MODERATION IN ALL THINGS

by James Lincoln Warren

It looks like I’m the only member of the CB crew who will be heading off to Malice Domestic in Bethesda, Maryland, at the end of next month. For those of you unfamiliar with this particular fan convention, it is dedicated to the “traditional mystery,” and its patron saint is Agatha Christie. After Bouchercon, it’s the biggest and most prestigious of all the various gatherings in mystery fiction fandom, and unlike Bouchercon, it really is mostly about the fans rather than the writers.

Their awards, the “Agathas,” take the form of ceramic teapots and are much coveted by scribblers, since winning an Agatha almost always guarantees that a book will reach its intended audience, thus turning into extra printings. Malice is also probably the most congenial of all mystery conventions—Jan Burke calls it “the world’s largest family reunion.” I always have a great time there, but having given it a miss for the last several years—I usually combine it with a trip to New York for the Edgar Banquet, which immediately precedes it—I’m very much looking forward to it.

I’ve been assigned as the moderator for a panel on Saturday morning called “Better Together: Amateur Sleuths Who Work with the Police”. Assignments to panels are always mysterious, and I found this one a wee bit curious because I’ve only written one story featuring an amateur sleuth, and she lived at a time when there were no police around to work with. But I’m always happy to get an assignment no matter what it is, and by the time the convention rolls around, I will be well prepared to draw out the various insights of the panel members: Jane Cleland, P. L. Gaus, B. K. Stevens, and Leann Sweeney. (By the way, Bonnie Stevens’ new story is in the same issue of AHMM as Rob Lopresti’s story “Why”, which I discussed two weeks ago. Recommended.)

Not that I intend to bring it up, but I have always found amateur sleuths, with some rare exceptions, to be problematical, and that’s why my detectives are always pros—even my amateur, Mrs. Stavacre, was employed to determine cause of death, and so had a reason for being near corpses. Think about it. Sleepy little Cabot Cove must have been the murder capital of the world, and being related to one of Jessica Fletcher’s friends was tantamount to a death warrant or a long prison term. Most of us do not stumble upon murders very often, and even if that horrific crime does impinge on lives, it doesn’t present itself as a problem to be solved as much as it does as a numbing and debilitating shock.

Combining an amateur with a policeman at least provides a cover for the amateur, although it may not always explain why the professional puts up with the interference of a nosy civilian, which if you think about it is somewhat ghoulish—criminals are well known to inject themselves in investigations, after all, so the civilian’s presence in real life would definitely raise some eyebrows. But let’s not be harsh or overbearing, because the amateur detective is every bit as conventional a sleuth as any hard-boiled private dick, and frankly, not a bit less realistic. Jon Breen’s wonderful detectives are mostly amateurs. Miss Marple, the ur-amateur, is my third favorite detective in all of crime fiction, after Holmes and Marlowe.

My fourth favorite detective, though, definitely fits the bill of an amateur who hangs out with the police. That’s Lord Peter Wimsey, in case you were wondering. His presence is a little easier to explain than most amateurs, at least most of the time. First of all, rather than be at the right place at the wrong time and stumbling over the body in the hallway, although similar coincidences certainly do occur in Sayers’ oeuvre, Lord Peter is usually asked to investigate by someone in trouble who needs his help. At first, his presence at crime scenes, etc., is tolerated by virtue of the British class system, since he is the second son of a Duke and has the ear of many a distinguished personage in Government—and in one story, even the ear of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Later, of course, he is tolerated because Inspector Parker is his brother in law.

But readers do not tolerate amateurs because of any such niceties. Rather, readers like amateurs because they feel affection for them. We love Miss Marple, old cynic that she is. We love Wimsey’s wit and warmth. But I think that we mostly love amateurs because they pursue investigations not because it is their job and duty, but purely for the sake of seeing justice served. This is an appealing and admirable characteristic. Despite whatever faults the amateur may have, this is a redeeming strength. The reader, after all, is almost always an amateur, too, even if the writer is a professional law enforcement officer in real life. To a certain extent, we all like to read about ourselves.

So not for the Malice crowd the dark despondent corners of noir or the seedy underbelly of twisted psychopathological obsession. Good, clean justice, that’s the ticket, where the wicked shall cease from troubling and the weary be at rest. And that’s fine with me.

WHERE THERE’s a WILL

by Leigh Lundin

Before you continue, listen to this. Really.

I’m not sure how I missed the June 2008 Alfred Hitchcock, but I’m glad I did, because I stumbled across the AHMM podcasts. Their introductory offering was a little recording called ‘In Search Of’.

For a bachelor, solitary meals are more about fuel than food. I sometimes settle in a living room chair with breakfast in hand and listen to an audiobook. One day I started iTunes playing AHMM’s first podcast as I began my cholesterol assault.

I paused, puzzled that the opening lines seemed more science fiction than crime. Had Dell mixed up an Asimov or Analog recording?

No problem. Like my CB colleagues, I cut my teeth on sci-fi and continued listening.

But… my eating slowed.

I forgot my fork. And the food.

The story grabbed me.

I’m not sure how it happened; drops of moisture collected in my eyes, probably from too much pepper in my food. (If anyone claims they were tears, I’ll deny it and kick their ass.)

I did something I don’t ordinarily do. I listened again. And again. And a couple more times. Unlike other audiobooks, readings, and radio plays, I didn’t delete it from iTunes.

Knowing I wanted to write an article about it for CB, I pondered what to say. I thought ‘In Search Of’ was kind of an instant classic. The story was bloody brilliant and so unique no one would be able create anything quite like it.

I worked my way around to wondering about the author, Will Ludwigsen, and I located his web site. Who could better talk about the story than its creator?

So I contacted Will and offered him fame and fortune as only CB can. He generously acceded and created today’s article.

Note that throughout, he speaks of weirdness. Funny, but I don’t find it weird at all. It all seems normal to me.

In exchanging eMails, we discovered we shared many of the same influences, Lovecraft, Poe, Doyle, Shirley Jackson and Bob McCammon’s Boy’s Life, and even faded wallpaper. Will’s fiction has appeared in Weird Tales, Cemetery Dance, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Strange Horizons, and the Interfictions 2 anthology. He also has a book out, Cthulhu Fhtagn, Baby.

Will and his partner Aimee Payne live in Jacksonville, Florida. He’s a graduate of the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program as well as the Clarion workshop. He blogs frequently on applied weirdness at his web site.

If you haven’t listened to the powerfully understated recording by the voice actor, Daniel John Kelley, listen to it before continuing.  

In Search Of

by Will Ludwigsen

I’m not good at explaining what kind of writer I am, so much so that I’m reluctant to even admit I am one. The first thing people ask when they find out is, "What do you write?"

And here I stumble and stammer. If I say "horror," the person says, "Oh! Like Stephen King!" If I say "fantasy," the person says, "Oh! Like Tolkien!" If I say "dark fantasy," the questioner squints at me and assumes I’m a pornographer.

If I told the truth, I’d say "weird mysteries," and my story ‘In Search Of’ would be the prime example.

In the late 70s and early 80s, I grew up watching the In Search Of television show for which the story is named. In it, host Leonard Nimoy guided credulous viewers (especially me) through investigations of UFOs, Amelia Earhart, ghosts, the Bermuda Triangle… you know, all the good stuff. I particularly remember being scared to death of the Jim Jones episode, ending as it did with the image of Jones’s face on a black background as actual recordings played of him pleading for his followers to kill themselves.

Creeeepy.

When other little boys took home books from the elementary school library about sharks and motorcycles, I took home ones about missing people and poltergeists. I knew more about the Manson family than the Brady’s. I was the only nine-year-old in my town with elaborate theories about D.B. Cooper. My nightly prayer in terrifying Florida was, "Dear lord, please let there be no bugs in my bed and no vampires coming to get me. Amen."

Where this interest in the strange came from, I’m not sure. I didn’t exactly grow up in the most peaceful and stable household, so I wonder if I was searching for signs of magic and mystery. My life was weird in all the wrong ways, and I think I wanted there to be meaning, intelligence, and imagination behind the weirdness. Behind the fear, really.

So I fell in love with odd stories, The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson, Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Bloch, all of them structured and plotted to make the shaky foundations of reality seem a little more… purposeful.

I didn’t have a name for the kinds of stories I liked to read (and, increasingly, to write), but I knew certain names were reliable. Alfred Hitchcock was one of them, and I always begged my mother or grandmother to buy me Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. It was the November 1985 issue that changed everything.

Inside, I found a story by Nancy C. Swoboda called "Roomer Has It." In it, a man recently paroled from prison moves into a curious room in a boarding house with faded cherub wallpaper. One night over drinks, he brags to his hosts about getting away with murder before going off to bed. They sigh, regretful, and begin reading from an ancient book. The next morning, they go into the man’s room, see that the cherubs on the wallpaper are vivid and fat again, and pack up the things of the now-gone boarder.

The last line of the story reads something like, "Look, Thaddeus! They still won’t eat the buttons!"

Creeeepy. And wonderful.

I’ve never found Nancy C. Swoboda but I owe her a great debt. It was her story that rang my mental bells so precisely that it occurred to me that people wrote these things on purpose, mostly for other weirdoes like themselves. It awakened me to the possibilities of writing about the things I loved, not the boring literary stuff we had to read in school.

It gave me license to be strange. the show In Search Of started me consuming the weird, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine started me creating it.

In the twenty years after, I wrote plenty of strange stories and started selling them in 1999. I appeared in Weird Tales, Cemetery Dance, and– yes– Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, usually with tales intersecting crime and the peculiar. They were eerie, chilling, and often funny… but not quite right, somehow.

In late 2006, I started writing a story with the perfect fantasy premise: "When I die, somebody had damned well better tell me what the hell was going on in Dealy Plaza in November 1963. And where D.B. Cooper ended up. And what the Loch Ness Monster was." Heaven won’t be heaven if I don’t get some answers.

The story’s working title was "Debriefing" and I wrote it fairly quickly, over the course of a few days at most. It was easy, after all: most of those theories I already had.

A friend has taught the story to one of her classes. Many of the students wondered how I "knew all that stuff." I told her to tell them that I was a retired CIA agent.

Part of my writing process now includes what I call the "near draft," something I confuse with the completed story because I’m just so excited that it looks any good at all. I sent off ‘Debriefing’ to a few places and it came back with rejections.

I wasn’t surprised. Something didn’t feel right about it to me, either.

I’d written the story just a few short months after my divorce and a few more after completing the Clarion workshop for writers of science fiction and fantasy. I’d learned recently that art is never stopping short, that doing it right meant going all out and sacrificing something of yourself.

And that’s what unlocked the story and many more since: I had to make the story personal. It had to be about someone, someone very much like me, someone interested in big mysteries because he wanted to get at the little one inside him.

I had to make it a story only I could write in quite that way. So I rewrote sections of it, adding the real mysteries about the narrator’s life, many of them details from my own and my family’s.

I stopped using stories to hide from my weird and terrifying past and started using them to share it with readers who also had their own weird and terrifying pasts. I ponied up myself.

The lesson didn’t quite sink in immediately, but ‘In Search Of’ was a turning point in my career. It got me my first cover on Hitchcock’s, a great and appropriate honor. It led to other stories where I got personal, including "Remembrance is Something Like a House” from the Interfictions 2 anthology, "The Speed of Dreams" in Asimov’s Science Fiction (March 2010), and the forthcoming "We Were Wonder Scouts", also in Asimov (August 2011).

It also led to the novel I’ve finished recently for the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program, one that plumbs my childhood of weird mystery for the story of an idealistic boy of the early 60s who solves crimes large and small, wide and personal, as he comes of age.

‘In Search Of’ was a very special story to me, and I’m glad so many people have enjoyed it. I think it illustrates once again how cosmic and personal mysteries intersect, and how the weird is truly universal.

Surprise Gifts

The Speed of Dreams

Remembrance is Some -thing Like a House

CHAPTER AND VERSE

by John M. Floyd

My friend Carolyn Haines, one of the most talented and prolific mystery authors around, once said to me that when she started writing novels she tried to avoid short chapters. Her reason was that she’d always heard a writer should never give the reader an opportunity to put the book down. That’s sound advice, and at first glance, it would appear that the end of a chapter would be a perfect place for the reader to pause for a while — and maybe become the fish that gets away.

Well, chapter endings might well be a logical place to stop and take a break or mow the lawn or visit the bathroom or do the laundry . . . but if those endings are crafted the right way, they can accomplish just the opposite, and propel the reader forward through the story. One school of thought says the end of a chapter should do the same thing the end of a scene does: make the reader want to keep reading. And if he does put the book down (hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go), at least he’ll be eager to pick it up again when he gets back.

Planning and packaging

Some writers, like James Patterson, make almost all their chapters short. If I remember correctly, one of his books — The Jester — had less than 400 pages and more than 100 chapters. Some were only a page or two. But it moved fast; I read that entire book in jester few hours.

How exactly does that work? How do you keep the reader interested enough to keep going full-throttle past the stop-signs of chapter endings, and ignore things like hunger and bedtime and the calls of nature? In Patterson’s case, I think it’s several things. One is that he employs frequent POV shifts from one character to another (which can be risky in less competent hands), and a separate chapter is a good way to accomplish that. Another is that he often inserts “cliffhangers” at the end of those short chapters that make you want to find out what happens next. TV series do the same thing, at the end of an episode or just before a commercial break. The carrot that gets dangled in front of the reader/viewer doesn’t have to be anything extreme — it might be the emergence of some new plot complication, or the discovery of a needed piece of information. Or even just a hint that more information exists. (Maybe it’s the promise of an exit visa to get the hell out of Casablanca.) The only requirement is that it be something that makes further action inevitable. Especially if the genre is mystery/suspense. Yet another argument is that the end of a chapter is the best kind of dramatic pause, and when done well, pauses are a good way to add extra emphasis and impact to what’s just been said or done. And the more of those, the merrier.

This whole business of very short chapters is something I don’t remember seeing a lot until fairly recently. In olden days chapters occasionally rambled on for twenty pages or so, and some of James Michener’s went way longer than that. (He was a great novelist, but when you consider his history-lesson content and mostly dialogue-free, margin-to-margin text, I’m a little surprised that I did hang in there and finish so many of his books.) There are also plenty of other techniques that are now used more often than they used to be, like present-tense narratives and nonlinear storylines and switching from first- to third-person POV and back again — and when done correctly they all seem to work.

Refilling the suspense dispenser

I think the first time I noticed short chapters was while reading the Spenser series by Robert B. Parker, years ago. Harlan Coben also loves to use short chapters, and I believe it’s one of the reasons — along with frequent dialogue — that the novels of Coben and Parker and Patterson read so quickly. Shorter chapters, like shorter sentences and paragraphs, don’t function as the speedbumps they appear to be: they actually increase the pace of a novel. I would add that frequent scene breaks do that also, but in a novel with extremely short chapters there aren’t many scene breaks; the next scene is the next chapter. In the case of Elmore Leonard, who uses a great deal of that speedy dialogue, the chapters aren’t glaringly short but usually contain a lot of scene breaks, which (once again) helps hurry the story along.

I’m planning to do a column soon on the subject of pacing in fiction, and will cover all this in even more painful detail, but meanwhile, what do you think of the idea of short chapters? Does it bother you? Does it matter? Should chapter length be dictated by the storyline? By the genre? By the writer’s personal style?

Different houses, different rooms

I should probably mention here that Carolyn Haines still seems to use fairly long to medium-sized chapters, but she’s such a gifted writer it doesn’t matter one way or the other — I love her books and always will. Robert B. Parker, though, stayed on the short-chapter bandwagon throughout his career. I’m reading his novel Painted Ladies now, and he managed to fit 67 chapters into its less than 300 pages.

I suspect it’ll be as good as all the others.

FACTS, FICTIONS, AND OTHER BUBBE MAISAS

by Steven Steinbock

Spring is nearly upon us. Where I live, that means that I can see my driveway and the rooftop of my house, but my lawn is still enshrouded in a cocoon of snow.

I’ve kept myself in a similar cocoon these last few months. Fortunately there are a lot of books here. Much of the last few months has been spent reading, and with my new responsibilities as critic for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, it’s been quite a bit.

(I don’t know how Jon did it. He managed to cover a dozen titles in every issue of EQMM for the thirty years he wrote the “Jury Box” column. For a good portion of his tenure, that was thirteen issues per year. I take my hat off to you, Jon. I’ll try to measure up. Meanwhile, Jon, what are you reading now?)

Something I like to do during winter is bake bread. It’s a wonderful distraction when there are more important tasks to be done. Kneading dough is very therapeutic. It also had the added benefit of exercising the digits, countering the damage I do to them by typing so many hours a day. The only major downside to baking bread is that when I’m finished, I feel compelled to eat it. Hence, the extra few pounds of fat during hibernation season.

Maybe in some future column I’ll wax on about breadmaking as a metaphor for the creative work of writing. But not today. Bread, however – and more precisely, dough – has important relevance to the subjects of fact and fiction. The line between them is as fine as the silk of my winter cocoon. As fine, in fact, as a single string of protein molecule forming the gluten that holds bread together.

The things we call facts today often become the fictions of tomorrow. Up to the mid-nineteenth century, scientists had identified eleven planets. By 1930, the scientific establishment had declassified four of those, and added one more, bringing the total to eight. Then, for most of my life there were nine. Now there are eight again, unless you count the newly classified dwarf planets. Which fact is actually factual?

Vitamin C can shorten the duration of colds. Vitamin C has no affect on colds. Which is true? Just wait a week, and the facts will change again.

Remember in Woody Allen’s “Sleeper” when he wakes up 200 years in the future, and a doctor offers him a cigarette? “It’s one of the healthiest things for your body,” the doctor tells him. Don’t even get me started on global warming.

In junior high, I was taught that the human tongue was capable of distinguishing three different tastes: sweet, sour, and bitter. My science teacher even had us do experiments to map where those taste-receptors were on the tongue. Current research by agronomists, nutritionists, and neurobiologists suggest that there are at least five distinct tastes, and possibly eight additional sensations that the tongue can perceive.

And what about the tongue-mapping we did in junior high? Turns out it was bunk. Placebo and the power of suggestion. Even the New York Times said it was false. The whole thing was a bubbe meiseh.

It even turns out that “bubbe meiseh” is a bubbe meiseh. For the ethnically disadvantaged among you, the Yiddish term bubbe meiseh (I won’t even try to explain how it’s pronounced) essentially means “old wives’ tale.” A “bubbe” is a grandmother, and “meiseh,” from the Hebrew “ma’aseh,” has come to mean “story.” Then I come to read in Michael Wex’s funny and informative book Born to Kvetch that the term originated as Bove Mayse, from the name of a hero of a collection of adventure tales that was translated from Italian into Yiddish and published in 1541. (Wex describes the story of Bove as “basically Hamlet meets Mickey Spillane – on a horse”).

Nothing – not even the bubbe meiseh – is sacred.

Getting back to dough. . . this is something (I dare not call it a fact) that I find really cool. If you trace the words Fact and Fiction back to their origins, it turns out they may have a common pedigree. The Proto-Indo-European ancestor of Fact – and quite possibly of Fiction – is, according to Robert Claiborne1, DHE-, which comes to us through the Germanic lineage as the verb “do” (as well as the suffix “-dom”) and somehow through Latin as facere, meaning “to do or make”2 which gives us such words as “facile,” “facility,” “manufacture,” “proficient,” “factory,” “facade,” “counterfeit,” and of course, “fact.”

The Proto-Indo-European source of fiction, according to Claiborne, is DHE(I)- or DHEIGH-, meaning “formed” and provides us with the Germanic “dough” (as in the stuff we knead to make bread) and the Romance words “feign” and “fiction.”

I set before you the evidence: We have the homophonous “do” and “dough,” the similar-sounding “fact” and “fiction,” and their proto-meanings of “done” and “formed.” It doesn’t seem to be too much of a stretch (no pun intended) that “fact” and “fiction” aren’t quite as opposite as they seem.

This column was a bit of a mind-stretcher. Let’s make some bread.

1. In The Roots of English, 1989, which is a nifty book, but of dubious scholarly merit. Claiborne was a folksinger before he was a linguist. (Not, of course, that being a folksinger precludes being a scholar, as Robert Lopresti so ably demonstrates). [↩]
2. “To do or make,” incidentally, is the meaning of the Hebrew word that is the root of ma’aseh and the Yiddish maiseh [↩]

TALK TO ME

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

slang—n. Nonstandard vocabulary consisting typically of arbitrary and often ephemeral coinages and figures of speech. — Webster’s New Dictionary

Words and their meanings—whether the “respectable” ones we learned in school or the “other” ones we learned in schoolyards—are a part of our life and shape our generation.

Slang changes so quickly. It’s cool when you’re a part of it and sort of sad when you don’t understand the new jargon. (Hint: it means we aren’t quite as young as we thought any more.) Nothing is sadder than an adult trying to use teen slang. It never quite works and they end up looking like a nimrod (see last week’s Femme Fatale article) to those they must be trying to impress with their youth and sounding in the know. Which is also an antiquated bit of slang.)

Slang shapes the literature we read. It’s as crucial to the time period as the apparel and vehicles (or lack of transportation). Think how different The Catcher in the Rye would be without Holden Caulfield’s teenage angst-speak. In The Great Gatsby, even the name Gatsby is said to have come from the popular slang word gat meaning a gun. Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, and even Shakespeare used slang to add realism to their time period stories. Writers who’ve chosen to use slang seem to be in good company.

See how many of the following slang words you recognize and discern the decade they were first popular. (Answers at the bottom of this article. More slang will appear in next Thursday in “Femme Fatale.”) As you can see, the same slang word often changes in definition throughout the decades. (This collection has been gathered from various sources. Many came to me from other writers, from stories I’ve read and people I’ve interviewed, so I can’t promise total accuracy.)

(1) Airhead — someone really stupid
(2) All at sea — confused person
(3) Awesome — great
(4) Axed — get fired from a job
(5) Bender — drinking spree
(6) Beefcake — good-looking man
(7) Blast — enjoyable time
(8) Blitzed — intoxicated
(9) Bogart — to keep something to oneself without sharing
(10) Book — to arrest someone
(11) Book — to leave a place
(12) Boogie — to leave a place
(13) Bromance — close male friendship with no sex involved
(14) Bronx Cheer — sound made by blowing air between closed lips to make an insulting noise
(15) Brown nose — to do or say something to entice a closeness to someone who can help you
(16) Call girl — prostitute who makes appointments by telephone
(17) Can — toilet
(18) Can — prison
(19) Can — to get fired
(20) Chill out — to take it easy
(21) Chizzle — to relax
(22) Chow down — to eat
(23) Chrome Dome — a bald guy
(24) Church Key — bottle opener
(25) Clam — a dollar
(26) Corked — intoxicated
(27) Cougar — older woman who dates younger men
(28) Creep — a contemptible person
(29) Crib — home where you live
(30) Croak — to die
(31) Cruise — drive around in hopes of finding someone in which to flirt
(32) Cup of tea — something you like
(33) Cushy — simple or easy
(34) Dime — attractive female
(35) Dilly — something that is exceptional
(36) Deep Pockets — lots of money
(37) Dibs — first claim
(38) Dicey — a risky proposition
(39) Doofus — a fool
(40) Dolled up — dressed up
(41) Dogpack — a group of male friends
(42) Downer — a depressant
(43) Drag — a draw on a cigarette
(44) Drag — to race another vehicle
(45) Dragnet — widespread search for a criminal
(46) Dubdub — asking for the URL address beginning with www
(47) Earful — gossip
(48) Ease up — calm down
(49) Easy — someone easily seduced
(50) Eyeball — to look over someone intently
(51) Face time — actually meeting someone in person
(52) Fade — to leave
(53) Faded — being intoxicated
(54) Fake out — to pretend, cheat or deceive someone
(55) Fin — a five dollar bill
(56) Fish — a college freshman
(57) Flatfoot — a police officer
(58) Flex — to show off
(59) Flip out — to lose control
(60) Flivver — broken-down car
(61) Floozie — woman with loose morals
(62) Fly boy — an aviator
(63) Foine — attractive
(64) Freebie — no cost item
(65) Funny Farm — an insane asylum
(66) Gear — your clothing
(67) Geek — smart person with no people skills
(68) Geezer — old person
(69) Geezer Rock — 1950’s music
(70) Glitch — a defect
(71) Glitzy — luxurious
(72) Gnarly — excellent
(73) Greenback — a dollar
(74) Grift — to run a con
(75) Grease — to bribe
(76) Groovy — great
(77) Gumshoe — a private investigator
(78) Groupie — a person who follows famous people just to be near them

Answers:

(1) 1980’s
(2) 1910’s
(3) 1980’s
(4) 1920’s
(5) 1940’s
(6) 1950’s
(7) 1940’s
(8) 1950’s
(9) 1970’s
(10) 1940’s
(11) 1990’s
(12) 1980’s
(13) 2000’s
(14) 1920’s
(15) 1950’s
(16) 1940’s
(17) 1950’s
(18) 1940’s
(19) 1900’s
(20) 1980’s
(21) 1990’s
(22) 1950’s
(23) 1940’s
(24) 1950’s
(25) 1920’s
(26) 1920’s
(27) 2000’s
(28) 1940’s
(29) 1980’s
(30) 1940’s
(31) 1950’s
(32) 1930’s
(33) 1910’s
(34) 1990’s
(35) 1910’s
(36) 1930’s
(37) 1930’s
(38) 1950’s
(39) 1960’s
(40) 1900’s
(41) 1990’s
(42) 1960’s
(43) 1910’s
(44) 1950’s
(45) 1900’s
(46) 1990’s
(47) 1910’s
(48) 1940’s
(49) 1950’s

NO EXCAPE

by Rob Lopresti

You are, it goes without saying, a wonderful person. Nice, reasonable, easy-going, and a general pleasure to be around. So why is it, that every once in a while, you will be in a conversation and find yourself losing your temper, biting your tongue, wanting to shout . . .

(No, I am not talking about getting into an argument with someone who has an idiotic opinion about politics, or thinks the Jersey Shore is a good program. It is perfectly reasonable to get angry at them. I’m talking about . . . )

You want to shout: “The word is library! Not liberry! It’s a building, not a fruit. Look at how it’s spelled, for Pete’s sake!”

Ahem

The point I’m trying to make here is that some of us wordie types react badly to mispronunciations.

KUOW, a Seattle public radio station, used to have a show called Sandy Bradley’s Pot Luck. Every week they would play a song from some part of the Evergreen State and then Sandy would solemnly intone “There IS no R in Washington.” If that seems a little odd or even surreal (Sure, and there’s no M in zebra. What’s your point?) then you have obviously never heard someone pronounce the first syllable of that word as though it rhymes with harsh. It doesn’t.

It happens that the university where I work has a vibrant and fascinating social network run by the liberry – Sorry! – so I recently asked the users there if they had any special favorites (or unfavorites), mispronunciations that made them cringe.

To be fair, some said absolutely not, and thought the subject was ridiculous. Others said that the examples I gave were not mispronunciations but dialectical variations. Maybe so.

But from the students and my friends I did compile an interesting assortment. The single biggest offender was the unwanted X. I refer to an es or esc or isk turned into an X sound. So we get:

ax (for ask, arguably a dialectic difference, a common African-American pronunciation)

asterix (not meaning the French cartoon character)

ex cetera

expresso

Here are some other classics:

acrost

a PRO pos (for apropos)

artic

Febuary

indict (rhyming with strict)

mischeeveeous

nucular

Peace Corpse

pre madonna

sherbeRt

tex(t)

They also brought up a few examples that were not mispronunciations so much as the repeating of mondegreens (mishearing a word):

anotherwords

for all intensive purposes

Sylvia Wright coined the term mondegreen but I first read it in William Safire’s language column in the New York Times. I also remember Safire writing about interviewing Jerry Brown and hearing him mispronounce a word. Safire was in a quandary. Here was a governor and presidential contender who didn’t know how to pronounce a word. Should he correct him (and risk insulting him) or let him make the same mistake to bigger audiences?

Safire chose a third path. He used the word in his next question, using it correctly. Brown immediately said “Oh, is that how it’s pronounced?” A useful technique, perhaps.

This reminds me of another bit of useful advice, from the grammar expert Will Strunk: “If you don’t know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!” Strunk’s most famous student, E.B. White repeated this command with enthusiasm: “Why compound ignorance with inaudibility? Why run and hide?”

But which pronunciations make you want to hide? Go ahead. Espress yourself.

WHEN HOLLYWOOD GETS IT RIGHT

by Melodie Johnson Howe

I saw a trailer on TV about the remaking of Mildred Pierce to be released in spring as a five part mini-series on HBO. My heart sank, my stomach dropped, my chest tightened, my lips drew back, my heart, even though it had already sunk, now raced as I screamed, “Nooooooo, don’t do it.” But obviously they already had because I was watching them tell me how wonderful and creative this new film will be. And much closer to the book! But the movie, Joan Crawford’s movie, was better than the book. My apologies to James M. Cain, but sometimes Hollywood gets it right!

Again Hollywood can’t let be what they got right in the first place so they do a remake. The cast for the remake is filled with fine actors. But Kate Winslet is no Joan Crawford. Those are some shoulders to fill. In the beginning of the trailer Kate’s Mildred looks a little downtrodden. Joan’s Mildred was desperate for money but she was never downtrodden. Kate will have to prove to me that she can open a string of restaurants by selling her pies and greasy chicken. And James Pearce sporting a bushy mustache does not look like he “ . . . came from a long line of gypsies.” Zackary Scott did. And who can match the snappy one liners from Eve Arden’s Ida?

The actress who plays Veda, though beautiful, does not have the hard edges to her beauty that Ann Blyth had. Ann and Joan looked like mother and daughter. They shared an intensity of two determined women with the same strengths. One for good, one for destruction. I didn’t see a resemblance between Kate Winslet and Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Veda. Or that shared strength. But I am rushing and screaming to judgment.

One of the trailers opens with a voice over saying something like “ . . . in a time when women didn’t work.” (Meaning in the thirties.) Really? I think women worked very hard back then. Can you imagine a trailer for the original movie saying that? It makes me nervous. Joan is rolling over in her grave. In the black and white version, Veda ends up singing in Wally Fay’s (Jack Carson) dive while wearing a hula skirt. Okay, they had to deal with a morals code back then. In the remake, which is true to the book, Veda is an opera singer. (I always thought this was an odd choice Cain made for Veda’s character.)

Lip synching opera is a difficult task in a movie and if the actress is not right on she will make the audience’s toes curl. The one improvement promises to be the part of Mrs. Binderhof. Poor Mrs. Binderhof in the original was the only mistress in history that was more prim than a nun. But looking at these trailers what worries me most is that the costumes look like they are wearing the actors. This does not bode well.

Despite my bitching I’ll watch this mini series with a tiny bit of hope. And try not to notice Joan Crawford’s shadow looming over it adjusting her shoulder pads.

James M. Cain wrote a novella or very short novel called Sinful Woman about a Sheriff and a movie star thrown together to solve a crime. It is intentionally light and wonderful. I don’t think it has even been made into a movie. It would make a good one. And nobody has done it as far as I know. Now that I’m writing about Sinful Woman, I want to reread it.

Watching this preview of portending failure (did I just write that?) I was reminded of other movies that were better than their books. My apologies to another great writer, Dashiell Hammett, but the movie, The Thin Man, was better than the book. The novel was a good mystery. But Hammett’s Nick and Nora were drunks. Drunks aren’t that funny or charming unless of course they’re played by William Powell and Myrna Loy. I have not read the book in a long time, but I remember the depressing weight of a major drinking problem connecting Nick and Nora more than love or solving crime. Because the drinking was unexplored it left a pall over the book.

Another movie that was better than the book was Laura. I’m sorry Vera Caspary, but it’s true. As with the other two movies I mentioned, it is the literate script and the casting along with David Raskin’s lilting score that makes this film endure. Clifton Webb was cuttingly inspired and thin compared to Caspary’s vilian who was fat and not so witty.

L.A. Confidential was better than James Elroy’s book. The screenwriters took a wonderful sprawling over-the-top saga and tamed it into a smart script. James Pearce was great in this movie. And Kevin Spacey was brilliant , as was his death scene. And the actors wore their fifties costumes as if they belonged in them.

When Hollywood gets it right there is nothing more entertaining and satisfying. Maybe this remake of Mildred Pierce will come close. But . . .