Where Writers’ Ideas Come From: Slivers of Backstory

Posted on by

Authors are constantly admonished not to dwell in backstory—especially early in a book or at the introduction of each new character—yet there are aspects of a character’s prior experiences that writers want readers to know. Unless you start your book at the very beginning of a character’s life, like David Copperfield’s “I Am Born,” there are relationships and episodes you need to review in order help readers understand who the character is in the today of the novel.

Since my character, Archer Landis, is in his early sixties in 2011, he was in his mid-twenties as the Vietnam War was ending (I have done this arithmetic about a hundred times, convinced I have it wrong!). The war, the draft, the demonstration would have been very much top-of-mind to him at a crucial and formative stage of life, with indelible impact.

Rather than take a deep dive into his war experiences—like Michael Connolly did so well in his first Harry Bosch story, The Black Echo, which was so immersive that when the story returned to the present day, I was briefly discombobulated—I doled out Landis’s war memories in small bites.

He briefly returns to his Vietnam experiences at three points in the novel. I hadn’t realized it as I wrote, but looking back, in each case, they come to his mind at times he is very much in peril. It must be the intensity of the hazard that resurrects them. For example, late one afternoon, Landis is standing in front of a window in his office, and someone shoots at him from across the street. He reflexively dives to the floor. No standing there, thinking, “What? Where did that come from?”

Some chapters later, anticipating a possible violent confrontation, he hearkens back to his Vietnam experiences and the way the Viet Cong would enter hostile territory and contrasts that with his options in the situation he finds himself in. It causes him to reflect on the kind of person he has become. I’m not telling a war story; I’m showing who he is.

Many pages later, when an attack on him and a well-armed colleague is expected—this is now forty years after Vietnam—he asks whether he should have a gun too.
“You done much shooting?” his colleague asks.
“Not since Vietnam.”
“There’s your answer.”

These snippets are reminders that Landis engaged in the issues of his day and was a part of them. They help me—and the reader too, I hope—see him as a fully rounded person who has a past, but is not dominated by it.

For how to think about this aspect of his past, I relied on Karl Marlantes’s fine novel, Matterhorn. Marlantes is a Yale alumnus, was a Rhodes Scholar, and served as a Marine in Vietnam.

Creating a Character: Theater Magic

Posted on by
Into the Woods
Into the Woods

My “how to watch a play” class recently watched a London production of Into the Woods, the Stephen Sondheim fairy tales mashup. It was an excellent lead-in to that week’s discussion on creating a character, because the show is stuffed with them.

Course leader Adam Immerwahr, artistic director at Washington DC’s Theater J, described the process of creating a character as a collaboration between actor and director. You see this collaborative process in action in the comedy Noises Off, about a play-in-rehearsal that goes terribly wrong. In the excellent film version, Christopher Reeve plays the part of Gary Lejeune, who badgers his director (Michael Caine) about his character’s motivation. The more banal the action, the more puzzled Gary is (see one of those scenes here).

Character creation starts with casting. Directors are looking for talent, sure, but also for certain personal and physical qualities. They take into account some or all of the actor’s race-gender-age-body type to the extent those matter for specific roles. If they’re casting a musical, singing and dancing ability may outweigh acting chops.

Some productions may need an actor with name recognition (to boost ticket sales) or with specific skills. Juggling. A little soft-shoe. Productions of Top Dog/Underdog require an actor to do a compelling demonstration of three-card-monte. Not just the moves, but also the confidence in handling the cards.

A stage adaptation of the novel Midwives I saw last year included a jarring change from the original book. Black actors played a clergyman and his wife newly relocated to rural Vermont. For me, this casting raised a lot of questions external to the story. How had a couple from the Deep South been received in 99% white Vermont? What propelled them to make such a dramatic change in their environment? Did they choose a home birth because they felt unwelcome in the local health system? Such implications kept taking me out of the drama and made their characters seem opaque.

By contrast, my class was surprised that, in the production of Into the Woods we watched, the cast was all-white. If ever a play lends itself to diversity, that would seem to be it. We did enjoy the actor who played Little Red—plus-sized and a few years older than the usual choice. This Little Red actually lines up better with the script. When the wolf compliments her plump flesh, well . . .

In a great many roles, the race or even the gender of a particular character is irrelevant, and non-traditional casting not only works, it’s refreshing (think Hamilton). No longer do theaters and audiences assume the default race is white. You may recall the flap when the Vietnamese engineer in Miss Saigon was played by Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce.

They say ninety percent of directing is casting, and certainly, it’s the first step in bringing characters to life.

The Perfect Weapon

Posted on by
The Perfect Weapon, HBO, David Sanger

In mid-October, HBO released its documentary, The Perfect Weapon, about growing cyber security risks (trailer). A recent Cipher Brief webinar featured David Sanger, national security correspondent for The New York Times, who wrote the book on which the documentary was based, and Mary Brooks, who contributed to both his book and the documentary, and was moderated by Cipher Brief founder Suzanne Kelly.

Creating a documentary based on a detailed, fascinating, and chilling 340-page book is a challenge. It had to be more interesting than 000s and 111s scrolling down the screen. There was a history to lay out. Director John Maggio decided to render the technology aspects of earlier cyberattacks in broad strokes and to humanize the story by focusing on the victims. This approach not only revealed how many sectors of society are vulnerable to cyber criminals, but also how diverse are the sources of these attacks.

The first cyber attack receiving much play in the United States was North Korea’s 2014 takedown of Sony in response to a movie it didn’t like. For that segment, Maggio’s team could interview actors and executives. It was harder to get the story of the next significant attack—this one by the Iranians on the Sands Casino in Las Vegas—because the casino executives don’t want to publicize it.

Since then, attacks have continued, most recently with ransomware attacks on US hospitals already stretched thin by the coronavirus, and on local governments in Florida, for example—after crippling attacks on Baltimore and Atlanta.

Though costly and significant, these episodes have not been serious enough to trigger retribution by the US government. “They are short of war operations,” Sanger said, “and deliberately calculated to be so.” The potential for much more consequential acts definitely exists. It is known, for example, that malware has been placed in the US power grid, where it sits. Officials don’t want to talk about it, or remove it, ironically, because they don’t want the bad actors to understand our detection capabilities.

Of course, the United States isn’t inactive in this arena. In 2010, our government. and Israel used the malicious computer worm Stuxnet to disable Iran’s nuclear program, an action US officials won’t admit to even now, Sanger said. Unfortunately, the destructive Stuxnet code escaped into the wild and is now available to many black-hat hackers. Stuxnet “didn’t start the fire,” he said, “but it was an accelerant.”

Who is behind an attack can be murky. For various reason, organized crime has increasingly muscled its way into the cyber-threat business. Governments hire hackers or external organizations to create havoc, because it gives them deniability. “Not us,” they say.

The US Cyber Command’s goal is to “defend and advance national interests.” However, the job of preventing attacks is difficult. It’s a challenge that requires considerable imagination, given an environment where the risks are escalating rapidly, the technology is improving constantly, and the targets have no boundaries. You may have read about recent threats to COVID vaccine research.

What exactly are the “national interests,” when American businesses have suppliers, clients, and customers all over the world? Companies don’t want to be perceived as working against those relationships. Google, for example, declined to participate in a military program to make drone attacks more accurate. Similarly, though Microsoft and the Cyber Command were both attempting to disable TrickBot in the last few weeks, their efforts were independent and uncoordinated.

Thomas Donahue, Senior Analyst at the Center for Cyber Intelligence has said, “We cannot afford to protect everything to the maximum degree, so we’d better figure out what cannot fail,”

The documentary—and the book—lay out what’s at stake for all of us. Past posts on this topic:
* Our Biggest Threats Keep Growing
* Cyberthreats: Coming to a Company Near You

The Mathematical Murder of Innocence

Posted on by

By Michael Carter — For every mystery/crime fiction lover, there are books that hit the sweet spot of their special interests. There are the cozies with the knitting patterns and recipes. There are election fraud novels for political junkies. There are the gritty, down and dirty books for people who don’t get enough of that in the daily news. Books featuring computer nerds, financial advisers, art appraisers, cat sitters, on and on.

The Mathematical Murder of Innocence, not the first book I’ve read about a math whiz, is an eye-opener. It was inspired by real-life cases in Britain, in which women were convicted of killing their infants based on a really faulty understanding of statistics. Most people—and that apparently includes lawyers and judges and juries—don’t have a good grasp of how statistics work. You might think calculating odds (except, perhaps in horse-racing) is a rather straightforward exercise. Yet, how you calculate them makes all the difference, and the results can fly in the face of “common sense.”

For example, if you toss a coin that comes up heads ten times in a row, you might be inclined to take the bet that you’ll get tails on the next toss. Don’t do it! Unless the coin is faulty, each toss is an independent event and the odds of heads or tails is 50-50 every time. Likewise, you might estimate you’d need a group of at least 100 or even 200 people to make it likely two of them would have the same birthday. You’d be wrong. You only need 23 people to have a 50-50 chance of matching birthdates.

Luckily for the fictional Sarah Richardson, the woman standing trial in Michael Carter’s novel, on her jury is engineer Martin Fielding. Richardson’s two infant sons have died of cot death (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in the US). Dr. Michael Goodwin, the prosecution’s expert witness, says that, given the relative rarity of cot death (one in every 8,500 births), the odds of losing two children that way are one in 72 million (8,500 x 8,500). “One death is a tragedy; two deaths are murder,” he says. But juror Fielding believes the correct number is more like one in 18 and sets out to prove it.

Set aside for a moment any skepticism that a juror would repeatedly burst out his objections to a witness’s testimony. Then set aside your doubts (perhaps they could be expressed as odds, like one in a thousand) that Fielding would be invited to take over the questioning of Dr. Goodwin. Once you accept those long odds—the outbursts, the cross-examination—the story becomes a delightful takedown of a pompous and dangerous man. A bit of a deep dive into statistics, but . . . it might save someone’s life.

The photo is from a 1990s British courtroom drama series, Kavanagh, QC, starring John Thaw. Excellent entertainment!

Where Writers’ Ideas Come From: What Kind of Trip Is it?

Posted on by

Tarifa, Spain

When describing characters’ travels, do you bear in mind the purpose of the trip? Is it business, pleasure, family, or personal? The trip’s purpose will of course affect their actions, but it also colors what they see and observe.

Think of a destination as a bare-bones stage set; what the writer adds can reinforce the drama and the character’s state of mind. To some extent, writers may do this almost unconsciously. If there’s danger, they might describe a cold wind, trash in the streets, streetlights blinking out. If there’s romance, they may provide beaches and outdoor cafes and bright colors.

So the ideas about what to describe in a place and how to describe it come from the place, from the character, and from the character’s purpose in being there. These descriptors need to be tightly connected to all three or they risk feeling arbitrary and superficial.

I try to move some of those unconscious—call them automatic—choices into the conscious realm, hoping to strengthen them and make sure I’m not sending mixed signals. My novel’s protagonist, Manhattan architect Archer Landis, travels to Brussels for work and to Tarifa, Spain, for powerful personal reasons. In Brussels, he was there to get a job done. But in Spain, he can’t escape the emotional reasons motivating his trip. As a result, a different set of details are highlighted. In Tarifa, food and street life and vistas are emphasized over the newspapers and briefcases and cabs of Brussels.

Tarifa is on the southwestern tip of Spain, and, amazingly, right across the Strait of Gibraltar, you can see Africa. When I was there myself and realized Tangier was only an hour away by hydrofoil, I had to go. Proximity to Morocco is one reason my characters ended up in that spot.

Despite having visited, I still had to study maps to remind myself of the broad strokes. From Google street views, I gained a sense of different neighborhoods that let me pick an area for my characters to stay in. I studied people’s photographs for details—whitewashed walls, narrow brick streets, potted red geraniums, wrought iron balconies. These were among the things an architect, like my character Landis, would notice. If he’d trained as a Navy Seal, the claustrophobic streets, the balcony shutters ajar, the low-rise, flat-roofed buildings would have had totally different significance.

Although I didn’t write a point-by-point description of the streets, I worked these elements into the action. For example, Landis naturally notices how the whitewashed buildings bring light into the narrow streets; at one frustrating point, he says he’s come to hate the geraniums’ aggressive cheerfulness.

One photograph I studied a long time was a rooftop view, akin to the one reproduced here. Staying in a hotel penthouse suite (sixth floor), Landis’s view would have been similar. Studying that view, he pulls together stray thoughts about the Pillars of Hercules (the nearby Rock of Gibraltar in Spain and the mountain Jebel Musa in Morocco, in thispicture, only slightly visible through the haze).

Tarifa, Spain

Hercules wasn’t in mind at all when I wrote my first draft, but I do a  kind of “see where it leads me” research, and at some point I realized the myth’s potential metaphorical value in the story. As a result, Landis muses that the difficult task he’s set himself in Tarifa would be worthy of another of Hercules’s labors.

It’s a few simple words, but for those who know their Greek myths, I hope it has resonance. And, even for those of us (like me) who have forgotten so much, such associations still work, I think, at some subconscious level. On a business trip, that kind of wandering thought probably wouldn’t have a place.

Other posts in the Where Writers’ Ideas Come From series can be found under the Writers’ First Draft tab.

Photos: balcony, Akuppa John Wigham; rooftop view, Andrew Nash; both for Pixabay

The Mirror and the Light

Posted on by

In 2009, British author Hilary Mantel published Wolf Hall, the first book in her trilogy about Henry VIII’s powerful counselor, Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540). I wasn’t surprised that year when it won the Booker Prize, Britain’s top literary award. Three years later, part two of the trilogy, Bring Up the Bodies, won the Booker again—making Mantel the first British writer to win more than once. Eagerly, I’ve waited and waited for part three.

The Mirror and the Light was published earlier this year and, though it made the Booker longlist, it’s not on the shortlist. That seems more in the spirit of giving another author a chance than a critique of this new volume. It follows Cromwell in his final years, and, because I knew how it would end, I read its 750-plus pages in spread-out batches, extended my association with the protagonist and delaying the inevitable. I like to think Mantel felt the same reluctance for the story to end, accounting for the long wait.

Thomas Cromwell was the son of a violent, ill-educated blacksmith from the London suburb (then) of Putney, who rose to have extraordinary power in King Henry’s court. He had no army of his own, no particular following. Other than a few close allies, mostly among his family, the nobility, in fact, hated him and his influence. What he had in abundance was political acumen.

He made Henry a rich man and extended the king’s power and authority. He engineered the annulment of his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and his marriage to his second, Anne Boleyn. When Anne declined in royal favor, Cromwell again aided the king in ridding himself of an unwanted wife and placed Jane Seymour (probably the one of Henry’s six wives he loved best) in Henry’s path. After Jane’s untimely death, he negotiated with the German princes for a marriage to Anne of Cleves.

But there was so much more to Cromwell than bedroom politics. He oversaw the dismantling of Church properties, as he and Henry established the king as the head of the Church of England, not the Pope in Rome. He maneuvered against the Spanish, the French, and the Holy Roman Empire to protect his king and further his interests. In a nutshell, he saw the future and England’s role in it, laying the groundwork for a modern nation led by skill and intellect, not birthright.

Mantel’s trilogy benefits from the tumultuous times in which Cromwell lived. But beyond the inherent drama of the story, her books are an astonishing feat of imagination. In no aspect of his life is Cromwell dealt with superficially. He is a wholly imagined person, with a chess-player’s ability to think many moves ahead.

Over the centuries, other chroniclers have portrayed him as ruthless and ambitious—a characterization his enemies among the nobility would have spread about—Mantel’s books employ the skills of a mind-reader, making him a person of much greater depth. His enemies claimed he wanted to be king, but in her telling, he wanted only to serve his king.

Bottom line? Any author who can help you know so intimately and care so deeply about a person who died almost 500 years ago has accomplished something indeed.

Seeing a Play Twice: The In-Between

Posted on by

This fall I’m taking a five-week ZOOM course on “How to Watch a Play,” led by Adam Immerwahr, artistic director of Washington, D.C.’s Theater J. Prior to the first class, everyone watched online a 2018 production of the Tony-award-winning play Red by John Logan. I’d seen it a few years ago and didn’t remember it all that well.

This London version had Alfred Molina as Mark Rothko (born in 1903; committed suicide in 1970) and Alfred Enoch as his assistant, Ken. In the script, Ken arrives to help Rothko with the task of creating nearly 40 enormous canvases to hang in Manhattan’s then-new Seagram Building. He stretches canvas, he mixes paint. Red paint. The paintings are undeniably red, in varying shades, and it’s a tribute to both artist and playwright that audience members can go from “my kid could do that” to “I get it” in about 90 minutes.

A filmed play has plusses and minuses. Closeups are an advantage. Actors and directors manage stage elements so that you’re looking in the right place at the right time; with the camera, the decision where to look is made for you. What’s lost is the sense of community a live audience provides. (Adam cited a 2017 study that found audience members’ hearts begin to beat in sync.)

Adam distinguishes between a play and a production. The play is the script. Everything that brings it to life (actors, sets, costumes, lighting, music) is the production. And, when it comes to production, he says, “Everything’s a choice.”

When you see different productions of the same play, those choices become apparent. One version may be immensely enjoyable, another a big disappointment. A few years ago, Princeton’s McCarter Theatre produced an intimate version of My Fair Lady with no orchestra, just two pianos. A delightful choice. We’ve seen six or seven productions of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum—from Broadway to community theater—and enjoyed each one. Great choices.

Then, the disasters: Romeo and Juliet in a tiny theater where the set design included a traditional second-floor balcony and, when Juliet was up there, the audience could see her only from the knees down; a particularly awful Hamlet (referred to at our house as “the nude Hamlet”); and A Christmas Carol with Tiny Tim played by an adult. Cue eyeroll. Yet, whatever their choices, a production team doesn’t totally control your reactions. External factors intrude. Say you eat a bad dinner before the show, or an actor reminds you of someone you loathe (or love!), or the set calls to mind your terrifying Aunt Gertrude’s living room. Between my first and second viewing of Red, as it happens, I visited Houston and saw the Rothko Chapel, hung all around with his large, dark, ominous paintings. Because of that experience, when Rothko says, “There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend. . . One day the black will swallow the red,” I took so much more from that line. To me, that’s exactly what happened with Rothko, both literally and metaphorically.

For Spooky, Edgar Allan Poe Has Staying Power

Posted on by
The Raven, MWA, Poe

One hundred seventy-one Octobers ago, Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore. Judging by the frequency with which cultural references to him and his works pop up—Poe and Raven masks, the Edgar Awards, t-shirts, mugs, you-name-it—it seems he haunts us still. Now, in 2020, perhaps his shade’s message is, “What didn’t you get about ‘The Masque of the Red Death’?”

The late mystery writer Julian Symons’s Poe biography, The Tell-Tale Heart, is a painful journey. Time and again, Poe’s precarious financial situation would start to brighten, and time and again, he would get in his own way, sabotaging his prospects.

Poe’s parents were itinerant actors. His heavy-drinking father deserted the family in Poe’s first year, and his mother died of consumption when he was two. Certainly retrospective psychoanalysts of his personality make much of these early traumas. For his part, Symons believes a combination of predilection and early experience marked Poe, ‘and his life can best be understood as a play in which he half-consciously cast himself as a tragic hero.’

He dropped out of the University of Virginia, resentful of the aristocratic young men he met there, and moved to Maryland. In Baltimore, he connected with his aunt and later married her not-quite fourteen-year-old daughter. Having a family gave him a sense of purpose, but the problem then and ever after was earning money.

Today we know Poe best for his short stories, and that one poem. Yet Poe’s greatest desire was to be a poet and literary critic, to have his own magazine. Unfortunately, the caustic reviews he wrote for literary journals cost him many friendships and connections with people who might have helped him. Eventually, Symons says, ‘his drinking and critical quarrelsomeness were too well known for anybody to employ him.’ A modern reader can’t help but think Poe suffered from some psychiatric disorder that today might have been treated.

His last, disastrous decision was to name Rufus Wilmot Griswold his literary executor. For reasons of his own, Griswold made false and scurrilous accusations about Poe’s work and character that tarnished the author’s reputation for nearly a century. To a degree, they persist today.

In the last couple of years, I’ve written two short stories inspired by Poe’s “Berenice,” in which a young man becomes obsessed with his wife’s teeth. After she dies, he yanks them out before her body is relegated to the family crypt. Alas, (and you know this is coming), she isn’t dead.

They appeared in an entertaining anthology of contemporary stories with roots in classic Poe called Quoth the Raven, edited by Lyn Worthen; and in an anthology with the premise that Sherlock Holmes is called in to investigate the strange doings Poe set up. It’s Sherlock Holmes: Adventures in the Realms of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Brian and Derrick Belanger. No doubt Poe would never have imagined that the stories he dismissed so casually just to put money in his pocket would continue to fire other writers’ imaginations these many years later.

Photo: c2.staticflickr.com

Where Writers’ Ideas Come From: Seeing Through a Character’s Eyes

Posted on by
subway station

In my novel about Manhattan-based architect Archer Landis, he travels from New York to Brussels to visit the site of a major design project about to break ground. His firm, Landis + Porter, has the commission to design the reconstruction of a major station in the city’s rail and subway system. The station I chose for his firm to work on was Schuman station, located in the heart of the European Union district. Aside from strictly architectural considerations, it faces two major challenges.

Foremost, Landis is worried about terrorism, and he wants to be sure there’s nothing about his firm’s design that makes it more vulnerable. Would a glass canopy make terrorists think access is simple, or that they are too easily scrutinized?

I selected Schuman station some years ago when I began working on this book and so was shocked when, in the morning of March 22, 2016, suicide bombers attacked Maalbeek metro station, one stop east of Schuman. This attack was coordinated with two others at the Brussels airport. In all, 35 people were killed and more than 300 injured.

The second concern arises from protests at the site, because it will involve the destruction of a building regarded as “Belgium’s Stonewall,” where a young gay activist was killed some years earlier. The protests seem manageable, and Landis doesn’t immediately realize the danger associated with them.

Eventually, of course, as a matter of business and despite the personal issues he’s facing, he must deal with both of these dilemmas.

To write about Brussels, a city where I’ve never been, I used several detailed maps of the city center and the EU district, and walked the streets with the little guy in Google maps. I studied the websites of hotels near Schuman station, restaurant menus, and news outlets, as well as the station itself, which at that time (2011) was undergoing a major renovation, thoroughly described and dissected online. The availability of that information to me, to you, and to anyone, led to a major epiphany for my fictional architect.

Photo: labwebmaster for Pixabay.

My Friends Write!

Posted on by

Despite Covid, my friends who are writers are coming out with new books, but with fewer—or at least vastly different—strategies to let us know about them. I’ve joined any number of their ZOOM and Facebook book launches, followed their social media announcements, and read their marketing emails. By and large, these strategies are interesting and not totally satisfying. Better than nothing, I suppose, if frustrating for them.

Here are three recent books by writer friends not reviewed here before. Dick Belsky and Al Tucher I know from crime writing conferences and events sponsored by the New York chapter of Mystery Writers of America. I haven’t met PA De Voe in person, but we’ve bonded over a shared passion for Robert van Gulik’s Tang Dynasty magistrate, Judge Dee Goong An. I mentioned James McCrone’s new political thriller yesterday. Click on the book’s title for my Amazon affiliate link.

The Last Scoop

RG Belsky is a former New York City newsman who’s turned his intimate knowledge of the city and its characters into a number of engaging crime novels. In this story, harried Channel 10 news director Clare Carlson is in the middle of both a puzzling murder story and a potential exposé of city political shenanigans. In following clues left by her late mentor, she gradually uncovers what would have been his last scoops: a previously unrecognized serial killer on the loose and a pattern of mob payoffs. Clare is a bull in a china shop, but she has a powerful, self-deprecating sense of humor, and the demands of the daily news cycle keep her plowing forward at speed. Read my full review here.

Pele’s Domain

A novella set in Hawai`i is almost too appealing. This new story by Al Tucher brings the lore, the multicultural mix, the unique foods, and the island attitude front and center once again. Pele, the volcano goddess, is acting up, and the volcano that’s her home, Kilauea, is erupting spectacularly.

For residents of the raggedy communities in the path of the searing lava, the eruptions are more deadly hazard than spectacle. Trees, houses, cars—all incinerated. Perfect places to hide a couple of murders. The ironic contrast between tropical paradise and dirty dealing in Tucher’s novels is always fun and, here, Kilauea itself is added to the detectives’ adversaries. Read my full review here.

Judge Lu’s Case Files

If a Hawaiian escape isn’t quite distant enough, go back to Ming Dynasty China where PA De Voe channels what must be an earlier incarnation to write with such authenticity her novels and short stories set in that period.

The twelve short stories in this collection have straightforward plots, partly a result of their length and party the reality that cases in that era had to be wrapped up in a day or two. Plus, miscreants were expected to confess, and “encouraged” to do so by their jailers.

Although the stories take place more than 600 years ago, they provide timeless insights into human behavior. Read my full review here.