The Lupines are Blooming on Deer Isle

Last week we visited friends on Deer Isle in Maine. Harold will presently write it up and attach lots of pictures, whereupon you can eyeball his page an be dazzled. Right now, though, I thought I'd sit down and give you a foretaste before we unpacked.

This weekend is the Lupine Festival, in case you're in the neighborhood of Mid-coast Maine. The lupines are a right treat. Spiky and blue, when they aren't white or pink, hey have a nice smell, subtle and spicy. Right now they are blooming all over the island and beyond. People will come pouring onto the island for the Lupine Festival, filling the restaurants, jamming the parking places, hiring seats in airplanes to buzz the local gardens and see the flowers from above. I'm glad not to be on Deer Isle for the festival, though it was good to see the flowers before everybody else and his brother got here. It sounds almost like Lambertville's Shad Festival, an annual event hated and cursed by the locals (but great fun for tourists).

They say the lupines are not native to the island, but were brought in from away, took off, and naturalized themselves. I guess we're all like that. It would be good if we could smell that good and look that pretty.

Kate Gallison

The Art of Extrapolation

Some writers can’t write about anything unless they have experienced it first-hand.

If they write about climbing Mt. Everest, they must climb Mt. Everest; if they write about escaping from killer sharks, they must swim with killer sharks; if they write about being stranded in the desert, they must become stranded in the desert, and so on and on. I am not one of these writers. And I’m sure I’m not alone. But take heart fellow cowardly writers, for there is an alternative. It’s called extrapolation. As defined by Webster, to extrapolate is “to project, extend or expand known data or experience into an area not known or experienced.” Or, as my grandfather put it less elegantly, but more simply, “You don’t have to stick your head in the garbage can to know it stinks.” Wise old grandpa.

For example, most moms have experienced losing sight of their child in a crowded airport, train station or department store. The panic, the rush of adrenalin, the icy fear. And they have also felt the dizzy relief, the joy mixed with anger, when the tot shows up, peeking out from a rack of clothing. It is not too hard to extrapolate those feelings into what a mother feels when her child is kidnapped, and later returned.

We have all experienced death in some form, either of a pet or a wild animal—bird or squirrel—in the woods. Some of us have even had the misfortunes of witnessing the death of a relative or friend. The point is, we don’t have to visit a morgue and look at rows of corpses, to know what death is.

Recently, in the novel I’m currently working on, I was trying to describe the claustrophobic feelings of a young man on a submarine. I remembered playing hide and seek as a child when some smart-aleck kid locked me in the closet where I was hiding. Presto! That panicky, trapped feeling came back in a rush and I was able to give those feelings to my character. While working on another novel, I had to describe what it’s like to ride a motorcycle. A kind friend let me sit on his Harley, parked on a busy highway and that was enough. I could imagine the rest—the throb of the motor, the wind in my hair, and narrowly missing an eighteen-wheeler.

So—relax. You don’t have to risk your life to write. Extrapolate. That’s what we have imaginations for.

Robin Hathaway

Long Shadows – A Tale of One City

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Today our new comrade in blogdom, thriller writer Thelma Straw, joins the regulars on the Crime Writers' Chronicle. A true woman of mystery, Thelma has been an extremely active member of the Mystery Writers of America, a founding member of the Carnegie Hill Writers, and a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. She has reviewed mystery books for Mystery International and Orchard Press Mysteries. Contact her at tstraw2@verizon.net.

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Barack Obama's disputed words about the June 4, 1967 lines triggered poignant memories.

It was another time. Another war. A tale of one city. . .

From the academic enclave of Sewanee, Tennessee, I headed for Jerusalem. A personal pilgrimage to the holy city.

At JFK the airlines told me the Israelis had closed Jerusalem to outsiders.

London, then Paris, then Rome. All had the same message: Jerusalem was closed. Nailed down to outsiders.

Didn't the American know there was a war on?

In Athens a small window opened. But only as far as Tel Aviv.

The night before the flight I got a taste of war – the Athenian military pomp and swagger. The Greek bloodless coup d'etat from April 21, 1967. The Regime of the Colonels. Boxed in at a concert at the amphitheater by hundreds of highly decorated members of the Greek military junta. The smell of fear and unease was all around me.

The next day I traded the casual outdoor atmosphere of the Athens Hilton pool for the solemn tone of the Tel Aviv Hilton with the mountains of sandbags lining the halls of the hotel.

Daily I hounded the travel desk for any news of a passage to Jerusalem.

No hope. The only way I could get inside the walls of the holy city was to go hidden under a canvas tarp in a cart filled with live produce. No guarantee of safety.

I retreated to the cool water of the Mediterranean and waded into the sea, my purse and all my worldly goods held above my head.

After a week I got word that the first planeload of outsiders had arrived at Ben Gurion Airport, a group of British pilgrims for a ten-day bus tour of The Holy Land. They had one seat left.

For ten glorious days our group stayed at various kibbutzim. We met hospitable Israeli and Arab people in towns and villages, held nightly prayers in inter-faith settings, made new friends.

Finally we reached the Holy City. From the King David Hotel I followed up on introductions from colleagues - the Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem, contemplative nuns on the Mount of Olives, teachers who worked at schools and missions.

On the last night I ventured out on my own to explore the famous bazaar. The labyrinth in the Old City souks, dazzling, stiflingly hot. A maze of narrow alleyways.

And got lost! No street signs, nothing looked famiiar. I was terrified.

Suddenly a young boy appeared and offered to guide me back to my hotel. But only after I went with him to meet his family.

A trick. I'd read this in books.

But they were real. Welcomed me as if I were a rock star! Wanted to hear all about America!. Served delicious tea and sweet cakes.

As we rode the tour bus back to Ben Gurion the next day I was more aware of friendliness and warmth I'd found on this trip than of sandbags and military force.

Obama brought back the memories – 44 years ago.

So many questions now.

The boy would be over 50 now.

Is he part of the Arab Spring?

Or does he fight for Israel -- or even Libya or Yemen or god knows where?

Did he come to America?

Is he even alive?

Long shadows from a night in the labyrinthine bazaar. . . . .

Thelma Straw

Depravity, the WSJ, and Young Adult Fiction

I wrote a blog post some months ago about Bucker Dudley, my as yet unsuccessful effort at writing a war story. The war was the War of 1812, not a wildly popular conflict in this country, given that the enemy burned our capital and made us look like dunces. One of my ideas was that by tweaking it I could convert Bucker Dudley into a young adult novel, if I could figure out what that was. It's been a while since I was a young anything.

Last weekend the Wall Street Journal famously ran a piece by Meghan Cox Gurdon denouncing what passes for young adult fiction in the modern day as depraved, and calling on parents to keep it away from their adolescents. A huge outcry erupted on Twitter, under the hashtag #yasaves, spearheaded by YA writer Maureen Johnson. Some people wrote to say that the books Ms. Gordon had denounced as depraved had saved them from suicide, if only by reassuring them that they weren't alone in their particular agonies. So this is what YA novels are all about, I said to myself. Books to save the young from the tortures of adolescence in the modern day.

In an ideal world, June Cleaver could select whatever reading material she thought would be good for Beaver and Wally's little minds, and they would read it gladly and become improved. We do not live in such a world. Certainly the idea of a society where violence is the order of the day, where the strong prey on the weak, where fathers force themselves on their daughters and priests on their altar boys, where young people have to drug themselves insensible to make it from sunup to sundown, is repellent to any civilized person. But that's pretty much where we are right now. Conscientious parents raising gourmet children in sanitized enclaves everywhere are free to keep this information away from them, as Ms. Gurdon recommends.

I tell you what. If YA is all about saving the young from drugs and suicide, I'm not good enough to write it. This is a higher calling than I'm up to. God knows I've taken my share of hard knocks in my time, but nothing like the stories of some of these survivors. What could I say to them that would do any good? The best I could manage would be an adventure story to take their minds off their problems.

Maybe I could try that. Bucker Dudley might work.

Kate Gallison

The Criminal Brain

Those of us who write and read crime stories may be interested in a new wrinkle on what causes criminal behavior. The twist is in the wrinkliest part of anyone’s body—his brain. Neuroscientist David Eagleman, in an interview on the great public radio show Fresh Air, recently described his research on the criminal mind. Eagleman has written a book called Incognito, about the unconscious workings of the human brain. Everything about the interview is fascinating, but the part that struck me was his inquiries into criminal behavior and how it relates to the brain. He gave a couple of fascinating examples.

Remember that guy who went up into the tower at the University of Texas and killed those people? His name was Charles Whitman, a former Marine and a student at UT Austin. On August 1, 1966, this quiet, well-liked, academically excellent young man killed his mother and his wife in their home and then climbed the tower of the university’s administration building, killing three people along the way. From the observation deck, he opened fire on the people below. He killed ten more and wounded 32 others before being killed by the police.

The initial theories about why Whitman went bonkers posited a dysfunctional family and abuse of amphetamines. Whitman, who had been complaining of unbearable headaches, left a suicide note that asked that an autopsy be performed on his brain. The postmortem revealed that a brain tumor called a glioblastoma. The coroner’s report said it "conceivably could have contributed to his inability to control his emotions and actions."  Eagleman thinks it did. I believe him.

Eagleman also told the story of a perfectly normal man in his forties who suddenly became a pedophile, collected child porn, and hit on his stepdaughter. When his wife found out, she threw him out of the house. He was arrested and served time. But in the meantime he was discovered to have a massive tumor on the frontal lobe of his brain. When it was removed, his behavior returned to normal. After a time, he started to display the criminal behavior again. He went back to the doctor, who discovered that a piece of the tumor had been left behind in the surgery. When they removed it, his behavior again returned to normal.

Eagleman insists that people who are dangerous have to be taken off the streets, but his research has enormous implications for the criminal justice system. If you would like to hear the interview, here is link to the podcast. This is all fascinating stuff and might influence the thinking of writers of crime fiction as well as the procedures of cops, judges, and wardens.

The part about criminal behavior comes in the second half of Terry Gross’s masterful (as usual) interview.

Annamaria Alfieri