Research and Development

Some years ago I got interested in the War of 1812. It was one of those strange obsessions, like the one the Dickens character had with King Charles's head. It will make more sense to you when I explain that my forebears were on this continent in those days, some in Canada and some in the States, and so personally involved. What was that like? I was curious. In the course of reading about that war, and about the border between Maine and New Brunswick, where the ancestors lived in those days, I came across the story of the Reverend Mr. Duncan McColl. An extraordinary man. A saint, if the Methodists had saints.

No doubt you've asked yourself from time to time, what if they gave a war and nobody came? It actually happened on the Saint Croix River. Duncan McColl made it happen. After many years of his labors to save souls, he had built up a huge congregation from both sides of the border, including most of the people in the towns of St. Stephen (Canadian) and Calais (American). Living as they were in Christian amity, they didn't want to fight each other when the American government declared war.

So they didn't.

Duncan McColl went to the magistrates to urge for peace. They formed a committee of the prominent men on both sides of the border to keep order. All went well. The following year, American troops showed up in Calais. Luckily, or by the grace of God, the commanding officer and many of his men were Methodists. Duncan McColl preached to them and they agreed to keep the truce. British troops came to the other side, but Mr. McColl talked to their officers also, and they, too, kept the truce. They say a load of gunpowder that the British authorities sent to St. Stephen for self-defense was given to Calais so they could have fireworks for a proper fourth of July celebration. A picnic, I'm thinking, although with no dancing. Duncan McColl was sternly against dancing.

Lest you think that Mr. McColl was some sort of milksop, let me assure you that before he answered the call to become a preacher of the Gospel he had a distinguished military career, serving in the Argyll Highlanders, the famous 74th Regiment of Foot, where he saw sharp action at Castine, Maine.

It's all in his memoirs. These were serialized in the British North American Wesleyan Methodist Magazine of 1841 and 1842, ten years after Mr. McColl's death, printed out in tiny blurry print almost illegible to human eye or optical character reader. I'm here to announce that I spent all of last week, something like fourteen hours a day, scanning, copying, and parsing his words (and the words of whoever edited and annotated his work for the magazine) with a view to putting the memoir up on Kindle in legible form. This I have done. As a result I'm almost blind from eyestrain. I would be happy to give it away, but 99¢ was the least Amazon would let me sell it for. Go get it here.

…And now I'm going to go rest my eyes.

© 2014 Kate Gallison

My First True Crime

In the summer of 1967 I was spending time at home. Though I was 14 and about to turn 15, at the beginning of the summer I was still waiting to see if my parents were going to insist I have a babysitter. My last babysitter had not been reengaged.

Mrs. Marsh was a single mom, one of whose daughters was in my class at school. She was nice enough but life at her home was boring. Her taste in music ran to the Ray Conniff singers and she served one unvarying lunch: Warmish iced tea in waxy glasses and Kraft American Singles (you couldn’t call it cheese) on toasted bread. She was rarely my babysitter in the afternoons. She went off to the officer’s club at the local military base and her daughter, my classmate, was in charge of me.

One day she came home aglow (and perhaps a-slosh) with the news that she had seen my father at the officer’s club. She leered at me and it was only some years later that I realized that if he was talking to officers at all, they were probably female. Alas, for Mrs. Marsh, my dad also saw her, the caretaker of his delicate daughter, at a bar in the middle of the day. As I wasn’t knocking back martinis with her, she couldn’t be watching me. She was out of a job.

I begged to be on my own. If I promised not to answer the door or go off our property, what could possibly happen? Would reading too many books put me in danger? So my parents, with some reluctance, let me stay home by myself. My mother left sandwiches for lunch and I was allowed soda pop. Normally, I would have listened to the Beatles, and Broadway show recordings (I can still can do a fair number of Rex Harrison’s ‘songs’ from My Fair Lady) but in the early part of the summer I had a larger task.

My parents and I were a Nielsen family. We got a weekly log in which we were to record what we watched on T.V. The big event in the early summer of 1967 was the Arab-Israeli War (also known as the Six Day War). All the networks were covering the debate at the United Nations. I recorded that I watched every minute of that debate.

I wanted the folks at Nielsen to know that I was a teenager deeply interested in world affairs. (The fact that information about names and ages wasn’t requested didn’t faze me.) And I did learn something. I learned that when U.N. delegates really despised each other they hid it under diplomatic language. No delegate called another a smarmy little worm. The language went like this: “If I might remind my distinguished, learned, honorable colleague…” That’s diplomatic lingo for smarmy little worm.

What was I really glued to? My hardcover copy of Dorothy Kilgallen’s Murder One.

Yes, while foreign intrigue featured on T.V., my book spoke of malice domestic. This was ,for my naive 15 year old self, hot stuff. I’m sure no 15 year old of today would turn a hair.

The trials Kilgallen covers span the 1930s to the 1960s and they all involve sex. Kilgallen has a way with a phrase. Describing Bernard Finch who is on trial for the murder of his wife: “Dr Finch at 40 had a lucrative surgical practice, was a ranking tennis amateur, and had a winning way with the ladies. He was, in short, notably successful both as a surgeon and an operator.”

In the case of “Greta Peltz,” who spices her love letters with bits of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, we are told that her defense attorney whispers this Lawrence into the record. Ms. Peltz admits to killing her lover because he raped her. She is acquitted it seems, not so much because of the rape, but because her lover asked her to perform repulsive sex acts. Ah, guilt in a more innocent time. There are also accounts of one case that very much resembles An American Tragedy and the first trial of Sam Shepard. I loved this book.

When my parents came home, I made sure to regale them with stories from the U.N. My mother knew what I was reading, but hadn’t read the book herself. Then one evening my father, no reader he, came home, picked up the book, and started leafing through it.

“You’re reading this?”

“Yes.”

“Well as long as it doesn’t make you uncomfortable and you’re not bored.”

“No,” I assured him. “Never bored.”

© 2014 Stephanie Patterson

Going Through the Books

I woke up this morning and as soon as I had eaten breakfast began to pull books off my shelves and evaluate them for re-shelving, tossing, or re-reading. I didn't want to sit down, you see. What with the snow and all it's been weeks, oh, all right, months, since I regularly attended the gym. I can feel myself turning to cement from the armpits down. Maybe even higher. So, the books. One must stand up to examine them, lift them, drag them around.

The shelves in the bedroom contain mostly non-fiction, mostly American history. The straight-out genealogical books and the witch trial stuff live in my office, the fiction in the "library," where we keep the television, the children's books on the shelves in the third floor guest room, the guilty pleasures of Louis L'Amour, Terry Pratchett, and Brian Jacques in a small bookcase in the upstairs hall. The big bookcases in the upstairs hall are full of Harold's books, which I wouldn't dream of touching, since he has his mysterious system.

Fact is, I haven't touched my bedroom bookcase in quite a while either. So the exercise involved Swiffers, first to dust the family pictures in front of the books, and then to dust the books themselves. Then to rediscover all the things I used to be interested in. Here's a row a yard wide of books about the Indians. Actually I'm always interested in the Indians. Here are a number of books about Thomas Edison, including one all about the electric chair. Those of you who read The Edge of Ruin, which I wrote as Irene Fleming, will recall that I did a number on Edison in that book. I would never do that without reams of documentation.

Then there are some diaries. Keep? Toss? I was on the point of throwing away a nearly blank diary covered in red leather with something weird like rotted brown paper sticking to the front when I got a look at the earliest entries. This is the book I took notes in the time I pretended to be a newspaper reporter so I could get next to Bil Baird, the famous puppeteer, when he gave a talk at the Trenton museum. I was, I confess, a drooling fan. I'll tell you the whole story sometime, but the diary is well worth keeping. It has sketches of puppets and their workings.

The bookshelves are mostly shoveled out now. I'm sitting here eating lunch and considering actually going to the gym. When I get back I'll return the family pictures to the shelves and think about putting up Duncan McColl's memoirs as a kindle. They are long, long out of copyright, and it seems to me that scholars would like to see them. He was a famous Methodist preacher in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada. I admire him greatly; sometime I'll tell you why.

That's the fun thing about my bookshelves. They're full of people I admire, Lincoln Steffens, Maxine Eliot, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Masterman Hardy, Ida Tarbell, Bil Baird, Tecumseh. Anytime I want to I can go read about their doings, now that the dust is off the books, and fall in love all over again. But first I have to go to the gym.

© 2014 Kate Gallison

Title Finder: A Tool For Crime Writers

There are myriad websites where one can search for names for expected offspring.  You can even search by ethnicity.  Hispanic baby names, Kikuyu baby names, even Finnish, I suppose, but then try to pronounce them.

Naming books can be every bit as difficult, and publishers have opinions that sometimes differ greatly from what the author wants to call the “baby.”  My first book—City of Silver—had three names before it came out—the one I gave it, the one my agent thought it should have, and the one the publisher chose from a list of alternatives that my editor asked me to supply.  Fortunately, I really like the one it ended up.

With Invisible Country, it took only two tries.  With Blood Tango, I just submitted a list of possibilities with the finished manuscript.  I am glad they chose the one I liked best.   Coming up with the list, however, was not so easy.  I wanted something that said “Argentina,” without using the word.  “Buenos Aires” seemed too many syllables and has no music when pronounced with an American accent.  “Tango” was a no-brainer, sexy with an edge of darkness.

What I did next was to make a list of words that might go with “tango” and say “murder mystery.”  Sometimes with intervening prepositions—Tango of Death.  Sometimes just as adjective and noun—Dark Tango.  Sometimes with an added article—A Fatal Tango.

“Blood” seemed the most apt adjective, since my murderer wields a switchblade, a criminal’s weapon of choice in 1945 in Buenos Aires.

In the end, I wound up with enough words on my list to make it, perhaps, useful for naming future books.  Today I have turned them into a chart for other writers.  One could, by using it, take a word from column A and one from Column B and play with them.  There are certainly books that already exist whose titles would pop up if you tried.

Since the publication of Blood Tango,  I have noticed that there seem to be a lot of books this past year that have the word “blood” in their titles.  Maybe some of the words on the list will become fads in naming books, but that--as everything else in publishing--would be impossible to predict. 

Annamaria Alfieir

Reunion III: All’s Well That Ends

My third biannual reunion with the cops with whom I’d patrolled the streets of Bushwick, Brooklyn, in the 1970’s was held in the VFW hall (as always) in Valley Stream, Long Island late last September. I’ve always thought it odd that Brooklyn cops had to travel to Nassau County to get together; then I remembered again it’s because most of them still live out there as they did back then, but now have no reason to go into Brooklyn, or anywhere in the City, for that matter. Truth is, the younger ones had no liking for the City in those crime-filled days and fled back to East Cupcake as soon as they’d finish their tour. But not so my partners, the hell-raisers of the 83 Precinct Conditions Car.

We weren’t young. All of us had more than eight years on The Job, having survived the layoff of 5,000 cops as the City teetered on the brink of bankruptcy in February, 1975. (Last On, First Off, the Rule). Consequently, we had no illusions about being indispensable or highly-valued by our masters. Truth is, we just loved the work. Of course, it was dangerous; some of us died from gunfire, from ambush. But being in our thirties, none of us yet forty, we knew in our hearts we were immortal, not about to die that day or any day.

No one, no Internal Affairs spies, were looking over our shoulders as we worked the streets. When a Precinct was dangerously high-crime, an “A” house--as the Eight-Three was in the mid-1970s—IAD (“shoeflies” we called them) tended to keep their distance. Dante had it right: When you served in hell, life was simpler.

Of course, all this happened almost forty years ago. Yet, their faces, the men I served with, are right there before me though some names will escape me. When I see them at the reunions, it all comes back, our history. As I work the room this night, I tread my way among several hundred guests till I sit down with Lou Hunter, who confides he has neuropathy in his hands and feet, that’s why he’s on a cane (as I am). No need to commiserate, instead we laugh about kicking looters’ asses on Broadway during the Blackout Riots, July 13, 1977. Dominic Bjelobrick (“B.J.”), our perennial PBA Delegate at the Eight-Three in the 1960s , 1970s and 1980s, admits to being 80-years-old. We assure him we can see it in his old wrinkled mug, although he stands as straight, solid as a brick shithouse still. Scandinavian genes.

I corral Mike (can’t recall last name) by the aluminum chafing pans lined up on folding Bingo tables at the back of the Hall. The food is always the same—several kinds of pasta in a sauce thick as red paint, sausage & peppers deliciously swimming in its greasy pool, fish-in-a-white sauce, mounds of fresh Italian loaves, but I’m not here for the menu. Mike was a Lieutenant in Public Morals after the Eight-Three, so I figured he might know somebody in Missing Persons who’d be willing to talk to the mystery author, Allison Gaylin, for her new novel. (She’d asked me and I said I knew somebody.)

“Bobby, I retired 23 years ago,” Mike said, “I know nobody who’s still there!” I inquired of other detectives I’d worked with. Same response. I could have asked the only woman I was introduced to, Cookie Kunkle, former Chief of the Narcotics Bureau, but by then I was too depressed, contemplating that I no longer had contacts on The Job. (Sorry, Allison.)

At long last, I came upon two of my partners from the Eight-Three Conditions Car, the kickingest-ass team that ever patrolled the mean streets of Borough Brooklyn North. As fate would have it, John Medina and Louie were at the same table with others from the Old Days, but not talking to one another. You should know this: that John and Louie were on the outs since Louie had lied about John to the FBI on the occasion of Louie’s being arrested as a member of a big-time drug-dealing gang in Bushwick and environs. Louie was retired from The Job at the time while John was a Detective Second Grade in the Eight-Three Squad. Louie was facing serious time in Federal prison that could only be reduced by his “cooperation” with the U.S Attorney, meaning: Rat out some higher-up, a criminal of significant stature. Louie swore to the Feds that John was dealing drugs. (A drug-gang-affiliated NYPD Detective qualified.) And so began a year-long investigation by the FBI and the Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau—a source of endless harassment and embarrassment to Det. John Medina. John had a chest-full of medals for bravery, a ‘Supercop’ in everyone’s estimation, far and away the best street cop I’d ever seen. I like to think that’s why Louie, in a moment of desperation, pointed a finger at John: Because he knew it would never be believed, never stick, in the end. It didn’t, and Louie went to a Federal pen for seven years.

So tonight we all are sitting at this round table with cake and coffee in front of us. Then some wag says, “Remember Troutman Street!” Everybody laughs and points at me.

John points at Louie and says: “You fired shots!” Louie says, “If I didn’t, that mob would have had your asses that night!” The truth. We were making an arrest for drug sales in a tenement hallway on Trautman St. when the guy, a Puerto Rican, resisted and I had to pound him into bloody submission with my heavy-duty 5-cell metal flashlight. As we left the hallway with my prisoner, we were confronted by an irate mob of his countrymen who were intent on his liberation. John, me and my handcuffed prisoner in tow made for the safe haven of a bodega directly across the street, while Louie, protecting our backs, emptied his service revolver in the air to scatter the crowd in front.
Once inside, John called a “10-13” (Officer Needs Assistance) on his portable radio, and within minutes the cavalry arrived to rescue us and restore order. We all had a good laugh, basking in the warm glow of our shared, ancient camaraderie.

The best part for me was to see them reconciled, Louie forgiven. TV, civilians don’t understand. Not all “rats” are equal. For a cop, the ultimate terror is jail; cops don’t jail well. The choice is often: “cooperate” or suicide. In the end, Louie did his time and was pardoned in the eyes of his comrades.

© 2014 Robert Knightly