THE ART OF THE SHORT STORY

by James Lincoln Warren

Here’s the presentation I gave to the Orange County chapter of Sisters in Crime on Sunday, August 15, 2010. It is essentially the same presentation I gave in tandem with Melodie Johnson Howe last year at the California Crime Writers Conference, but without Melodie’s contributions, at about half speed, since last year I had to cram an hour’s material into thirty minutes.

The illustrations are the same, so I’ve posted them here again for convenience.

FLORIDA NEWS

by Leigh Lundin

Florida’s leading gubernatorial candidate is a handsome probable billionaire named Rick Scott who … wait for it… if commie conservative liberal libertarian leftist pinko court documents are to be believed, engineered not only the largest Medicare fraud ever, but the largest fraud in our proud Florida history, a state that has an outstanding tradition of major frauds. Ironically, he proposes reducing Medicaid fraud by giving recipients vouchers, even as new charges in his new company arose last week concerning fraud and misleading regulators. Scott refused comment, saying "it’s a private matter." The candidate won the hearts of Florida voters thanks to his claims of "business experience". Oh, yes, the fines for his original fraud were $1.7 BILLION. That’s $1,7 and EIGHT ZEROS in fines, not the fraud itself!

Malta

Personally, I would be happy to enact a law to ban Malta (the drink, not the island nation), ubiquitous in Florida. I tasted Moxie once and it’s difficult to judge whether Moxie, Malta, or chilled jet kerosene tastes worst. Malta should be ruled a DEA schedule 6 threat making it perfectly legal to pull over cars suspected of transporting Malta across state lines, then sending perpetrators to Guantanamo. Actually, the wheat/barley drink comes from Cuba and Puerto Rico, although they claim it was invented by accident in Germany when a batch of black beer went horribly wrong. Germans have a lot to answer for.

Criminal Brief, a leader in criminal blogging technology, planned to bring you touch-screen scratch’n’sniff until James pointed out the majority of viewers still use Windows XP. Besides, we value our readers too much to expose them to even the smell of Malta, the kind of drink that when your brain unseizes from The Horror, you can’t believe it’s possible to make anything taste so bad and humanly survive.

Malta is a thick brown carbonated soft drink made out of distilled tires, industrial vegemite solvent, feline urine, and extract of skunk roadkill. It’s best known for cleaning rust spots off chrome and giving gringos (me) a squinty-lip squinty-eye look. President W Bush got his famous squinty-lip squinty-eye look from imbibing Malta when he visited Jeb down here in Florida. Really. That’s how he got it.

Wet T-Shirt– Gotta Lovett

Wearing a wet T-shirt with a padded bra is grounds for arrest in Florida. Either that or looking like an illegal alien when you’re not. Or being slow to produce identification, when demanded. Choose one or more.

Plus, the town of Tavares is apparently keeping a database of women in padded bra wet T-shirts. Or illegal legal aliens. Or both. Choose one or more.

In this strange and scary story, Mr. and Mrs. Lovett took their autistic seven year old boy to a local kiddie Splash Park. Mrs. Lovett T-shirt got splashed, revealing she wore a padded bra. That’s her in the T-shirt on the left.

Personally, I think padded bras should be illegal, but wearers shouldn’t be harassed or arrested. Not everyone believes the same and a city employee ejected Janet Lovett from the kiddie park who told her to remove herself or change into a swim suit or other clothing.

Weird, huh. But this is Florida, so it gets weirder.

She wrapped a towel around herself and leaving their son with her husband, she headed home. It’s not explicitly known the city worker phoned the police, but as soon as she stepped outside the fence, a police officer popped up and demanded to see her identification to enter in a database.

Mrs. Lovett started trembling. She’s from Peru where police do things like stop people and demand identification, and she’d earned her US citizenship just three months earlier. The cop said she couldn’t call her husband and arrested her for not producing her ID "fast enough"– it was in the car– and charged her with obstruction of justice and resisting arrest.

Arizona and Florida law nonwithstanding, the police cannot legally stop citizens and demand papers, as authoritarian countries may. In this case, the cop stated her name was wanted for their database.

Database? What database, exactly? Tavares officials have been asked if they are keeping a secret database, but they’ve declined comment. It wouldn’t then be secret, would it?

If there was any doubt Mrs. Lovett is a true American, she’s suing the town.

Bless her little heart!

You show me yours and …

You know those full body scanners in use at major airports and many government buildings? Those perv machines that take ghostly photos to see if you’re packing heat? Remember Homeland Security told the public the scanners aren’t capable of storing images? (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)

Someone forgot to tell the scanner at the federal courthouse in Orlando it couldn’t keep pictures so it’s been blithely filing 6000 images a month on its hard drive. I know you’re all shocked.

My body fat index isn’t the greatest, but hey, snapping a photo of my ectoplasm is far less onerous than many other things the government does, and trust me, you wouldn’t believe the staggering amount of data the government collects in Oracle databases. But a photo? All you had to do was ask. You didn’t have to lie to us.

At last, TSA admits the scanners are capable of storing images after all, but not to worry because we can (cough, cough) trust them. Besides, the US Marshalls Service says it’s allowed because they dialed down the detail.

Shift now to Miami, where, after being body scanned, a TSA worker went berserk after enduring a year of cruel jokes about his, er, boyhood, so to speak. Fed up, the poor shlub beat a fellow worker with his, er, baton. Really, his baton, that’s what the reports claim.

UNDERAPPRECIATED

by John M. Floyd

Everyone likes the blockbuster novels, the ones that attract millions of readers. We usually even know beforehand that we’ll like them, either because we’re familiar with the authors or because we’ve seen the reviews or heard the buzz. You know the ones I’m talking about: Jaws, The Godfather, The Prince of Tides, Lonesome Dove, Mystic River, The Green Mile, Shane, Deliverance, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Silence of the Lambs, etc. Oddly enough, the outstanding novels I’ve mentioned here became outstanding movies as well. (That doesn’t often happen.)

The funny thing is, some of my favorite pieces of fiction have not been the ones that were widely praised or even widely recognized — at least not at first. In a way, these are more fun to discover: they’re like well-kept secrets. Some of these novels and films then go on to achieve great success (we call them “sleepers”), but others never seem to find much of a following at all.

Without further ado, here are sixteen lesser-known (or at least lesser-discussed) books and movies that I thought were excellent:

Novels:

Rose — Martin Cruz Smith. A mystery set in the English coal country, with a twist ending I still remember, years afterward.

Sands of the Kalahari — William Mulvihill. Murder and betrayal in the African desert.

True Crime — Andrew Klavan. A great mystery story, with a ticking clock throughout.

The Reincarnation of Peter Proud — Max Erlich. An entertaining novel, later adapted into a disappointing movie.

Magic — William Goldman. Don’t read this one if you’re spooked by puppets or mannequins.

Mind Prey — John Sandford. In my opinion, the strongest of the Lucas Davenport novels.

Banner in the Sky — James Ramsey Ullman. A tale of a boy’s courage, set in the Swiss Alps.
Adapted into the Disney movie Third Man on the Mountain.

Demolition Angel — Robert Crais. Edge-of-your-seat action and suspense.

Movies:

Blood Simple (1984) — The first and one of the best of the Coen Brothers’ films.

From Noon Till Three (1976) — A lighthearted western, with great music.

Medicine Man (1992) — Sean Connery as a researcher in the Amazon rainforest? It actually works.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008) — A surprisingly good love story.

Rustler’s Rhapsody (1985) — A funny, funny movie. I dare you to watch it without laughing out loud.

The Spanish Prisoner (1997) — A well-done mystery, with multiple plot reversals.

The Abyss (1989) — Adventure and aliens and newfound love, all underwater. Fantastic writing.

Silver Bullet (1985) — An exciting horror film, from Stephen King’s novella Cycle of the Werewolf.

Have any of you read or seen these and enjoyed them as much as I did? If you haven’t, I hope you’ll put one on your bedside table (or in your Netflix queue, as the case may be), and then let me know what you think. All of them are way better than I thought they’d be, and some are better than the blockbusters.

Like short stories, good novels and movies will eventually find an audience.

And since I’m a member of that audience . . .

Here are the last (okay, hold down the applause) of the answers to the movie-dialogue quiz from a few weeks ago. Hope you did better on it than I would’ve done if YOU’d been quizzing ME.

41. What in the hell you doing with that lawn mower blade? / I aim to kill you with it.
SLING BLADE (Dwight Yoakam / Billy Bob Thornton)

42. I don’t understand. All my life I’ve been waiting for someone, and when I find her . . . she’s a fish.
SPLASH (Tom Hanks)

43. I can’t drive you around while you’re killing folks. It ain’t my job. / Tonight it is.
COLLATERAL (cab driver Jamie Foxx / Tom Cruise)

44. You know what makes this bird go up? Funding makes this bird go up. / He’s right. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
THE RIGHT STUFF (Dennis Quaid / Fred Ward)

45. If you build what, who will come? / He didn’t say.
FIELD OF DREAMS (Amy Madigan / Kevin Costner)

46. Swee’Pea is the worst name I’ve ever heard on a baby. / Well, what do you wants me to call him? Baby Oyl?
POPEYE (Shelley Duvall / Robin Williams)

47. They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way, and that’s how you get Capone.
THE UNTOUCHABLES (Sean Connery, to Kevin Costner)

48. We killed a man, Drew. Shot him in the back. A mountain man. A cracker.
DELIVERANCE (Burt Reynolds to Ronny Cox, after rescuing their friends)

49. I’m sorry we won’t be able to invite you to the wedding, Benjamin, but the arrangements have been so rushed.
THE GRADUATE (Anne Bancroft, to Dustin Hoffman)

50. Good luck with your layoffs, all right? I hope your firings go really well.
OFFICE SPACE (Ron Livingston, as he leaves a meeting with the two Bobs)

SURFIN’ SAFARI

by Steven Steinbock

This week I’m bereft of any original thoughts or themes to share with you in this week’s edition of Bandersnatches. Almost bereft. Anyhow, a common form of blog column consists of annotated links to interesting and relevant websites. Allow me to share some of the gleanings of my web-surfing forays.

Against my normal, meandering nature, my web-browsing has been fairly goal-directed this summer. I suppose that’s because I’m working on a book and doing my best not to let my browsing habits suck up my productivity. It’s hard to stay on the straight and narrow path when web-browsing, though. Even Weather.com contains links to videos, headlines, and an On this date article (which, as I write this the day before publication, happens to be about a 1778 hurricane that prevented a major British-French sea battle along the Rhode Island coast).

The two websites I’m most likely to visit multiple times during a day are Wikipedia and Dictionary.com (as well as the latter’s sister site, Thesaurus.com).

Without getting into the well-trod discussion of how Wikipedia often contains inaccurate, biased, and incomplete entries, it remains my favorite reference site for getting a quick and dirty overview on just about anything. (I can understand why teachers don’t allow their students to use Wikipedia as a source in their research papers, but it’s still of heck of a good starting point).

On any given day, the Wikipedia main page is filled with Today’s featured article, In the news, Did you know…, and On this day…. Normally these sirens of temptation have little or no pull on me. but a week or so back, I was delighted to see that the featured article of the day was about sentence spacing. There was little there that I hadn’t already learned while researching my January 7 blog column. But it was still interesting reading.

The website where I’m likely to find interesting sidebar articles on a regular basis is Dictionary.com, with its Hot Word Blog. A few of the interesting topics of late have been What do “corny” and “corned beef” have to do with plain-old “corn?” (which contains a link to another blog entry on hamburgers, hot dogs, and frankfurters), this this one about links between “hoax,” “hocus pocus,” and the Eucharist, and this one about tuxedos, yarmulkes, and honeymoons (all relevant to the Clinton/ Mezvinsky wedding)

HEADLINE NEWS

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

“All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance. ” —Will Rogers

I am reminded how easily ideas sprout like wildflowers in the oddest of places. In reading the newspaper headlines this morning, I found my own inventive stories popping into my mind long before I knew the details of what really happened. For those who love mysteries—whether as writer or reader—I’m not alone in playing the What If? game. Below are a few that made me think of interesting slants that might have happened if I were not reporting, but writing the stories.

See if some of these headlines pique your imagination with ideas:

• Rifle-wielding man near Georgetown shot dead
• Michigan man killed in Oklahoma drag boat race
• 47-year-old drowns in Oklahoma lake
• Las Cruces gets ready for 9-acre corn maze
• Probe continues after plane crashes into house

“A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.” —Will Rogers

The true stories involved a man in an altercation with his wife, a boat crashing during a race’s qualifying lap, a man trying to cool off on a hot summer’s day, a plan to cut a 9-acre cornfield into a Disney character and a small aircraft plummeting into a suburban home.

My stories went somewhere else. Not quite the Twilight Zone, but definitely out there. Humble beginnings of several short stories meandering through our minds and sprouting into something considerably wild if we so choose.

“If you want to be successful, it’s just this simple. Know what you are doing. Love what you are doing. And believe in what you are doing.” —Will Rogers

DOCTOR WATSON, IN THE CONSERVATORY, WITH A CHAIN SAW

by Rob Lopresti

If this piece seems familiar it means that 1) you subscribed to MURDEROUS INTENT MYSTERY MAGAZINE in 1999 and 2) your memory is excellent. Congratulations.

A while ago I heard Earl Emerson, one of my favorite mystery writers, speak in my local bookstore. Earl coined a phrase that night that made me like him even more. He referred to a certain type of character in mystery fiction as the “Sociopathic Sidekick.”

The traditional sidekick, of course, is a staple of the mystery, going all the way back to the anonymous narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s Arsene Lupin stories. His job was to tell us how brilliant the hero was, engage in sparkling conversation, and investigate ineffectually.

But in recent times a new sidekick has developed. This fellow, the Sociopathic Sidekick (or, appropriately enough, the SS) doesn’t do mainstream investigating. He gets called in during emergencies to watch the hero’s back or kick the frosting out of bad guys.

(In movies it is different, of course. The sidekick’s role in current flicks seems to be dying horribly, thereby justifying the hero’s vengeful mayhem.)

While there may be earlier examples of the SS (aren’t there always when you declare you have found the original of something?) the first I can find is Hawk in Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series. Hawk first appears in my favorite of the series, Promised Land, where he seems to be a bad guy not too different from many others Spenser faced before and after. But Spenser allows him to escape from the cops which results in Hawk helping him out later in the book. After that they are BFF in novel after novel.

If you are an ethical private eye, as Spenser tries to be, it is very convenient to have a pal who doesn’t clutter his life up with such details. For example, in Early Autumn a bad guy keeps hiring people to kill Spenser. When the hero goes up against the villain he simply surrenders. Being the good guy Spenser can’t kill a guy who won’t fight but he knows that tomorrow the whole sending-killers routine will start again.

Hawk, on the other hand, has no such compunctions and is happy to apply a little lead therapy to the situation. .Such are the joys of having a Sociopathic Sidekick.

The big picture

It is worth noting that Spenser is white and Hawk is black. Parker was a former English professor and was no doubt familiar with the famous essay by Leslie J. Fiedler which demonstrates that one of the basic motifs in American literature is the friendship between a (somewhat-civilized) white male and a (less-civilized) male of different ethnicity. Consider Leatherstocking, Ishmael, and Huck Finn, to name the white half of three such pairs.

(Of course, that pairing goes back far beyond American Literature. Jacob and Esau doesn’t really count since they never became friends, but the match of Gilgamesh and Enkidu is even older.)

One could argue that the oppression Hawk has experienced justifies or at least explains his looser moral code. Sometimes the justification comes from a different kind of experience. In Robert Crais’s novels about Elvis Cole, for example, SS Joe Pike is a Vietnam veteran.

However, my favorite SS is a different fettle of kish. In Harlan Coben’s books sports agent Myron Bolitar is assisted by his best friend, Windsor Horne Lockwoode . Win, whom one character aptly labels “Myron’s psychotic tonto,” is a smart, wealthy, attractive, WASP financial analyst. His hobby just happens to be killing bad guys as painfully as possible.

Before I end this I have to return to Earl Emerson. His novels about private eye Thomas Black feature a character who is almost a parody of the SS. Snake has the requisite fast gun and loose morals but the herp winds up rescuing him more often than the other way around.

I’ll leave it to the doctorate students to decide what the evolution from Dr. Watson to Hawk says about society and literature. But apparently these days the man who walks the mean streets needs meaner backup.

Another thread from the web

I’m sure you all know about Wikipedia, but have you heard of Wiki racing? I just read an article about it as an exciting new trend and a friend of mine says her high school kids have been doing it for three years.

Here’s the idea. Pick any two pages on Wikipedia. Say: AUTOHARP and DASHIELL HAMMETT. The object is to get from one page to the other in the fewest number of links by clicking on the hotlinks which takes. You wouldn’t think those two have much in common, but here’s the route I found: AUTOHARPS were created by people form GERMANY which started WORLD WAR II which included the ALEUTIAN ISLANDS CAMPAIGN, which was fought by, among many others DASHIELL HAMMETT. Three degrees of separation.

You can play this game at a site called Wikispeedia,which sets up games and keeps track of the best scores. And here’s the cool part: the information scientist who set up the website uses the results to see how people do research on the web. This was the basis for his master’s thesis.

From a school game to scholarly publication in one degree of separation. I love it.

Here is the shortest Sherlock Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle, and also probably one of the shortest novels ever written—for it was printed as a book in its own binding, containing 34 pages. It was written in 1922 for the library of Queen Mary’s Doll House, a sumptuous doll house built for the wife of King George V, created to be displayed for charity and completed in 1924. Everything in the exquisite model was authentic, even the wine in tiny bottles. The house is now on exhibit at Windsor Castle. Doyle’s little book was printed in 1:12 scale by Sangorsky & Sutcliffe.

You might notice that except for the opening paragraph, the entire story is in dialogue, a subject discussed by Rob Lopresti on this site two weeks ago.

HOW WATSON LEARNED THE TRICK

by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Watson had been watching his companion intently ever since he had sat down to the breakfast table. Holmes happened to look up and catch his eye.

“Well, Watson, what are you thinking about?” he asked.

“About you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, Holmes. I was thinking how superficial are these tricks of yours, and how wonderful it is that the public should continue to show interest in them.”

“I quite agree,” said Holmes. “In fact, I have a recollection that I have myself made a similar remark.”

“Your methods,” said Watson severely, “are really easily acquired.”

“No doubt,” Holmes answered with a smile, “Perhaps you will yourself give and example of this method of reasoning.”

“With pleasure,” said Watson, “I am able to say that you were greatly preoccupied when you got up this morning.”

“Excellent!” said Holmes. “How could you possibly know that?”

“Because you are usually a very tidy man and yet you have forgotten to shave.”

“Dear me! How very clever!” said Holmes. “I had no idea, Watson, that you were so apt a pupil. Has your eagle eye detected anything more?”

“Yes, Holmes. You have a client named Barlow, and you have not been successful with his case.”

“Dear me, how could you know that?”

“I saw the name outside his envelope. When you opened it you gave a groan and thrust it into your pocket with a frown on your face.”

“Admirable! You are indeed observant. Any other points?”

“I fear, Holmes, that you have taken to financial speculation.”

“How could you tell that, Watson?”

“You opened the paper, turned to the financial page, and gave a loud exclamation of interest.”

“Well, that is very clever of you, Watson. Any more?”

“Yes, Holmes, you have put on your black coat, instead of your dressing gown, which proves that your are expecting some important visitor at once.”

“Anything more?”

“I have no doubt that I could find other points, Holmes, but I only give you these few, in order to show you that there are other people in the world who can be as clever as you.”

“And some not so clever,” said Holmes. “I admit that they are few, but I am afraid, my dear Watson, that I must count you among them.”

“What do you mean, Holmes?”

“Well, my dear fellow, I fear your deductions have not been so happy as I should have wished.”

“You mean that I was mistaken.”

“Just a little that way, I fear. Let us take the points in their order: I did not shave because I have sent my razor to be sharpened. I put on my coat because I have, worse luck, an early meeting with my dentist. His name is Barlow, and the letter was to confirm the appointment. The cricket page is beside the financial one, and I turned to it to find if Surrey was holding its own against Kent. But go on, Watson, go on! It’s a very superficial trick, and no doubt you will soon acquire it.”