“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
While there is some debate as to whether this quote belongs to William Butler Yeats, the sentiment is one that has stayed with me, particularly throughout my writing career. One of the best things about being a writer is that it requires ongoing education. I love that my job demands regular research. I’ve gone down more rabbit holes that I care to admit, but it’s this spark of learning something new that fuels my enthusiasm for my fiction.
I experienced a wonderful “lighting of a fire” during my week in Salem, Massachusetts at the Writer Unboxed Unconference. Unlike other writer conferences that I attend (and love), this one involved being solely a student for the entire week. The conference welcomes all genres, and spending time outside of crime fiction gave me some valuable insight into how others approach storytelling, structure and character development.
Therese Walsh opened with her session titled “Good Chaos: Provocation and Invitation,” and by the end, I knew this week would be one of time well invested. Susan DeFreitas is a gift to writers. Her session, “Emotional Alchemy,” was so thoughtful and packed with practical advice that I took ten pages of notes. I’ve re-read them twice since returning home. And as someone who gets excited about outlines, timelines and plotting considerations, her “Anatomy of a Novel: Create a Blueprint” session provided me with specific skills to apply to a current project.
Watching Tiffany Yates Martin stand in front of a room to discuss fiction is an experience I hope every writer gets at least once. Her passion, knowledge and enthusiasm for characters, craft, storytelling and readers rolled through the room. She’s also damn funny. I left with another ten pages of notes.
Because there were two session tracks, I was forced to make difficult choices regarding the schedule, and I know that I missed several other excellent sessions. Lunch breaks provided the opportunity to explore a bit of Salem, walking through downtown and adjacent neighborhoods. Evenings were spent sampling different restaurants, and I left with a favorite pub (O’Neill’s), sushi spot (Finz Seafood & Grill—the Lobster Maki Roll was fabulous), coffee shop (Lulu’s) and bookstore (Wicked Good Books). That I was able to experience this week with some of my favorite writer friends made it even more special.
Returning home with a novella sized document full of notes, I took my time reading through them, extracting additional gems, and analyzing how they might influence my own projects. I’m back at my desk, and the spark remains. The learning continues, and it seems I will never graduate.
If so, I would consider that success.
Laura Oles is the award-winning author of the Jamie Rush mystery series. Her debut mystery, Daughters of Bad Men, was an Agatha nominee, a Claymore Award finalist, and a Writers’ League of Texas Award finalist. Her work has appeared in crime fiction anthologies, consumer magazines and business publications. She loves road trips, bookstores and any outdoor activity that doesn’t involve running. https://lauraoles.com
Now and then, when I sneak a book off the shelf, glancing around to be sure no one notices it’s a children’s book…or pick up an old LeCarré…I’m grateful for the joy of rereading.
Rather like upcoming Thanksgiving dinners! Think of their literary content! Suspense, of course–is that turkey really done? Imminent peril–are the drippings sufficient for decent gravy? Strong characters–the usual suspects are arriving at the table! Ethical challenges–no comments on the burnt marshmallow topping on the yams. And, hopefully, enough whipped cream for a happy ending!
Of course an invitee may decide to bring Something New. (I refer to an aunt’s “Pumpkin Chiffon” creation, still infamous years later. I mean, it wasn’t pumpkin pie and never would be.) In the face of such unwonted (unwanted) novelty we draw back: we don’t want something new: we want…reassurance.
So many good books are out now, deserving our attention–Lawrence Wright’s Mr. Texas, Paulette Jiles’s Chenneville, Paul Woodruff’s Living Toward Virtue, and my dear friend Dr. Megan Biesele’s amazing memoir about her anthropological adventures in the Kalahari, Once Upon a Time Is Now. https://amzn.to/3MSVL7y
But sometimes I return to the old faves, craving (especially these days)…reassurance.
What sort of reassurance? How about vindication for a beloved character in trouble? See the end of William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1948), a murder mystery where Lucas Beauchamp with his gold toothpick is saved from lynching with the help of two teens and an old lady. It’s a precursor to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (which has a sadder ending).
Children’s books require vindication of the hero. Lucy receives that in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when her older siblings finally follow her through the back of the wardrobe into Narnia and discover her amazing story is true.
As a Le Carré follower, I remain thrilled by A Legacy of Spies (2017). And yes, like many of his spy thrillers, it’s a murder mystery. Our first-person narrator is “young Peter Guillam” who won our hearts earlier as the man that master spy George Smiley could always count on. White-haired, a bit deaf, and back home on the Breton coast, he’s no longer protected by the now-retired Smiley, and Britain’s foreign service (the “Circus”) has hauled Guillam to England and arrested him. The Circus is plotting an unconscionable rewrite of agency history, with Guillam cast as the villain.
But this old dog still knows old tricks, and, yes, is vindicated! We rejoice, reassured, when Peter Guillam once again is strolling the Breton coast, with a furious Smiley about to descend with a vengeance on the Circus.
Other great rereads for reassurance: Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin sea novels. The last pages of The Commodore (Book 17) provide classic vindication for our surgeon-spy, Stephen Maturin. After many perils, barely surviving yellow fever, and finally encountering his beloved potto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potto, Maturin learns of the death of a most vicious but hitherto unnamed enemy, who has plotted Maturin’s downfall, even his murder, for years (through many volumes). Just pages later Maturin experiences the wild joy of an unexpected reunion with his lost Diana. O’Brian’s unsurpassed powerful brevity can create the sudden turns and arouse the fierce emotions that satisfy a happy (re)reader.
My housemate reports that his rereads include The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monserrat, Cannery Row, Pride and Prejudice, certain sections of Moby Dick, and more.
This Thanksgiving I give thanks for books, new and old. Do you remember learning to read? I do. Early one morning, age five, I opened a new book titled Children’s Book of Knowledge. The long strings of separate curly letters abruptly morphed into words. Like a bolt of lightning! I could read! Words became magnetic: I couldn’t keep my eyes away. I read everything–stray magazines, newspapers, the Cheerios box. I was now independent. No waiting for grown-ups to dispense information: I could simply read for myself! (With a library book stashed inside my desk at East Elementary–unfortunately confiscated by the teacher.)
Reading sets us free, gives us resources, gives us respite, gives us independence..and reassurance. Happy Thanksgiving!
I’m working on the ninth novel in the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series set in Coffee Creek, Texas, in the Hill Country. You can be sure the inhabitants insist on cornbread dressing and pumpkin pie with whipped cream. The burros will hope for leftovers.
Last week, trudging up a rocky trail to an abandoned abbey high above an Italian valley in the Sabine Hills, I heard another walker ask this: after the Romans defeated the Sabines, were any Sabine ruins left?
“Yes,” said the guide. “A temple to the goddess of empty spaces.”
The goddess of empty spaces? Her name?
“Vacuna.”
Even in fourth year Latin at McCallum High, our beloved teacher, Miss Bertha Casey, never mentioned Vacuna.
The walker’s question—any Sabine ruins?—had never occurred to me.
Questions by others can open empty pages in our own minds.
From this hill to the next hill stretched a vast empty space.
Well, not exactly empty––the air seemed visible, with sunlight glinting on bits of dust and mist. But the enormous not-exactly-empty openness fired imagination. The land below contains houses, farms, fences, vineyards—all presumably considered to belong to someone. But watching the air shimmer above the valley I wondered—does that openness belong to Vacuna? To anyone looking out across the valley?
Wait—it didn’t belong to anyone. Not to a hang-glider, nor a kite-flier, nor a drone. Long after they’d folded their toys and gone home, empty space would still be there, stirring imagination, raising questions, dreams, ideas.
How do you respond to the words “blank page”? To a new notebook? To a waiting empty screen—a “new document” in Word? Your pencil is sharp. Your fingers are poised. What will you write, draw, scribble on that blank page? The very sight of the words “blank page” makes you pause, doesn’t it, making you wonder what you might write? Blank pages prick the imagination.
Or you’re an artist, brush in one hand, a vivid palette of colors in the other, confronting a blank canvas. The choices! Red? Violet? Ochre? Viridian? Think of Rembrandt’s self-portrait, as the artist lifts his brush, staring directly at us while coyly hiding the canvas. For us, his canvas is blank. What’s the artist thinking? What do we imagine he’s painting? Of course the tricky master has already painted the canvas we’re looking at, and he included his staring eyes, his ruthless assessment of himself, every wrinkle, every wart.
I think of Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, fiercely concentrating on finishing the portrait she began years ago. We can’t see her painting, but we feel the intensity of her decision-making as to precisely why, where, and how she’ll move her brush for the last stroke.
I spend hours revisiting mysteries, reveling in the craftsmanship of the greats, and the enormous creativity that blossoms from the first page, where the canvas is empty before the reader. This week I’ve revisited “Fred Vargas” (writing name) – the French archeologist whose mysteries about her Pyrennean police commissaire, Jean Baptiste Adamsberg, lead the unsuspecting reader into wild leaps of imaginative plotting. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Vargas In An Uncertain Place, for instance, when Adamsberg goes to London for an international police conference, his English counterpart, Inspector Radstock, drags him to Highgate Cemetery where someone has left at the entrance 18 pairs of shoes with human feet in them. https://highgatecemetery.org/ The feet have been chopped off dead bodies awaiting burial in funeral parlors. Oh, wait—that’s 17 pairs plus one solo shoe with a solo foot. Adamsberg returns to France, still mulling this weirdness, and confronts a grisly murder where the corpse has been chopped into confetti, with special attention to the big toes and hands and feet. Why? And is the wild-eyed twenty-something who invaded Adamsberg’s Paris house really his undreamed-of son? The plot turns on Serbian vampire stories and the rumor that when Victorian artist/poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti exhumed his dead wife Elizabeth Siddal seven years after her death—ostensibly to retrieve his manuscript volume Poems—she was still rosy and pink. https://nonfictioness.com/victorian/the-exhumation-of-elizabeth-siddal/
From a blank page, to dead poets, to vampires and tombs in Serbia, to…well, check it out! Let me know if you actually identify the murderer before the end. Adamsberg’s one of my favorite characters. Still don’t know why he wears two watches and can’t tell time.
How do fiction writers fill the blank page? By that mysterious process—imagination. In the October 16, 2023 New York Times, Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli asks how we can learn about black holes—places we can neither travel to nor see. His answer? “To travel to places that we cannot reach physically, we need more than technology, logic or mathematics. We need imagination.”
Per Merriam Webster, “The meaning of IMAGINATION is the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality.” J.K. Rowling: “Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.” https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/06/text-of-j-k-rowling-speech/
Our genre requires imagination. Mystery writers need a vivid, tangible setting, especially for the murder. My mind has taken me to a rock-art painted cave atop a bluff high above an old ranch, to a music recording studio, to a dining room where a horse rears. We need characters. Protagonist! Murder victim! Suspects! Subsidiary characters who adds color, flavor, depth—like Eddie LaFarge, the retired pro football center who limped into the Central Garage in my imaginary town of Coffee Creek.
And I find something unexpected has happened to me, writing the Alice MacDonald Greer murder mystery series. In the middle of the night, my characters now feel as real as relatives. I watch them driving, kissing, feeding the burros, worrying. Sometimes they pause for a moment, imagining what they’ll do next.
Thank you, Vacuna, goddess of empty spaces.
Those croissants? We’re recovering in Paris from hiking, where these, from the Maison Julien patisserie on Rue Cler, may be the best ever. Letting melting butter create those empty spaces between the layers? Genius.
Helen Currie Foster writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series (now working on the 9th) north of Dripping Springs, Texas, in the Hill Countrloosely supervised by three burros. She’s active in Austin Shakespeare and the Hays County Master Naturalists and very much enjoys talking to book groups. The 7th mystery, Ghost Daughter, published June 15, 2021, was named The Eric Hoffer Award 2022 Mystery/Crime Category First Runner-up, and also 2022 National Indie Excellence Award Finalist, Mystery.
You go to a play, you’re reading the program, you’re waiting for the curtain to go up. It does. And onstage a character comes alive. You not only believe in that character—suddenly you feel that character is real.
After the play, in the lobby, out comes a chattering group of actors, one of whom is—the character you believed in! But it’s merely…another human being!
This happens to me over and over at Austin Shakespeare productions. I remember sitting riveted, watching Othello preparing to smother Desdemona, his face just a few feet from the front row of the Rollins Theatre. “No, no!” I wanted to scream. Minutes later, still quaking from the death scene, I watched the actors come back out for their traditional after-talk with the audience. I watched brokenhearted Othello plop down in a folding chair and grin at us––morphed from Othello into actor Mark Pouhé. At Free Shakespeare outdoors in Austin’s Zilker Park I held my breath, watching young Romeo climb the balcony to talk with Juliet, enchanted––like Juliet––by every word he uttered. Then at intermission, still in costume, actors came out and climbed the hillside, shaking buckets for donations, including…Romeo! Jarring to think he’d time-traveled from sixteenth century Verona to an Austin hillside. https://www.austinshakespeare.org/
You may be thinking, “I know all about that––it’s just the ‘willing suspension of disbelief.’ Coleridge, right? Maybe you’ve just got an aggravated case!”
But the question is—how exactly can actors do that? Maybe because Shakespeare has made Othello and Romeo so active, so appealing, so fascinating, so human, so alive in their loves and hates, that we believe in them, and we must hear their story. Others call such fixations our willing contract with actors, in exchange for being entertained––so long as the illusion is not spoiled. See The Actor’s Edge Online, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdGM7QzFJhM
As always, Shakespeare says it best. In the Prologue to Henry V, his Chorus begs the audience to use their own imaginations to make the small wooden stage come alive with the war between the “two mighty monarchies,” England and France:
“Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them/
Printing their proud hoofs I’ th’ receiving earth./
For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,/
Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years/
Into an hour-glass…” Henry V, Prologue.
That’s genius.
Coleridge himself recalled his agreement with Wordsworth as follows: that while Wordsworth would write poems about the charm of everyday things,
“It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” (Emphasis added.)
By buying a theatre ticket, or a movie ticket, we’re inviting an agreement like the one between the child who begs, “Tell me a story!” and the adult who responds, “Once upon a time…” In those two phrases, the contract is made. The child agrees—likely longs––to suspend disbelief, and the storyteller promises a world where the unexpected (even the unbelievable) can happen. Talking animals…bears with beds and chairs…
You and I happily suspend our disbelief when the characters become real to us, even though the events may be beyond “belief.” Harry Potter! Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny! Lord of the Rings! Star Wars!
What does this have to do with mysteries? At least the protagonist in any mystery must come alive for us. If you’re a Louise Penny fan, you appreciate how Gamache smiles at his wife, how he strokes his dog. As for Donna Leon’s Inspector Brunetti, I know him well; I’ve followed him upstairs to his Venetian apartment so many times, practically huffing with him on that last staircase. I’ve watched him choose a panini to have with coffee in his favorite coffee bar—indeed, I can practically smell the espresso. I’ve stood with him in the police boat as it bounces across the lagoon to a murder scene. He’s become so familiar, so…well, real to me. V.I. Warshawski in the Sara Paretzky novels? I know the emotion she feels when she touches her mother’s cherished wine glasses, I feel my blood pressure rise with hers over injustice. And Robert Galbraith’s team, Robin and Cormoran? I ache with the pain of Cormoran Strike’s prosthetic as he runs, trying to catch a suspect; I feel Robin’s fear as she opens a door to a dark hallway. I peer over Joyce’s shoulder as she writes in her journal in Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club series.
A story (play, movie, mystery novel) demands a setting in which the protagonist comes alive for us. We’ve suspended disbelief when our favorite mystery characters no longer exist merely as ink on a page, as lines in a Kindle. Coleridge’s goal was to create “a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment.” We’re interested in what happens—a “semblance of truth”––to a character who arouses our “human interest.” The author, actor, director, has made us feel in league with our favorite characters. We’ve become collaborators with them, sharing their adventures, their frustrations, their fears. Suspending disbelief may be why we’re so anxious when our protagonists face danger, why we’re indignant when they’re treated badly, why we’re so relieved when they’re vindicated.
Of course a mystery plot may challenge imagination. The perfectly timed rescues in Daniel Silva’s spy thrillers…and the magnificent art restoration skills of his hero, Gabriel? The exquisitely choreographed capture and totally successful interrogation of Grigoriev in John Le Carré’s Smiley’s People?
Or the clever solutions deftly reached by ex(?)-spy Elizabeth and her friend Joyce at a foreign agent’s swimming pool suspended high above London, in The Bullet that Missed? https://amzn.to/45NxJlE
Knowing how reality usually works, we worry how plans go awry, how colleagues disappoint, how villains can foil. We shake our heads, fearfully anticipating that the plan will fail, and our character’s bluff will be called. But we’re still hoping, and holding our breath every second. And we keep turning the page.
In My Reading Life, a grand book about reading and writing, author Pat Conroy says, “The most powerful words in English are ‘tell me a story…’” bit.ly/3PpSoHF
Yes! And don’t we know stories demand––require––insist on characters? Fairy tales––Jack in the Beanstalk, Hansel and Gretel. Epics––The Fellowship of the Ring, Star Wars.
I love the beginning of Emily Wilson’s recent translation of The Odyssey: bit.ly/43Bdjvi
Tell me about a complicated man,
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
When he had wrecked the holy town of Troy…
…Now, goddess, child of Zeus,
Tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.
So, how do writers create memorable characters? What works to create character? And why do we care? Isn’t it because character drives narrative?
Recall Shakespeare’s famous terse description in Julius Caesar: “Yon Cassius hath a lean and hungry look…” Those ambiguous words reach beyond the man’s shape or facial expression to hint at driving ambition…the very subject which drives the play’s narrative.
How does Jane Austen create character? Looking back, I am surprised by the lack of physical description. She doesn’t tell us what Mr. or Mrs. Bennet, or the five daughters, look like. We’re given a few visual breadcrumbs, told that Bingley and Darcy are “handsome” and that Bingley “wore a blue coat and rode a black horse.” But her characters, with their personalities, their actions, largely come to life in our minds otherwise: by conversation.
Elizabeth overhears Mr. Darcy describing her as “tolerable but not handsome enough to tempt me”—a criticism she later recounts to friends, “for she had a lively, playful disposition.” Okay, there’s one aspect of Elizabeth—lively and playful. Yet after telling friends that Elizabeth “had hardly a good feature in her face,” Darcy “began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes.” So she’s also intelligent! Elizabeth tells her sister Jane, “you are a great deal too apt…to like people in general. You never see a fault in any body.” Elizabeth is not just “playful” and “intelligent,” but a critical observer.
Using dialogue––what Elizabeth and Darcy say––Austen shows us how Elizabeth—and ultimately Darcy––think. In a world focused on superficiality—class, wealth, appearance, social skills and niceties––Austen makes us care about two characters who are too smart, too critical, too thoughtful, not to keep thinking and––ultimately––change their minds. Their characteristics (both pride and prejudice!) drive the narrative.
But hey, what about those dark eyes? Mr. Darcy disturbs the haughty Miss Bingley by saying he’s meditating on “the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow.” As all Austen readers know, that specific detail––“[A] pair of fine eyes”––will also powerfully move the plot.
Texas’s Larry McMurtry shows us how conflict between characters drives narrative. In his Lonesome Dove, the first character we meet is Augustus, sitting on the porch at the Hat Creek Cattle Company, in “the smidgin of shade he had to work with.” He has retrieved his jug from the springhouse and, as is his custom, he’s drinking Tennessee mash whiskey, which makes him feel “feel nicely misty inside.”
We’re in Augustus’s point of view when we meet his counterpoint, the other key character, his stubborn partner Captain Woodrow Call. Augustus, when he hears the whir of a nervous rattler in the corner of the springhouse, believes “in giving creatures a little time to think.” He doesn’t shoot the snake; he waits until the rattler has “calmed down” and crawled out a hole. He contrasts his own behavior to Call’s:
Call had no respect whatsoever for snakes, or for anyone who stood aside for snakes. He treated rattlers like gnats, disposing of them with one stroke of whatever tool he had in hand. “A man that slows down for snakes might as well walk,” he often said.
As Call and their diffident hand, PeaEye, arrive at the porch, Augustus notes that while he himself stands four inches taller than Call, and Pea Eye three inches taller, there’s no way to convince Pea Eye that Call is the short man: “Call had him buffaloed.” Augustus knows that if a man means to hold his own with Call, that man must keep in mind that Call isn’t as big as he seemed. Thus Augustus begins many a day by remarking, “You know, Call, you ain’t really no giant.”
McMurtry doesn’t give us a detailed physical description of Augustus or Call. Instead, we hear them banter. We see Call’s impact on others, and how Augustus works to maintain his own status vis à vis Call. Right off the bat McMurtry makes us feel the sheer force of two characters, two magnetic and conflicting personalities, and their relationship, as we’re launched into this epic tale. Their characters, the combined magnetism and conflict, drive us to Montana…and back…
We first meet Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, when Holmes is introduced to the narrator, Dr. Watson, as a potential roommate. Watson walks into the lab: “There was only one student in the room, who was bending over a distant table absorbed in his work. At the sound of our steps he glanced round and sprang to his feet with a cry of pleasure. ‘I’ve found it! I’ve found it,’ he shouted to my companion, running towards us with a test-tube in his hand.” Then he shakes hands with Watson: “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” Watson is astonished. bit.ly/3N0U4Ep
We get no actual physical description of Holmes until Chapter Two. Instead, we confront Holmes’s vigor, curiosity, perspicacity, confidence in his own powers. Similarly, in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Watson first describes Holmes’s “immense faculties and extraordinary powers of observation” in deciphering clues. Then, looking up from the street, Watson sees the detective’s silhouette on the window-shade: “I saw his tall, spare figure pass twice…He was pacing the room swiftly, eagerly, with his head sunk upon his chest and his hands clasped behind him.” Watson instantly knows, “He was at work again.”
The author engraves that image of Holmes, pacing eagerly, on our imaginations. We can’t wait to see Holmes in action: that’s what we’re reading for.
Herman Melville deprives the reader as well as Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick, of even one glance at Captain Ahab until Chapter 28, when Ishmael is well out to sea on the whaling ship Pequod. Ahab finally appears on deck and stands erect, holding on by a shroud, his bone peg-leg planted in the auger hole drilled on deck for that purpose:
There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though…they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master eye…moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.
The word “character” comes from the Greek root for “engraving tool.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/character If ever character was engraved on a person’s body, Melville’s description of Ahab and his impact on his shipmates qualifies. The uneasy silence of the officers! The crucifixion in Ahab’s face! His unsurrenderable wilfulness, fixed and fearless!
If that’s not enough foreshadowing, in Chapter 36, Ahab demands the entire crew to assemble and then hammers a gold piece to the mast for the first man who sees the white whale which took off Ahab’s leg—Moby Dick. Starbuck objects: he signed on to hunt whales, not to take vengeance on a mere animal, which he calls blasphemous. But Ahab makes the rest of the crew swear: “Death to Moby Dick!” Melville creates a character whose physical description conveys tragic history and deep emotion, and whose forceful actions persuade the crew to follow him. We know there’s no stopping Ahab now. And we haven’t yet met the whale.
Pat Conroy also tells us, in My Reading Life, of the day his beloved high school English teacher, Greg Norris, took sixteen-year old Conroy to visit the poet Archibald Rutledge. Rutledge “suggested that I make the close observation of nature part of my life’s work and that I learn the actual names of things,” because “specifics always proved fruitful to the validity of any narrative”:
“A Cherokee rose, not just a rose. A swallowtail butterfly, not just a butterfly. That kind of thing,” he said. “Get the details right. Always the details.”
Always a great reminder for mystery writers. My character Alice, in the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series––stays on me to get the details right. https://bit.ly/3qC2fzI
So–tell me a story! Show me the character! Get the details! And we’re off!
About Helen Currie Foster
I live north of Dripping Springs, Texas, supervised by three burros. I’m deeply curious, more every day, about human history and prehistory and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. I’ve loved the Texas Hill Country since my first sight of it as a teenager. Artesian springs, Cretaceous fossils, rocky landscapes hiding bluegreen water in the valleys. After law school (where I grew fascinated with water and dirt) I practiced environmental law and regulatory litigation for thirty years––then the character Alice suddenly appeared in my life. I’m active with Austin Shakespeare and Heart of Texas Sisters in Crime. And I’m grateful to the readers who enjoy the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series!
What’s your favorite place to read? A certain chair? The one with a lamp that shines on your book, not in your eyes? Perhaps a ferryboat seat, where you glance up at the horizon, then down at your book? On a plane, or train?
When I was young our house had an elm tree in the back yard which was not only climbable, but offered two branches that stuck out at the perfect angle for a lounging pre-adolescent. Even better—the lounger was invisible from the house. I could scramble up, arrange myself, open my book—and be left unfound, undisturbed, for some time.
A later joy was climbing on the New Haven RR in Boston after final exams (Chaucer, Shakespeare), armed with the latest James Bond and the very biggest Hershey bar with almonds, and being rocked south for miles along the coastline. Uninterrupted.
And I confess to rereading books. I further confess to rereading children’s books. Maybe a more accurate word is: revisiting. At least every two years, I pick up Kipling’s Kim, finding my way to the part where Kim guides his Tibetan lama, who seeks a sacred river, on a pilgrimage into the high deodar forests of the Himalayas. I can almost smell the trees. There Kim steals the Russian spies’ notes––his own initiation into the Great Game. Even more satisfying? The long afternoon where, exhausted, he is “taken apart” by Eastern massage and finally stumbles out, recovered, to find his lama at the brink of—well, no spoilers.
Why this gravitational pull of favorite children’s books?
Maybe because the best children’s books feature enterprise, surprise, disguise. And—most important––the discovery of identity.
Consider The Sword in the Stone, where Merlin transforms Wart into various animals (badger, owl, fish) who teach him survival techniques (“put your back into it!”). And magic! Giants! Griffins! The Queen of Air and Darkness! (See volume below–griffin looming behind tree.) One favorite moment? When Merlin transforms Wart to a raptor—a small merlin––who must sit for desperate minutes during his formal initiation, near the maddened and perilous Peregrine. Why does Wart need Merlin’s special tutelage? Because of his identity, which he and we will finally discover.
Others I still pull off the shelf: The Wind in the Willows, especially Mole’s tearful return home, where he recognizes his true self.
Also Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising. Maurice Sendak’s Nutshell Library – memorizing all the poems. I sneak back to Harry Potter—a feast of enterprise, surprise, disguise, and Harry’s search for his own identity. Occasionally I return to Lord of the Rings––especially the battle for Gondor. You’ll note I missed out on Jack London and many others. But there’s always The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—remember that wondrous moment when Lucy slips through the back of the wardrobe, past all the mothballed coats…into magic? Into the snowy landscape where she meets Mr. Tumnus the faun? Into the realm where––as Lucy later discovers––she is Queen Lucy?
You have your favorites. So do our collective children and grandchildren. Bookstore shelves still offer children tales of enterprise, surprise, disguise—and characters discovering their own identities.
And fortunately, children’s books needn’t follow the 1930 Detection Club’s 10 Rules for Writing a Mystery. Rule #2: “All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.” Following Rule #2 would let out magic, of course, and its enormous space for imagination. (If you, like me, crave an occasional touch of magic for grown-ups, try Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. amzn.to/44iIoVj)
As a mystery writer/reader I usually write about mystery. But thinking lately about the bibliophile’s favorites—favorite reading spots, favorite chairs, favorite characters––has sent me down a different path. Why reread? Wait––why revisit?
What is it about the end of Kim, or the plight of Frodo and Samwise in Shelob’s lair, or Harry Potter’s first moment on his broom, learning how good he is at Quidditch––that whispers, “read it again!”
I reread mysteries too. Have you reread a Dorothy Sayers, a Ngaio Marsh, a Sherlock Holmes? Or John le Carré? How many times have you read Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy, or Smiley’s People? (Come on, spy thrillers are part of the mystery-thriller-spy novel genre.) And why do we reread le Carré? One character in particular: George Smiley.
Smiley first appears on page 1 of chapter 1, titled “A Brief History of George Smiley,” in Call for the Dead, le Carré’s first book, published in 1961. Smiley’s marriage to the aristocratic Lady Ann Sercomb has ended when she abandoned him, and he’s described as follows: “Short, fat and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad.”
We learn of his deep love of 17th century German literature, his success at Oxford, his recruitment by MI-6, his dangerous service abroad as a spy in WWII. Not a commanding figure, no. But le Carré allows us to glimpse his sharp mind, his penetration, his ability to absorb all he hears. Smiley’s work as an intelligence officer provides him “with what he had once loved best in life: academic excursions into the mystery of human behaviour, disciplined by the practical application of his own deductions.”
Smiley appears next in A Murder of Quality (1962), where Smiley’s solution to the murder rests on a scathing critique of the snobbishness of British public schools (le Carré despised his own experience at such a school).
By the time we reach Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), Smiley has been put out to grass at MI-6 under the new regime headed by Bill Haydon, who has seduced Smiley’s wife Ann and taken over London Station after causing the bitter dismissal of Control as its head.
In Tinker, Tailor, Smiley is plucked out of retirement to interview a somewhat dubious British agent who claims the Russians may have placed a mole inside MI-6. Here’s Smiley, listening to the agent’s tale:
“He sat leaning back with his short legs bent, head forward, and plump hands linked across his generous stomach. His hooded eyes had closed behind the thick lenses. His only fidget was to polish his glasses on the silk lining of his tie, and when he did this, his eyes had a soaked, naked look that was embarrassing to those who caught him at it.”
Le Carré’s letter to Sir Alec Guinness (3 March 1978) appears in A Private Spy / The Letters of John le Carré, at 213. He tells Sir Alec:
“Apart from plumpness, you have all the other physical qualities: a mildness of manner, stretched taut, when you wish it, by an unearthly stillness and an electrifying watchfulness. In the best sense, you are uncomfortable company, as I suspect Smiley is. An audience wishes––when you wish it––to take you into its protection. It feels responsible for you, it worries about you. I don’t know what you call that kind of empathy, but it is very rare, & Smiley and Guinness have it: when either of you gets his feet wet, I can’t help shivering.”
I love that “as I suspect Smiley is.” Does the author’s own speculation about George Smiley explain, in part, why we readers become so attached to this character? What drives us to Smiley’s side? Is it his apparent ineffectualness, his vulnerability, his stillness, his watchfulness, entwined with our certainty that he will somehow keep going?
Not until 1979 in Smiley’s People does Smiley achieve final vindication, catching the Russian master-spy who conceived the long set of steps that led to Haydon’s seduction and Control’s fall. At the climax, we (along with Smiley and his fellow spy Peter Guillam) await the possible arrival of the Russian in cold war Berlin, at the crossing point from East Germany. Will the spy make it across the bridge? Guillam asks what cover the Russian will use:
Smiley sat opposite him across the little plastic table, a cup of cold coffee at his elbow. He looked somehow very small inside his overcoat.
“’Something humble,” Smiley said. “Something that fits in. Those who cross here are mostly old-age pensioners, I gather.’ He was smoking one of Guillam’s cigarettes and it seemed to take all his attention.”
At book’s end, we are waiting with Smiley. It’s cold there by the Berlin bridge. I expect Smiley’s feet are wet. Like the author, “I can’t help shivering.” When we know a character’s vulnerabilities, we begin to perceive true identity.
For Smiley, for all the characters created by their authors with such vividness and such vulnerability that we seem to feel what they feel, for such characters–I reread. Yes, the better word is revisit: I go back just to be sure the characters are still there, still available, still waiting quietly on the shelf. And, yes, just as good as I thought they were.
I’d love to hear your favorites (reading spots, children’s books) and the favorite characters you…revisit.
*****
Author: Helen Currie Foster
I live north of Dripping Springs, Texas, supervised by three burros. I’m deeply curious, more every day, about human history and prehistory and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. I’ve loved the Texas Hill Country since my first sight of it as a teenager. Artesian springs, Cretaceous fossils, rocky landscapes hiding bluegreen water in the valleys. After law school (where I grew fascinated with water and dirt) I practiced environmental law and regulatory litigation for thirty years––then the character Alice suddenly appeared in my life. I’m active with Austin Shakespeare and Heart of Texas Sisters in Crime. And I’m grateful to the readers who enjoy the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series!
This post doesn’t aim to inform, persuade, or entertain. It’s more of an observation, a meditation, a rumination, a mulling over, a puzzling. A rambling through recent events and old secrets. A mystery.
I. The Story
Crime fiction writer Anne Perry died in Los Angeles on April 10. She was eighty-four. A native of New Zealand and long-time resident of Scotland, she published her first mystery novel, The Cater Street Hangman, in 1979. Her latest, The Fourth Enemy, was published the week before her death. A final novel,A Traitor Among Us, will appear in September 2023.
In all, Perry published over a hundred books: the Thomas and Charlotte Pitt series (32 novels); the Daniel Pitt series (6 novels); the William Monk series (24 novels); the Elena Standish series (5 novels); the World War I series (5 novels); the Christmas Stories (20 novellas); the Christmas Collections (6 anthologies); a fantasy series (2 novels); the Timepiece series (4 novellas for young adults with dyslexia); standalone novels (7); and three volumes of nonfiction. She also contributed to and edited four short story anthologies. To date, over 26 million copies of her books have been sold.
In 2014, freelance writer Lenny Picker wrote in Publisher’s Weekly, “Quantity for Perry has not come at the cost of quality. She’s won major mystery awards, including an Edgar and two Anthonys, which demonstrate the esteem of fellow writers and fans alike.” At the 2009 Malice Domestic, she received the Agatha Award for lifetime achievement.
“Her belief in free will,” writes Picker, “allows Perry to hope for spiritual progress, both for herself and for humanity at large.”
He continues, “Perry’s writings are an effort to facilitate such progress. Through mystery and fantasy, she aspires to make a difference in her readers’ lives, by teaching them, in her words, ‘something of the human condition—a wisdom and compassion, an understanding of life that enables feeling empathy for people whose paths may be very different from our own.’”
Crime writer Ruth Rendell has died aged 85, her publisher says.
She wrote more than 60 novels in a career spanning 50 years, her
best-known creation being Inspector Wexford, which was turned into a highly
successful TV series.
Rendell, one of Britain’s best-selling contemporary authors, also wrote
under the pen-name Barbara Vine.
Crime author Anne Perry, who, as a teenager helped murder her friend’s mother, has died aged 84.
The writer served five years in prison from the age of 15 for bludgeoning Honorah Mary Parker to death.
Perry died in a Los Angeles hospital, her agent confirmed. She had been declining for several months after suffering a heart attack in December. . . .
Her first novel, The Cater Street Hangman, was published in 1979. She went on to write a string of novels across multiple series, which collectively sold 25 million copies around the world.
Three major British writers of crime fiction die. They were contemporaries. They were prolific. Their novels received both popular and critical acclaim.
One major British news outlet reports the deaths. But the third report expends over 300 words before focusing on the author’s literary career–and then devotes only ninety-nine words to her books.
P. D. James lived an exemplary life, untouched by notoriety. The most serious offense I’ve found reported about Ruth Rendell is that on her first writing job, reporting for a newspaper in Essex, ” . . . she was forced to resign after filing a story about a local sports club dinner that she hadn’t attended. Her report failed to mention that the after-dinner speaker had died half-way through the speech.”
But Anne Perry was a murderer. In 1954, when she was fifteen, she helped to bludgeon her best friend’s mother to death. Convicted, she served five years in a New Zealand prison, was released under a new name and identity, joined her family in the United Kingdom, and worked for twenty years in what her New York Times obituary refers to as “less creative fields,” before becoming a writer. In 1994, forty years after the murder, and fifteen years after the publication of her first novel, her secret became public. She has since spoken about it in interviews. Although the Personal Biography on her official website omits reference to the crime, she has never claimed innocence. In the reporter’s judgment, Perry’s criminal past was of more import than her years as a literary superstar.
III. Social Media
Readers, too, judge. So do other writers.
Comments on Perry’s Facebook page express admiration for her and sadness at her passing. Elsewhere, however, reactions are mixed. A paraphrased and truncated sample of what I’ve seen on social media follows:
Perry was a gracious person and a brilliant writer. She should be remembered that way.
She was a murderer. She should have written in a different genre. A murderer shouldn’t write about murder.
Reading her books and knowing what she did–it makes me feel weird.
She didn’t celebrate murder in her books. She brought murderers to justice.
Can writers choose what they write? Choose what they’re good at? Perry tried writing historical fiction but didn’t succeed. Should she have refused to do what she did best?
She had to make a living.
It doesn’t matter what she was; it’s what she became that counts.
She served her time, paid her debt to society.
Five years isn’t enough to make up for murder.
She behaved badly at the trial. She laughed. She’s never expressed remorse.
Maybe bringing criminals to justice in her fiction was an attempt to atone.
It’s impossible to atone for murder.
What about redemption? Don’t you believe in redemption?
When you buy her books, you’re supporting her and condoning murder.
She made a major contribution to the mystery genre and to the culture.
She was a great person.
She read some of my work and offered advice. She was very helpful.
If she’d been a man who committed a brutal murder, would the public let her off so easily?
I love her books. I don’t care what she did before.
She was a murderer.I’ve never read her books and never will read them.
Her books raised awareness of social issues.
It’s a shame reporters dredge up all that business about the murder. That shouldn’t be her legacy.
Leave her to heaven
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interrèd with their bones.
All right–Shakespeare wrote those last two, and he didn’t post them on social media. But they’ve been looping through my brain over the past week, so I thought I’d throw them in.
IV. The Questions
The social media exchange is about more than just Anne Perry. It concerns how we view the relationship between artists and their art.
How do we separate writers from what they’ve written? Can we? Should we try?
And what do readers have the right to expect of writers, beyond words on the page? Do good writers have to be Good People? Just how good do they have to be? When people who’ve done bad deeds write good books, are we wrong to read them?
If writers and their books are inextricably linked, and reading is wrong, how much imperfection should we tolerate before we take those books off our To Be Read list? (Should books by Bad People be pulled from library shelves?*)
Or maybe reading isn’t the issue–maybe it’s money.
When we purchase books by writers whose past acts are abhorrent to us, and thus support them financially, do we condone their crimes? Money talks, but what exactly does it say?
Does time matter? What if a writer is dead, and the crime is long past, and our purchase instead supports heirs, publishers, booksellers–are we still enablers?
Is there a flip side? Do writers–artists–have a responsibility to the public? When they behave unacceptably–in Perry’s case, an understatement–should they expect the public to embrace their creations on merit alone?
Had Perry become a painter or sculptor, would the discussion be different?
Does Art stand on merit alone, independent of its creator?
Should there be a discussion at all? Are these questions a waste of time, gray cells, and energy, and not worth the pixels they’re written in?
Is Hamlet correct:
There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
V. One Answer
To Perry, at least, the issue was more than academic. The New York Times obituary quotes from the 2009 documentary film Anne Perry: Interiors:
“‘In a sense it’s not a matter — at the end — of judging,’ she said in the documentary. ‘I did this much good and that much bad. Which is the greater?’
“’It’s in the end, Who am I? Am I somebody that can be trusted? Am I someone that is compassionate, gentle, patient, strong?’ She mentioned other traits: bravery, honesty, caring. ‘If you’re that kind of person — if you’ve done something bad in the past, you’ve obviously changed.’
“She concluded, ‘It’s who you are when time’s up that matters.‘”
*****
Sources–And possibly a summing-up of everything that comes before:
Leave her to heaven
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, v
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interrèd with their bones
– William Shakespeare,Julius Caesar, III, ii
Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is
nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it
so. – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, II, ii
*
*Librarians select books and materials based on their reading of multiple reviews published in professional journals, without regard to the Goodness or Badness of the authors. It’s a matter of professional ethics.
I’ve been reading quite a few headlines about the new Artificial Intelligence writing apps that burst onto the scene in November of 2022. Reviews have been mercurial. Some say is the end of our ability to think. Others say it is the savior of our intellectual future.
I’m a curious person, so I decided to give it a go. I joined ChatGPT via chatopenAI.com, and put in the following prompt:
“Compare books by K.P. Gresham and J.D. Robb.”
(Of course, I chose J.D. Robb—she’s my favorite author. Just once I wanted to see my name and her name in the same sentence!)
Here are excerpts from ChatGPT’s response:
J.D. Robb and K.P. Gresham are both authors who write mystery novels, but their books differ in several ways.
J.D. Robb’s books are primarily crime and suspense novels, featuring a recurring cast of characters led by the protagonist, Eve Dallas, a New York City police detective…
K.P. Gresham’s books, on the other hand, are typically set in small towns in Texas and deal with more personal, often domestic, crimes…
Another difference between the two authors is their approach to character development. J.D. Robb’s books are centered around a recurring cast of characters, including Eve Dallas and her husband, Roarke, who are well-developed and have complex backstories that are gradually revealed throughout the series. K.P. Gresham’s books, on the other hand, feature a different set ofcharacters in each novel, with some recurring characters that show up occasionally.
In summary… While both authors are skilled at creating engaging and suspenseful stories, their books differ in terms of genre, writing style, setting, and character development.
Okay! I’ll take that. But there was a hiccup in my info: I do not have a different set of characters in each novel. My mysteries feature Pastor Matt Hayden and his cronies in every book.
I responded to the post: “I thought K.P. Gresham’s books feature Pastor Matt Hayden and his friends and family.”
Excerpts from ChatGPT’s Response:
You are correct, and I apologize for my previous response. K.P. Gresham’s books do indeed feature Pastor Matt Hayden and his friends and family. I was mistaken in my previous response, and I appreciate you bringing this to my attention.
“K.P. Gresham’s mystery novels, including “Murder in the Second Pew,” “Dying for a Change,” and “Murder in the Choir Loft,” are set in the small Texas town of Shady Grove and feature Pastor Matt Hayden as the main character…
Similar to J.D. Robb’s books, K.P. Gresham’s writing style is character-driven and creates a strong sense of place… K.P. Gresham’s books are centered around Pastor Matt Hayden and his family and friends.
In summary, K.P. Gresham’s mystery novels do indeed feature Pastor Matt Hayden and his friends and family, and the books are characterized by a strong sense of place, character development, and personal crimes that occur in the small Texas town of Shady Grove.”
Actually, this is great stuff—for the most part. Except I didn’t write Dying for a Change or Murder in the Choir Loft.
My response? “K.P. Gresham did not write Dying for a Change nor did she write Murder in the Choir Loft. She did write The Preacher’s First Murder, Murder in the Second Pew, Murder on the Third Try and Four Reasons to Die. Her stories do not take place in Shady Grove, but in Wilks, Texas, and Austin, Texas.”
Excerpts from Chat GPT’s Response:
Thank you for bringing this to my attention, and I apologize for my previous mistakes. You are correct that K.P. Gresham did not write “Dying for a Change” or “Murder in the Choir Loft” and that her novels do not take place in Shady Grove, but in Wilks and Austin, Texas.
“K.P. Gresham’s mystery novels, including “The Preacher’s First Murder,” “Murder in the Second Pew,” “Murder on the Third Try,” and “Four Reasons to Die,” are set in small Texas towns and feature Pastor Matt Hayden as the main character. Her writing style is character-driven, with a focus on creating a strong sense of place and developing the personalities and relationships of her characters…
Once again, thank you for correcting my mistakes, and I hope this response provides a more accurate comparison between the books of K.P. Gresham and J.D. Robb.”
That’s my glimpse of Chat GPT. It got the big, important stuff right (i.e. all the J.D. Robb information). When it came to little ol’ me, it needed some important corrections. (Important to me, anyway.)
My takeaway? If you’re using a writing AI, don’t count on it for lesser known info. As a writer, I take my research VERY seriously. I don’t think this technology shows enough promise to depend on everything it says. Is the AI teachable? Yes. Reliable? Not so much.
Stay safe by doing your own research. (Hey—next time I’m going to write a blog on making the “perfect” Old Fashioned adult beverage. Talk about enjoying your research!).
And, as always, keep on writing!
K.P. Gresham, Author
Professional Character Assassin
K.P. Gresham is the award-winning author of the Pastor Matt Hayden Mystery Series as well as several stand-alone novels. Active in Sisters in Crime and the Writers League of Texas, she has won Best Novel awards from the Bay Area Writers League as well as the Mystery Writers of America.
“MARCH MADNESS”? In the Texas Hill Country, “March Madness” doesn’t only mean NCAA basketball. Its alternate form: Demented Spring Gardening. Too early, you say? Well, according to the snakes, spring’s already here.
Of course it’s not officially spring yet. Just three weeks ago, here north of Dripping Springs, Texas, the entire landscape—every tree, every leaf–was shrouded in solid ice. But this week, well before the equinox, beneath the oaks you’ll spot the amazing heartbreakingly beautiful fuchsia of the redbuds.
And roses! The tender yellow flowers of the Lady Banksia rose are cascading from the oak tree that serves as her trellis.
On other branches you can see the first luxurious pink buds of Souvenir de Malmaison, named for Empress Josephine’s rose garden, beginning to open.
In the garden the ineffably fragrant Zephirine Drouhin is performing her slow tease, loosening the green sepals, delicately unveiling her bright pink petals.
I’ve already planted two new and reputedly very fragrant roses––Madame Plantier, and Cramoisi Superieur. (What a name!) And I replanted Buff Beauty, which produces buff and yellow and apricot blooms. Still waiting for two more—Savannah and Sweet Mademoiselle, both promising strong fragrance. Seriously, a rose without fragrance? Isn’t it disappointing to lean forward into a rose, inhale…and…nothing? As Shakespeare points out in Sonnet 56:
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour which doth in it live.
But for sheer fragrant spring bravado, tinged with peril, what about the ridiculous grape Kool-Aid smell of Texas mountain laurel? Intoxicating and loopy. The plant—sophora secundifolia–– isn’t called “Texas mescal bean” for nothing. https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=sose3: “The brilliant red seeds contain the highly poisonous alkaloid cytisine (or sophorine) – this substance is related to nicotine and is widely cited as a narcotic and hallucinogen.”
“A Light exists in Spring” by Emily Dickinson was new to me. I treasure her recognition, her human diagnosis, of that first moment when we notice the magical presence of spring. It begins:
A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period —
When March is scarcely here
A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.
More symptoms of March Madness? The powerful, even uncontrollable, urge to fill your cart full of geraniums, dirt, mulch, annuals, perennials, unknown roses, tomato plants, new trees… Trudging a quarter mile from the local native plants emporium to your car, lugging a red wagon full of blue sage, lantana, and other plants hopefully accurate in describing themselves as “deer-resistant”… Other symptoms include impassioned online review of rose varieties, frantic ripping open of seed packets and daily watering of small unlabeled pots, then staring at tiny emerging seedlings and wondering—what are you? Is that the fennel or the Aji Crystal Pepper or the Mexican plum?
I’d never heard of Mexican plum until a friend gave me a jar of her amazing Mexican plum jam. She described the trees as small, with fragrant white blossoms. So I ordered seeds. The very small print on the seed packet required “stratification” in the refrigerator. Well, I tried. Every morning I peer at the still-empty pots of dirt… little plants, where are you? Can you live in the Hill Country?
Also—perhaps prematurely—we dragged hay bales into the garden and embarked on the great Haybale Tomato experiment:
Supposedly, according to our favorite local well-driller, this approach produces for one local rancher “the most beautiful tomatoes in the Hill Country.” Our donkeys kept sticking their muzzles through the fence, trying to eat the bales. Watch this space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2jjIHgmypM
Gardens can be perilous. Think of Eden. But how many murder mysteries are set in gardens, or involve garden poisons? If you haven’t already become a fan of Reginald Hill, you might try Deadheads. Dalziel and Pascoe solve virtually every murder presented to them in their Yorkshire police headquarters. In this one, roses abound, beginning on the first page. And rose culture. And… murder. bit.ly/3Fgce23
Texas author Susan Wittig Albert knows her way around poisonous plants, in Texas or elsewhere. I just finished her Hemlock, Book 28 in her China Bayles series. This mystery—impressively researched, and fast-moving–takes the reader to the Blue Ridge mountains and theft of a rare botanical book, with deft historical backstory. https://susanalbert.com/hemlock-book-28/
For more on Texas mountain laurel, its power and peril – see Ghost Dog, Book 2 in my Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series. bit.ly/3YIotv5
The weather report threatens another cold snap this week—even (gasp!) a possible freeze. But right now it’s 74 degrees. Geraniums to plant. Blue sage. Tomatoes to water. Yes, it’s hubris, exposing these tender plants so early to the vagaries of Hill Country weather, but—I can’t help it. I just saw a big bud on Star of the Republic! I swear it wasn’t there yesterday. March Madness reigns!
***
Find Helen Currie Foster on Facebook or at http://www.helencurriefoster.com. The eight books of the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series, including the most recent, Ghosted, amzn.to/3YrJBXf, are available at Austin’s BookPeople as well as on Amazon (Kindle and Paperback).
Believe it or not, the mystery novel is considered a “young” form of literature. Yep, that’s right. Mystery fiction didn’t exist before 19th century England. Many suggest two reasons why this was the case. First, the ability to read was now reaching “below” the upper class educated citizens. Farmers and factory workers and children were being taught to read. Secondly, back then, most towns relied instead on constables and night watchmen. No centralized police forces existed.
So what happened that caused the change in policing? The public’s morbid national obsession with murder.
Two cases in particular were instrumental in beginning this fixation on crime, according to Lucy Worsley, chief curator at the Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity responsible for maintaining the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace State Apartments, and more.
In her BBC four-part series, “A Very British Murder” (2013), Worsley suggests that the first murder, known as The Radcliffe Highway Murders, took place in 1811. Only a constable was available to the poor maid who realized something dreadful had happened when she returned to the home of her employers only to find the door locked, and a woman screaming inside. The newspapers hyped the crime, stirring the public into a frenzy.
Eventually John Williams was arrested and charged with the crimes. He committed suicide in his jail cell before the trial, though his trial was carried on without him. It was speculated that this was done to calm the public’s fear.
The second case, “The Red Barn Murder”, took place in 1826. Here a woman was found dead in a barn, apparently the victim of an elopement gone wrong. Again, the public fixated on the murder to the extent that a very macabre execution took place. On 11 August 1828, the convicted murderer, John Corder, was taken to the gallows and hanged shortly before noon in front of a large crowd. One newspaper claimed that there were 7,000 spectators, another as many as 20,000. But that wasn’t all. The body was taken back to the courtroom at Shire Hall, where it was slit open along the abdomen to expose the muscles. The crowds were allowed to file past until six o’clock, when the doors were shut. According to the Norwich and Bury Post, over 5,000 people lined up to see the body.
So now the British public was ripe to read anything that would feed their fascination with murder. All it needed was a writer to satiate their thirst.
Enter Edgar Allen Poe and his short story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” which was published in Graham’s Magazine in 1849. It has been described as the first modern detective story and featured the world’s first fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin. Though Baltimore-born Poe was known in America for his literary critiques (several of which named Henry Wadsworth Longfellow a plagiarist), he was much more popular in Great Britain where he became well-known as an author.
(It should be noted that two books are also considered early mysteries but had little following due to their foreign languages. The first may have been Voltaire’s Zadig written in 1747, and Das Fraulein von Scuderi by E.T.A. Hoffmann in 1819.)
And the floodgates opened. Wilkie Collins’ novel The Woman in White was published in 1860. Arthur Conan Doyle published his first Sherlock Holmes mystery, A Study in Scarlet, in 1887. Doyle’s series is credited with being singularly responsible for the huge popularity of the mystery genre.
Mystery novels have gone far beyond the private detective motif. The genre now covers romantic suspense, noir, cozies, thrillers, traditional, etc.: even comic books, graphic novels and web-based detective series now carry on the mystery tradition.
I read mysteries, watch mystery movies, (probably have most of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies memorized line by line), and write mysteries. However, I had no idea I was entertained by such a “young” form of literature.
So, whodunnit next?
***
Note: Sources for this blog included Lucy Worsley’s BBC’s four-part series, A Very British Mystery, and the Biblio Blog “What Exactly is a Mystery Book”.
***
K.P. Gresham, Author
Professional Character Assassin
K.P. Gresham is the award-winning author of the Pastor Matt Hayden Mystery Series as well as several stand-alone novels. Active in Sisters in Crime and the Writers League of Texas, she has won Best Novel awards from the Bay Area Writers League as well as Mystery Writers of America.
Austin Mystery Writers 