THE KING OF KINDLE

Video and song by Parnell Hall, appreciation by James Lincoln Warren

Everybody’s been writing about Bouchercon, so I haven’t had a lot to add. But then Steve Steinbock wrote to let me know that Parnell Hall’s special Bcon Edition of his latest video was up on YouTube, and he mentioned that Melodie, he, and I were all at one point or another featured in it. Well, I hope so. Parnell took a lot more footage than what showed up in the video.

There are some folks in the crime fiction writing community whom everybody loves. (Most of them are featured in the video, although I’m there, too.) Parnell Hall is among the most prominent. I first met him many years ago at Malice Domestic, where I heard him perform what may well be regarded as his theme song, “Signing in the Waldenbooks”. Then I heard him perform it at the Edgars. And then at Malice again. Hell, when something works, hang on to it.

Obviously, Parnell is a man with so much talent that it’s no wonder he shares it with the world. But that is not what I really admire about him. What I really admire about Parnell is his tenacity, his unwillingness to go softly into that good night, his astonishing ability to reinvent himself as a mystery writer time and again. I am dead serious.

Parnell Hall’s Edgar-nominated first novel, Detective, introduced the world to Stanley Hastings, a forty-something failed actor and aspiring writer who paid the bills by acting as an investigator for a shyster lawyer. Witty and atmospheric, the series was always well received critically, but when Parnell’s publisher dropped him, Parnell recognized that it was time to come up with something completely different if he wanted to stay on the bookshelves. (Not that he abandoned Stanley, whose last appearance was in 2007.) At the same time as he was writing the very funny Hastings books, Parnell also wrote a second series under the pseudonym of P. J. Hailey, courtroom dramas featuring a character named Steve Winslow. Two multiple-volume series were somehow insufficient to maintaining his career. Parnell was facing a serious crisis.

Did he give up? No. Well, yes. He gave up being Parnell Hall, at least for a while.

Enter Cora Felton, the Puzzle Lady, and the Crossword Puzzle Mystery series, originally credited to “Alice Hastings”. (Hastings? Where have I heard that name before? And I don’t mean Hercule Poirot.) That’s right, Parnell not only reinvented himself, he invented an entire new genre of mystery story. (He has since expanded into sudoku.) When the Puzzle Lady books succeeded, Parnell confessed that he was actually Alice, which is almost exactly like Tony Stark admitting that he is Iron Man.

Not bad for the guy who got his start as the screenwriter for C.H.U.D. (The story for that “cult classic” came from somebody named Shepard Abbot. One has to wonder if that’s another pseudonym, but I’ve never had the guts to ask Parnell.)

Anyway, “King of Kindle” shows exactly what’s so fun about Bouchercon. One of those things is Parnell Hall. Enjoy.

HALLOWEEN CRIMES

by Leigh Lundin

What better time to catch up with weird crime news than Halloween? Read on!

Carpooling Corpse (click to read)

As disturbing as this story is, it’s difficult not to feel sympathy for two women in dire distress. Still, it’s not a place to trick-or-treat.

Dangerous Drugs

It seems the US faces a shortage of lethal injection drugs. We manufacture nothing these days, so we outsource many things, even at the risk of unapproved sources.

No doubt the worry was Chinese lead or melamine. While Britain hasn’t executed anyone in half a century and banned capital punishment totally before the millennium, they were happy to help us execute our own. Now about imported milk with melamine and candy with lead…

Zodiac Tips

Four decades have elapsed, but the public hasn’t forgotten the Zodiac killer, murderer of teenagers out ‘parking’. As the article reports, the tips keep coming in this unsolved case.

What a Croc (Shakes on a Plane)

You don’t give a second thought how you load your SUV, but pilots of small to medium planes carefully calculate ‘weight and balance’, which affects how a plane flies… or doesn’t.

A crocodile smuggled in a flight bag escaped as a commuter plane was on approach. Passengers panicked, putting as much distance between themselves and the reptile as they could, throwing off the plane’s fragile equilibrium.

Twenty passengers died, the croc survived– briefly.

FLORIDA

      And here in Florida…

Are you glad to see me, or …?

Yep, leave it to a Florida dude to stuff his pants with three pounds (a kilo and a half) of bacon. In these, er, hard times, meat has become one of the most commonly shoplifted products. Under skirts, in pants, it’s time to reconsider vegetarianism.

Crack

In the spirit of the meat man, another Florida man hid drugs between his butt cheeks. After officers found marijuana and cocaine, the suspect said, "The white stuff isn’t mine, but the weed is."

Really? Who else would share that space?

Arsenic Lace

A teenage daughter laced her family’s food with arsenic insecticide, detergent, and dog feces. After a year of illness, Janet Tinoco learned her daughter had been poisoning her family. Prosecutors say they don’t have evidence the girl was actually trying to murder anyone.

Halloween Bargain

Have you wracked your skull thinking what to buy for Halloween? While Florida floats with weirdos, it is a place for Halloween bargains. A Florida couple who likes yard sales bought a skeleton for only $8. What a real deal! In fact, it was real.

The article notes: "State law prohibits individuals from owning human skeletons." Darn, I’m in violation of state law! So are most of the people I know, possibly excepting politicians.

BEFORE THE SHOOTING STARTS

by John M. Floyd

I watched a documentary the other day called Tales From the Script, a collection of interviews with dozens of Hollywood screenwriters. Since I’m both a writer and a movie fan, I loved it.

I am not, however, a screenwriter. I’ve tried my hand at it, as have most writers at some point, and I think I at least understand the form and the process—but I’m better suited to fiction written for the printed page. After all, the things I like most about screenplays—the definite three-act structure, the dialogue, the visual scenes—are also important to the kind of genre stories I enjoy reading and writing. (The thing I find difficult about screenplays is that they of course can’t get into a character’s thoughts, except via dialogue and reactions.)

What made this documentary particularly interesting to me is that many of the featured writers’ points about screenwriting (ideas, content, editing, goals, self-doubt, inspiration, rejection, etc.) can also apply to most other forms of writing. When all’s said and done, stories are stories.

Here, then, are excerpts from some of the interviewees’ observations about writing for the big screen:

John August (Big Fish): I used to try to make everyone happy, and so if someone said they didn’t like something, and had a suggestion, I would immediately try to incorporate that suggestion. Which is one of the worst things you can possibly do.

Dennis Palumbo (My Favorite Year): A writer friend of mine once described screenwriters as egomaniacs with low self-esteem . . . On the one hand, you have to believe that what you wrote was so great everyone needed to see it, that the world couldn’t go on without it, and at the very same moment you think, God I knew I was crap.

Kris Young (UCLA professor): There’s a scene [in The African Queen] where Humphrey Bogart gets out of the river covered with leeches—and he hates that more than anything in the world, leeches. And they get all the leeches off, and the boat’s stuck in the weeds, and the scene where he has to get back in the water and pull the boat again . . . that’s how I feel when I have to do another draft.

William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid): Screenplays are structure and they’re story, and that’s all they are, and the quality of writing, which is crucial in almost every other form of literature, is not what makes a screenplay work.

Ron Shelton (Bull Durham): I learned early on that I can’t write something if it’s not about me . . . about my experience, my needs, fears, desires, whatever. So even if it’s about a photographer in the Nicaraguan revolution, his issues have to be issues that I care about personally.

Billy Ray (Breach): Chinatown took thirteen drafts—and none of us are as good as Robert Towne. Amadeus took I think 46—and none of us are as good as Peter Shaffer. So all that means is, with the previous 45 of Amadeus, someone said, “Peter, you can do better.” And I’m sure that pissed him off, but he kept writing.

Mark D. Rosenthal (Mona Lisa Smile): In Los Angeles there’s probably a quarter million people writing screenplays . . . and 99.999 percent of them, when they say “Oh I’m being rejected, I can’t get ahead”—it’s because their writing isn’t good.

Joe Stillman (Shrek): Just as a screenplay needs to be developed, I think a writer needs to be developed, and that it takes a number of failures in order to eventually write something that gets better. It seems like, yeah, I can fill 110 pages—that’s a screenplay, yahoo! But that’s very different from writing something that’s going to move somebody on some level, when they read it.

Andrew W. Marlowe (Air Force One): The reason why Shakespeare is a genius is that he used to write his plays, watch them performed, and then go back and rewrite. And every time it didn’t connect with the audience, or didn’t have the intent that he wanted, he went back and he rewrote. And these plays were performed a hundred times, and he rewrote them a hundred times—and we don’t have that luxury.

John August: I think what newer screenwriters fail to understand is that about fifty percent of the job is how well you write. The other fifty percent of the job is how well you can understand what the people making the movie need in order to make the movie.

Jane Anderson (How to Make an American Quilt): If, as a filmmaker or writer, you can lift an audience’s spirits, and also give them something to chew on when they walk away, that’s the ultimate accomplishment.

I think that’s what all of us, whether we write scripts or novels or short stories, want to accomplish. I can’t imagine anything more rewarding.

One more thing: If you like this subject, stay tuned. My column next week will include some of the documentary’s views about the perception and the “business” of screenwriting. Until then . . .

FADE OUT.

TOUGH GUYS AND THE GREAT DETECTIVE

by Steven Steinbock

I’ve had tough guys and The Great Detective on my mind.

The tough guys are because of a project I’m doing with Audiofile Magazine. We’re doing a celebration of hard-boiled audiobooks, and I was asked to come up with a list of great detectives (and other hard-boiled heroes) that we’ll be profiling. Stay tuned for details.

Audiofile has also arranged for me to interview Jack Reacher. Well, not the real Jack Reacher. That would be difficult. (At Bouchercon, incidentally, Lee Child hosted a cocktail party at which three male models were posing as Jack Reacher, and attendees voted on which one looked most like Reacher. I don’t know who won).

No, for an online podcast I’ll be interviewing actor Dick Hill who will be answering questions in character as Jack Reacher. Hill has narrated every “Jack Reacher” novel from Day One. He does a good job. You can read about him and about the audiobook adaptations (with samples) at Lee Child’s website as well as on Dick’s own website.

WHAT ABOUT THE GREAT DETECTIVE?

There was a moderate amount of discussion last winter when the film “Sherlock Holmes” was released with Robert Downey Jr. in the title role. The question asked of anyone who had any connection to Sherlockiana was: “What do you think of the film?” The answer I heard on most peoples’ lips (including my own) was a cautious “It was entertaining.” It’s true. Robert Downey was spectacular, and the gaslit – almost steampunk – tone of the film was nicely done. Let’s leave aside the fact that the Sherlock of the film engaged in far more action sequences than he did deduction. (And I was a little bothered that most of the intellectual scenes were tied more to fight moves than they were to solving crimes).

But that movie is already old news.

This past summer in Great Britain, a new series of Holmesian 90-minute films – co-produced BBC Wales and Hartswood Films. One of the creators and executive producers of the series is Steven Moffat, the Scottish writer who was so instrumental in bringing Doctor Who to the Twenty-first Century.

No one could replace Jeremy Brett in my mind, but other than that, so far, so good.

But then I learned that the series was to be set in modern London rather than on the coal-stained gas-lit streets of Queen Victoria’s realm. This I thought, can’t be good.

Then I watched the first two episodes. They were brilliant. The first one aired in the States (on PBS) last Sunday, and the second will air on Halloween.

What struck me about the series is how this Sherlock Holmes was so much closer to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character than Robert Downey’s portrayal of Holmes as a flamboyant action hero. Laptops, cell phones, and Twenty-first Century forensics aside, Benedict Cumberbatch gives us Holmes as an attractively brooding genius with a hint of Aspergers and a touch of OCD. If Doyle were alive today, this would be his Holmes. Although the stories are original, their faithfulness to the themes and characters of the original stories is stunning.

SHERLOCKIAN BITES

The other reason I’ve been thinking about The Great Detective is that I’ve begun reading Graham Moore’s debut novel, The Sherlockian. This was one of the handouts at Bouchercon, to be published and officially released in December. Even chapters tell the story of the murder of one Sherlockian scholar while another young scholar searches for a lost volume of Doyle’s personal journals. Odd chapters, set at the end of the Nineteenth Century, follow Arthur Conan Doyle, having killed off his own detective hero, trying to solve a murder of his own. I’m not far, but I’ll guess that Moore’s novel will provide a new twist on why Doyle resurrected Holmes, ending the Great Hiatus.

There have been numerous pastiches over the years in which Sherlock Holmes comes face to face with Count Dracula. But as far as I can recall, The Sherlockian may be the first novel to team Doyle up with Bram Stoker.

’TIS THE SEASON

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

The best part of October is looking forward to the masquerade at the end of the month. For one night everyone can be who or what they wish without fear. You always thought yourself a bit of a witch or a ghoul? It’s okay. You’re leaning more to Jean Harlow or Rhett Butler? That’s fine, too. Perhaps you have a yen to feast with the Twilight or Harry Potter crowd. Whatever inner secret life you’d like to play for a day, your time has come. As for me, I am leaning toward either Vincent Price or Edgar Allan Poe, and wondering which would actually be the scariest.

Edgar Allan Poe was certainly melancholy, but composed some of his most compelling work while in that state. Everything he did, he felt. A middle child, his parents were actors. In today’s world, we could read much of the torment of his later life from this information alone. Poe’s work lives on because they are masterpieces. Poe pushed the edge of the envelope and the resulting trip for readers has been a pure delight.

The publishing industry of the 1830s was not that much different than today. New technology made publishing easier, but many periodicals ended within a few issues. Some publishers didn’t pay on acceptance and some not even after publishing. As it still is in 2010, making a living as a writer in Poe’s time was tough. Yet Poe’s work withstands time because it was so well done. Being a published author didn’t keep Poe from being poor or occasionally feeling miserable about his life’s work. His lack of money in the bank didn’t keep him from being remarkable in his trade or from being remembered as one of the best writers in American literature.

Vincent Price’s legacy includes a vast amount of horror film adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s writings (including “[The Fall of the] House of Usher”, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, “Tales of Terror”, “The Raven”, “The Masque of the Red Death” and others). Price also was a philanthropist. Coming from an affluent family, he studied Art History and Fine Art in college. His acting earned him a nice lifestyle, but he also inherited a fortune from his grandfather, the inventor of “Dr. Price’s Baking Powder,” the first cream of tartar baking powder. Vincent Price and his wife donated more than 90 pieces of art from his personal collection to establish a “teaching art collection” at East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park, California. Worth more than five million dollars, the collection now includes over 2,000 pieces. His bank account allowed him to share not just his talents, but also his love of art.

Two men at opposite ends of society, yet they share inescapable bonds. As a writer and an actor, both were entertainment artists. Both had voices that made strong impressions through their work. Both were commanding—and perhaps a bit daunting—in their appearances. Does one man’s life ever fail to touch another’s in some manner?

Vincent Price is paired with Poe again as the narrator in Tim Burton’s “Vincent.” That year (1982), he also voiced the rap to accompany Michael Jackson’s MTV cult favorite, “Thriller.”

Vincent Price or Edgar Allan Poe? Neither would be a bad choice for my costume this year. I think I’m going to have a horrifically fun time.

SUSPENDING DISBELIEF . . . BY A THREAD

by Rob Lopresti

Adapted from my column in Murderous Intent, Winter 1997. Alas, some things don’t change.

Happy Halloween to you and yours and the broomstick you rode in on.

I had a spooky experience today on the subject of . . . well, spookiness. Mystery writer Jane Haddam had an article in Skeptical Inquirer on the very topic I had been planning to write about.

What an astounding coincidence!

Not really. If you assume that even one fifth of our population reads or watches some news source on a given day, that’s fifty million people with a chance of coming across something they were just thinking about.

Put it that way, it would be a miracle if one day passed without anyone having that experience. The cool part would be if you could predict who would have the experience on a given day; then we’d be talking surprising.

I bring this up because Haddam was lamenting magical thinking, which is what makes people think coincidences are miraculous (well, that and the fact that most of us are bad at math).

She was complaining that “literary” novelists are throwing supernatural events into their books as casually as brand names. “At what point,” she asks, “did we become a society… in which even highly educated people were willing to accept telepathy and spells as easily as they accept Big Macs and fries?”

Haddam argues that authors of mystery and even horror fiction feel obliged to offer a “vigorous defense” of supernatural elements if they use them, while elite novelists have started including these things “simply because they do.”

I applaud Haddam’s sentiment but I think she is too generous to our field. Many of us are guilty of what I call the “ooh . . . spooky” phenomenon, in which the paranormal is introduced casually, for effect.

Let me be clear. I am not saying (and I don’t think Haddam is either) that authors shouldn’t use the supernatural or fantastic. Go ahead and write about Santa Claus’s chief security elf, or about an armchair detective who happens to be an armchair, as long as you have the talent of James Powell, who carried both of those ideas off brilliantly.

But—and this is my point—if your private eye happens to be a centaur, I want to know from the start that the gumshoe wears horseshoes.

In Barbara Paul’s mystery Liars, Tyrants, and People That Turn Blue, we learn in the first chapter that the main character can see people’s auras. I don’t believe that such things exist, but I was happy to suspend my belief and keep reading, because Paul told me from the start what was coming. As the comedians say, if you buy the premise you buy the bit.

Elmore Leonard provides both good and bad examples. His non-mystery Touch is about a man who can heal injuries through touch. Fine and dandy; accept the premise or don’t read find a different book. But in another novel which I won’t identify Leonard creates a character whose supposed communication with the dead is treated as one of many examples of the character’s quirkiness—until the spook suddenly turns out to be real.

Now, if the reality of the spirit was the surprise twist, the point of the book, I might not like it but I wouldn’t complain. (And full disclosure: I published a story decades ago in which the surprise ending was that the hero was a witch.) But in this book it wasn’t the main point. It was just thrown in to produce a shiver. “Ooh… spooky.”

For some reason TV movies seem to be particularly culpable in this regard. I can’t count how many shows I have seen in which a supposedly paranormal event is explained materialistically and then at the last moment – but wait! Where was that mysterious light coming from? It must have been a real ghost! Ooh . . . spooky!

Ooh . . . yuck.

Most mysteries are to some degree unreal. Private investigators seldom get near murder cases. Cops don’t work on one case at a time. Elderly women don’t find corpses behind every rose bush.

But early on the author must indicate what type of unreality the reader is expected to accept. If you break that contract the results can be scary.

IS IT LITERATURE, YET?

by Melodie Johnson Howe

At Bouchercon I went to a panel I had not intended to go to, don’t ask, and found myself listening to writers telling very funny horror stories of trying to sell their books and dealing with wacky fans. The authors and the audience were having a jolly time until one not so wacky fan stood up and asked a serious question. It was something like this: Do you think that mystery novels can ever equal great literature?

The panel fell silent. The audience hushed. Then John Connolly, no slouch of a writer, spoke (and again I am paraphrasing), “No, I don’t. I mean not compared to Nabokov . . .” and he listed the names of several other great writers

His once jolly comrades turned on him and began to grumble and say, “That’s not true.” One announced that Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon had made the top one hundred best literary novels list.

Connolly tried to persevere using such words as fragile and ephemeral to describe literary plots as compared to mystery plots. I think what he was trying to say was that the suspense/mystery novels have more of a hard logic at their core. But he was drowned out by the other writers who began to throw out titles such as Crime and Punishment, The Great Gatsby, and the more contemporary The Lovely Bones, as being examples of literary mysteries.

I have heard this argument over and over about whether genre books and short stories, such as the ones we write, can be considered literature; or will we always be the stepchildren, the great unwashed, compared to our much better writers. I remember when television was deemed inferior as an art form to the movies, so I have a rather jaded point of view about all this. By jaded I mean a French shrug of the shoulders preferably with a cigarette in the hand.

The discord that question brought to the panel stayed with me. I couldn’t figure out why it upset the other writers except John Connolly to think they could not be allowed into the blessed golden circle of literature. And so they had to trot out the old warhorses such as Dostoevsky, Fitzgerald, Dickens, etc.

It was during one sleepless night that I figured out, along with many other important things (what else are restless nights for?), what was disturbing me about this argument.

The answer came in two words: author’s intent.

Nobody on the panel asked if Fitzgerald intended to write a murder mystery when he wrote The Great Gatsby.

The answer is no. He did not. At least I haven’t read anything to suggest otherwise. If someone has, please let me know. The murder of Gatsby was the inevitable end to a life built on dreams, fantasies, and corruption. Gatsby became the sacrificial lamb for a woman he could never have, Daisy. We know who killed him and we know why. The killer had the wrong guy. He should have killed Daisy. It is heart-wrenching, but it is not a mystery. And Fitzgerald did not intend to write one. So why say that it is?

Okay, the novel is called Crime and Punishment, but is it a mystery? Did Dostoevsky sit down to write a novel of suspense? I don’t think so. He was exposing the consequences of crime and punishment on many levels from the soul to the cell. Was he really writing in the mystery genre? No.

Dickens of course was writing in serial form and, do I dare say it– for the masses. He was a popular writer who wrote to entertain and he was brilliant at it. (There are academics that still question whether he should be allowed into the golden circle.) Dickens did toss in a few murders into his multi-layered plots, Bleak House for example, but that doesn’t make him a mystery writer. And he never referred to himself as one. Besides, Dickens was only interested in killing off the lawyers.

Does it matter if our books and short stories will never be accepted as great literature? Not to me. I’ll just settle for great, and the acknowledgement that I intended to write a mystery.