The Lovely Summer Continues

Heading into the middle of August, I'm pleased to report that the weather in Lambertville could not be nicer. Not, that is, from my point of view. I like it cool, dry, and partly cloudy. I'm sitting at the dining room table right now with all the fans off, a gentle natural breeze wafting through from the front of the house to the back. The temperature in here is 74 degrees Fahrenheit. Harold has gone to work, all our summer house guests have been and gone, and while I miss them, it's nice to have the house to myself.

Now you may say, all right, then, why aren't you working on BUCKER DUDLEY? At least two readers have expressed the desire to read Episode Four, which you promised to put up for them on Kindle for 99 cents a shot. I guess I'll get to that in a little while. Right now Polly is in a half-burnt store in Toronto (called, at the time, York) in her moose-hide Indian Maiden outfit, trying to sell the storekeeper three rabbits she snared in the woods, while avoiding the eye of her archenemy, Cousin Arthur Garnett. The next scene I have to write involves a frantic chase through the streets of the town. I have to think up the 1812 equivalent of a phone booth so that she can change into the sailor boy outfit of Bucker Dudley and escape her evil cousin's clutches. But I'm feeling too languid right now to do this.

Instead I'm thinking about the coming fall, and what I might feel like wearing when the weather gets even cooler and drier. (And also how we're going to survive the next hurricane and ten-day power outage, and whether we need an automatic gas generator, but that isn't fun to think about.)

What's really fun to think about is clothing. Flying in the face of common sense, I just sent away for some plaid wool stuff to make a suit with. The plaid has a six-inch repeat, so that if I ever finish the thing and wear it out of the house I'm going to look like a Scottish Sherman tank grinding down the street. I don't care. Autumn is for plaid. Plaid is for autumn. Hey, I already have a pair of boots to go with the suit.

Okay, back to work now.

Kate Gallison

The Sex Lives of Aquatic Mammals

Guess the PUNch line:

Bjorn Friede wanted to be the first zoo keeper to breed porpoises in captivity, but no matter what he did, he could not get the animals to mate.  Finally, he convinced the director of the zoo to allow him to go on a field trip to see if he could find out what would put the porpoises in the mood.

After traveling thousands of miles, Bjorn found a beautiful tropical lagoon where he could sit on the shore and watch the porpoises in their native habitat.  He watched them swim and play and mate, but he came to no conclusion about what triggered the mating behavior.  Then, he suddenly noticed that each porpoise mating was preceded by raucous calling by the mynah birds in the trees over his head.  He observed the scene for a few more days and became convinced:  the bird calls were some sort of aphrodisiac for the porpoises.

Bjorn hurried back to the zoo with a plan to borrow two mynahs from the aviary.  Bjorn was about to make zoological history.

But Al Katraz, custodian of the aviary, wouldn’t agree to lend Bjorn the birds.  He was envious of Bjorn, whose porpoise charges gave shows and attracted so many more visitors than the aviary, to say nothing of Bjorn’s recent jaunt to a tropical paradise at zoo expense.    Katraz was adamant—the mynah birds were too valuable to submit them to the dangers of being moved to the porpoise pool.

Bjorn was determined, in spite of everything, to have his way.  He hatched a daring plan to kidnap the birds in the middle of the night.  The only problem was that Bjorn was sure Al Katraz would be on his guard for just such a scheme.  In fact, he had seen that Al was spending a lot time with Hans Hupp, the head of zoo security.

The shortest way from the aviary to the aquatic mammal pool was through the lion’s den.  Bjorn decided it was the only way.  To make sure he didn’t have any trouble with the cats, he added a strong animal tranquilizer to their food when no one was looking.

That night, he stole into the aviary, took the birds, and tiptoed into the lion’s cage, but he found that two huge sleeping males had lain down right in the doorway.  Frightened but determined, Bjorn crept up to the sleeping lions.  Just as he began to climb over them, bright lights went on all around him.

Hans, Al, and the local sheriff were all there.  Bjorn was arrested and the sheriff charged him with…….

You name the crime!

Gimlet-eyed

For many years, my mother gave me literary themed calendars for Christmas.

The first of these was a simple calendar that listed the birthdays of various writers of note. I remember my tremendous dismay when I turned to my birthday, July 23, and discovered the name of Coventry Patmore.

If the sight of his name doesn’t start you quoting from his most famous work, Angel in the House, you’re not alone. I remember going to the library to learn more about my birthday twin. Librarians, who like psychotherapists, hear everything and can keep a secret, understood my distress as they described this poem about the embodiment of feminine perfection. They did not expect to gladden my heart. I’m sure Victorian scholars could offer more nuance and context, but suffice it to say that the angel in the house is obedient to her husband and devoted to her children. Not the kind of role model I was looking for at the time. The Angel in the House gets to be but she doesn’t get to act.

Years passed. Literary calendars got savvier. One Christmas I turned to July 23 to find that Coventry Patmore had been replaced by Raymond Chandler. RAYMOND CHANDLER!!

Honor. Despair. Ennui. ALCOHOL!! My kind of guy.

So every year around my birthday I spend a little time with Mr. Chandler. Several years ago, I tried a gimlet. According to Terry Lennox, Philip Marlowe’s client in The Long Goodbye, a proper gimlet is made with half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice. I don’t know if my gimlet was made using that recipe, but it was uninspiring. I returned to the world of the Rob Roy and the vodka martini.

I’ve never lost my taste for Chandler’s prose. This is Terry Lennox’s paean to the perfect moment in a bar:

‘I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and pull the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar—that’s wonderful.’

Happy Birthday, Raymond Chandler (a few days late)

Stephanie Patterson

*NB: If you go to youtube you can hear Ian Fleming interviewing Raymond Chandler. Some of it is hard to hear, but it’s well worth a listen.

An Ill Wind

The strange tale of the Killer Nurse is one of those stories that smells like an urban legend. Charles Cullen, the Angel of Death! You come out of the anesthetic to find him standing over you, his face a mask of granite, his hands gripping the fatal pillow/hypodermic needle/plastic bag.

The picture strains credulity. At least that's what I thought when I went to see my father in the hospital, sometime in the nineteen-nineties, when he was recovering from an operation to install a shunt in his head. I found him strapped to his bed. The anesthetic they gave him for the operation made him so crazy they didn't know what he might do.

"See that man?" he said to me, as a male nurse silently puttered about the room, doing housekeeping nurse chores. "He's trying to kill me. Get these restraints off me. I have to get out of here."

"It's all right, Daddy. They're going to take care of you until you're well enough to go home."

"I tell you he's trying to kill me. All these people are after me. They want to take my money and send it to Washington." Well, I knew that was a lie. He was on Social Security; the only money he had came from Washington. Why would they take it back? So I put the whole rant down to a drug-induced paranoid delusion. Indeed my father regained his wits in a day or two and lived on for many years.

But I remembered that nurse when they arrested Cullen sometime later and charged him with murdering forty people, maybe more, as they lay helpless in their hospital beds. For some reason I was reminiscing about that last year in the emergency room of that very hospital. They were treating Harold for an allergic reaction to some drug or other. A young fellow with a clipboard came into our cubicle to take down some information, and I found myself chattering to him about my father and Cullen.

The young man glanced over his shoulder and pulled the curtain closed. "Ah, yes," he said. "Him."

He proceeded to tell us the following story.

Sometime in the nineties the young man had been hard at work on an Eagle Scout project. This was his second attempt, he said, the first one having failed through some evil stroke of fate. This one was a sure winner. The Catholic Church was hosting a large group of homeless people in one of their facilities, but it was a large open space with no privacy. The Scout drew up plans for partitions to make their stay more comfortable. He cleared his plans with the zoning officer and bought the materials he would need to build the partitions.

Then he took his plans to the parish priest.

"No," said the priest. "You can't do that."

A few days later the priest fell ill, so ill that he was confined to the hospital, where he came under the care of Charles Cullen. That was the end of him.

The following week the Scout presented his plans to the priest's successor, who said, "Go right ahead, son." The young man completed his project and became an Eagle Scout.

I was thinking that this could be a great theme for a TV series, sort of like The Millionaire in reverse. Every week we could get to know somebody and then Cullen could kill him. If it weren't in such poor taste, that is. But then, we're talking about TV here.

Kate Gallison

Leighton Gage, a Personal Remembrance

At Bouchercon in Indianapolis in 2009, Leighton Gage moderated a panel called Murder at the Edge of the Map. The other writers on the dais included Yrsa and Stan. Since my first novel, out just a month, was set not only far away, but long ago, I was anxious to hear what other, more experienced writers had to say on the subject of stories set in exotic locations. The meeting room was packed with people.

Leighton showed the audience a bracelet he wore, made by a Brazilian Indians, that was a charm to boost one’s creativity. I remember wishing I had such a thing, but I was too shy to introduce myself to Leighton, much less ask him where I could get one. Had I been more courageous, I have no doubt he would have sent me one, if not taken his off and given it to me on the spot. That was the kind of man he was: generous, giving, helpful, encouraging. But I did not know that yet.

Several months later, out of the blue, an email from Leighton arrived in my inbox. He had searched me out to tell me that he had read City of Silver as part of his service on the Edgar Awards jury for best first novel. He had been disappointed that the book had not garnered a nomination, and he was talking it up on internet chat rooms because he knew how difficult it is to get a good book noticed. He invited me to Murder is Everywhere to do a guest post. He stayed in touch, always encouraging, open, warm, and charming.

Then, one day, we found we would both be in Italy at the same time. He came with his friend Jes to visit me in Florence. We had two days to eat good food, drink good wine, and talk writing, books, the biz, life. In those days, Leighton learned of my husband’s Alzheimer’s disease. One of the things I confessed to him was that my weekends were lonely, when I was caring for David on my own and when the love of my life could no longer be a companion. After that, on Fridays Leighton would write me an email posing a subject for discussion, usually one having to do with writing fiction. Then, through the weekend, he would keep me company in long written conversations.

In the past few days, with comments here on Murder is Everywhere and on Facebook, it has become clear how many people Leighton befriended in just such ways. It’s impossible to fathom how he had the time to do all that while being a loving husband and father AND writing such wonderful books—one every year.

The people Leighton gathered around him are themselves a warm, welcoming, affectionate bunch. They are generous and bring out the best in one another. They are different from Leighton and from each other in many ways, but not in all the virtues one would desire in a colleague and friend. He brought out in others what was wonderful in himself. It seems a magic trick, but he performed it. Then he gave us one another.

My gratitude and love and admiration are Leighton’s forever.

Annamaria Alfieri