“You do not realize how the headlines that make daily history affect the muscles of the human body.” — Martha Graham

By PJ Parrish

So, how you feeling today? Not so good? Stomach in knots? Head hurt for no good reason? Can’t sleep? Maybe you need to stop doom-scrolling on Facebook. Maybe you need to turn off cable TV.

Or maybe you just need a good walk in the woods.

I and others here have written often about how getting off your keister and going out in the fresh air is good for your well-being. And, more to the point for us crime dogs, how it helps you get the writing muscles going. So when I was paging through the New York Times book section Sunday, I was delighted to come upon an essay about just this subject, and I knew I had to share it with you.

The author, Dwight Garner, writes about the deep connection between reading, writng and physical health. But he admits that writers who work out are just not his kind of people. (“I run only when chased,” he admits). Writing is a sedentary job, he notes, and goes on to quote Harold Pinter that “intellectual arses wobble best.”

He seems a bit awestruck, though, by those authors who are exercise nuts. Dan (Da Vinci Code) Brown has his computer programmed to freeze for 60 seconds every hour so he can stop and do push-ups and sit-ups. Jim Harrison told the Paris Review that “I dance for a half-hour a day to Mexican reggae music with 15-pound dumbbells. I guess it’s aerobic and the weights keep your arms and chest in shape.” Now that I know this about Harrison, his books make a lot more sense to me.

There’s one basic problem with exercise, Garner asserts — it’s boring.

So you have to find ways to fool yourself into thinking it’s not. Boris Johnson, the ex-PM of Britain, claims that the only way he can do his daily run is if he recites poetry, specifically The Iliad, out loud in various voices. I’ll leave it to you to fill in the audio-visual there. Here’s a little help:

I used to listen to my iPod during my daily walks, singing as I went. But lately, during my 4-mile turns around the lake in the woods, I’ve taken to holding conversations with myself in French. I don’t know what’s more startling to my fellow path-mates. Hearing me belt out Bohemian Rhapsody or practicing “Un ver vert est dans un verre vert.” (a green worm is in a green glass).

I’m still up in New Jersey on family business and I am not getting outside much. And the only thing my brother-in-law seems to get on his TV is Say Yes To The Dress. So I am reading for hours a day. Reading is a lot like exercise. If you don’t do it regularly, you can lose the urge. Right now, I am working my way slowly through The Soul of America: The Battle For Our Better Angels by Pullitzer Prize winner John Meacham. It is an elegant, troubling, and ultimate inspiring recounting of America’s dark history. “In our finest hours,” he writes, the soul of the country manifests itself in an inclination to open our arms rather than to clench our fists.”

This is my balm until I can get moving again. As Don DeLillo said once, “I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours then I go running. This helps me shake off one world and enter another.”

I’m thinking of taking up yoga again. My physical therapist thinks this is a grand idea for my poor back. I dunno. I used to be quite the yoga-doer, could even do a proper head-stand and a serviceable crow pose. But I was never able to get that quiet-the-brain thing down pat. The world was always too much with me.

As the English novelist Angela Carter wrote, “Yoga improves one posture but not one’s tranquility.”

So that’s my new plan. Turn off the TV, return to yoga. Keep going for long walks, leaving early and taking the dog. Thanks for listening today. On this quiet muggy Sunday here in New Jersey, writing even just a silly blog post makes me feel better. May you find your own serenity in our roiling sea.

Dear crime dogs. Due to an unexpected family emergency, I am en route today to New Jersey. Not sure when I will be back or when I will have extra time. Didn’t have time to finish my planned post on anti-heroes. Will save my notes for my next round. So forgive me today for re-posting an old topic dear to my heart. Will try to weigh in during layover in Chicago. Thanks for your patience!

By PJ Parrish

“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”–James Baldwin

I wanted to be a ballet dancer. This was way back in grade school, when I was as round as a beachball and rather lost. So I bugged my dad until he let me enroll in Miss Trudy’s School of Dance and Baton Twirling.

Did I mention I was chubby? Did I mention I had no talent? Neither stopped me. I had a ball trying and to this day, I can remember every step of my first recital dance. I eventually lost the weight but never the desire to dance. So around age 30, I took up lessons again. I did pretty good. Until I got to pointe. You know, the part where you shoe-horn your feet into those pretty pink satin shoes with a hard box at end and then you’re supposed to just rise up on your toes?

It hurts like hell.

So I gave up. Did I mention I had no talent?

Flash forward. I became a dance critic. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, well…

I got to meet and interview almost every famous dancer of my era, including Barshnikov, Margot Fonteyn, Bob Fosse, you name it, I also got to cover the birth of the Miami City Ballet, and became friends with the artistic director the late Edward Villella. One day, he asked me if I wanted to be in The Nutcracker. In the first act party scene where the parents do a little minuet-type of dance. I accepted. So I danced, in front of 5,400 people. I didn’t screw up. It was one of the most memorable nights of my life. To quote one of my favorite writers, Emily Dickinson:

I cannot dance upon my Toes—
No Man instructed me—
But oftentimes, among my mind,
A Glee possesseth me,

This is my round-about way of getting to my topic — talent vs technique. See, I had the desire, but I didn’t have the body type, the turn-out of the hip joints. I knew the steps, sure, but I didn’t have that vital muscle memory that comes to all dancers after years and years of learning their craft. I didn’t have the music inside me that separates the mere dancer from the artist.

So it is, I believe, with writers.

Years ago, my friend Reed Farrel Coleman wrote an article in Crime Spree Magazine titled “The Unspoken Word.” It was about his experience as an author-panelist at a writers conference. Reed was upset because he thought the conference emphasized technique to the exclusion of talent.

Reed wrote: “To listen how successful writing was presented [at the SleuthFest conference], one might be led to believe that it was like building a model of a car or a jet plane. It was as if hopeful writers were being told that if everyone had the parts, the decals, the glue, the proper lighting, etc. to build this beautiful model and then all they needed was the instruction manual. Nonsense! Craft can get you pretty damned far, but you have to have talent, too. Writing is no more like building a model than throwing a slider or composing a song.”

At the time, I was the president of the Florida chapter of Mystery Writers of America, and our board decided, after much debate, to purposely steer SleuthFest toward the writers “workshop” conference. We did it because attendees told us they didn’t want any more authors getting up there just flapping their gums telling tired war stories. They wanted authors to pull back the green curtain and show how it is done. They wanted to hear authors talk about how they created memorable characters, how they maintained suspense, how they built a structure, why they chose a particular sub-genre. That’s what we gave them.

You know, sort of what we try to do where at The Kill Zone.

But Reed did raise an interesting question in his article — can novel writing really be taught? I think it can and should be. I think unpublished folks can go to workshops, read books, and learn the basics about plotting, character development, the arc of suspense, the constructs of good dialog.

Does that mean they have the stuff they need to be a successful writer? No, it only means they might — if they work hard — have a chance of mastering their craft. And I don’t care how talented you are, you aren’t going anywhere without craft.

Let’s go to the easy metaphor here — sports. A person may be born with a natural ability for basketball. They may be tall, able to shoot hoops with accuracy and be a fast runner. But that’s not enough. There was this guy who played for the Chicago Bulls…I forget his name. He didn’t make his high school’s varsity basketball team until his junior year, and when he got to University of North Carolina, he told the coach he wanted to be the best ever. Yeah, he had talent. But he worked like a dog. He became the best.

When I teach writing workshops, I preface everything with this one statement: I can teach you the elements of craft but I can’t teach you talent. Anyone can learn to hit a baseball. But only a few are going to have Ted Williams’ eye. The rest are going to be the John Oleruds of the world — competent major league role players. And what’s wrong with that if you can at least get to The Bigs, have a healthy backlist and maybe take the kids to Disney World on your royalties?

Which brings me back to James Baldwin’s quote. There are, indeed, many “talented ruins” out there. And there are many not-so-talented writers making a good living from their books. Some even become bestsellers.

So where to I come down on the talent question? I agree with Reed. All good writers have some talent. But I also believe you can’t have talent without craft and desire. Peter Benchley once said: “It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.” True, Jaws is a little cheesy, but it was one of the greatest serial killer thrillers ever imagined.

By PJ Parrish

A couple weeks ago, I posted about a writer who was having problems taming her backstory beast. Click here to review. She was really struggling because she was beginning to realize she actually had TWO main plots but one was disguising itself as backstory.

It got me thinking about simple story structure. Which is never really simple.

Simple explanation: Story structure (also known as narrative structure or plot structure) is a way of ordering all of the events in your book. Every story has a beginning, middle and end.

Not so simple part: There are myriad ways you can present your events in a story. And that’s what got my writer friend in trouble. She was having a really hard time figuring out how to structure her story. I suspect many of you out there have fought the same battle.

I often think of plot structure as architecture. There are countless ways to build a house. You can have a simple ranch. This is your basic whodunit, thriller or romance with a solid linear plot. You go in the door and progress easily through the rooms. It might be a small ranch house; it might be a grand one. But it is always built to lead you through with logic, harmony and balance. Call it fictional feng shui.

You can have a three-story filigreed French colonial. Twisting subplots, big cast of characters, high intrigue, multiple points of view, complex time-shifting narrative, unreliable narrators, multiple suspects. (James Ellroy’s LA Confidental comes to mind) See photo below!

Then there are the butt-ugly houses. Maybe they started out as a basic ranch but the writer lost control and start just tacking on action scenes, distracting subplots, and dumb secondary characters, hoping this would dazzle readers and hide the sad fact that the writer didn’t really know what the hell they are trying to say to begin with. (See this mess below)

Or sometimes, writers can’t figure out what KIND of book they’re writing. They deperately mix sub-genres (am I writing a a cozy or hardbioled? Should I give my hero a girlfriend? Maybe he needs a dog who helps him solve cases!) and they end up with something like this:

And then there are the tri-level builders. This is where I see writers mostly fail. You remember these houses from the 50s and 60s. You go in the door but you can’t decide whether to go up, down or sideways. Is that the basement or the rec room? And where the hell is the john? This, I think, is what happened to my writer. She had two main plots, a couple subplots and she just couldn’t figure out the best way to get in the door. 

I love ranch houses. They are simple, linear, and you can’t fall down the stairs or get lost in them. For all you scholarly crime dogs out there, this basic ranch house plot structure has a fancy name —  The Fichtean Curve. John Gardner usually gets credit for this in his 1983 book The Art of Fiction. But this sturdy structure has been basis for countless novels, especially commercial fiction.

Let’s break down the architecture. (I’m going to rely on Jaws as my example, because it’s a basic thriller plot that all of you know.)

Step 1: Rising Action

The story starts with some kind of inciting incident. What our own James calls a break in the norm. A murder, an abduction, a crisis of some kind that gets the narrative ball rolling. In Jaws, in the opening scene, a skinnydipping girl is devoured by a shark on Amity Island.

The main character has to WANT something. (to solve the case, save the child, catch the serial killer. And the WANT relates, in the best fiction, to some inner conflict for the hero. In Jaws, Chief Brody needs to figure out how to catch the serial killer shark.

The plot progresses through a series of crises wherein the protag faces set-backs that raise the stakes and things become more personal to the protag. In Jaws, Brody faces myriad obstacles, including the dumb mayor, free-lancing yahoos in skiffs, his own fear of water, and eventually the Ahab-ian shark-hunter Quint. Quint also represents one of the most effective tension-creating devices in rising action — a riff in the team.

Step 2: the Climax

Rinsing action is the bulk of your structure, but the climax is the apex. It could be a final battle or confrontation, a big reveal or giant plot twist. In Jaws, of course, the climax builds as the Orca slowly gets destroyed, Quint gets eaten, Hooper is lost, and Brody becomes isolated on the sinking mast, praying his last bullet will hit its target. Which it does in spectacular fashion.

Step 3: Falling Action

Also called the denouement. The bad guy is vanquished. The child is saved. The case is solved. We get to take a well-earned breath. Any plot loose ends are wrapped up. (Although not all stories have an extended falling action. Jaws’s denouement is brief.) But beyond tying things up, the purpose of falling action is also to give you the writer an opportunity to emphasize the theme of your story, and stress how the hero has been impacted.  It’s not how the detective works the case. It’s how the case works on the detective.

One last point, because I’ve gone long here today. There are many other ways to structure your story. And depending on how firm your grasp is on your craft, you might be comfortable with more complex architecture. We can talk about that another day.  But when it doubt, bet it all on the ranch.

By PJ Parrish

I was sitting in my favorite breakfast place, dipping my rye into my sunny-side-ups and reading an old paperback that I had found at a yard sale. It was by a mega-bestselling author, and frankly, I was smugly happy that I had paid only 50 cents for it.

I looked up to see a familar face. It was Tom S., one of my pickleball peeps. He’s sort of annoying, on court and off, the kind of guy who slams the ball at your head and then disingenuously apologizes for almost taking out your eye. So when he asked if he could join me, I was dearly tempted to go with the truth. But no…I try to play nice, on court and off.

“Sure, have a seat,” I said cordially.

He sat down, his eyes slipping secretly to the paperback lying wantonly by my coffee mug. “I see,” he said insightfully, “that you are reading a book by XX.”

“Yes,” I said affirmatively, nodding energetically.

“Do you like it?” he asked inquiringly.

I wasn’t sure how to answer. See, Tom’s trying to write a book and my kind-hearted sister Kelly had recently offered to give him a quick critique. His WIP was a hot mess but she patiently offered Tom some some good tips about plot structure, the differences between thrillers and mysteries, and character building.

Tom wisely picked up on my silence. “So,” he said interrogatively. “I take it you don’t like the book?”

“It’s sort of meh,” I said flatly.

“In what way?” he asked inquisitively.

“Well, I can’t quite put my finger on it,” I said perplexedly.

“How is the plotting?” he asked ploddingly.

“The plot was okay. But it’s sort of falling apart toward the end,” I added brokenly.

“That’s too bad,” he said sympathetically. “Anything else?”

“The characters were okay but kind of cardboard,” I said woodenly.

“Really?” he said shockingly.

“Yes,” I acknowledged.

“But this is a New York Times bestseller,” he interjected suddenly, jabbing at the book pointedly with his extended right index finger. “It got great blurbs. And all the reviewers loved it.”

“Well,” I said deeply, with a exhalation of a sigh. “I just don’t know what it was about the book that I found tiresome but there was something.”

Tom gave me a nod of his head, shaking it up and down, and then added a small, understanding smile, displaying his Chiclet teeth. “Well,” he said philosophically. “Some books are just like that.”

And with that, Tom rose and sauntered away, slowly and casually, slipping out the door, sidling across the parking lot, and disappearing into the almost rainy, slightly foggy, early morning Michigan mist.

I was left with my bad book and my thoughts. I was thinking about all the good advice I had heard over the years at all the writers conferences I had attended. Thinking about all the great panels I had sat on, even a really special heated one about talent versus technique. I was thinking, too, about all the wonderful posts here at The Kill Zone that tackle such a wide range of topics on our craft — everything from yanking yourself out of the muddy middle to the sins of the semi-colon.

Gina the waitress refilled my coffee and I returned to my mega-bestseller. Only a couple chapters to go, and even though I knew in my heart I should have tossed the book aside a long time ago, I was determined to finish it. Maybe I just wanted to get my full 50-cents worth. Then it came, this sentence:

“I could have saved her,” he whispered quietly.

I turned the book to its cover and looked at the author’s name. It was in huge block letters and bright neon pink, the name bigger than the title.

I flashbacked to a panel I moderated years ago at Sleuthfest. Robert Crais was our guest of honor and he was waxing eloquent about our craft. But it was one sentence he said in his keynote address that I was remembering at that moment: “Adverbs are not your friend.”

He didn’t say it lightly. He didn’t it dramatically. He didn’t even say it succinctly. He just said it.

By PJ Parrish

This was a good week. Found out my dog Archie doesn’t need $800 in dental work. My physical therapy is working wonders on my bad back. And best, I finally got some traction on a short story that I agreed to do for an anthology. In honor of all this, I think I deserve a break. Actually, I admit it. I just ran out of time this week to do a good thoughtful post on writing. So I hope you will give me a hard pass this week. I have a really good post in the works on backstory…I promise.

In meantime, let’s have some fun. I have been bingeing of late on old Turner Classic movies. In the wee wee hours last night it was Joan Crawford in a A Woman’s Face, a twisty noir wherein Joan plays a horribly disfigured woman who will do anything to get her beauty back, including blackmail to pay for a plastic surgeon. Does she start a new life or return to her dark past? A risky part for Joan, who fought hard to star in this remake when Garbo turned it down. Juicy stuff!

Anyway, this movie reminded me of a little quiz I saw in The Atlantic. I had to admit, I had trouble figuring out my answers. So I thought I’d ask you guys. Go get some Sno-caps and fill in the blanks:

1) Worst well-regarded film
2) Most overhyped film (note that this is slightly different from above; the first measures the absolute badness level, while the second measures the delta between reputation and actual quality)
3) Worst film to win a best picture Oscar
4) Most disappointing film (ie should have been good but wasn’t)
5) Worst movie, full stop. (Must have been a major motion picture release–no direct-to-video, or film festival torture tactics, please)
6) Worst movie with good direction (ie terrible script, awful acting, producer interference, etc)
7) Biggest unknown treasure

Here’s my picks:
1. Unforgiven (sorry, Clint)

2. Cleopatra (Just re-watched this on TCM recently. Even stentorious Richard Burton couldn’t save this toga dog)

3. Vintage version: The Greatest Show on Earth (Jimmy Stewart as Buttons, the murdering clown!) Modern version: Crash (a total wreck)
4. Godfather III (no contest. I will die on this hill)

5. Staying Alive (John Travolta as a loincloth-clad Broadway gypsy; a crass sequel attempt to cash in on Saturday Night Fever)
6. 2001. I have watched this a million times and still can’t figure out what the hell is going on at the end.

7. Cinema Paradiso (Okay, so it’s not unknown. It won best foreign film but it’s still my fave “little” movie. I also have a soft spot for Downhill Racer (Robert Redford going against type as a bastard Olympic skier.)

What say you? And thanks for letting me take it easy today. And now….HERE’S JOAN!

By PJ Parrish

See this guy at left? The one that looks like the kind of guy who would correct the grammar in your Facebook “I luv wiener dogs” post?

This is Aldus Manutius. He was an Italian printer who founded the Aldine Press, and he devoted most of his life to publishing rare texts. His flaming desire to preserve Greek manuscripts marked him as a great innovator of his age. He also introduced a small, portable book format, which revolutionized personal reading habits and probably led to the modern paperback. So I guess I should thank him for that since that’s where my humble beginnings in this business lie.

He also is credited as the father of the semicolon. For which I can’t forgive him.

If you’ve read my posts here on the beauty of apt punctuation, you know how passionate I can be about some things. I really dislike exclamation marks, for instance. I’ll excuse one or two in really hot action scenes, like “You’re gonna die really ugly, Butkiss!” Or in moments of intense emotion in a Stephen King novel, like “Don’t go in the basement!”  But usually, I side with F. Scott Fitzgerald who famously said using exclamation marks is “like laughing at your own joke.”

And don’t get me going on the rampant misuse of the humble apostrophe. Shaw called them “uncouth bacilli,” so his writings are peppered with stuff like didnt, wont and aint. Today, most people can’t or won’t be bothered to learn how to punctuate with the apostrophe. It’s like, banana’s out there! (sic)

But then there’s the semicolon. I was an English major, so I know in my brain what the thing is supposed to do: create a pause between two related independent clauses. As in: My dog Archie, sleeping at my side, just passed gas; he ran out of the room faster than I could so I got the blame when the husband came in. But in my heart, I hate them. And I really hate them in novels.

Thankfully, the semicolon is on the wane. According to a study from the Babbel, the online language-learning platform: “Semicolon usage in British English books has fallen by nearly 50% in the past two decades.”

But The Thing has been dying a slow death for a long time now. A study of semicolon use in U.S. publishing from 1920 to 2019 noted a dramatic slide. Newspapers, magazines, and fiction and nonfiction books all soured on the semicolon, though nonfiction after 2000 did see an uptick from the depths.

Uptick…probably had something to do with lawyers.

The Babbel study set off a predictably anal reaction in the British press. The Independent lamented: “Our best punctuation mark is dying out; people need to learn how to use it.” The Financial Times whined: “Semicolons bring the drama; that’s why I love them.” Gawd, loosen your bun, Wilma. Only The Spectator had the sense to write a wry obit: “The semicolon had its moment; that moment is over.”

I’m not alone in my distaste for The Things. George Orwell called them “an uncessary stop.” Cormac McCarthy called its useage “Idiocy.” Even Edgar Allen Poe called for the dash to replace it. (Yeah! Go, Eddie!)

Here’s a passage from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Find the semicolons and then you tell me if they work.

Having lived in Westminster—how many years now? Over twenty—one feels even in the midst of traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.

It’s argued that the semicolon between the “warning, musical” and “the hour, irrevocable” achieves an “indescribable pause,” as Woolf puts it. Would a full stop have worked better? Would periods (the likely choice of modern writers) been less fussy? And the ultimate question: Who am I to quibble with Virginia Woolf?

I dunno. To me, a semicolon in fiction just never feels right. It feels pretentious and archaic. To you, or other writers, it can feel…useful, even lending a certain gravitas. Martin Luther King used them with magnificent ease. Ditto Twain, Chandler, Rushdie.

The best quote I found about this comes from Abraham Lincoln, no less. He wrote, in 1864:

“I have a great respect for the semi-colon; it’s a very useful little chap.” But then he adds the kicker: “With educated people, I suppose, punctuation is a matter of rule; with me it is a matter of feeling.”

Indeed. Fiction is about finding your way around the placement of words, sentences and phrases. It is all about feeling your way, feeling period. If it weren’t, you and I would be writing legal briefs. So, okay….go forth, crime dogs, and semicolonize. If it feels good, do it. I’ll just look the other way.

By PJ Parrish

I’m going to try really hard to stay on topic today. But it’s going to be tough sledding because I have all this…personal…stuff on my brain this week. Still, it’s odd when stuff in your personal life sometimes dovetails what is going on in your reading life.

Post-vacation (where I read four books in two weeks), I’m finding I still have a strong urge to keep reading. While in Paris, searching the hot and stuffy crannies of the Abbey Bookshop on behalf of my claustrophic husband, I pulled out a ratty paperback for 2 euros. it was Nick Hornby’s About A Boy. I gave it to the husband and he read it in week, often keeping me awake at night with his laughter.

I brought it home and started it two days ago. Finished it last night. What a terrific book. Now, I have seen the movie (starring Hugh Grant) but had never come upon Hornby’s 1998 book. How did I miss this book?

To summarize: Will is 36 but acts like a teenager. He goes to the right nightclubs, loves Nirvana, and knows what trainers (sneaks) to wear. He has also discovered the perfect way to score with women — hanging around a single moms’ group, pretending to be Mr. Nice Guy and the father Marcus, a dweeby 12-year-old boy. Marcus is weird. He loves Mozart, never has owned a pair of sneakers, and lives in fear that his single mom Fiona will finally succeed in committing suicide.

About A Boy is very funny. But it’s about growing up (or failing to do so), keeping life at arm’s length, and the prickly friendship of two adolescents. It’s a slender little book in which nothing much really happens. (outside of Fiona trying to “top herself.”) Yet the book is impossible to put down as you grimace, groan, laugh and ultimately root hard for these people. Along with Hornby’s elegant writing, the character progression of Will and Marcus is what propells this story. As a reviewer for the The Guardian put it:

The psychology of Hornby’s characters is carefully, thoughtfully, and gently done. There is a heart to Hornby’s writing which sets its world apart from those of Connolly or Amis. Will’s friendship with Marcus – at first grudging, then resigned, and finally desperate – is both funny and touching. If About a Boy lacks anything, it is incident…this is a book where nothing much happens except people getting on with their lives. How Will Freeman gets on with his if he gets one at all is what About a Boy is all about.

It’s all about people. And learning to not keep people at arm’s length.

Which brings me to the personal stuff. I’ve always been fairly good at keeping people at arm’s length. It’s just my nature. But over the decades, I have tried very, very hard to learn how to not do this. I’m lucky that I married a social animal whose singular talent is making others feel comfortable and, well, noticed. My best friend Linda is also one of these people. I used to think this was something you are just born with. Like, they got the people gene and I didn’t. Well, I have learned that’s not true. You have to work at this stuff.

Allow me a metaphor. I love to garden. You know what decades of gardening has taught me? You can’t just stick a plant in the ground and expect it to bloom and grow so you can then sit back in your chair and admire it. You have to really pay attention to it. Watering, feeding, finding it a new home if it’s not thriving. You have to do this constantly. Not just when you feel like it. So it is with the people in your life.

I dislike Facebook. It’s a time-suck and I know it’s bad for me. But it has recently helped me reconnect with two old friends whom I had allowed to drift away. One, who did public relations for the Miami City Ballet, contacted me out of the blue only because I had posted something about dance on FB. I called her. We talked for two hours. I had forgotten how much we enjoyed each other’s company. I am working hard now on keeping in touch with her. I’m trying to pay attention this time.

Another old acquaintance found me on Facebook while I was in Paris. She was my boss at the Fort Lauderdale News and we lost touch decades ago when she moved to France. We weren’t able to meet up in Paris but now we’re emailing regularly, and trying hard to get the friendship synapes firing again.

A third friend recently lost her husband. Yeah, it’s hard being around people in mourning, or those trying to cling to the pieces when their boats sink. But I am trying to be there.

One last note. I have another friend — acquaintance really, we’re not real close — who is going through a really hard time right now. Her adult daughter has been drifting away, not staying in contact and seemingly not interested in keeping the relationship alive. My friend is at sea over this. It’s hard to be around her because she’s really needy, But I am trying to at least listen. Even when my inner-me is wanting to pull away. As Will says in the book:

Life was, after all, like air. Will could have no doubt about that any more. There seemed to be no way to keep it out or at a distance, and all he could do for the moment was live it and breathe it. How people managed it pull it into their lungs without choking was a mystery to him; it was full of bits. This was air you could almost chew.

Strange how some books find you when you most need them.

I am going to seek out Hornby’s other books. I like this writer. He can be witty but also dark and sarcastic, dealing with painful things. In About A Boy, nothing much happens, yet I didn’t care one bit. Give me a writer who isn’t afraid to be emotionally generous any time over a writer who holds his characters — and his readers — at arm’s length.

By PJ Parrish

I am home. But my heart is still elsewhere. Call it jetlag or maybe just Post-Paris Depression. All I know is that is always takes me a while to come back down to Earth after vacation.

We’ve been to Paris many times, but this time was a little special. Maybe it was because we didn’t do much. We’ve been to all the museums and seen all the sights, so this time we did things differently. The Italians have a great expression for it: Il dolce far niente. The sweetness of doing nothing.  The closest French phrase is l’art de ne rien faire. The art of doing nothing. Which really is an art in a city where the Louvre is two blocks away and everyone else is running around trying to keep to their Chatgpt schedules. (Oh geez, gotta hurry, Mildred. The Eiffel Tower sparkles at 10 p.m.!)

We ate. We drank. We walked our dog Archie in the Palais Royal gardens. We did a Seine dinner cruise for my husband Daniel’s 80th birthday. We went inside the refurbished Notre Dame. While I dog-sat, Daniel and my bestie Linda went to the French Open (outside court access only for 30 euros…we’re not rolling in dough. But we did watch Coco’s great win on TV). That was about it.

Except we read. A lot. This is where I always catch up on my to-read list. But I always take books that are set in the country or city where I am visiting. This time, I started out with The Paris Widow by Kimberly Belle. It won the Edgar this year in Best Paperback Original. It’s a solid thriller, redolent of the city. I took it to lunch with me at Bistrot Valois.

Finishing that, I headed over to The Abbey Bookshop to pick up some used books. I don’t use an E-reader so this bookstore, run by Canadian Brian Spence, is always on my itinerary. I picked up and devoured The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George, a beat-up copy of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal (because I love the movie) and Georges Simenon’s The Yellow Dog (because I have one).

Reading a book while you’re actually in the book’s world doubles the pleasure, I think. It deepens your appreciation for the culture and history. It connects you emotionally. And it enhances your memories once you leave.

That said, I did not read Under the Tuscan Sun when visiting there. Seemed a bit too spot-on, you know? In Rome, I brought a copy of Ross King’s Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling because we intended to visit the Sistine Chapel. Didn’t make it due to a mild illness, but I am STILL plugging away at this one. Dense but very interesting book. Maybe, like the pope implores Michelangelo, I will finally make an end of it one day.

So, crime dogs. Good to be home and among you again. Ready to get back to planting my tomatoes, walking around my lake, and trying not to miss duck confit and fresh-squoshed orange juice. Tell us, if you will, what books made your vacations more memorable. In the meantime, indulge me while I share a snap I took of Archie. It was 6:30 a.m. and raining. We were on our way to the boulangerie to pick up our daily croissants. We had the Louvre to ourselves.

(Spoiler alert. I am going to kill off some characters today and tell you about it.)

By PJ Parrish

Some of you might know I have a thing for apocalyptic stories. For some odd reason, dystopic fiction really floats my Charon’s Ferry. Give me degraded societies, post-nuclear nilism, and weird games of survival over sunny utopianism any day.

Aside: I am really a nice person. I tend to side with the optimists. You’d even want to sit next to me at a boring wedding.

But this is just my thing. One of my favorite movies is On the Beach, which led me to hunt down a copy of Neil Shute’s excellent source novel. No one dies in On the Beach, but everyone is doomed. The novel quotes these infamous lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.”

I also liked Suzanne Collins’ books and count The Road among my all-time favorite novels. So when we started watching the TV series, The Last Of Us, I was all in for the long haul. The Last Of Us unfolds 20 years after the world is ravaged by a fungal pandemic that transforms humans into aggressive zombies. The hero Joel is a hardened smuggler, haunted by past loss, who is tasked with escorting Ellie, a 14-year-old girl immune to the infection, across the remnants of the US because she might be the key to a cure. They make their grim way from the ruins of Boston to the Montana wastelands, dodging zombies, renegades and what’s left of a foul government force.  Think The Road meets Night of the Living Dead.

It’s really grim, yet strangely life-affirming, focusing on the prickly relationship between Joel and Ellie, and the drama’s main theme of human duality — our equal capacity for love and violence.

But then Joel dies. Not just dies by zombie attack. He is brutally murdered by rogue survivalists. I was crushed. I was so emotionally invested in this character that I almost didn’t want to watch the series anymore. A week later, it still haunts me.

Why kill off a good character? What’s to be gained? In The Road, Cormac McCarthy choses to kill off the father, who is leading his young son through the bleak post-nuclear world. But I sensed it had to end that way. The boy is taken in by a man and woman and the book’s elegiac ending is oddly optimistic:

She [the woman survivor] would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

I felt none of that sense of faith or higher purpose in Joel’s death. I felt only anger at the banal barbarity of it. I’m trying to process this as a writer. Sometimes, good characters have to be sacrificed. I get that. I’ve done it myself.

But killing off a character should always be done with the greatest of care. When done well, it makes us empathize with the extreme emotions characters are feeling. More to the point, it can — should? — provide momentum for the surviving characters. In the case of The Last Of Us, I can see where things are going to go. Joel’s death will spur Ellie to seek vengeance. But somehow it also seems a little cheap, done only by the writers to make me wonder, “What comes next?”

Killing off the good should never be only done as a plot tease. It must have purpose. I’m going to let someone else speak to this. Quoting novelist Karen Outen here, my emphasis in bold:

Killing off a fully realized character tests a story in a way unlike any other. It draws attention to itself, but the writer has to ask: does it draw energy away from or toward the story? Some deaths can render the story superfluous by contrast, or simply suck all the  remaining energy out of a story. At its best, a character’s death should arrest some lines of story movement but create clearer narrative paths—ones of heightened tension—for other parts of the story.

I see death acting as a pinball lever, shooting a story from one path onto another and opening a new world of consequences for the characters and for the story arc. That new thrust can be as exciting for the reader as for the writer, carrying along with it a dizzying array of emotional realities: regret, relief, hubris, grief, joy, fear. The basic question about whether to kill off a character, then, is no different than the question about any narrative choice: does it work? 

Does the death draw energy toward or away from the story? Is the death well earned? Does it propel the story via another character’s arc? Does it work? That’s the bottom line. I am willing to give The Last Of One a little more time to prove to me that it does.

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Postscript: I am on vacation for the next two weeks. In Paris, by the time you read this, taking in the sights, sounds and the insouciant house red. The world spins on. So please talk amongst yourselves and I will catch up soon. Bonne journée!