****The Birdwatcher

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birds

photo: Alan Schmierer, public domain

By William Shaw – “There were two reasons why William South did not want to be on the murder team. The first was that it was October. The migrating birds had begun arriving on the coast.The second was that, though nobody knew, he was a murderer himself.”

Birdwatching is an avocation that instills in its practitioners the virtues of patience, keen observation, and meticulous attention to detail, traits that police sergeant South brings to his work as well. He’s a Local District lead based in Kent and generally works with neighborhood groups, drug busts, traffic accidents. A good, solid copper. Murder, by contrast, is something a person can be driven to in a moment of panic and loss of control. The murder South committed took place when he was only 13 years old, and you soon understand whom he killed—his own father—and eventually you learn why.

South was born in Northern Ireland, son of a brutal enforcer in the Ulster Volunteer Force during the Troubles, and his father’s death was blamed on internecine rivalries within the UVF. To escape the violence all around them and with the intervention of a police sergeant sweet on his mum, mother and son were safely transplanted to Kent. Though he has become a policeman, South avoids any more contact with killing.

However, a new murder case changes all that, and South has been assigned to it, like it or not. The victim is South’s neighbor, retired school teacher Robert Rayner, a nice man living in a quiet place who’s been viciously beaten to death. The two bachelors have spent many hours together birding along the coast where they live. Despite the many hours spent and the friendship South thought they shared, it soon emerges that he actually knew very little about Rayner, and what he knows is faulty.

The rage that would produce a death such as Rayner’s is terrifyingly familiar to South, and in this well constructed plot, you understand it is destined to reverberate in unexpected ways. Overall, Shaw’s writing is clean and unlabored. The banter among members of the police team also are good, and much of it is funny. The characters are ones you come to care about, too.

A Song at Twilight

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The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey

The F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre, Madison, NJ

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey opened its 2016 season with Noël Coward’s A Song At Twilight, directed by Paul Mullins. Coward wrote it in 1965, the first in a trio of plays that take place in a single suite in a Swiss hotel (you’re welcome, Neil Simon), called the Suite in Three Keys. He wanted “to act once more before I fold my bedraggled wings,” as he said, and he wrote himself a juicy role here.

As the play opens, the hotel waiter Felix (played by Ben Houghton) is playing a grand piano and singing, a service for which extra tipping is undoubtedly required. The suite’s guests are Sir Hugo Latymer (Edmond Genest), an eminent author in his early 70s, and his somewhat dowdy, one might even say serviceable, wife Hilde (Alison Weller). Hugo is noticeably slowing. He’s had health problems, and Hilde has added nurse to her duties as secretary and chief organizer.

She’s preparing to go out; he wants her to stay. It isn’t because he wants her company, as his waspishness makes clear, but because an old mistress he hasn’t seen in decades is coming for dinner, and he doesn’t want to be alone with her. Carlotta Gray is an actress who had a middling career. Why is she coming? What does she want? Money?

When Carlotta (Laila Robins) enters, she’s glamour and energy itself—upswept hair, an acid yellow sheath, and sparkling stilettos. Perhaps with a wee bit of glee, Hilde leaves him to her. The two old flames’ point-counterpoint dialog is full of Coward’s characteristic wit and verve.

Hugo’s break-up with Carlotta so long ago appears still painful to her, as was the uncharitable characterization of her he wrote in his autobiography. Now Carlotta is writing her own memoir, and what she wants is much more significant than cash. Since the era in which the play was written the issues people want to keep secret may have evolved, but the capacity for guilt and shame remains with us and, along with the loss of love, has a powerful emotional impact.

Robins and Weller fully inhabit the two female characters and deliver Coward’s rather fussy and formal dialog (by 2016 standards) convincingly. At one point Hugo calls Carlotta “feline,” and indeed Robins moves around the stage much like a cat playing with her mouse. I’ve seen Robins on stage several times, and she’s always great, and I hope to see Weller again.

I scrambled my dates for posting this review, and tickets for this production are no longer available. Apologies, but it’s one to watch for if your own regional theaters produce it.

Information vs. Confession: New Police Interrogators

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Punch & Judy, police

photo: Dan Dickinson, creative commons license

Mystery and crime fiction readers (and writers!) may soon encounter a new approach to police interrogation that may be more effective at producing solid information and valid confessions. Until the mid-1930s, suspected criminals were subjected to the “third degree,” which often included bodily harm or at least the threat of it—like dangling a suspect out of a window (!).

Currently, police mostly use confrontational techniques “a rusty, stalwart invention that’s been around since the days of JFK,” says reporter Robert Kolker in the current issue of Wired.

These supposedly more scientific techniques are based on psychological manipulation, in which police attempt to persuade their suspect that confession is their only reasonable choice. Hallmarks of the technique are the claustrophobic interview room in which detectives appear absolutely convinced of a suspect’s guilt and present a damning version of facts (and even made up “facts”) that paint the suspect as the culprit. (If you want to see a memorable demonstration of this technique, check out this terrific YouTube clip from The Wire.)

The developers of confrontational interrogation justified the use of false information and other tricks because they—and many cops trained in their methods as well as judges and prosecutors—were convinced an innocent person simply would not confess to a crime he did not commit. This post demonstrates what a tragically wrongful conviction that was. Evidence against its reliability started piling up when DNA analysis became available and a large number of convictions were thrown out, even though the accused at some point “confessed.” Further, and contrary to expectation, Kolker says, “The more confident police officers are about their judgments, the more likely they are to be wrong.”

Now a growing number of police departments, starting with the LAPD, recognizes the shaky science behind these methods and are moving to an “investigative” approach more similar to that long used in England and Canada. As a joint effort of the FBI, CIA and Pentagon, the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) studied interrogation techniques around the world, with an eye to producing valid confessions and avoiding false ones among terrorists. Bottom line: “If you want accurate information, be as non-accusatorial as possible.” Now they are trying to spread the word throughout domestic police departments.

I can see changes in fiction—plots where one officer is trained in the HIG techniques, but the partner resists; repeat criminals unnerved by the change in police attitude; and the expansion of information police have to work with when their questioning causes suspects to simply clam up. Of course, in both fiction and real life, many skilled interviewers have used these techniques for years, without official sanction. (Fictional detective Lt. Colombo comes immediately to mind as a possible, possibly extreme example.) Any attempt to change the culture of policing is ripe for drama.

Think the Truth Protects You?

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Texas, guns

(photo: C. Holmes, CC license)

Douglas Starr in the December 9, 2013,  New Yorker, describes how the most commonly used confrontational interrogation technique used in the United States leads to false confessions. The method relies on detectives’ observing non-verbal behavior, looking for (or creating) anxiety, never giving the suspect a chance to voice a denial, minimizing the crime and trying every trick to make it easier for the suspect to admit it, even claiming to have evidence they don’t have, with their right to lie to suspects in many circumstances protected by a 1969 Supreme Court decision. The goal is simply to get a confession.

Psychologists became suspicious about the issue of false confessions several decades ago and began studies on it. And experienced detectives have begun to doubt it, as they’ve seen suspects mold their statements to fit the information the detectives have fed them.

In Britain, police don’t try for confessions, they go for information. They focus on the content of what is said, not nonverbal behavior or anxiety (proved to be not correlated with lying). Instead, they look for inconsistencies: “For the suspect, lying creates a cognitive load—it takes energy to juggle the details of a fake story.” It’s hard to keep it up. Nor are the police allowed to lie about what evidence they have.

In the United States, out of 311 people exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing, more than a quarter had given false confessions—perhaps most notoriously, the Central Park Five. (Ken and Sarah Burns film on the case). Why do they confess? Worn down by the interrogation, an innocent suspect “fabricates a story to satisfy his questioners.”  This is most likely what led to the false statement made by Amanda Knox, which, although she recanted, has been used against her ever since.

This post originally appeared February 3, 2014.

What a Character!

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typewriter, writing

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

This guest post by writer Robert Hebditch is excerpted from a workshop he recently conducted on developing characters for fiction. I’ve added a few examples in italics.

My way of creating character is pretty wasteful and I don’t recommend it to anyone, particularly beginners. My method leads to a lot of re-writes, restarts and a lot of cut and pasting. I often end up throwing it all away. But maybe some pieces of it will work for you!

Following Flannery O’Connor’s famous dictum that you’ve gotta “Write it down, then see what you’ve got,” I tend to write my ideas for the story first, maybe including vaguely defined characters. Then I start writing, fleshing out the characters as each new situation demands.

I draw on my own experience more than any other source. In a lifetime we are exposed to an awful lot of people—friends, lovers, neighbors, people on the street, at the club, at social gatherings, and yes, even in libraries. Most of us already know many more character types than we can invent. I take bits and pieces from these different sources and lace them together with a strong dose of imagination.

Experienced writer or not, asking yourself questions about your characters is certainly necessary, but there’s no need to have all the answers before you start. For me, the old journalistic maxim “Who, what, when, where, how and why” works well. You can selectively apply this where the situation dictates until you’ve filled out your character sufficiently to fulfill the demands of the story.

Ten Basic Points in Developing Characters in Fiction

  1. A character, especially a main character, should be “believably real,” so that the reader will suspend disbelief (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817).
  2. Some information about how characters look, and not just significant physical attributes, like body type and face, scars, tattoos, but also how they walk, dance, run or scratch their face.
  3. Robert pointed out that a great many contemporary writers prefer not to provide much physical description, following Stephen King’s advice to let the readers supply it. “If I describe mine, it freezes out yours,” King says.
  4. Similarly, Ian Rankin, in Knots and Crosses, also prefers to leave the physical appearance of his main character to the reader’s imagination. Detective John Rebus is described as having “brown hair and green eyes, like his brother.” And that’s it.
  5. What characters say, how they say it, how their speech differs from other characters, and whom they talk to. Also, what other characters say about them—a device that works best when it reveals as much about the observer as the observed. Because Robert’s insight about observer and observed  prepared me to appreciate it, I found this perfect example, in which a son is talking about his tyrannical father: “My mom had to lay [my homework] out for him next to his breakfast plate, to the left of the juice but not touching the fork, so he could scan through it with those gray eyes of his, searching for mistakes, tapping his long finger against the papers like a clock-tick.” From those few lines, you know the father’s horrible and mom and son are terrified. (from The Far Empty by J. Todd Scott). “To the left of the juice but not touching the fork”—brilliant!
  6. What characters do (their actions.) This is the key element, of course, because this is how they move through the plot.
  7. How characters act, which can be at odds with what they do, sometimes helping to create mystery or tension. For example, a man whose appearance is quiet and calm may suddenly reveal his true self by a violent action, such as knocking someone’s teeth out or kicking a cat.
  8. How character live—where they live, where they go, their history and habits, friends, relatives, work associates, hangouts and whom they hang out with.
  9. How and what they feel—emotions, moods and perceptions. At the extreme, writers have shown the emotions and perceptions of people who are insane—think of Chief Bromden’s belief in the black machinery behind the walls in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Or cognitively impaired Benjy Compson’s stream of consciousness in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Or Dr. Jennifer White, narrator of Alice LaPlante’s masterful murder mystery Turn of Mind, who suffers from progressive dementia.
  10. Minor characters are not unimportant characters. They should always serve the story by helping the protagonist move through the plot in some way, no matter how small. In Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, the little we know about the man Thursby is from the established liar Brigid O’Shaughnessy. He makes no real appearance in the novel, yet without his death early on, the whole mystery of the black bird could not unfold.

A final thought. There are so many ways to create character and no one way is the right way. What works for us is what we must go with, with the proviso that there is always something new to learn. What matters most is how our characters make a good story better.

Guest poster Robert Hebditch is a writer of short stories, a local author and is published in US 1, The Kelsey Review and Genesis. He is a member of Princeton Public Library Writers Room and Room at the Table writing groups and a retired staff member of Princeton University.

 

***Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine – May & June 2016

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scarecrow

photo: Brady Wahl, creative commons license

The first mystery when dealing with “The World’s Leading Mystery Magazine” is, what’s the name of this publication stuffed with short stories, anyway? The cover says Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, but the website calls it Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Best just to do what the cognoscenti do and call it EQMM and be done. Always a treasure-trove for mystery lovers, it’s in its 75th year, and all year long is publishing celebratory content.

The International Issue

The May issue is devoted to stories from international authors. Some of those I enjoyed most were:

  • “The Scarecrow’s Revenge” by Paul Halter (France) – this story is copyright 2016, but reads as if it is a Golden Age classic—in style, plot, and theme. Deadly fun.
  • “The Miracle on Christmas Eve” by Szu-Yen Lin (Taiwan) – a sweet story about a widowed father’s determination to preserve the myth of Santa Claus for his young son.
  • “An Elderly Lady Has Accommodation Problems” by Helene Tursten (Sweden) – you shouldn’t underestimate the determination of an old lady to cling to her apartment, in Scandinavia, as elsewhere!

Other stories are from Argentina (Jorge Luis Borges), Angola, Switzerland, Canada, Japan, the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and Belgium and prove, in case proof were needed, that mystery is a universal language.

Mystery Writers of America Issue

In the June issue, the editors pay their respects to the Mystery Writers of America and feature new stories from authors who have won at least one of MWA’s several awards. Again, many riches to choose among, with special appreciation from me of:

  • “Puncher’s Chance” by Doug Allyn, who is not only an MWA winner but a frequent and highly popular author in EQMM. This was one of the best of his I’ve read. He captured the boxing world and the psychology of fighters superbly.
  • “The Unit” by T.J. MacGregor, whose 2002 novel Out of Sight won an Edgar Allen Poe award. I love how her website confesses upfront that her publisher advised her to use initials, not her name (Trish) because, and she quotes, “mysteries by men or androgynous people [think JK Rowling] were outselling mysteries by women”!
  • “The Night Watchman’s Wife” by William Dylan Powell. I’ve read a previous story about boat-dwelling, Lone Star-swilling, unlicensed Texas private investigator Billie and his pet monkey Ringo. Ringo is a charmer. Billie, too. Funny & fun.

Subscribe to EQMM with the link below or find single-issues in the magazine section of your local B&N.

Guilty Pleasures: Plot

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Dickens, writer

(photo: Alan Weir, creative commons license)

In this essay for The Guardian, John Mullan has laid bare a dirty secret I share with many of you. Why do we read fiction? Watch tv & movies? See plays? Plot.

“How we love plots—and how we look down our noses at them,” Mullan begins his essay. Sophisticates are supposed to prefer in-depth character studies, deep psychological explorations, wrenching perspectives on arid reality. I’m afraid I’ve never recovered from the childlike thrill of having a story read to me whose next installment almost made bedtime something to look forward to.

But in contemporary novels, says Mullan, “it sometimes seems that the delights of plot have been contracted out to genre fiction”—especially mysteries, thrillers, and the like. In other words, my favorites.

Of course, genre fiction with believable characters, plausible action, intriguing settings, and (my preference here) significant themes are more satisfying to read, for me it is still plot that makes them worth reading at all. “Yet nowadays we admit the enjoyment of plot as if it were a low kind of self-indulgence—irresistible but ignoble,” says Mullan. We recognize it is what makes us unable to put down certain books, “but not what we any longer expect of ‘serious fiction’” (my emphasis). However, as literary agent and author Donald Maass points out in Writing 21st Century Fiction, plots is more than “clever twists and turns [that] are only momentarily attention-grabbing.”

The many significant characters in the novels of Charles Dickens all turn out to be important to his ultimate plot, even when you don’t fully appreciate their role until the end. Though the drama may have been unfolding through a series of seeming digressions, every aspect is important to the ultimate outcome. This is quite different from presenting string of red herrings and random events. Or, as Mullan puts it, “Plot is what stops narrative being just one thing after another.”

The ending of the popular television series The Good Wife or, Mullan suggests, the evolution of Game of Thrones, appear to have abandoned the connecting thread of plot development for ad hoc-ery: “matters of ingenious improvisation rather than achieved design.” When viewers began to feel this during the six seasons of Lost, what was lost was their interest.

Must writers plan out every detail of plot development before they begin writing? Of course not. When I’m writing a story, I dump in all kinds of information that comes to me as potential plot elements. As I work toward the conclusion, some of these ideas are discarded and some minor points turn out to be essential to the final resolution. In that way, I retain the freshness of discovery, which I hope I can transmit to the reader, I have a rich array of clues and directions to draw upon, and I’ve laid the groundwork for the ending.

Sometimes that groundwork needs to be reworked and strengthened, the reader reminded obliquely of a particular point here and there, but the aim is to achieve a coherent whole in the end. And for some of those points to surprise readers, to smash their expectations head-on and veer off in a different direction, but one totally supported by the plot elements that have gone before.

***A Tapping at My Door

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The Raven, MWA, Poe

Page by Ian Burt (photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

By David Jackson, narrated by Jonathan Keeble – The early chapters of this police procedural are tremendously intriguing. A woman copper in Liverpool is murdered in her back garden, with a dead raven splayed over her face. Only when the crime scene investigators remove the bird do they learn her eyes have been gouged—pecked?—out. And that the raven has a note attached to its leg saying ‘nevermore.’

Even for people who are not fans of Edgar Allen Poe, that’s spooky. And, it’s a puzzle the police must struggle to work out. Not too long afterward, another police officer is found murdered in his home, again with a dead bird nearby, carrying a new message.

While these crimes are bizarre, at least there’s something to work with. Both murdered officers were implicated in the death in custody of a mentally challenged youth a few years earlier. An investigation cleared the two officers of wrongdoing, but the family and a large segment of the public still blame them for this death. Accordingly, the family is questioned, with all the renewed mutual hostility one might anticipate.

When two more police are killed who seem to have no connection to the earlier tragedy, what are the investigators to think? Are these new deaths merely a diversion? Jackson does a good job portraying the fractured relationships between the community and the coppers, writ small in this family tragedy, and writ large. He presents the action through alternating perspectives, mostly those of DS Nathan Cody and the unknown murderer, whose motives ultimately—well, you can pass judgment on that.

Cody is the principal investigator of the crimes, and to his surprise he’s teamed up with a new murder unit detective, Megan Webley. Unbeknownst to the powers that be, Cody and Webley were once an item, engaged to be married even, until his love of the job put a wedge between them. They dance around each other, not wanting to bring up the past and wanting to get on with their current assignment. There’s a cop-killer out there, after all.

But Cody become unhinged in several run-of-the-mill situations and Webley is starting to doubt his mental stability. His strange outbursts and reckless self-endangerment hearken back to an experience a year earlier in which he was held and tortured by a mysterious group of kidnappers.

About the time of the lengthy flashback in which Cody relives this hostage situation for the sympathetic Webley—an experience he has refused to seek any counseling for—I began to lose interest. The gruesome nature of the torture seemed intended to titillate, not interest me in Cody as a character. From there on out, the plot followed the well-trodden path of escalating craziness and bad decisions, woman-of-interest in danger, and drawn-out final resolution, with a particularly ham-handed, flashinglightsallaround ‘sequel!!’ signaled at the end.

Since this was an audiobook, the narration inevitably affected my reaction. In some passages Jonathan Keeble was terrific, but in others, it was as if he were narrating a silent film (you can listen to a bit through the Amazon link below). They were jarringly melodramatic. In other words, a mixed bag.

Disgraced

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Islamic art

photo: Vicki Weisfeld

Disgraced, at Washington, DC’s Arena Stage, is Ayad Akhtar’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winner. Its five characters—two couples plus one nephew—are all disgraced before the play ends, one way or another, publicly or not.

Amir (played by Nehal Joshi) is married to an American, Emily (Ivy Vahanian). He’s a lawyer who has masked his Pakistani and Muslim heritage, “passing” as Indian. Emily, a painter, is nevertheless entranced with the artistic language of Islam. She’s approached by museum official Isaac (Joe Isenberg—full disclosure, my talented nephew-in-law!), a Jew, who wants to include her paintings in a high-profile exhibit. She met Isaac through her husband’s law firm colleague, Jory (Felicia Curry), an African American striving like Amir for advancement in the firm.

When Amir is pressured by his wife and nephew Abe (Samip Raval) to look in on legal proceedings against a controversial imam, Amir fears his act may be misinterpreted by his conservative employers. These convoluted relationships could go wrong in many ways, and do at a dinner party involving the multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-religious foursome. The consequences of even the loosest association with the imam are laid bare.

The person who best keeps his wits about him is Amir’s nephew. In the beginning of the play, he has adopted the name Abe Jensen to seem more American. He gives up this quest and reverts to his birth name Hussein Malik by the play’s end. The play raises important questions about identity and self-identity, passive observer and activist, and religious and secular choices in an increasingly fragmented American society, as well as the persistent and entangling prejudices (in the original, pre-judging sense, emphasis on “judging”) that lurk barely beneath the surface.

Like The Body of an American, reviewed yesterday, Disgraced has an important theme and an excellent cast, especially in its leads (Joshi and Vahanian). Under Timothy Douglas’s direction, this 90-minute production moves rapidly into the quicksand of what the playwright calls our “degraded social discourse.”

Said New York Times reviewer Charles Isherwood, “Everyone has been told that politics and religion are two subjects that should be off limits at social gatherings. But watching Mr. Akhtar’s characters rip into these forbidden topics, there’s no arguing that they make for ear-tickling good theater.”

At Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth St., SW, through May 29. Box office.

The Body of an American

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Eric HIssom, Thomas Keegan, The Body of an American

Eric Hissom (L) & Thomas Keegan

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to see two plays in Washington, D.C.—both contemporary, both superbly acted, and both leaving the audience with plenty to think about. If, as playwright Tony Kushner says, in theater, “you discover things you can’t afford to countenance in waking life,” these plays were journeys of simultaneous discovery and self-discovery.

First up was Theater J’s The Body of an American, by Dan O’Brien, winner of the 2014 Horton Foote Prize for Outstanding New American Play. The title sounds like the lead of a news story—one whose predicate you may not want to know. The play is a metadrama about O’Brien’s real-life relationship with award-winning journalist and photographer Paul Watson (played by Eric Hissom).

Watson took the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the desecration of the body of Staff Sgt. William Cleveland in Mogadishu in 1993, after two U.S. Black Hawk attack helicopters were shot down. In large part as a result of the public outrage at this event, U.S. troops were pulled out of Somalia. Both before and since, his pen and camera have recorded an untold number of unspeakable acts around the world.

How does being witness to so much brutality—so much evil—affect a person? O’Brien (Thomas Keegan) comes from a presumably cosseted life by comparison. Why does he seek Watson’s insights regarding the world’s dirtiest acts? As you might expect, he’s not without his own deep scars.  He may not have Watson’s post-traumatic stress disorder, but he is in a similar struggle to understand his own life’s significance.

In the several days before Watson shot that famous picture, he tells O’Brien, much worse atrocities had taken place in Mogadishu. But they weren’t photographed, and the military denied they’d occurred. But with Cleveland’s fate, the proof was in his camera. He believes the American reaction taught a nascent Al Qaeda the propaganda value of a dramatic, well-documented moment, and fear of a repeat contributed to President Clinton’s refusal to intervene in the Rwandan genocide. Eight years later, 9/11.

The picture has affected him at the personal level, as well. He’s haunted by a voice that came to him as he was about to click the shutter of his camera. It was Cleveland’s voice, he thinks, though he knows Cleveland was already dead. It said, “Do this, and I will own you forever.” Him, O’Brien, all of us.

The Body of an American hews to the trend of short, if not sweet, productions. It’s 90 minutes with no intermission at Theater J, 1529 16th Street NW, Washington, DC, through May 22. Box office.

Tomorrow a review of Disgraced, now at Arena Stage.