April 1! It’s spring, with a riot of bluebonnets this year.
Plus paintbrush! Winecup! Verbena! Prairie celestials (so lovely)!
And within the fence, safe from our marauding burros, the roses are opening their petals and sharing their beauty. Humans have been growing and hybridizing roses for millenia. I favor those with deep rose fragrance. This year the sniff prize goes to Madame Isaac Pereire,
but Zephirine Drouhine is a strong contender as well—sweet perfume, but no thorns!
Blooming with pride are Cramoisi Superieur, fun to pronounce, and dainty little Perle d’or, below.
Yes, the French have been busy. But I’m waiting on the spectacular Star of the Republic, which is covered with buds that will become exquisite cream and pink roses, and is almost as tall as Texas.
Thanks for human ingenuity and the deep love of beauty and fragrance that resulted in these roses. We humans are so able to produce beauty—and yet we mystery readers and writers know how gripped we are by the companion question: why do humans commit the primal sin of murder?
I’ve been reading a riveting book called How the Mind Changed, A Human History of Our Evolving Brain (2022), by neuroscientist Joseph Jebelli, who studies the genetic history of the human brain. I’ve had to put stickers and checks on so many pages!
Jebelli says that, starting about 7 million years (or 230,000 generations) ago, when humans split from chimps, our brains were only 350 cm3 big. Then 3.5 million years ago, when our ancestor Lucy came along, we got a new uniquely human gene that gave us a folding neocortex and nearly doubled our brain size to 650 cm3.
Later, he says, our brains bloomed to 900 cm3, when we began cooking (maybe 2.7 million years ago), then to 1000 cm3, about 2.5 million years ago, then to 1500 cm3 500,000 years ago, and then grew another 25% by the time, 300,000-400,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens appeared.
Later research shows—the bigger the brain, the bigger the social group. Id., 69.
And lucky Homo sapiens came along when our planet was in extreme ecological instability: “African megadroughts depleted the land’s fresh water; vanishing grasslands diminished the number of animals available…” Homo sapiens spread across the planet, interbreeding along the way with the Neanderthals (who went extinct around 40,000 years ago), and the Denisovans, Neanderthal cousins from Asia. Most humans outside Africa carry around 2 percent Neanderthal-derived DNA while today humans in Papua New Guinea and Australia possess up to 6% Denisovan DNA.
Now we have tools of advanced microscopy and molecular genetics to use “the mosaic of neurons, the constellation of synapses and the tributaries of molecules to learn the age of the brain and the transformations it has seen.” Îd., 21.
But it’s Jebelli’s discussion of brain research on “fair play” that I find most fascinating – whether the experiment uses rats, vampire bats, or humans. “Our minds intuitively draw a distinction between unfair equality (all students receiving the same…grades regardless of merit) and fair inequality (the doctor earning more than the cleaner). When push comes to shove, humans nearly always prefer fair inequality to unfair equality.” Jebelli goes on to explain that when we humans engage in fair play, we experience a surge of neural activity in our brain’s reward centers, releasing dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins. Id., 68.
Watch out: scientists are identifying gene mutations that explain amazing things. “Non-monogamous brains tend to have a special kind of dopamine receptor gene called DRD4, which is linked to promiscuity and infidelity.” Id., 78. Use that in a plot, mystery-writers!
But I was thrilled by the focus on the link between strong imagination and intelligence in our “default network, a brain system that participates in daydreaming, mind wandering, reflective thinking and imagining the future….People who engage in these cognitive practices…have greater access to the states of mind necessary to solve complex problems.” Id., 115. Jebelli says our default networks are only active when we’re not focused on a task, “when the brain is cycling through thoughts not associated with the immediate environment.” In other words, the default network contrasts with our executive control network. Jebelli makes another leap: compassion also stimulates the default network. “Compassion requires imagination. ‘Climb into his skin and walk around in it,’ Atticus tells Scout.” But imagination also requires compassion. Id., 119.
Why has this book grabbed me? As a mystery writer I wrestle with why some humans will run into the street to save a child from a bus, and some will just watch; and why and how some humans invent gripping new imaginative worlds (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Slough House, Yoknapatawpha County, the Forest of Arden, Hat Creek and the saga of Lonesome Dove) that tell of human struggles and victories, tragedies and comedies. Yes, writers who stimulate our “default networks”!
So you might like to take a peek at How the Mind Changed—check out the chapter on that age-old conundrum––what is consciousness? And the chapter on different minds, or neurodiversity, including genetic components. And the chapter on the new field of neurocriminology: what makes humans commit crimes? Which brain regions are responsible for violence? One possibility—it’s an area of the hypothalamus called the ventromedial hypothalamus, “an ancient brain region that has been conserved throughout mammalian evolution.” Yikes!
As Jebelli notes, plots will abound from this inquiry, this research. As always, inquiring minds want to know.
Meanwhile, it’s April! So let us now praise Geoffrey Chaucer – whose compassion and imagination gave us “Whan that April with his showres soote The droughte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veine in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the flowr…”
And further to celebrate—Book 9 of my Alice MacDonald Greer legal thriller series has gone off for copy-edit. Yes, again the primal crime has been committed…!
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.
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.
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.
The world has been a crazy place since the emergence of Covid-19. Although it’s still out there, I’ve begun to venture forth into the world and attend author events. It feels wonderful to get back into the world of books and speaking with other writers! I think the last event I went to was the Bullet Books event in February of 2020 at the Bosslight Bookstore in Nacogdoches. (Fellow AMW writers Kathy Waller, Helen Currie Foster, and Laura Oles are also Bullet Books authors.)
The whole crewScott Montgomery and Joe LansdaleSwapping liesThe first batch
My first foray back into the public realm was a Noir At The Bar event in Dallas back in June. Of course, it was outside and still blazing hot even though it started at 7. But I had such a great time listening to the other authors that it was worth it! Not a dud in the bunch. We laughed at some stories and were creeped out by others. I read a short piece that I wrote a few years ago, Tutusuana. (“Tutusuana” is a Comanche word that’s explained in the story.) It was nice to see old friends and finally meet online friends in person. Loved the experience. I highly recommend The Wild Detectives bookstore/bar. This is a jewel in the Bishop Arts district in Dallas.
Mike McCraryEryk PruittWilliam Dylan PowellHarry HunsickerJim NesbittKathleen KentKasey LansdaleKevin R. TippleKeith LansdaleWho is this scary, short lady? Me!Scott MontgomeryJoe LansdaleTran Quỳnh Thị Vũ and Patrick Noel Batalla PombuenaOrganizer of event, Johnny WesnerPoster I designed
Now we travel to Book People. Yesterday, August 21, I went to my first Book People event since pre-Covid. Mark Pryor has a new book Die Around Sundown. This is the first book in a new series so of course I had to be there to cheer him on! I’m excited to read this book. It’s an historical mystery set in Nazi-occupied France. I enjoyed the book talk and, again, seeing friends in person that I haven’t seen in a while.
New books!Scott Montgomery introducing Mark Pryor
This Wednesday I plan to go to an author event at my local library. I haven’t met Michael Miller but since I live in a small town, I want to attend events and provide support. He’s a long-time university professor, presently at Texas State. And he is also a Presbyterian minister, serving La Iglesia Presbiteriana Mexicana for the last ten years in San Marcos. His book is The Two Deaths of Father Romero: A Novel of the Borderlands. Sounds interesting!
Then the next day I’ll be back at Book People, if the roads aren’t flooded. (We’ve been in a severe drought this summer, as much of the world has been too. I’m looking forward to the rain, but I hope it’s a slow, soaking rain and not a deluge.)
It’s going to be epic. Two of the authors are NYT best selling authors. All of the panelists are Texas mystery authors with stories set in Texas. You know I’m gonna love that. https://www.bookpeople.com/event/mystery-author-panel
Note: AMW member Helen Currie Foster will be on the panel too.
What a busy week! Looks like I have a lot of reading in my future. A few more books to add to my TBR (To Be Read) pile. My shelves are sagging. I better get busy, or build more shelves!
I wrote the following for my personal blog to answer a “challenge.” I intended to post it at the end of September 2009–yes, 2009. But I got all tangled up in words and couldn’t write a thing. Then I intended to post it at the end of October. I still couldn’t write it. I managed to write it after the October deadline.
In the middle of the “process,” I considered posting the following review: “I like Nancy Peacock’sA Broom of One’s Own very very very very very much.”
But the challenge specified a four-sentence review, and I had hardly one, and I didn’t want to repeat it three times.
So there’s the background.
I must also add this disclaimer: I bought my copy of A Broom of One’s Own myself, with my own money. No one told, asked, or paid me to write this review. No one told, asked, or paid me to say I like the book. No one told, asked, or paid me to like it. No one offered me tickets to Rio or a week’s lodging in Venice, more’s the pity. I decided to read the book, to like it, and to write this review all by myself, at the invitation of Story Circle Book Review Challenge. Nobody paid them either. Amen.
*********************************************
Review of Nancy Peacock’s A Broom of One’s Own
I like Nancy Peacock’s A Broom of One’s Own: Words About Writing, Housecleaning & Life so much that it’s taken me over two months and two missed deadlines to untangle my thoughts and write this four-sentence review, an irony Peacock, author of two critically acclaimed novels, would no doubt address were I in one of her writing classes.
She would probably tell me that there is no perfect writing life; that her job as a part-time house cleaner, begun when full-time writing wouldn’t pay the bills, afforded time, solitude, and the “foundation of regular work” she needed; that engaging in physical labor allowed her unconscious mind to “kick into gear,” so she became not the writer but the “receiver” of her stories.
She’d probably say that writing is hard; that sitting at a desk doesn’t automatically bring brilliance; that writers have to work with what they have; that “if I don’t have the pages I hate I will never have the pages I love”; that there are a million “saner” things to do and a “million good reasons to quit” and that the only good reason to continue is, “This is what I want.”
So, having composed at least two dozen subordinated, coordinated, appositived, participial-phrase-stuffed first sentences and discarding them before completion; having practically memorized the text searching for the perfect quotation to end with; and having once again stayed awake into the night, racing another deadline well past the due date, I am completing this review—because I value Nancy Peacock’s advice; and because I love A Broom of One’s Own; and because I consider it the equal of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird; and because I want other readers to know about it; and because this is what I want.
*
I’ve posted this review before both here and elsewhere. I consider the reposting a service to writers. The book is absolutely invaluable, and all writers need to know about it.
***
I blog at Telling the Truth, Mainly. I write crime fiction–have published short stories and am working on a novel. My blog, however, doesn’t have much to do with crime. There I write about anything that comes along. I like to think it’s eclectic, but it’s really just a jumble.
The definition of reading readiness is the point
at which a child goes from not reading, to reading.
~ Sight and Sound Reading
But, Gwammy, I can’t wead.*
~ Jenny, five years old, after one week in kindergarten
When I was five, my Great-aunt Ethel gave me an ancient primer. She had found it in an old school building, abandoned when consolidation sent children in my hometown to a school two miles away, and then used only as a polling place. The primer had also been abandoned, and Aunt Ethel, election judge, liberated it and gave it to the youngest member of the family (youngest by about forty years; it was an old town).
My parents read to me almost from day one. The story goes that, as a toddler, I met my father at the door every evening when he got home from work, saying, “‘Ead a book, Daddy.” (Unlike Jenny, I had no pwoblem pwonouncing my ahs; I just dropped them.)
We didn’t have a library nearby, but I plenty of books: a Bumper Book, Little Golden Books, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Andersen’s Fairy Tales, which I didn’t like, in part because they were dark (“The Little Match Girl”), but mostly because the end papers sported a hairy black thing with an ugly humanish face and enough long, winding legs to qualify it as a spider. Grimms’ tales were more pleasant.
When I received the primer, I already knew the alphabet. In fact, a year before, I’d written my name in red adhesive tape–the gooiest, stickiest adhesive I’ve ever come across–on the inside of the kitchen door. It stayed there for years.
Anyway, armed with the primer–a school book, for reading–I set about teaching myself. While my mother did housework, I trailed behind, spelling out words.
“T-h-e”
“The”
“m-a-n”
“man”
“s-a-i-d”
“said”
I don’t think I taught myself to read. But the next year, when I entered first grade–no kindergarten back then–I was ready. I took right off on the underwhelming adventures of Dick, Jane, and Sally (siblings who never had a decent disagreement) plus Spot and Puff, who came and ran a lot.
In second grade, I got a Little Big Book—Gunsmoke–that had one hundred pages. I read it on Saturday and reported the accomplishment in our Class News at school on Monday. Later I got a literary Little Big Book, Huckleberry Finn.One sentence confused me: a dead man’s leg was stuck out at a strange angel. I was about thirty when I realized angel was really angle. I was also surprised when, in high school, I learned that the Little Big Book had been severely abridged.
Then I discovered comic books. They were more educational than most people think. From Scrooge McDuck, I learned that emeralds come from South America. Unfamiliar with physics, I pronounced Atom Cat as A-Tomcat. Seemed reasonable.
The next year, thanks to a Christmas present from my grandmother, I discovered Nancy Drew. Nancy had a blue convertible and drove around wherever she wanted, and her father never grounded her. I envied Nancy her freedom. I didn’t like her, though; she had a tomboy friend, George, who said, “Hypers, you slay me,” which was fine, but her other friend, Bess, was plump, and Nancy often referred to how much Bess ate. I presume in later editions, Nancy behaved better. But her treatment of Bess didn’t stop me from reading about her. I wrote letters to Joske’s Department Store in San Antonio: “Please send me one copy of The Hidden Staircase and one copy of The Clue in the Jewel Box. Please charge my account.” They each cost two dollars. My mother kindly signed the letters. It was her account.
I soon outgrew Nancy, but, like many other mystery readers and writers, I credit her for getting me hooked. I read a couple of Trixie Beldens–Trixie was sickeningly enthusiastic when her mother made her dust the living room before going out to solve mysteries, but she did manage to sneak out at night. I read some Kathy Martins. Kathy, a nurse, often suspected her (nice guy) brother for whatever (minor) crime had been committed, which I thought strange, but she was more mature and more realistic than other characters. No convertible, no sneaking.
Young Adult novels didn’t exist as a genre until the late sixties, when increased federal money became available to schools, and authors found a new audience. Born too soon, I moved from children’s books into adult fare: Zane Grey, Thomas B. Costain, Charles Dickens, Aldous Huxley, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Daphne DuMaurier, Rafael Sabatini (Scaramouche: “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”) Noticing that I read the classics, the bookmobile librarian, unasked, brought me a copy of the scandalous Madame Bovary. I was fifteen. He’s still my hero.
On the bookmobile, I rediscovered mysteries in the real thing—Sherlock Holmes. I cried and cried when he and Moriarty went over Reichenbach Falls. Nobody told me he would be back.
But enough about me. The point is that reading was, and is, important to me.
And that this week I’ve been reading A Velocity of Being: Letters to Young Readers, edited by Maria Popova & Claudia Bedrick. The editors compiled 121 letters from “scientists, musicians, artists, philosophers, composers, poets, actors, a 98-year-old Holocaust survivor, Italy’s first woman in space, and many more remarkable humans whose splendor of spirit cannot be contained in the shorthand descriptors we often use to condense a person’s character and cultural contributions.” Each letter is paired with an illustration to “bring it to life visually.”
Many letters describe books as portals to the universe, to other worlds, to adventure, to curiosity and questions, to dreams, to logic and imagination; they’re boats and planes and magic carpets. Contributors write about hating book reports, and being hellions when they were little and refused to listen to Goodnight Moon at bedtime because they wanted dinosaurs, and being called antisocial when they preferred to read instead of play with friends.
But other contributors take the subject to a deeper level:
Author Alain deBotton writes, We wouldn’t need books quite so much if everyone around us understood us well. But they don’t. Even those who love us get us wrong. They claim to know what we need, but forget to ask us properly first. They can’t understand what we feel . . . That’s the moment to turn to books They are friends waiting for us, and they will always speak honestly to us. They are the perfect cure for loneliness. They can be our very closest friends.
Screenwriter Shonda Rhimessays, Reading saved me. When I was twelve, I spent most of my day trying to be invisible. The year before I’d been the new girl in school, and I’d spent a lot of time trying to be accepted. . . . The very desire to bend and twist to fit in–assures your rejection They did not like me. They hated me.
I spent a lot of time alone. I rode the bus alone. I spent weekends alone, I ate lunch alone. Except I was never alone. I always had a book in my hand. If you have a book, you don’t need to bend and twist to fit–you’re there. You are in. . . .
If you have a book in your hand, you can stop being invisible. Because you’re a little more invincible.
Venture capitalist Chris Sacca says that books are dangerous: If you keep reading, you might learn so much that you can take over for the adults and then you kids will be in charge! You all could be the journalists, entrepreneurs, artists, professors, authors, doctors, explorers, scientists, and even the leaders of our countries! Then what would the grown-ups do? Live in a world run by brilliant, interesting, innovative, and compassionate young people. Ugh. No, thank you.
So please stop reading before you become really smart, successful, and happy.
But seriously, books are dangerous. Holocaust survivor Helen Fagin writes about life in the World War II Polish ghetto, where being caught reading by the Nazis meant anything from hard labor to death. But books were smuggled in, read by each person for only one night, and then, for the sake of safety, passed on. She stayed up all one night reading Gone with the Wind. Then she decided the children she secretly taught needed not dry information, but stories. And for one hour each night, she told them the story of Scarlett and Melanie, Rhett and Ashley; and for that hour they “escaped a world of murder.” Then “a knock at the door shattered our dream world.” Years later, she met one of only four of the students who survived. The woman called her “the source of my hopes and my dreams in times of total deprivation and dehumanization.”
Composer Mohammad Fairouz shares a story that I cherish from my upbringing; . . . 1400 years ago in the deserts of Arabia, a meditative prophet named Mohammad had a vision of the Angel Gabriel who came to him with a message: “Read” . . . This was the first word of the Quran.
In the years following the prophet’s death, his followers built an empire where they contributed to every branch of knowledge, from algebra to optics and medicine to music. Countless things we have today would not exist without their contributions: that includes space stations, glasses, aspirin, your iPad.
They were able to do this because they were inspired to seek out the power that comes with being to read. You deserve the same power . . .
Years ago, I knew a young man who had never learned to read. I don’t know why; he just hadn’t. As an adult, he took a literacy class. He said that when he traveled for his work, he was always scared, because he couldn’t read road signs, and he was afraid he would get lost. At the most basic level, reading is power.
And consider: At one time in the American South, it was illegal to teach slaves to read. If they were literate, they might be able to read signs that would help them escape. They might also read some inconvenient truths: “. . . that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness . . .” Inconvenient for their owners, that is.
“So the research shows that perhaps reading fiction does make people behave better. Certainly some institutions consider the effects of reading to be so significant that they now include modules on literature. At the University of California Irvine, for example, Johanna Shapiro from the Department of Family Medicine firmly believes that reading fiction results in better doctors and has led the establishment of a humanities programme to train medical students.
“It sounds as though it’s time to lose the stereotype of the shy bookworm whose nose is always in a book because they find it difficult to deal with real people. In fact, these bookworms might be better than everyone else at understanding human beings.”
Philosopher and professor Martha Nussbaum gives an example: The great African-American novelist Ralph Ellison said that a novel like his Invisible Man could be “a raft of hope, perception, and entertainment” on which America could “negotiate the snags and whirlpools” that stand between us and the democratic ideal. He’s referring here to Huck Finn and Jim, who got to know one another as full human beings, rather than just as a white man and a black man, when they traveled down the river on a raft together. On the raft, they had to look at one another, listen to one another’s stories. In our divided society, such encounters happen all too seldom in real life, and are fraught with mistrust when they do. Reading can create such encounters in the head, so that the ones that happen in the world are a little less crude, a little less deformed by fear and anger.
Huckleberry Finn has for years made the American Library Association’s list of most often challenged, banned, or restricted books–a novel that can teach us to be better people.
Design writer and educator Steven Heller extends the idea that reading is power and issues a challenge: Books are weapons in humankind’s battle against ignorance. I don’t mean like lasers and drones. I mean that knowledge is strength and the kind of knowledge you get from books is not the same as the quick fix that Googling gets you. What’s more, books can’t be hacked. But they can he censored, which means blocked or forbidden from being published. And this is why they are so valuable to us all. Often in fighting ignorance, the ignorant take books prisoner. If you don’t read books, then those that have been censored over the ages will be lost and forgotten. So kids, don’t let them down. Read them, savor them protect them. Don’t let others make books irrelevant.
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*Jenny soon learned to wead. And to pwonounce her ahs.
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I’ve gone on too long. If you’re still with me, thanks for sticking. And one more thing: Despite the title, A Velocity of Being isn’t just for young readers. It’s also for adults who need to be reminded to make reading part of their children’s lives.
While writing this post, Kathy was watching/listening to an old TV series of Dorothy L. Sayers‘ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. Bless Youtube and all who post on her. (Opinion: Ian Carmichael was the best Peter Wimsey by far.)
George Woodstock received the peculiar phone call on his sixty-sixth birthday. . . He let the phone ring twice, then answered, “Woodstock Machine Shop.”
It was Helen’s voice. “Clara called, George.”
“Where is she?”
“Your sister. She’s out at Woodstock where she always is. Your papa has escaped from the nursing home.” . . .
“What in the hell does escaped mean? Did you ask any questions? . . . Have they put up a fence for patients to climb over? Or did he tunnel out? Did he wound any guards? I thought Papa was in a nursing facility.”
“Please don’t be snotty, George. I’m only telling you what Clara said. I said you’d call back.”
According to Best Mystery Novels, mysteries must meet certain criteria: there must be a puzzle; a detective or protagonist who sets out to solve the puzzle; suspects; clues; red herrings; hidden evidence; gaps in information; and suspense.
The Heirs of Franklin Woodstock isn’t classed as a mystery. It’s “general fiction.” Literary fiction. It isn’t shelved in bookstores and libraries amongst the Christies and the Hammetts and the Chandlers.
Author Benjamin Capps is famous for his award-winning historical fiction, realistic novels set in an Old West lacking the romance of pulp fiction. He didn’t write mysteries.
But based on the criteria laid out above, The Heirs of Franklin Woodstock is a mystery. On page one, the puzzle is laid out: ninety-one-year-old rancher Franklin Woodstock has “escaped” from the nursing home and is missing. And protagonist George Woodstock sets out on the three-hour drive from Fort Worth, northwest to the town of Woodstock, near his father’s seven-thousand-acre ranch, to find out what’s going on. (Clara, the sister who called, is known in the family as “a dingbat.”)
George’s investigation begins in chaos. The sheriff says they don’t usually find missing persons, just bodies they then identify by going through the files. He has two deputies out looking and will call in more searchers–George offers to help with expenses if necessary–but that’s about all his office can do.
At the Goodhaven Nursing Home, George asks the nurse at the front desk if she has a clue as to what his father might have been thinking in the days before he disappeared. She has a ready, and vehement, non-answer:
“I’m trying to bring the charts up for the next shift,” she said. ” . . . Now, sir, I would like to tell you what is charted again and again about Mr. Franklin Woodstock: Stubborn! Will not eat boiled and mashed carrots. Stubborn! Will not accept bath. Stubborn! Will not let aides assist in toilet. Stubborn! Tries to pinch aide or nurse. Stubborn! Will not lay as asked in bed. Stubborn! Pulls out feeding tube. Stubborn! Broke injection needle. Stubborn! Will not swallow boiled and mashed vegetables. Stubborn! Spits out pills.”
Asked the same question, the ward nurse sticks out a hand: “See that thumb? That knuckle! That’s where a patient bit me. Just bit me on purpose. . . . She’s only got about seven teeth and she sunk every of them into my thumb.”
The Director of Nursing speaks more formally, but her only specific reference to George’s father is that a nurse was fired because she was discovered bringing him food from home–ground broiled steak mixed with mushroom soup and thermoses of cold beer.
At the Woodstock ranch, George finds a haven in the person of Izzy, housekeeper, cook, compulsive gardener, canner, egg gatherer and churner of butter, and mother to everyone, although she’s probably no older than George. Izzy’s son Juan, who’s always gone by the name of Johnny Woodstock, is, as always, doing the practical–heading out on horseback with tenant-cowhands Buck and Slim to search for their employer. Johnny knows the ranch nearly as well as Franklin does.
Then the phone calls begin, and the six-hour round-trips to the airport in Fort Worth to pick up siblings and to try to keep his small machine shop afloat.
So the suspects gather. With plans. And motives.
Walter, a New York businessman with a degree from Harvard Business School, sees an opportunity to subdivide five thousand acres for an exclusive community, “no low-class people.” With his experience, of course, he’ll head up the project. That Chicano Johnny is good enough for punching cows but using a computer and managing a huge enterprise? Maybe he graduated from high school. Walter has also hired a private detective to find Papa, no matter how far he has to go or how much it costs.
Irma and her evangelist son Wilbur propose a different idea: The ranch will become Noah’s Ark, a combination religious retreat that will attract famous preachers, and a place of safety where every resident will be armed, a thousand rounds of ammo for each rifle, seeds, chainsaws, experts who can fix windmills and water pumps, animals two by two . . . because Russia, or somebody, is preparing to drop the Bomb. They’ve thought it out to the nth degree. Papa was a Born Again Christian and would have approved. Wilbur will probably be the first president, receiving a modest salary of $60,000. Irma had suggested $100,000.
Clara seems to want only to spoil her grandchildren, and Clarence, with a Ph.D. in literature and teaching in California, seems only to want to sit up all night with George, sharing several six-packs and talking old times. But Frank, his geologist son, believes the ranch sits on deep oil wells that could be profitable.
During George’s long drives between Fort Worth and the ranch, we learn a lot about Franklin Woodstock. He hasn’t always been “stubborn” or “Born Again.” He’s been a hard worker and a shrewd manager, starting with nothing and acquiring land and cattle, building “the Old Place” and later a large house, adding stock tanks and windmills, working alongside his hands in every endeavor. He has raised a family and sent his children to any school they wanted. When Clara’s grandson, Homer, who is “different,” is expelled from third grade for arguing unintelligibly with the teacher because he doesn’t want to sit down, and then (it is assumed) keeps breaking into the school library and stealing books (which are always returned), Franklin somehow smooths things over and starts building a library in his own home; the break-ins cease. Homer can’t read but seems to think if he could , he would understand what everyone else does.
Franklin Woodstock is the best man George has ever known.
We learn a lot about George, too: a surveyor with the CCC, a navigator who flew forty missions over the Pacific in World War II, an assistant engineer with the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, a machinist and tool-and-die maker. He’s a man with a high school education who wants to work with his hands, and he’s good at it. His father respects that and has promised him $100,000 to expand his business–a loan, not a gift. But with nothing on paper, and no witnesses to the promise, George doesn’t know whether he’ll get the money. And he feels guilty for even thinking about it.
He’s also worried that his siblings are behaving as if Papa is already dead. Walter says they can have him declared so. Walter is determined. Who knows what the others will agree to?
Although the active characters are the heirs of Franklin Woodstock, the old man holds the novel together. He’s missing. Is he dead or alive? Will they ever know?
What happened to Franklin Woodstock? There’s the mystery.
There are, of course, clues, red herrings, hidden evidence, gaps in information, suspense–all of the other basic criteria. But it would be a shame to share too much here.
As they say in fourth-grade book reports, if you want to know what happens, you’ll have to read the book.
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A word about the author:
Benjamin Capps was born in 1922 in Dundee, Archer County, Texas.
At fifteen, he entered Texas Technological College in Lubbock but left after a year to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps and then as a surveyor in the U. S. Department of Engineering. As a navigator, he flew forty missions over the Pacific in World War II. He received two degrees in English and journalism from the University of Texas and taught at Northeastern State College in Oklahoma. But teaching didn’t allow him time to write and drained his creativity. He became a machinist and tool-and-die maker before becoming a full-time writer. He lived in Grand Prairie, Texas.
According to Capps, his writing’s aim is to be authentic and “to probe the human nature and human motives” involved in his stories. His works are painstakingly researched for historical accuracy and generally explore lesser known facets of the American frontier.
Three of his books won Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America. One novel and one work of nonfiction received a Wrangler Award from the Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center. He was the recipient of numerous other awards.
Dundee, Capps’ birthplace, is nineteen miles from Archer City, where Larry McMurtry was born eleven years later. Capps never achieved McMurtry’s fame (or notoriety).
But he’s been counted among writers such as Walter Van Tilburg Clark and Conrad Richter for writing about the Old West with “compelling authenticity.”
James W. Lee, Director, Center for Texas Studies, University of North Texas, calls his Woman of the People “the finest novel ever to come out of Texas.” (Note: Lee is right.)
He also says “Ben Capps is the Texas author whose work will still be read a hundred years from now.”
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Kathy Waller has published short stories and one novella, Stabbed, written with Manning Wolfe. She blogs at Telling the Truth, Mainly.
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Sources:
Benjamin Capps. The Heirs of Franklin Woodstock. Lubbock: TCU Press, 1989.
Master’s class, “Literature and Lore of the Southwest,” Southwest Texas State University, taught by Dr. Dickie Heaberlin, 1984. Memory and informed opinions of Kathy Waller, student.
First off, the best job I ever had (short of writing mysteries) was teaching. And yes, I taught Middle Schoolers, which most people think is the worst possible teaching job you can have. Not me. I loved the students, and I loved my fellow teachers and staff. The kids were sponges. As long as you weren’t a jerk to them, they weren’t a jerk to you. And when they succeeded, both teacher and student won. The same could be said for all of us school employees who came to work every day to help those students become educated, excellent citizens.
What does that have to do with Sisters in Crime? Well, this time I’M the student, and my fellow chapter members and I are the sponges, learning as much as we possibly can to be better writers, readers and business people.
Sisters in Crime (SinC), both on the national level and the chapter levels, provides the teaching. The organization is based solely on helping readers and writers, women and men to learn their craft and sell their books.
SinC is the premier crime writing association focused on equity and inclusion in our community and in publishing. The association, founded in 1986, has 4500+ members who enjoy access to tools to help them learn, grow, improve, thrive, reinvent if necessary, and to share the lessons they’ve learned during their mystery writing experience.
4500+ members? That’s a whole lot of folks to learn from!
SinC National offers many resources to mystery readers and writers. They support a large international network of local chapter with grants, webinars, a central bank of crime-writing research, etc. They support local libraries and independent bookstores. National also provides a monthly newsletter called inSinC which is sent to every member.
Local chapters are where the meatiest teaching takes place. In the last year, our Heart of Texas Chapter centered in Austin, Texas, hosted a plethora of programs spanning the mystery writing need-to-know list. NY Times Bestselling author L.R. Ryan shared her secrets to plotting the blockbuster novel. Cathy DeYoung, a former LAPD CSI fingerprint analyst (and the inspiration for the character of Abby on the TV show, NCIS) walked us through the steps of exploring a crime scene. Mike Kowis, a mild-mannered tax attorney for a Fortune 500 company AND a fellow author, taught us the ins and out of the tax code for authors and other legal matters. Oh, and we were graced with a frank Q & A with the U.S. District Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas.
Honestly. Why would a writer not want to learn from these experts?? And these incredible lessons all were brought together through the Sisters in Crime organizations.
Once you get past the realization that we kill people for a living (on the page, of course), crime writers and readers are a very supportive, very giving group of people. And Sisters in Crime is the best way to get to know them.
At book groups I ask the beloved readers: “Why do we read mysteries?”
After a pause, for modesty, one honest person says: “We like to figure it out!”
Yes, we do. Why? Writer Patricia Cornwell, who created the forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta, gives this answer as to why readers are fascinated by murder forensics: “To me, this goes back to our tribal survival instincts. If you can re-create a situation in your mind about what happened to someone, how that person died, there’s a better chance it won’t happen to you…[I]t’s part of the life force compelling us to look death in the face…We want to learn what happened…so we’ll feel less vulnerable about the same thing happening to us. It’s the kind of curiosity that propels us to study monsters.” https://amzn.to/3vQ3fPe
While survival provides an evolutionary purpose for curiosity, Livio points out, “One of the things that researchers still don’t have an answer to, is that we, as humans, seem to be much more curious than what is just necessary for survival.”
According to Livio, we have two basic types of curiosity that show up in two different parts of our brains during MRI scans. One type is “perceptual curiosity”—what we feel when something surprises or puzzles us. “It is felt as a sort of uneasiness, an unpleasant situation … like an itch you need to scratch…,” he says. Yes, that creepy feeling, the hair on the nape of your neck prickling, because something doesn’t feel quite right. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/makes-us-curious/
The interesting thing about murder is that we seem convinced that ultimately, the murderer will be found out. At least as early as the 14th century, in The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400) knew readers were sure they could identify a murderer. “The Priest’s Tale” tells us, “Though it may skulk a year, or two, or three, Murder will out…”
In Hamlet (c.1602), King Claudius fears detection of his murder of Hamlet’s father. He confesses at prayer, “O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; it hath the primal eldest curse upon it, a brother’s murder.” Act III, Scene 4. Hamlet has already announced in a soliloquy, “For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.” Hamlet, Act II Sc. 2. Hamlet intends to play detective, sure that he himself can detect the king’s guilt by watching the king’s reaction to the play he has the actors perform: “I’ll observe his looks…if he but blench, I know my course.”
Literary agent Anne Tibbets says mystery readers insist on understanding what happened. We are outraged if the author dares hide or suppress clues: we want a fair shot at solving the murder. We evaluate each potential suspect; we note physical clues; we scrutinize alibis; we use our own human experience to test the strength of each suspect’s motives. But as readers, of course we depend on the protagonist asking the right questions for us, identifying the victim, interviewing witnesses, examining the crime scene, noticing every salient detail. Each murder mystery effectively presents us with a miniature history of a crime, and we must absorb, and dissect, that history in order to satisfy ourselves we know “what happened.”
Because we’re curious. Or, as Alice observes in her visit to Wonderland, “Curiouser and curiouser.” Lewis Carroll dubbed Alice “this curious child” and indeed, following Alice down the rabbit hole, we too want to know what the golden key will open and what’s behind the little door.
Alice is an indefatigable questioner. For instance, quizzing the Mock Turtle about his school days, she asks, “What else had you to learn?”
“Well, there was Mystery,” the Mock Turtle replied…”Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography…”
Mystery, for history, ancient and modern. The Mock Turtle is spot on. So much of history remains a mystery: no matter how many questions we ask, no matter how skilled and diligent the historian, no matter how thick the tome or how voluminous the footnotes, we never have all the documents, all the testimony, needed to understand everything that happened during, say, the great convulsions of history. Just think of the unknown moments buried during Reconstruction, or the Spanish Civil War, or the Russian Revolution, or…
Like Alice, mystery readers are “curiouser and curiouser.” The joy of being a mystery reader, after experiencing the miniature history within a good murder mystery, we reach the conclusion we’ve awaited. For once, at least, our curiosity is satisfied. We know “what happened.”
Author Helen Currie Foster lives and writes north of Dripping Springs, Texas, supervised by three burros. She writes the Alice MacDonald Greer mysteries, set in the small town of Coffee Creek, Texas, somewhere west of Dripping Springs and east of Fredericksburg. In Book 7, Alice finds herself in a lethal battle over hidden art and the victim’s will. Available on Amazon and IngramSpark, and at BookPeople in Austin.
Austin Mystery Writers 