The Pickle Jar Hearse

by Mary

The first thing the horrified technician said was "You were lucky not to have had an explosion."

Since last we darkened subscribers' in-boxes, some days at Maywrite Towers have been less dances of delight than Fortuna deciding to play the cat and banjo with our plans.*

A couple of examples. The ongoing Rebellion of Household Machinery struck last month when an out of season cold night triggered the heating. The boiler leapt into life, hummed through its cycle, and shut down.

Unfortunately there was no heat.

Soon afterwards, the water heater attempted to balance out our lack of warmth by producing hot water that was far too hot, diagnosed as caused by our water's high mineral content reaching the point when it blocked the relief valve, leading to the technician's remark mentioned above. All this, mark you, despite annual inspections of both appliances. And what, you ask, about the problem with the boiler? Well, it turned out its thermocouple had conked out only a couple of years after its last replacement.

We are of course grateful the boiler didn't wait to work its ticket in the frigid months soon to advance down the pike, as it did one memorable night a few years back when the thermostat failed during the dark hours and we woke up to a house temperature in the forties.

Speaking of cold weather reminds me country folk say when mice migrate into a house during autumn it's a certain sign of a harsh winter ahead.

Living as we do on the very edge of woodland, occasional visits from wildlife are inevitable. As a result animals paying a call have included deer dining on our day lilies and a flock of wild turkeys tearing up our back lawn -- though to be fair they left the front one alone. Smaller fry of various descriptions have also occasionally found their way indoors. A while back a creature about as long as my thumb was caught stealing the cat's dry chow if you please. We had already deduced something was afoot because a small cache of said comestibles was found in one of Eric's sneakers. Given this particular visitor's fur was dark, it appeared to be eyeless, and moved so smoothly it might as well have been on roller skates, my guess would be it was a pygmy shrew but I can't be certain, because I observed it as it was moving fast away from me and in poor light to boot. Whatever it was, it was never seen again.

Then there was the unfortunate mouse with a broken leg, likely caused by our then resident feline Sabrina. However, there are doubts as to her guilt because when the mouse appeared he and she crouched a few feet apart, staring at each other. Sabrina took no interest whatsoever. If only we had a camera...that mouse was a fine example of what we might call a Disney mouse. Despite lack of white gloves, red shorts, or large yellow paw-wear, he was a neatly turned-out little fellow with grey fur and a white pinny undercarriage. But he also possessed exceedingly long teeth as sharp as needles, as we saw when he was escorted from the premises to be released into the woods out back.

Lugubrious British comedian Les Dawson once claimed he knew when his mother-in-law was coming to stay because their mice threw themselves on the traps. We have never seen one of the newfangled "rodent exterminators" (otherwise known as electric mousetraps) though we understand they do exist, nor are we keen on spring-loaded or sticky traps. Yet you cannot entertain mice in your living space -- think of them as house fleas. At least they were not as destructive as Beatrix Potter's Two Bad Mice. On the other hand, I'd say it's acceptable to give a pass to sugar mice, Cinderella's mice-horses, and the somnolent dormouse at the Mad Hatter's tea party, who were all better behaved.

What puzzles us is why they insist on intruding because we always make certain food is stored in covered containers or in the fridge overnight. Now Sabrina has crossed over the rainbow bridge there's not so much as a bowl of cat chow to raid.

Despite all precautions, however, last month we received several visits from field mice. It was as if a murine entrepreneur was running a charabanc to save them having to walk to our house. The Pied Piper of Hamlin being elsewhere engaged, we dealt with their invasion by reluctantly laying down poison and then transporting the departed into the woods for disposal, with a pickle jar retrieved from the bag of recyclables serving as their hearse.

Apparently it isn't just us: the technician who restored our heating boiler to working order mentioned his house was under siege as well.

* Tips of the hat to Phil Ochs and Rudyard Kipling respectively.

A Famous Burning Colander

by Eric

Here in the northeast leaves are starting to fall. I simply grind them into lawn fertilizer with the mower. But when I was growing up in the suburbs homeowners raked the leaves up, hauled them to the curb, and burned them. A wall of smoke and swirling sparks rose from bonfires lining the street. It was a spectacle second only to the colored Christmas lights strung between the utility poles after Thanksgiving. And second only because the fires didn't foretell the coming of a bearded man bearing gifts.

Children are elementals. They love to play with water and dirt and fire. A street in flames was irresistible.

One of my childhood friends used his father's Aqua Velva aftershave to make fire. He poured it into the palm of his hand and lit it to our great amusement. One can't help but think of sixties rock star Arthur Brown of "Fire" fame who used to wear a burning colander on his head during concerts. (The sixties really were a wonderful era.) Wikipedia informs me that when Arthur accidentally set his head on fire a fan saved him from serious injury by dousing the flames with beer. My friend somehow managed to never set his hand on fire. Just as well since we never had any beer handy.

The closest I came to handling fire was around the Fourth of July. It was great fun waving sparklers around and drawing patterns in the air. (I did collect fireflies in jars which is a kind of cold fire.)

My friend also made small conflagrations with shredded newspaper in the upstairs playroom at his house. Flames provided more entertainment than the building blocks, board games with missing pieces, and broken plastic trucks littered around the floor. Better yet, in the loft in the barn behind the house, someone had squirreled away and forgotten enough toilet tissue to last through several pandemics had there been any pandemics around at the time. Brittle and brown with age the paper was delightfully flammable. We'd cart rolls to the field behind the barn and create long winding trails leading to an enormous pile. We'd light the end of the trail and watch the flames race towards the explosion at the end, like the fuse on a cartoon bomb. It was better than fireworks.

That wasn't the end of our fiery creativity. Inspired by Ray Harryhausen classics like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, we made stop action movies with my Super Eight movie camera. Needless to say our directoral aesthetic demanded flames. However, this presented technical problems. We constructed a castle out of cardboard. Our Plasticine protagonists were supposed to flee down some stairs. After positioning the figures we set fire to the cardboard, shot a couple frames, and blew out the fire. Then we repositioned the figures and set the castle ablaze again in order to take a few more frames.

This animation procedure led to two problems. For one thing the castle started to deteriorate too quickly. Worse, the Plasticine figures started to melt. We did our best to restore their shapes between shots. The resulting film showed them weirdly transforming as they fled, their proportions changing as they devolved into nearly unrecognizable blobs. Fencing skeletons they were not.

I would like to say that I gave up playing with fire as an adult but that would not be strictly true. Greek Fire figured prominently in our second John the Lord Chamberlain novel. The composition of this ancient super weapon remains a mystery. Some historians have suggested it was based on naphtha and quicklime. The compound apparently ignited on contact with water. The Byzantines sprayed this flammable substance at enemy ships to devastating effect and in Two for Joy we arranged to set the waters of the Golden Horn ablaze which surely would have thrilled my younger self and my fire loving buddy.

The Puzzling Case of My Favorite Mysteries

by Eric

Who are your favorite mystery authors? What are your favorite genres? For me, the first answer is easy. There are authors whose work I've enjoyed for decades. The second question is much harder because my favorite authors' books are oddly divergent. For instance, both Agatha Christie and John D. MacDonald are among my favorites. But how can I like both the elderly spinster Miss Marple and rugged beach bum Travis McGee?

I've always been attracted to the intellectual nature of classic mysteries even though I rarely, if ever, solve the puzzles presented. In Death Comes as the End, Christie kills off her ancient Egyptian suspects one by one until there are only two left and even then I guessed wrong! I suppose I like being surprised and seeing how the author fit everything together and fooled me. Years ago Mary and I went to a fair where a strolling magician stood six inches from us and performed sleight of hand making coins appear and vanish. Even though I knew it had something to do with diverting our attention and sheer dexterity I couldn't spot the trick and Christie performs similar magic of a literary sort.

Then too as a kid I loved Golden Age science fiction from the thirties, forties, and early fifties where intellectual content (even if mostly pseudo science) far outweighed characterization, psychology, or any literary pretense. What would happen if you could travel back in time and meet yourself? What would life be like on a planet where gravity would crush humans? Later I discovered mystery novels where whodunnit was figured out logically in convoluted detail just as puzzles involving time and gravity were in science fiction.

Do I even have to say I love the locked room mysteries of John Dickson Carr and Ed Hoch? These are even more purely "scientific" than Agatha Christie.

However, I've also read all of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee books more than once. The houseboat he lives on in Florida is wildly different from the English estates and manor houses which provide the settings for many Christie novels. And neither Miss Marple nor Poirot are likely to engage in fist fights with the bad guys. And talk about really "bad" bad guys. MacDonald depicted some of the most realistic nasty villains -- as opposed to cartoonish villains -- I've ever read about.

However, a Florida houseboat is to me as exotic a setting as an English estate. Christie's villains can be pretty diabolical in their own ways. And although Travis will use his fists when necessary the books mostly revolve around some elaborate con game he and his economist friend Meyer set up to retrieve whatever the villains have stolen from their victims. These schemes can be every bit as clever and surprising as the solution to a Christie murder mystery.

Certainly my liking for noir novels of the sort Gold Medal published in the fifties matches my liking for the Travis McGee stories, which can be quite black and bleak. But, when you think about it, Christie wrote some very noir stuff featuring greedy, evil sociopaths who kill innocents. Also, her mysteries can end as unhappily as any noir, I don't want to give anything away but if you are familiar with Christie you know what I mean. It irks me when I hear her work described as cozy because, settings aside, most of her books are not anything like those marketed as cozies today.

I haven't mentioned another of my all-time favorites, Georges Simenon's Maigret. The gloomy underbelly of Paris where Maigret usually operates is about as noir as it gets and though he may not be as physical as Travis he is not adverse to throwing his considerable weight around. But unlike the classic whodunnit with its elaborate maze of clues, Maigret focuses almost exclusively on the psychology of the murderers and victims. Or so we are told. To me, this isn't all that much different than a locked room mystery because what room is more tightly locked than the human mind? The tangle of intellect and emotion that might motivate a person to commit a crime is every bit as complicated and puzzling as a method for knifing someone in the back through a locked door. Once Maigret solves the characters he encounters he has solved the murder.

I'm sure I've left out some favorites and similarities between them all. But thinking about it, maybe different genres of mystery aren't as dissimilar as they might seem.

Black Sand and Bleezers

by Mary

We were among those affected by smoke from the Canadian wildfires. Considering it carried particulates of whatever materials they burnt and thus presented serious health affects, we at Maywrite Towers consider ourselves fortunate to have got away with scratchy throats, runny noses, and a touch of hoarseness.

What was intriguing was the sky turned dirty yellow but caused an eerie pinkish twilight all day, followed by spectacular tomato-coloured sunsets. Having grown up in an industrial city permanently swathed in smoke from satanic mills of all descriptions situated amid rows of terraced housing, I'd expected the same type of murky grey-black veil that hung above those long-ago streets, black stained brick rows much as depicted in a number of Lowry paintings, of which my favourite is https://www.lowry.co.uk/lowry-original-industriallandscape.html

Such brooding skies could not be laid solely at the feet of commercial enterprises, given homes were heated by coal and so many people and their coughing brothers smoked what locals call tabs indoors and out. Some started young. Classmates pinched a cigarette from home and smoked it behind the bike shed in elementary school. It was almost a rite of passage for boys in particular.

This was a time when homes might use a bleezer, a square piece of metal held against the kitchen fireplace to help the coals "catch" by improving the draught. Some, like my lot, used an opened newspaper page for the same purpose. A dangerous custom, given this sort of makeshift bleezer sometimes caught fire and had to be quickly thrown into the grate. Since anything that could be burnt was put in the kitchen fire, tainted smoke added to the dark cloud hanging over the city. No wonder peoples' lungs have been compared to kippers. Older films offer noticeable and to modern eyes shocking evidence of just how polluted the air had become, to the extent sheets hung out to dry were routinely taken in speckled with soot.

Speaking of which, a story often retold at family gatherings involves my niece and nephew. At a young age they were visiting with their mother and went out to play, investigating a long untenanted stable at the top of our back lane. On their return they announced they had been playing with black sand, a fact obvious at a glance given a local sweep stored bags of soot in it.

In England seeing a sweep or shaking their hand has long been considered lucky, as Dick Van Dyke points in Chim Chim Cher-ee. Couples have been known to engage a sweep to attend their wedding in full fig (top hat and neckerchief included), bringing along his brush and rods. He also brings good luck to the nuptial pair by kissing the bride and shaking the groom's hand.

While on the topic of romance, we're all familiar with cinematic interludes of that type involving cigarettes and soulful gazes. Tobacco has long assisted couples to meet. Smoking provides a chance to those -- particularly shy teens -- who wish to strike up a conversation with a stranger. He (or less commonly she) strikes a match and offers to light the other person's gasper, thus effecting the desired introduction in a socially acceptable fashion.

Though I observed such interactions numerous times while still in school I did not experience it directly because I had only a brief fling with Lady Nicotine. I tried a ciggy or two during those painfully awkward years we call the teens, scandalising my younger sister when she saw me puffing away trying to master the fine art of blowing smoke out through my nostrils. I never could master it but since I didn't care for the taste of tobacco and the way the smell of smoke clung to my hair and clothes, I soon abandoned tabs forever. Yet even at that age several girls in my class were already fully paid-up members of the Sisterhood Of The Saffron-Stained Digits. In fact, one already smoked so heavily her fingers felt cold and her fingertips were stained almost to the point of turning brown.

I recently learnt from an impeccable source (which is to say Mr Maywrite) that in grade school he made and painted a clay ashtray he described as being of "a strange shape", putting me in mind of Lovecraftian rooms with walls of singularly peculiar angles of a disturbing nature. There being far fewer smokers than there used to be, it seems fair to deduce making ashtrays would be an unlikely art project for youngsters to undertake nowadays.