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?

Deborah Crombie and Elizabeth George

Elizabeth Zelvin


I happened to read back to back two new novels by Americans who write long-running mystery series set in England. Both are character-driven police procedurals. Both have a nice balance of nifty plot twists and progress in the series characters’ lives and relationships. The characters involved in the investigation are developed fully enough for the reader to become engaged with them. Both authors are multiple award winners. But I can recommend only one of these books without reservation. While I enjoyed reading the other, I have, well, reservations.


In both Deborah Crombie’s No Mark Upon Her and Elizabeth George’s Believing the Lie, the series protagonist suspects an ulterior motive when his boss asks him to take on a case that is outside his usual routine. Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid is sent to Henley, home of the Royal Regatta, to investigate the drowning of an elite rower who was also a high-ranking police detective. A strong hint that settling on the victim’s husband as the murderer would be a satisfactory outcome arouses Kincaid’s determination to look deeper for the solution. Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley is also asked to investigate a drowning in the Lake District in Cumbria. At the behest of an influential crony of his boss’s, he is to go undercover and to tell no one, including his own superior and his investigative team.


In the meantime, Kincaid’s wife, Detective Inspector Gemma James, is looking forward to handing over the care of their three children—his, hers, and a three-year-old adopted girl of mixed race with separation anxiety and a passion for Alice in Wonderland—to Kincaid so she can get back to the job. Lynley’s partner, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, is reluctantly becoming friends with the no-longer-runaway wife of her friend and neighbor Taymullah Azhar and mother of his daughter Hadiyya and even more reluctantly trying to obey her boss’s order to get an extreme makeover. Plenty of complications ensue in the investigations and subplots of both books.


Both authors are New York Times bestsellers. Both are considered master storytellers. Both are widely admired for the psychological depth of their characters. So why do I give Crombie’s book a full two thumbs up, while George’s leaves me wiggling ’em around a little? The answer lies in the point I started with: how each of them handles the challenge of being an American writing about contemporary England.


It’s not the authenticity of the settings. Both authors have done their homework thoroughly. But Crombie has an ear, and in my humble opinion, as we say on the Internet, George does not. Crombie’s mastery of British idiom, with its subtleties of class and place, is so smooth that not for a second do we get jerked out of the story by a word or expression that doesn’t fit. The language is authentic, and the reader never has to think about that fact that the author is an American.


I wish I could say the same for George. She has been irritating me since her first novel by throwing in vocabulary that she might have gotten from Agatha Christie or P.G. Wodehouse. It’s not as bad as it used to be. She didn’t commit “chuffed” (from the wrong person) or “innit” (in the wrong sentence) in this book at all. But she keeps using “meant to” for “supposed to,” in dialogue— “You’re meant to be there as soon as possible,” instead of “You’re supposed to be there...” or “He expects you there...” and “It’s meant to be a surprise” instead of “It’s a surprise”—and in narrative—“This seemed to be code for the fact that Lynley was meant to do nothing at all if Nicholas Fairclough turned out to be the killer”—as well. That’s another one, “as well”—sprinkled in to remind us unnecessarily that Brits often use the phrase instead of “too.” I’m no Henry Higgins, but I suspect (“suss out” is another one) that the lower middle class is more likely to use many of the words that George attributes to characters from the titled, Oxford-educated Lynley to laborers and sheep herders.


All of Crombie’s dialogue is believable; to my ear, a lot of George’s is not. Furthermore, all of Crombie’s characters are believable, while some of George’s behave like idiots, if not implausible constructs. I had particular trouble believing in the naiveté to the point of cluelessness of the young tabloid reporter in this book and in the length to which ongoing series character Deborah St. James went in impersonating a police officer. No one who’s ever seen a TV show would make the mistakes she does, with catastrophic results.


In spite of its flaws, Believing the Lie is an entertaining read with a plausible tragedy or two at its heart. But if you want an author you can trust completely, pick Crombie and No Mark Upon Her.

Do we have a name for it?

Sandra Parshall

Somebody tells you, “I’m reading a terrific book.”

What do you envision? A rectangular object made of paper, with decorative covers and page after page of type?

Do you still draw a line in your mind between “real” books and e-books and refuse to refer to an electronic download as simply a book?

Maybe you’ve grown comfortable with the term e-book, but do “enhanced e-book” and “interactive digitized book” make your teeth ache?

Written work is turning up in so many different forms these days that we sometimes need to string several words together to make ourselves clear when distinguishing between them. I’ve thought for a while that we need to come up with some new names for these new forms, instead of continuing to piggyback them onto the venerable and seriously overloaded word book. I was happy to find support for my view in Anne Kostick’s blog on Digital Book World. Excellent piece. Go read it – after finishing this one.

The word “blog” is a perfect example of what we need for all the different forms of bookness. English is the most elastic of languages, and when we hear a new word that fits, we waste no time adopting it. Within months, we may be using it so freely that it has become a necessity in our daily lives. Blog, of course, is short for web log, which is believed to have originated with Jorn Borger and his Robot Wisdom page in 1997. For a while, “weblog” seemed to gain popularity. Then in early 1999, Peter Merholz broke it into two words again, with a twist: we blog. By the time everybody on the planet had one, blog was part of our language. Although some purists – if one can be a purist about made-up words – insist that it be used only as a noun, blog, blogging, and blogged are widely accepted as verbs. And who blogs? A blogger.

Language changes have always been driven from the bottom up, starting with users, not from the top down. If a lot of people use a word, sooner or later the self-appointed language gatekeepers will have to acknowledge it.

When will a blog kind of magic strike the various forms of books on the market, so we will know in an instant what people are talking about? E-book has become such a commonly used term that it’s too late to change it, but to avoid confusion, shouldn’t we use it only when we’re referring to a straight transfer of words to electronic form? Audiobook and graphic novel have been around for a long time and have the virtue of clarity and precision. Other booklike creations still need better names, though, and more are undoubtedly on the horizon. For starters, what pithy names would you give to these?

Enhanced e-book
Interactive/editable/updatable digitized book
Enhanced or interactive children’s picture book
Online (not downloadable) book
Digitized art book

The Bro Code

Sharon Wildwind

Two first cousins meet in a bar . . . . No, that’s not the start of a joke.

I have two characters who are first cousins. They live in different cities and haven’t seen each other in about two years. They meet each other, unexpectedly, in a bar on a Saturday night. Both are facing serious problems, one financial, the other a threat to his reputation. Neither knows that the other one is in trouble, but both are glad to see the other because they’re family. Suddenly neither one feels as alone. The problem is, how am I going to use body language to show that?

If they were girl cousins, I could take a running leap at writing how they would greet one another. What they would say. What their body language would be. What they would tell one another, and what they would hold back. But guys? I realized I’d completely lost track of what guy body language was happening out there.

The last thing I remember being aware of was bear hugs where both guys pounded each other’s back as if dislodging food from a choking victim’s windpipe, hitting each other on the shoulder with a closed fist, and in some cultures, doing a complicated dap with their hands. Mentioning the dap should give you an idea of how many decades it’s been since I did guy-culture research.

Off I went to a sports bar. That in itself was a revelation. There was a very good salad on the menu. There was also decor. High wooden-and-black-leather chairs. High wooden tables to match the chairs, and about nine high-definition televisions, each one tuned to a different sport, but none of them with the sound on.

I learned there is now a GPS locator that will give you the co-ordinates of where fish are. With apologies to the avid golfers, I relearned that watching golf on television is incredibly boring. I learned that college football players are huge and that they seem to communicate mainly by making a fist and touching the knuckles of another player, kind of like that infrared transfer that electric devices do when they are sending information to one another.

One of the teams scored a touchdown. In the stands strangely-dressed people, some with half their face painted one color and half another color, whooped and high-fived one another. Two figures—gender unknown—who for all the world appeared to be wearing green body suits that covered even their faces and heads, hugged one another.

On the sidelines, one of the football players put his hands on either side of another player’s face and kissed him. On the lips. For a long time.

None of the guys in the bar seemed to care.

Okay. What planet was I on?

Apparently, this guy kissing thing started on European soccer fields. Of course, soccer players have a lot of strange rituals, including the scorer banging with his fist on his chest (A Tarzan imitation? Self-administered CPR?). The scorer outstretching both arms and running around changing the angle of arms mimicking an airplane. And the scorer sucking his thumb as a tribute to his child(ren). I suppose it beats having gallons of ice-cold sports drink poured on your head.

Since the last time I checked on such things, a whole sub-culture called the Bro Code has emerged.

The man hug, where the guys briefly shoulder-bump is okay. So is the high-five, the fist bump (the acting mayor of Memphis fist bumped the Dalai Lama), and the Bro hug (right hands clasped in a handshake, interlocked hands between the bodies, bodies not touching except at the shoulders, and the left hand patting the other man on the back).

Holding hands is out, at least if you’re Toronto Raptors basketball players. The 10-second YouTube clip of Leandro Barbosa and Reggie Evans holding hands on their way to the lockers resulted in so many negative comments that the site disabled the video.

Also pulled was a You-Tube video of Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow kissing his teammate wide receiver Demaryius Thomas after a successful field goal was kicked.

If the guys in the sports bar are any indication, I have a feeling that in a couple of years, neither hand-holding nor kissing will do so much as raise an eyebrow.

Since one of my cousin-characters lives in Memphis, I’ve decided to follow the mayor’s lead and go with the fist bump for them. It seems a safe middle ground, though by the time the book is published, it may seem terribly restrained and old-fashioned.

Is it my imagination or are the times they are a changing?

Hail to The Boss

by Julia Buckley

Our oldest cat has earned a sort of patriarchal throne in our home. When he was young, my toddler saddled him with the name "Pibby Tails," which we have shortened to Pibby. But these days, we refer to him as "The Boss."

When The Boss enters a room, you immediately feel a sense of respect. Perhaps it's because of his lordly bearing, or the way that he can make his paws either silent or loud with purpose. Or perhaps it's the way the other two cats defer to him, moving away from the food bowl when The Boss wants to eat, or getting out of the chair when it's clear The Boss wants it.

Like an aging Hollywood actor, The Boss seems to grow more attractive as he grays. His white-tipped temples look as though he had them done at a cat salon, and he is meticulous about his grooming, which he likes to do in the center of the living room rug while we watch television.

Whenever The Boss strides to the center of that rug, my husband jokes that he's about to call a meeting. He gives us all a stern look; we obviously disappoint him on a continual basis. Eventually he tires and tips over, curling up his front paws like a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

He was a beautiful kitten, with chocolate brown eyes. Those eyes have since changed to a mysterious green, but his beauty is undiminished.

The Boss bears many scars from when he was an outdoor cat. (The injuries themselves determined that we needed to keep him inside, although he sits in the window with an air of longing, like a sea captain separated from his vessel). The Boss's ailments have included:

--Infection from cat bite (with corresponding swollen gargoyle face)
--Second infection from cat bite (and surgery)
--Tail inadvertently closed in door by absent-minded boy (surgery)
--Severe back injury by unknown assailant (hawk?) (surgery)

Despite his many ailments and scars, he remains the strongest of the cats, both personally and physically. When he gets into brawls with his brother Mulliner, who is our fluffiest cat, we find tumbleweeds of Mulliner hair blowing through the house, and little brother learns another lesson about challenging The Boss's place in our household hierarchy.

The dog learned long ago to leave the cat alone. They exchange the occasional sniff, or share the occasional sunspot, but otherwise they keep their distance.

The Boss is our primary mouser, and in his heyday it was not unusual for him to stroll past us with a tail dangling out of his mouth. He taught his younger brother to hunt, as well, although our littlest cat, Rose, seems to show no inclination to hunt things, other than the mysterious creature she is sure lives under our refrigerator.

We are grateful to The Boss in all his grandeur. He adds a certain elegance to our home that not every cat can achieve. I'm sure T.S. Eliot would have special words to apply to The Boss alone, but the closest might be in the lines of his poem "The Rum Tum Tugger":

"For he will do as he do do
And there's no doing anything about it!"

(From OLD POSSUM'S BOOK OF PRACTICAL CATS)

Far from the primrose path...

By Kate Flora
 
Sometimes the course of our careers is mysterious and far from smooth. I never meant to write police procedurals. When I started writing mysteries back in the mid-1980’s, I was a practicing lawyer, spending my days in a world that still found women lawyers a novelty. I had a nice, big feminist chip on my shoulder and I wanted to write books about women as heroes, women in charge, women rescuing themselves. My long-time protagonist, Thea Kozak, did all of that. I happily rode the wave of post-Nancy Drew writers coming of age for several years. I loved Thea. I loved my reader’s reactions to her. I felt like I was rejoining a group of old friends whenever I started to write a new book in the series. And then the series got dropped.

Many of us know what that’s like. You’re writing a book a year, you feel like you understand the drill, you’ve got the rhythm, and suddenly, someone jerks the rug out from under you and you’re lying there on your back, trying to figure out what happened.

But writers write, regardless of the world’s acclaim. My agent was saying try something new. So I looked around and realized that to make it credible, crime writers have to know about crime. I’d been asking my local police a lot of questions. I’d taken a citizens’ police academy course, and a police-taught RAD class. I thought the police were really interesting. Since a writer grows when she challenges herself to do something new, I decided to write about a trio of male cops. Got a lieutenant in the Portland, Maine police department to be my advisor, and my Joe Burgess series began.

Playing God was born over breakfast with a Newark, Delaware cop when I was at the Mid-Atlantic Mystery Conference in Philadelphia. He described the devastating effect a murdered child case had had on a colleague. That story meshed with my vision of the kind of cop I wanted Joe Burgess to be—a man who had seen too much, who had black patches on his soul. My imaginings and his story were fueled by my deep anger at the way doctors had handled my sister’s final illness. I needed distraction. I needed obsession. So I set out to see how fast I could write the story of a philandering physician found dead in his Mercedes, and of the cop whose mother that doctor had carelessly misdiagnosed, who now had to investigate his death. Powerful stuff.

I wrote 10-11 hours a day, and in four months, I had written 485 pages. With brilliant editing from Joshua Bilmes, the book emerged a hundred pages lighter, but still strong and dark. And a funny thing happened. I had spent such intense time writing book that when I typed “The End” and tried to return to normal life, I felt like my friends had abandoned me. My imaginary friends. I had to start the second book so I could spend more time with them. The Angel of Knowlton Park, about investigating in the death of a small boy found in a city park, was written at a normal pace. And Burgess and his colleagues settled back into being characters again. Characters who struggle with the challenge of being normal when their world is so far from normal.

As someone who lived through the Vietnam era, and spent a year jumping every time the phone rang at an odd time, I wondered what the effect of Iraq and Afghanistan, and another wave of our young coming home damaged and unacknowledged, would have on our veterans. That wondering led to the third Joe Burgess, Redemption, when the body of Reggie the Can Man, Burgess’s high school football buddy who never recovered from the war, is pulled from Portland Harbor and an astute M.E. suspects that the drowning was no accident. As long as Reggie was alive, Burgess could always hope for his recovery. Now that hope is gone. The one last thing Burgess can do for his friend is see that his killer is found.

Writing police procedurals has led me down some strange roads, including a lot of nights in cop cars on back streets in dark cities. It led me into the arena of true crime when my police advisor decided he wanted to write about his most compelling case. It has led me deep into the Canadian woods on an ATV in pursuit of another true story. It’s going to take me to Arkansas, following the story of an international child abduction. And down the dirt roads of Maine as I help a warden write his memoir. My personal hero, Jim Huang, revived the Thea Kozak series by publishing Stalking Death. I’m now gearing up to write Death Warmed Over.

Along the way, this is what I’ve learned: If life knocks you over, get up and go on. Only you get to decide you’re a writer. Take chances. If the thought of writing something scares you, that may be the next thing you should write. If you think you write mysteries with strong women, and a strong male character comes knocking with a story, open the door. Follow your heart. Write the story that speaks to you. And believe that if it gets you excited, it will probably excite your reader as well. 
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Attorney Kate Flora’s twelve books include seven Thea Kozak mysteries, two gritty police procedurals, a suspense thriller written as Katharine Clark, and a true crime, Finding Amy, which was a 2007 Edgar nominee and has been optioned for a movie. Her current projects include Death Dealer, a true crime involving a Canadian serial killer, a screenplay, and a novel in linked stories. Her short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies. She is a former editor and publisher at Level Best books, former international president of Sisters in Crime, and a founding member of the New England Crime Bake conference. Her third Joe Burgess police procedural, Redemption, is available now. For more information, visit Kate's website.