Was It A Click Or A Clunk?

by Mary

A significant portion of the last couple of weeks of January was devoted to sleeping, eating, and working in shifts to cover flushing the loo 24/7 to prevent our water line freezing. We'll be on patrol again this coming Monday and Tuesday nights, when lows are predicted to fall to single digits.

We have long since concluded whoever was responsible for the layout of Maywrite Towers did not completely consider the effect of winter weather on the structure as demonstrated by the fact they routed not only the water line and drains but also the hydronic heating pipes through a north-facing crawl space.

When frigid weather comes down the pike as it inevitably will at this time of year, and especially when accompanied by high winds, kitchen and bathroom taps left dripping overnight and a water line lagged and fitted with heat tape come into their own.

But sometimes those precautions are not sufficient. Proverbially we are warned to beware of a silent dog and still water. During our first winter in residence we found out the hard way this aqueous advice was right, for there came a night below zero with unbelievable wind chill values when we suddenly realised the well pump was no longer making its sharp click as it turned on and off, signalling the water line had frozen. (A more solid clunk indicates the power's gone out, leading to the same result. Those occupying an older house soon learn to read its various noises.) On this occasion, heat gun in one hand, torch in the other, and swathed to Michelin Man proportions, Eric trundled out into bitterly cold darkness to squirm into the crawl space -- a well-named location given it's only a couple of feet high -- to deal with the problem.

The same blockage happened the following night.

Experience is an excellent teacher so ever since we take shifts flushing the loo every hour on the hour around the clock during the worst spells of frigid weather. So far this winter it hasn't been necessary for him to brave that cold, dark place again. And just as well, given it's the home of enormous spiders, one or two of which have successfully stormed the ground floor of Maywrite Towers. Those intruders did not, shall we say, hang about the place long. To avoid the possibility of upsetting subscribers with arachnophobia, I shall not describe the awfulness of these unwanted visitors except to mention they are larger than any arachnid has the right to be. Unfortunately, they seem unaffected by extreme cold. Which is a pity, because we've just weathered a couple of weeks featuring successive days well below freezing and nights sprinkled with single-digit readings with an occasional sub-zero temperature tossed into the mix.

Our prize exhibit so far this year is the unforgettable night when the thermometer dipped to minus 14*F. On the other hand, when lows during the dark hours are forecast to be 15*F or higher, both shifts are able to retire to bed at the same time, the well pump clicking on and off a reassuring lullaby since it means the water line's still flowing.

Brushing Away the Pixel Dust

by Eric

When Mary pointed out to me that it was 25 years since the first Orphan Scrivener appeared in February 2000 I went to the newsletter archive on our website to read that issue.

It seems I had recently driven to the post office, finding there the March issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine with the third story about our Mongolian Inspector Dorj, Death on the Trans-Mongolian Railway. I also learned on that day a quarter century ago,a nor'easter was on the way inland and as the snow accumulated my old Chevette barely made it up the long hill outside town, fishtailing all the way.

When the Internet came along I thought it represented the future. The whole planet would be linked in instantaneous communication. Pure science fiction.

While that is partly true, the Internet seems to be mostly about the past. Tom Swift's Amazing Electric Attic.

Used to be the past went away and stayed away. Now you just have to rummage around cyberspace. Brush away the pixel dust and those ancient, discarded television shows and movies are all there, along with every forgotten fad and useless piece of trivia. Trying to recall the name of an obscure sixties band that cut two singles and broke up? Once upon a time they were never to be heard of again. Today they've got a new CD available at their website. Heck, the Internet attic is even crawling with web spiders, thanks to search engines.

And we all keep shoving our own pasts into the attic.(See for example the Orphan Scrivener archive I've just been reading: https://maywrite.blogspot.com/p/list-of-essays-we-started-this-email.html) Even if we make no effort at preservation, websites like the Wayback Machine are making sure nothing is lost. I was born long before the World Wide Web was invented so I can only delve a limited distance into my past but younger people can already review their entire lives.

In the long ago, when I sat reading a Batman comic with a scratchy 45 of The Purple People Eater for a soundtrack, a cool glass of root beer Fizzies in my hand, I sometimes felt a frisson, almost as if I were being watched.

Now I know what it was.

The older me peering back through the Internet at my younger self.

Rodent Rage

by Eric

Never fall for a rodent.

They might have cute faces and squeak like squeeze toys, but in the end a rodent's just a rodent.

Recently we've had to put aside our tendencies towards anthropomorphism and rid the house of some adorable looking little visitors from the surrounding woods.

That, and Mary's essay on British fetes, reminded me of a sobering experience with rodents that started at a kind of American fete, a library fundraising event that in addition to the usual booths, food, and attractions found at small fairs, featured an auction.

When my buddy and I spotted three hamsters in a box at the auction we were still kids. We didn't even know the word "anthropomorphism." Rodent fever gripped us. We had to have them. The bidding was furious. One dollar. A dollar fifty. Two. Three. Four dollars. Five. Six dollars. Going once for six dollars. Going twice. Sold!

Three weeks allowance blown on three balls of fur. I had a dime and four pennies left in my jeans. I suppose my buddy and I should've stopped bidding against each other back at a buck twenty-five. But where's the fun in that?

The plan was to trade the little fellows back and forth, so we could both experience the indescribable bliss of hamster ownership. The first night they were going to stay in the basement at my parents' house. For hours, we watched the cuddly critters chittering and cavorting in their aquarium. Then we went upstairs and turned out the lights.

Next morning when I went downstairs the first thing I noticed was the blood. Too much blood for the wood chips to soak up. Then I took in the rest of the scene.

I had a strong stomach. I drank root beer Fizzies before breakfast. But I'd never seen anything like the carnage in that aquarium. This was something out of a Jim Thompson novel. One of our pets lay sprawled on its back, belly ripped open, eyes glazed. Another furry body was crumpled in a corner, much too far from its head.

Luckily we hadn't named them yet. It would've been worse if it had been Squeaky and Baby with their innards hanging out.

The survivor -- the killer -- chattered and hissed and bared its teeth. This was not a locked aquarium mystery. There was no doubt what had happened.

Isn't it always the way? You give in to a pair of dark imploring eyes and next thing you know someone's head is lying in the wood chips.

Why had it happened? How had the fight started? Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of hamsters?

My buddy and I carried the aquarium through backyards and up the railroad tracks, a long way, until we came to the swamp, and then we walked down a muddy track into the woods, until the path gave out and we couldn't go any further. That's where we dumped the murderer.

He plopped onto the ground, paused, twitched his head to stare at us through those black killer's eyes, wrinkled his bloody snout. and grinned. But it wasn't a nice grin. Then he turned and rolled straight into the woods as if he was on wheels.

Hell on wheels.

We knew that sooner or later he'd meet up with a circling hawk, a stray dog, or a hungry feral cat -- heaven help them.

Possession of a Currant Cake Could be Dangerous to Your Health

by Mary

Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear is the only novel I've read in which the plot is triggered by a contest for a cake. A currant cake, to be exact, to be awarded to the person who guesses its weight. During World War Two with its associated rationing such a prize would be attractive indeed.

This guessing game takes place at a wartime fete in aid of the Mothers of Free Nations. A smallish affair, it features a band and three stalls: one devoted to books (its stock includes second-hand Penguins for the armed forces), another offering used clothing (Greene notes due to the war less baby clothing then usual is available because wool is rationed), and a third is the traditional White Elephant stall (its selection of odds and ends include brass ash trays and cigarette cards, a postcard signed by no less a personage than Mrs Winston Churchill, and a collection of various foreign copper coins, as well as works considered too shabby for the book stall).

Pondering on The Ministry of Fear recently naturally put me in mind of a similar jamboree.

Some years ago I lived in a village on the edge of the Fens, an area best known to mystery readers as that part of East Anglia in which Dorothy L. Sayers set The Nine Tailors. It sits only a foot or so above sea level, being formed of reclaimed land drained by wide ditches cutting across it as straight as dies. Its windswept lonely miles feature few trees although the area is noted for growing vegetables and cut flowers. If you were looking out across it, the view would always be made up of a third land and two-thirds sky, whether it lay under bitter winter or kindly summer.

It was on one such sunny summer afternoon that I visited a charity fete held by a local church. Tables manned by redoubtable ladies in flowery hats extended invitations to visitors to guess the number of beans packed in a big glass jar or estimate the weight of a large fruitcake. Other stalls offered opportunities to purchase potted plants or big bunches of flowers grown by local gardeners, not to mention home baked goods and preserves, as well as beautiful examples of knitted items and various crafts. The white elephant stall, always the most interesting to browse at these events or so I've found, offered the usual bric-a-brac from attic and cellar. Books, sadly, are often treated as white elephants, and as a girl I purchased for pennies what in later years I came to suspect was a first edition of Ivanhoe at a Newcastle church hall fete. Alas, Sir Walter's imaginings now lie lost somewhere on the shores of time and history.

The rural fete of which I speak also provided pony rides for children, while those possessing a sharp eye demonstrated their skill by throwing rings, hoping to snag a prize at the hoopla game. If they didn't they could have a go at skittles, knocking down milk bottle-shaped pins with wooden balls in the traditional game often played in old-fashioned pub gardens. They might work up a bit of a thirst in the process but the refreshments offered at the event did not include anything available in licensed premises. On the other hand. what goes better with an outing on a warm English afternoon than a nice cup of tea?

Two cups of tea comes the reply from the back row.

My favourite attraction, although I did not avail myself of it, was an opportunity to throw a wet sponge at the vicar, a youngish man of the cloth whose demeanour showed how much he was enjoying the event. I did however notice most of those who tossed a sponge or two at him were polite enough to miss him.

In Greene's fete protagonist Arthur Rowe visits a fortune-teller's booth. Its occupant mistakes him for someone else and tells him the weight of the cake. Naturally he then goes off and wins it. However, the event must shut down soon before darkness and blackout time arrive, adding to a sense of increasing menace as attempts are made to persuade Arthur to part with his prize, to the extent of...but better not give too much away except to whisper possession of the currant cake might well be dangerous to his health.

It's probably just as well I didn't win that Fenland fruitcake after all.

The Lord Chamberlain's Mother

by Eric

According to Amazon.com -- which has a better memory than I do -- our first novel, One for Sorrow, had an official publication date of November 15, 1999. So shockingly enough we are fast approaching its 25th anniversary. Perhaps now is the time to reveal that John's mother was a cave girl.

Let me explain. Back in the mid-eighties there was an explosion of indie comic books. Creators took advantage of easy distribution to sell their comics in the thousands of comic book specialty stores in the United States and Canada. Most indie comics were printed in black and white with two color covers and had nothing to do with superheros. Well, except for a few like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a satire of the superhero genre which became more or less the very thing it had been intended to mock.

A friend of mine was scraping out a living publishing comics and he asked me to script a title he'd come up with -- Kiwanni Daughter of the Dawn. He didn't have a story in mind, just something about a cave girl living in a world with dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts. Notwithstanding that my favorite comic strip as a kid was Alley Oop, we both knew that humans did not coexist with dinosaurs but the artist he had in mind drew animals brilliantly and could pencil one mean T-Rex.

I enjoyed my venture into scripting and subsequently tried to sell some new ones, based on my own ideas, to other small press publishers. One proposal was a superhero historical. Not long after the fall of Rome, when the surviving Eastern Empire has become a bastion of Christianity, a slave comes across a magic ring, once the property of Julian, the last pagan emperor. The ring gives the bearer super powers, of a sort, depending on which god happens to show up when summoned by the ring, and what kind of mood he or she is in, taking into account that the Roman gods were an unreliable and unpredictable lot.

Publishers weren't interested and my career in comics fizzled out. Then one day in the early nineties Mike Ashley contacted my wife Mary and wondered if we could produce an historical mystery for an anthology he was editing, He needed the story quickly.

"Historical" and "quickly" are words that tend not to go together, considering how much research is necessary before writing can even begin. I immediately thought of placing a mystery in the early Byzantine era because I already knew something about sixth century Constantinople. I had done enough research for the comic book script to prop up a 2,000 word story.

And so we hurriedly co-wrote the first tale featuring as detective John, Lord Chamberlain to Emperor Justinian. A Byzantine Mystery appeared in 1993 in The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits. After starring in more short stories in anthologies and Ellery Queen Mystery magazine, John moved on to twelve novels from Poisoned Pen Press. I'm sure Kiwanni would be busting her buttons with pride, if animal skins had buttons.

Sidney the Snake: A Moral Tale

by Mary

History records the proverbial description of someone who is hard of hearing as being as deaf as a snake, which have no ears. However, I am reliably informed they have similar inner ear arrangements to ours but connected to their jawbones, enabling them to "hear" through sensing vibrations.

It seems their range of vibrational awareness makes their hearing less than a human's, which is just as well given the loud excited exclamation that floated upstairs when Eric recently went into the kitchen and saw a snake disappearing behind the fridge -- and my sudden equally noisy utterance when I spotted it lurking under our sideboard an hour or so later.

When I was in my teens, a young courtesy cousin once stayed with my family for a bit of holiday. One evening I went up to bed and on turning back the covers saw a snake. It was small and yellow and so obviously a toy I did not shriek and run downstairs in a panic, much to his disgust. Years later, when the Zoo Lady visited the elementary school where I helped, she brought with her a large snake. While showing it to the class to my surprise she draped it around my neck. I am here to tell you snakes do not feel slimy but rather cool to the touch. Having held one, my chief impression was they resemble elongated kippers in that they seem all spine. So I can still look a feather boa in the eye. It's just...different...if you don't know where the reptile in question is lurking. Fortunately research informed me Sidney was most likely a rat snake and so not venomous. Those of a nervous disposition are advised not to go looking for a photo.

Sidney the Snake has not been seen since that morning. He didn't look too well at the time so we've speculated either he found his way outside or conked out somewhere under the house, I say crossing my fingers and glancing over my shoulder. The problem is until we started looking around we had no idea how many places a snake could hide. The average dwelling is full of them -- take a glance around the room in which you are reading!

Anyhow, it's occurred to me a story could be written for children instructing them on their behaviour, a genre particularly popular during the Victorian era. Naturally its title would be Sidney the Snake: A Moral Tale and it would relate how a naughty young snake took no notice of his mother's constant warnings not to go into houses for if he did he would certainly come to a terrible end. Weep no more, tender-hearted readers. The close of the tale would reveal despite Sidney's disobedience in doing just what he was told not to do he managed to escape and got home to his mother. Who bent his (non-existent) ears no end as to his willful foolishness and then sent him to bed without any supper.

My Life as a Businesskid

by Eric

I can't recall when I first held a coin or understood its significance but I must have been very young because by the time I entered grade school I was dealing with personal finances. My allowance was a quarter a week, "compensation" for chores like keeping my room tidy. Although this might seem a paltry amount it was enough to buy an issue of Detective comics featuring a Batman and Superman team up (ten cents) see a movie at the local theater (fourteen cents) and buy a piece of Bazooka bubblegum, wrapped with a horribly printed and laughably unfunny Bazooka Joe cartoon.

Mary remembers being given a shilling which, according to the Internet, would have been worth only fourteen cents at the time, but then she grew up in a poor part of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne whereas I lived in a middle-class US suburb. Not that the discrepancy was quite as bad as it appears. Admission to her local cinema was only nine old pence, the equivalent of ten cents, so she needed to spend 64% of her income on a movie while I had to spend 56%, a modest difference. I didn't look up what she would have paid for a Detective comic because I doubt she would have wanted one.

I did make an effort to augment my allowance by selling hand-drawn comics on the school playground at recess. Incredible as it might seem my classmates were willing to pay a few cents or a nickel (depending on length and whether pencil or full color crayon was used) on titles like Mortimer the Talking Dog, Elmoe the Talking Fish and King Cotton vs Boll Weevil.

In warm weather I set up a card table on the sidewalk in front of the house to sell lemonade. My parents capitalized the business supplying sugar and lemons, but received no part of the profits. I was a shrewd businesskid. I tried to sell comics too but thirsty adults were not especially interested in a Giant Annual Elmoe and Mortimer Team Up.

Sitting at my computer during the heat wave we're enduring I'm reminded of how my childhood income increased in the summer. My parents ran a picnic grove and the family moved to a cottage there. This opened new and more lucrative entrepreneurial opportunities. I scooped minnows out of the lake and turned over rocks in the creek, finding crayfish which I knew -- being an expert crayfish hunter -- would jet away backwards into my waiting paper cup. A cup of minnows could fetch a dime from picnickers and some would pay a nickel for a single crayfish. At the time I didn't give much thought to why anyone would pay for minnows and crayfish. I liked to watch them swimming or crawling around in a jar and I guess I figured others would appreciate them too. It didn't occur to me that the poor things were bought for bait. I fished but used earthworms which didn't seem so much like actual animals.

Even better profits could be made by picking up discarded returnable bottles. There was a two cent deposit in Pennsylvania. It was like a treasure hunt. I'd search the weeds beside the road around the lake finding an empty Coke here, a Ma's Black Cherry there. The asphalt burned my bare feet if I didn't keep moving. In the grove there might be a sarsaparilla under a picnic table, a Royal Crown Cola beside a birch tree. If so many people hadn't ignored the no-litter laws and been too lazy to dispose of their trash properly I would have been out of luck. I was making money off human weakness and vice, just like the Mafia.

All those empties added up. And a good thing too. The little store where I cashed in my finds sold Davy Crockett cards one year. At five cents a pack it turned out to be an expensive proposition to collect the whole set but I managed.

After I grew up I earned a lot more than I did with returnables, bait, comics, and lemonade stands but I never had as much fun making money, except maybe when Mary and I were writing novels and short stories.