Cinematic Scenes

At The Southwest Armchair Traveler Mary writes about memorable cinematic scenes she's seen.

More From the Tour

In the wartime issue of The Mystery Readers Journal Mary writes about how criminals in Great Britain took advantage of conditions on the homefront during the Second World War.

At B.K. Stevens Mysteries Mary analyzes how we wrote The First Two Pages of Ruined Stones.

Mary's Blog Tour

We know we've neglected our blog recently. Ruined Stones, the second Grace Baxter mystery set in the UK during World War Two, was published July 4 and Mary has been "away" on a bit of a blog tour. Here are a few places you can read her essays:

Mary visits Lelia Taylor's Buried Under books to write about a vacation walk involving a Bagpiper on the Beach.

At PJ Nunn's bookbrowsing, Mary writes about Character Paper Doll for Promotional Use.

At Marilyn's Musings, Mary describes the "Newcastle flat" type of housing she grew up in and which our protagonist Grace Baxter occupies in our new World War Two mystery Ruined Stones.

Our Detective, Grace Baxter, Talks

Auxiliary Newcastle police officer Grace Baxter recently sat down with author and blogger Terry Odell to answer a few questions about her experiences as the protagonist of our new World War Two mystery Ruined Stones.

Terry: What was your favorite part of being a character in this book?

Grace: I am proud to be able to contribute to the British war effort by following my father into police work, although it has turned out to be very different from his experience and what I had anticipated my role would be.

Read the rest of the interview here:

Character Interview - Erio Reed's Grace Baxter.

A Ghost Story

by Eric

StoryADay.org proclaimed May International Short Story Month back in 2013. The Short Mystery Fiction Society is celebrating by highlighting members’ online stories.

Today, the featured story is one by SMFS member Mary and her co-writer: “Waiting: A Halloween Short Story” archived at Kings River Life Magazine.

When Umbrellas Attack

by Mary

A couple of years after the Second World War broke out, the Bishop of Fulham in London was kind enough to share with readers of The Times some advice he had then but lately received from an unnamed official. Apparently the bishop had asked what to do in the event of an enemy attack by poisonous gas. The recommendation he received: to put his hands in his pockets and (presumably not simultaneously) raise his umbrella.

On reading this, my thoughts turned to Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident who defected and subsequently broadcast on the BBC World Service about life in his home country He was assassinated in London in 1978 by means of ricin, introduced either on the tip of an umbrella jabbed into his leg, or by way of a pellet shot from an umbrella-gun. The exact details of the affair will probably never be known, because the Bulgarian Secret Service file relating to his murder was among those reported to have been destroyed when their archives were opened to the public about five years ago.

But since on weekdays at least certain areas of London swarm with civil servants and business men dressed in an unofficial uniform of dark suits, bowler hats, and neatly-rolled umbrellas, who could possibly have suspected that among them was one with murderous intent?

On the other hand, it is my contention the person toting the gamp in Edward Gorey’s sinister title sequence for the Mystery series on PBS is up to no good, and until contrary evidence is produced, I shall remain convinced that there is Something Nasty concealed under that umbrella.

Fanciful, you may say? Perhaps so, but in the annals of the law cases are recorded where there is a direct link between crime and umbrellas.

Take, for example, an 1983 California case concerning a defendant apprehended going into a bank with a stickup note about his person and an umbrella handle disguised as a weapon by the ingenious device of draping it with a towel. The equally ingenious defence offered that his umbrella had been broken by high wind, and he was taking the handle home to attempt a repair of a handleless umbrella he had there. And the stickup note? He maintained that he had just been to a job interview and, while waiting to be seen, had read an article on bank robberies. This had inspired him to idly write a mock stickup note. As to the towel: he declared that he was carrying it because of excess perspiration. An appeals court decided that an umbrella disguised in the manner described would be frightening enough to support a conviction of attempted armed robbery.

Less than ten years later, in 1992, on the other side of the country a New York man was found guilty of being involved in the sale, by a third party, of a controlled substance to an undercover detective — in this case, cocaine vials, produced from an umbrella.

Sometimes the umbrella’s role is more marginal, for example in questions of liability. The worst case occurred in 1983 in Louisiana, where a passenger attempted to stop a woman leaving a bus. The woman’s husband struck him with an umbrella and was then fatally shot. The bus driver was not held liable because of his lack of knowledge as to the intent of the passenger, and the fact that he did not know he was armed. However, in 1916 in Arkansas, when a female passenger struck a fellow traveller on his head with her umbrella — he had apparently grabbed her arm — the railway company was held liable because the man had been allowed to board in an intoxicated state.

In Louisiana in 1930 a driver escaped liability for negligence when he struck a pedestrian in an intersection after the light turned green. It was found that because it was a dark, rainy night, and the injured party was not only dressed in dark clothes but also was holding a black umbrella over her head, the driver would have been unable to see, and thus avoid, her.

Another Louisiana case in 1969 involved a shopper hit by an automatic door when leaving a store. Having paused within range of its sensor to open her umbrella, she was considered to have contributed to the accident. As in a 1993 suit in North Carolina, where a customer fell over an umbrella protruding from a display into a store-aisle, the complaint was dismissed.

Courts have ruled that expert testimony is not required in cases where the general public would find cause and effect obvious. This was illustrated in 1981 case in Illinois, where the record noted the public generally understood that if someone is stabbed in the eye with the point of an umbrella, that eye will be severely damaged.

Lamentably, then, umbrellas have been occasionally been put to uncivil uses. Lovers of Ed Hoch’s short stories must forgive my closing by giving away part of the plot of his One Bag of Coconuts, published in the November 1997 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, but who could resist quoting this wonderful confession:

“I had to do it,” Adelaide said, holding the smoking umbrella.

The Last Summer Holiday

by Mary

Occasionally I find myself wondering if those eternal motion machines that are the young ever pause long enough to contemplate the enjoyable sight of the lengthy vista of days -- nay, weeks -- stretching out before them when the summer holidays finally begin.

Why, the time rolling out ahead seemed endless to us when school was at last out, with those menacing back-to-school sales so far away at the other end of the summer as to be easily ignored -- and just as well since once they arrived we would have to get the number 4 bus into town to buy school supplies and new tennis shoes, which in turn meant that the new term was not far off and thus soon it would be time to drag ourselves off to the grey Victorian building in which we laboured, to again wrestle with French verbs, toil over geometry exercises and try to recall the names of all the Hanoverian rulers in the correct order -- all these tasks being carried in that strange chalk-and-old- books atmosphere that seemed to permeate every school in which I ever set foot.

Thinking on it now reminds me that my last school holiday was largely spent sprawled on my bed devouring cookers (cooking apples) so tart my teeth almost shrank from them as I chewed away while reading as many books as I could borrow from the library. It was a particularly hot summer that year and our fashionable frou-frou sponge-skirted petticoats ensured that those of us who considered ourselves trendy suffered mightily for the privilege. But the unaccustomed heat -- for when it's above 72 degrees in England, it's inevitably described in the media as A Scorcher -- made my shady room, the pile of green, shiny-skinned cookers and the even larger stack of books with covers of all colours even more attractive to one who was already a bookworm and fruit-lover. The noise of the neighbours' children playing all over the roadway -- despite living in houses with hanky-sized gardens that were nonetheless large enough to allow games of Traffic Lights or Statues or Tag without any risk of getting run over by the mobile fish and chip shop or a passing coal lorry -- was easily ignored, even though our windows were wide open to whatever breeze might meander in, bringing with it the scent of the two small lilac trees growing by the corner of the house.

Because even if those kids had spent their entire summer practicing playing euphoniums outside our front door, I should have taken no notice at all -- I had flown off on the magic carpet of books and would not be back until teatime. And so those long, golden afternoons unwound to the gentle rustle of pages turning and the piling up of apple gowks (cores) until it was time for tea. And when the washing up was done, the tea-towel hung up to dry and the plates and cups and cutlery put away again, there would still be time for a chapter or two or more to be read as shadows started to advance, shrouding the raspberry canes in the back garden and fingering the windows. Soon there would come that strange hush that creeps in between the time when workers arrive home for their evening meals and when they go out for the evening. Every night that quiet calm fell around the house like a kindly mantle and while it was true that, to the despair of my parents, I would probably be found in the kitchen at midnight frying up bacon and eggs, still I knew that tomorrow would proceed at the same slow pace, and the next day, and the day after that as well.

But it was recalling that this would be my last long summer holiday before I joined the work world that really added to its strange enchantment and, I think, to the sense that time was flying, bearing us all along willy-nilly faster and faster towards adulthood. It all seems dreamlike and far away now.