STEALING FROM THE BRITS

by Rob Lopresti

I have a story in the latest (July/August) issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Well, it’s more of an anecdote. “Shanks on Misdirection” is very short, especially compared to my last appearance there, which was a novelette.

But what I want to discuss is that I stole the idea for this little tale from two English authors. No, I didn’t swipe the plot from Dame Agatha, or lift some ancient history from Edward Marston. These two people were not writing mysteries, or even fiction. And what I have done was what Lawrence Block once called “legal theft,” or I wouldn’t be telling you about it, would I?

Party time

Briefly, here is the plot (and I can’t tell it any way except briefly; it’s short.) Mystery writer Leopold Longshanks walks around a party and solves two problems, one personal and one criminal. That’s it. So how did I swipe that from two authors?

Let’s start with The Spectator. That’s a very old (founded 1828) British magazine and it still comes out every week. It is aimed at a conservative and wealthy element On the last page there is a column called, “Your Problems Solved.” People write in and Mary Killen advises them on burning questions such as how to tell the butler that the roast beef isn’t cut properly, whether guests are obligated to chip in for petrol on a private helicopter, and how to avoid cheating on your girlfriend while traveling overnight with a beautiful woman.

Mary’s advice ranges from the standard to the bizarre. She sometimes recommends invoking non-existent third parties. For example, when you invite guests to spend a week at your country home, rather than ask them directly not to do the awful thing they did last time, you should explain that you are still cleaning up after your LAST guests who did that horrible thing. (She seems to like making the fictional barbarians American since obviously they will do anything.)

A few years ago a drama critic wrote in to explain that he had recently written a play and now had the problem of dealing with those of his brother critics who had panned his show. How should he react when he ran into them?

Mary’s advice was cunning to the point of being fiendish. I thought to myself: “I would never have the nerve to do that, but Shanks would.” And in my story, he does.

Why is this legitimate theft? Because you can’t copyright an idea.

Gathering Diamonds

The second writer was John Diamond, one of my heroes. He was a journalist and a commentator for BBC. Through the 1990s he wrote a column for the (London) Times Magazine, with the snarky title “Something For The Weekend.” (In British slang, that’s a condom.)

Diamond wrote wittily about parties, nightclubs, the Web, and being married to TV chef Nigella Lawson. After his first child was born he solemnly pronounced (paraphrased here) that “as the first person ever to become a parent I have an obligation to tell you how it feels.” As a parent myself, I can tell you that that is exactly how it feels.

I wrote him an email once and my sigfile (the note at the end that gave my name and address) ended with a quotation, and it happened to be one of his. Apparently that was the first time he had had that experience and he bragged in his column that he felt prouder to be in someone’s sigfile than he would be to be in Bartlett’s.

In 1997 Diamond announced that he had been diagnosed with throat cancer. It was a type so rare, he said later, that just by reading about it you decreased your chance of getting it. He debated, in print, over whether it was appropriate to write about his illness and treatment in what was supposed to be a humorous column. Many readers — me included — wrote to tell him he had earned the right to write as he chose. He did, and won the Columnist of the Year award.

He wrote hilarious, gripping stuff about the illness. I would match his piece about trying to siphon petrol out of his car without getting any down his trach tube against any three pages by Thurber or Twain. His book C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too, is used in Britsh medical schools to teach future doctors how medicine looks to a patient.

The book ended with his cure, but the cancer came back. Four years after the original diagnosis he died while writing a book he called “an uncomplimentary look at complementary medicine.”.

To fill out the unfinished work, Snake Oil, the publishers added a selection of his best columns. One of them describes an encounter Diamond had with real-life criminals. And that’s why I could steal it for my story, you see. You can’t copyright real-life events.

Gems from the Diamond mine

I’ll quit before this essay gets longer than the story itself, but first, here are a few of my favorite chips from Diamond.

“I persuaded myself that I owed it to my vanity to be interviewed.”

“How could anything so sublimely complicated not be the simple answer?”

“I asked him why is it that all the best medical systems from the mystic East and deepest Africa come from countries where the average life span is that of a World War I pilot with a death wish.”

“It just never occurs to me until it’s too late that Learn Banjo in Five Minutes a Day means five minutes a day for the rest of my life.”

“Desperate times call for desperate analogies.” –

“Even if we don’t know what there is to live for, we all want to carry on living.”