Sneaky That Way

Tim Vickers allows the image at left to be used - copyright free from wikicommons. Nice job, I think. Eastern Diamondback.

I like characters whose twists sneak up on you.

I consider myself a friend of Joel Cairo and in that crowd a friend of the friends of Eddie Coyle.

Eddie had no friends when all the bills were paid. Neither did Mr. Cairo.

I like the twists and turns not so much in plot but in character. Took me a while to see that.

I'm trying a little of that business myself.

If you've ever seen a snake by surprise, you know what I mean. It looks like a stick or leaf litter or nothing at all, really.

Then, it is a snake.

Of course, the snake has all sorts of bad or evil connotations and in my characters, these are just sides of them we didn't expect. We're set-up all along walking down the path and bam, we're a little surprised at how competent or insightful or just plain tough they are in the end.

I've a heroine in the current WIP in that mold. The protagonist looks after her and regards her as a little sister but she's tougher than all the murderers in town put together.

There's a lot of murderers in town all of a sudden. All it takes is one and everybody wants to join the club.

I like the camouflaged character. I like it most when you think back and all the pieces fit together but not in the way you thought at the time.

Watch where you step.

Some of that twisting and turning might be something that bites in the end.

Ask Eddie.

[ Eddie Coyle appears without permission of Mr. George Higgins, author. The Friends of Eddie Coyle ].

Backwater

At left, a photograph of Gross Iser now in the public domain.

Gross Iser is/was a small village by the Polish boarder largely removed by the Soviets in '45.

The residents - few in number - made their livings in part by fishing and eating local trout.

I'm thinking of these little backwaters tonight as I look at a novel.

Bogmail written Patrick McGinley taught me that murder, deception, mistrust, prejudice, and the rural environs can be a wonderful combination for a story.

It was my fist piece of rural noir, as it were.

Now, as I set on a new project I'm thinking of this book. There is more thinking to do and so I'll let the backwaters run slowly for a bit longer as I tackle a topic a bit more developed in my mind.

Murder in the rural village still haunts me. There's nothing quite like the fracture of confidence which comes from the unnatural demise of a neighbor.

Watch him with that shovel, Sasha.

Cold Shoulder

Ice in Minnesota from Lake Superior. Taken by the EPA photographer Jeff Gunderson as part of official duties so, no copyright. Nice photo, Jeff!

I went to lake Michigan today - not Superior. The ice is breaking-up but extends out as far as you can see. The breeze? Pretty much like wind off a giant frozen lake. Yep, just what you'd expect.

It is a fantastic image in my head. I'm not quite sure what to do with it.

Would I leave a body on the ice? Would I have a victim chased onto the breaking ice to then meet a demise in the water?

I'm just not sure what to do with it. I can see the fractured slabs being dynamically unstable. The weight of a person could send them flipping.

I've got to think about it.

My thoughts are somewhat frozen.

Maybe spring will help.

It's Spring!

Really - it is spring! My local Dairy Queen and the local A&W drive-in both opened today.

Yes, the ice rink is still up in the park and Mill Creek is frozen over.

Picture at left from Deansfa on wikicommons. Lovely snap and thanks for the use!

I get the medium chocolate shake with burger and rings; but, horses for courses.

Friday morning saw twenty below temperatures. Today's high crested twenty above and that felt balmy. There's a line at the Dairy Queen. It's a walk-up. Yes, people in parkas are waiting on their ice cream.

I don't think any of the parkas are zipped, though.

I wore my "light" parka today. I only wear the heavy expedition gear when it is actually cold outside. I also drive a rear-wheel-drive sports car all winter. I put snow tires on it. German engineering plus one hundred sixty pounds of softener salt in the trunk. Drives like there's a hundred sixty pounds in the trunk, too.

So, the worm has turned.

Cristina James wrote this week about working in her garden. My garden is under two feet of ice.

We had an exchange over how the cold has influenced crime in my area. If you were going to do any domestic killing this winter, you had to dig the rose garden last fall. The frost is too deep here to do any effective body disposal at the moment.

Yes, we do open graves and conduct funerals. Backhoes are wonderful pieces of equipment; but, it isn't equipment found next to the power mower.

I love winter crime. I love the spring and the bodies coming to light. The river thaws and the fishermen go out to find the winter kill. The snow pile melts and the bodies come out.

It's a great time for the mind of crime.

From the great "Country Death Song" by the Violent Femmes:

I started making plans to kill my own kind.

Or, for you Tom Waits fans, from "Murder in the Red Barn"

There's always some killin' you got to do around the farm.

That's it. There's a lot more to Tom than just an emotional weather report or Frank's Wild Years.

I'm thinking hard these days on Nick and Nora and think Mr. Hammett was onto something with this pair. Hardly surprising given his lovely works.

I keep thinking of Nick and Nora with the other shoe.

I think of Nora in the lead and the pair as amusing criminals instead of detectives. I'd definitely reverse the roles. Glamour? Sure. Nora would have all the connections as Nick does in the movies. She'd be the one in the native land of criminals. Nick would be the younger of the pair rising to the occasion when required but clearly following - mostly - Nora's lead.

I know it is horrible to disclose that I'm thinking of such a ham-fisted theft from the great Hammett.
His characters are great!

I'm of two minds about it in the end and I'm sure I'd do enough twisting and turning to make the stories my own. I'm not suggesting a vaguely disguised theft of story and plot.

I just think Hammett really had something in the chemistry of the pair and I've admired that sort of thing for years.

I like the idea of Nora being the lead. There is just something about a girl with a .380 wearing chiffon in the study standing over a corpse newly made.

I think I can do better on the pair's dialogue, as well. I enjoy the understood subject and letting the reader in on the unsaid that the characters dance about without declaring. Not everyone's cup of tea.

So, spring. I've new ideas. I've work to do but I have new ideas.

I also had a small burger, onion rings, and a chocolate shake for dinner.

Now I have a foxhound who won't leave me alone.

Maybe we'll go for a walk and see what is under the ice.

Deathly Silence

At left, a Russian silenced pistol provided with a waiver of all rights under the creative commons license on wikicommons.

The pistol is a suppressor equipped version of the Makarov used by the Soviets as general sidearms for police and a litany of others from the early 1950's through 1991.

It will kill. It is brutally simple in construction. It weighs slightly less than you think it would if it were cast of lead. The blowback action makes the slide really heavy.

Other than that, the pistol qualifies as a POS.

At under twenty yards  (the range for which pistols should be employed), it works just fine seven days a week. The Soviets weren't idiots.

It was manufactured in typical Soviet style: large numbers. It is a simple device. It operates in single and double action modes.

Drop it and the floating firing pin will cause a discharge some of the time - especially if it is dropped on its barrel.

For the safety conscious, don't be dropping automatic pistols. Arguing they are dangerous when dropped is exactly the same as arguing that your chef's knife  is dangerous when accidentally used on your husbands.

I show this pistol here because these little gems were used by the security services and a great many of these pistols are finding their way around the world. You can't walk into a commercially reputable store and buy the silenced version. You can however find them for sale.

Need a cheap rugged weapon for your killer? Then this is it.

It does not shoot regular 9mm ammunition. It shoots Soviet and Bulgarian made ammunition. You can have some fun with the Bulgarian variant. The East Germans manufactured ammo too though I doubt any of that is commercially available.

So, need to give your killer a suppressed weapon for use backstage at the opera? This is your choice today. The countries of origin do not exist so technically these are treated like antiques and not as production weapons. Scary fact, that.

Anyway, there is always the need for a killer to have access to a suppressed weapon that isn't precious enough so that discarding it is a concern. Here you go. Say, $1000 worth.

More fun, have the bullet traced to the Soviets and give the gun a history. I'm sure the CIA can tell you if this particular gun was used to shoot a British operative in South Lebanon in 1983.

There are always concerns about exotic weaponry and the possibility of obtaining it.

You can put this baby in Auntie Marge's handbag, have her shoot that two-timing bimbo Sara Ramsbottom, and toss the thing in the creek. She'll still have money in the fund to buy cat food.

Dogs won't even bark when it is fired. You can hear it, but it isn't as loud as a hammer strike on a two-by-four on Sunday morning.

I hope your silence is merely restful and not of the deadly variety.

For some of my characters, that is not the case at all.

Don't open the door Martha. Don't do it.

Murder, for me? How nice!

I was at the bookstore Reader's World in Holland, MI his past weekend. I like the store and find it well curated.

Among the several finds there was this volume: The Invention of Murder. How could I pass it up?

I have several treasures to show you over the next few days and while I am sure Judith Flanders is an excellent writer, the fiction volumes I acquired hold much more interest.

Nevertheless, I do plan on reading from it on Sunday afternoons so that I can at least discuss the history of some crime fiction with a bit more authority than I am allowed at present. Those are my feet in the picture. I was taking a snap with the book too near the edge of a teak table.

 I killed a character off last night: a toymaker. He was modeled quite closely on a very dear friend and I'm not precisely how I feel about the unprovoked killing of such a character. He didn't do anything wrong and deserving.

He was a convenient mechanism to increase the turmoil for my protagonist. Thus, a murder. Bad to hang around one of my protagonists. Bad when he's being pursued by the murder bug. Bad when I need a good shot of additional conflict and higher stakes.

Anyway, I have of course killed of many characters based on firends. Often though, I've put them in harm's way as active participants. I felt a little funny about the out of had killing for a plot device last night. I'm not normally a senseless killer. I don't normally have crime without a slender thread of attribution.

We don't learn why this fellow got it. It isn't germane to the story "why." We the reader can come up with a half dozen possible reasons but that isn't the book and its never answered in my text.

Someday, I'll write a darling short of a poker game between some of my notable victims. it doesn't matter now; but, one day it will be a funny bit.

I'm off to do some brick and mortar story-building tonight. I've a pocket full of notes from lunch.

I'm laying bricks and building story walls. I know you're writing. I wonder if you've killed someone off today.

Does your spouse know? Best to not suggest a new rose garden in any case.

Holiday !

At left, my current mood. [ Dead Kennedy Album cover copyright was in doubt so instead, Pol Pot from the Romanian photo archives of communism].

I get like this once in a while.

I wrote a little about despots this morning early. I'm putting some things in place. I know the humor in the forbidden just like Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. You laugh nervously about the serious dark side of life.

You laugh though and cannot look away.

I have an article on my desk tonight from The Times of India from Saturday past. [ Read Widely. Start every single writing class you teach with that admonition. Writers are first broad readers ].

Thirty-Seven dead in Russian psychiatric hospital fire located in Luka 137 miles SE of St. Petersburg.

Wooden building. No sprinkler. Middle of the night fire. Hard to say what caused it though they did have a pyromaniac admitted this past summer. Sixty male patients were housed including fifteen who were bed-bound.

There's a story there, too.

Horrible topic, you say.

The Diary of Anne Frank ? How about something less horrendous: The Good Earth which won the Nobel prize for Pearl Buck. Only a little famine and infanticide there. I know. Slaughterhouse Five or maybe Catch-22 which certainly is a cleaned-up version of the human suffering of war.

Horrible topic present us with the mayhem and maelstrom that unhinge our characters and remove from them refuge. They struggle with the horrendous and through it free you to feel  - but feel less than if you too suffered.

Horrible still, you say?

Read - not watch - read Life of Pi and tell me about the horror and fear of tremendous fiction.

Do some harm people. I know you are writing.  Write something other than the martini being warm.

Ashore

At left, an empty boat courtesy Horia Varlan. Nice snap.

I'm back in civilization. I've been off the grid and out of the country. I had a blast and a lot of time to think about the current WIP. I've got a game plan to get over the humps that were in my way and a scheme to make the story work.

I often have schemes.

I'm behind on my reading and that will take a while to make-up.

I had a bit of adventure on the trip.

Hours into the bush by float plane, I came upon a boat tied to the shore. It look much as the boat at left, only tied to the shore. There were a few personal items within. Few enough that I knew it wasn't a boat crewed by anyone familiar with how wrong things can go in the bush. The little 15 HP engine had two tanks of fuel both with too little for comfort when combined. No answered the repeated calls.

Now, my mind ran to alternatives. I've already written a couple of stories about death in the bush from the hands of a fellow party member and a story about the slaughter of a fishing party by a fellow with nothing much to do with the time on his hands than kill some fishermen.

I knew one of the outposts on the lake had been closed for the season already. I thought the other empty when we flew over on approach.

Murder kept creeping into my mind. Murder-suicide, actually.

On the next day, we learned that the other abandoned looking outpost held a couple of people doing assessment work for the Ministry and it involved 2 kilometer hikes into the bush along GPS nav lines identifying tress and categorizing their size. The folks doing the work were not really backwoodsmen and traveled light. No harm.

It did get the creative juices of mayhem flowing right off the bat. The rest of the outing saw pages of notes on the unfortunate demise of otherwise healthy people not associated with danger. That's not strictly my bent on things; but, the unfortunate demise figured heavily in my thoughts.

Nothing like a vacation thinking of murder.

I hope your break went as well. I hope the body count is high. I know the word count is high.

Kill 'em if you've got 'em.

Bathtub Murder

It was in this very bathroom that I killed Glenn White, character.








I put him in the tub with a large model radio - probably a zenith ...

The outlet and extension cord have no GFI circuit and the fuse (screw in ) had been replaced by ... the penny. Hardly brilliant on Glenn's part.

Of course, his wife playing catch with the radio while he was in the tub was no great act of kindness. We only get to see Glenn beneath the waves. The Lights in the room are still flickering and sparking from the dead short.

Hope your writing is going well. At least, shockingly well.

UPDATE:

It's probably important to attribute this idea to a newspaper clipping I've had since 1984. I bought a paper (return to civilization) and saw this article. I ripped it out. Last night, I used it on Glenn.

Who the hell carries an article about two dead kids in a bathtub for thirty years?

Credit: UPI OCT 30 1984

FORT WORTH, Tex., Oct. 29— An electric hair dryer fell into a bathtub while two children were bathing tonight, electrocuting the 8-year- old girl and her 6-year-old brother, the authorities said.

The children, Sandra and Shawn Austin, were pronounced dead at Fort Worth hospitals, the police said. Officers said the children were found by an older sister when she went to check on them. The sister told the police she had placed the hair dryer on a shelf or on a sink in the bathroom, but officers did not know how it was knocked or fell into the tub.

Content and a Green Dragon Hangover.

I've had the same cold for a month now. I think I have to give it a name at this point. I'm torn between "Fucker" and "God Damned Cold." Maybe I should have a poll.


================================== content.


I worked my way from bell hop to assistant night manager at the President. My reward was the night desk eleven to five.

It had been a lot of ass-kissing and shit-detail volunteering but the effort paid off. I could study for the day-gig at 'Tech as long as no one was in the lobby, and no one ever was. The rack rate was something on the order of a nice used Chevrolet. That and a .38 in the drawer kept the hustlers and pimps at bay. Downtown was still downtown.

It had rained a little earlier and it was cool now. I could see through the brass-and-glass fronters a little wetfall fog loitering on the sidewalk. Traffic outside had slowed to cops and milkmen and the half-hour bus.

I jumped a little when the big turnstile door moved and its glare parted like curtains at the Met.

Five-foot-nothing walked across the hotel lobby and the marble tiles twinkled as she passed. She had Texas-big auburn hair, a powder blue suit, and an Uzi bright with oil like an Uzi should be.

The voice of Atlanta herself in three hundred years of pride rang out. A little of my soul melted.

 "Young man, Mr. Smith is a guest of yours tonight. I'd like his room number, please."  She smiled a little and Mona Lisa got down from her frame, went into the powder room, and cried for three hours.

I was in love and like every time, I'd never be the same again. I call it my moment of clarity.

"Five Twenty-Three," I said. "I could show you."

The wrong alley

I might have taken a story down the wrong alley.

As a qualifier, I haven't written a detective mystery before. I have mysteries but never with anything resembling a detective as the protagonist. I felt it was time to try.

I gave the protagonist a lovely pistol. It's distinct and reflective of his considered approach to matters of crime. (You have to trust me on this point). It isn't merely a roscoe. [ Fedora tip to Robert Bellem.]

I didn't intend for him to use it. I merely displayed it as a prop to have a cop put my protagonist in cuffs at one point. I wanted to establish a resistance to his presence on the part of locals.

Of course, following the Chekhov Rule I need to have him use it.  It is not suitable as a red herring. I despise those sort of ruse writing tricksters that defeated me as a boy only to introduce new and unknowable evidence in the last chapter. I'm not going there. I give a guy a gun, he's going to shoot at something.

Now, I have to use the Chandler rule : "When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand."

Not the worst solution.