THEORY OF THE CRIME

by James Lincoln Warren

In science and in law, a theory is an explanation for observed phenomena. The theory of evolution, understood by most people to refer to Charles Darwin’s theory of speciation through natural selection, is a case in point; likewise Newton’s law of universal gravitation, which explains why and how objects accelerate as they fall. A lawyer’s theory of a case is his explanation of the evidence, the story that explains how a fingerprint appeared on a murder weapon and what it proves. Theories are not mere hypotheses. They must be supported by facts.

In the arts, theory means something a little different. Literary theory, for example, is a justification for the relevance of literary criticism—how a novel is constructed, for example, or how language is manipulated to maximize beauty and expressive power. Music theory is an explanation of how music works—in the language of harmony theory, twelve bar blues can be described as a particular progression of the tonic, subdominant, and dominant triads over twelve four-beat measures (I-I-I-I, IV-IV-I-I, V-V-I-I).

But like scientific theory, arts theory is evidentiary in nature. The theory of baroque musical counterpoint, for example, wasn’t invented in order to enable composers to write fugues, although it certainly helps do that, but as a means of explaining fugues that had already been composed. The time-honored phrase describing this is, “Theory follows practice.”

In the early 20th century, there was a big effort among composers to come up with the theory first and then to write music to conform to it. The most famous example of this is the “serial composition” invented by Arnold Schoenberg, sometimes called dodecaphonic or “atonal” music (although there is much “atonal” music that is not serial), which dispensed with scales and chromaticism in favor of a fixed progression of the twelve notes in the tempered scale. Triadic harmony was tossed out. Although it held the stage for decades among serious and intellectual composers, serial music was essentially a failure, because its cultural context was for all intents and purposes arbitrary and synthetic. In order to be meaningful, the arts must exist in a cultural context (which statement is itself a theoretical one)—if you don’t understand what art is trying to accomplish, the odds are overwhelming that you probably won’t appreciate it.

Children with no musical theoretical underpinnings can tell the difference between major and minor keys. If you tell them that minor keys sound sad and that major keys sound happy, and they will correctly discriminate between minor and major keys almost 100% of the time. The truth is that there is nothing inherently sad about minor keys or anything inherently happy about major ones, but we are culturally acclimated to associate plaintive songs with the minor key, and joyous songs with major keys.

Likewise, we crime writers usually have some theory at work when we’re telling stories. Distinctions of subgenre—hard-boiled, noir, traditional detective, cosy, procedural, etc.—are theoretical distinctions. The invention of the cosy, for example, is generally attributed to Agatha Christie, the creator of Miss Marple.

“A cosy,” I will explain when asked, “is a sentimental traditional detective story that features an amateur sleuth, usually a nosy single woman of a certain age, wherein all the violence occurs off stage, there are multiple suspects, and a ratiocinative solution based on fair-play clues is central, and which usually involves a I’m-sure-you’re-all-wondering-why-I-asked-you-here-tonight dénouement.”

The thing is, I don’t regard Miss Marple as cosy at all. For one thing, she is brutally unsentimental. For another, the mysteries she solves are not very far removed from the cases of Christie’s other major sleuth, Hercule Poirot, who is certainly not very cosy. The only things that really distinguish her from Sherlock Holmes (most of whose cases were also domestic) are gender and knitting in lieu of playing the violin. But she was so brilliantly original that she spawned an entire subgenre of imitators. She illustrates perfectly how theory follows practice.

Most of us, readers and writers alike, have some theory running in the back of our minds underpinning our tastes. (One of my favorite criticisms, attributed to Truman Capote speaking to Jack Kerouac, makes my point: “That’s not writing, Jack. It’s typing.”)

Adhering strictly to a theory can be a sure-fire way to write formulaic stories, but it can also assist a writer in speaking to his audience in a way that satisfies their expectations. This is why I say that most good writing, at least of short detective fiction, is a balancing act between convention and invention. My Treviscoe stories all pretty much follow a template, which always involves some footwork à la standard P.I. fare, a lot of physical evidence, and a crime or solution unique to the 18th century. Unlike hard-boiled private eye stories, though, Treviscoe stories are fair-play mysteries with a deductive solution. I guess the major character in our literature that he most closely resembles, at least in terms of plot, is Lord Peter Wimsey, although what I had in mind when I created him was more Sherlock Holmes. But you will note that in either case, I was calling on what had gone before.

Theoretically speaking, that is.

LITERARY NEWS

by Leigh Lundin

Lots of news is happening in the world of writing. Let’s get started.

The Visitor Nevermore?

For six decades, a mysterious visitor left roses and a bottle of cognac at Edgar Allan Poe’s grave in Baltimore. However, for the second year in a row, the phantom mourner failed to appear, lending credence to a hypothesis he may have died. It’s also possible our visitor decided the two century birthday might be a good time to halt the practice.

I found it interesting the visitor signified his presence with cues to Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum, using a particular arrangement of roses and a secret hand signal. None of Wednesday’s four impostors passed on the secret codes.

The Blessing: Canon +1

As Dale Andrews could tell you, winning approval of heirs and authorial estates for publishing under the aegis of original authors can appear a formidable task. Many authors publish Sherlock Holmes stories, but until this past week, no one has done so with official backing of Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate. That changed when Doyle’s estate chose Anthony Horowitz, author of stories about teen spy Alex Rider, to write an as-yet untitled full-length Holmes novel to be published this fall by Orion.

The Reader

Back when the Kindle was $350 and the Sony eReader not far behind, I commented the ideal price point would break at $100. Over the holidays, we saw selected Nooks and Kindles offered at $89 while Radio Shack and competitors advertised more for less. In a celebration of mysteries, Stieg Larsson hit the million dollar mark on the Kindle last summer and, in recent weeks, others have followed.

As we previously observed, women are the largest purchasers of digital readers and eBooks. Women’s literature, particularly erotica and the big names in romance, remain the most popular genres.

The Writer

The January issue of The Writer magazine offers several useful tips for writers. If you’re interested in writing, check out these articles:

Screen writer Sy Rosen suggests personal embarrassments make good seeds for characterization and plot in "Turning an Embarrassment into a Terrific Story". (I have a silo full of such fodder.) Sy bases part of the article on Sigmund Freud’s "Creative Writers and Daydreaming".

Meanwhile, agent/instructor Lisa Cron tells why writers should read bad literature in her article "The Love of a Good Story". She suggests you don’t know what your expectations are until they’re not met. In other words, you learn how not to write from stories that irritate the hell out of you. (Check out her excellent writing blog.)

Thomas Bowdler versus Mark Twain

This came to me from a reader: You may have heard NewSouth Books plans to publish yet another expurgated Huckleberry Finn. These days, the ‘n-word’ is commonly heard in rap, hip-hop, and BET, but some of us have disgusted memories of its use and others have painful memories. Without a Ghetto Pass, white folks should avoid the word, though to our dismay, the n-word reared its ugly head in recent politics.

That said, James and I have been particularly outspoken about emasculated literature and none of us at Criminal Brief likes bowdlerised prose. Neither do The Economist, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, which weigh in against sanitizing Twain.

Censors and critics fail to understand Clemens opposed slavery and other social problems of his time. (Or, as my father observed, perhaps critics do understand and use censorship to subtly undermine Twain’s message.)

NewSouth Books also eradicates the word ‘injun’, which personally offends me… the removal, not the word. My Algonquin ancestry isn’t the least bit insulted by a 19^th century mispronounced misnomer.

While I understand children’s editions of classics, I wasn’t aware so many ‘classics’ series (including Sterling’s Classic Starts, Signet Classics, and Loeb Classical Library) issued milquetoast versions. As Twain biographer Ron Powers points out, if children (and their parents) don’t get Twain’s writing, the original wording provides a ‘teachable moment’.

The mystery community is not entirely guilt-free. Our own Agatha, a product of her era, used the n-word in the original British title of the book now known as And Then There Were None. However, Jamelle Bouie writes this in a short but brilliant essay:

It doesn’t provide racial enlightenment, or justice, and it won’t shield anyone from the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination. All it does is feed the American aversion to history and reflection. Which is a shame. If there’s anything great about this country, it’s in our ability to account for and overcome our mistakes. Peddling whitewashed ignorance diminishes America as much as it does our intellect.

STORIES FOR SALE—NEW & USED

by John M. Floyd

There are two tasks you must perform if you’re to be a published author. Obviously, one of them is to write the manuscript. The other is to sell what you write. The marketing phase can’t be done without the writing, and published writing can’t be done without the marketing.

I already know I’m weird, but I actually enjoy the process of trying to find markets for my short stories. It’s not as much fun as writing them (I’m not that weird), but it’s also not something I dread doing. The only part I don’t like is the actual packaging and mailing of a manuscript. But even that has become easier, since many magazines and anthologies now allow the use of electronic submissions, which saves time, paper, printer ink, money for stamps, and trips to the P.O.

Mining for gold

I use two different ways to locate homes for my stories. One is the annual Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market (WD Books, $30) and the other is the Internet. N&SSWM, with its hundreds of listings handily organized by category, has everything a writer needs to know, but even when I find a possible market there I still check it out online before submitting. If I take the Internet route first, I just Google something like “short mystery markets” or click on a site like duotrope’s digest or Storypilot or Ralan’s Webstravaganza and go from there. Once I find what looks like paydirt, I check out that market’s individual site for submission guidelines, sample content, payment terms, etc., and if/when I’m satisfied I write a cover letter and send my story out the door and let it fend for itself. Sometimes it’s accepted and sometimes it comes limping back home again.

Does all this prospecting sometimes produce fool’s gold? Sure it does. I’ve published stories in some places that I’d rather forget about, and quite a few stories in places that shortly afterward keeled over and put all four feet in the air. (Sometimes they died even before my accepted submissions had a chance to get published.) But none of those sales were wasted. In submitting to those editors and dealing with them I feel that I learned more about the process and the business, and besides, I’ve since been able to submit and sell most of those published stories as reprints to other markets.

Often dissed, seldom kissed

I don’t mean to imply by all this that I don’t receive more rejections than acceptances. I still do. The difference is, I get more acceptances than I used to, and the rejections don’t bother me as much. The thick skin everyone says you must develop to be a published writer happens quickly if you submit a lot of stories, and pretty soon you stop taking rejection so personally. As I think I’ve said before, it’s important to remember that good stories get rejected every day. To make it as a writer—at least as a short story writer—you have to keep reading, keep writing, and keep submitting. And for God’s sake don’t pay too much attention to the odds; if you do, you might never try to submit anything.

To paraphrase something Lawrence Block once said, “A rejection slip is your membership card into the universal fellowship of writers.” All of us get them. Writers who say they don’t are still writers, but they’re also liars.

Bonus material

An additional benefit of researching possible story markets is that it’s made me familiar with a lot of publications that I otherwise wouldn’t have known about. Some of them that have never even accepted one of my stories have become places that I now go to in order to read stories written by others.

Another plus: As a result of all these submissions over the past years, I have come to know (or at least I feel that I know) certain editors fairly well. Four of my favorites in the short-mystery world are Linda Landrigan at AHMM, Janet Hutchings at EQMM, Johnene Granger at Woman’s World, and Andrew Gulli at The Strand. These are kind and delightful people in real life and are incredibly good at their jobs. I hope they’ll stay at their posts forever.

NO LOITERING

A quick word about output. All of us who are writers know about setting goals for the number of words or pages you complete during writing sessions. Well, the same kind of quota system can apply to your marketing efforts. For example, many writers say it’s helpful to try to have a certain number of manuscripts in the mail and under consideration at any one point in time.

For the first ten of the sixteen years I’ve been submitting stories for publication, I made sure I always kept a minimum of thirty stories out there and circulating at any one time. If one got rejected, I sent another one out to that market and sent the rejected story someplace else. I don’t do that anymore—over the past five or six years I’ve tried to be more selective in targeting my submissions, and I tend to concentrate more on paying markets—but I still try to keep a dozen or so stories in the mail (or zooming around in cyberspace) at a time. There’s no rule of thumb here, and there was nothing magic about the number thirty; I just figured if I kept that many stories circulating, I’d be getting regular replies in my mailbox—and I did.

Everybody’s a salesman

The bottom line is, if you’re a writer it’s not enough to merely write. Now and then you also have to put on your plaid sportcoat and white shoes and trudge out to the lot or the showroom and make your pitch to customers.

Most of them won’t buy a thing—but some will. And when they do, that makes it all worthwhile.

POSERS AND DEPOSERS

by Steven Steinbock

I’d hoped to get back to my beloved Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine collection so that I could share some of the lost treasures and forgotten gems discovered therein. But my reading and writing time has been usurped by other responsibilities. Perhaps next week, possibly next month, I hope to dig into the old volumes to see what mystery stories were being read in decades past.

Speaking of usurpation1, this morning I came across the word “deposition” in a novel. It was being used in a completely correct sense, but not in the sense that it’s normally used. At least, when I think of a deposition it’s in the legal sense, such as when a witness writes down a statement. It’s like an affidavit, but more serious.

The context in the novel, however, was regarding the deposition of a monarch. I’m accustomed to the verb depose, meaning to remove a person from a position of leadership. So the process of deposing a monarch is a deposition. But it’s less common to see the word used that way.

On the flip-side, if a deposition is a sworn statement, then the act of writing one should be to depose. That’s probably a word bandied about in halls of justice, but I’ve never used it that way.

The common thread is that to depose means to “put down,” whether in the sense of putting words down on paper, or putting a king down from his throne.

By the way, if you’ve ever wondered where the word affidavit came from (and be honest, I know the question has been nagging you daily), it comes from a Latin verb, affidare (affidavit is the third-person singular perfect form of the verb), meaning to declare an oath, or literally, to trust oneself. The modern words faith, fidelity, and fiancée all share the same ancestry as affidavit.

PAIN POUR NICOL

False etymologies are usually more outrageous than the true origin of a word. They almost always make better stories. The popular (but false) origins of words like picnic and crapper are titillating. Rumors about the racist meaning of picnic resulted in a slew of emails calling for the word to be taken out of usage. (The website Snopes.com gives some background to these word legends here and here, and PlumbingWorld.com tells the truth behind the crapper myth here). The coolest false etymologies are the ones for graveyard shift, dead ringer, and saved by the bell that all have to do with the fear of premature burial. These stories are so horrific that I’m disappointed that they’re bogus.

But I’ve just discovered a case in which the false etymology is pretty boring compared to the straight poop. I was eating some Trader Joe’s Pumpernickel Pretzels the other day, and it got me thinking, what the heck is pumpernickel? Never one to shy away from research when there are more important things to be done, I decided to delve into the wry history.

False story first: While on a military campaign, the Emperor Napoleon rode into a German village on his horse, Nicol. When he was served some hard, dark bread, he exclaimed in disgust, “Acch! C’est pain pour Nicol.” And thereafter the German bread took on that moniker.

The only problem is that people were eating pumpernickel bread, and calling it by that name, long before Napoleon or the horse he rode in on were even born.

The accepted (i.e. probably true) story of pumpernickel: The dense rye bread was at one time known to cause such serious and noisome flatulence that it was named for the Devil’s Farts. Pumpern apparently means “fart” while Nickel is a shortening of Nicholas, a nick-name of sorts for Satan. (We have the phrase “Old Nick” in English). Just because dictionaries say it, it doesn’t make it true. But for the time being, I like this story and I’ll stick with it.

1. Usurpation; an ugly word and one I never thought I’d use or even want to use, but I did say “usurped” in the previous paragraph, so what choice did I have? [↩]

LET YOUR CONSCIENCE BE YOUR GUIDE?

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

“There is no witness so terrible, no accuser so potent, as the conscience that dwells in every man’s breast.” —Polybius

Recently, I stumbled upon the 1928 movie version of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the earliest acknowledged adaptation to film of Edgar Allen Poe’s classic story of a conscience getting the better of the protagonist (who is his own antagonist). The short film stays close to the actual short story, giving artistic license to director and actor accordingly.

The prose style yanks me back to a time when people actually said sentences such as, “You fancy me mad!” Yet, the story holds up to the Millennium (and beyond) because though our language changes, the basic man has not. Sure, we are more sophisticated and world-conscious, but mankind has not grown above instinct. Most of us still have a conscience, whether we chose to follow its path for us or not.

A parlor game of “What would you do if . . . ” proves that just about half of us say we would do the noble thing, but if we didn’t, would our consciences bother us?

One of my Facebook friends, young adult novelist Sabrina Hunter, asked, “Here’s a question that doesn’t require an online response, although it would be interesting to see what those responses would be. Could any of you do what those three senior citizens did by tackling that gunman in Arizona? How you answer this question, to yourself, will give you a great insight on how YOU project the future of our country.”

Sabrina received over 20 comments with this post. Most people said they would give their lives to protect others in the same situation. Sometimes, we find ourselves acting in ways we never expected.

My response to her question was:

“It’s one of those things that just happen, not what you think about doing. When a burglar broke into our home, I chased after him down the block. I have no idea what I intended to do if I caught him, but I was so angry that I just reacted. I never would have dreamed I would have done that. So, yes, I probably would have tried to stop the gunman.”

My characters—as well as others’ characters—have often surprised me with their reactions, but in a good way. Although previously I absolutely knew if I’d been home when a burglar broke in, I’d be smart enough to get out to a safe place where I could call the police, that is not what I did in that circumstance. But if anyone had dug deep into my own character, anyone would have known I’d probably had the response I did. I’m not the one who hides from a fight. I have learned to speak up and make my opinion heard (even when it wasn’t popular). My rage at the burglar was not due to him attempting to steal our things, but the audacity of breaking into our home. I could not have lived with myself if I didn’t do something. And yes, I realize, I most certainly could have been hurt, maimed, or killed by my actions, too. I didn’t think. I just acted, and in the end, my conscience was my guide as much as my anger. I felt like one of King Arthur’s knights on a mission to institute right over might.

The Encarta Dictionary defines conscience as “. . . the sense of what is right and wrong that governs somebody’s thoughts and actions, urging him or her to do right rather than wrong.”

If a character has been created properly, the reader isn’t really surprised when he rises to the call to action. Instead, we feel a pride that he is “taking care of business.” Whether he is actually fighting an enemy, keeping an innocent citizen from being harmed or simply standing up for what his conscience is telling him he is doing right, we cheer for him.

A conscience is a terrible thing to lose. I weep for those who pay no heed to theirs.

POPCORN PROVERBS

by Rob Lopresti

With John’s kind permission I have decided to slip into his territory (a Floydian slip? Rimshot…) with a column featuring quotations from fifty of my favorite crime movies. They are arranged in order by the title of the flick. Answers begin next week. Enjoy.

1. –You hear that Gina? Your Mama wants Grandchildren!
     –You’re a crook. Steal her some!

2. Insanity runs in my family… It practically gallops.

3. –I’m not afraid o’ you, Marty.

–Well, ma’am, if I see him, I’ll sure give him the message.

4. –What would you do if some miracle happened and we could walk out of here tomorrow morning and start all over again clean? No record and nobody after us, huh?
     –Well, uh, I guess I’d do it all different. First off, I wouldn’t live in the same state where we pull our jobs. We’d live in another state. We’d stay clean there and then when we’d take a bank, we’d go into the other state.

5. One might propose that I am either insanely brave or quite insane. I’d answer neither. I’d say, insanely loyal. Take your pick. There’s insanity in all the answers.

6. Report back to me when it makes sense.

7. –Are you alone?
     –Isn’t everybody?

8. Six hours he’s riding the subway before anybody notices his corpse doing laps around L.A., people on and off sitting next to him. Nobody notices.

9. –Asian Dawn?
     –I read about them in Time magazine.

10. –I think you’re a very stupid person. You look stupid, you’re in a stupid business, and you’re on a stupid case.
     –I get it. I’m stupid.

11. Oh for Pete’s sake, he’s fleeing the interview! He’s fleeing the interview!

12. Now let me correct you on a couple of things, OK? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself." And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.

13. –We have a good life, right?
     –Is that a trick question?

14. One question. Do you want to stick to that story, or do you want to keep your teeth?

15. Thank you, sir. May I have another?

16. I grew up in Dublin. I love Dublin. If I grew up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me but I didn’t, so it doesn’t.

17. Serpentine, Shelly. Serpentine!

18. I got the motive which is money and the body which is dead.

19. I confess my innocence!

20. –She opens the door, and she got nothing on but the radio. Yeah, invites me to sit down, sits on my lap, fires up a spliff.
     –Geez. Really?
     –No. Idiot.

21. Boy, it’s really lucky for you that I just happen to be a very self–destructive person.

22. –Shotguns? What, like guns that fire shot?
     –Oh, you must be the brains of the operation.

23. –Long story short.
     –I think we’re well past that point.
     –I bet it was that mouth that got you that nose

24. You don’t crucify people! Not on Good Friday!

25. A crippled newsie took ’em away from him. I made him give ’em back.

26. There’s no retirement home for assassins is there? Archery at four. Riflery at five.

27. –Look in your heart! Look in your heart!
     –What heart?

28. –So Jimmy, when was the last time you saw Dave?
     –The last time I saw Dave…
     –Yeah, Dave Boyle.
     –Dave Boyle…
     –Yeah Jimmy, Dave Boyle.
     –That was twenty–five years ago, going up this street, in the back of that car.

29. –Oh dear.
     –Why oh dear?
     –You ARE in love.
     –Is that bad?
     –For a monk, it does present certain problems.

30. You gentlemen aren’t REALLY trying to kill my son, are you?

31. Is this your first time being robbed? You’re doing great.

32. –I can’t get over it. What kinda creep wouldn’t catch a baby? If it was real it coulda been crippled for life.
     –He wasn’t paid to bodyguard the baby.

33. We find the defendants incredibly guilty.

34. –I love you, Pumpkin.
     –I love you, Honey Bunny. All right, everybody be cool, this is a robbery!

35. –He killed a dog last night because the dog was scratching around in the garden. You know why? Because he had something buried in that garden that the dog scented.
     –Like an old hambone?
     –I don’t know what pet names Thorwald had for his wife.

36. –You’re an animal!
     –No, worse! Human. Human!

37. Do I understand this correctly? I’m being marked down? I’ve been kidnapped by K–Mart!

38. I won’t let you be happy, why should I?

39. We begin by coveting what we see every day.

40. I love hitmen. No matter what you do to them, you don’t feel bad.

41. –Remember my nickname in the joint?
     –The Brain?
     –The Brain. That’s what the guys used to call me, right?
     –But, Ray, that was sarcastic!

42. We must never forget that we are human, and as humans we dream, and when we dream we dream of money.

43. Buckle up for safety!

44. What was I supposed to do – call him for cheating better than me?

45. Don’t worry, I’m not going to shoot you, Mr. Haines. It might disturb Mother.

46. Don’t worry. I know how to handle a gub.

47. What’s this? I don’t see many O–Levels there, Earl old chap.

48. I also remember a movie your husband made. He shot 12 guys with a 6-shot revolver. I ain’t gonna argue with that kind of marksmanship.

49. I don’t think Mozart’s going to help at all.

50. –Do you think you were framed, like Dreyfus?
     –Dreyfus was guilty!

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

by Melodie Johnson Howe

An editor responded to a section of a well-known author’s work by writing in the margin, “Less is More.” The author (alas, I cannot remember his name at the moment) wrote back to her and said, “Less is Less. More is More. And Enough is Enough.”

His words have become my motto for writing and for living. As a writer my life is filled with words. I’m always trying to pick the ones that will help me define my story while discarding the others. I work hard at this.

When I leave my office and walk out into what people now call “real” life, (this is an example of More is More) I have no control over the words coming at me. I can’t rewrite them, I can’t even edit them—and it seems nobody else can either (especially those bleating the words.)

The reactions to the cold-blooded murders and maiming in Tucson are an example of this. The only person who wasn’t talking was the shooter. After rampaging in More is More he quickly understood when confronted with the law that Less is Less.

However, the political class who has never subscribed to Less is Less went on a More is More bender. And the one word they all seemed to settle on like vultures on a wire, was “civility.” We must be more civil in our political discussions, they raged. But I had a sneaking suspicion that when they said “we,” they really meant “you.” Which made me feel Enough is Enough.

Bones and I watched the Golden Globes last night with a writer friend of mine, Jane Heller, and her husband Mike. We sipped wine and ate steaks while a ballroom full of big egos tripped all over themselves to receive an award that had probably been bribed from the Hollywood Foreign Press, whoever they are. Ricky Gervais, an Englishman, who is so full of himself I was afraid he was going to explode and ruin my dinner, was the Master of Ceremonies. He obviously had not heard the screaming from the political class about civility. He ripped his peers in a merciless nasty unfunny manner. Not that they didn’t deserve it. But if one is going to skewer your cohorts then, please, do it with wit. But wit takes a Less is Less sensibility and Hollywood is the land of More is More.

The perfect example of More is Helen Mirren, an actress whom I admire, announce on camera, without being asked by the fawning interviewer, that the Cartier diamonded necklace she was wearing cost, something like twenty billion dollars or the amount of the stimulus package. Why? She doesn’t own the necklace. Cartier is letting her wear it for the night. She didn’t put out her hard earned money to buy it. So why flaunt the necklace? Because Enough is never Enough in Hollywood.

As Steve and James have noted in their columns , two lions in the mystery genre, Ruth Gavin and Joe Gores, have died. Less is Less. The Mystery Bookstore in Westwood (once The Mysterious Bookshop) will be closing at the end of the month. Less is Less. Borders and Barnes & Noble in Santa Barbara have closed. More was More. But now Less is Less.