's why.

When I want to buy a new book, hardcover or trade, I go to my favorite independent bookstore. But when I am going on a trip I go to my favorite used bookstore which has an amazing selection of thousands of MMPB mysteries.

So when I went to Egypt and Greece in January I headed to used-book-land with a special list of authors in my hand. Take a look at the picture below and I am sure you can see the factor that connected them. And the beauty was, when I finished one I could leave it in a hotel or train and not worry about the cost.

I suspect the used book store will have old MMPBs long enough to last me out, but you young whippersnappers may not be as lucky.

Change of Direction

2026-05-05T00:05:00.183-04:00

My turn to blog has circled around again. Originally, I had planned to use this space to talk about Malice Domestic. I'd rhapsodize about the forums I attended, impart the things I'd learned, congratulate the award winners, and, naturally, laud the high-level conversation conducted at the panel in which I participated.

The rough draft turned out to be a pretty boring read. Consequently, I've switched directions.

The longer I work at writing, the harder it is to find value in the planned events at a conference. Occasionally, I glean a nugget. And I still believe there is merit to an occasional refresher course on the lessons I should already know. But the thunderclaps of insight are becoming increasingly rare.

That's not to say that I didn't benefit from attending Malice Domestic. Rather, at this stage, the value I gained was subtle and harder to articulate. I renewed many old friendships, established several new ones, and plotted some future opportunities. None of the details fit well to a column like this.

Some months back, Michael Bracken modestly proposed in a SleuthSayers blog post that writing conferences should schedule less time for panels and more time for standing in the hall. The hallway, outside the meeting rooms, he noted, was where the real business got done.

More than ever, I found that I concur. But it is hard to talk about afterward.

And perhaps, it should be so.

The word "hall," according to Etymology Online, comes from the Old English heall, meaning a large space covered by a roof--think Beowulf's great hall or a market hall. The word later morphed into a term for a passageway as a castle's private rooms became separated from the common areas by doors.

National Archives College Park Public Domain

The heart of the word heall seems to be the roof. It protected the space from the elements. In some explanations, the roof concealed or shielded the room's occupants. The hall, in its oldest form, was a place of cover, protection, and concealment; it's only fitting that what happens in the hall, therefore, stays in the hall.

Fully geeking on the etymology of conference words, I spent a little time researching "panel."

Seamstresses and fans of craft cozies shouldn't be surprised to learn that the word panel comes from a French term meaning a piece of cloth, generally a rectangular one. The same root word is used for a glass pane.

Sometime around the 15th Century, panel made the jump to refer to those summoned by French authorities to serve as jurors. Once called, jurors' names were inscribed upon a rectangular piece of parchment (cloth). By the late 16th Century, this notion of panel had been diluted to include any group of people who gathered together to advise and consider.

And now, a distinguished foursome sitting on a dais behind a cloth-covered table holding forth and sharing their insights has become a panel. But the word remains particularly apt for Malice Domestic, Bouchercon, or any of the other mystery conferences.

Remember the original meaning of panel as a rectangular square of cloth? Heavy fabric made a great wall covering. The word panels also developed in that direction. Panels became the term for specific wall or door sections. And it's here that things started to take a dark and nefarious turn.

Bordellos and other disreputable places would be outfitted with panels. In these seedy establishments, at least one could be slid back and allow for customers to be robbed, beaten, or possibly killed. By the 19th Century, a panel-house had become slang for a bordello.

Panel, therefore, has the twin traditions of an erudite gathering combined with a dash of thievery and bodily harm.

Halls and Panels--two words with suggestions of secrecy. Perfect words for a mystery conference.

Until next time.

BSP: Panels do provide a great time to tout new works. Thanks to all who helped me release The Firefall by attending one of the launch events. I appreciate your support.

Straight-laced hobgoblins.

2026-05-04T00:00:00.057-04:00

I’ve been tying my own shoes for about 70 years, give or take. In that time, I’ve always preferred to include a double knot following the basic bow for added security. When my son was a little boy, he called this extra precaution a “daddy knot”. I’d do the honors, since it took a while for him to master it.

In all that time untying my laces, I’ve pulled a loose end, which released the whole knot, quickly and simply. Though it often didn’t, instead, tightening the knot further. This led me to use fingernails and grit to complete the task, in a much more laborious operation. I frequently wondered why sometimes the free lace untied the knot, and sometimes it didn’t. I began to believe that I must have been tying the laces in different ways at different times, and in the back of my mind, promised myself to delve more deeply into this mystery when I had a ridiculous amount of spare time.

Then the other day, on my 75^th birthday, I pulled at one of the loose ends, which tightened the knot, then chose to pull the other one, which released it. I thought, huh. Is that the answer? I realized I’ve tied my laces exactly the same way since early childhood. The difference is that one end works great at freeing the knot when you pull it, and the other works at cross purposes. It only took most of my years on earth to figure this out. Discounting a few occasions when I went barefoot or wore flip flops, or loafers, I’ve probably had the opportunity to discover this simple truth about 24 thousand times (rough estimate by a non-mathematician.)

This was sobering. I wondered what other solutions to common problems have been lurking there, staring me in the face for my entire life. What else did I miss?

I’ve written a lot of stuff since I learned how to do it. I feel in some ways, I’ve gotten better at it, and in other ways, continue to fall short. I’ve read masterful writers and think, how do they do it? What do they know that I don’t? Do I need to learn how to pull the right shoelace instead of the wrong one I’ve been pulling for my entire life?

I like to study brain science, because who doesn’t? One of the things I’ve learned is that the brain prefers to follow pathways that it’s already established when assembling a thought or initiating a behavior. This is because the brain consumes a disproportionate percentage of the resources we require to exist, so it’s always looking for more efficient ways to accomplish day-to-day responsibilities. Carving out new routes is harder than trekking along familiar highways, thus more energy conserving. They call it habituation, and there’s no shame in it. It’s just how we’re wired.

When you’re 75 years old, simple activities take on greater significance, since there are fewer important enterprises to focus on. As a good German/Anglo-Saxon, I strive to make each of these more efficient, or less onerous, or more engaging, depending on the task. Nobody but me cares about this, and neither should they.

One of my favorite books from my early reading years was John Barth’s The Floating Opera. He published it when he was in his early twenties, remarkable enough. One of the protagonist’s practices was to intentionally make or break a habit as a matter of regular pratice. This is the sort of wisdom that should be reserved for people far older than 20-something Barth. He proposed that we should stop every once in a while and ask ourselves if we’re thinking something or doing something because it’s a good idea, or because our neural pathways are forcing us into lazy mental processing.

Keeping an open mind is a whole lot harder than it sounds. It’s almost impossible, no matter how much we revere the disposition. Aside from the tyranny of our brain’s energy conservation there are social pressures to conform to certain established norms. We like keeping the goodwill of our friends and family, so adventurous deviations, just for the hell of it, have their costs.

Family members in particular are threatened by sudden changes in course. Their first thought is, “Uh-oh, Dad is getting wifty.” But unless these loved ones are also your editors, changing up your approach to writing shouldn’t fire up any alarms. Your family hasn’t paid enough attention along the way to notice anyway. You’re just the granddad, or grandmother, huddled over the keyboard in your little corner of the house like you always do.

Following John Barth’s advice, I’ve been dabbling in habit making and breaking. One of the most salubrious outcomes is realizing that some habits are very valuable and hard won. You get a chance to recommit to certain things, because you’ve given them a fair appraisal. You feel more secure in certain beliefs after they’ve been stress-tested and found to be worthy.

You begin to realize that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”, but so is a promiscuous sampling of all the less beneficial options available.

Spam and Scam • part 2

2026-05-03T00:00:00.007-04:00

Last time, we shared real life scam stories. In the interem, an acquaintance was conned out of $38,000 as part of a marriage scam. Fortunately, once he discovered his mistake, he acted quickly and was able to recover all but $2000. He was lucky.

This month, I’ll offer basic suggestions to protect yourself.

Red Flags

Unsolicited contact (call, text, email, or social media) demanding action right now.
Unwarranted sense of urgency: Your bank won’t collapse. Super amazing investment deals can wait. The Nigerian prince is dead or he isn't. The IRS doesn’t keep local police on speed-dial. They also don’t phone you at home.
Pressure to pay with untraceable methods: wire transfers, gift cards, payment apps, or that dark mystery of cryptocurrency.
Requests for personal or financial information.
Requests for you to help catch a bank swindler.
Offers that sound too good to be true.
Stories that tug hard at your emotions.
Poor grammar in ‘official’ messages.
Discouragement toward verifying their story with a trusted source.
URL links that may or may not look slightly off. For example,

YoürBank.com instead of YourBank.com or
YourBankHelp.com instead of YourBank.com.
Be aware that emails and web pages may display a web site name with a clickable link that hides a sinister URL within the HTML. In other words, text on the web page may display YourBank.com, while the hidden web address might be www.NastyScams.com.

Practical Protection

Pause and verify. If someone claims to be calling from your bank or the government, hang up and call back using the number on your bank statement or official web site, never one scammers provide.
Think before you click. Hover over links to check the real address. Better yet, type in your bank’s address. Don’t trust conveniently provided URLs.
Block and filter. Use your phone’s built-in tools to enable spam-text filtering and silence unknown callers.
Register with the national Do Not Call list. It’s imperfect, but it helps.
Secure your accounts. Use strong, unique passwords and monitor statements weekly.
Better yet, use lengthy passphrases. For example: ‘Judges12:5-6SayNowShibboleth’ is much, much stronger than Shibboleth42k (or Sibboleth).
Do not provide real answers to so-called security questions. I may be the only consultant who argues against security questions, but I’m convinced it’s critical. Never ever select your favorite color question. Lie to protect yourself. Make up a nonsense alternative:

Favorite pet name? “Forget it, buddy.”
Your first car? “Forget it, buddy.”
Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb? “Forget it, buddy.”

Most experts recommend using multi-factor authentication everywhere possible. I confess reluctance, having witnessed users losing access because of a forgotten passphrase. Nevertheless, pros urge using 2FA until something better comes along. You decide.
Never urgently send money to ‘help’ a ‘family member’ without independent confirmation. Call them on a known number first. For example:

You receive a call from a Mexican jail claiming your grandchild is locked up but needs bail money. That can seem funny when your young relative is safely sitting on the sofa beside you, but it’s not funny in the middle of night when the caller sounds and acts exactly like your young relative and you have no idea where they are.

Consider creating a family ‘safe word’ for emergencies.
Do not download attachments from unknown sources.
Be very cautious before downloading programs outside your app store.
Help protect your family, especially trusting older relatives who are frequent targets.
Don’t be concerned you'll hurt suspect callers’ feelings. They’ll survive. Scammers have screamed and cursed me. I survived.
Know that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issues monthly advisories and alerts.

What to Do If You Suspect a Scam

Act fast, but don’t be stampeded into recklessness before you can verify a caller’s story.
Contact your bank or credit-card issuer immediately to freeze or reverse transactions.
Report incidents at ReportFraud.ftc.gov . The FTC uses reports to track patterns and pursue criminals.
If you shared personal data, place a fraud alert with credit bureaus and monitor your credit report.
For tech-support or investment scams, additional help is available through the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (www.IC3.gov).

Scammers count on fear, greed, kindness, and time crunches to cloud judgment. They operate by script, intent of fooling a profitable percentage of ‘suckers’. Don’t be a sucker. Slowing down, asking questions, and trusting instincts breaks their playbook. Every report you file helps shut down operations and protects others. Stay vigilant, talk openly about scams with friends and family, and remember: legitimate organizations will never rush you into sending money or sharing sensitive information.

For more resources, visit consumer.ftc.gov or consumer.gov. Awareness is the best defense. Spread the word and stay safe.

April Stories

2026-05-02T00:00:00.129-04:00

First, sincere congratulations to all the 2026 Derringer Award winners, especially to Adam Meyer, Alan Orloff, and Michael Bracken--and special congrats to Golden Derringer recipient David Dean. I'm also thrilled that Dave Zeltserman has won the Edgar for Best Short Story. Well done and well deserved, my friends!

Now, to less important matters . . .

I'm a couple of days past April, here, but this is a quick look at the stories I published last month. And I should begin by saying, yes, these are mystery/crime stories even though I mentioned a few weeks ago that I've started producing stories in other genres lately. I'm hoping that in several months some of the science fiction/fantasy stories I've been writing since then will pop up someplace. We'll see.

Anyhow, here are my three stories that popped up in April.

"Creativity," published on April 3 at Curated by Costuic, a market I discovered via one of my friends on the Short Mystery Fiction Society list. This 1100-word story consists almost entirely of dialogue between two characters, both of them businesswomen who meet on a flight from Lost Angeles to Dallas. As I've said before at this blog, stories that are heavy on dialogue are always among the easiest and the most fun for me to write, and I remember this one coming together pretty fast. It was published many years ago and was lucky enough to be a Pushcart Prize nominee. If anyone feels the urge to read a quick little crime story, it's posted here. Many thanks once again to editor Nikita Costuic.

Speaking of SMFS, the second one of my April stories was "On the Road with Mary Jo," published April 7 in the anthology Hot Shots: Celebrating Thirty Years of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. For those of you who don't already know, this anthology features 28 stories that won the Derringer Award--one story for each year between 1998 and 2025--and editor Josh Pachter did a great job of putting it together. My story in the book was a winner for Best Short Story in 2020, and had previously appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine's Jan/Feb 2019 issue. Like "Creativity," this story is mostly dialogue but is quite a bit longer, at 2700 words. As I said this past Thursday night in the Zoom meeting about the anthology, I was surprised when "On the Road with Mary Jo" was accepted at EQMM because it's mainly humor, and therefore different from any of my other EQ stories. Quick summary: It's a weird story about two nitwits who carjack a self-driving vehicle and use it as a getaway car in a bank heist. Yes, I said it was weird . . .

The last of these three stories was "Lewis and Clark," first published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine's May 2012 issue and reprinted on April 16 in The Ranger's Almanac, Vol 1. As the publication's title suggests, this market wants forest/park-based stories; mine was a 2200-word tale of two young Boy Scouts who get lost on a hike in the woods and stumble upon a couple of bank robbers on the run. It's more a YA adventure story than anything else, and marks one of those times when a previously published story that's sitting around doing nothing happened to exactly fit the submission guidelines of a new (to me, at least) publication. Before I forget, I owe a big thank-you to Ranger's Almanac editors Andrew Akers and Adam Geer. Check this market out here.

I think the only unusual thing about these April stories is that none of them were in publications that I'd been in before (one, of course, was a one-time anniversary anthology) and that two out of the three were sold to paying markets I didn't even know about until fairly recently. The editors of both of those were great, and were prompt in their responses to my submissions. "Creativity" wa submitted to Curated by Costuic on 11/4/25 and accepted later that same day, and "Lewis and Clark" was submitted to The Ranger's Almanac on 1/14/26 and accepted on 1/18/26. (These were breaths of fresh air in a world where we writers often wait for many months to hear back from a submission.)

So, here are my questions for the week, to any fellow short-fiction writers out there. Are you, in answer to our recent downturn in the number of available mystery markets, finding new places to send your work? Where are you looking, in order to do that? The Internet? The SMFS market list? (You can find it under "files" at the SMFS forum site.) Are you sending any stories to existing markets that you haven't tried in a while? Are you continuing to submit to those who have regularly published you in the past? Do any of you have, as I do, submissions queued up at those markets? Are any of them already accepted and waiting to be published? Are you, like me, writing and submitting some non-mystery or cross-genre stories, and getting any relief from that corner? Please update me in the comments.

And then get back to writing.

See you in two weeks.

Boo Hoo, Tee Hee, She Chortled

2026-05-01T00:58:00.073-04:00

As a writing teacher, I spend an inordinate amount of time urging other writers to eschew clichés. This is more easily said than done (see what I did there?) as sometimes a cliché expresses one's thoughts perfectly. Nonetheless, I'm ruthless with my students, who are mostly published writers - all talented - and can take it. No nights as black as pitch, no thinking outside the box, no being sly as a fox or brave as a lion. And for the love of God, no smiles that light up a room.

So it was with some chagrin that I found myself recently "laughing through my tears."

Yep. This is an action I've read in a thousand sophomoric short stories and novels, and even in a few poems, yet one I didn't even know could actually be done. If you keep track of happenings in the mystery world, you're no doubt aware that Down&Out Books closed recently, and my newly-released collection of stories, It's Not Even Past, died along with them, just when the reviews (and orders) were starting to roll in. Now, I've published before, but this is truly the book of my heart. Most of the stories were originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and the main character, Lori Yarborough, is a librarian-on-the-run in Federal WITSEC. Lori is a mostly-better version of myself - like me, sort of, but smarter, braver, stronger, better-educated, and more resilient. She's shorter and skinnier than I am, though, and a good deal younger. In fact, the version of her that lives in my head looks an awful lot like my daughter.

There's a picture of said daughter, taken by the talented Robert Tate, in which she's striding down Mulholland Boulevard in an evening gown, strong, powerful, and stern. I call that picture "Don't Tell Me to Smile," and I keep it pinned over my desk to remind me of the tenacity and potency at my character's core.

Lori Yarborough would never laugh through her tears. In fact, she brags in a couple of stories that she never cries at all. But I do, and what drove me to enact that oxymoronic stock phrase was receiving yet another order for my DOA book. When the publisher closed, I'd hastily ordered a couple of boxes of resale copies, but more fans than expected had tracked me down to order. I was saving one copy for the coffee table and one for my grandson - and that was it. So there I was, laughing ruefully but snuffling back tears, too, as I checked the author's copy carton in my closet (still empty), thinking what a fool I'd been to order so few, to choose the wrong publisher, hell, to write a book at all.

(As it turns out, a white knight publisher rushed in - yes, inspired by one of those author's copies I sent out - and It's Not Even Past will be released anew later this year, along with a volume of short stories not from the librarian-on-the-run series. My cup runneth over! But more on that when I can share all the details.)

Meanwhile, Lori's life post-collection continues. In Traveller from an Antique Land, published in EQ in May/June 2025, she hit rock bottom, living in a tent on the streets of Los Angeles. In When Bright Angels Beckon, coming in the September/October issue, she's on her feet and back to amateur sleuthing. (Cliché count: two in this paragraph, two in the graph above. I think I owe my students a mea culpa.)

Writing a returning, evolving character is tough - as plenty of folks here on SleuthSayers can attest. There are lots of details to keep track of, of course, but there's also the simple recurring question where do we go next? I gain inspiration from the world around me, particularly from photographs.

Here's a photo I found helpful in writing about Lori's days on the street. The image of makeshift shelters over the 405 in California - a freeway that runs by Disneyland and Hollywood along the sparkling Pacific Ocean, through BelAir and into the opulent valley - while small, tragic lives play out unseen above, is particularly evocative. But there are real meat-and-potato details in the photo, too. That blue tarp - who hasn't seen them on roofs and hillsides after a heavy rain? The piles of trash heaped around something that may be the form of a sleeping person, and there, heartbreakingly, a bag of food clipped out of reach of rats, as if the unhoused were camping in the Angeles National Forest guarding their food from bears.

I'm not alone in looking to visual images for inspiration. Photographer Horace Bristol's collaboration with Steinbeck inspired the immortal Grapes of Wrath. (Though many associate that book with Dorothea Lange's iconic photo Migrant Mother, there's not actually a linear connection between Steinbeck and Lange.)

Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje was inspired by a rare photo of jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden and his band.

The epigraph to Clarence Major's gorgeous poem, Photograph of a Gathering of People Waving, reads "based on an old photograph bought in a shop at Half Moon Bay, summer, 1999." Who would not be transported by the poet's lines, "You remember your own meadow/…your grandmother’s church-folk/ gathering on a Sunday afternoon in saintly quietness."

In my series, Lori's friends Tony and Marta Morales have three kids, the youngest of whom is Camilla, named after one of Lori's alter egos. In some of the stories, the Morales family barely surfaces, while in others they play an integral role. But it's been years since I was part of a big, loud, active family, and I need my work to be up to date. I don't want to show the oldest boy bragging about his razor scooter, only to find dirt bikes are the current thing. Do people still cook out on tripod Weber grills? Are bougie toddlers wearing spaceships this year, or jungle animals, or clowns, or dinosaurs? Google can tell you a lot, sure, but to see how people really live, go onto facebook or instagram and start scrolling. Like many parents and grandparents, I don't post pictures of children or teens online. There are too many freaks out there, manipulating photos with AI. But plenty of people do post pics of little Shiloh learning to ride a bike, of Jaden's birthday party and Olivia's sixth-grade graduation, and those photos will give you a wealth of detail to work with.

You'll find that razors are still popular (along with dirt bikes, offroad bikes, and skateboards). Yes, people still burn burgers on Weber grills, and while spaceships and jungle animals are perennially popular, dinosaurs are really back - and for girls, as well as boys. But you're not going to find much by way of clowns in your local Carter's shop. Cool Millennial and Gen Z couples are tearing out carpeting, throwing down hardwood, and painting the interiors of their homes muddy browns and greys and mauvish-pinks. For the outsides, "Millennial charcoal" is still a thing, but white, grey, and pale blue are coming back strong.

You can also get story ideas from those pictures of anonymous strangers - remember the photo of little Olivia's sixth-grade graduation noted above? Perfumes of Arabia, the first story in It's Not Even Past, was inspired by just such a photo. In a shot posted on Insta by a proud mom, Olivia is beaming, her dad's arm around her on one side, Mom beside her on the other. But who's that off to the side? Could it be Olivia's younger sister, looking up at her with narrowed eyes that seem more envious than admiring?

And to see where that went, you'll have to grab a copy of the book and read the story. I'll keep you posted about our upcoming pub date.

And yes, "I'll keep you posted" is absolutely a cliché.

You Can Take the Kid Out of Middle School...

2026-04-30T00:05:00.169-04:00

Eve Fisher

I was driving over to one of South Dakota's state parks last week, and I spotted a blue car with the following South Dakota licence plate:

FCK YOU

I instantly thought: Well, they seem nice.

No I didn't. Instead, I thought about going to the local Walmart to buy a paintball gun and, when I saw that car again, drive up and spray it heavily. Deeply satisfying.

But I didn't.

It's all so middle school, and I've already been there. The days of 12-13 year olds going on 18 (we thought). Pimply, snarly, sarcastic, selfish little know-nothings trying desperately to learn only the bad stuff in order to grow up fast, hard, tough... Ready to throw a riot or a fit, doing anything (especially insulting the teacher - if you could get a rise out of the teacher, that just made everyone's day) - to just get attention. And betraying each other for a laugh, a sneer or just more attention. Periodically someone would burst out in tears and storm out of the room, screaming at everyone. Generally after insulting the total crap out of someone who turned around and handed it right back to them (which of course was NOT the idea).

I remember we were reading "Lord of the Flies", and almost none of us were horrified at the behavior in it. The teacher asked what would have been different if it had been all girls instead of all boys? A lot said, oh, it would have been really different, girls don't do that kind of stuff. I disagreed and said so: that it would have been pretty much the same, and in some ways worse. Mean girls start young and stay late.

Basically, the middle school motto is FCK OFF and/or this Famous Coat Message:

But they did care, they do care, and what they really wanted / want was to piss everyone off around them and / or get them in trouble. "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate all of you - WHY IS EVERYBODY MAD AT ME???"

Or, as Thornton Wilder put it in "The Skin of Our Teeth":

HENRY: What did they ever care about me?
SABINA: There's that old whine again. Always thinking you're not loved enough, that nobody loves you. Well, start being lovable and we'll love you.
HENRY: [Outraged.] I don't want anybody to love me. I want everybody to hate me!
Sabina: Yes, you've decided it's second best...

The depressing part is so many people are still there.

For example, How dare you do something I don't want you to do?

Sergeant Dusten Mullen showed up at the ICE protest run by Hamilton High School students masked and fully armed with an exposed handgun in a holster and two extra handgun magazines. (my emphasis added) Mullen said, "My plan is legitimately to just let them all assault me and you guys arrest them all, and I’ll keep it on film. I also have other people filming from a distance." According to police, Mullen also said that more protesters in support of him were on the way, some armed with rifles (my note - this apparently wasn't true), going on to say his goal was to "get all these kids in jail if they want to break the law." (LINK)

Ahem: (1) It's not against the law to protest peacefully - it's one of our First Amendment rights. and (2) In these times of endless school shootings there's nothing legitimate about an unknown (remember, Mullen didn't announce who he was) armed masked man at a school doing his best to incite violence.

Some other interesting ways to twist real events to one's own reality:

"How dare you do what we tell you to do, you warlike heathens?"

Wounded Knee Massacre:

Back in the 1890s, the US Army / Government was convinced that the Ghost Dance spreading among the Lakota would destroy the U.S. government’s decades-long effort to “civilize” the Lakota, i.e., get them settled on the reservations (the size of which kept getting smaller every day), and take up farming like good civilized people. Things reached a head on December 29, 1890, after a group of 350 Lakota had been called to the Pine Ridge Agency and went, as ordered, with a detachment of the 7th Cavalry to a camp on Wounded Knee creek. At daybreak, the troops demanded all the guns (which BTW, were the Lakota's only way to hunt food, since their rations had been cut to the bone). There are differing reports of what happened next - other than the fact that it was a massacre, and the soldiers lost all control: nearly 300 of the original 350 - men, women, children and babies - were killed or wounded, with a blizzard preventing immediate search following the massacre.

One of The Mass Graves of Wounded Knee

"If you had just obeyed the orders you never got, you wouldn't have been killed"

The Amritsar Massacre:

This one happened when Asian Indians were mobilizing the Indian Independence Movement. Naturally, the British Raj was totally opposed to it, and passed the "Rowlatt Acts", which gave power to the police to arrest any Indian person on the basis of mere suspicion. And keep them arrested.

On April 13, 1919, a large Asian Indian crowd gathered in the beautiful garden of Jallianwala Bagh, which unfortunately had only one exit. The local commander of Indian Army forces, Brigadier General Dyer had ordered that no Indian assemblies were allowed, but had only told his troops. Without warning, Dyer ordered his troops to block the exit and shoot toward the densest sections of the crowd. They shot for approximately ten minutes. Unarmed civilians, including men, women, elderly people and children were killed. A cease-fire was ordered after the troops fired about one third of their ammunition. He stated later that the purpose of this action "was not to disperse the meeting but to punish the Indians for disobedience." There's nothing like killing them all to get them to obey, is there?

"How dare you not accept the deal I'm offering you, no matter what it says?"

The Destruction of the Summer Palace:

At the end of the Second Opium War, on October 18, 1860, Lord Elgin ordered the destruction as a "solemn act of retribution" to target the Qing Emperor personally and force the signing of the Treaty of Beijing. British and French forces burned the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) and destroyed the gardens, the treasures, everything. Total destruction. It worked, but at the cost of something that was, according to Stuart McGee, then chaplain to the British forces, "arguably the greatest concentration of historic treasures in the world, dating and representing a full 5,000 years of an ancient civilization". Charles "Chinese" Gordon, who was no stranger to slaughter in China (he fought for the Emperor / Empress in the Taiping Rebellion), wrote "You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt. It made one's heart sore to burn them; in fact, these places were so large, and we were so pressed for time, that we could not plunder them carefully. Quantities of gold ornaments were burnt, considered as brass. It was wretchedly demoralising work for an army."

BTW, the treaty literally gave foreign ambassadors have immunity for any and all actions and legalized the British sale of formerly illegal opium in China. Most opium sellers instantly became foreign ambassadors. And a few other things...

And a couple of more modern examples:

The Godfather

Recently:

"Some of the previous [Iranian] leaders are now no longer on planet Earth because they lied to the United States and they strung us along in negotiations, and that was unacceptable to the president, which is why many of the previous leaders were killed." Karoline Leavitt, March 30, 2026.

BTW, classic middle school, all the way:

The spat between the President and the Pope because Pope Leo spoke out in favor of peace. Actually, that's the pope's job - back during the Gulf War, Pope John Paul II spoke against it, repeatedly, to President Bush, et al. "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." (Matthew 5:9)

Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth praying at the Pentagon:
"They call it CSAR 25:17, which I think is meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17. 'The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherds the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother, and you will know my call sign is Sandy 1 when I lay my vengeance upon thee. Amen.'" (Actually, it's from Pulp Fiction.) (Link)

The original version:

NOTE: There's nothing more middle school than trying to out-tough Samuel L. Jackson.

Oh, and just last week, Chicago police had to investigate because there was a bomb threat made against the Pope's brother. We really are in middle school, and all the nosepickers are out. (Link)

Social media right now is just a stew of on insults, invective, lies, damn lies, statistics, and bullshit – specifically in order to get another party to react and punch back. Preferably harder. Threats are rampant. And the trouble with threats is that sooner or later the threatener must either fulfill it or back down, and either way someone (at least metaphorically) is going to end up stuck to the flagpole with a frozen tongue thanks to a triple-dog-dare. That's middle school.

Sigh...

Look, what I want is a return to a country, a world of adults, who actually know things, like history, science, mathematics, literature, the arts, and who have probity: integrity, honesty, moral uprightness, goodness, virtue.

Who really do want and work for peace, human rights, liberty and justice for all. Not profit for some.

Who really do know how fragile this planet is, and even more, how fragile we are on this, our only home.

Image taken by Atemis II Commander Reid Wiseman

from the Orion spacecraft's window

Location, Location, and... What Was It?

2026-04-29T00:00:00.119-04:00

I was looking at A Textbook Case this week, the SleuthSayers page I created as a sort of informal manual on writing fiction. It consists of about sixty essays I wrote here and at other blog sites.

I noticed that I had only one piece about settings, and that one was about imaginary places. This didn't really surprise me because I am not a big fan of descriptions of setting. Elmore Leonard famously advised us to leave out the parts people don't read, and that is how I tend to feel about those descriptions. But I admit they have their place - sometimes.

You can find some excellent essays on setting here at the SleuthSayers website. In one of them I found this comment from O'Neil DeNoux: "Setting is not just the name of a place or time period, it is the feeling of the place and time period. It includes all conditions – region, geography, neighborhood, buildings, interiors, climate, time of day, season of year."

Good starting place. I began thinking about descriptions of setting that really stood out for me and a few came to mind:

* The beginnings of Chandler's novels.

* Elizabeth Peters' descriptions of Luxor and the Valley of the Kings in various Amelia Peabody novels.

* Doyle's descriptions of Dartmoor in Hound of the Baskervilles.

* Tony Hillerman's description of the Navaho Reservation.

* Hong Bay in William Marshall's Yellowthread Street novels.

Personally I am much more interested in interior settings: descriptions of houses and rooms. How many full size reproductions have been made of 221B Baker Street? Rex Stout provided a detailed plan of Nero Wolfe's famous office but that doesn't prevent people from arguing with it or (very common) picturing it in mirror image.

If you want a real master class in describing interiors in an interesting manner open any of Mick Herron's Slow Horse novels. Near the beginning of each one you will find a description of Slough House; each version is different, and each is intriguing.

All this came to mind because I have a story in the current issue of Black Cat Weekly and setting is important in it. All the tales in my "Bad Day" series take place in Brune County, which is fictional, but "A Bad Day For Good Samaritans" centers on a park which is very much based on a real one in my city.

Well, here is a little report I wrote on Facebook in 2020 about something that happened to me:

The pond this week

My story begins with a similar situation except the mother is nasty (conflict is the kernel of fiction). So I went to some trouble to describe the place. But the other scenes in the story are afterthoughts, with hardly more than a few words of description.

The pond in 2020

I suppose the point I am making is that you don't go deep into setting unless it is crucial to the story. That could mean it is part of the plot (as in mine) or part of the mood. But as always in short stories, the rule is not one word should be included that doesn't move the story forward.

Now over to you: what are your favorite fictional settings?

Franchesca Ramsey wants a word with you.

2026-04-28T00:00:00.003-04:00

Not quite our main subject, but I think you will see the relevance, and sympathize... - Robert Lopresti

How do writers look at success?

2026-04-27T00:01:00.098-04:00

Liz Zelvin with Lee Child

I have rubbed shoulders with a few writers whose success can be measured by the traditional yardsticks of fame and fortune: name recognition, sales in the millions, and New York Times bestsellers. (In the case of Lee Child, the shoulder-rubbing is figurative, since in terms of height as well as achievement, Lee's a mountain to my mole hill, even in this 2010 photo, when I was several inches taller than I am now.) For literary novelists, winning a Pulitzer or National Book Award are unassailable marks of success. For mystery writers, becoming an MWA Grand Master or winning an Edgar Award may be equivalent measures. For short story writers, a Pushcart Prize, a story published in The New Yorker, or a cover or lead story in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine has cachet. A novel or novella turned into a "major motion picture," aka a movie, or a popular TV series denotes success. Even making a yearly income the writer can live on is what many of the writer's peers would call success.

But what if none of these marks of traditional success comes your way? Can you still call yourself a success as a writer?

There's been a lot of talk on the Short Mystery list recently about the demise of markets and the lack of opportunity to make a living as well as the joys of getting a story accepted, especially in a milestone event eg for the first time or to a prestigious market. This made me think about my own measures of success, since I concluded years ago that both my successes and failures as a writer are genuine and made my peace with them. The failures have nothing to do with my talent or hard work as a writer, seventy plus years into my career. I can reframe them as disappointments, setbacks, or learning experiences, and let them go. The successes, whatever form they take for me, can bring me satisfaction, even joy, if I let them.

Here's an event that felt like success to me last month: my first novel, first published in hardcover by a major publisher 18 years ago, had two new readers on Kindle Unlimited, and other Kindle readers bought two novels, a novella, and one short story in the series, all but the novella originally published before e-books existed. I still have readers! New readers! They read the first novel and want to read the entire series all these years later. The numbers are minuscule and the royalties, especially for Kindle Unlimited, microscopic, but having new readers makes me feel I've succeeded as a writer.

Liz reads at Poets House, NYC

Moving the reader—or an audience—also makes me feel I've succeeded as a writer. My goal has never been fame and fortune in the first place, at least not since I passed my early twenties, when it hadn't happened, and I developed some common sense. I write to say what I have to say and make my readers laugh and cry. Finally, I believe I've succeeded as a writer because I know beyond all doubt that as a result of applying rigorous craft to an innate gift over many decades, I write well. Could I write Shakespeare's plays? No. Could a barrel of monkeys write my short stories? No.

I asked fellow members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society what defines success for them as writers. None of them fall into the rich and famous category, though quite a number of them are well published and winners of multiple prestigious awards.

Jeff Markowitz agrees with me about writing well: "The quality of the work itself may be the best measure of success. It's the one that keeps me in front of my computer, working on the next project."

Josh Pachter, who's been publishing for more than fifty years and had his share of kudos, says, "There's really only one metric by which I measure capital-S Success, and that's Am I having fun?"

Gary Earl Ross says, "After a ceremony honoring one of my old students, she introduced me to friends as her English professor and said she still needed to read my last book. I felt part of something much bigger than myself, the same way I feel when I interact with other writers. We’re rich in the ways that matter most."

Joseph S. Walker's views are similar. "I write because it's fun, it's personally fulfilling, and it's occasionally rewarding. It's the best way I've found of engaging with the world." Success? Joe says it's "having a story published because an editor/publisher liked it and accepted it (and, ideally, paid me for it); to keep writing, and to have the sense that I'm improving; to keep challenging myself to do new things--which takes me past the act of actually writing and into the broader world of being a writer. And finally--yes, knowing that a story has reached readers and, ideally, that they liked it. There are lots of ways in which you can learn that the story you threw out into the world actually meant something to somebody."

In the end, for each of us, success constitutes a unique blend of what writing means to us and what our work means to others.

"At the best of times when I write, when I'm done for the day I feel as if I'm coming out of a trance. It's gratifying." - Terry Shames

"The joy of having something in print—and having a reader tell me that they enjoyed something of mine they’ve read—is more of a high for me than a paycheck. Success also means finishing a story the way I imagined it in my head—that the pacing, voice, characterization and connections are all right and I’ve done my job properly. Even if no one reads a piece I write, I’ll know if it feels right to me." - Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier

"I regard myself as a successful working writer. I'll probably never make a lot of money at this, but I will be leaving a legacy, and a body of work. That gives me satisfaction." - A.L. Sirois

"It's your ability to write something that readers like and enjoy and love and can't put down. It's damned hard to involve readers with your writings to that extent, that they keep thinking about it for days and weeks afterward (or months and years)! - Yoshinori Todo

"I want everything to sell, the new and the old. Last month I sold one of my earliest mysteries and the newest one as well as a fantasy. I keep having new ideas; I’m not just finishing out old series. That is definitely success. I keep tackling new ways of doing things or learning something. That’s success because it means I’m still curious and accepting challenges. - Emily Dunn

"I write because I enjoy it. I like that there are a few people who say to me, "When is the next book coming out?" I am enjoying my life and, to me, that is the most important thing. As an older adult, I have found that those who feel most satisfied with their life - at this stage - are those who are doing, or have done, what they enjoy." - Elena Smith

"When a reader tells me they read and enjoyed my book, it puts me over the moon. I once had a woman I'd not met yet come to a sales event and tell me she came specifically to see me. That made my day far more than the sales did." - Rosalie Spielman

"A girl I met when she was four years old, sitting on her front porch reading, is now 35 and teaches high school language arts. She has influenced thousands of students to read and write. She says it’s all because she met me, because she saw me writing, and because I allowed her to go through my home library and borrow anything, any time she wanted to. Over the years, she’s kept up with every single one of my publications, read them and commented on them. That to me is success." - Bobbi Chukran

"I write almost daily. Love every minute. The pleasure is profound because I do exactly what I want to do. That is my measure of success. I've never been happier." - Wil Emerson

"I once got an email from a woman in Canada who was cleaning out her mother’s house after she died. She said she found a stack of my books. She hadn’t known her mother liked mysteries, and now she was reading them. That email was such a treat. A word of enthusiasm from a stranger once in a while can make all the difference." - Susan Oleksiw

"Writing from the heart, telling a story the way I want to tell it, and receiving positive reader feedback - that's success." - Catherine Dilts

Elizabeth Zelvin writes the Bruce Kohler Mysteries, the Mendoza Family Saga, and the Emerald Love Urban Fantasy Mysteries. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle (2025) is Liz's third poetry collection over fifty years as a published poet.

Picture Imperfect

2026-04-26T00:00:00.112-04:00

There's a bit by the comedian Stephen Wright. A friend asks if Wright would like to see a picture of the friend when he was younger, and Wright replies "Every picture of you is a picture of you when you were younger."

Which I would paraphrase this way: Time is a bastard.

I hate having my picture taken. Always have. I've never seen a photo of myself that I like. There are probably lots of deep psychological reasons we don't need to get into. Most of the time, this isn't a problem. It's not like there are people clamoring to take my picture on a daily basis.

But there's a part of being an author I didn't anticipate: people do want your picture. Specifically, they want a headshot, usually for promotional purposes--to accompany an interview or publication announcement, for example. This presented me with a dilemma. I certainly wasn't going somebody to take a professional headshot that I wouldn't like any more than what I could do with my own phone. So at the start of my career I just used selfies, of varying quality, when asked for a headshot.

Then, a few years ago, I started using this.

That's our cat, Imogene. Her original name, when we got her from the shelter eleven years ago, was Smudge, but my wife renamed her for a character in a movie she was fond of. She also had a persistent habit of sneaking up behind people (the cat, not my wife), so her full name, thank you very much, became Imogene Smudge Underfoot.

For the first time, I had a headshot I didn't mind using. Imogene blocks enough of my face to make me enigmatic, as opposed to flatly unappealing, but that hardly mattered since everybody would be looking at her anyway, what with her being so darn cute and all. Plus, it seemed appropriate to give her a little credit for my work, since one of her favorite things to do was jump into my lap while I was writing and insist that hands were for petting, not typing. It was part of her basically sociable nature. If she wasn't asleep, she wanted to be where the people were, which is a nice attribute in a pet for a guy who works at home.

Here's what I didn't think about, and, yeah, you probably see where this is going, so this is your chance to jump off while this is still a happy post.

Imogene had a lot of health issues last year. With the help of a couple of determined and compassionate vets, we got her through that, and she had a great year of being, I believe, happy, comfortable, and very loved. Then, because time is a bastard, the issues came back, and a couple of weeks ago we had to make that most difficult of decisions that every pet owner has to make, sooner or later.

I do wish it had been later. It's an inevitable part of having a pet, of course, and I'll remember the eleven good years we had with her after I've forgotten, or at least dulled, the memory of the stressful final days. I'm sad, but I'll be okay.

But there's that damn picture. And what I never thought about was how I'd feel every time I see it, once she was gone. That photo shows up in a lot of places. It's in the back of my collection Crime Scenes. It's in convention programs and on websites. I'm likely to keep running across it for years.

Sigh. Every picture is of you when you were younger. When you had the best cat ever as your writing partner (a lot of you reading this probably think you have the best cat ever, to which I sez, everybody's wrong sometimes).

So, just a small tribute this month to Imogene Smudge Underfoot. Thanks for indulging me--and if you happen to run across that headshot, raise a glass to her, wouldja?

How to Maintain a Career in Fiction Writing

2026-04-25T00:30:00.027-04:00

Today, I'm combining the wisdom of two authors I much admire, Benjamin Stevenson and John Floyd.

Two nights ago, I hosted/interviewed Australian author Benjamin Stevenson on stage at the Centennial Theatre in Burlington, Canada. To say I was 'outnumbered' is an understatement: Benjamin's book "Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone" has sold a million copies! I don't believe I've sold even half that if you were to combine all my books, short stories, and comedy pieces put together. (Okay, the newspaper columns had audiences in the millions, but that wasn't fiction.)

It was an electric night on stage with Benjamin, as we both got our start writing standup. Lots of fun! But some of the things we talked about have really resonated with me after the event.

Benjamin said it takes him two years to write a book. (It takes me one year. I sit in awe of cozy writers who can write three a year, frankly.) We both agreed on one thing: We have to be really excited about a book project to sit down, bum in chair, and write every day until that one project is done.

Excited. I've thought back to my own career as a novelist, and can see that this drives me as well.

I didn't start as a novelist. I began life as a short story writer. But when the short story market began to shrink, I started to think about meeting the challenge of writing a novel.

My first series is still my bestselling individual series. Rowena Through the Wall was epic fantasy, or what they would call Romantasy these days. It was featured in USA Today some years ago, and took off (a top 50 Amazon bestseller, all books.) That series was great fun to write, but once I finished it, it felt that fantasy was kind of done for me. I looked around for something that would excite me.

This brings me to John Floyd's column from a few weeks ago, The Old Genre Switcheroo, about moving between genres or subgenres. I realized that this is what I've been doing. It's how I've stayed excited, while continuing to write novels.

My next series was The Goddaughter mob caper series. You can't get more different from dark ages fantasy than that! A contemporary mob goddaughter in Hamilton doesn't want to be one, but keeps getting dragged back in to bail out her family.

Totally different genres with different rules. What they did have in common? Both series were high comedy.

When that series ended, I looked around for another genre or subgenre that I could get excited about. Something that would challenge me, and provide a host of fresh ideas.

Which led to The Pharaoh's Curse Murders (out this week!) and the historical Merry Widow Murder series. Still humorous, but with the challenge of a 1929 setting and - new for me - classic mystery plotting requirements.

Challenging and therefore exciting, for this writer.

What does all this prove? This is what I've learned:

The secret to having a multi-decade career in fiction writing is to be versatile. Move where the market goes. Keep yourself fresh by exploring new genres or sub-genres.

Versatility. Which begs the question, what's next for this writer, after The Kennel Club Murders, out April 2027?

I'm excited to see.

Melodie Campbell is the winner of ten awards, including The Derringer and the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence, for her 21 novels and 60 short stories. She didn't even steal them.

NOW AVAILABLE AT B&N, AMAZON, CHAPTERS/INDIGO AND INDEPENDENTS!

In Cold Blood Revisited

2026-04-24T00:00:00.008-04:00

In 1966, Truman Capote claimed to have invented a new type of writing, the non-fiction novel. The result was his seminal work, In Cold Blood. In it, he depicts the 1959 murder of a prosperous farming family in Kansas. The murder actually happened and baffled authorities for Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. The pair met in penitentiary, where a fellow inmate told them stories of working for Herb Clutter, the patriarch of the Clutter family. Specifically, he told them Clutter had a safe in his house holding $10,000. Which was not true as Clutter seldom carried cash.

The pair agreed they would rob the family once they were out of prison. They also agreed they would have to kill the witnesses to cover up their crime. But rather than simply walking in and shooting everyone in their sleep, Hickock raped the oldest daughter first, and the pair tortured Herb Clutter before killing him. The pair then fled to Mexico, pawning what they could take from the home (which did not include $10,000.) Smith had dreams of buying a boat and taking tourists out on deep sea adventures and finding sunken treasure. Hickock, stunted and slightly crippled from a car accident, just wanted to get high and debauch. The pair were cornered in Las Vegas two years later. Both men were hung in 1965.

Despite Capote's claims, In Cold Blood was not the first "non-fiction novel," or more accurately, true crime novel. There were others before it. But Capote's captured enough attention to be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It also paved the way for LA District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi's book about the Manson Family murders, Helter Skelter. One thing that sets both these books apart is they don't really sensationalize the murders. Hickock and Smith are a pair of career criminals and drifters who might have been at home in Kerouac's On the Road if they were just a bit smarter and more sociable (and less violent. Merry pranksters these two were not.) Manson doesn't need sensationalized. He and his followers brought their own flair for the theatrics, which actually makes them scarier.

What struck me about the killers in In Cold Blood is they could not articulate their motivations, especially Hickock. He was a violent thug who had vague resentment against anyone who thought they were better than him. Never mind he'd never met or talked to the Clutters before killing them. Smith seems to have trapped himself in the life, hitching his star to a more charismatic and fierce Hickock and constantly regretting it even as he goes along with the next scene. The pair was doomed from the start. The Clutters became collateral damage, as the innocent often are in these cases.

Whittled Away Bit by Bit

2026-04-23T04:20:00.000-04:00

My dad has early stage Alzheimer’s. Until recently, I had been helping manage his care without doing a whole lot of reflection on what is going on with my father and how it’s affecting him, and by extension the members of his family — my mom, my brother, my wife, our son, and me.

That all began to change when I turned 61 earlier this month. Nothing like a birthday to cause a thinking, feeling person to stop and take stock of their life, of the world around them, of the situations arising in their daily existence, and how things are going for their loved ones.

One of those situations has been dogging my steps longer than I’d have admitted. But before I get into all that, I want to talk a bit about Nash Bridges.

I remember back in the late ‘90s, one of my guilty pleasures was watching Don Johnson’s wish fulfillment project Nash Bridges on CBS. The title character, portrayed by Johnson himself, had it all: cool job (police inspector/later captain of an elite investigative unit), cool car (an exceedingly rare late ’60s yellow Hemi ’Cuda convertible), cool partner/best friend (played by Cheech Marin — I mean, come on), cool girlfriend (portrayed by Yasmine Bleeth of Baywatch fame), cool penthouse apartment on the top floor of a skyscraper in San Francisco, cool ex-wife, cool relationship with his teenage daughter, and cool clothes.

Cool car. Cool clothes. Cool city. Cool life. The stuff of fiction.

Like I said: wish fulfillment.

On the show one aspect of Nash’s life that was less than ideal was the fact that his father was afflicted with Alzheimer’s, and Nash had just begun to act as his guardian and main caregiver. This is the first time I can recall actively paying attention to a fictional arc about a character with Alzheimer’s. Before this I had seen news pieces about the disease, about dementia, and other aspects of aging that included memory loss, personality changes, mood swings, and confusion.

Nick Bridges was the first fictional character I ever remember watching deal with Alzheimer’s. But his condition was not in any way realistic. If anything, it served as more of a plot convenience than an actual portrayal of the progression of the disease. Nick would seem foggy when it served the plot, then get sharp when that served the plot too. Half the time he just seemed like a crotchety old man with an engaging, salty sense of humor. As portrayed by veteran character actor James Gammon, the character was an awful lot of fun. Kind of like the rest of the show.

So: not just wish fulfillment. Completely delusional wish fulfillment!

I didn’t think much about that at the time. I mean, it was entertainment. Nash Bridges is not a documentary. If you’re looking for clinical accuracy, you’re gonna need to seek it elsewhere.

And yet for all that, these days I can hardly help but think about it. And that because nowadays I know exactly what the real thing looks like.

As far back as I can remember, my father had always been the sharpest tack in the room. And by “sharp,” I mean clever. Articulate. Incisive. Precise with his language — and exacting with me on my employment of same.

If I was relating a story, talking about something that had happened to me earlier in the day: a strange interaction with a sales clerk, perhaps, and in the course of so doing, gave a thumbnail of what I said, rather than exactly quoting, my dad would tell me what I ought to have said and how I ought to have said it. He never once stopped to consider that I was giving a thumbnail. It seemed never to occur to him that in all likelihood I had acquitted myself just fine in the moment. He was constantly trying to improve my language, and by extension, me.

Constantly.

Exhaustively.

And exhaustingly.

In a nutshell this is because my father is a textbook narcissist who has always worked hard to keep himself at the center of any conversation. This made for rocky times during my young adult and early adult years.

These days he cannot even really follow a conversation. Most of the time it’s all he can do to muster repeated volleys of the word “What?”, phrased eternally as a question while struggling to keep up.

Ironically, he and I have never gotten along better than we do now.

Unless he happens to be in the grip of a bout of sundowning syndrome. In those instances all bets are usually off.

Without getting too clinical: a person dealing with Alzheimer’s spends their entire day struggling with confusion, disorientation, and memory lapses. They start the morning relatively refreshed after a night’s sleep (good or otherwise). But as the day progresses, the effort of managing their all-encompassing confusion, their endless disorientation, tends to wear on them. They get tired. And when they get tired, the confusion gets worse. And when the confusion gets worse, they get more tired. It’s a vicious cycle.

So by sundown — or sometime around then — you’ve got someone who has been struggling all day, has reached their limit, and is, for lack of a better term, cranky. They lash out. They can get mean.

In my dad’s case, he can also become pretty incoherent. During one of these episodes, he will invariably key on something, anything someone else says and argue with them about it — in terms that make less and less sense as the dispute progresses. The other invariably finds themself having to defuse the situation.

My entire family deals with this. And make no mistake: this situation puts significant strain on all of us — my mom, my brother, my wife, our son, and me. I’ll leave it at that, except to say that during this difficult time we have closed ranks, are all pulling together, trying hard to support each other, and to support him.

Sometimes during all of this pulling together, I can’t help but entertain the question of whether my father’s Alzheimer’s is hereditary. I try not to spend too much time dwelling on it — on whether this might be a glimpse of my own potential future. That way lies madness.

What I find myself thinking about far more. What I find myself worrying about. What I find myself sometimes consumed with, is my mother, and the weight she carries daily.

After all, I know that I am struggling with my own emerging impressions of who my father is becoming. But I cannot even imagine what my mom is going through.

I got a glimpse of it the other day. I told her I had broken down crying over what's happening with my dad. She said, "Welcome to my world. I cry every day."

A startling admission coming from my stalwart, stoic mother. No one who knows her would ever think of her as a crier.

Watching the personality of the person she has spent her entire adult life with — sixty-plus years — be whittled away. Be carved down. Be eroded like sandstone by the wind, like granite rock on a headland worn down by the surf and the tide.

All of it a diminishing. A gradual vanishing. My father, and by extension, all of us who love and try to support him, victims of Time.

Babylon Berlin

2026-04-22T03:00:00.004-04:00

Okay, now here’s one you can sink your teeth into. Babylon Berlin, streaming on MHz.

Germany, 1929, the Weimar Republic. An experiment in social democracy that nobody was ready for, not after the slaughter in the trenches, and the poisonous embarrassments of Versailles. The great political struggle of the 20^th century is being played out in the streets of proletarian Berlin, as murderous performance art, the reactionaries and revanchists trying to beat back the Bolshevik menace, and in the economic and social exhaustion that comes, the Nazis will step in to pick up the pieces.

This is rich soil to cultivate, and for me, as a political junkie with a side in history, naturally fascinating. It’s a little Cabaret - without the eye-watering phoniness of Liza Minnelli – and very reminiscent of Philip Kerr’s series of Bernie Gunther novels, but darker and more Gothic than both. It also happens to be mordantly funny.

The success of the show, I think, is that it’s absolutely convincing in the details; it certainly convinces me. You land right in the middle of this disturbed environment, a postwar collapse that’s never properly righted itself. And the sexual license, the drugs, the music (fabulous cameo from Bryan Ferry as a nightclub performer, but who also wrote some of the songs), are all of a piece: the place is crazy wild, and you want your share. Everybody’s on the make, the mob, the crooked cops, the political outliers and also-rans, the pimps and the whores and the dopers.

Now, of course, you need somebody to root for, and the show has two engaging leads, as well as a shifting cast of slippery secondaries, some of whom step up to full-frontal villainy, and some who fade. The violence is abrupt, as are the sudden sexual encounters. The whole feeling is of fragmentation, that your faith or assumption in a larger social stability, or benefit, is delusional. (The guys who wrote the show, and exec produce, say one of the things that interests them about it is the fragility of the era.) Watching the heroine and the hero try to navigate this chaotic house of cards - while they themselves are sometimes trusting of one another, and sometimes suspicious – is what gives the narrative its forward motion.

The show is based on a series of novels by the German writer Volker Kutscher, which I’m now interested in, and are available in English translation. The series, though, changes the chronology. So far, the first three seasons take place in 1929, the fourth in 1930-31, and the last – the fifth season, yet to be released - in 1932-33, when the Nazis come to power. And, as odd and ominous as the first three seasons are, the Nazis haven’t even shown up yet, which gives you an idea just how odd and ominous the series really is. Things are already bad enough.

The producers have also put a lot of time and effort and money into recreating period Berlin, and as somebody who’s actually spent some time there – and considering how much of the city was flattened, during the war – they’ve done a terrific job. They do use CGI, but it’s pretty seamless. The famous Alexanderplatz doesn’t really exist the same way it once did – Berlin Alexanderplatz is a hugely successful 1929 novel by Alfred Döblin, adapted twice to film – but it looks plenty real here, in all its prewar significance.

This may be an acquired taste, in that not everybody shares my fascination with the place and the time, but I think it repays your attention. It’s not a history lesson, or a documentary, although they aren’t fudging the facts - it’s more along the lines of a fevered dream, which seems like an entirely accurate representation. Berlin, then and now, has always been a state of mind, somewhat hallucinatory.

Just Four More Days Until April 25th!

2026-04-21T00:09:00.002-04:00

I offer thanks to my fellow SleuthSayer Bob Mangeot for inspiring this blog post. Ten days ago, on April 11th, he wrote about all the things April 11th is known for. He started with it being The Most Boring Day in History (specifically, April 11, 1954--want to know more? Click here) and ended with Bob Needed a Blog Day.

Hey, I know a good idea when I see one. But I'm going to tweak it. See, I'm not here to talk about April 21st (i.e., today). I am here to talk about what is coming this Saturday, April 25th. (Some of you already know to what I am referring. I can feel your brains buzzing with excitement. But hold on. There is more to April 25th than that.) There is ...

Independent Bookstore Day

Now in its 13th year, this holiday celebrates indie bookstores. Yep, those shops that aren't part of big chains or an online behemoth with the same name as a South American rain forest. These are the stores that hand sell books and give personalized service. When we readers dream of owning a bookstore, it is these types of stores that we fantasize about. So it's only right that there be a day each year to tip our hat to them (and maybe pop into one and buy a book or three).

World Penguin Day

This is the day to celebrate the beauty, diversity, and intelligence of penguins--not to mention their sense of style (there's a reason why tuxes are called penguin suits). This is also a day to recognize and fight against climate change, which is threatening penguin habitat and thus their ability to hunt and breed.

Hug A Plumber Day

This pretty much goes without saying: If you've ever needed a plumber, you know that you're probably ready to hug them when they arrive. But since doing so usually would be awkward, it's good to have a day dedicated to it.

National (US) Go Birding Day

Held on the last Saturday each April, this holiday is designed to celebrate birds and bird-watching. It gives you a reason to go outside (with binoculars, if you have 'em) and focus on our feathered friends. And if you can't or don't want to go out, that's okay. You can see birds through windows too.

(Caveat about binoculars: Remember, you're supposed to use them to look at birds, not your neighbors. Except if you're Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. Then you can. But I wouldn't rely on that if someone calls the cops. It's a pretty narrow exception.)

And finally, the holiday you've all been waiting for ...

Miss Congeniality Day!

Yep, April 25th is Miss Congeniality Day, or as it's described by Miss Rhode Island during the interview portion of the Miss United States pageant in the fab 2000 movie Miss Congeniality, (of course), it's "the Perfect Date."

Yep, when asked to describe her perfect date, this contestant didn't talk about a romantic dinner or walking with someone she loves on the beach. No sirree. She said her perfect date was April 25th. "Because it's not too hot and not too cold. All you need is a light jacket." What a scrumptiously hilarious response based on a misunderstanding in a moment of stress. Last weekend our own John Floyd talked here about movies with non-starring characters who stole the show. Well, whenever I think of this movie, this is the line I think of. It did indeed steal the show. To whoever wrote it, thank you.

Agatha Awards banquet

For those attending the Malice Domestic mystery convention later this week, April 25th is also the day this year's Agatha Awards will be given out. Malice attendees will be able to vote for the best mystery book published last year in five categories, as well as the best short story. If you haven't read the five short story finalists, it's not too late. Just click here. All the short story titles link to PDFs.

Happy early April 25th!

Together alone.

2026-04-20T00:00:00.018-04:00

It’s received wisdom that writers are the world’s most inveterate introverts. Who else could spend hours, days, years alone hunched over a keyboard or pad of paper? It’s so obvious. Most normal human beings couldn’t stand it. Which is why most normal human beings don’t become writers, for their own sakes.

And yet, most of the mystery and thriller writers I know are more than agreeably sociable. If you want proof, just hang out at the rambunctious hotel bar during Bouchercon, or any of the regional writers conferences that take place around the country.

Thinking about this, I was reminded of my college era playing in a rock and roll band. We performed constantly throughout the school year. After a while, some patterns

I'm hoping a guest singer will remember the lyrics

emerged. Parties contrived to bring dispirit groups together took forever to get rolling, while the close-knit communities, like fraternities and sororities, launched on the first chord. Thursdays often produced wilder nights than Saturday or Sunday. I’m not sure why, unless it was anticipation of the coming weekend, or the thrill of rebellion – launching youthful mania while there was still a day of classes in the offing.

Another high point was the first party after the end of exams. Our college had a disproportionate number of pre-med and pre-law students, people we rarely saw during the passing months, having sequestered themselves in feverish study. But after exams, with nothing left to prove, they’d emerge, pasty and unclean, and go completely nuts. Their undeveloped social skills didn’t help, nor did a deep unfamiliarity with the plentiful intoxicants available at the time.

So it could be that writers are a lot like college kids who spend their undergraduate years, and their parent’s tuition money, actually studying (I held down the other end of that curve). Since we’re biologically pack animals, long periods of time isolated from human contact probably creates a pent-up demand. A chance to re-engage ones vocal cords after hours in monkish silence. An irresistible need to satisfy the intraspecies fellowship programmed into our DNA.

That’s probably true, but I think an even greater impetus is mingling with people who do the same thing you do. As with any reference group, be it police chiefs or philatelists, common experience short-circuits all the meandering, and stilted, searches for common ground that characterize social interaction. Blessedly, when hanging with writers we don’t have to parry the usual inane questions, like “Have you written anything I heard of?” or “When are they going to make a movie out of your book?” None of us is really very interested in the other’s childhood inspirations, choice of writing software, or process, whatever the hell that means. In fact, most of my casual conversations with writers have absolutely nothing to do with writing at all. Sometimes the travails of promotion come up, or an impending book launch, or a new project/agent/publisher, but usually we just talk about our kids and dogs, and recent vacations, just like everyone else.

Still, I think common sense dictates that writers lean toward introversion, though there are plenty of exceptions. Somehow a monstruous, flaming ego like Earnest Hemingway managed to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. As did Winston Churchill, no one’s idea of a wall flower. I could easily provide a list of mystery and thriller writers who could have

succeeded as standups or late-night talk show hosts (though Johnny Carson was, in fact, an introvert; deviations litter every argument.) The most flamboyant of my closest friends started out his career as a freelance journalist. I imagine someone had to strap him into his chair until the article was finished.

Introverts do have one clear advantage. While extroverts are shaking hands, kissing cheeks and angling for attention, introverts are watching the room. They notice little slights and flirtations, they size up personalities and sniff out phony posturing. Their nerves tingle from the social dynamic, registering envy, vanity and lust. All of this gets stored away on mental file cards for future use.

Most of the writers I know fit this description, yet they have a small contingent of people to whom they are very attached. They prefer to go deep rather than wide. I’ll cop to being one of those.

We can turn it on when we need to, then quietly slip back to the keyboard.

Spam and Scam • part 1

2026-04-19T00:00:00.002-04:00

Spot and Stop • How to Recognize Scams and Cons

Frauds and scams traditionally preyed by using and abusing trust, blinding the ‘mark’ to criminal reality. Today’s fraudsters are armed with powerful new tools like AI voice cloning, deepfake videos, and hyper-personalized messages.

The result? Losses are soaring. North Americans reported over $12.5 billion in fraud losses in 2024, with imposter scams topping the list and investment fraud causing the biggest financial losses. A recent 2026 survey found 40% of adults experienced some form of financial fraud or scam attempt in the past year.

I am one of those targets as are you and you and you. No one is immune, young or old, tech-savvy or not.

Damage extends beyond financial. Scammers don’t merely steal money; they erode confidence, they damage trust. By knowing most common tactics and defenses can keep you and your loved ones safe.

Top Scams Making Headlines

Imposter scams remain the most frequently reported. Fraudsters pose as banks, government agencies (IRS, Social Security), law enforcement, or trusted companies. They create urgency with fake alerts about ‘suspicious activity’ or ‘frozen accounts’, then pressure targets to transfer funds or share login details or withdraw funds to unmask ‘real’ criminals. Losses from these schemes recently reached $3 billion.

AI enhanced scams are exploding. Initially voice cloning hid Indian or North African accents. Now voice technology lets scammers sound like a grandchild or family member in a crisis, demanding immediate wire transfers or gift cards to alleviate a concocted emergency. On the internet, deepfake videos and emails impersonate celebrities pushing fake investments.

Investment and cryptocurrency scams promise ‘guaranteed’ high returns. Romance phishing scams blend emotional manipulation with financial finagling, building online relationships before inventing crises or ‘opportunities’ that require a quick transfer of money. Employment scams flood job boards and social media with fake offers that ask for upfront fees or personal data.

Online shopping and marketplace frauds trick buyers with too-good-to-be-true deals, while recovery scams target past victims, promising to retrieve lost funds– for another fee. (Chances are your state or province tracks unclaimed funds. Google them. In my state, it’s known as Florida Treasure Hunt.)

On a Personal Level

Most of the time, my phone filters spam and scam calls, but once in a while I snatch up the phone whereupon I encounter a scammer. Sometimes I mess with them. Say IRS agent Marty Melrose (badge number 123456) informs me via this courtesy call before my account entered collections. Marty has a soothing Indian accent, a break from obvious computer generated spiels. Frankly, I am mildly surprised how much scammers know about me, but Agent Marty rapidly gets to the gist of the matter, ‘confirming’ my social security number.

I said, “Okay.”

After several seconds of silence, he said, “Sir, I need to confirm your SSN.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m waiting.”

“You have to read it to me,” he said.

“I know what my number is. I need to hear it from you.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“You want me to blab my social in a room full of people? That’s not going to happen.” No one else was nearby, but he didn’t need to know that.

“Listen, by law, you have to give me your number. Evasiveness can result in arrest and criminal charges.”

“Nope. Not gonna happen.”

Marty becomes more abusive and threatening, declaring federal agents will appear on my doorstep within 30 minutes to arrest me. I laugh. I swear I hear his headset smash against his desk before disconnection.

And then…

Several evenings ago, my phone rings, showing my bank’s name on caller ID. The man on the other end purports to be my bank following up on suspicious card activity. He rattles off several large purchases in Texas.

This has happened before, usually from the credit card company, not my little bank. Typically they verify recent purchases, but this time the caller asks for my on-line banking ID.

I’m not suspicious at that point, but I automatically decline to state my logon credentials. He presses on, insisting I reveal my ID.

More curious than concerned, I don’t know what to make of it. My ID isn’t secret information, is it? He says if they can’t resolve this now, my cards and accounts will be blocked and suspended by morning. Nonetheless, I refuse and opt to phone my bank when they reopen.

Sure enough, no alerts, no blocks, no suspicious activity… except that out-of-the-blue phone call. What the hell is going on? He didn’t ask for passwords or identifying information. And then it dawns on me.

I have long been an opponent of so-called ‘security questions,’ queries asking where you went to high school, your mother’s maiden name, and your first pet. I argue these are insecurity questions. In this backwards situation, the scammer knew– or thought he could guess– one or more answers to my security questions to bypass the passphrase and face recognition. All he needed was my user name!

Hint: Never ever place honest answers in those security questions and, if offered, never answer your favorite color.

Where did you attend high school?

Sod off.

What was your high school’s mascot?

Sod off.

Who was your high school sweetheart?

Sod off.

Who’s your daddy?

Sod of… huh?

And then…

I previously discussed a friend’s ordeal when money unexpectedly appeared in her Chase account. Not treating it as a gratuitous windfall, she visited the local branch, which shrugged and said someone had given her money. And then I heard about it, a known scam. Chase Bank still contends they’re not at fault, the lying rotters.

More recently, she received a work-at-home job offer from a Swedish company. She was excited to be interviewed, tested, and accepted. They sent her a sizable check to set up a home office.

Sour and dour me? Even after I confirmed the company and the HR VP’s name were real, I remained suspicious. But the check they sent her? Not so real. They would, I suspected, soon instruct her to send part of that money elsewhere. I advised her not to deposit it (which could take weeks to fully resolve), but to ask her bank to verify it (which took mere minutes).

Next Time: Practical Protection

Stealing the Show

2026-04-18T00:00:00.169-04:00

Here's a look into my fascinating personal life: There are groups of folks I talk with pretty regularly about things like reading, writing, and movies--and those groups often, but not always, overlap. My point is, the other day our little movie group was chatting about our favorite characters. The discussion soon moved to favorite heroes/heroines, favorite villains, favorite sidekicks, and so on.

Finally one lady said, "Let's simplify it. Which ones are the most memorable?"

I, of course, can't let something like that go to waste. After all, I have a duty to post a SleuthSayers column every first, third, and fifth Saturday, rain or shine, and I know a good subject when I hear one.

So, since movies are a type of fiction and this blog's supposed to be about fiction . . . that's the first of today's two questions: Who do you think are the most memorable movie characters?

Before you answer, here are my own top ten:

Note to my friend Elizabeth Zelvin, who will say "John, these are mostly 'guy movies.'": You're right, Liz--but not ALL of them are . . .

1. Augustus McCrea (Robert Duvall, Lonesome Dove)

2. Al Swearengen (Ian McShane, Deadwood)

3. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver, Aliens)

4. Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell, Escape from New York)

5. Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates, Misery)

6. Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men)

7. Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman, The French Connection)

8. John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan, The Green Mile)

9. Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand, Fargo)

10. Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman, Die Hard)

Yes, I admit I cheated and included characters from a mini-series or two, and I also didn't count no-brainers like James Bond, Indiana Jones, Michael Corleone, Hannibal Lecter, Scarlett O'Hara, Rick Blaine, Norman Bates, Superman, Forrest Gump, Nurse Ratched, Darth Vader, Marty McFly, Ferris Bueller, Harry Callahan, Tony Soprano, Rocky Balboa, etc., etc.

Second question--and the real reason for the title of this post: Who do you think are the most memorable movie characters in a minor or incidental role? In other words, not one of the main characters? (Think Ronny Howard in The Music Man or Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.) I think some of these folks not only steal scenes; the steal the show.

Here, for what it's worth, are my choices:

1. C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard, Bonnie and Clyde)

2. Vizzini (Wallace Shawn, The Princess Bride)

3. Private Hudson (Bill Paxton, Aliens)

4. Belle Rosen (Shelley Winters, The Poseidon Adventure)

5. The Wicked Witch (Margaret Hamilton, The Wizard of Oz)

6. Pea Eye Parker (Timothy Scott, Lonesome Dove)

7. Crewman #6 (Sam Rockwell, Galaxy Quest)

8. Pop Fisher (Wilford Brimley, The Natural)

9. Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison, The Green Mile)

10. Lyle (Burton Gilliam, Blazing Saddles)

11. Johnny Henshaw (Stephen Stucker, Airplane!)

12. The Stranger (Sam Elliott, The Big Lebowski)

13. Clifford Worley (Dennis Hopper, True Romance)

14. Customer in diner (Estelle Reiner, When Harry Met Sally)

15. The Governor (Charles Durning, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas)

16. Short Round (Ke Huy Kwan, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom)

17. Old-timer in saloon (Pat Buttram, Back to the Future III)

18. Dusty Davis (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Twister)

19. The Black Knight (John Cleese, Monty Python and the Holy Grail)

20. Captain Koons (Christopher Walken, Pulp Fiction)

21. Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine, Escape from New York)

22. Diner waitress (Margaret Bowman, Hell or High Water)

23. Dr. Ray Reddy (M. Night Shyamalan, Signs)

24. Oda Mae Brown (Whoopi Goldberg, Ghost)

25. Beatrice (Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Men in Black)

If you like trivia, and if you're really bored . . . which of the above 25 minor characters said the following?

"All right, Hobbs, knock the cover off the ball."

"How 'bout some more beans, Mr. Taggart?"

"I'll get you, my pretty--and your little dog too."

"It's coming! It's headed right for us!"

"Ooooo, I love to dance a little sidestep . . ."

"Little man, I give the watch to you."

"Dirt in the fuel line--Just blowed it away."

"Docta Jones! Docta Jones! No more parachutes!"

"You been declared competent, son. Know what that means? It means you gonna ride the lightnin'."

"Hey, Snake--You don't wanta be walkin' around down there."

"It's only a scratch."

"Game over, man. Game over!"

"If you don't go out there, everybody everywhere will say, 'Clint Eastwood is the biggest yellow-belly in the West.'"

"Molly? You in danger, girl."

"Yeah, he asked me for some water. Sugar water."

"I been workin' here 44 years. Ain't nobody ever ordered nothin' but T-bone steak and a baked potato."

"My lord. Old Deets is gone. My lord."

"Don't open my pantry, Father. I found one of them in there and I locked him in."

"Oh, it's a big pretty white plane with red stripes."

"I changed my mind. I wanta go back."

"So you're a Sicilian, huh?"

"You see, Mr. Scott? In the water I'm a very skinny woman."

"The Dude abides."

"Incontheivable!"

"I'll have what she's having."

Before we stop this silliness, here are some runners-up:

Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn, Fast Times at Ridgemont High)

Dot (Frances McDormand, Raising Arizona)

Santanico Pandemonium (Salma Hayek, From Dusk till Dawn)

Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen, Reservoir Dogs)

Principal Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones, Ferris Bueller's Day Off)

Now, once again--What are your choices for most memorable movie characters, major and minor? Do you agree with me on any of the above? Have you created these kinds of unforgettable characters in your own fiction?

In my case . . . well, I wish.

The Case of the Silent Fan

2026-04-17T00:00:00.002-04:00

My young nephew recently landed the job of his dreams after a two-year stint in the NBC Page program. The job seems perfect for him. As long I can remember, he’s been obsessed with movies and screenwriting. Now he’s working in the industry. Hearing his dad talk about his son’s new gig reminded me of one of my first job interviews, which unwittingly touched upon our beloved genre.

Not my nephew.

Cue dream sequence music and SFX.

Doodly-do, doodly-do…

I am fresh out of college, living back at my parents’ home in New Jersey, and scouring want ads in the New York Times.

Oh—here’s one! A major publisher is looking for editorial assistants. This is not a surprise to me. I have a degree in journalism, but I am deeply uninterested in writing for newspapers. (Newflash: this is the 1980s, folks. Newspapers still exist.) In the fields of magazine journalism and book publishing, being someone’s editorial assistant is how one breaks into these two specialized fields. I am prepared to editorially assist the heck out of anyone who will have me.

I phone the number in the newspaper. Somewhere in the Big Town, the phone rings. The person asks a few questions, and instructs me to bring my résumé and my sunny disposition to 175 Fifth Avenue on the appointed day and hour.

Wowza! I have a job interview!

I ride the bus from the Jersey side to the Port Authority bus terminal. I walk 20 blocks south because I know nothing of city buses or subways. It’s summer, so my button-down shirt and blazer are probably soaked by the time I get there. But this is a dream sequence, so I arrive looking pristine. Even my résumé is perspiration-free.

Reasonable facsimile of Joe upon arrival
at job interview.

I am standing in front of the famous Flatiron Building. I may have heard of it in my reading but this is the first time I have ever been there. The human resources person chats me up, asks about my majors in school, and then tells me she would like to introduce me to the book editor who will be needing an editorial assistant very, very shortly.

She mentions the editor’s name, but I am a) nervous/anxious/self-conscious beyond belief, and b) hearing impaired, and wear gigantic hearing aids that I am sure astronauts can spot from space. It is quite possible I did not wear the hearing aids today because, well, see a) above.

The editor’s name goes in one ear and out the other. Vaguely, the name sounds like Jon-Kon, which may have been a character in the Star Wars franchise. The human resources woman and I ride the steam-driven elevator to another floor, while she tells me that this particular editor is quite special.
Because she has her own imprint.

I am a twenty-one-year-old college graduate and I am an idiot, which the remainder of this discussion will fail to disprove. I don’t know from imprints. I don’t know what they are or why I need to know this word.

For 15 of the last 21 years I have been busy doing homework, sleeping, watching TV, and reading. Books, baby, books! That’s me. I don’t know from stinkin’ imprints.

Minutes later, I am sitting in the tiny office of a small woman with short-cropped hair and wide, smiley eyes.

“Editing is the easy part,” she tells me after a bit. “If you were an English major, this will come easy. But contracts? That’s where the young people go wrong. Can you add and subtract?”

Yes, absolutely, I tell her.

“Can you type a sentence word-for-word that is right there in front of you on the desk?”

Yes, of course, I tell her.

“See? That’s all that’s necessary. Now...authors. Most are very nice. Very interesting. But a few are... difficult. Here are some of the books we edit here…”

She went rooting on the shelf behind her. One by one, she passed the books to me. I glanced, I boggled, and I placed them on a stack on the desk in front of me.

Nervously.

Because, you see, they were all, every one of them, mysteries.

As it happened, I read mysteries. Lots. In fact, you might say that sitting on my duff reading mysteries was the only skill I had acquired in my young life.

The editor was glad to make my acquaintance. She wanted me to meet the young person who was leaving her post, so that I could understand what the job entailed. If I got the job, I would be reading slush piles, recommending books I liked to Jon-Kon, dealing with her correspondence, typing up contracts, seeing that packages got from her to literary agents and vice versa.

And once in a while, if I had the aptitude for it and the desire, I might be permitted to acquire the books I liked and carry them from manuscript to finished book. With Jon-Kon’s assistance and supervision, of course.

The outgoing editorial assistant repeated much of what her employer had said. And yes, she said, she had in fact acquired and edited some books on her own. It wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t really her cup of tea.

“Why are you leaving?” I asked.

“Oh—I got another job,” she said. “Across the street. See that bank down there? Right there. It pays better.”

(The editorial assistant salary was $12,000, about $36,000 today.)

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This woman, who was only a few years older than me, was leaving what I imagined was a dream job to work at a bank rather than acquire and edit the work of mystery writers? What the living heck?

I had so much more to learn about the world.

The editorial assistant asked if I had any other questions. I didn’t. I bid her and Jon-Kon goodbye.
That was it. I went downstairs and told the human resources person that this truly seemed like a dream job. I said little more.

She said she would be in touch.

Of course, she was not. Not ever.

What do they tell kids fresh out of college? They have to be persistent. They must be go-getters! Two things no one would ever say of me. And yet, for several days in a row, I phoned their office and tried to persist and go-get as best I could, to no avail. With each call, I must have seemed more desperate.

Because by then I had glanced at some of the hardcover books in my meager collection and spotted a curious thing printed at the bottom of those spines or else on the back.

A Joan Kahn Book.

Depending on who is relating the history, Ms. Kahn may have been the first editor to have her own imprint. Her name on the cover of the books she edited—by Dick Francis, Tony Hillerman, Patricia Highsmith, and so on—signaled to readers who had never heard of this particular author that they were nevertheless in for a good time.

In her remarkable career, which stretched from 1946 to 1989, Ms. Kahn collected two awards from the Mystery Writers of America, the Ellery Queen Award for editing, and upon retirement a special Edgar to recognize her incredible contribution to the genre. She died in 1994 at age 80.

In my memory, she lives on as the person who asked so brightly on the day of my greatest mistake if I could add and subtract.

What was my mistake, you ask?

Perhaps you have guessed it.

I’ll give you a moment to mull it over. You have all the facts. I have laid them before you as best I could, omitting nothing. A foolish kid walks into a job interview, realizes that this represents his fondest wish—to work in the world of mystery fiction—and what does he say?

To the human resources woman? To the outgoing editorial assistant? To the great Jon-Kon herself?

Does he utter a single thing about his interest, nay, obsession with mysteries? Does he mention his favorite authors? Does he reference his subscriptions to the digest magazines? His growing stack of Armchair Detectives? The beat-up first edition of a Philo Vance hardcover that he found at a flea market that still has an intact oh-so-cool foldout map of the murder scene?

Nope.

Not a peep. Not a word. I entered their offices as a complete zero and exited shortly after without raising that number a whit.

That’s why, strangely, at this time of year, when students are about to collect their parchments in droves and head out into the world to seek their fortunes, my only real advice for them is drawn from a movie I watch every Christmas, The Family Stone.

In it, Luke Wilson consoles his brother’s uptight girlfriend, played by Sarah Jessica Parker. He wishes she would learn to make peace with her quirky self and not try to be so perfect, so appropriate, all the time.

“Here’s the thing, Meredith,” he tells her. “You have a freak flag. You just don’t fly it.”

Even if you’re young, you’ve earned that flag. Most of us have. It’s the thing that makes you you. Flying it is letting the world know who you are.

And yeah, I know that a job interview is probably one of the last places to let one’s fandom leak out. But geez, when a stranger announces to you that their greatest delight in the world is digging into a nice, juicy murder, read the room and unfurl the colors, you sweet, beautiful nerd.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

What do NBC Pages actually do? Watch Joe’s nephew and find out.