My Weblog

Blurred Lines

by Femmes Guest Sherry Harris

I knew Sherry as she went through the process of writing and selling her mysteries. It's delightful to see The Longest Yard Sale,  the second in the Agatha Award nominated Sarah Winston Garage Sale series, hit the shelves. And of course, to welcome her here!

Sherry tells me she started bargain hunting in second grade at her best friend’s yard sale, then honed her bartering skills as she moved around the country while her husband served in the Air Force. Sherry combines her love of garage sales, her life as a military spouse, and her years living in Massachusetts as inspiration for her mysteries. Her discussion of blurred lines does make me wonder if she's ever seen a copy of one of her books on sale at a garage sale...



Thanks for letting me join you today!

Fiction versus reality—sometime the lines get a little blurred for me. I borrow lots of bits and pieces from real places and people to create the world where Sarah Winston lives. And sometimes I forget which is real and which is fiction.

Ellington, Massachusetts is a fictional version of the real town of Bedford, Massachusetts. We lived in Bedford for two years and I fell in love with that little town, which is often overshadowed by its more famous neighbors, Lexington and Concord. Fitch Air Force Base is a fictional version of Hanscom Air Force Base where we lived for three years. If you ever go to Bedford or Hanscom you will find a lot of my descriptions are fairly accurate.

West Concord Seafoods is my made up depiction of Twin Seafoods in West Concord. They have the giant lobster rolls on hamburger buns instead of in the more typical New England style hot dog buns. They also have a fish counter and excellent chowdah (chowder), and it’s owned by two brothers (why yes they are twins) with great New England accents. Last time we were in Massachusetts my daughter showed me a picture of her lobster roll. I said, “Did you go to West Concord Seafoods?” She looked at me strangely until I realized my mistake and called it Twin Seafoods.

Carol Carson and Stella Wild are friends of Sarah's—Carol an old friend and Stella a new friend. I came up with the names by combining the names of four college friends who I still get together with. I borrowed bits of their personalities and physical traits, but I change things up, too. Stella Wild is a voice teacher at Berklee College of Music. The real Stella and Wild say they can’t sing a note on key.

Angelo DiNapoli is loosely based on a former neighbor in Bedford. I renamed him, pumped up his personality (although not by much), and made him a chef and restaurant owner. But some of the stories Angelo tells Sarah are stories that my neighbor told me. I’ve mistakenly called my neighbor Angelo. Yeesh!

People often ask me if CJ is based on my husband. He’s not although they do have a few things in common. Like CJ, my husband was in the air force but he wasn’t ever in the security forces. CJ drives a red Chevy Sonic just like my husband and they both sleep very soundly. But trust me, I never confuse the two of them.

Sarah is not me. I grew up in Iowa not Pacific Grove, California (although I was lucky enough to live in Monterey right next to Pacific Grove for eighteen months.) I do love garage sales but I often just give my things to charities instead of throwing garage sales.

The Revolutionary War sites mentioned in the books are all the real thing as are the reenactments mentioned in the series. The Minute Man National Historical Park runs through Lincoln and Concord. One part of the Battle Road Trail is a stone’s throw away (okay, if you have a really strong arm) from the house we lived in on Hanscom Air Force Base. The urban legend is the woods are haunted by the soldiers killed in the first battle of the Revolutionary War on April 19, 1775. I never saw a ghost but when I walk the trail and stop at the Paul Revere capture site, the Bloody Angle, and the Old North Bridge I feel the history seep through my bones and into my soul.

New England’s Largest Yard Sale sadly is fictional because I would love to go. However, Brimfield Antique Flea Market in Brimfield, Connecticut is supposed to be fabulous. It’s a five day event that runs three times a year with hundreds of dealers and it’s America’s oldest outdoor antiques market. Some day I will make it to Brimfield.

Readers: Is there a fictional place you wish you could visit?

 

 

 

Making Use of Envy

Catriona writes: I've just got back from three days in San Francisco, at the American Library Association Annual Conference (+ Pride). High emotion, high caffeine, high engagement, and all in a cavernous convention centre. I'm exhausted and that might be why Lori Rader Day's guest post here on making use of envy has just made me cry big fat tears. Read on and let me know if you get a lump in your throat too. (And make sure to check out the giveaway of Lori's terrific second novel, LITTLE PRETTY THINGS, at the end.)

Lori writes:

Lori Rader Day

Envy may be a deadly sin, but it’s always worked for me.

When I was writing my new mystery, Little Pretty Things, about young women friends estranged over a contest they both lost, I had the opportunity to think about the nature of competition a great deal. I didn’t have to dig all that deep to find a source for those feelings because I’m a competitive person. I wish I could wave my hand and direct your attention elsewhere, but there it is. I am. It’s unseemly to admit it, but probably worse to lie about it.

It’s probably tasteless to have this conversation at all, but can we agree that envy is a potential hazard in writing and publishing? It doesn’t matter how many books you write, how many copies you sell, how many awards you win. Someone else will have already been there, done that and also bought the beach house with their royalties.

The great thing about the mystery community is that writers are actually very generous with one another. My theory is that we realize how voracious our audience is. There’s always room for another mystery author at the table because, as many great mystery novels as there already are, mystery readers want more.

Of course that doesn’t mean you can’t find things to covet. On a bad writing day, when your measly word count took all your internal organs with it on the way out, you can check in with Facebook and find someone who’s just typed “the end” on her manuscript, someone else who just got another foreign edition deal to a country you’ve never even heard of, and someone else listing off one more award nomination (sorry).

So even though I’m not yet a recovering coveter of other people’s naturally curly hair or summerhouse in Maine, I’ve come to understand two things about envy. The first is that you can be envious of someone’s achievement and still be happy for them. We call these people grown-ups.

This one’s not hard, and it’s basically required as a writer. It’s not just a growth opportunity. To adopt this policy means that you can get on with your own work and your own sanity.

This is how I learned the lesson. In 2006, one of my closest friends from high school published a book. A good book. Christopher Coake and I always wanted pretty much the same thing out of life—only he had put in the time and the effort to make it happen and I hadn’t. On the day I went to the bookstore to buy his book, I hadn’t written a word of fiction in five years.

I could have continued being happy/being jealous. Instead, I turned the joy for my friend into book sales for him, and I turned the envy portion into fuel to get myself sorted out. It took a little time, but in 2014, my first novel, The Black Hour, was published.

So the second thing I have come to believe about envy is that it can be useful.

Maybe I was a life coach in a past life—and you can hate me appropriately—but why not turn the feelings I should be ashamed into action? Envy of what others have achieved, shame, regrets. These feelings seem like secrets we should keep hidden away, and I would never say that bad feelings should be encouraged. But if you’re going to have them anyway, why not figure out a way to spin them into gold while you’re busy forgiving yourself for them? 

How do you learn from your envy? When someone else’s achievement pings your sense of hey-what-about-me, give it a good, close look. Do you actually want the thing they have? No? Then what is it about their move forward that drives you wild? Is it perhaps only that they have moved forward and you haven’t? If you can examine the green monster in the light of day, you might find your own path forward and a next step to get moving. Make sure the next time you feel that pang of resentment, the “under construction” sign is already up. You’re already hard at work on your own goals.

And you probably already have a lot worth celebrating yourself—remember that. There’s no race. There’s no finish line. In all the ways that count, we’re all on the same team.

Lori Rader-Day’s debut mystery, The Black Hour (Seventh Street Books, 2014), received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal and was a finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award. Her second mystery, Little Pretty Things, is out in July. Her short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Time Out Chicago, Good Housekeeping, and others. She lives in Chicago with her husband and spoiled dog and is active in the Mystery Writers of America Midwest Chapter and a member of Sisters in Crime and International Thriller Writers.

Leave a comment below to be entered in a drawing for a signed copy of LITTLE PRETTY THINGS

June, glorious June

by Donna Andrews.

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Treasures on My Shelves

In my last blog I talked about the task of moving my extensive book collection when I relocated from Houston to the Jackson, Mississippi area. Today I thought I would talk about some of the treasures on my shelves, books that I consider the gems among my books. One of the collections within the overall collection is Golden Age detective fiction. The Golden Age is roughly the period between the two World Wars, when detective fiction flourished, through the works of writers like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and my all-time favorite, Margery Allingham (1904-1966).

Finding signed or inscribed copies of Golden Age detective stories can be a challenge. Writers during that period didn't do the kind of promotional tours that are common these days. They rarely did formal book signings at all. They were more likely to sign books for family and friends rather than for the general public, and finding an affordable copy signed by any of them makes for an interesting treasure hunt. I would love to have books signed by Christie and Sayers, but I doubt I could ever afford it if I did manage to locate one.

Allingham, on the other hand, is more affordable, or was so in the past. I've been collecting her books for thirty years now, and I'm lucky enough to have a couple of books signed by her. I have first editions of nearly every one of her books. A number of them don't have dust jackets, and I would love to "upgrade" those with copies in jacket, but that could be expensive, if not almost impossible.

Her enduring creation is Albert Campion, the self-effacing, rather foolish-looking man in horn-rimmed spectacles who, we eventually learn, has a connection to the Royal Family. Over the course of her long career, Allingham grew as a writer, and if you read the books in order you can see the changes. The impact of the two wars had a demonstrable effect on her, and her books from the late 1930s on, and particularly those of the 1950s, reflect a world deeply marked by cataclysmic events. Out of these changes came the book that I, and others, consider her masterpiece, The Tiger in the Smoke. Essentially a morality play, the book pits Evil -- in the form of ruthless killer Jack Havoc -- against Good -- in the form of Canon Averil, Campion's uncle, an unworldly cleric whose profound belief in the essential goodness of Man seems particularly naive in the post-World War II world. It's brilliantly done, with the inimitable mix of humor and suspense that Allingham wrought so beautifully.

In addition to the Campion novels, she wrote short fiction, two more mainstream novels, and three suspense novels under the name Maxwell March. I've not read the March books yet; I like to think I have books of hers yet to read, though I have reread most of the Campion novels over the years.

Allingham's books were published on both sides of the Atlantic, and for several titles I have both American and English first editions. In two cases I have copies of the Advance Reading Copy as well. The picture above of More Work for the Undertaker, another great favorite, demonstrates the one title for which I have all three. English first in the upper left, American first on the right, and the ARC at the bottom left.

 I have paperback copies of most of her books when I want to re-read her; in some cases there are no paperbacks that I'm aware of, for example for the March books, so I will read the hardcover copy -- but carefully, of course. Allingham's books are finally being made available as e-books, and I hope that will introduce her to new readers. I will continue to treasure the physical books and look at them on my shelves with considerable pleasure.

In praise of the battle-axe

by Catriona

I don't mean it pejoratively. Honest, I don't. At the right time, I fully intend to become one.  

My friend Catherine and I are plotting this course together, planning to keep on with the hair and make-up and exercise and social niceties until the agreed-upon birthday (I say seventy five; she's arguing for eighty) and then going full-on crazy old broad: cutting our own hair - if we can be bothered; dressing for comfort alone; changing our wills a lot in an Agatha-Christie sort of way (we are both aunts and I'm already a great aunt, but neither of us is a mother); and - here's my dream - glaring at young people through a lorgnette and using an ear-trumpet.

It's not in our genes. Catherine's mother was a willowy, gentle soul with an infectious laugh and my mother only stops knitting for her grandchildren to make them birthday cakes. And we're not surrounded by exemplars either. All of my friends in their late seventies and eighties are normal, pleasant, engaged and engaging women.

But I do have a role-model when it comes battleaxitude. My late step-grandmother, Laura, was by anyone's reckoning a splendid old trout. She was opinionated, exacting, peremptory, made of equal parts pepper and vinegar and I adored her.

By the time I met her, she was long-widowed, completely blind and a wheel-chair user, and lived resolutely alone in her own house surrounded by good antique furniture and china and frequently visited by the families of her three stepsons.

Many conversations with Laura consisted of her asking a question, answering it herself, arguing with your timid contribution and setting you  straight. She was particularly fierce about the geography of the city of Edinburgh, where she had lived decades previously and where I lived right then. Bus routes, street names, the locations of churches - she brooked no dissent about any of it, even if I had walked down the street that morning to get the train to go and visit her. Bliss.

And so when I was writing THE CHILD GARDEN and found the heroine, Gloria Harkness, visiting an elderly friend in the care home where her disabled son lives and being tongue-lashed for no good reason, I felt a spooky sense of recognition.

Miss Drumm, in the book, is not exactly Laura . . . but she's pretty damn close. The big difference is that Gloria, at forty, gives as good as she gets, whereas I, in my twenties, wouldn't dare.  Here's Glo, rolling up to visit Miss Drumm near the start of the story:

“You’re late,” she said. She put out a hand and slapped the outsize button of her clock. Five-fifty-three, said the robot voice.

“Are you bursting with news for me?”

“In this place?” said Miss Drumm. “Chance’d be a fine thing. Then I could give up on those soap operas that are rotting my brain like ergots.” She moved her thumb over the nodule on her chair arm that controlled the direction until she had swung round to face me. The light shining in from the corridor bounced off the lenses of her spectacles and hid her eyes. If I hadn’t known she was blind, I’d have sworn she was glaring at me. "It's your job to bring news to me.”

“I did a wedding today," 

"Humph." She couldn’t care less about weddings, didn’t have a romantic bone in her body.

"Two lovely boys who’ve been together for seven years."

She snorted. She knew when I was baiting her and wouldn't rise.

"And old Mr Thorne died.”

“Oh?” said Miss Drumm, with her first glimmer of real interest. A death in the village? Now that was something.

The lore in my husband's family was that Laura didn't have a romantic bone in her body either. She was a parishioner of my grandfather-in-law when his wife died leaving him with three young sons. In those days, the nineteen forties, a minister needed a wife about as much as boys need a mother and so - the story goes - Laura was drafted. She was a housekeeper-cum-nanny and that was all.

I believed this version until after her death when I inherited some of her books and photographs. There were letters, carefully kept in the books, that blew the tale of a sensibly-chosen housekeeper out of the sky. I'm not going to go any further than that. But I will share the wedding picture of Laura marrying David, my husband's granddad. I think they way they're holding on to each other's hand speaks volumes too.

 

 And now, from the grubby commerce division: THE CHILD GARDEN is out on the 8th of September and is available for pre-order now.

 

THE FEAR OF EVERYDAY THINGS

One of the weirdest and most upsetting everyday mishaps is when objects you have been regarding as helpful turn out instead to be malevolent tools of Satan.

I refer, of course, to the familiar chopping knife that suddenly chops your very own finger, or the light switch that gives you a shock, or the bedstead that stubs your toe. The shower handle that falls off on your bare foot. The comb that breaks off in your hair.

This feels like as big a betrayal as your beloved pet Fido suddenly biting your hand – the hand that feeds him. Now, you know inanimate objects can’t plot, but don’t you sometimes feel they do? “All together, now – let’s get her!” they crow during the night, and the next day will be a pinball course between getting cut, pinched, zapped, and stepping on broken china.

Then comes the suspicion. You might avoid the stapler in favor of a simple paperclip, because paperclips are not as prone to cause you harm. You might pick up the scissors with extreme caution. You become very careful handling paper, because those paper cuts can be vicious.

This is also a good time to avoid your bathroom scales and your razor, of course.

Here’s one that gets me every time. The cylinders of biscuits or sweet rolls that you buy in the refrigerated section. You peel off the label as the cylinder advises you to do, and then . . . and then . . . there’s a POP, and it’s always a surprise, and the cardboard springs apart and dough bulges out in a distressing way. I know it’s going to happen, but I startle every time. Why don’t I learn?

One of Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing is to never use “suddenly.” I’ve always interpreted this to mean that nothing really happens except in its own time, so “suddenly” is redundant. However, I wonder if Mr. Leonard ever opened one of those cylinders of biscuits.

Somedays, navigating my house seems the most hazardous course of all.

Party In the Femmes HOUSE!!!

 

by Mary Saums

 

Wow, great news today - nominees for the 2015 Macavity Awards were announced - and some Fab Femmes are on the list!

 

In the Best Novel Category:

 

THE DAY SHE DIED by CATRIONA MCPHERSON

Congratulations, Catriona!

 

 

In the Best Mystery-Related Nonfiction category:

 

 

WRITES OF PASSAGE: ADVENTURES ON THE WRITER'S JOURNEY, edited by HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN

 

Congratulations, Hank!

 

Three Femmes edited short story anthologies that included nominees for Best Mystery Short Story:

 

 

THE SHADOW KNOWS by Barb Goffman

CHESAPEAKE CRIMES: HOMICIDAL HOLIDAYS

edited by DONNA ANDREWS, Barb Goffman, & MARCIA TALLEY

 

and

 

 

HONEYMOON SWEET by Craig Faustus Buck

MURDER AT THE BEACH, BOUCHERCON 2014

edited by DANA CAMERON

 

Congratulations, Donna, Marcia and Dana!

 

And for the Sue Feder Memorial Award for Best Historical Fiction:

 

 

A DEADLY MEASURE OF BRIMSTONE by CATRIONA MCPHERSON

 

which may also look like this:

 

 

or quite possibly this:

 

 

All gorgeous. Congratulations again, Catriona!

 

And congrats to all the nominees. Here's the complete list:

 

Best Mystery Novel

The Lewis Man, by Peter May (Quercus)

The Last Death of Jack Harbin, by Terry Shames (Seventh Street)

The Killer Next Door, by Alex Marwood (Penguin)

The Day She Died, by Catriona McPherson (Midnight Ink)

The Missing Place, by Sophie Littlefield (Gallery) 

The Long Way Home, by Louise Penny (Minotaur) 

 

Best First Mystery Novel

Invisible City, by Julia Dahl (Minotaur)

The Black Hour, by Lori Rader-Day (Seventh Street)

Someone Else’s Skin, by Sarah Hilary (Penguin)

Dear Daughter, by Elizabeth Little (Viking)

Blessed Are the Dead, by Kristi Belcamino (Witness Impulse)

Dry Bones in the Valley, by Tom Bouman (W. W. Norton)

 

Best Mystery-Related Nonfiction

Writes of Passage: Adventures on the Writer's Journey, edited by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Henery Press)

The Figure of the Detective: A Literary History and Analysis, by Charles Brownson (McFarland)

Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe, by J. W. Ocker (Countryman)

400 Things Cops Know: Street Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman, by Adam Plantinga (Quill Driver)

 

Best Mystery Short Story

“Honeymoon Sweet” by Craig Faustus Buck, in Murder at the Beach: The Bouchercon Anthology 2014, edited by Dana Cameron (Down & Out)

“The Shadow Knows” by Barb Goffman, in Chesapeake Crimes: Homicidal Holidays, edited by Donna Andrews, Barb Goffman, and Marcia Talley (Wildside)

“Howling at the Moon” by Paul D. Marks, in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Nov. 2014

“The Proxy” by Travis Richardson, in Thuglit #13, Sept./Oct. 2014.

“The Odds Are Against Us” by Art Taylor, in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Nov. 2014

 

Sue Feder Memorial Award: Best Historical Mystery

Queen of Hearts, by Rhys Bowen (Berkley Prime Crime)

Present Darkness, by Malla Nunn (Atria)

A Deadly Measure of Brimstone, by Catriona McPherson (Minotaur)

An Officer and a Spy, by Robert Harris (Knopf)

Hunting Shadows, by Charles Todd (Wm. Morrow)

Things Half in Shadow, by Alan Finn (Gallery) 

 

 Good luck to all!!

 

 

The High Price of Free Delivery

By Elaine Viets

Appliances have special sensors to detect when a check arrives. The sophisticated ones know exactly the amount of the check.

That’s why our fridge died on payday, a few months ago.

We bought a good used fridge. It was better for the environment, not to mention our budget. The fridge had room for our staples – eggs, ketchup, and diet soda.

The used appliance shop would haul away our old fridge for another $100, and deliver our fridge to our condo before 5:00 o’clock that same day.

Don and I congratulated ourselves on a good deal.

Except the delivery guy was busy and didn’t show up until 9:00 that night, breaking the condo after-hours delivery rule. Plus he wanted another $50 to dump the old fridge.

So when the washing machine broke, I looked for one online from safe, solid Sears, then spent two hours on the phone with a helpful woman. We found a washer that fit in the utility closet. It had free delivery!

I was still congratulating myself when the Sears delivery service called. The free delivery would cost $30 because we "lived above the third floor," a man said.

What?

Our condo has an elevator, so why should taking a washer up another four  floors make a difference? Clearly, somebody’s elevator didn’t go all the way to the top.

I canceled the Sears washer and Don and I went to hhgregg. The salesman sold us a better washer that was cheaper than the Sears model. The delivery was sort of free – we got a $79 gift card, which we spent on dinner.

When our dishwasher died recently, we went back to hhgregg. We needed a built-in model that fit under the granite counter. A salesman showed us three models in our price range, but I saw a better dishwasher for $100 less.

"That’s on sale ‘as is,’" the salesman said. "All it needs are the clips to install it and you can buy those at Home Depot for a few bucks."

 Sold! We bought the dishwasher and drove to Home Depot, where a dishwasher saleswoman told us, "I don’t know why hhgregg always says that. We don’t sell dishwasher clips. We’ve never sold clips."

Why didn’t we buy a dishwasher from her?

Because she was the only person in that department and it was packed with tired, unhappy people. We didn’t want to wait.

Instead, we drove back to hhgregg and returned the dishwasher we’d owned for an hour. Then we drove to Best Buy, where a salesman helped us buy another dishwasher. It was better than the hhgregg dishwasher, but not as cheap. At least the delivery and installation were free.

Meanwhile, I was washing dishes. My grandmother washed dishes all her  life, but she was a better woman.  I missed my dishwasher. I never realized how many dirty dishes two people created.

At last, the Best Buy dishwasher arrived, along with two strapping young men to install it. They removed the dead dishwasher. For the next hour I heard clanking and pounding in the kitchen.

Then one installer said, "Sorry. I can’t install your dishwasher."

"Why?"

"You have granite counters. I’d have to drill a hole in the counter and it could crack the granite."

"But you knew I had granite counters when you got here!"

He was sorry, but not as sorry as I was. I called Best Buy and cancelled the order. The two repairmen left with the old dishwasher AND the new one.

They also disconnected the kitchen drain. Water spewed all over the floor. I mopped it up with towels.

Now I had no garbage disposal and couldn’t wash the dishes. I devised an elaborate system using dishpans and buckets in the kitchen and dumping the water in the bath.

Meanwhile, Don called a friend, who recommended Fortney’s Appliance in Fort Lauderdale. Some of their customers seemed to be locals with big-box store burnout.

Fortney’s sold us a better dishwasher than the one at Best Buy or hhgregg for the same price. They also charged $110 to install it.

You know what?

It was worth every penny.

                                        ****

Win "Clubbed to Death,"  Dead-End Job #8. Helen works at a country club where the motto should be:  "Do you know who I am?"

Click Contests at www.elaineviets.com

The Buzz about HOVER!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: 

Have you hear about HOVER? Anne Wilson’s debut novel from Forge Books is getting high-altitude buzz! And talk about air time. Here’s the incredibly cool cover.

Is it a thriller? Or woman’s fiction? Can it be both? That’s what the critics are saying in a raft of rave reviews!

Anne graduated from the United States Naval Academy and served nine years active duty as a navy helicopter pilot, which included deployment to the Persian Gulf. The Naval Helicopter Association named Anne and her crew Helicopter Aircrew of the Year, an award given for search and rescue.

Anyway, Femmes, this post made me cry. Welcome, Anne Wilson.  And you totally rock.

 

 

 

Behind the Visor

 
  by Anne A .Wilson

Thank you, Hank and Femmes Fatales for hosting me on your site.

My debut novel, HOVER, features a female navy helicopter pilot, who is unaware she is being groomed to fly a highly classified Navy SEAL mission. Although she is well qualified, men higher in her chain of command hesitate to approve her selection because she is a woman.

Working women face discrimination like this all the time, of course. But I would have to say, female pilots have an advantage that many women who work in male-dominated environments don’t—they can demonstrate their competency when no one is looking.

I served as an active duty navy helicopter pilot for nine years, and I wore a big bulky helmet, equipped with a dark visor. With the visor in place, you can’t tell who’s under the helmet. And for a women looking to prove herself, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Yes, I ran into my fair share of men who staunchly believed that women didn’t belong in the military, and certainly not in the cockpit. And though I would never say this out loud, I had the sweet satisfaction of showing many of these men that I could competently do my job, even when they weren’t aware they were being shown. They would watch, not knowing who was landing on their ship to deliver supplies, not knowing who was rescuing them off the side of a mountain, or not knowing who was responding to an aircraft emergency, ensuring they and their fellow passengers were brought to safety.  

 
We’ve seen it in the movies, of course—the woman who pulls off her helmet and flips her hair about, often in slow motion, and almost always overdone. That wasn’t me, but I did remove my helmet on many occasions, to be met with stunned expressions and that awkward hesitation, before a man would reach out to shake my hand.

It could get even more awkward, though. Like the times, say, during a brief with ground crews, prior to commencing an exercise, when men would indeed see me, but address their comments, concerns, and questions to the men in my crew only.   

I’ll never forget the time we briefed with a local county sheriff’s search and rescue team prior to a joint training exercise. I used to fly search and rescue, when I was stationed in Fallon, Nevada, which is located about sixty miles east of Reno. We flew up and down the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range and in the Lake Tahoe area, searching for lost skiers and snowboarders,  rescuing injured climbers, and picking up stranded hikers. For the first two years I was there, I was the only woman in the squadron.

Anyhow, I was the aircraft commander for this training flight, and I had a brand new co-pilot with me, one who’d joined our squadron less than a week earlier. We flew to the training site, shut down the aircraft, and stepped out to meet the sheriff’s personnel—about ten men—to brief the plan of the day. However, during the course of the brief, the man in charge of the ground team only held eye contact with my copilot. He would occasionally glance at our three aircrewmen, but I was invisible.

My copilot—I’ll call him Bob—dutifully nodded his head throughout the brief. And towards the end, the man in charge asked Bob a rather involved question. Bob looked at me, then back at the man. He said, “I have no idea. I’ve only been in the squadron a week. You need to ask the aircraft commander.” And he pointed at me.

The man looked at me—a long look—then said simply, “Oh.”

There was a bit of foot scuffling from the sheriff’s personnel, but I didn’t want to make it any more weird than it already was. I just answered the question, briefed the plan of events, safety considerations, radio calls, etc., all to silent nods.

The training went off without a hitch, and the next time we worked together, it was far better.  That was my guiding principle, by the way. Model competency one interaction at a time. It took patience, but eventually, not only that county sheriff group, but others, learned that I could do my job and do it well—no stealth performances behind the visor required.

 Stories behind the photos

Orange and white helicopter – That’s me flying the H-1 Huey during an actual rescue in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. We had been doing a training exercise earlier in the morning and had a photographer with us. Then, during the training, we were called on an actual rescue. At the rescue site, we had no place to land, so we did a maneuver called a one-skid, where you hover one foot above and one foot over from where you’d like to drop people off. Our rescue crewman, paramedic, and the photographer jumped out of the aircraft. When we returned to retrieve our crew and the victim, the photographer took this shot.

 

Green helicopter – Again, me flying, but you would never know it. This is the H-46 helicopter, the same one you find in HOVER, and what you see here is something called VERTREP, or vertical replenishment. Our helicopter would fly from ship to ship in the battle group delivering supplies and this was one method for moving those supplies.

 

 HANK:  So, femmes, yay, Anne, huh?  I remember when I worked on Capitol Hill in the 70’s as a legislative aide in the U.S. Senate. I was in the office one day by myself, and a guy came to the door, looked at me, and asked: “Is anyone here?”  

Femmes, how about you?

 

And here's more about HOVER:

 

Helicopter pilot Lieutenant Sara Denning joins a US Navy battle group with little fanfare, and that’s just the way she likes it. Sara’s philosophy is simple—blend in, be competent, and above all, never do anything to stand out as a woman in a man’s world.

 

Somewhere along the way, Sara lost herself—her feminine, easygoing soul is now buried under so many defensive layers, she can’t reach it anymore.

 

When she meets the strong, self-assured Lieutenant Eric Marxen, those defenses start to falter. Eric coordinates flight operations for a Navy SEAL Team that requests Sara more than any other pilot. This blatant show of favoritism causes conflict with her colleagues; Sara’s sexist boss seems intent on making her life miserable, and her roommate and best friend—the only other woman on the ship—is avoiding her. It doesn’t help that Sara’s interactions with Eric leave her reeling.

 

The endgame of the SEAL’s mission is so secret, even Sara doesn’t know the reason behind her mandated participation. When Sara’s life is on the line, can she find her true self again and follow the orders of her heart before it is too late?

 

Farewell to a beloved actor

by Donna Andrews

I will miss the incomparable Christopher Lee. Dracula. Saruman. Scaramanga. Count Dooku. Sherlock AND Mycroft Holmes (and Sir Henry Baskerville). Fu Manchu. Grigori Rasputin. The Count de Rochefort. Gormenghast's Flay. Tiresias. Terry Pratchett's Death. To study his filmography is to relive a large portion of my movie-watching history. I'd watch otherwise forgettable films for the chance of seeing and hearing him. I recall railing to friends about a BBC miniseries of Ivanhoe that I found largely disappointing—as I told the friends, when the sinister Templar Grand Mater Beaumanoir is sexier than the title character, a production of Ivanhoe is in deep trouble. Of course, Beaumanoir was played by Lee . . .the seventy-five-year-old Lee, but still.

Yes, I will miss Lee, and will probably mourn his passing by having a mini retrospective of his films. Even if I narrow it down to my favorites, that will take all summer.

So first, I plan to have another smaller retrospective, for another favorite actor: Ron Moody.

If you've ever seen the big 1968 film Oliver!, you've seen Moody as Fagan. It was the role that made his career—and then warped it a bit. He has said, “I turned down quite a few offers afterwards because I thought the people didn't come close to those I'd worked with on Oliver!—which in retrospect was a mistake."

One of the roles he declined was Dr. Who. When Patrick Troughton, the Second Doctor, left the show, Moody was offered—and turned down the role, which went to Jon Pertwee. Moody's on record as regretting that decision.

But thank goodness he didn't turn down Mel Brooks when the still relatively unknown director was casting his second movie, The Twelve Chairs.

The Twelve Chairs is based on a 1928 Russian novel. It takes place in 1927, a decade after the Russian Revolution. Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov, an impoverished former member of the nobility, learns that his mother-in-law sewed all her family's jewels in the seat of one of her family's twelve dining room chairs--chairs that have now disappeared. Vorobyaninov—played by Moody—joins forces with a charming con man—Frank Langella, in his first film role—and they go searching for the chairs, which have been split up and sold in smaller sets or even individually, and are now scattered across the whole of Russia. Unfortunately, the local Russian Orthodox priest—Dom DeLuise—has also heard the mother-in-law's confession, and is competing with them to find the chairs.

Dom DeLuise is hilarious as Father Fyodor; Brooks himself has a charming minor role as one of the mother-in-law's former servants, but Langella and Moody are the main show. Langella's more famous for his serious roles, but The Twelve Chairs demonstrates that he's equally adept at humor. And Moody is a genius at physical comedy. I can still crack myself up by thinking about “the bench scene” in The Twelve Chairs. And at the end of the movie, the way Moody grips a fragment of a broken chair—one minute it makes you laugh, and the next minute it will break your heart. That's my definition of the best kind of comedy.

I'm not alone in my admiration for The Twelve Chairs. In his 1970 review of the film, Roger Ebert says: The Twelve Chairs is the sort of movie that improves upon reflection. You go in expecting to laugh a lot, because you've seen The Producers. And you do laugh a lot -- to the point, perhaps, that you miss what this new Brooks film is about. It's not going for the laughs alone. It has something to say about honor among thieves, and by the end of the film we can sense a bond between the two main characters that is even, amazingly, human. To arrive at humanity through total cynicism is a very difficult thing in a work of fiction, although it happens all the time in life. Samuel Beckett does it, somehow, and so, somehow, does Brooks.”

I think a big part of the “somehow” was casting Ron Moody.

I haven't seen Moody as often as I have Christopher Lee—I think he did more stage work than film. But he was an equally beloved part of my movie-watching history.

Rest in peace, Ron Moody. And you, too, Sir Christopher. You'll be missed.