Poe in Boston

by Sheila Connolly

It was only this year that I learned that there is a public art project to honor Edgar Allan Poe in Boston.  What makes that funny is that he didn’t have very nice things to say about Boston.

As you’ve no doubt learned or seen over the years, Poe is commemorated in multiple cities. But he was born in Boston, to travelling actors.  No, the house isn’t there anymore—it was torn down in the 1960s and replaced by the state Transportation Building.  He lived in Richmond, VA, with foster parents after his own parents died.  There are Poe museums in Baltimore, the Bronx, and Philadelphia as well as Richmond; the room where Poe lived as a student at the University of Virginia are preserved in his honor.

All Poe has gotten from Boston until now is a small plaque on the wall of a luggage store. (Hmm, maybe there’s some irony there, because he certainly traveled around a lot.)

Why do we care?  What is it about dead writers that draws the average tourist accompanied by two point five whining children? Do they think some spirit of the author lingers in the stone and concrete?

It is interesting to note that the (much more successful) author Stephen King made a nice contribution earlier this year to the proposed monument.  It arrived at the Poe Foundation of Boston, which is managing the project, on April Fool’s Day, and was briefly thought to be a joke. You have to believe that King planned it that way, right?

Poe’s relationship with the city of his birth was a rocky one.  He sometimes denied having been born in Boston at all. He was contemptuous of the literary elite of Boston and the area, especially Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, saying they were “incapable of recognizing a decent poem if it fell onto their precious Common,” and frequently referring to Boston as “Frogpondium,” in reference to the frog pond at the Boston Common. In 1845 Poe gave a reading at the Boston Lyceum which bombed (he recycled an existing poem, one of his youthful efforts, rather than presenting something new) and the local papers slammed him.  In 1848 he tried to commit suicide in Boston but failed.

 

 

And still the city chooses to honor him, if belatedly.  They’ve commissioned a statue, to be erected in Edgar Allan Poe Square, a brick-paved plaza at the corner of Boylston and Charles streets.  The statue, to be executed by New York sculptor Stefanie Rocknak, features Poe with a humongous and rather terrifying raven swooping out of an open trunk, with a human heart (really? Yes, I know it’s a reference to The Telltale Heart, but still…) and loose papers fluttering behind him. Running after an elusive idea, or trying to flee a city he didn’t like?

How ambivalent we are about our writers! But maybe Longfellow had the last word when he said, “Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny, for it is destiny.”

 

Manor houses! Lost art works! A doomed romance!  All you could ask for in a mystery novel, coming February 2014

 

What She Didn't Do

by Sheila Connolly

This past week the news in my area has been full of stories about the tragic death of Amy Lord, a young woman living in Boston.  She was only 24, and had moved not long ago to South Boston (the notorious "Southie" that spawned Whitey Bulger, currently on trial in Boston for multiple murders and other crimes, but now increasingly gentrified), sharing an apartment with roommates, working, and enjoying her independence.  She was educated and pretty, and had everything going for her, including a loving and supportive family not far away.

Then one day she opened the door to the wrong person, who attacked her.  That was bad enough, but then he insisted that she go with him—in her car—to get cash for him from ATM machines.  And here's where the story goes awry.

They stopped at five ATM machines.  In broad daylight.  On busy streets, in plain view—there is bank surveillance footage of at least one of these stops, and you can see the cars passing on the street behind. So why did she meekly get back in the car with her assailant, over and over, rather than running like hell, screaming, into the bank or to a police station or almost anywhere else?  The man acted alone; he wasn't holding her family or her children or even her dog hostage. Why did she do what he asked, and then keep doing it?

I know it's wrong to blame the victim.  Of course she was terrified and disoriented—things like this don't happen to nice pretty girls from the suburbs, certainly not in the middle of the day. But why couldn't she have found a way to get away?  Instead she accompanied him, and at the end of the day he stabbed her and dumped her body in a wooded park (where she was found very quickly).  Could she have saved herself?

As writers we are charged with creating characters who are both appealing and believable.  We want the readers to be able to identify with them, so that they care what happens to them.  Of course, what you as the writer set down on the page is not exactly real life, and you can shape your fiction any way you choose, but you usually want your characters to be liked..

We all carry in the back of our minds the movie image of the sweet young coed who is all alone in the house when she hears a suspicious thump in the basement while all her sorority sisters are out on fabulous dates (and the nerds are at the library).  So she decides to investigate, usually clad in the skimpiest of nightgowns, barefoot; maybe she takes a flashlight (the lightbulbs are always burnt out in these basements).  Of course things end badly for her, but we all know she was asking for it.  We label these young women Too Stupid to Live.

I'm not for a moment saying that Amy Lord made such poor decisions, but I can't shake the feeling that she should have been more proactive.  I can't believe she didn't have more than one opportunity to save herself, merely by making noise and running.  Would he, could he have shot her?  Maybe.  Would he have hit her?  Possibly, but by no means surely.  Wouldn't being shot be preferable to what actually happened?

Please don't think I'm unsympathetic, because this bright, talented young woman's death is truly a tragic waste.  But I keep thinking, if I had read this in a novel I would have said, "What's wrong with you? Do something!"

The Boston Bombing

by Sheila Connolly

Poor Kim Jong-un.  You almost have to feel sorry for him.  His sabre-rattling was going so well; he had thousands of North Koreans parading around, waving their guns and dragging missiles around the country.  The rest of the world was sitting on the edge of their seats, biting their nails, wondering "Will he?  Won't he?" actually send a nuclear warhead somewhere.

And then along come one or two guys with a couple of pressure cookers and

some buckshot and nails, and suddenly North Korea has fallen off the map, and Boston is front and center on every news outlet in the country.  Explosive devices made of stuff that you or I could buy on any street or in any mall in Middle America.  My husband tells me you can cook up gunpowder with no exotic ingredients and no high-tech equipment, in your garage (I haven't tried it). See, it doesn't take nuclear warheads to terrify people.  The bloody deaths or maiming of some children and innocent bystanders is more than enough to make the point.

And whoever made and planted those bombs hasn't even bothered to come forward [as of the time of this writing—it's a very fluid situation].  Can't you see him (most likely it's a him, right?) sitting back and watching the wall-to-wall news coverage and gloating?  I did that! Is it a good thing or a bad thing if that feeling of personal satisfaction is enough for the perpetrator, without any grand political agenda or terrorist affiliation? 

This is not a political blog, but we are all mystery writers here, so we all choose to deal with death and fear and threats on some level.  None of us writes violent stories filled with explosions and assault weapons and stacks of bodies (and I'll confess I find it harder and harder even to read those as I grow older).  We write softer, gentler mysteries.  Yes, someone dies, but the plot revolves around finding out who killed that person, and why the killer believed that person had to die.  There are seldom convincing reasons for the killing, because killing another person is inherently wrong.

Our stories most often involve ordinary people, usually women, thrust into an investigation because finding a killer is the right thing to do.  Often one of the main characters is a law enforcement official of some sort, and that matters too, because that person carries the weight of our whole societal structure.  He or she is appointed or volunteers to keep us safe, and to pursue and root out the evil that hides within our culture.

Violence is never far from American society. Witness the heated arguments about gun control.  Private citizens may never in their lives fire an assault weapon, but they want to be able to, just in case.  In case of what?  Do they truly believe that chaos is just around the corner, and having a serious weapon will protect them?  If the entire citizenry of Boston had been carrying during the Marathon, would it have made a difference? (More likely a lot more innocent people would have been injured by terrified citizens shooting wildly.) The sad thing is, we don't feel safe, even in our own homes.  And the Marathon Bombing just reinforces that.

I have no solutions.  I write murder mysteries because killing is wrong, and I believe that it is important to show that justice can be served, even if it's only by one person at a time.

POE IS COMING

by Sheila Connolly

Apparently nineteenth-century sleuths are enjoying a resurgence. The fictional detective Sherlock Holmes enjoys an unflagging popularity, and recently he has enjoyed renewed attention in the mystery writers' community. There are those among us who love the recent Robert Downey Jr. movie version, and who look forward to the coming sequel; there are those who think it is a travesty and a corruption of the canon.

Others have taken great glee in the recent BBC limited series, starring the delightful Benedict Cumberbatch, in which Holmes is thrust into modern times. Then there is the 2010 book The Sherlockian, an entertaining novel by Graham Moore, in which the author alternates chapters featuring a contemporary protagonist who has just been inducted into a society that reveres Holmes and finds himself applying Holmesian principles to solving a crime, with chapters tracing a fictionalized account of Arthur Conan Doyle's foray into detecting in 1900. Holmes lives on, in many incarnations.

So it was inevitable that the commercial television networks would sit up and take notice: now ABC has commissioned a series pilot starring the non-fictional Edgar Allan Poe as a detective in the 1840s in Boston. Titled simply Poe, the one-hour drama is described as "a crime procedural that transforms the famed author and poet into the world's first detective, who uses "unconventional methods to investigate dark mysteries in 1840s Boston."

As you may recall, we Daughters here recently celebrated Edgar's birthday, and I'm not sure any of us would envision him as a sleuth. Not only did he seldom sit still (he spent time in the military, he worked at a variety of jobs, and he changed residence frequently), but he rarely completed anything save poems and some significant short stories. In the 1840s–the period that ABC has chosen–he announced he would start his own journal in Philadelphia–which never happened. He sought a political appointment–which never happened. He went back to New York, where he worked for a time in journalism. Then he moved to the Bronx, where his wife died. When did he manage to spend any time in Boston, much less solve any crimes there?

While Poe may be labeled the inventor of the mystery story, he didn't do it in Boston–Philadelphia claims that honor. He may have been born in Boston, but he had a rather rocky relationship with its writers, to the extent that it has been called a literary war. Poe was quoted as saying of Boston, "Their hotels are bad. Their pumpkin pies are delicious. Their poetry is not so good." He simply didn't like Boston.

So one must wonder why ABC decided that Boston was a better place than Philadelphia, Baltimore or Richmond VA to set a mystery series. It's sure not the weather.  More "dark crimes" there?

Still, I suppose we Daughters should be pleased that our mentor is being inducted into the ranks of mystery writers who solve crimes, on the small screen (and at least he won't be scheduled opposite Castle).

Now the most important question is, who would you cast as Poe?