Sarah Monette's Blog, page 27

STICKY POST: greetings and a listing of stories and essays available online

Greetings!

This is the blog of Sarah Monette/Katherine Addison, a professional writer of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Sarah Monette is my real name; Katherine Addison is a pen name, intended to be transparent.

If you've found me here, odds are pretty good you're looking for something to read, so the following is--to the best of my knowledge--a complete list of everything I've written that's available online:

STORIES
Absent from Felicity
After the Dragon
Blue Lace Agate
Coyote Gets His Own Back
Darkness, as a Bride (podcast--or here if you want the podcast read by me)
Draco campestris
Elegy for a Demon Lover (podcast read by me)
Fiddleback Ferns (podcast)
The Half-Sister
Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans' Day
A Light in Troy
Mermaids of the Old West (podcast--or here if you want the podcast read by me)
Meta
Mongoose
A Night in Electric Squidland
Queen of Swords
The Replacement
Requiem for Prey
Sidhe Tigers (podcast read by me)
Straw
Sundered
Under the Beansidhe's Pillow
Wait for Me
The Watcher in the Corners
The Yellow Dressing Gown or as a podcast read by me here
White Charles
[with Elizabeth Bear ( matociquala )] Boojum Part 1/a> and Part 2 (podcast)
[with Elizabeth Bear] Mongoose Part 1 and Part 2 (podcast)
[with Elizabeth Bear] The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward Part 1 and Part 2 (podcast)
I also have written episodes of Shadow Unit.

ESSAYS
Appreciation: "Men without Bones" by Gerald Kersh
The Art of the Short Story
Choose Your Own Adventure
Deadline on the Horizon
Doing Tolkien Wrong
Everyperson Blues
Fiction, History, and Tombstone
Finding the Story in the Story
Five Things I Know about World-Building
Fundraising and Self-Publishing: Lessons Learned
Getting out of Your Own Way
How to Hack the System
I Suppose You're All Wondering Why I've Called You Here Today . . .
I'm a Member of an Evil Horde. Ask Me How!
If This Ferments Long Enough It May Become a Story
In Which I Explain the Inner Workings of my Mind with the Cunning Use of Puppets
Little Red Riding Hood and the Hospital
Narrative Efficiency
Of Scullery Boys and Kings
On the Vile Habit of Thinking Too Much
The Purpose of Imaginary Places
Review: John Clute, The Darkening Garden
Review: Joanna Russ, The Country You Have Never Seen
The Right Word
Should Cinderella Kiss the Prince?
Still Seeking Chloe and Olivia
T-Minus . . .
Taking Another Tilt at the Windmill
Things I Know about Writing on August 29, 2008
Verisimilitude. Plus, a sestina.
What Not to Do with Writer's Block
Welcome to the Reformation, Bitches
When Last We Left Our Heroes . . . and two caveats
Where Do We Go From Here?
The Wonderfulness of . . .
. . . Revisions Which a Minute Will Reverse
(Thinking about) Thinking about Writing

If you know of anything I've missed, please leave a comment!

My friend Elise Matthesen is a very brave person.

My friend Elise Matthesen is a very brave person.

UBC: Kansas Charley, Dr. Crippen, Major Arthur Griffiths, Charles Bravo, Mary Rogers, Lizzie Borden

So mirrorthaw and I both have some low-grade virusy crud, which means that, instead of going to Midwest Horse Fair, I spent all day yesterday reading the stack of books that I'd hoped to ration out over a couple of weeks. It's all Victorian true crime (with one foray into Edwardian), and there's no common theme here besides murder.

Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. Kansas Charley: The True Story of a 19th-Century Boy Murderer. New York: Viking Books, 2003.

This is a very good book about a completely forgotten murderer. "Kansas Charley" (born Karl Muller, but known for most of his life as Charles or Charley Miller) was fifteen when he committed his crime and seventeen when he was hanged for it. Like Gitta Sereny in Unheard Cries, Brumberg is interested in the phenomenon and plight of children who kill, and she provides a much more nuanced and historically aware discussion--unlike the horrifically historically naive Sereny, Brumberg is perfectly aware that the "innocence" of childhood is a construction of nineteenth-century middle-class privilege--including questions of race and class, as well as gender. (She also notes that today's "violent video game" theory of child criminals is presaged, pretty much note for note, in the "trashy dime novel" theory; she does not note, although I do, that the "immoral comic book" theory of the mid-twentieth century also falls squarely in this lineage.) Possibly because her subject is fixed in time, limited to his trial testimony and newspaper interviews, rather than available for interviews as an adult, she also does a better job than Sereny of giving a sense of her subject as a person--a flawed, warped, incompletely developed person, who commited a brutal, unjustifiable, unforgiveable murder, but who still deserved something better than he got from the state of Wyoming.

Cullen, Tom. Crippen: The Mild Murderer. 1977. London: Penguin Books, 1988.

I came across a quote from Robertson Davies the other day which sums up perfectly my feeling about Cullen, as about several other true crime writers: "She was worse than a blabber; she was a hinter. It gave her pleasure to rouse speculation about dangerous things." This is Cullen in a nutshell. He hints, and it drives me crazy. He goes about ninety percent of the way to outlining a case that Ethel LeNeve was the actual murderer--or at the very least Lady Macbeth to Crippen's dithering--but he never comes out and says it. He keep leaving it in implications and hints, without even the decency to put it out there as frank speculation.

The book has other flaws, particularly in the hard to follow, chronologically higgledy-piggledy structure which Cullen clearly chose as providing maximum drama rather than maximum clarity. But it was interesting, if for no other reason than that it demonstrated a man could be a brutally cold-blooded murderer (unless that was Ethel), could immolate himself in self-sacrifice (even if Crippen committed the murder alone, Ethel clearly was an accessory both before and after the fact, and Crippen was willing to tell all the lies it took to get her acquitted and himself executed), and could still be banally sentimental, intellectually and ethiclly muddled, and--except for the fact of his uncharacteristic crime--utterly uninteresting.

The book also confirmed my belief that Walter Dew is not a trustworthy source for anything, and Ripperologists need to stop quoting him.

Griffiths, Arthur, Major. Mysteries of Police and Crime: Victorian Murderers. 1898. Stroud: The History Press, 2010.

This is the only book on this particular list actually written by a Victorian (Griffiths is notable as the first publication of Sir Melville Macnaughton's three most likely suspects: Druitt, Ostrog, and the mad Polish Jew, also for his comments on Constance Kent, whom he knew when he was in charge of the prison she was sent to, which for the life of me right now I can't think of the name of, and I'm not going to look because I feel like death warmed over on a hot-plate), and like the Newgate Calendar, it's mostly interesting as a historical conversation piece. Griffiths has no idea how to tell a coherent story, and his murderers and victims are curiously flat, all their individuality flattened out into the little melodrama marionettes of Victorian convention. Every case in Victorian Murderers that I'd heard of, I've read a better account of (except for William Palmer, whom I otherwise know only from the allusion to him and Pritchard in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and for the cases that I know from reading the Newgate Calendar--which still has a better account of Mary Blandy), and the cases I hadn't heard of, Griffiths did not leave me feeling particularly enlightened.

Stashower, Daniel. The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder. New York: Berkley Books, 2006.

Although not as good as Cline's book on Helen Jewett, this is a much better book than The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers . Although I suspect Stashower may have cribbed from Srebnick in discussing Mary Rogers' genealogy (since this is a "popular" book, his citing of sources is sketchy at best), he has done--or has profited from someone else who has done--yeoman's labor in tracing the narrative of the crime and the investigation through the newspapers. He makes it very clear how randomly tacked-on the idea about a botched abortion was (even though he, too, seems to be somewhat swayed by it), and he addresses the thing that maddened me so about Srebnick's book: if Mary Rogers died of a botched abortion, why was she strangled? And she was strangled; Stashower does an excellent job of making that clear. He doesn't have answers, any more than anyone else, but (possibly because he himself has written mysteries) he is much much better both at laying out the evidence in a coherent and comprehensible way and at articulating the questions and the way that the various theories either do or do not answer them.

This book is only half about Mary Rogers. The other half is about that self-destructive genius (and genius at self-destruction) Edgar Allan Poe, and his "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt." Stashower talks about Poe's career and his absurdly, tragically melodramatic personal life, and the way in which this particular story was both a serious attempt to prove Poe's theories about ratiocination and a shameless publicity stunt which very nearly got scuppered at the eleventh hour by the late-breaking botched abortion theory. Stashower lays out Poe's efforts at legerdemain in making his story fit popular opinion (not unlike twisting facts to suit theories), and does me a great service, thereby, because he explains one of the reasons why "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," in its current form, is so unsatisfying. Poe's waffling neither actually rewrote the story to make the botched abortion theory the answer, nor held true to his original theory of the naval officer; it only made it harder to see what his theory was.

Ruddick, James. Death at the Priory: Love, Sex, and Murder in Victorian England. New York: Grove Press, 2001.

I was skeptical of this book. Ruddick is as sketchy about citing his sources as Stashower (again, this is a "popular" book), and he performs some bits of legerdemain of his own which I found highly dubious. He's also a little too invested for my taste in trumpeting his own resourcefulness and originality (even though I understand rhetorically why he needs to, it just puts me off). But for all that, this is a very engaging book, well-structured and clearly written, and in the end he convinced me that his theory was correct. Partly, this is because he does what I always want true crime writers to do, which is providing a meta-commentary about theories of the crime and how they do or don't fit the evidence. Partly, this is because his theory does fit the evidence, and it makes sense of the otherwise baffling behavior of Florence Bravo and (especially) Jane Cannon Cox. I also ended up liking Ruddick for his patient empathy (as distinct from sympathy) with all the actors in the drama.

Sullivan, Robert. Goodbye Lizzie Borden. 1974. London: Penguin Books, 1989.

Although Sullivan makes a nasty and unnecessary swipe at Victoria Lincoln in his introduction (and I admit, he started the process of alienating me right then and there), he comes to essentially the same conclusion she does, and for the same reasons: Lizzie Borden killed her father and step-mother, she told transparent, self-contradicting lies about it, and she got off because the judges at her trial were determined that she should and the jury let themselves be led by the nose. Sullivan was a lawyer and a judge of the Massachusetts Superior Court himself, and he's only interested in the legal aspects of the case, meaning that his comments on the trial are fascinating, but his treatment of everything else frequently only makes sense if you have read Lincoln (or another careful, thoughtful, well-researched book on Lizzie Borden; although I myself have not read one, that doesn't mean they aren't out there). He isn't at all interested in the background of the crime or in any of the bits of the mystery still surrounding it. (The title is a direct and deliberate reflection of his impatience with Lizzie Borden's continuing pull.) Sullivan frequently differs with Lincoln on interpretations of character, and he lost great whacking heaps of my trust by putting forward as more reliable than anyone else Abby Borden's ninety-year-old niece (whom he talked to when writing his book in 1973) and her memories of Abby and Lizzie Borden and of the murders, which occurred when she was ten. Paul Sugden talks very usefully in his book on Jack the Ripper about the complete worthlessness of memoir and reminiscence as forensic evidence, and while Abby Borden Whitehead Potter's memories are great from an oral and social history point of view, they don't tell us a single damn thing about the murders. Specifically, there's an anecdote which Sullivan relates from her, an anecdote about Lizzie killing her stepmother's cat (with an axe!), which is in complete contradiction with the one thing we do know about Lizzie, namely her love for animals (and Sullivan knows this, too, because he quotes her will and mentions that the porch of Maplecroft, the house she bought after she was acquitted, was designed so that she could be invisible to her neighbors while she watched the birds and squirrels she fed). It's too pat--too neat a foreshadowing of what Lizzie was going to do to Abby herself--and combined with the rest of Abby Potter's "evidence," made me feel that she, and by extension Sullivan, who quotes this anecdote as if it were gospel, were simply not to be trusted.

There's also a very very weird moment, which I'm just going to quote:

[...] it is said that there was considerable post-trial correspondence between Lizzie and her former attorney, which ultimately came into the hands of Governor Robinson's grandson, a distinguished member of the Springfield Bar until his death late in 1973. I inquired of the correspondence, hoping for the opportunity to examine it, but leanred from associates of Mr. Robinson that he was then very seriously ill, that he had destroyed much of the correspondence several years ago, and those letters which he had retained he did not wish to make public on the understandable ethical grounds of confidentiality of client-attorney communication--a most creditable position to have adopted, and one that I respect
(Sullivan 200)

The fact that Mr. Robinson destroyed the correspondence makes me howl with wrath, and frankly, I'm puzzled as to how letters between Lizzie and Robinson after Lizzie ceased to be his client could still be considered sacred to attorney-client confidentiality (is there holdover because they were letters about his services to her as her attorney?), and especially after both parties were dead--for, please note, the Robinson pleading attorney-client confidentiality is not the Robinson who was Lizzie's attorney. I can understand that Mr. Robinson might wish to prevent from being made public letters which showed his grandfather in a bad light (and given Robinson's performance at the trial, there's really no way they couldn't), but this apologia, again, made me feel that Sullivan was not to be trusted.

And after he goes through and rips apart Judge Dewey's horribly biased charge to the jury, making it absolutely clear that Dewey was telling the jury how to interpret the facts--exactly and expressly what the judge is not allowed to do--he has this weird backpedaling passage:

Holding, for somewhat longer than did Judge Dewey, the same judicial office which he held in the last century, I find it uncomfortable to criticize his judicial action in the Borden case, and I do not. I do, however, disagree.

Any assertion that there was a hint of colluison in Judge Dewey's conduct at the trial is false and absurd, nor do I charge Judge Dewey with bias or prejudice. But it is here suggested that the appearance of bias or prejudice can, at times, be as damaging to public confidence in the proper administration of justice as would the actual presence of prejudice or bias.

The contention I make here is that Judge Dewey displayed a lack of objectivity in his charge to the jury.
(Sullivan 199)

What, exactly, is the difference between "bias" and "lack of objectivity"? And why, after providing a pithy, pungent, and entertaining criticism of Dewey's charge, is Sullivan so anxious to claim he isn't criticizing Dewey at all? The old-boys network of the Massachusetts legal community is all over this book, and it makes Sullivan both difficult to parse and rather unlikeable. He does, however, offer a clear explanation and a very useful map of the legal minefield of Lizzie Borden's trial.

The South Bank Lion

Because the world is full of randomly awesome things, and the Internet helps you find them:

The South Bank Lion, photo & history here, another photo here. He's not made of stone, but of something called Coade stone, which was perfected in 1770 by Eleanor Coade--the Wikipedia article points out that she did not invent Coade stone, but she made it into something that could produce the South Bank Lion, who's been around, in one place or another, since 1837.

The Owl and the Pussycat

Fum i Gebra

(It becomes very clear as you watch the video that, no, the cat is not trying to hurt the owl.)

a brief bibliographical interlude

My spies, a.k.a. mirrorthaw , tell me that "Coyote Gets His Own Back" came in second in Apex Magazine 's 2012 Story of the Year Readers Poll, behind tied-for-first-place Alethea Kontis and Katharine Duckett.

This has reminded me that I should make a post about the things I published in 2012. So here you go:
"Blue Lace Agate" ( Lightspeed Magazine 20)
"Coyote Gets His Own Back" ( Apex Magazine 38)
"Extract from 'Horror in Pierre Lucerne: Suburbia, Alienation, and the Rejection of Community" ( The Magazine of Speculative Poetry 9.2)
"Hope Is Stronger Than Love" ( Shadow Unit 4.03)
"A Road That Has No Ending: Revenge in Sandman" ( Chicks Dig Comics )
"The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward" Part 1 & Part 2 ( Drabblecast 254-55)

UBC: historical true crime

Bourke, Angela. The Burning of Bridget Cleary. 1999. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
King, David. Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris. New York: Broadway Paperbacks-Random House, 2011.
Roughead, William. Classic Crimes. New York: New York Review Books, 2000.
Summerscale, Kate. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective. New York: Walker & Co., 2008.

I may have blogged about The Burning of Bridget Cleary before, but if so, I can't find the entry, and y'know, it doesn't hurt to say again that this is an excellent book.

Bridget Cleary was burned to death by her husband in 1895. The reasons--as Bourke demonstrates--are difficult to tease out; it isn't clear ultimately whether Michael Cleary believed his wife was a changeling, or if in the aftermath of her (at least semi-accidental) death, maddened with grief and guilt, he came to believe that he believed she was a changeling. Bourke is very interested in the ways that traditional Irish folk beliefs, as a coherent system of orally transmitted knowledge, were becoming obsolete at the same time that, as artifacts of indigenous Irish culture, they were acquiring a different kind of value. And she's interested in the ways that those two different kinds of valuation were hopelessly and tragically at loggerheads in the Clearys' house in the summer of 1895. She describes the way that class, religion, politics, familial jealousies, and a nasty case of bronchitis combined to create the circumstances under which Bridget Cleary died. Bourke is careful, compassionate, and nonjudgmental, and she's very good at marking clearly the divide between what we can know and what we can only speculate about.


William Roughead was a Scottish lawyer and true crime writer in the first half of the twentieth century. I should confess first of all that I find him compulsively readable, although he may not be to everybody's taste (profoundly influenced by Dickens, check). The twelve essays collected in this book discuss crimes from 1765 to 1926, ranging from the infamous, like Burke & Hare, to the utterly obscure, like Katharine Nairn or John Donald Merrett. I can see his influence quite strongly in Dorothy Sayers (it doesn't hurt that some of the cases he discusses are cases she clearly used as inspiration for her stories, like Madeleine Smith (Harriet is kind of an inversion of Smith in Strong Poison) and Dr. Pritchard (quite explicitly, in the opening of Unnatural Death)). I have thus far resisted the urge to go to Amazon and just buy all the Roughead I can find, but it's a struggle. He has also pointed me toward other true crime writers of his era, and I shall be seeking them out, as well. And I shall bewail the fact that the Notable British Trials series (also prominent in Sayers) is out of print and the individual volumes going for crazy amounts of money.

It is also thanks to Mr. Roughead that I found Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, which is another excellent book, this one about the murder of Francis Saville Kent in 1860. Summerscale not only charts the 10-days-wonder of the investigation and the belated (and somewhat doubtful) confession of the little boy's half-sister, but also fits the case into the criminological history of Victorian England and the history of its crime literature. Inspector Whicher, who was pilloried in the press for daring (correctly) to accuse a sixteen-year-old girl of murder, was the model for Wilkie Collins' Sergeant Cuff, and more broadly, his Pyrrhic success in the Kent case (he was right, but couldn't prove it for a variety of reasons, mostly to do with other people NOT DOING THEIR JOBS) was a major cause of the fall of the police detective from an idolized and idealized superman to Inspectors Lestrade, Gregson, Jones, et al. in Conan Doyle.

The one thing I wish Summerscale had done is, at the end, after she'd laid out all the evidence (and we have more evidence than Whicher did), I wish she'd gone back and listed out the remaining discrepancies. Because there are several, and I don't know that Summerscale's theory (that Constance and her full brother William committed the murder together and that her confession was meant to exonerate him and free him from the burden of the family scandal) entirely resolves them. It's quite clear--it's clear from reading Roughead, although if Roughead recognizes it, he doesn't make it explicit--that Constance murdered her little half brother to get revenge upon her stepmother (and father, although she never says so) for their treatment of her full brother. (Her anxiety to assure everyone that she wasn't seeking revenge for their treatment of her is telling.) But it's not clear that William was guilty, and it's not clear that assuming his guilt solves more problems than it causes.

But I almost always want true crime writers to provide more explicit meta-commentary on the crime and the crime-solving process, and the fact that Summerscale doesn't give me what I want doesn't mean she hasn't written a very good book.


So there was a serial killer at work in Paris under the Nazi occupation. His name was Marcel Petiot, and the number of his victims is actually unknown. "More than ten" is about as precise as anyone can get. Petiot's M.O. was grisly in itself: he pretended he was a Resistance fighter, running an organization to smuggle Jews, and downed Allied pilots, and other people who wished urgently to leave, out of France. He took his victims' money, had them pack their clothes and valuables, and brought them to his house on rue Le Sueur, where he killed them, means unknown, dismembered them (and the forensic pathologists of Paris were quite admiring of his skill), and variously burned their bodies, treated them with lime, or dumped them, piecemeal, in the Seine. King speculates that he used cyanide gas to kill them (as the Nazis were using at Auschwitz & other death camps), and it's a good speculation. Petiot had any number of people helping him in his operation, people who may or may not have known what was really going on, and--although King doesn't really discuss this adequately--he seems to have been an entirely opportunistic killer. Whoever his nets brought in, that was who Petiot killed.

This is an interesting book, and I suppose I'd rate it "pretty good." King's prose is functional (except where he fails things like parallel structure), and I don't envy him his task of trying to organize his bewildering material. (Although there were a couple of little ha-ha! bait-and-switches in his narrative that I could really have done without.) But here, even more than with Summerscale, I really wanted a final chapter that stepped back and took stock, rather than leaving me floundering between the accusations of the prosecuting lawyers, the indignant rebuttal of Petiot (he claimed that everyone he killed was either a German or in the pay of the Germans and that he was, in essence, being prosecuted for being a patriotic Frenchman), and the weaselings of the defense attorney. Petiot was clearly guilty and clearly a sociopath, but there was still a lot of muddle left over, and I kept feeling like not all of the muddle was inevitable.

Some update-y sorts of things

1. I have work again. Yay!

2. Clarkesworld: Year Three is now available (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.). "White Charles" is in it if you're trying to find print versions of the uncollected Booth stories, and in general Clarkesworld is made of awesome.

3. This month's Apex Magazine is Shakespeare-centric; I contributed an essay about Hamlet and the Reformation, "Welcome to the Reformation, Bitches," which explains why pepole saying Hamlet's fatal flaw is indecision gives me a homicidal nervous tic.

"I don't seem to have felt at all how for a long time."

So, one of the pieces of writing advice I tend to endorse is the idea that you need to write every day, or as close to it as you can manage. And I still think it's true, or at least helpful, to think of writing as something you have to practice frequently and regularly, like music or baseball or dressage.

But I swear to god I had no idea how hard it is.

I knew about how hard it could be to find the time, especially if you have the pieces of a real life to try to assemble around it. And I knew how hard it could be when you felt like there were no words in your head, even when you had time to write them down.

I stopped blogging last year because of tendinitis in my right thumb (and, yes, that word really is spelled correctly, wrong though it looks) and carpal tunnel issues and the fact that my day job was all data entry. Thumb and wrists have improved, especially if I am NOT STUPID; temporary day job, being temporary, ended in November, and I am still waiting for another assignment; it seems like this would be the perfect time to write things: An Apprentice to Elves, for example, or Thirdhop Scarp, or any of a score of other projects.

But then there's the Restless Leg Syndrome, which revved up about the time my day job ended and has been relentless ever since. I learned in 2010 that creativity and RLS exist in inverse proportion to each other; in 2012 I learned that not only does RLS scour the creativity out of my head, but on the occasions when I do manage to write something, or to think seriously about writing something, it also deploys the worst of all the inner voices any writer (or artist or musician or anyone who loves what they do) can be afflicted with, the one that says, That's stupid. No one wants to read that. God, that's just puerile. This isn't working. The more words you put into it, the worse it's getting. Stop before you destroy whatever good you'd managed at all.

I know that voice is a liar. But I'm also tired and stressed and unhappy (see above re: neither job nor writing), and you know, that write every day advice seems smug and self-satisfied, and dear god don't you think I would if I could?

My RLS specialist and I are working on adjusting my medications. I am trying to get the things done that I can and not to beat myself up about the fact that right now there are things that I can't.

But it may be a while before I'm blogging regularly again. Thank you for your patience.

Whatever you celebrate, if anything, at this time of year

may it be very happy!

Also, as a sort of Whatever-You-Celebrate-If-Anything present, episode 19 of the SF Squeecast, Delicious Delicious Sin, is live, in which, as the Very Special Guest, I inveigle everyone into talking about Sherlock Holmes.

Also, ZooBorns has posted their Top 25, which includes a link to the flickr stream of In Cherl Kim, which includes a flourish of fabulous fennec fox photographs.

So anyway. Happy whatever! from the Upper Midwest where we are currently snowed in and listening to the Lumineers.