Hand in Glove

“Hand in Glove”by Ysabeau S. Wilce. In Steampunk!, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant. Candlewick Press. 2011.

So, what the hell is steampunk? My unexpert explanation is that it is a subgenre of fantasy that creates a nineteenth century that never was, using technology the Victorians had, or could have had, or is based on scientific theories of the day that didn’t pan out.

Pre-cursors of the field include the Walt Disney movie 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and the TV show The Wild Wild West.

My wife is the main consumer of science fiction and fantasy in my household but she steered me to this story because it is indeed a police procedural, and a very entertaining one.

Some fantasy or alternative history stories create elaborate outlines (in words or in actual charts) of their worlds, but Wilce doesn’t take that route. We don’t learn much about Califa, the place where this story takes place, although the name and Spanish nomenclature of some of the characters certainly suggest California, and the climate and geography suggest we are in what we would call San Francisco.

When the story opens the most celebrated cop in the city is being congratulated on closing another case: a terrifying strangler has just been convicted. But one rookie cop, Estreyo, doesn’t believe they have the right man. She is a believer in scientific crime solving, using such new techniques as fingerprints, and doesn’t trust the instinctual approach of the pretty boy hero detective.

Unfortunately she finds that the fingerprints of the murderer match those of a young man who died before the killings began. Either the theory of fingerprinting is wrong, or something very weird is going on. This being steampunk you can probably guess that it is the latter.

Before the mystery is solved you will see nods to several classic works of literature or film. The writing is light and witty One complaint: there are three important characters who all appear in the same scene and have last names beginning with E. Why make life hard on the reader that way?

Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead

"Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead is Purely Coincidental," by Robert S. Levinson, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, September 2011.

It's hard enough to make up characters. Using real people doesn't necessarily make it easier. Even ignoring the legal questions (it helps if the people you enlist into your fiction are safely dead) there is the problem of making them believable - which is not the same as making them real. You have to fit what people think is true about them.

I know a little bit of this since a few Real People showed up in my folk music mystery. One of them, Tom Paxton, was (and happily, still is) alive. He gallantly offered to be the murderer, but had to settle for being a suspect.

Robert S. Levinson has lately been making a cottage industry out of writing stories set in the early days of Hollywood, using real movie stars. His "Regarding Certain Occurrences in a Cottage at the Garden of Allah" made my best-of list last year.

The current story is set in the late 1930s and begins with Lupe Velez finding her husband Johnny Weissmuller in a compromising situation in their cottage.

Well no, I tell a lie. The story actually begins: "The way I heard the story.." And each new scene begins with this familiar formula. It pays off nicely at the end, as does the title.

As things get going there is a murder, a cover-up, an ambitious starlet, mogul Louis B. Mayer, and William Powell. There is even a possible explanation of a real-life mysterious death of a Hollywood star. If you can figure out which characters are fictional you will probably guess who the bad guy is, but in any case you'll have a good time.

A New Pair of Pants

“A New Pair of Pants” by Jas. R. Petrin, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. September 2011.

The last time I talked about a series character it was James Powell’s Inspector Bozo, and that piece led Jim to write this excellent piece on how story series develop, so don’t say I never do any good for the world.

Have you noticed that some of the series character who are the most enjoyable to read about (or watch) are people you would NOT want to spend time with in real life? Seriously, how long do you think you could tolerate the presence of Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, Columbo, Rumpole, or Dr. House?

Part of their attraction is they don’t obey the rules of society, getting away with stuff our superegos would never permit. One of the reasons Shanks is my favorite among the characters I have created is because he does things I am far too well-behaved to try.

Which brings us to Jas. R. Petrin’s Leo “Skig” Skorzeny. Skig is an aging Halifax loan shark, a quintessential tough guy with a heart of – well, granite mostly, but there is a thin streak of gold running through it somewhere. Skig also has an “imp” in his gut (I think it was defined as stomach cancer in an earlier story) which keeps him popping pills and even crankier than he would other be.

And he has reasons to be cranky. Two of his clients – a cop and a school administrator – can’t pay their debts, and when one of them is suspected of murder it looks like Skig may have to write off the debt. Meanwhile one of the few people he likes, an old woman, is in danger of making a bad business deal, and Skig won’t allow that. And while tough guys can be scary, it’s good to have one on your side.

Tools of the Trade

"Tools of the Trade" by Tom Robinson, in Needle, issue 1, number 2.

At Sandra Seamans' indispensable website My Little Corner I recently learned about a new print publication called Needle, a " magazine of noir."

So I got it. And I must say, I don't get it.

Here's what I don't get. Apparently this is not a paying market. So how do they acquire such professional-quality stories? My first theory is that the publishers have a vast research department digging up blackmail evidence for noir writers. My second theory is still being formed.

The stories adhere more strictly to the classic noir formula (a nobody tries to be somebody and gets shafted) than, say, the Akashic noir city anthologies I have read.

For example, Todd Robinson's "Tools of the Trade." The nobody in this case is a card cheat and the way he tries to rise above himself is by playing in a game where he can't cheat. Inevitably, things don't turn out the way he hoped.

The story is told cleverly in a series of flashbacks and fragmented scenes. Eventually you find out what happened and precisely what hole he has dug himself into. And as with most of the stories in Needle, the quality of the writing and language is very high.

Gamblers are like thieves. Real poker players take money that isn't ours and we do it through lies and deception. Every poker face is either a lie or hiding a lie. Like thieves, we're always looking for the great score. The one big haul that will set up up with the house in Cabo and the fleet of Cadillacs.

But that's a lie too.

The Sadowsky Manifesto

"The Sadowsky Manifesto," by Karen Catalona, in Mystery Writers of America Presents The Rich and the Dead, edited by Nelson DeMille.

I bought an iPad a few months ago. Mostly I have been using it to check my RSS feeds (see the right column of this screen) for which it seems to work better than my desktop. But it's called an eBook reader, so I had to get around to buying a book, and I have done so. (I hasten to add that I bought it through the website of my local bookstore, thereby contributing to the people who sponsor authors' readings in my town. That's how you buy eBooks, right?)

The MWA anthologies are always themed. The editor invites certain authors to submit; the rest of the slots are available for any MWA member to shoot for. I think I have submitted three times and made it in once.

This year the editor is Nelson DeMille and the theme is the very rich. So far, my favorite story barely qualifies on the theme. But that's okay. It's good anyway.

Max Bergen runs a not-too-successful literary agency. One day a pot of gold rolls in over the transom. More literally it is a manuscript from the serial-killer-du-jour, who had just killed himself. The FBI and publishers are clamoring for the book and Bergen stands to make a fortune on commissions.

Of course, there has to be a problem, right? Sadowsky's book is not an angry political rant. It's a science fiction novel, and it's so bad that after fifty pages readers will be rooting for the giant robots to kill the hero. The book is a disaster and there is no ethical way for an agent to make money off it.

But, hey, Bergen is a literary agent. Who said anything about ethics?
I have never heard of Karen Catalona before, but I hope to run into her again.

The Diner

“The Diner” by Sean May. In Crime Factory. Issue 6.

This is the second time my pick of the week is a free-online choice, this time in the zine Crime Factory.

Once again we are back to bad guy meets bad guy, a format I complained about recently. What makes this story a treat is that the narrator is an experienced heist artist critiquing a young punk who is robbing the diner where our hero happens to be having a late dinner.

Yeah, shades of Pulp Fiction, but there are only so many plots in the world and the question is what you do with the plot. May has fun with this one.

I always like to make a good impression on the people I’m holding up, so I always wear a suit whenever I do a job. Nobody expects that the guy in the suit and sunglasses is going to pull a gun on you until you’re looking straight down the barrel of the thing and you’ve got nowhere to go.

And speaking of nowhere to go, this story could have gone in a dozen different directions, so I was kept in suspense wondering which choice the protagonist would make. A lot of fun.

Politics Makes Dead Bedfellows

“Politics Makes Dead Bedfellows,” by Brad Crowther. Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. July/August 2011.
This is the winner of the Black Orchid Novella Award, co-sponsored by AHMM and the Wolfe Pack. The guidelines for this contest specifically say that "We're not looking for anything derivative of the Nero Wolfe character, milieu, etc," but a pastiche of Rex Stout is precisely what they got. And a good one, too. So let’s talk about pastiches.
I have written on this subject before, so let me start by explaining what a pastiche is not. Some dictionaries say the word is interchangeable with parody, a work that uses elements of another work in order to poke fun at it (e.g. Robert L. Fish’s Schlock Holmes of Bagel Street.) Some sources use pastiche when Writer B writes about the characters invented by Writer A, writing a new book in a dead author’s series (e.g Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Percent Solution.

I say no to both. A pastiche is a work in which Writer B uses elements from the character and style of Writer A to create something different. I would suggest there should be two categories in this field. Hard pastiche is the term I use for works in which the original characters exist in thin disguises of new names and addresses. For example: August Derleth’s Solar Pons is an unmistable copy of Sherlock Holmes.

One way to look at is the TV series rule. Imagine that someone turned Donald E. Westlake’s Dortmunder books into a TV show. If they ran out of books a screenwriter could take Jay Cronley’s novel Quick Change, change a few names and other details, and have a script ready to go. That’s a hard pastiche.

A soft pastiche takes more liberties. While it is unmistakable based on its model, and is intended to appeal to the same audience, but it creates a new world for the same formula. For some reason Rex Stout seems to attract a lot of these; see works by Dave Zeltsermen, Lawrence Block, Loren D. Estleman, and now (finally) Brad Crowther.

I knew we’d get to the point eventually. Let’s talk about “Politics Makes Dead Bedfellows.” I’ll assume that you are sufficiently familiar with Stout’s books about Nero Wolfe that I don’t need to connect the dots.

Edna Dugué is an wealthy private eye in Charleston, South Carolina. She is also an attorney, and teaches at a college. “I never pretended that my intentions are honorable,” she tells one visitor, but clearly they are.

Her assistant and the narrator of the story is Jerrelle Vesey, an African-American part-time college student. When Edna was a public defender she had helped him when he was sent to prison for badly beating two white men who killed his brother.

When the story opens a city councilman arrives to tell Edna that his wife has threatened to kill him. Not surprisingly he ends up dead and the widow becomes Edna’s client. What follows is classic Stout territory with Archie – Sorry! Jerrelle – going out to interview half a dozen suspects and bringing the results back to Edna, who figures out whodunit.

Two things make the story a treat. First is Jerrelle's dialog. Here he is chatting with the councilman: "I don't hold any grudges. As a matter of fact, I almost voted for you in the last election. In the end though I threw my support behind our neighbor's pet rat, Lester." I like this guy.

Second, are the set of supporting characters. For example, Edna's police nemesis is a woman, a friend of Jerrelle's family. She was the one who arrested him after his crime, and the one who drove him home after he was pardoned. And we still haven't met Edna's grandfather who lives in the attic.

These are interesting people in a world that feels fully developed and three dimensional. Rex Stout would be proud.