Category: crime fiction

The Winner Takes It All

I wrote over three hundred thousand words’ worth of novels last year.

That is only the final word counts on the books I wrote last year. That doesn’t count any words written and discarded; essays; this blog; short stories; or even emails.

I realized this yesterday afternoon when I got home from work; I walked into the Lost Apartment and saw that the scaffolding was finally down (I’d forgotten how much space there actually is in the living room; no worries, it still needs to be painted though); this startled me so much that I just put the groceries away and decided to sit down and read for a while. I still haven’t finished reading the Pelecanos novel; not that it isn’t good–it most definitely is–but I am trying to read a short story a day and that, of course, has cut into my reading time. I plan to finish reading that this weekend, though–it’s not one of the books I am taking on vacation with me so it must be finished before I go.

But realizing that last year I probably wrote close to half a million words (at least) was a bit of a shock; one that I am still reeling from this morning.

So, when it was time to retire to my easy chair, I looked at the pile of anthologies, single author collections, and magazines for my short story reading…and had that weird feeling of…well, nothing there moved me. The only thing I wanted to read was another story from Laura Lippman’s Hardly Knew Her, and having just done one of her stories I wasn’t sure that I should do another. I looked through my bookcases and a book I’d forgotten about’s spine screamed at me from the shelf: The Best American Mystery Stories 2014, edited by Laura Lippman. I grabbed it and retired to my chair, opened it up…and giggled.

The first story was by Megan Abbott.

As I curled up and started to read, I smiled to myself in cat-like satisfaction. Abbott AND Lippman, I thought to myself as I started to read, does life get better than this?

The story was originally published in the Dangerous Women Volume One anthology, edited by George R. R.Martin and Gardner Dozoir in 2014.

He waited in the car. He had parked under one of the big banks of lights. No one wanted to park there. He could guess why. Three vehicles over, he saw a woman’s back pressed against a window, her hair shaking. Once, she turned her head and he almost saw her face, the blue of her teeth as she smiled.

Fifteen minutes went by before Lorie came stumbling across the parking lot, heels clacking.

He had been working late and didn’t even know she wasn’t home until he got there. When she finally picked up her cell, she told him where she was, a bar he’d never heard of, a part of town he didn’t know.

“I just wanted some noise and people,” she had explained. “I didn’t mean anything.”

He asked if she wanted him to come get her.

“Okay,” she said.

On the ride home, she was doing the laughing-crying thing she’d been doing lately. He wanted to help her but didn’t know how. It reminded him of the kind of girls he used to date in high school. The ones who wrote in ink all over their hands and cut themselves in the bathroom stalls at school.

Almost everyone who writes novels about crime–well, probably every author, my familiarity runs to crime writers–always get asked in interviews where they get their ideas from. I can’t speak for other crime writers, but I know I often get inspired by the news. I’ll see a story, either in the paper, on-line, or on the news, and will think to myself, “Hmmm. I wonder what really is going on there?” True crime is often much more twisty and fascinating than actual fictional crime. I sometimes do think that I read crime, and write about it, in order to understand it better, make some sort of sense out of it because MY mind doesn’t work that way. Who are these people, where did they come from, what made them the way they are?

Megan Abbott’s wonderful story from this collection, “My Heart is Either Broken”, is about a Casey Anthony-type mother whose daughter is stolen from her from a coffee shop. She asked a stranger to watch the little girl while she ran to the bathroom; when she came back the stranger and her daughter were gone. No one believes that she didn’t kill and dispose of her child; her behavior doesn’t seem normal for a grieving mother, nor does she seem to particularly miss the child that much–at least in the public eye. She is one of those people–I’m one of them–who reacts to stress or tension or nervousness by smiling; which of course gets her reamed in the court of public opinion and in the press. The story is told from the point of view of her husband, the baby’s father…who wants to believe his wife, desperately wants to believe the woman he married couldn’t have killed their child…but the mounting evidence is making him doubt her, and hate himself for doing so. The story is genius, really; in conception and execution. The end is a real punch in the mouth, too.

And where is the single-author collection of Megan Abbott short stories?

And now, back to the spice mines.

Mamma Mia

I got my brake tag Tuesday afternoon (FINALLY) and so now my car is at long last legal; six days after I bought it and drove it home from the dealership. Woo-hoo! I also bought one for two years, which I didn’t think you could do. Ah, well. There you go. I’ve also had a few almost panic-attacks over the last few days: a new car? Financing? What were you thinking how the hell are you going to pay for this what happens if this happens or this happens and how are you going to handle this and what if someone hits it/scratches it/steals it/vandalizes it and so on. I also panic when I am stopped at a traffic light and I see a car coming up very fast behind me.

Sigh. It ain’t easy being a Gregalicious.

So, I rewarded myself after getting my brake tag by curling up in my easy chair with the delightful Laura Lippman’s short story collection, Hardly Knew Her, and read the first story, “The Crack Cocaine Diet.” Originally published in The Cocaine Chronicles, in 2005, this is a wonderful wonderful story.

I had just broken up with Brandon and Molly had just broken up with Keith, so we needed new dresses to go to this party where we both knew they were going to be. But before we could buy the dresses, we needed to lose weight because we had to look fabulous, kiss-my-ass-fuck-you fabulous. Kiss-my-ass-fuck-you-and-your-dick-is-really-tiny fabulous. Because, after all, Brandon and Keith were going to be at this party, and if we couldn’t get new boyfriends in less than eight days, we could at least go down a dress size and look so good that Brandon and Keith and everybody else in the immediate vicinity would wonder how they ever let us go. I mean, yes, technically, they broke up with yes, but we had been thinking about it, weighing the pros and cons. (Pro: they spent money on us. Con: they were childish. Pro: we had them. Con: tiny dicks, see above.) See, we were being methodical and they were just all impulsive, the way guys are. That would be another con–poor impulse control. Me, I never do anything without thinking it through very carefully. Anyway, I’m not sure what went down with Molly and Keith, but Brandon said if he wanted to be nagged all the time, he’d move back in with his mother, and I said, “Well, given that she still does your laundry and makes you food, it’s not as if you really moved out,” and that was that. No big loss.

Isn’t that opening extraordinary?

Laura Lippman has long been one of my favorite writers, and every novel/short story I read from her is a revelation; every time I read something from her, I am always amazed. Reading her work is humbling for me, and yet also inspires me and pushes me to work harder, be more creative and to think differently about my own work. The way she can juggle an incredible, long-running series with powerful, creative and smart stand-alones is really a master class in how to build a successful career as an author.

This story, though.

When I wrote my first noir story years ago, the anthology editor’s instructions were simply to come up with my own definition of noir and write a story that fits that definition. For me, the definition was ‘the endless nightmare–someone innocuously makes a bad decision and things just keep getting worse, and the decisions made also get worse–as the choices are between bad and bad.” That story was “Annunciation Shotgun” (one of my favorites), but years later I heard Laura on a panel define noir as “dreamers become schemers,” which is a better definition. And boy does this story fit both definitions. Our main character and her friend made a bad decision–‘hey, we need to look hot at this part our exes will be at, so let’s do a lot of coke and lose weight’–which then leads them down a path that gets darker and darker and darker. The stakes continue to rise with each decision, with each new situation, and the surprises and twists come like machine gunfire. God, what a story. And I sure as hell didn’t see that ending coming.

Bravo!

Here’s a hottie for the day:

Knowing Me Knowing You

Monday, of a three day weekend. I sincerely hope everyone has a lovely day, and takes a least a minute or two to think about the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement in this country. It still boggles the mind, doesn’t it, to think that just sixty years ago (and less) segregation and Jim Crow were still the law of the land…we’ve made some progress since then, but we still have a long way to go.

Today will be spent finishing, at long last, the Book That Would Not Be Finished; I promised it (late) to be turned in today. It doesn’t suck nearly as much as I thought it did last week, which is something, but I am not overly fond of this manuscript. I’m sure no small part of that is being utterly sick of it and the desire to be finished with it once and for all; it can be quite a relief to finish something and turn it over to an editor for a final go over once and for all. I have two essays and some short stories to work on the rest of this month; and then, once all of that is finished, I am going back to another couple of projects that have been lying fallow and waiting for me to get back to them. I do think 2017 is going to be a very good year. I also have another book idea I’d like to start messing around with; a noir with a gay main character. The working title for it is Muscles, but that may change as it gets worked on. I’ve had the idea since the early 1990’s, and perhaps it is time to get to serious work on making that book happen.

I also am hoping to get the brake tag for the new car today. The Shell station on Magazine Street, where I’d been getting brake tags since we moved back here after The Lost Year in Washington in 2001, is no longer at that location! It was still open when we went to Pat’s Christmas party last month, but it has since moved to Claiborne Avenue. I wasn’t exactly sure where it was located–and I didn’t take my phone with me on Saturday so I could look it up–so I just went on to the grocery store and figured I would check it out once I got home. They may be open today; I am going to call them in a moment to find out. If they aren’t, I’ll have to go on Wednesday morning on my way to work. Woo-hoo!

But at least I don’t mind driving any more, so there’s that. It should count for something, right?

I still haven’t finished reading “Grail”, either. I spent most of yesterday working on the manuscript, and then last night when I was burned out and tired, we watched another episode of Slasher–which we decided we may not continue watching, because it progressively gets worse and worse with each episode–and then started watching Westworld on the HBO app. I’m not really sure what to think of the show, after only watching one episode…I know I’ve seen some critiques of it that made me stop and think about it a bit, but the show is extremely well done, and is extremely well cast. The concept behind it is interesting. I barely remember the original film, with Yul Brynner, from the early 1970’s, but I do remember thinking it was exceptionally clever. Michael Crichton, the mind behind The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, and Sphere, wrote the original screenplay for the original film. (I don’t remember if I ever read Jurassic Park; obviously, I saw the movie, but I do remember reading a lot of his other work. You’d think I’d remember reading it, especially since I remember the other novels of his I read. Interesting….but now that I think about it, I did read it; I remember the ending. At any rate, we will continue watching for now.

I’ve also started thinking about what books to take along with me on my trip; I am leaning toward a Michael Koryta, an Ace Atkins, Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King, and a Laura Lippman novel I came across the other day while organizing that I never read (I know, right? Madness), The Most Dangerous Thing. It’s always fun to suddenly realize you’ve not read something by one of your favorite authors; it’s also kind of exciting.

So, as I prepare to head back into the spice mines for the day, here’s your hunk for today.

I Sing for the Things

Again in the thirties this morning. Yeesh. We did turn the heat on last night, and after burying myself in blankets last night in bed, I woke up after a really restful sleep and also realized, despite the pile of blankets, that I was merely comfortable and not hot…I got out of bed and it was pleasant…then I came downstairs to the Arctic temperatures. Madness. Yesterday I discovered that my hands will fit into boys’ gloves–so I bought five pairs so I could cut the fingertips off and wear them to type in my office. I have a space heater going, a wool cap on my head, and with the fingertip-less gloves, I actually feel like I can get some work done in the freezer, er, office, this morning.

Yesterday I was on a panel about Villains at Wizard World’s Comic Con here in New Orleans at the Convention Center, with Genese Davis, the incomparable Heather Graham, and the sublimely talented Bill Loefhelm. I walked down there from the house, despite the cold, and got a lift home from Heather and the awesome Connie Perry (whom I also love seeing). So I got a lot of my Fitbit steps in as well. The panel discussion was pretty lively–really, you can never go wrong with villains, and hey, any time I get a chance to mention/talk about Catherine de Medici on a panel and see people in the audience nodding? I chalk that up as a BIG win.

Today I have to buckle down and work; I’ve got more than one space heater going here in the kitchen and the fingerless gloves really do make a difference, by the way–you never realize how much heat you lose through your head, hands and feet until you actually cover them up. At least it’s not gray outside; despite the cold the sky is blue and the sun is shining, and the bright sunlight coming through the windows feels lovely. I can handle–although I dislike it intensely–cold weather, as long as the sun is out. Dark and grim and gray and cold? Miserable.

Today’s short story is from the anthology Tart Noir, edited by Lauren Henderson and Stella Duffy. The purpose of the anthology was to flip the script on noir; which at the time of publication (2002) was still seen primarily as the province of men and stories told from the male point of view; which usually reduced women to being sex objects in the form of femme fatales. Tart Noir was about the female gaze, noir told from the woman’s point of view (and think about it, wouldn’t The Maltese Falcon or Double Indemnity, told from the woman’s point of view, be fascinating?), and editors Duffy and Henderson got some major crime writing women to contribute–in addition to themselves, there are stories from Val McDermid, Laura Lippman, Karin Slaughter, Denise Mina, Vicki Hendricks, and Sujata Massey, among others–and the book is quite remarkably good.

The short story I want to talk about today is “Tragic Heroines Tell All,” Lauren Henderson’s contribution to the anthology. Lauren is quite an accomplished author; she wrote the Sam Jones series (which you should check out) and several other things, including y/a, and then started writing the fabulous Rebecca Chance “ripped from the tabloids” bonkbusters (Bad Brides is, bar none, one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read; I giggle just thinking about it), which are enormously fun. “Tragic Heroines Tell All” is also quite clever.

It was always going to be a disaster. I couldn’t understand why I was the only one, out of everyone who worked on the show, who had seen it coming. But they were all too caught up in the celebrities who were participating…the originality of the concept…the miracles our booker had performed, coaxing even the most reluctant guests into the spotlight by dangling the carrot of a large, juicy fee in front of their noses.

Didn’t it occur to anyone, I wanted to say, that if it were such a good idea, someone would have done it before? People who were much better qualified than us? But that would have sounded negative, and we were big on positivity at The Jillian Jackson Show. Besides, I didn’t need to cover my back. I was too lowly for anyone to try to dump the blame for this fiasco onto me. I could watch the slow-motion train wreck unfolding on the screen before my eyes and, in a twisted, perverse, altogether skin-crawling kind of way, actually enjoy it.

The premise of the story is quite clever. When the story was written and the book published, trashy talk shows of The Jerry Springer Show were all the rage on television; everyone, it seemed, had a show along the lines of Oprah or Donahue; the difference being Oprah and Phil Donahue addressed social issues in order to create discussion and understanding; the others went for the lowest denominator and shock value. The show in this story is one of those, and the theme of this particular episode being taped, “Tragic Heroines Tell All,” features two from Greek mythology, Phaedra and Medea, and later Lady Macbeth joins them on stage. The humor is biting–the notion of Medea killing her brother and cutting his body into pieces before later killing her children when Jason abandons her for a younger woman was a bit too much for this audience; as is Phaedra’s insistence she was under a spell from Aphrodite and that was why she claimed her stepson raped her, and on and on.

Smart, funny, and witty–I love this story.

And now back to the spice mines.

Sister Honey

It’s currently thirty-one degrees in New Orleans, and I suspect it is close to that here in my office in the Lost Apartment. My fingers are tingling with cold as I type, and my space heater is going full roar close to my chair. I have on a T-shirt and a sweatshirt, a blanket wrapped around my sweatpant-clad legs. At some point I have to venture out there to go to the grocery store and pick up the mail, and still later I have to go to the convention center for a panel on villains. It was so cold this morning I didn’t want to get out from underneath the five blankets on the bed until slightly after ten o’clock. It’s only supposed to be this weather this weekend; Monday it’s back in the sixties and then next week we are back in the seventies again.

Crazy New Orleans weather.

As Short Story Month continues, yesterday I curled up in my easy chair with Collected Stories of William Faulkner. I’ve not really read much of Faulkner’s short fiction; but I do love Faulkner. Reading Faulkner is never an easy task, and I often think to myself that I should not only revisit some of the novels of his that I have read–Sanctuary, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, As I Lay Dying–but should also try to read more of his work. I read Sanctuary when I was in high school, and read the other three novels when I was in college–but not for a class; I read them for pleasure. The Sound and the Fury is one of my all-time favorite novels, and every time I read something of Faulkner’s–or think about him and his work–I get inspired to write about Alabama. It was during that period that I was reading Faulkner that I wrote most of my Alabama short stories, and whenever I dip back into that well, I don’t know, I can see the Faulkner influence on them. (I am very aware how pretentious that probably sounds; Faulkner was a great writer and comparing ANYTHING I write to him is the ultimate in pretension and arrogance.)

I had not read “A Rose for Emily” in a long time; if it isn’t my favorite short story of all time (and it probably is), then it is definitely one of them. It’s the perfect story, really; the way it’s worded, the use of language, the rhythm of the words, and the story itself, which is grim and dark yet very matter-of-fact. Small Southern towns, whether the Jefferson, Mississippi of the story or the Maycomb of To Kill a Mockingbird, are no different than any other small American town; Peyton Place with a magnolia-scented accent. I have created an entire county in Alabama, along with a county seat–a small town–and have written a lot of mostly unpublished short fiction set there. (It also made a brief appearance in Dark Tide; it was where my main character was from) Every so often I think I should focus more on my Alabama fiction, and rereading Faulkner certainly has that effect on me.

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful attention for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant–a combined gardener and cook–had seen in at least ten years.

It was a big, squarish frame house that has once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps–an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the Battle of Jefferson.

Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor–he who had fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron–remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily’s father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris’ generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman would have believed it.

Isn’t that a stunning opening?

I first read “A Rose for Emily” for an American Lit class in college. Unlike almost everything else I was ever forced to read and talk about in a class/write about for class, I actually loved this story (I am actually planning on rereading some of the stories I was forced to read and hated this month; to see if I still hate them: “The Minister’s Black Veil” by Hawthorne, “The Girls in their Summer Dresses” by Irwin Shaw, etc.), and have gone back to reread it any number of times. There is so much truth in this story; this is exactly what small Southern towns and the people who live in them are like; and almost every small town seems to have that strange, eccentric spinster who is the last of a good family living in a crumbling once-proud house.

As you can see by the opening, the story takes place after Miss Emily has finally died; the narrator–whose name we never know, and we never learn anything about other than he is a resident of Jefferson–then proceeds to relate the sad story of Miss Emily, or rather, what the townsfolk know about her. This is all casually pieced together from years of observation and town gossip; the story is told (with incredibly beautiful language) in the tone of someone sharing a good story across the kitchen table, with sweating glasses of iced tea and a bowl of wild blackberry cobbler.

Miss Emily never had a prospect for a husband, other than Homer Barron–who, the people in town viewed as not worthy of a Grierson; he wasn’t a local and moreover, he was a day laborer, brought in to supervise the installation of cement sidewalks. No one really knows what happened between Miss Emily and Homer; but there was a lot of talk. And then he vanished, from town and from Miss Emily, never to be heard from again.

Until now.

Rereading the story, I caught something I’d never noticed before, this particular passage:

When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, “She will marry him.” Then we said, “she will persuade him yet,” because Homer himself had remarked–he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks’ club–that he was not a marrying man.

Emphasis mine.

First, it surprised me that I’d never noticed that throwaway line of Faulkner’s before–really, if you aren’t paying attention, you wouldn’t really notice it as anything more than what it says; Homer wasn’t a marrying man. But the combination of sentences: “he liked men” and “he was known to drink with the younger men in the Elks’ club” in combination with him not being a marrying man–well, it may not have been intended that way in Faulkner’s mind, but those are codes for ‘gay’ in the Old South; no one ever said the word ‘homosexual’ but instead said things like “not a marrying man’ or ‘confirmed bachelor’.

As you can imagine, this has caught my curiosity.

Faulkner is often called a ‘Southern Gothic’ writer, along with Carson McCullers, Erskine Caldwell, and Flannery O’Connor, among many others; but I’ve always felt that some of his fiction, and this story in particular, certainly can be considered noir, or noir adjacent. The story doesn’t really answer any questions, but if it was told from another point of view, rather than unknown narrator–her black manservant’s, for example, or even Miss Emily’s herself–the story would definitely become something else than what it is.

But as it is, it is perfect: beautifully written, painfully honest and real, and macabre.

I’ve always wondered if the story inspired the songs “Delta Dawn” and “Angie Baby,” both recorded by Helen Reddy; both songs always make me think of the story, as does “Sister Honey” by Stevie Nicks.

Something to think about, I guess.

And now, off to the spice mines. Here’s a hot Southern guy for you:

Rock a Little (Go Ahead Lily)

Happy Twelfth Night!

It rained all night, the temperature (as threatened by meteorologists) dropped, and it looks grim and dreary outside today. I got another good night’s sleep last night, and feel rested this morning. I am about to get my second cup of coffee, and cut into our first King Cake of the season. Woo-hoo! I do love me some king cake! Tomorrow I am on a panel about villains at New Orleans Comic Con, which should be a lot of fun; and yesterday I finished editing, and turned in, the next J. M. Redmann Micky Knight novel, The Girl on the Edge of Summer. Now, I have some more things to get done this weekend, and then I am sort of free from the constraints of deadlines; I have to write a piece for the Sisters in Crime newsletter, and I have an essay due by the end of the month for another book. I am also heading to Kentucky at the end of the month. Yikes! Oh, January.

Last night, before watching another episode of the oddly compelling Ray Donovan, I read a Daphne du Maurier short story I hadn’t read before; “Escort,”, from the Don’t Look Now and Other Stories collection. I recently got a copy when I realized that this collection had several stories in it I hadn’t read; her collection Echoes from the Macabre is my usual go-to for her short fiction. The problem has always been, for me–and I could be wrong–but her short story collections seem to all be named for stories that were also in Echoes from the Macabre, and in fact, several of the stories in this collection are also in that one. But there are some stories I’ve not read–which is why I decided to go ahead and get this one.

There is nothing remarkable about the Ravenswing, I can promise you that. She is between six and seven thousand tons, was built in 1926, and belongs to the Condor Line, port of register Hull. You can look her up in Lloyd’s, if you have a mind. There is little to distinguish her from hundreds of other tramp steamers of her particular tonnage. She had sailed that same route and traveled these same waters for the three years I had served in her, and she was on the job some time before that. No doubt she will continue to do so for many years more, and will eventually end her days peacefully on the mud as her predecessor, the old Gullswing, did before her; unless the U-boats get her first.

She has escaped them once, but next time we may not have our escort. Perhaps I had better make it clear, too, that I am myself not a fanciful man. My name is William Blunt, and I have the reputation of living up to it. I never have stood for nonsense of any sort, and have no time for superstition. My father was a Non-conformist minister, and maybe that had something to do with it. I tell you this to prove my reliability, but, for that matter, you can ask anyone in Hull. And now, having introduced myself and my ship, I can get on with my story.

We were homeward bound from a Scandinavian port in the early part of the autumn.

I’ve talked before about how, when I was a kid, I not only was an avid reader of mysteries for kids and novels and history but comic books as well. The EC Comics that Stephen King read and was influenced by when he was a kid were no longer around, but I read DC’s House of Secrets and House of Mystery, and Gold Key comics used to produce Mystery Comics Digest bimonthly; collections of stories from three different comic books they used to produce, and the digests rotated between the three titles–and they also included new stories, too. The three titles were The Twilight Zone, Ripley’s Believe It or Not (which I loved to read in the daily paper, too), and Boris Karloff’s Tales of Mystery. These stories were creepy and had elements of horror in them; there were almost always big surprise twists at the end. I loved these, and read them over and over and over again.

“Escort” reminded me very much of those digests. I also love du Maurier–she’s one of my favorites, as Constant Reader is already aware–and she also specialized in twists in her grim and dark short fiction. This story is set in the early days of World War II, and the captain of the ship falls ill–probably appendicitis–and Blunt has to take over control of the ship. A German u-boat shows up, and they play cat-and-mouse for a while…until a freezing cold fog drops down over the sea, and an escort ship shows up–and that’s when things get strange.

The story is very well done; du Maurier is quite the master at the slow build and the sudden burn, but this isn’t one of her better stories. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good story–it’s just that stories like “Don’t Look Now” and “The Blue Lenses” and “The Birds” and “Kiss Me Again, Stranger” have set the bar so high that it would be impossible for any writer to consistently match the brilliance of those stories. It is definitely worth the read, and there are other stories in this collection I’ve not yet read, either….which is really lovely.

Huzzah!

And in honor of the story, here’s a sailor:

I Can’t Wait

I seem to be doing much better this year with Short Story Month, and am rather proud of myself. The goal about managing my time better isn’t going quite so well, but it’s still early in the year. Hope springs eternal.

Another story I greatly enjoyed in the MWA Vengeance anthology was my first introduction to the writing of Twist Phelan, “The Fourteenth Juror.”

The two detectives stood in the reception area of the judge’s chambers on the fifth floor of the county courthouse. Ebanks made the introductions.

“We have an appointment to see the judge,” he said.

The secretary smiled at them. She was a discreetly elegant woman with assisted blond hair and not too much pink lipstick.

“His Honor is expecting you,” she said. “He shouldn’t be too much longer. He’s finishing up a JNOV hearing.”

Ebanks had to cough.

“May I get you something to drink?” the secretary asked.

Ebanks cleared his throat. “No, thank you,” he said.

“Coffee would be good,” Martinez said.

Ebanks was pinning his hopes on Martinez. The guy was no genius, but once he got an idea in his head, he was relentless. If Ebanks could get him pointed in the right direction on this case, the rookie’s doggedness would pay off even after Ebanks retired next month.

A JNOV is an acronym standing for the Latin words for “judgment notwithstanding the verdict”, a legal term in civil courts where the judge can reverse the decision of the jury, or alter their verdict. Ebanks and Martinez, a veteran police detective nearing retirement age and his rookie partner, have come to see a civil judge who’d been pressed into presiding over a criminal case because of a backlog in criminal court; the Dolan case, which ended in a hung jury. Dolan, a minor league baseball celebrity, had been accused of killing his wife, but the jury hung and the day after, he died of a carbon monoxide leak up at his cabin at a nearby lake. The jury foreman, who had refused to believe in Dolan’s guilt at any time during the deliberations and eventually convinced two other jurors to help him hang the jury, was just killed in a hit-and-run accident.

The judge never has a name; he is only referred to as ‘the judge’, ‘His Honor’, or “Your Honor’ throughout the story.

As the story progresses with the two detectives questioning the judge about the Dolan case, it slowly but surely becomes obvious to the reader that there is a lot more going on here than appears on the surface, and Phelan masterfully drops clues and red herrings in so casually as the story moves along that the reader almost doesn’t notice them…and then the last few pages! Wow!

Here’s an example of the gems Phelan produces: The woman smoldered with unhappiness.

I wish I had written that sentence.

Phelan won a Thriller Award for another terrific short story, “Footprints in Water,” a few years back. The story was published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 2013, and it’s simply extraordinary. She also writes novels–I am currently enjoying the hell out of her Finn Teller series, which I will blog about at some point, and her Pinnacle Peak series is in my TBR pile–and also is quite the accomplished world traveler. She is also funny as all hell; she moderated a panel I was on at Sleuthfest in 2013 (?), which is where I met her the first time, and she always makes me laugh.

So, read Twist Phelan. And in honor of this wonderful story, here are some hot shirtless cops.

Careless Whisper

So, I’ve decided to give Short Story Month another go. The idea is to read a short story every day, and then write a blog entry about it; or at least include a discussion of said story in that day’s blog entry. I really do love short stories, and I am not completely certain why I have so many mental blocks, both about writing and reading them. Go figure. I think the thing about reading of them comes from having edited so many anthologies; although having edited over two hundred (at least) novels hasn’t affected my ability to read them. Hmmm, interesting.

Today is the final day of my three day weekend, and I have a lot to get done today–and this week. Saturday I am on a panel at Comic Con here in New Orleans, which is exciting; and our friend Michael is having a gallery show opening later that evening. So, my Saturday is pretty much spoken for this week, but due to long days at the office the next two days I only have to work a half-day this Thursday so I can do all the errands–grocery, etc–that day before going into the office.

Last night I started reading George Pelecanos’ The Way Home and really got into it more; he’s quite a good writer, and I am curious to see how the rest of the book plays out. We also finally got the Showtime app on our Apple TV to work again (I had to delete and download it again) so we could get going on Ray Donovan again, which is also an interesting show. I am quite enjoying it but am not hooked, if that makes any sense? Paul is going into the office today, and I have to go to the grocery store–direct result of sleeping in Saturday morning, damn it; obviously I would have rather slept in this morning–but at least it looks like the incessant rain has finally let up.

The first short story of this month is an Edgar Award winner from 2013; Karin Slaughter’s “The Unremarkable Heart,” which I have revisited for this occasion. It was originally published in MWA’s anthology Vengeance (I wrote a story for this, but I don’t remember which one; obviously I have not checked off ‘getting a story into an MWA anthology’ off my bucket list–I failed again this year but didn’t think it was going to get accepted this time around, didn’t have much hope as it felt rather forced), and went on to win the Edgar. I was at the ceremony, and obtained a copy of Vengeance specifically so I could rest this story. I did read the entire book on my flight home–airport and so forth–but Karin’s story was quite remarkable; it reminded me very much of Shirley Jackson and Daphne du Maurier: it was that good.

June Connor knew that she was going to die today.

The thought seemed like the sort of pathetic declaration that a ninth-grader would use to begin a short-story assignment–one that would have immediately elicited a groan and a failing grade from June–but it was true. Today was the die she was going to die.

The doctors, who had been so wrong about so many things, were right about this at least: She would know when it was time. This morning when June woke, she was conscious not just of the pain, the smell of her spent body, the odor of sweat and various fluids that had saturated the bed during the night, but of the fact that it was time to go. The knowledge came to her as an accepted truth. The sun would rise. The Earth would turn. She would die today.

June had at first been startled by the revelation, then had lain in the bed considering the implications. No more pain. No more sickness. No more headaches, seizures, fatigue, confusion, anger.

No more Richard.

That opening is like a punch in the mouth. Grim and unrelenting, Slaughter sets up her unsuspecting reader like a master: here we have a woman who, at long last, after a debilitating illness, is finally going to die and she knows it. As she reflects, in her deathbed, about finally being finished with the messy business of dying, she adds one more thing that she is finished with: Richard.

As the story unfolds–I won’t spoil it, the unfolding is part of the mastery of the story-telling–the sense of horror continues to grow as June reflects back on the horror of her own life, the tragedies she has seen and lived through, how she somehow managed to survive things that would break lesser people. It continues to insidiously unfold, as Slaughter keeps playing out her cards carefully, taking each trick from her mark like a punch to the solar-plexus, each new revelation an even bigger, more horrific shock than the last…until she gets to the very end, and the reader faces the biggest horror of them all. I remember reading this story on the plane and when I reached the final sentence of the story, I gasped and dropped the book.

I’ve not read anything else by Karin Slaughter; I know she is enormously popular and successful, and I have copies of several of her books which are in the TBR pile. But I am a fan, simply based on the brilliance and utter horror of this short story. The Edgar was well deserved; this story has resonated with me in the years since I read it and I’ve never once forgotten how horrific and smart and well-written it is.

If you’re a fan of short stories, you really need to read this one.

And now, back to the spice mines, and here is your Monday morning hunk: