Category Archives: writing

Take-Aways

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In a post last week based in part on an interview with award-winning author Laura van den Berg, she talked about the strangeness we encounter in daily life. Some people may see mysteries in that strangeness, some see the workings of the supernatural, and some just pass right by, eyes glued to cell phone. Now that’s strange! The current Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine includes a number of stories that anticipate Halloween and the different ways people react to such hard-to-explain happenings.

Strangeness and ambiguity are useful tools in fiction, not just at Halloween. In real life, friendships may suddenly end, marriages dissolve, and we may not know why—even when we’re one of the principals. Conversely, the things that keep a relationship going can be equally puzzling.

To van den Berg, the ambiguity in a story can be either positive or negative. Even when a story doesn’t provide all the answers, she says, “it should give [readers] something to take away.” Inexperienced writers, trying to achieve a sense of mystery, may under-explain, running the risk of merely creating confusion and giving their readers nothing to latch onto. It’s equally off-putting when authors over-explain. Trust your readers to figure many things out. A friend used to write sentences like, “He threw the plate against the wall because he was angry.” Clearly, the “because” clause is completely unnecessary. “She spent an hour on her makeup because she wanted to look her best.” Ditto.

A story’s ending is an important contributor to what the reader will take from it. Van den Berg’s approach to finding the endings of her stories doesn’t sound like a huge assembly of 3 x 5 cards and post-its. Nor does she flail around trying to discover the ending in a morass of prose. Instead, she says she often sees the ending as “an image of some kind.” She may not initially see all the action steps (plot) that will get her there, but she’s moving toward it, through the fog of creation, following the glow of a distant light.

In the mystery/crime/thriller genre, an ending is likely to be unsatisfying if it leaves too many mysteries unsolved, too many loose ends. When I’m writing, I keep a list of unresolved story questions. They may be tangible issues such as, How does Evie know Carl has a peanut allergy? Or less tangible ones, like, If Steve really loves Diana, why did he have an affair?

I don’t have to work out an answer to them the moment they come up (an invitation to backstory that derails the flow), but when I arrive at the end, I check my list. Are all the questions that can be answered with a fact addressed in some logical and preferably unobtrusive way? Have the intangible questions at least been considered by the character? It isn’t necessary that readers completely believe a character’s explanations, but they should be confident the character believes them, at least at some level. A frequent and annoying cop-out is the phrase, “he had no choice but to . . .” following which the author steers the character into some plot-necessary action. Of course there were choices, and it is the writer who made one. Slightly better is when characters say, “I had no choice . . .” Yes, you recognize they’re probably just rationalizing. Weakly. Unpersuasively. Which of itself says something about them.

You may recall that one of the necessaries of a short story is “it needs to have a point.” That doesn’t mean a political point, or a hit-them-over-the-head-with-a-hammer point. It’s more subtle, something that grounds the stories despite and because of life’s mysteries. Irish author Anne Enright said it well, “Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.” You, the writer, are the rock in a sea of ambiguity.

Going to the Dogs

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Interested in how police and emergency service dogs are trained and used? Lots of readers are, and mystery/crime authors often want to include service dogs in their stories, but accurately. Members of the Public Safety Writers Association got a close look at that corner of the world last Saturday from organization Vice-President Steve Ditmars. Ditmars worked many years as a police service dog handler and K-9 Unit supervisor for the Long Beach (Calif.) Police Department and gave a jam-packed Zoom program on the topic.

His first piece of advice was to find out what the policies and procedures are in the locale where you’re writing about, if it’s a real place, in the time period of your fiction. Ways of handling and using dogs vary by jurisdiction, he explained, and these practices change a lot too. If the locale is totally fictional, you have more leeway.

The training process for a police service dog is extensive, but the risk here, he said, is to get so caught up in it, you give Too Much Information. Ditmars has skirted such pitfalls very well in his own books—Big Dogs, Gasping for Air, and a third (coming soon). He finds adding canine characters helps him tell a story, because they enable a variety of perspectives and events. For example, the way someone handles or react to a dog can reveal key aspects of that person’s character.

And, of course, he cautioned authors to be mindful about what happens to the dog. Many readers have a soft spot for Man’s Best Friend, especially when they’ve shown heroism, loyalty, and discipline. You can write a gritty thriller where human lives come to a bad end, but if the dog doesn’t survive the last chapter, you’ll get pushback.

Dogs can be trained to take on many different roles: search and rescue, personal protection, patrol, tracking and trailing people, finding things (narcotics, cadavers, explosives, gas leaks, even from buried pipes). Each of these roles has a different training regimen and relies on dogs’ acute senses of smell and hearing. Ditmars said they are better than humans at pinpointing where a sound is coming from.

Public safety personnel like to use dogs for certain jobs, because it saves time, in, say, searching an area or building. They can be trained to guard suspects until their handler arrives. The threat of a bite is sometimes enough to keep the suspect in place. Dogs are good for departmental public relations too, at open houses and other public events.

Just as new parents “suddenly” notice how many baby products are out there, in a few days after hearing this excellent presentation, I read two stories in which dogs played a role. They were: Doug Crandell’s lively story “Bad Hydrous” in the Sep/Oct 2024 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Creeping Man.”

Thanks, Steve, for this literary heads up!
Read more about Steve here.

Meet Author Laura van den Berg

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The interviews the late lamented Glimmer Train magazine published are a fine source of information on authors beyond, say, John Grisham and Lucy Foley. The mag’s interview with Laura van den Berg was published in 2012—a dozen years ago. Accomplished as she was at that time, she’s done even more now! Then, she was “working on” a novel (isn’t everyone?), but now she’s published three: State of Paradise, The Third Hotel, and Find Me, plus four collections of short stories, including the one with my favorite title, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears. All the while, she’s been racking up the prizes. (Van den Berg’s website here.)

Her newest novel, State of Paradise, was published only two months ago and deemed a “most anticipated book” by a great many review publications. NPR said it was “at once an adventure and a treat, a deep study of Florida’s psychogeography,” and if you know very much about Florida, van den Berg’s home state, you’ll know what a deep and complex subject that can be. “So many worlds,” she says.

In the interview, she talks about the attraction of Gatorland, where people wrestle alligators, which reminded me of Karen Russell’s 2011 Swamplandia!, a Pulitzer Prize finalist about an entire family of Florida alligator wrestlers. Not recommended bedtime reading. “And many other parts of the state are just as strange,” van den Berg says.

Unlike so many authors, van den Berg didn’t start out to be a writer. She wanted to be a psychology major but ran into a major stumbling block: math. As a person who used to sleep with her statistics book under her pillow in case some insight would crawl out of it and into my head during the night, I can relate. What turned her attention to the possibilities of writing was discovering contemporary literature—not the classics.

Part of her learning to write fiction was to learn how not to be “willfully strange.” When her stories have strangeness in them, as they often do, it must “have roots in the characters’ lives” and not feel as if she is “imposing strangeness on them.” Certainly in writing mystery and suspense stories, events, however untoward, should not feel arbitrary or conceived merely to move the plot along. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking a particular character wouldn’t act as the story describes, you may have encountered something “willfully strange.”

Twelve years ago, van den Berg explained her attraction to magical realism themes, “monsters and myths,” as due in part to Florida’s influence. In addition, she says, “there’s so much about the world, so much mystery, that I would never understand,” that may be better described or appreciated through a totally different perspective. Her view was prescient, given the popularity of paranormal themes in fiction today. Recent crime novels with neurodivergent protagonists—Nita Prose’s The Maid, Liz Nugent’s Strange Sally Diamond, or Tim Sullivan’s Detective George Cross come to mind—may be another manifestation of shifted perspective.

Part of the pleasure of reading van den Berg’s work or that of the other authors I mentioned is sorting out what’s real and what isn’t. These alternative realities, like belief in the Loch Ness Monster or the power of wishes, are both “beautiful and terrifying,” she says, because in a way, “it’s easier to not believe in things.” And, “There’s a beauty to people who do live in the world with imagination, and who embrace the mystery of the world at large.”

Take it from me, it’s possible to love such flights of imagination and the cut-and-dried world of “just the facts, ma’am” police procedurals at the same time.More Recommended Florida Reading:
Swamplandia!by Karen RussellNaked Came the Florida Manby Tim Dorsey – irrepressible craziness

Keep Them in Suspense

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What is suspense? In the world of mystery, crime, and thriller fiction, it can seem like an all-purpose label for books that don’t fit the other, increasingly blurry categories. Know who the villain is?—not a mystery. Single narrator?—not a typical thriller. Bad things happening but not, technically, crimes?—not crime fiction. Occasionally, I’ve had to justify reviewing a book for the UK website CrimeFictionLover.com by saying something like “if you think it’s a crime for governments to deceive their citizens…” Not everything that’s a crime, writ large, is illegal. Just ask the fake news purveyors.

A few months ago Kathryn Schulz wrote an interesting New Yorker piece on suspense. “Like a lot of fun things,” she wrote, “suspense has a bad reputation,” and its detractors think of it as just a cheap trick to entertain “the masses” (like me!). A hundred-fifty years ago, when detective novels and mystery stories began to appear, they were criticized for merely appealing to curiosity, rather than offering nobler forms of fulfillment or ethical example.

I’ve been rereading Sherlock Holmes (complete works, 2 volumes, I’m on page 1052). It turns out The Great Detective provides not only suspense, but many ethical examples. Working outside the law enforcement apparatus, he relies on his personal sense of justice. And it doesn’t always entail turning a perpetrator over to the police, though in other situations, he does so gleefully.

The critiques are also misapplied, Schulz said, because almost every form of writing—excepting, she says, telephone directories and instruction manuals—makes use of suspense to captivate its readers. (I might disagree with her here, given some of the highly mysterious instruction manuals I’ve encountered for electronics manufactured abroad.) Shakespeare certainly deployed suspense to great effect. Will Othello kill Desdemona? Will Macbeth evade justice for slaying Duncan? Will Hamlet follow the order given by his father’s ghost? The late thriller writer Henning Mankell once said, “Every good story has a mystery in it.” I use that truism as the epigram for my own website.

Today’s descendants of the critics whose noses turned up at suspense 150 years ago today cluck over “genre fiction”—you know what that is. Mystery, romance, science fiction—in other words, the kinds of books people like to read. E.M. Forster, in noting that every fictional work must be built around a story, said that for a story to be effective, it must make readers want to know “what happens next.” That is, suspense.

While it might seem that withholding information is the key to creating suspense, Schulz points out that suspense also requires sharing information. A reader may not know what’s behind that door, but the writer has implied there are dark doings somewhere in the house; has shown the little boy’s fear; has made the rusty door handle hard to turn, but turn it he does … ever … so … slowly.

She cites Alfred Hitchcock’s example of a bomb going off in a crowded theater. The reader (or filmgoer) can know the bomb is there in advance, or not. How much more scary is it to know that the bomb is ticking away, while people blithely munch popcorn than it is to have a sudden loud Boom! and a lot of flying body parts and settling dust? Even knowing what will happen, we can feel excruciating suspense.

An excellent example of this is the new novel by Robert Harris, Precipice, set in 1914 on the very eve of World War I. He presents, verbatim, some of the hundreds [!] of love-letters UK Prime Minister H.H. Asquith wrote to young Venetia Stanley. Asquith hears the saber-rattling on the Continent, reads the desperate telegrams from diplomats in Russia and France, but can’t be distracted from his obsessive correspondence. Meanwhile, I was tearing my hair out! Because of the extreme suspense, waiting for the worst to happen, this book was one of the most gripping I’ve ever read (my review coming soon). I hope you wait for it with suspense—of the anticipation variety, not the dread kind.

Short Story Essentials

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reading, apple

Almost a year ago—how time flies!—the Central Virginia Chapter of Sisters in Crime organized a Zoom workshop on the ingredients of a great short story. They assembled a fine panel of presenters, too—Michael Bracken (well over a thousand short stories under his belt), Barb Goffman (recent winner of the Lifetime Achievement award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society), K.L. Murphy (Virginia native, novelist, and short story author) and Josh Pachter (not only a prolific writer—first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine at age 16—and anthology editor, but also an expert translator of others’ fiction).

In the piles of notes from the various seminars I Zoom in on are many intriguing insights. They often help me crystallize my own thoughts on a topic and, eventually, maybe, lead to a blog post for you. Here’s what I took away from this estimable group.

Among the most important things that a short story needs:

  • It needs a point. That’s what convinces readers the story was worth it; short stories that aspire to being literary often miss this, obscuring their vague purpose in high-flying prose. If you read the masters, like Chekhov and Gogol, the point is not only present, it’s significant. Yet it needn’t hit you over the head. It’s intrinsic. As George Saunders says, “I want my stories to move and change someone as much as these Russian stories have moved and changed me.” Dry, meandering modern stories will never achieve either impact or staying power.
  • It needs a strong ending, Goffman emphasized, which is what makes the point clear—again, even if not stated in so many words (actually, preferably if not spelled out). Trust your reader.
  • It needs believability. Even if it’s fantasy or about alien worlds, there must be a core of truth that the reader can invest in.
  • It needs strong characters, “right from the beginning,” said Murphy. She wants them to draw her in. Here’s an example: “‘Tell me the truth,’ Ruthie Ford said. ‘Why exactly did you come here?’” from John Floyd’s terrific story “Moonshine and Roses” in the Jul/Aug 2024 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. You know something—something interesting—about both these characters in just those first lines.

When selected stories for an anthology, Pachter looks for reliable writers, ones who’ve withstood, as he said, “the test of time,” which I’m guessing in part reflects writers who follow guidelines, who can meet a deadline, who won’t send in a too-early draft that will require a lot of editing. Such problems can hold up an entire project. An anthology is a collaboration among points of view, but the editor has the Master POV, the overall conception of the project, so Pachter also looks for authors who are willing to be edited, or, as Goffman put it, who will “work with me.”

If there’s fact-based information, Pachter added, the author needs to get it right. I’ve read a two stories very recently (novels, actually), where the author didn’t seem to have a good handle on the world. I referred to one of them in a post yesterday about the top temperature humans can survive at. In another, a character was bragging about her 14-carat diamond engagement ring. Whoa. That would be heavy! Not something you would/could wear every day.

Asked to suggest a memorable short story, Murphy mentioned Goffman’s “Dear Emily Etiquette,” which is one of my favorites too. It appeared in the Sep/Oct 2020 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, winning the Agatha Award as well as the magazine’s annual Reader Award. Pachter is a fan of Stanley Ellin’s “The Specialty of the House,” which appeared in EQMM in 1948; you may remember the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television version from 1959. Bracken recommends John M. Floyd’s well-plotted stories: “twist, twist, twist,” he said. And Goffman is a fan of John Connolly’s “The Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository” (2013), which won both Edgar and Anthony Awards.

For more, see the authors’ websites:
Michael Bracken
Barb Goffman
K.L. Murphy
Josh Pachter

Writing as Espionage

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spy, espionage, reading

As a new generation of excellent spy fiction writers emerges in the West, I took a sentimental look back at one of my American favorites—the late Charles McCarry, writer par excellence, former CIA man, and undercover operative in Africa, Asia, and Europe. I discovered an old interview with him and found great insights for authors of every genre.

In his first novel, The Miernik Dossier, published in 1973, he was already thinking about the challenges of being a novelist. Paul Christopher, protagonist of at least ten of his novels, says, “There is an artistry to what we are doing: spies are like novelists—except that spies use living people and real places to make their works of art.” In the interview, McCarry reiterated his view that there’s a striking similarity “between the creative process and tradecraft.”

The spy’s clandestine operation is the plot with almost inevitable twists and turns; agents are akin to stories’ protagonists; and the people they interact with are love interests, antagonists, and other sometimes disruptive characters. Authors often complain about their fictional characters not sticking to the plot—“minds of their own.” They go off the page, introduce unexpected complications, misbehave. Certainly, real-life people often don’t do what you expect or want them to, either.

A lot of story complications and their fallout emerge from below the writer’s conscious level. As a person who’s a “pantser”—that is I write by the seat of my pants, rather than with elaborate notes and outlines—I appreciate McCarry’s saying that, for him, writing remained a mystery, as with spying, where “I never quite understood what was going on.” I can relate. In my novel, Architect of Courage, there was a lot in there that I didn’t even realize until I was finished. “Oh, yeah. The subconscious mind at work again.”

McCarry created a character who was the Speaker of the House of Representatives in the book Shelley’s Heart. This fictional person turned out to be much more significant than McCarry expected. “Every morning when I sat down to write my 1,500 words, he would pull some other stunt.” Yet these actions were all perfectly logical in terms of where the plot and characters were going. Somewhere in a writer’s head, he believed, the brain must be assembling elements and figuring out how they work together.

One time in Kyoto, McCarry was in a Buddhist temple, trying to meditate, and discouraged that he couldn’t clear his mind and concentrate. The Zen master said something to this effect, “Don’t you realize that what those monks are trying to achieve is what you achieve every time you write a poem or a story? That is, the opening of consciousness.” Sliding open the doors between the conscious, the unconscious, and the subconscious, so that the work can be influenced by all three.

Acclaimed author Robert Olen Butler says you’re most likely to have access to the subconscious in the early morning while you’re still half-asleep! Before caffeine, the phone, and your analytic, goal-oriented mind take over. You can sometimes tell when a piece of writing was dominated by the author’s conscious mind—or as I think of it, their head not their heart. It may be logical, but it’s thin. It hurtles head-long toward a fixed goal (conclusion), when the characters clearly want to do something else. Artists in many fields talk about arriving at a trance-like state, when they’re deeply submerged in the creative process. Writers do too! In other words, basically, they make their “whole mind” work for them.

Recent espionage novels I’ve especially enjoyed:
The Translator by Harriet Crawley
The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry
Moscow X by David McCloskey
All three novels by James Wolff that shatter spy stereotypes. The first: Beside the Syrian Sea.

Name Your Poison (actually, no, don’t)

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A thought-provoking presentation on poisons at last month’s conference of the Public Safety Writers Association reminded me of a blog post I’d written a while ago. Such a relief for a crime writer to get away from guns for a while—and don’t even talk about knives! The tagteam presentation by Janet Gregor and Gloria Casale prompted me to update my earlier post. Plus, it gives me a chance to use this painting of “Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners,” showing she didn’t let an opportunity to conduct scientific research go to waste.

A PBS documentary on poisonings begins: In 1922, 101 New Yorkers hanged themselves, 444 died in car accidents, 20 were crushed in elevators. There were 237 fatal shootings, and 34 stabbings. And that year, 997 New Yorkers died of poisoning.

Not all those deaths were intentional, it turns out. A century ago, life was full of poisoning hazards at work and at home. You may remember the below-stairs tour of cleaning products, rat poisons, polishes, and “remedies” in the movie Gosford Park, each one of which looked mighty suspicious when the master was murdered.

A major cause of death was carbon monoxide (CO), an odorless, tasteless gas that got into the air thanks to leaky stoves and gaslights piping. Even today, when houses are shut up tight for winter, we still hear about deaths from malfunctioning space heaters or, difficult to believe though this is, charcoal grills people roll inside to heat up the house. You may remember when seven members of a Minnesota family died of accidental CO poisoning in December 2021.The culprit? A faulty furnace.

apothecary bottles, poison

Still, poisonings are much rarer today than they used to be because in 1917 New York City hired Dr. Charles Norris to be the city’s (and the nation’s) first chief medical examiner. Norris, born into a wealthy family, was one of those larger-than-life characters who create their own weather. Norris, in turn, hired Alexander Gettler to head the City’s first toxicology laboratory. Gettler and his staff built the field of toxicology from scratch, and he and Norris created modern forensic science. CSI fans are grateful.

As they brought science to the analysis of murder victims, murder by poison became less and less feasible. A fun (!) read is The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy. During his lifetime (120-63 BCE), Mithradates Eupator fought some of the most famous Roman generals, mostly successfully. At the height of his career, he governed 22 nations around the Black Sea and could speak all of their languages. And, he was an infamous poisoner. He believed that was how his mother murdered his father, so, to protect himself, he learned as much as he could about them.

One protection he engaged in was to take small doses of certain poisons every day to build up his tolerance. As a result, when Mithradates’ enemies gave him a lethal dose of something, it had no effect, which didn’t hurt his reputation for invincibility. He also developed a “universal antidote” to poison, still of scholarly interest. When the Romans finally captured Mithradates, he tried to commit suicide by poison, but his protection worked too well, and he was ultimately stabbed to death. Gardeners may recognize the King’s name: Eupatorium is a genus of flowering plant with several hundred species, including (and in my garden) Joe-Pye Weed. One of its species is, of course, poisonous to humans.

Much as Americans complain about “government regulations,” before the Food and Drug Administration took dangerous patent medicines off the drug store shelves in the 1920’s, and before there was a Consumer Product Safety Commission, and before the workplace safety rules that protect people like the poor young women who worked as radium dial-painters and died horribly of jaw and bone cancer, everyday life was full of deadly hazards, and mystery writers had one more handy tool in their store of potential mayhem-makers.

Want more?
12 Toxic Tales from National Geographic
The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum
The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy by Adrienne Mayor—fascinating!!
The Poison Artist fiction by Jonathan Moore – great use of the weapon

Crime Fiction: Partners, Sidekicks, and Foils

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Paging through the notes I’ve taken on innumerable Zoom calls—book discussions, writing tips, publishing conundrums—one from a few months ago caught my eye. The Zoom was sponsored by the New York area chapter of Mystery Writers of America, organized and moderated by expert author Gary Earl Ross of Buffalo.

It was a discussion about “partners in crime” detection—the reasons why in crime fiction the principal detective so often has a sidekick. It’s quite a useful device, because a slightly dim or new-on-the-job partner gives the detective a reason for explaining (to the reader) what they’re doing and why they’re doing it in a natural-feeling way.

As I’m rereading all of Sherlock Holmes currently, Conan Doyle uses Watson in this way. He is not dull-witted (the Nigel Bruce portrayal notwithstanding), but he finds Holmes’s methods baffling. You can empathize with his confusion, especially when Holmes is attempting some high-wire mental acrobatics, and you can feel a tiny bit superior to Watson, confident that Holmes will have it all figured out, even if you can’t see how he gets from A to Z, either.

One characteristic of our fictional detectives that readers (and viewers and hearers) like is their perseverance. Tim Sullivan’s Detective George Cross is like that. He doesn’t give up on an investigation, even when his superiors insist the case is solved. He keeps at it and…he’s right. As Ross said, readers appreciate an investigator who works hard. Of course, it’s the #2 who’ll have to kick in the doors (I’m looking at you, Ben Jones).

In cozy mysteries the bake shop owner (etc.) and her confederates (shop assistant, sister, best friend) frequently encounter a kind of person they don’t generally have to deal with. These meetings inspire readers’ thoughts of how they would handle that kind of person or situation. And, in cozies, having these confederates around provides some safety in numbers.  

Partners can not only provide flashes of insight, they also earn their keep by inserting a bit of humor. The lead detective’s colleagues in the New Zealand cozy-adjacent television series Brokenwood (quite fun) are not only good investigators themselves, they contribute big-time to squadroom humor.

Conveying a sense of justice is good rationale for the genre. But that’s not always simple. I’m thinking about S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears—one of his very best—and the uneasy partnership between two very different fathers. It’s that collaboration that lets Cosby explore highly fraught social territory.

Justice, of course, doesn’t always mean following the letter of the law, or even enforcing the laws. Having a partner lets a character thrash out those options. Here I’m thinking of The Plinko Bounce by Martin Clark—a wonderful tale about a public defender and his colleagues trying not to be outplayed by the man they’re defending. In crime stories, characters with a strong sense of right and wrong may find it in the law and, sometimes, outside it. In tricky situations, it’s great to have a partner you trust to hash things out with.

Weekend Movie Pick: Wildcat

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The award-winning author Flannery O’Connor is something of an acquired taste. You may be familiar with her Southern Gothic stories, her preoccupation with religion, especially Roman Catholicism (she attended mass daily), her deep understanding of human nature and its propensity to darkness and violence, and her startling candor. She said, for example, “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” Lastly, we recall her suffering with the crippling autoimmune condition systemic lupus erythematosus, which took her father’s life, and whose inevitable difficult progression she knew all too well.

O’Connor died at age 39. Now she comes blazing back to life in this bracing movie directed and co-written (with Shelby Gaines) by Ethan Hawke and starring his daughter, Maya Hawke, as O’Connor and Laura Linney as her mother, Regina (trailer), both of whom do brilliant work here. Flannery lived with her mother almost all of her life, and their relationship was obviously pivotal to the author’s view of human nature and its shortcomings.

O’Connor never gave her stories’ characters an easy way out, they never defaulted to a formulaic happy ending or an excess of sentimentality. What comes through in the stories is how strongly she rejected the shallow “niceness” of the people around her. Under her characters’ good manners and professed propriety, she saw a core of racism and religious hypocrisy. Her own mother was the epitome of Southern graciousness and, naturally, did not understand Flannery’s writing at all.

The film weaves together scenes from O’Connor’s life and relationships with dramatized excerpts from her stories. (It helps probably to be somewhat familiar with the actual stories, but works, regardless.) Interestingly, the mostly awful male characters in these recreations are played by a succession of actors, whereas Hawke and Linney play the sparring (mostly) female characters. They approach each of these fictional relationships fresh and without condescension. Relationships are complicated; you can love and despise a person at the same time.

Critic Jeffrey M. Anderson wrote, “This fine depiction of a great author avoids typical biopic trappings, instead concentrating on the rhythms of the artistic process and capturing O’Connor’s voice in a visual way.” Some critics object to the intrusion of the stories in the narrative of her life, but to me they illustrate so much, so effectively, showing us what she thought and found important.

Below left is a photo of the Little Library outside O’Connor’s childhood home on Lafayette Square in Savannah, which we visited a few years ago. She loved birds, especially peacocks, and raised many of them. The movie scenes take place at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in New York with her publisher, and mostly around Milledgeville, Georgia, where the family relocated when she was a teenager. We visited the house (below right) and museum in Milledgeville last year.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 56%; audiences 74%.

bookshare, Flannery O'Connor, peacock
Bookshare box outside Flannery O’Connor’s girlhood home with an adored peacock (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

Sherlock Holmes: Master of Disguise

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Contemporary writers of Sherlock Holmes pastiches take inspiration from real events and characters, as well as having occasional fun with familiar Holmes tropes. In the entertaining volume Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery 1885, published late last year by Belanger Books, editor Richard Ryan included several stories in which Holmes capitalized on his considerable talent for disguise.

Here’s what some of the anthology’s authors say about that particular aspect of Holmes stories

“The ‘manic,’ childlike energy of Holmes’s disguises—particularly those in A Scandal in Bohemia or The Hound of the Baskervilles—is an oft-overlooked part of his character. Holmes is often seen as sober and serious, so I wanted to explore a different side of him,” says George Gardner.

Gustavo Bondoni said Holmes’s disguises let the detective mix and mingle with all classes of people, bringing him “out of the drawing room and into the world.” In my stories in which Holmes takes on a disguise, I deploy it for humor, as well as information-gathering. Poor Watson, poor Lestrade! They never recognize him. But the Irregulars? Not fooled for a minute. In another clever twist, in Katy Darby’s story, Watson, not Holmes, is the one getting to act for a change, when he impersonates the Lock Hospital Inspector Q. Forrest? Luckily the head surgeon who meets him is rather short-sighted … !

“A frail and twisted old man” with “rather strange personal grooming” appears in George Jacobs’s story, revealing himself to Watson in time to participate in a very interesting interview with a trio of Bengalis seeking justice. And in a Kevin Thornton story, an Irish navvy appears, “looking for all the world like he’d just finished a shift on the docks,” fooling Holmes’s astonished client, but this time, not Watson, who had guessed what Holmes was up to.

Let’s look at how two of these clever stories handle disguises:

Gustavo Bondoni’s story, “The Burning Mania,” takes a cue from two significant events of 1885: a new law permitting the operation of crematoria and the Irish bombings in various London locations. Lestrade asks Holmes to investigate the recent disappearances of eight criminal gang members very possibly linked to the bombings.

As they track the culprits, Watson says this about Holmes and disguises: “I always felt more comfortable when he did that”—a consideration as Holmes’s growing notoriety increases the possibility of recognition. Later, Watson acknowledges that, even without different hair or clothing, Holmes “could become completely unrecognizable in moments by changing the way he looked or even his personality,” persuading others “to see him as something different from what he was.” An insightful comment from the good doctor.

In “The Adventure of the Damaged Tomb,” George Gardner’s story, he similarly refers to heightened public alarm after the Fenian Bombings, so when Hamworth’s Catholic church of St. Mary’s is attacked with dynamite, severely damaging the ancient tomb of the Mountfalcon family, assumptions are made. In their lodgings one day, Watson nervously encounters “a heavy-set, red-haired man of about fifty,” with the “distinctive twang that categorized him with the Irish-American set.” Another disguise success!

The authors mentioned above used disguises to good effect in their stories in Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery 1885. Their stories are:
George Gardner – “The Adventure of the Damaged Tomb”
Gustavo Bondoni – “The Burning Mania”
Victoria Weisfeld – “A Brick Through the Window”
Katy Darby – “The Adventure of the Lock Hospital”
George Jacobs – “The Mystery of the Cloven Cord”
Kevin Thornton – “Tracks Across Canada”