E-BRIEFS

by James Lincoln Warren

I was out of town this weekend, and since my hotel charged ten bucks a day for internet access—which is half of what I pay every month for my home DSL connection—I decided to let my email ride until I got home Sunday afternoon. Sitting in my mailbox was the following:

Hello James,

My name is Darlene Poier and I’m the publisher of a brand new online magazine called Pages Of Stories. This magazine has been live for just over 2 weeks now and it’s been pretty exciting so far. The magazine comes out on a quarterly basis and will be filled with fiction stories of all genres; we do consider creative non-fiction stories as well. We offer another venue for authors to submit their work and get paid for it. In the time that we’ve been live, we’ve gained people from 6 different countries have signed up for the free issue. I pick up the Ellery Queen magazine and read it when I can. I very much enjoyed your last story “Jungle Music”. Sadly, I haven’t been able to find the Alfred Hitchcock magazine, but I’ll keep looking. I wanted to invite you to take a look at our website and magazine at www.pagesofstories.com. The website will be evolving over time as will the magazine. The intention was to give the reader the same look and feel of reading a paper magazine as reading it online. That technology exists and will be implemented in the coming weeks. Thank you for your time and I look forward to reading more of your stories in Ellery Queen.

Sincerely,
Darlene Poier
Publisher Pages Of Stories
www.pagesofstories.com

Well, hell, there’s nothing I love better than being flattered. I think I’ve mentioned before that I have no pride whatsoever, and Q.E.D.

Anyway, I wrote back to Darlene to ask her the particulars—what rates she pays, what length stories she considers for publication, and since Pages Of Stories is a Canadian website, whether she provides income tax documentation for American authors. (That last was a joke. All right, a really lame joke, but it’s only been two weeks since April 15.)

I’m still awaiting her reply, so I can’t report on what she has to say, but it got me thinking about the whole electronic/internet publishing angle. In the interest of candid disclosure, I have to say that I have always looked upon web-based short story markets with the same jaundiced eye as that with which I look at publishing-on-demand houses. In short, not professional.

The controlling criterion for being professional in terms of markets for fiction is the size of the check. Since I don’t know what Darlene pays, I’m withholding judgment with regard to her site, but there can be no doubt that at least some electronic publishing markets have made the transition from fan-based or vanity projects to genuinely consumer-based professional publications. First, there was Amazon Shorts. (Hint: go to Amazon and look up John M. Floyd.) Then there were electronic editions of print periodicals, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine for Kindle and other e-formats.

In spite of my prejudice against web-based short story sites, I am starting to change my opinion, especially given the various formats available to dedicated and handheld devices. It strikes me that this might actually be a development in which the short story can thrive. Typically, such devices are used on the run, away from home, and short fiction is better suited to fill the time that such devices are designed to occupy—like reading the paper on the commuter train. Maybe the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the headlight on the locomotive after all.

NEWSWORTHY

by Leigh Lundin

The city: Palo Alto.

A Silicon Valley engineer celebrates his 27^th birthday in a Redwood City pub. A little tipsy, he leaves his cell phone on a barstool before he leaves the bar.

Customer finds phone and discussions ensue how to return it. Customer leaves bar with cell phone. Next morning, the cell phone is dead, disabled remotely. Customer tries at least once to return it, to no avail.

Normally, that would be the end of the story.

But…

It isn’t an ordinary cell phone– it’s an iPhone. And it isn’t an ordinary iPhone.

The phone is Apple’s next generation prototype disguised to look like the current model.

Customer phones Apple and tries to return it, reaching low-level tech support who assume it’s a Chinese knockoff or a hoax. Apple is so legendary for its security, no one takes seriously one of their prototypes might end up on a barstool in a German beer garden in Redwood City, California.

Customer next approaches hi-tech geek sites. Gizmodo confirms the story and pays $5000 for a look at the device before returning it to Apple. They pry off the shell of an ordinary iPhone revealing a shiny jewel of technological wonder.

Gizmodo takes the thing of beauty apart and confirms it’s an awesome Apple product with awesome Apple components assembled in a new and awesome Apple way. They write the story about its awesomeness and film a report with full disclosure.

At the same time, Gizmodo offers the device to Apple if they formally request it back. They also urge leniency dealing with the engineer who lost the phone on his birthday.

After much hemming and hawing, Apple attorneys craft a suitably vague letter and Gawker Media (Gizmodo’s parent company) provides Apple with the reporter’s address to make arrangements to retrieve the phone, which apparently took place.

Normally, that would be the end of the story.

But…

Police batter in the door of the Gizmodo’s editor’s apartment, seizing company computers, hard drives, servers, cameras, notes, and a file of business cards. Police and prosecutors are apparently on a hunt to discover anything that might be discovered. Note that the iPhone had already been returned to Apple, apparently without charge for Gizmodo’s $5000 outlay.

Prosecutors want to investigate Gizmodo’s computer files to determine if they can put together evidence of a felony. Such a search upon ordinary citizens might be outrageous, but it seems unthinkable against a news outlet. However, San Mateo County’s chief deputy district attorney, Stephen Wagstaffe, claims reporter shield laws do not apply to Gizmodo. According to police sources, the DA’s office is prepared to go after other blogs as well.

Unconfirmed reports from Wired claim that "Apple police" fruitlessly (sorry about the pun) knock on the door of the original cell phone finder and demand to search his place, too. (It should be noted that Apple is on the board of the task force responsible for the raid.)

What’s going on here?

The Daily Show has its own take.

The Fourth Estate

Those who read this column know I often write one thing while I’m really thinking about something else. That happens to be true in this case.

Those of us who appreciate hard news (and hard-earned news reporting), bemoan the deaths of reputable newspapers around the nation. For more than two decades, newspapers have been dying, withering, and blowing away in a dust storm of new technology combined with a disdain of journalism while embracing opinions disguised as news.

The term ‘fourth estate‘ comes to us from Thomas Carlyle quoting Edmund Burke about Parliament (Congress in our case): "Burke said that there were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters Gallery yonder, there sat a fourth Estate more important far than they all."

Politicians, police, and prosecutors have a reputation of detesting news media, but the fourth estate is most important because it keeps an eye on government and its minions. A free press helps keep a people free and won’t be fully appreciated until it’s gone.

The Death of Journalism

Popular commentary argues the loss of the great news organizations doesn’t matter because news is ‘democratized’ thanks to the internet and blogs, which helped kill off newspapers. This theory has several departures from reality, notably that the quality of reporting depends upon the commitment to integrity and the resources available, both which are in questionable supply in one place or another in the blogosphere.

Frighteningly, the courts, led by a strained misinterpretation of a New Jersey decision and aggressive actions by the Transportation Security Administration, have begun to rule that news blogs don’t meet the standard of legitimate news organizations. The courts use this ambiguous standard to knock down press shield laws, preventing reporters from protecting their sources.

To overly simplify the circular legal reasoning: Prosecutors contend news blogs aren’t professional because they can’t protect their sources and reporters can no longer protect their sources because they aren’t professional. Yes, other considerations are involved such as paying for stories (à la National Enquirer), but the gist is that with the loss of the great news organizations, professional journalism hasn’t moved to the World Wide Web, it’s blown away.

Final Judgment

This is the story behind the story: If courts continue to rule news blogs aren’t news-worthy, so to speak, we stand on the brink of losing our freedom of the press. The one thing we can do is… blog about it.

ABOARD THE BUSTED FLUSH

by John M. Floyd

I like good titles. The Matarese Circle, The High and the Mighty, “The Gift of the Magi ,” A Walk Among the Tombstones, etc. — to me, those are interesting, and eye-catching.

I also think it’s interesting when an author chooses to follow a pattern with his or her titles. I know it’s mostly a marketing ploy, but it also requires a bit of imagination to keep coming up with “themed” titles without making them sound old, or boring. Or silly.

I am curious (about) yellow

I especially like the titles in the old Travis McGee mystery series by John D. MacDonald. Each one of them uses a color of some kind, which I think is a great idea. Good writing consists in part of producing images in the mind of the reader (show, don’t tell), and what better way to do that than to provide something that’s easy to visualize, like The Empty Copper Sea, before the reader even turns the first page?

At any rate, a “colorful” title came to be a signature of MacDonald’s work, or at least of the McGee series. Here is (I think) a complete list of those novels:

The Deep Blue Goodby (1964)
Nightmare in Pink (1964)
A Purple Place for Dying (1964)
The Quick Red Fox (1964)
A Deadly Shade of Gold (1965)
Bright Orange for the Shroud (1965)
Darker Than Amber (1966)
One Fearful Yellow Eye (1966)
Pale Gray for Guilt (1968)
The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper (1969)
Dress Her in Indigo (1969)
The Long Lavender Look (1970)
A Tan and Sandy Silence (1972)
The Scarlet Ruse (1973)
The Turquoise Lament (1974)
The Dreadful Lemon Sky (1975)
The Empty Copper Sea (1978)
The Green Ripper (1980)
Free Fall in Crimson (1981)
Cinnamon Skin (1982)
The Lonely Silver Rain (1985)

No fibbing, about McGee

The series is a little unusual, as mysteries go, because even though it is of course genre fiction (top priority: entertainment), it’s sometimes been referred to as “classy trash,” sort of a beach getaway for the white-collar set. I might not go so far as to call them literary fiction, but some of the views of Travis McGee and his friend Meyer are certainly insightful and thought-provoking, and the characters and settings are unforgettable. How could McGee, a “salvage consultant” who lives on a houseboat that he won in a poker game, not be an interesting and complex character? (He reminds me, now and then, of Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder.)

The MacDonald franchise

JDM also wrote many standalones, among them the hurricane novel Condominium; the delightful fantasy The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything; and The Executioners, which was twice adapted (in 1962 and 1991) into the film Cape Fear. I’m not sure I like his other work as well as I like the McGee series, but Stephen King once said the MacDonald book The End of the Night was “one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century.”

One more point. MacDonald also produced some quarter-pounders: five collections of short stories, two of which (The Good Old Stuff and More Good Old Stuff) are here on my shelves at home. Those two books include twenty-seven of his early mystery shorts.

That makes me like him even more.

MALICIOUS ADVENTURES

by Steven Steinbock

As with last week’s column, I’ve written this Bandersnatch dispatch long in advance of publication. Last week I was preoccupied with Sam’s Bar Mitzvah. No sooner had the last guests been sent on their way, I packed myself off to the Edgars. (The preceding sentences was written before any of the guests had even arrived; I feel like a character in “FlashForward”).

Two days ago (or ten days in the future, as I write this) I will have presided at the International Association of Crime Writers
board meeting. Yesterday I will be accepting an honorary doctorate from my graduate school, also in New York. That night (Thursday, April 29, which if all goes right should be yesterday) I’ll be going to the Edgar Awards Banquet. This morning, I’ll be hopping a trail to Washington, DC and then hopping over to Arlington, in the shadow of the Pentagon, where I’ll be attending Malice Domestic.

At Malice, I’ll be sitting on two panels: the first, at 4:10 this afternoon, I’ll be sitting with Doug Greene, Margaret Maron, Mary Higgins Clark, and Janet Hutchings for a session titled Ed Hoch Remembered: Honoring One of the Most Prolific Writers of Short Detective Fiction. Later in the weekend I’ll be sitting on a Sherlock Holmes panel along with John Betancourt, Parnell Hall, William Link, and Daniel Stashower.

If any Criminal Brief friends, fans, or followers happen to be at any of these events, be sure to say hi.

Feckless Facts and Indefatigable Mirth

As I’ve been promising for several weeks, I will now share my thoughts on the word Feckless, as well as the relationship (or lack thereof) between Ninny and Nincompoop. Next week, I promise, I’ll be back with Wistful, Mirth, Laconic, and Languid.

Starting with the last, according to dictionaries (American Heritage online, Random House online, and others), ninny and nincompoop both mean “a fool or simpleton. So you’d think that they shared a common ancestry. Ninny is pretty easy to trace. It is a shortened form of the adjective “innocent” as well as being the pet form of proper name “Innocent.”

Nincompoop is more complicated. Some have suggested that it’s a goofy form of the name “Nicodemus” which in French slang once meant “a fool.” While modern etymologists (including the OED) don’t buy it, I like Samuel Johnson’s 1755 explanation, that it is a goofy form of the legal phrase non compos mentis (meaning “mentally incompetent”).

Moving on, we come to a series of words for which I have always had a difficult time understanding, either because the definition doesn’t match the sound (in an onomatopoeic sense) of the word, or because it’s just a strange word. First is feckless, which is odd for two reasons: 1) because it obviously means lacking feck even though no one knows what the heck feck means, and 2) because it closely resembles a Saxon-based obscenity. Feck, for all the ninnies and nincompoops out there (including me) is a Scottish form of effect, meant in the sense of value or vigor. So there you have it, folks. Feckless means lacking drive, direction, or purpose.

Perhaps a good antonym to feckless is tenacious, which I don’t find to be a problematic word like the others I’ve mentioned. But it’s a fun word to say, so let’s have at it. Tenacious means “stick-to-it-ness” in both a figurative and literal sense. The root is the Latin is tenax, which I think of as a gluey, sticky verb, and is the source of the modern Spanish verb is tener (“to have”). It’s similar in meaning, although not in origin, to that tireless term indefatigable, which I never seem to spell or pronounce correctly.

And so, until next week, I am indefatigably yours,

Your humble nincompoop.

THE MIDDLE OF EVERYTHING

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

Creating the beginning of a new story is easy for me. The ending usually is too. It’s the nether regions of the middle that seem to play havoc with a writer. I remember taking a screenplay workshop from a woman who worked on a semi-famous movie that starred names everyone would recognize. (I’m keeping mum on all of it because some of the tales she told were risqué and I’m not so sure were all true, but they did make interesting talk over glasses of wine) She recounted various troubles between actors and directors, the critical importance of the opening scene on the big screen and of course, problems with the second act.

It’s always the second act that is the most difficult. I was wondering if that’s true in everything. Do more divorces occur in the years between newly-wed and the Silver or Gold Anniversaries? Are the teenage years rougher than terrible two’s or leaving for college angst? Maybe I could agree with this concept, except I have no problem with an entrée between soup and dessert.

I have decided that my second act in a story will forever be my main dish and I will treat it with respect. If its preparation is time consuming or requires additional work like marinating, it is only because of its importance to the entire meal.

The beginning of a story is like an appetizer. The idea is to make the reader hungry for more. Whet the appetite, but don’t completely fill your guest. Keep the appetizer lite, but sumptuous. The ending is coffee with an amazing dessert. You’ve just dined on a fabulous meal and even now, you are remembering the best parts, but in a slower, more relaxed mood.

The middle must taste better than anyone expected. This is where the twists and turns fill the reader with flavor. Again, not too much, not too little.

New writers are often so in love with writing, they want to share every thought on paper. They tend to pile on too much in the opening, leaving the middle to flounder, fighting for attention. The reader is not someone who had been stranded on a deserted island, eager to toss anything into his mouth and be satisfied. Instead, he is a bit of a snob with a sophisticated palate. He’s eaten really good food and if he’s hungry, why would he settle for less when quality is the same price?

I have heard of some producers opening the script to the middle and begin reading. Kind of scary, isn’t it? I can hear the writers screaming, “No! They don’t even know why he’d do that!” Exactly. They don’t, but if it isn’t good enough to arouse his wanting to know why the hero did that, the writer missed the point anyway.

I believe I could open a Sherlock Holmes adventure or anything by Charles Dickens or Stephen King and become interested enough to read the entire story. This is a personal challenge: go to any bookstore, library or your own collection and open a story you haven’t previously read and begin reading in the middle. Read no more than a minute tops. Are you interested in what you just read enough to continue either forward or from the beginning? I think this is where we separate the good writers from the great ones. Let me know your results. I promise not to skip to the middle to see your reactions.

If this piece looks familiar to you it is because it appeared briefly last Wednesday before I realized I had sent James the wrong column and he very kindly fixed it. If you commented on it last week, please feel free to include the same or a different comment today. (And if you didn’t see what I wrote about Mark Twain last week go back and take a peek).

—Rob Lopresti

OVERLOAD

by Rob Lopresti

It’s probably time to admit it. I have a problem. A definite problem.

It started simply enough. A few weeks ago I was reading two books. One was Blackout, the latest novel by Connie Willis, one of my favorite science fiction authors. The other was a biography: Mark Twain: Man In White, by Michael Shelden.

And that was fine. I like being able to shift between fiction and non-fiction, depending on my mood.

But they were both hardcovers and I also like to have a paperback I can slip in my pocket. So I dug into my waiting-to-be-read shelf and found Murder In The Hearse Degree by Tim Cockey, a comic mystery.

Then I had to drop by the public library for something and I spotted The Snake, The Crocodile, and the Dog, by Elizabeth Peters. I had been meaning to catch up with her Amelia Peabody series, and that was the next one for me to read. So I borrowed it.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?

At the university library where I work I found we just acquired Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God, by Amos Nur and Daw Burgess, and how could a dig and mythology nut like me pass that up?

And that’s when the latest issues of Alfred Hitchcock’s and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazines arrived. Now the situation was getting desperate.

But wait. There’s more!

Because sitting on my desk are three history books that I want to skim for background on a story that popped into my head this week. I have carefully set them aside, even though I am yearning to read them.

Because this is crazy. And I am not even discussing the approximately two shelves of other books on my to-read shelves. Perhaps I should stay home from work. I could call in literate.

On the bright side, I guess, the Cockey book seems to have vanished. I took it with me when we went to the local ice cream parlor and, in a milk- shake-induced sugar haze, I seem to have lost track of it. Maybe that’s all for the best. Without it I am only reading one, two, three, four, five books/magazines at the same time.

Like I said, I think I have a problem.

Did I mention that I am a member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and April is the time members are supposed to read and vote on the nominees for the Derringer Awards?

And last week< a friend of mine asked me to read a book of his that is about to be published.

So I am feeling guilty for writing this when I should be reading my friend’s book, and when I read that I feel guilty for not getting to the library book which will soon be overdue, and when I’m reading that I know I should be reading the Derringer stories, and when I delve into them I remember that my wife is waiting for her chance at the Connie Willis book. Maybe I should let her read it first, do you think?

Did I mention I have a problem?

How many books are you reading?

The following is an excerpt from The Renaissance (1876) by British cultural, art, and literary critic Walter Pater (1839 – 1894). Although Pater was writing about “high” art, I think that his thesis—that in truly accomplished art, the content is virtually indistinguishable from its form—applies equally to popular short stories.

—JLW

ALL ART CONSTANTLY ASPIRES TOWARDS THE CONDITION OF MUSIC

by Walter Pater

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation—that the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape—should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.

This abstract language becomes clear enough, if we think of actual examples. In an actual landscape we see a long white road, lost suddenly on the hill-verge. That is the matter of one of the etchings of M. Alphonse Legros: only, in this etching, it is informed by an indwelling solemnity of expression, seen upon it or half-seen, within the limits of an exceptional moment, or caught from his own mood perhaps, but which he maintains as the very essence of the thing, throughout his work. Sometimes a momentary tint of stormy light may invest a homely or too familiar scene with a character which might well have been drawn from the deep places of the imagination.

Then we might say that this particular effect of light, this sudden inweaving of gold thread through the texture of the haystack, and the poplars, and the grass, gives the scene artistic qualities, that it is like a picture. And such tricks of circumstance are commonest in landscape which has little salient character of its own; because, in such scenery, all the material details are so easily absorbed by that informing expression of passing light, and elevated, throughout their whole extent, to a new and delightful effect by it. And hence the superiority, for most conditions of the picturesque, of a river-side in France to a Swiss valley, because, on the French river-side, mere topography, the simple material, counts for so little, and, all being very pure, untouched, and tranquil in itself, mere light and shade have such easy work in modulating it to one dominant tone. The Venetian landscape, on the other hand, has in its material conditions much which is hard, or harshly definite; but the masters of the Venetian school have shown themselves little burdened by them. Of its Alpine background they retain certain abstracted elements only, of cool colour and tranquillising line; and they use its actual details, the brown windy turrets, the straw-coloured fields, the forest arabesques, but as the notes of a music which duly accompanies the presence of their men and women, presenting us with the spirit or essence only of a certain sort of landscape—a country of the pure reason or half-imaginative memory.

Poetry, again, works with words addressed in the first instance to the pure intelligence; and it deals, most often, with a definite subject or situation. Sometimes it may find a noble and quite legitimate function in the conveyance of moral or political aspiration, as often in the poetry of Victor Hugo. In such instances it is easy enough for the understanding to distinguish between the matter and the form, however much the matter, the subject, the element which is addressed to the mere intelligence, has been penetrated by the informing, artistic spirit. But the ideal types of poetry are those in which this distinction is reduced to its minimum; so that lyrical poetry, precisely because in it we are least able to detach the matter from the form, without a deduction of something from that matter itself, is, at least artistically, the highest and most complete form of poetry. And the very perfection of such poetry often appears to depend, in part, on a certain suppression or vagueness of mere subject, so that the meaning reaches us through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding, as in some of the most imaginative compositions of William Blake, and often in Shakespeare’s songs, as pre- eminently in that song of Mariana’s page in “Measure for Measure”, in which the kindling force and poetry of the whole play seems to pass for a moment into an actual strain of music.

And this principle holds good of all things that partake in any degree of artistic qualities, of the furniture of our houses, and of dress, for instance, of life itself, of gesture and speech, and the details of daily intercourse; these also, for the wise, being susceptible of a suavity and charm, caught from the way in which they are done, which gives them a worth in themselves. Herein, again, lies what is valuable and justly attractive, in what is called the fashion of a time, which elevates the trivialities of speech, and manner, and dress, into “ends in themselves,” and gives them a mysterious grace and attractiveness in the doing of them.

Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material; the ideal examples of poetry and painting being those in which the constituent elements of the composition are so welded together, that the material or subject no longer strikes the intellect only; nor the form, the eye or the ear only; but form and matter, in their union or identity, present one single effect to the “imaginative reason,” that complex faculty for which every thought and feeling is twin-born with its sensible analogue or symbol.