Reni, Guido; Susanna and the Elders; Glynn Vivian Art Gallery; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/susanna-and-the-elders-227206

By Elaine Viets

Sex, violence, perjury, crooked judges, blackmail – and police procedural techniques still used today. All these are in the first detective story.

So which one is it?

Some say the first detective story was Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” way back in 1841. Wilkie Collins generally gets credit for the first detective novel, “The Moonstone,” in 1868. And others claim Metta Victoria Fuller wrote the first American detective novel, “The Dead Letter,” in 1866. After that, scholars slug it out until we get to the undisputed champion, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his detective, Sherlock Holmes, in 1887.

But I agree with M.T. Logan that the first detective story was published several thousand years earlier. It’s the story of Susanna and the Elders. If you’re Catholic or Greek Orthodox, Susannah is in the Book of Daniel and is considered divinely inspired. For Protestants and many other religions, the story is part of the Apocrypha, the books that didn’t quite make the cut.

Susanna was a young married Jewish woman, living in Babylon. She was God-fearing and good-looking. Susanna liked to walk in her husband’s orchard, and two old pervs – excuse me, two highly respected judges – liked to watch. They fell madly in lust with her, and conspired “when they might find her alone,” as the Good Book says. The old creeps lucked out.

On a hot day, Susanna decided to take a bath in the orchard. The two old men hid themselves and watched as she told her maids, “Bring me oil, and washing balls, and shut the doors of the orchard, that I may wash me.” As soon as the maids brought the things for Susanna’s bath, they shut the doors and left. Nobody knew that the two old degenerates were lurking in the orchard.

Once the doors were shut, the horny old coots cornered Susanna, and said she’d better have sex with them, or they would lie and say “that a young man was with thee, and therefore thou didst send away thy maids.”

Susanna realized she was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t, but she’d be damned if she’d have sex with those two creeps. “It is better for me to fall into your hands without doing it, then to sin in the sight of the Lord,” she said.

Susanna screamed and the old blackmailers screamed, and there was a trial. The judges testified falsely against Susanna, claiming she was with a young stud under a tree, and they’d tried to stop this terrible sin of adultery. The young man got away, but the judges caught Susanna. “The multitude believed them, as being the elders, and the judges of the people, they condemned her to death.”
This was long before #MeToo, and while adultery was a sin for both sexes, it was a bigger sin for women. The patriarchs didn’t want free-range women begetting someone’s child.
Susanna called out to God, “I have done none of these things, which these men have maliciously forged against me.”
In stepped young Daniel, who said, “I am clear of the blood of this woman.”
He lectured the crowd for condemning Susanna “without examination or knowledge of the truth.”
He then conducted his investigation the way all good modern police officers do. He separated the two judges.
He asked the first judge under what tree did he see Susanna doing the wild thing with the young hunk. The judge said, “under a mastic tree.” That tree is where chewing gum comes from.
The second judge claimed Susanna did the deed under a holm tree, a type of oak.

The two lying judges had convicted themselves “by their own mouth.” They were killed.
So there you have it – a detective story with a victim, two villains, and a hero who knew how to search for the truth.

Note: Today’s blog is a repeat. I’ll stop by when I can. — Elaine

By John Gilstrap

About 25 years ago (and at least that many books ago), I was in Hollywood at the Warner Brothers lot, writing a script for a film called Young Men And Fire, which I foolishly thought would be an adaptation of the wonderful Norman McLean book of the same name, but turned out to be something different.

My boss at the time was Len Amato, then a producer for Baltimore/Spring Creek Pictures, and more recently president of HBO Films. Len was a great guy to work for–very patient and a solid mentor to young and inexperienced screenwriters. I remember turning in a scene I’d written in the script that had some really cool, innovative stuff going on. If I recall properly, it was about secondary characters doing the cool stuff to rescue the lead character, who would be listed as the “star” of the picture. Len read it, said some complimentary things, then smacked me with one of the great lightbulb moments of my writing career:

“John, remember that the star gets to do all the cool stuff.”

Extrapolating out, this means that the star (main character) should own every scene in which he or she is present. Because they’re the ones driving the story, they should also be the ones driving their scenes.

I was reminded of Len Amato’s mentorship a week or so ago, when my editor at Kensington, the wonderful Michaela Hamilton, sent me her editorial letter on the manuscript for Scorched Earth, the next Jonathan Grave thriller, due out next spring. In it, I presented scenes where the bad guys were setting up their bad guy stuff in active ways, while Jonathan and his team spent most of the first third of the book researching databases and connecting dots. They really don’t do much of anything. If Scorched Earth were a mystery, then the quiet sleuthing would be fine.

But my fans are not looking for a mystery from me. They’re looking for a thriller, and in thrillers, the main character (the star) makes things happen. Plots points are revealed kinetically, the results of the star’s actions.

I’d forgotten Len Amato’s Dictum.

And heres’ the thing: While I was and still am very proud of the story, I knew something was wrong with it. I told my wife that the story’s heartbeat didn’t seem quite right. For the life of me, though, I couldn’t see what was wrong.

But Michaela Hamilton did. This is the wonder of a long relationship with a fantastic editor. Once she showed my how in the first act, Jonathan processes and acts on information that is provided to him, rather than hunting down and finding the information himself.

Well, crap. I don’t mean to sound un-humble, but it’s been decades since I’ve been compelled to a massive rewrite of a manuscript because of editorial input. More than a few of my books have required no change at all beyond copy edits.

At their face, the changes I’m making affect only the first act. In reality, because my plots are tightly woven and fairly intricate, there’s no such thing as a first act change that doesn’t have impact on some scene or line of dialogue later in the book.

It’s my own fault. I’ve been wildly distracted by various life events in the past 12 months, and in retrospect, I tried to get away with a shortcut that didn’t work. I didn’t do it intentionally, but if I’d been 100% mentally in the game, I’d be on to my next project by now, not causing stress for myself and the entire production team by stopping forward progress and working backwards to fix a problem that never should have existed.

I think it’s important to understand that every observation made by my editor–and the changes they triggered–were all presented as merely suggestions. They were willing to publish the book exactly as I had written it, but “maybe it would be better if . . .”

There’s no maybe about it. I’ve given myself two weeks to make the changes.

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.

One of my oldest friends, Steve Knagg (a former newspaper columnist), is a guitar-picking son of a gun. In the late 1980s and 90s, he and I traveled across the country to our state and national conferences and events, and played in hospitality rooms to mostly entertain ourselves, and hopefully, others.

That was back in the days when Southwest Arlines flew with only a few dozen passengers, even at peak times. Once, he and I boarded with our guitars and found there were only six other seats filled. We’d been in the bar earlier, so we went to the back, and after the plane took off, took out our guitars and started playing.

The flight attendant came by. “Y’all can’t be doing that. You’re disturbing the other passengers.”

I glanced down the aisle. “We’re providing entertainment.”

“I’d like for you to provide silence.”

Steve spoke up. “We’ll quit playing if you’ll give us free drinks.”

She came back with a dozen bottles of Wild Turkey and we put away our instruments. I think that was the most we were ever paid for our performances.

I haven’t played in over twenty-five years, but he still picks a little, and a couple of weeks ago, we started talking about how we learned. My limited abilities came from lessons when I was in junior high school. To a kid who loved The Monkees, the idea of being a famous musician was appealing, but after learning the basic chords, I abandoned the classes because I didn’t like to practice.

After that, I tinkered with my old Stella, and like other kids of our era, my friends and I formed a garage band that was…terrible. We had three songs, and I’m sure they were like fingernails on a blackboard to anyone over eighteen. One of my female cousins asked us to play at her fifteenth birthday, and we went through our repertoire five times before my uncle came into the living room, unplugged the microphone, and took it with him.

We weren’t surprised. The year before, we played In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida on the record player so many times he took the LP off the spindle, opened the door, and flung it like a frisbee into the yard. He was very clear on what he liked, or disliked.

Steve, on the other hand. learned to play in a different way. One day his dad bought a cheap guitar and without saying a word to his three sons, leaned it up in the corner of the living room where it gathered dust for a year or two. Then one day, after listening to Bob Dylan albums, Steve wiped the dust off and asked a friend to teach him some chords.

He showed considerable aptitude and eventually taught his younger brother to play. That brother became an engineer at Skunkworks, but could have made a career out of playing in professional bands. He’s one of the best pickers I’ve ever known.

I asked Steve once what he would have done if his dad came in with the guitar and said, “Here, learn to play this.”

“I wouldn’t have done it.”

Typical kid reaction, and I should have learned from it, since I took child psychology classes as part of my degree in education. Which leads me to today’s post. Our oldest daughter, Chelsea (AKA the Redhead in my newspaper columns), is now a high school librarian and suffers the same stubbornness. If I tell her to read a book that caught my attention, she won’t do it. She loves me, but there’s some unconscious quirk that kicks in and she can’t help but dig in her heels.

Her twelve-year-old daughter, Riley, inherited the same stubbornness, but I didn’t know it until a couple of weeks ago when the Bride and I took the whole crew down to the Texas coast. Riley suffers from the same affliction I’ve carried all my life, the need to have books close by. It makes my heart happy to see she brings a backpack full of books everywhere she goes.

Interestingly, she prefers not to read on electronic devices, stating that she likes the feel and smell of books.

Ahhhhh.

Now that she’s graduated to chapter books, I really want her to read one that I discovered when I was in the seventh grade. Let’s pause here to understand The Spooky Thing was hysterical to a boy in 1967. William O. Steele was a favorite back then, and I have most of those books on my nostalgia shelf. Sorry about the blurry image, but it was the best I could find online.

So I made the mistake of telling Riley I wanted her to read the book, and described the plot and how funny I thought it was. The Redhead cut her eyes at me and gave her head a small warning shake. It was too late. The sixth-grader shut me down and left the untouched book in the kitchen table.

When she went outside to swim with her brother and cousins, the Redhead caught me. “She won’t read it now. You should have just put it somewhere she could see it and maybe she’d pick it up.”

“This isn’t like when I was a kid and adults were the enemy. It’s a good book.”

“Never trust anyone over twenty-one. I know, Dad, you’ve told us those stories, but she’s like I am, and you’re her granddad. Remember what you say when you’re teaching a writing class. Show, don’t tell.”

“So what should I have done?”

“Put it somewhere where she’d see it and maybe she would have picked it up and thumbed through the pages. But it looks old, the protagonists are boys, and she likes girl heroes the most.” She shrugged. “And besides, I don’t think the cover would ever catch her interest.”

“I like the artwork.”

“Of course you do, but she reads graphic novels. She’s used to Calvin and Hobbs artwork, too, as well as Garfield. Now she reads things like School for Good and Evil, and Big Nate, and The Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Her new favorite is the Sherlock Society.”

“Never heard of those.”

“She just read The Thief of Always.”

“Okay, I see where the graphics are better, but she reads Clive Barker and not my own stuff?”

“She doesn’t know him, but she’ll get there with your books, because she sees them on the shelf behind your desk all the time. She asked me the other day if she would like The Rock Hole, but don’t suggest it. Let her find the books in her own time.”

I sighed, realizing I should have remembered Steve’s dad and the guitar, and left The Spooky Thing out with all the other kid books in what we call “the kid’s room,” and crossed my fingers.

So with that knowledge, my next project is to collect all my old childhood favorites and put them on a shelf where the grandcritters can see them. Maybe our future readers will find something of interest, and they can enjoy the books that led me to become a dedicated reader, and eventually a writer.

I should have listened harder in Child Psych 101, but then again, that was a long time ago and I didn’t want anyone, especially professions, to tell me what to do.