Every Word’s a Choice

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Last week, I gave a presentation at a writhing workshop sponsored by the Public Safety Writers Association—an organization for public safety professionals (police, fire, EMT, military, etc.) who write and the authors who write about them. It’s a great group for any crime writer because you can get all your procedure-strategy-mindset questions authoritatively answered.

I think I took a different tack than the “grammar lesson” people may have expected, and instead focused on words, using the best words, and using them better. Words are our smallest writing elements, and I started with this quote from Mark Twain:

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning”

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting some of the information and resources I assembled for the workshop, but first I’ll answer a basic question: Why focus on such a small unit of our literary output? I focused on the words we writers choose, because they are fundamental to improving our skill as  writers. They are fundamental to making that connection with our readers that keeps them turning pages and coming back for more.

Some of the information in this series may be in the category of “helpful reminders,” like the chime that reminds you to fasten your seat belt. Some of it may be new, or at least strike you in a new way. And all of it, I hope, builds your appreciation for the magic you create when you write your stories. Think about it: You go from a blank sheet of paper to something with meaning and impact for your readers.

I’ve come to realize that the black squiggles I put on paper are only half the job of writing. All readers, with their assumptions, experiences, understandings (or lack thereof) perform the other half. They’re what bring my work to life and allow it to entertain, inform, and, sometimes, reflect. Pulitzer-Prize Winner Robert Olen Butler says the author’s job is to set up a dream, then author and reader experience the dream together. Grammar errors, poorly chosen words (even typos), jolt readers out of the dream, and they may not come back.

Words are how we authors communicate our thoughts, our emotions, our stories. There’s no body language or tone of voice to clue readers in to what we were thinking when we wrote a particular passage. For that reason, we need to take our words seriously, so that we evoke in our readers the feelings and understandings, the tension and the resolution we strive for. Words are our tools. Above is a word cloud of my presentation, the tools I used that day. How long is that new story, that book? 85,000 words? 90,000? Well, then, the author has 85 or 90,000 chances to get the words exactly right!

I hope you’ll go with me in the succeeding weeks on this “Every Word’s a Choice” journey.

A Murderous Reading Vacation–Right in Your Own Back Yard

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So your friends are off to the Jersey Shore or Thailand or the Maritime Provinces. You can have your own exciting vacation right from the ol’ lounge chair. Here are five recent crime stories that will give you a taste of sea, sand, and foreign climes.

Pele’s Prerogative by Albert Tucher
If a Hawai`i vacation is just what you need, you’ll find plenty of local color to make you think you’ve vacationed in that island paradise. Pele, you’ll recall, is the goddess of volcanoes and fire who created the Hawaiian Islands. The flowing lava creates lava tubes, akin to cave systems. Seventy-three-year-old Langston Otsaka, is found dead at the bottom of a lava tube in his back yard, and the wound on the back of his head suggests it wasn’t an accidental. Read my full review here.

Runaway Horses by the Italian literary duo Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini
Lawyer Enzo Maggioni and his wife Valeria, traveling to Siena, encounter a violent hailstorm, take a wrong turn, and end up at an enormous villa, where they remain guests for several days. They’ve arrived shortly before Siena’s August Palio, a centuries-old event in which horses race three laps around the town’s Piazza del Campo. The competition is vigorous and not always fair. Then there’s the dead jockey in the library. My full review is here.

Killer Potential by Hannah Deitch
This story sneaks up on you and before long has its claws in you good and solid. From the moment Evie Gordon walks up to her clients’ quirky Southern California mansion and finds the front door wide open, you know she’s about to uncover something better avoided. A young woman is tied up inside, and Evie’s employers are dead. When suspicion falls on the two women, they go on the run across the US—a 2025 Thelma and Louise. Here’s the full review.

Sayulita Sucker by Craig Terlson
In this story, set in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, you’ll visit back alleys and dicey neighborhoods not featured in any guidebook. Luke Fischer barrels through the pages as unstoppable as a locomotive. He’s not always polite, prefers beer to wine, and raises a dust storm wherever he goes. Yet, he has an uncanny knack for finding missing people. This time, his client is a man whose teenager daughter has disappeared. Full review here.

Murder Takes a Vacation by Laura Lippman
The acclaimed author’s first cozy mystery is a delight. Muriel Blossom, widowed and newly wealthy, has planned her first trip to Europe—Paris and a splurgy river cruise. You might suspect that Lippman has an older auntie or family friend who inspired her to so perfectly create open-hearted, naïve Mrs. Blossom. From the first page, you’ll peg her as the inevitable victim of an assortment of solicitous character. Read the full review.

reading, apple

Great New Jersey Theater!

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Some shows you enjoy, some inspire a “meh,” and some occupy a “don’t miss!” category. In our family, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is in that last group, and the new production at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, which opened Saturday and runs through June 1, knocks it out of the park! STNJ artistic director Brian B. Crowe and the cast reveal and revel in every bit of the penetrating wit that makes this show perennially popular.

The crux of the story is that two young women are determined to marry men with the given name Ernest, a name epitomizing sober seriousness. Unfortunately, they’ve fixed on a pair of society gentlemen of the complete opposite temperament. Neither is named Ernest, though both pretend to be. Even worse, because a man needs certain credentials to marry a society daughter, the origins of one of them are completely unknown. It’s left to dowager Aunt Augusta to get to the bottom of the case, or suitcase, as it were.

While the play is most definitely a comedy, and in this production the audience appreciated the humor immensely, the humor works because of Wilde’s spot-on observations about human behavior at the extremes.

Christian Frost plays Algernon Moncrieff, nephew of Aunt Augusta, and Tug Rice plays Jack Worthing, aspirant to the hand of her daughter, Gwendolen. Not only do these two actors deliver their lines with perfect comic timing, their body language and gestures make the always-slightly-ridiculous situation even more so.

Marion Adler is perfection as the unyielding Lady Augusta Bracknell, with Carolyne Leys her besotted daughter, Gwendolen. She believes all is well with her engagement to Worthing until she meets his hitherto unknown and suspiciously beautiful ward, Cecily Cardew, played by Joyce Meimei Zheng. The two young women immediately feign deep friendship, but you know the claws will come out once the unmasking of the pseudonymous Ernests begins.

In smaller roles, Richard Bourg plays both manservant to Algernon and later to Jack. Though he’s in the background, his reactions to the young people’s shenanigans add a great deal. Alvin Keith plays the country parson being tapped to christen or re-christen the men with new names, and Celia Schaefer plays Miss Prism, tutor to Cecily, who unexpectedly holds the key to the whole dilemma.

The young men may not be Ernests, yet, but they are definitely Earnest when it comes to love!

A word about the set. There are three scenes (Algernon’s flat, Worthing’s country garden, and, finally, his drawing-room), and the design accommodates all three with just enough elegant detail. Delicious costumes and atmospheric lighting effects in the garden scene too. STNJ productions are hosted at Drew University in Madison, N.J. (easily reachable from NYC by train). For tickets, call the box office at 973-408-5600 or visit the Box Office online.

Fair Haven

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Laury A. Egan’s new crime thriller, set in the suburban town of Fair Haven, dispels any notion you might have that the suburbs are dull. Fair Haven is an actual town in Monmouth County, New Jersey, and Egan grew up there, so while she describes its Jersey Shore locale with convincing authenticity, the residents’ shenanigans are, one hopes, wholly fictional.

Coincidentally, while reading this book, my husband and I found ourselves practically next door, attending the opening day of Monmouth Park Racetrack’s 2025 season. I kept glancing around at my fellow racing fans in search of doppelgangers for Egan’s lively characters! As Egan describes the area in a foreword, it’s a middle-income to wealthy year-round community with sailing, yacht clubs, the ocean, two rivers, and a rich history. Homicides, she says, are rare.

Maybe so, but she’s put a juicy one in Fair Haven. The protagonist is Chris Clarke, a professional photographer in her early 40s, who formerly worked for Monmouth County’s Forensic and Technical Services Bureau. Though she no longer works for them, the local police call her in when a staff overload leaves the Fair Haven Police with a dead body on their hands and no photographer.

The dead woman is Sally Ann Shaffer, a tennis pro at the Sycamore Country Club, who was electrocuted in her hot tub, and there is no shortage of suspects. It seems quite a few people, men and women alike, had sexual liaisons with Sally Ann. She may even have had her eye on a Roman Catholic priest, new in the community, who runs a summer tennis clinic for children of the parish.

Chris is in an intimate relationship with physical therapist Kate Morgan, and what I liked about this story is that Egan has made the sexuality of this couple and several other characters an integral part of the plot. Kate has been married and has a 14-year-old son, but one of the dilemmas she and Chris face is that the son doesn’t want to live with his mom as long as she’s with Chris. Too embarrassing.

Kate lost custody of her son in the divorce, when the judge received a letter from Sally Ann revealing that Kate is a lesbian. The hypocrisy eludes Kate’s ex-husband Harry, who drinks too much, and has been carrying on with Sally Ann for years. With justification, Kate wants their son back. Both of them end up among the several suspects in Sally Ann’s death.

There’s blackmail, thievery, fraud, assault, and more awaiting readers of this book. Although the characters engage in much antisocial behavior and hold quite a few prejudices, Chris is a likeable protagonist and remains the moral center of the story. I did feel that her old friend, Police Chief Mackie, and the department’s lead detective share more information with her than they should, but that does keep the story moving along briskly. While there are twists, they are all earned—Egan lays her groundwork well.

Weekend Movie Pick: The Penguin Lessons

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Although dramatic actors often have trouble with comedy, it’s remarkable how comic actors can do such wonderful jobs with dramatic roles. Think Robin Williams, Steve Carell, Melissa McCarthy. Maybe it’s their timing, or how comfortable they are being “all in,” or how carefully they listen and react, I don’t know. But the chance to see (mostly) comedian Steve Coogan in a straight role was irresistible. You may remember him from his pairing with Rob Bryden in the hilarious “The Trip” series and the lovely The Lost King.

The Penguin Lessons was directed by Peter Cattaneo (The Magpie Murders), and written by Jeff Pope and Tom Michell, based on the book by Michell (see the trailer here). The story recounts Michell’s experience working as an English professor at an upscale boys’ school in Argentina during the harrowing time of the military overthrow and all the “disappearances” of protestors (some 30,000 of whom were never returned to their families, dead or alive). The school, run by a rigid head master (Jonathan Pryce) has a strict “no pets” policy, so when Michell finds himself in possession of a penguin, he has to hide it. But the penguin turns out to be exactly the catalyst that helps everyone to become their better selves—better students, better teachers, better family. When the granddaughter of the school’s housekeeper is kidnapped by the military, the stakes become serious.

The plot isn’t groundbreaking, but it is very soothing and never becomes sappy, as such films so often do. The performances of Coogan and the housekeeper (Vivian El Jaber) feel absolutely real. Björn Gustafsson is a clueless science professor. The penguin is charming.

If you need a break from the news of the day, this is a good one! And, it appears, audiences agree. In case it isn’t showing in your area, I think you can see the whole movie here.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 84%; audiences: 94%.

Water Everywhere

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When I opened Janet Rudolph’s fascinating Spring 2025 collection of essays for Mystery Readers Journal—this edition her second on the theme of “London Mysteries,” I was delighted to discover the first one, by Aubrey Nye Hamilton, was “The Lost Rivers of London.” This was a happy coincidence, because my mystery book club this week was set to discuss Rivers of London: Midnight Riot, a 2011 book by Ben Aaronovitch that I listened to a few years ago.

This was one of those books I would never have chosen if I’d realized what it was about, but which I enjoyed immensely—despite myself, you might say. There has been a new book in the series every year since (plus a second in 2011), bringing the series total to 14 so far. I’ve not read another of these urban fantasies, but I did enjoy the first. In it, an apprentice wizard (and London police constable) must figure out why ordinary people are becoming vicious killers, as well as try to broker a peace between two warring gods of the River Thames and their respective families. I recall that the several River gods and their watery relatives were quite entertaining.

Hamilton’s essay describes the 600 km network of rivers that flows mostly invisibly, but sometimes audibly, beneath the city. They are the numerous tributaries of the Thames, and the River Fleet (yellow on the map), for which Fleet Street is named, is the largest. As author Melinda Mullet notes in her MRJ essay, the Charlbert Street Bridge (pictured above) is actually an aqueduct whose enclosed iron pipes carry water from the “lost” Tyburn River (purple on the map) to the lake in Regent’s Park.

Paved over and channeled into drainage pipes, the city’s “lost rivers” now aid its sewage and flood protection systems. Nevertheless, Hamilton notes, “sections of the sewer are often relatively dry and quite safe, if unpleasant, to travel.” This has made it possible for people, for whatever reason, to walk the city easily and invisibly, underground. As this and other essays in the volume attest, crime fiction writers have taken full advantage of this urban feature. In recent years, considerable effort has been directed to restoring and revitalizing these watercourses.

The map shows the lost rivers in color. The white squiggle is the River Thames. Perhaps they do all have distinctive personalities like author Aaronovitch speculates. The currents below the surface.

Another Winner from Tim Sullivan

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When I scan the list of books I’ll be reviewing in the next few months for crimefictionlover.com, I’m thrilled when I see one of Tim Sullivan’s entertaining murder mysteries coming up. The series, each entry titled with the profession of the victim, proves no occupation is safe from murderous impulses. His latest is The Bookseller. You might think a bookseller, particularly one whose esoteric specialty is dusty rare books and first editions, couldn’t rile anybody up to the point of murder, but Ed Squire appears to have done just that.

In this story, Detective Sergeant George Cross, somewhere on the autism spectrum, again burnishes his reputation as an investigative bulldog. Once George’s jaws latch onto a case, he isn’t letting it go until he’s absolutely and completely satisfied the right perpetrator has been brought to justice. This is good for justice and frustrating for his colleagues in the Avon and Somerset Major Crimes Unit, who meanwhile have been barking up a great many wrong trees and just want to move on.

Of course, George and his partner, Josie Ottey, would find it easier to quickly home in on the proper suspect if victims didn’t tend to go through life accumulating a significant array of enemies. Over the course of this investigation, the detectives uncover serious family problems—financial and interpersonal. It begins to look as if everything isn’t on the up-and-up in the book shop, either. Most dangerous of all, the deceased ran afoul of a Russian oligarch to whom he sold some stolen documents, and the man wants his £2 million back.

The Russians—not just the fabulously wealthy oligarch, but also his gangsterish henchmen—bring a sense of real menace to the proceedings. Only some clever police work by Ottey and Cross’s team reveals the extent of their rather persistent presence and how they have been staking out the Squires’ shop.

Meanwhile, George is beset by his own problems. DS Ottey is now a Detective Inspector, outranking him. He fears he’ll be assigned a new partner. Of course, everyone recognizes she’s the only person who’s been able to work with him. As a reader, I also want her to stay! She’s an interesting character and a perfect foil for George.

More significantly, George’s father, Raymond, has had a stroke and will need a long course of rehabilitation, which George assumes he should take charge of. No one, especially Raymond, believes that would be a good idea, but changing George’s mind is never easy. The relationship between George and his father—and in more recent books, his mother—is one of the many charms of this series. Like Ottey, his parents know they can’t interact with their unusual son in the usual ways, and they’re models of effective coping.

Tim Sullivan is crime writer, screenwriter, and director, and his George Cross series benefits from that background in both (“I didn’t see that coming!”) plotting and the development of a diverse, never-boring cast of characters. Highly recommended.

Theater Extravaganza!

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Last weekend we enjoyed an unforgettable theater weekend. Thanks to gifts, we did not have to remortgage the house to snag tickets for two of the hottest, most interesting shows currently on Broadway: Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal in Othello and George Clooney in Good Night and Good Luck.

For more than 400 years, audiences have found Shakespeare’s plays so perfectly capture human motives, failings, and dilemmas that they continue to offer important commentary, however far removed we are from their creation. Good Night and Good Luck, an adaptation of the 2005 film, is set some 70 years ago—an eternity in the age of texting and instant messaging—but it too lent itself painful timeliness. Do such works speak to audiences today? They did last weekend. Is their message lost on today’s audiences? Not for a New York minute.

Othello, you’ll remember, is the story of a vaunted Venetian general whose chief aide, feigning loyalty but secretly vindictive, sows doubt about the faithfulness of Othello’s wife, Desdemona. Suspicion builds, and this false story eventually so enrages Othello that he murders her and, in this version, the play ends with death upon death. What devastating power lies have. And, once accepted, how difficult they are to dislodge.

A major theme of the play is reputation. Iago famously says, “Who steals my purse steals trash; ʼtis something, nothing . . . But he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed.” Even in his last speech, the suicidal Othello is concerned about how he will be perceived thereafter.

In Shakespeare’s time, although news of a person’s transgressions—real or imagined or maliciously crafted—might eventually reach the ears of many people or the few who mattered; today, such reports are instantly accessible to a worldwide audience and wreak havoc with the ideas of privacy and safety and innocence. Whether they are true or not seems irrelevant. The point is to hurt. In the face of this onslaught, we are “perplexed in the extreme,” as Othello says, and damaged in some cases, beyond repair.

George Clooney has had a long interest in the topic of how fear stifles political debate. In this project, he and co-writer Grant Heslov took the Army-McCarthy hearings as their subject. Senator Joseph McCarthy was infamous for his sensational accusations that various individuals were Communists based on slender or no evidence. His particular targets were the federal government, universities, and the film industry. It was a fearful time. Tremendous pressure was brought on television journalist Edward R. Murrow and his co-producer Fred Friendly to tread lightly around McCarthy, as anyone who opposed him would very likely become his next target.

Nevertheless, Murrow and Friendly produced a famous See It Now documentary using clips of McCarthy himself and his wild accusations. Commenting on the Senator’s words, Murrow said, “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty” and warning against letting fear push the country into an age of unreason. The production definitely wants to establish parallels with current-day politics, and one of its biggest laughs comes when a newsman laments that he hasn’t quite understood what’s been happening in the past few years and says, “It’s like all the sensible people flew to Europe and left us here.”

Both plays benefit from excellent casts, including Clooney and Gyllenhaal, who are not stage actors. Othello has a spare stage that adapts to whatever configuration is needed, whereas Good Night and Good Luck has a very specific set, a 1950s newsroom, with all the chaos of a production about to go on air. Both work.

Queen of Diamonds

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This is the third in Beezy Marsh’s trilogy inspired by a real-life female shoplifting gang that operated in London in the first half of the twentieth century. The first two books, Queen of Thieves and Queen of Clubs, deal with the gang’s activities during their heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, while this book describes how their leader—Alice Diamond—got her dubious start two decades earlier.

Alice, the future Queen of Diamonds, is an orphan working long hot hours in Pink’s Jam Factory. Aspiring to a better life, she shoplifts little indulgences for herself on her off-hours—silk stockings, colorful scarves, and the like. Alice’s story is interspersed with that of Mary Carr, another legendary leader of a real-life shoplifting gang whose career began several decades earlier. Mary grew up in one of London’s most notorious slums, Seven Dials.

In Marsh’s story, Mary is noticed by a Mayfair lady out slumming. She’s looking for subjects for her paintings of dirty, downtrodden, poverty-stricken children and finds Mary a perfect model for her art. By inviting the girl to her home and studio, the condescending Lady Harcourt exposes Mary to a completely different side of life, whetting her appetite for better things. Mary soon realizes she’s treated completely differently when she’s wearing Lady Harcourt’s daughter’s hand-me-downs than when dressed in her own dirty rags. From that point, there’s no going back for her.

Author Marsh evokes sympathy with her descriptions of the women’s sordid living conditions and unambitious, resentful family members. It isn’t surprising they aspire to glamour beyond the understanding of the people they grew up with. What’s remarkable is that both Mary and Alice are brash and determined enough to get it, with potential trouble with the authorities always right around the corner.

All that is fairly sociological. What about the story? It never flags and rests on the tremendous strength of the characters Marsh has created. She puts us right there, fingering those silks, decorating those bonnets, and running for our lives when the coppers appear.

Permissible Laughter

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In a thought-provoking interview with award-winning Lebanese-Canadian novelist, journalist, and visual artist Rawi Hage a few years back, he talked about how it’s the writer’s job to push the limits, to not settle for being only entertaining. For me this resonates with the idea that authors shouldn’t try to bang out the next “The Girl Who. . .” book, but strike out into some new territory. Of course, for many, it seems, they run up against a failure of imagination or an excess of anxiety, which is why when a particular book catches on, it will have so many clones. In a contradiction bound eventually to fail, many authors try to recapture that uniqueness.

Think, for example of Dan Brown’s books and all the religio-cryptic thrillers that came afterward. Or all the books where a discrete set of people with a shared past and rivalries and bitter secrets are stranded on an island, in a remote area cut off by a storm, or wherever, and . . . they start to die. Or the Gone Girl clones, or, rather, would-be clones.

Hage said he thinks of himself as “a confrontational writer,” and the more marginal he feels about a piece, the better his writing is. In other words, he’s not trying to please everyone. “Writers who try to please and go by the rules and try to do the right things, they tend to fail,” he thinks. It’s an interesting stance to take, and difficult for authors, when the publishing industry seems increasingly risk-averse.

He talked interestingly about the way the Arabic language affected his writing. He read a lot of Arabic poetry as a young man, and it’s very visual, perhaps making up for strictures on visual representations of people and animals in the culture generally. It’s a “very elaborate” language, he says. Writing in English, he pared back.

Even so, he brings “bags and bags of history, travels, concerns, revenge; a mixture of the emotional, the experiential, and the cultural” to his writing. That comports with my view of writing as like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with a thousand disparate pieces of the kinds he mentions, and seeing what picture they create. He wisely infuses that mix with dark humor too. Pavlov, the protagonist of his fourth novel, Beirut Hellfire Society, says, “Laughter should be permissible under all circumstances.”