They would kill for that

by Sandra Parshall

It’s nothing new, kids killing kids over trendy jackets, shoes, and other apparel. Look back through news archives and you’ll find stories about such killings twenty, thirty, forty years ago. Each time it happens, though, it hits many of us with fresh shock and horror because we can’t understand this kind of violence.

Sometimes the thief plans to sell what he steals. We recognize that money causes a type of temporary insanity, and we’re used to humans killing each other for a relatively small amount, but we still have trouble understanding such a waste of life. When the thief simply wants to own the victim’s clothing rather than profit from it, and is willing to commit murder for it, we cross into crazy-in-the-head territory. We can only observe the aftermath and shake our heads.

I always wonder how the victim’s parents feel, knowing their fourteen-year-old child was murdered for a jacket or a pair of athletic shoes. I wonder how the killer’s parents feel, knowing their son has thrown away his own life and freedom in this senseless way. I always imagine a fifty-year-old man waking up in his prison cell decades from now, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, asking himself why he thought that jacket was worth killing for.

The victims and perpetrators of the most serious crimes are almost always male, although girls have their own rivalries over trendy clothes. The thieves/killers are often, but not always, from poor or lower middle-class families, and they usually get caught. 

The social aspect of these crimes is easy enough to understand. Most teenagers are herd animals. They can’t bear to be left out, to stand ignored on the sidelines while everyone else runs with the herd. Trends and fads spread quickly – more quickly now, through social media, than ever before. Many teens don’t understand or don’t care about family finances. They want what other kids have, so they’ll be part of the cool group. As painful as it may be for parents to admit, peer group approval is often far more important to teens than their parents’ opinions.

When I was a teenager, Madras shirts and Bass Weejuns were all the rage. I don’t recall anybody being killed for them, but I do recall some thefts. And I remember the angst of teens whose parents couldn’t or wouldn’t provide them with the latest hot item of apparel. 

Remember the madness over the first Air Jordans from Nike? That sticks in our minds because the shoes have remained popular (at a less dangerous level). Many other fads have faded, and our memories of the brand names with them. 

Helly Hansen jacket

Right now a lot of adolescents of both sexes are convinced their happiness and social lives depend on having rugged Helly Hansen outdoor jackets that retail for $499 to more than $600. The trend seems to be centered in the Washington, DC, area, where I live, and it seems odd to me, since our winters are short and mild and we don't have a lot of days when such heavy jackets would be comfortable. To prevent theft, retailers (who are mystified by the fad) display the jackets out of reach high on the walls – and in some cases they chain the jackets to the walls. 

Recently an 18-year-old man was stabbed at a Metro station by a thief who took his Helly Hansen jacket, and two other young men have been robbed at gunpoint. The mother of one victim said, “It’s every kid’s dream to have a Helly Hansen. But if I had known there was so much danger that comes with the coat, I never would have gotten him one.”

What does it take to end this incredibly stupid type of violence? In 1996, President Clinton was concerned enough to recommend that all public schools require students to wear uniforms so nobody will strut the halls showing off his status symbol and putting his life in jeopardy. Some public school systems do require uniforms, but many parents as well as students oppose what they see as an infringement on personal liberty.

Would education about the consequences stop potential thieves? Could they be scared straight before they end up killing somebody? Maybe they don’t understand that if they kill somebody they probably won’t go to a juvenile correction facility for a short stay. They will be sent to adult prison, and they’ll be there for many years. Maybe a tour of a state prison would make them think twice about committing a crime. Maybe they need to hear a graphic description of what can happen to a young man when he enters a prison filled with hardened criminals who have been locked up for a long time. Maybe someone needs to ask them how they’ll feel when they’re fifty years old, lying in their cells and staring at the ceiling, wondering why they took a life and threw away their own freedom for a trendy jacket.

I might be naive for thinking it’s even possible to get through to these kids who literally put shoes and jackets ahead of life and liberty.

What’s the alternative?

Do you have any ideas that might work?

Murder in 3-D

Sharon Wildwind

The trending topic in our house right now is 3-D printing. In the time it took me to blink 3-D printers went from novelties turning out primary-colored plastic gee-gaws to huge industrial printers incorporating over a dozen materials into one model.

The first Y-split has already happened between professional manufacturers and serious geekdom.

The professional manufacturers are printing entire jet engines weighing 30%-40% less than those made in the conventional manner; medical-grade surgical implants and prostheses—There’s a eagle flying free in the wild wearing a prosthetic beak; movie props—Why blow up a real Aston Martin DB5 when you can blow up a couple in the movie, auction the remaining one for a good hunk of cash, and still have spent less money than one real Aston Martin costs?; scaffolds for coral reefs to grow on that are resistant to the rising acid levels in the oceans; and clothing created entirely out of polyester filaments, which, incidently can be combined with LED lights so that your clothes light up, or monitoring capabilities to check your blood pressure, blood glucose level, cardiac status, and the like.

Serious geekdom is being more modest, at least for now. Got a retro lamp that you love, but for which parts no longer exist? Print the parts you need. Thinking of remodeling your house? Print a 3-D model of what your completed renovations will look like. Model train enthusiast? Want to build a replica of your city’s real downtown area for your diorama? Print it building by building.

What heated up our home discussion was the announcement that the office-supply company, Staples, will provide a 3-D printing service, which customers can access from home. Draw a design, upload it to Staples’ website, and have the resulting print-out shipped to your home. We’ve already got a list of things we need printed. Perhaps need is too strong a word, but it’s the one we’re going with.

A top-of-the-line industrial-grade mega-printer costs about half a million dollars, so we’re going to be giving Staples business for the forseeable future, but maybe not forever. Makerbot already advertises a starter printer which they suggest would be perfect for elementary schools. Hold a bake sale or two and introduce kids to inventing and manufacturing their own goods at a young age.

You probably already know where thinking about this led me. Take any mystery writer on a tour of a new building, and she finds places to hide a body. Show her a new gadget and she spends hours musing on how it can be used as a) a murder weapon b) a red herring or c) a way to insert a clue into a mystery.

3-D Printers and the Mystery Novel

• Sad to say, some experimenters have already produced working firearm components on 3-D printers. These are instant, one-use, disposable, untraceable firearms. Use it and toss it in the nearest fireplace, burning barrel, or other heat source. Let’s see what forensics can do with a lump of molten plastic or a bunch of ashes.

• When Great Britain reformed its chemist’s system to included signing a ledger whenever poisonous substances were purchases, police had a new way to trace possible poisoners. The same is true today of tracking purchases of materials that might be used to produce illicit drugs or other materials not in the public interest. What happens when these materials can be printed by the end-user?

• Need to bypass a door protected by retinal scan security software? Print the inside of the back of an eye.

• Want someone else accused of the bank robbery you commit? Print facial details and combine them with movie makeup to create unassailable witness statements and closed-circuit video tapes. Just to be certain, also print a fake license plate for your get-away car.

• Want to steal something, but not clue the owners into their precious object being missing? Print a replica and make a switch.

Have I mentioned that chocolate is one of the materials already being printed? Edible chocolate structures have been around for about five years now. At MIT, they’ve figured out how to print faces in chocolate.

Personally, I’d much rather have printed chocolate than printed guns.

-------------

Quote for the week

Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands - and then eat just one of the pieces.

~ Judith Viorst; author, journalist and researcher

A Tale of Something Lost and Something Gained

by Julia Buckley

Recently the only Hungarian restaurant near my house closed. This was a tragic blow for my whole family, since we love Hungarian food. In honor of The Epicurean, the late Magyar eatery, I am posting an essay I wrote about it back in 2009. (The deer pictured is not either of the deer mentioned in the story. The doe above was one we met while on vacation in 2011).

On the day of my birthday, December 31^st, I drove out into a light snowfall to meet some of my family at The Epicurean, one of the few Hungarian restaurants in the Chicago suburbs.  My father, a full-blooded Hungarian, longs for the food of his homeland, and so makes the hour-long drive to this restaurant at least once a year.  Today, he was treating me to a birthday lunch.

We settled at the table: my mother and father and I in a 45-year reunion of my birth, and my sister Claudia, who is staying with my parents while she’s in town from Virginia.

The first thing we noticed was that this lovely restaurant, beautifully decorated with all sorts of Magyar touches, was very cold.  My father told this to our waiter, Luis, who greeted us with a tentative air that lasted throughout our visit.  Luis assured us he would turn up the heat.  Then he asked if we wanted any drinks to start with.  My father plunged right in.

            “I’ll have a scotch on the rocks.”

            Luis looked apologetic.  “I’m sorry, we don’t serve scotch.”

            My father’s face fell.  I don’t know if it’s a Hungarian tradition (his own father always drank highballs at family events) or just a personal preference, but my father loves his scotch on special occasions.  “Wine, then.”

            Luis looked uncomfortable.  “We don’t serve any alcohol.”

            From this, I don’t think my father ever quite recovered.  “No?  You did the last time we were here.”

            “We haven’t for a year or so.”

            So he took our soft drink orders and went on his way; we sat in the large room, cold as a barn, and tried to change the subject away from the lost J & B. 

            My parents showed me pictures of a deer they’d found in their yard that morning.  It had an injured leg, and it sat convalescing under my parents’ backyard birdfeeder.  “Did you call animal control?” I asked.

            “Yes.  They said they don’t do anything for deer.”

            You may recall my story of the dying cat in my parents’ back yard this past summer.  I couldn’t understand, first, how these animals seemed to seek out my parents, and secondly, how there seems to be no help in the world for sick wildlife.

            The doe, my mother told me, had eventually stood up and limped away, and they lost track of her.  They didn’t think she’d been hit by a car, because only one leg was affected and there was no visible blood.  I wondered, odd as it sounded, if she could have slipped on the ice and sprained a muscle.  Her thin leg was visibly swollen.

            Troubled by this, I took my plate to the buffet table.  There is no Hungarian food that is not delicious to me, from chicken paprikas to beef gulyas (goulash) to palascinta, which are little sugared crepes.  Chicken soup with delicate hand-made noodles, crisp pierogi filled with meat and potatoes, sliced cucumbers mixed with spices, szekely gulyas (a delicious blend of sauerkraut, tender pork, sour cream, and true Hungarian paprika), and dumplings, wonderful dumplings—made lunch a delight.

And for dessert there was a six-tiered Dobos Torte with chocolate rum filling and a jelly-covered cookie on top.

It never got warmer in the restaurant (we feared these were signs of imminent closure), but the lunch was as delicious as ever.  My mother, who in forty-five years has never missed acknowledging my birthday with wrapped gifts, gave me a lovely Guatamalan bag, in which I can carry the ubiquitous papers that need grading.

Altogether it was a lovely experience; but I kept thinking about that deer long after we parted.  How sad that a wild animal has no one to care for it when it is wounded.

That evening my sons and I picked up my husband from work and I begged him to let me drive around a bit and look at Christmas lights as a birthday treat—before everyone took them all down.  Despite his hunger for dinner, he agreed, and the four of us drove to what I think of as “the rich side of town” to see the truly lavish displays.  We drove down a suburban street with homes that seemed to have been transplanted from East Egg and marveled at their light displays. 

It was snowing again--a soft and lovely accentuation of the holiday visuals.  Suddenly a deer was there, bursting out of someone’s yard.  On the rare occasions that I see deer in the suburbs, they are always does, but this one was a buck—an eight or ten point buck who trotted right next to our car like a guide into the New Year.  I was speechless with delight. 

I braked finally, and he cut right in front of us, a beautiful silhouette in the soft snow, then stood to the left of the car, seemingly curious.  I rolled down my window and greeted him.  He didn’t seem at all frightened by us; perhaps deer only fear hunters because they can smell the scent of aggression.  We were simply in awe.  “Hello,” I said.  “Thanks for being a good omen.”

He stared back with his wide unblinking eyes.  We drove away, and only later did I realize that I had my camera in my purse, and that I could have captured a once-in-a-lifetime shot. 

Still, I have the memory of his beauty, and the good feeling that he brought to the end of the year. 

Guest Blogger: Stephen Legault

Stephen Legault is a talented Canadian author, with three series on the go. He visited the Daughters a year ago to talk about his mysteries featuring disabled Canadian Mounted Policeman Durant Wallace. The End of the Line showed that Stephen wrote cold and snow well enough that more than one reader commented on needing to put on warmer clothes as they read the book.

In his new Red Rock Canyon mystery series, he heads the other way, into the Utah desert. And he proves he can handle heat and desert scenery as well as he did southern Alberta in the grip of a killer cold winter. The wilderness descriptions are beautifully detailed, which isn’t surprising, giving Stephen’s non-writing passions as a full-time conservation activist, an outdoorsman, and a photographer. He’s an author who’s taken the maxim to “write what you know” to heart.

The first book in the series is called The Slickrock Paradox with good reason. Slickrock is sandstone, hollowed out and polished smooth by intermittent floods. One-way crevices form. Some are easy to descend, but impossible to climb out of, or the going-down may kill you before you get a chance to discover if coming up would be easier.

Descending into one-way crevices describes Silas Pearson’s life. Three-and-a-half years ago his third wife, Penelope, disappeared. All Silas knows is that she was working on a secret conservation project. Many people searched for her when she first disappeared and all of them came to one of two conclusions. Either her body was in the Utah desert and would never be found, or Penelope chose to escape her troubled marriage by running off with another man.

Silas refused to believe either possibility. He gave up his tenured university professorship and began a dogged search for her. In his daily travels up and down desert canyons, he’s covered over four thousand miles. A trek equivalent to having walked one-and-a-half times across the United States or climbed Mount Everest ten time.

At night he stands before a room sized topographical map and marks off the territory he’s searched that day. Marking a map is better than the nightmares that haunt him when he tries to sleep. He knows that rest will come to him only after he either finds Penelope alive and get answers, or is able to give her body a proper burial.

If you've got one of those hard-to-buy-a-book-for guys on your holiday list, check out the Red Rock series. It's got the west, it's got beautiful scenery, and it's got a mystery as slick as the rock that Silas both respects and fears.

Stephen Legault lives in Canmore, Alberta. Please visit Stephen online at  or follow him on Twitter.

Historical Fiction

by Sheila Connolly

 

 

Recently I was exchanging emails with my agent and she said something like, "you like history—why don't you write an historical?"  I said no—fast.

Fellow Daughter (that sounds wrong, doesn't it?) Jeri Westerson writes mysteries set in the Middle Ages and does it well, and I applaud her.  But I can't do it.

Many, many years ago, when I was trapped in a dead-end job and had a memory typewriter (I did say "many years," didn't I?) sitting in front of me, I thought I'd try my hand at a medieval mystery, since I was once a medievalist.  I had the perfect opening:  someone is found dead in the cloister of a monastery under construction, his head crushed by a falling capital. Actually, in hindsight I realize I did one thing right:  I had the body right up front. But I gave up after three pages.  I had an interesting death and nothing more—no plot, no characters, and no idea where to go from there.

Obviously I came back to writing mysteries, a couple of decades later, but I chose to write contemporary ones.  Why?  Because as I told my agent, writing a historical is TOO MUCH WORK.

Once upon a time I was an academic: I have a Ph.D. in Art History.  If you've never been a member of the rarified world of academia, you probably don't realize that you can't make a statement, at least in writing, without having researched it thoroughly, and without adding at least two footnotes to back up your carefully phrased assertion.  Here's an example of academic-speak: "there are those who have suggested that the prevailing influence in the peripheral ornamentation of stone sculpture in the Southwest of France in the later twelfth century owes much to the infiltration of Moorish scrollwork appearing slightly earlier in manuscripts smuggled into the country by itinerant monks." You've gone to sleep, haven't you?  Obviously if you tried to write like this in a mystery, your reader would have turned her attention to her grocery list, which would be far more interesting.

 

A more normal person would write a simple statement like "French stone carvers copied a lot of Moorish motifs."

 

You might say that the same principle applies to writing mysteries. But still…  It's hard to let go of that training.  Suppose you say, "the colonial house sat proudly on a hill overlooking the old King's Highway." The reader gets a quick image of the setting, no problem: old house on hill.  Me, I'm saying—early colonial? Late colonial? Was it there before or after the King's Highway was built?  When were the King's highways built? And so on.  And one thing you're not supposed to do is insert "infodumps" into your book—you lose your reader's interest, fast.  They do not want to read two pages about the evolution of domestic architecture and its correlation with public infrastructure in the American colonies during the eighteenth century.

 

So I cheat, just a little, in my series.  My protagonist in each case probably knows very little about certain subjects, so she can ask stupid questions of someone who does know.  That way I sneak a little information in, without overdoing it.  It's a balancing act.

 

I love history, really.  In all my books I'm aware of how much the past informs the present, whether it's in Massachusetts, Philadelphia, or County Cork. But that may be as close as I'm going to get to writing historical fiction. I think I've found the perfect intersection:  a t-shirt I bought at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, which bears a quote from Henry David Thoreau, "Simplify, simplify."  Words to live by.

 

 

Living through History

Elizabeth Zelvin

If Thanksgiving hadn’t fallen on November 22 this year, this post would have appeared a week ago, on the 49th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Yes, I’m of the generation that remembers exactly where I was at the time: in my off-campus apartment at college, where the friend I’d planned to spend the afternoon with arrived on my doorstep two hours late, tears streaming down her face as she said, “Oh, Liz, the President is dead!” But this blog isn’t about that.

I’m not a fan of horror—in books, in movies, or on TV—and for many years I avoided the works of Stephen King, about whom all I knew was the erroneous belief that he was just a horror fiction writer. Writing mysteries and hanging out with genre fiction writers over the past ten years corrected that impression. First, I read John Dunning’s wonderful mysteries about the used book business and learned that first editions of King’s early books are highly collectible. Then, I became aware that King is highly respected by other writers, in fact, a writer’s writer, as well as author of what’s considered one of the best books on writing. I also learned that he has written well in a broad variety of genres. Finally, I heard him speak in person, when he was named a Grand Master of Mystery Writers of America. I’ve repeated many times his advice to aspiring writers: “Read, read, read; write, write, write; and lose the adverbs.” But I’d still never picked up one of his books until this fall, when I decided to read the novel 11/22/63, about a time traveler from 2011 whose mission is to prevent the Kennedy assassination.

I was born in 1944, just ahead of the boomer babies. For me, “the War” is World War II, and “history” ends (and “the present” begins) at its conclusion. When I hear fiction set in the 1950s or 1960s referred to as historical novels, I get a little wigged out, even though I’m well aware that I’ve lived through more than half a century since I went off to college. What King does with tremendous skill in 11/22/63 is not only to render the texture, the idiom, even the smell of the period from September 1958 (my junior year in high school) to November 1963 (my senior year in college), but to bring to vivid life how different it was from the America we live in now. The book is 842 pages long, so he’s got plenty of time to build up the detail, while never allowing the pace of the story to flag as the reader keeps turning the pages to find out what happens next and empathizes ever more deeply with the engaging protagonist.

Having lived one day at a time through the period that Jake Epping spans by walking a few steps through a figurative “rabbit hole,” there are many ways in which I’ve experienced the changes with which we all live so gradually that I’d never really thought about some of the sharper and more subtle disparities that King’s discerning eye illuminates. Of course, I’d made the broad comparisons. I know there were no computers or cell phones in 1963. We hadn’t sent a man to the moon or a woman to the Supreme Court or what we then called a Negro to the White House. But do I really remember the omnipresent tobacco smoke and the cheerful way advertisers encouraged the public to light up? How about airports, how passengers flapped their tickets at a clerk and then carried their unexamined bags across the tarmac to their planes? How about hospitals, the lack of security and of technology we take for granted? Two characters acquire disfiguring injuries in the book, and the best that cosmetic surgeons can do in 1963 lags far behind the laser treatments available in the 21st century. Nor can a severely injured or comatose patient be monitored via digital screens that graph and beep the difference between a beating heart and one that’s flatlined, as we say in our era. Nor would I have thought I needed Stephen King to remind me of the impact of the women’s movement (in which I myself participated). But he draws attention to the magnitude of the gap between our speech, appearance, expectations, and assumptions then and now.

Here’s a bit of Jake’s first impression of 1958: “Mostly I was just plain freaked....I kept thinking about the ladies in their long dresses and hats, ladies who would be embarrassed to show so much as the edge of a bra strap in public. And the taste of that root beer. How full it had been.”

Now that he’s called my attention to it, I can remember that we used to be greatly embarrassed if a bit of strap or the edge of a slip showed or if a stocking seam was crooked, and how little that matters now. And I guess things tasted better, but I’d have attributed that to my changing relationship with food and the increasing age of my taste buds. In spite of the ubiquitous smoke and a smelly factory or two, King reminds us of an era when air, water, and food both animal and vegetable were cleaner, doors less likely to be locked and guarded, and the human race as a whole more optimistic about the future.

Tales of Two Hitchcocks

by Sandra Parshall

Who was the real Alfred Hitchcock?

The sex-crazed obsessive who tortured Tippi Hendren when she rebuffed his advances? Or the henpecked director who let his wife tell him how to make his films and was sweet as a doting uncle to Janet Leigh?

A recent television film called The Girl and the new biopic Hitchcock remind me of the cautionary tale about two blind men who were asked to describe an elephant. After one touched the animal’s trunk and the other its tail, they gave wildly contradictory descriptions of the complete creature. The two films about Hitchcock have a lot of verifiable facts in common, but they offer very different perspectives. Hitchcock is so light and breezy and The Girl so dark that it’s hard to reconcile the two viewpoints.

In Hitchcock, which opened in theaters last weekend, Anthony Hopkins plays the director with a mild comic edge that makes him seem harmless and likable even when he’s conversing with the dead serial killer Ed Gein. The movie is about the making of Psycho, inspired by Gein’s devotion to his mother. Gein dug up his mom’s corpse and returned it to their house, where he slept beside the rotting body and carried on as if she were alive and well.

Hitchcock’s penchant for blonde actresses is well-known and was obvious in his films – he worked with Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, Kim Novak, Vera Miles, Ingrid Bergman, among others. For the lead in Psycho he chose Janet Leigh, and he gave the subsidiary female role to Miles. Although the new biopic shows him briefly lamenting Miles’s refusal to let him turn her into a film goddess, there’s nothing obsessive about his behavior, and he is depicted as a perfect gentleman toward Leigh, played by Scarlett Johansson.

With a total lack of conflict in Hitchcock’s relationships with the actresses, the filmmakers resorted to invention, concocting a romantic attachment between Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville (played by the incomparable Helen Mirren), and a male screenwriter who wants her help in doctoring a script. Alma, by all accounts a gifted film editor who worked on her husband’s movies without an on-screen credit, is portrayed as the savior who whipped Hitchcock’s flabby, unexciting version of Psycho into shape and made it a masterpiece of suspense and terror. Without her intervention, it seems, Psycho would have had a limited release and died a quick, quiet death. Alma suggested killing off the Leigh character after 30 minutes, and she insisted on the unforgettable music in movie history’s most famous shower scene.
 
 
Alma is also depicted as a discontented wife, fed up with her husband’s “fantasy affairs” with his blonde leading ladies and craving his attention at the same time she feels disgusted by his weight and piggish eating habits. He rebels against her criticism at times, but he knows that he needs her.

The Girl, a joint production of the BBC and HBO that was shown on U.S. cable TV recently, is about the making of The Birds, the film that followed Psycho. Alma is a minor character in The Girl, and Hitchcock is a man teetering on the brink of madness. Played by Toby Jones, he is sexually obsessed with Tippi Hedren (acted by Sienna Miller). When the actress isn’t playing her physically exhausting role on the set, she’s narrowly escaping the director’s advances behind the scenes. Hitchcock punishes her for rejecting him by forcing her to do dozens of takes, a full day’s worth, of a scene in which she is attacked by a mob of birds. Nothing about that attack was faked. Hedren ended up collapsing, covered with bleeding wounds.

The Girl has stirred up a storm of protest from those loyal to the Hitchcock legend. The filmmakers say they based much of the script on interviews with Jim Brown, Hitchcock’s long-time right-hand man and assistant director on The Birds. But Brown died before the movie was completed, and his wife has declared in interviews that she is “absolutely sure” her husband would never have spoken ill of Hitchcock. Scriptwriter Gwyneth Hughes, a BBC veteran, responded that her screenplay reflects Brown’s frank statements about Hitchcock’s “painful relationship with Tippi Hedren.”

Hedren says the film is an accurate account of what happened to her while she was working for Hitchcock on The Birds and later on a second movie, Marnie. She has called him “evil and deviant” and told the audience at a London screening of The Girl that his obsession with her was “oppressive and frightening” and a “horrible experience.” Another of Hitchcock’s blonde leading ladies, Kim Novak, told the press that he never made a pass at her, therefore she doesn’t believe the stories Hedren tells about him.

It’s up to the viewer to decide which film is closer to the truth about the real Hitchcock... or whether they show two sides of the same man. Fortunately, nothing we discover about the filmmaker, his personal behavior, or his wife’s role in shaping the movies, can diminish the films themselves. Like any brilliant work of art, they live on as distinct entities, quite apart from their creator.

The Next Best Thing

Sharon Wildwind

Thanks so much to Texas mystery writer, Bill Crider, for tagging me last Wednesday in The Next Best Thing go-around. I was supposed to answer these questions tomorrow, on Wednesday, but Bill, sweet guy that he is, said I could do it a day early, so that’s what I’m doing.

Here are the questions he passed on to me to answer:

What is the working title of your next book?

Carrying the Blood

Where did the idea come from for the book?

One night as I sat in a folk club listening to a musician-friend perform, I noticed how much of the audience was my age, that is to say we remember the great folk scare of the late fifties and early sixties. My involvement with the folk music world has waxed and wained over time, but what about creating characters who have been heavily involved for a long time? The live music world is a small family and eventually family secrets come out. That could lead to murder, couldn’t it?

What genre does your book fall under?

Amateur sleuth with a touch of romance.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I watch very few movies, and what I do see comes from Britain, this is a tough one. So I decided to go with two people no longer with us, and one British actress, still very much alive.

Jay-Jay is absolutely Waylon Jennings: big, tall, gravely voice, and likely needs a haircut. For Sid I wanted an extreme contrast, a quiet man who always sink into the background. How about Don Hebert, who was Mr. Wizard on Watch Mr. Wizard? Rosemary Harris, the wonderful British actress who plays Peter Parker’s aunt, would make a terrific Robbie. As you can guess, all three of my main characters are of an age to also remember the great folk scare.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Robbie Breland believes that great music matters more than backstage shenanigans, but when a young musician dies it’s the backstage goings-on that point to murder.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Wherever I can get the best deal.

How long did it take you to write a first draft of the manuscript?

Six months, and counting.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I’m fond of both Earlene Fowler’s Benni Harper series and Margaret Maron's Deborah Knott series. In my wildest fantasies I’d love to write to their level, so that’s what I’m aiming for.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The most immediate inspiration was a British Columbia performer named Tom Lewis who was on stage when the idea of the book came to me. And a dear friend, no longer with us, named Tex König. And a whole lot of time listening to music at summer folk festivals in Edmonton, Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Calgary.

What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

Robbie thought she’d gotten over Jay-Jay decades ago when she divorced him and married Sid. Now she’s not sure where her heart lies.

What I was supposed to do now is tag five other writers, who would answer these same questions next week on their blog. I’ve always had a problem with chain-type thingys, so what I would prefer is for you to leave a comment with the name of some of your favorite mystery-related blogs. Bet we get more than five.

Quote for the week

Once upon a time, wasn’t singing a part of everyday life as much as talking, physical exercise, and religion? Our distant ancestors, wherever they were in this world, sang while pounding grain, paddling canoes, or walking long journeys. Can we begin to make our lives once more all of a piece? Finding the right songs and singing them over and over is a way to start. And when one person taps out a beat, while another leads into the melody, or when three people discover a harmony they never knew existed, or a crowd joins in on a chorus as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher, then they also know there is hope for the world.

~Pete Seeger, musician, songwriter, and activist

How Killers Blend In

by Julia Buckley

I was contemplating the idea of murderers who get away with crimes--from fictional characters like Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov to real-life controversial figures like O.J. Simpson (who was exonerated in the courtroom but not necessarily in the court of public opinion)--and wondering what it is that allows some people to walk away from a crime and never face consequences, while others are caught, either instantly or after an investigation.

Part of getting away with it, Dostoevsky suggests, is random.  His character, Rodion Raskolnikov, commits a murder that is quite bloody.  He is almost caught in the act, which compels him to commit another, quite unplanned murder, and then he is almost caught again.  The only thing that saves him is the whim of the other person, who decides to go and get help rather than investigate what is behind the door of the apartment.

After that come more coincidences--the fact that there is an empty flat in which Raskolnikov can hide when the police come; the fact that no one happens to be on the stairwell when he comes down, and the fact that the courtyard of the building, at that particular time, is empty.  He is able to slide out onto the sidewalk unseen, unnoticed, even thought his clothes are stained with blood.  The only thing that leads to his eventual detection is the gradual disintegration of his mind, partly due to the persistence of his own conscience.

If one goes with the theory that O.J. Simpson was guilty, there is all sorts of evidence to support that idea, from previous 9-1-1 calls made by his wife, alleging violent attacks by him; blood and hair evidence linking Simpson to both Brown and Goldman; clues left at the scene of the bloody double homicide; and the behavior of Simpson himself after the murders: strange, erratic, inappropriate. He led the police on a now-famous slow-chase in his white Ford Bronco and left a rambling, self-pitying suicide note implying that he himself had been victimized.  One line read, "At times I have felt like a battered husband or boyfriend but I loved her, make that clear to everyone. And I would take whatever it took to make it work" (The Trial of OJ Simpson--selected documents).  Simpson's seemingly unconscious alteration of that final cliche could be read as a chilling sign of his obsession and his violence.

Simpson suggested that he was a good person who lived by the Golden Rule and that the media was to blame for the way people perceived him. If he is guilty of the crimes (and several people have come forward since the trial to say he "confessed" to them), he has lived with his own guilt since 1994, first as a free man and later in prison.

So how do killers go on with life and with potentially crushing guilt?  The most successful of them are probably psychopaths, according to Dr. Mary Ellen O'Toole, who wrote this blog for Psychology Today.  The psychopath has no conscience, O'Toole notes.  He or she also knows how to "look normal" and "land on [his] feet."  In OJ's case, it helped that he was a national hero, a beloved sports icon whose fans were reluctant to believe that he could do anything so dastardly as double homicide.

Simpson always contended that he would search for "the real killers" of Nicole, but never took steps to do so.

After the recent acquittal of Casey Anthony, whom many believe to be guilty of killing her own two-year-old daughter (and who displayed some of the most narcissistic behavior in the history of accused killers), one might raise the question of just how many murderers walk the streets, undetected.  O'Toole points out that "dangerous people do not look any different than non-dangerous people. They can be married, live in houses, and have pets and children."

So, not to turn this into Rear Window--but do you ever look at your neighbors, or at your block, or your neighborhood--and wonder just how many people are getting away with murder?

Medieval Hanukkah

Since the first night of Hanukkah is December 7th--not very far away--I decided to post an article I've run before on my other blog, Getting Medieval (because like any older person, I'm beginning to repeat myself):

Growing up Jewish in a Christian America was sometimes trying, especially when my family was of the reformed variety. Christmas couldn't be avoided. It was everywhere in shops, on television in the children's fare of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer", and on the radio with Christmas carols bombarding the airwaves. Little wonder this little Jewish girl comes to look on at Christmas with brightly shining eyes.

But it was the Dickens Christmas of roast goose and wide-skirted carolers; Father Christmas and plum pudding (of which I had never partaken), that captured my imagination.

Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights that rolled around usually at the same time as Christmas, just couldn't hold a candle. Er...

But it is a holiday with many meanings and expresses many events at once. The medieval Jew embraced it: the idea of the smaller army of Jews rising up to conquer their gentile oppressors. Always a popular theme with Jews in Europe when they were ousted from so many places, just as they had been ousted from the Holy Land. They could relate to that ancient history since it kept happening to them again and again.


Given that this is a holiday with no biblical source (the Books of Maccabees where part of the Hanukkah celebrations can be found, are listed in Christian bibles, which are apocryphal to Jews and not considered part of the canon), there was a clash between those rabbis who followed oral rabbinic traditions and those that were strictly biblical. (The same clash occurs between Protestants and Catholics regarding traditions with a small "t" and Traditions with a large "T". In the Last Supper, for instance, where the gospels say that Jesus is reclining at table is a perfect example of the importance of following tradition with a small "t". Biblical commandments in Exodus have God exhorting Moses to instruct the people to eat their Passover standing up as a people in flight, ready to high-tail it when the time is right. But sometime between the time of Moses and the time of Jesus, Jewish tradition changed to the partaking of the Passover in a reclining position. As it says in the Haggadah [the prayer book used during the Passover Seder] the Egyptian Hebrews stood to eat just as a slave stands to eat in the presence of his master. But to recline is to exclaim one's freedom. Thus Jesus, as a good Jewish boy, follows Jewish tradition rather than God's biblical command.)

The source for Hanukkah, or the Dedicating of the Temple, comes from something called the Megillit Antiochus or the Scroll of Antioch, dating from somewhere between the 2nd and 5th centuries AD (there's more on that in the Jewish Encyclopedia.) The Books of Maccabees talks about a re-dedication of the Temple by Judah Maccabee, his brothers, and his army, but never specifically mentions a miracle, only that the celebration should last for eight days, which, indeed, most Jewish holidays do. (In Jewish numerology, Seven is the perfect number: seven days of creation. But the number eight--God--is beyond perfect. When a boy is eight days old he is circumcised and brought into the covenant. Eight days for most Jewish celebrations.) It is this scroll that gives us the story of the miracle of the oil.

The Story: Around 175 BCE, Antiochus IV Epiphanes King of Greek Syria and other places, ruled over the Jews and outlawed Judaism, ordering a statue of Zeus to be erected in the temple. The Maccabees revolted, won, and worked to reconsecrate the Temple, getting all that nasty gentile stuff out of there, building a new altar, etc. In order for the re-dedication to be complete, the menorah or candelabrum or multi-burning oil lamp was to burn for seven nights, but there was only enough consecrated oil to burn for one day and there was no time to get more. But it miraculously burned for eight days. Thus the eight day celebration.
In the middle ages, the Megillit Antiochus was read aloud in synagogues much as Purim, another rabbinically declared holiday and another tale about Jews rising up against their oppressors, was celebrated. Jews reenacted the lighting of a menorah in the synagogues as well as in their homes. The proper way to light a menorah is to have it in a doorway. Not quite practical, so the next best thing is to have it in a window, fulfilling the rabbis decree to show the miracle to the world (which is why there are all those public displays of menorah lighting. It is NOT the Jewish answer to a public lighting of a Christmas tree. If anything, it's the other way around.)
 
Though for all that, Hanukkah was never a huge holiday. It was just one of many. Certainly not a High Holy Day like Rosh Hashonnah (Jewish New Year) or Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement). It was another reminder to Jews of God's miracles and His dedication to the Chosen People no matter where they find themselves and under what circumstances.

And by the way, have you noticed that it falls on different days year by year? That's because it's a moveable feast. The Jewish calendar follows the cycles of the moon and so Hanukkah can fall as early as Thanksgiving and as late as after Christmas, but usually comes somewhere in between.

The tradition of giving a gift for each day of the holiday is more a reflection of their Christian neighbors during a gift-giving season than part of any older tradition. The Eastern European tradition of eating foods cooked in oil, however, can be more gratifying if not cholesterol-building. Because it is a feast of oil burning, foods such as latkes (potato pancakes) and donuts are part of the fare. Can't knock that. Playing the dreidel is supposed to be a reflection of a game that the Maccabees played while waiting to attack their enemies. It's like dice. It's a gambling game.

Incidentally, you haven't miscounted when you see a menorah and wonder why it has nine places for candles instead of only eight. The center place is for the shamash or helper candle. It merely lights the other ones. However, you will notice in all the older images and bas reliefs of menorahs, they have the more traditional temple number of seven arms (six and the shamesh).

So next time you see a menorah and hear about Hanukkah, don't do what my Christian contemporaries did when I was a child (and still hear on occasion); don't compliment the Jew on "their Christmas". Appreciate it on its own level, its ancient and varied traditions.

And have a latke. They're tasty.