the hardy boys – Page 2 – Queer and Loathing in America

Up Where We Belong

Shirley Jackson never explained.

I’ve always loved The Haunting of Hill House, and Jackson has always been one of my favorite writers. I’ve long ago lost count of how many times I’ve reread the book, and of course I love the original film version from 1963, directed by Robert Wise and starring Julie Harris in one of her best screen roles as Nell. The sense of dread and fear contained within the pages of that incredibly short novel are astounding. I’ve always believed that one of the book’s greatest strengths was its lack of explanation; horror novels, or ghost stories, or whatever you want to call Jackson’s novel, inevitably always get hung up on explanations of who or what caused the place to become haunted and/or accursed. Jackson never bothered, knowing instinctively that the unknown is far more unsettling and terrifying than any understanding or explanation she could provide to her readers; she just never explained. “The Lottery” offers no clues as to why the villagers have developed this annual ritual, it simply happens and she shows it to us without explanation…which again makes it that much more unsettling. In the years since I originally discovered and read a very cheap copy of The Haunting of Hill House at a used book store, with its Gothic-style cover depicting a beautiful Nell with long flowing hair and a long flowing gown, holding a candle while climbing the horrible spiral staircase in the library, I’ve read more of Jackson and become an even bigger fan of her work than I already was. The Haunting of Hill House and “The Lottery” firmly cemented Jackson’s deserved place in American literature; the rest of her equally brilliant, disturbing and unsettling work serve to heighten that place and elevate it even more.

I am not a purist. A long time ago I realized that films and television programs adapted from books would almost always be disappointing for a fan of the book; ones that are actually better than the book (The Exorcist, The Godfather) are few and far between. I stopped getting irritated by these changes a long time ago. I also learned to stop being bothered by such things; it’s an adaptation, after all, and that means changes because it’s now a different medium. (I have already mentioned my amusement at how militant fans can be about these things; particularly when it comes to things like Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys.) I hated the 1999 remake of The Haunting; it was special effects nightmare that made little to no sense; the whole point of the story was you never see what it is that’s going on and never are really sure; this second film version ignored that and therefore, it wasn’t The Haunting but just another haunted house movie. I greatly enjoyed the Netflix adaptation mini-series by Mike Flanagan; it was a different interpretation–again, you never see anything–and I thought it was a brilliant modernization/adaptation.

But I did approach this book, said to be a retelling of the story, with a bit of trepidation. I’d heard of Ms. Hand before, of course–I have a copy of Curious Toys, which I bought when she on the Shirley Jackson Award for it, and had been meaning to get to her work at some point.

I left the rental just as the sun poked its head above the nearby mountains, and golden light filled the broad stretch of river that ran alongside the little town. Nisa was still curled up in bed, beathing deeply, her dark curls stuck to her cheek. I brushed them aside but she never stirred. Nisa slept like a child. Unlike me, she was never troubled by nightmares or insomnia. It would be another hour or two before she woke. Longer, maybe. Probably.

I kissed her cheek, breathing in her scent–lilac-and-freesia perfume mingled with my own Jasmin et Tabac, one of my few luxuries–and ran my hand along her bare shoulder. I was tempted to crawl back in bed beside her, but I also felt an odd restlessness, a nagging sense that there was somewhere I needed to be. There wasn’t–we knew no on around here except for Theresa and Giorgio, and both would be at work at their home offices overlooking the river.

I kissed Nisa again: if she woke, I’d take it as a sign, and remain here. But she didn’t wake.

I scrawled a note on a piece of paper–Nisa often forgot to turn her notifications off, she’d be grumpy all morning if a text woke her. Going for a drive, back with provisions. Love you.

This book isn’t a retelling of the Jackson novel, but rather a kind of sequel, picking up at Hill House some sixty years after poor Nell drove her car into the tree after the turn in the driveway as she realized she’d been wrong about everything but only too late. This is a new story of Hill House, and our main character, Holly Sherwin, is staying upstate with her lover Nisa in an Air BnB, and bored, wakes up early and goes for a drive. A playwright, she’s recently won a grant to help cover expenses while she works on her play, Witching Night, which is based on an old sixteenth century manuscript she came across by chance. It’s the story of an old woman accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake, based on a real event; her girlfriend Nisa is an accomplished rising singer/songwriter, who is rewriting old murder ballads to use as the soundtrack/backdrop of the play. She goes for a drive and finds herself at Hill House…which draws her in much as it did Nell in the original Jackson and she decides to rent the house for two weeks, move in with her cast (her bisexual friend Stevie, a former child star molested on set and now an amazing sound tech) and Amanda, a brilliant aging actress whose career took a turn when a costar fell to his death–and of course people wondered if she pushed him. Holly herself has a bit of a checkered past; someone had told her a story that she adapted into a play; the original person threatened to sue her but before anything can be done that person commits suicide. That derailed her playwriting career–and believe me, Hand does an excellent job of depicting what the excitement that a burnt-out creative experiences when inspiration, an opportunity to flex those creaky muscles and create again, feels like.

All four of the characters are beautifully rendered and are completely real, and one of the things I liked was how Hand slyly also referenced the Flanagan mini-series as a part of the Hill House continuity. Hand’s Hill House has similarities to Jackson’s, and there are more than enough nods for the Jackson fan to recognize and smile about. Hand also does an incredible job of creating that claustrophobic dream-like feel Jackson used for her book, but Hand doesn’t mimic Jackson’s style; the style of this novel is entirely Hand’s, but one has to marvel at Hand’s mastery of creating that same feeling in her reader but in an entirely different way. The language she uses is flawless and rhythmic, just like Jackson’s was, but again completely different. There are also moments that mirror the original novel beautifully; call backs to the original story that I personally felt like little secrets Hand was sharing with me the reader. It’s a very intimate story, and I felt like I was there with them, the characters were people I understood and knew and cared about. Hand also tells the story in alternating points of view, which helps create the off-balance slightly skewed perspective the story needs; Holly tells the story in the first person, but the others are from a third person point of view.

It was terrific, and I look forward to reading more of Hand’s work.

Judy in Disguise

Judy Bolton was never quite as popular as Nancy Drew, but she has some very loyal and very partisan fans. Unlike Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys (and perhaps some other Stratemeyer Syndicate series), there was only one writer for the entire length of the series, Margaret Sutton, and she wrote about her native Pennsylvania–the state is never mentioned in the series, but it’s close enough to New York for a short train ride to take you into the city, and it was pretty clear she had set the series in a fictional town in her native state. The series was also unique amongst kids’ series in that Judy aged–she was fifteen or sixteen in the first book, The Vanishing Shadow, eventually graduated from high school, and got married. The grandmother she is staying with at the farm in Dry Brook Hollow in that first book eventually passes away and leaves the farm to Judy, who moves into the old farmhouse with her husband and former high school boyfriend, Peter Dobbs.

I discovered Judy Bolton at Bargaintown USA, which eventually became Toys R Us. Their book wall, which was the back wall of the store, had every kids’ series in print at the time. I just stared at the wall in wonder, wondering how I would ever choose just one book out of the vast array of choices. I liked the title The Vanishing Shadow, and my parents–eager to get me to read about boys instead of girls–didn’t notice it was a “girls” book because the spine was green–Nancy Drew was a very bright yellow, and they’d trained themselves to watch out for those telltale yellow spines in time to negate the purchase. Like most kids’ series, the Judy Bolton books had never been revised or updated; they weren’t Stratemeyer Syndicate books and had a single author, for one (Sutton always felt Grosset & Dunlap “favored” Nancy Drew in marketing over Judy Bolton; and that her series would have been just as successful with the same marketing Nancy got), and so this initial book, originally published in 1932 (!!!) seemed a bit old-fashioned. I was also a bit surprised because Judy was kind of unpleasant and unlikable. She was especially mean and vicious to her younger brother Horace–who was timid, shy, and weak; dismissed as a coward by everyone including his sister–and she was incredibly bored, staying at her grandmother’s–which I could also related to as I often was bored when I spending the summer at my grandmother’s. Judy and her family actually lived nearby in the small city of Roulsville, which sat in the shadow of an enormous dam and reservoir. Judy overhears some suspicious characters talking about a weakness in the dam–and so she entertains herself trying to figure out what’s going on. There’s a very exciting climax where the dam itself does rupture, and Horace rides a horse into town to warn everyone to flee for safety, becoming in the process the hero of the Roulsville Flood. This surprising act of heroism for the formerly “cowardly” Horace has a strong effect on him, and he becomes a completely different person from then on–strong, confident, courageous. Judy also solves her mystery, involving shoddy construction of the dam and corruption, and all’s well that ends well–except the Boltons are now homeless.

My junior high school had a lot of the kids’ series in its library, and I checked out and read as many as I could–not just Judy Bolton, but other series like Biff Brewster and Ken Holt, that I also enjoyed (more on them later)–and in the second book of the series, The Haunted Attic, the Boltons move into an old but beautiful, reputedly haunted mansion in the nearby, much bigger than Roulsville city of Farringdon. Judy’s transition from her old high school to the new one in Farringdon brought its own set of challenges; her adventures in the first book also made Judy grow up some and become a little less self-centered and more concerned about helping other people, with a strong sense of right and wrong. The Judy Bolton series was kind of amazing and vastly different from the others in that Judy not only grew and evolved, but so did her friends. The books also tackled social issues, like class and snobbery and mean girls, while Judy also solved mysteries. She became friends with a group of kids, with both wealthy Arthur Farringdon-Pett and Peter Dobbs interested in her; Arthur’s sister Lois became Judy’s friend, but Lois’ other best friend Lorraine Lee was a bitch who was extremely jealous of Judy–but rather than dragging her for the filth she is, Judy feels more sorry for her than anything else, and is always kind to her.

One of the other things I really liked about this series–besides Judy aging and growing and changing from a teenager to an adult married woman over its run–was often Judy’s mysteries involved reuniting long lost children with their families. The Haunted Attic put her squarely in the sights of a criminal gang, who had a sad teenaged daughter Judy took pity on and befriended…eventually discovering she was actually Peter Dobbs’ sister, who everyone thought had died at birth. Judy and Peter eventually married, and they wound up living in her grandmother’s house in Dry Brook Hollow, which she inherited when her grandmother dies (off camera). Another thing I liked about the series was its careful attention to continuity–many of Judy’s later adventures were tied to the Roulsville Flood, or have long-running characters like Holly Potter who eventually have a mystery that needs clearing up by Judy; she and Peter also took in a little girl named Roberta who lived with them for several volumes before Judy finds out the truth about Roberta’s past and reunites her with her parents (The Clue of the Stone Lantern). Judy even deals with racism against Muslim-Americans in The Search for the Glowing Hand––which was pretty fucking far ahead of its time for the 1960s, don’t you think?

*As you can see, advertising played up the fact that Sutton based her stories on real places and real events.*

The last Bolton case written by Sutton herself was The Secret of the Sand Castle, which, of all things, takes Judy to FIRE ISLAND to solve a mystery. I know, right? When I finally got a copy of it (in very good condition, and far cheaper than I would have ever guessed it would be) I wasn’t surprised to read that Judy encountered no partying gay men, never wandered into the Pines at night by mistake, and so on. It was also set in the off-season, so there was no one else–or not many people, at any rate–out there on the barrier island with her.

I also liked that Peter, Judy’s husband, became an FBI agent after they were married, and sometimes Judy inadvertently got involved in one of his cases. Her cat Blackberry, originally gifted to her as a kitten in volume one, is “loaned” to Congress to catch mice in the basements of the Capital when she and Peter are living in Washington briefly because of his work–The Whispered Watchword involves a conspiracy against the US by a foreign enemy–before they return back to Dry Brook Hollow. Peter is also often away (gosh, sounds like Frank and Colin, doesn’t he?) so Judy is usually on her own when a mystery comes across her path. I also liked that Judy didn’t just become a wife when she married; she continued having adventures, even if she is a bit more deferential to Peter than I would have liked, but marriage neither changes her nor makes her settle down into domesticity, the way an actual baby would have; that was my biggest fear reading the series…that Sutton would eventually make her a mother. But that wouldn’t have flown with the audience or the publisher, I suppose (SEX! OMG JUDY AND PETER HAVE SEX!), so that’s why Roberta came along–to give Judy that “normal” look of having a child to look after now that she’s a wife.

Fans completed some of Sutton’s unfinished manuscripts after she died; while I am sure they are marvelous stories, maybe someday I’ll have an interest in reading either of them. But it’s hard for me to read someone else’s take on a long-running series; it just feels wrong to me, somehow and I know it’s irrational. I did like Ace Atkins’ take on Spenser, and I am going to read Alison Gaylin’s take on Parker’s Sunny Randall. (I also used to not like watching movies that were subtitled, either, so…change is possible.)

It would be very cool if someone could update this series, but I’m not sure if it can be done. The first book came out almost a hundred years ago (!), and times have changed dramatically since then. I always thought if I wrote a girl detective, she’d be a cross between Judy Bolton and Trixie Belden.

Near You

Several weekends ago, I did an on-line panel for Outwrite DC. The moderator was John Copenhaver (whom you should already be reading), and my co-panelists were the always delightful and intelligent Kelly J. Ford, Margot Douaihy, Renee James, and Robyn Gigl. The video is actually up on Youtube, if you would like to watch it. John’s questions were insightful and intelligent (as always), and the conversation was marvelous, inspiring, and fun; there’s nothing I love more than communing with other queer crime writers (or any writers, to be certain), and I always try very hard to not monopolize panels because I do have a tendency to talk too much–especially if and when I get going on a topic I am passionate about. So, I thought it might be fun to take John’s questions and turn them into a long form interview, for thoroughly selfish and totally self-promotional reasons.

The panel blurb claims that “queer characters are riveting and necessary material for crime fiction and how those stories can shape (and perhaps reshape) the landscape of contemporary crime fiction.” Do you agree with this statement—and why do the stories of queer characters have the potential to shape crime fiction?

I completely agree with this statement. Queer crime fiction has a very proud history that was never really recognized or appreciated by the mainstream crime writers, readers, organizations, and conferences. That is changing for the better.

New blood is always necessary for any genre–horror, romance, crime, literary fiction–because genres tend to stagnate after a certain period of time. The cultural shifts of the late 1960’s and 1970’s echoed in crime fiction, for example; you couldn’t write crime in those periods without addressing all the cultural and social shifts; Ross Macdonald’s later novels are a good example of this. The 1970’s saw a lot of anti-hero books being written. The private eye sub-genre had grown quite stale by this time, which was when the women really moved in and gave it a shot of adrenaline–Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, and Sue Grafton blazed that trail, and revitalized a sub-genre that had kind of lost its way. Queer writers and crime writers of color are currently doing the same to the entire genre. Voices and perspectives we aren’t used to seeing are now getting into print and changing how we see, not only our genre, but each other. Crime fiction has always given voice to societal outsiders and outliers; queer people and people of color are the ultimate outsiders and outliers in this country. Who better to tell stories of societal alienation?

Why did you choose your sub-genre? How do you think the sub-genre has influenced the types of characters you write?

Well, I write in several different ones. Chanse MacLeod was a straight private-eye series; Scotty Bradley was more of an amateur sleuth/humorous series, but he does have a private eye license in Louisiana. A Streetcar Named Murder was a cozy, with an amateur sleuth heroine who gets caught up in a family mystery. I’ve also done young adult and “new adult,” whatever that is (it’s been described as ages 16-25), and Gothics with a touch of the supernatural. I tend to write things that I like to read, and I have a varied reading taste. I started writing the Chanse series because I wanted to do a harder-edged private eye series with a queer twist and set it in New Orleans. I didn’t know about J. M. Redmann’s Micky Knight series when I started writing Chanse; would I have done something different had I known she’d already covered the hardboiled lesbian private eye in New Orleans? We’ll never know, I suppose. Scotty was meant to be a lark; a funny caper novel and a one-off. And here we are nine books later…

As for Streetcar, I had been wanting to try a traditional mystery with a straight woman main character for a long time. When the opportunity presented itself, I jumped in with both feet. I like trying new things and pushing myself. Having to follow the “rules” of a traditional cozy was a challenge–especially because I have such a foul mouth in real life. I love noir so am working on two different gay ones at the moment.

Why do you think amateur detectives are appealing? Do you think there’s a reason queer characters often find themselves in the role of amateur detective?

I think it’s because we all think we’re smarter than the police? We enjoy seeing a character we can identify with figuring things out faster than the cops, especially without access to all the evidence, interviews, and forensics the cops do. Murder She Wrote has been off the air for about thirty years and yet the books based on the show continue coming out every year. If we start out in mysteries reading the juvenile series–Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and Judy Bolton and all the rest were amateurs, so we always cut our teeth in the genre with them to begin with. Scotty is basically an amateur, even though he has a private eye license he rarely uses; he and the boys never get hired (although they kind of do in the new one, coming this November.)

Let’s talk about place. Greg, your books take place in the South. Why is place important to the crime novel—why is it especially important to the queer crime novel?

Place shapes who we are–not just as queer people, but as people in general. There are similarities between growing up in a small town in the Midwest and growing up in one in the South, but the differences are very marked. I’ve lived all over the country–pretty much everywhere but New England or the Northwest–and always felt, as a Southerner (despite no accent and not growing up there) like an outsider. Couple that with being gay in a time when it was still considered a mental illness, and you have someone always on the outside looking in. But I have that Southern pull to write about the South–although many would say that writing about New Orleans and writing about the South are not the same; like me, New Orleans both is and isn’t of the South, and I feel that very strongly. I’ve written books set in California and Kansas, even one in upstate New York, but I very much consider myself a Southern writer.

Place is even more important in a queer crime novel because place shapes the queer people so much. As a writer, I think one of my strengths is setting and place, and I think that comes from being very much a fan of Gothics growing up. Gothics are known for place and mood, and I think those are two things I do well.

All of you write wonderfully flawed characters. Sometimes, as LGBTQ+ writers, we feel the burden of representation and the urge to write only positive LGBTQ+ characters as an attempt to undo history’s (the dominant culture’s) demonization of us. Unfortunately, that can be limiting—even flattening. Clearly, you’ve all struck a beautiful balance with your characters. Talk a bit about how you approached this issue.

The flaws, to me, are what make the characters seem real. Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys always annoyed me because they were so perfect; no one is that perfect, and anyone that close to perfect in real life would be irritating and insufferable. I am am quite aware that I am flawed (one of my biggest flaws is believing I am self-aware because I most definitely am not), but I am not trying to be perfect; I just want to be the best version of myself that I can be. By showing queer people with all their facets and flaws and failures and blind spots, we’re showing the reader that we are human; despite what those who hate us say or claim, we are human beings just like everyone else, just trying to get through life and do the best that we can. The villain in my first book was a gay man–and the entire book was a commentary on how we, as queer people, tend to overlook flaws and red flags from members of our own community. Just because someone is queer doesn’t mean they are a good person–and queers with a criminal bent do exist, and often take advantage of that sense of camaraderie we feel with each other, especially when we don’t know the person well. I tend to trust a queer person more readily than I will a straight person, and that’s wrong–which is why I think we feel so much more hurt when queer people betray us.

Speaking of the demonization of LGBTQ+ folks … Ray Bradbury of Fahrenheit 451 fame said, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches.” What do you think about the current tactics to ban queer books from schools, libraries, and even bookstores in places like Florida, Arkansas, and Texas? Why are they targeting queer books?

This is, I hope, the last gasp of the homophobes who’ve never updated their hate speech in over fifty years. What the hate group “Moms for Liberty” are doing and saying is no different than what Anita Bryant said and did in the 1970’s, what Maggie Gallagher and her evil co-horts at the National Organization for Marriage repeated, then came the One Million Moms…all too often it’s the cisgender straight white women who are the real foes of progressive politics who fight to uphold a bigoted status quo. They always claim they’re concerned moms worried about their children–but are perfectly fine with them being shot up at school; working in a meat factory on the night shift at thirteen (have fun in hell, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, when you get there and French-kiss your Lord and Master Lucifer); or shouldn’t have the right to vote…they know better than a child’s actual parents, you see, about what the child needs or wants. Maybe they should spend more time with their own children than worrying about everyone else’s? Phyllis Schlafly, queen skank of the conservative right, ignored her own family while she embarked on her crusade to strip women of their rights and autonomy–all the while shrieking like a hyena into any microphone nearby that she was fighting progress to save the American family while selling some Leave it to Beaver-like nonsense as reality. I always felt sorry for her gay son. Imagine that as your mother.

As for why, it’s about control and power. I actually respected Anita Bryant more, because she truly believed all the vile, horrible, unChristian things she said and espoused. Most of the others, including the unspeakably vile and disgusting Moms for Liberty, are working a grift for money, attention and power. Hilariously, they’ve sold their souls in the worst possible way in the guise of family, religion and God; if they’ve ever actually read their Bibles, they need to work on their reading comprehension skills as they are both apostates and blasphemers who will spend eternity doing the breast stroke in the lake of eternal fire. Hope they enjoy it.

Sorry your husbands and children don’t love you, but who can really blame them?

What are you working on next? What’s coming up?

I have a short story in an anthology called School of Hard Knox from Crippen and Landru (and somehow got a co-editor credit for the book with Donna Andrews and Art Taylor); Death Drop, the first in a new series from Golden Notebook press, drops in October; and the ninth Scotty comes out in November, Mississippi River Mischief. I am writing a gay noir, and may be writing second books for the new series I started with Crooked Lane last year as well as a sequel to Death Drop, and have a couple of short stories I want to finish to submit to anthologies I’d love to be in.

Tishbite

And suddenly it’s Sunday, and I go back to the office tomorrow. Paul leaves on Wednesday for ten days, so Wednesday night is going to feel really weird and off when I get home from work. No cat, no Paul, and that has the potential to be incredibly sad and lonely, if I allow it to go that way. I don’t think I’ll be able to manage just goofing off when I get home from work while he’s gone; not to mention the time we usually spend together every night. I will most likely finish watching My Adventures with Superman while he’s gone, and I’ll probably watch Heels on Starz, with Stephen Amell; obviously, it’s a drama series built around a local wrestling promotion–and since my current WIP does the same (it’s not about the promotion, but the promotion plays a part in the book), it couldn’t hurt to watch, right? I just have to be careful not to steal, er “borrow”, anything from the show. (I doubt I will; the promotion is really back story more than anything else.)

But yeah, next weekend is going to be weird as shit around here. I’ll have to get used to sleeping alone–always an issue for me; changes to sleeping situations never are particularly easy for me to adapt to, ever–and without Scooter to cuddle up next to me in the bed, it’ll be particularly lonely. Ah, well.

I started reading Kelly J. Ford’s The Hunt yesterday, and I have to say wow. From the very first page she pulls you into the story, and the authorial voice! Magnificent. I still haven’t read Real Bad Things, her previous novel, yet; I don’t want to not have another book by her to read (my usual author-fan neurosis kicking into gear) but I am also thinking I may read it on the plane to Bouchercon, depending on how far along I am with my TBR pile by then–I have, after all, books by Eli Cranor, S. A. Cosby, Alison Gaylin, Laura Lippman, and Michael Koryta to get through yet as well–but with Paul gone, I will either be reading or writing every night when I get home from the office, so maybe I can get a lot of this reading caught up on. I also want to read this original text version of The Mark on the Door (The Hardy Boys) so I can write about it, too. I was also thinking it might not be a bad idea to take some of these really old blog posts I never finished and copy them into Word documents…because they really are longer form personal essays that require more work than just what I think off the top of my head–I actually have to look things up and do research to be effective, and I can save them in a folder called blog essays so I know where they are when and if I decide to ever look at them or try to finish them because it bothers me that I have all these unfinished drafts saved on the blog–many of which I tend to forget about until I’m reminded when I see the draft, which isn’t exactly conducive to finishing it. There’s one particularly old one where I wanted to read and talk about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, probably one of the most famous books ever published in this country and one that actually effected societal change…but it’s undoubtedly, from the modern lens, incredibly problematic, which is why I wanted to read it. I also have an electronic copy of The Clansman, which is the book Birth of a Nation was based upon, which clearly is a problematical text; perhaps someday I can do a lengthy personal essay about both of those books, along with Gone with the Wind, in the context of the Lost Cause mythology I was raised to believe (never really did because I could never get past the evil that was chattel slavery, no matter how much any of the latter two authors tried to convince their readers that it was benevolent and better for the enslaved than freedom…even typing that, I can’t wrap my mind around the fact people believe that bullshit, or even more insanely, some still clearly do).

I also spent some time doing research into Filipino immigration to Louisiana (because I am looking into writing about them) in the eighteenth century as escapees from enslavement on Spanish galleons in the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana truly is the melting pot I was taught growing up as a part of American exceptionalism; Louisiana had immigrants from all over the world and from every imaginable “race” (which is not biology but a social construct, and no one will ever convince me otherwise), from the Isleños from the Canary Islands to the Filipinos who settled at St. Malo just off the coast-line on the opposite shore of Lake Borgne from New Orleans–I am also interested in the idea that there was also a settlement of escaped formerly enslaved people in the East called “maroons”–not to mention the enslaved people brought here unwillingly from west Africa as well as the Caribbean islands. Europeans were well represented here by French, English, and Spanish; Jews also came over in the eighteenth century, as well as Germans (There’s a town called Des Allemandes–the Germans–on the west bank of the Mississippi, and an entire stretch of the river called the German Coast), and of course there are Cajuns, Armenians, Greeks and Americans, too. There is a quite large Vietnamese immigrant community in New Orleans East, too. I’ve always felt New Orleans had a darkness to her; the slave trade flourished here (New Orleans was what they meant by being “sold south” or “sold down the river”–and it was so bad those words and phrases were considered threats)…which also reminds me I should revisit Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January series, which I always recommend to people interested in reading about New Orleans and its history. All of the former slave states have a darkness to them, which is what I am exploring in my Alabama and Louisiana researches on now; how to incorporate that theme, of the suffering embedded in the blood-soaked soil and how so many souls cannot possibly be at rest.

That’s kind of what my revision of this nearly forty year old short story is becoming, and that’s kind of why I am stuck in the part I am at now; when the two boys are told the Civil War legend about the ghost of the cemetery. The original story was one that has since turned out to be apocryphal, a story my grandmother told me as truth when I was a child. I have found an equally bloody and horrifying legend based in the actual grisly history of the region from whence I sprang, and I am trying to get the tone right. I think the man telling the story to the boys would not have been a Union sympathizer but a Lost Cause believer, which makes telling the story and getting the tone right much more difficult. I think I’ve figured out the way to do it right–I don’t really care if Lost Cause sympathizers are ever offended by my writings about the South, to be perfectly clear if it wasn’t already–but I am of course worried that I’ll blow it so had to rest my brain and think about it some more yesterday. I also scribbled some backstory on my main character for the book I just started writing in my journal, which was very cool. After getting the mail and the groceries yesterday I was just drained–the heat really can suck the life right out of you–and so I just sheltered in the apartment and did some cleaning and organizing and thinking, really.

We watched two movies, Renfield and They Cloned Tyrone, both of which were quite enjoyable but completely different. I wasn’t so sure about Renfield, which I assumed was simply a modern take on the Dracula story from Renfield’s point of view, which I thought was a clever idea–but I didn’t realize it was intended to be a comedy. The female lead is Awkwafina–which I did not know and didn’t see her once in any preview of the movie I ever saw, which was some peculiar marketing. I wouldn’t have even thought twice about watching the film had I known she was in it–and she was amazing, as always. I am really becoming a fan. They Cloned Tyrone was a tech horror movie, filmed like a 70’s blaxploitation film, and it was interesting and clever and really smart (although part of it reminded me very much of an Edgar award winning novel from a few years ago that I loved) and we really enjoyed it before watching some more Nora from Queens before turning it in for the evening.

Today I am going to get cleaned up a bit, get ready for the week and do some writing. I want to get this short story revision completed as well as taking another shot at revising the third chapter of the WIP. I do need to do some more straightening and organizing–as always–and there’s a load of dishes in the dishwasher that need putting away. I am feeling better rested, which is lovely, and I am hoping to carry that energy, along with some positivity, into this new week. I do have some errands that will need to be run this week, alas, but I think most nights I’m probably just going to come straight home from work and either read or write or clean and organize. There will of course be nights when I am horribly lazy and won’t do a thing, but I am getting bored with being lazy and am feeling like I need to be producing in one way or another–making myself useful in my spare time. That of course is a neurosis in and of itself; the refusal to accept and allow myself to have down time where I am not doing something or anything or even thinking; sometimes I just need to mindlessly go down Youtube wormholes for the evening, and sometimes I even learn something when I do.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday however you choose to spend it, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later.

Roar

Ah, Nancy Drew.

Nancy Drew wasn’t the first kids’ sleuth series I discovered (Trixie Belden’s The Red Trailer Mystery and The Three Investigators’ The Mystery of the Moaning Cave came first), but when I was in the fifth grade, sometime between 1969 and 1970, we had a table of books in the back of the room that had belonged to the (now grown) children of our teacher. I was already reading mysteries checked out from the library or ordered from the Scholastic Book Fair, so when I saw The Secret of Red Gate Farm there on the table, along with the banner NANCY DREW MYSTERY STORIES, I couldn’t pass it up.

And on the back was a listing of all the titles in the series to that point in Nancy Drew history when this copy was printed. This was very exciting for me–a series? Of mysteries? I’d never heard of such a thing, and my life was about to be changed forever.

I recently found excellent replacement copies for my collection at the library sale–my copies of Crossword Cipher and Red Gate Farm are seriously dilapidated and wrecked–and I don’t remember if I have a revised text copy of Twisted Candles, so I picked it up, too. I do sometimes wonder if my collecting this books isn’t part of the neuroses I think it it is and part of a tendency to hoard things, especially books.

It probably will not come as a surprise to anyone that it always really bothered me that I didn’t read or acquire the books in order. There were other volumes in the series back on the table, including The Mystery at Lilac Inn, The Hidden Staircase, and The Haunted Showboat. (There was also a Dana Girls, The Secret of the Old Well. I eventually acquired the first and third books, The Secret of the Old Clock and The Bungalow Mystery, from the Woolworth’s on 26th and Pulaski in Chicago.) Nancy Drew was my first real foray into collecting a kids’ series, and of course, my parents were delighted that I moved on to the Hardy Boys without argument as ordered; they never liked me reading books with female heroines, which of course made Nancy Drew even more appealing to me because it was forbidden. (So, of course, I kept reading and acquiring them whenever I could when I wasn’t being supervised. So, yes, I was even in the closet as a Nancy Drew reader,)

But even as the revised texts appealed to me more because the font was better and the books were illustrated, I did notice, even as a kid, that Nancy was a lot more passive than she was in the original texts. Things happened to Nancy in the newer books, and her personality was bland to the point of being beige. It also irritated me that of course this rich lawyer’s daughter didn’t have a job, didn’t go to school, didn’t seem to have any responsibilities whatsoever other than traveling around doing as she pleased and stumbling over mysteries (sometimes the mystery came to Nancy). Her friends all adored her, would do anything she asked, and she was good at everything she tried. As someone who was not good at everything he tried, this annoyed me. Why not give her some flaws? Why make her this super-character who was perfect in every way? As I got older and revisited the original texts more, I could see why aficionados preferred the older versions, despite being dated and rife with racial and racist stereotypes; because Nancy wasn’t perfect in her original incarnation. She was a bit arrogant, definitely classist, and very headstrong to the point of being willful. She was also absolutely fearless, and had very deep convictions about right and wrong, and how wrongs must always be righted. She was fascinating but realistic. She’s aware of her privilege–even as she uses it as needed–but tries to use it to help others less fortunate, which is kind of admirable. The original text Nancy was the kind of character a girl between the ages and nine and thirteen would find aspirational, would want to be like, a role model of sorts presented at a young and formative age that they, too, could be smart and independent and liked as themselves, rather than as someone’s daughter or girlfriend or wife.

Even as a kid, I was drawn to strong, independent female characters. That has never changed.

Most of my collection of Nancy Drew mysteries–and all the other kids’ series I collect–are currently in boxes in my storage attic. There just isn’t room to have them out on display (which makes me crazy, but it’s either that or the copies of my own books, and my vanity trumps not displaying the books every time), because I do have copies of every Nancy Drew except for maybe one or two, and there are some revised editions I don’t have. Shortly after I got to the age where I could actually buy them with my own money, the editions changed; they went from the old flat matte covers to what aficionados and collectors call “the flashlight editions”, because there’s a flashlight as the logo on the spine (rather than the little black box with Nancy in profile) and they went to a glossy cover; also on the cover where NANCY DREW MYSTERY STORIES was changed to a banner across the top in yellow (the Hardy Boys’ banner was blue), and I didn’t like the new glossy covers or the flashlight editions or the banner…plus, I wasn’t going to start over and collect them all in this new format; this was when I started looking for them at yard sales, second hand stores, and flea markets (before the Internet and ebay).

I’ve also noticed how rabid the fans for both Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys can be. I belong to several Facebook groups for fans and collectors, and those people can get worked up really easily–and of course, it always has something to do with bigotry and change. They hated the new Nancy Drew series because (gasp, the horror!) Ned was Black and even greater horror, she has sex. There was a lot of pearl-clutching over this, as there was about the new Hardy Boys series, in which Joe was made much younger, their mother was killed off, and there were a lot of supernatural elements to both (I never finished the Nancy Drew show, but not out of distaste; I always appreciate new interpretations and find the changes made interesting. I never finished because I forgot about it, in all honesty)–again, pearl clutching–but every so often it amuses me to think about writing a book built around this fandom. But it would of course have to be a fictional series, but it could be really, really funny.

And I think the Hardy Boys may now be in the public domain? I don’t know how that works, but I’d love to be able to write my own. I’ve always wanted to, and if I could actually use the original characters…how fun would that be? I’ve also always hoped to get a gig ghostwriting for either series…I suppose it’s not impossible, but I’m not sure they are still releasing new titles in either series. There have also been spin-off series, too–but I’ve never read outside the original canon. Once they stopped being published in hardcover, I don’t care about collecting the paperbacks or reading them, either.

But Nancy was important in the formation of my interests in reading and what I write, and maybe she wasn’t my favorite series of them all, but I have an appreciation for her and the books still to this day.

My goal is to write an entry on every series I collect–I think I’ve already done The Three Investigators–but so what if I have? My blog, my entries!

Next up, I will probably read the original text of the Hardy Boys’ The Mark on the Door, which I picked up in a tweed edition sans dust-jacket at the library sale.

Until then, hang in there.

Seekers Who Are Lovers

Sunday morning in the Lost Apartment again, and I am looking forward to a lovely and productive day here. We had a rather marvelous thunderstorm last night–although there was potential street flooding, so hopefully the car is okay–which was nice. It’s been awhile since we’ve had a thorough cleansing rain like that, which is part of why the heat index has been so miserable lately. The temperature has been hot, and the humidity about what it usually is–not humid enough to rain, but so close it’s miserable. I had planned to barbecue last night, despite the heat, but when I was getting ready to start putting everything together was when I realized it was not only raining but pouring. There was also magnificent, long lasting rolling thunder claps that lasted for seconds; the kind where it sounds like the sky is splitting apart. So, I made pizza instead for dinner, and hopefully will be able to cook out this afternoon. The power also went out overnight–I slept well again last night, to wake up to blinking clocks everywhere. It was out for maybe about twenty minutes, based on the emails from Entergy letting me know an outage had occurred (how does one check one’s email without power? A mystery for the ages) and the follow up announcing the restoration of power was sent about twenty minutes later.

I ran my errands yesterday, including making groceries and dropping off boxes of books at the library sale. I cleaned and organized and filed most of the rest of the day, finally getting the office area whipped into some semblance of order that’s not only workable but close enough to being finished that it won’t take long to do so that I can finish it over my coffee this morning and while taking breaks from writing this–although these things generally tend to be fairly stream of consciousness. Today I am going to make a to-do list for the week, update the bills list and make sure everything is current, and I’d like to make some progress on the rugs in the kitchen. The living room looks much more bearable now that those boxes of books are gone, and I think I need to thin out the beads next as well as do some additional book pruning. I cleaned out some drawers yesterday, getting that project under way, and I also need to go through my last few journals to mark the places where I made notes on the things I am thinking about writing now. I’m also trying to decide what the point of whatever it is I want to write next will be. I’d like to write something for the Malice anthology, but the deadline looms and I don’t think I really have anything I can whip into shape in merely one day, which means I am going to need to write a draft and figure this story out as I go–the idea is very amorphous, and I’ve not been feeling terribly creative yesterday, which could prove to be a most frustrating writing experience. There’s another one I’d like to revise and work on–I am feeling connected to it, and to its voice, but again I am trying to figure out what I am trying to say in the story. I need to reread all of these things, of course. I need to reread lots of things so that I can get a grasp of them again so I can find my way into writing them. I actually started two books this past week, can you believe that? Like I don’t already have enough things in progress already that I need to start two more? I wrote the first sentence of each book, and stopped there. I know what I want to say in both of them, and where I want those opening chapters of each to go, but I’m not sure precisely how to say it.

I also got deeper into Megan Abbott’s Beware the Woman, taking it slowly and savoring the experience as the rare treat and pleasure reading anything written by Abbott always winds up being. Each book is different in content, yet variations on a theme; I think future literary scholars will look book on her canon and study it as the incisive social commentary it is, about what it is to be a woman as well as how it is to be one, the strictures and compromises, the struggles between expectations and reality, all wrapped up in a lovely bow of beautifully constructed sentences that are complex in their very simplicity, and razor-sharp observations and insights into the strange tangle of emotions and contradictions that make us all so tenderly and sadly human.

We watched a tragic gay romance movie last night, Firebird, which was based on a true story from the days of the Soviet Union and its homophobia (still a thing in Russia to this very day, never forget). It was very well done, but it was also sad as such stories always are, with the kind of bittersweet ending where the truly conflicted one ends up dead and the one who isn’t moving on with his life stronger for the experience. So, no, not the feel-good gay movie of any year, by any means, so after that a few episodes of Awkwafina is Nora from Queens was just the ticket back from that downer.

Also, when I was dropping off books at the library sale, since I had cash on me (which is a rare thing) I checked the children’s section for series books I collect (I do this periodically, but only when I have cash on me) and I scored today with four books at two dollars apiece, and I had exactly eight dollars on me. I got three yellow-spined revised text (important) Nancy Drews (The Secret of Read Gate Farm, The Sign of the Twisted Candles, The Clue in the Crossword Cipher) which was the style when I started reading them so those are the ones I want. I already had copies, but the ones I already had on hand have been damaged over the years, and these were in excellent condition. I also got a tweed original text Hardy Boys The Mark on the Door, which I’ve never had a copy of (I only ever had the blue spine revised text) and have never actually read. There was no dust jacket, but it’s in really good condition. It’ll be fun to read it; per the fan groups, this was one of the books written during the time the original writer had left and the new ghost writers weren’t as good; and the plots tended to be a bit on the insane side sometimes. I am rather intrigued to read it–since they were all revised to get rid of offensive ethnic and racist stereotypes and language, it could be eye-opening.

I’ve also been reading Matt Baume’s marvelous Hi Honey I’m Homo, and am now up to the chapter on Dinosaurs, which I never watched. It’s really a fun book about how queer representation began and evolved over the years, as well as documenting the pushback against that representation (newsflash shocker: evangelicals have been coming for us every step of the way), and it’s written in an easy and accessible style that flows well. I’ve enjoyed his Youtube content, and I’m delighted to see that the book is in the same vein and just as well done. Highly recommended, and definitely more to come on that when I’ve finished reading the entire thing.

And now to my easy chair, to spend more time with Megan Abbott. Have a great Sunday, Constant Reader, and I will check in on you again tomorrow.

Private Eyes

I loved the Three Investigators.

When I was writing about rereading “The Birds” the other day, it brought Alfred Hitchcock to mind again. I have been revisiting the old Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthologies lately, and slowly (finally) realizing what an enormous influence on my writing Mr. Hitchcock was. Obviously, there’s the films, and the television series, of course, but even more so in books–books he had little to do with other than licensing his name–because hands down, no questions asked, my favorite juvenile series was The Three Investigators. I loved those books, and still do. The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the other series–they don’t really hold up well for me now, but I can still enjoy the The Three Investigators as much today as when I first read them. The books are incredibly well written, and the three boys themselves are very distinct from each other yet not one-dimensional, and that holds true for all the members of their supporting cast–Uncle Titus, Aunt Mathilda, Hans and Konrad, Hitchcock himself, Worthington the chauffeur–as well as the primary settings, the Jones Salvage Yard and Headquarters, a wrecked mobile home hidden in plain sight, beneath and behind piles of junk, with secret tunnels leading to it.

What I liked the most, though, was that the plots of the mysteries themselves were very intricately plotted, and the criminals were actually pretty smart, so it took a lot of good detective work, thinking, and intelligence to outwit them. Many of the books were treasure hunts, which of course I love love love, and often required the solving of a puzzle, which I also loved. The three boys who formed the investigation were Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews. Jupiter (First Investigator)had been a child star on a Little Rascals type television show as “Baby Fatso”, which he doesn’t like being reminded of, or being called fat (this was actually one of the few kids’ series that dealt with fatphobia and flat out said making fun of people for being overweight was cruel; think about how much Chet Morton gets teased for being fat in The Hardy Boys and the same with Bess Marvin in Nancy Drew); he is also the brains of the outfit. He has a quick deductive mind, pays attention to details, and has read a lot so he’s got a lot of arcane knowledge in his mind that comes in handy quite often. Pete (Second Investigator) is strong and athletic and not nearly as bright as Jupiter. Pete also gets scared easily, but an ongoing theme in the books is how Pete always overcomes his fears to come to the aid of his friends. Bob Andrews is Records and Research; he works at the local library so can do research for them, and he also is the one who writes up all their cases to present to Mr. Hitchcock, to see if it’s worthy of his introduction. When the series begins, he has a brace on one leg from a bad fall down a nearby mountain–so he doesn’t get to get involved in any legwork or in-person investigations for several volumes until the brace comes off.

And of course I loved learning from Jupiter’s vast stores of knowledge.

“Help!” The voice that called out was strangely shrill and muffled. “Help! Help!”

Each time a cry from within the mouldering old house pierced the silence, a new chill crawled down Pete Crenshaw’s spine. Then the cries for help ended in a strange, dying gurgle and that was even worse.

The tall, brown-haired boy knelt behind the thick trunk of a barrel palm and peered up the winding gravel path at the house. He and his partner, Jupiter Jones, had been approaching it when the first cry had sent them diving into the shrubbery for cover.

Across the path, Jupiter, stocky and sturdily built, crouched behind a bush, also peering toward the house. They waited for further sounds. But now the old Spanish-style house, set back in the neglected garden that had grown up like a small jungle, was silent.

“Jupe!” Pete whispered. “Was that a man or a woman?”

Jupiter shook his head. “I don’t know,” he whispered back. “Maybe it was neither.“

Jupe and Pete are on their way to call on a prospective new client, referred to them by none other than Alfred Hitchcock himself. Professor Fentriss had bought a parrot from a peddler, primarily because he stuttered and was named Billy Shakespeare (Fentriss is an English professor). The parrot says “to-to-to be or not to-to-to be, that is the question.” But this is in and of itself mysterious, as Jupe points out, because parrots don’t stutter; they have to be taught to stutter. Why would anyone teach a parrot to stutter? But the stuttering parrot is just the start of a bizarre and unusual case, with twists and turns and surprises everywhere the boys turn. Their detecting soon leads them to the revelation that there were six parrots and a mynah bird the peddler was selling, and they were all taught specifically to say one phrase. The phrases are clues to a treasure trail, and the prize is a magnificent and incredibly valuable painting by a master.

This book is an excellent example of precisely why I loved this series so much. The pacing is always excellent, the characterizations are three-dimensional, the mystery is intricate and puzzling and hard to figure out, and the conclusion of the book, where the boys have to beat several bad guys to actually find the painting, which takes place in a spooky abandoned cemetery on a foggy night, is some of the best atmospheric writing I’ve ever encountered. You really feel like you’re lost in the fog with bad guys you can’t see out there somewhere.

I’ve never understood why these books never achieved the popularity of the Hardy Boys and other series like them. They were better written, better stories, and just over all vastly superior to the Hardy Boys in every way. The first book in the series, The Secret of Terror Castle, remains one of my favorite kids’ books to this day (several books from this series make that same list). The problem with the series was time, really. Alfred Hitchcock eventually died, and they had to get someone else to fill in for him. Eventually, recognizing that Hitchcock’s name alone dated the books, they removed the references. The books themselves were never updated, which is also a shame because it dates the books but at the same time gives them a kind of nostalgic charm, as well. The Secret of Terror Castle was about the home of a silent film star whose career was ended by talkies, who turns out to be still alive. That was a stretch for me even when I first read it in the early 1970’s, let alone today. Whenever I think about writing my own kids’ series, I always think of it in terms of being Hardy Boys-like, but really what I would want to do is emulate the Three Investigators, whose books were well-written and a lot of fun to read.

Be sure I will talk about them again another time.

Song of the South

I am both of the South and not of the South.

I was born in Alabama but didn’t grow up there. I was two years old when my parents migrated north in search of work, good jobs, and a better life for our family. My parents, however, were very Southern, so I was raised with their values and beliefs (which were very Southern and of their time) but being confronted with very different values and beliefs at school every day opened up my mind in ways that it may not have been had I grown up in Alabama. Our neighborhood in Chicago, near Lawndale Park (our nearest major cross street was 31st and Pulaski), was the perfect representation of America’s vaunted ‘melting pot’; our neighborhood was filled with first or second generation European immigrants; many from eastern Europe, who fled either before or after the war. There were Czechs, Poles, Austrians, Hungarians, and Serbs; in the fourth grade we even had a Muslim girl from Yugoslavia. She had the most delightful first name which I’ve never forgotten–Zlatiça–even as her last name is lost in the clouds of memory. It was also very confusing trying to figure out where the immigrant kids (either they were born in another country or their parents/grandparents were) came from, given that the maps of Europe had been redrawn barely twenty years earlier. The Czech children I knew didn’t identify as Czech but rather as Bohemian; they also called their language that. It took years of study and reading up on history to realizing Bohemia became Czech after the first world war; for many years I believed Bohemia still existed under that name but had somehow been folded into another country or something; I don’t remember. I do remember being confused. Until I finally wrapped my mind around the post WWI renaming of the region, I always just assumed Bohemia was a German region. Reading history didn’t help much in that regard, as Bohemia was part of the Holy Roman Empire for centuries (in fact, the Thirty Years’ War kicked off in Bohemia).

But there was a lot of racism in our neighborhood too; the white European immigrants detested the brown immigrants from Mexico and Central America; I vividly remember the way our babysitter would sneer the word Mexican when referencing anyone brown. There was also a lot of strife in Central America at that time; I think both Guatemala and Nicaragua were enduring civil wars of some sort, hence the influx of Central American refugees and immigrants. I remember Martha, a girl in the sixth grade, telling me about how soldiers came and shot up her village, killing dozens of people she knew and members of her family. She was very calm and unemotional as she told me about it, which is pretty remarkable for a child who couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven, talking about a trauma she witnessed when she was six or seven. (Now I know she was dissociating; and I do remember her telling me calmly that she felt like she wasn’t even there as it happened; like she was watching it all happen from a distance.) Ironically, we became friends because we exchanged Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys mysteries; this conversation came about because we were reading a Hardy Boys book set in Central America; I want to say Footprints Under the Window, but it may have been something else….but she wanted me to know that the depiction of Central America in the book was nothing like the reality.

My grandmother used to tell me wonderful stories when I was a kid about my family history and the history of the county we’re from in Alabama. As a wide-eyed innocent and naïve child, I believed everything she told me, and always wanted to fictionalize those stories. I was in my early twenties when I wrote a short story based on one of those tales; about the Lost Boys and the evil renegade Yankee soldier who burned the house down and presumably murdered the two boys of the house. The story was called “Ruins,” and while I was pleased with the story I felt the story was too short; there was more to the story than I could fit given the length restrictions. I always thought of the story as a kind of an abstract or lengthy synopsis of the novel I would write someday. But it was also a Civil War story, and I wasn’t sure how I could write a Civil War ghost story without being, frankly, offensive. I tucked it away in a drawer and would think about it from time to time–usually when driving through Alabama on my way north–but still couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I worried and fretted and feared and doubted myself constantly. I told the story once to another writer friend of mine, and she urged me to write it…in fact, she hounded me about it for about twelve or thirteen years before I decided to take a deep breath, put on my big boy pants, and take that risk.

“Was this an accident, or did you do it on purpose?”

I opened my eyes to see my mother standing at the foot of my hospital bed, her heart-shaped face unreadable as always. The strap of her Louis Vuitton limited edition purse was hooked into the crook of her left arm. Her right hand was fidgeting, meaning she was craving one of the rare cigarettes she allowed herself from time to time. Her dove gray skirt suit, complete with matching jacket over a coral silk blouse, looked more rumpled than usual. Her shoulder length bob, recently touched up as there were no discernible gray roots in her rigid part, was also a bit disheveled. She wasn’t tall, just a few inches over five feet, and always wore low heels, because she preferred being underestimated. Regular yoga and Pilates classes kept her figure slim. She never wore a lot of make-up, just highlights here and there to make her cheekbones seem more prominent or to make her eyes pop. Looking at her, one who didn’t know better would never guess she was one of the top criminal attorneys in the country or that her criminal law classes at the University of Chicago were in high demand.

I could tell she was unnerved because she’d allowed her Alabama accent to creep slightly back into her speech. She’d worked long and hard to rid herself of that accent when she was in law school, because she said no one took her seriously when she spoke or else thought she was stupid once they’d heard it. The only times she used it now was when she wanted someone to feel superior to her, or she’d been drinking, or she was upset.

It worked like a charm getting her out of speeding tickets.

I hadn’t been asleep, nor had I been awake either, hovering in that weird in-between state where it seemed like I’d been living for the last three or four days.

“It wasn’t on purpose.” I managed to croak the words out. My throat was still raw and sore from having my stomach pumped. My lips were dry and chapped, and my eyes still burned from the aftermath of the insane drug-and-alcohol binge I’d gone on in the aftermath of the break-up with fucking Tradd Chisholm. “It was an accident.” I shifted in the hospital bed, trying to sit up more, the IV swinging wildly. The memory of that last and final fight with Tradd flashed through my head.

The main character in the original short story was only twelve, and the cousin he shares the adventure with was supposed to be fourteen. I was writing a lot of short stories at the time set in Alabama, with the idea to tie them all together in some ways–and was also reading a lot of Faulkner at the time, so yeah, a fictional county in Alabama where all the stories were set and were interconnected was kind of derivative; I kind of smirk to myself now when I think about the hubris of aspiring to be Faulkner-esque, especially at that time, when everything I wrote was pretty much garbage. Ah, the hubris of youth. But I did write a lot of “Corinth County” short stories back in the day, and while the writing may have been atrocious, the idea behind them and the core themes were good and had potential.

When I started thinking about turning the short story into a novel, I soon realized that the characters were too young, so I aged them. I originally aged them to teenagers, and in the first attempt at a rough first draft, I got about two chapters in with my main character, Jake, being banished the summer before his senior year to help take care of his dying grandmother back in rural Corinth County. The original first line was something like The summer before my senior year my mother ruined my life. Properly self-absorbed, narcissistic, everything’s about me teenager, right? My original thought was he was a student at a Catholic all boys’ school, was openly gay, and had a crush on a classmate…and having just found out said classmate had gotten a summer job lifeguarding, managed to get himself and his female best friend jobs at the concession stand at the pool, so he could be around his crush and see him all the time. His banishment for the summer had to do with his lawyer mother accepting a co-counsel role in a major trial in California and being gone; she has also kicked out her fourth husband (a much younger tennis pro) and so she can’t leave him alone in Chicago for the summer. The other option was staying with his father and his second family in the suburbs, which was equally unappealing, so he choses Alabama…and is picked up at the airport in Birmingham by another teenager who’d been taken in by Jake’s grandmother when his own mother died. This character, Kelly Donovan, was originally meant to become close with Jake and participate in all the mysteries Jake encounters at his grandmother’s. I also wanted to play with Jake’s being strongly attracted to Kelly, who is some kind of distant cousin, and straight.

But I scrapped that beginning, too. Would a young senior in high school in rural Alabama, a star athlete, be so accepting and open to Jake’s sexuality? Probably not…and he would also be worried and nervous about his patron’s grandson coming to stay there. As I delved more deeply into Jake’s character and who he was, I started thinking it made more sense for him to be older. Why not have him be a student at Tulane, and living in New Orleans? But if he was living in New Orleans, what would make his mother exile him to rural Alabama for the summer? And the more I thought about Jake…the more I realized there was underlying trauma in his life. I didn’t want his mother to be homophobic, but her mother, the dying family matriarch? Yes, yes, that worked better. I made him a loner, but someone who didn’t want to be a loner. He didn’t ever feel like he had friends at his Catholic school; and coming to Tulane he met his first, real boyfriend…which ended up being a disaster. And then realized, what if he goes on a binge–easy enough to do in New Orleans–after a bad break-up and winds up in the hospital? And if he had tried once before to kill himself…yes, yes, this is a MUCH better backstory and pulls the actual plot of the book together much better.

I also knew I wanted to touch on themes of homophobia in the rural South, as well as the horrors of modern-day Southern racism and the South’s racist past.

When I started doing research for the book, I soon learned that many of the old family/county stories my grandmother used to enthrall me with were all apocryphal; almost every region of the South has some version of the stories she told me; the story of the Lost Boys, a local legend which was the foundation of the book, pops up all over the old South–almost every state and every region of the old Confederacy has a version of the story, complete with renegade Union soldier (think Gone with the Wind), and so I decided to address that trope in the book while also using it. But I also added another layer to the story–the Lost Boys may not be the only ghosts at the old Blackwood place, which has a tragic and bloody and horrifying history, as does the entire county. I also started lessening Kelly’s importance to the story–he’s still there, he’s still a character who also gets a big reveal later in the book–but Kelly’s behavior to Jake is abominable and homophobic, establishing some conflict between the two of them as well. Part of this was because of the change in the story, but then I needed to partner-in-crime as well as potential love interest, so I came up with Beau Hackworth (the Hackworths are a large and poor family in the county; I’ve used that family before in stories; my main character in Dark Tide was a Hackworth from Corinth County).

And of course, when you’re writing about a Southern rural county and the Civil War, you cannot avoid the issues of race, prejudice, Jim Crow, and enslavement. I wanted to make it very clear that this wasn’t some “Lost Cause” romantic fantasy that perpetuates the lies and mythologies that sprang up in the South decades after the actual war ended. Jake’s mother raised him not to be racist or prejudiced, as she tells him several times, “We do not take pride in the fact our ancestors enslaved people. The heritage is hate, and don’t ever forget that.” I did wonder if I was being too generous to white people with this, but on the other hand I wasn’t interested in writing from the perspective of someone racist. I will be the first to admit that I worried about being offensive in this book; the last thing I would ever want to do is be insensitive on the subject of race. But I also knew and trusted my editor enough to know she wouldn’t let me get away with anything, and I also had to trust myself to handle it all sensitively. There were a couple of things she saw in the manuscript that could potentially be considered problematic–but they were also easily fixed.

I was very pleased with the end result, and I do think it is one of my best books. I was absolutely thrilled when it was nominated for two Anthony Awards last year at Bouchercon.

And it also goes to show that you cannot play it safe, and things that scare you are precisely the things you should write about .

(For the record, I will add Cheryl A. Head’s Time’s Undoing is one of the best crime novels ever written about racism in Alabama. Beautifully written and brilliantly told, it should really be required reading.)

For All We Know

The world shut down in March of 2020, in the face of a deadly new virus that was spreading around the world, and spreading quickly. It was a major paradigm shift; everything changed and the world would never be the same as it was before. As everyone locked down and adapted (or decided it was all a hoax and chafed against the intrusion), the question began being asked of writers: how will you handle the pandemic in your work, or will you address it at all? A lot of authors said that they wouldn’t address it, because they couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to read about it, or revisit it again after it was over. I came down firmly on the side of “we have to address it”; pointing out that Hurricane Katrina was a paradigm shift for New Orleans and Louisiana authors, and we all had faced the same issue and question. Some writers chose not to deal with it at all, some stopped writing entirely, and others–like me–addressed it. I found it incredibly cathartic to write about the disaster by viewing it through someone else’s eyes, and of course, much of what Chanse saw and dealt with was taken directly from my own experience. Writing the book in some ways helped me to heal from the emotional trauma and deep depression I was experiencing, and I don’t think I would have possibly gotten over it had I not written it out of my system. I will undoubtedly deal with the pandemic in a Scotty book at some point–I already have the title for it picked out and a folder created to keep my notes and ideas in–but I am not quite there as yet.

Leave it to Carol Goodman to not only do it, but do it incredibly well.

“We’re here.”

Reed’s voice wakes me from the fitful sleep I’d fallen into somewhere north of Portland, the slap of wipers and the sluice of tires accomplishing what bourbon and sleeping pills had failed to do for the past two weeks. I open my eyes to a wall of sodden gray the color of wet cement. I can feel it pressing down my throat–

I cough.

Reed swivels his head toward me, blue eyes feverish in the gloom above his white surgical mask.

“I’m fine.” I reach for the water bottle and swig lukewarm water that tastes like copper. “The others–“

“Behind us. Crosby’s driving like an old woman, trying to protect his precious Volvo’s paint job. Honestly, for a supposed socialist he likes the trappings of the bourgeoisie.” He grins, his bones sharpening under sallow skin. With all the stress of the recent news and preparations to come to the island, neither of us has been eating much for the past few weeks.

“They could have gotten lost.”

I’ve been a huge fan of Carol Goodman’s since my first dip into her canon, The Sea of Lost Girls. I have since been dipping back into at times as a reward to myself; she’s easily moved into my top ten list of current writers and won’t be dislodged anytime soon. She’s won numerous awards–deservedly–and is, to me at least, the modern incarnation of the great Mary Stewart. Goodman’s novels are decidedly Gothic and extremely smart and literate, with strong characters that are sharply defined and well rounded that the reader can easily identify with as well as like or dislike.

The premise of The Disinvited Guest is that another pandemic has descended upon the world after the 2020 COVID-19 one. Wealthy Reed Harper has decided to quarantine on an island his family owns–Fever Island, off the coast of Maine and near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River–since his wife Lucy has residual health problems since the first pandemic. Invited along are his lesbian sister Liz, a painter; Nico, Liz’ partner, a photographer; Ada, an old college friend of both Reed and Lucy who works now as an ER nurse; and her husband, also a medical professional in hospital administration, Crosby–who’s a bit of a dick. The remaining character is Mac, whose mother was a housekeeper for the Harper family working on the island. Mac knew Reed and Liz as children, and now he lives on the island as a caretaker. Reed, who also suffers from OCD, has carefully planned out every last aspect of this quarantine adventure–and while the quarantine and safety is the primary issue at stake here, any reader of crime or suspense knows that having seven people living together on a remote, isolated island is the perfect set-up for personality clashes and battles and intrigues and, of course, for murder. How many horror films or murder mysteries are set in such locales? (Goodman of course is wise enough to make an Agatha Christie/And Then There Were None reference in the text; the geographic elements of the island–the Dead Pool, the bog, Dead Man’s Cove, etc.–also sound like something out of the Hardy Boys, and she acknowledges that several times as well.)

There’s also some excellent backstory. Fever Island is named this because during the Irish immigration period of the late 1840’s–the potato famine and typhus epidemic–the ships with ill passengers were sent to Fever Island to quarantine before being admitted into Canada. A makeshift hospital is set up on the island, nuns come out to operate it along with several doctors–including a Harper ancestor–and so there is also a makeshift cemetery on the island. There’s also another legend, going back even further than the quarantine days; the earliest settlers believed a woman was a witch and essentially buried her alive on the island. The story claims she placed a curse on the island and summoned the devil. This is enough of a horrible backstory to make easily the possibility of supernatural forces at work on the island completely believable, which only adds to the suspense. There’s also the backstory of Reed and Liz’s own experiences spending their summers on the island with their horrible father and alcoholic mother; Reed’s dead former girlfriend, who died on the island during the first pandemic, along with his parents; and of course the diary of Dr. Nathaniel Reed Harper, who details life on the quarantine island and the growing suspicion amongst the superstitious fever victims and a group of sailors stranded their by a shipwreck that the witch’s curse is haunting them and that maybe even one of their party has been possessed by the witch and has summoned the devil.

Ada and Lucy were best friends and roommates in college, with Reed as the third side of their triangle. Lucy has also written one well-received novel, but hasn’t written anything since…and her discovery of the diary begins to inspire her to write about the island. Goodman is quite excellent at weaving the multiple storylines and multiple time-lines–Lucy is flashing back to the original pandemic, which is what brought her and Reed together as a couple; the incidents from the 1840’s as revealed in Dr. Harper’s journal; and of course, what happened on the island during the original pandemic.

Strange things start happening once they are all safely ensconced on Fever Island, and of course there are the inevitable personality clashes, which amp up the tension and then, of course, the deaths begin. At first Lucy can’t help but wonder if the island is indeed cursed–but slowly begins to realize that there is a very clever murderer on the island pursuing a definite agenda, but who?

And I love how Goodman chose to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than setting the book during that shutdown, she instead chose to write about a future quarantine/shutdown, with the COVID-19 one in the distant past (ten years or so) but having a lot of impact on what is happening in the present.

I loved every minute and every word of The Disinvited Guest, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

When I See You Again

It’s a work at home Friday and Paul is getting ready to head out to the airport. Heavy heaving sigh. While alone time is something I can always appreciate, it doesn’t take more than a day or two before I start missing him. But I have a lot to keep me busy, so if I just focus and work my way down the to-do list, I should be able to keep busy enough to not miss him while at the same time getting a lot of things done–always a plus, especially given how behind I am on this book–but a Gregalicious at rest tends to stay at rest, so the big thing for me is going to be staying motivated.

Ugh, I hate when Paul goes away.

I was tired again yesterday when I got off work and came home, so spent some time organizing and doing mindless chores once I got home until Paul got home from work. By the time he’d gotten home I’d already finished the chores and given in to Scooter’s demands for a lap to sleep in, and was watching the latest iteration of ESPN’s show Saturdays Down South, which of course is a history of the Southeastern Conference. This episode was for the decade 2010-2019, and while it naturally focused on the Alabama supremacy, it was fun revisiting some of that football history from that decade: Auburn’s runs in 2010 and 2013 (the “Kick Six” win against Alabama included); the runs for both Mississippi and Mississippi State in 2014 that ended disappointingly but had them both ranked in the Top Three at the same time (until they lost to LSU and Alabama, respectively, on the same day), and of course ending with the incredible LSU season in 2019. Much as I would love to climb on board this year’s LSU hype train, I’m reserving that excitement until a week from tomorrow. Alabama is the stumbling block as it always is (only one national champion since 2006 was able to claim the title without having to beat Alabama–hence The Alabama Supremacy), and even the game being in Tiger Stadium means nothing. LSU has beaten Nick Saban exactly four times (2007, 2010, 2011, 2019) with three of those games being in Tuscaloosa. LSU hasn’t beaten Alabama in Baton Rouge since 2010–twelve years.

So, yes, I am a huge LSU fan but I am also realistic. I’ll be cheering for the Tigers, you bet, and I want them to win…but I am not expecting them to win. I am hoping for it to be a great game.

After Paul got home we caught up on American Horror Story: NYC, which weren’t as interesting to me as the first two episodes. In other words, as we get deeper into the season the plot is beginning to derail a little as so often happened with seasons of the show. However, since the story is set so strongly in the gay community of the early 1980’s, I’ll keep watching. I somehow always manage to keep watching this show (Double Feature we bailed out of during the aliens second feature; we also gave up on Hotel but somehow managed to watch both Roanoke and Apocalypse all the way to the bitter end) despite how far off the rails some of these seasons inevitably wind up going–it’s the completist in me, I think–although I feel pretty confident we’ve also given up on A Friend of the Family as well. (Paul: “This could have been a two-hour movie; it didn’t need to be an ongoing series.”) I am now at a loss for what to watch with Paul gone–I can’t watch anything we’re watching together, or something we’d watch together–but I think I am going to revisit the latest Nancy Drew series; I watched the debut episode and kind of was intrigued by it, but Paul wasn’t interested so never went back to it. I checked yesterday and was stunned to see three seasons have aired, which is cool. I hope The Hardy Boys also gets another season, in all honesty; I enjoyed the show. Having grown up on the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, I am always interested to see how the characters/stories get adapted for a modern audience (and belonging to several fan groups on social media for the books is equally interesting, particularly in how imprisoning and limiting so many people can make of nostalgia for something from their childhoods), just as I was interested in seeing Riverdale’s approach to the Archie characters.

I wound up going to be relatively early as I started falling asleep in my chair while watching AHS: NYC last night (I will probably have to rewatch the latest one because I kept dozing off; I also rewatched Andor last night for the same reason before Paul got home). I also got a new espresso maker yesterday which I am dying to try out this morning. I also want to finish my reread of The Haunting of Hill House before moving on to something by Paul Tremblay. I didn’t do well with my “October horror reading month”–I didn’t read very much this month at all, which is shameful, especially since I got Wanda Morris’ new book this week as well–can’t wait to dig into that.

Sigh. Am I being overly ambitious with my plans to get things caught up while Paul is out of town? It’s entirely possible, and I could possibly be setting myself up for a terrible disappointment, but there it is.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow.

Tag: the hardy boys

Up Where We Belong

Judy in Disguise

Near You

Tishbite

Roar

Seekers Who Are Lovers

Private Eyes

Song of the South

For All We Know

When I See You Again

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