The Wild, Wild West

I met today's Guest Blogger in the Mavens of Mahem, the Upstate chapter of Sisters In Crime. I cheered Joel's induction as he raised the number of "brothers" in our group to three.

Joel Gomez-Dossi has done a lot of things in his life, and some of them he'll even admit to. He started his career as a stage manager. Then he became a production manager for PBS and finally morphed into a freelance writer, working for regional publications across the country. Now he practices the world's second oldest profession: telling stories. He is the author of two novels published by Bold Strokes Books, Pursued and Deadly Cult. Joel can be contacted at joelgomezdossi@yahoo.com and www.JoelGomez-Dossi.com.

Robert Knightly

---

Yuma, Arizona during the 1960s seems like the perfect setting for a Western. Located about twenty miles from the Mexican border, the town’s call to fame was the Territorial Prison. But it closed in 1904, and agriculture became the economic powerhouse. The township, with a population of about 25,000, was now modern. It even had a new dog track to encourage economic growth. Yet growing up in Yuma during that time, I longed to experience a Hollywood adventure where I could be a cowboy and overcome insurmountable odds. Because in every good Western, the good guy wins, the villain is punished, and life becomes better.

No doubt, the adults in town shared in my fantasy because for one week each year they relived the Western ideal. At the county fairgrounds, the Yuma Jaycees presented the Annual Silver Spur Rodeo, with a bronco riding competition; steer wrestling; and everybody’s favorite, team roping.
Months before the event, townsmen stopped shaving in order to participate the whisker-growing contest. And women hauled out their sewing machines and bought shiny fabrics in anticipation of the Queen Horsemanship Competition.

But this weeklong event couldn’t satisfy my quest for adventure all year long. I needed more. I wanted unknown territory, filled with excitement, sin, and other adult things. On one particular Sunday, my Hollywood dream almost came true. My best friend and I were riding our bikes at the school parking lot. He pulled a wheelie, and then abruptly stopped and asked, “Ya wanna go to the Dog Races?”

“Really?” I asked, with my eyes lit up. I'd never been to the dog races before, though my parents talked about it often, usually disparagingly because it involved gambling, drinking, and other adult vices. Everything a good cowboy could want.

From January through March of each year, dog racing competed for the affections of Yuma Township. Ten dog races were held each night during those months, with eight dogs chasing a state-of-the-art artificial rabbit. Betting included straight, place, or show and they even had a “Quiniela double,” if you were lucky enough to bet on the first two greyhounds to cross the finish line. It was fair and square. They even used photo finishes – the first dog track in the state to have them.

With great anticipation, we left the school parking lot. I wondered what mysteries we would discover at the track. Would we stumble upon a thief attempting to abscond with a lucky winner's take? Or maybe we would discover a box load of winnings that was mysteriously buried.

Sadly, we never made it to the dog track. After what seemed like an hour of riding in the hot sun, we hadn't arrived anywhere. We were just beyond the town border, and in the desert. All around us was zilch. Nothing. Nada.

Except in the distance, where something peaked out from a hill of sand. We hid our bikes at the side of the road and stealthily climbed the hill. Just beyond it was a near-hidden oasis consisting of a corral and an adobe hut. Horses grazed in the corral. And nearby, saddles waited in the ready with reins neatly arranged by the side. And on the wall of the hut hung two large rifles.

We looked at each other and wondered. Who owned this outpost, and for what purpose? There weren't any humans on the property, at least from what we could see. So our conclusion came quickly. Its purpose had to be bad. We needed to investigate further.

“You go first?” my friend asked.

"Me?" I said. "No way."

“Okay, I’ll go." His voice lacked conviction, but I didn't care. He took a deep breath, and trudged down the sand. Then he suddenly disappeared from sight.

“You okay?” I shouted at the sand.

“Yeah, I fell, that's all.” He stood up, brushed off his pants, and made his way to the corral. The horses trotted towards him to say hello. "Come on. Ya gotta see this!" he beckoned to me.

I began running to the horses. I never was very athletic, so I was kind of slow. But when I reached the corral, a man shouted out from nowhere. “What are you two kids doing here? GET OUT.” We looked round and round, but couldn’t see anyone.

He yelled again, and my friend turned towards the sound of the voice. Then he turned towards me, and then towards the voice again. He made an instant decision and ran away, leaving me in the dust and facing certain doom.

“You, there,” the man yelled at me. “Why are you here?”

I said nothing. A grizzly-looking man appeared from the side of the hut, hauling two large garbage cans. “Get the hell outta here!” He threw the cans at me, and rotting garbage flew everywhere.
I didn’t hesitate. I ran back to the road, mounted my bike, and flew home as quickly as possible. When I arrived, I quietly opened the front door and snuck in. My mother and father sat on the davenport while a Gunsmoke rerun played on the television. I slipped through the living room, and as far as I could tell, my parents didn't suspect a thing.

The next day, my friend and I exchanged stories about our adventure with everyone at school. Yes, we embellished the plot a bit. But even if we hadn't, our adventure would still be filled with thrills and suspense.

I live in upstate New York now, and I write thrillers. But I try to remember what I learned that day every time I sit down at the computer. The tenets of a good story remain the same, whether it’s a Western, a Thriller, or a Mystery. Suspense is anticipation. And to be thrilled involves narrowly escaping catastrophe.

It's also important I mention that in the 60s, the public never realized the cruelty that dog racing inflicted on its dogs. The Yuma Greyhound Park was no different. It closed in 1993, after two serious cases of animal abuse claimed the lives of over a hundred hounds.

© 2014 Joel Dossi

The Mystery of Titles

Agatha Winner's New Novel…

Sandra Parshall's blog "How I Write" should be required reading for crime writers! (Find it on her website at www.sandraparshall.com.)

A pillar of Sisters in Crime, Sandy, a native of South Carolina, is a constant source of helpful information on the publishing world for many mystery/crime writers. As a child she wrote stories on pulp paper tablets, then as an adult progressed from writing obituaries in Spartanburg to top-notch features at the Baltimore Evening Sun.

Winner of the esteemed Agatha at Malice Domestic in 2006 for The Heat of the Moon, she combines her love of animals and her keen observations of human nature in her series, featuring veterinarian Rachel Goddard.

Her current novel, Poisoned Ground, explores the issues of land development in the Blue Ridge Mountains, as well as poisoned ground beneath a bucolic Southern surface.

An avid photographer, she would love to visit the Wolong and Chengdu panda centers in China!

I am delighted to have her as our guest today…

T. Jackie Straw

---

Everybody agrees that a great title is essential to a book’s success. Unfortunately, agreement on what makes a great title is hard to come by. Sometimes the person closest to the material, the author, is the worst judge of what to name it.

Agatha Christie’s all-time bestselling novel, And Then There Were None, started out with the title Ten Little Niggers. (Let’s pause while everybody cringes.) She drew the reference from a British nursery rhyme, and the book was originally published in the UK with those words on the cover. The American publisher balked and changed it to And Then There Were None, drawing from the same nursery rhyme. Some editions were published as Ten Little Indians, but the only title now approved by the Christie estate is And Then There Were None.

Other examples of poor title choices by authors are less offensive to our social sensibilities but equally cringe-worthy.

We’ve all heard about the various names attached to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous novel before it became The Great Gatsby. Would you want to go see the film version of Trimalchio in West Egg or Among the Ash-Heaps starring Leonardo diCaprio? Would you be even slightly tempted to pick up a book with one of those titles?

The original title of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was Atticus. Beloved though the character is, his name alone just doesn’t do it as a title.

Carson McCullers titled her first novel The Mute. Houghton-Mifflin changed it to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, drawn from an 1896 poem by Scottish writer Fiona McLeod.

Crime fiction titles have to carry more baggage than those on literary novels, and the name Christie’s book ended up with is a good example of that. And Then There Were None has an ominous ring to it. We know something terrible is happening between the covers of this book, and the mystery fan in us wants to find out more.

The crime fiction umbrella covers several subgenres, and titles are chosen to signal what type of mystery or suspense novel the reader can expect. Even without seeing the colorful, pleasant scene on the cover, we can recognize a cooking cozy or a knitting cozy by its title. A humorous mystery needs a title to match. A blunt, one-word title like many of Karin Slaughter’s — Blindsighted, Fractured, Undone, Fallen, Criminal — tells us to expect a hard-edged thriller.

The titles I love, though, have a bit of poetry in them, and they’re often found on books with a strong psychological suspense element. A Dark-Adapted Eye, by Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine, is the most beautiful crime fiction title I’ve ever seen, and it perfectly evokes the mood of this novel about family secrets.

Some writers agonize over choosing titles, seeking advice from family, friends, and their writing communities. Others have a title before they’ve fully developed the concept for the book, and they cling to it after it no longer fits what they’re writing. Few authors are happy when their publishers rename their work, and they may rail about marketing taking precedence over creative judgment — even when everyone else can see the publisher’s choice is clearly better.

Most of my titles have come from the text of the books. At some point, as I’m writing, a phrase will spool out on my computer screen and I’ll stop and say aloud, “That’s it.”

My working title for The Heat of the Moon was Memory. Then I wrote a passage in Chapter Eleven about an incident in Rachel Goddard’s childhood that made her realize her mother would never truly love her. “Her show of affection for me,” Rachel recalls, “was like the heat of the moon, an illusion, a glow that gave no warmth.” As soon as I wrote the line, I knew I had my title. I still love it, but I’ve grown used to people misremembering it, calling it In the Heat of the Moon or (confusing it with the movie) The Heat of the Night.

Disturbing the Dead also came from a line of dialog, when someone warns Tom Bridger — who has just discovered two skeletons of long-missing women on a mountain — that no good can come from disturbing the dead. The damaged lives of so many characters in my third book suggested the title Broken Places, and Bleeding Through seemed ideal for a book about secrets from the past bleeding through into the present and destroying lives. Among my six books, the one title I don’t like is Under the Dog Star. It fits the story, but I’ve never lost the feeling that I could have come up with something better.

Poisoned Ground, the title of my new novel, is a metaphor for the lethal strife among local people over a proposed resort development in the small mountain community of Mason County, Virginia. But it has another, hidden, meaning that gradually comes into focus as a present-day murder investigation uncovers long-ago events on some of the properties in question. That’s the kind of title I love, one with layers of meaning.

What sort of titles attract you to a book? What are some of your favorite mystery titles?

Sandra Parshall
www.sandraparshall.com

My Misspent Youth

Once upon a time I belonged to a motorcycle gang.

Actually it was a lunch club. It was sometime around 1980. We met at my apartment on State Street in Trenton, within easy walking distance of the state office buildings where we all worked. Everybody gave Harold five dollars a week, and he came up with enough food and drink to get us through the rest of the day until dinner time. The menu was long on instant powdered soup, as I recall, the contemporary equivalent of ramen noodles.

Nobody had a motorcycle. Most of us had never even ridden on one. At some point we acquired a helmet, but that was as close as we ever came until Phil Rowe abandoned his non-functioning Ducati and Harold dragged the pieces home and stuck them in the yard. So, as you see, motorcycles weren't the point of the club, and neither was gourmet lunch. We came together because we were dizzy stylists, out for an hour of fun away from the bowels of the state bureaucracy.

We ate our soup, talked about Life with a capital L, gossiped about our friends, and sometimes did writing exercises. The three core members, me, Harold, and Lee, were writers. Others dropped in, Jim from upstairs, Leanne when she could get to town, the lovely Phoenix, and even George, who recently published his entire memoirs without ever mentioning the Wild Snakes. The membership was fluid. At its height it included all of our friends plus the forty city employees who claimed to be living in Jim's apartment. You had to live in Trenton to work for the city in those days, and these people, architects and like that, were far too hip to live in a place like Trenton. They commuted from Manhattan or Brooklyn and gave the city Jim's address.

At the height of the Snakes craze, when everybody wanted to belong, we threw a huge party in Jim's apartment. It was themed. The purity party. Everyone came in costume, and the costumes had to be white. Harold rented a white tail-coat outfit. I made myself a white satin evening gown and bought a cheap blond wig. One of the women came as Princess Leia, with her long hair done up in cootie-garages over either ear. The resemblance was striking. I've forgotten what everyone else wore, but we all looked perfectly gorgeous. We were perfectly gorgeous. We had so much style.

When Harold and I moved to Lambertville the Snakes broke up for lack of a place to meet. It had been winding down before that. The city, for example, found that it didn't really need all those architects, and Jim went back to Minnesota. Every spring, though, I feel the stirrings of the old desire for dizzy style. Here it is again. I think I'll go try to find my old Wild Snakes tee shirt.

© 2014 Kate Gallison

Left Coast Crime

I am heading for the airport and Left Coast Crime in Monterey.  I will have a report on the conference and my following travels around California for you next week.  For now I leave you to contemplate this:

This was what ECONOMY class looked like in the 1960's!  It is NOT what I will be experiencing for six hours today.

Annamaria Alfieri

The Pipes, the Pipes are Callin'…

The best plate of corned beef and cabbage to be had in Albany on St. Patrick’s Day is at the Hall of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) on Ontario Street downtown. Actually, I’m there on the Saturday before St. Patrick’s Day because that’s when the City of Albany celebrates The Day with two Parades. The regulation one is a Downtown event that attracts the politicians and ends in front of City Hall (first erected in the late 1600s by the Dutch, commonly referred to as The Orangemen, but not on this day). The other occurs in North Albany, historical seat of the Irish and their political power from the First World War to today. The North Albany Limericks run it on their turf and no outlander pols show their faces, I’m told.

Back at the AOH post-parade, the steam table is manned by six elderly Irishwomen in aprons, ladling out slabs of corned beef, steaming cabbage, carrots, and bread and butter to the throng on line (overwhelmingly male); the Irish soda bread (two kinds—white and brown) is already in baskets at the tables. Four other grandmotherly types circulate, working the lineup of the hungry, handing out pieces of soda bread like nurses tending to weary warriors as they stumble in from the battlefield. Two even older ladies—beatifically smiling, wrinkled faces—take your money at the entrance to the Hall, and push the raffle tickets: 3 for $5, you win a Basket of Cheer (what else?). The twelve of them—a Band of Good Faeries.

There’s entertainment. A kilted bagpiper is on a dais upfront. I pay attention as he describes his instrument, a two-drone bagpipe. A drone is the bag and he has to blow it up to play and as he demonstrates you realize what a perfect name is “drone”—pure onomatopoeia! Its range is merely nine notes but an experienced piper can “whiffle” to enhance the tune. Then, for the next twenty-five minutes, he plays—The Galway Piper, The Rakes of Clonmel, The Minstrel Boy, The Garry Owen, ending with the only one I can name, Amazing Grace. Marvelous! Stirring! And very loud! As the pipers played when the Irish faced the English down the Centuries. Queen Elizabeth I, when told that the Irish fought more fiercely on hearing the pipes, decreed death for their playing. Later, Cromwell would let you live but minus your fingers. In 1745, after the Battlle of Culloden, any Scot caught with a bagpipe was hung. The bagpiper, who led the Celtic armies into battle, was honored as the bravest of men, with the shortest of life expectancies.

Makes me wonder if there were English pipers?

© 2014 Robert Knightly