Is It Time To Retire
The Defective Detective?

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“The rain was comin’ down like all the angels in heaven decided to take a piss at the same time. When you’re in a situation like mine, you can only think in metaphors.” — Dick Justice, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

By PJ Parrish

Maybe I’m just hanging around the wrong people these days.

I’ve been lucky to have some free time this month so am reading for pleasure. But have started and put aside four books. It didn’t dawn on me until this week why: The protagonists are all hot messes. Maybe it’s because I see enough losers in real life that my patience with fictional ones has snapped its last thread. Coupled with the fact that every character on TV seems damaged, deranged or just too ditzy to live.

Now, we all love a flawed protagonist. Their personal journey is a parallel track that runs along side the main murder plot and creates interest and empathy. But man, does everyone have to be addicted, divorced, friendless, childless, and beset with demons from their screwed up childhoods? Do we really need another detective whose only steady relationships are with Cutty Sark and John Coltrane?

I really wish I could name names here because I hit some passages that are really worth quoting to make my point. And none of these books are old noir. Each is of recent vintage and a couple are big-name writers.

This all dovetailed with a recent Facebook post by my writer-friend and Shamus winner Rick Helms. He’s on a cruise with lots of time to read, but he, like me, has lost patience. To quote:

[I’m] relaxing with a generally well-written private eye novel by a writer new to me. Like many PI novels these days the protagonist is almost painfully damaged. Whether it’s alcohol, drugs, gambling, or just plain paralyzing depression or grief, a large segment of the mystery writing community frequently writes broken protags. Some of these characters have been very critically successful. I have sort of a different take. I tend to regard emotionally damaged protags as a bit of a crutch.

Sure, I’ve written them…[my PI] Pat Gallegher is a gambling addict dragging half a century of failure behind him like a Dickens ghost. My small town police chief Judd Wheeler has PTSD and panic attacks. My forensic psychologist Ben Long presents with a dramatically exaggerated version of my own high-functioning autism. In each case, however, they are coping adequately with their difficulties. While they may experience distress, they don’t wallow in it. None of them wakes up hung over to a living room strewn with pizza boxes and beer bottles and days of dishes piled in the sink (the universal literary language for desperation and giving up). They are managing well despite their problems. Their personal tragedies impact their lives, but they aren’t the story itself. 

Rick goes on to say he’s old enough to remember reading the lastest new releases by Ross Macdonald and his own work is influenced by Chandler, Robert B. Parker, Brett Halliday, and the like. He, like me, has a special love of Macdonald. To quote:

Lew Archer TOLD the stories of his investigations. He never WAS the story. The pathos and distress in his stories were always portrayed by the people he interviewed in the course of his investigations. He regards a murder victim or an oil spill in Santa Barbara with the same dispassionate observations as he might describe a businessman’s special baseball game. Archer is an observer of tragedy, seldom reacting to it with more than average empathy. He cares, but he doesn’t lose himself in his investigation. In the end, he walks away with little observable growth or change in his basic character, because he was never broken in the first place. The story was never about him. It was about solving the case.

He also cites Parker’s Spenser as a relatively mentally healthy and confident guy doing a tough job while maintaining a long-term relationship. He cares about people, but — with the possible exception of when Ruger nearly killed him in Small Vices — he rarely allows his own personal condition to do much more than put a hitch in his giddy-up.

Likewise, as Rick points out, “We know little of Phillip Marlowe’s inner emotions and mental functioning. We know his opinions, because Chandler was full of them, mostly of the sardonic variety. But nobody would refer to Marlowe as damaged.”

When did the shift to a protag’s personal journey begin? I’m not well-read in the old stuff to even guess. But I do know I’m weary of the dreary dick. Is it time to call them out as the tired cliches they are?

Okay,  we have to stop and back up. Time for definitions. I love definitions. They bring clarity to fuzzy topics like this. Is a cliche the same thing as a trope? Or is the latter just an uppity word for the former? Lemme give it a go:

Cliche: Using certain phrases, expressions, devices, or archetypes that have been used so much they lose freshness. Maybe they were once intriguing, but when readers see something too often, they become desensitized, and the idea no longer carries the currency it once had. Examples: the naive female rookie patronized by boss and colleagues. (Tyne Daly, playing clean Kate to Eastwood’s dirty Harry?) The slimy defense lawyer. The good-cop-bad-cop. The crabby lieutenant who suspends a rogue underling.  The PI who gets the crap beat out of him but jumps out of bed the next morning all dishy and doodle. Add your own to the list…

Trope: A familiar character type, plot point, setting, or writing style that has become instantly recognizable to readers. Very common in genre novels and when done well, every effective. Examples: In the romance, “enemies to lovers” trope (lifted from Jane Austen). The lone gunslinger and embattled sheriff. (Come back, Shane!)

Most folks conflate cliches and tropes but they are distinctly different. Tropes can be good things, helping a character to come across as an old friend or making classic situations feel fresh again (think Romeo and Juliet transformed into West Side Story.)

Time for some Joseph Campbell here. In his The Hero With a Thousand Faces, he drew upon works by psychoanalyst Carl Jung to develop recognizable literary archetypes. According to Campbell, everyone from Homer’s Odysseus to Neo in The Matrix is living out the same epic story. George Lucas credits Campbell for the Star Wars trilogy, using the King Authur trope to create boy-king Luke Skywalker, who gets a magic sword, is guided by an old mentor, and storms a castle to save a princess.

One of my favorite tropes is Austen’s Mr. Darcy. He’s handsome, mysterious, sexy. I loved how Helen Fielding used him in Bridget Jones’s Diary: “It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It’s like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting ‘Cathy’ and banging your head against a tree.”

Let’s face it, crime fiction is at its heart tropian. We rely on situations (crimes, usually murder), archetypes (loner cop holding out for justice) and even some “rules,” which of course can be broken.

But how do you honor the great traditions of our genre without being banal? How do you cleave to such a well-worn path and still give your readers some new vistas? How do you utilize trope and not slide downhill into cliche?

Our dilemma is that a story has to feel new and yet be familiar enough to be recognized as part of the genre. Writers often want to pay homage to their favorites from the past, but characters have to distinguish themselves in their own present or they petify into stereotypes. In the early books, Spenser seemed a Marlowe knockoff, but Parker quickly made him into his own man.

Years ago, I got into a lengthy blog discussion on this subject with a bunch of crime writers. Luckily, I kept this quote from Brian Lindenmuth: “the PI novel is the haiku of the mystery genre; there may be only 17 syllables but in the right hands those syllables will sing. There is the potential for a lot of power in that framework.”

I liken crime writing to classical ballet. There are only five positions for the feet and arms in ballet. But within that strict framework, anything is possible, from swoony-romanticism of Swan Lake to George Balanchine’s Stravinsky-twitchy Agon.

The trick, if it can be simplified as such, is that you have to take our beloved tropes and turn them into your own, like Fielding did with Emma and Bridget Jones. A while back, I contributed a short story to an anthology whose theme was honoring the PI tradition. Being on a John D. McDonald binge back then, I decided to create a female McGee whose business card read: Mavis Magritte, Salvage Consultant, Slip C12, Duncan Clinch Marina, Traverse City, Michigan. I had a ball writing that thing. Mavis has to prove her best friend Eunice Meijer didn’t kill her creepy lover Dirk. And yes, they drink gin.

Trope on, crime dogs. In the meantime, take some inspiration from the pas de deux from Balanchine’s Agon.

 

One Word Holds Power

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Have you ever received a text from a family member or close friend and knew something was wrong even though the words indicated the opposite?

I’ll show you what I mean with a real-life example.

The Kid planned to drive up to deliver ducks to the couple who lives at the top of our mountain, off-the-grid in a year-round camp surrounded by tall pines, oak, birch, and maple trees. By 10 a.m. that morning, we still hadn’t heard from The Kid, which is unusual. He’s always been an early riser.

So, I shot him a text. “Still planning to come up today?”

Several minutes dragged by before he responded. “Yes.”

My intuition tapped me on the shoulder. Something’s wrong. He never responds with one word. Besides, a simple yes didn’t give me enough information. If he brought all three grandkids, I would need to plan to feed six rather than three.

Plus, I let my little fur-babies run around my office during the day, but our grandchildren have a habit of leaving doors open. So, when they visit, it’s safer to leave them in their guinea pig habitat.

I texted back, “The Joe and the chicks coming, too?”

Another long pause. “Just The Joe.”

“You okay? You sound… I dunno… off.”

The Kid knows I’m tuned into him. Over the years I’ve learned to trust my intuition, and it has never failed me. Lying would be pointless.

“I was chasing ducks.”

“Okay, cool,” I texted, but something told me “chasing ducks” wasn’t the full story. Regardless, I didn’t want to push the issue via text. “I get the feeling you won’t be staying long.”

“We can stay for a bit.” The five-minute pause seemed to last twenty. “The longer the better. LOL”

And there it was—the first hint of the real reason he seemed off. Which he’d spill in person. It’s much harder to hide behind a false façade while staring into a concerned parent’s eyes. Though I’d never want to come across as pushy—he is a grown man, after all—I can’t take it when my kid is hurting. I don’t care how old he is. I’ll always be fiercely protective of his beautiful heart.

I do have a point to all this.

With that one simple word—Yes—I, the reader, knew to pay attention. That yes held power. That yes held unlimited power, more powerful than if he’d written an entire paragraph.

Writers should do the same. It’s a simple but effective way to add tension to a scene, cause a disturbance, and cue the reader to pay attention. The one-word, staccato sentence is a tool used for emphasis.

Run. Now.

It’s short and to the point. It calls attention to itself and exploits a reader’s emotions. Varying sentence structure holds a reader’s attention.

The following example looks like an exaggeration, but I once had to critique the first few pages of a novel written just like it.

As he stared at me, I could not look away. As I moved around the room, his stare held me hostage. As he moved closer, I told him to stop. As I backed away, he kept coming.

Every sentence began with “As” for three, never-ending pages. Not only is it grueling and repetitive, it’s annoying to read.

Rewrite:

His wolf-like stare held me hostage. Stop. Please stop. He moved closer. I backed away. Dear God, no. Not again. My spine hit the wall, my fingers searching behind me for the doorframe.

See how much more immediate the second example sounds? We don’t want to overdo it, but nothing can replace a well-placed staccato sentence here and there.

Writers have access to a plethora of writing tips, but it’s important not to overlook simple ways to hone our craft, like the act of reading and sentence structure.

Thoughts? Let’s discuss. 

 

Warriors battle a ruthless animal trafficking ring in Yellowstone. They will protect the sacred lineage of American Buffalo by any means necessary.

Even murder.

Download a sample on Amazon

 

How Not to Speak in Public

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

On occasion a writer is tapped to make some remarks in a public setting. For some, this is as enticing as a root canal, or being forced to watch The Golden Bachelor. We’ve given out some good advice on public speaking here at TKZ (you can use the search box). Today, I’d like to talk about things you should never do when giving a speech.

To help me out, I call upon the great American humorist Robert Benchley. Benchley came to prominence with a stage performance called “The Treasurer’s Report.” It was a hilarious bit about a befuddled man trying to make a dull presentation somewhat entertaining. It was turned into a short film in 1928 and is one of the earliest “talkies” ushered in by The Jazz Singer.

Benchley gave a similar performance the 1943 movie The Sky’s the Limit, starring Fred Astaire. It gives us a compendium of speaking blunders we should attend to.

Take a look at this:

What did Mr. Benchley do wrong here?

Throat clearing (literally and figuratively). He announces that he has some remarks “by way of introduction.” Well, duh! That’s why he’s up there. You don’t need to tell your audience you are there to make some remarks. Just start remarking.

Which brings us to your opening words. So many speakers get introduced, then step up to the microphone and say something like, “Thank you, Jan, for that lovely introduction.” This is the equivalent of throat clearing. These words that go through the ears out right out of the heads of the audience. They are waiting for what you to say that they haven’t heard before.

Joke intro: “I’m reminded of a story, which probably most of you have heard…”

First of all, it’s very hard to tell a joke successfully in a speech. Some people are natural at it and can get away with it, but they never announce that they are about to tell a joke. That raises expectations and increases the chance of bombing.

If you’ve got a funny line that you have tested before others, go ahead and toss it in, without any additions.

Don’t laugh at your own stories or offhand remarks. Let the audience do all the reacting.

Don’t look above the audience. Make eye contact. I usually find a few friendly faces on either side of a room to return to.

Don’t intro your slides. You’ve got slides? That’s good. When they to on, guess what? The audiences sees them. That’s the wonder of it. In any event, you don’t have to say you have prepared some slides. Make them appear, then say what you need to say about them. Which assumes, of course, you know everything on them, unlike Mr. Benchley:

And now the ending:

First, don’t drink water during your talk (unless necessary for survival).

Second, stick your landing. Know your ending. It’s that last note you leave with your audience. Don’t befuddle it.

Third, always leave sooner rather than later.

On occasion, Mark Twain would attend the services of Dr. Doane, later Bishop of Albany, but then the Rector of an Episcopal church in Hartford. The good doctor was not known for his brevity. His sermons tended to go on…and on. Twain, one of the world’s great speakers, wondered how to offer some advice to the minister. One Sunday he took his chance.

“A fine sermon this morning,” Twain said. “You know, I have a book at home containing every word of it.”

“You have not!” Dr. Doane said.

“I do indeed.”

“Well, you send that book to me. I’d like to see it.”

“I will,” Twain said. The following day he sent Dr. Doane an unabridged dictionary.

These are some big “don’ts” of public speaking. Any others you’d like to add?

Here What I’m Saying?

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I’m typing this slowly today, but a hard deadline looms and despite the vertigo threatening to wash me off this desk like a rogue wave/waive, I’ll try to make sense/cents through all the fuzziness in my frontal lobes. I feel unanchored and today’s blog post tends to drift as well. If you’ve never experienced this malady, let me explain. A single snowflake would look like a blizzard the way my head is spinning.

But to use a stolen line, I shall endeavor to persevere.

Rev, don’t move your head too fast, and keep it still. At least you aren’t leaning over the porcelain throne like the first time in Key West with the Gilstraps…and it wasn’t the gin or wine/whine then, either. Quit wandering around and focus, Spin Boy! 

All right. Debbie Burke’s fun post on A Pair of Pants several days ago brought to mind something that’s been bothering me for a good long while/wile. I guess I shouldn’t let the little things irritate me, but trying to lie/lye still all day yesterday, I found my fuzzy mind wandering, especially after looking at Facebook for a couple of minutes when the world settled down for a moment. This came to me.

I’m afeared the English language all us writers cherish is slowly deteriorating, and it might/mite due to social media.

Authors can use a number of platforms to promote their/there/they’re work, but I’m of the age to embrace only a couple. Facebook works best for me. (I’d always said I’d never have an FB account and avoided it for years until my first book was published. I knew so little about it, I once called it MyFace.) I eventually learned to link it to Instagram, figuring two/too/to birds were better than one.

So that’s where I settled, and I’m dismayed by all the abbreviations and the posters’ inability to use the correct words in a sentence or idea, let alone punctuation. Good lord, we all took English in school, and someone please tell me, did half the population of this country sleep through that class!!!???

Sentence structure aside, it’s/its/its’ the wrong words people select that drives me nuts. I suspect those folks don’t know/no the meaning of the word homophone. I’m not trying to be mean here, but I’m seeing more and more of those same issues arise in novels, whether/weather they’re self or traditionally published. I ask, “where were the copy editors!!!???

Biting down the rising nausea in/inn my office that refuses to be still, let’s get back to the classroom. A homophone is each of two/to/too or more words having the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins, or spelling.

Yep, these words can cause confusion when we use them in error and most word programs should catch the issue, but then again…

For the past few years, I’ve judged professional writing contests and the problem seems/seams to be getting worse. The wrong words with innocent intent are getting through. Here are just a handful I’ve seen in recent weeks, especially on social media and in other places, and in no particular order…wait, urk.

Getting back from the water closet and feeling like a freshman college student on their/they’re/there first night in the dorm, let’s/lets continue with our homophones.

Shear/Sheer

Sale/Sail

Sight/Cite

Bare/Bear

Peel/Peal

Whole/Hole

Roll/Role

Tale/Tail

Waste/Waist

Weather/Whether

Cell/Sell

Four/For

Break/Brake

Die/Dye

Heel/Heal

Creek/Creak

Idle/Idol

Knot/Not

Wright/Right

Sole/Soul

Accept/Except

Affect/Effect

Immigrant/Emigrant

Deer/Dear

Pear/Pair

Whole/Hole

Knew/New

Stationary/Stationery

Flower/Flour

Style/Stile

Know/No

Right/Write

Pane/Pain

Way/Weigh

Sweet/Suite

And of course, There/Their/They’re

Most of these came from Facebook posts I’ve collected over the past several months. Speaking of that platform, when I first became an FB user, I had the noble/nobel idea that it was a new version of the front porch on an old general store where people would/wood sit exchange positive ideas, stories, and information. Instead, it’s become a wasteland of manipulated videos, trolls who incite/insight fright or anger, and political antagonism promoted by those who hide behind an electronic wall and spew anything they want without fear of real/reel repercussion. If any of that had happened in front of a store when I was a kid, someone would‘ve gotten their nose busted and for good reason.

But back to what I was saying, this particular issue with the English language can be traced back to the way vowels were pronounced between the 14th and 18th centuries as individuals were more and more influenced by the introduction of other languages by migrants who moved to England after the Black Death.

Or/oar it might have come from what are known as “French loan words” (where the introduction of these words forced a change in the way English was pronounced). Another suggestion is that as the French language made/maid its way into everyday use during the war with France, general anti-French sentiments caused the middle class to deliberately make English sound less like the French.

Pronunciation is another key, and it’s hard to get specific vocalizations into what we write/right. It originates, I suspect, with our ancestors and region. For example, my former secretary from New Jersey and I often argued over the pronunciation of pen vs. pin. Each time I’d ask for a pen, she’d bring me a needle or map pin just for meanness. Here in Texas, the words are distinguishable only by spelling.

Take the word “here” for example. In Texas, we make it two syllables, whereas country music stars Dolly Parton and Dwight Yoakum have a unique Appalachian pronunciation that’s hard to duplicate unless you’re from that part of the nation. It’s an Old English soft sound produced at the back of the throat and can only be written as “hyer,” but not spoken as harsh as the spelling would dictate. In fact, I prefer their version, and though I’m a fairly good mimic, I can’t get that one down.

I believe those from the Ohio Valley pronounce “hear” with two syllables the way we do down hyer in Texas.

Trying to steer back to my original discussion in this mental tempest, no matter the origin, I suspect there are hundreds of other homophones I haven’t thought about. I bet you have your own to add, along with stories that tweak your Irritation Nerve.

And with that, I hope others find some value here in my version of English 101.

Everyone shout in agreement, here here! Which is what I thought people we saying back when I was in elementary school, (supposedly to authenticate our presence, I suppose). but then again, I soon found that the “dawnzer-lee light” was actually “dawn’s early light” in the Star-Spangled Banner, (it made sense since we pronounced “window-light” for a window pane) but I digress…and the spins are getting worse.

Our Secret Language

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By Elaine Viets

We writers learn many specialized words. Words for our craft, including point of view, story arc, and pacing. Legal words such as subpoena, defendant, and waiver. We learn forensic words, sports language and many more.

But we all speak a private language, though we may not realize it. I’m talking about family words.

I first learned about family words from Paul Dickson, the author of  “Family Words: A Dictionary of the Secret Language of Families.” If you can get your hands on this book, grab it.

Dickson describes family words this way: “Every family has them. The words that only you use, your own secret language. For instance, one family has coined the word ‘lurkin’ for any sock that has lost its mate because ‘you know the other one is ‘lurkin’ around somewhere.’”

My personal favorite from Dickson’s book is “Grabacabbage,” someone whose name you don’t know or can’t remember. As in, “I saw that Grabacabbage kid from Cedar Court skateboarding through traffic. He’s going to get hit.”

My family also had their own words. Many centered around food. Here are a few:

Mustgo. Leftovers. As in “must go today or you’ll eat it tomorrow.”

Bread sandwich. My grandfather’s scornful name for a sandwich with only a thin slice of meat. Grandpa liked to pile on his meat and cheese.

Sunday ham.  When unexpected guests dropped in around dinner time on Sunday, Mom would serve up an informal spread of potato salad, chips and lunchmeat. The cold cuts were the everyday stuff packed in our lunchboxes: baloney, pickle loaf, salami and braunschweiger, Swiss and American cheese.  One of us kids would be sent to the local convenience store for ten cents’ worth of ham – usually about three slices. The Sunday ham would be draped on top the platter. Only the guests could eat it. If they didn’t, Dad got the Sunday ham in his lunchbox. We kids weren’t allowed to touch it.

FHB. (Family Hold Back). Used when we had voracious visitors, and there was a sudden shortage of hamburgers, steaks, or pork chops. The meat was reserved for guests. Once they were served, we kids could eat. If there were two chops or burgers left, they went to the guests under FHB rules.

My family gatherings had their own special words.

Organ recital. When my great-aunts visited my grandmother, these formidable women would repair to the kitchen for coffee cake and what my grandfather called the organ recital. Grandpa would flee to the living room and watch the ball game.

The organ recital was for women only. Kids like me were banned, but I found a place where I could eavesdrop on the gruesome details.

My aunts were permanently upholstered in black and wore Enna Jettick shoes. During the organ recital, my aunts would discuss their aches, pain and operations in loving detail.

Better yet, they talk about other people’s operations. Especially the hopeless ones. Aunt Marie would say, “The surgeon opened Eddie up and found a tumor the size of a grapefruit. There was nothing they could do, so they sewed him back up and sent him home.” I don’t know why, but tumors were always the size of a grapefruit.

As the afternoon wore on and the coffee cake disappeared, the labor contest would commence, and the women would one-up one another with horror stories about how long they were in labor during childbirth.

Is it me or is it hot in here? A euphemism for hot flashes. No woman would ever admit she was in menopause, much less suffered hot flashes. Instead, she’d ask this question. The other ladies would declare the heat was getting to them too, and fan themselves dramatically with napkins and magazines. The hostess, who was usually the same age, understood what that question meant, and adjusted the room temperature to December in Iceland.

Mutton dressed as lamb.  An age-shaming remark aimed at an older woman dressed like a young girl. Today, Kris Jenner, Charo and Madonna are often sniped at as mutton dressed as lamb. I doubt they care. They’re laughing all the way to the bank.

Short arms. My grandfather’s term for someone who avoided reaching for a check. As in,  “I’m not going out with that short arms and get stuck with the dinner check again.”

Tuberoses. My grandmother’s nickname for any mournful chiming clock. Apparently, when she was younger, tuberoses were a popular funeral flower.

Pasture pool. A golf game.

What are your family words, TKZers? Do you use them in your writing?

***

It’s here! A Scarlet Death, my new Angela Richman, Death Investigator mystery. Buy A Scarlet Death hardcovers and ebooks at:

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Let’s Go To New Zealand

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Let’s Go To New Zealand
Terry Odell

First, a huge thanks to Kathleen Donnelly and James L’Etoile for filling in during my absence. Loved your posts.

I was going to jump back with a writing-related post, but let’s be honest. We get those all the time here at TKZ, but how many firsthand posts about a 3 week trip to New Zealand are in the archives?

(Also being honest – I haven’t gotten back to the wip. I printed out the first 25 chapter, which is as much as I’d written before I left, and read them on the rare occasions we had free time, and did my markups. They’re still in the envelope I packed them in.) Another “almost writing” thing? I actually remembered to keep a journal this time, although I have no intention of writing a book based on this trip. And, another moment of honesty—most of my notes were ‘travelogue’ and not the sorts of things I’d use in a novel if I’d planned to write one. Not to mention my longhand has degenerated to the point of bordering on unreadable.

So – New Zealand was a definite bucket list trip. The only improvement would have been to have Scotty beam me to Auckland and then back at the end of the trip. More details here and here.

map of New Zealand with a tour route markedWe covered almost the entire country, as you can see by the map. The tour lasted 18 days. We also arrived a couple of days prior to our tour to allow for potential delays and to get over jet lag. (There’s a 19 hour plus a day time difference between Auckland and Colorado on the way out. We get that day back on the return trip.)

For me, I’d say one of the things I’d want to remember wasn’t so much the experiences, amazing as they were, as it was the education. It was heartening to go to a museum and see group after group of schoolkids with their interest and enthusiasm about the exhibits, all of which were extremely well done. They’re the future.

We were on an organized tour, and didn’t spend a lot of time at any destination, but we covered a lot of destinations. Not just end-of-the-day, here’s your hotel, but numerous stops along the way. Sometimes just for photos—and the scenery was stunning—and sometimes for tours.

Want to follow along? I’ll give you a minute to grab a map or its digital equivalent.

We started in Auckland, but set out for Paihia and the Bay of Islands the next morning. En route, we stopped at Glow Worm Caves and the Waitangi Treaty House where we had our first introduction to the Maori culture and history. (Not my favorite subject in school, and definitely never had classes that touched on the Maori).

Maori Treaty House

Learning about the Maori culture and seeing the efforts being made to keep it alive—and/or recover it—was another positive. Because—going back to something I learned in my college anthropology class—when two cultures collide, the one with the higher technology will overtake the other. Guess who lost out when the white man showed up? That’s pretty much a universal truth.

The Bay of Islands would be a must-see place in the North Island, especially if you can cruise through the “Hole in the Rock”, which we did. We also spent a little time at Otehei Bay on Urupukapuka Island, and some time exploring the town of Russell. (You finding all these locations? How’s your Maori?)
(Clicking should enlarge images.)

We had a fun ride on the Glenbrook Vintage Railway, run by volunteers in period dress, and offering a light tea service. From there, by coach to Rotorua with a stop at the Hamilton Gardens.

Rotorua is another “must” stop, although a bit odiferous from all the sulfur. We walked through a redwood forest, stopped at the Blue and Green Lakes (although the lighting wasn’t conducive to the markedly different colors between the two.

The Te Puia center was a “don’t miss.” A kiwi breeding center, geysers, bubbling mud, a fantastic buffet dinner and Maori entertainment. All well done, but the bottom line is this is a school where they’re trying to keep the Maori arts alive. Students are vetted, and they take very few each year.

The next day was spent in travel. We took the Northern Explorer train from Hamilton to Wellington, which was our southernmost stop in the North Island. There are a lot of sheep and cows in New Zealand. And green. Everything is so green. Ferns everywhere, many the size of trees.

For our final day on the North Island, we took a gondola that rose a whopping 120 meters. (For someone who lives at 9100 feet, this was barely a hill), but at the top, we enjoyed a view of Wellington and roamed the Wellington Botanic Gardens, followed later that day with a guided tour of the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa. Another educational and interesting experience, with more exhibits focusing on the historic culture and how it can coexist with the current day. Artists created their “updated” version of a meeting house.

That’s it for the North Island. If there’s interest, I can report on our South Island adventures another time.

Okay, a little about writing so I don’t feel too guilty. Although I’m not planning a novel set in New Zealand, the people on the tour provided lots of character fodder for other books. The woman whose cackle would put Phyllis Diller’s to shame. Her husband called her his locator beacon. Or the woman who kept “losing” her husband. “Has anyone seen Tim? Where are you, Timbo?”

Then there was the woman who was severely visually impaired, yet who, with the help of her husband—and everyone else in the group—did and saw everything. I felt it was inappropriate to ask what her specific conditions were—she had other physical issues, but she took pictures with her phone, and said she enjoyed the views, and she talked about many other trips she and her husband had taken.

Or the Brit who refused to try anything new when it came to food, and subsisted on potatoes and “puddings” for much of the trip. The man who was first off the bus, roamed the farthest to take pictures (with his phone), and the last back on. The elderly couple who wore matching clothes and held hands as they walked. Or the one who seemed to wear one of the same two shirts every day, but when I brought it up—obliquely—she said she had four of them.

The floor is yours. Comments? Questions? Personal adventures?

How can he solve crimes if he’s not allowed to investigate?

Gordon Hepler, Mapleton’s Chief of Police, has his hands full. A murder, followed by several assaults. Are they related to the expansion of the community center? Or could it be the upcoming election? Gordon and mayor wannabe Nelson Manning have never seen eye to eye. Gordon’s frustrations build as the crimes cover numerous jurisdictions, effectively tying his hands.
Available for preorder now.

Terry Odell is an award-winning author of Mystery and Romantic Suspense, although she prefers to think of them all as “Mysteries with Relationships.”

A Pair of Pants and Other Mysteries

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Photo credit: Marcusstratus CC by NC SA 3.0

by Debbie Burke

 @burke_writer

The English language is full of quirks that are downright puzzling.

Take, for instance, the term a pair of pants.

Okay, a pair of shoes, a pair of glasses, a pair of aces—they all make logical sense. Two related objects make a pair.

But when was the last time you saw someone wearing a single pant?

Where did that weirdness come from?

According to Quora, it originated when people wore pantaloons, which were two separate pieces of clothing, put on one leg at a time. Eventually someone sewed them together, creating a singular garment, but the plural term stuck. The first recorded use of pants was in 1835 as a slang abbreviation for pantaloons.

Britannica says scholarly references don’t back up the sewn-together theory. Instead, they use the term, plurale tantum.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines plurale tantum, which is Latin for “plural only,” as a “noun which is used only in plural form, or which is used only in plural form in a particular sense or senses.” Bifurcated items (things that can be divided into two), such as pants, fall into this category. Think of items that are usually referred to in plural—often preceded by “pair of” or something similar, even when there is only one item: pliers, glasses, scissors, sunglasses, tweezers, etc. So, pants is a type of noun that is used only in its plural form, even when there is only one item being discussed.

 I dunno if I buy the plurale tantum argument. Back in the 1800s, few people could read, let alone comprehend Latin. I tend to believe the sewn-together legend as the more likely origin.

Since TKZ readers and wordsmiths focus on crime writing, let’s look at a couple of plurale tantum examples that are used as weapons.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

 According to Merriam-Webster, a pair of scissors originated from “Vulgar Latin”:

 …caesorium referred to a cutting instrument, and this Latin word was singular—even though the cutting instrument it named had two blades that slid past each other. When the word was borrowed into Middle French, French speakers gave it both a singular form (cisoire) and a plural form (cisoires). The plural didn’t refer to multiple cutting implements, however; it was modeled on the two blades of a single caesorium.

We began calling an individual scissors a pair to emphasize the matched cutting blades. There’s precedent for it. Before we called them scissors, we called them shears, and pair was used with shears for about 100 years before scissors arrived on the scene.

Alfred Hitchcock chose a pair of scissors as the weapon in his 1954 classic, Dial M For Murder.

 

Photo credit: Kandy Talbot CCA by 3.0

 

Another possible weapon is a pair of pliers.

The versatile tool was likely developed in Europe during the Bronze Age to handle and shape hot metal. An early Greek illustration shows the god Hephaestus at a forge using pliers.

Wikipedia says Hephaestus is “the Greek god of artisans, blacksmiths, carpenters, craftsmen, fire, metallurgy, metalworking, sculpture and volcanoes.”

In the 1973 film Charley Varrick, Walter Matthau and cohorts rob a bank that turns out to be a repository for mob money. Mobsters go hunting for Matthau’s gang. In the scene below, a villainous character tries to obtain information from a hapless banker who was in on the heist. The villain threatens torture with “a pair of pliers and a blowtorch.”

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

 

 

According to the British Film Institute, Charley Varrick influenced director Quentin Tarantino who coopted the line about pliers and a blowtorch for Pulp Fiction (1994), delivered by the menacing Ving Rhames.

Warning: this link contains offensive language.

 

 

 

Digging deeper into pluralia tantum, here are some examples where the singular meaning is different from the plural:

Arm is a limb. Arms are weapons.

Brain is an organ. Brains are intelligence.

Custom is a traditional event. Customs is the government body that collects taxes on imported goods.

Damage is harm done to something. Damages are monetary compensation for harm.

Gut is the bowel. Guts are courage.

Enough linguistics for today. Let’s wrap up with some amusing inconsistencies in the English language.

In school, we learned “I before E except after C, or when sounded like A as in neighbor and weigh.”

Then along comes a smarty pants to turn that rule on its head:

Sign outside bookstore:

I before E…Except when your foreign neighbor Keith receives eight counterfeit beige sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters. Weird. 

~~~

 TKZers: which peculiarity of the English language baffles you the most?

The Art of Darkness

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“Creativity – like human life itself – begins in darkness.” –Julia Cameron

* * *

April 8, 2024  The date of the great eclipse when a wide swath of the United States will be darkened as the sun and moon perform a heavenly pas de deux.

Memphis will see only a 98% covering, so my husband and I plan to travel with some friends to Arkansas to experience the full beauty of the show.

This will not be the first time we’ve observed a total eclipse. Way back in 1970, there was a total eclipse in my hometown of Savannah, Ga. I remember the experience well, but not for the reason you may think.

Unfortunately, the day was cloudy, but as the moon moved between the Earth and the sun, the clouds would occasionally break and give us a series of snapshots of the phenomenon. When the moment of totality arrived, the clouds once again opened, and we saw the black disk, then the bright flash of light as the moon moved on to continue its course. But that still wasn’t what astonished me.

It was the darkness.

Standing on the front lawn of my parents’ home, I looked down the street and saw a wall of black shadow racing toward us. It wasn’t like a cloud that covered the sun. It was a dark, menacing presence, rushing forward to devour the light in its path until it overtook us, and suddenly all was night.

Even though we understood what was happening, I had a sense of primordial awe that I have never forgotten.

* * *

Authors of mystery, suspense, and thrillers are well acquainted with darkness. It’s a symbol of the unknown, and that usually means fear, anxiety, loneliness, or panic will grip the main character and get the reader’s heart pumping a little harder.

“All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.” –John Ruskin

A character walks out into a black night and senses a presence that he can’t see, or comes face-to-face with his own demons in the dark night of the soul when all appears lost. That heart-stopping look into the abyss rivets the attention and keeps the reader turning pages.

Here are a few examples.

 

* * *

We probably all studied Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven in high school. Fear and doubt consume the poet as he contemplates his own loneliness late at night. Then he hears a sound and thinks it’s a visitor knocking. He opens the door and sees … nothing.

 

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”

 

The murky setting on the moors gave Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles a sense of mystery and foreboding. 

“As if in answer to his words there rose suddenly out of the vast gloom of the moor that strange cry which I had already heard upon the borders of the great Grimpen Mire. It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away. Again and again it sounded, the whole air throbbing with it, strident, wild, and menacing. The baronet caught my sleeve and his face glimmered white through the darkness. ‘My God, what’s that, Watson?’”

 

A sense of impending doom in Dean Koontz’s Midnight builds as a woman goes for a run on the beach in the middle of the night.

“Suddenly, as she was passing a pair of forty-foot, twisted cypresses that had grown in the middle of the beach, halfway between the hills and the waterline, Janice was sure she was not alone in the night and fog. She saw no movement, and she was unaware of any sound other than her own footsteps, raspy breathing, and thudding heartbeat; only instinct told her that she had company.”

 

Last week Kris introduced us to the Edgar finalists in her post. The first sentence of All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby hints of a violent past returning to haunt a small town.

“Charon County was founded in bloodshed and darkness.”

* * *

 

So, TKZers, there you have it. The Art of Darkness. How do you represent darkness in your books? Do you have any examples from the works of others that illustrate either physical or metaphorical darkness? Have you ever seen a total eclipse of the sun?

* * *

I don’t know how much access I’ll have to TKZ during the day, but I’ll respond to comments whenever I can.

 

“Character, like a photograph, develops in  darkness.” –Yousuf Karsh

Private pilot Cassie Deakin has a lot of opportunity to develop character while she hunts a killer.

Buy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, or Apple Books.

Style Over Plot and Characters?

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

He was 44 years old, an alcoholic, and had just been fired from his job because of his drinking. The Depression was in full tilt. Married, with savings running low, he had to find a way to make a living.

So he decided to become a writer. Ack!

Because of his background in business (he’d been an oil company executive for thirteen years), Raymond Chandler approached his new vocation systematically.

He started with an adult education course called Short Story Writing. He read pulp magazines, especially the famous Black Mask, with an analytical eye on what the writers did in their stories. He would make a detailed synopsis of a story by, say, Erle Stanley Gardner, then rewrite it in his own way, compare it with the original, then rewrite it again. That’s not a bad method for learning the craft.

What he didn’t see a lot of was style, a certain “magic” in the prose. (This reminds me of John D. MacDonald’s goal of “unobtrusive poetry.”)

Thus he began to type on strips of paper half the normal size. This forced him to put down choice words, and if he felt they didn’t work he could toss out the 15 lines or so and start again.

He kept notebooks, jotting down potential titles, story ideas, characters, and his observations of people, especially the clothes they wore and the slang they used.

His writing routine was based on time, not output (he was admittedly slow on the production side). He sat at his typewriter for four hours in the morning, until lunch. If the words didn’t come, he didn’t force the matter. If a writer doesn’t feel like writing, Chandler said, “he shouldn’t try.” (I have to disagree with the master here. But who am I to cavil? In 1939 he published The Big Sleep, got a bunch of Hollywood money, and became famous over time.)

He wrote to please himself and the reader. He once said in a letter, “I have never had any great respect for the ability of editors, publishers, play and picture producers to guess what the public will like. The record is all against them. I have always tried to put myself in the shoes of the ultimate consumer, the reader, and ignore the middleman.”

Of the two writers he was most associated with, he had this to say: “Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but what he did he did superbly. But James Cain—faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat.”

And get this, from a 1947 letter: “I wrote you once in a mood of rough sarcasm that the techniques of fiction had become so highly standardized that one of these days a machine would write novels.”

Ha! (He also said technique alone could never have the “emotional quality” needed for memorable fiction. Looking at you, AI.)

For Chandler, the priority order of fiction factors seems to have been: style, characters, dialogue, scenes, plot. He was not a plotter. Far from it. In a 1951 letter to his agent, Carl Brandt, he wrote: “I am having a hard time finishing the book. Have enough paper written to make it complete, but must do all over again. I just didn’t know where I was going and when I got there I saw that I had come to the wrong place. That’s the hell of being the kind of writer who cannot plan anything, but has to make it up as he goes along and then try to make sense out of it. If you gave me the best plot in the world all worked out I could not write it. It would be dead for me.”

There are definitely plot holes in Chandler, the most (in)famous being who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep? When Warner Bros. was doing the movie, they sent a wire to Chandler asking who the murderer was. Chandler replied, “I don’t know.”

But here’s the thing. We remember Chandler, and place him atop the pantheon of hardboiled writers, because of what he emphaszied—his style. I mean, look at some of these gems:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Ana’s that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. – “Red Wind”

Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town. Once, very long ago, it was the choice residential district of the city, and there are still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles and full corner bay windows with spindle turrets. They are all rooming houses now, their parquetry floors are scratched and worn through the once glossy finish, and the wide sweeping staircases are dark with time and cheap varnish laid on over generations of dirt. In the tall rooms haggard landladies bicker with shifty tenants. On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun, and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles. – The High Window

I lit a cigarette. It tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief. – Farewell, My Lovely

There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream. – The Long Goodbye

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight. – The Little Sister

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window. – Farewell, My Lovely

“I’m an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.” – “Spanish Blood”

The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back. – The Long Goodbye 

So, my writer friends, what do you think? Is style the secret ingredient over plot and character? We usually talk about the importance of character within a plot, or vice versa. But Chandler worked hard for that “magic” in his prose and, well, his books are still selling!