It’s chilly here for Mykonos (70s and overcast in the mornings), but then again it’s only mid-May and things won’t get hoping until June.  Or least that’s what everyone is hoping.  By the time I get back from CrimeFest in Bristol (May 30-June 2), all will be hunky-dory.  The sun shining, the tourists touring, the world in order…

Uhh, let’s go back to that Yay moment.

Are you familiar with CrimeFest?  As described by its organizers, Myles Allfrey and Adrian Muller: CrimeFest is a convention for people who like to read an occasional crime novel as well as for die-hard fanatics and was first organized in June 2008 following the hugely successful one-off visit to Bristol in 2006 of the American convention, Left Coast Crime.  CrimeFest is an annual convention that draws top crime novelists, readers, editors, publishers and reviewers from around the world and gives delegates the opportunity to celebrate the genre in an informal atmosphere.

I’m on two panels, each with another Poisoned Pen Press author!  I’d say that’s pretty good international representation for an “Arizona” publisher, though I’ll be sure to wear my cowboy boots to live up to expectations.

For the curious, on Friday, May 31^st at 10:00, I’m on a panel titled, “From Ancient to Modern: Travelling through Crime & Time,” with our own Jane Finnis along with Anthony Hays, and William Sutton—moderated by Ruth Downie.  And later that day, at 13:40 (stop counting on your fingers, it’s 1:40PM), PPP’s Martin Edwards moderates our panel called, “The Tourist Board Never Said Anything About This,” with Quentin Bates, Xavier-Marie Bonnet, and Peter James.

I know I’ll have fun.  That’s why I go to these events, to be amid the camaraderie of fans and writers far more knowledgeable than I on all things mystery, to make new, lasting friendships, and, of course, to hang out at the appropriate (or inappropriate as the case may be) bar with my Murder is Everywhere and PPP buddies.

In fact, that’s how I come to be going to CrimeFest.  Adrian Muller, one of the organizers of CrimeFest, moderated my Murder is Everywhere panel at Bouchercon in 2011.  At Bouchercon 2012 Adrian asked why I hadn’t made it to CrimeFest. Not having a sensible answer—what with my living in “nearby” Greece—I paid the registration fee and voila, nine months later here I am on my way the to the UK in ten days.

My only disappointment is that I failed to sign up in time for the “creating Sherlock” event.  (The entire Festival is SOLD OUT, not just that event!).  No, my disappointment isn’t simply because I’m an ardent Conan Doyle fan; it’s something personal: I feel I’m betraying my ancestral roots.

“Huh?” you say.

The explanation is simple, I’m related to Sherlock on his father’s side and can prove it.

Do you recall the name of Sherlock’s father?

Pause while you rush to Wikipedia.

Yep, SIGER HOLMES.

I hope the family forgives me.  And while I’m in a prayerful mood, here’s hoping to see some of you in Bristol.

By the way, for those of you expecting a bit more of a Greek flavor to this post, here’s a link to my blog post yesterday on Murder is Everywhere, titled “Greece’s Sun and Moon God Twins: Apollo and Artemis.”

—Jeff

Wordsworth’s poem relates how he saw a host of golden daffodils growing wild in the Lake District, but we city dwellers had to purchase the yellow trumpetted flowers at the greengrocers.

Each spring, my mother bought the first bunch of daffies she saw. They went into a truly hideous green jug made of a chalky material which she had had for decades. There are two of these jugs and two matching wall vases, so my guess is they must be of 1930s or 1940s vintage. I have them the set now, among the few personal possessions I brought with me when I emigrated.

After a move south from Newcastle, we lived in a house with a garden featuring numerous clumps of daffodils but strangely none of them were never cut for display. Perhaps it was enough to see them outside?

Thus daffie-down-dillies always remind me of my mother.

Fast forward some years. In the house I then occupied, the back fence was set away from the easement between our garden and that of the house backing on it. The spring after my mother died, a single daffodil appeared in the easement just on the other side of our fence — yet there were none in gardens in the immediate neighbourhood.

The logical explanation is a daffodil bulb was buried by a foraging squirrel and yet its location in a sort of no man’s land between two dwellings catches the attention and causes speculation…

maywrite@earthlink.net

Mary Reed is the co-author of the John the Lord Chamberlain mysteries set in sixth century Byzantium. The current entry is Nine for the Devil.

You can also follow Mary on Twitter.
Follow @marymaywrite

First, some background:

The “unreliable narrator” is a storyteller that, for one reason or another, we decide is not reliable. In the courtroom, the jury’s challenge is to determine whether the “eyewitness” narrator on the stand is reliable, and the opposing counsel’s challenge is to reveal on cross-examination that the witness is unreliable. Sadly, as The Innocence Project and research in neuroscience have demonstrated, the memory of most eyewitnesses is inherently unreliable.

These findings are old news in the world of literature. Though the term was apparently coined in 1961, the unreliable narrator has been a literary staple since at least the Wife of Bath, the hilariously unreliable narrator of her tale in Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th century Canterbury Tales. A narrator can be unreliable for one of several reasons: age (Huck Finn), mental impairment (Benjy in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury), naiveté (John Dowell in Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier), or deceitfulness (Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita). Here’s one blog’s list of examples.

But for a mystery novel–especially one narrated in the first person–the concept is convoluted enough to make your head spin. First, of course, is the fact that our narrator necessarily knows less than the author, who obviously needs to know the murderer’s identity before our narrator does. Indeed, for most authors, we know that identity before we write the first chapter.

For mystery writers, however, a bigger challenge is to avoid cheating, which I would define as artificially maintaining suspense by failing to disclose to your reader one or two crucial clues that your narrator has discovered along the way. To commit that sin is to render your narrator unreliable by cheating–and the reader is the one who feels cheated.

But for authors who play fair with their readers, the unreliable narrator is a fascinating and fun challenge that adds a new layer of suspense and another dimension to the reading experience.

A good recent example is Gillian Flynn’s blockbuster novel Gone Girl, which features alternating husband and wife narrators–Nick and Amy Dunne–both of whom prove unreliable. Early on in the novel, Amy disappears. Her husband Nick quickly becomes the prime suspect and soon reveals himself to us as unreliable. Much later in the novel–spoiler alert!–we learn that Nick’s deceitfulness pales in comparison to Amy’s.

My hands-down favorite in this field is Scott Turow’s brilliant and captivating first novel, Presumed Innocent. As in Gone Girl, the husband narrator, Rusty Sabich, quickly becomes the primary suspect in a grisly crime. He’s a prosecuting attorney who finds himself indicted for the murder of a beautiful female co-worker with whom he was having a kinky affair. As we follow him through the pretrial preparations and the trial, which ends in dismissal on other grounds, he never reveals to us whether he is innocent. Indeed, only near the end of the novel–long after the trial–do we find out the truth about the crime. If you haven’t read this greatest of all modern legal thrillers, you are in for a treat.

I confess that I have not yet taken on the challenge of writing an unreliable narrator. I’m wondering whether any of my fellow writers out there have tried, and what their experience has been.

And for all of our readers, what are your thoughts about unreliable narrators? Any favorites?

*   *   *   *

Mike is a lawyer by day and an author at night. His next novel, The Flinch Factor, will be published this June. You can read more by and about him at www.michaelakahn.com.

However, this month’s post comes straggling in late, as I didn’t realize until this morning (sitting in the car repair shop) that today, yes, today is (was) the 15^th!

Part of the problem for me has to do with my recent return from New York. I’d spent a month there, helping out family, and during my one week since I’ve returned west, I seem to be having “re-entry” problems. For instance, I wake up, stare blurrily out the window (being very near-sighted, it’s a VERY blurry stare), and try to figure out what I’m looking at. Is that the Manhattan skyline out there somewhere? Or the trees from the backyard?

I wonder if folks who split their time between two locations, such as Poisoned Pen Press’s Jeffrey Siger, experience this kind of “dislocation confusion.”

And, I wonder, if part of the issue is the speed at which the scenery changes. With planes, a switch from East Coast to West Coast is accomplished in 6 hours. “Way back when,” a stagecoach ride from St. Louis, Missouri, to San Francisco, California, took 22 days, with only brief stops along the way… and I do mean brief.

Going further back, a wagon train from Missouri to California took (on average) four-and-a-half to five months.

Of course, folks on stagecoaches and wagon trains probably wondered the same things I do these days upon waking: “Where am I? What day is this?”

I guess some things about travel never change….

Jessica at mock trial competition

     I also wanted to pursue something I heard at a presentation about the Lorena Bobbitt trial: the distinction between JUSTIFIABLE and EXCUSABLE homicides. Two psychiatrists spoke, one a forensic psychiatrist who traced this dintinction to Aristotle; the other a psychiatrist whose testimony is credited with Lorena’s acquittal.  When she described how often and brutally Lorena was raped anally by her husband and had to crawl rather than walk across a room, I wondered that Lorena had only cut off his penis and had not killed the beast.  Space prevents all exchanges with Jessic: I will quote her critique and my revised opening address.

           REMEMBER THIS IS A GAME.  DON’T DECLARE A MISTRIAL!

     The situation is this: Jamie Haarris, who has left a very wealthy and very abusive husband, has sued for generous support for herself and her daughter Felicity.  Vindictively, he wants to deny her support, but threats to harm her have not dissuaded her.  But when he threatens to harm their daughter, she goes to his office and shoots him to death. At trial she pleads innocent.

Jessica, having read my first address:

     A great start but some things are missing.  If I were your coach, I would tell you you need a theme.  Juries prefer sensationalized short themes they can latch on to.  Who can forget, “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit”?

     Then you must present the facts in the light MOST favorable to your case.  Next, you have to tell the jury what the prosecution has to prove, instructing them on the law and what it means, again in a light most favorable to your client.  After that you must tell them what the burden of proof is in this cae, following with something like, “Through evidence and testimony, we will show that the prosecution will NOT be able to meet this burden.”

     After that, you will go through the evidence, and the testimony you have, and what you think each piece of evidence/testimony will contribute to your theme.  Then, you have to end with a BANG, and tell the jury once again that SINCE the prosecution will NOT meet their burden, and you will show why it will not, they will be asked in your closing statement to bring in a verdict of NOT GUILTY.

    Good work, Grandma!

   Obviously I could not incorporate all suggestions within the parameters of our blog.  But here goes:

     Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this trial will be a war over motives. You have already heard the prosecutor claim that my client, Jamie Harris, knowing she stood to benefit financially from the death of her estranged husband, coolly and calculatedly went to his office and shot him in cold blood, intending all along to claim he abused and frightened her.  But please remember that the state has the burden of convincing you that this is why Jamie killed her husband and that no other explanation of what happened can be true. What I will tell you right now is that the state will not meet this burden of proof.

     Jamie Harris has never denied she pulled the trigger on the gun that killed her husband.  And she never claimed that her act was JUSTIFIED. What we will prove through evidence and testimony is that her act was EXCUSABLE and that she was driven by circumstances that left her no choice. Now you may wonder what the difference  between  JUSTIFIABLE and EXCUSABLE homicide is.  I am going to explain because the difference will erase any concern that a Not Guilty verdict will be a free pass for all abused wives to murder their husbands.

    Had Jamie arrived home to find her husband in the process of strangling her daughter Felicity to death and managed to kill him first, the homicide would be JUSTIFIABLE because it would extend to any mother who found herself in this situation.  But an abusive spouse and angry threats alone do not permit all abused women to commit homicide.  Nevertheless, if the circumstances were such that the abused mother had no alternative, as I will show you was so in Jamie Harris’s case, then the homicide would be EXCUSABLE.  And an excusable homicide would lead to a verdict of NOT GUILTY without necessarily setting a precedent.

     What I will show you, Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, is that what Jamie faced was so overwhelming that her act is clearly excusable. We will present witnesses who overheard the threats to Felicity. Other witnesses will testify to her ex-husband’s history of violence and lack of conscience. And you will hear members of the police admit that Jamie had appealed to them for help they did not offer her.  We will also bring to the witness stand people who knew Jamie well, who were aware of her mounting terror over Felicity’s safety.

     Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, Jamie Harris did what almost every one of God’s creatures would do and killed to protect her offspring, her daughter Felicity.  You will find her NOT GUILTY.

Note: At the presentation I attended, Lorena’s psychiatrist offered an extensive clinical diagnoses. Very briefly, Lorena had a low IQ and had suffered trauma.  Dissociating, she split her husband between his penis and whole person.  It was the penis she thought had abused her. Jessica tells me the Bobbitt case was a very rare instance of jury nullification.  The jury brought in a verdict of of not guilty by virtue of temporary insanity despite the facts of the case.

Last week, I was reading a story to my three-year-old grandson, and when a character insisted that he hated vegetables, Simon said, “He shouldn’t say ‘hate.’”

I asked why not.

“It’s a potty word.”

That floored me. Never mind whether he should or shouldn’t hate, he was not even supposed to say the word.

From across the room, my daughter called out, “School. Let it go, Dad.”

Just as well; I was speechless anyway. Kids are being taught it’s not only verboten to feel hate, but just saying the word is a no-no? Do people really think they can legislate emotion?

I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked. Society also evolves. After the freewheeling 1960s swept away the bluenosed Language Police and their early-twentieth-century restraints on use of those old Anglo-Saxon terms for bodily functions in movies, music and books, a new, even more offensive team of Word Cops came into force. Legislating morality was now old hat; regulation of improper attitudes was the new goal. People began to specify use of particular words (with avoidance of others) in pursuit of one or another personal agenda. More than once, I was told that since I had said ‘cure’ rather than ‘heal,’ it was clear I was not a good doctor. I was also taken to task on occasion for saying ‘sex,’ where a proper-minded person would have said ‘gender.’

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn became a lightning rod, as the self-appointed guardians of proprieties moved to legislate ethnic slurs out of historical existence. Huck was banned from libraries around the country, and even worse, expurgated versions of the masterpiece were written and published. The idea that anyone actually had the audacity to rewrite Mark Twain for any reason, let alone to make it conform to a particular political persuasion, is stunning. The author’s own reaction would’ve been something to hear. But there it was. If we pretend That Word never existed, that’ll fix everything.

I gave a great deal of thought to Huck as I began to write a trilogy of historical mystery novels, set as far back as 1899, with a good bit of the action set in Missouri. I was determined to keep all background history and geography accurate – but how about language? A hundred years ago and more, who used ethnic slurs?

Everyone.

Or damn close. Popular slangy synonyms for Blacks, Italians, Germans, Jews, Irish, French, Latins, Russians, you name it, were rampant in everyday casual conversation. Irving Berlin told interviewers he could play piano only in the key of F-sharp, so he always used all the black keys. Only he didn’t call them “the black keys.” Point is, by all accounts, Berlin was a man with no racial prejudice whatever. He was simply using a common figure of speech of the time, and meant no offense.

Give Huckleberry Finn a careful, thoughtful read. Many of the appearances of ‘nigger’ are utterly free of sting. But at other points in the story, in different situations, and coming from other speakers, the same word sends my blood pressure up to dangerous levels. The very same word! That’s writing, man. Now, read an expurgated version of the book. Talk about pale copies.

The issue goes beyond artistic considerations. A good dose of Mark Twain will do infinitely more to oppose bigotry than any amount of hectoring over the use of a particular word. Show does trump tell.

So, in the end, for my historicals, I went for language as authentic to the time as it would have been to the place, the dress, and the attitudes of the people who lived there and then. I hoped my readers would be offended by some of the speakers and their behavior, not by any word in and of itself.

And I hope one day to hear my grandson say there are things he hates. Like intolerance. Bullying, cruelty, mean-spiritedness. Censorship. For certain, bigotry and bigots. Any form of potty behavior.

Virginia Woolf will be remembered for many things, but for me, the essay “A Room of One’s Own” is her crowning glory. And while I know that Woolf is speaking of “room” in both its literal and metaphorical sense, I can’t help but breathe a “thank you” to Virginia every time I sit in my home office and begin writing.

It’s not big, this room of my own, maybe twelve by twelve. There’s a desk, and a loveseat, and a coffee table that belonged to my grandmother. There are old bookshelves that belonged to a great-uncle, plus file cabinets and wastebaskets and two original works of art that were gifts from people I love. I have rocks and crystals all over the desk itself— baskets and bowls of gem clusters and river stones, citrine and calcite on the windowsill, a labradorite paperweight, my gargoyle reading a book.

The desk sits right in front of the window overlooking my front yard. It’s a western view, so the setting sun illuminates my work area with sluicing orange light. Right now, it’s deep spring here, on the edge of summer. The dogwoods gleam bright green; the azaleas have spent their blossoms. The grass is still soft and tender. Soon the green will get brown-edged and crispy with the broil-and-bake temperatures that are South Georgia summers. But for now, all is moist and vernal.

As you can probably tell, my room of my own has to be a room with a view. I recently read Vickie Delany’s excellent post on how much writing she got done on vacation in the Sudan, in a room with nothing to distract her from her task. But I am not such a creature. I write best when my eyes have something to feast on while my brain chugs along (my brain itself requires caffeine, but that’s another story).

One of my best writing afternoons was spent in Colorado Springs when I snuck away from the Left Coast Crime festivities and hunkered down in my room with a hot chocolate on the nightstand and a dazzling snowscape through the balcony window. As a child of South Georgia, I was stunned and delighted by all the white stuff, and found the old creative engine stoked by a view I never get at home (even better, my fourth book in the Tai Randolph series is set during a blizzard, so research bonus).

At the other extreme, I found the desert sands of Scottsdale to be just as inspiring. I was there during a spell of rainy weather that had the temperature hovering in the low sixties instead of the predicted nineties, so I replaced my planned umbrella drink with a yet another hot chocolate. Luckily, the desert has a gravitas and bigness that opens up new vistas in the imagination, regardless of temperature.

This fall, I have an experiment planned. I’m taking the train from Savannah, Georgia to Albany, New York for Bouchercon, so I rented one of the sleeper cars. I plan to spend most of that 22-hour trip writing with an ever-changing view, happily sequestered in a tiny, moveable room of my own.

I’m curious about the room of your own — what does your fantasy writing space look like? Care to share? I’m collecting “rooms of our own” images on my Pinterest board, so drop me a line or a photo and I’ll add yours to the collection.

*     *     *     *     *     *

Tina Whittle is a mystery writer living and working in the Georgia Lowcountry. Her current novel — Blood, Ash and Bone, the third in the Tai Randolph/Trey Seaver mystery series — is available now.

Visit www.tinawhittle.com to learn more.

In 1927, twenty two years after its founding in northern Italy, the publishing house Mondadori created an imprint devoted to crime, in cheap paperback editions.  It included translations of foreign titles as well as the work of Italian authors.  Thanks to this series, which initially appeared weekly, Italian readers were able to enjoy such authors as Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, and so many others.  The books were an instant success, and were easily spotted on store and kiosk shelves by their distinctive yellow covers.  Well, yellow except for a lurid picture in the middle.

Mondadori is still turning them out, but over the decades the term giallo has come to mean any crime book, and also has spread to crime movies, especially those of the noir genre.  In everyday Italian, the word can also mean any mystery.  (“Luigi, who took those cannoli I put on the kitchen table?”   “I don’t know, Mamma, it’s a giallo.”)
David Wagner’s giallo, Cold Tuscan Stone, will be published in September.

So Amazon invites me to review a book I recently purchased. Okay, sure, I enjoyed the book, and appreciated the author’s craft, and would be delighted to help promote it. But first, before I write a word, I’m supposed to grade it, one star to five.

Nuts to that.

I teach writing, and the part of the job that most dismays me is grading.

Writing projects aren’t multiple-choice exams, where one can feel justified in giving a D to a student who answers six out of ten questions wrong. Grading essays and stories, unless what we’re after is robotic attention to spelling, grammar and syntax, calls for a whopping portion of subjectivity.

Any writing teacher, editor, critic or reviewer who claims to be objective, I consider as deluded as a writer who feels no need to revise.

So here I am, stuck on the Amazon rating page.

Not only am I averse to grading stories whether in manuscript or book form, I also am wise to what goes on in book marketing. The book in question, if forced to rate from one to five, I would give a four, because my standard has to be a comparison with my all time favorites. If I used another standard, how would I rank those masterpieces?

The book in question was recently published. The current rating shows only six reviews, all five-star. I will pass no judgment about the sources for those reviews, but I suspect the reviewers may be grading by a different standard than mine.

And I’m not inclined to spoil the perfect record of a fine novel by labeling it a four.

Maybe I’ll return later, when the book has gotten enough reviews so that the average goes down to somewhere at or below the rating for The Brothers Karamazov, Pride and Prejudice, or The Big Sleep, all of them graded around 4.5.

Find more of Ken’s rants etc at www.kenkuhlken.net

Pay phones are all but gone now, and it won’t be long until all land lines follow.  The sheer scope and blinding speed of the cell phone revolution has caught just about everybody by surprise, at least everybody my age.  Those tiny, ubiquitous, immensely powerful, and insidiously addicting devices have impacted our culture with a profundity that’s hard to exaggerate.

This got me thinking about cell phones and the craft of mystery writing.  Back when the telephone was bolted to the wall, or later, tethered by a stretchable helical cord, it didn’t see much action as a critical element in mystery story telling.  I seem to remember a Sherlock Holmes mystery featuring a newly installed telephone that wound up with a body next to it, and the burning question, “Who had the murder victim been talking to?”  There was the dandy whodunit, Dial M for Murder, in which Ray Milland plots to lure Grace Kelly into harm’s way using a well-timed telephone call.  But by and large, the copper-wired, immobile, analog telephone was a bit player, a necessary prop, but not a device a writer could use to strategically advance a plot or introduce a jarring twist.

Fast forward to the second decade of the third millennium, and the story is dramatically different.  A cell phone today can be a trigger for a bomb, a means of calling for help, any time, any place, a device for navigating anywhere on the planet, a flash light, a camera, or by virtue of an embedded GPS chip, a means of tracing someone’s movements, and, of course, an instantaneous gateway to much of the collected knowledge of the human race.  And the device fits in the palm of your hand and is nearly always on your person.

In short, a digital Swiss Army knife on steroids.

Examples of the growing impact of cell phones in crime investigative work are piling up.  Not only can a bad guy be tracked in real time, his cell can be used to establish where he’s been in the past, since the phone periodically pings the nearest cell tower, a record that stays buried in the phone’s memory.  More than one alibi has been debunked using these latent digital footprints.  And the bad guys can forget removing the SIM card, or using a protective PIN, or otherwise deleting or damaging the data stored in their phones.  Technologies exist to go deep into the bowels of the devices to extract records of texts, calendars, images, videos and the like.  As the French criminologist, Edmund Locard famously said over one hundred years ago–”Every contact leaves a trace.”

Fertile ground for some interesting new plot twists, I’m thinking.

As I thought about my own writing, I realized that cell phones have played a significant role in several of my stories.  In Dead Float, a Cal Claxton mystery (www.warreneasley.com), a high tech executive is murdered during a fly fishing trip in Oregon.  Before the fishing party gets deep into a river canyon and out of cell phone range, Cal notices subtle differences in the phones used by members in the party, a clue that turns out to be decisive.  In a short story, To Catch a Wolf, a young homeless boy tricks the murderer of a woman into giving up his cell phone number, which the boy uses to prove the man’s guilt.  In another short story, The Promise, a young girl uses the recorded voice of her grandfather on his cell phone to solve his murder.

Crimes solved, murderers brought to justice, all with the aid of a trusty cell phone.

But wait, there’s a downside to these digital wonders, too.  I wrote a scene a while back in which two people were locked in a shed by the bad guy until he could figure out how to dispatch them.  It wasn’t until a couple of edits later that I realized the killer hadn’t taken their cell phones away!

In sum, cell phones can be much more than just a prop for the tech savvy mystery writer, and even if they are not central to the plot, the writer had better keep track of the little buggers at times.