SHIKARI, RATTLE, AND ROLL

by James Lincoln Warren

I have been asked by Janet Hutchings, editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, to make a podcast recording of my story “Shikari”, which I wrote specifically for their annual Sherlock Holmes tribute, the next of which will be the February 2012 issue. (I should mention that although Janet assures me that the story will see print, I really shouldn’t count my chicks before making the omelet, since I haven’t seen a contract yet.) The story is very long, and so I decided to record it at home in installments rather than wait until the next time Janet and I are in the same town, which will be in mid-September for Bouchercon in St. Louis, and do it all at once in her hotel room, as Mary Jane Maffini and I did for Mary Jane’s Agatha-winning story, “So Much in Common” in Bethesda earlier this year at Malice Domestic.

“Shikari” comes with its own specific set of difficulties along with the general ones of making a recording at home. Among the latter, you can include ambient noise, which in my neighborhood in West Los Angeles means regular emergency vehicle sirens, loud traffic, and helicopters orbiting overhead, along with the usual doorbells, ringing phones, and the ubiquitous bowling ball-dribbling upstairs neighbor (well, that’s what it sound like). These can be overcome by patience. But to address the former, there is nothing to be done but the application of industry.

“Shikari” features three first-person narrators, the first of whom is the putative “editor” of the piece, viz., yours truly, the other two both being well-educated Victorian Englishmen. Being Victorian and well-educated means that they most likely spoke with Received Pronunciation (“RP”) English accents. I am not English, except ethnically, and RP is not remotely my native accent, so there’s Problem 1. Problem 2 is that they are men of vastly different character, age, and experience, and their actual voices must as distinct from one another as their literary voices are.

Affecting a British accent, I am certain that I could never pass for an old Oxonian in Britain, but for my purposes, I think it’s sufficient simply to get close, to light the lamp of the Gentle Listener’s imagination, as it were. But that still requires some preparation. So I went through the typescript and made notations regarding particular pronunciations here and there. Sometimes this meant pointing out how the vowels should be pronounced in certain words. These can be very different: Americans pronounce “Afghanistan” with all three “a’s” short, as in “I am”, but in RP, it comes out closer to “Efganistahn”, where only the middle “a” is short. But the most difficult part was getting in the use of supernumerary “r’s” between words that end and begin in vowels or vowel sounds. For example: In RP, the word “war” is pronounced (more or less) as “waugh”1, and the “r” at the end is only sounded if the next word begins with a vowel, so “War Office” comes out as “Waugh Roffice”.

So the marks were made. Not perfectly, to be sure, and even if the marks are largely correct, I’m not claiming I can necessarily get my tongue around all of them, so the attentive Gentle Listener will no doubt detect that I am actually a Yank putting it on. So let it be written. But as Sergeant Preston of the Yukon never said to his faithful canine companion, “King, our job here is not quite done.” The problem of the sound of the three voices remained.

Jackie Sherbow, Janet’s Assistant Editor, advised me that the software that Dell Magazines uses to record their podcasts is Audacity, which has the great advantage of being freeware. So I downloaded it and started playing around with it. The first thing I noticed was that the recordings I made were very quiet, and the second thing I noticed was a lot of “white noise” (i.e., a hiss) in the background. No trouble—among the electronic effects available in Audacity is one for amplifying the signal, and another for noise reduction. And then I noticed something else: there’s an effect for changing pitch. This is intended for music, but it works equally well on a plain voice. I had to be careful, though, because it shifts one’s entire voice with all the attendant overtones, and an excessively liberal application makes it come out like a cartoon character—tweaking one’s voice too high turns one into a chipmunk, cast it too low and, ahem, one soundeth as one might speaketh employing the antipodal orifice.

I found that raising my voice up a half-step pitched me tenor, and that lowering my voice three quarter-tones made me sound something like Christopher Lee (which tickled me immensely). Here’s an example, with all four corrections applied:

“Shikari” Voices

Cool, huh?

The last problem I recognized was that I was reading much too fast. Most people who have grown up in Texas tend to talk in a slow, stately rhythm, but I rattle away like a tommy gun. Maybe overcompensating a little, now I’ve retarded my delivery so much that I’m worried the pace will be like unto blackstrap molasses in the most frigid of Februarys. But not to worry. Audacity also has a feature for changing tempo. We’ll see.

1. With apologies to Mr. Evelyn. [↩]

The THIEF WHO STOLE KNOWLEDGE

by Leigh Lundin

Imagine a world where a cartel wants to publish your work, which may receive worldwide distribution and be archived for centuries. They may not pay a lot; they may not pay at all. They might charge you a nominal fee to cover expenses.

But this is a prestigious publishing group. Like the ancient Library of Alexandria, they collected wisdom of the centuries, perhaps a cure for cancer, the secret of interstellar flight, or a translation of a pre-Biblical codex. Perhaps they published your mother or your great-grandfather and perhaps they published his great-grandfather. That’s not impossible– they house treatises dating from the 1600s.

If you don’t have an elite cartel library card and you want a copy of your own work, they’ll charge you $5, or $15, or more. You might desire they make your works publicly available for nothing, but they won’t. Alternatively, you might want to monetize that brilliant college thesis. That can’t happen. You may wish to independently republish your article. Nope, can’t do that either (except portions in ‘collected works’).

For the Good of Mankind

Surprisingly, this cartel is based upon the assumption that its members are supposed to educate and serve the public good, but in fact, the cartel makes a fine living hiding information and thwarting the unwashed public who might like to access it, sometimes members of the public who can little afford it.

The cartel could reasonably have based its business model on Project Gutenberg or Open Library, Google or Wikipedia, making information freely available, but why give wisdom away when you can make money secreting it and extort interested parties a thousand pennies at a time?

Robin Hood

Suppose an intellectual adventurer grows disgusted at this abrogation of public trust. He obtains one of the elite’s library cards. He begins to check out articles… five million articles. He doesn’t ‘steal’ them from the shelves, but he copies them presumably with an eye to making them freely available to one and all, rich and poor.

Mr. Swartz engaged in a certain amount of techie cat ‘n’ mouse with JSTOR and then MIT. Each time JSTOR blocked Swartz’s IP address, he bumped it by 1. At some point, JSTOR blocked an entire range of IP addresses, cutting off customers and shooting themselves in the financial foot. (Presumably government prosecutors blame this ‘outage’ on Swartz in their indictment.) MIT acted a little smarter, blocking Swartz’s MAC address (internal computer serial number), but again Swartz responded by spoofing a new MAC bumped by 1.

The cartel doesn’t like that. It calls the Sheriff of Nottingham and claims he’s stolen… er, excessively borrowed five million documents with the intent of sharing them, even though large numbers of these documents are public domain or might have other fair use waivers. The cartel demands authorities seize these works he stole, er, borrowed and fine him $1-million and toss him in prison for 35 years to teach freedom-loving cartel-haters a lesson. The prosecutor can’t figure out which legal theory applies, but they jail him just because.

Putting the Cartel Before the Hoarse

This cartel, which we’ll call JSTOR, and its prominent member, MIT, did exactly that to a Harvard fellow named Aaron Swartz. As closely as I make out, Mr. Swartz is a believer in freedom of knowledge and intellect… you know, the thing MIT and other universities are supposed to take seriously. MIT, like most publishers of academic journals, acts as a minion of this cartel, JSTOR. Indeed, apparently JSTOR threatened to terminate MIT’s access to the archives MIT contributes to.

Former Princeton University president William Bowen founded JSTOR (‘journal storage’) with good intentions. Rather than schools and libraries storing their own copies of journals (some obscure, some rare), JSTOR proposed outsourcing that part of the library in stored digital form. A benefit would be increased availability and searchability. For a fee.

But then JSTOR discovered something– in many cases they’d placed under lock and key the only source of certain documents, which made them very valuable indeed. And they owned the only key.

Who’s Minding the JSTOR?

They started in 1995 with seven libraries. Sixteen years later, 7000 libraries find themselves members. That’s a success story by most standards except for one minor point. These works of the ages are not freely available to mankind. That’s what Aaron Swartz protested by wishing to place public domain (and non-public domain) articles in the, well, public domain.

If he’d sabotaged the facility, he wouldn’t be threatened with 35 years or a $1,000,000 fine, prosecutorial over-reacting. Because he dared protest a unilateral decision made by those who financially benefit from the brains, sweat, and tears of the most intelligent authors on the planet, Mr. Swartz is considered worse than a violent criminal because he thwarted the intellectual establishment. JSTOR and MIT disingenuously claim they consider the matter closed– except it isn’t closed for Mr. Swartz.

Freeing Free Knowledge

I have great sympathy for Mr. Swartz. I research historical and technical information for my writing, but I can’t tell you how many times I hit a JSTOR brick wall or ‘paywall‘ as it’s called, cutting off that avenue of research– sometimes the only avenue of research.

I discussed this with my local library, which isn’t a JSTOR member, and with our resident librarian, Rob, who is. With JSTOR (and similar archival services), I can pay for individual articles, subscribe for a period of time (up to tens of thousands of dollars if I’m big and rich enough), or bribe pay a JSTOR member institution to let me peek at the goodies.

Publish, not Prosper

From an economic standpoint, it’s a losing proposition for the individual going it alone. Say I want to write an article on the Piltdown Man scandal. Using Google, I zero in on articles found in JSTOR finding The Man of Piltdown by George Grant MacCurdy, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Apr-Jun, 1914), pp. 331-336, price $12.

$12 for an article from a dead author that fell out of copyright long ago? Does a dead or living author or his family reap any part of my $12? No.

If I want to research a dozen articles, that’s $144 or more and I have no guarantee any of the articles might serve my needs. If I sell my resulting manuscript, I might be paid as little as $150 or nothing at all if I contribute it to certain blog or encyclopedia sites.

The Dutch Masters Brain Trust

In graduate school, a professor persuaded me to write a paper on a computer data structure technique to be published by Elsevier. As I recall, Elsevier rewarded authors with a discount to their journal. I looked up author benefits, considerably less than some vanity presses although Elsevier now offers free ‘e-prints’ as long as you don’t try to make money off your own article. Among the ‘rights’ (Elsevier’s rights, not yours) is this verbiage:

Authors of Elsevier-published articles may use them only for scholarly purposes as set out above and may not use or post them for commercial purposes or under policies or other mechanisms designed to aggregate and openly disseminate manuscripts or articles or to substitute for journal-provided services. This includes the use or posting of articles for commercial gain…

In other words, they can make money off it but authors can’t. They retain more crucial rights to the article than their contributors.

Robin the JSTOR

In protest of Swartz’s arrest, academic activist Greg Maxwell published an archive of 18,592 public domain articles from JSTOR’s Royal Society collection on the file-sharing site Pirate Bay. He says, "I find a lot of my interests land at the intersection of technology and public policy," which is why he’s often found on Wikipedia and Wikimedia, the organization that shares knowledge, not hides it.

NEITHER NOIR NOR NEO-NOIR

by John M. Floyd

Even though this is a blog about mystery/crime/suspense short stories, I sometimes veer off into the area of mystery/crime/suspense fiction in general, which includes movies. Among those I have written about in the past are Double Indemnity, Witness, The Spanish Prisoner, Dial M for Murder, Blood Simple, In Bruges, Psycho, and L.A. Confidential — and most seem to fall into the noir category, or in some cases (if there is such a thing) present-day noir.

“Organized” crime

The movie I’m covering today is neither. It’s a combination of totally different storylines about people in the Los Angeles area that interconnect during the course of the film, and the result is outstanding. I’m talking about Crash, the movie that won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2006 (defeating the critically-acclaimed frontrunner Brokeback Mountain), and will — like Chinatown — probably still be taught in film schools fifty years from now. For some reason it’s not well known, but believe me, it’s worth your time. (NOTE: This should not be confused with another feature film with the same title that came out in 1996, with Holly Hunter and James Spader, or with the 2008 TV series starring Dennis Hopper. Completely different shows. Enough said, there.)

This one stars Matt Dillon, Brendan Fraser, Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Ryan Phillippe, and many others, and takes chances that usually do not result in a hit film. It’s extremely slow-paced and moody, for one thing, and it features no superstars except maybe Bullock, and — as I mentioned — it jumps around and follows the stories of a lot of seemingly unrelated players. As always with great movies, however, the characters are well written and well acted: racist cop, immigrant shopkeeper, Hollywood director, pampered wife, carjackers, aging parents, drug addicts, etc.

Crash course

I can’t say enough about the construction of this movie. Paul Haggis’s direction and writing were top-notch (Crash took the Oscar that year for best screenplay as well), and I wasn’t surprised to learn that Haggis had also written Million Dollar Baby, which won Best Picture in 2004. Among other things, Crash includes two stunning plot twists that are perfectly set up and executed (they’ll make you want to stand up and cheer) and an absolutely satisfying ending, but the biggest and best thing about this film is the use of “arcs” that completely change the attitudes and the lives of almost a dozen different characters. That’s the kind of thing we as writers should strive for — and stories like this one can teach us that.

Crash is one of those intelligent crime films that manages to entertain as well as “illuminate.” (I love it when that happens, whether it’s a movie or a novel or a short story, and it seems to happen less and less these days.) Even its commercial tagline is clever, and appropriate too: “Moving at the speed of life, we are bound to collide with each other.”

STARLIGHT BY COACH

by Steven Steinbock

This week’s Bandersnatch is coming to you from seat #22, car #14 of the Amtrak Coast Starlight. The old man in the seat kitty-corner to me is watching “Uncle Buck” on his little DVD player. I can’t help myself; I keep glancing over at the seven inch screen. I’m laughing at the funny parts and getting choked up at the sentimental parts. I guess I’ve seen the film too many times.

A woman with wild gray hair and wilder gray eyes has walked up and down the aisle a number of times. I think she’s looking for her seat. Aren’t we all?

In the seat in front of the old man watching “Uncle Buck” is a little boy who has tired of the ride and is antsy after sitting in the same train car for six hours. Despite the father’s reassurances, the boy is telling his dad that he hates him. Poor kid has another sixteen hours of rail travel.

I’m taking the trip to central California to see some old friends. I’m getting older and the friends I’m seeing are even older than that. It’s kind of a sentimental journey. Several of the people I’ll be seeing – one man in particular – helped inspire the book I recently finished writing. He’s no longer the same man who first sparked the idea, but he continues, in strange inexplicable ways, to inspire me.

The whole summer has been that way. While in Seattle I’ve contacted people I haven’t seen in years. I called one man that I haven’t seen in more than forty years. (That’s not precisely true; I ran into him once in 1976 when he was working at a car wash). He was my best friend until my family moved two miles to the west and the friend and I lost contact. Two lousy miles. And the years go by. He and I are staying in contact and will try to get together when I return to Seattle four days from now.

I hadn’t planned it this way, but the train ride is turning itself into a metaphor before my eyes. As the world passes by through the window, I feel the days and years, and the people I’ve known pass by. Mile by mile the trees rush past while the clouds keep watch, seeming not to move.

You can’t go back. Thomas Wolfe said it better than I ever could. You can’t go back home to a young man’s dreams. But sometimes as we move forward, the people we’ve loved follow us like those clouds in the distance. Sometimes they’re lost behind the trees and buildings. Other times, as my train emerges into a clearing, they glow in the sunlight.

Nostalgia is a bitter-sweet box of chocolates. When you bite in, there are no assurances what to expect. You can choose which pieces to take and which to leave. The tastes are usually sweet but often surprising and sometimes you need to rush for a napkin so you can spit out a flavor that you don’t like any longer. Each piece you take leaves an empty spot in the box.

SCATTERED THOUGHTS

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

Once I started reading mysteries regularly my mind began to think in a different vein. I started to find criminal elements everywhere. I’m not sure this is healthy, but it aids my writing, so I’m not complaining.

Pouring milk into my breakfast cereal reminds me of missing children—and those who may take them, whether it is a stranger or a parent not happy with the court’s arrangements for visitation or custody. The cereal box itself could bring to mind chemical-enhancing drugs used in sports—which often begets thoughts of gambling, bookmaking, and racketeering. If the cereal box displays a happy-go-lucky magical creature, I wonder, what if someone put something hazardous inside the magical bits?

Media outlets—including TV, radio, print publications, and the Internet—are filled with news-breaking headlines that may be ominous, but perhaps I am only a bit cynical and paranoid about politicians right now. It could trigger more horror stories than mysteries, so I’ll give that story idea a pass for now.

I can’t help but notice suspicious characters.

Who are the two elderly men who walk the same busy street every day together—except they keep six feet of space between them at all times? They both look tired and yet, independent. I see them only on this one street and at different times of the day. They walk only on the east side of the street and keep their distance as they trudge along. I want to know where they are going and if they have a place to sleep at night. but there is something about them that warns me not to get close enough to ask. Maybe they are two veterans who refuse to abide by the rules of the nursing home and have escaped and live on the outskirts of town in a dugout they have packed with bits of useful-to-them items they find and they are playing out their own Survivor game.

What’s with the couple that’s always in the same chairs at the library no matter what time or day of the week I go there? While the man seems to be always reading something incredibly interesting, the woman flips page after page as if she is being paid by the page to do so. What’s their story? Perhaps they are spies waiting for their connection to whisper a code word and they will leap into action and save the world.

What about the new neighbor? Is he really retired or does he have a secret laboratory in the basement. No one sees him come and go and yet, surely he does buy groceries, gasoline and someone is cutting his hair regularly.

Has thinking like a mystery writer distorted my view of the world? Oh yes. I think it’s quite wonderful.

PT CRUISING

by Rob Lopresti

I’m back from our vacation in Port Townsend, a Victorian seaport on the Olympic Peninsula. (I think there must be an obscure Washington state law requiring the town to be described as a Victorian seaport. . . . Nobody ever calls it a nineteenth-century harbor town, for instance.)

The town’s unofficial motto is “We’re all here because we’re not all there.” That’s an usual example of aclean double entendre. Yes, they are embracing their eccentricity, but they are also saying “we don’t want to live in Seattle.” And this town of 9.000 is spiritually a million miles away from the city on the other side of the Sound.

This being a literary blog, let’s take a literary tour. Here is my favorite description of PT:

Years ago the Town with her rich dot of timber and her beautiful harbor was voted Miss Pacific Northwest of 1892 and became betrothed to a large railroad. Her happy founders immediately got busy and whipped up a trousseau of three- and four-story brick buildings, a huge and elaborate red stone courthouse, and sites and plans for enough industries to start her on a brilliant career.

Meanwhile all her inhabitants were industriously tatting themselves up large, befurbelowed Victorian houses in honor of the approaching wedding. Unfortunately almost on the eve of the ceremony the Town in one of her frequent fits of temper lashed her harbor to a froth, tossed a passing freighter up onto her main thorofare [sic] and planted seeds of doubt in the mind of her fiancé. Further investigation revealed that, in addition to her treacherous temper, she was raked by winds day and night, year in and year out, and had little available water. In the ensuing panic of 1893, her railroad lover dropped her like a hot potato and within a year or so was paying serious court to several more promising coast towns.

That was Betty MacDonald in The Egg and I, her bestselling memoir of life on a chicken farm just outside of town. It became a successful movie which spun off an even more popular series of flicks about Ma and Pa Kettle. A local family sued MacDonald, claiming they were the models for the Kettles and had been libeled. MacDonald took the stand and swore she had made the whole thing up. The jury believed her—or claimed to—and found for the defendant.

Long before the failed railroad romance J. Ross Browne visited Port Townsend. I have a special place in my heart for Mr. Browne because this Irish-born bureaucrat made his living on two kinds of writing: government reports and humor. Can anyone else in history boast of that particular combination?

Browne noted in 1857 that the local Indian chief was a drunk, but observed that he “and his amiable family were not below the average of the white citizens residing at that benighted place. With very few exceptions, it would be difficult to find a worse class of population in any part of the world. No less than six murders have occurred there during the past year. It is notorious for ‘beachcombers’ and outlaws of every description.”

And that was what he said in an official Treasury Department report. In his private publications he cut loose:

The houses, of which there must be at least twenty in the city and suburbs, are built chiefly of pine boards, thatched with shingles, canvas and wooden slabs . . . The streets of Port Townsend are paved with sand, and the public squares are curiously ornamented with dead horses and the bones of many dead cows, upon the beef of which the inhabitants have partially subsisted since the foundation of the city. This, of course, gives a very original appearance to the public pleasure-grounds, and enables strangers to know when they arrive in the city, by reason of the peculiar odor, so that even admitting the absence of lamps, no person can fail to recognize Port Townsend in the darkest night.

Inexplicably, the town fathers were displeased by Browne’s attentions and invited him to return for a full and frank discussion, which would no doubt have featured tar and feathers. Browne declined the honor. A few years later there was a gold rush in that part of the world and would-be miners rushed to what was (thanks to Browne) the only town on the Peninsula they had heard of. Proving again that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

A few years later PT was the scene of the Pacific Northwest’s second most famous bloodless battle (after the Pig War). This involved Customs Officer Victor Smith, of whom novelist Patricia Campbell said that he turned every friend into an enemy using “the alchemy of Smith’s personality.” Smith returned the compliment, calling Port Townsend “a rotten borough whose people fared so sumptuously on the spoils of government that their eyes stuck out with fat.”

During the Civil War Smith went back to D.C. to try to persuade the government to move the Customs office to Port Angeles. When he returned on the revenue cutter Shubrick, he discovered that the people had convinced his assistant to take over and lock him out of the Customs House. Marines on the Shubrick threatened to open fire if the House was not opened. Campbell takes up the story in her novel Cedarhaven:

The file of marines marched smartly away from the Customs House and lined up beside the gangplank of the cutter.

They are going to do it, Genia thought. They are really going to do it! If I stay here I will be blown to bits, like Julie said. Reason told her to fly, but a delicious languor held her captive.

The officer on the Shubrick’s deck had a watch in his hand. When he put it in his pocket and drew out a pistol—he would signal with that, she supposed–the door of the Custom House burst open. . . .

They had surrendered. They had spoiled it all.

Novelist Ivan Doig wrote about the town in Winter Brothers, his excellent non-fiction book about yet another Northwest eccentric, James Swan:

Port Townsend always has lived a style of boom and bust and that record of chanciness is a main reason I cherish the town. In a society of cities interested most in how svelte their skyscrapers are, Port Townsend still knows that life is a dice game in the dirt. I have been in and out of the place as often as I could these past dozen years and I can almost feel in the air as I step from the car whether the town is prospering or drooping. Small shops will bud in the high old downtown buildings. My next visit, they have vanished . . .

[I]n its early years the town was noted for whiskey so strong it was suspected to be a vile compound of alcohol red pepper, tobacco and coal oil. The quality of Port Townsend’s early inhabitants occasionally was questioned in similar tones, as when a transplanted Virginian assessed his period of residence: ‘Suh, when I first came here, this town was inhabited by three classes of people–Indians, sailors, and sons of bitches. Now I find that the Indians have all died, and the sailors have sailed away.

The combination of Victorian buildings, winding hills and ocean fogs make PT a natural location for spooky stories. Jack Cady wrote The Off Season, a comic novel about a town in which buildings and centuries shift their foundations and ghosts go on strike.

Our founders, mostly from Puritan New England, came to this frontier coast and built big houses. Gloom and mist, eternal rain, criminality went into building the town–smuggling, prostitution, Chinese bond slaves–and caused the builders to feel depressed and guilty. Recall, also their frontier isolation. The green forest pressed close, as it does today. The sea crashed down the Strait and battered beaches.

Mysteries seem to be underrepresented here. P.J. Alderman has written two supernatural mystery novels set in the non-existant Port Chatham. Haunting Jordan is the first.

The latest (2011) novel set here is Spam vs. the Vampire, by local fantasy writer Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. Spam is a cat. The vampire is a real monster, not one of those beautiful Twilight phonies from the west side of the Olympic Peninsula.

Other writers associated with PT include poet Richard Hugo, science fiction master Frank Herbert, and pioneer Ezra Meeker.

Meanwhile, back at the fort

The music event that brought us here was held at Fort Worden, a few miles north of the main part of town. The fort was built to defend the entrance of Puget Sound. It later turned into a state park, but it still has its cool drill field and army barracks. Remember An Officer and a Gentleman? The “air force base” where Richard Gere trained was Fort Worden.

Tucked away in the white army buildings is Copper Canyon Press, founded by poet Sam Hamill.

You can walk north of the Fort and see the gun emplacements that stood guard over the Sound for fifty years. They never fired a shot in anger. Hoping you the same.

BYE-BYE BORDERS

by Melodie Johnson Howe

Borders is liquidating. Barnes & Noble survived, but not without closing down many of its stores. You could say B & N saw the future of eBooks and Borders didn’t.

I remember the outcry when Borders first opened. This was the wholesaling of books, this was going to ruin all the independents, this was worst thing that could happen to the book world! For most of the independents it was. And as with the eReader , I felt guilty when I went into Borders, and not my local independent.

But Borders proved it was great at selling books. Publishers began to rely on them. Sales reps soon had an editorial say in what would sell and what wouldn’t. In other words, what was published and what wasn’t. Authors and publishers began to rely on the big stores and what they wanted. Borders was cruel for mid-list authors. They didn’t fit into their “big book” concept. Soon many mid-list authors were being dropped as the publishers went greedily along with Borders’ “big is better” thinking.

A novel’s placement in any bookstore is important, but it was hugely significant with Borders. They could make or break an author. Still books that nobody thought would sell did, but these books were not placed in the front of the store. They were hidden in the back under such categories as Human Psychology, or Literature for Dummies.

Never once did I walk into our neighborhood Borders and feel at home. I knew I was supposed to. They had comfy chairs for reading. They had an espresso maker as loud as a train. In fact they had a small cafe where you could buy iced mochas, cookies, and sandwiches. I’m surprised they didn’t cater. The store was filled with people. The young clerks would run around with buds in their ears so they could, I guess, find a book for you by asking the Wizard of Oz. But it was the size of the store that got to me. It was big enough to sell refrigerators or beds and linens. In fact our Borders is now a Marshalls Department Store. It’s a perfect fit.

In Santa Barbara, the homeless loved Borders. They hung out in front around the remaindered or deeply discounted book tables. Some played their guitars and beat their drums to rhythm of the rattled music in their heads. Others lounged at tables I meant for the avid readers/buyers. I remember one lone woman who stayed apart under the shade of a portico where she parked her shopping cart neatly stacked with all the pieces of debris that were important to her. Her face was painfully red and her thin brown hair twisted in clumps around her slumped shoulders. She berated herself endlessly. Then she disappeared, but her cart remained, undisturbed. She stays with me. Borders doesn’t.

What seems to go unmentioned in this demise of the big bookstores is not the clueless clerks, but the managers who tried to bring writers into the stores for signings and talks. In Santa Barbara and Goleta they worked hard to get reader/buyers in. They loved books and authors. They tried to do their best for Borders. But they were small cogs in a giant wheel that wasn’t turning. Decisions were being made far, far away and nobody was listening to the people on the ground. Toward the end Borders began to sell stationery in an email world. The wheel fell over.

I for one am not upset about their demise, except for the thousands of people out of work in a terrible economy. I’m looking forward to the new world of books, whatever that entails. Amazon could care less about what I think, but I suggest they take a good hard look at the dinosaur bones of Borders and remember that it can happen to the biggest.