IN THE GAME

by James Lincoln Warren

Last month, my wife Margaret surprised me by suggesting that we buy a video game console. The stimulus for this was something she’d read on facebook by Gregory Han, my niece Emily’s boyfriend here in L.A., about a new video game called “L.A. Noire” [sic] and his link to a trailer for the game on YouTube (above). Coincidentally, I had that very morning read an article about the game in the Los Angeles Times. She thought I’d be interested in it, and she was right.

But buy a video game console? My nephews in Texas (my other sister’s kids, that is, not Emily’s siblings) played video games incessantly when they were in junior high and high school, but they were all combat games featuring excessive ordnance ridding the Earth of aliens and the like. (Their father, a Marine Corps Vietnam veteran who served as a tunnel rat, wisely flatly forbade them to play any games that simulated actual wars.) The last time Margaret and I were both in Texas visiting family, the game console with all its beeping and explosions and gunfire had driven her nuts, and she had heretofore expressed nothing but contempt for them.

But this—this was different. “L.A. Noire” is an atmospheric police procedural. First of all, although the game features any number of car chases and gun battles and other mayhem, its focus is on investigation and interrogation rather than on action. Secondly, and this was a big selling point, the game designers (Rockstar Games and Team Bondi) had painstakingly recreated three large neighborhoods in Los Angeles, which is of course my town, almost exactly as it appeared in the late 1940s: Hollywood, Wilshire (now mostly known as Koreatown), and Downtown. To do so, they had scanned thousands of pictures of L.A. (The only real liberty they deliberately took was making L.A.’s ubiquitous palm trees much taller in the game than they were in the 40s, but I can live with that. There are also seem to be a lot of dumpsters. Did they even have dumpsters in the 40s? And there aren’t any smudge pots, still a common roadside attraction when I was a kid in the 60s.)

They have made the closest thing to a time machine for the city I live in, and bundled it with a genre mystery game. How could I resist that?

So I did a little research, and opted for the Sony PlayStation 3 instead of the marginally less expensive Microsoft XBox. Off to Best Buy, where I also placed a pre-release order for “L.A. Noire” and bought another game (“Portal 2”, if you must know—it was fun) to practice with before getting the game I was truly after. The day “L.A. Noire” arrived, I showed up at Best Buy and tremblingly took it home for a test run.

We’re about 20% through “L.A. Noire” by now (I usually have the controller, but Margaret and I decide together what moves to make), and I have to say that it is, well, not to overstate the obvious, COMPLETELY BITCHIN’!

Although I must confess that my gaming console skills are not those of my nephews. Every time I get into a gun battle, I get creamed. Every time I get behind the wheel of an automobile, I turn the game into an inadvertent demolition derby. But still. The game is very engaging, and uses a new facial scanning technology that renders the faces and expressions of all the actors who contributed to the game extremely lifelike (the star, playing the part of Cole Phelps, our hero working his way up the LAPD heirarchy as a detective, is Aaron Staton, probably familiar to the Gentle Reader as Ken Cosgrove on “Mad Men”), which is important when interviewing witnesses and suspects, as the characters usually have tells to indicate how truthful they are in their answers. The investigations so far are interesting and challenging without being insurmountable, and are essentially on the same scale as crime fiction short stories. You know I’m going to like that.

But the real star of the game is 1947 Los Angeles. Sometimes Margaret and I will ignore the plot entirely and just cruise around, taking in the sights, comparing the city in the game to the one we live in. Margaret grew up in Los Angeles, and says it very much reminds her of what L.A. was like when she was a very little girl in the 50s. (She was disappointed, though, that the concrete slabs at Grauman’s Chinese Theater didn’t have the hand- and footprints of any movie stars.)

In a word, it’s superb. A word of warning, though: the game contains considerable profanity and features adult themes, so it’s categorically not for young children. And I’m still wondering where that “E” at the end of “noire” came from, but what the hell.

This is the city. Los Angeles, California.

TOM SAWYER and the DIABOLUS EX MACHINA

by Leigh Lundin

Earlier this week, Melodie linked Mark Twain and technology of the Kindle. Rob added that Samuel Clemens went bankrupt backing a new a new typesetter and Leigh mentioned Twain published the first novel written on a typewriter. Steve ironically followed with an article about how difficult it is to decipher printed text into digital form.

Relating to Twain

It isn’t possible to grow up in an old family without lots of legends. On the distaff side of my family, some are actually provable. Andrew Jackson really did sign the land grant, two ancestors truly did come over on the Mayflower (Francis Cooke and Stephen Hopkins), while other relatives were already here to greet them. Genealogy can be colorful when antecedents bed-hopped on the wrong side of the sheets.

On my father’s side of the family were frontiersmen and pioneers who claimed kinship with Daniel Boone and Daniel Beard, but their most rumored legend had it Samuel Clemens was a cousin. (Some members spell their family surname Clemons, which they insist is a variant, like Lundine and Lunden, and like Kemper, Kamper, and Camper on my mother’s side.)

Lest the Twain Shall Meet

Stephen Hopkins was an intriguing adventurer, but if I had to claim an ancestor, Mark Twain would top my list. We both are (put politely) quirky; enjoy writing, technology, and travel; managed to be broke, and are strikingly handsome. Admittedly, Twain dressed much cooler than I do.

When it came to new technology, Twain was fascinated but critical, especially sour about new military hardware such as the Gatling gun, but intrigued by scientific topics as unlikely as microbiology . He was an attendee at World’s Fair Expositions, updating himself on the latest science and engineering.

Tech Support

Clemens was a futurist, interested in products for the home and personal use, devices such as burglar alarms, telephones, automobiles, and the potential of air conditioning. He was what we’d call an early adopter or ‘bleeding edge’.

Sholes & Glidden type-writer

Twain bought some of the earliest typewriters, clunky, cranky machines. An early model used a foot treadle as a space bar. He claimed authorship of the first novel typed for publication, although "a machinist" did most of the actual typing.

Harper's Weekly, 18 March 1905

I was the first person in the world that ever had a telephone in his house for practical purposes. I will now claim– until dispossessed--that I was the first person in the world to apply the typewriter to literature. The early machine was full of caprices, full of defects– devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to (author, friend) Howells. … He took it home to Boston, and my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered.

Saml. L. Clemens

Some confusion surrounds which novel was actually typed. Twain claimed The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) was first but a historical researcher suggests the first was Life on the Mississippi (1883). Looking at the timelines, both could have been typed. Judging from one of Twain’s typical ‘testimonials‘ to Remington in 1875, he certainly owned a ‘typing machine’ at the same time he was writing Tom Sawyer:

Hartford, March 19, 1875

Gentlemen:

Please do not use my name in any way. Please do not even divulge the fact that I own a machine. I have entirely stopped using the Type-Writer, for the reason that I never could write a letter with it to anybody without receiving a request by return mail that I would not only describe the machine but state what progress I had made in the use of it, etc., etc. I don't like to write letters, and so I don't want people to know that I own this curiosity-breeding little joker.

Yours truly,

Saml. L. Clemens

Twain sent his friend and author William Dean Howells a follow-up letter:

Hartford, June 25, 1875

The machine is at Bliss's, grimly pursuing its appointed mission, slowly & implacably rotting away at another man's chances for salvation.

I have sent Bliss word not to donate it to a charity (though it is a pity to fool away a chance to do a charity an ill turn), but to let me know when he has got his dose, because I've got another candidate for damnation. You just wait a couple of weeks & if you don't see the TypeWriter coming tilting along toward Cambridge with the raging hell of an unsatisfied appetite in its eye, I lose my guess.

Yours truly,

Saml. L. Clemens

Type Casting

Following the American Civil War and the explosion of newspapers across the nation, publishers desperately needed to evolve from handset type. Two primary competitors emerged, James Paige and Ottmar Mergenthaler.

Twain and his wife invested in the Paige Compositor. With such a catchy name and 18,000 parts, how could they lose?

Paige Compositor

The machine was highly sophisticated but highly complex. Like some engineers, Paige was a perfectionist, constantly improving his machine rather than releasing it for use. As he was toying, the competition ate his lunch.

While Paige continually tinkered, Mergenthaler was manufacturing and selling his considerably simpler device, improving as needed, a model for technology companies. The Linotype Company would go on to dominate printing in the next century. When the Macintosh came out with ‘desktop publishing’, Linotype developed a Mac-compatible Postscript RIP (raster image processor) in short order.

Mergenthaler Linotype

Mr Paige lost everything and died in the poorhouse. Twain declared bankruptcy and also declared he’d "learned two things from the experience: not to invest when you can’t afford to and not to invest when you can."

And that is the story how Mark Twain still affects the publishing industry.

Get lost! Can’t you see I’m busy?

BOOKLIST

by John M. Floyd

A mystery-writer friend asked me a tough question last week. It wasn’t about style or marketing or any of the other things this lady and I usually discuss; this was about my preferences as a reader. She asked me if I could name my all-time favorite novels. (Why doesn’t anybody ever ask about one’s favorite short stories?)

This reminded me of a question I got at a book signing two Saturdays ago: a customer who was considering buying one of my three books asked me which one is my favorite. I told him, very honestly, that that’s like asking me which of my children I love the most. And this later question about novels I’ve read made me feel the same way. How can you single one out?

I told my friend this, and she said, “Make it six, then. Half a dozen novels that you think you liked more than any others.”

I wasn’t sure that would be any easier. She can be a difficult woman, this friend. “What genres? Are we talking mysteries, here?”

“Any genres,” she said. “And quit stalling.”

So I named six novels. Here they are:

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Stand, Stephen King
The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris
Jaws, Peter Benchley
Eye of the Needle, Ken Follett
Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

And I’ll tell you the same thing I told her: these aren’t necessarily the six best novels I’ve ever read. They’re just the six I think I remember enjoying the most. They’re books that I absolutely loved while reading them, books that stayed constantly on my mind every time I had to put them down to do something else.

Which brings up another question. What made me like them so much? What is it about these that so captivated me, and stayed with me long after I finished them?

The answer to that goes back to things we talk about a lot, at this blog: plot, characterization, style, POV, theme, setting, etc. Here are a few specifics that come to mind:

All six of these novels contained characters I’ll never forget. Some of their names (Gus McCrae, Atticus Finch, Martin Brody, Hannibal Lecter) are probably more widely known than their creators’.

At least half of these books included a stunning surprise at or near the end. I love that, in either a short story or a novel.

Two of them (The Stand and Lonesome Dove) are sprawling sagas that cover a lot of time and a lot of geography. Because of their flow and structure, though, those two three-inch-thick books read as if they were much smaller and shorter. I was never bored, and never once lost the desire to find out what will happen to these people?

All were written well. This probably goes without saying, but I liked the writing style of these six authors a lot — or at least the style they used for these particular books. (I can recall too many novels that had great plots and characters but were tedious to read.)

At least four of these books generated suspense throughout the story, and at the end of two of them (Eye of the Needle and The Silence of the Lambs) it was the “sweaty-palms, edge-of-the-seat” variety — two of the best endings I can remember. And all six of course served up conflict on many different levels.

I surprised myself a bit, in that my choices turned out to cover so many different genres. Several of them (Jaws, Lambs, Needle) could be categorized as thrillers, and several as crime fiction as well. One of the six had supernatural elements, one was a western, one was a spy novel, and at least two are considered literary classics. I suppose the only one that contained an actual mystery (a subplot to the main “trial” storyline) was Mockingbird.

Another note: all six of these novels were adapted for the screen, and all except one (The Stand) resulted in an excellent movie. That’s an amazing fact in itself.

Not that it matters, but these six writers were born in places as varied as their subjects: Alabama, Maine, Mississippi, New York, Wales, and Texas.

What are your all-time favorite novels?

And yes, I know it’s a difficult question. How about your favorite short stories . . . ?

SCAN THIS PAGE

by Steven Steinbock

Earlier this week , Melodie shared with us the experience of her bold leap forward into the twenty-first century with a Kindle. I don’t own an e-reader. I probably will at some point. For now I like my books the old fashioned way.

There are some huge advantages of ebooks. For lovers of the short story, in particular, e-readers seem to be a marriage made in techno-heaven. As I think anyone who has looked at the Kindle (or other electronic) editions of EQMM or AHMM – or its sister science fiction magazines – will attest, the Dell magazines have translated very well the e-book medium. Reading short stories and carrying a Kindle or Nook are both well-suited to busy commuters looking for a respite of intellectual escape.

Technology has led to another interesting development in publishing: the sudden availability of long out-of-print books, articles, and stories. E-books and Print-on-Demand has given authors a welcome opportunity to make their own works available again. It’s also made it easier for readers to track down the old hard-to-find classics.

One of the drawbacks, however, has been the appearance of a new kind of typographic error, known by many modern archivists as scannos. A scanno happens when a scanned document is read by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and various words or characters are incorrectly converted.

OCR programs are pretty impressive when you think about it. They look at a digital image of a printed page, and analyze the black marks on the page, distinguishing lines, words, and letters, comparing the shapes on the page to letters in its memory, and then checking the resulting words with words in its dictionary. The technology has come a long way since the handheld scanners of almost twenty years ago. (I used to have a Logitech Scanman which, given lots of time and a steady hand, could scan and convert a document with thirty-percent accuracy). But even with advances, computers sometimes incorrectly read text with jarring results.

For instance, it wouldn’t be uncommon to find the word “scan” misread as “sean” or the word “jarring” jumbled up as “jamng.”

I’ve encountered some reprints printed by hack-publishers with little or no quality control. It’s embarrassing. By contrast, I happen to know that Crippen and Landru Publishers, which gets most of its material from pulp magazines and old issues of EQMM and AHMM, makes painstaking effort to catch and correct every scanning error in their books. (C&L may have let some scannos slip through, but if so, I haven’t caught them).

I’ve been scanning a large number of short stories from a variety of sources, and I can testify that the editing process is tedious. Some errors, while amusing at first, become tiresome after the fortieth or fiftieth time they occur in a document conversion.

Punctuation marks change in bizarre ways. Periods acquiesce into nothingness, while quotation marks evolve into double-apostrophes. Accidental ink marks and imperfections in the paper result in all manner of dots, dashes, slashes, and hyphens. “I” and “l” (lower case “L”) get switched around, and often both are replaced with “1” (numeral one). Here is a sample of some of the scannos I’ll encounter in a typical editing session:

fireworks becomes Artworks
in becomes an
thing becomes th1ng
like becomes hke
tiny becomes tmy
carrying becomes caning

In one bizarre metamorphosis,

fireflies became leeches

Quotation marks (“), as I said, frequently transform into double-apostrophes. But sometimes the transformation takes an uglier form:

“Come was read as become
“Not became Aint
“Fire transformed into barrel
notice.” became novice’s
deserved.” became deservedly

I think one of the strangest scannos I encountered was when the word

The

was rendered as

”1”11e

Have you run into any wild scannos? If so, share them below.

Yesterday David Dean, mystery writer and police chief, gave us a short course on hand guns; specifically the revolver. Today we go semi-automatic . . .

WRITE TO BEAR ARMS-Part II

by David Dean

Colt M1911A1 .45 semi-automatic pistol with magazine,
showing .45 ACP and 9mm parabellum cartidges for comparison

Now to those semi-automatics, also referred to as automatics: If they were truly automatic, then the shooter would be able to fire all the bullets the gun contains with a single squeeze of the trigger, like a machine-gun. Instead, semi-automatics fire every time you pull the trigger and the shooter must pull the trigger each and every time he wants another bullet to be off to its target. There are fully automatic pistols, of course, but they have generally been reserved for military use.

Short-barreled guns that fire that rapidly tend to be very inaccurate and are not wise to use in the crowded urban and suburban environment most of us write about. Unless, of course, your bad guy just doesn’t care who all gets killed when he’s out gunning; many don’t.

Semi-autos are sleeker than revolvers (and therefore better at being concealed on one’s person) because they do not require a cylinder which gives the revolver its bulbous middle. Instead they carry a magazine (often called a “clip”) within their handles. Caution: the term “clip” is now considered somewhat anachronistic. These magazines generally carry anywhere from seven to fourteen bullets which are fed into the gun by a spring within it.

Semi-autos are the workhorse of almost all American and European police departments. Only a very few still employ revolvers. When I started out I was assigned a .38 revolver as semi-autos were still a modern notion for cops back then. It’s not that semi-autos were actually new, they weren’t, it’s just that most cities and states couldn’t afford to outfit their police with them. But as cops found themselves running out of bullets even as their opponents were just getting warmed up, the solution became obvious—cops needed semi-automatic pistols. They held more rounds, fired faster, and reloaded a heck of a lot more easily and quickly than did revolvers. All you have to do with the semi is slap another magazine into the well and start shooting again; with the revolver you had to push a bullet into each individual chamber while trying to keep your hands from shaking. Of course, there were “speed-loaders”, but these handy-dandy little contraptions were also bulky and not particularly easy to use, either.

In fact semi-autos have been in use since the beginning of the last century. The U.S. Army helped to pave the way for their use by commissioning the Model 1911 .45 cal semi-automatic, a pistol that remains the arch type of the modern handgun.

At the time (1911, hence the designation) the Army was fighting a little remembered and particularly nasty action against the Moro insurrectionists of the Philippines. We had just become the new owners of that nation with Spain’s defeat in the Spanish-American War and inherited some unfinished business involving drugged-up religious fanatics wielding machete-like knives and attacking in human waves.

The Army needed a gun that would, at the very least, knock down their opponents since the drugs they ingested appeared to make them impervious to pain, and if they were not killed outright; they just kept a-coming and in great numbers. The .45 fit the bill and did the job. It’s a knock-down gun.

My own department carries a .45 cal though not because of any Moro problems. The pistol’s characteristics make it very suitable for a built-up urban environment—It is dangerous for bad guys and less so for the innocent by-stander. How so, you ask? Cause it fires a large, heavy bullet that travels very slowly (for a bullet) and tends to stop at whatever it encounters along the way (hopefully your target). This not only stops the bad guys, just as it did in 1911, but avoids having the bullet continue on through the target and seeking another, and unintended, one down the street. You don’t get all the ricocheting either, that you would from a faster, lighter round.

The opposite of this was the 9 millimeter pistol so fashionable in the ’90s. This gun fired a smaller, high velocity round that had a tendency to pierce its target and just keep a-goin’ with unfortunate results for the innocent passers-by. Naturally, bad guys don’t care about this and still like them very much as they are lighter and can carry more ammunition. It’s a lot easier when you don’t have to consider anything other than results.

Model 500 Smith & Wesson .500 S&W Magnum, to date the world’s most powerful production revolver. The extremely short barrel on this one makes it inaccurate, but it’s perfect for shooting a rhinoceros at six feet if you don’t mind having your shoulder dislocated by the recoil.

Why do I need to know these things, you ask? Because people, and therefore characters, choose guns in the same manner they choose clothes or purses—according to taste, personality, and intent. A woman may choose a smaller pistol based on the simple fact that her hands are small (hence the term, Lady’s Gun). A hired killer may choose a revolver over a semi-auto because he doesn’t want to leave any shell casings behind for the forensics folks; or a guy who’s not too confident may pick a gun with a high-capacity magazine so that he can make up for his lack of accuracy with volume, while a savvy gunman may pack a revolver because he knows that semi-autos have a tendency to jam.

Smaller calibers such as the .22’s, .25’s, and .380’s have less kick than the larger ones and so accuracy is more easily achieved. Also, the longer the barrel the more accuracy is possible over longer distances, which may make a long-barreled revolver the optimal choice for your assassin who likes to keep things clean and business-like.

In general though, pistols are for up-close and personal encounters of the ugly kind; most gunfights are conducted at about a ten-foot range between opponents. You get much closer than that and you may as well use knives. Rapid-fire semi-autos are probably most optimal in these situations; preferably with the aforementioned “knock-down” power.

So, as you can see, there are lots of choices to make along the way and I hope that this information helps you to make the right ones for your characters. Ammo enters into the equation, as well, but that’s best saved for another day. In the meantime, work on your breathing, and squeeze, don’t jerk, the trigger.

Today and tomorrow, our regularly scheduled columns are being pre-empted by special programming. Over to you in the studio, Rob! —JLW

David Dean is an excellent writer of mystery stories, but don’t take my word for it. Read “Tomorrow’s Dead” in the current (July) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. David also happens to be a police chief and he has shared with us before a little of what it feels like to combine those two jobs. Clearly a glutton for punishment, David has volunteered to help us with something that should be very important to all mystery writers: getting your guns right.

—Rob Lopresti

WRITE TO BEAR ARMS-Part I

by David Dean

It’s hard to write crime fiction and avoid running into a gun. Sooner or later, your detective, police officer, femme fatale, low-life thug, outraged citizen, criminal mastermind; someone lurking within your pages, is gonna pull their piece and all hell is gonna break loose. You know I’m right, so it’s time to get to know your gat, your heater, your nine, your roscoe; that is to say, your gun.

Even though I’m a policeman I’m not an expert on guns; in fact, I’m not even a particularly good shot, but between seven years in the army and twenty-five with the force, I’ve handled quite a few. In this article I’m only going to focus on handguns.

As a writer it’s easy to stumble when putting firearms into the hands of the characters we create. Firstly, there are so many to choose from, and secondly, the average writer, even of crime fiction, doesn’t get the opportunity to handle guns very often, and may not even want to do so. But since you don’t want your cop-under-fire to reload his service revolver with a magazine and risk being laughed out of the publisher’s office, let’s talk guns. I’ll try not to get too technical and bore you with the details.

In essence there are two types of handguns: the revolver (as seen in all your favorite cowboy movies and early detective films) and the automatic (wielded by nearly everyone else and more accurately described as a semi-automatic, but I’ll get to that later). There are a few other types such as the musket-style pistol used by duelers of old and the machine-pistol (that is truly automatic) that crops up most often within the military sphere, but for the sake of clarity I’m going to focus only on the first two categories because they are, by far, the most common.

A revolver is so-called because of its design: a revolving cylinder. With each pull of the trigger this cylinder rotates a chamber containing a bullet into line with the barrel of the gun. That bullet is fired with the action. (See below.) Generally a revolver has six chambers within the cylinder (hence the appellation, “six-shooter”), though some have only five or even fewer.

There are two basic types of revolvers: single-action and double-action. Oh Lord, you say, I thought you weren’t going to bore us with details. Well, I lied. Wise up; it’s important you know this so pay attention and keep your hands where I can see them.

A single-action is an old style of revolver that requires the shooter to pull back on the hammer with his thumb, thus rotating the next bullet into place; then pulling the trigger in order to fire that bullet. Remember the old Western TV series where the hero drew his six-shooter and then proceeded to ‘fan’ his gun by repeatedly slapping the hammer back with one hand while pulling the trigger with the other? That poor sap was wielding out-dated technology even for those times—he was saddled with a single-action gun and employing the only available tactic to make it shoot faster! It did look really cool though.

The new-fangled double-action only required that the gunman pull the trigger; the hammer cocking itself with the trigger-pull; then striking the bullet (technically, the firing pin, but I promised not to bog you down with details, and the point is the bullet gets struck) causing it to fire, thus combining the two actions with one trigger squeeze—double-action! It was a big improvement at the time because it allowed the gunman to fire much more rapidly while maintaining a degree of accuracy.

Revolvers, like their semi-automatic counterparts, are designed to fire one size of bullet, though again, I have to caution that there are exceptions. Bullets are generally described by their diameter, hence, .45 caliber, .38 caliber, 9 millimeter, etc. and it is their size and weight that determine the design, and limitations, of the gun itself. If the average pistol used in action films were truly able to fire as many bullets as Hollywood allows; they would weigh more than you and I could lift with one hand, much less accurately shoot.

Well, ’nuff said ’bout that—tomorrow: automatics. Until then, keep your powder dry and your head down.

KINDLED

by Melodie Johnson Howe

My son, Geoff, gave me a Kindle for Mother’s Day. His boss gave it to him for Christmas. He decided since he is loaded down with Apple this and Mac that he had no use for it. And now I have it. He spent the afternoon getting me connected. The reason it took an afternoon is that I could not remember any of my Amazon passwords or account numbers. I had them written down somewhere. My daughter, Erica, darted in out of my office giving Geoff and me instructions on how to handle the problem. My other daughter Kathy had a stiff neck and walked around like a zombie. When attempting to face one of us her entire body turned in unison as if she had no neck. By the end of day we were all walking around as if we were no- neck monsters.

Alone with my Kindle, I stared at it. I think I have the economy version, which has all the flash of a Mao suit or a Russian-made car. Its dour screen reminds me of the old Commodore computer from the eighties. I was unimpressed. I wrote a column , “Babble Books,” about my unease with the e-readers, so I wasn’t going to be easily awed anyway.

Last Friday I was reading Steve’s column about Malice Domestic where he mentioned Daniel Stashower. I clicked on his name and discovered his new non- fiction book, Beautiful Cigar Girl. It’s about the murder of a young woman and Edgar Allen Poe’s desperate attempts to use ratiocination to discover her killer. I thought I’d like to read that. I’ll get it the next time I go to the bookstore. Then I remembered the Kindle. It was lying on my desk like a blank stone tablet. I murmured, “hmmm,” and hit on Stashower’s name again, then clicked on Amazon, and up popped his book. In the corner of my screen was a little box that stated: Melodie’s Kindle. This immediately threw me back into my childhood and my father putting my name on my lunch box and adding a star to the end it.

Back in the present, I tapped on that little box and ten seconds later I had Stashower’s book on my Kindle. I admit to a thrill. Not an eye-popping thrill, but certainly a tingle of excitement. I mean, how easy was that? I began to order books as if another would never be written. Then I stopped. Reminding myself that this costs money and I had yet to see if I liked reading on this bleak contraption.

Finishing my writing for the day, I propped myself up in bed (my place for reading) got myself all comfy and picked up the Kindle. It was like holding a giant credit card instead of a book. But I maneuvered through to the first page and began to read. An hour later I looked up and realized I had been in Stashower’s world just as deeply if I had been reading the hardcover or paper back. Now I have to give most of the credit to the author and his fascinating subject matter.

Here is the major drawback to the Kindle as I see it. It is unyielding to hold. I am getting a cover for it, which I think, will make it easier. I love black and white. I wear a lot of black. I love black and white old movies. I even created a master detective who wore only black on one day and white on the other, alternating. (The Mother Shadow and Beauty Dies). But the Kindle’s black and white makes me feel as if I’m trapped in Ingmar Bergman’s film, The Virgin Spring, and I can’t get out of it. All color has been stripped. The artwork of the dust jackets is lost. The great illustrations on the covers of EQMM are a gray blur, which make me feel like I’m reading for the good of Mother Russia.

On the other hand, my screen saver displays delightful pictures of Mark Twain, Virginia Wolfe, Jules Verne and many more great authors instead of butterflies or psychedelic amebas.

The Kindle will not replace a book because it is nothing like one. But it is so damn easy that it almost makes me forget about my local independent bookstore. Almost.

Simple and fast, the Kindle is the perfect reading tool in this day and age of instant gratification and portability. Is something lost? Yes. When I pick up a book I have the weight of the author’s words in my hands. Opening a book, I am physically entering the author’s world. Turning each page I’m following the author deeper into his or hers imagination. I feel personally connected to the writer and the book. I have no sense of this intimacy on the Kindle. Will I stop reading on it? No.

I wonder what Mark Twain and Virginia Wolfe would think about being screen savers on an e-reader. I’m sure Jules Verne would say, “What’s the big deal?”