THAT REPO LOT IN THE SKY

by James Lincoln Warren

It’s been a rough week for lovers of mysteries. First, there was the unwelcome news that The Mystery Bookstore in Westwood Village, a scant two miles from my home and the store where I used to work, is closing its doors forever at the end of the month. It’s the end of an era for independent mystery bookstores in Los Angeles. Then on Friday, Steve wrote about the passing of beloved editor Ruth Cavin. But the saddest news of all, at least for me, was the news of the death of one of my heroes, Joe Gores, as noted by Rob Lopresti in the comments section to Steve’s post.

I had suspected that Joe was in poor health when he failed to appear at Bouchercon San Francisco last year, because I had seen him at the Las Vegas and Chicago conventions in previous years, and San Francisco was practically his home town. (He actually lived in San Anselmo, about 15 miles north of the Golden Gate.)

As I said, I remember seeing him at those conventions, walking by himself from panel to panel, nobody seeming to recognize who he was. Well, I certainly recognized him. To me, he was a giant.

I first met Joe at the aforementioned Mystery Bookstore in 2000, when I was assistant manager there. The occasion was not, as you might expect, the publication of one of his books. Instead, it was a book signing event for another author entirely, Robert Crais, who was just kicking off his book tour for his novel, Demolition Angel. Joe just happened to show up because he was in town.

One of the perqs of working at TMB was aprés signings, because we would frequently go out for dinner with the authors who signed there, and so it was on this occasion. Because Joe was there, Sheldon McArthur, my boss, asked Bob Crais if it was OK if Joe joined us for dinner after the signing.

Bob’s reaction was immediate. “Are you kidding? I would be honored. Will Dori be there , too?”

Dori, whom I’ve never met, was Joe’s wife and his muse. Open to the dedication page of any Joe Gores book and you’ll read something along the lines of:

This Novel Is For
My Beloved Dori

Every one of his books was dedicated to Dori. It’s exactly the sort of thing my father would have done for my mother, and it always endeared Joe to me.

Needless to say, conversation that evening was scintillating. One of my favorite memories of all time.

The next time I saw Joe was when he was on a book tour for Cons, Scams, & Grifts, a novel in his DKA Files series and a direct sequel to my personal favorite of all his stories, 32 Cadillacs. (Cons has my favorite jacket design for a crime novel of all time, so I’ve included it today along with the title page with Joe’s inscription.) This time we wouldn’t have dinner because he had a tight schedule, but as I said, I did see him at Bouchercons over the next few years.

The obituary in the Los Angeles Times mentions his best-known work and makes a rather extended point of how his work is readily compared to Dashiell Hammett’s, especially for the novels Hammett and Spade and Archer, which after all are Dashiell Hammett pastiches. (Excellent books both.) I love those stories, but for me, the heart of Joe’s contribution was the DKA Files. These were mostly short stories, with the occasion novel like 32 Cadillacs thrown in when it seemed called for, and they actually represented a whole new approach to hard-boiled detective fiction, that of the private investigator procedural. Police procedurals had been around for years and likewise “lone wolf” hard-boiled P.I. stories, but based on his own experiences as a P.I., Joe was able meld the two into something wonderful and unique.

My Cal Ops series was created in specific emulation of Joe Gores’ DKA Files model. That isn’t to say that the Cal Ops stories are just an imitation of Dennis Kearny and his merry band of repo men and women, any more than, say, Philip Marlowe is an imitation of Sam Spade. (For one thing, Carmine Ferrari and Custer Malone, my two principals, do not do repo work, which is central to the DKA Files.) But without Gores’ example, they would never have been conceived at all.

So I guess Joe missed a payment and his vehicle got taken to that Repo Yard Upstairs. And you know what? That particular model was too valuable for street driving, anyway. Now it’s on a golden highway all its own. Adios, Joe.

PROFESSIONAL PURPOSE

by Leigh Lundin

New Mexico must have per capita the greatest number of writers, some which we’ve mentioned such as Susan Slater and Tony Hillerman. Today I’ll introduce you to another, Marie Cash, a friend and colleague of my friend Steve, and creator of series character Jemimah Hodge.

Marie is an unusual mystery writer in a number of ways. For one thing, she spends her days carving and painting, and her nights writing. For another, she won a Javits Fellowship and graduated college at age 55. Finally, she didn’t fall in love with the genre for the first half century of her life. When she began writing, she persisted as she’d done most things. She rolled with those bloodying gut-punch critiques and improved her novel, landing a publishing contract.

I’m pleased to doff my Stetson as I introduce you to …

Marie Romero Cash

The Trail to Mystery Publishing

by Marie Cash

I wish I could say I’ve always been a writer, but I can’t. The truth is that all my words have been in storage for years before I started withdrawing them one line at a time.

I love reading stories about how just one story catapulted Stephen King into unbelievable fame and about JK Rowling’s struggle to just make it through each day before she too became a household word. It took 35 years for me to dabble in an art form which eventually became a career and fifty-five before I started writing.

I was born in 1942 into a Spanish-American family in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Women from my generation were not intended or expected to be anything more than housewives and mothers. It took a while for me to break that mold.

After many years of attempting to live within cultural barriers in place at the time of my birth, I was on my own. Art came much easier than writing. My word skills didn’t develop until I enrolled in college at the age of fifty and graduated five years later.

The Art of New Mexico

Most of my published writing has been about Northern New Mexico, traditional art, churches, saints, and the like. In my day job, I created art and spent evenings and weekends writing. A memoir about growing up in Santa Fe, Tortilla Chronicles, and a book of short stories rounded out my experience.

There’s nothing like a contest to challenge a writer’s creative process. Two years ago, I attended the New Mexico Book Awards, as my short story book had been nominated. Anne Hillerman was the guest speaker. She announced that to honor her deceased father, the upcoming Tony Hillerman Award was being increased to $10,000. The story had to be set in the Four Corners area (New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah) and had to focus on the solution of the crime rather than the crime itself.

I discussed the competition with my son and said I didn’t think I could write a mystery. He said, “You’re a good writer, Mom, go for it.”

Inspired, I figured how hard could it be? It wasn’t long before I discovered that switching from research-based writing to fiction and mystery was going to be far more difficult than I could have imagined.

So how does one write about something they know nothing about? I hadn’t read many (actually any) mysteries.

My Seduction

I mentioned this in passing to my brother-in-law, an avowed mystery fan, who shuffled me into his library and sent me home with over a dozen books by the leading mystery writers: Patterson, Sanford, Evanovich, and a few by Michael McGarrity and Mary Higgins Clark. When I finished reading them, he had another stack waiting for me, and Borders had another thousand or so I perused.

I wanted to learn how these writers plotted their stories. What was it that kept a reader turning the pages until long after midnight, begging to sleep but held captive by words which moved at a rapid clip and piqued their imagination. There was no disguising the fact that I was hooked.

Crime in the Family

For many years my brother-in-law had been a Sheriff’s deputy in Orofino, Idaho. He told me about investigating murders. He described finding bodies and using Mentholatum on his nostrils to be able to tolerate the stench of decomposition. He also told me how to construct a booby trap from a chair, a sawed-off shotgun, and a piece of string. Thus when someone opened the door, their knees would be blown off.

I took notes on every word he said and then went home and started writing what I thought would be a believable plot. Several hundred pages into it, I realized I needed help. I liked my story line but I wasn’t sure anyone else would. It needed a punch and I didn’t know a whit about dialogue.

Show and Tell

I read somewhere about show me– don’t tell me in writing. I recognized right away I was telling the story.

Looking for an editor, I turned to a few online mystery blogs and found Leigh Lundin on Crimespace, who recommended I contact Roger Paulding in Houston. He was willing to take on a novice’s first attempt, and I imagine it turned out to be much more than he bargained for. In Paulding’s first email, his comment was that my first chapter read like a travelogue, and the second chapter read like a weather report.

For the next two months and hundreds of emails later, his many suggestions finally took hold and writing became less of a task and more of a pleasure. Months after submitting my manuscript, I learned the Hillerman Award had not been given that year. Out of a hundred manuscripts, not one met the criterion established by Minotaur Press.

Booking an Agent

Ah well, at least I had a completed book, even though it would spend another year in a drawer before I gutted and fine-tuned it. Inspired by completing that task, I plotted a sequel.

The next daunting task was to find a publisher. I am a firm believer that it’s not who you are, but who you know, and I didn’t know anybody in the publishing business. Yes, I knew all the regional university presses and small publishers who produced my previous works, but I didn’t consider them ‘real’ publishers. Don’t misunderstand that statement: I appreciated the fact they considered my work publish-worthy. But like most fledgling writers, I was looking for the brass ring, and maybe the New York Times Bestseller List dream.

Casting Couch

A few months ago, my friend Michael Pettit concluded a video interview at my studio. While the crew was gathering equipment, we sat on the couch and small-talked about writing. I mentioned I completed two mysteries and had one in the oven, but no potential publisher. He said he would send a query out on his writer’s blog later that evening.

Through this series of events, enter Catherine Treadgold from Camel Press, an offshoot of Seattle based Coffeetown Press. Carl Yung would call it synchronicity when the universe places us in the right place at the right time. Within days after I submitted my first mystery to her, a contract followed, and there you have it. Shadows Among the Ruins was released in December. It doesn’t get any more serendipitous than that.

A FANTASY WORLD

by John M. Floyd

Leigh Lundin’s CB column “Hollywood Musts” a couple years ago, and his and Tony Harris’s examples of clichés and illogical scenes in movies, have done what every piece of writing should do: they’ve stayed on my mind. The points they made should be a lesson to everyone who writes fiction, because we’re so often tempted to take the easy way out. (I’m also reminded of several readers’ comments to my last Saturday’s column, which referred to goofs they’d noticed in movies. I love that kind of thing.)

I once heard an author say that fiction must be, if anything, more logical than nonfiction, and more logical than real life. Otherwise, readers won’t believe it. Writing about things that don’t make sense is not only lazy, it’s distracting.

How many times have we, as moviegoers or TV viewers, looked away from the big or small screen and thought things like:

• Why does everyone in town always belong to the same church?

• How can heroes play the guitar without moving their fingers?

• Why do barroom chairs always break apart when they’re used to whack folks on the head?

• Why do people being chased by cars run down the middle of the road?

• Where are the waitresses who ask customers what kind of salad dressing they want?

• How can clipped-on badges come off so easily?

• How do drivers always find parking spaces right in front of the buildings they’re going to?

• Were the streets in Westerns really that clean? Who scooped the poop? Marshal Dillon?

All this makes me think of a poem I first published in a journal called Mobius several years ago. With sincere apologies to any serious poets out there, I have included that piece here. It’s called “A Fantasy World”:

The only thing moviewise I find obscene
Isn’t brutal or racial or sexual;
It’s that scene after scene that I’ve seen on the screen
Could never be factually actual.

For example, in Westerns, the ladies of course
Still look fresh after months on the range,
No one’s ever injured when thrown from a horse,
And bartenders never make change.

All heroes bound tightly within villains’ lairs
With one touch of a knife can be freed,
And the chuckwagon crew might as well say their prayers
Anytime there’s a cattle stampede.

Every car, when it crashes, will burst into flames,
All cougars are shot in mid-leap,
Most private detectives have rugged last names,
And night watchmen are always asleep.

Our heroes are blue-eyed, their teeth are white-capped,
All six-guns shoot ten times at least,
And wrapped gifts and presents need not be unwrapped —
Their tops just lift off, in one piece.

And when stagecoaches fired on by unfriendly forces
Are chased twenty miles without rest,
No one ever thinks to shoot one of the horses —
That’d make things too simple, I guess.

More examples? Okay. Taking showers is deadly
(It’s better to just stay unclean),
And movie blood glistens a trifle too redly,
And windows don’t ever have screens.

Drivers don’t watch the road and they don’t lock their cars,
Bathers never use washcloths, just soap;
And the strength of a jail window’s solid iron bars
Is no match for a nag and a rope.

So the next time you witness an in-progress plot
To commit a spectacular crime,
Just step in and save everyone on the spot —
In the movies it’s done all the time.

And sometimes (too often?) in our stories.

THE BOOKS OF RUTH

by Steven Steinbock

The mystery world lost another legend this week. Ruth Cavin died on Sunday at the age of ninety-two. I call her a legend because she was, and still is, even though a lot of readers will not have heard of her. She wasn’t a big-name author or an active member of mystery fandom. Hers is a quiet legend. Ruth was instrumental in the mystery genre, but mostly behind the scenes. And where she was visible, it was with her ever-present smile.

For 22 years, Ruth was the associate editor at Thomas Dunne Books, a division of St. Martins. She started out in the publishing world editing mysteries for Walker & Co. in 1979. In her career she was responsible for bringing out some 900 books, including titles by Laurie King, Sue Grafton and Charles Todd.

I barely knew Ruth. We’d been introduced a couple of times. Once, as I recall, by Carolyn Todd (the mother half of the “Charles Todd” team), but I doubt she would have remembered me. Wherever mystery people gathered, whether at Bouchercon, Malice Domestic, or an Edgar Awards dinner, Ruth was there, usually in the company of her daughter Nora, and always with that kind but wry smile.

All the authors I’ve known who worked with Ruth Cavin liked her. The press has called her the First Lady of Mysteries, but I like what Sue Grafton said when she called Ruth the “soul mother to mystery writers for years.”

My thoughts go out to Ruth’s family. I wish I’d had the chance to know her better.

TURNING PHRASES

I enjoy doing Hebrew calligraphy. My normal handwriting is a mess. But being a left-handed writer with a decent knowledge of classical Hebrew, I can put pen-tip to paper and watch my hand move with a grace I’m not accustomed to.

A few weeks ago I stopped in a craft store and bought myself some ink and nibs. In the past I’ve always used Sheaffer pens with their convenient ink cartridges. They’re still pretty handy, and a lot safer than working with an open bottle of ink on the kitchen table. But now I have a more latitude with inks and pen tips. Maybe next I’ll be cutting my own quills.

It got me thinking, what does the word nib come from? The stylus tip of a fountain pen is called a nib. So are the crushed cocoa beans that I mix into my yogurt. Is there a connection? The best I can come up with is that a pen nib comes from a sixteenth century Scottish and/or German word meaning “sharp point” or “beak.” Nib as a small morsel of food might come from the fifteenth century Middle English word that survives in modern English in the form of nibble. My guess is that the two uses of nib are two separate branches of the same root.

I do most of my Hebrew calligraphy without adding the vowels and other diacritical marks. All those markings were added about a thousand years ago in order to preserve pronunciation and phrasing. Those “other diacritical marks” I mentioned are the tiny curves, twists, diamonds, and wishbone symbols that indicate how a passage is to be chanted. The common term used for those marks is trope, a Latin term of Greek origin meaning “turn” (as in “a turn of phrase”). It makes sense. The marks are turns of pen and ink that indicate turns in the vocal chords.

But I like the older Hebrew term for the symbols better. The word te’amim (plural of ta’am) means “taste” or “flavor” and in calligraphy (as well as in cantillation) refers to the symbols and the vocal changes they signify. Maybe that’s the real connection between pen nibs and cocoa nibs.

GOING SOMEWHERE ELSE

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

Weather temperatures have dive-bombed beyond reasonably chilly and catapulted past a postcard prettiness and onto the bitter part of winter—and this is only the beginning of the season. I type slower when my fingers are freezing. Yet when the brain starts churning out ideas, my fingers flies across the keyboard and forget the cold. Maybe it’s the mini-workout my hands receive when the Muse comes to play that warms my soul.

Whisked away to another place, time, and point of view, my mind allows an opportunity to soak up a milder climate somewhere else. Right about now, somewhere else sounds good to me.

I long for a tropical location with waves crashing across the beach. Palm trees are swaying to an island tune—perhaps something by Jimmy Buffet and accompanied by the taste of a margarita and an itchy reminder of a new tattoo.

These are the times when I re-read Travis McGee mystery adventures. In his yacht berthed in Ft. Lauderdale, I ride out the winter with warm days and nights and scents of the ocean air drifting into my consciousness amid the talented and (in my mind) quite the good-looking “consultant” who recovers others’ treasures.

In Mary Willis Walker’s 1995 Edgar Award winning novel, The Red Scream, I am transferred to the hot, sticky days in Austin, Texas, awaiting execution of a serial killer aka The Texas Scalper. This one gives me chills, but while reading it, I feel anything but cold.

I reach for tales of the Caribbean or perhaps one of those who dream of a pirate’s life like our friend, Travis Erwin’s Plundered Booty, which is both funny and poignant at the same time—and yes, there’s a mystery involved. Thanks, Travis, for sharing this manuscript with me. Some fortunate editor is bound to grab this one soon.

To my surprise, I discover a book by Agatha Christie that is new to me. Death Comes as the End is set in Egypt—a decidedly warmer climate than my present locale. I must add this mystery onto the To Be Read Soon list. Though some books are better than others, I have never been disappointed by Christie.

By mid-July, I will most likely search for stories set in an Aspen snowstorm, Finland, or the Antarctic. But for now, I am happy to settle in with a quilt, a ready carafe of coffee, and a delightful mystery taking place in a desert. I can almost hear the camels braying. When you can read, life is good. What fun for a wintry day.

ODD SOCKS 9

by Rob Lopresti

I just spent some time on Vashon Island, a lovely little zone nestled in the midst of Puget Sound, not all that far from Seattle. That reminded me to tell you about this tidbit. The obituary you see above appeared in the Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber. In case you don’t recognize that illustration, it is the famous sketch of D.B. Cooper, the (incorrect) name given to the original skyjacker-for-profit. “Dan Cooper” collected $400,000 and a parachute and bailed out over the forests of Washington state on Thanksgiving eve in 1971.

There is no reason to believe Michael Layhon really was Cooper. There is, however, ample evidence that his brother Alex has an odd sense of humor. The local motto is “Keep Vashon Weird,” and Alex believed his brother would approve.

Amazing stories

We all know that private eye novels are essentially fantasy literature. Real life private detectives don’t get to investigate murder or other serious crimes and their cases are mostly humdrum collections of facts for accident cases and the like. Nothing much to see here, folks.

Except.

My daughter recently sent me a link to an amazing article from Vanity Fair and, as she said, it reads like a piece of terrific fiction, but it’s all true. It takes part in Leigh’s part of the world, but he has given me his blessing to tell you about it.

One day in 2005 a twenty-one year old blond woman was found raped and beaten nearly to death in the weeds outside of Miami, eight miles from her hotel. The cops could not figure out who did it, how she got out of the hotel without being seen on security cameras, or even whether she was somehow a party to a crime (her first words in the hospital were to ask for a lawyer). (And if you want to know why they were suspicious, compare her case to this one, which Leigh pointed out to me.

Enter Ken Brennan, a former cop and DEA agent, now P.I. He was hired not by the victim (as you might expect from detective fiction) but by the hotel, which was being sued by the victim. The management hoped he would find evidence she was a prostitute who had been roughed up by a customer, which would get them off the hook.

The truth turned out to be quite different – and so astonishing that Brennan had a hard time convincing his employers it was true. What he learned, and the incredible lengths he went to to catch the serial rapist involved, are too long to cover here. Read the article. It will be the best mystery story you read today.

A word from the north

Ever hear of William Deverell? I hadn’t until recently, although he apparently lives approximately fifty miles from me. Canadian authors and U.S. authors don’t seem to mix as much as you might expect. My local library has none of his books, even though he won the Hammett Award.

I recently heard good things about his 2009 title Snow Job and I can report that I enjoyed it a lot. It is part of a series about an attorney Arthur Beauchamp (pronounce it Beechum, please). I can’t tell from Deverell’s webpage how many of his books are about Arthur. So I don’t know exactly how much of the story I have missed.

Beauchamp is a successful lawyer with an embarrassingly flamboyant alcoholic past. At this point, Beauchamp is old enough to retire, except that he had been “unable to win a divorce from the law, that soul-destroying bitch.” He has a more pleasant wife as well, the younger Margaret Blake, who is the only member of parliament from the Green Party, which forces Arthur into politics, which he loathes more than the law.

And speaking of Parliament, as this book opens Canada’s conservative government has decided for political/economic reasons, to embrace a nasty East European dictatorship. When an act of terrorism on Canadian soil follows that country’s Ultimate Leader For Life declares war on Canada and what follows is a hilarious example of what the military call “unsymmetrical warfare.” Arthur winds up the lawyer of record for the presumed assassin, who may or may not have been a subject of extraordinary rendition out of the country.

What follows includes a sudden election, three Canadian tourists on the run in the enemy territory, and a British Columbian entrepreneur who declares “Unpossible ain’t in my dictionary.” A very funny and enjoyable book.

Slip decision

Here is a handy tip for all you future attorneys out there. When you seek to impeach the opposition’s expert witness, be careful what source you choose for your evidence. According to Hugh Pickens, “The Philippine Daily Inquirer reports on a recent case where the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) lost an appeal after seeking to impeach the testimony of a defendant’s expert witness by citing an article from Wikipedia.”

AN EMPTY MIND IS A TERRIBLE THING TO WASTE

by Melodie Johnson Howe

James’ very funny column reminded me of an incident that happened years ago. I was eighteen and in acting class. A girl my age, also blonde, sat alone on the stage, a platform painted black, under a single spotlight. Jeff Corey, the coach, asked her to close her eyes.

“What do you see?” he asked in his deep booming voice.

“Nothing,” she replied, softly.

“Speak up. Describe the nothingness.”

“Black.”

“Describe the blackness.”

Excruciating silence. Then she said, “You know, just black.”

He became very frustrated with her and eventually told her to get off the stage and sit down.

I had some empathy for this creature who dared to say she saw nothing. There is a certain boldness or just plain mulishness in defying the acting teacher. In essence saying to him, “Don’t try to dive into my imagination, because you’re going to hit your head on the bottom of a very shallow pool.” She didn’t know that the unexplored life wasn’t worth living.

Wedged between other young promising (or not so promising) actors, I sat on a cold folding chair grasping a Styrofoam cup of coffee. Knowing I was going to be called on, I decided to test the waters of my own imagination. I closed my eyes. Nothing. My eyes shot open. And it was black. She was right! Well, my nothingness was a little grayer, which seemed even more pathetic to me. Panic. The fear of failing in front of twenty or so other people filled me. Any moment I could be asked, “to close my eyes and describe what I see.” I vowed (à la Scarlett O’Hara) there was no way I was going to be told to get off the stage and sit down. Other than ‘you’re not right for the part’ those are the worst words an actor could hear.

As with all fates mine came eventually. Jeff Corey called out my name.

“Mel…ooooo…deeeee.”

The stage was the length of a gangplank away from me, and I walked it numbly. I sat on the lone chair under the lone spotlight and the command was given.

“Close your eyes, Melodie. What do you see?“

Black, black, black. Gray, gray, gray. Nothing , nothing, nothing. Uneasy silence in the room. My heart pounded against the top of my skull. Isn’t that where my brain is supposed to be?

“Flag . . . stone,” The word floated from my mouth.

Corey’s bored voice grew alert. “Go on.”

“ Flagstone . . . patio. A bird . . . with a . . . a . . . broken wing.”

The nervous actors contained their restlessness. The room was still silent. But it was a good silence that made me feel warm and in control. I was captivating them.

I continued, “A man’s starched shirt cuff. Very white . . . against his tan flat wrist.”

When I was told to open my eyes, there was applause. I had aced the exercise. I was an example of being able to delve into my unconscious and describe the images it was showing me. The girl who had admitted to seeing nothing gave me a wan smile. I smiled back, feeling a sharp jab of guilt, and took my place among the other students.

In that act of survival two things came together: My acting ability and my extensive reading at a young age. On stage I had pretended to grope for those images as if I had never read them in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry. And I was smart enough not to quote Shakespeare or Chekhov because Jeff Corey had those plays full in his head.

But if those simple words, images, had meant nothing to me they wouldn’t have stayed in my unconscious; and I would be with the young woman who saw nothing. Which one of us was more honest? Well, we had both gotten up on stage where artifice is the path to truth.

Now I am a writer with a picture of Edna St. Vincent Millay in my office. My poet/savior still looks over me.