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Just don't let them get control of Skynet*...

by Dana

My husband and I were re-watching the superb miniseries Caprica a while back.  For those of you who aren't familiar, Caprica is the prequel/genesis of the recent incarnation of Battlestar Galactica.  One of the things we like—make that adore--about both shows is how they take present-day issues and put them into imaginary contexts.   Tough questions of ethics and morality are easier to argue about when they're not real world, and this is one of the qualities that makes SF, mystery, and other genre fiction so potent, IMNSHO.

Without giving too much away, I remarked that the inventor chose a dangerously unstable model with which to simulate a human brain in the armored cybernetic Cylons (basically battle robots).  This leads to all the drama in BSG later on, when the Cylons wage war on humans.  I suggested the only thing less stable would be to use a cat brain.  James pointed out that's already happened:  IBM claims to have simulated a brain larger than a cat's cortex.   Not everyone agrees with the results of these experiments (all on supercomputers, mind), but you'll agree, it's—ahem--heady stuff.

When I thought about it, I began to get nervous:  imagine the brain of a cat in the body of the Terminator.   Not a pretty picture.   Humanity is doomed.

This was about the time we acquired Kaylee and Zoë (yes, yes, I've already admitted we're geeks), two little shelter kittens we'd promised ourselves for Christmas.  No more than a few pounds each and not even a week with us, they've already reshaped the house in their image and scheduled our lives with amazing facility.   Editors, agents, and global corporations have tried to do that and failed.

This reassured me about the cybernetic cat brains in heavily armored bodies.  It won't happen.  Fluffy little bundles of sweetness and evil, fuzzy ninjas with razor-like claws, they don't need armor or lasers.  They don't even need opposable thumbs.  They have us right where they want us.  Resistance is futile.  I mean, yook at dose widdle faces...

Femmes and friends, I won't be saying anything shocking if I point out 2009 has been a trying year.  At our house, it's also had its share of rewards.   All the best to you.  Welcome 2010. 

*Skynet

The Great Washington Blizzard of 2009

"Look at that all that snow," my mother said, as I was driving her over to my brother's house on Christmas day.  "This is the most snow I've ever seen at one time in my whole life."

Not surprising, since up until last year, Mom had never lived outside of southeastern Virginia.  And if her twin grandsons hadn't been at the end of that eight or nine mile ride, I bet we couldn't have pried her out of her building with the proverbial crowbar.  But by Christmas day, I was feeling like an old hand at driving on snow and ice.  "This part's not great," I warned her, as we turned off a main road into my brother's neighborhood.  For a few seconds, I saw the world through her eyes, as we half-drove, half-skidded down one particularly icy stretch, and I felt a brief frisson of fear.  And then I reminded myself that I'd successfully traveled this particular stretch of road several times this week.  We'd be fine.

Flash back a week to when it gradually dawned on everyone in the Washington area that we were in for something a little bigger than the usual light, transient dusting of snow or treacherous wintry mix.  At first they said a chance of snow Saturday, and one of the members of my writing group that was scheduled to meet that day raised the issue of whether we should reschedule, since we have one writer who drives up from Richmond for the meetings.  The forecast gradually changed from a chance of some accumulation to two to four inches . . . make that four to eight inches . . . eight to twelve inches . . . and eventually one to two feet of snow. We rescheduled.

At the same time that my writing group was prudently postponing, my brother and I were dealing with a notary public who seemed curiously indifferent to the looming weather event.  We were supposed to meet with her at my house on Saturday morning to sign some financial papers, and she brushed aside all our suggestions that perhaps we could either get the paperwork over on Friday or postpone it till the following week.  "She must have a four-wheel drive," my brother said.  Or maybe a dogsled, I thought. 

I did the proverbial pre-snow grocery run, and tried to do a little of the Christmas shopping that it was now obvious would not get done over the weekend. I made sure I knew where my snow shovel was.  Put the caving helmet by my bed, in case of power outages.  And went to bed feeling strangely content with the prospect of being snowbound for a day or two.

By morning, a blanket of snow already covered my yard and the road beyond.  I couldn't tell if the road had been plowed at all, but clearly it hadn't been plowed recently, and equally clearly, I wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.

The notary canceled.

I suddenly felt immensely cheerful.

This has been a particularly busy year for me, especially this fall, and I was beginning to have that cranky feeling, like Lewis Carroll's Red Queen, that "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"  Nothing like a major weather event to bring all that crazy busyness to a screeching halt.

Yes, there were useful things I could have gotten done during the snowstorm.  And I did a few of them.  But I also curled up in bed with a Nero Wolfe book . . . made homemade meatloaf . . . watched a favorite old movie . . . and sometimes just sat and watched the snow falling, gently and inexorably.

A perfect time to think.  As the year draws to a close, I like to ruminate on it.  Assess what went right and wrong, and what I can do to have more things go right in the coming year.  Savor the events of the year.  Contemplate my new year's goals.  Goals, not resolutions--see my New Year's Eve 2008 blog if you want to know the difference. 

But it's hard to put on the brakes enough to find the time to do that ruminating during the busy holiday season. I can remember more than one time when I've come down with a cold just before or after Christmas--perhaps the body's way of responding to the mind's need for the break in the daily grind.  Being snowed in's lot nicer way to stop the world for a day or two.

By Sunday afternoon I began planning for my reentry into the world.  I shoveled a path to the barely plowed street, then paid a young Ukrainian man who was going door to door with a snow shovel to clear the rest of the driveway. I excavated the car. The notary rescheduled.  By Monday afternoon, my street was clear enough that the shoveled driveway was actually useful. Life was beginning to stutter back up to speed.

A prediction of sleet, icy rain, or the dread wintry mix for Christmas morning cast a shadow over our plans for a while. I got up before dawn so I could get Mom to my brother's house before things got messy.  And as luck would have it, the predicted precipitation didn't start until mid-afternoon, by which time the temperature had risen and we saw only gentle rain. 

It's been above freezing since Christmas day.  Even people who'd been trapped on tertiary streets and cul de sacs for nearly a week have emerged and are getting over their cabin fever.  The snow is steadily disappearing, though there are still huge mounds in parking lots and on street corners.  The Great Blizzard of 2009 is melting into history.

But I'm feeling nostalgic for that peaceful day spent reading and thinking in a house so quiet that I could hear the gentle, muffled sound of new flakes landing on the surface of the snow.

Those wacky mystery folks

By Kris

These have been troubling times for many people. I hope you and your families have found peace this holiday season, and wish, for you and yours, much happiness, health and prosperity in the days ahead. Happy holidays, everyone!

Mystery folks, be they readers or writers, are different from other people. We make a distinction between real crime, which no sane person would want in their lives, and written crime, which loads of us cheerfully embrace.

I remember an incident that occurred last year. Mystery Writers of America had just sent out its annual Edgar Awards program, and I loved the cover. If you haven’t seen it, it depicted a shadowy alley with a chalk outline on the ground. Beside it a man casually leaned against a wall, glancing down at the chalk outline. Though the hoodie he wore obscured his face, the man could be identified by the sickle that rested beside him. The caption read, “Death Becomes Us.”

I tried sharing my glee over that cover with friends who don’t read mysteries, but they clearly didn’t get it. They actually looked appalled by the whole idea of it. That was the Grim Reaper I was laughing it, after all. What? Is that bad luck or something?

Mystery folks can have fun with fictional crime. At the October debut of my urban fantasy-mystery, High Crimes on the Magical Plane, which was held at my Sedona bookstore, The Well Red Coyote, my husband gave me a grand introduction. In addition to other remarks, he mentioned that he’s such a good husband because I know five hundred ways to kill people without leaving a trace. An exaggeration to be sure — I can’t possibly know that many. Besides, most of the methods that play out in mysteries are failed methods. The bad guys get caught, after all.

What I found most interesting were the reactions of the readers and writers in the large audience. The mystery people laughed freely. Well, really, most of the genre people did. But the laughter coming from the people who don’t usually read mysteries seemed more uncomfortable. I could distinctly see the difference. Their laughter was anxious, and seemed to regard what Joe said as being inappropriate and in bad taste.

Now, I’d agree that actually doing it, that is, offing your spouse with one of those foolproof methods, is inappropriate and in bad taste. But talking about it can be both intellectually stimulating and emotionally freeing. I’ve read that Sue Grafton actually began planning her first mystery, A is for Alibi, during a bitter custody battle with her ex. Thinking murderous thoughts won’t profit everyone like that, but lots of people would feel a whole lot better if they gave release to those thoughts.

There’s also the element of justice. It’s not often we get to see karma played out in real life. Maybe what goes around actually does come around at some point, but I suspect most of us are rarely there to see our tormentors getting their comeuppance. In mysteries — even the cross-genre types written by a number of the Femmes Fatales — we not only get to see justice served, it’s usually in the most satisfying and symbolic way.

Especially in a time filled with so many challenges, why would anyone want to live without that?

The Year Things Changed

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

This post is PG—and you’ll read why in a moment.

It’s about Santa.

I was signing in a bookstore a few weeks before Christmas, and also having fun watching people select books, and overhearing snippets of conversation.

A mom and a pre-pre-teen daughter were heading out the door. The girl—cute, hip, mismatched gloves--was looking at her mother with a strange expression. She stopped, and held on to her mother’s arm.  Wait, she said. You mean—YOU’RE Santa?

I almost burst into tears. What a once in a life time moment. And it reminded me…

Twas the night before Christmas—no, it really was. And at my home in rural Indiana, back in–1960-something? I had just turned sixteen.

Twas the night before Christmas—and my younger sister and I were very unhappy.  My mother had laid down the law. This year, there would be no Christmas tree.

We were too old, Mom said. It was difficult. And even though we’d always had a Christmas tree, and all that goes with Christmas morning, and unwrapping presents and candy canes and chocolate apples and Handel on the record player and oranges in the toes of our stockings--this year, it was not gonna happen.   The Santa thing was long over (being careful here) and there was no reason for a tree. 

My sister Nina—age 13—and I were devastated. We had three younger siblings, and even though they were no longer waiting for Santa, we knew they would be devastated, too.

We pleaded.

 Nope, Mom said. We would have presents, and brunch, and all the trimmings. But a tree was a pain (she probably didn’t use those words) and just not necessary. 

Christmas Eve day came, and our living room was looking right out of Dickens. I mean—Bleak House, not A Christmas Carol.  Presents on the floor. Stacked in front of the fireplace. Sure there were stockings hanging, right where they should be. But where there should have been a tree, there was…living room.

It was about 4 o’clock. And I had an idea.  Mom? I said, all innocence. Nina and I need to go to the store. To get one last present.  I remember trying to look guiltily sly, as if I were hiding that I was going to buy HER present. Could I, I continued, take the car?

With my brand new drivers’ license in my wallet, Nina and I headed out in the family station wagon. But not to the store. We went the Christmas tree place by the shopping center. All that was left, as you can imagine, were Charlie-Brown-scraggly leftovers. No matter.

We put one of them in the wayback of the station wagon. Then realized—we had more to do. How were we going to decorate the tree?   We couldn’t get the boxes of ornaments out of the basement, we’d get caught. So—we went to the movies. But not to see a film. We hit the lobby, and bought several boxes of popcorn. We got home, and hid the tree behind the garage. By that time it was dark, and we totally got away with it.  Then we ran upstairs. Mom thought we were hiding her gifts, probably, and actively ignored us.

We got out our sewing boxes (no comment) and madly started stringing popcorn with a needle and heavy thread. We worked and worked.  I think we had to stop for dinner, then we went back upstairs. “Wrapping!” we said.

At one point, one of us had a brilliant idea. We headed down to the basement, and got a bag of whole cranberries out of the freezer. “Being frozen will make it easier to string,” one of us said. And so we made frozen cranberry garlands too.

That night, we could barely sleep. (What else is new on Christmas Eve?) But we got up early early early, dragged the little tree from behind the garage, and set it up in its rightful place in the living room.

(I don’t really remember how we did that, but somehow it worked.)

We festooned it with our popcorn garlands, and our cranberry garlands (not terribly successful, however, as the cranberries began to defrost, drip and get mushy). We made a star-like thing out of aluminum foil.

Then we high-tailed it back upstairs. We had been instructed to come downstairs no earlier than 7 AM. We came down earlier anyway. So we were there when my mom and step-dad saw the tree. And, in their pajamas and robes and slippers, they stopped in their tracks.

Mom’s face was a mixture of—shock, and surprise, and joy. And love.

“Santa!” she said. Her voice was a whisper. “He came!”

 

Do Good Girls Finish Last?

By Nancy Martin

Nancy Martin was awarded the 2009 Romantic Times award for lifetime achievement in mystery writing.  Including her Blackbird Sisters mysteries and Our Lady Of Immaculate Deception, she is the author of nearly 50 popular-fiction novels.  Welcome to the Femmes Fatales blog, Nancy!

I swim laps most mornings. Keeping my head underwater helps control my blood pressure.  

Which is a good thing, because Kirkus—just days before they announced the closing of their shop--reviewed my upcoming book, and---if you’ve been around the publishing rodeo long, you know what’s coming next—the review didn’t exactly glow.  (Kirkus was known for giving authors a light slap across the face, and that’s if they liked your book.)  Yes, the review was favorable, but they couldn’t resist a slam:  “Martin’s change of sleuths from wishy-washy Philadelphia socialite Nora Blackbird to gritty Pittsburgh tough gal Roxy is a definite improvement.”

Wishy-washy?  To me, Nora Blackbird was layered! Nuanced! Complex!  How could those morons possibly—well, I needed a swim to calm down.

Driving over to the pool, I listened to an NPR story about Australian actresses.  One of the commentators generalized that our Aussie cousins were exciting onscreen because they’re not afraid to wear false noses or let their hair frizz. They didn’t mind playing unpleasant characters, either.

American actresses, on the other hand (the generalizing commentator seemed particular hung up on Sandra Bullock) would never achieve greatness because they were too worried about being pretty and sympathetic.  Sandra would rather be a good girl on screen than stick a rubber nose on her face and go for the gusto. Her likability—her goodness--has held her back.

I thought of my lovely and gracious Nora Blackbird.  When creating her, I’ll admit likability had come first on her list of traits.  Had I inadvertently made her wishy-washy? Must all female sleuths be as squeaky clean as Nancy Drew?

As I slogged up and down the pool, I recalled the months I spent considering Dexter—the police blood spatter expert who’s also an appealing serial killer. And I thought about another Nancy---Nancy Botwin, the widowed housewife of WEEDS who decides the best way to support her family is to sell dope in suburbia.  Nobody would describe these characters as wishy-washy. They’re strong protagonists who survive by their wits and tenaciously pursue
their goals—even if their moral compasses occasionally go on the fritz. They’re funny, too.  Perhaps it’s their humor than mitigates the moral slipperiness?

In my devious writer’s heart I wanted to come up with an equally intriguing “bad” character for my new mystery series. It was time for me to go for the gusto.

Swimming miles, I created Roxy Abruzzo, a former mafia princess from a tough neighborhood.  She supports herself and her teenage daughter by doing “favors” for her crime boss uncle. In other words, she’s a single mom who’s mob fixer.  Between jobs, though, she helps people who can’t go to the police when they’re in trouble.

Is Roxy a good girl?  No.  Is she squeamish about getting her hands dirty? Not hardly.  And for me, it was her voice—funny and streetwise—that mattered more than whether or not she was as pretty as Sandra Bullock.

In the first chapter of Our Lady, Roxy steals a priceless statue. (What red-blooded girl can resist a handsome naked man?)  But the statue’s disappearance triggers the murder of a philandering tycoon and an international art scandal. Roxy’s caught in a big mess of her own making.

And although this may sound like a thriller premise--hell, she commits a crime in the first pages!—I’ve saddled her with enough mystery novel baggage to provide a compelling emotional arc for many more books: Her teenager is probably smarter than she is.  The father of her child has faults that make him an unsuitable life partner. And Roxy has what I’ll delicately call sexual issues that will only be resolved when she reconciles her past.

I think I came up with a dynamic character who’s as unfettered by “goodness” as her male mystery counterparts. We’ll see if readers go for her. 

Meantime, what about you?  Do you think it’s okay to leave the good girls behind?  Are we allowed to retire Nancy Drew? Or is my brain waterlogged? 

Our Lady of Immaculate Deception, in stores March 2010.

Learn more about Roxy at www.NancyMartinMysteries.com

I'm a member of MWA (Mystery Writers of America), among other professional organizations. On an annual basis, MWA names a Grand Master. I don't have the literature in front of me, but a Grand Master should be a much-published and much-revered member of the mystery community. The Grand Master should also have written work that was so sound that it became the template for what came afterward.

This year's Grand Master is Dorothy Gilman. Gilman has published over thirty books, the best known of which are her Mrs. Polifax novels. Mrs. Polifax is a sweet-looking older woman who becomes a spy almost by accident. Along with many, many readers, I enjoyed the adventures of this woman of a certain age, and I appreciated the skill it took to make Gilman's writing look simple. (Incidentally, Gilman writes for both adult and YA readers.) Emily Polifax, widow, was a cozy heroine; an amateur sleuth stuck in a professional role, a woman who had a second career much more adventurous than her first.

As the most unlikely spy, Mrs. Polifax travels to foreign countries, unsuspected because of her middle-class-little-old-lady demeanor and good manners. She meets her adventures with nearly unfailing courage and determination -- and some of those adventures are very unpleasant indeed. But Mrs. Polifax perseveres, and she finds -- yes, she does -- love along the way. 

I think every single MWA Grand Master has earned his or her slot on that list. There are no undeserving political appointees, no one who bought a chance to join that exclusive club. They're legitimate heavyweights in the mystery genre. But I'm glad that Dorothy Gilman is on that list now. I'm glad that an American traditional writer's influence on the genre has been recognized. 

I'm proud of her selection.

Pretty gritty

by Dana

I've been doing lots of promotion in support of Boston Noir, which includes my story, “Femme Sole.”  It's been tremendous fun working with the good folks at Akashic, I was delighted by the chance to contribute, and I'm proud of the work I did on my story.  But there's been a recent twist on the “how much is your character like you?” question that every author gets.  It's become “Anna Hoyt's a very angry person.  Are you angry about something?”

The short answer is, well, yeah.  There's plenty in the world to be angry about, but people don't generally go around asking each other “are you angry today?”  This clearly was more personal, more specific to me and my story.  A couple of times, trying to sort out my confusion, the question was changed to “Anna's struggling because she is a woman.  Were you drawing on some experience you had as a woman?”  Again, the answer was too easy and unsatisfactory:  “Sure.  Everyone has an experience where he or she is treated differently because of expectations based on prejudice.  And most of mine have been because I am a woman.  All writers take experience and extrapolate.  I've written about a werewolf.  No one seems concerned that I'm about to start chasing rabbits and howling at the moon.” 

Since I got this question three times in four days, it got me wondering:  just what is so crazy about Anna and “Femme Sole” that it provoked this response?  It's not like Anna does anything so shocking, I explained to my husband.  He promptly ran down the list of things that happens in the story, some of them pretty gritty.  But it's noir, I said.  It's the same as the other stories in the collection because in noir, as I see it, people who can't go to the authorities to solve problems are forced to find their own, often criminal, solutions.  I've written antagonists in amateur sleuth books who were far scarier and more violent, in my opinion. 

“Yeah,” he said.  “It's just that good female rage.  Everyone's afraid of it.”

“It's different when it's a guy taking the course that Anna took?”

He shrugged.  “Yeah.  People think so.”

So, I have to ask:  what's everyone so scared of?

Of Coleridge and Cabot Cove

by Donna

The other day I did a book talk to a fairly erudite group, and the conversation turned to the subject of Cabot Cove Syndrome--the way everyone who came into Jessica Fletcher's life exited, sooner or later, either feet first or in handcuffs,  Some people think that’s an insurmountable problem for mysteries with an amateur sleuth. How many murders can you plausibly believe that one person can encounter?  How many dead bodies can our protagonists find? How can we expect our readers to buy this implausibility book after book?

Easy, I said.  Willing suspension of disbelief.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (of Rime of the Ancient Mariner fame) first used the phrase in 1817, in his Biographia Literaria.  The Age of Reason had made writing about the supernatural out of fashion, and yet Coleridge felt it was still possible to write about " persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."

To put it in more modern terms, to enjoy a work of fiction you may be required to accept a premise that you wouldn't believe in the real world. 

Willing suspension of disbelief is vital to the enjoyment of any stage, screen or television production.  We know the people we see are actors, the daggers plastic and the blood only fake.   People don't really live out their lives before cameras or rows of rapt spectators.  Greeks were rarely followed around by choruses commenting on their lives.  Shakespeare's audience knew no real people who spoke in blank verse, yet that didn't their enjoyment of his plays. 

Suspending disbelief is obviously needed to enjoy fantasy or science fiction.  You don't have to believe in the existence of magic to enjoy reading the Harry Potter books.  I don't know how many of Charlaine Harris's devoted readers hold it as an article of faith that vampires actually exist, but I'm sure it falls well short of 100%. Star Trek and Star Wars offer two very different views of the future of the galaxy, and yet many fans happily enjoy both without being upset by the discrepancies between the two universes. Alternate history is a popular sub-genre, and part of its charm is knowing how things turned out in the real world and putting that knowledge aside to allow the author to entertain and enlighten with a series of ingenious "what ifs."

Perhaps "what if" is just another word for suspension of disbelief.  Forget what really happened.  What if this happened? It's the basis for all fiction. And perhaps enjoying any work of fiction requires some suspension of disbelief.  Letting go, immersing yourself in another time, another place, or even another view of life completely different from your own--that's one of the challenges and also one of the joys of reading fiction.

I would try to say something eloquent about people who avoid whole provinces of the literary world--fantasy, science fiction, romance, or amateur sleuth mysteries--because they find them unrealistic.  But it's getting late in the day, and I'm already late posting this, so I'll simply mention that recently I've been rereading a great many of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries.  Wolfe isn't precisely an amateur sleuth, but very few real life private detectives spend even a fraction of their careers investigating murders.  And I wouldn't call Wolfe's world unrealistic, but I doubt if anyone, no matter how much of a genius he is, would ever get away with running roughshod over the NYPD Homicide Bureau as he does.  In fact, everything about Nero Wolfe comes perilously close to being over the top, larger than life, and almost too much to believe.  And throughout the thirty-year life of the series, none of Stout's characters ever seem to age a day. 

When asked about the last point, Stout said, "Those stories have ignored time for thirty-nine years. Any reader who can't or won't do the same should skip them."

Of course, anyone who did so would be missing some of the best reading in mystery fiction.  Here's a belated thanks to Jim Huang and his fellow organizers of Bouchercon 2009, who declared Some Buried Caesar the official "one convention, one book" selection, and reminded me that it had been too long since I'd paid a visit to West Thirty-Fifth Street.

And now I'm going to curl up with And Four to Go.  Anyone else ready for a little eager suspension of disbelief? 

Or perhaps, culling another phrase from Coleridge, a little poetic faith.