My Wife is Cheating on Me, But I Have a Job Offer in Bournemouth

I don't know where these people are getting my email address.

This morning I opened up my email only to be deluged with the usual flood of clickbait and spam. Five different people wanted me to know that my wife was running around behind my back. Their warnings were accompanied by a photo of a slutty-looking dame young enough to be my granddaughter in the arms of some guy. Click here to find out more. Luckily, I am not yet so far around the bend as to think I have a wife, even in the modern day when women are allowed to have them. Actually I have a husband. He’s not cheating on me. He knows it would hurt my feelings.

So I didn’t click on that one. Nor did I click on any of the emails that offered to spray away my baldness, two sprays every morning. Nor the cures for diabetes (a false disease, they claim. All you need is the right attitude. Click here and we’ll explain everything.) Nor yet on the promises to restore my eyesight. Throw away your glasses! Click here!

I have succeeded in automatically sending all the solicitations from the Party straight to my junk mail folder, ten or fifteen of them every day. The burden of their message is that the kabillionaire Koch brothers are buying up all the elections. To counteract the efforts of these evil men I must send the Party five dollars at once. Never mind how silly it is to imagine that the discretionary income of an old lady on Social Security is going to counterbalance the wealth of the Kochs. That’s not even why I won’t send them money. I won't send them money because I know they would use it to hire more people to bombard me with emails. If elections really are for sale, then I guess they’re going to have to go to the wealthy.

A number of years ago there was a congressman in a neighboring district who was plainly in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry. I researched to see what Big Pharma had donated to his campaign, and it turned out to be $250,000. The value of our house. “How cheap!” I cried. “Harold, let’s sell the house and buy a congressman.” “What would we do with a congressman?” We decided we’d rather have the house. But I digress.

The daily job offer from Bournemouth is a curious thing. It's one of a number of solicitations that come to my mailbox from the UK. I once ordered a book directly from a British publisher. The book was great. It came in a big mailbag with customs markings all over it. But evidently the publishers sold my email address to various other entities in the UK, shopping and travel sites, even a newsletter for landlords on how to deal with government regulations and brutalize the tenants. All useless to me. I’m too far away to spend a weekend at a Scottish castle and I don’t deal in pounds.

I must confess that the reason I read my mail at all, aside from the occasional notes from relatives and friends, is to see the latest fashions being offered by the likes of Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, and Neiman Marcus. Most folks would probably consider that stuff to be spam. Still, by following it carefully, I can occasionally pick up a great bargain to swank around Lambertville in. Then there's Shoebuy, which has these great sales.

Shoes. Now you're talking.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Security!

Nearly everyone I know who uses Yahoo! for an email provider has had the Yahoo! mail account hacked sometime in the last couple of years, strangers sending out messages over the rightful owner's signature. Russians (okay, Russians and others, let's not be bigots) get hold of the password and use the email account to distribute spam and malware. But you don't have to be on Yahoo!. It can happen to anybody. It happened to me, just last week, on my Host and Store account.

How I knew that this was going on was by the messages that bounced back from the "postmaster" of email, undeliverable, sent from my address. All in Cyrillic. The Russians, those clever devils, are at it again. Actually one of the messages was in Italian, but it was addressed to Yuri somebody-or-other. The message was clearly spam, couched in the form of a job offer: click here to get a good job and turn your life around. Right. I'll be sure to do that, right after I send the Nigerians my bank account number.

Anyway, as a result of having my email account hacked last week I changed my email password. It's a good idea to do that at regular intervals anyway, for all your passwords.

Then the news broke about Heartbleed, which isn't even a hack, or a virus, but a back door that somebody left open when they put the open-source security code together that's supposed to keep the hackers out of many sites. What it does is enable knowledgeable hackers to steal your passwords, maybe your Social Security number, maybe your bank account number, maybe your phone number. Does Host and Store use this open-source code for security? I don't even know. They were too small to be interviewed. I do know that they haven't re-upped the security certificate for my website, not since they've been handling it, so that I get a warning message every time I go to open my mail. But I digress.

Heartbleed. It's everywhere, almost. If you want to know about a particular site, here's a link you can use to inquire: https://lastpass.com/heartbleed/. Although it might not be entirely effective, given that it says that Host and Store's web site doesn't even exist. Bottom line, you might want to stay off the internet for another few days, and then change your passwords. If you change a password before a patch is in place, the hackers can get it right away anyhow, if they want to, or so say the knowing ones.

As for me, I recommend putting nothing out on the internet that you wouldn't want to see on a billboard in Times Square. That includes birthdays. You won't find my birthday on Facebook. I assume you wish me a happy birthday, whenever it is. I wish you one too. It'll be happier if criminals aren't stealing your identity.

Yours in paranoia,

Kate Gallison

Open Pores

I introduced myself to Tom at the 1992 MWA Edgar Awards Dinner. I’d read Dark Maze and believed it the best crime novel of the year, so I brought it to the dinner for Tom’s autograph. It got the Edgar and I made a friend. Ten years later, Tom was in L.A. waiting to be discovered when he persuaded his buddy, the late David Mills, to buy our pilot script, ‘The System,’ for Aaron Spelling-TV Productions. That got us two free weekends in Hollywood working with Mills in his trailer on the set of his then ill-starred ‘King Pins,’ a gory Mexican cartel melodrama, as we revised and blackboarded our script. Spelling flew us from NYC to the Coast First Class. On arrival, the agent Tom had arranged as our representation said words to us I’ll never forget. “You’re hot in this town,” she said.

In the end, NBC passed on filming our opus, and flew us back home—Coach. We’d cooled.

Robert Knightly

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Thus begins a fog-bound Thursday in the life of Yours Truly, mystery writer of yore:

I awake, scratch myself, consider the merits of shaving (or not), drink up the newspapers and a pot of coffee, wonder where I might find a spot of cash, decide who among the people in my head are quick or dead, and wonder about a cryptic e-mail.

A decade ago, my place in the demimonde of crime literature, as I prefer to call the noble genre, still flickered, if weakly. Two decades ago, I established myself in that world on the wonderful April evening of ’92, when I collected an Edgar Allan Poe Award. Now in the year 2013, you have likely never heard of me. My last crime novel, Grief Street, was released in 1997. Its forerunners—Sea of Green, Dark Maze, Thrown-Away Child, Drown All the Dogs, and Devil’s Heaven—have been promoted to Glory, to employ the Salvation Army eulogy. There are two ways of looking at this: negatively, or positively. Which is to say, Nothing recedes like success—or, To everything there is a season.

My comrades in the writing dodge—scriveners like me, whose claims to fame are now mainly down the drain—frequently blame publishers for their plight. (To be sure, publishers deserve a measure of ill repute. As a species, they are unlovely, possessing all the imagination, romance, and élan of—pigeons. Yet they are not so beautiful against the sky.) But just as often, and to their great credit, my comrades recognize a time to move on.

A few of us, having moved on and aged with some degree of grace, harbor the hope of one more of life’s rewards before we croak—perhaps one more book that we may set upon the brag shelf. Such is how it is with me.

Presently, I compose essays for a daily online journal of literature, music, and politics—the Berlin-based CulturMag. My usual dateline is “New York, near America,” and my stuff usually involves the absurd behavior of a fading empire. I am a foreign correspondent in my own country. Besides this, I slowly labor toward completion of Lovers & Corpses, which I think of as a novel with murder. The book involves a minimum of shaving, what my German colleagues call Gesäß aus Eisen (buttocks of iron), and a number of choices regarding who shall live to tell a tale and who shall die trying—and more importantly, why.

The tale concerns a burned-out cop who evolved as a burned-out journalist. Since I came within inches of becoming a cop as a young man, I am able to imagine myself as the former character. And having spent several decades in American corporate media, I know whereof I speak as regards the latter.

Should Lovers and Corpses sound rather downbeat, I hasten to add my happiness on discovering that I retain the Writer’s Soul: still, I have need of fiction’s ingredients—a cast of characters, a ripping plot, an alter ego—to sort through the chapters of my own true life.

Good cops, good journalists, and good writers walk around with their pores open. That way, everything gets under the skin. Most people don’t like feeling itchy all the time; as mentioned, though, I scratch a lot. In true life, things much stranger than fiction will occur. This very drab Thursday morning, for instance, I opened an e-mail message under the subject line, “GET BACK TO ME ASAP.” It reads, word for mangled word—(and I swear, I am not making this up):

…Someone you call a friend wants you dead by any means and the person have spent a lot of money on this. The person also came to us and told me that he want you dead and he provided us with your name, picture, and other necessary informations we needed about you. So I sent my boys to track you down and they have carried out the necessary investigation needed for the operation on you, and they have done that but I told them not to kill you that I will like to contact you and see if your life is important to you or not since their findings show that you are innocent…

If Lovers & Corpses ever sees the light of a publication day, and should you be willing to plunk down twenty-five dollars or so for your very own copy, you will recognize the foregoing as an excerpt from a larger fulmination of menace.

And know that beyond the obvious grift, the e-mailer’s lie could be a truth somewhere in time.

Thomas Adcock