I’ll be back with The Scribbler on Monday, March 7. In the meantime, he-e-e-ere’s Janice! —JLW

JUST THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF REALITY

by Janice Law

My son, who is a professional sportswriter, and I are currently putting together a thriller – the first time I have done any collaborative writing. Since I’ve never even belonged to a writer’s group and am usually in a panic about sharing my work, producing joint chapters has been an adventure.

Fortunately, most of the time we are in agreement – homicide clearly brings a family together – but when we aren’t, the appeal is always to realism. He claims to know how mobsters operate, understandable since he lives in Chicago. I counter that I know how big country houses operate, having grown up downstairs on an upstairs downstairs estate.

Fine. Argument settled? No way, because the disagreeing party now appeals to the Conventions of the Genre, which is the writer’s equivalent of the Way of the Samurai. This in turn leads to the big consideration, how much reality is enough?

That, as Hamlet said, is the question, whether in a full length mystery, thriller, literary novel, short story, or screen play. It is a big question in the short form, as everything must be dealt with efficiently in a few thousand words or less, and it is a really big question in the short mystery story.

Why? Because in real life the motives for homicide are usually boring, and death is horrible but banal: too much liquor leading to bad temper, and bad judgment with firearms leading to disaster. The local papers have this covered, and ordinary crime is not much fun to read.

Or write. What’s the poor writer to do but reach for the Conventions of the Genre and steal as much as possible from giants past? Oh, for the ingenuity of an Agatha Christie, whose murderers spend so much time giving us original means of death and setting up crime scenes with messages. The results are totally implausible but good for exercising the little gray cells, especially as we age.

But as every action provokes an equal and opposite reaction, the Christie school of ingenious murder and elegant detection produced a reaction in the form of the tough guy detective, who kicked the body out of the library and into gritty urban alleys. The so-called cozy, whether in short or long form, has never quite recovered its dominance, on the grounds that it is too “feminine” and not “realistic.”

However, a closer look at what might be called the macho school of mystery and thriller writing reveals that Christie’s ingenuity has maintained a subterranean life in the intricate plots, hidden messages, and esoteric information beloved by any number of best sellers. Herbal poison may have given way to computer hacking, but the wild plots are no less unrealistic even with high caliber weapons and high testosterone protagonists.

As for the gritty urban detective, I fear that he is barely more realistic than Peter Wimsey or Hercule Poirot. With his high alcohol consumption and horrible diet, he would be more likely to keel over with a heart attack than run down bad guys half his age. Even Mankell’s Kurt Wallander, currently afflicted with very plausible diabetes, has not cut back on the derring-do.

But that’s exactly why we like mystery stories. We like to think that nice suburban women can outwit serial killers and that overweight guys of a certain age can save the world. Fiction is how we shape things nearer to our heart’s delight, and in mystery fiction that means bringing most criminals to justice most of the time. It also means, and this is why the mystery is in many ways a hopeful and a democratic genre, that the intelligence and common sense of quite ordinary people can set things right again after evil happens. Nothing wrong with that!

But the Conventions of the Genre will always be to some extent at odds with reality, and the writer has to find a good balance point. This is especially true in genre fiction of every kind. In short mystery stories, surprising twists, always a delight to the reader, almost always reduce plausibility. And as plots become more intricate, psychological realism often takes its leave.

Writers work around this in various ways. Research into background details is one ploy. The hope is that someone who knows so much about French military pistols or types of Japanese pottery will be trusted when plots begin to take leave of the here and now.

Local color is also helpful, whether the setting is the last word in luxury and elegance or down among seedy warehouses and moldering tenements. If you can get the reader to smell the sea air or the mildewed staircase, you’re more than half way home, because we read fiction to be elsewhere. We want to leave the here and now for some place different, even if that some place is unpleasant. Wherever we wind up, the realism of the details lets us know that we have traveled, but the Conventions of the Genre assure that we will enjoy the trip.

WIKILICKS

by Leigh Lundin

Today: Plotting, intrigue, war games, crimes, and confusion. If you ever wanted fuel for your hi-tech thriller, take notes. In this intrigue, the so-called good guys do bad things and the so-called bad guys do good.

As usual, read ‘allegedly’ before every sentence and all parties are considered innocent until proven guilty.

WikiLeaks
Julian Assange

Those Who Live by the Sword …

You’re probably aware of WikiLeaks and vaguely know they received classified government documents. They’ve published thousands to date, embarrassing government officials across the planet. You might remember its elusive director, Julian Assange. You may even know that Assange was arrested last August when two Swedish women claimed sexual assault. Charges were dropped the next day, but three weeks later, following a European arrest warrant, Swedish authorities reopened the case. An extradition hearing is pending, but you ain’t heard nuthin’ yet.

You don’t have to admire or loathe Mr. Assange to appreciate the delicious irony when he objected to his personal information being released. That aside, were the accusations accurate? Did Assange fall into a honey trap? Was it a plot to bring him down?

Wiki-Tiki-Tavi

In the beginning, WikiLeaks’ goals were admirable. It was founded by a confederation of technologists, mathematicians, social engineers, and dissidents (Chinese and African) as a whistleblower site. If you discovered wrongdoing in your company or your government, you were invited to submit evidence that would be evaluated and published if it could be verified.

From the beginning, the site was both castigated and honored.

• In 2008, The Economist awarded WikiLeaks its New Media Award.
• In 2009, Amnesty International UK gave it their Media Award.
• In 2010, the New York City Daily News named WikiLeaks the top organization "that could totally change the news."
• In 2010, Time Magazine named Julian Assange the Readers’ Choice Person of the Year in 2010.
• In 2011, the British Information Commissioner honored WikiLeaks, saying they "empowered citizens."
  • But …
• In 2010, following videos of erroneous air strikes, WikiLeaks began publishing material from classified US government documents.

At that point, many supporters drew the line.

Could these documents, edited and redacted as they were, hurt us? Harm allies? Aid enemies? Help terrorists?

WikiLeaks has recognized that in an effort to do right by their lights, they might one day find "blood on their hands." To be fair, WikiLeaks asked the Pentagon and human-rights groups to help remove names from documents to reduce potential harm caused by their release, and they were turned down by both. Assange had burned through the good faith good people extended him.

Battle Lines

Much of WikiLeaks’ greatest support comes from American libertarians including Ron Paul, Connie Mack IV of Florida, and Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers notoriety. Another backer is constitutional and civil rights lawyer, columnist, and writer Glenn Greenwald.

But others disagree. WikiLeaks angered both the far right and far left, resulting in peculiar conclaves of cyber-attacks against Wiki servers.

PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, and Bank of America refused to accept donations for WikiLeaks, claiming such donations might be illegal. As constitutional attorneys pointed out, their refusal to process legitimate payments might itself be a violation of law. But, BankAmerica had a deeper motive… WikiLeaks possessed BoA internal documents that weren’t pretty to investors or customers.

Follow the Money

America’s largest bank began life in 1904 as Bank of Italy and later acquired Banca dell’Italia Meridionale. For this reason, some associate the Bank of America (renamed in 1930 following another acquisition) with the mafia. Whether or not there was ever a link, Bank of America felt documents WikiLeaks obtained would be damaging if exposed.

Perhaps thinking they might have a common enemy, BoA asked the Department of Justice for help. Rather than aid the bank, Justice recommended they consult a law firm, Hunton & Williams.

Since WikiLeaks hadn’t yet done anything illegal, Hunton & Williams and Bank of America allegedly settled upon a "dirty tricks" collaboration. This bag of baddies would include false documents, disinformation, and sabotage. They also decided to "disrupt" author and attorney Glenn Greenwald (mentioned above) to make him consider his own "survival".

Toward that end, they brought in three other companies, Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies, and HBGary Federal, together called ‘Team Themis‘. Documents further suggest planned collaboration with the national level Chamber of Commerce involving a $200,000 fee for a limited “smear campaign” against Chamber critics (Change to Win, Chamber Watch, Think Progress, and the SEIU) and $2-million for a larger "disinformation campaign against progressives".

An old saw says only the finest of lines separates cops from crooks, and it’s certainly true in WikiLeaks versus Bank of America. A law firm, the nation’s largest bank, and three corporations prepared to break the law to wreak vengeance upon an organization that was technically not guilty, even if it wasn’t innocent.

Anonymous
Scientology
Op Payback

Anonymous

Another group surfaced, one called Anonymous. I first bumped into Anon on the streets of Orlando when members in black tights held a peaceful protest outside a Scientology recruitment office on Colonial Drive. Scientologists called the police who pointed out that picketing was perfectly legal in Orlando, and have a nice day.

People differ whether Scientology is a church, a corporation, a cult with a heavy hand toward critics, a criminal organization not above breaking into government offices and homes, or a zany bet between science fiction authors gone horribly wrong. It’s safe to say Anonymous took one of the latter views.

Anonymous appears to the outside world as a loose confederation of ‘hactivists’, activists comprised of computer hackers and crackers. Members claim ages of 16 through 66 and encourage an aura of anarchy, although a closer look offers a different story. They’ve waded into frays in China, Libya, and Yemen to help political dissidents. When not only extremists attacked WikiLeaks but corporations piled on as well, Anonymous sided with WikiLeaks by going after their attackers.

Life Gets Interesting

HBGary specializes in computer security and consider themselves one of the top in their field. They find civil liberties a trifling inconvenience whether operating on either side of the law. HBGary Federal’s CEO Barr wrote Palintir that security companies should track and intimidate people who donate to WikiLeaks. "Security firms need to get people to understand that if they support the organisation we will come after them."

Although associated with McAfee, HBGary has long been thought to have more than an academic interest in computer viruses. Recent revelations hint that a slithery HBGary may be willing to exploit viruses for customers’ purposes. They also worked up ‘Magenta‘, a Windows 7 ‘rootkit’, a software exploit that allows them to invade anyone’s computer with little or no trace.

As the Bank of America / Hunton & Williams consortium ramped up, HBGary decided to infiltrate, undermine, uproot, and expose Anonymous… for profit. In fact, they intended to sell information about Anonymous’ upper echelon to the FBI. Before bringing down WikiLeaks, they planned to destroy those pesky Anonymous urchins. A dozen disorganized dudes 16 to 66? No sweat. They were going to ‘pwn‘ them, hacker ‘leet speak‘ for "own their ass".

Clock Cleaning at 13:37

CEO Aaron Barr thought he’d uncovered the hackers’ identities and like rats, they’d scurry for cover. If he could nail them, he could cover up the crimes H&W, HBGary, and BoA planned, bring down WikiLeaks, decapitate Anonymous, and place his opponents in prison while collecting a cool fee. He thought he was 88% right; he was 88% wrong.

HBGary, super-duper security firm hardly knew what hit them. Within hours, Anonymous pwn’d them, taking over their computers, their web site, their eMails, their projects, and databases. Much of the takedown is technical or cast in hacker leet-speak, but for the technically inclined, the spy-vs-spy is fascinating.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6]}

In the fallout, Anonymous uncovered the BoA/H&W plot hatched against themselves, WikiLeaks, and reporter Glenn Greenwald. Not long after, Penny Leavy, humiliated president of HBGary, found herself in an Anonymous IRC chat room begging for mercy.

HBGary Federal’s feckless CEO Aaron Barr, faced with humble pie instead of ‘delicious cake‘ (leet-speak for fruits of victory), tried to spin the notion Anonymous forged 71,802 eMails plus documents, but reactions from other co-conspirators suggest the eMails are genuine.

Both Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies announced they were severing their relations with the HBGary, Bank of America, and H&W law firm’s sabotage ‘project’. Although they didn’t admit to anything, they promised not to do it again, "severed all ties with HBGary going forward," reaffirmed their belief in free speech, and apologized to author/advocate Glenn Greenwald.

Lawyers within Hunton & Williams could face disbarment for what Forbes calls their "Nixonian campaign".

Chamber of Horrors?

Thanks to holes in the released documents, I don’t completely grok the connection, but eMails leaked so far don’t quite implicate the Chamber of Commerce in the BoA plot; rather the Chamber reportedly approached the firms involved to implement a similar plot for them.

The CoC refutes accusations and disowns any planned smear and disinformation campaigns, but they deny culpability in a most bizarre way. As they distance themselves from the wreckage, they blame seemingly uninvolved "progressive organizations" for engineering this debacle as a "smear campaign" against them.

A Healthy Dose

I have mixed feelings about WikiLeaks or more accurately I have sour feelings about Assange. We’ll survive quite nicely, thank you, and some things our State Department said about other world leaders must be heard. Unlike the British military, the Pentagon addressed a few issues that needed to be taken care of. The jury’s still out, but it’s possible we may experience a net benefit.

As for Bank of America at the moment, I don’t care what their dirty laundry or dirty money might be. They did wrong. What they instigated (or at least agreed to), went beyond the pale.

Anonymous V

Anon. Anon

As for Anonymous, I’m going out on a limb with an unpopular opinion and suggest the bandits perform a useful function, not only combatting tyranny in China, Lybia, Myanmar, and Yemen, but also in a free society.

Can they screw up? Of course, and if they go too far, they’ll pay the price. They goose the body politic when it becomes too fat and complacent. They may not obey the law, but they follow a code. If we listen very, very closely, we can hear a tiny ping of conscience.

As I wrote above, a thin line separates the good guys from bad guys. As this article demonstrates, it’s not always clear who is who. In my former life, I specialized in operating system internals and decoding machine code. In a handful of challenging cases, I went after bad guys who defrauded banks, regrettably not banks who defrauded the public. When the game is afoot, the battle becomes an exhilarating combination of chess and poker because no one at this level lacks brains.

And that line is so, so fine …

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

by John M. Floyd

This piece today is about story twists, but not the usual kind. I once heard a speaker at a conference say that reversals in fiction don’t have to be just at the end of a story, and they don’t even have to be restricted to plot reversals. Even dialogue can provide sudden surprises and changes in direction. (I’ve heard this referred to as “oblique” dialogue.) I was reminded of this a few weeks ago, when I ran into an old friend.

I was also reminded that situations in real life can be stranger than the ones in stories.

Our chance meeting took place in the parking lot of our local Borders, which has become sort of my home away from home. (The store, not the parking lot.) I hadn’t seen the guy in a long time, but since our children had grown up in the same town we’d spent many hours together at soccer games, piano recitals, Christmas parades, and school programs over the years. After a few minutes of chatting about the Old Days, he told me about what he and his wife were doing and where his son and daughter were and so forth, and then asked me about our three kids, two of whom had been in the same grades and classes with his.

“I remember your oldest, from the Scout troop,” he said. “He was good with the younger guys. I bet he’s — don’t tell me, let me guess — a schoolteacher now. Am I right?”

“Nope. Chemical engineer.”

“No kidding?”

I held up two fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

“Here in the state? I always figured he’d stay close to home.”

“He’s in West Virginia,” I said.

“Oh. I would’ve thought your second son would be the traveler — all those backpacking trips he made –”

“Actually, he lives here.”

“In the South, you mean, or in the U.S.?”

“I mean about a mile from our house.”

“Is that so.” He frowned and said, “He majored in mechanical engineering, didn’t he? Like my son did.”

“Yep — I think they were in the same freshman dorm.”

“M. E.’s a good field,” he said.

“Well, actually, mine switched over to biological engineering, after the first year.”

“Oh. So he’s doing what now, research work?”

“He’s a doctor,” I said.

“Ph.D, you mean?”

“The other kind. He went on to medical school.”

“Hmm.” He looked a little puzzled. “How about your daughter? She was always laughing, never met a stranger — I bet she went into marketing, am I right? Or maybe politics.”

“She’s a schoolteacher.”

“Really. Teaching what? No, don’t tell me: public relations.”

“Music.”

“Seriously?”

I gave him a serious nod.

He mulled that over, then brightened. “I heard your wife’s teaching some, too. She was an R.N., wasn’t she?”

“Long ago,” I said.

“So she’s teaching nursing classes?”

“She’s teaching sewing classes.”

“Sewing.”

“Yep.”

Now he was really baffled. “Well, at least you’re doing what I would’ve expected,” he said. “I saw someplace that you teach computer courses, at one of the colleges.”

“Well, not computers.”

“What, then?”

“Writing,” I said.

A silence passed. “You’re teaching writing classes?”

“Fiction writing.”

“I thought you graduated in electrical engineering.”

“I did.”

“And worked for IBM, all those years.”

“Yep.”

“But . . . how does any of that qualify you to teach fiction writing?”

“Beats me,” I said.

He stared at me a while, squinting as if through a heavy fog. “Well,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Good to see you again, Floyd.”

“You too. Best regards to your family.”

As he wandered off, turning now and then to look back at me, I realized that in five minutes of honest but oblique responses, I had taken a content and satisfied person and managed (although it was unintentional) to confuse him thoroughly.

Or maybe I just made him think, and see that things are not always as they appear. That’s what writers are supposed to do.

Am I right?

SHAGGY DOG STORY

by Steven Steinbock

Last week I threatened to bore you with some Shabby Dog history. I’ve done some research. You asked for it. Read on.

When I was a kid, the older brother of a neighbor kid told a bunch of us a joke. It was a long story about a boy and his pet moth. The main character discovered that his moth could consume huge amounts of garbage. So he entered his pet moth in a local garbage eating competition. The moth won, and went on to a regional garbage-eating race. The moth won again. Boy and moth went on to the national competition, and the moth won again. Throughout the storytelling, my friend’s older brother padded the story with graphic details about the great effort the moth went through, the suffering he endured while consuming many times his weight in trash, and how tall the heaps of garbage rose. In the end, the moth won again, and was it so much pain, it began to cry. It cried and it cried. It wept so hard that everyone in the stadium felt sorry for the moth. It wept so hard. . . what? You’ve never seen a moth bawl?

At the end of the story, we kids were rolling on the floor. The next day we went to the brother and said, “Tell us again. Tell us about the garbage eating moth.” Each time he told the story, the details would get more involved. The moth had a name, and siblings, and a whole personal history. We knew the color of the moth’s hairs, and the texture of its eyes. We knew the patterns of its wings. We could almost smell the contents of each pile of garbage. The competitions took the boy and his moth to bigger and greater contest, all the way to the Intergalactic Moth Olympics on Jupiter. And always the story would end with the same stupid pun. And we’d still laugh our butts off.

My friend’s brother called it a “Shaggy Dog Story,” which was odd because there was no dog in the story. Why not call it a shaggy moth story?

The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (1997) defines a Shaggy Dog Story as a “long drawn-out anecdote with an absurd or anticlimactic ending.” Sometimes they feature dogs. Sometimes talking dogs. Sometimes the dog in the story is shaggy. A number of classic Shaggy Dog stories lead up to the disappointing punchline:

He’s not so shaggy.

It’s not certain where or how the term “Shaggy Dog Story” originated. One source credits an article in the May, 1937 issue of Esquire as containing the first printed reference to the phenomenon. In it, the author suggests a method for measuring sanity:

One of the more sporting ways of finding out which ones are not [sane] is to try shaggy-dog stories on them.

I don’t claim to understand that. I don’t have access to the entire piece, so I don’t know the context. But I’d like to step back a few decades.

In the early 1900s, journalist and dog-breeder Albert Payson Terhune wrote a series of short stories about a collie named “Lad” that appeared in Red Book, Saturday Evening Post, The Atlantic Monthly and others. These stories were collected in the 1919 book Lad: a Dog and in the 1922 sequel Further Adventures of Lad. I haven’t read them. They were popular, and spawned a 1962 film. Despite the similarity of name, breed, and heroic nature of the dog, it isn’t clear whether Terhune’s canine creation inspired Eric Knight’s famous fictional collie, “Lassie.” But that’s another Shaggy Dog story.

In 1926, the November 6th issue of The Manitoba Free Press featured a story by Terhune titled: “The Strangest Dog Story I Know.” The story, which Terhune claimed to be true, is that of a shaggy collie, guilty of killing sheep, who punished by being shot in the head three times, clubbed, bound in wire, and buried. Three days later that same shaggy dog, complete with grave dirt, bullet holes, and binding wire, showed up on the man’s porch very much alive.

The story isn’t funny. It doesn’t have a punchline – at least not one with any punch. But the story certainly is tedious. I put my money on this being the daddy of all Shaggy Dog Stories.

FREDRIC BROWN: A SHAGGY INTRODUCTION

Few readers today are familiar with Fredric Brown. He’s a favorite of mine, though. He wrote hundreds of crime, mystery, and science fiction stories for the pulps, as well as authoring five science fiction novels and around two dozen mystery novels. His most famous books are The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947) and The Screaming Mimi (1949), but I love him for the 1950 novel Night of the Jabberwock. (Indirectly, I credit that book as the inspiration of the title of my weekly Criminal Brief column).

1944 was a prolific year for Brown. The fifteen short stories he saw published that year included “The Arena” (the basis for the 1967 “Star Trek” episode of the same name), as well as the two stories that Brown cannibalized into Night of the Jabberwock (“The Jabberwocky Murders” and “The Gibbering Night”). That same year, the September issue of Detective Tales contained a crime story by Brown called “To Slay a Man About a Dog.” In it, the lead character, encountering a prank that would later turn deadly, discusses Shaggy Dog stories with a blonde. That story was later republished as “The Shaggy Dog Murders.”

More about Brown in some future installment of Bandersnatches.

THE JURY BOX

The May issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine shipped out this week to subscribers. In another week or so you’ll be able to find it in better bookstores. On the cover is a painted illustration showing Howard Haycraft as a train conducter, with John Dickson Carr, Allen Hubin, Anthony Boucher, and Jon L. Breen as passengers. Inside the magazine, editor Janet Hutchings discusses the importance of the review column in EQMM and provides a nice bio of Jon Breen, who has served as foreman of “The Jury Box” (EQMM’s review column) for thirty of the past thirty-five years. Jon is a frequent visitor to Criminal Brief and is an accomplished novelist and more importantly, short story writer.

Jon is semi-retiring from “The Jury Box,” and I will be stepping into the foreman’s seat beginning next month. It will require a lot of reading on my part. It will be a challenge for me to measure up to Jon, for the quality and concision of his reviews as well as his insane output (twelve books reviewed in each column!) But I’ll do my best. I plan to continue my weekly column here at Criminal Brief. I’m sure you’ll let me know (gently) if my quality starts to suffer.

Be sure to regularly visit the Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine website to keep up to date on the stories and events associated with that magazine.

A DEAD LINE

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

dead•line (noun)
     1. time limit
         the time by which something must be done or completed.
     2. line marked in prison
         Formerly, a line in a prison or prison camp marking beyond which prisoners were forbidden to go on pain of death.

– Encarta Dictionary: English (North America)

I love words, so it makes sense I adore dictionaries, too. I have no idea how many I own or even where they all are at the moment. Several are near my computer, but I also tend to carry them to wherever reading looks inviting.

For a story simmering in the back of my mind, I created a character that required a name not radically uncommon, but not crazy weird either. I liked the idea of “Rain” as a name (long before I knew who Rainn Wilson was and before people started naming their children Apple, Phinnaeus and Audio Science—but long after I’d heard of cute little babies being strapped with monikers like Moon Unit and Dweezel.) Those were too unusual for my character.

I gravitated toward the letter “R” and began with Ra (the sun god) and worked my way to Ryukyuan, which I already knew the definition was a native or inhabitant of the Ryukyu Islands since we’d lived on Okinawa during my husband’s military tour. In fact, while there, we attended the wedding of our friends, Paul and Ryukyu. Unfortunately, my character was not another Ryukyu and I did not find a suitable name in the dictionary that day. What I did find was a delightful excursion reading all the “R’s” in that particular dictionary.

I know. I’m hopelessly nerdy about words. (I admit I’m nowhere near the same category as JLW concerning vocabulary knowledge, but that doesn’t keep me from loving words any less.)

But, I didn’t have an indefinite time to find just the right name. I was on a deadline.

For me, the word deadline creates an imagination trip that kept undulating like a snake on a never-ending desert. No place to go but forward and though it looks like a hot and gritty trail, there’s no turning back. I found the images fascinating.

I pictured a line drawn by a saber in the sand at the Alamo or one where a Foreign Legion taken prisoner finds no escape or a line the literally dead cross into the hereafter.

For most of us, a deadline is simply a circle on the calendar when another writing assignment is due. From the moment we start school, we find ourselves surrounded by deadlines. For those of us who write for a living (or sheer enjoyment) a deadline is a stopping point we must reach to satisfy an editor.

I rather like the idea of a deadline for such things. It pushes me to work harder and faster than if there is no mention of a cut-off time at all.

What I don’t like is a dead line that when printed onto the paper, does not breathe.

My character finally emerged on the page as Harmony. Not completely unknown, yet not common enough to know more than one or at the most two, unless your realm has more hippie-era parents. I know, I know. Kind of nerdy in a too-sweet way, but Harmony fit her so well that when she spoke, it was easy to forget she was completely fictional and I hadn’t known her from somewhere long ago.

And I made the deadline.

THEME PARK

by Rob Lopresti

I’ve been reading a weird and interesting anthology of short stories. Not mysteries, but there is a connection.

I have mentioned Ryan North before. He is the creator of Dinosaur Comics, a very strange bit of web-based art. In one strip North’s hero T-Rex proposed an idea for a book: someone invents a machine that successfully predicts the manner of your death. Stick in a finger, it takes a drop of blood and spits out a piece of paper that reads: OVERDOSE, CAR CRASH, IMPROPERLY PREPARED BLOWFISH, or whatever. And the machine is always right.

But the machine has a quirky sense of humor. OLD AGE could mean being killed tomorrow by an octogenarian. SUICIDE could mean being hit by a jumper. And so on.

The idea became a book: Machine of Death, edited by Ryan North, Matthew Bernardo, and David Malki, is published by Bearstache Books.

Some of you have probably recognized that this is a technological variant of one of the oldest themes in literature: wanting to know (and probably to cheat) your fate. See Oedipus Rex, for example.

My favorite story in the book is “Flaming Marshmallow” by Camille Alexa, which asks the question: what would high school students do if they knew how they were going to die? Her brilliant answer: use the information to form new cliques. So the “crashers” and the “burners” are automatically the cool kids.

Not all the stories are funny. Julia Wainwright asks what do you do if the slip of paper reads “Killed by Daniel” and one of the millions of Daniels in the world is your beloved son?

The advantage over mystery

Not everyone’s cup of tea, obviously, but the point I want to make is that this sort of theme anthology seems a natural for science fiction, and not so much for mysteries. I think this is because “what if” is the natural beginning for science fiction and that fits well with themed collections.

Even I have taken the bait. One of my two published science fiction stories appears in Jigsaw Nation, where the theme is: what if the red and blue states separated?

Anthologies of original mystery anthologies don’t generally seem to be created around a theme in this way. Granted, MWA’s annual books tend to have a general rallying point – show biz, lawyers, cops – but that’s not the kind of specificity I am thinking of here.

I can only think of two such themed anthologies of mystery stories: The Plot Thickens (each story contains a thick fog, a thick book, and a thick steak,) and The Black Moon (a private eye is hired to collect six paintings in different cities and hires different detectives as sub-contractors.)

I’m sure there are more such themed collections, and I expect you are about t to tell me what I missed. Feel free!

But first, one more thing . . .

An amusing anecdote. The editors of Machine of Death urged their friends and fans to but the book from Amazon on the day it was released, in the hopes that it would, for one brief shining moment, make it to number one. And it did! But by coincidence this happened to be the same day that Glenn Beck’s latest book was released, so he came in at number 2. For some reason this made him cranky. Go figure.

WHAT WOMEN WANT

by Melodie Johnson Howe

This will be a brief column because I’ve been fighting the flu or the flu has been fighting me. We are at a draw right now. For the last few of days I‘ve been stuck in TV land. If Freud were alive today and could ask his famous question, “What do women want?” I could tell him. They want a pink Hoodie Footie.

For those of you not in the know, a Hoodie Footie is a one-piece garment with feet in it and a hood (the feet are on one end, the hood on the other) and it zips up the front. It’s akin to something an infant would wear. These same women who love Hoodie Footies adore Vermont Teddy Bears, who also happen to wear Hoodie Footies. And these little bears are desired even more when given by a man. It’s important to note that the man should not be wearing a Hoodie Footie when giving this gift because that would be a big turn off.

Now there are a few more things that women want such as a diamond from Kay’s Jewelry Store. It wasn’t clear to me in my sneezing, coughing state if they also wanted one for their Teddy bear. Women also want to eat a lot and lose weight a lot. Now I could identify with that. But when they brought out the Ab Cruncher, which made a loud click every time you crunched, I drew the line and blew my nose. That thing would drive me right up the wall, which might be a better exercise for my abs. Where are my abs? Can you feel them?

For those of you who want to take the easy way out (and who doesn’t?) there is a pill that will shrink your stomach because as we all know if we eat more our stomachs expand and they shrink if we eat less. It may really work because this thin woman looked straight at me and said, “It’s only for people who are serious about losing weight.” However in the following hour a “real” doctor told me with professional earnestness to forget the pill. He wanted women to eat his energy bar and drink one glass of water before they have dinner and they will lose weight. See, the bar and the water fill you up causing your brain to think you’ve already eaten that filet mignon, garlic mashed potatoes, and chocolate cake sitting in front of you. As I sat propped up by pillows and sucking on a cough drop (ten calories) l decided that we women could save our money and just wear Hood Footies for the rest of our lives and no one would know if we were fat or thin.

I also discovered in my sickened state that women are not happy with their hair. In fact women are not happy. Period. Except for the Hoodie Footie women, and they could just be faking it. In TV land women must go through many transformations in search of happiness. They must change their hair color, their diet, their living rooms, their dried-up faces, and their men. I only saw two women on TV who were happy. Sarah Jessica Parker was very happy with her hair. And Julia Roberts was ecstatic, if not a little smug, over her Revlon make-up. Personally I don’t think they’re that happy over the products they’re using. I think it’s the multi-million dollar contracts they signed to do these commercials. But don’t tell this to the poor Hoodie Footie actress. She was lucky to get two hundred bucks and lunch.