Tag: The Murderer is a Fox

Glass Candle Grenades

Monday and a holiday; it’s lovely to have another day at home to work on these edits, which I am hoping against hope to complete today. Yesterday was lovely and relaxing; I worked on the micro edits–the lines/copy edit–which is always a long and tedious process. The macro edit, to me, is more fun if more creatively taxing. I’ll be digging into that a little later, when my mind is more awake and I have more caffeine in my system. It’ll be a weird and short work week for me, and then of course next week I am on vacation. I’ll be taking lots of books with me on that trip, although I’m not sure I’ll have much time to read. I’m not really sure what Dad and I will be doing in Kentucky. I know when I’ve been up there before he’s mentioned going sight-seeing; like to Cassius Clay’s home (the original, the one Muhammed Ali was named for at birth; he was Henry Clay’s brother and one of Kentucky’s leading abolitionists) or to the Kentucky Derby museum. Which is fine, I love history and while horse racing history isn’t something I’ve ever looked into much before, but you never know. I had thought about writing a mystery around the horse racing at the Fairgrounds…I knew a horse trainer back in the day–but never got around to it. I mean, Dick Francis kind of cornered the horse racing mystery market, did he not?

Of course, I’ll come home to another short week because of the 4th holiday, too–so it’s going to be three weeks before i do another full five day work-week. I slept decently last night–not great, but not bad, either–and so this morning feel a little bit dragging around, but that’s fine; coffee, a shower, and some time reading should get me over the hump. We abandoned City on Fire last night; we just had no enthusiasm for watching, and so moved on to The House of Hammer, which is about, of course, the twisted history of the Hammers through the lens of Armie Hammer, the actor, getting canceled for his abusive sexual preferences. It was interesting–I am always fascinated by twisted rich families that hate each other so passionately–but we need to find something meaty, like a good crime series, to dig into. It’s amazing how we can hve so many options yet can never find anything to watch, isn’t it?

I spent some time yesterday with Chris Clarkson’s adorable That Summer Night on Frenchmen Street, which is charming and fun and delightful to read, and may even be able to finish reading it today, with any luck and some strong motivation, at any rate. I think from that I will move on to either Megan Abbott or Eli Cranor; I can’t decide which of the plethora of great 2023 new releases to select from, to be honest. I know I’ll be listening to Carol Goodman in the car next weekend on the way up and I’m not sure who I’ll listen to on the way home.

A quick glance at Twitter has shown me that LSU fans have now surpassed eleven thousand shots in the Rocco’s College World Series Shot Competition, and are well on pace to break the record (just over eighteen thousand) set by Mississippi last year. Oh, how the bars and restaurants in Eauxmaha must love LSU fans! I mean, even if the shots are only a dollar, that’s over eleven grand in receipts on those shots alone, not counting everything else being sold there. LSU is playing Wake Forest tonight, and it will take a strong effort for the Tigers to pull off the win. If they do pull out a win, I’m thinking the shots record will fall tonight.

I also read an old short story yesterday that I remember from when I was a kid. Periodically, Mom let me join a book club. The first one I joined was the Mystery Guild, and those selections i received from the Mystery Guild really kind of shaped my future both as a reader and writer. I still remember the books–still have some of the original copies–and over the years, I’ve tried to replace the ones lost over time to cross-country moves. Recently I repurchased a copy of Alfred Hitchcock Presents a Month of Mystery on eBay, and there was a story in it I read as a kid that I never forgot; and I wanted to reread it. It was called “The Queen’s Jewel” and was written by Robert Golding (I’d forgotten the name of the author). I took the book down yesterday afternoon to reread the story, and it was amazing to me how much of it I still remembered, the details. The main character, Jane Farquhar, owns a small hotel of sorts with guest cabins in the brush in Africa. One of her ancestors was a server for the imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots, and before her execution she gave him the pendant of a ruby set in a heavy gold chain with four carat blue-white diamonds surrounding it. It is very valuable, and Jane’s father raised her to be prepared, always be prepared, because someone will eventually come to try to steal it from her in some way…and thus the story is about her defending herself against a criminal pretending to be an American cousin. The story holds up and works, but it opens with Jane discovering the body of her poisoned guard dog–which did make me wonder, would this story be published today? Opening with a dead dog?

I also didn’t know much about Robert Golding, so after reading the story I used the google to find out he was one of the many Ellery Queen ghostwriters (I only recently found out that many Ellery Queen novels were ghostwritten) and it turned out Golding wrote two of my favorite Ellery Queen novels, The Player on the Other Side and Calamity Town, which is one of my all-time favorite mystery novels; little wonder his short story connected so well with me. I don’t remember The Player on the Other Side other than that it was one of my favorites; but Calamity Town? I remember a lot of that novel, and it was primarily about the Wrights, the first family of Wrightsville–a location so popular that Queen kept returning there for more murder mysteries (The Murderer is a Fox was another great Wrightsville mystery). He also apparently wrote a lot of the juvenile Ellery Queen mysteries–published as Ellery Queen Jr.–which I also enjoyed as a kid; Ellery Queen Jr. and the Jim Hutton 1970’s television series Ellery Queen (which I loved) were what originally brought me to reading the adult Ellery Queens; the first I read was the one they actually filmed for the pilot, The Fourth Side of the Triangle, which was marvelous, and then I started buying his books or checking them out from the library. So thank you, Robert Golding, for being an influence on me and my writing without my knowing it. I’m really looking forward to reading some more of these old short stories. I got another Hitchcock (Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories to Be Read with the Door Locked) and an old MWA one, edited by Robert L. Fish, With Malice Toward All, which also looks rather fun.

And on that note, I think I am going to head into the spice mines and read for a bit while my brain continues to wake up before tackling the manuscript. Have a lovely holiday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check back in with you later.

When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes

As I mentioned yesterday–these blog post titles taken from the Supremes discography sometimes feel a bit off as I do some Blatant Self-Promotion about my new soon-to-be-released novel #shedeservedit.

I got my first ignorant comment on one of those blog posts yesterday; someone posted a link to a video about “toxic femininity” and how it’s “as bad if not worse” than “toxic masculinity.” Needless to say, I not only didn’t approve the comment but marked it as spam and blocked the user from commenting/reading my blog. For those of you who are new here–I don’t engage with trolls, not do I permit them the energy or the oxygen of allowing their ignorance to be seen by anyone here. This is my blog and I pay for it; therefore I will curate the content here and if you want to troll me, well, it’s just going to earn you a comment marked as spam and get you blocked, so don’t waste your time or energy on me. You may, of course–I cannot stop you, but I won’t engage with you nor will I allow Constant Reader to see your ignorance, so there you have it.

I wrote yesterday, and it felt good to get another chapter down. I only have two more to go and the revisions, and I have to say, pantsing this thing on a tight deadline hasn’t been the easiest way to write this book, but it’s working. I’ve got the plot all worked out now, who the killer is and why, and now all I have to do is cram the resolution into the last two chapters and we are finished, done, ready to go off to the editor with prayers that she likes what I’ve done and doesn’t require a complete overhaul, which is also entirely possible and within the realm of probability–one of the reasons, frankly, that I’ve not signed. a contract to dive straight away into another book when this one is finished; I thought it best to leave my time free just in case. (I am going to start working on Chlorine and Mississsippi River Mischief while waiting for my edits; there’s always something to write, after all–I can also work on the revisions of the novellas in the meantime as well.)

There’s always something…

Today’s BSP is going to focus on writing about small towns, rather than what I’ve been covering (toxic masculinity). The first book I remember reading about a small town that really stands out to me–as an examination of small town dynamics, rather than merely a setting for the story–was Ellery Queen’s Calamity Town, which was, if you are an Ellery Queen fan, the first Wrightsville story. There were several of these novels–the second, I believe, was The Murderer is a Fox–and I enjoyed them all; Queen clearly loved writing about Wrightsville, since he kept returning to the scene of the crimes, as it were, but the best, the true standout for me, was the first: Calamity Town. This book–published well over a decade before Grace Metalious scandalized the world with Peyton Place–also covers the same territory as Peyton Place: scandal and hypocrisy and the paralyzing power of gossip in small town America. Calamity Town remains a favorite mystery novel of mine to this day; I should reread it. It’s plot is ingenious and entirely rooted in human psychology, and it also contains one of the best and most clever misdirections in crime fiction history. It was Calamity Town that made me first start thinking about how small town society is actually a microcosm of American society as a whole, all encapsulated in a small package, and also that made me realize, for the first time, how claustrophobic small towns can be; where everyone knows everyone and you can’t really do anything without someone knowing; and how secrets kept can become very damaging over time. Queen is, at first, struck by the apple-pie Americana of Wrightville…and then he begins peeling back the layers.

Peyton Place, which I found to be far less scandalous than either General Hospital or All My Children by the time I got a copy at a secondhand bookstore in Emporia when I was seventeen or eighteen, also showed me again how claustrophobic small town life could be. Sure, there’s some bad to the point of laughable writing in the book (“your nipples are hard as diamonds”, anyone?) but other than those brief moments, overall it’s a very well-constructed book and a damning indictment on the hypocrisy of American small towns. I also read Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street around the same time for an American Literature class (I still think we should have read Elmer Gantry instead, or It Can’t Happen Here, but I was not in charge of the syllabus), which is also about the falseness of keeping up appearances and worrying what the neighbors think. I find it interesting that “small town American values” are frequently–particularly by conservatives–pointed out as what is the backbone of our country and so on and so forth (part of the entire “cities are BAD” thing we have had going on culturally for decades, if not centuries), but when that veil is peeled back, there is just as much rot and decay as in any “wicked” city. As I pointed out on Susan Larson’s radio show the other day, the vast majority of the soaps were originally set in very small towns, rather than urban centers.

Nobody does small towns quite like Stephen King, and the first time he really addressed small town life was in ‘salem’s Lot–although it can be argued he did a masterwork on small town life with Needful Things–and it was in his tale of small town Maine being overrun by vampires, he also did an incredible job of painting the town, it’s working class citizens and the minutiae of their lives; how circumstances trapped some of them and killed their dreams–and how others never had any dreams to be killed in the first place. The way he interweaves the lives of his small town characters, their relationships and histories and how everything is interconnected is masterful; has anyone ever done a critical analysis of King’s work with small towns? It also falls into this group; what King does with Derry is just as exceptional as his work on Castle Rock and Jerusalem’s Lot in the other works.

I based Liberty Center on Emporia, Kansas, geographically; my town is loosely laid out the same way Emporia is; there’s a small college there, as in Emporia, and there’s a meat packing plant on one side of town that reeks of death and stale blood on the south side of town, and of course, the waterfall on the river on the way out of town heading south and the park that goes with it. Other than that, it’s memory and invention; I’ve not set foot in Emporia in nearly forty years and have no plans to ever do so again. (Likewise, when I write about my fictionalized county in Alabama–it’s loosely based on where my family is from, but I haven’t been there in thirty years and will most likely never go visit again, so it’s all memory and invention for me.) I don’t know if I will write another novel about Kansas–I have some other ideas, of course, don’t I always–but it seems weird to create another fictional small city so similar to Liberty Center, but at the same time it seems even weirder to set another book there after having already done so (although i should probably revisit Sara sometime and see how I did it–and what I called the towns in Kahola County–before deciding one way or the other).

Heavy sigh.

Today I need to write another chapter, and I also need to work on revising a short story as well as writing a promotional article–and of course, there’s the horror that is my email inbox which needs to be dealt with this week once and for all (it’s all relative; answering everything and emptying it out inevitably means generating more emails there; my email responses will trigger emails in response which turns it into a Sisyphean task without end), and today is the men’s US figure skating championships, which naturally I plan to watch so I need to get my writing done before then, don’t I?

So on that note, I head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader.