Hildegarde

Okay.

So here I am, almost done with this thing, which is good, because it turns out this is not going to be a truncated version of the old cold.  I’m just sick.

That said, I’m at a place where I know all my decisions are, so I’m not going to stop to take it easy.  The last thing I want is to forget how I finally decided this all fit together. 

In the meantime, I find myself in one of those dilemmas. 

I am very careful about what I read when I write and when I cut–there are some things that simply make it impossible for me to keep my mind on the project in hand.

These things are not necessarily bad.  Stephen King is one of them, and my guess is that the problem is not that he’s bad, but that he’s good.  He just has too strong a narrative voice for me to fight my way out of.

Very badly written books can go either way.  Sometimes they drive me so crazy, I can’t do anything.  Sometimes they actually affect me less than they would have if I wasn’t working. 

I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what any of this means.  I just know what works, and I go with that.

Every once in a while I have a problem that I’ve mentioned before and some of you think is just crazy–I finish a book, and I just can’t find another one that I can manage to read.

This happened yesterday, when I put down the last of the Perry Masons in the house that I hadn’t read yet and looked around for something else.

Now, here’s the thing–when I have actually finished a book, I need what I think of as a “transition” book, a book to transition into real life.

This almost always turns out to be something nonfiction and argumentative.   It also tends to be something I’ve read before, because that way I can be sure it’s the right kind of thing.

I actually have a book I would like to use as my transition book–in fact, I’ve got two.  One I don’t own yet.  The other I own two copies of but can’t find either.

So when I came out of the office yesterday, having cut as much Gregor as I could without falling over, I found myself not just with nothing to read, but with nothing I could make myself understand.

And that’s when I went for my default–the movies I watched when nothing else works right.

And that led me to think about–well, Danny Ocean.

I know I’ve talked about this before, but let me go back to the issue again, because it continues to bother me.

Caper stories–novels and movies–have cycles of popularity.  There was a positive fashion for them in the Sixties and early Seventies, with two very popular paperback series–one by Donald E. Westlake and one by Lawrence Block–getting not only decent sales but movie versions.  Hell, at one point, Dormunder, Westlake’s thief-character, got played by Robert Redford.

But any way you think about it, caper stories are an odd venture.  There are people out there who like to identify with the Dark Side and to fashion themselves as evil–consider Alastair Crowley–but most of us don’t, and even most of us who are engaged in objectively evil (or just objectively wrong) actions manage to reframe them as objectively good or neutral.

Theft is, I think, an objectively wrong action, except in those cases where there is something unusual that might excuse it–think Jean Valjean. 

Caper novels are almost never written about Jean Valjean characters, though.  They’re written about professional thieves, people who make their living stealing other people’s stuff.

Almost nobody who has ever had any of their stuff stolen sympathizes with thieves.  The first problem a caper story has, therefore, is to turn an unsympathetic character into a sympathetic one–to somehow take the mind of the audience off the thievery and onto the thieves’ personality.

Larry  Block’s series had an interesting way of doing this for a while.  His thief, Bernie Rhodenbarr (sp?), would start to rob an apartment or other venue and stumble over a body.  He would then have to solve the murder to avoid being charged with it himself.

And since murder is a lot worse than burglary, and since most people haven’t been burgled, this worked.

It worked well enough to keep the series in business for many years, and to produce at least one movie, Burglar, with Bernie Rhodenbarr transformed into the person of Whoopi Goldberg.

Sometimes a caper story works because the thief, although a professional, and the job, although a robbery, aren’t really that in this particular instance.

That’s the set up in The Italian Job, where the robbery is being executed against a man who stole what he has to begin with an in the process caused the gratuitous death of one of his partners.

With other caper stories, the issues aren’t all that clear cut–which is  how we get to my default movies, when I’m just too tired or too sick or too out of it to really want to think.

This is how we get to Danny Ocean.

Now, let me explain something about what I like about these movies.

First, I like the Eleven and the Thirteen movies more than I like the Twelve, and that is because Twelve is set in Europe, and the other two are set in Las Vegas.

And I like them because the Las Vegas of these movies is bright and shiny and–I don’t know what.

You have to understand, from off, that I do not like casinos in real life.  In real life, casinos seem to me to be sad and desperate places, with few if any of the people in them having a “good time.”

I do understand that people can gamble as a pastime without becoming habituated to it.  I have a good girlfriend from college who goes to Vegas or Atlantic City every year, takes along exactly how much money she’s willing to lose, and stops when she’s lost that.

Even so, these places always seem unhappy to me, and more than a little sordid.  I did an event at Mohegan Sun once and had to walk across the slot machine area to get to dinner.  There is just something wrong with people who sit hunched up like that for hour after hour.

Nobody sits hunched up like that in the world of Ocean’s Las Vegas.  Everybody is beautifully dressed all the time and drinking as if they’ve got somebody else to drive them home.  There is a right way and a wrong way to gamble, and everybody knows it.

But my fondness for these movies is even odder if you consider what’s actually going on in them.

In numbers Twelve and Thirteen, Ocean and the boys are ripping off either somebody who is already ripping them off and will kill them if they don’t succeed in a counterstrategy, or somebody who is himself dishonest and brutal in a way the Ocean crew is not.

In Ocean’s Eleven, however, the target is a casino owner who is admittedly a thug–but a thug in the way Lorenzo di Medici was a thug. 

What’s more, it’s clear that his success is due not to his thuggery but to his other accomplishments, which are considerable.  He works his butt off, as the saying goes. He speaks several languages and is learning more, so that he can talk to high rollers from places like Germany and Japan in their own tongue. 

I’ll admit that, as with diMedici, it’s hard to like Terry Benedict.  He certainly commits a big no-no by valuing his casino empire over his girlfriend.

But he has still earned what he’s got, not cheated it out of other people, and on several levels it’s difficult not to admire him. 

That leaves me, of course, with the question of why it doesn’t bother me when Ocean and the boys get away with $160,000,000 of his money. 

Some of it may simply be the amount of time that is spent explaining that the man is insured and will be made whole no matter what. 

I don’t usually fall for that kind of line, because I know that insurance payoffs hurt everybody in the long run.  The insurance companies will make that money back by raising premiums and doing other things to otherwise innocent parties.

And yet it just doesn’t bother me. 

What I seem to want out of these movies is a shiny world where nothing is quite real–not in the way that science fiction landscapes aren’t real, but in the way dreams are. 

The very premise of these things is just so–ridiculous is the word I think I want here.  Even the money isn’t real.

And maybe that’s what I really want from these things.

A world where the money isn’t real.

So, it’s Saturday of what turns out to be Easter week–American Easter week, as we would have said when I was growing up–and I have yet another sore throat and yet another stuffy head. They’re not terribly awful yet, so I have my fingers crossed.  Usually I think my students are trying to kill me.  Today, I think the intention may have been only to maim.

Whatever.  I am at that place in the book where it is just impossible to stop, and I’m past my deadline, so I’m going to keep going.

And the semester has been more or less calm, and I’m pretty much caught up on my correcting, so that isn’t giving me a nervous breakdown.

It does feel, however, as if the entire year has sort of drifted. 

Even politics can’t make me angry any more.  I see political stories and the back of my head goes, automatically:  yeah, but. 

Al Sharpton has a program these days on MSNBC, which I usually only watch snippets of, because it consists of him stating the obvious political cliches and then shouting them, as if he had to talk above a crowd to be heard.

He’s sort of a left wing version of Hannity on FoxNews–both of them shout a lot, never say anything you’re not expecting them to say, and seem to know less than nothing about just about anything. 

Both of them seem trapped in narratives not of their own making and that neither of them realizes ceased to be coherent years ago.

I watch more than I did, though, because of the Trayvon Martin case.

Let me say from the beginning that Zimmerman lost my sympathy when he actually chased after Martin, who was running away.

To me, self defense ended when the kid took off.  No matter what the kid was or wasn’t doing, whether he had a weapon or didn’t, self defense ended once he started heading for the hills. 

It would be different in the case of a police officer, of course, but then nobody would be claiming self defense.

And that, I think, really ought to settle it.  But media blitzes being what they are, it won’t, and Florida law being what it is, it’s possible that Zimmerman could claim “self defense” if he roused the kid out of a sound sleep and shot him them.

What’s more interesting to me is the way the story has played out, and it’s interesting because it’s completely predictable.

First we had dozens of stories about how the kid was a first rate good kid with no record of violence of any kind, and those stories were accompanied by pictures of him as a skinny, weak looking little thing in an oversized football jersey.

Then we had the backlash reports–he’d been suspended several times from school, including once for vandalism and once for drug violations; the picture in the football jersey had been taken years ago, he was now six feet two and physically well developed.

Am I really the only person on earth who sees all this as entirely beside the point?

There was absolutely no point to portraying Martin as a plaster saint to begin with.  His family,of course, can be forgiven (and more than forgiven) for that.  They’d just lost their child.

But a lot of the impetus towards the original portrayal of Martin was coming not from his family but from media people and people in various activist organizations, who seemed to have thought Zimmerman would be justified in gunning down a fleeing man if the fleeing man wasn’t a cross between Martin Luther King and baby Oprah.

When I point this out, people tend to tell me that America is so racist that they just wouldn’t take the case seriously if there was any reason at all to suspect that Martin had been up to no good when the altercation with Zimmerman started. 

The problem with this is twofold:  first, that the facts about Martin’s life and reputation were going to hit the news eventually, whether his supporters and the supporters of his family wanted to or not; and that once those facts hit the news, Martin was going to end up looking worse than anything he ever was.

There is simply no way that shooting a man in the back while he’s running away from you can be classified under any traditional definition of self defense.

And it doesn’t matter if that man is an angel from heaven or an out and out thug.

Trayvon Martin’s character should not be the issue here.

By now, of course, it’s the only issue.  That, and whether George Zimmerman should be classified as “white,” since he’s at least half Hispanic.

The story seems to me to be about not much of anything by now, but it does present a curious demonstration of the fact that both the race narratives of the left and the security narratives of the right are now thoroughly exhausted. 

Nobody really believes either one of them any more–and we’ve reached a point where nobody cares about being called a racist any more either.

Which is another interesting question about where we go from here.

One of the problems with writing this blog when I am finishing a Gregor is that I often find myself wondering–when I’ve actually got the time to write it–if I’ve got anything left to say.

I tend to follow the things I’m interested in most of the time less when I’m trying to cut a huge Gregor manuscript, so that I’m aware, for instance, that there seem to have been a number of Republican primaries and that Mitt Romney has been winning them. 

I don’t, however, really know if that Means Something or not.

I have not been following the Trayvon Martin case, but from what I’ve heard it seems that Florida has a Stand Your Ground law that not only allows you to stand your ground but to chase after somebody who is running away and then to shoot him and call it self defense.

This does not make a whole lot of sense to me, since if somebody is running away from you he can’t still be threatening you, but I really haven’t been able to pay much attention, and I may be missing something here.

I know there was a shooting at some kind of religious college in California, but I don’t know who the shooter was or what his issue was.

It’s like that.

Most of the “issues” I hear about feel contrived.  All of the various essays and articles I read would be close to incomprehensible to the other side. 

So I wish to make a suggestion.

There is, at this point, only one issue.

That issue is this:  we have become a country where there is no longer any societywide consensus about what is moral and immoral.

One of the reasons the founders and most of the generations that followed them up until very recently had no problem with thinking that the separation of church and state was completely compatible with legislators defending their votes by referencing the Bible, or calling on religious motives and ideas for public policies, is that they lived in a world where no matter what your religion was, or even your lack of it, everybody agreed on what was moral and immoral.

On the big issues of today–homosexuality, birth control, abortion, and all the rest of it–Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Deists and even atheists all affirmed a nearly identical moral code. 

Susan B. Anthony and most of the rest of the suffragists thought abortion was something men forced on women, and no woman would ever want.  Homosexuality was considered simple vice and punishable by law, and that attitude was upheld just as strongly by secularists as by religious people.

What has happened to us, I think, is that we no longer agree on what is good and evil.

At the beginning of the country, there was exactly ONE  issue like this–slavery.

Now we have the same kind of divide about virtually everything as we once did about slavery. 

And because the divide is the kind of divide it is, we can no longer talk to each other in any straightforward way.  Liberals are convinced that conservatives are really secret racist thugs–after all, nobody believes all that talk about “limited” government,” it must be just a cover for returning to patriarchalism and white supremecy.  Conservatives are convinced that Liberals are just plain lying.  “Reproductive freedom?”  Give us a break. That’s just code for “it’s okay to kill the baby if it’s inconvienent for you–like if you’d rather go to college or if the baby is going to be born disabled and be too much of a burden for you to care for.”

A house divided against itself cannot stand, the man said, and he knew a lot more about all this kind of thing than I do.

I think the sentiment is real enough. 

Without a common moral code with common foundational principle, we cannot survive as a society. 

Eventually, we will settle on one.

Which one, or what kind of combination of the two, isn’t clear at the moment, but I think both sides live in terror that the winner will not be them.

This leads to a lot of public displays of what I’d call “assuming the conclusion.”

“Do you REALIZE,” a secular magazine I read regularly said a few months ago, “Mother Teresa herself said that her goal wasn’t to help the poor, it was to glorify God!”

Shock!  Horror!  The grass is green!

Yes, of course she said that.  That’s what Christians believe.

“Do you REALIZE,” I’ve heard on The O’Reilly Factor, “that progressive eductors believe that their job is to wean students away from the values of their parents?”

Shock!  Horror!  The sky is blue!

Of course they believe that.  They’ve believed it since Dewey, who wasn’t shy about saying it.

The Shock! Horror! is meant to cue the audience that what follows is complete beyond the pale–no decent person would ever believe that.

And that cues the audience that OUR moral code is the only ACTUAL moral code.

And the problem with that, of course, is that half the country doesn’t accept that code.

Whichever code it is.

Here we go, of course, because I’m blithering again.

But it seems to me that the issue is that we cannot resolve any of the other issues without resolving this one. 

And we’re not even trying.

Every once in a while, I wonder if this thing about being born on Friday the Thirteenth isn’t having more effect on my life than I’d like to think.

And this week was one of those times.

At the bottom of this post, I intend to talk about a book, which is much more interesting than my whining–so just bear with me for a bit.  I’ll get past the week as soon as I can.

But–to start.

First, I have, for the last SEVEN years–emphasis deliberate–been renting a car from a local car rental place.  That’s renting, not leasing.

Lots of people have told me I’ve been insane to do t his, but my rationale was quite simple. 

Although leasing is much cheaper on the surface, it comes with costs.  The lessee is expected to get the car serviced every three thousand miles and to pay for any repairs the car needs like brakes that need brake jobs and transmissions that go wonky, as well as paying for things like conveyance fees and taxes and a lot of other stuff.

With the rental, I got the car, and if anything went wrong with it it wasn’t my problem.  I dropped it off, they gave me a substitute, I was good to go in a second and then I picked it up when the repairs were done.  I paid my rental and nothing else.  They handled the endless fees Connecticut puts on cars.  I brought the car in for service and never paid a dime for it.

When my brother was alive, he did my car repairs for me, and if there was something he couldn’t do, he took it into somebody he could trust and who wouldn’t dare rip him off.

But my brother had moved to Kansas at about the time I totaled the Escort in a freak snowstorm, and a few months after that he was dead.  This was not a bad arrangement.

The only serious drawback came in the form of the guy I had to rent it from, who was, in the words of my sons, “a douche.”

What he was was one of these people who had a hard time admitting he was wrong, and who responded to situations where it was obvious he was wrong by going on the offensive about something else.

At one point, he started to harrass me on a nearly daily basis to bring in the car for service, and when I told him I’d been there less than three weeks before, he gave me a lecture on  how it had actually been months and it needed to come in right now.

So I brought it in, and of course there was the sticker.  But he didn’t acknowledge that, and he didn’t apologize. Instead, he started harranguing me about how there was a little tear in front bumper and I needed to get that done right away and he needed to see an estimate immediately and…

There certainly was a tear in the front bumper, obviously something that had happened in a snow bank–but it was small, and the estimates were in the range of $250.  There was no need for anything to be done about it immediately, and since at that point it looked like I was going to drive that car until it died, there might not have been any need to do anything about it at all.

But, you know, at least we weren’t talking about the fact that the car not only had not gone 3000 miles from its last service, but it hadn’t gone 600 miles.

It was that kind of thing.

This man was, as far as I could see over the years, nasty and unpleasant to virtually everybody who walked through his door.  His most common conversational style was accusatory, whether he had something to accuse you of or not. 

I used to wonder how he’d managed to stay in business, considering the way he treated customers.

And then I found out—he didn’t.

I got the phone call, out of the blue and with no warning whatsover, that I had to return the car by this past Friday, because he was going out of business.

I could go on at some length about the experience of turning the car back in–the insistance that I was at least a month behind in the car rental payments (I have bank records, and he knew it, and he finally backed down), that my initial deposit was “absorbed in the rental” (whatever that means), and that he didn’t owe me for the week I’d paid for that I wasn’t going to get since I had to return the car then.

It was as nasty and unpleasant as it had been all along, and it resulted in my coming home without a car.  I’d been given such a short time to fix something up, I haven’t yet been able to arrange for something new in the way of a ride, and I am stuck here this week-end without one.  And maybe for longer. 

I will eventually get it done, but the inconvenience is severe, and the whole damned thing is going to end up being expensive and inconvenient, especially since I live in something less than a bustling metropolis, and truly local options are few and far between.

But that didn’t end the week-end.

I got home Friday night with enough supplies to last me for a while, did some e-mail, checked a few web sites, and then headed off to make dinner.

Dinner being made, I realized that I had never shut down the computer and all the lights in my office were on.

I sent my younger son in to sign off–and  he came back to tell me the monitor was now entirely dark puce and even darker blue, and that it wasn’t possible to read anything on it.

He was right.  I couldn’t read my mail.  I couldn’t read my manuscript.  It was all just–messed up.

And, since the problem with my account being hacked last month, I also can’t get mail from my main e-mail account on my phone. 

So…

Well, I have good friends who Do Things with computers, and they had a spare lying around the house, and they came over yesterday to bring it to me.

I only lost one day of work and I’m back today–but the monitor I’m borrowing is, according to my friends, a little wonky.  It’s probably about to die, and every once in a while the image on the screen shudder as if it’s about to die, and it probably will.

So now I’m sitting here with no transportation and a monitor that gives me heart failure a couple of times an hour.

And it’s Sunday.  And I’m going to make something nice for dinner and not think until tomorrow morning, because if I think, I’ll explode.

And that brings me to the book.

It’s called The Night Men, and it was written by Keith Snyder, a nice man who once sent me very interesting tea.

It was, I think, the last book he published, and it came out in 1996.  He published it with Walker, and I think Walker went out of business.  He wasn’t able to pick up another contract and he went on to other things, including becoming something of a powerhouse in the field of the design and publication of e-book editions of mystery novels.

But here’s the thing–this is a great book.  It’s a remarkable book.  It is everything I’ve ever tried to do in the writing of crime fiction, and everything I’ve failed at.

The writing is beautiful, the construction of the thing is like Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, and I’m not sure I could explain it to you. 

But what got me is this:  this is a good book.  It’s well written in the sense of being absolutely beautiful prose, and it’s well constructed in the sense of having all its parts fit together–and that’s a high wire act in this thing.

And Keith Snyder doesn’t have a contract.

But the woman I didn’t name who wrote that thing I didn’t name about two months ago, the one that was a hashy mess–well, she’s not only got a contract, she’s got a multiple book one.

And it makes me ashamed of the American reader that this is where we’re at.

Go read Keith Snyder’s The Night Men.  It’s not exactly a mystery story, and it’s not exactly a “crime novel,” and I don’t know how to tell you what it is.

It’s just an amazing book.

So, yes, I know.  I’ve been less than diligent about the blog.  But the Gregor is going fine, and is likely to actually be handled in when promised, and I’m happy.

Right now, I want to address a question:

When reading mysteries–all kinds of mysteries, where you don’t know who the perpetrator is from off–does it matter to you if you figure out who the perpetrator is before the detective/protagonist/whoever does?

I want to discuss this with regard to a particular example, so I want to tell you right up front that what follows will be about Isaac Asimov’s Murder at the ABA, and that I will be giving away the ending.

Murder at the ABA was published in 1975.  I don’t know if it’s in print, and I don’t know if anybody reading this blog has read it or wants to read it.

But here’s the

                            SPOILER ALERT

Everything after this point will have specific information about this book, including the solution.

The ABA, for those of you who don’t know, is the American Booksellers Association, and this book is one of those things Asimov used to do from time to time as a kind of tour de force.  Asimov himself is in it, and the fourth wall breaks down every few pages.   The main character was almost certainly meant to resemble the science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, and since Asimov and Ellison were friends, my guess is that Ellison didn’t mind.

In spite of all that, however–the various footnotes meant to be from the supposed narrator and Asimov himself, the in jokes and the references that very few of the readers would have understood, or even been able to tell were happening, the book is a fairly standard and reasonably well constructed fair play mystery.

And it’s because that’s what this is that I was brought up short.

Because I knew who the killer was within maybe five pages of the body being discovered, and it probably didn’t take that long.

Here is the set up.

The victim is a writer names Giles Devore, who has had one big best seller and whose new book is just about to drop.  He has arrived at the ABA convention to schmooze booksellers and to make connections, because he is determined to drop his small publishers and go with a big house for his next book.

On the night before he is to do his Big Signing, he has a commitment that makes him worried he will not be back in time to get a package from the cloakroom that has been left for him by his wife.

He therefore gives the ticket for this package to Our Protagonist, and Our Protagonist promises to retrieve this package and leave it in Giles’s room.

Our Protagonist gets distracted, and doesn’t remember about the package until well into the next day.  He finds out that Giles has attempted to retrieve it himself, and not having the ticket has been refused.  Giles then had a fit and, in his autograph signing, had even more fits.

Our Protagonist finally retrieves the package and rushes up to Giles room to hand it over.

When he gets there, he finds Giles dead in the bathtub and clothes strewn all over the room, and a little pile of white powder that he is able to identify as heroin on the top of the bureau.

He immediately calls security, and a security guard named Michael Strong shows up. 

Our Protagonist points out that the clothes flung all over the room mean that this must be murder, and not an accident, because Giles was notoriously neurotic about folding his clothes neatly and putting them away.  He would never fling them about.

Michael Strong allows as how this isn’t much to go on, and that Giles may have had some reason for not following his usual routine.  Then he calls the head of security.

When the head of security shows up, Our Protagonist explains about the clothes and gets the same kind of so-what reaction.  Then he goes, “and on top of that, there’s heroin in this room!”

They look at the bureau as he points, and there is no sign of heroin there.  The top of the bureau is shiny and clean.

And at that point, of course, I knew that Michael Strong was the murderer.

I did not stop reading the book there, of course.  I read lots of books where I know who the murderer is.

But maybe because I didn’t know the murderer before I started reading, because I figured it out on the page, the rest of the book read very oddly to me.

For one thing, I could not get over the distinct feeling that, given the fact that Michael Strong was the murderer, a lot of the rest of the plot was simply superfluous.

It all felt beside the point–the exposition of Giles’s rancorous relationship with his small publishers, the various women Giles had tried to get to accommodate his very peculiar sexual habits, the highly uncordial relationship between Giles and the ABA and hotel staffs.

Part of it, I think, was that a lot of the subsidiary motives were not very believable to me.  There’s a famous story about some science fiction writer–it might have been Harlan Ellison, come to think of it–throwing a piece of office furniture through the window of Lester del Ray”s Manhattan office, and I never heard anybody say that del Ray had been ready to kill him.

Publishing people do not, in general, resort to physical violence agaisnt each other.  Some of them do other very nasty things, but the physical is just not part of the repertoire.

And although I think rape could lead a woman to murder, I’m not sure that I believe that a woman would kill a man for suggesting sex she found disgusting.  I’d believe it might cause her to slap him, or to knee him, or to run away in disgust, but why kill a man who isn’t trying to force you? 

I find myself, in the meantime, a little uncomfortable with this whole thing.

The people who walk up to you and go, “I figured it out before the end!” as if “figuring it out” is the gold standard of value for the fair play mystery, or any mystery, drive me crazy.

There ought to be more to a book–including a fair play mystery–than just “figuring it out.”  If that was all it was, nobody would ever reread mysteries, and plenty of people do.

So there’s a question–do you read mysteries to “figure them out”?  Is “figuring them out” the whole point, or the main one?  Is a mystery you can’t figure out until the writer tells you at the end better, and a more satisfying book, than one where you do?

I thought I had the answer to this, for me, a long time ago.

With this one book, though, my usual answer didn’t hold true.

I was less happy with this book because I figured it out that early.

As for the title, don’t ask.  It’s one of those days.

But I’ve been looking over the comments from the last post, and two things struck me.

First, pace Mique, Harold Robbins never wrote an explicit sex scene in his life.  Even Grace Metallious (Peyton Place) only informed her readers that some kind of bizarre sex had taken place.

For explicit sex, you had to look at Henry Miller, who was a sort of cult icon among (mostly male) writers in the Sixties. 

But the issue comes down to what will and won’t sell books, and writers and publishers are looking for “the kind of thing” that will get readers to buy.

It’s not entirely true that any “good” book will find an audience.  Fashions come and go in fiction as in anything else, and very good books that are outside their time often go nowhere.

But the fashion for very explicit sex and violence is something else.

It’s an attempt to make books not books.

Books have always been addressed principally to the mind. 

I don’t mean they were Intellectual with a capital I, but that the writer and the reader both assumed that the attraction of reading was getting your mind to work, either logically or imaginatively. 

A book doesn’t have to be difficult to read in order to do this.  The idea isn’t to give everybody the mental equivalent of a full body workout.  It can be, but it doesn’t have to be. 

The issue is only that it be your mind that is appealed to, and maybe to your emotions in the sense of sympathy for the characters, which is also a mental act.

What books do when they provide more and more graphic sex scenes and more and more graphic violence is to appeal not to the mind, but to the gut.

I’m not talking about sympathy or imagination here, but a reaction similar to getting tazed.  The material bypasses mind and emotions both to give you a kind of electric shock.  And if you like that electric shock, you’re going to want a bigger one the next time.

For centuries, the only kind of literature that went for the electric shock was pornography, and that was why pornography was deemed both trashy and illicit.  It was trashy because it didn’t appeal to the mind, which was assumed to be the most human part of the human.  It was illicit because the Powers that Were thought it was a bad idea for human beings to spend their time chasing ever larger electric shocks.

Think drug addiction.  Or–closer in actual experience–chronic gambling.

I do not like to read or watch explicit violence, so I was unaware that graphic descriptions of child rape and murder had become so prevalent. 

It does occur to me that such graphic violence marks a distinct change from when I started publishing fiction, when I was told that violence done to a child would hurt a book.  I even had a book–Charisma–with such violence, that was roundly panned in several places, including the New York Times, for having such violence.

But if violence is becoming more common in books, my guess is that it’s there because there is no other place to go. 

And all graphic violence looks like a how to manual.  It would almost have to.

But if such books are selling, then somebody wants to read them. 

And it seems to me that books without the electric jolt are selling less well.

And I have, really, no idea of what any of this is supposed to mean.

It may, though, explain something about the tendency to shove books that are not cozy into the cozy label. 

Maybe we have just reached a point where there is no name for a novel that is just a novel, genre or otherwise.  You either have “dark,” meaning explicit, or books that are deemed before they’ve ever been read to be cutsey, silly and unrealistic.

I’ve got a good one, by the way, if you want to read a decent traditional mystery novel but might get turned off by the cozy label because you don’t like detecting cats or characters that are less like human beings than vaudeville skits.

Try Jane K. Cleland’s Consigned to Murder.

It’s the first in her Josie Prescott series, and it’s very good indeed.  And very well written.

And not in the least bit cutsey-wootsie, giggle and give recipes.

That’s my recommendation for the week.

When I write mysteries, I often also read mysteries.  And I tend to read older mysteries, at least as much because it’s hard to find the kind of mystery I like being published today. 

We are in an era of “thrillers,” and thrillers don’t thrill me very much.

But we are also in an era of escalation, if that’s the word for it. 

There are so many mysteries being published by so many different people in such a very few subgenres, that each of the subgenres seems to me to be in a state of constant one-upsmanship. 

I have no idea if the grammar of that sentence makes any sense.

But you know what I mean.  Each author feels the need to go one better than the last author, especially the last best seller author.   Each serial killer novel is gorier and more outrageous than the last.  Each police procedural has a more convoluted set of body wounds or a more complex set of twists that rely on the idea that the police aren’t necessarily angels.

This kind of thing causes problems in any subgenre it occurs in.  After awhile, readers like me tend to get innured to the blood and gore and yet another sexual aspect and to feel more bored than shocked or entranced.

But in the particular subgenre in which I work–the fair play mystery–there’s another problem, and it’s a big one.

If you’re going to start out your mystery with a corpse found in a spectular situation–dressed like a bat and hanging upside down from its knees from the lintel of his wife’s front door, say–you’d damn well better have an explanation that is just as spectacular.

Okay, I’ll admit it.

I like that bat thing.

But I’m never going to use it, because there are only two ways in which I could explain it that would be in any sense plausible.

The first is that there is something about the commission of the crime that REQUIRES the perpetrator to resort to such a thing.

And by requires, I don’t mean “was made at the victim and this was his way of getting revenge on the victim by making the victim look ridiculous.”

That’s the kind of explanation we get for most of these things, and it’s beyond lame.

I know a lot of you here don’t think it’s necessary to stick to what could happen in the real world when you’re writing a story, but a situation like the one I’ve outlined above, coupled with the kind of explanation I’ve outlined above is beyond being implausible.  It’s just plain silly.

Murderers do not dress their victims up as bats and hang them from lintels for the very good reason that doing so naturally increases the chance that they’ll be caught. 

That kind of thing takes a lot of time, and it provides many more opportunities for the murderer to leave physical evidence, like fingerprints and clothes fibers. 

The closest thing I ever saw to a decent explanation for a situation like this came in a Murder, She Wrote episode, where the corpse was dressed in a costume from a costume party in order to make people believe, when seeing it, that it was really somebody else.

The plot did  not require that anybody buy the mistaken identity for very long, and the reason for the switch was in fact necessary to the murderer getting away with it, but it was still iffy.

In most cases, the explanation isn’t nearly as well thought out, and what we’re left with amounts to “the murderer went through all this extra trouble because the victim locked him in a room with a bat when they were both five.”

The other possible explanation is that the murderer wasn’t able to avoid leaving the corpse in such an outrageous position–that the living person was actually in that position at the time he was killed, or that something about the disposal of the body or the killer’s need to get away left him no other choice but to do this thing.

The obvious problem with this, of course, is that there are very few circumstances in which this sort of thing would be the case.  How plausible is it (there’s that word again) that the ONLY time the killer could have to murder the victim is in the middle of a costume party while the victim is hanging from a lintel in a bat costume? 

In the actual world of murder mysteries, and especially of cozies or quasi-cozies–we get a lot of situations like this in which the reason for the victim wearing the bat costume is plausible enough (costume party, Halloween), but where we are then told that the murderer deliberately posed the body over the lintel.

Worse, we eventually come to find out that by doing this, the murderer was “sending a message” he expected at least some other people to be able to read.

Apparently, the murderer does not care that sending messages of this kind will almost certainly make it much easier for the police to figure out who did it.

This is, I think, a large part of what I don’t like about the core of the “cozie” subgenre.  I’m not a big fan of cute in any case, but I don’t mind the outlying regions of “cozy” which are not so much “cozy” as they are just sort of straightforward middle of the road detective stories.

But the artificialness of this kind of situation makes me wild.

And that goes back to why I end up reading old mysteries.

Before the escalation started, there were a fair number of books written that did the outrageious-circumstance thing fairly well, and did it both plausibly and without resorting to lots of silly not-really-within-the-realm-of-believability explanations.

Of course, there were also a lot of books that did just the kind of awful thing I’m talking about–but they’re now out of print.

This morning, I’m reading Erle Stanley Gardener’s Perry Mason mystery The Case of the Half-Wakened Wife.

He’s very good at the kind of thing I’m talking about.

And he’s a genius–because only a genius could have named a continuing character Ham Burger, and gotten away with it for 40 years.

Here’s the thing.

I almost never know who the murderer is going to be whenI start writing a book, and I almost always change my mind several times over the course of writing.

What’s more, I almost always change my mind again when I’m doing the cut from the first draft, and sometimes I change my mind twice.

This requires an awful lot of going back and forth with things, and there is simply no way that I don’t miss some of them.

Of course, this is what editors and copyeditors is for, but with this book I’m trying a new method of checking on myself–I’m printing out the whole thing as I do it so that I can reread it in hard copy.

I have no idea why I seem to pay more attention to, and retain more, with hard copy than I do with what I see on a computer screen.

I don’t know why I never noticed this before, but I do know I noticed it this time because the mystery I constructed depends on a lot of little and not always obvious details–when the alarm system at a house was activated and deactivated, for instance.

I don’t usually write technical mysteries of that kind, but this was a good idea, and I had an explanation for a few elements that I think are rather novel, so I went with it, and here I am.

But what’s striking me this morning is this–a lot of what I read now I read on the Web.  I don’t own an e-read, but I know many people do.

How much of what I’m reading on the Web am I missing?

Does everybody have the same problem I’m having, where they just find it easier to retain what they read in hardcopy?

And if they do, are they having the same problem with their e readers as they are with actual Web based content?

And at what point does this sort of thing become seriously dysfunctional?

My problem with e readers, at the moment, is that I don’t much like the format.  I haven’t tried one, but I know I can’t manipulate a hard plastic box the way I can a series of pages that can be twisted around in my fingers and other things I do with books when I’m reading them.  I also do a lot of highlighting, even in fiction, and I’m not sure how that would work on a e book or if I would find it easy to find the quotes I need when I’ve forgotten everything about them.

But the difference between what I’m retaining of what I’m reading of my own book on the computer, and what I’m retaining by looking at the hard copy is HUGE.

It’s so huge, I’d have to say that reading is different experientially on the computer than it is with the hard copy.

And I wonder what that means.

So try this

http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2012/02/neo-atheism-atheists-dawkins

It was on Arts and Letters Daily today, about the “new Atheism” and that sort of thing.

So, okay.  My head is still full of Gregor, as it’s going to be for the next couple of weeks.  And when my head is full of Gregor, I tend not to be able to really focus on anything else.

That said, some observations from my week:

One of the reasons I like Perry Mason novels, and a lot of Fifties television, is that they were conceived and written before everybody in the country was watching his weight.

When Perry Mason takes Della Street out for dinner, she orders a steak and a baked potato dripping with butter, and she finishes it.  If anybody has problems with food, it’s with not getting enough of it.  People run around doing things, and then they’re famished, and then they can’t get to dinner fast enough, and they complain.

The “got to watch my calories and keep my figure” thing started in the Sixties, at least on a broad scale, and I suppose that’s another black mark against the Extreme Decade. 

I have no idea where my balance sheet bottom line is on whether I loved or hated the Sixties, but here we are.

Last week was the week of March 1, which is traditionally the week we get our biggest nor’easter of the winter.  We did get snow, but it was on the order of about two inches, and didn’t even require shoveling the walk. 

Most years, we get about two feet.  By this time last year, there was so much snow the banks of it on the sides of my walk were over my head.  If this is the most of winter we’re going to get, I say yay. 

The Republican primary process has now gone on for so long, it’s made my skull numb.

If it had just been primaries, I don’t think it would have been so bad, but the primaries have been accompanied by endless debates that never seem to come to any kind of conclusion.

I’ll admit that I don’t know what kind of conclusion I want them to reach, but by now my politics-addled brain just wants them to settle on something.

The only definitive conclusion I’ve come to so far is that I’m fed up with the people–starting with Alan Colmes, speaking on Fox News–who make fun of Rick Santorum and his wife, or call them crazy, by the way they responded to the death of their child.  This does not seem to be a legitimate part of the political process.

I will, in case you’re wondering, put up with the endless (on both sides) and almost certainly deliberate (on both sides) misstatements about the other sides positions, or the blithe ignorance of the particulars of those positions. 

I’ll put up with a lot in the way of cheap shots, too. 

But the man had lost a child.  Let it go.

I do admit that I find it less and less possible, over time, to keep the whole political thing in my head.

I am tired, however, of the constant attempts to get one or another commentator pushed off the air or fired from his university teaching job because he said X, whatever X said.

I find it literally impossible to listen to talk radio–it’s just too damned distracting in the car, and I don’t have a radio in the house–so I’m not 100% sure what Rush Limbaugh said, but from all reports, he behaved like a jerk.

Getting him shoved off the air, however, would not be a victory for anybody but the Nurse Ratcheds–only OFFICIAL speech is allowed!  Rights come with “responsibilities.”

No, they don’t. 

Rights are close to absolute claims against government power.  That’s why they’re rights instead of priveleges.

That said, the right is against the use of GOVERNMENT power, which means that calls to boycott Rush’s sponsors so that he’s no longer on the air do not constitute “censorship.”

I wish everybody could get this into their heads.

I wish the right could get it straight now, with Rush, and that the left would get it straight the next time some private group or business decides not to carry their favorite book or magazine.

And yes, I am very close to the grand old tradition of “a pox on both their houses.”

That said, the local political landscape here is very odd. 

By local I mean very, very local–school board, probate judge,  first selectman.

You literally cannot tell anything here from party affiliation.  The “cut the budget and never raise taxes” parties in the towns out here are as likely to be Democrats and Republicans. 

Some of the towns out here, especially the ones that are doing the rural equivalent of gentrifying, have spawned Independent parties whose focus is on increasing funding for public schools in order to provide more AP classes, more foreign languages, and that kind of thing. 

That’s because the towns’ traditional parties are both of the opinion that the schools should provide something basic and vocational, and beyond that you should send your kids to private schools.

Which, in some towns farther up in the hills, might mean an hour commute each way.

Whatever the particular constellation of issues, however, it’s as if local politics has come completely unmoored from the national variety–as if they’ve taken “a pox on both your houses” to the extreme of just ignoring what’s going on in Hartford and Washington completely.

And that has some interesting implications for the long term.  National politicians start out as local politicians.  This is the pipeline that will produced Democrat and Republican candidates for elections to Congress, the Senate and, maybe, the presidency.

If  this keeps up, another dozen years and you’re going to see Connecticut politicians with familiar labels and completely unfamiliar policies.

But the big kicker in my week so far has been this: 

There is a case in Oregon where parents are suing the hospital where their child was born because the hospital failed to detect that that child would have Down Syndrome when born.

Therefore, they went ahead with a pregnancy they wouldn’t have continued if they’d known.

The child is now four years old.

And all they can think of is that they’d have preferred to have her dead.

Give me Rick Santorum singing to his dead baby any day.