Category Archives: writing

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”

Rules Made to be Broken

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Only recently did I hear about Ronald Knox’s 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction, penned about a century ago. How much times have changed! Knox was undoubtedly attracted to the “10 Commandments” idea because he was a Catholic priest, but he also was a mystery writer who clubbed with notable mystery writers of his day. Below are his rules, and for many of them, I—and you, too—can think of entertaining exceptions! (Mine in parentheses.)

In contrast with the man pictured at left, who may feel his interpretation of the rules brooks no disagreement, we can see a lot of room for nuance here!

  1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow. (This leaves out the whole multiple point-of-view serial killer subgenre, but I will confess that, while multiple points of view don’t bother me, I don’t enjoy it when one of those viewpoints belongs to a predatory character. Creeps me out.)
  2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course. (So much for another whole category of thriller that agents and publishers today say they’re looking for, and books like Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes. Someone forgot to tell Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and Shirley Jackson about this, for three.)
  3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable. (Hmm.)
  4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end. (Agree. Sounds like cheating and very possibly boring.)
  5. No Chinaman must figure in the story. (Yet one of my favorite detective quotes comes from Charlie Chan: “Theory like mist on eyeglasses. Obscures vision.” And this leaves out my all-time favorite detective, Judge Dee Goong An, in the novels by Robert Van Gulik. And S.J. Rozan!) The rule probably came about because a “Chinaman” had been overused as a sinister character, Fu Manchu moustache and all.
  6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he (!) ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right. (This rule lives on in objections to plot coincidences. They are annoying.)
  7. The detective must not himself commit the crime. (Omitting a whole category of cops-gone-wrong and unreliable narrators. Tricky.)
  8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader. (Did you ever have a “what just happened?” moment while reading? That’s sometimes because you didn’t see—or weren’t shown—the clue. Agree, it’s bad when this occurs.)
  9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader. (I object! Nigel Bruce’s characterization of Watson in the old movies was bumbling, but Watson is far from stupid. And what does that say about the “average reader”?)
  10. Twin brothers (what about twin sisters, huh?), and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them. (Twins are a problem. But can move beyond clichéd mix-ups into unexpected territory, as in award-winning Japanese novelist Riku Onda’s fascinating mystery, Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight).

Behind That Clever Mask

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Quite a few contemporary short story writers look to Victorian England—and the Great Detective—for their inspiration. Yet there are aspects of Holmes’s erudition, personality, and behavior that Conan Doyle leaves discreetly unstated. Most notably, libido. We’ll get to how authors of several stories in Belanger Books’ recently published Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery 1885, address that gap.

Readers can miss some of the more subtle aspects of the Great Detective’s character, as well, if they focus too intently on his cleverness. Author Shelby Phoenix believes that focus obscures “the full richness of Holmes’s character”—eccentric, complex, yes, but also compassionate. Holmes keeps “the full colors of his personality” to himself, she says, showing them only in flashes and cracks. Holmes has a strong moral sense and can admit when he’s wrong, George Jacobs says. DJ Tyrer believes his occasional fallibility allows for a more well-rounded character than readers may imagine.

Prolific Holmes pasticher (is that a word?) David Marcum, among other authors in this collection, emphasizes the humanity that hides beneath the façade, “in the way that Mr. Spock insisted that he was Vulcan, denying and covering his human side,” while “some of his best scenes were when the mask slipped.” One of Marcum’s favorite aspects to the stories is the long, healthy friendship between Holmes and Watson, built on loyalty and, yes, a sense of humor.

When readers merely wait for Holmes to solve a crime, says George Gardner, they miss seeing his thought process and logical reasoning, as in “The Adventure of theDancing Men,” which lays out the detective’s code-breaking methods. Holmes’s conclusions aren’t magic; his cleverness is earned. But Holmes isn’t just a thinking machine, as Paul Hiscock points out, he’s always up for adventure. He cares for his clients and enjoys his work. If a Holmes pastiche overlooks this sense of excitement, he says, they “end up cold and lifeless.”

As Phoenix aptly summed up, “To focus only on what his mind is capable of doing is falling into his trap.”

In this Volume
Authors Gustavo Bondoni and Kevin Thornton commented that Holmes fans shouldn’t overlook the whole fascinating Victorian world with its atmosphere and its fog, its bright spots and blind spots. One of those Victorian blind spots is the bifurcated treatment of women (saint versus sinner). The three women authors in this collection took treatment of women as their theme.

Two of their stories key off of a major real-life debate in 1885 England: reform of the Contagious Diseases Acts. These laws were intended to counter the high rate of venereal diseases in the military, blamed on the prostitutes who camped out near army bases and navy ports. Dr. Watson, being both a doctor and former military man, had seen this problem up close, and had thought the laws were appropriate. That is, until in Katy Darby’s “The Adventure of the Lock Hospital,” an ex-soldier clergyman and Watson’s old friend bring to his attention the plight of a falsely accused young woman headed for a “lock hospital.” She was a former street-walker whose life turned around after the clergyman brought her into the church and found her a respectable job. Now she’s been misdiagnosed with syphilis, and her future is precarious.

(Under English law at the time, police could pull aside any woman they merely “thought” was a prostitute, forcibly examine her, and send her to a “lock hospital” for a period of months without trial. Available treatments were ineffective, even dangerous. The women lost their jobs, if they had them, and had to abandon their families.)

In Darby’s story, Holmes must identify the machinations behind the young woman’s arrest, while Dr. Watson strives to arrive at a correct diagnosis. And the pair isn’t above using some unorthodox, if dubiously lawful, methods—living up to the word “Adventure”!

In my story, “A Brick through the Window,” which I’ve written about previously, Holmes and Watson help crusading journalist William T. Stead. In real life, Stead not only fought the contagious disease laws, but also campaigned against the poverty leading London families to sell their young daughters into prostitution. Quite a spicy scandal at the time, as you’d imagine.

Shelby Phoenix’s “Sherlock Holmes and the Six-Fingered Hand Print” takes up the issue of female trafficking, in an atmospheric story of murder in a lowly Japanese pottery shop. Lord Byron Keeper, well-known gambler and man-about-town, has been entranced by the shopkeeper’s Japanese wife and is the chief suspect when the shady shopkeeper is murdered by someone who leaves behind a bloody six-fingered handprint. Only Holmes recognizes that two women’s survival is at stake. As Phoenix says, the satisfying outcome of this story is more evidence of Holmes’s deeply ingrained, if idiosyncratic, moral sense. And, she says, it reflects his wry remark in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”: “I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies.” The authors mentioned above expertly portray Holmes’s many facets. Their stories in Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery 1885 are:
George Jacobs – “The Mystery of the Cloven Cord”
D.J. Tyrer – “The Japanese Village Mystery”
David Marcum – “The Faulty Gallows”
George Gardner – “The Adventure of the Damaged Tomb”
Paul Hiscock – “The Light of Liberty”
Gustavo Bondoni – “The Burning Mania”
Kevin Thornton – “Tracks Across Canada” and “Tracked Across America”

Letting Dr. John Watson Occupy Your Writing Brain

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Authors of the 14 pastiches in the recent anthology, Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery 1885, edited by Richard T. Ryan, talked about how they time-travel from the 21st century back to the Victorian era for their stories.

Most of the anthology’s contemporary authors—including DJ Tyrer, George Gardner, and George Jacobs say re-reading some of the Sherlock Holmes stories gets them going. This, or watching one of the Basil Rathbone films, helps Hassan Akram “get into Watson’s mental atmosphere.” Tyrer uses the original stories to channel Watson’s voice and remind himself how Holmes talks. When Gardner starts writing, he tries to adhere to the stories’ basic structure: Watson sets the scene, a visitor arrives at Baker Street and explains the problem, Holmes (and sometimes Watson, too) investigates, the villain is apprehended, and the pair discuss the case in an epilogue. If Jacobs gets stuck, he finds a jumping off point by seeing how Conan Doyle approached an analogous situation in one of the stories. He also says that the audiobooks narrated by Simon Vance help him “keep the voice going in my head.”

As Gardner noted, “Watson has quite a direct voice suited for action scenes, but he still retains a Victorian flourish in some of his descriptions.” The language “has to be consistent not only with the era, but also with Watson’s social standing and experience,” Gustavo Bondoni says, adding that Watson is “a gentleman with a military (and medical past), he will think in very specific ways, and I don’t want to get out of that groove.” Katy Darby says “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but it has to be accurate, otherwise, what’s the point?”

The stories have to establish the right tone, too. Paul Hiscock says that the author guidelines for one of the first of the many Holmes pastiches he has written advised that Watson should always refer to The Great Detective as Holmes, not Sherlock. This formal touch, even within such a close relationship, helps establish that correct tone and, with all his experience, he says, “these days I barely think about it.”

David Marcum has written so many Sherlockian pastiches that the can afford to, as he says, “simply wait for Watson to speak.” He says he never knows more about the situation than does Watson, “who is in the middle of it and watching it unfold” (spoken like a true pantser). This makes the story all very immediate to him, and he says he can re-read one of his earlier stories and, “except for a few plot highlights, the whole thing is a surprise to me.”

Getting into Watson’s head? Kevin Thornton says, “A slightly pompous, middle-aged, educated white man? I think I have that covered.” LOL

Let’s take a closer look at Paul Hiscock’s captivating story, “The Light of Liberty,” dealing with political and fundraising difficulties surrounding the Statue of Liberty. Designed and built in France, the Colossus was to arrive (disassembled) in New York in 1885, there to await completion of its pedestal. But a key piece of the statue—the Flame of Liberty—has been stolen from a warehouse near the docks in Rouen.

Holmes and Watson journey to France to sort out this tricky diplomatic business, which is perfectly suited to Holmes’s deft touch. You’ll meet French Inspector Lapointe, even more reluctant to accept Holmes’s help than his English counterparts. Liberté!

See how these authors put fact and fiction together. Their stories in Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery 1885 are:
D.J. Tyrer – “The Japanese Village Mystery”
George Gardner – “The Adventure of the Damaged Tomb”
George Jacobs – “The Mystery of the Cloven Cord”
Hassan Akram – “The Return of the Buckinghamshire Baronet”
Gustavo Bondoni – “The Burning Mania”
Katy Darby – “The Adventure of the Lock Hospital”
Shelby Phoenix – “Sherlock Holmes and the Six-Fingered Hand Print”
Paul Hiscock – “The Light of Liberty”
David Marcum – “The Faulty Gallows”
Kevin Thornton – “Tracks Across Canada” and “Tracked Across America”

Photo of Sherlock Holmes London statue by Oxfordian Kissuth, Creative Commons license.

Like, Literally, Dude!

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Ticked off by verbal tics? Language-expert Valerie Fridland has written an entertaining book about the origins and utility of what many people consider bad speaking habits. Like “like,” vocal fry, and excessive intensification.

Many of these speech habits she covers in Like Literally, Dude are tiny, she says, like saying “Whaaa?” instead of “What,” but that dropped “t” is one of the many linguistic choices that help craft a person’s social identity and offer great guidance for authors writing dialog. Your Gen Z college student can’t sound like one of his professors!

Different versions of “what” have subtly different effects. “What-hh,” as she describes it, has a tiny puff of air after the strongly enunciated “t.” It’s what you say when you’re interrupted for the 43rd time while trying to write a tricky paragraph. “What?” is a normal, business-like query. But “whaaaa?” is more casual or characteristic of certain population groups. To my ear, it indicates not an actual question, but conveys a sense of true wondering. It’s what you’d say if a spaceship landed in your back yard.

Fridland’s book delves into many such features that distinguish one person’s speech from another’s. And, speakers vary their speech, depending on what they are (mostly unconsciously) trying to convey. She says we use vocal tics “to project different attitudes and stances toward what we talk about and who we talk with.” A goldmine for dialog-writers!

Her observation that young people and women generally lead the way in linguistic changes is especially interesting, as is the note that these are the very speech patterns that take the brunt of criticism, women’s speech having been historically “disparaged as chatty, gossipy, and less topically important than men’s.” And women typically soften their presentation so as to be non-threatening. When writing my novel Architect of Courage, told from a man’s point of view, I worked hard to reflect male speech patterns—for example, excising “I think” and “I want,” and replacing them with flat statements and “I need.”

Take “like,” like it or not. This much-maligned word serves a great many non-grammatical (versus ungrammatical) purposes in sentences. One of Fridland’s examples is “I exercised for, like, ten hours.” Anyone hearing that understands the speaker did not, in fact, exercise for 600 minutes, but more that it felt that excessive. Leave out the “like,” and the sentence says the same thing, but doesn’t mean exactly the same. In this role, “like” becomes “a way for a speaker to communicate a certain impreciseness or looseness of meaning.”  

“Discourse markers” are features of speech that don’t contribute to the actual meaning of a sentence (so, you know, actually, oh, um, uh), but convey a sense of the speaker’s intentions. Although we think of these language quirks as being of recent vintage—a deluge of undesirable flies landing in the ointment of perfect English expression—their pedigree is lengthy. Fridland’s example is, “Oh, I finally got a job!” In that sentence, the “oh” invites the hearer to share the surprise.

The tendency to start sentences, “Soooo, . . .” give the speaker a few seconds to gather her thoughts and signals the hearer to listen up. “Well, . . .” does the same. Such discourse markers appear in Shakespeare and date back more than a thousand years. So much for modern bad habits! “Like” used as a discourse marker can be found as early as 250 years ago.

So, if you like language and if you write dialog involving different ages and types of people, you may find this book, whose subtitle is “Arguing for the Good in Bad English” helpful as well as entertaining!

Finding Your Author Niche

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The anthology, Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery 1885, edited by Richard T. Ryan, is one of a series filling in the years 1881-1886, the period between the stories “A Study in Scarlet” and “The Reigate Squire” when no Holmes cases were reported. This fallow period was interrupted only by “The Speckled Band” (one of my favorites), set in 1883. Contemporary writers, not content to assume the duo spent those years twiddling their thumbs, have enthusiastically created adventures to fill in the gap.

Each A Year of Mystery volume, published by Belanger Books, includes a dozen stories, one for each month, and even a bonus story or two from that year. Clearly, the Great Detective was capable of multitasking at a high level! The 1885 volume, which contains one of my stories, was published last December, and I asked some of my fellow authors how much experience they had with this very particular mystery genre. Turns out, a lot!

George Gardner’s story, “The Adventure of the Damaged Tomb,” was his debut as a Holmes/Watson pasticher, and three of the authors (including me) have had two or three published. But to demonstrate that the genre’s well of inspiration is far from empty, five of the authors have published repeatedly in it and one—David Marcum—has published 118 short stories and two novels involving Holmes and Watson.

“The Faulty Gallows” by David Marcum

Let’s give Marcum’s latest story, “The Faulty Gallows,” a closer look. In endnotes, he tells how in real life John “Babbacome” Lee “famously survived three attempts to hang him” for murdering his employer, and how James Berry, another real-life character, was the official executioner who tried and failed to execute him, repeatedly. Marcum provides pictures of both men, and Lee is dapper in his bowler hat. Berry looks unhappy.

Marcum did a beautiful job taking the raw facts of Lee’s narrow escapes and fictionalizing them. Holmes is asked to involve himself in this fiasco by a mysterious “acquaintance at Whitehall.” This device gives him a plausible reason to investigate and allows Marcum to wrap the circumstances of the botched executions in a larger conspiracy that Holmes tumbles to. By the story’s end, a bit remains unresolvable and, when pressed by Watson, Holmes asks for time. No too-neat-and-tidy ending here.

Holmes fans will realize that the mystery man is no doubt Holmes’s brother Mycroft, but since Watson hasn’t met him yet, he’s a cipher to the story’s narrator. Says Marcum, “Mycroft is a useful tool in pastiches—although as a strict Holmesian Chronologist, [I can’t bring him] in too early.”

Holmes is known for his brilliant deductions, yet “the story structures also allow for a lot of off-stage techniques to advance suddenly toward the story’s conclusion,” Marcum says. Contact with Mycroft, which doesn’t have to be explained in detail, sometimes accomplishes that. Mycroft’s murky Whitehall connections also can give some stories, like this one, a bigger frame.

Read more about Marcum’s Holmes addiction on his blog or visit his Amazon author page.

What Makes Stories Work?

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Last week was time off for family business, but if you’ve ever dealt much with the health care “system,” you’ll understand my advice to myself, “take a book.” There’s always so much time sitting around, waiting, and waiting again, that something engaging to capture at least part of your attention is welcome. You don’t forget why you’re there, of course, you just give the extraneous sights and sounds some competition.

The book I clung to was Man Booker award-winner and Syracuse U. professor George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. It’s one that works for writers who want to put more into their writing and readers who want to get more out of their reading. Saunders takes seven stories from four Russian short story masters (Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol) and breaks them down to consider why they work. This isn’t one of those craft books that debates character-driven versus plot-driven or the usual ways stories are analyzed. Instead, Saunders talks about how the stories create the effects they have on readers. So much I wasn’t noticing!

Here’s a small example. One of the stories is Tolstoy’s “Master and Man,” which in (very) short is about an arrogant merchant, Vasili, who, with his servant, drives out in a horse-drawn sledge on an errand on a blizzardy day. The master doesn’t listen to the servant’s advice about route and gets them lost; they arrive at a small village, twice, because they are driving in circles; but the master refuses to stay the night; they become lost again; and I won’t tell you the rest, in case you want to read it yourself.

Saunders says that in his work with talented young writers, two factors separate the writers who go on to publish their work and those who don’t: a willingness to revise and “the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality.” In the Tolstoy story, because of the kind of person he is, Vasili doesn’t listen to his servant’s advice and gets them lost, because he won’t stop or stay at the village, they are lost repeatedly.

Saunders says, “For most of us [writers] the problem is not in making things happen,” but “in making one thing seem to cause the next.” Why is this important? “Because causation is what creates the appearance of meaning;” it’s what makes them work.

Another gem from this same story is Tolstoy’s laundry. Outside the little village of Grishkino is a cottage with a clothesline, which Vasili and Nikita pass four times in their lostness. Each time Tolstoy describes the articles hanging there slightly differently, the wind-blown shirts waving and flapping their sleeves in increasingly desperate fashion. On their last pass, the laundry is gone. Tolstoy doesn’t make the mistake of explaining the symbolism, he just plants it in the reader’s mind to let it grow in significance. Those little repeats, barely more than a sentence each, escalate the story’s tension, even if a reader notices them only subliminally.

Try it!: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders. And read Donald Maass’s blog this week on “Effect and Cause.”

I Saw You!–or Maybe I Didn’t

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Unease about the growing use of facial recognition technology has clustered around some by now well-known difficulties: inaccurate results when non-white individuals are involved; inadequate training of personnel who “read” the results; adoption of privacy-invading systems without public knowledge or input; inadequate monitoring of accuracy.

Despite these concerns, use of this technology is expanding in law enforcement, border control, airport screening, even business, including retail. Remember Rite Aid? How’s it really being used? What are the benefits as well as the unintended consequences? These questions create a fertile arena for authors of crime fiction.

Properly implemented, facial-recognition could help make policing more efficient. It has been used to identify a number of the January 6 rioters, whose participation was then verified by other evidence (their own Facebook posts, often). The UK, whose cities are blanketed with camera surveillance, nevertheless still values the human element—a cadre of super-recognizers who “never forget a human face.” That would not be me.

Unfortunately, an identification facilitated by the facial recognition technology sometimes trumps other evidence gathered in more traditional ways. The arrestee’s alibi, for example. No matter how sophisticated the technology becomes, it remains true that a person cannot be in two places at once.

Police departments say the technology is used only to generate leads, and people should not be charged with a crime until there is corroborating evidence. In practice, though, the algorithm’s output often doesn’t mark the beginning of an investigation, but its end. That perception was borne out by a Washington Post story yesterday about. A Texas man has filed a lawsuit against Macy’s (and others) claiming overconfidence in the technology led to his arrest by the Houston police. While in custody, he was sexually assaulted. This is one of a half-dozen ongoing wrongful arrest cases are around the country.

In the U.S., a growing number of state and local law enforcement agencies have available to them the faces of nearly half the adult population. These photos come from various sources—including billions scraped from social media, as well as government-issued I.D. cards, mug shots, driver’s licenses, etc. (In which case I don’t need to worry, because my driver’s license photo looks nothing like me! Though probably it matches up with the eighty or so “nodal points” that define a particular face.) The Georgetown University Law Center’s project on privacy and technology calls this vast database “the perpetual line-up.” And you’re likely in it, no matter how law-abiding you are.

Maybe you’re thinking, “So what? I’m not a criminal. This doesn’t affect me.” At least not until there’s a misidentification. Crime fiction writers should have a field day with this one. It’s one thing in a traffic stop or arrest situation to attempt to verify someone’s identity; it’s quite another to use the database for a fishing expedition after-the-fact. And fish will be caught, possibly using grainy, out-of-focus, out-of-date, candid selfies, to create a list of possible matches. Facebook for a while identified individuals in the photos on our news feeds. My friend’s wife was consistently identified as me. I didn’t think we look at all alike, but the algorithm did, so I understand the reality of misidentifying people.

Police departments in several major American cities are experimenting with street surveillance cameras that can continuously scan the faces of people in real time. More than a whiff of China here. The People’s Daily has reported that China’s facial recognition system needs only one second to scan the faces of its 1.4 billion people.

Warrants aren’t required for a search of facial databases. The investigations aren’t necessarily limited to serious crimes. Defendants may never be told that it was an algorithm, not a human witness, that identified them. People who don’t trust the justice system, may prefer to take a plea deal and never have their case tried in court and face a potentially longer sentence. This means the true rate of false positive identifications is unknowable. All these aspects of the technology and its implementation, good and bad, lend themselves to situations crime writers can exploit.

Graphic by Mike MacKenzie (www.vpnsrus.com) under Creative Commons license 2.0 Generic.

A Brick Through the Window

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What makes a short story work for me, as its writer? I’ve been thinking about this in light of the recent publication of my short story, “A Brick Through the Window,” in Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery – 1885. Now that my short stories have been published more than 40 times, what’s the engine that drives a more successful writing project?

Most important, I like to key off facts. I’m in awe of writers who can develop a character and plot out of thin air, but it helps me to have something real to chew on. Also important is my emotional investment; I write a better story when I’m mad (!) or excited about something. My favorite one involved rural ne’er-do-wells planning to stage a fight between a bear and a tiger. As a big fan of Big Cats, I’m sure my blood-pressure was spiking until I reached “The End.” That story was written a few years ago, when many states had few restrictions on the private ownership of Big Cats, and four had none at all—no licensing requirements, no standards for animal welfare or public safety. Thankfully, that situation ended in late 2022 with the passage of the federal Big Cat Public Safety Act.

Two of my stories have been published in these Sherlock Holmes anthologies: the 1885 edition’s “Brick/Window” and the 1884 edition’s “The Queen’s Line.” Both started with real situations.

“The Queen’s Line” (sounds like a new underground service, no?) keyed off the tragic 1884 death of Queen Victoria’s son, Leopold. He was the only one of her four boys who inherited hemophilia, although at least two of her daughters were carriers and introduced this life-limiting condition into various royal houses of Europe. My story keyed off vicious rumors that Victoria was illegitimate, because there was no history of hemophilia in her well-documented family line. (Experts now believe she experienced a spontaneous genetic mutation passed on to some of her progeny.) At that time, she and Prime Minister Gladstone were at loggerheads, and pressure was mounting to allow Irish Home Rule. All those facts (the funeral, the rumors, the politics) came together at 221B Baker Street in “The Queen’s Line.”

For “A Brick Through the Window,” I struck a goldmine of intriguing facts. In July, crusading newspaperman William T. Stead (a true Victorian eccentric, pictured) was focused on the problem of young girls from poverty-stricken London families being sold into “the flesh-pots of Europe.” All true so far. In my story, Stead asks Holmes to help his investigation. Holmes is, of course, a bit squeamish about the details, but there was no denying Stead’s sincerity. (You can read about this real-life journalistic episode here.)

At this point, I erred. I asked the editor about word length, and was told “about 10,000” or so. I should have realized he meant the upper limit, when I had meant the lower. Following my false interpretation meant I had to create a secondary plot of some kind!

In real life, Stead, along with a number of upper-class ladies, had also been active in opposing the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, originally intended to combat the high rate of sexually transmitted disease in the military. Under these laws, any policeman could arrest and examine any woman he “suspected” of prostitution, even without evidence. Working-class and even middle-class women were pulled off the streets and subjected to humiliating examination not by doctors, but by ordinary police. If declared infected, they were confined to a lock hospital until they either recovered (there were few treatments) or they completed their sentence, which might be as long as three months. Tremendous hardship was thereby visited on children and families.

Because men who frequented prostitutes were neither examined nor punished, these laws ignited a debate about unequal treatment of men and women and became an early skirmish in the battle for women’s rights.

You’ll recall that Dr. Watson was a military medical man himself, and in my story, he is aware of the problem of prostitution near military installations and initially supports these laws. But Stead opens his eyes to the resultant abuses. When Watson understands the inequity in the way the law was implemented, he joins Stead and his supporters in advocating repeal. Meanwhile, Holmes collects evidence on the child prostitution problem with help from the Irregulars.

Back to real life: In August 1885, Parliament passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which raised the age of consent from age 13 to 16 and strengthened protections for women and girls; in 1886, the Contagious Diseases Acts were finally repealed. In April 1912, William T. Stead died aboard the RMS Titanic.