The Brits have many differing reputations – not all of them good. We binge-drink. We paint Union Jacks on our faces and run riot at sporting events abroad. We are obsessed with the cult of talentless celebrity (being ‘a celebrity’ is now a recognised ambition for school-leavers). We will sue for libel at the drop of a hat. And if that hat lands on our foot, we’ll sue you for personal injury as well. Our politicians promise the earth when they’re in opposition, then once they get into power they renege and cheat on their expenses … oh, hang on, maybe that last point isn’t so unique to this country.
The engineering brilliance of the Victorians has been transformed into a nation of fun-pubs and asylum seekers, shirkers, chinless wonders, boarded-up high streets and blame-culture ‘you-must-not-have-any-fun-in-case-you-hurt-yourself’ Health & Safety petty bureaucracy.
Sounds like a cue for Stone Sour:
But, the Brits do have their good side. Our military, while under-supported and under-equipped, are still regarded as a superb fighting force. The vast red brick factories of the Industrial Revolution have given way to small pockets of technical ingenuity.
A visit to the Coventry Motor Museum, where they have a display of Richard Noble’s two land-speed record-breaking cars, Thrust 2 and Thrust SSC, tells you as much as you need to know about our abilities to improvise in remarkable ways.
And while we don’t do Spectacle quite as well as the Americans …
… political plain speaking quite as well as the Australians …
… and can’t run a railway anywhere near as well as the Japanese …
… you have to admit that we do a pretty good line in Pomp and Ceremony:
But one thing the Brits do find it enormously difficult to do is open up and Share.
I don’t know why this should be. Maybe something of that stiff upper lip colonial mentality still remains, but I find it very hard to unload emotionally onto strangers, to talk about what I earn, or discuss what we paid for our house. If someone remarks on my dress, I’m far more likely to confess that I bought it in a mega-sale than smile sweetly and accept the praise. I once said about Charlie Fox that she took a punch easier than she took a compliment, and maybe there’s a lot of her in me, or vice versa. I may get a lot of things across in my writing that I should have unloaded onto my therapist – if I had a therapist. (That’s another thing Brits don’t do – therapy.)
So, while others are prepared to strip themselves bare in public, I prefer to keep things just a little more bottled up, to use it in another way. Just because I don’t talk about my emotions, doesn’t mean I don’t have any, or can’t access them. I’d rather think of them as the flames in an internal combustion engine rather than a bonfire. Maybe it’s little more than a writing technique, but everyone goes about this job in their own way.
I spent last weekend at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, where I ran into our Tess who was delightful enough to be singing the praises of my books. (And, being a Brit, I’m getting embarrassed even typing that …) as well as a whole host of other literati. I was struck once again by the generosity of the writing crowd. When I mentioned to Al Guthrie that I’m bringing out the early Charlie Fox books in e-format next month, he immediately offered to interview me for his Criminal-E blog. Lee Child readily agreed for me to use the introduction he wrote for the Busted Flush edition of KILLER INSTINCT in the e-version as well, and said he’d link to his own site. And I had four approaches from agents, who’d just learned that I had, with much regret, parted company from my own.
Next month I should have an e-anthology – which I’m convinced should be called an e-thology – of Charlie short stories, and the first five novels being launched in e-format for the first time. I may well be singing and dancing about that a LOT. So, being a Brit, I shall apologise in advance for such vulgar self-promotional activities, but I hope you’ll forgive my excitement.
So, ‘Rati, what are the best and worst characteristics of your fellow countrymen (and women, of course)? Alternatively, what characteristic is often exaggerated in books or movies, that really annoys you? (Only, if you’re a Brit, you’ll probably be too polite to say so …)
This week’s Word of the Week is giraffiti, which is vandalism spray-painted very, very high …
When I was in medical school in London, I traveled a lot. I’d decided that while I was young, I had no money, but I had time, and that once my career kicked into gear, my opportunity to rattle around the world would be lost. Whenever possible, I took electives in foreign countries, and every school vacation, I tried to get away somewhere interesting.
So it was that I ended up in Cairo, in a squalid little concrete block hotel not far from the endless deafening, traffic jam that is Tahrir Square (next to which, by the way, is the Egyptian Museum; I don’t know if they’ve renovated it since my last visit, but it was astonishing in a Raiders of the Lost Ark kind of way, a handsome old building with sandstone walls and marble floors, stuffed with huge, ancient statues and sarcophagi and dusty wood and glass display cases holding 5,000 year old cat statuettes and canopic jars and whatnot. I recognized many pieces from the archeology books in my father’s study; around each corner was an exhibit even more amazing than the last.)
It was a memorable stay. I was paranoid about theft, so one of my Third World hotel protocols was to hide my passport on top of the largest piece of furniture. When I reached up onto the armoire, I felt something smooth under my fingers; I took down the filthiest pornographic magazine I’d ever seen, a glossy German language celebration of a very pale, blonde dwarf and her obsession with huge, impressively-endowed black men. The porn mag was an exhilarating find – a number of the activities contained within were outside the realm of what I’d previously thought of as “sex”.
In the hotel’s lounge, I met a young Japanese guy – I’d been studying Japanese at night school, and, since he didn’t speak English, I banged out a few of my best verbs and nouns, and found to my amazement that we were actually able to communicate. He was one of the most unusual people I’ve met while traveling. No, he hadn’t visited the Egyptian Museum. No, he hadn’t seen the pyramids. How long have you been here? Five weeks, he said. He had no interest in Cairo as a place; he just wanted to be there. Why?, I asked.
He explained that he was following the footsteps of his hero, the French Decadent poet Arthur Rimbaud, who had apparently spent seven weeks convalescing in Cairo in the 1880’s. In another two weeks, my new friend hoped to go on to Ethiopia by land, although he was having some difficulties because of unrest at the border. When he got to Harar, where Rimbaud had lived, he intended to spend a month there. Again, he’d stay in a hotel, lying on his bed and smoking Marlboro Red Label 100’s, concentrating on being in the place his hero had once inhabited.
Rimbaud was a fascinating man. One of France’s greatest poets, he stopped writing before he was 21, and got a real job. He scandalized literary Paris by his affair with Paul Verlaine, who ended up shooting him. Rimbaud turned out to be not really the job-having type; he spent much of his time walking around Europe, then took work that would get him abroad. In Ethiopia (then Abyssinia), he worked as a gun-runner; claims that he was also a slaver have been rejected in recent years, but were still part of the man’s mystique at the time I met his Cairo Superfan.
At the end of the week, when I left for Luxor, the Japanese guy was still lying on his bed, his door cracked half-way open to the hall. I stuck my head into his room, stifling in the heat and cigarette smoke, to say goodbye; he was hopeful that his visa for Ethiopia would come through at the end of the week.
Over the years, I’ve thought about him often. There was something both pure and absurd about the conceptual plane on which he’d chosen to exist. To travel 6,000 miles and skip the Great Pyramid of Giza (the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing, fer chrissakes!) seemed a little nuts, but I liked his dogmatic insistence on using his travel time for what he wanted it to be, not for what he was expected to do.
The next trip I made – a week in Paris – was largely influenced by his example. Indeed, my travel patterns since probably owe him a debt, as I have evolved into primarily a sensual traveler. I don’t feel a pressing need to see or do anything in particular when I’m at a destination. I’m there for the physical experience of the place, not the tourist highlights – I don’t get up at the crack of dawn so that I can fit in the Baths of Caracalla before I hit the Coliseum. I’m much happier sitting on a bench in a park, watching the people go by, or, better yet, enjoying a three hour lunch at a café, chatting with the waiter, reading a book, enjoying being not where I normally am.
Anyway, my post-Cairo Rimbaud fanatic trip to Paris: I decided to devote my week there to the study of early Modernism. I’d stay in my hotel and listen to and read about Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, and read and read about T.S. Eliot’s epic poem The Waste Land. I’m not sure why I chose the Wagner – probably because Eliot had quoted from it in The Waste Land, and because Wagner had a reputation as being difficult (I was a cultural snob back then, predisposed to like something if it was challenging).
I took the train to Paris, and checked into the frumpiest of single-starred hotels by that glum industrial estuary of railroad tracks that fan out behind Gare du Nord. I unpacked my suitcase, arranged my books carefully on the battered desk and setting out my Sony Discman, a stack of batteries, and the 1981 Leonard Bernstein recording of Tristan, with Peter Hoffman singing Tristan and Hildegard Behrens singing Isolde. I had a shower, went down to the street and bought a croquet monsieur and a bottle of Orangina, ate my dinner, and then began.
I don’t have that much to say about the Wagner – it’s an astonishing piece of music, almost four hours of flowing and ebbing music centered around a theme of love, ecstasy and death, culminating in the infamous “liebestod”, where the protagonists die while in a transcendent state of love, a recurrent theme in classical literature. Tristan is a tragedy in the grand tradition, with a mass die-off at the end, tonally somewhere between Romeo and Juliet and Reservoir Dogs. The opera is still important to me – indeed, my next tattoo will be a quote from it.
Here’s Jessye Norman singing the final aria as the dying Isolde, consumed by love for her dead Tristan:
Mostly, though, the week was dedicted to The Waste Land, the 434-line poem written by the American/English poet Thomas Stearns Eliot, first published in 1922. The first time I had encountered it (at a poetry reading competition when I was about 15), it had blown me away. I thought it was one of the most astonishingly beautiful things I’d ever heard – and I had no idea what it was about.
A sidenote: In England, you decide what you want to do with your life when you’re about 13, and then tailor your classes appropriately. Since I was going into medicine, I’d abandoned my favourite subjects (English, French, Latin) to concentrate on Chemistry, Physics and Biology. I felt cruelly deprived of an arts education; it didn’t seem fair to me that other students got to sit in class and learn about stuff like The Waste Land, while I had to study frog reproductive systems and the structure of benzene. So I tracked down a copy of the poem, and read it earnestly.
Now The Waste Land is an almost postmodern tapestry of quotes and allusions, with every quote and allusion tacking the interpretation to fairly specific meanings. There are quotes from Dante, Wagner, Rimbaud-shooter Verlaine, from Hindu, Christian and Buddhist religious texts, and references to anthropologic works on ancient fertility myths. In short, I was way out of my depth. But the language was magnificent, lyrical and lapidary. And much of the poem is uttered in snippets of dialogue or monologue, the words so precise that the characters, undescribed and unsignalled in the text, spring vibrantly to life.
Here. From the first section of the poem, “The Burial of the Dead”:
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
Beyond any deeper meaning, the language is vital and immediate, completely enchanting. I read it over and over, accepting that I didn’t understand it, accepting that Eliot’s abundant annotations were also beyond my scope, just thrilling to the words, to the sounds, to the imagery.
By the time I got to Paris, I was older, and maybe a bit more world-weary; after all, by that point, I had delivered babies, and watched men die. In my hotel room, I read about The Waste Land late into the night, going beyond the text to develop a deeper understanding of the origins of the work in the years following the maelstrom of death and ruin that was the First World War, a recent event at the time Eliot was writing. And I read about the fertility rituals that inform the poem and its sources, about the wounded Fisher King. I understood Eliot to be presenting European civilization as almost zombie-like, decayed but refusing to die, endlessly revived to stagger on without beliefs, without the succor of religion or myth. I was able to synthesize the poem better, to recognize its referents and their meanings.
But along the way, the poem seemed to dull for me. It might have been recognizing the anguish it contained, or becoming too conscious of its complex infrastructure of invoked works, but the poem lost a little of its life, a little of its ecstatic beauty. I returned to London, set it aside, and went on with my life. I liked recognizing the poem when it was cited in song lyrics and magazine articles and book titles (Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, Iain Banks’ Consider Phlebas and Look to Windward, and many others), but for a long while, I rarely looked at the work itself.
Luckily, over time I’ve forgotten much of what I’d learned about the poem. The Waste Land gradually resumed its potency (a phenomenon which is the reverse of the poem’s main theme), and I treasure it again. I read it once every six months or so – fairly often for a poem from which I could probably recite long passages from memory.
Recently, Faber has released a fantastic iPad app, The Waste Land. It’s a labour of love, and it’s really wonderful. It includes the entire poem, and is beautifully designed so that you can effortlessly appreciate the text in a number of different ways. By sliding your fingers across the screen, the published poem is replaced with a scan of the original manuscript, heavily marked up by Eliot, the poet Ezra Pound (to whom Eliot gave a huge amount of credit for his work on the poem) and Vivien Eliot (who recent scholarship suggests had a much larger part in its creation than has previously been supposed).
But that’s not all! When you tap on a particular line of text, generous annotations appear in a side panel; the annotations are much more accessible than Eliot’s original notes. And there are a series of video interviews with prominent literary or cultural figures discussing different aspects of the poem.
But wait – there’s more! Tired of reading? Just let any one of five (5) famous people read the poem to you! The words scroll slowly by as you enjoy listening to recordings of Eliot himself (two different), Ted Hughes, Alec Guinness and… Viggo Mortensen as they bring this magnificent work to life!
There actually is still more: the prominent Irish actress Fiona Shaw (Marnie on the current season of True Blood) does a filmed dramatic reading of the piece in a battered but very lovely house. All of the readings have their different strengths; Eliot’s own recordings have never made the poem sound as good as I hear it in my head. (Or out loud – somewhat embarrassingly, I’ve read this poem. To chicks. In bed.) Hughes’s reading is reverent and workmanlike, but poor Guinness is hard for me to listen to – I keep waiting for him to say something about Mos Eisley Spaceport, or using the Force. Viggo’s reading is surprisingly good – again, reverent, but modest and earnest. He’s not as strong at the monologue/dialogue parts as is Fiona Shaw, but she’s a stage actor. And also, she overdoes the bits with the – what, omniscient narrator? – who hovers in the background as the poem’s spine.
Anyway, I highly recommend the app; it’s the perfect introduction to one of the most important pieces of literature of the 20th Century — and one of my fondest artistic epiphanies. I can’t help but think that it would’ve really enriched my cloistered week in Paris. Then again, I suppose that finding unfamiliar pornography on the armoire might also have done the trick; an epiphany of an altogether different sort.
So, what about you? Have you had any (preferrably youthful and embarrassing) artistic epiphanies? Has a book or play or piece of music given you sudden insight into a universe you’d barely understood before?
This year marks the release of my fourteenth thriller. It also marks the fourteenth time I’ve gone on book tour, and after nearly two weeks on the road, I finally got home last night. Now I have about 36 hours to catch up on my sleep, visit my mom, tackle my email and my stuffed in-box, do my laundry, and then re-pack my suitcase before I board a plane for the next two-week stint on the road, this time in the UK.
Oh, and I have to write this blog post. Which explains why this may be short and I may be just a tad distracted. When you cross too many time zones in a matter of days, the brain does tend to fade out on you.
After so many years, the various tours blend together. One reporter asked me if I’d ever been to his town before. I sat flummoxed for a moment, because I just couldn’t remember. And no wonder we forget where we’ve been. All we see is airports, the inside of bookstores and radio stations and media escorts’ cars, plus a numbing succession of hotel rooms. I’ve gone days in a row without time for lunch, much less sightseeing. I’ve learned to eat when I can and sleep when I can. And yet, every single moment of the tour, I never forget how lucky I am to be on tour. It’s a privilege that not every author enjoys, and despite the grueling schedule and the lost sleep, it’s exactly where I want to be.
I also relish the chance to see familiar faces. In Cincinnati/Dayton, I’ve had the same media escort since my very first book. Through the years, Kathy Tirschek and I have traded family news and shared the ups and downs of the business. When I get to Phoenix, I always look forward to seeing Evelyn Jenkins, who’s sure to point me to the hot new restaurants, and Barbara Peters at Poisoned Pen Bookstore, who was one of the first booksellers in the country to rave about my debut novel, HARVEST. We’ve been in this business together long enough to see the changes.
And there certainly have been changes. When I started out, the independents were the stores for an author to visit: Joseph Beth, Hawley-Cooke, Davis Kidd, Kepler’s, Cody’s, Stacey’s, and Chapter Eleven. Then there was Waterstones in Boston, Complete Mystery Bookstore in Portsmouth, Bookland in Maine, and the Mystery Bookstore in Los Angeles. Of course, there were also visits to chain bookstores , and every tour would usually include stops at Barnes and Noble and Waldenbooks and Borders.
But as the years went by, many of those beloved independents vanished. In Hawaii, the venerable Honolulu Book Shops was squashed by the arrival of Borders. The era of the big box stores had arrived, and I’d arrive in a city to find that the little mystery bookshop I’d visited just a year ago was no more. Waterstones disappeared. So did Cody’s and Stacey’s. Shops you thought would live forever instead withered on the vine.
This year, there’s been a strange turnabout. Borders has closed half its stores. Suddenly places like Maui, where Borders took out all the independent competition, is left without a bookstore. As chain stores close, whole swathes of the country become bookstore poor, and customers are forced to rely on Amazon.com or grocery stores to buy books. Add to that the popularity of e-readers and the transition toward 50% e-sales, and it’s harder and harder to just drop into a local bookstore to browse for print books.
But … what’s this I’m seeing? In Scottsdale, at the Poisoned Pen, the crowd for my latest book event was the largest ever. In Maui, the local populace is trying to lure a bookseller, any bookseller, to open a shop. Maybe a mid-sized town can’t support a big chain store, but a smaller neighborhood independent — the ones we used to see everywhere — just might be able to make it again.
So now we seem to be cycling back to where I started, where the little bookseller is once again a treasured part of the local community. I witnessed that just yesterday in the village of Bucksport, Maine, where Bookstacks has managed to become a popular stop in town. I see it in Half Moon Bay at Bay Books, which has become a destination for book lovers from miles around. Yes, we’ve probably lost a lot of print readers permanently to the lure of the e-book. But there’ll always be a core group of readers who want a place where they can ask for recommendations, browse the stacks, and talk to a bookseller about what to buy Uncle Bob for Christmas.
(As often happens here on the ‘Rati, a couple of us will be thinking about the same thing in different ways . . .I just read JT’s post from Friday. Her letter of love is so beautiful. Take a few minutes to read it if you haven’t already. And congratulations to JT once again for a well earned award! )
Two weeks ago, I went to the farmer’s market closest to my house. It’s just getting established and there aren’t many vendors, but I appreciate not having to drive across town to buy organic and locally nurtured elegant golden beets, crunchy lemon cucumbers, ruffled patty pan squash, hot green chiles. Our market also has a few brave fine artists – painters, photographers, potters — and though I’m unlikely to buy any of their pieces due to my current monetary constraints, I do like to talk with them.
Artists tend to be interesting people, forced to create because of an inner yearning that I can certainly relate to. I can also relate to their selling experience. Any writer who has done a mall book signing has sat in a booth or at a table watching people walk by without buying or saying a thing.
On this particular Saturday, I was feeling bleak . . . melancholy . . . bummed. I knew that going to the market would be therapeutic; fresh, beautiful produce always makes me happy.
On the way out of the market area, I stopped to chat with a ceramicist named Holly Kuehn One thing led to another and of course I mentioned that I write. Nearby, a woman kept looking our way with that concentrated curiosity of an eavesdropper. She hadn’t entered the book, so I decided to help Holly sell some of her work. I loudly admired a group of tiles depicting cranes in flight and suggested to the woman that she come in and admire them too. As soon as the woman entered, I walked outside and the artist and I resumed our conversation.
“What’s your name? I’d like to look up your books,” said Holly.
“Just look up The Clovis Incident; you’ll find my name more easily that way than trying to key it in,” I said.
And that’s when the woman next to us squealed and opened her purse.
“Here it is!” she said, pulling out one of my brochures. “See? Right here. Pari Noskin Taichert.” She grinned as if winning a prize and called her husband and friends over. “Look. This is her! She’s the one who wrote those books I’m making you read.” And then back to me. “I’m your biggest fan!”
She proceeded to explain why she had the brochure in her purse in the first place. “I went to a bookstore the other day and they didn’t seem to know who you were so I was going back to show them this.”
Is it trite to say she made my day?
Is it trite to say that I had a marvelous time this last Saturday meeting Allison Davis (of the many comments here on Murderati)? That it, too, brought me tremendous joy?
Or what about the couple who showed up at my door several years ago? I’d met them at my first Malice Domestic and they became convention friends; we’d seek each other out each year. Well, one day the doorbell rang here in ABQ and there they both stood . . . looking a little sheepish.
Yes it was a bit weird, but it was also lovely. They were right too; I would’ve been upset to know they’d traveled through NM and hadn’t stopped by. A few years later, their visit was made even more precious when I went to my last Malice and found out that the husband had died of skin cancer . . .What a gift to have seen him here in NM, to have seen him smiling and happy and to be able to hold on to that beautiful memory.
Perhaps there are people who become so famous that their readers (sometimes aka fans) devolve into nuisances. I can’t imagine it. To me, it’s an incredible blessing to meet someone who has taken hours of his or her life to spend reading what I’ve written.
Every thank-you is an honor.
So today’s questions are:
Do you thank writers, musicians, actors or other artists in some way?
If so, who’s the last one you did?
. . . and if you don’t thank these creatives, do me a favor and try it. You may or may not get a response, but you might just make someone’s day. And good karma never hurt anyone.
Because then-President Ronald Reagan made it famous by appropriating it for a “no new taxes” speech to the American Business Conference in 1985, most people think . . .
. . . is the greatest line Inspector Harry Callahan of the San Francisco Police Department ever uttered.
But I beg to differ.
Clint Eastwood has snarled a lot a memorable things over the course of the five films in which he’s played the iconic Dirty Harry (DIRTY HARRY, MAGNUM FORCE, THE ENFORCER, SUDDEN IMPACT and THE DEAD POOL), but in my opinion, as meaningful snippets of film dialogue go, his “make my day” line doesn’t hold a candle to the one he dropped, more than once, in MAGNUM FORCE:
“A man’s got to know his limitations.”
While the “man” Harry was talking about was his two-faced supervising lieutenant (played to hair-raising perfection by Hal Holbrook), his statement could have applied just as easily to writers as policemen. Because the writer who’s constantly working beyond his limitations — which is to say, outside the boundaries of his innate strengths — is probably not writing very well.
“Limitations?” you say. “I don’t believe in limitations!”
And that’s understandable, of course. Who among us wants to think that there are things we would like to write that we can’t? Things, in fact, that we may be ill-suited to ever write particularly well? Such ideas run counter to everything we’ve ever learned about the power of positive thinking and the indomitable creative spirit.
Still, I think there’s something to Dirty Harry’s declaration.
One of the most common fears we professional writers have is that an unpublished novel from out of our past will someday be discovered and published, to great critical abuse, after we’re dead. Something we’ve determined should die unborn will instead be dredged from the depths of our effects and made public the moment we’ve been lowered into the ground. It’s a terrible thought, isn’t it? And yet, I don’t happen to have this particular concern. I don’t have it because none of the dozen or so novels I attempted to write, prior to finally publishing FEAR OF THE DARK, would add up to 200 pages. FEAR OF THE DARK was the first novel-length manuscript I ever completed; all the others petered out and died after two or three chapters. (And this is a very good thing, people, believe me. They were all dreadful.)
There were many reasons for all the false starts: lack of skill, preparation and commitment chief among them. But one of the main reasons most of these novels died on the vine was that, in each case, the realization inevitably dawned on me that I was trying to write a book I was not equipped to write. It was not my book. Instead, it was a book outside my realm of competence: too big, too complex, too far removed from my particular life experience.
I loved spy novels, so I tried to write spy novels. I enjoyed comic westerns, so I tried to write a comic western. Science fiction, horror, coming-of-age melodramas — if I read it and loved it, I tried to write it, and almost always with the same disappointing result: an unreadable, unconvincing manuscript. Only when I set my sights on FEAR OF THE DARK — a classic, hardboiled private eye novel that fit right in the groove of my interests and skill set at the time — did I write and finish a book that felt like my very own.
Did I do the right thing in pulling the plug on all those other manuscripts, rather than soldier on to each one’s ultimate conclusion? I think I did. I could have done a ton of research to fake my way to the very end of one or two, sure, but I don’t think that would have accomplished much, because it wasn’t just an insufficient knowledge of the material involved that made me the wrong person to be writing these particular books. It was the fact that I had little or no personal perspective on them; I was a foreigner trying to write a book only a local could really do justice to.
I know this all sounds like an argument for that tired, age-old piece of advice that says a writer should only write what he knows, but that’s not what I’m suggesting at all. What I am suggesting is that, just because you can learn all there is to know about something and then write a book about it, that doesn’t mean you should. How well suited you are to write a given book doesn’t begin and end with how well informed you are about its subject matter. There are other qualifications to consider as well, such as:
Insight
What insight, based upon your own personal or professional experiences, do you have into the material? Will you be writing from the inside looking out, or from the less advantageous perspective of an outsider trying to peer in?
Passion
What reasons do you have to be passionate about this book? What makes it one you need to write, rather than one you’d simply like to write?
Motivation
Have you decided to write this particular book because it appeals to you artistically, or are you simply chasing the dime? Would this still be your project of choice if all commercial considerations were set aside?
Confidence
Is this a book you can write with a level of confidence the reader can actually feel? Or will your self-doubts regarding your command of the material, regardless of how much research you’ve done, be noticeable on every page?
The Fun Quotient
Yes, writing is work, and it’s not supposed to be all fun and games, but a book that’s well-suited to your talents and interests should, on some level, be enjoyable to write. If, instead, you find writing it feels like a daily stint on the San Quentin rock pile, you may very well be writing somebody else’s novel, not yours.
In baseball, they call the area around the plate in which a pitched ball is most likely to be pounded by a given batter his “wheelhouse,” and I believe all writers have wheelhouses of their own. That’s where your best work lies. Over time, as you grow as a writer, your wheelhouse grows naturally right along with you, broadening the range of material you can write reasonably well. But unless you’re one of those rare genetic mutations who are capable of writing anything they choose with equal brilliance, there will always be books that reside outside your wheelhouse, and those are the ones you’d be better off leaving alone. Taking a swing at them instead — to run with my baseball metaphor just a little while longer — is more likely to earn you a strikeout than a homerun.
There’s a published author of my very casual, online acquaintance who does a great deal of crowing about the diversity of his work and his determination to write in and across all genres. It seems he’s intent on writing any book, for any market, that suits his fancy. From an artistic point of view, this sort of blind ambition may be admirable, but as a business plan, I think it’s a disaster, because it’s based upon a rather vain assumption of professional infallibility that few, if any of us, can honestly claim. Anyone less than a literary phenom, in fact, following this guy’s formula, is going to write some books that work and a lot more that don’t, and surely life is too short to be wasting time writing the latter just to flaunt one’s disdain for boundaries.
Let me state for the record that none of this is meant to imply that a writer shouldn’t always try to stretch himself, or make a constant effort to avoid being pigeonholed. Versatility is a wonderful thing. I am, however, suggesting that smart authors assess their strengths, weaknesses and comfort level with certain types of material, honestly and accurately, and prioritize the things they write accordingly, for their best possible chance of success.
And they don’t much care how much credit they’re given for being someone who can write anything they damn well please.
Questions for the class: Name an author you love to read, but wouldn’t dare attempt to imitate, for the reasons I’ve stated above. Or instead, make an argument for why you think no kind of book should be off-limits to you.
(FINAL NOTE: The title for this post is another favorite outtake of mine from one of the Dirty Harry movies, this one from the titular DIRTY HARRY. It’s Harry’s answer when he’s asked to explain how he came to get his nickname: Because he always seems to catch “every dirty job that comes along.” Which, if I were a cynic, I might say is often the writer’s lot in life, too.)
I have traveled more this summer than I have… um… in a long time. In fact, I have traveled so much that my brain feels like it’s scattered across the continental United States. Including Alaska. Because, hey, Alaska is on the continent, even though there’s some Canada in the middle.
Which is not a complaint–I love traveling, and I’ve had an amazing time rocketing back and forth and stuff. I’m just kind of stupid.
I have a theory that the deal with jetlag is that your body travels at the speed of sound or whatever, but your brain is in a covered wagon behind two oxen on the Oregon Trail. Kind of getting jostled. And it takes a while for the twain to re-meet.
So here is where I just got back from: Wyoming. Where the buffalo roam. And the elk, and the bison, and the antelopes, and the horses and stuff.
I got to go stay on my Uncle Bill’s ranch outside Cody, which was pretty fucking awesome. Here is what we ran into on the driveway, on the way in:
These guys are just kind of pets, who wander around. I thought that was pretty great. But then one of them decided to scrape the paint off the rental car’s hood with his teeth. Not so great.
And, frankly, he was a little pissy about it.
Which seems a little entitled to me, considering what the hood looked like.
But hey, it was totally beautiful there, even though there are wolves and you kind of shouldn’t go outside without “bear spray,”
and so maybe it’s not so great if you’re a young elk (this was also on the driveway, BTW):
But, seriously, beautiful… here is one of the trout ponds:
And here is one of the 183 alligators that Uncle Bill shot last winter in Florida:
Uncle Bill likes to shoot stuff. He is very, very good at it. He taught me a bit about shooting while I was there, too. I kind of suck at trap shooting, as it turns out. I only hit one clay pigeon on Saturday, and one on Sunday. Out of about 50 each day. So, you know, MASSIVE suckiness on that front. And I think he was a bit disappointed.
(This would be me, NOT HITTING ANYTHING)
Thankfully, I did better with the crossbow:
Here is what I hit:
Not too shabby.
And also, he loaded up a nice pistol for us and let us shoot at the range he’s set up on the place:
I did okay with that, too:
Although when I posted this pic on Facebook, I got shooting tips from no fewer than four men. Only one of whom I actually know in real life. No women offered comments–perhaps because I didn’t actually ask for advice? Testosterone is funny stuff. Go figure.
Also, I beat Uncle Bill at chess three times. Which was pretty great. But then again, he’s 93 and he’s only been playing for a year. And he beat ME six times. So… well… it’s kind of like the time my sister sent a postcard home from Switzerland in eighth grade that said, “Dear Mom, I was in a ski race the other day. I came in third. Unfortunately, there were only three people in the race.”
Although as my sister likes to point out in retrospect, “the other two people made the Swiss Olympic ski team, so I didn’t suck THAT badly…”
Don’t even ask how many times he kicked my butt at Go. Because that’s just embarrassing.
But the best thing about being there, other than the fact that Wyoming is so gorgeous:
(this is where we stopped to picnic, on the drive up from Jackson)
Was getting to hear Uncle Bill’s stories at dinner.
I posted a link to the interview he did with a naval research institute magazine about getting shot down in the Phillipines during WWII the last time I posted here, but I got to hear way more details about that adventure in person.
Like, about how he had a COMPOUND FRACTURE of his leg and they were on the island for six weeks, and he made himself a crutch out of the bomb cradle from this Japanese plane that got shot down a couple of days later–wrapping the metal with the shrouds from parachutes in the Jap plane. Which had thirteen dead guys in it.
I asked him what they ate while they were there.
“Coconuts,” he said. “Although I did see one of those Komodo Dragons, and thought maybe I could get it so we could grill it and have it for dinner, but then I realized that it was going into the plane to eat the dead Japs, so I decided against it.”
They finally got the two guys in the best shape to build a raft and go to another island for help–from the Phillipine guerrila fighter dudes. They finally got picked up by a submarine.
“What was that like?” I asked.
“Food was good,” he said. “Always is on a submarine. But the view’s terrible.”
He ended up in a hospital in Australia for a couple of months. The guy in the bed on one side of him had his arm in a sling after cracking up a Jeep. Guy in the bed on the other side had his leg in a sling. He told Uncle Bill that everything had been going fine “but then her husband came home.”
Uncle Bill has a Wyoming license plate with a Purple Heart on it. And he totally earned it.
Also, he told me about going hunting with my Great-grandfather Fabyan in the Twenties, which was pretty great to hear about. Bill is the eldest of my dad’s eight siblings. So, the stories about family stuff go way back. Which I love.
(Uncle Bill is second from left, top row. Sorry this is such a crappy repro–photo of a photo, taken with my phone.)
And he gave us his passes to the Buffalo Bill Center, in Cody. Which is an incredible museum.
They have astonishingly beautiful paintings of the west:
And incredible Plains Indian artwork:
And then we went to Bubba’s for Barbecue:
Which was pretty damn fabulous:
Also, I learned how to make really good buttermilk biscuits from Billy, who works on the ranch. He’s from Florida. I made sausage gravy, which Billy said looked relatively authentic. Though he makes his gravy from sausage he makes himself, out of wild boar he shoots in the Everglades.
He made his biscuits with Crisco, for us, but at home he makes them with lard he renders from the wild boar fat. The dude is SERIOUSLY awesome. And he’s also a rocking crossbow coach. Well, and pistol coach. We said we were psyched to get to do “biscuits, bows, and bullets” with him.
Uncle Bill has asked me to come down to Florida to shoot alligators, which I totally want to do this winter. But I’m also hoping to taste some of that boar gravy… and more of Billy’s biscuits.
Anyway, the whole trip was astonishingly wonderful. And we scattered some of my dad’s ashes on one of the trout ponds–under some falls where he always suspected a really giant trout was hiding.
I also loved getting to go to the bone store with my stepmom and half-sister–and travelling with them generally:
Even though my half-sister kicked my ass at trap shooting:
I am hoping I get to go back to Cody some more, because it was lovely, and Uncle Bill is fabulous. And also, I need more practice shooting so I don’t embarrass the family quite so badly.
For now, though, I have to go back to being a Democrat.
Though I did return to New Hampshire with a souvenir:
And some very fond memories:
So, hey… thank you, Uncle Bill!
What’s your favorite thing you’ve done this summer, o dearest ‘Ratis?
As many of you have heard by now, THE COLD ROOM was named 2010’s Best Paperback Original by the International Thriller Writers two Saturday nights ago. I was overwhelmed at the nomination – and up against two very good friends, Shane Gericke and Rob Browne, both incredibly fine writers. (And let’s all wish our dear Murderati alum Rob well – his new book, THE PARADISE PROPHECY – also in production as a film, went on sale yesterday, Congrats, Rob!) I have to shout out about their books that were nominated too – TORN APART and DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN – both of which are amazing!
I was a bag o’ nerves going into the conference: I’ve never been nominated for anything, and I put a lot of unnecessary pressure on myself because I was really nervous about the whole thing. Plus I was teaching at Craftfest and moderating a panel, and you all know how much I adore being the center of attention… not.
Well, someone divine knew I needed to stop fretting, because Tuesday morning before the con I woke with a whoppingly (soppingly?) bad cold. I was shocked they let me on the plane Wednesday, actually. I had to cancel all my Wednesday plans, and suck it up when I woke Thursday for my Craftfest class with Erica Spindler and felt exactly like hell. I left all my sparkle in the hotel room. (Sorry, Erica, for being so scattered and blech!)
I made it through the day, but at the big cocktail party Thursday night, my voice started to go. By Friday, I had none. By Saturday, it was even worse – I was feeling okay, but for all intents and purposes, mute. So our divine Murderati alum Toni McGee Causey moderated my panel for me.
My illness was strangely prophetic on several levels. First, because of my nervous state, I told Randy I’d been praying for laryngitis so if I did win, I couldn’t get up in front of all those people and speak, thus making a fool out of myself. Second, because in the new book, WHERE ALL THE DEAD LIE, Taylor is suffering from hysterical aphonia. She has no voice. I joked to my publisher that I was simply starting the marketing early with a personalized story.
And third, when I got choked up and started to cry on stage, I was able to mask it.
Yes, I cried. I am such a girl. I get overly emotional all the time, and this was no exception. To be honored by my peers was utterly overwhelming. I had no speech prepared because I honestly didn’t think I’d win. Our Allison can attest – I was genuinely shocked.
But that’s wasn’t the only magic happening in New York that Saturday night. Many of you know that John Sandford was my direct inspiration to start my writing career. I was reading the PREY series and three books in had this epiphany: I wanted to write a female Lucas Davenport. And so I did. Of course, Taylor is very different from Davenport on many levels, but I absolutely took the idea of a cop who was half rock star, half hero from those books. John’s novel was up for best novel, and lo and behold, he won. Which meant things like this were happening Sunday and Monday following the conference:
I really can’t put into words what reading that headline did to me. Affirmation of my chosen career, a reward for the many hours of labor spent toiling away, especially on a book that had three titles, three covers, twelve drafts, eight revisions, and a threesome with a dead body…. All that combined with winning the award with my heroes in the room…. it was priceless.
And yes, I say heroes, because it wasn’t just John there. Diana Gabaldon, my favorite author, was there too! When she congratulated me, I about melted into the floor.
But it was even more than that. ITW has been a part of my writing life from day one. I will never forget how excited I was when I got my deal just in time to add AUTHOR to my name badge at that first, mythical Thrillerfest in Phoenix. To be honored by the very organization that has been nurturing my career from day one… well, you get the idea.
My acceptance speech managed to thank my darling husband Randy (though I shouldn’t have started with him, I got choked up immediately), my amazing agent Scott Miller, my incredible publishers Mira Books, my former editor Linda McFall, and the whole of ITW.
But let me take this moment to thank you. All of you. Because you read the books, buy the books, blurb the books. Because you share the books with your mom and dad, your sister and brother and friends. Because you request the books be housed in your library, and tell your favorite bookseller that they need to carry the titles. Because each and every day, you reach out to me: here on Murderati, on my blog, on Twitter and Facebook, through email. Because of you, I am inspired. I have a writing career. And that’s the most beautiful thing of all.
With love,
JT
Wine of the Week: Let’s have a glass of bubbly, yeah? Some Veuve Clicquot, my favorite, would be nice. Here’s to all of you! (ching ching)
Today I’d like to welcome fellow Aussie crime writer, Katherine Howell to Murderati. Katherine is an ex-paramedic turned author who uses her own expertise to create realistic characters and scenarios. So far, she’s won two Davitt Awards (Sisters in Crime Australia) and has recently hit the best seller lists here in Oz.
Her third novel, Cold Justice, has just been released in the UK. In Cold Justice, Detective Ella Marconi is on the trail of a cold case, an eighteen-year-old murder. Katherine is giving away three signed copies of Cold Justice to Murderati readers…scroll to the bottom for more information.
Katherine also has ties to other members of the Murderati gang, namely Tess Gerritsen – who had the following to say: “COLD JUSTICE races like a speeding ambulance, delivering so many surprises and thrills that you’ll scarcely have time to breathe. This was one of my favorite books of the year. Katherine Howell has written a real winner!” Katherine is delighted to be interviewing Tess in Melbourne at a Sisters in Crime dinner on Saturday 27 August. You can find out more at the Sisters in Crime website. I’ll be there 🙂
You use paramedics and police almost equally in your books. Can you tell us why you decided to do that? I always wanted to write a crime series, partly because it’s what I love reading and partly because the idea of developing characters over a number of books really appealed to me. But I started the early drafts of Frantic with paramedic Sophie as the main character and no cop in sight! I felt I couldn’t write a cop point of view because I didn’t know the police world the same way that I knew paramedic life and worried about being able to portray it with convincing detail. I realised, though, that the story would be so much deeper and stronger if I could build the POV in, and also it was going to be a stretch to have a paramedic coming back in each book, especially if I was going to have her solve crimes! I needed to pull myself together and just do it. I have a number of cop friends who help with the facts of the job and draw on my own experience in being called as a paramedic to police stations and the cells and so on too.
And so Detective Ella Marconi was born. She’s about half of each book that I write. The stories involve one and sometimes two paramedics who get caught up in crime in varying ways—sometimes they’re called to a homicide scene, sometimes they find a body, sometimes they’re involved personally—then Ella is one of the investigators called in on the case.
What differences do you find writing a paramedic versus cop? The main difference is their role in the story: Ella investigates and is fairly distanced emotionally, while the paramedics are caught up and drawn in and often are very emotionally involved. The way I write each point of view differs too: I’m very comfortable writing the paramedic scenes because of my years of experience there, but with the police scenes I’m continually questioning my detective friends over each little detail: what would the detectives say here? What would they do next?
Is Cold Justice based on something that happened to you while you were working as a paramedic? Paramedic Georgie in Cold Justice was viciously bullied at her previous station, and when I was writing the book there were many reports in the media about bullying cases in the ambulance service and their subsequent investigations. None of this was news to me or to paramedics I knew, however. The things that happen to Georgie are a combination of tweaked stories that I’d heard, made-up events, plus a few of my own experiences. The plot however is fictional. While I use some elements of particular cases that I did (such as a burns case in The Darkest Hour), none of the plots as a whole are based on anything I did.
To date, your books are published in several countries, but not the US. How can American readers get copies? There are some copies on Amazon, including for Kindle. I’ve heard that once you hit check-out you can’t actually get it due to territorial restrictions, but I know my Australian publisher was working to sell the ebook rights so maybe they’re now accessible. (If someone out there buys one, or can’t, could you let me know in the comments please?) Otherwise check out the Australian publisher’s site (www.panmacmillan.com) or any of the online booksellers. Or contact my partner’s bookshop (www.lovethatbook.com.au) and I’ll even sign a copy to you before it hits the post! If all else fails, you can read the first chapters at least on my website www.katherinehowell.com.
Tell us a bit about your writing day and space. I have an office at home and I write at the computer (though now and again I like to take a notebook and sit in the sun). I get in there about eight or nine but I write best in the afternoons so unless I have a looming deadline I tend to spend the morning dealing with emails and working on whatever author talks or workshops I have coming up, and uni research (I’m doing a PhD in writing at the moment too). I have a big corner desk currently covered in edit notes and reports. My window looks out onto the garden, and in the co-worker department I have a big, fat, long-haired cat who sleeps in her bed on my desk and a Chihuahua pup who sleeps in a blanket on my lap. Lazy girls.
Win your copy Win a signed copy of Cold Justice by guessing which of the following statements about Katherine is a lie. The first three correct guesses will win!
I used to have a pet goat whose name was Boris.
I have a tiny tattoo of a bluebird on my hip.
I was in an ambulance crash once and was unrestrained in the back at the time; but the only injury I got was a fat lip.
Once, while I was travelling alone back from the UK, I ran into my sister in Singapore Airport.
At one of the Davitt award ceremonies I had to leave proceedings to play paramedic for a woman who’d collapsed in the toilet.
Thanks to Katherine for being my guest today! She’ll be online to respond to comments and of course to check for winners.
In over 15 years working as a private investigator, I only faced real physical danger once—and it was a doctor who tried to kill me.
We’ll call him Rob “Doc” Devendra, and in the early 1980s he took a year off from med school to work in a friend’s business. The friend was a San Francisco cocaine dealer linked to the Medellin Cartel. Doc drove 50-100 pound loads of Colombian cocaine from Miami to the west coast. (This was before the Mexican pipeline developed, obviously.)
As job’s went, it wasn’t half bad: The money was unbelievable, and the adrenalin rush as addictive as the coke. But, after only a year, Doc developed an all-too-common medical condition known in layman’s terms as Cold Feet. He realized he could make millions in the drug biz legitimately, writing prescriptions for bored housewives, a future his flirtation with the dark side could ruin. And so he and his Colombian-connected pal parted ways—amicably, as it turned out. Doc returned to med school, became a doctor, and lived a happy and prosperous life—until the summer of 1988.
Doc’s friend the dealer, facing a ten year sentence for trafficking, became a federal informant and began identifying all his past associates and business partners. Interestingly, Doc was not one of the people he named—which is, in legal parlance, a material omission. This made Doc a very interesting fellow to the people the drug dealer did name.
Rule No. 1 of criminal defense: Snitches lie. And in this case Doc was the living proof.
I was retained by one of the defendants, accused of helping the snitch launder his money. My job was to find Doc, interview him, and serve him with a subpoena mandating his appearance at trial.
After weeks of talking with a variety of characters, plus record searches in three states, I tracked Doc down to Hannibal, Missouri, where he had a stake in a small family-practice clinic.
Arriving in town in mid-July, I first drove to his house—common practice, a man at work can always claim he’s too busy to see you—and rang the bell. Shortly his slender, doe-eyed wife appeared, accompanied by a very friendly Dalmatian. I told the wife I was working on a legal matter based out west, and it was important I speak with her husband. I politely declined to say more out of respect for his privacy.
The wife seemed mystified. She told me Doc was out of town but she’d let him know I’d stopped by. I asked when he’d be back. She said she wasn’t sure, then pressed me for more information: Legal matter? Out west? Her husband?
“It really is best,” I said, “if I discuss all this first with Doc.”
I had to assume she was lying, of course, so I kept returning. Sometimes I’d just park down the street, hours at a time, to see who came or went. I followed the wife here and there, noting the make of her car, the one left behind in the garage, where she went, the friends she met. And as I kept re-appearing at her door, she greeted me with increasing alarm. (The Dalmation, curiously enough, always seemed glad to see me.)
Getting nowhere with the wife, I decided to try the father. He owned a small jewelry shop, and had reportedly also, once upon a time, strayed from the law. He was rawboned, blondishly gray with a short-cropped beard. His attitude started out folksy and sly, but when I just kept coming back he grew hostile. He told me to stop pestering him, he’d call the law. I apologized for the intrusions—and called his bluff, returning again and again.
Two days in, frustrated with the direct approach, I decided to get creative. I made an appointment to see Doc at his clinic. Using an assumed name, I complained of lower back pain—which in fact was true, an affliction caused by long hours spent in cars finding, trailing, and surveilling people like Guess Who. I was sitting there in the examination room, complimenting myself on being so doggone clever, when the door opened.
Not Doc. His partner—Asian, soft-spoken, middle-aged. I had—as they say in the biz—been made. The partner asked: “What is this about really?” I calmly, professionally, repeated my spiel. The doctor, feigning puzzlement but clearly disturbed—what kind of trouble was his partner in?—said he would pass word along. I left, sensing I’d at least increased the pressure on Doc to stop delaying and meet with me.
Meanwhile, another far more serious situation arose. It concerned my brother John. He had gone in for an AIDS test, and the results were due. I called, spoke with his lover David, and asked what they’d learned. After a very long pause, David said: “You’ll have to ask your brother.” When I finally spoke with John, he calmly discussed treatments that were available, and assured me there was nothing to fear just yet.
The receiver felt like a stone in my hand. I was devastated.
My love for John had gone through four distinct stages.
One: early childhood—he was my hero, my protector. I adored him.
Two: age 5 or so to 18, he turned on me from guilt and shame, evoked by his homosexuality, his fear of being found out—he tormented me, tongue-lashed me every day, finding fault with every single thing: my daydreaming, my sloppiness, my books, my interest in sports and military history, my music. I hated him.
Three: age 19 to early thirties—John came out of the closet, accepted himself, and apologized to me for all those years of vicious, relentless hazing. I abided him, playing the righteous victim, holding on to my resentment like a trophy, even as we got along better and better.
Four: the final two years of his life—I realized my stupidity, my need to let go of that pointless grudge and forgive. I accepted his need to love me and be my big brother, and accepted as well how much I wanted that.
Desperate to return home, visit John, I became even more obsessive in my quest to nail Doc Devendra. I spent the entire weekend going back and back again—the wife, the father, a lawyer who’d incorporated the medical practice, a realtor who’d brokered the purchase of the clinic, an old business partner in nearby Palmyra, names I’d come up with in my searches—letting everyone know I was going stay in their lives on a daily if not hourly basis until the good doctor met with me face to face.
Come Monday morning—feeling exhausted, outfoxed, emotionally spent—I came up with one final plan. I had my camera with me, to take pictures if he fled, and my tape recorder to record all verbal exchanges, in case he tried to claim I’d threatened or extorted him. I parked my rental car in front of his clinic, slumped down into the seat so I couldn’t be seen, adjusted my rear view mirror so I could observe all incoming vehicles. People walking into the clinic could see me, but that was a risk I had to take. I waited. From previous visits I knew that, if he parked behind the clinic, he was trapped.
About forty minutes later, his wife’s gold Honda sped past me down the small side drive. There was only one person in it. A man. Doc.
I turned on my tape recorder, dropped it in my sportcoat pocket, grabbed my camera and the subpoena, then followed him on foot. I turned the corner just as he was getting out of the car, thirty yards away. Seeing me, he jumped back in, threw the Honda in gear. The car sped toward me.
I blocked the only way out.
One often hears it said that there is a difference between courage and fearlessness. The sheer overwhelming and predictable physicality of fear is something the brutal repetition of combat, police and firefighter training is meant to overcome. Blind habit will take over and push you forward into the teeth of your terror when the mind, the hobgoblins and specters of imagination, will freeze you in place. Fearlessness, in this way of thinking, is foolishness. There is no such thing. The absence of fear is lunacy, and its presence can actually be a kind of animal wisdom, as long as your training is there to save you.
Buddhism has a somewhat different take, as I’ve noted before. Fear is seen as the flip side of hope. When we hope for something we reside in a fictional world, projected into the future, a seemingly benign dream that fuels our initiative. And often we fear that we will do something, or something will get done to us, that will jeopardize this oasis we’ve imagined for ourselves. But it’s a mirage, it never existed in the first place, except as a vessel to hold our wishes. In her book WHEN THINGS FALL APART, which a friend gave to me after my wife Terri died, the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön writes: “If we want to be free of fear, we must first surrender hope.”
And so, as I stood my ground, waiting to get run over, I suppose it’s fair to ask: Which was I—courageous, fearless, or just out of hope? In all honesty—and anyone who has been in a high speed car crash (or combat) will know exactly what I’m saying—I was none of the above. What I felt was time distortion, the seconds expanding like deep breaths, and a kind of numbness, tinged with my underlying anger. Marines call this Task Saturation, when you are so focused on what you have to do, your emotions lock down—anger, fueled by adrenalin, is the lone exception. In my case, I was simply so focused on serving that god damn subpoena once and for all so I could get home to see my brother, and so enraged I hadn’t done so already—enraged at myself, Doc, his wife, his father, my brother, God, fate—that I simply didn’t care what happened. The car kept coming, faster. I remember thinking, “Be my guest, asshole.”
At the last moment, the Hippocratic Oath kicked in. The Honda screeched to a lurching stop inches from my body, the bumper grazing my legs. Still trying to scare me, Doc revved the engine to its highest RPMs—this would be the only sound on my tape—as I leaned out at full length across the car hood and tucked the subpoena under his windshield wiper.
I stepped aside. Doc sped away. Only then did I notice I was shaking.
When my report hit the office back in San Francisco, the staff regarded me with a new, somewhat hushed respect. They thought I was remarkably—if, perhaps, crazily—brave. Only then did I realize I’d done something out of the ordinary. And though I wanted to give myself credit, I knew it wasn’t courage or even fearlessness I’d demonstrated back in Hannibal—it was fury. I wasn’t even sure I knew what courage was.
A few months later, I was visiting my brother at his house. He was still handsome then, though increasingly gaunt from the wasting, to where his vivid blue eyes looked haunted. He told me he needed to take a bath, and asked if I would help scrub his back. Karposi’s Sarcoma had left large seeping lesions all across his body. He gingerly settled down into the bathwater. I lathered my hands, and gently washed his back. When I was finished, he said quietly, “Thank you.”
I left him alone, went into the kitchen, told David I’d just helped John bathe. Very calmly, he reached for a special soap dispenser at the sink.
“You need to wash your hands with this. It has bleach in it.”
Every day, David risked his life to care for my brother. He would ultimately die from that devotion.
That’s courage.
So, Murderateros, who was your tutor in courage? How did your lesson play out?
How have you carried the lesson forward?
Have you been someone else’s mentor in what it means to be brave?
Do you agree that there’s a difference between courage and fearlessness?
Do you think hope is a source of strength, or a house of cards?
Did you ever have your own “trip to see the doctor?”
Note: I’m in a panic today, preparing for the Book Passage Mystery Conference — specifically, getting ready for my pre-conference seminar, Integrating Acts & Arcs (not to be confused with Implementing Snacks & Snarks) — so I apologize in advance for any tardy responses to comments. I’ll do my best to be prompt.
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Review Update: Please excuse the BSP, but Len Wanner, whose The Crime of It All is one of the most engaging online sources on crime writing, recently posted his review of DO THEY KNOW I’M RUNNING? If you don’t know the book or my work, this is perhaps the most flattering, humbling, gratifying introduction I could hope for. I can die now.
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Jukebox Hero of the Week: I’m a little conflicted. This post made me miss my brother, and I grew up listening to John practicing Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” on the piano — in fact, I’m not sure I remember him practicing anything else — but I just couldn’t bring myself to put it here. (“If I never hear that tune again as long as I live …”)
But Terri’s birthday is coming up (July 23rd), and as a small memorial I’ve decided to include a video of a song she loved, Lloyd Price’s “Personality.”
I had originally included a performance she and I once watched together on PBS. It’s one of only a handful of times I ever saw a piece of music reduce her to tears — she trained as a concert pianist, it tends to grind the sentiment out of you. I still choke up when I listen to this music alone. It’s as perfect a performance as I’ve ever heard: Martha Argerich on piano, the second movement to Ravel’s Concerto in G. But today of all days they closed that video down, claiming copyright infringement. Phooey, as Terri would say. My apologies to thos of you who tried the earlier link and came up short.
Wait! As Katherine so kindly pointed out, there’s another YouTube version of the Ravel, for the more classically minded of you. Here tis (THANKS KATHERINE)!
Hi Ratis. Most of you have seen the notes from “Sylvia” in our comments section, but many of you don’t know the Sylvia behind the keyboard. She’s Sylvia Marino, a SYSOP wizard, wife, mother of three, and part time mystery writer who was in my writers’ group back in 2003 when I was stabbing out my first novel. I was awed by her charm, wit, gumption and great good heart at that time, and nothing has changed since. Back then, because just trying to write your first novel was not challenge enough, Sylvia also learned how to swim for the first time. And the protagonist she wrote about was a woman swimming from Alcatraz to San Francisco through the Bay’s choppy, chilly waters.
Last week she successfully swam the English Channel with a five-woman relay team.
Now you know why I think she’s such a wonder.
– Louise Ure
Finding Your Character(s)
By Sylvia Marino
When Louise asked if I would share my write-up on Murderati, my immediate response was, “But there aren’t any dead bodies, will it count?” She assured me that it would and in the short week that has since passed I realized that whether you’re a writer or one who is perpetually on the first chapter, we all think about and are inspired by finding and developing characters. No matter where I am, my favorite characters stay with me.
Sometimes, right in the middle of the English Channel.
In the line – “stranger than fiction” the character and characters found on this trek couldn’t be more apt and any one of them could be the lead character in a developing story.
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We had been sitting in Folkestone for four days waiting to get the call that the weather had cleared and we were a go for our English Channel attempt. Five women sitting around obsessing about wind conditions and checking windguru.com multiple times a day and walking to the lookout over the Channel to check the water can drive anyone crazy. We knew no teams had gone out that week due to weather and the first possible day would be Sunday or Monday. After that our one-week window would close as unfavorable tides and weather would take over until the next window opened later in July. Many people train for years and make the trip to swim on their scheduled date only to sit and be turned away due to poor weather and tides. With swims booked years in advance, most cannot uphold the level of training to wait again for another chance to swim. Our call finally came on Saturday evening to report to Dover Marina the next morning at 5:30am.
Wearing the allowed attire of one regular swimsuit a silicone cap and pair of goggles, our first swimmer started off Shakespeare Beach in Dover at 6:12am on Sunday, July 10 – Britain’s Memorial Day. Every 60 minutes thereafter a new swimmer in our fixed rotation would go in. Depending on where you were in the order, we had assigned jobs – watching the swimmer in the water to not lose them to swells, one person warming up the swimmer coming out of the water, one getting ready to swim and a swimmer getting warm from being in the water. We ran pretty much like clockwork. When you have a team of women ages 41-53, what else can you expect? Compared to juggling full-time jobs and families, having only one job to do at a time was a luxury.
The official observer on board was lovely giving us all the rules and regulations from the Channel Swimming Association (http://www.channelswimmingassociation.com/) including one of his own. “You may not use the word ‘awesome‘ at any time. It’s a terrible word and used quite too much. Really, how can a burger be awesome? It’s just a bloody burger!” With this the mood was lightened. We were concerned about transitioning between swimmers as one false move can halt and disqualify the entire swim. He made sure our transitions were flawless.
The pilots of The Viking Princess – a 60 ton fishing boat – were two brothers named Reg and Ray who have been piloting swimmers all their lives. Their father Reg Sr. had piloted swimmers before them. Two men of the sea with matching anchor earrings and who, when urged, could tell stories of past Channel attempts.
We all had a little “boat envy” earlier in the day when other swimmers were meeting their boats at the Dover Marina. We saw some nice boats with padded benches and kitchen galleys. The Viking Princess turned the corner and it was like expecting a limousine and seeing a weathered tow truck instead. On board there was really no place to sit except on the metal floor outside the wheelhouse. All of our gear was in plastic tubs on the deck where the fishing gear (or fish?) were usually kept. What we soon came to appreciate was our shield against the swells. As our Observer pointed out – many swims have been lost due to the boat not being large enough to protect the swimmer on their crossing.
The day before we went swimming in Dover Harbor and met Freda Streeter, mother of Alison Streeter “Queen of the Channel” with 43 English Channel crossings, including a few doubles. Freda was running her Saturday swim clinics for Channel swimmers and chatted with us. “You ladies are from the South End. I’m not worried about you lot.” Jane Murphy, wife of Kevin Murphy “King of the Channel” with 34 crossings including a few doubles and an attempted triple crossing (halted at 52 hours due to weather) was equally encouraging explaining that the men whine and whimper while the women just put their heads down and carry-on.
The conditions throughout the day were Force 3-4 meaning we were in winds up to 17+mph and waves, whitecaps and swells regularly in the 3-6 foot range with sometimes smoother water and in gusts, sometimes a bit rougher. The water temperature was steady at 58-59 degrees, warmer than the San Francisco Bay.
Over the course of the day, we saw and came close to dozens of cargo ships and large ferries. We learned about the various lanes, the separation zone between the lanes and found small celebrations in crossing the lanes, crossing into French waters, over the Channel Tunnel (I had the pleasure of swimming across this) and watching Dover disappear and seeing no coastlines to seeing France begin to appear on the horizon. Our Observer had us charmed with stories of his 23 year-old cat Jessica and rolling with laughter with tales of past swims.
I can say that from my first rotation to my last, each felt natural finding a rhythm in the sea immediately. The rise and fall of the swells, learning quickly how to swim with the boat on your right (watching it rock towards you can be daunting). On my second rotation in the water, the water itself was stunning with jellyfish floating below and plankton that glowed making it look like you were staring into a galaxy. At times I had to remind myself to turn my head to breathe and look to make sure I wasn’t too close to the boat because I just wanted to keep my head down and watch what was happening below. Keeping the song “My Way” in my head helped keep a good rhythm, even when I saw an empty crisps bag floating a few meters below me and hoping the hand of its consumer wasn’t attached to it.
As we went into our third rotation, we began to calculate how far we were from landing. The tide had turned and we were going away from Cap Gris Nez and towards Calais. Soon we could see a truck on a road above the cliffs outside of Calais. With passing strokes I could see the sun setting behind me under my right arm and when sighting forward, the moon rising over the white cliffs. I could then start to count the windows on the houses along the beach. My hour was up, having broken across the tidal line.
Finding ourselves at the top of the swim order, our first swimmer went in and made quick work of the last remaining trek of our nearly 31 miles and in 24 minutes with the moon above we could see her stand on the beach in Sangatte and raise her arms. The horn blew and we were now English Channel relay swimmers. Above the beach a lone silver firework went off. Perhaps a backyard party, perhaps planning for Bastille Day, we will never know. At the moment we simply stared in awe and took it to be for ourselves.
The ride in The Viking Princess back across the Channel lasted three hours and in that time we texted and called family and friends, hooted, hollered, high-fived and then collapsed in exhaustion. Making it back to our hotel rooms by 2am we popped the champagne and toasted our loved ones and an old soul by the name of Trudy DeLorenzo, a German immigrant who had died a few weeks prior. Trudy was one of the original women in the 1970’s who took the South End Rowing Club to court so that women would be allowed to join and train in open water swimming in San Francisco. In an even stranger twist of fate, as we were landing on the beaches of France, the first all-female team from the South End Rowing Club, Trudy’s memorial service was being held in San Francisco.
As is tradition, those who successfully cross the Channel can sign their names on the wall at the White Horse Bar in Dover. The walls are covered in the “who’s who” of open water swimming. We found names of people we knew and finally found a place in a corner where in at least one small place of the world, we have been immortalized.
So ‘Ratis, which character(s) would you choose to develop and hear tales from? The swimmers? Observer? Pilots? Or the Channel itself?
(P.S. from Louise: Or how about from that one particular swimmer; a woman who dared to put both her foot in the water and her butt in the mystery writing chair?)
But, the Brits do have their good side. Our military, while under-supported and under-equipped, are still regarded as a superb fighting force. The vast red brick factories of the Industrial Revolution have given way to small pockets of technical ingenuity.
A visit to the Coventry Motor Museum, where they have a display of Richard Noble’s two land-speed record-breaking cars, Thrust 2 and Thrust SSC, tells you as much as you need to know about our abilities to improvise in remarkable ways.
I don’t know why this should be. Maybe something of that stiff upper lip colonial mentality still remains, but I find it very hard to unload emotionally onto strangers, to talk about what I earn, or discuss what we paid for our house. If someone remarks on my dress, I’m far more likely to confess that I bought it in a mega-sale than smile sweetly and accept the praise. I once said about Charlie Fox that she took a punch easier than she took a compliment, and maybe there’s a lot of her in me, or vice versa. I may get a lot of things across in my writing that I should have unloaded onto my therapist – if I had a therapist. (That’s another thing Brits don’t do – therapy.)
