Lea Wait's Blog, page 130

The Origins of American Noir Fiction

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Vaughn

Vaughn C. Hardacker here: I’ve been told on several occasions that my novels tend to be noir. Have you ever wondered where the form of crime fiction labelled as noir came from? I have . . . but then I’m a bit on the compulsive side. When I become interested in something I want to know everything there is to know about it (sometimes to my detriment). In its modern form, noir has come to denote a marked darkness in theme and subject matter, generally featuring a disturbing mixture of sex and violence.[1]

While related to and frequently confused with hardboiled detective fiction—due to the regular adaptation of hardboiled detective stories in the film

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The Killer Inside of Me by Jim Thompson example of a noir book cover

noir style—the two are not the same. Both regularly take place against a backdrop of systemic and institutional corruption. However, noir fiction (French for “black”) is centered on protagonists that are either victims, suspects, or perpetrators—often self-destructive. A typical protagonist of noir fiction is forced to deal with a corrupt legal, political or other system, through which the protagonist is either victimized and/or has to victimize others, leading to a lose-lose situation.

All that said, let’s look at two writers who are considered to be early proponents of the sub-genre:

Cornell Woolrich was born in New York City; his parents separated when he was young. He lived for a time in Mexico with his father before returning to New York to live with his mother, Claire Attalie Woolrich. He attended Columbia University but left in 1926 without graduating when his first novel, Cover Charge, was published. Woolrich enrolled at New York’s Columbia University in 1921 where he spent a relatively undistinguished year until he was taken ill and was laid up for

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Cornell Woolrich (1903 – 1968)

some weeks. It was during this illness (a Rear-Window-like confinement involving a gangrenous foot, according to one version of the story) that Woolrich started writing, producing Cover Charge, which was published in 1926.” Cover Charge was one of his Jazz Age novels inspired by the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. A second short story, Children of the Ritz, won Woolrich the first prize of $10,000 the following year in a competition organized by College Humor and First National Pictures; this led to his working as screenwriter in Hollywood for First National Pictures. While in Hollywood,  he married Violet Virginia Blackton, the 21-year-old daughter of J. Stuart Blackton, one of the founders of the Vitagraph studio. Failing in both his attempt at marriage and at establishing a career as a screenwriter (the unconsummated marriage was annulled in 1933; Woolrich garnered no screen credits), Woolrich sought to resume his life as a novelist:

Although Woolrich had published six ‘jazz-age’ novels, concerned with the party-antics and romances of the beautiful young things on the fringes of American society, between 1926 and 1932, he was unable to establish himself as a serious writer. Perhaps because the ‘jazz-age’ novel was dead in the water by the 1930s when the depression had begun to take hold, Woolrich was unable to find a publisher for his seventh novel, I Love You, Paris, so he literally threw away the typescript, dumped it in a dustbin, and re-invented himself as a pulp writer.(Eddie Duggan (1999) ‘Writing in the darkness: the world of Cornell Woolrich’ CrimeTime 2.6 pp. 113–126[)

When he turned to pulp and detective fiction, Woolrich’s output was so prolific his work was often published under one of his many pseudonyms. For example, “William Irish” was the byline in Dime Detective Magazine (February 1942) on his 1942 story “It Had to Be Murder”, source of the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock movie Rear Window and itself based on H.G. Wells’ short story “Through a Window”. François Truffaut filmed Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black and Waltz into Darkness in 1968 and 1969, respectively, the latter as Mississippi Mermaid. Ownership of the copyright in Woolrich’s original story “It Had to Be Murder” and its use for Rear Window was litigated before the US Supreme Court in Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207 (1990).

Woolrich’s mother died in 1957, he [went] into a sharp physical and mental decline. Although he moved from Harlem’s decrepit Hotel Marseilles to a more upmarket residence in the Hotel Franconia near Central Park, and later to the Sheraton-Russell on Park Avenue, Woolrich was a virtual recluse. Now in his 60s, with his eyesight failing, lonely, psychologically wracked by guilt over his homosexuality, tortured by his alcoholism, self-doubt, and a diabetic to boot, Woolrich neglected himself to such a degree that he allowed a foot infection to become gangrenous which resulted, early in 1968, in the amputation of a leg.

After the amputation, and a conversion to Catholicism, Woolrich returned to the Sheraton-Russell, confined to a wheelchair. Some of the staff there would take Woolrich down to the lobby so he could look out on the passing traffic, thus making the wizened, wheelchair-bound Woolrich into a kind of darker, self-loathing version of the character played by James Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

With the type of closure that is usually only encountered as a literary device, the Woolrich story turns full-circle around the Oedipally charged foot motif, the writing career that apparently began with a period of confinement attributed to a foot infection ends with an amputation, and the deep Freudian resonance that amputation induces

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James M. Cain (1892 – 1977)

James M. Cain was an American author and journalist. Cain vehemently opposed labeling, but he is usually associated with the hardboiled school of American crime fiction and is seen as one of the creators of the roman noir. Several of his crime novels inspired successful movies. He was born into an Irish Catholic family in Annapolis, Maryland. The son of an educator and a failed opera singer, he inherited a love of music from his mother, but his hopes of a career as a singer were thwarted when she told him that his voice was not good enough. The family moved to Chestertown, Maryland, in 1903. In 1910, Cain graduated from Washington College, where his father, James W. Cain, served as president. By 1914, Cain had decided to become a writer. He began working as a journalist for the Baltimore American and then the Baltimore Sun. Cain was drafted into the United States Army and spent the final year of World War I in France writing for an army magazine.

Upon returning to the United States, Cain continued working as a journalist, writing editorials for the New York World and a play, a short story, and satirical pieces for American Mercury. He briefly served as the managing editor of The New Yorker and later worked mainly on screenplays and novels.

His first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, was published in 1934. Two years later Double Indemnity was serialized in Liberty magazine.

Cain made use of his love of music, particularly the opera, in at least three of his novels: Serenade, about an American opera singer who loses his voice and, after spending part of his life south of the border, re-enters the United States illegally with a Mexican prostitute; Mildred Pierce, in which, as part of the subplot, the surviving daughter of a successful businesswoman trains as an opera singer; and Career in C Major, a short semi-comic novel about the unhappy husband of an aspiring opera singer, who unexpectedly discovers that he has a better voice than she does. In his novel The Moth, music is important in the life of the main character. Cain’s fourth wife, Florence Macbeth, was a retired opera singer.

Cain spent many years in Hollywood working on screenplays, but his name appears as a screenwriter in the credits of only two films: Stand Up and Fight (1939) and Gypsy Wildcat (1944), for which he is one of three credited screenwriters. For Algiers (1938) Cain received a credit for “additional dialogue”, and he had story credits for other films. Cain continued writing up to his death, at the age of 85. He published many novels from the late 1940s onward, but none achieved the financial and popular success of his earlier books.

 

“Neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night . . .”

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, reprising and expanding on a blog I first posted here several years ago. It was called “The First RFD Carrier in Town” and was about my grandfather, Fred Gorton, who was the first RFD carrier out of Liberty, New York. He started on March 2, 1908, when the whole idea of Rural Free Delivery was new. The mailmen, or carriers, who made $67.50 a month, provided their own horses and wagons and feed for the horses, too. In those early days, the RFD carrier usually worked from 10:30 until 4:30. Fred traveled a route twenty-seven miles long. At the end of the day he emptied all the mail he’d collected into a big tray in the post office in Liberty.

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Fred had a horse named Old Dobbin for the first five years he worked this job. His first wagon had no top. He used an advertising umbrella for shelter. In 1915, Fred bought a Model T Ford for $467.50. It came in a boxcar on the O&W Railroad. After two days of instruction, he drove it on his own. He had to crank it to start it, and when he had a blow out, he had to jack the car up, patch the inner tube, and blow it up again with a foot pump. Fred drove the Model T for three summers on the RFD route, but for four months every winter he still had to use a horse.

Another horse Fred used on the RFD was named Roxy. He hired a livery horse every Thursday to spell her, but she made the trip five days a week nearly all winter. Some days he could use the horse part way, leaving her with someone while he made another loop through the fields and coming back again for her when he was done.

All of my grandfather’s story, one of my earliest writing projects, is now available from online booksellers. What follows are excerpts from the chapter in The Life of a Plodder: Fred Gorton’s 95 Years on the years he spent delivering the mail.

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In 1912 or 1914 we had a big snow storm. I went out each day and made part of the RFD route on foot, or used the horse part way, leaving the horse with someone while I made another loop, coming back again for the horse. One time I left the horse tied at the bottom of the hill near S. Duberoff’s and walked to the Oliver Cooley place and left five patrons’ mail there, and returned to turn the horse around and go on Loch Sheldrake to serve some more patrons. This same winter I went in the fields off the road five times to serve the route. One day I walked maybe ten miles. The O&W train got through at Taylor’s Crossing and I got on and rode to Liberty, the only time I carried mail by train.

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The old post office building in Liberty

I drove my Model T Ford three summers over the RFD route, but never got stuck so bad as to have anyone help me out. But sometimes I had to get stones from the stone wall to block up the hind wheels when I got stuck. About four months in winter I used horses to make the trip. They didn’t plow the roads in those days. We generally had good sleighing from Christmas until March 15th or April 1st. I used a single horse. The staves was shifted so as to let the horse travel in the left side path as there was a comb between the two paths.

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Fred in 1902, before he took the job with with post office

February 19, 1916: I served the RFD trip with difficulty. I upset twice in going to Clements’. Lost my horse feed in the field. Met Mr. Drennon at Clements’. Roxy the horse wouldn’t stand so I jerked her and broke the turret on the saddle of the harness. I arrived to Alvin Brown’s and the road was closed with a ladder so I put Roxy in his barn and put all the mail in the sack and traveled on to Cooley’s. It was 12:30 PM. I took dinner at Cooley’s and left eight patrons’ mail there. I went to Geo. Earl’s. There I met him with the ox sled below Max Keller’s place, breaking the road for me. It took forty-five minutes to reach Chas. Spitzer’s place from Tony Vantran’s. Next stop Myer Abramson. The bull pup came out and I called him a son of a bitch for chasing me. I went to Bonney’s Corner. Sold 20¢ of stamps to McIntosh up to the McIntosh School. Two boxes there and on to C. P. Berylson’s place to get signature for the special delivery letter for Mr. Kahn. They offered me coffee. [At]Bushlovitz I went in their house and cleared my felt boots of snow and ice. They offered me some tea but it looked like liquor in a glass. I took none. I passed on through Workman’s Circle to Howard’s place. Here I asked him to take Wm. Abplanalp’s mail to him. I had no mail for Abe Zeller so I went to Den Brock’s, box 102. Took a cup of tea there and then to Alvin Brown’s to get Roxy. They had unharnessed her and they hooked her up while I rested and visited with his wife. I got in Liberty Post Office at 7:05 PM so lame from walking I felt it for two days. I presume I walked seventeen miles over the route. Quite a long walk when one is used to riding. The snow was perhaps two feet deep.

March 9, 1916: I started over my trip on RFD. I skipped 11 to 16 but went to Mr. Robt. Smith’s box and returned to Joe Brown’s. Took dinner and left there just as the clock struck twelve. Thence to Crary’s and Newton Clements’. They offered me dinner. I got a signature for the special delivery at P.A. O’Malley’s (lived next to Nichols School) and when I got to J.R. Gerow’s she asked me to dinner and coffee and Jas. Wyncoop  asked me to eat. I stopped and took tea. Dewey Carr and wife also offered me dinner. Mr. Tripps was there. Also Dewey’s sixteen month little girl. Aaron Stanton met me halfway to the corner. Took his mail and Jas. Osterhout’s. I retraced back to Geo. Earl’s place. Mr. Earl was at Cooley’s Corner to meet me but I went past Earl’s to Arch Kirschbaum and Prince’s and Fred Vantran met me at the corner by Two Bridges and I gave him Levine Bros. mail, Kalmanson #72, also Chas. Spitzer. I turned for Liberty, went past Pshonick’s to Alvin Brown’s. Brown hooked up the cream colored horse while I went in their house and heard four phonograph records. They had a live hen in a pail with two sticks of wood to keep her in. She could stick her head out. I was taken to the post office by Elu, the son, with his covered sleigh. Otherwise I walked or ran all the way. It was 5:30 PM.

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March 25, 1916: I went out in the field all these places to serve the RFD route: Crary’s road was blocked with snow from Mrs. Mary Simmons’ to Crary’s Corner; took the field at Morton’s to J.N. Clements’; went in the woods next to Martha Grant’s; next blockade was A.B. Stanton’s and Prince by Mauer’s Corner. Retrace to Seigel’s through Geo. Earl’s place; Prince place to Geo. Eltz, W.E. Porter. No road from the Rexford place. We went in the field to the left from Levine’s place through his barn yard to Tony Vantran’s; up in the field to Spitzer place; in the gully halfway to Abramson’s place; at the top of Nicholson’s Hill; in the meadow to the Workman’s Circle. Here we dash out of the road to the Cold Spring House. Four roads past Seiken’s we go into John Nicholson’s field, left past his barn, and come out at the bars. We cross Den Brock’s lot to the sand bank by Howard Rowe place, the last place in the field making twelve places apart from the regular road traversed by the RFD route from Liberty.

Grampa obviously believed in the words of the inscription on the main post office in New York City: “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” The quote, incidentally, was adapted from Herodotus, who wrote: “The Persian messengers travel with a velocity which nothing human can equal . . . Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor darkness, are permitted to obstruct their speed.”

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With the publication of A Fatal Fiction, Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-two books traditionally published. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. Currently she writes the contemporary Liss MacCrimmon Mysteries and the “Deadly Edits” series as Kaitlyn. As Kathy, her most recent book is a collection of short stories, Different Times, Different Crimes, but there is a new, standalone historical mystery, The Finder of Lost Things, in the pipeline for October. She maintains websites at www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com. A third, at A Who’s Who of Tudor Women, contains over 2000 mini-biographies of sixteenth-century Englishwomen.

Our Maine Summer Update

Today, Maine Crime Writers share a photo or two of what we’ve been up to this summer. If you feel like, we’d enjoy it if you would share some of your Maine photos as well. If you aren’t in Maine or having been this summer–and we know this has been a difficult summer for everyone–share a photo of where you have been!

Kate Flora: I spend as much time as I can in a cottage on Bailey Island, were I can watch lobster boats passing and enjoy some gorgeous summer sunsets, like these:

John Clark: Summer brought a vacation in Washington County, a new granddaughter and lots of fun with our other two, Piper and Reid.

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Susan Vaughan: One summer highlight was a cruise out of Port Clyde to see puffins, who nest on Eastern Egg Rock. The guide narrated the sights along the way and did a lobster hauling demo. I’d done this cruise before, but this time saw more puffins than ever. My second highlight is the various natural sights at the Maine lake where we have a cottage. Pickerel weed grows among the other reeds, and of course water lilies. Then this past week, I caught the loons beginning to “raft up” now that fall approaches.

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Dick Cass: Before the (very tall) deer got to them:

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And the inevitable fishing picture, at an unnamed bass pond in central Maine:

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 (Note to Dick re: deer. Milorganite fertilizer keeps deer away but don’t use on veggies. Is a bio-solid. But truly amazing flowers.)

Sandy Neily: we got out more using our new/used small camper.  Since we were towing a toilet and lots of peanut butter, we could go most anywhere safely. My favorite spot was my daughter’s driveway where I could take early AM walks with older grandgirl and we could all hang out, wear capes, and laugh. Sorely needed!  [image error]

Top to bottom: Cobscook Bay State Park: campsite and my AM stretching table. June at the Penobscot River: Bob reading by river waiting for temp to drop below 90 so fish would come out to play. There was way too much work on the camp roof. We camped in the White Mountains (Bob on the Zealand trail) on the way to VT where we could stay in a friend’s huge field. Way toooo many people on those White Mt. trails: sign of the Covid times. Some good land trust walks with Raven (here hypnotized by a squirrel). And I gave up on her having at least one piece of furniture.

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Weekend Update: August 29-30, 2020

[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will be a group blog on Monday, and posts by Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Tuesday), Vaughn Hardacker (Wednesday) Kate Flora (Thursday), and Brenda Buchanan (Friday).

 

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

Sandra Neily’s second novel, Deadly Turn came out in early July to strong early reviews.  Her middle-aged narrator (hiding from a failed life in her family’s run-down camp) accompanied by her wayward Lab, are hired to collect dead bats and birds at wind power sites. She stumbles over the body part of an unknown man whose death implicates  both her and her dog. Once again, Patton is offered only outlaw solutions to fight for a disappearing world as she tries to clear her name.

Here’s how Sandra explains her stories: “I am creating a series of murder mysteries about the murder of the natural world … stories that are compelling, intimate field trips into a world at risk of disappearing.”  [image error]

 

 

 

 

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

 

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. Contact Kate Flora

Once More To The Lake

[image error]Shameless Commerce Division: Sweetie Bogan’s Sorrow, number 5 in the Elder Darrow Jazz Mystery Series, will be out on October 2. Because my good friend Barb Kelly’s business depends on selling books at events and we haven’t had too many of them in the last six months, I’m going to direct preorders (which you can do today) to her Web site at kellysbookstogo.com. If you’re local, she may even be able to deliver. If not, she can mail them. I will sign all books ordered through Barb (even Books 1-4!) and include some small tokens of my appreciation. Thanks. On with the show . . .

If the geese are in the corn stubble at Maxwell’s Farm and it’s starting to be dark at 5 AM, I know the fall is coming. I’ve been reading a lot of E. B. White this summer, partly for the sake of nostalgia for what seemed to be simpler times—this photo by Jill Krementz [image error]may have had as much to do with my wanting to come to Maine and live as a writer as anything—and partly because his smooth, wry, considered voice is one of the few things I’ve found to calm me in this maelstrom of a year.

The peregrinations of Fred the dachshund, the self-deprecating silliness behind a Manhattanite becoming a chicken rancher in Maine, the everyday details of life on the farm with his menagerie, the weather reports, the trees and the birds, and the thousand details of everyday life faithfully reported and all of it interspersed with commentary on the run up to World War II and the other major political and governmental events of those years, a time as volatile and uncertain as today. All is couched in sentences as crisp and clear as the skim of frost on a puddle.

But in this summer, of doom and gloom and hiding in our rooms, I was affected all over again by his famous essay Once More to the Lake.

There is a lake in my past, too, though in New Hampshire [image error]and not Maine. But the images abide: showering in the warm rain under the downspout; chasing a porcupine away from a confrontation with Sean, the world’s least intelligent Irish terrier, holding hands with the redhead next door.
But the image from White’s essay that I remember most clearly from my own summers at the lake is the shiver of recognition as his son pulls up his cold and clammy bathing suit over his “vitals” and shudders. It’s definitely a male image, and I wager there isn’t a man reading this who didn’t feel a shock of recognition just now.

Once More to the Lake is a story about fathers and sons. I remember having a discussion with my father, one of many, where I insisted that a talented enough person (I suppose I meant myself) could be excellent at more than one thing. It was a genial enough argument and I suppose I’d have to agree with him now how difficult that would be. But like any son, I’ve never stopped trying to prove myself right to him. And now he is 93 and I am 69 and we don’t argue about anything any more. I’m just glad to have him around.

The essay turns on a piercing last line, which ties a neat knot around the understanding that fathers both have sons and have been sons. The points White makes along the way about politics, the war, the depredations and idiocies of the criminal politician classes, are all faint in the face of that realization, the shock of White’s realizing that, yes, he will die.

And that’s the nub of it,  pushing past the sense of our own exceptionalism to realize what we all share. And to feel with White the desire to do the best we can for ourselves and the ones we love: tend our own gardens, celebrate our families. The more we do that, the better off we are. The good world is not made of achievement or power or money, but of a thousand small acts of care, love, and attention.

Looking For A Great Weekend Adventure?

Looking For A Great Weekend Adventure?

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John Clark letting you in on one of my favorite spots in Maine, one I first discovered more than 40 years ago. George Hall, Mike DeSisto and I worked together at the old Augusta Mental Health Institute and loved to fish. I don’t remember who came up with the idea to fish Pierce Pond, but we headed off with a small boat and our trusty DeLorme Atlas one Friday night and managed to find a passable logging road that came close enough to Upper Pierce Pond so we could carry the boat down to the shore. We fished that evening and all day Saturday. While we failed to catch anything, I’ll never forget the sight of three pound brook trout surfacing to snap up hatching insects. Unfortunately, we had nothing to match the hatch.

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There were several interesting places to explore along the route to where we camped that night. The logging road no longer comes close enough to Pierce, but there are other easily accessed spots and these are what I’m sharing today. To get to them, take Route 201 north to Solon. At that point, you can keep going, or turn left at the blinking light and cross the Kennebec to follow Rt. 16 up the back side of the river. If you go this way, you might see herons or otter in Lily pond on the left.

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If you continue on route 201, when you get to Bingham, turn left where 16 joins 201 and cross the river. Turn right and it won’t be long before you spot Wyman Lake. The view of the dam is impressive and if you want to know more about it, check out this article on the Maine Memory Network (https://www.mainememory.net/sitebuilder/site/815/page/1225/display). If you have kids with you, consider stopping at the public beach on your right. It’s a fine place to wade and get a look at the dam.

Next up is Houston Brook Falls. It’s a short hike down from the road. Look for it just after the Pleasant Ridge transfer station. If you visit when the water is warm enough, think about giving yourself a water massage in one of the pools below the falls. It’s also a fine place to build a rock sculpture.

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A short distance past the falls is on your right is the Carry Pond Road. You’ll follow this for the remainder of your trip. I suggest doing so on a weekend as the area is actively logged and meeting a fully loaded logging truck isn’t much fun. There’s a picnic area on your right several miles in and several spots where you can admire Wyman Lake. I always slow down to look at the large home overlooking the lake and wonder about its history.

After you leave the lake, you follow a brook that is worth fishing if the season is open. It’s perfect for introducing youngsters to trout fishing. Don’t be surprised to see deer cross in front of you and a moose sighting isn’t out of the question. There are also some places where several western mountains are worth slowing to view.

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The next stop is the best. Its at the bridge over Pierce Pond Stream where the Appalachian Trail crosses. I suggest having a camera and several hours at your disposal. Hike up the trail to Pierce Pond first. There are several waterfalls on this stretch and the view of the pond is nice. You’ll be at an old log dam and don’t be surprised to see a decent sized brook trout lurking under one of the logs that have washed up over the years.

The downstream portion of the trail is one of my favorite places in Maine. The first portion abounds with black winged dragonflies. As you go further, the stream drops several hundred feet through a series of waterfalls. Getting down to some of them is tricky, so be very careful. Don’t be surprised to meet through hikers as you head toward the point where the trail meets the Kennebec River. Hikers are taken across by rowboat (https://sectionhiker.com/the-kennebec-river-ferry-on-the-appalachian-trail/).

If you’re still game for more, keep going up the road. There are two small ponds on the left that aren’t easily spotted, but if you see a cabin on the shore, turn around and go back until you see a road on your right. You can park there and walk down to the shore. This is one of those rare spots where much of the time you can close your eyes and hear no sounds aside from those made by nature. Loons, ducks, deer and moose can be seen if you’re lucky. It’s also a place where you can put in by canoe or kayak and the trout fishing can be exciting if you hit it just right. If you do go, let me know with a comment here or in a future column.

Why write? Because of stuff like this

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“Good” Augusta didn’t make it into the book, because writing wouldn’t let me.

NOTE TO READERS: Holy Covid! Was it really almost two years ago my last book came out? I’d like to say I’m rerunning this old post because I’m busy finishing up the next one, but I’m actually just really busy working, dodging the coronavirus and trying very hard to gain some traction on my next book. So, I apologize, but I think you’ll enjoy revisiting this one. — Maureen 

There’s this thing that happens after a writer has spent a year — or two — grinding out a book. People read it.

Some are nice. They’re polite and kind. I appreciate that. Then there are the people who want to tell you what you should have done with a plot or character instead of what you did. I smile and say something like, “That’s an interesting idea.” Or try to explain, if I’m in the mood, why I did it the way I did. I frequently want to say, “You can do that when you write your book.” But I don’t.

Then there are the people who want to tell my about a typo. No thanks. Three and a half years later, I’m still losing sleep over the missing “she” in my first book that changed. “God, she was an idiot,” to “God was an idiot.” Not much I can do about it right now.

Writers like to talk about their books. At least I do. It’s not so much my massive ego as me wondering if the stuff I tried to do worked. I spend a lot of time with those characters and words, because I want people to get what I’m trying to say.

The other night I was talking to someone who was reading my most recent book, BAD NEWS TRAVELS FAST.

He made a reference to a line I’d written about Augusta.

I love my little hometown, but I knew the line he wanted to talk about. It’s one I threw in while I was whipping through the scene the first time. The two characters were unhappy. It was raining. I would have liked to have given a warm friendly nod to my town, but sometimes the writer has no control, and Augusta ended up in a scene where everyone was miserable:

He drove down the tree-lined hill, Augusta’s ancient wooden houses sagging in the rain. He turned onto Route 27 to go north. The houses gave way to peeling clapboard triple-deckers and vacant storefronts, convenience stores and old men walking dogs. The pot-holed bumpy road and gray little city depressed him.

When I write, I try to get the story down, then go back and work it over. I can change a word dozens of times trying to get it right. I’m not sure how many times I went back to this passage, thinking I needed to fix it — say more, or less, or something different. But every time I said, “I’ll just let it sit for now.” It ended up staying. It just felt right and, while it’s not perfect writing, I ended up kind of liking it.

I wasn’t really sure, though, if anyone would see what I saw in it.

When the reader brought it up, I braced for something negative. It didn’t come. He recited it, almost word for word.

Want to know what the point of writing is? That’s it.

A Little of This, a Little of That

Darcy Scott, here. Maybe twice a year I share some thoughts on the books I’ve been reading and, it being August and thus the month my husband and I drop all semblance of responsibility and head off for a month of sailing (which this year includes the decided oddness of masked trips to the grocery and dinghy-distanced cocktail parties), I thought it a good time to dip back into this. My summer reads tend to be escapist fiction, with a few exceptions here and there—books I’ve spent months gathering and hoarding to savor when I’d have the time to truly relax. 

“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.”

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Thus begins Shantarum—a sprawling, 900 page tome and first novel by Aussie writer, Gregory David Roberts. (Its sequel, The Mountain Shadow, is just as massive and delightfully awaits in my TBR pile.) This was an unusual choice for me. Set amid contemporary Bombay’s “hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries,” the story is narrated by the character Lin, an escaped convict with a false passport who flees a maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of a city where he can disappear. It’s a mesmerizing story that mirrors Roberts’s own—a guy who, while on the lam and despite very minimal medical training, established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers in the heart of Bombay’s poorest slum, and worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gunrunner, and street soldier for a branch of the Bombay mafia where he was ultimately recruited by a group of mujahedeen guerrillas. Clever writing, intriguing plot twists, a touch of romance, and I was totally hooked.

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I discovered the writing of Liz Moore a few months back, as well, and boy, what a find! Both Heft (the story of an obese man and his tenuous connection to the world outside the NYC brownstone he’s refused to leave for decades) and The Unseen World offer unusual premises and profound story arcs that held me rapt—the second a deep, slow burn of a novel about the world of artificial intelligence as told through the relationship between a brilliant computer scientist with a secret and his even more brilliant and quirky young daughter. But it was Moore’s latest, the newly released thriller Long Bright River—a harrowing, hard-bitten tale about a female cop/single mom trying to save her troubled sister from the ravages of opioid addiction—that completely blew me away. Prepare yourself for a story that is at once deeply emotional but with all the taught edginess of Tana French and Dennis Lehane—an often harrowing read about the heartbreak of addiction and the unbreakable bond between siblings.

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Right now I’m maybe halfway through The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie—the first in Alan Bradley’s delightful Flavia DeLuce mystery series (and a winner of the Agatha, Arthur Ellis, Dilys, and Debut Dagger Awards), about a precocious 11-year-old girl rather disturbingly fixated on poisons who stumbles on a body in the back garden of the sprawling family manse in Ye Olde England. This kind of novel is a departure for me, I have to say—straddling the line as it does between adult and young adult fiction (perhaps the first such book I’ve read since John Green’s fabulous The Fault in Our Stars)—its plot making no bones about favoring the superior cognitive skills of young, prepubescent girls. It’s the kind of book designed for rainy afternoons curled in an overstuffed chair with a cuppa by your side, fuzzy blanket tucked about you as a slow fire sizzles in the grate. Full of dry British humor, it’s a novel the Chicago Sun Times calls “Wonderfully entertaining…sure to be one of the most loved mysteries of the year…[Flavia is] a delightlful, intrepid, acid-tongued new heroine.” And at last count there were another nine books in the series to be enjoyed. Oh goody.

Another unusual choice for me this time around was Hermit: The Mysterious Life of Jim Whyte, by Jeffrey H. Ryan. Whyte, a stranger to the slate mining town of Monson, Maine, arrived in 1895 with sacks of money, a pile of secrets, and a fierce desire to keep to himself. Almost 130 years later, people still don’t know what to make of him, though strange stories of spies, illicit crime and buried treasure at the edge of the wilderness still abound, drawing even the FBI in for a look-see. Based on a true story, Hermit follows one man’s quest to discover all he can about Whyte’s secret life. As a reader, I found it a little slow going at times and a bit of a tease at others, but it was nonetheless intriguing and well worth the read.

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Now onto my TBR pile, which has much to offer this time around, including a few more mystery writers who are new to me. At the top of the list is John Galligan, a top-notch writer whose Bad Axe County (reluctant female sheriff searches for a missing girl, battles local drug dealers, and seeks the truth about the death of her parents some twenty years before) drew me in with its great plot, nonstop action, and tasty dialogue. Dead Man Dancing, the second in the series, recently found its way to my mailbox and is next on my list. Can’t wait to tuck into this one. I should mention that Galligan is also the author of an interesting-looking five-book series of fly-fishing mysteries (The Wind Knot, The Clinch Knot, The Blood Knot, etc.), that I’ve yet to dip into.

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Also in the TBR is the much lauded The Nickel Boys, the sequel to Colson Whitehead’s 2017 Pulitzer-winning The Underground Railroad. This one is a powerhouse of a story about the Jim Crow south, inspired by the cruel realities of an actual reform school that operated in Florida for 111 years, warping the lives of thousands of children. It’s a devastating story made all the more so by the author’s spare, eloquent prose.

Finally, there’s Hillary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light—the third and final installment in her excellent, strangely empathetic trilogy about the life of the cruel and enigmatic Thomas Cromwell—a blacksmith’s son from Putney who claws his way to the heights of power and into Henry the Eighth’s heart, eventually becoming the infamous figure long-hated by generations of red-blooded Brits. The first two books in Mantel’s series—Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, were both awarded the Man Booker Prize, among others, and in this writer’s humble opinion, deservedly so.

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Darcy Scott (Winner, 2019 National Indie Excellence Award; Best Mystery, 2013 Indie Book Awards; Silver Award, 2013 Readers Favorite Book Awards; Bronze Prize, 2013 IPPY Awards) is a live-aboard sailor and experienced ocean cruiser with more than 20,000 blue water miles under her belt. For all her wandering, her summer home and favorite cruising grounds remain along the coast of Maine—the history and rugged beauty of its sparsely populated out-islands serving as inspiration for much of her fiction, including her popular Maine-based Island Mystery Series. Her debut novel, Hunter Huntress, was published in Britain in 2010.

 

Weekend Update: August 22-23, 2020

[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will be a posts by Darcy Scott (Monday), Maureen Milliken (Tuesday), John Clark (Thursday), and Dick Cass (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

from Kathy Lynn Emerson: I’ve added a new page at my website in preparation for issuing new e-book and print editions of my children’s books. You can find it at http://www.kathylynnemerson.com/Children’s%20books%20and%20YA%20novels%20by%20Kathy%20Lynn%20Emerson.htm

 

 

 

 

 

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

 And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. Contact Kate Flora

Where Do Writers Get Their Ideas??

If there’s one often-asked question that especially bugs authors I think it’d be “where do you get your ideas from?”. Stated that way, it sounds like people think there’s a special place where you can buy them.

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 The truth is that ideas are all around us. Our job, first, is to select the right one for our next book. In my experience, that’s often the easiest part. I just know. The challenge for me, then, is where the heck to go with it. After that, the really hard part is to do the work—put in the countless hours of writing, revision, editing, more revision, etc.

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Right now there’s a compelling idea that keeps calling to me, but I’m facing a tricky situation I’ve not dealt with before.

As I suspect most readers are aware, several weeks ago a horrific event stunned us Mainers. A lovely woman swimming off Harpswell peninsula where she lived was fatally attacked by a great white shark. I didn’t know her but feel so very sad for her family, friends, and of course for her.

Here’s the dilemma. I’m a marine scientist-sea kayaker who writes mysteries that get readers “in, on, and under” Maine’s waters, so a great white threatening boaters and swimmers would be the basis for a compelling story.  But that could not be a “Jaws”-type tale in which the shark is a monster-alien from another world. Given the fact that sharks certainly are large predators, framing the story would be a delicate task.

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I’m reminded of the challenges some of my colleagues (e.g., Kate Flora, Bruce Robert Coffin) face as they write a story based on actual murders, accidental deaths, and the like. Cop shows and movies perpetuate many myths about the real world of policing, but most of us know nothing about the emotional, mental, and physical tolls officers deal with every day.

Picture, for example, a detective who witnessed a dreadful murder in the early morning and has been dealing with the aftermath all day.  At that point she wants to work through what happened with colleagues but can’t take the time because she’s hosting her sister’s birthday dinner party where she’ll pretend all is well. I would imagine similar situations happen all the time.

Returning to my Maine mystery-that-features-a-shark, what might readers be surprised learn about these fish? (Um, besides the fact that they are fish).  For starters, even though Maine’s great white populations are increasing (laws protecting marine mammals has resulted in more seals, a preferred food), shark-human attacks are extremely rare (a dog bite is much more likely). Given that, why a shark might bite a person?  One reason is that people in wetsuits look like seals to them.

My challenge, of course, will be to imbed particulars like these in a compelling story with memorable characters, striking scenes, and all the rest.

Returning to “where do you get your ideas from?” I’ll end with a couple of responses from three authors:

            • “In asking that you have done the thing that all authors hate. And, we hate it for two reasons. One because we get asked this every day, and two, we are scared the ideas will stop if we tell someone else.” (Neil Gaiman)

            • “I fell asleep on the plane, and dreamt about a woman who held a writer prisoner and killed him, skinned him, fed the remains to her pig and bound his novel in human skin. His skin, the writer’s skin. I said to myself, ‘I have to write this story.’” (Stephen King)

            • “I wanted to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Great Depression and its effects].” (John Steinbeck on “The Grapes of Wrath”).