Event Boundaries

Sharon Wildwind

How are you doing on the healthy big five?

Exercising every day? Eating reasonable-sized portions of healthy foods? Keeping those blood pressure, cholesterol, and glucose levels in good ranges? Sleeping enough? Brushing and flossing every day?

Ready for a new health hazard?

Doors.

I swear I’m not making this up. Late last year researchers from the University of Notre Dame released results that showed walking through a door contributes to memory loss.

People who were asked to remove objects from a table, and then walk through a door, had difficulty remembering what objects they had removed. People who walked the same distance, but didn’t go through a door remembered more objects.

What’s more, the door didn't have to be real. The researchers found the same results whether test subjects walked through a real objects and a real door or a virtual-reality universe.

A door is an event boundary, a marker that separates activities and marks a change from that happened there; this happens here. That separation is handy for things like keeping the list of chemicals used in chemistry class separate from the list of ingredients for Aunt Matilda’s ginger chews. Chemistry happens in the lab; cooking happens in the kitchen.

Great for safety in the kitchen, but not so great when we can’t remember why we went to the kitchen in the first place.

This door thing started me thinking about event boundaries we build into our lives.

Breakfast at our house ends twice each day. For my husband, breakfast is over when he stands up from the table. For me, it not over until several hours later when I empty and rinse the breakfast tea pot. This probably accounts for the discrepancy when, sometime between noon and one PM, he asks, “What’s for lunch?” and I respond, “Lunch? I just finished breakfast a few minutes ago.”

It’s time to stop Christmas shopping when I hear Little Drummer Boy for the first time in a mall. I can take that song only so many times. Like once. Then it’s game over and time to either make gifts or segue into on-line shopping.

Dare we discuss Daylight Savings Time? Whatever Sunday springing forward or falling back is moved to, the real change for me happens at least two weeks later when my body grudgingly admits that the change isn’t going away and I’d darn well better get with the program.

Event boundaries are one of the things that initially made genre fiction, genre. They were the classic turning points—usually three—where the situation changed , making it impossible for the protagonist to return to a previous behavior pattern. Romance event boundaries were easy to spot: girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy. Any idea what these boundaries were for science fiction, westerns, and mysteries?

Here’s some door art for you to look at while you think of the answers. No peeking now.

Science Fiction

1. The sentinel awakens. That lowly engineering tech working the night shift knows the ship doesn’t sound right, but no one believes him.

2. The failure of conventional science. Nothing can stop the menace.

3. An unconventional idea saves the day.

Western

1. An outside force threatens the community.

2. The community loses either courage (the sodbuster sells his farm) or reason (the lynch mob outside the jail).

3. The hero restores the community to safety.

Mystery

1. The body is discovered.

2. The detective takes on the case out of a sense of duty.

3. The search for the killer becomes personal and the detective knows she has or will have to pay a price to see justice done.

If by any chance you want to remember those lists, maybe you should write them down before you leave the room.

And by the way, happy spring. Another boundary we're passing through today.

________

Quote for the week

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.

~ Charlie Parker (1920 to 1955), bandleader, bebop saxophonist and composer

Pessimism, Pragmatism, or Perplexity?

by Julia Buckley

The weather has been amazing in Chicago for four days now, and we're breaking all sorts of warm weather records. I'm sure people in all parts of the U.S. are used to the sentence, "We haven't had a day this warm since _________" (fill in your own date).

So naturally all of the warm-weather lovers see this early Spring-in-Winter as a boon, a gift from the gods, and have come out of the woodwork in their shorts and halter tops to rollerblade, walk their dogs, ride bikes, jog.

I certainly enjoy the breezes coming in my window and the scent of flowers beginning to bloom, but a dark part of me (and I fear a fairly large part of me tends toward darkness) sees this as a terrible illusion, a pleasant mask over something terrible. Last week I talked about Hamlet, and I can't forget his fear that "Time is out of joint; o cursed spite/that ever I was born to set it right." Hamlet was under the impression that he could set it right, which, in a way, he did. I'm not as sure that we have that option.

Whether or not one believes in the Global Warming phenomenon (and why wouldn't someone believe it, again?), one certainly can't deny that our weather is changing. Last month I heard an interview with a local meteorologist who said, in essence, that he'd been a forecaster for thirty years but that his job had become hard because "this is no longer an atmosphere that I recognize."

We've always weathered extreme storms, of course. But the storms of today, especially in a place like the once-stable Midwest, which could boast freedom from east and west extremes like hurricanes and earthquakes, seem different. After the last two summers, I feel tempted, for the first time in my life, to dig an underground shelter.

And what are we to make of an almost non-existent winter and too-early spring? I told my son, jokingly, that his children might not know what snow was, and he said, "It's okay; I can tell them." I suppose he is the optimist in this matter, but he pretty much has to be. He has many years ahead of him, and he needs a world that he can count on.

I realize that pessimism may just be a part of my makeup, a particular twist in the strands of my DNA. But because of it, I can't truly enjoy these sunny days because of my fear of that sun's encroachment on the earth.

Straight from the Parade in New York City

Elizabeth Zelvin

It's St. Patrick's Day in New York, and I jogged across the park in time to see the start of the St. Patrick's Day Parade.

Here comes a marching band.

Then comes the Fighting 69th, an all-Irish regiment when they first gained fame in the Civil War, according to my husband the history buff.

I love the sound of the pipes and the way big men look so very fetching in their kilts.

I love to see women playing drums and tubas.

The crowd was enthusiastic.

But then disaster struck. We were lined up behind the barricades at Fifth Avenue just above 79th Street. The parade route was always up past the Metropolitan Museum and east on 86th Street. But for the last couple of years, it's been announced that it would only march to 79th--presumably as an economy measure. That would have been fine if they hadn't set up the barricades and allowed the first few contingents to march all the way past them. Suddenly, a host of police blocked off the route and directed the marchers to make the turn before they reached the hundreds of parade-goers lining Fifth Avenue above 79th.

All we saw of them was the horses' arses, as they probably say in Ireland, as they marched off to a chorus of disappointed boos from the crowd.

That was the end of the parade for us. But it's a glorious day in Central Park, with daffodils in full bloom, star magnolias (the early, fragrant ones) coming into their glory, and the pink magnolias around Cleopatra's Needle in bud.

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone!

Lá Fhéile Pádraig

by Sheila Connolly

Indulge me—tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day. I'm half Irish. What can I say?

Why is this such a popular holiday? St. Patrick (c. AD 387-461) is one of the patron saints of Ireland, and was responsible for bringing Christianity to that country. It was made an official feast day in the seventeenth century.

But over the years it has lost its religious associations and is now primarily a secular celebration of Irish culture. Well, maybe, if you believe that the Irish run around in green clothes picking shamrocks and getting drunk, after which they see leprechauns. For all of that, Wikipedia proudly states that it may the most widely celebrated saint's day in the world.

For several years I've taken classes in Irish language with a lovely woman who is over seventy and grew up in Connemara, on the west coast of Ireland, although she's lived in Boston for years. Ask her about St. Patrick's Day and she'll tell you that her people never made much of it. By "her people" she means not the entire population of Ireland but the ones she grew up with in a small town. It was just another feast day, one of many.

Millions of people left Ireland during the Great Famine, when there was no food. Or rather, there was food, but it was promised to the English landlords, and if the tenant farmers didn't deliver, they were thrown off their land. Many died: one of the most moving and disturbing sites I have seen in Ireland is the cemetery at Abbeystrowry, outside of Skibbereen in Co. Cork, where there is a single mass grave for eight thousand people who died during the famine (it may be more—nobody's quite sure). It's about the size of a football field.

A lot of those emigrants from Ireland ended up in the United States, which is why there are so many people of Irish descent here—almost 12% of citizens, according to the Census Bureau. Massachusetts, where I live, has the highest proportion of Irish descendants of any state, closer to 25%. There are still immigrants arriving, and most of the Irish-born people I know go back to Ireland at least once a year. The ties are strong.

I worry about all this because I'm writing a new series about a young American woman who ends up living in Ireland—and not because she wanted to. The thing is, the Irish don't buy many cozies, which is what I write. There is a thriving community of Irish crime writers, but they generally write grittier books. So I don't expect to sell many of my books in Ireland, which means my main audience is American. Of course, it may be an Irish-American audience that likes to fantasize about "going home." Or it may be readers who think they know what Ireland is: shamrocks and leprechauns, and a lot of Guinness.


What do I do? How far do I alter what I know of Ireland (and I'll admit that is limited, having spent maybe a month of my life there) to please American tastes? Do I take out the less pretty parts, or put in things that don't really exist but that Americans want to believe are true? I feel like I'm walking a tightrope: I want to be true to the reality, but I also want to sell books.

Maybe I should offer a quiz: what are the first three things that you think of when someone says Ireland?

A Quick Visit to the Renaissance

Elizabeth Zelvin

If you’re within range of Manhattan, and if you hurry, you might make it to the exhibition of Renaissance portraits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The huge show closes this weekend, and I’m glad I didn’t miss it.

The Met is a ten or fifteen minute jog across the park for me, though I don’t get there as often as I would like. I particularly like portraits, which feed the fascination with people, the curiosity about what they’re really like inside, that led me to my two careers of writer and therapist.

Getting your portrait painted was serious business back in the quattrocento, much like Victorian portrait photography, though more expensive, I imagine. No spontaneous poses, no “Say formaggio!” In the early portraits, both men and women were invariably shown in profile (“Do you think they were familiar with Egyptian art?” my companion asked), unflattering as that view was to some of the sitters’ aquiline or otherwise generous noses.

Instead of wedding photos, couples of means had their portraits painted together to commemorate a marriage. I can imagine all sorts of stories about them, especially the gentleman in red and what must have been his much younger wife.

If you think 21st century hairstyles are weird, look at what the Florentine gentlemen were doing with their hair.

The blurbs at the museum said this fetching style was called a zazzera. The glossary of the website florentine-persona.com defines zazzera as “a tuft or lock of hair on a man's head, especially in front.” In this case, I think a couple of pictures are worth a lot more than thirteen words of definition. The glossary makes up for its understatement by informing us that “a man with such a notable tuft or front lock” was called a zazzeruto. Notable, yes, that’s more like it. And “a very vain person, especially of his hair,” was called a zazzeatore.

The older gentleman’s more conservative haircut makes him look, to my eyes, Roman—or almost modern.

Portraits have survived of some of the celebrities of the day.

Here’s Giuliano de’ Medici, one of the family of merchant bankers who ruled Florence for three generations, painted by Botticelli. Considered a playboy compared to his brother Lorenzo, civic leader and patron of the arts, Giuliano was assassinated in the Cathedral (the Duomo) at the age of 25.

And here is Simonetta Vespucci, considered the most beautiful woman of her day and believed to be the model for Botticelli’s Venus on the Half Shell (no, that’s not what they really called it). Or perhaps it’s Simonetta, but not what she really looked like—the Met’s curators hedge their bets.

One of the most remarkable paintings in the exhibit was this one of an old man and his grandson, almost modern in the way it conveys their affection.

While the expression “warts and all” would not be applied to portraiture for another three hundred years or so (it’s attributed to Oliver Cromwell in the seventeenth century), they’re such a prominent feature that if the artist had left them out, the painting would not have resembled the old man at all. The Met’s blurb kindly explained that he suffered from the disease of rhinophyma.

Wonderful as the paintings are, the portrait that fascinated me most, in a creepy kind of way, was a cast of the death mask of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

Known as Lorenzo the Magnificent, he was the most brilliant and celebrated member of a family that had it all: wealth, power, patronage of the arts. To whom can we compare them? The Kennedys? The Rockefellers? No, there’s no comparison, because the Medici weren’t hampered by electoral politics or income tax or the media. So here’s a man whose name and achievements are still remembered five hundred years after his death, and this is not a painting. It’s Lorenzo himself. It’s what the guy really looked like, stubble on chin and all.

Not only did I find this intimate glimpse of Lorenzo mesmerizing, but it also raised a lot of questions. Have we killed celebrity by glutting the market? Has the flood of new information and constantly emerging personalities made it a lot less likely for people’s reputations to live on? Would you want the world to be interested in what you look like five hundred years after you die? Would you want them to see you dead? How long a shelf life do you think today’s photographs will have? How about the planet?

Some more faces of the Renaissance:

A slip of the e-mail

Sandra Parshall

I’ll never forget the feeling. 

I had disagreed with a woman in a group I belonged to on some minor issue (can’t even remember what, although I recall the aftermath vividly). She wrote an e-mail expressing her opinion of me. She meant to send it to another member of the group. Instead, she sent it to me.

I replied (with her message appended), saying simply, “I don’t think you meant to send this to me.” An embarrassed apology came back. Did I believe a word of it? Of course not. I don’t know whether the mistake resulted from her e-mail program auto-completing the TO address or from her subconscious taking control of her actions, but I am certain that I got a glimpse of her true feelings through that misdirected message, and it altered the way I regarded her and the way I interacted with her.

The experience also made me super-cautious about checking the recipient address on any e-mail that might be remotely sensitive. I’ve since slipped up once that I recall, but fortunately it was a relatively minor incident with no great consequences.

Slips of the tongue are common. We all make them every day, and usually they’re not significant. So-called Freudian slips, which supposedly reveal deep-seated hostility, desire or belief, are far more embarrassing but also less common. (Remember when Condoleeza Rice referred to George W. Bush as her husband?) Most people can laugh off such a gaffe – although everyone who hears it might take pleasure in repeatedly it ad infinitum, whether it’s funny or scandalous or sad.

E-mail slips are different. When you put something in writing, it’s awfully hard to claim you did it accidentally. And once people see a statement written down, they’re less likely to believe you didn’t mean it. Sure, you can fire off an angry e-mail on impulse (I’ve done it often enough), but it requires more conscious effort than simply spitting the words from your mouth. If you tap out a scorching assessment of your boss’s salient characteristics, he will care more about the opinion you express than about your mistake in posting it to the entire office network. 

When I saw the critical e-mail about me, I was wounded because I had thought the people involved were my friends, that we shared a common goal. I was willing to forgive the accidental (or subconscious-driven) misdirection to my inbox, but I couldn’t overlook the message itself. It made me more wary, more suspicious of others.

This is the kind of thing that destroys friendships in the computer era. I’m sure some romantic relationships have also ended because of e-mail mistakes. The worst errors of all, leaving damning e-mail on a computer where anyone can read it, or sending a sensitive message to someone who might reveal it, have undoubtedly ended a few marriages. As former Congressman Anthony Weiner discovered, once it leaves you, you have no control over how it’s used.

Do you have a personal e-mail horror story? Have you heard tales of woe from friends or relatives who have been done in by misdirected e-mail? Do you take any measures to safeguarded against sending messages to the wrong people?

No Hair in the Gate

Sharon Wildwind

The part of movie cameras where photography happens is called the gate. The rest of the camera is there to store unexposed and exposed film and move the film, frame-by-frame, through the gate. Once the camera starts rolling, it’s impossible to tell if anything unwanted has gotten into the gate.

When a scene has been filmed the camera operator opens the camera to inspect the gate. She or he is looking for hair, a speck of dust, or the occasional insect which might have been trapped in the gate during shooting.

If there is something there the whole scene has to be reshot. When the operator calls out to the director, “No hair in the gate,” the director decides if he or she likes the scene. If it was satisfactory, the director calls out something like, “That’s a wrap,” or sometimes “Can it,” which means to put the exposed film in the can.

This morning at eight o’clock, when I signed off my last shift, I put 48 years and 6 months of nursing in the can.

In October 1962 I worked my first Saturday shift as a volunteer with my high school Future Nurses Club. I worked from 8 AM to 3 PM, in a nursing home, where I distributed water, spent time talking to the residents, took them to the dining room, and helped serve them meals.

This past weekend I worked my last on-call weekend, starting at 9 AM on Saturday morning and ending at 8 AM Monday morning. It was in a community-based geriatric program affiliated with a care centre, which is the updated name for nursing home. I supervised a staff of 3 licensed practical nurses and 14 nursing assistants, caring for over 70 frail, multi-need elderly. I carried a cell phone, accessed client information on a laptop, assessed and managed clients who were unstable, conferred with our on-call physician, and, oh yeah, spent time talking to the residents, took them to the dining room, and helped serve them meals.

In between those two book-ends, I nursed on two continents, in three countries. I worked in trauma and critical care, orthopedics, rehabilitation, public health, home care, and geriatrics. I was a staff nurse, relief float nurse, head nurse, evening supervisor, nurse-educator, and certified geriatric nurse.

The first baby I saw born was named Sharon. Not after me, the mother didn’t even know my name, but I still liked the coincidence.

During the very first shift I worked as a graduate nurse (3-11 shift on a medical-surgical unit), a licensed practical nurse asked me if she should give a patient an extra dose of Tylenol for a headache. I looked at this woman who had been in nursing longer than I’d been on earth. Four years of nursing school evaporated. I didn’t have a clue whether I should say yes or no, so I said, “Let’s go over the chart and make this decision together.”

I worked a huge number of evening and night shifts, which I’d always preferred to day shifts. In the past eleven years, I’ve pulled roughly 1,800 on-call shifts, which means having the phone on all night, just in case there was a problem.

I survived a few mortar attacks and a few dress parades. On the whole, I preferred the mortar attacks.

I rode with a rural volunteer ambulance and survived rolling the ambulance on its head into a ditch on an icy road.

I taught so many orientation classes that if it was 9:30 Thursday morning, I could tell you what sentence I’d be saying. No matter how many I taught orientation, I never slept the night before a new group of employees started work. Johnny Rico explained it better than I ever could.

“I always get the shakes before a drop. . . . It stands to reason that I can't really be afraid. . . . It isn't anything important—[the psychiatrist says] it's just like the trembling of an eager race horse in the starting gate. I couldn't say about that; I've never been a race horse. But the fact is: I'm scared silly, every time. ~Juan Rico, Starship Trooper by Robert A. Heinlein

My first year in nursing school, keeping up with class assignments meant going to the library to try to find where issues of the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature had been misfiled. If I was fortunate enough to find the index that I needed, I’d spend several hours identifying maybe 10 articles that might be relevant to my topic. Six would be in journals that the library didn’t have. Two more would turn out to be duds, so I’d emerge from the library after three or four hours, carrying photocopies of two articles that possibly might be relevant.

In my last six months in nursing I followed 12 Internet sites, all specifically related to geriatric nursing. I read 45 multi-disciplinary articles from all over the world, in my home office, on the computer, at a time of my choosing. The last workshop I took was an on-line module in Coping and Adapting to Chronic Illness. The last article I read—10 days before I retired—was “Positive and Negative Neuropiasticity: Implications for Age-Related Cognitive Declines” from the Journal of Gerontological Nursing.

My last team. I'm still saying, "Let's make this decision together."

This morning I opened the gate, took a good look inside, and knew there was no hair there. I’m good to go. Literally. Away from nursing and more into my next careers of being a writer and artist. I probably will still get the shakes whenever an important artistic deadline looms, but that’s okay. Johnny Rico survived and I will, too.

It's a wrap.

The Ghostly, Mysterious and Lyrical HAMLET

by Julia Buckley

I first read Shakespeare's HAMLET as a senior in high school, back around 1982. I remember liking it.

When I became an English teacher, I assumed I'd be teaching it all the time. But somehow, in twenty-three years of teaching, I never once taught HAMLET until this year. My class just finished the play, and I have to say that I understand why it's sometimes called the greatest work ever written.

It's not just that HAMLET has many layers for interpretation--mystery, ghost story, psychological tale, philosophical treatise, love story, dysfunctional family yarn, Oedipal triangle, life and death conflict, revenge drama--one could go on with this list for quite some time. After all, the play has kept the public's interest for more than 400 years.

But what stays with me now, after my first adult examination of HAMLET, is how beautiful the words are, and how they tend to stay imprinted on the mind.

I thought my students might feel this way, too, but they're eighteen, and it's not the same at that age. I remember that my own high school teacher gave us a sheet of lines to remember so that when he called on us in class, we could recite something by heart. But he didn't want any of us to repeat a quote that someone else had already said, so it was a terrifying experience, hoping I memorized enough things to be sure I said an original line. The one I finally said out loud was "A little more than kin, and less than kind," which is Hamlet's first line in the play, and his description of his uncle-now-father, Claudius.

My teacher, Mr. Wooddell, wasn't thrilled with my choice, since it was the shortest one on the list. I fell into disfavor that day.

Yet this year I tried to encourage my students to do something similar, except instead of demanding that they memorize something (I'm not as tough as Mr. Wooddell), I offered two extra credit points to the student who could repeat one rhyming couplet from the play. "They're easy to remember," I assured them, "because they RHYME."

So the first student to try was asked if she could repeat what Hamlet said about time after seeing his father's ghost.

"Uh--something about being out of joint, and something something about being born."

"He actually said 'Time is out of joint; o cursed spite/that ever I was born to set it right," I told her.

Her friends rallied around. "You're not going to give her the points?"

"No. She didn't come anywhere close. And it was only two lines," I said.

"But she had the idea," said one stubborn young woman (demonstrating that special quality that theorists say is prevalent among "millenials," or the students of this generation who are said to be the product of doting parents and an excess of rewards).

"You're not appreciating Shakespeare's own words, which was the goal of this challenge," I said.

They looked at me disapprovingly. Some suggested that it would be nigh on impossible to memorize those words, and for some students it's true, because their vocabularies have shrunk with the lack of reading, and literally every word of the play is unknown to them (barring articles and prepositions).

But the words are SO beautiful that it remains worth the effort. I nearly cried each time I read Hamlet's soliloquies, not only when he longed for death and feared what might come after it, but also when he explained the existential malaise that had become his worldview:

"How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!"

Yet Hamlet lives on and suffers, because Hamlet is a THINKER. He is a university student, a reader and a life-long learner, and thanks to his training as such, he cannot commit a brutal act of revenge simply because his father tells him to. He must think about it, and examine it and think some more, and this vacillation is identified as his tragic flaw. He must decide whether "it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."

But that's just it--Hamlet has a noble mind, a worthy one, which is truly what elevates this play to the level of great thought. Hamlet goes from his "To be or not to be" soliloquy, a fearful examination of his options, to a "Let be" speech delivered to his friend Horatio, in which he acknowledges that he is ready for whatever may happen, even his own death. "There is special Providence in the fall of a sparrow," he tells his sad friend. "The readiness is all."

Here the beauty of Hamlet's words reflect the pared-down philosophy of his thinking. He has faced the slings and arrows and has come much closer to facing eternity itself.

Hamlet goes on to fight a duel which everyone loses; as with all Shakespearean tragedy, circumstance litters the stage with bodies, and Hamlet lies dying in the arms of his true friend, Horatio, who wanted to die with him. Hamlet insists that Horatio stay alive, but asks him to "Absent thee from felicity awhile/and in this harsh world, draw thy breath in pain/to tell my story."

This final concession to death even as he begs his friend to stay alive for him is, for me, one of the most beautiful parts of the play, but the most lovely, the most golden sentence in the play is Hamlet's last line: "All the rest is silence."

How long, I wonder, did Shakespeare ponder what last wisdom Hamlet should impart, and how many things did he consider that might best capture the mystery of the universe in contrast with man's potentially meaningless existence on earth?

The play begins with the words of a guard: "Who's there?"

The end of HAMLET echoes the same sentiment, as a man searches for his identity on earth and eventually must take his question to Heaven.

(Photo: Kenneth Branagh in his grand 1996 film version of HAMLET).

Brad Parks on the Couch

By Brad Parks

Phew, am I glad Sandy asked me to be here on Poe’s Deadly Daughters today, not just because it’s a home to some lovely writers and great readers, but because I know Liz Zelvin is a therapist.

And, well, I’ve got something I need to get off my chest.

So excuse me while I get my feet up on the couch and relax for a second – this is confidential, right? – and, okay, here goes…

See, doc, I write mysteries for a living, and you would think that would make me good at sussing out the killer in other writers’ mysteries, because I know all the tricks and sleight of hand that goes into keeping folks off balance, but… well, doc… I’m just gonna come straight out with it:

I may be the dumbest mystery reader you’ve ever met.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book where I’ve successfully guessed whodunit. The ending is always a big surprise to me.

This is true when I read, where at least I’m the only one in the room who knows just how dumb I am. But it’s also true when I watch movies, television shows, YouTube videos… pretty much any media. Even when everyone in the living room is crowing “The butler did it!” I’m that guy in the corner going, “Gee, I don’t know, are you sure it’s not the professor? Because he looked pretty sinister in the first scene…”

I’ve even read books for a second or third time and – because of a sieve-like brain that forgets the plots of books roughly four seconds after I finish them – I’ve been fooled all over again. I’ve probably devoured John D. MacDonald’s entire canon two or three times, yet he always stumps me like it’s all brand new.

And as long as I’m confessing, doc, can I tell you this? Most of the time, I don’t even try to guess the killer. I just get it wrong anyway. But I also I think it diminishes my enjoyment of the book when I dedicate too much energy to the whodunit part. I’d rather dive into the characters, the setting, the plot twists, the writing. Figuring out the red herring ranks just about dead last on my list of things to do.

(As a matter of fact, I’m so hopeless with this stuff, the first time my editor at St. Martin’s Press used the phrase “red herring” I had to ask her what that was. I told you I’m dumb.)

(And, hey doc, as long as I’m in parenthetical mode, I might as well confess that the first time a reader asked me if I “played fair,” I had to ask what that meant, too. It had never occurred to me to play any other way as a writer.)

I guess this has all been on my mind because of an exchange I had recently with Jeff Pierce over at The Rap Sheet. Now, mind you, Jeff is a guy who reads a lot of mysteries – he’s probably in the 99th percentile when it comes to readers who are tough to fool. But he told me he figured out the “whodunit” about halfway through my latest book, The Girl Next Door.

I was impressed, mostly because I don’t plot out my books – I go seat-of-the-pants, seldom knowing more than one or two scenes ahead of time what’s going to happen. I guarantee you that when I was halfway through writing The Girl Next Door, I didn’t know who the killer was going to be. But Jeff did! Is that guy good or what, doc?

Then it occurred to me: Wow, I’m not only dumb when I’m reading mysteries, I’m stupid writing them, too.

But then I started wondering, does it matter? How much do readers really care? As long as it’s not blindingly obvious, does it ruin the experience of reading if you’re, say, 75 percent sure who the bad guy is?

Does it, doc?

Yeah, I know that a lot of readers really enjoy the puzzle aspect of mysteries. But if all they wanted was the puzzle, wouldn’t they just do Sudoku instead? And don’t they have to read to the end to at least see if they’re right?
 
Anyhow, doc, I’m eager to hear what you have to say about this. Am I the only one? Is there anyone else out there as dumb as I am?
**************************
Brad Parks is a winner of the Nero Award and the Shamus Award. His latest book, The Girl Next Door, releases from St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books on March 13. For more Brad, sign up for his newsletter, like him on Facebook, or follow @Brad_Parks on Twitter.

Something Phishy?

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I received an email request from someone who claimed to be a middle-school student writing a school assignment—about me. How sweet, I thought. I'm flattered.

Until I read her list of questions. She wanted to know my date of birth, who my parents were, where I went to school. And the red flag of suspicion went up.

My sister has been the victim of identity theft, and she rarely even uses a computer. Every day I receive spam telling me that I've won a million dollars, and all they need is my bank account number to transfer the funds. If I believe the taglines, I win a contest at least once a week. Who do I trust?

Part of me wants to believe the (supposedly) young sender of the school project request. The suspicious mystery-writer part of me says, "not so fast." So first I asked a group of fellow mystery writers if they had received anything like this. The answer was no (although they do get a lot of requests for a free book, to "review"). Then I did a quick Google search and found the specific school the writer mentioned, with a nice website. I also found a reference to the sender, in a blog supposedly written by family members. All good, right?

But still… The email itself was surprisingly well written—better than I would expect from a thirteen-year-old. That made me suspicious (my apologies to that state's educational system if I have in any way maligned you—if this email isn't bogus, you're doing a good job.). Anybody trolling the web could find the same information about the sender that I did. For that matter, anybody with even limited web expertise could find a lot of information about me, and I don't hide a lot—probably less than I should. I don't list my home address or the names of my family members on any site I control, although I'm sure there are probably plenty of public directories that would cough that up in a few seconds. And I don't give out my date of birth. Ever.

The whole thing makes me sad. Part of me wants to take the request at face value and write back with at least some of the requested information. Part of me envisions some evil person (or even a group of people) generating mass emails with just enough real information to give credibility, and then sitting back rubbing their hands, waiting for that small number of gullible authors (that's right, hit us right in our vanity—I'm a "famous author"!) who will do exactly as requested and cough up essential information so that the sender can clone us and trash our credit rating.

I asked my writer colleagues what they would do. The consensus was "do nothing." Do not engage this person in a dialogue. Do not respond, certainly not with any additional information. But I was reared to be polite, and I hate the idea of disappointing an eager young person who's just trying to finish a school assignment. If that's really who it is.

So, if you, young correspondent, happen to read this post, by a Famous Writer, I'm sorry you asked in a time when we are forced to be less and less trusting. When our lives are guarded by passwords and captchas and firewalls and virus detectors. I want to believe you are sincere, really I do, but the downside risk is too great. I wish you the best of luck with your assignment.

What would you do?