Meet my newest character, Cleo Jimenez, a former Marine, former police officer, and now Dallas-based private investigator. “Mirror Life Meltdown,” in Black Cat Weekly #255, is Cleo’s first published appearance, but not the first story I wrote for her. That story is still awaiting publication later this year. Her third case is currently on submission.
Cleo is non-descript, with average height, average build, average looks. She’s a thirty-something, brown-hair-in-a-pony-tail, jeans-and-t-shirt kind of woman. She’s not into fancy clothes, fussy hair-dos, or make-up. Being average makes it easier for her to blend into the background when she is following a subject suspected of infidelity. The majority of Cleo’s cases involve family drama, from cheating spouses to crimes caused by addiction, mental illness, greed, vanity, and lust. In Cleo’s world, a bird that walks like a duck is usually a duck, not a whooping crane. Her cases stem from people doing stupid things and making bad choices, resulting in blow-ups in their personal lives.
Cleo enjoys romance novels, historical or modern. She studied communication at the local community college. She can handle a gun, but doesn’t usually need to carry one, since taking photos of cheating spouses, unseen, rarely leads to conflict. She drinks Shiner Bock beer and drives an older model Nissan.
When Cleo accepts a case surveilling a professor whose wife is concerned by his sudden inattentiveness and lack of communication, she isn’t expecting a deep dive into the world of university-level bioengineering and biochemistry research. She fully expects to photograph the professor in a sleazy motel, maybe with a grad student. Then her duck turns into a whooping crane, and the case takes on potentially earth-shattering consequences. Thank goodness Cleo is resourceful, even when out of her depth!
Where did the idea for this story come from?
I saw a call for a short story of any genre that included a mention of something potentially apocalyptic. As I was pondering the guidelines, I asked my neurodiverse college student son, who is currently working as an undergraduate research assistant at the University of Texas at Austin, if he could think of any possible causes of a man-made apocalypse, excluding obvious things like thermonuclear war or robots and AI. He spouted a list. (This is a fairly normal conversation in my house.) The creation of mirror life bacteria was on his list. I asked what that was. He defined it. Fortunately, I retained enough of the chemistry and organic chemistry classes that I took in college to understand his explanation.
Then I went to the internet and read several articles on mirror molecules and mirror life. In one of those odd quirks of coincidence, I even received a newsletter from UT Austin with an article about the work on mirror molecules being done at UT Dallas around that time.
Now I had an interesting topic and a setting: UT Dallas, where my oldest son attended college. Next, I needed some characters for the story.
I have another PI character who lives and works in the Dallas area. Her name is Maya Laster, and she’s a private investigator specializing in forensic and genetic genealogy. I considered how I could place Maya in a mirror-life case, but she felt wrong for the story. Then I remembered Cleo. Cleo was perfect for the case I was imagining.
In her next adventure, Cleo is hired to stand guard over a painting at the State Fair of Texas. That case, entitled “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Likes,” will appear in the anthology Big Tex and Suspects: Crime at the State Fair of Texas which is scheduled for release later this year.
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For more information on short fiction by N.M. Cedeño, visit nmcedeno.com
The Grimm Brothers’ tales, first published in 1812, are part of our childhoods—Hansel and Gretel! Little Red Riding Hood ( aka Little Red-Cap)! Cinderella! Rumpelstiltskin!Rapunzel! Sleeping Beauty! Snow White! The Bremen Town Musicians! As you well know, some tales involve grisly situations where children—to survive––must be resourceful. Hansel, caged by the wicked witch in the woods to become her future supper, sticks a bone through the bars to convince the witch he’s not yet fattened up. When the witch orders his sister Gretel to climb into the oven to see if it is “hot enough,” Gretel—no fool—persuades the witch to demonstrate—then shoves her in! The children escape!
As folklore students in Hesse, Germany, the Grimm Brothers collected and edited (perhaps with extra moralizing) oral versions of tales from family friends. The Grimms ultimately gave us two hundred fairy tales. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Brothers-Grimm.
The Grimms’ (grim) lesson that youngsters will use every means to stay safe—including trickery and persuasion—also appears in The Three Billy Goats Gruff (one of the Norwegian tales collected 1841-1844 by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe). https://bit.ly/4vffbac
The three hungry young goats, desperate to cross a bridge to reach their grassy meadow, are in peril of becoming lunch for the ravenous troll threatening them from beneath the bridge. The two younger goats cleverly urge the troll to wait for their toothsome big brother as they race across—and then big brother defeats the troll.
Hunger! Danger! Potential betrayal! The need for ruses! For cleverness! Even disguises! Fierce lessons for children!
And for grownups? Oh, yes. Consider the perils faced by Odysseus in The Odyssey, when the crafty architect of the Trojan Horse departs for home after the Trojan War. He (like the children in the old tales) will need all the ruses he can develop, all the disguises he can wear, all the courage he can muster, to deal with the Cyclops Polyphemus… The nymph Calypso, who traps him in her cave… Poseidon, furious… Circe! Scylla and Charybdis! A tale of tales….and of a teller of tales.
Such troves of scholarship in past years! 1996 brought us Robert Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey. Fagles tells us this epic poem (12,109 lines of hexameter verse) was “composed, probably, late in the eighth century B.C. or early in the seventh…The poem, in other words, is some 2,700 years old.”
Fagles says copies of the poem “were to be found all over the Greek world of the fourth and fifth centuries B.C.” Fagles, at 3. https://bit.ly/4vbzDbR
The year 2014 brought us Adam Nicolson’s Why Homer Matters. Nicolson envisions Homer as recording the conflicts experienced when “the semi-nomadic, hero-based culture of the Eurasian steppes to the north and west of the Black Sea” moved south and encountered “the sophisticated, authoritarian and literate cities…of the eastern Mediterranean. Greekness…emerged from the meeting and melding of those two worlds.” At 2. For Nicolson, “Homer is a foundation myth, not of man nor of the natural world, but of the way of thinking by which the Greeks defined themselves” and “which, in many ways we have inherited.” For instance, which matters most? Individual or community? The debate continues.
Nicolson sees the poems as recording “the violence and sense of strangeness of about 1800 BC recollected in the tranquillity of about 1300 BC…written down (if not in a final form) in about 700 BC.” At 4. Nicolson says the oldest surviving example of written Greek poetry is three lines of Greek scratched onto a funeral offering, a wine cup. “The second and third lines…are perfect Homeric hexameters” but not, Nicholson says, of Homer’s poetry.
Both Fagles and Nicolson cite the pioneering work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. In the 1920’s Parry discovered that TheOdyssey and The Iliad were full of prefabricated bits (such as descriptions of the “wine-dark sea”). Using those bits could allow a singing poet—the bard—to keep the metrical pattern of the music moving, while letting listeners hear and feel the traditional elements they’ve heard before, and anticipate hearing again. Nicolson, at 77-79. In what sounds like epic grad school work, Parry’s student Albert Lord accompanied him for two years through remote villages of Yugoslavia to hear and record over seven hundred singers, each using their single-stringed violin (the gusle) (interesting to hear online!) as accompaniment to their “long epic songs of battle and disaster.” Nicolson, at 83, 85. Albert Lord turned those two years into his remarkable book on oral composition of epic poetry by bards, in The Singer of Tales, Cambridge, Mass., 1960. https://bit.ly/4vQM6Da
Is there a bard in the 2026 version of The Odyssey about to hit our screens? Yes!
What will we hear?
Will it be poetic?
Nicolson reminds us that “Homeric epics are essentially the music of hexameters.” At 76. Each line has six “feet.” Feet can have a long stress and two shorts (dactyl) or two longs (spondee). The fifth foot is usually a dactyl while the sixth must be a spondee. Id. Because each line has a natural break in the middle, the bard can tailor the music to the varying stresses.
The Fagles translation is in hexameter, but Fagles notes, “Turning briefly to Homer’s metrics, I would also like to hold a middle ground, here between his spacious hexameter line—his ‘ear, ear for the sea-surge’ as Pound once heard—and a tighter line more native to English verse.” So his translation “opts for a freer give-and-take between the two.” He works “from a five-or six-beat line while leaning more to six” but sometimes, seven beats, or, for stress, three. Fagles, at 492.
But wait! In 2018, Emily Wilson published a new version of The Odyssey. And hers—is entirely in iambic pentameter! Five feet, ten syllables…as she shows us in line one: “Tell me about a complicated man.” Why?
As she says in her Translator’s Note, “The Odyssey is a poem, and it needs to have a predictable and distinctive rhythm that can be easily heard when the text is read out loud. The original is in six-footed lines (dactylic hexameters), the conventional meter for archaic Greek narrative verse. I used iambic pentameter, because it is the conventional meter for regular English narrative verse—the rhythm of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Keats, and plenty of more recent anglophone poets.” Wilson, at 82.
However the dialogue sounds in the 2026 movie version, I can’t wait to see—and hear—this version of Homer’s The Odyssey. If it was 2700 years old in 1996, it’s 2730 years old now…and still bringing in the crowds. Because, all these years later, we still beg, “Tell me a story!”
Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery Series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. Follow her at http://www.helencurriefoster.com and on Facebook. The ten books in the series are available online at Amazon and at BookPeople in Austin.
I’m working on a mystery novel—I’ve been working on it for years, but am now seeing the light at the end of the tunnel—and am faced with dilemmas too numerous to whine about in only one post, so I’ll move along.
I will instead write about the one pleasure of the writing life: creating and naming characters.
My novel is set in a little town very like my own hometown. I don’t base my plot on real events, and I don’t use real people as characters—with one exception: Steve Dauchy.
Not Steve, but close
Note: One of my readers, Dr. Cullen Dauchy, knows more about Steve than I do, especially about his early life, and I hope he’ll feel free to correct any errors.
Steve Dauchy was a career blood donor at Katy Veterinary Clinicin Katy, Texas. On retirement he moved to Fentress, where he lived with his veterinarian-owner’s parents, Joe and Norma Dauchy. Joe and Norma lived next door to me; in local terms, next door meant that my house was on one corner, then there was a half-acre “patch” of pecan and peach trees and grass and weeds, then a street, and then on the next corner, the Dauchy yard and their house. The point being that when Steve visited me, he didn’t just stroll across a driveway.
Joe was my dad’s first cousin, so I guess that makes Steve and me second cousins. I have a lot of cousins on that side of the family, although most are human.
Steve is a family name, with a story behind it. As I understand it, back in the ’20s or ’30s, my Great-uncle Cull (Joseph Cullen Dauchy, Sr.), enjoyed listening to a radio program about a Greek character who frequently spoke of “my cat Steve and her little cattens.” Uncle Cull was so amused by the phrase that he named a cat—probably one of the barn cats—Steve. And for the next forty or so years, he always had a cat named Steve.
Uncle Cull and Aunt Myrtle Dauchy’s house, home of the first Steves
So when the clinic cat became part of the Uncle Cull’s son and daughter-in-law’s family, he became the latest in a long line of Steves.
How to describe Steve? He was a fine figure of a cat: a big tabby, deep orange, with an expression of perpetual boredom. His reaction to nearly everything translated as, “Meh.” I’ve heard that’s common among clinic cats.
Once when Steve was standing on my front porch, the neighbor’s Great Dane got loose and charged over. I was frantic, shouting at the dog, shouting at Steve. But when the dog hit the porch, Steve just looked up at him. Dog turned around and trotted home.
Some would say Steve was brave, and I’m sure he was. But I believe his grace under pressure had its roots elsewhere.
First, he had experience. He knew dogs. In his former employment, he’d observed the breed: big, little, yappy, whining, growling, howling, cringing, confined to carriers, restrained by leashes, sporting harnesses and rhinestone collars, hair wild and matted, sculpted ‘dos and toenails glistening pink from the OPI Neon Collection. He’d seen them all. He was not impressed.
Facing down a Great Dane, however, took more than experience. There was something in Steve’s character, an inborn trait that marked him for greatness: his overarching sense of entitlement. He was never in the wrong place at the wrong time. My porch was his porch. The world was his sardine.
Except for the kitchen counter. Steve thought kitchen counters were for sleeping, but Joe and Norma’s maid didn’t. Consequently, he stayed outside a lot. He took ostracism in stride and used his freedom to range far and wide. Far and wide meant my yard.
Steve’s house
At that time I had three indoor cats—Christabel, Chloe, and Alice B. Toeclaws—and a raft of outdoor cats. The outdoor cats started as strays, but I made the mistake of naming them, which meant I had to feed them, which meant they were mine. Chief among them was Bunny, a black cat who had arrived as a teenager with his gray-tabby mother, Edith.
One day Bunny, Edith, and I were out picking up pecans when Steve wandered over to pay his respects, or, more likely, to allow us to pay our respects to him. Bunny perked up, put on his dangerous expression, and walked out to meet the interloper. It was like watching the opening face-off in Gunsmoke.
But instead of scrapping, they stopped and sat down, face to face, only inches apart. Each raised his right paw above his head and held it there a moment. Next, simultaneously, they bopped each other on the top of the head about ten times. Then they toppled over onto their sides, got up, and walked away.
That happened every time they met. Maybe it was just a cat thing, a neighborly greeting, something like a Masonic handshake. But I’ve wondered if it might have had religious significance. Bunny was a Presbyterian, and Steve was a Methodist, and both had strong Baptist roots, and although none of those denominations is big on ritual, who knows what a feline sect might entail?
Steve had a Macavity-like talent for making himself invisible. Occasionally when I opened my front door, he slipped past and hid in a chair at the dining room table, veiled by the tablecloth. When he was ready to leave, he would hunt me down—Surprise!—and lead me to the door. Once, during an extended stay, he used the litter box. Christabel, Chloe, and Alice B. Toeclaws were not amused.
Distance Steve traveled between his house and mine. His house is way over there behind the trees.
Invisibility could work against him, though. Backing out of the driveway one morning, I saw in the rearview mirror a flash streaking across the yard. I got out and looked around but found nothing and so decided I’d imagined it. When I got home from work, I made a thorough search and located Steve under my house, just out of reach. I called, coaxed, cajoled. He stared. It was clear: he’d been behind the car when I backed out, I’d hit him, and he was either too hurt to move or too disgusted to give me the time of day.
It took a long time and a can of sardines to get him out. I delivered him to the veterinarian in Lockhart; she advised leaving him for observation. A couple of days later, I picked him up. Everything was in working order, she said, cracked pelvis, nothing to do but let him get over it.
“Ordinarily,” said the vet, “I would have examined him and sent him home with you the first day. I could tell he was okay. But you told me his owner’s son is a vet, and I was afraid I’d get it wrong.”
Although he was an indoor-outdoor cat, Steve managed plenty of indoor time at his own house, too, especially in winter, and when the maid wasn’t there. One cold day, the family smelled something burning. They found Steve snoozing atop the propane space heater in the kitchen. His tail hung down the side, in front of the vent. The burning smell was the hair on his tail singeing. They moved him to a safer location. I presume he woke up during relocation.
At night, he had his own bedroom, a little garden shed in the back yard. He slept on the seat of the lawnmower, snuggled down on a cushion. Except when he didn’t.
One extremely cold night, I was piled up in bed under an extra blanket and three cats. About two a.m., I woke up to turn over—sleeping under three cats requires you to wake up to turn over—and in the process, reached down and touched one of the cats. It was not my cat.
I cannot describe the wave of fear that swept over me. It sounds ridiculous now, but finding myself in the dark with an unidentified beast, and unable to jump and run without first extricating myself from bedding and forty pounds of cat—I lay there paralyzed.
Unnecessarily, of course. The extra cat was Steve. He’s sneaked in and, considering the weather forecast, decided that sleeping with a human and three other cats in a bed would be superior to hunkering down on a lawnmower.
Steve’s full name was, of course, Steve Dauchy. In my book, he will be Steve MacCaskill. MacCaskill was the name of a family who lived next door to my Aunt Bettie and Uncle Maurice. Their children were friends of my father and his brothers and their many cousins. They were a happy family.
“My family had to plan everything,” my dad’s cousin Lucyle Dauchy Meadows (Steve’s aunt) told me, “but the MacCaskills were spontaneous. If they decided they wanted to go to a movie, they just got into the car and went to a movie.” When Lucyle and the other girls helped their friend Mary Burns MacCaskill tidy her room before the Home Demonstration Agent came to examine it, one of the first things they did was to remove the alligator from the bathtub.
I heard so many delightful stories about the MacCaskill family that I decided they were too good to be true. Then, at Aunt Bettie’s 100th birthday party, my mother introduced me to Mary Burns MacCaskill, who had traveled from Ohio for the party.
So as an homage to that family, I’ve named my main character Molly MacCaskill. And when choosing a pet for Molly, I couldn’t choose a finer beast than Steve.
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Note: Cullen Dauchy no longer owns Katy Veterinary Clinic, but he did when Steve worked there, and the clinic was Steve’s first home, so I’m leaving the link.
And I’m so glad the Home Demonstration agent didn’t inspect bedrooms when I was a girl. I didn’t have an alligator, but she might have thought I had something worse.
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This post first appeared in Ink-Stained Wretches in 2021.
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Kathy Waller blogs at Telling the Truth, Mainly. She has published short stories, and a novella co-written with Manning Wolfe. She is perpetually working on a novel.
Today’s post is by our friend and former Austin Mystery Writer Kaye George, author of several successful mystery series. When I asked Kaye to do a guest post, I told her to pick her own topic. She’s chosen to write about her newest project, a departure from the mystery.
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Kathy Waller gave me free rein, so I can write whatever I want here, right? Okay, okay, I’ll stick to writing about writing.
My latest project is foremost in my mind. SOMEONE IS OUT THERE came out in April, but it’s still getting noticed, which makes me so happy. I’ve done several mystery series, cozies and traditional, but got it into my head one day that I could write a suspense novel. It does kinda make sense, since I love to read them.
I’m trying to remember where the first seed for this came from, but I don’t really know, now that it’s done. I do know what went into it. I wanted to use a disaster that occurred in Ohio when we lived there. We lived in Dayton for about six years and, one day when the sky looked ominous and my husband was on the golf course, a disaster struck Xenia, a small town nearby—a town we used to drive to for chopping down our Christmas trees on a farm nearby. A vicious tornado struck the town in 1974, killing and injuring many, and wiping out, obliterating at least half of that town. That year they had what they called the 1974 Super Outbreak, one of the worst tornado seasons in US history. I figured it would make a good backdrop to a tense story.
To be honest, I also fed in some of the stories the people in Wichita Falls told me about the similar disaster they had there in 1979. We lived outside that town in Holliday years after that, but the people who had gone through it had vivid memories of every second. We had our own experiences there, too. Our second night in Holliday, there was a straight line windstorm with 90 mph winds that took off many roofs and caved in the school gymnasium, which had just been evacuated, fortunately. The night we moved out, a tornado touched down a mile away.
Anyway, enough about storms. I also needed to work up some stormy characters. I used my knowledge of nursing (from my mother, who was a nurse, and from my nurses’ aide experience) to create my main character. Unbeknownst to me, I used subconscious knowledge to create her name, Darla Taylor. I had a good portion of the book written when I realized I have a Facebook friend named Darla Taylor! I had used her name! I was mortified, and messaged her about it. She was actually okay with that, so I kept going. And gave her a copy when the book was finished. She liked it and reviewed it! Whew!
Stalking seemed like a scary thing to build the plot on, so I did that, keeping the identity of the stalker hidden until the end. I threw in my son’s family dog, Henry, a big chocolate lab (and renamed him Moose), and gave Darla a hobby of archery, since I used to love doing that.
You can see that so much of the book came from my life, because, where else would it come from? Although I have never been stalked. And hope it never happens.
Kaye George is an award-winning novelist and short-story writer. She writes cozy and traditional mysteries, a prehistory series, and one suspense novel, which is her seventeenth book. Over fifty short stories have been published, mostly in anthologies and magazines. A horror story will come out in 2026. With family scattered all over the globe, she makes her home in Knoxville TN. You can find out more here: http://kayegeorge.com/
When I first sat down to write the stories that would eventually become part of For Every Evil Under the Sun, I didn’t know exactly where they would lead me—I only knew I wanted to stretch my writing skills, try new things, and be a part of a hot, cool collaboration. (Yes, I like puns.)
Now, I’m proud to announce that this collection is out in the world, published by the brand-new Fredonia Ink Publishing. I’m honored to be sharing the pages with two powerhouse writers, Alexandra Burt and Laura Oles—both of whom are not only incredibly talented but also deeply committed to telling stories that explore the dark, complex corners of the human experience.
This collection is a bit of a literary experiment. We each approached the idea of “evil” through our own unique lens—psychological thriller, family drama, crime, horror, western—and let the stories guide us. What came out of it is a collection that isn’t just eclectic, it’s electric. It shines! (Yes, another pun.)
As for me, I leaned into the grit—into crime, revenge, justice. I wanted my stories to carry that weight—to explore the consequences of violence and vengeance. And also add a little bit of fun to the mix. And the stories by Alexandra Burt and Laura Oles are equally as dark and entertaining.
And hey, if you’re in Austin this summer, I’d love to invite you to join us for a special event at Vintage Bookstore and Wine Bar (1101 E. 11th St.) on July 18 at 7pm. Alexandra, Laura, and I will be discussing short story craft, the experiences of women writing crime fiction, and what went into shaping this haunting little book. It’ll be an evening of books, wine, and maybe a few goosebumps.
So if you’re in the mood for stories that simmer under the heat of summer and explore just how far people will go—to protect, to avenge, to survive—then For Every Evil Under the Sun might just be what you’re looking for.
🗓️ Event Info: July 18, 7pm @ Vintage Bookstore and Wine Bar, Austin, TX 🔗 Learn more, here is the Amazon listing. Ebook now available and paperback will be soon on Amazon and bookstores everywhere: https://tinyurl.com/2tph4xcz
An excess of animal spirits”–springtime! Really? Molly Ivins was right as usual when she wrote, “Texas–land of wretched excess!” We’ve had ridiculous lows, unseen for decades. Early daffodils and hyacinths came, shivered, and shriveled in the unholy cold winds roaring across the plains. But we’ve also had the earliest 90 degrees in decades! Wretched excess indeed!
Just two days until the vernal equinox on March 19, and spring. What makes us wander outside, searching for the first bluebonnet, the first violet? What makes us huddle outside the garden store, searching through the little plants shivering in the breeze, fingering seed packets, carrying home small pots of basil and blue salvia even though the weather’s far too untrustworthy for planting? What is this proto-agricultural spirit that makes us lug home the potting soil, hoe the garden bed? More sunlight? Cabin fever? Some early human gene? We, the Animal Kingdom, working with the Plant Kingdom?
I’m rereading Barry Cunliffe’sEurope Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000, a book I value not just for the stunning photographs of prehistoric sites and art, but for describing a history of human inventiveness. Cunliffe, Oxford Professor Emeritus of Archeology since 2007 (many books), says “massive transformation” occurred in Europe between 1300-800 BC. Population growth required developing more crops than wheat and barley, including lentils, peas and—“the celtic bean (Vicia faba).”
Immediately I ordered a giant pack of fava bean seeds.
Then I read the label: they’re mostly a winter crop–but this year I’m desperate. With last year’s blistering hot drought, I wound up with only one pot of cherry tomatoes on the porch and a dozen wilting jalapeno plants in the garden. Cunliffe’s reference to Vicia faba fired my imagination—envisioning myself harvesting large fuzzy green pods, containing delectable beans, and adding a little vinaigrette…olive oil (since 4000 BC) and vinegar (3000 BC). Using an ancient bean and ancient vinaigrette recipe! Possibly those beans were harvested, and the vinaigrette shaken, by some long-ago ancestor 3000 years ago, making me wonder if we have genetic preferences, genetic recipe roots? After all, we of the Animal Kingdom depend on the Plant Kingdom (oxygen, vinaigrette, and wine!).
Mysteries offer escape—a protagonist we like, an intriguing plot, a vivid setting. Like plants, favorite old mysteries offer much when we revisit. Mystery writers? They’re good to “talk to.” This morning I discovered on the shelf my dad’s 1934 Modern Library edition of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, with a brief bio and the “new introduction” by Hammett.
I didn’t know Hammett had worked as an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency before he started writing! “Drifting through a miscellany of ill-paid jobs, he found a temporary solution to his economic problem by shadowing real malefactors with what might be called conspicuous success.” Then came the World War: “He won a sergeantcy and lost his health.”
Hammett can remember where he got his characters. Here’s a snippet of what he says about The Maltese Falcon:
“Dundy’s prototype I worked with in a North Carolina railroad yard; Cairo’s I picked up on a forgery charge in Pasco, Washington, in 1920; Polhous’s was a former captain of detectives…Effie’s once asked me to go into the narcotic smuggling business with her in San Diego…”
Hammett then muses about his own protagonist. “Spade had no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not—or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague—want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.”
What a great description, and didn’t Humphrey Bogart nail it?
It strikes me that this new character of his upended the vision of the members of the London 1930 Detectives Club—Hammett gave the wide-eyed mystery audience a protagonist who is not a secret member of the aristocracy (Albert Campion) or a perfect gentleman (Roderick Alleyn) or a hyper-particular French veteran drinking tea and waxing his moustache (Hercule Poirot)…but a “hard and shifty fellow…able to get the best of anybody.” Welcome to the New World’s new-style mystery protagonists, the children of Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Sara Paretzky and others…including that hybrid protagonist, Mary Russell, in Laurie King’s Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series.
For Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, the scent of honey is a repeat theme (her Holmes is a beekeeper). I like her Holmes, I like her Russell, and just finished her Garment of Shadows(2012). King has chosen a fascinating and ambitious setting: the 1920’s, with Spain and France fighting for control of Morocco, each coveting its crucial strategic location at Gibraltar, while various Moroccan groups—Berber and otherwise—fight for independence. King uses first person point of view for Mary Russell, who’s suffering from acute amnesia—forgetting her childhood and even her marriage––but uses third person POV for Holmes’s chapters. Those shifts sometimes confused me. But her depth of history and geography, and her vivid descriptions of the magical city of Fez with its souk, bring the setting alive. Mary Russell herself has become quite a protagonist, with linguistic skills—including Arabic––and the imagination and drive to devise a daring escape from a horrible prison. I’d like to learn knife-throwing like Mary Russell (she keeps one in her boot) but the likelihood seems dim.
Writer/theologian Bruce Reyes-Chow mentioned how, when stuck, he’d “talk through ideas with myself, my plants…” I intend to follow his lead. On our deck sit five jasmine plants we’ve toted around since the seventies. I think they sometimes do communicate with me—“I’m dry-y-y-y!” But from now on, when I’m stuck on a plot, I’ll go consult them. Every spring, those jasmine produce tiny white flowers with an unmatchable scent. In search of even more scent, this year I’ve planted another mix of old and new. Rose de Recht is a fragrant pink heirloom damask, Fragrant Blush promises pink perfume, and Star of the Republic is tough, like her name, but delicate pink with exquisite fragrance.
And now suddenly the redbuds, with their irresistible yet evanescent fuchsia buds, are blooming. I’ve seen our first bluebonnet,
and the first purple prairie verbena. The live oaks know it’s almost the equinox—they’ve flung down their old leaves (aided by the fierce winds) and are preparing their catkins and baby leaves. The cedar elms have put out tiny chartreuse leaves just in the last two days.
So it’s spring! Grab that trowel! And after all your work, you deserve to loll on the couch at night with a good mystery. I’m halfway through the tenth book in my Hill Country murder mystery series. This one raises a question I find intriguing and difficult. Can justice be served when, unauthorized to pronounce justice, we take justice into our own hands? Is that still justice? I’m discussing it with the plants. More to come….
Here are Helen, Noreen Cedeno, and Juanita Houston at the Texas Book Festival!–Heart of Texas Sisters in Crime
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Award-winning Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series (9 volumes so far) north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s working on Book 10. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party.
My most recent blog post announced the publication of my short story, “Under The Blackjack Tree” in Killer Nashville magazine and now I’m now doubly thrilled to announce that the short story was also chosen by Otto Penzler and John Grisham to appear in the 2025 edition of Best Mystery Stories of the Year! (Mysterious Press)This is a huge honor. Honestly, at first I didn’t think it was true. I read the email about three times and did some online research before I believed it!
But another reason why this is so special to me is because my story is steeped with bits of my family’s history.
It began when my mother told me several years ago that one of her most cherished memories was when she got to help her grandfather feed the inmates at the Huntsville jail when she was about four. (Wait, what?) That’s when I learned that my great grandfather had been sheriff of Walker County. I later learned that it was common practice for the sheriff and his family to live on the first floor of the jailhouse while the inmates would be on the second floor.
The image of an innocent girl closely interacting with a potentially dangerous person was so intriguing to me, I was compelled to put it in a story. (I played with the timeline and instead of my mother being the little girl, I made it my grandmother. It simplified the story.) I had no idea where the story was going to go, but I knew that I needed that opening scene. It took me places that I didn’t expect!
Some of the things that were true are-
My great grandfather was sheriff at the time of Bonnie and Clyde. I thought that would make an interesting backdrop. A lot of tension in Texas at that time.
My grandmother’s first mother did die in childbirth and her loving stepmother was called “Cullie”.
There really was a bank robbery in Conroe at that time. (I don’t think it was ever solved.)
Trusted inmates often cooked the meals for the other inmates and sometimes for the family.
It was my mother that fell into the yard with the hunting dogs and was almost mauled.
My grandmother was shot in the face with a shotgun, by accident. It was a miracle that her eyes were spared, and she had not one single scar. That is such an amazing part of our family history that I had to include it.
And two things that I didn’t know until after I wrote the story.
My grandmother was sometimes called “Mary V” at school because there was another Mary in her class.
When she attended Sam Houston to get her teaching certificate, she would often cut across the cemetery when her classmates wouldn’t. She was never a squeamish person.
My grandmother, the flapper!
Although the Mary V in the story is pure fiction, I hope that my grandmother would be proud the story and that some of our family history is saved and shared with others.
O villain, villain, smiling damned villain. . . That one may smile, and smile and be a villain. — William Shakespeare
Lately I’ve felt as if I have a sesame seed stuck between my molars. Except instead of an annoying seed, it’s an idea I can’t let go of. It started when a group of fellow writers were talking about overuse of certain pat descriptors to express emotions. “Smiled” is a common culprit. Now I’m haunted when I read my copy. Why are my characters always smiling? What kind of smile is it? Nervous smile, a smile to mask confusion, fake smile, cold-as-ice smile, snide smile, crooked smile, challenging smile, weak smile, infectious smile or just a plain old vanilla grin?
I can’t unsee the way I fall back on dull and overused expressions such as “she smiled,” instead of taking the time to ask myself, what underlying emotion is the character feeling? How can I describe that emotion so the reader understands it in a precise and fresh way? How can I eliminate all that superfluous smiling that goes on in my copy and instead home in on the intended emotion? In other words, when my characters smile, what emotion am I trying to communicate? Unless writing a picture book an author has only words to create an image in the reader’s mind.
My new-found fixation on smiling is now creeping into not only my writing but also into books I’m reading. Sometimes a smile is understood without the word being used as in The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon. “Good humor stretches out from the corners of Ephraim’s eyes in the form of crow’s feet, and I realize he has lightened my mood on purpose.” Sometimes the smile is expressed unambiguously as in My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. “She made a half smile of contempt that meant: Marcello Solara makes me sick.” Or this from Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto. “They are sort of smiling, but the smiles are heavy and apologetic. . .these aren’t the kind of smiles you give when you have good news to share. They’re the kinds of smiles that know they’re about to ruin someone’s life.”
The scholar Paul Ekman has identified 18 common types of smiles with disparate meanings: the fixed polite smile (I really don’t know what to say); the embarrassed smile (I don’t know anyone); the tight-lipped relieved smile (oops, that was a close call); the exhausted smile (happiness after a long race); the sadistic smile (it particularly exudes evil); the exasperated smile (annoyance); the compliant smile (it will be over soon); the diplomatic smile (a “professional” smile); the ecstatic smile (life is wonderful); the exaggerated smile (imitation of joy, a little forced); the worried smile (the situation is really awkward); the contemptuous smile (one is secretly a bit spiteful); the ironic smile (welcome to sarcasm); the fake smile (to hide an emotion of weakness); the delighted smile (in front of a baby); the warm smile (that of a mother encouraging her child); the meditative smile (Buddha-like, filled with compassion); and the amorous smile (I adore you).
Ekman’s work was the basis of the American crime drama Lie to Me, in which an expert in facial expressions, tone of voice and body language uses his skills to help law enforcement uncover the truth.
We have Charles Darwin in his 1872 book (Expressions of the Emotions: Man and Animals) to thank for one of the earliest scientific studies of human emotions. What is important for writers is that he also offered analysis of the body language — facial movements, gestures, sounds, and the physiological changes — that go with different emotions.
Conrad Veidt in character as Gwynplaine from the American film The Man Who Laughs (1928).
William Shakespeare wrote more than two hundred years earlier than Darwin, about the trap of the hidden meanings behind a smile. For instance, Hamlet confronts the lie hidden in a devious smile when he realizes his stepfather, King Claudius, murdered his father, saying “O villain, villain, smiling damned villain. . .That one may smile, and smile and be a villain.” The notion of a misleading smile is something Shakespeare first visited in Act 4 of Julius Caesar, when Octavius says, “And some that smile have in their hearts, I fear. . . millions of mischiefs.”
Fortunately there are any number of guidebooks to help writers navigate this tricky smile business. Among them are S.A. Soule’s The Writer’s Guide to Character Expressions and Emotions; Valerie Howard’s Character Reactions from Head to Toe; Kathy Steinemann’s The Writer’s Lexicon: Body Parts, Action and Expressions; and The Emotion Thesaurus by Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman. Jordan McCollum’s three-part posting on the subject of avoiding overused “gesture crutches” is also helpful.
These sources may also help writers avoid a second trap: overdoing tired descriptors to convey emotions. The conversation with other writers that set in motion my fixation on smiles was triggered by an article in which Mark Twain praised his friend, William Dean Howells. Twain minced no words about what he saw as overuse of empty stage directions to convey meaning while praising Howells as a master in the use of body language to describe thoughts and emotions without the need to be repetitive. “Some authors overdo the stage directions, they elaborate them quite beyond necessity; they spend so much time and take up so much room in telling us how a person said a thing and how he looked and acted when he said it that we get tired and vexed and wish he hadn’t said it at all,” Twain observed. He said directions such as “laughed” are worked to the bone when the author has given the character nothing to laugh about.
The lesson? Be clear about what kind of smile you intend but also give the character something to smile about.
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A former political reporter in Austin, Dixie also taught writing at Syracuse University. When she teamed up with Sue Cleveland to write fiction, they sold a screenplay to a Hollywood producer. Although the movie was never made, the seed money financed ThirtyNineStars, their publishing company. Through it they published two award-winning thrillers (Shrouded and Digging up the Dead) under the pen name, Meredith Lee. Dixie’s first solo mystery was Bloodlines & Fencelines, set in a tiny Texas town near Austin. Kirkus reviews described the book as, “A twisty whodunit that’s crafted with care and saturated with down-home Southern charm.” She is working on second mystery in the series. www.dlsevatt.com
Image of Tim Roth at the 2015 San Diego Comic Con International in San Diego, California. The Hateful Eight panel by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Image of actor Conrad Veidt in character as Gwynplaine from the American film The Man Who Laughs (1928). Universal Pictures, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Image of book cover, Charles Darwin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The mystery is solved! In my search for what I recalled as “the “Blitzkuchen” once served at Schwamkrug’s outside New Braunfels, in the Texas Hill Country, I had the name wrong. It’s a blitz torte, not a blitz kuchen! Several readers sent recipes from German cookbooks indicating that “Blitzkuchen” is a quick cake, usually one layer only. My memory, though? A tall two-layer confection, baked with meringue and almond flakes on top and between the layers! And in my memory, more meringue on the outside, plus some moistness in the filling.
Online I found Oma Gerhild’s “Oma’s Blitz Torte Recipe ––Lightning Cake.” https://www.quick-german-recipes.com/german-blitz-torte-recipe.html Each almond-flavored layer is baked with meringue and sliced almonds on top of the batter. The recipe offers either custard filling or whipped cream filling. I opted to finish off with whipped cream with powdered sugar and vanilla, not just inside, but around the cake (and in blobs all around the kitchen).
FINALLY! First, that lovely almond taste. Plus, everyone at the table now wore an attractive little white mustache of whipped cream. You don’t get that with a madeleine and a cup of tea, do you, M. Proust?
As October runs into November, Texas Hill Country towns are celebrating Oktoberfest, or, in New Braunfels, Wurstfest. Normally by now our trees would show some fall color––nothing like New England, of course. The cypresses by Lake Austin are turning bronze. Out here north of Dripping Springs, the possum haws are showing their red berries. The cedar elms turned bright yellow, then slowly lost their leaves. The live oaks, thankfully, stay green.
But this year? Drought brings bad news for trees. Cypress-lined creeks are dry…the cypresses’ arched roots groping into the earth for water. Downhill at our place Barton Creek is dry, and I mean dry, with only occasional small pools. Up on the limestone plateau the leaves on some smaller saplings just turned brown and fluttered to the ground, with the tree already looking dead. We’re watering, but in Stage 2 drought restrictions. Will our wells run dry? Have we drained the Trinity aquifers that lie hundreds of feet below?
So, to general geopolitical angst, I’ve added…tree worry.
Trees in books play such a role in our imaginations. After reading Johann David Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson (1812)—where the shipwrecked family builds a tree-house on their desert island––I always wanted to live in a tree-house! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swiss_Family_Robinson We’re drawn to forests, home of the trees—scary, but sometimes the safest place. In The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White (1939), first of the four volumes that make up The Once and Future King, the Wart (the young Arthur, under Merlin’s tutelage) and Kay meet Little John who tells them about Robin Wood (explaining why it’s not “Robin Hood” and why he lives in the woods (or “‘oods”):
“They’m free pleaces, the ‘oods, and fine pleaces. Let thee sleep in ‘em, come summer, come winter, withouten brick nor thatch, and huntin’ ‘em for thy commons lest thee starve; and smell to ‘em with the good earth in the springtime; and number of ‘em as they brings forward their comely bright leaves, according to order…”
There the boys, the future King and Sir Kay, approach “the monarch of the forest. It was a lime tree as great as that which used to grow at Moor Park in Herefordshire, no less than one hundred feet in height and seventeen feet in girth, a yard above the ground….” Headquarters for Robin Wood and Maid Marian! And there begins a great and perilous adventure for Kay and Wart, who break into the castle of Morgan le Fay, Queen of Air and Darkness—to rescue prisoners paralyzed by magic. (Speaking of paralyzed victims of witches—note how C.S. Lewis later describes turned-to-stone courtyard figures in his first foray into fantasy, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950).)
One writer, Elisabeth Brewer, notes that “The Sword in the Stone shows a passion for trees that White shared with Tolkien. https://bit.ly/3Ceqk. How about the Ents we meet in Fangorn Forest, in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth? Trees that walk…and tend other trees. Not all trees are benign––including the wicked old willow which captures Frodo and friends (rescued by Tom Bombadil).
I’m reading a fascinating graphic (yes, graphic!) book about Tolkien and his close friend C.S. Lewis: The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, by John Hendrix. https://bit.ly/4hqiyFr
Tolkien and Lewis met in 1929 in Oxford, where they were, famously, members of a writers’ group, the Inklings, and shared many hours at The Eagle and Child. That’s not all they shared. In 1916, both men experienced horrific warfare on the Western Front in France. Young and just married, Tolkien fought in the trenches, then contracted life-threatening trench fever. At nineteen, Lewis was wounded by shrapnel (from friendly fire) on the Somme, and carried shrapnel in his body the rest of his life. Hendrix’s wonderful book uncovers the sort of salvation two disillusioned veterans found in the healing power of imagination, including Norse mythology and the European fairy tale. Tolkien knew of Yggdrasil, the sacred ash tree central to Norse mythology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil; https://dc.swosu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2130&context=mythlore
And how the worlds created by Lewis and Tolkien fired our imaginations! The fantasy world of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia emerged when The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published (1950). Tolkien’s The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, was first published in 1937 but became a pop-culture phenomenon only in 1960’s, when the paperback edition became available. https://time.com/4941811/hobbit-anniversary-1937-reviews/
Both Lewis and Tolkien had copies of The Sword in the Stone early on. Indeed, in 1939 it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. T. H. White 1964 obituary, https://nyti.ms/4hlasht. Curiously, Hendrix’s book on Tolkien and Lewis doesn’t mention T. H. White, perhaps because Hendrix focuses on the impact of war; T.H. White 1906-1964) was born too late to serve in World War I. Nor was he an Oxonian. While C.S. Lewis reportedly disparaged The Sword in the Stone in 1940, he later invited T. H. White to the Inklings if he ever visited Oxford. https://bit.ly/4f4wcww (“Dickieson post”). Perhaps Hendrix doesn’t mention T. H. White because unlike Tolkien and Lewis, though he creates a fantasy world, White grounds The Once and Future King firmly in England.
But Elisabeth Brewer commented in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King that The Sword in the Stone shows a passion for trees that White shared with Tolkien. (Dickieson post.)
What about powerful trees in more recent books? Consider the Whomping Willow, in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Wizard of Azkaban? https://bit.ly/4f1koex Magic—but terrorizing—it reveals the secret passage which ultimately allows Harry and friends to discover––well, remember? Indeed, Harry reminds us of T. H. White’s Wart, both with an earnest determination to do right, and a magical tutor.
Maybe children are especially open to tree power because they still climb trees. My dad swooped us off to grad school in Atlanta, and then to Charlotte, before we moved back to Texas. In the southeast I discovered the power of pine trees. We children built an admirable and secret treehouse in the woods, where we surveyed the world from on high. No parents came near to scold or warn: deep in the trees we ruled our own domain. Later in Carolina at eleven, I could climb the neighbors’ big back yard pine all the way to the top. The tree swayed slowly back and forth, but I could see the entire neighborhood and beyond. Tree power.
The way live oaks vary their leaves makes identification tough. On the Edwards Plateau, the species passes into the “shrubby Texas Live Oak”—shorter with smaller trunks: “…[I]ntermediate forms occur between the variety and the species and the distinctions are often difficult,” per Robert Vines, Trees, Shrubs and Woody Vines of the Southwest (1960). Well, thanks.
Now, in drought, with grass turned grayish tan, with dirt powder-dry beneath our feet, we treasure the blessed green of live oaks, often home to swings and hammocks, and providing wide shade to houses, pastures, and somnolent cattle.
Trees inspire us. We know Shakespeare’s song: “Under the greenwood tree, who loves to lie with me…” (As You Like It). The first poem in Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir begins, “I go among trees and sit still.”
Mary Oliver’s “Honey Locust” begins,
“Who can tell how lovely in June is the
honey locust tree, or why
A tree should be so sweet and live
in this world?”
Robert Frost knows his trees: The Road Not Taken, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Tree at My Window, Spring Pools, so many. Of course, his Birches:
“When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them…”
Frost makes it easy to imagine “some boy” swinging the birches—or Frost imagining that, as he marched through a yellow wood.
And then e.e. cummings, My Father Moved Through Dooms of Love—I like this verse:
“My father moved through theys of we,
Singing each new leaf out of each tree
(and every child was sure that spring
Danced when she heard my father sing)”
And Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall:
“Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?”
Yes, trees: later in the poem we find when “worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.”
The forecast calls for rain. Please cross your fingers.
Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery Series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. Currently she’s working on Book 10. Her protagonist, Alice, gets into legal drama, and matters of the heart. And yes, Alice does have a treehouse.
When you read a passage and experience words that strikes home forcefully–so forcefully that you almost gasp–what did the writer do that moved you so?
I’m collecting examples. For my husband it’s John Steinbeck’s tide pool in Cannery Row:
“…When the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals…Starfish squat over mussels and limpets, attach their million little suckers and then slowly lift with incredible power until the prey is broken from the rock…”
I’ve never seen a Monterey tide pool. Yet Steinbeck made me feel I have. I want to sit at the edge of the tide pool, hear “the snapping shrimps with their trigger claws pop loudly” and see the “black eels poke their heads out of crevices and wait for prey.”
Why? Steinbeck’s description is so closely observed…it’s as if my own eyes and ears saw and heard.
What about food? Proust’s memory of a madeleine crumb dipped in his aunt’s tea didn’t initially resonate with me (a madeleine seemed too bland; I would’ve preferred a buttery, crunchy, tender croissant!)–until I read his analysis.
When Proust discovered that his second and third bites of the madeleine lacked the same impact–“the potion is losing its magic”–he stretched his mind further. He writes that the source of memory was not his sense of sight (though his description of the scalloped pastry is charming). Instead, his memory came from taste and smell: “But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment,…and bear unfaltering…the vast structure of recollection.”
No French bakery in my grandmother’s small Texas town, Itasca. But the memory of her kitchen still comes back when I smell lavender, or yeast–my grandfather’s lavender talc, my grandmother’s ineffably delicious yeast rolls.
Here’s another powerful example from The Orphan Keeper by Camron Wright, about a young man, kidnapped from his home in India, then sent to a dishonest orphanage which places him for adoption in America where he rejects any Indian heritage and suppresses all his memories that aren’t “American.”
As a student in England he’s taken to an Indian restaurant where–reluctantly–he smells, then tastes, what’s offered:
“The scent that swirled around his neck had started rubbing his shoulder, reminding him softly that once, a very long time ago, they had met….[He] took his first bite. The spices in his mouth grabbed hands and began dancing in rhythm across his tongue–cumin, garlic, peppers, ginger, tamarind, cinnamon, and more. They weren’t just dancing–they were cheering, clapping, celebrating, singing, reminiscing. They were pulling out wallets and showing each other pictures of their kids….The mingling spices, the familiar taste, it felt like a whisper arriving with the wind, more message than memory.”
Curry, of course. Just reading this made me long for mango chutney! And I thought it a powerful description, because closely observed, and particularly because until this moment we know the protagonist has been stubbornly resistant to anything Indian.
In A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles, do you recall the bouillabaisse scene? The three conspirators have carefully gathered the ingredients–hard to come by in Moscow; have picked up their spoons; and have taken their first taste. Count Rostov closes his eyes “to attend more closely to his impressions”:
“One first tastes the broth–that simmered distillation of fish bones, fennel, and tomatoes, with their hearty suggestions of Provence…One marvels at the boldness of the oranges arriving from Spain and the absinthe poured in the taverns. And all of these various impressions are somehow collected, composed, and brightened by the saffron–that essence of summer sun…[W]ith the very first teaspoonful one finds oneself transported to the port of Marseille–where the streets teem with sailors, thieves, and madonnas, with sunlight and summer, with languages and life.”
Bouillabaisse! Your memories may differ. Were you reading Julia Child and launching a kitchen experiment? Were you visiting Marseille, and were there still sailors, thieves and madonnas?
The Count has shared his memories, aroused by fish bones, fennel, tomatoes, shellfish and saffron. But your memories are your own. Also, the scene is powerful not just because it is closely observed, but also because it reminds the reader forcefully that at this point the Count has only his memories–he can’t leave the Moscow hotel, much less travel to Marseille.
I’m puzzled not to find food more “closely observed” in novels. A favorite moment: Virginia Woolf famously describes the boeuf en daube at the dinner party which is a central feature of the first half of To the Lighthouse. Mrs. Ramsay is thinking the cook “had spent three days over that dish,” as she prepares to serve it to her guests:
“…An exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice rose from the great brown dish as Marthe, with a little flourish, took the cover off. …[Mrs. Ramsay] peered into the dish, with its shiny walls and the confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats, and its bay leaves and wine, and thought, This will celebrate the occasion…”
Cookbooks, of course, intend to awaken our senses as we peruse the recipes. But the description of boeuf en daube in To the Lighthouse, with the mouthwatering anticipation it creates, has a different impact. It places us in the scene. It almost makes us, as readers, feel like guests sitting at Mrs. Ramsay’s table, alongside the odd characters Woolf has already introduced. Or possibly we also feel a bit like Mrs. Ramsay, the hostess, hoping to delight and reassure her houseguests, who are a difficult lot.
I’d love to hear other examples from readers. A “closely observed” passage can make us do just what the author wants: turn the page and keep reading! Right now I’m engrossed in Someone Always Nearby, Susan Wittig Albert’s fascinating novel about two real people, Georgia O’Keefe and Maria Chabot. I’m finding this a daring literary adventure about two daring and adventurous women, the artist you know and the woman who wanted to be indispensable to her.
It’s May–bluebonnets are gone, summer approaches. What tastes and smells bring back your summer memories? Grape popsicles, melting on the tongue? The clean bluegreen smell of Austin’s Barton Springs, mixing creek water and artesian spring water? The faint smell of chlorine from a pool crowded with splashing children? A mountain trail in the Rockies, with the cool green odor of aspen groves rising up from a creek? Dust blowing at the ball park, freshly mowed lawns, the faint rubbery smell of a sprinkler on a hot day? The smell of a roasting marshmallow just before it bursts into flame?
Good news from where I write: Ghost Bones, Book 9 in my Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series set in the small town of Coffee Creek, Texas, will soon be out! With mystery, legal drama, and matters of the heart.
Helen Currie Foster lives and writes north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and prehistory, and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. Ghost Daughter, Book 7 in The Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series, was named Finalist in the 2022 Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize Short List. Follow her:
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