….And Then What Happens?

November 29, 2021 / Austin Mystery Writers / Leave a comment

By Helen Currie Foster

If you haven’t read Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, or his latest, The Man Who Died Twice, fear not—no spoilers here. Oh, maybe a couple of teases, but that’s my theme today: curiosity as a driver of mystery novels.

George Saunders, in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, his boldly subtitled “master class on writing, reading and life,” recounts his experience submitting a short story to Bill Buford, fiction editor of The New Yorker. After receiving some “painful edits,” Saunders asked Buford what he liked about the story: “Well, I read a line. And I like it…enough to read the next.”

Saunders gives a short answer to why we keep reading: “Because we want to.” And why do we want to? “That’s the million-dollar question. What makes a reader keep reading.”

Back to The Thursday Murder Club. We meet the varied characters of an upscale home for the elderly in scenic Kent who meet weekly to solve murders—old and new. Some characters seem ordinary, like the new club member, Joyce, whose journal depicts her as sprightly and slightly ditzy. Some, like Elizabeth, are veiled in mystery. Is Bogdan just a dumb Polack? We begin to wonder what’s he hiding. Then we begin to wonder what each character’s hiding. We also desperately want to know who’s buried—no, who else is buried––in the nuns’ graveyard on the hill. We read in the bathtub. We sneak our Kindle into the examining room and finish another chapter before the nurse arrives. Same with The Man Who Died Twice: we keep reading the next line! Before beginning, I asked myself, how can Orman’s second book be as compelling as Thursday? Just hide and watch. For each character—whether detective or potential villain—a slow (but never too slow) reveal will move you, the reader, to keep reading the next sentence.

In my blog Curiouser and Curiouser I mentioned astrophysicist Mario Livio’s book, WHY: What Makes Us Curious. https://www.amazon.com/Why-What-Makes-Us-Curious-ebook/dp/B01M7WV0LV/ref=sr_1_4?qid=1638133468&refinements=p_27%3AMario+Livio&s=books&sr=1-4 Livio begins by discussing Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” a very short 19^th century tale of a woman who has just received news of her husband’s death. Livio cites Chopin’s “singular ability to generate curiosity with almost every single line of prose.” He says she inspires “empathic curiosity,” driving the reader incessantly to ask “why?” and to try to understand the desires and thoughts of the protagonist. Chopin also uses the element of surprise—“a sure stratagem to kindle curiosity through heightened arousal and attention.”

The physiological basis for such heightened curiosity? When we encounter the unexpected, our brains assume we may need to take action. “This results in a rapid activation of the sympathetic nervous system” as we focus on the key issue, says Livio. He notes that when we’re surprised and have a fear response, both fast and slow brain pathways are activated. On the fast track, our thalamus sends sensory signals to the amygdala which directs our emotional response. But on the slow track, our thalamus sends signals to our cerebral cortex before going to the amygdala—allowing a “more thoughtful” response.

And don’t mystery readers have highly developed cerebral cortexes? Of course they do. For starters, though, we request a protagonist who engages us, so our empathic curiosity can push us to the next sentence. Perhaps we need to care at least a little for the protagonist in order to want to know what happens next. All the great tales combine empathic curiosity and surprise. Will Kim and his lama find the River of the Arrow? Will Mr. Darcy ever propose a second time to Elizabeth Bennet? Will Gus and Call survive the cattle drive to Montana? Will Frodo make it to the Cracks of Doom? Will George Smiley figure out the mole’s identity? We want to know what happens next. Mystery readers beg their authors: make us want to know!

Livio highlights some remarkably curious humans. One is Leonardo da Vinci (described by art historian Kenneth Clark as “the most relentlessly curious man in history”). A look at Leonardo’s Notebooks shows as just one example of his curiosity his study of human physiology [186] and anatomy—skeleton, musculature, circulation.

Leonardo provides detailed drawings and descriptions of human limbs, and then moves on to how they work: “The walking of man is always after the universal manner of walking in animals with 4 legs, inasmuch as just as they move their feet crosswise after the manner of a horse in trotting, so man moves his 4 limbs crosswise; that is, if he puts forward his right foot in walking he puts forward, with it, his left arm and vice versa, invariably.” We come to believe Leonardo was not just trying for painterly accuracy: he wanted to know how bodies work (as well as why candle flame moves as it does, how screws and tempered springs work, how to depict perspective…).

It goes almost without saying that mystery readers are notoriously curious. We love to plunge into new or unique settings—Alaska (Dana Stabenow), Southside Chicago (Sara Paretzky), Scotland (Ian Rankin), the south of France (Martin Walker), the Four Corners (Tony and now Anne Hillerman)…and don’t forget Texas, big cities and small towns, the coast, the border, the Hill Country. We’re delighted with new worlds—paranormal mysteries. We’re curious about alibis—any holes? What exactly did the medical examiner say? Which facts point to a motive—or lack thereof?

Another example of a “relentlessly curious” human is astrophysicist Richard Feynman: “Feynman’s genius and achievements in…physics are legendary…He became known to the general public as a member of the panel that investigated the space shuttle Challenger disaster…When asked to identify what he thought was the key motivator for scientific discovery, Feynman replied, ‘It has to do with curiosity. It has to do with wondering what makes something do something.’” [10]

“What makes something do something.” And what makes someone do something. The stuff of mystery.

Livio considers the drive for knowledge a deeply human characteristic, with curiosity a powerful force not just for childhood cognitive development, but for intellectual and creative expression later in life. [9] He says “perceptual curiosity” motivates visual inspection—for instance, when we see something novel, puzzling, or an extreme outlier. Opposite “perceptual curiosity” is “epistemic curiosity”—sheer desire for knowledge, which Thomas Hobbes called “lust of the mind” because it only leaves you wanting more.

Well, isn’t that your basic mystery reader? The best mysteries leave us momentarily satisfied—we want to read each next line until we get to the very last line—but still wanting more. Where’s the next book?

Helen Currie Foster writes the Alice MacDonald Mystery Series, and lives north of Dripping Springs, supervised by three burros. Find the series at BookPeople, Amazon or IngramSpark and at various libraries. The books (Ghost Cave, Ghost Dog, Ghost Letter, Ghost Dagger, Ghost Next Door, Ghost Cat, and Ghost Daughter) include “Ghost” in their titles because an old sin, old love, or old death still hangs around…resulting in a new murder. Ghost Cat won “Semifinalist” for Mystery in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. Kirkus says of Ghost Daughter, “An appealing character headlines a solid thriller with panache.”

Follow her at http://www.helencurriefoster.com,

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A Little Hitchcock, Two Stories, Plus Spoilers

November 7, 2021November 7, 2021 / Austin Mystery Writers / Leave a comment

by Kathy Waller

The summer I was six, my cousin of the same age was visiting our spinster great-aunt and bachelor uncle who lived up the street. Uncle called one evening. Cousin was being a major pain. It was a weeknight, and the only amusement our miniscule town afforded, a roller skating rink, was open only on weekends. Great-aunt and uncle weren’t accustomed to dealing with children of the painful variety, so he did what he often did when desperate. He appealed to my mother: You’ve got to do something.

A veteran of dealing with a juvenile pain, she proposed the perfect solution. They loaded both of us into the car and took us fifteen miles to the drive-in movie.

An excellent plan: Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, trailers of coming attractions, and the feature film: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

A synopsis of the novel from which the movie was adapted appears on Wikipedia:

A prosperous shipbuilder hires a former detective who suffers from vertigo to tail his wife Madeleine who is acting strangely. The detective falls in love with the shipbuilder’s wife but is unable to stop her committing suicide by jumping from a tower. Haunted by her death, he sees a woman who bears a strong resemblance to the dead woman, however, his attempts to get closer to this doppelgänger ultimately result in tragedy.

In these enlightened times, many, if not most, parents would be horrified at anyone’s allowing a first-grader to see such a nightmare-inducing movie. I, however, spent every afternoon glued to the Afternoon Movie. I guess my mother assumed that if I could handle Don Ameche trying to get rid of his wife, Claudette Colbert, by drugging her hot chocolate and then piping in repeated suggestions that she jump off her bedroom balcony, Hitchcock wouldn’t upset me.

And I’ve always been grateful to her, because that night at the drive-in, I fell in love. I watched Hitchcock’s television programs and all the movies I could manage. They were wonderful, and if they starred Cary Grant–Francine Paino wrote about one of those, North by Northwest, last week–that was icing on the cake.

Now Netflix, Prime, Roku, and other streaming services have allowed me to watch many of them again.

But this post isn’t a celebration of Hitchcock. It’s about two stories adapted for his television show. Watching them as an adult, I saw something I hadn’t seen years (and years) ago. I enjoyed both, but one had something extra.

The first is “The Second Wife,” in which a mail-order bride comes to believe that her husband plans to kill her. At the outset, he seems insensitive, unconcerned about her needs; when she says the laundry room in the basement is uncomfortably cold, he complains about the cost of installing a heater. She also hears

stories: he took his first wife to visit her people at Christmas and she died and was buried there–or that’s what he claims.

Gossip fuels the second wife’s fears, and when the husband announces plans to take her home for Christmas, she acquires a gun. Before they leave, however, he insists she go down to the basement. She takes the gun and descends the stairs. He’ll follow in a moment.

The viewer feels her fear: The husband will kill the second wife, as he killed the first.

But there’s a literary catch. In a letter, Anton Chekhov stated one of his principles for writing fiction: “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.”

The wife has a gun. And this is Hitchcock; he keeps his promises.

The wife shoots and kills her husband, then realizes he’d only wanted to show her her Christmas present–the heating system he’d had installed in the laundry room.

A tragic ending, but satisfying in its irony.

The second story, “Night of the Owl,” however, has something extra, something unexpected.

A couple have reared an adopted daughter, now a teenager, a bright student, a well-adjusted, happy girl. But the parents have carefully guarded a secret: the girl’s father murdered her mother, then killed himself in prison. When a prison chaplain and his accomplice appear and blackmail the couple, then come back for more, the father considers his options: murder the blackmailer, or tell his daughter about her past. Both are unthinkable. Then one of the blackmailers is murdered. Evidence points to the father.

How can the plot be resolved? Did the father commit murder? He escapes being charged but can’t escape telling his daughter about her birth parents.

In “The Second Wife,” the resolution is either/or, and the viewer can almost certainly predict which it will be.

But the ending of “The Night of the Owl” isn’t predictable. Will the girl become hysterical? Fall into depression? Reject her adoptive parents? Run away? Harm herself?

Told the truth about the murder/suicide in her background, she expresses empathy. How unhappy her parents must have been, she says–what sad lives they must have lived.

I didn’t see that coming. A Hitchcock program with a happy ending. And an exceptional character.

Critics (professional and amateur) point to problems with both programs. Fair enough. I didn’t watch for flaws. In fact, I didn’t watch for anything but the pleasure of seeing programs I’d first watched as a child. I just happened to see something more.

And to quote Osgood Fielding III, “Nobody’s perfect.”

***

“Night of the Owl” is available on Youtube.

Robert Bloch wrote the teleplay of “The Second Wife” based on a story by Richard Deming. It aired on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour on October 4, 1962.

Richard Fielder wrote the teleplay of “The Night of the Owl” b ased on a novel by Paul Winterton. It aired on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour on April 26, 1965.

Joe E. Brown appears as Osgood Fielding III in Some Like It Hot. He has the best line in one of the best, and funniest, movies ever made.

Research turned up this biographical item: “An ardent opponent of the Nazi regime, in 1939 Brown testified before the House Immigration Committee in support of a bill that would allow 20,000 German-Jewish refugee children into the United States. He would later adopt two German-Jewish refugee girls himself, naming them Mary Katherine Ann (born 1930) and Kathryn Francis (born 1934).”

Images are taken from Wikipedia. Both are in the public domain.

***

Kathy Waller blogs at Telling the Truth, Mainly.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST –

November 1, 2021 / Austin Mystery Writers / Leave a comment

Alfred Hitchcock at his Best

By

Francine Paino AKA F. Della Notte

North by Northwest, a mystery thriller filmed in the 1950s, was Alfred Hitchcock at his best, and the movie received the 1960 Edgar Alan Poe Award for Best Motion Picture.

The plot: “A New York City advertising executive goes on the run after being mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies, and falls for a woman whose loyalties he begins to doubt.” (quote from IMB). There are a few terms and facts viewers should know before settling down in the jammies with the bowl of popcorn (light, of course). Warning: Spoilers included.

First—the Maguffin. An object or device in a movie or book that serves merely as a trigger for the plot and receives little in the way of explanations. In a more current film, Titanic, the search for the Heart of the Sea diamond necklace is the trigger that drives the plot and the action, but Hitchcock popularized the concept of the maguffin. In North by Northwest, there are two: The microfilm of government secrets that James Mason’s character, Vandamm is trying to sneak out of the country, and the identity of George Kaplan, who doesn’t exist – not even in the movie.

The movie begins in New York with a dramatic and dangerous encounter with foreign spies. Thornhill is mistaken for George Kaplan and is kidnapped, questioned, and almost killed by the Vandamm agents. He escapes and is then framed for the murder of Lester Townsend at the U.N. Grant/Thornhill begins his trek north by northwest by sneaking onto a train headed for Chicago, pursued by the evil foreign agents and the police. Here he meets Eva Marie Saint/ Eve Kendall, a confidant of Vandamm’s, played by James Mason.

In Chicago, Grant/Thornhill leaves the train disguised as a porter with the help of Saint/Kendall and is set up to meet the elusive George Kaplan at the Prairie Stop, Highway 41, a little-used route more than an hour outside of Chicago. Here, Hitchcock creates a scene that became the forerunner for future action movies, especially the James Bond Series.

Hitchcock doesn’t do the usual dark city street motif for a deadly attack on Grant/Thornhill. Instead, Hitchcock has him vulnerable in an open field and targeted by a small aircraft with firepower. After diving to the ground several times, Grant/Thornhill sees a cornfield and runs for cover, but in comes the small aircraft again, this time employing its crop-dusting capabilities to cover him in a cloud of chemicals and flush him out. As the small plane circles to make a second pass, a tanker truck barrels down the highway. Grant/Thornhill jumps out in front of it, forcing the driver to stop, but the small plane misjudges and crashes into the oil truck. Both explode. Now a few innocent bystanders appear, traveling on this up-until-now deserted road. They stop their cars and get out, to get a closer look at the disaster. Grant/Thornhill slinks past them, steals one of their vehicles, and escapes.

As the story unfolds, we discover who Eve Kendall is, and we learn there is no George Kaplan, but the most dramatic scenes that end the movie take place on the remarkable stone-carved Mt. Rushmore monument, where Grant/Thornhill and Saint/Kendall try to escape by descending the faces of Rushmore, pursued and shot at by Vandamm’s agents.

To my great disappointment, the only authentic shots of the remarkable stone carvings of Rushmore were from a distance. Although Hitchcock had a permit to film at the monument, government officials banned the production when word got out that the writers scripted a fight scene and a couple of deaths. Thus, the hard work of climbing, falling, and fighting took place in Hollywood, and Mt. Rushmore was created by Hollywood trickery, using set pieces, special effects, and clever camera work—but don’t let that stop you from watching.

Of course, like most movies of those times, the good guy (Thornhill) gets the girl (Kendall), and like so many Hitchcock thrillers, the drama is intense even when you know it’s Hollywood and how it will end, but politics aside, Mt. Rushmore is its own dramatic story.

John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum created this remarkable feat of sculpting and engineering. In the summer of 1925, at the age of 57, Borglum went to South Dakota and began the project. Work on the sculpture started in 1927. Borglum remained devoted to the project until he died in Chicago, and his son Lincoln put the finishing touches on his father’s vision. Sadly, however, what’s left out of this remarkable story is that in 1933, Borglum hired Italian immigrant, Luigi del Bianco as the chief stone carver and paid him $1.50 an hour. (Excellent pay in those days. ) Del Bianco was tasked with more than the rough work of blowing up rocks and carving out simple shapes. He was entrusted with many of the finer points of creating those faces. Among his many duties, Del Bianco was entrusted with carving the detail in the faces. He cut Abraham Lincoln’s eyes and patched a dangerous crack in Thomas Jefferson’s lip.

Borglum constantly praised del Bianco for his outstanding abilities as a classically trained stone carver: “He is worth any three men in America for this particular type of work…. He is the only intelligent, efficient stone carver on the work who understands the language of the sculptor….We could double our progress if we had two like Bianco.”(Wiki)

Despite Borglum’s high regard, del Bianco, the Italian, was ignored until finally, three-quarters of a century later, his family fought for and won the recognition he so richly deserved. In 2017, a plaque was placed at the monument to honor his work as the chief sculptor.

So, one might say that North by Northwest is a mystery/ thriller filled with high drama both on and off the set, both fictitious and real. I’ve watched North by Northwest many times and always discover something new with each viewing.