A Mob of Russians

During the three years that we have been running the Crimewriters' Chronicle blog I have been puzzled, off and on, by a curious statistic. Russians are watching us. Why Russians?

You may ask, how do I know? I know because Blogger offers statistics to the blog administrators. The chart for today is in Figure 1. Look at that. 38 Russians looked in on our blog today. What is it, do you suppose, that they find so fascinating? Not that we don't offer our readers a thrill a minute, but hey, this blog is in English. Show yourselves, Russians! Leave us a comment! Who the hell are you and why are you reading this blog?

As you can see, every now and then I tear myself away from the absorbing work of writing to do geek stuff, like checking on Blogger statistics (not that I can find any useful meaning in them, but it gives me the illusion that I'm on top of things). Always I find the Russians, patiently piling up their pageviews. Then last week I stumbled upon something really strange. I've been quite unable to get to the bottom of it, since Blogger doesn't offer a phone number for support.

It's this: Somebody copied our entire blog from the beginning of 2012 to the week before last, pictures and all (even the pictures I stole! surely this is actionable), and reposted it on another blog called Louise Yvette. The layout is different, but it's our content, with no opportunity to leave comments and no dates on the posts.

Naturally the first people I suspected were those Russians who pay so much attention to a foreign blog that has no relevance to their lives. Russian spambots, I said. Spambots that copy your content and use it to inflate the search engine statistics of the entities whose many links they put at the bottom of your stolen posts.

Thelma suggested that it was Putin himself, looking in on us to further some devious anti-American plot. I would argue that it's the NSA, cleverly bouncing their signals from a secret installation in Moscow. But probably it's neither. Anyway if I start down that road I could wind up like the crazy library cataloger Harold used to know who wore a hat made out of tinfoil to keep the government from reading her thoughts. Hmm. Might not be a bad idea at that. I'll have to try it. Perhaps it will scare people into refraining from ripping off my posts.

Or maybe a simple declaration of my copyright will be enough to do the job.

© 2013 Kate Gallison

Annamaria's Bouchercon Interview

Here's part one of the interview with Annamaria that was filmed at Bouchercon this year in Allbany, where she talks about the trip that inspired her to write City of Silver.

Steph’s Knee ( with apologies to Eric Rohmer)

On Friday the 13th of September (Oh, blessed day!), I experienced the miracle of cortisone. An orthopedist injected my painful left knee. The encounter was short, straightforward and utterly uncharacteristic of any other orthopedic treatment I’ve received.

My initial encounters with surgeons were complicated by two factors. I was born with cerebral palsy. My parents were Christian Scientists.

At first my parents did seek medical treatments for me. I had courses of physical therapy and I wore leg braces. The leg braces were designed to keep my legs straight and my feet flat on the floor. They accomplished neither objective and I was exhausted from the weight of the metal.

Enter my paternal grandmother who was a Christian Science practitioner with near toxic levels of self assurance. She pointed out to my parents that doctors had not been helpful and if I would only experience God’s perfect love, I could be healed.

So the braces came off. My walk looked awkward, but it felt fine to me. (For readers who want an interactive experience, try the following: Rise up on your toes, turn those toes inward and walk). I went along like this from approximately age 8 to age 20. I sporadically attended Sunday School at the Christian Science Church and sometimes read the largely baffling “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mary Baker Eddy.

I wasn’t healed and about 3 years into college I started getting stress fractures in my feet. I was out of school for 3 weeks the first time it happened. I begged my father to let me see a doctor. He left the house and I thought he was checking out what options the military provided for medical care. He returned home with a turntable and stereo speakers. I returned to school when it no longer hurt to walk.

Then I developed fractures again. My dad agreed to take me to the ER at Kimbrough Army Hospital at Fort Meade. The doctor doing triage was a cardiologist.

“I can’t help you,” he said. “But there’s an orthopedic surgeon who happens to be here tonight.”

I was then ushered into the presence of L. Fiske Warren, M.D., who appeared to be not in the least interested in my stress fractures.

“Could you walk for me, please?” he asked.

I walked back and forth several times and then sat down.

“You have some classic problems that surgery could take care of.”

I was stunned and my father was very nervous. He began to talk very quickly.

“Well, I’ve had to make a lot of decisions over the years about whether Stephanie should have surgery or continue her education.” Never did he mention Christian Science.

Dr. Warren ignored my father and directed all of his comments to me. He pointed out to me again that surgery could solve a lot of my problems. He also told me that if I continued to walk the way I was walking, I wouldn’t be walking at all by the time I was 40.

But I didn’t want surgery either. I was slated to go to graduate school the following year and had been nominated for several fellowships. I had to assure the granters of those fellowships that my disability would not get in the way of my accepting their much needed money.

When I left the ER, it was agreed that I would come to the hospital weekly to have my foot taped since casting it would only cause more fractures.

A podiatrist or one of his assistants would tape the foot, but Dr. Warren stopped by to talk to me every single week. (Full disclosure: Dr Warren was young and handsome) I continued to insist that I didn’t have time for surgery.

“Oh, I am on spring break for a couple of days next week,” I said, confident that there wouldn’t be enough time to schedule surgery.

“There’s a same day procedure I can do next week.”

The procedure was simple. I just didn’t have time for more surgery.

Then my father announced that he could provide no money for graduate school and by the way he was accepting a job in Seattle. I got honorable mention on several fellowships but no money. I just knew that if I went to Seattle, surgery would be forgotten.

So in my post op visit with Dr Warren I asked, “If I was available for surgery through next year (my military coverage ran out at age 22), what could you do?”

When I finally left for graduate school the following year my legs were straight and my feet were flat on the floor.

My father went to his job in Seattle and only called once to see how I was doing (during a party I was having so that all my friends would remark on what a concerned parent he was). My Christian Scientist grandmother rarely saw us and was told I was having a “little surgery.” My mother was very anxious about all of it:

“He’s awfully young, Stephanie. Do you think he’s done this before?”

“So what if he hasn’t; he has to start somewhere.”

I haven’t talked to Dr. Warren in many years. He took metal out of my hip at Roosevelt Hospital in the late 1970s and from what Google tells me, he’s now at Coney Island Hospital.

Because of him I’m still able to walk and I expect clear explanations of everything when I talk to medical professionals. I think those both count as gifts that keep giving.

© 2013 Stephanie Patterson

Marketing to Teenagers

Today is the last day you can have MONKEYSTORM for free, if you have a Kindle. I've been giving it away all week, so you probably have it already if you want it, but in case you don't have it, and you have a Kindle, and you think you might like to read MONKEYSTORM (which is a lot of fun), click HERE.

You will notice that I changed the cover again. No more scary monkeys. Ever since a writer I ran into at a conference mistook it for a horror novel I've been trying to hit on a way to make the cover reflect the tone of the book, which is quite funny (if dark). So, starting from scratch, I made a plain cover in my favorite color of yellow. Then I found a charming, zany font to use for the title, and after that I bought a picture of a briefcase full of money (important plot point) from one of those sites that sell the royalty-free images. Pleased with the result, I decided to take Amazon up on their free promo plan while running ads on Facebook and wildly tweeting about it on Twitter.

Now, MONKEYSTORM was intended more or less to be a Young Adult novel, although I couldn't get the Lambertville Free Public Library's children's librarian to carry it on her shelves for some reason. For my part I would have read it with keen enjoyment when I was thirteen. It's less violent than THE HUNGER GAMES and not sexy enough to frighten the horses. So when Facebook wanted to know who I wanted to see the ads, I selected females between thirteen and thirty who like to read books or watch movies. I wanted to run the ads for the whole five days of the free promo, but the ads are no longer ten dollars a day. They are thirty dollars a day. So three days was my limit.

The first thing I did after designing the new cover and arranging with Amazon for the giveaway was to announce it on the DorothyL Facebook page, since those folks like to read mysteries and a few of them are still fans of mine. They downloaded maybe twenty copies. Then I sat back to watch what the kids would do.

It was gratifying. A lot of them "liked" my ad. One of them appended a little horror story in the comments. (I had no idea you could comment on a Facebook ad.) It started out, "YOU HAVE TO READ THIS OR YOU WILL DIE," and went on to tell the story of a little girl who murdered her parents and died horribly in a mental institution, and how she would come around tonight and cut you in small pieces if you didn't forward this story to ten people, but if you did, tomorrow would be the best day of your life. I hate chain letters. I looked around for some way to delete it, but Facebook didn't seem to offer any. Then I thought, wait. Leave it. This is a good horror story. Kids love horror stories. So I commented on the comment, praising the story but saying that I never forward chain letters, and in spite of that I've already lived to a ripe old age, which proves you don't have to, and that tomorrow is always the best day of my life.

I haven't yet been reduced to threatening readers with death if they refuse to read my work, though I've considered saying, "YOU HAVE TO READ THIS OR I'LL KILL THIS PUPPY."

The upshot of the Facebook ad story is that the statistics they gave me showed that most of the downloads resulting from the ads went to the teenagers rather than the 20 to 30 group. I may finally be connecting with my audience. I suppose this means I'll have to write a sequel.

© 2013 Kate Gallison

Watch on the Hudson

Last week, I spent a few days at Bouchercon, the largest of the US mystery writer/fan conventions, held this year in Albany, New York, a couple of hours up the Hudson River from my house.

Four swell things happened up there.

One, I was assigned a terrific panel on amateur sleuths, with Catherine Astolfo, Kate George and M.K. Graff. Here’s a pic of me with moderator Nora McFarland, who did a tremendous job – preparation is the key to spontaneity (and lots of laughs)!

Second, Rose and Robert Knightly threw a buffet dinner for writers and readers at their lovely townhouse in Albany. It was the only location associated with the conference that did not seem to be uphill both ways.

Third, I discovered my opening line to the fifth Lauren Atwill mystery. [Book number 4 in the series is already cuddled up with the publisher, ready to go out next spring.] It’s weird how one line can generate so much enthusiasm to get to the computer each day.

Four, I was able to share with an audience of mystery fans a portion of the screenshow I've created for presentations at libraries. Called “You Can’t Put That in the Movies”, it’s about the Production Code censorship in Hollywood in the Golden Age of Film. [I blogged a bit about the Code back on April 25.] It’s always good to get your work out before an audience: I saw I needed to shorten it, to allow for more discussion afterward.

There’s one part of the presentation I’m pretty sure I’ll never cut: The Production Code vs. Watch on the Rhine.

Let me tell you the story, briefly (I promise).

The 1943 film Watch on the Rhine is based on a stage play by Lillian Hellman. Warner Brothers wanted to turn it into a movie, and had submitted a preliminary script for Production Code Administration (PCA) review as was required by the Code office. 

Spoiler Alert! Watch on the Rhine is set in 1940, when Europe is at war but the US remains on the sidelines. Its hero is Kurt (Paul Lukas, who played the role on Broadway), an engineer who’s been working in Europe and has returned to the US with his family to visit relatives of his wife (Bette Davis, who took a smaller role than she normally would because of her strong opinions about the subject matter). It becomes clear along the way that Kurt has been working with and raising money for anti-Nazis in Europe. When one of a network of operatives is arrested, Kurt’s determined to go back to try to free the man, at great risk to himself. The villain of the piece, a Romanian count called Teck, discovers all this, and threatens to go to the German embassy with his information unless his silence is purchased. Kurt kills him.

The PCA had some ‘suggestions’ for the final script. One in particular astonished and disgusted the playwright Hellman, and here’s part of the letter she wrote to the Code office. (I found the letters included here during research at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.)

In the red-framed portion, she says “There is, however, one suggested change which I find deeply shocking. Your office says that, in order to have Teck killed by Kurt, it must be established that Kurt will be assassinated if Teck reports him and that, having killed Teck, it must be clearly established that Kurt has been finally killed by the Nazis.”

Yep, the PCA wanted Kurt to die.

Today in film, we grant vigilante rights to anybody who could even marginally be considered a protagonist. But the PCA took seriously its rule that crime cannot pay. Criminal acts – for example, taking the law into one’s own hands – were not allowed to go unpunished.

Here’s part of the letter Joe Breen – who was in charge of administering the Code – wrote to his boss, Will Hays, about the situation, no doubt in anticipation of the uproar that might occur if Hellman went public. Remember that in 1943, the US was fighting Germany in World War II.

He contends that in the movies under the Code, the law "can not be suspended, even when there is great provocation and even when we are at war." No matter the circumstances of a movie, no exceptions should be made.

And the PCA had the last word: they had to approve your script and your movie.

How did all this end?

No matter that America was at war, and that anti-Nazis were risking their lives every day in Europe, the Code office could not bring themselves to allow a man to kill another outside the framework of the justice system, even in the circumstances set forth in the script. In the released film, Kurt does kill Teck, and Teck is unarmed when it happens. Although the killing is committed offscreen, it remains a shocking moment when this good man marches Teck away. Kurt returns to Europe and communication is lost (which would not have been unusual in time of war). He is missing, but there is still hope he could be alive, which is the play’s original ending. The compromise from the PCA was to allow the movie to retain it.

What Breen's (and the Code's) position ends up accomplishing of course is to make it very difficult to portray the risks faced by the anti-Nazi underground in Europe.

Lots of books have been written about Hollywood’s neglect of social and political issues beginning from the moment the Code was adopted in 1934, and about Hollywood's unwillingness to take an on-film stand against Nazi oppression, particularly of Jews, after it was clear what was happening in Europe with the rise of Nazism and even after America got into the war. While it’s true that Hollywood was careful not to offend the Hitler regime in the 1930s (and threaten overseas revenues) and that the PCA even allowed the German attaché in Los Angeles on occasion to review draft scripts during that period, the industry was largely held hostage, not by Europeans, but by the considerable power of what most of us today would consider extremist views inside the United States – racial, religious, ethnic. Studios were very reluctant to endanger their domestic business by opening themselves up to vitriolic charges that they were making "political" movies, advocating certain kinds of social change or promulgating before Pearl Harbor American involvement in what was often referred to as a "Jewish war" in Europe. 

Hollywood was not alone in kowtowing to the power of those who advocated these views, but some other American corporations went even further, with some of their leaders (see Henry Ford for one) publicly and enthusiastically embracing shockingly racist and anti-Semitic views.

But unlike those companies, Hollywood left behind a powerful visual history of what it had done. Or not done.


© 2013 Sheila York