Chairs, a Table, a Cauldron

by Eric

Shakespeare's Macbeth isn't out of place in this newsletter. While not a mystery it can certainly be classified as a crime story. There's a large enough body count. One Internet source tallies eight murders. But I don't want to write about the play itself. My subject is the performance I saw in 1974 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City.

The theater has about three hundred seats, the rows curving around a thrust stage more or less creating half of a theater in the round. The whole audience is practically on top of the action. For this production the stage was covered by various levels of metal gratings. Most of the actors carried swords and wore heavy boots and dark bulky outfits with numerous metal fittings. They clanked and rattled across the gratings looking huge in the dim lighting. The set was stark. Chairs, a table, a cauldron for the witches.

All impressive and spooky but when Macbeth strode onto the stage a remarkable thing happened.

What is stage presence? Good acting? Appearance? An attitude? A psychic projection? However it might arise, after seeing this performance of Macbeth I have no doubt it exists. The actor filled the theater with the enormous force of Macbeth's personality. You couldn't look away.

On my way out, feeling almost stunned, I asked one of the ushers "Who was that?"

"Christopher Walken," she replied, rather incredulously, apparently shocked that I didn't know him or maybe just surprised I had neglected to read my Playbill.

Walken was already well known to New York theatergoers but had appeared in only a few movies. Stardom and the Academy Award for The Deer Hunter came later. Over the years he seems to have been relegated mainly to playing villains which strikes me as a terrible waste of talent. Maybe the magnetism I felt during his Macbeth can't be captured by film. I was thrilled to see the Avengers' Patrick McNee in Sleuth at a tiny, regional theater, but though I loved his television performance as Steed and his portrayal of mystery writer Andrew Wyke on stage was excellent, I can't honestly say he had great stage presence, at least for me.

I haven't seen many famous actors on stage. I thought Frank Langella as Dracula had less presence than Edward Gorey's stage settings. Strangely enough, Carol Channing in a frothy show designed for her had whatever it is and then some. And I never even liked her. Chatting with talk show hosts she struck me as too gushing and phony. Yet seeing her in person I absolutely believed in her sincerity. It felt like she created some sort of psychic bond with every person in the audience. Jason Robards -- I don't know. Can stage presence reach the nosebleed seats where you need binoculars to recognize the actors?

For what it's worth I saw Blondie close up on the CBGB bar/rock club's poor excuse for a stage. Debbie Harry basically jumped up and down in a little pink dress and much as I love Blondie's music she didn't rivet my attention. To be fair I was sitting practically next to the sound man (CBGBs in cramped to put it mildly) who fiddled in apparent desperation with switches and dials and buttons muttering things like "Twenty-five thousand dollars worth of sound equipment and a twenty-five cent voice." Which I think totally inaccurate after listening to Debbie Harry's recordings many times over the years.

However, I can say for certain that lesser known singer and actress Quinn Lemley has presence in abundance. When Mary and I saw her one-woman show about Rita Haworth in a tiny dinner theater, she walked over to the edge of the stage in her slinky dress, a couple feet from where we sat, and sang The Heat Is On directly to me. So....

While trying to get my facts straight (if only I could google my memory) I managed to find a listing for the Macbeth performance I saw. As my gaze passed over the cast list I suddenly stopped. Banquo was played by Christopher Lloyd -- Reverend Jim in Taxi and Doc Brown in Back to the Future. Well, how do you like that, I thought.

But wait. Peter Weller portrayed Lennox. The name sounded familiar. Let's see...he was Robocop! And there was another name I recognized -- Carol Kane who was also in Taxi and plenty of movies. Heck, she was only one of the witches! Who would have guessed she'd go on to marry Latka?

I looked up the rest of the cast. Practically every one had long careers and a Wikipedia entry. Without knowing it I'd seen Stephen Collins (Macduff) in Star Trek: The Motion picture, John Heard (Donalbain) and Jason Tolkan (Rosse) in the Home Alone films. Some of the actors I might have glimpsed in shows I watched, like Hill Street Blues. Others were in shows I've heard about: The Sopranos, Dark Shadows, the Doctors, and more.

Realistically it's pretty likely you'll see a lot of actors who are successful or headed for success in a New York City production so my experience was not, I am sure, very unusual. Still, it amazed me that I had seen unknowingly so many actors I'd watch in the future all on the same stage that long ago afternoon. Remarkable isn't it how the Internet can alter and even enhance our own memories? Or perhaps that's scary.

Meteor Right, Murder Wrong

by Eric

So, let me talk about a new cozy mystery series.

Meteor Right, Murder Wrong is the first of the Ye Olde Meteor Shoppe Mysteries

Newly divorced Lavinia Smith-Dusenberg moves to Dog Elbow Corners and finally realizes her lifelong dream. A meteor shop.

Lavi, as her friends call her, puts it this way. "Jiminy Cricket once sang when you wish upon a star your dreams come true. I wished upon a meteroid in space, a meteor during its descent through the atmosphere and a meteorite after it hit the earth. Which, I know, is a more complicated wish, but remember Jiminy was only an insect. And I can't sing.

"My beastly and controlling husband laughed and told me no one could make a living selling meteorites in a rural village but he was wrong. It's easy if you move to a village where people are constantly being murdered."

In the first book Flossie, owner of the local Paperclip Paradise, is apparently killed by a falling meteor, or meteorite, depending on whether a meteor can be considered to have reached the earth when it hits someone's head. Only Lavinia would think to ask such a question which -- spoiler alert -- turns out to be pivotal. She needs to employ all her investigative powers when the police classify Flossie's death as murder and target Lavinia as the chief suspect. "As I sat miserably in my cell all I could think was why me? How could they possibly suspect me? Yes, Paperclip Paradise was luring away my customers, but I never wanted Flossie dead. Much better she suffer."

Ye Olde Meteor Shoppe does no mail order business because "People like the personal touch, they like to buy their meteors from other people. Well, they'd probably prefer to buy them from an alien, but, you know..."

The Shoppe, designed to resemble a Mercury capsule much to the consternation of the local planning board, also sells other artifacts from space.

Browsing the control panel one sees: Genuine astronaut's boot lost during a spacewalk. Certified by noted space expert Professor Edward O. Wilbur, author of I Was Abducted by Two-Headed Venusian Hermaphrodites.

And near the observation window a quaintly hand-lettered sign entices the space enthusiast to: Buy a piece of the International Space Station or maybe a rusted bottle cap. For $6.99 it's worth the chance.

Of course, Lavinia's doughty cat companion Space Junk is always on hand to lend feline cunning and a helping paw.

The author has also written a romance novel, Flaming Descent, and is hard at work on a new cozy series, The Mealy Worm Mecca mysteries.

Soldiering On

by Eric

Recently a friend emailed some jpgs of old toy advertisements he'd dug up on the Internet. I remembered seeing similar ads on the back covers of my Batman and Superman comics.

"100 toy soldiers made of durable plastic only $1.25!"

What a bargain! At that price a gradeschooler could afford to fight a full scale war and have change left over for licorice whips. The set included machine gunners, sharp shooters, infantry men, tanks, jeeps, battleships, bombers, jet planes, and more. There were even 8 WAVES and 8 WACS. Perhaps they were provided for members of the fairer sex who preferred armed combat to Betsy Wetsy dolls. To be honest, my friends and I would have had no problem employing bazooka men and rifle men but we wouldn't have had a clue what to do with WAVES and WACS.

More intriguing to me, having written about the Eastern Roman Empire, was the set of 132 Roman Soldiers for a mere $1.98. And you didn't need to worry about resettling them in the provinces and paying ruinous pensions when they retired either. "Two Complete Roman armies," bragged the ad. It was probably easier than manufacturing Persians, Goths, and the like. "Fight again the battles of the old Roman civil wars."

Well, that puzzled me. Did any kids, back in the day, actually play at Roman civil wars?

We played Cowboys and Indians, or Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. We argued about who should be Wyatt Earp or Doc Holiday. Were there really kids who wanted to play Julius Caesar or Pompey, or who met by the corner of the woods Saturday morning and said, "I've got a great idea. Today, let's pretend we're in Judea revolting against Roman taxation"? How would you pick which old Roman civil war anyway? There were so many of them.

If we had possessed the war sets I've mentioned we would have made sure our Roman infantry were accompanied by tanks. I suspect children are more creative than the adults who design toys for them.

I did not, in fact, own any of the sets in the ads my friend sent to me, but I know what con jobs those ads were because I once bought a bag of two hundred soldiers at the local Five & Dime. The figures were utterly flat and so light and flimsy it was almost impossible to get them to stay upright on their plastic stands let alone array them for battle.

Since the bag the soldiers came in was transparent I did realize they were flat but I didn't know they wouldn't stand up until I got home and called them to duty. I can imagine how disappointed the children who ordered those magnificent armies pictured in the comic books must have been.

Toy advertisers have been deceiving youngsters forever. My kids were taken in by the Saturday morning cartoon commercials. Those castles and forts that were made to look like sets from Hollywood blockbusters turned out to be shoddy, plastic trash that fell over the moment they came out of the boxes.

Maybe that's why my ultimate go-to "toy" was modeling clay. Not the skimpy bits of colored stuff you could buy at the Five & Dime though. My dad bought huge chunks of clay at the art store. The sort sculptors use. Pounds of it. You could do something with that much. You could create buildings that didn't fall over.

Clay soldiers will stand up to fight. True, it wasn't feasible to make hundreds of them but at least if you did want to stage a Roman sword fight, unlike with plastic soldiers, heads could roll.

Interview with a Shadow Man

by Eric

It's mid-afternoon and the cafe in downtown Manhattan is brightly lit but the actor who goes by the name A. Mann is only a fleeting motion at the corner of my vision as he arrives for our interview and settles into a chair behind a pillar. He professes to feeling nervous about talking to me but I am the one who shivers as a sudden chill slithers down my spine.

If you've ever watched a horror movie or a thriller, you've seen A. "Shadow" Mann, though you won't find that name in any credits. He is the figure flashing past the open doorway, crossing the end of the hallway, lurking at the window. As often as not he is nothing more than a featureless shadow.

"As a child I used to startle people," says Mann, when I ask what led him to a movie career. "I'd walk up behind my mother and she'd jump. 'Oh, I didn't know you were there' she'd say. 'You move so quietly.' It was a talent I had. I liked making people jump. Movies gave me the chance to make a living at it."

His voice is not unusual. I remark upon that.

"Did you expect a Rod Serling voice, perhaps?" he says. "We do have something in common. When I appear in a movie, like Mr Serling, I tell movie goers without words that they are in a zone where things are out of the ordinary. In my case, a zone where people are likely to die horribly."

I lean back in my chair, attempting to see around the pillar, but Mann somehow contrives to remain just out of sight. "And you do this without words. Your parts never call for you to speak, do they?"

"No. Speaking would give away too much, too early. For quite a while I've been the world's highest paid silent actor."

"Do you take inspiration from the stars of the silent era?"

"Actually I study ballet dancers. What I do is all in the movement. You only see me for an instant. Gliding, creeping, lurching, scuttling, whatever is appropriate. I wish I could have seen the Russian dancer Nijinsky. There's hardly any film. I imagine he would have scuttled magnificently."

The disembodied voice is making me uneasy. What is he doing that I can't see? He might be contemplating the sort of wound a butter knife could inflict. For all I know he could be foaming at the mouth. Or a giant insect. I barely saw him arriving. I try to steady my voice. "You only appear for seconds at a time but your roles carry a huge responsibility."

"Yes. I'm the glimpse of evil and menace the audience sees first. It's up to me to capture the essence of the character in that instant when I race by. To instill a sense of dread. I lay the foundation that the actor or special effects crew builds on to portray the maniac or monster."

"Do you ever wish you had more screen time?"

"Not at all. That would ruin the effect. The horror the audience imagines after seeing my vague shape for a second is always far worse than what eventually appears fully fleshed out. Or partially fleshed out as the case may be."

Now I wonder if Mann's flesh is hanging in shreds or whether he is sporting scales instead. My voice starts shaking. "I've been told that you are the most in demand actor in Hollywood."

The statement is greeted with a soft laugh. Not in the least sinister. Not in the least. "Let's just say that I've played every kind of monster you can think of, human and otherwise, including most of the ones you've heard of. Actors like Robert Englund have been in plenty of films but I am, as they say, Legion."

Suddenly I must see him. I leap up and step around the pillar.

Mann is gone, as anyone who's ever seen a horror film knew he would be. I look around the room. No sign of him. Diners are eating and conversing unconcerned. Of course, they didn't notice the shadowy thing slinking in and out.

They have no idea of what they're up against.

Yet.

Eye to Eye with a Goldfish

by Eric

Out here in the Pennsylvania mountains winter comes down like old age.

Everything creaks: the walls at night; the stairs as I carry another cup of coffee to the office; the snow under my feet when I venture out to check the gauge on the propane tank; my bones all the time. I'm not built for the cold. I came into the world weighing less than a bag of sugar after someone's baked a batch of Christmas cookies and I've never caught up. Chill doesn't have far to travel to reach my bones.

In February silence encases the world like the ice on the branches of the pines beyond the window. With the space heater off you can hear at long intervals trucks shifting gears on the highway a mile away. Nothing else. The birds hopping around the snow-covered porch roof looking for seeds in the gutters never sing. How do they survive, I wonder? Usually the heater needs to be on. Its breathy hum drowns out the silence, muffles the noises of the furnace, water heater, and well pump turning on and off. Existential sounds this time of year. Necessary as heartbeats. I find myself listening for them, anxiously. Not unlike those poor souls who can't help hearing the click-click of their artificial heart valves.

Waiting for the well pump to grind through its cycle and click off successfully is the worst. The water pipes running through the unheated crawlspace beneath the house are wrapped in insulation and heat tapes but have still frozen deep in the hole where they emerge from the ground. You only find out when the pump can't force water through the blocked pipe and the faucets go dry. I'm starting to feel too old to wedge myself through the cat-sized door in the foundation and creep across frozen earth, avoiding pipes and wiring, inhaling cobwebs, in sub-zero darkness and then praying the heat gun won't fail to do the job this time. Come to think of it, I've felt too old to do that roughly from the time I was able to walk.

The cold also makes it impossible to go to the store for weeks on end. This area doesn't get Buffaloed with blizzards but our house is separated from the state road by a stretch of hill that's rendered impassable by an inch of frozen snow or a glaze of ice. So even while we listen out for the household machinery we're keeping track of the groceries we stock up during the fall, hoping they last until a rare winter thaw or spring. Unless this is the year spring doesn't arrive. By mid February warm weather begins to seem like a myth. Luckily we're both connoisseurs of tinned cuisine. If Spam was good enough for the troops during World War II why should a couple of scribblers complain? Besides, Spam is pretty much fat and salt. What's not to like?

Looking on the bright side, we've never failed to get through a winter yet. And the season does have its icy charms. Does life offer a more glorious gift than a snow day for a school kid? Is there any place more magical than snowy woods on a moonlit night? And the goldfish in the ice of the cow pond where my friends and I skated as kids were magical. I remember them, flashes of orange and yellow like gems embedded in the blue under my skates. If you were willing to kneel and let the ice bite through your trousers you could see their bulging eyes goggling up at you. Freed from their bowls during the summer, now they were imprisoned again. We convinced ourselves that as soon as spring arrived the goldfish shook the frost off their scales and swam happily all summer. I've come to doubt that but it's a nice thought.

There's little doubt, though, that Casa Maywrite will eventually thaw out and its inhabitants will resume swimming, however creakily.

Skunk Cabbage Dreams

by Eric

Dreams are funny things. Or maybe not. I never wake up laughing. Screaming is another matter. I'm not sure why I never have funny dreams. Is it just me?

Some say humor is based on incongruity. What strikes us as funny is the perception of something incongruous — something that violates our mental patterns and expectations. This theory was set forth by several philosophers including Arthur Schopenhauer, whose favorite joke was purportedly: "What is the angle between a circle and its tangent?" Which kind of makes one wonder if Arthur had any business philosophizing on humor.

Still, tangents and circles aside, were this theory true it would follow that dreams can't be funny. Where could we find incongruity in the dream world where the expectations of our waking lives don't apply and we accept the irrational as a matter of course?

Well, I do anyway. While I'm experiencing them, dreams are absolutely real to me. So real that they can spill over into wakefulness, coloring my thoughts during the day. Dreams are like a second, alternative life. I remember being impressed by a science fiction story I read as a child. One night a man dreams he is an alien skunk cabbage on another planet. Soon his friends have the same dream, Yes, as it turns out, humans are actually alien skunk cabbages who were only dreaming of being human. (No, they don't write them like they used to.)

I am leery of describing my dreams for fear people might draw psychological conclusions. (Unflattering ones at that) But as Freud said, "sometimes a dream is just a dream" or was that Jung, or neither?

The first dream I can recall had me perched precariously on the steps of a high porch. The gaps between the steps were wide enough for a four year old like me to fall through. The ground below, so clearly visible through the gaps, lay hundreds of feet below. This was an only slightly exaggerated description of the porch on my parents' second story apartment. Heights have terrified me ever since. I still dream of ladders in the sky with missing rungs, swaying bridges without railings and bizarre, skeletal skyscrapers which must be climbed by eroding staircases open to the clouds.

The only time I don't fear falling is when I fly. Haven't we all dreamt of flying? I don't power my way through the air like Superman or soar like a bird. I levitate. What a wonderful feeling! And as I levitate hither and yon I am thinking how cool it is and how it seems like a dream but-- wow -- it's real! Even asleep I'm a sucker.

My nocturnal imaginings are seldom so pleasant. As a child I had nightmares which I rather miss because they were entertaining as a Saturday matinee. I thrilled to Martian war machines looming over the houses on my street, shuddered at the unseen horror lurking in the shadows of the attic, gasped when I opened my closet door to reveal an endless twilit plain littered with skulls.

These days my dreams mostly lack the tropes of science fiction and horror. They are not frightening, merely muddled and disturbing, populated by people long gone or dead. And I can't tell you how many times I've found myself on the wrong bus, racing through unfamiliar countryside, headed God knows where. The story of my life perhaps?

Now, finally I see gray light through the office blinds. It's time for me to stop typing. I got up in the middle of the night to write this because I couldn't sleep for some reason.

Things the Library Taught Me

by Eric

Last month I visited the library for the first time in a year to make copies of our tax forms. Years ago a week wouldn't have passed without my going to the library, let alone a year, but recently I've turned to e-books and never need to leave the house for reading material.

My grade school was a short walk from the local library and every week our teachers would have the class troop single file to the white wood frame building to exchange our borrowed books for new ones. That was my introduction to libraries and over the years they taught me a lot, quite apart from a love for reading.

Even during my picture book phase those weekly school excursions weren't sufficient. Saturday mornings it wasn't uncommon for me to trek from home to the library to stock up on Dr Seuss and the like, exhaust my selections by afternoon and return for more. Unfortunately the walk to the library was close to a mile with steep hills at both ends. I greedily piled up books until I had far too many to carry under one skinny arm, and nearly too many to see over cradled in both arms. I staggered outside, nose more or less resting on a Lorax or Horton the elephant. My thick lensed glasses kept slipping down as I stumbled along, more and more slowly, arms beginning to ache from the weight of all those delightful flights of imagination. Thus I learned about one's reach exceeding one's grasp.

When I was on fourth grade I learned about censorship. I had read all the Tom Swift Junior books my parents had bought for me and desperately craved more science fiction. (Instead of a monkey on my back I had an alien). Unfortunately the science fiction section of the library was upstairs in what must once have been a small bedroom. It was adults only. Apparently certain science fiction, including juveniles by Andre Norton and Lester del Rey, were unsuitable for young minds. Maybe an irate parent had shown them Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, or else someone didn't think kids should be reading about futures that held out the possibility of things being different than they are. Luckily, before long my parents were able to straighten out the strait-laced librarian and I was no longer barred from reading Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 which condemned book burning, and plenty of other science fiction which railed against the suppression of knowledge and freedom.

Speaking of freedom, libraries also gave me a foretaste of the surveillance state and not just via science fiction. Are you old enough to remember when library books had borrowing cards in a pocket on the inside back cover? You'd sign and date them when you took a book out. It was interesting to see how many times the book had been borrowed, when, and by whom. But at the library I went to this system also allowed the librarians to keep track of how many books each patron had borrowed. Which one time led to the librarian checking my books out to admonish me that I ought to read more. My classmate Nancy C----- had read twice as many books as I had! Despite the great loads of books I'd lugged home. What can I say? As a girl Nancy was not obligated to spend hours of potential reading time with friends reenacting the Gunfight at the OK Corral with cap guns.

The library also taught me not to lose my head in financial dealings. No, I didn't read books of investment advice while growing up (nor since). Rather I went to the annual library auction with a buddy. Usually what attracted me to the fund raiser were the food vendors and used book tables but one year the big speakers by the auction platform in front of the barn blared out that the next item up for bid was a trio of hamsters. My friend and I excitedly counted our pocket change and immediately began bidding furiously. Against each other. Solely against each other. Who other than a ten year old wants three hamsters? I guess we were naive but the whole point of an auction is bidding. What's the fun if you don't bid? Not surprisingly we eventually exhausted our funds and took our furry little prizes to my friend's house. We'd agreed to share custody and trade them back and forth. But I never got to keep them at my place.They turned out to be a bad investment because they got along worse than the Three Stooges. The next morning one was eviscerated and one decapitated. The survivor of the fight (I suppose he would have been Moe) we set loose in the woods. God help the chipmunks.

So I learned a lot from libraries but today I sit here typing electronic words which you'll read off a screen. I can't help remembering lurching homeward, gasping for breath, legs trembling, under the burden of those picture books and thinking that maybe books that weigh nothing are not a bad idea.

Travels on the Roads of Life

by Eric

The pandemic has forced kids all over the country to learn from home, something technologically impossible when I went to school. The closest we came to distance learning was the occasional episode of Mr Wizard, barely visible on a tiny black and white TV set at the far-off front of the classroom. These days I'm okay with spending hours staring at a computer screen but I don't think I would have enjoyed it growing up. What I would have been happy to escape was the commute to school.

Admittedly, my walk to grade school wasn't bad. All of six tenths of a mile, according to Google Maps. (I'd have guessed it was a lot further.) Down the street past the telephone company where my grandfather worked as a custodian, the dairy, the post office, and the movie theater which charged fourteen cents admission. From there across the highway, past the pharmacy, barbershop, and police station. Yes, it does sound like some sort of small town play set, doesn't it?

The big brick box elementary school sat at the top of a steep hill that could be difficult in the winter when coated with snow and ice. Given that the school year was a mandated 180 days, even accounting for days missed due to chicken pox, measles, flu, colds, and miscellaneous vague discomforts I suffered from time to time when I got fed up with the educational system, I must have been up and down that hill 2,000 times. (I admit my calculations might be off since one of my common ailments was long-division-itis) I can still recall the sidewalks in intimate detail - the bumpy stretch of macadam, the place where a root had buckled and broken a concrete slab. Not long ago I walked up that hill for the first time in ages and those details remained. The sidewalks hadn't been touched in fifty years. The hill seemed steeper though. I wouldn't try running up it these days.

Although the actual journey wasn't onerous I could only run so fast carting my bulging book bag (no backpacks yet) which meant I had to choke down my Cheerios at high speed to arrive before the bell. And naturally the familiar walk soon became boring. I muttered made-up stories to myself to relieve the tedium.

After grade school my commutes got tougher. Sartre had it wrong. Hell isn't other people, hell is a school bus stuffed with adolescents. I can't bring myself to say more.

Driving the roughly twenty miles from home to college was a bit less horrific. Except in winter. The Plymouth wasn't exactly a chariot of the gods to begin with -- the body was mostly patches of unpainted unsanded fiberglass and it left a billowing black trail of smoke in its wake. I had to stop for oil fill-ups more frequently than gasoline. Add to that, during the months of icy weather, the heater didn't work and the tires were bald. One particular intersection required me to start pumping the brakes (such as they were) a half mile in advance when there was snow on the road. Then there was the hill with the sharp curve by the power plant where I twice executed a 180 degree pirouette, luckily not when one of the enormous gravel-laden trucks that frequented the road was coming.

During my last year in law school I worked at a county law library during the day and took night classes in lower Manhattan. This involved bussing from Weehawken NJ (yes, there's really a town with that name) to Jersey City in the morning and taking the subway to Manhattan in the afternoon, then taking another subway at ten PM uptown to the Port Authority in order to catch a bus back to Weehawken. The dark deserted streets I hiked to reach the Canal Street station after classes were exactly as you've seen on film with steaming manholes and the occasional taxi. Since the area was mostly warehouses it wasn't as dangerous as it looked. I felt more uneasy making my way through the maze of corridors, escalators and stairways in the Port Authority.

Luckily I've worked from home for the past twenty-five years and haven't had to commute, so that's that. I'll shut up before I start sounding like one of Monty Python's four Yorkshiremen outdoing each other about the hardships of their childhoods, living in shoe boxes or paper bags or an 'ole in the ground.

Dark and Stormy Beginnings

by Eric

In her latest blog, Questioning a Master? mystery author Triss Stein reminds us that Elmore Leonard famously wrote a list of writing instructions that began with “Never open a book with weather.” Triss goes on to say "that first rule has always bothered me. Here’s why: where I grew up , weather can be a major player in that game called life we are playing and writing about."

As it happens I lived for almost twenty years in upstate New York myself and when you have to deal with 130 inches of snow in the winter it makes Leonard's rule seem a bit foolish.

A few years ago I wrote an essay for the Orphan Scrivener(the newsletter Mary and I have been putting out since 2000) in which I also disagreed with the master. I'm reprinting it without change. As it was in 2008, it has been in the nineties here this week, and Mary and I have certainly not been able to ignore it.

***

For the past week Mary and I have tried to get a little writing done while we sweltered in 90 degree temperatures and watched bright red thunderstorms brush past us on the National Weather Service radar. Aside from a handful of half-inch bits of ice which quickly turned to droplets on the sun porch roof, the storms let us alone. The power stayed on and we suffered only from heat and distraction, which was bad enough.

I was reminded of Elmore Leonard's silly first rule of his Ten Rules of Writing -- "Never open a book with weather."

What? Never open a book by mentioning the element we're all swimming in? Weather affects how we feel physically and can color our outlook too. Of course, reading what I write, someone might suppose I was a frustrated meteorologist. There's a weather report every other page of our books and if it's not already teeming, rain is in the forecast. My Constantinople tends to be a dark and stormy place.

No doubt what I write reflects my personal preoccupation with the state of the atmosphere. I tend to be very aware of the weather. It affects my moods and changes my perceptions. The world of a cold winter morning is a far different place than that of a humid summer afternoon, and certainly important enough to mention at the start of a book.

Or is that just me? What about other writers? I opened up some books close to hand at random. Here are some first lines I came across in a few minutes:

"On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge." -- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

"To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth." ---John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

"The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting." -- Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

Well, Okay, so what do all those old time writers know? How about someone newer:

"A big noisy wind out of the northeast, full of a February chill, herded the tourists off the afternoon beach, driving them to cover, complaining bitterly." -- John D. MacDonald, The Quick Red Fox

Glancing through Travis McGee books it struck me that every other one began with a reference to the weather. How about something totally different, though -- a fantasy written recently:

"Thunderstorms were common in Sarantium on midsummer nights..."-- Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium

See, someone else thinks thunderstorms are important.

To be fair, as soon as Leonard stated his rule he admitted he was blowing hot air. "Never open a book with weather," he said. "If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want."

Don't start with the weather unless it has to do with the story or you can write brilliantly enough to get away with it. That's probably good advice, generally, but it applies to anything. Not just to weather. And besides, I still think most of the writers I quoted broke Leonard's rule because most of those first lines strike me as being mainly for the sake of atmosphere.

My rules of writing are more concise than Elmore Leonard's:

Rule 1 -- There are no rules.

Oh, and let's not forget that Mike Hammer makes his first appearance coming through a doorway and shaking rain off his hat.

I could use some rain on my hat right now. The office is stuffy. Hot weather makes me curt and cranky. Not that I ought to write about it.

The Blog Tour Continues

There's an interview with Eric Reed, our not so secret pseudonym, at Killer Crafts and Crafty Killers.

Retired and Retiring

Mary and I decided to change the title of our blog because we're retiring. We've both given up all of our freelance writing and editing except for the fiction. I guess if you only work at what seems like play, you're retired.

Then again we've always been retiring in the sense of being shy and diffident, at least when it comes to making a public spectacle of ourselves in order to sell books. Our retiring natures extend to Internet social media, like Facebook. Mary shies away from the invasion of privacy involved. I cringe at how you need to accumulate, "friends" or followers. To me. social networking sites feel too much like parties and the minute I walk into a party I'm immediately flung to the wall by the centrifugal force of the social whirl.

But both of us would love to receive -- and respond to -- comments here. Talking to people one at a time is different than addressing crowds. Unfortunately, crowded social networks are the preferred method of communication these days.

We hope to post to this blog more frequently than in the past. Mary has a strong interest in Golden Age detective novels and will continue with her reviews, but we have other interests as well and are also at an age where we can be forgiven -- hopefully -- for pausing to look back along the road we've traveled. And then there's our writing. We've learned quite a bit over the past decades and writing during retirement, which so many of us aim for, poses its own challenges.

We won't pretend to be writing teachers, however. Neither of us has ever taken a writing course, or attended a workshop. We both agree writing can't be taught. It's something you learn to do on your own. We all develop our own methods and write in our own styles. There are no tricks or magic formulas.

Too many years ago, while I was living in New York City, I was invited to a party by one of my former college professors. An accomplished painter, she was showing off her newest -- and very pricey -- canvases to potential buyers. As an impoverished student from the sticks I had less than nothing in common with the well heeled big city art crowd in attendance. Her enormous expressionist paintings wouldn't have fit on the wall of my apartment. I couldn't have afforded the paint to cover the canvases let alone buy the artwork. Luckily, my professor had invited another student from the small Pennsylvania college were she taught, a friend of mine. We retreated to a shadowy, far corner of the loft and talked and joked in the relative quiet as we observed the social melee from afar.

Mary and I are hoping this blog might serve a similar purpose as our own quiet little corner of the Internet.

How Accurate Must a Historical Mystery Be?

by Eric

Most readers and writers would probably agree that the history in a historical mystery should be accurate. If your mystery plot depends, say, upon Oliver Cromwell, Jack the Ripper and Gertrude Stein being contemporaries (heaven forbid!) then you're writing alternative history. Unfortunately the question of accuracy is rarely so simple. The historical record, not to mention common sense, would indicate that Queen Victoria didn't hunt Jack down in her spare time, let alone by posing as a member of a traveling circus, but then again maybe the historians missed that. The trick to writing imaginative historical mysteries is keeping just under the radar of the historians.

There is definitely some flying room there. A little research, especially reading the footnotes, quickly reveals that historians sometimes don't know quite as much as it appears. What looks like a detailed drawing often turns out, on examination, to be a few scattered dots of facts connected into a coherent pattern by the historian based on his general expertise and personal theories. Another historian might connect those same dots into an altogether different picture. In Two for Joy we mention the pagan philosophers who fled to foreign shores when Justinian shut down Plato's Academy. The story is often alluded to, but is actually mentioned only briefly in a handful of sources.

But sources also can be untrustworthy. Consider Procopius who, while in Justinian's service, wrote panegyrics to the emperor but in his posthumously discovered Secret History excoriated him as a rapacious demon without a face. As a writer, when faced with such inconsistency, I prefer to choose whatever suits my purpose! That might sound like cheating but, I suspect, historians do much the same thing in a somewhat more sophisticated way. (I don't know if a Byzantine mosaic depicting a demon, like the one above, would give a writer of historicals license to include demons!)

It must also be remembered that surviving records can be spotty. (Not surprising after 1500 years -- I have a hard enough time keeping track of the mailing list for our newsletter for two months). Much of what we know well, we know by chance and what survives is not always what we would expect. During the life of Justinian, Cassiodorus wrote a massive Gothic History. Strangely, those twelve volumes have vanished but a short abridgment, The Getica, by Jordanes, probably made during Cassiodorus' lifetime, survives.

I'm not arguing that historical mystery writers have a license to be inaccurate but rather that they should take advantage of the many available opportunities to be creative. To put the matter into legal terms, the fiction writer's burden of proof is the opposite of the historian's. Historians must prove what they say is true while historical writers are allowed to say just about anything that can't be proved false.

Writing Together

by Eric

It's been a while since Murder in Megara came out so Mary and I have started plotting the next of our John the Lord Chamberlain mysteries. Well, actually we've been plotting to write another book for months but we only now are trying to come up with a plot. Daydreaming about novels is so much easier than getting down to work.

People often ask how two writers can work together on the same project? The first step, as Mary likes to say, is to lock up all the kitchen knives.

Next we settle on a basic idea. In the case of Murder in Megara the idea was to force John to solve a mystery without recourse to his powers as a high official and in a place less familiar than Constantinople. This flowed naturally from the previous Ten For Dying in which he had been sent into exile at an estate near his boyhood home in Greece. In the past we've been inspired by history. Let's do a book taking place during the Justinianic Plague or the Nika Riots! We wrote a book to send John to Egypt and another to tell how he rose from being a slave to advising the emperor. Ideas for interesting mystery puzzles might also form the germ of a book. You'd need to ask Mary how these occur to her. She sees potential murder mysteries in everything. I'll be lying in bed, eyes closed, about to sleep and from the darkness a voice will suddenly say -- "Paperclips dipped in curare!"

I don't think you can chase ideas and catch one. They're like cats. They come to you if and when they want to. One often cited source that's useless to us is the newspaper. Our plots are never torn from the screaming headlines. (Or is that torn screaming from the headlines? ) When did you last see a headline: "Red and Green Factions Riot Outside Hippodrome"?

Which of us usually comes up with the intitial idea? I have no idea! But once it's there, purring and rubbing against our legs, we extrapolate. (My feline analogy will end here because if you try to extrapolate a cat you'd better have a first aid kit handy.)

It goes without saying (and isn't it strange how things that go without saying usually do not go unsaid?) that we sometimes ask ourselves what happens first and if that happens then what? But we also come up with things we would like to see happen during the book, places that would make good backdrops for scenes, characters to bring the book to life. For Murder in Megara we came up with a City Defender who serves Megara as both law enforcer and judge, a corrupt estate overseer, a shady pig farmer, a servant’s unwelcome suitor, a wealthy merchant who spends part of his time as a cave-dwelling hermit, and the criminals and cutthroats populating such a seedy port as Megara. Not to mention two childhood friends whose lives have taken very different paths, and the stepfather John hated.

Okay, I just quoted the publisher's description of the book. But the reason for all those people in the description is that characters are the most important part of most novels. And each character comes with his or her own possibilities, motivations and inclinations, which help form the plot. A story is in lage part the collisions and entanglements of the characters' desires.

Mary and I tend to take notes on our thoughts and trade them back and forth via email. I wonder how long of a detour those emails take to traverse the two feet between our desks? After a time we amalgamate the notes and start talking. We manage to construct a rough plot outline before entering into hand to hand combat (remember the knives are safely locked away.) This outline is divided into scenes -- no details to speak of, mainly just who does what and when and where. Enough to get started, but not so much as to take the fun out of "discovering" the story as we subsequently write it. We might know that John is going to visit a wealthy merchant in town and discover an important clue, but we don't necessarily know exactly what turns their conversation will take. That's the fun of the writing.

So far as individual methods go, Mary thinks and thinks and then whips through a scene before going back to rewrite. I tend to scribble notes and do my rewriting slowly as I go along a method made possible by word processors. When I typed I spent most of my time half covered in Wite-Out. Once we finish the scenes we've chosen to work on we turn them over to our co-writer for "editing" which can be light or heavy. We trade edited versions back and forth until we both like them.

The further we progress in the outline the more the projected story tends to change. We add, and subtract, scenes and characters, and we might even find out we've initially tabbed the wrong person for the murder! Yes, it has happened and no, I'm not going to reveal who did or didn't do it!

Our discussions are almost always about ideas, settings, characters, plot twists, clues. Those are what most readers, including myself, read for, not for individual words or niceties of grammar. I don't much care if a writer hangs an occasional participle so long as I give a hang about the characters. Which is not to say we don't pay any attention to using good grammar and effective words, but that is just the polish. Flaubert was perfectly entitled to his eternal quest for "le mot juste" but if you ask me he's caused aspiring writers a lot of grief! Luckily Mary and I both agree on not being carried carried away with style or we'd never get anything done.

Having said all that I'm not sure I've said much, or that there is much useful to be said about writing methods. Another thing Mary and I agree on is that writing can't be taught. Neither of us has ever taken a writing class or attended a workshop. (I admit to reading two books about writing in my life: Writing Pulp Fiction by Dean R. Koontz and Stephen King's On Writing.) The creative process is a mystery. Everyone will have a unique way of writing, developed only by writing, rather than thinking about it.

Now I will check my email to see if Mary has sent me any thoughts about the notes I just sent her on the new book.

It Wasn't the Cat

by Eric

At Halloween I always recall my childhood brush with the supernatural. My parents had taken my grandmother to visit relatives and so my grandfather had been left in charge of my brother Todd and me, not to mention my grandmother's very fat black cat.

My brother and I were fed easily enough. My grandfather carted us down cellar, opened the furnace door and we roasted hot dogs over the coals while conjecturing cheerfully about what might be lurking in the dark coal bin, behind the boxes of earth where the dahlia roots were buried for winter.

The cat was another matter. After futilely calling, my grandfather shoved an opened tin of Puss N' Boots under a kitchen chair.

"The cat must have got out. If he shows up he can eat." He preferred looking after his tomato plants. He always knew where to find them.

"Maybe something eat kitty," piped up Todd.

The expression on my grandfather's face became, as my grandmother would've said, "sour as pig swill."

"What would do that, here?"

"Don't know...something," said my brother, giving the final word a certain alarming twist

My grandfather did not lack imagination. In later years, after he'd cleared the pigs and rabbits out of the barn and had some spare time in the evening, he'd often don his spectacles and launch himself into a book of flying instructions which, while not as current as they had been during the bi-plane era, were every bit as adventuresome.

No, what he was against was the febrile wool gathering that during his boyhood had been a prime cause of tuberculosis in obscure romantic poets. When he saw Todd threatened he nipped it quick as he'd pick a cut worm off a cabbage.

"My razor strap will something you," is how he put it.

Todd chose not to pursue his theory. The razor strap wasn't as mind bendingly awful as what might be lurking in the coal bin, but it stung worse.

"Kitty just out," he agreed.

I suppose I was somewhat responsible for my brother's flights of imagination. Being five years older I felt I should take some part in his education. I decided to teach him useful words. A selection of everyday items would be laid out on the table in front of us.

"Scissors," I'd explain, pointing. "Apple ... orange ... banana ... bandanna (I was a tough taskmaster) ... amorphous horror."

Todd cast a bewildered look at the empty air I pointed toward.

"Can't see."

"Exactly," I said, giving the word a certain alarming twist.

My grandfather marched us upstairs early. The unfamiliar bed was high. More than high enough for something to have slithered underneath. But before we could check, the light was switched off and the room plunged into darkness.

As with all children, we spent our last moments of wakefulness waiting for sudden shrieks, eerie glows, disembodied voices and things that dropped off the ceiling smack into the middle of your bed. I generally slept with the covers pulled up over my head, snorkeling air through one partially exposed nostril, fingers clutched at the bed sheet in case something tried to pull it off.

In the strange dark of my grandparent's spare room our sensations were heightened. For awhile we listened for telltale scratching from beneath the bed. It struck me that this was a good time for a favorite diversion - recounting recent nightmares.

It's been a long time since I've had a nightmare worth remembering. My dreams have grown gray and mundane. But when I was younger my nights were filled with killer robots, werewolves and skull littered plains stretching endlessly into the distance beyond my closet door. This evening I plunged into the "barn dream."

"It was dark," I began. "When I climbed the stairs I suddenly felt another presence. Something waiting. Something indescribably horrible. Waiting for me...behind the boxes piled in the corner."

Todd's face floated in the dark before me like a gibbous moon. His eyes were round with fear. It took few words to call forth that consciousness of inexplicable horror shared by the young and submerged later in life beneath the paltry annoyances of reality.

When I paused the room filled with a terrible quiet. There was a sudden rush of breath from my brother's side and then, from somewhere all too near, there came a distinct, hideously loud THUMP.

When he spoke, Todd's voice was heavy with resignation. "There it is."

"And it isn't the cat."

For a few seconds we both contemplated this mind numbing truth in mute terror. Then my brother regained his voice.

"A morpus horror!" he cried. We both started shrieking.

My grandfather came upstairs and cleared the air with his razor strap. Next morning the cat was nowhere to be seen, but the cat food had been eaten.

I'm glad I didn't see what ate it.

Review: The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley

by Eric

When Sir Eustace Pennefather arrives at the Rainbow Club he finds in his mail a parcel containing a box of chocolates. The choleric baronet is outraged at being made the target of an advertising promotion, as indicated by the accompanying note. He passes the box on to a fellow club member who has arrived at that moment by chance. Graham Bendix, only vaguely acquainted with Sir Eustace, takes the chocolates home to his wife who, after eating several, dies of nitrobenzene poisoning.

Sir Eustace is, we are told, a thoroughly "bad baronet." For one thing, while most country squires are content to pursue foxes, Sir Eustace pursues women. No doubt he's made enemies, but who sent him the poisoned chocolates?

Scotland Yard is stumped. So stumped that Chief Inspector Moresby gives the Crime Club a crack at the case.

Detective novelist Roger Sheringham's Crime Club consists of six members who have passed a stringent test proving their crime solving expertise: "There was a famous lawyer, a scarcely less famous woman dramatist, a brilliant novelist who ought to have been more famous than she was, the most intelligent (if not the most amiable) of living detective-story writers, Roger Sheringham himself, and Mr. Ambrose Chitterwick, who was not famous at all, a mild little man of no particular appearance..."

Inspector Moresby briefs the club on what little Scotland Yard has learned. The members agree that each will attempt to solve the crime and report their conclusions the following week.

The book's plot is simple. Inspector Moresby makes his presentation and then each member details his or her solution and the methods and reasoning employed.

That's right. The book consists almost entirely of speeches!

If you're looking for a thriller or non-stop action, this novel isn't for you. If, on the other hand, you enjoy savoring an intellectual mystery puzzle The Poisoned Chocolates Case is a classic. (I admit that puzzle solving, for me, is a spectator sport. I'm no good at solutions but I enjoy the cleverness of them when they are revealed.)

The mystery lover will find here six different investigations and solutions, each one entirely convincing until the next presenter adds new facts or casts a different light on what is already known.

Each club member makes his or her presentation in a distinctive voice, from the bombastic lawyer to the timid Mr Chitterwick and each approaches the case in a unique manner. Methods of proof include inductive investigation, deduction from facts given or a combination. One member depends on psychology another on science. One looks for a motive of financial gain another jealousy. As an added fillip, each member also alludes to a parallel real life case. Mr Chitterwick, the final presenter, helpfully offers a chart summing up the approaches taken by those who came before.

The book is a treatise on the tricks of mystery writing filled with observations like that of detective novelist Bradley who says, "Artistic proof is, like artistic anything else, simply a matter of selection. If you know what to put in and what to leave out you can prove anything you like, quite conclusively. I do it in every book I write."

At the end of book, after five false alarms, Mr Chitterwick finally reveals the true murderer.

Or does he?

Surely if Anthony Berkeley, as author of the Poisoned Chocolates Case, had not included Mr Chitterwick in the club then the fifth speaker would have had the final say and the woman dramatist's solution would have been conclusive.

Or if Berkeley had decided a seventh member should speak, then poor Mr Chitterwick would have turned out not so smart after all.

The solution to a mystery novel really depends on where the author decides to stop doesn't it?

Review: The Case of the Blonde Bonanza by Erle Stanley Gardener

by Eric

One of the problems in trying to review a mystery is that you can't give away the solution and whether the solution makes sense, is fairly clued, is surprising and clever goes a long way to determining how the reader reacts to the book. The solution to Erle Stanley Gardner's 1940 Perry Mason mystery, The Case of the Blonde Bonanza, meets the criteria, as far as I'm concerned, and that's all I can say!

Another problem in reviewing mysteries is that the victim may not be revealed for several chapters. I hate reviewers giving away the identity of the victim since guessing who will be killed and how is part of the interest of many mysteries. I've given up reading the back covers of mysteries because very often the blurb will leap right into the middle of the story to spill the beans about the murder. As for The Case of the Blonde Bombshell....well, if I admitted I would feel uneasy about saying anything about the murder you might guess that it doesn't take lace on the first age.

So, forget I said that!

What can I say that might entice you to try this novel out?

Consider the initial set-up? Perry Mason's secretary Della Street, while dining every day at an open-air lunchroom on the beach, observes a young woman who has a puzzling routine. After drinking a glass of half milk and half cream she downs a steak, French fried potatoes and a salad, followed by apple pie a la mode and two candy bars. On her way out she checks her weight on the scales by the doorway. Della reckons the girl has gained five pounds in eight day.

When she calls Perry's attention to the mystery it seems simply frivolous. But as Mason observes:

"Apple pie a la mode . . . chocolate malted milk . . . there simply has to be a catch in it somewhere, Della--and there's an irresistible body meeting an immovable bathing suit. Something is bound to happen."

Of course he's right. The naive girl is in trouble and it's Perry Mason to the rescue. (Shades of Travis McGee) The solution to the girl's behavior is weird and interesting and the solution to the murder that follows depends on an intricate dance of suspects coming and going.

It amazes me how Erle Stanley Gardner handles everything from narrative to description in dialogue, but it works, especially in the court room show down. It's been a long time since I graduated from law school, and I never practiced law, but the sparring between the two lawyers and the judge at the preliminary hearing sure sounded authentic to me. Not surprisingly since Gardner did litigation work for a dozen years.

I was never much impressed by the Perry Mason television show. That was one of my parents' shows. Apparently I like Gardener's books better.

Review: The Cornish Coast Murder by John Bude

by Eric

It is a dark and stormy night on the Cornish Coast when Reverend Dodd and Doctor Pendrill meet at the vicarage as they do each week for dinner, conversation and to share a selection of books from the local library. As always the books are mysteries: Edgar Wallace, J. S. Fletcher, A Farjeon, Dorothy L. Sayers, Freeman and Agatha Christie. All Golden Age authors, not surprisingly since this novel appeared in 1935 at the height of that era. Little does the vicar suspect that he will soon have the chance to test the deductive methods he has acquired through his reading..

Even as the two friends discuss mysteries of the literary kind, while lightning flashes and thunder peels, a murder is committed. At Greylings Manor, overlooking the sea and barely a hundred yards from the vicarage, old Julius Tregarthan is shot dead.

There are plenty of suspects. For a start, old Tregarthan was not particularly well liked by the villagers of Boscawen. Then there are the servants at Greylings, and Tregarthan's niece, and her boyfriend who the old man hated.

Investigations reveal unexplained, or suspiciously explained, comings and goings. the night of the murder. Footprints in the mud and absence thereof, on the paths around the manor, add to the confusion, as do the three oddly spaced shots which were fired, without anyone hearing.

The case is handled by the amiable Inspector Bigswell, from nearby Greystoke, who is determined to keep Scotland Yard out of it, and open minded -- and eventually desperate -- enough to accept assistance from the Reverend Dodd. Happily, this isn't the stereotypical situation where the utterly incompetent law officer shuns the efforts of the brilliant amateur. In fact, Bigswell uncovers most of the evidence but is assisted at key points by the reverend who is thrilled to be involved in a real life murder but a bit ashamed that he should feel thrilled.

I enjoyed this novel thoroughly. But, be forewarned, it is the type of thing that, as Mary says, you'll like if you like that type of thing. Which is to say a classic puzzle oriented mystery. The book's basic structure is this: evidence is discovered and the inspector or the vicar forms a reasonable theory of the murder. Then more evidence is discovered which shoots that theory out of the water. So a new theory fitting the known facts is formulated and more evidence turns up which invalidates the new theory. This is repeated chapter after chapter. A delight for anyone who loves trying to make sense of the evidence, but perhaps not a thriller lover's cup of tea, if thriller lovers drink tea.

NOTE: In his informative introduction to this British Library Crime Classic (Poisoned Pen Press edition), mystery writer Martin Edwards, notes that the novel was originally issued by Skeffington, a small publisher which sold mainly to libraries. Copies of the first edition are hard to find and possibly quite valuable. And in fact, as I write this, a seller listed at AbeBooks has a first edition with dust jacket for $1,250!

Review: The Case of the Stuttering Bishop by Erle Stanley Gardner

by Eric

My grandmother was an avid reader. She particularly liked mysteries and her favorite author was Erle Stanley Gardner (or his alter-ego A.A.Fair) She had stacks of his slim paperbacks on her shelves. I was a science fiction reader as a kid. Mysteries didn't strike me as intellectual enough. How could my grandmother move so easily between Dickens and books about a television lawyer? Yes, I was familiar with the Perry Mason series starring Raymond Burr and didn't much like it either. When I did pick up one of the paperbacks and leafed through it appeared to be nothing but dialogue. Pretty thin gruel.

So it was a half century later that I finally read one of Gardner's Perry Mason novels, The Case of the Stuttering Bishop, and discovered that my grandmother was onto something. Published in 1936, the 9th Perry Mason novel begins when Perry is consulted about a twenty-two year old manslaughter case by Bishop William Mallory, who not only stutters (an odd thing for a bishop) but is keeping a secret. The ensuing investigation uncovers a possibly counterfeit heiress and perhaps an orphan girl who may or may not an heiress. A cast of high-born and hirelings maneuvre for the fortune that's at stake. People go missing and inevitably someone dies.

Perry is in his element. "How I love a mystery, " he tells his secretary, Della Street. "I hate routine. I hate details. I like the thrill of matching my wits with crooks. I like to have people lie to me and catch them in their lies. I love to listen to people talk and wonder how much of it is true and how much of it is false. I want life, action, shifting conditions. I like to fit facts together, bit by bit, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle."

Fortunately, for a reader who prefers detective whodunits to legal thrillers, Perry acts a lot like a private eye of the era, and isn't always as above board as one might expect. As District Attorney Hamilton Burger tells him, "You know, I've always had a horror of prosecuting innocent men. I want to be certain a person's guilty before I bring him into court. You've got a wonderful mind. There are times when you've unscrambled some mighty tough cases which would otherwise have resulted in the escape of the guilty and the conviction of the innocent, but you simply won't keep within ethical limits. You won't sit in your office and practice law. You insist on going out to try and get hold of evidence, and whenever you do, you start matching wits with witnesses and pulling some pretty fast plays, altogether too damn fast."

You might gather from the foregoing that Perry's sidekicks Della Street, investigator Paul Drake, and nemesis Hamilton Burger are more nuanced characters than they appeared on the small screen.

It should be pointed out that this is, from what I've read, not a typical Perry Mason novel. Perry does need to clear a suspect who all the evidence seems to point too, however there is no climactic courtroom scene. Those scenes, as depicted on the TV show struck me as preposterous, but the brief courtroom action here feels authentic, not surprisingly since Gardner practiced law for twenty year.

I'll need to read another Mason that sticks closer to the usual forumla but this book at least was a pleasant surprise.

By the way. I have read over the years that Gardner never bothered to describe his famous lawyer (who we all know looks like Raymond Burr) but this isn't strictly true for at one point in The Case of the Stuttering Bishop Gardner writes: "Standing with his shoulders squared, feet spread slightly apart, the soft shaded lights of the library illuminating his granite-hard profile and steady, patient eyes, he said, "Yes, I'm Mason." That is a description, of sorts.

Eating Maggots and Other Reasons I'm No Gourmet

by Eric

After one of our typical home heated up dinners I noticed that the ingredients listed on the bag included gorgonzola. Neither Mary nor I like to cook. To us, ingredients aren't things you measure, chop, or mix, but reading matter on the back of packages.

After one of our typical home heated up dinners I noticed that the ingredients listed on the bag included gorgonzola. Neither Mary nor I like to cook. To us, ingredients aren't things you measure, chop, or mix, but reading matter on the back of packages.

"Gorgonzola. That's cheese, isn't it?" I said, immediately activating the useful auxiliary brain called Google. Quicker than I can remember my Social Security number, I learned that gorgonzola is indeed a cheese, with bluish green veining.

"Whoa," I muttered. "Blue cheese. And look at this, the varicose veins are caused by -- you're not going to believe this -- mold spores growing into hyphae."

Mary frowned. "It doesn't really say "varicose viens" does it?"

"Gaaa," I replied sensibly. "I ate mold spore hyphae!"

In case I'm not being clear here, I don't care for blue cheese.

"Tasted all right to me. At least it's not the kind of cheese where you have to scrape the cheese mites off before you eat it."

"Cheese mites! Don't say that when I've got coffee in my mouth," I choked, frantically wiping off my keyboard. "You're kidding?"

"Look it up."

Unfortunately I did. According to Wikipedia, mites clinging to the rind of Milbenkäse are consumed along with the cheese, which has a "distinctive zesty aftertaste."

"Well, I can believe it has a distinctive taste!"

Mites are also help age Mimolette, the grayish crust being the result of cheese mites intentionally introduced to add flavor by their action on the surface of the cheese.

"I guess we can be sure that frozen pizza is never topped with Milbenkäse or Mimolette," I observed hopefully.

"If it were, the mites would have frozen to death."

"Maybe, but a mouthful of crunchy hard-frozen mites doesn't appeal to me."

I really should have stopped researching, but you know how it is with Google and the Internet and Wikipedia. You start out looking for information on the most innocent subject and a half hour later you are deep in the realms of things man was not meant to know.

Such as casu marzu, otherwise known as "rotten cheese".

Found mainly in Sardinia casu marzu contains live insect larvae. To be exact -- although "insect larvae" seems all you really need to know -- the larvae of the cheese fly. These larvae resemble translucent white worms about one third of an inch long. (So they say, and I'm willing to take their word for it and leave it at that.) A typical cheese contains thousands of these larvae -- known to the non-cheese lovers amongst us as maggots.

Call me a stick-in-the-mud, but I've never been into eating maggots. In fact, I was always been pretty much against eating anything while it was still alive. When my family went out to eat, the "very rare" (i.e. bleeding) steaks my mom ordered looked to me as if they were going to moo when you stuck them with a fork so I always demanded my steak be well done and then burned to a crisp, twice, just to be on the safe side.

Once, I admit, I ate a raw oyster at a street fair in Brooklyn. What can I say? I was young and stupid, the sun was hot, I'd had too much sangria. Sometimes when I remember it I can still feel the slimy mollusc sliding down, desperately fighting for life all the way.

Okay, so when it comes to food I've always had delicate sensibilities. I had to avert my gaze every time I passed the restaurant with the big sign announcing Tripe Pizza. Mary told me she liked tripe but I couldn't force myself to go there, not even when we were first married. I did however try to please her once by preparing another of her favorites, liver and onions. (Yes, we did try to cook once in a while until we both decided that the only thing worse than cooking was trying to eat each other's cooking.)

As a child liver had revolted me and I had revolted when it was served for dinner. But, I told myself, now I am an adult. Surely I am mature enough to consume a few token bits of a cow's internal organ?

So I forked up a chunk and chewed, and chewed, and chewed. It was like trying to chew a sponge. I couldn't grind it up, nor could I swallow it down. Every time I tried to gulp my throat balked with an instant gag reflex.

Yes, as an omnivore I am a dreadful failure.

But not even tripe or liver can match the aforementioned rotten cheese.

Apparently connoisseurs of the finer things in life enjoy spreading the stuff on bread. But then they have to hold their hands over the bread to eat it because those living maggots can jump as much as six inches! Holy leaping larvae, Batman! You wouldn't want a maggot up your snout when you were trying to get your tasty treat down your gullet, would you?

Now I think I'll go and have some tasty Pepto-Bismol. Now I think I'll go and have some tasty Pepto-Bismol.

Review: Miss Marple's Final Cases and Two Other Stories

by Eric

So where's Mary today?

Since she reads faster than she writes reviews, I offered to ease the burden by contributing an occasional GAD review myself. Unfortunately, she took me up on it!

The first book I want to talk about was an antidote to a recent Best Mysteries of the Year collection which featured one or two actual mysteries among twenty noir crime stories. It was enjoyable enough but badly mislabeled. I'd wanted mysteries!

So I turned to Agatha Christie. Where else?

Miss Marple's Final Cases and Two Other Stories was published posthumously in 1979. Presumably the six cases are "final" in that they were the last ones left to be collected at the time. None of the stories suggest that the end of Miss Marple's career is at hand.

The six mysteries include a man dying of a bullet wound in a church who utters a mysterious last word, a woman found dead in a closed room, and a maid framed for theft. They all contain fairly clued puzzles.

Amazingly I fingered the killer in The Tape Measure Murder.

"It must have been a weak story," Mary observed, having long since taken the measure of my powers of ratiocination.

It's true, I rarely figure out whodunit. The only other time I can remember it was not because of the clues but the way the story was constructed: i.e. a character who appeared to have no function in the story whatsoever, unless he was the villain.

Being a sucker for treasure hunts, I particularly liked Strange Jest wherein an eccentric great uncle's legacy is hidden somewhere on his estate. Only a cryptic deathbed clue marks the spot. The two bright young things who are directed to Miss Marple for help are dubious about the seemingly dotty old lady's abilities, until she finds the treasure after recalling her own dear old Uncle Henry who had a similar sense of humor to the deceased.

I suppose if I knew as many odd people as Miss Marple my own ratiocinative abilities would be better.

The "Two Other Stories" are supernatural, The Dressmaker's Doll is perhaps the best in the book. A vaguely malevolent doll appears out of nowhere, although no one can recall when, and gradually takes over a dressmaker's establishment. Creepy!

I've yet to read an Agatha Christie book I didn't like. This is a enjoyable little collection for those who of us who still crave a bit of mystery in the classic style.