So, there's a new story starting, and it's called Stevie One. More should be coming soon, I have quite a bit of the first part written, and some of the second part. After that, your guess is a good as mine. I'm really hoping to keep it to a reasonable length, ideally around as long as A Sane Woman (~45,000 words). I make no promises.
I'm fairly happy with the look of the new site, but I'm sure I'll tweak it as I go along. There will be an "About" page soon. I'll probably do my own printable-page script at some point.
You can scroll down to read another new post.
January 30th, 2012
Philo Vance is another of my non-guilty pleasures.
Philo Vance was a detective. He starred in a series of twelve mystery novels written by S. S. Van Dyne (the pen name of Willard Huntington Wright). The books were very popular, and Van Dyne was the top-selling writer in the 1920s in the United States. (In fact, I’ve read that it was the profits from the Vance novels that helped the publishing house Scribner’s take a chance on some unknown young writers named Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe.)
Vance is mostly forgotten these days. Scribners made an attempt to republish the books in paperback in the 1960s or 1970s, but they only made it through the first half dozen books or so (which was probably just as well – see below). But the books were influential as well as popular at the time.
In Ellery Queen’s earliest books he was a pretty obvious Vance imitation. The Tragedy of Y (a Queen book written under the name Barnaby Ross) was heavily influenced by The Greene Murder Case. The Three Coffins (AKA The Hollow Man) by John Dickson Carr, often cited as one of Carr’s best and one of the best locked-room mysteries ever, took its central gimmick from The Kennel Murder Case (it’s a great gimmick, and I’ve used it myself). The Bishop Murder Case is often cited as the first mystery where a serial killer murders according to a pattern (in this case nursery rhymes). This idea appeared in several Queen books (Ten Days Wonder uses The Ten Commandments, for example), in Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, and in other places as well (the movie Seven comes to mind).
So, with all this popularity and influence, why has Vance been so forgotten? Probably the style of the books. Vance was an upper class dilettante and a fop, usually wearing a monocle, always willing to halt an investigation for a few pages to lecture on Chinese porcelains, dog breeding, Egyptian archeology, horse racing, or whatever else struck his fancy (sometimes relevant to the case, sometimes not, but always heavily footnoted). There never seemed to be a language that Vance didn’t know or a topic on which he wasn’t an expert.
The poet Ogden Nash wrote a two line poem:
Philo Vance
Needs a kick in the pance.
This was a fairly common sentiment at the time (the poem is even mentioned in one of the books).
The other thing that probably operated against the books’ longevity is that there is a steep drop-off in quality halfway through the series. The first three are all strong, and were written at the same time, as Wright was recovering in a hospital (I’ve read various reasons for his hospitalization). They form a series-within-a-series, with the first (The Benson Murder Case) being about a man, the second (The “Canary” Murder Case) about a couple, and the third (The Greene Murder Case) about a family. The next one, The Bishop Murder Case, is the seminal serial-killer mystery I mentioned above, and the great locked-room mystery The Kennel Murder Case was #6. The next, The Dragon Murder Case, is somewhat ridiculous, and the rest are uneven at best. In the early books, Vance usually tries to apply psychological and aesthetic theories to the solutions of the mysteries. In the later ones, he looks for physical clues like anybody else.
But the best books are very good indeed (if you can stomach Vance himself, of course). Many of the books were made into movies, including several where Vance was played by Basil Rathbone, but the only one I’ve found was The Kennel Murder Case, with William Powell, Mary Astor, and Eugene Pallette. It was directed by Michael Curtiz (who later directed Casablanca), and it’s very good.
One thing that’s very noticeable to more modern eyes is the very unusual treatment of race in the books. Most of the detective fiction from that period (and later) has rather cringe-worthy treatment of Black and Asians (and others), but Vance always annoys (and even sometimes shocks) the official police with whom he is working by the way he treats people of other races. He treats them as he treats everybody else.
The other interesting thing, to more modern eyes, is the fairly obvious hints that Vance is gay. He certainly has nothing to do with women (in fact, the regular cast are all male, and none of them ever mentions a wife or a girlfriend or anything like that). Van Dyne (the narrator, Vance’s Watson) is his live-in lawyer – something which is probably fairly unusual even among the upper classes. Vances’ friend Markham, the District Attorney, even has a male secretary.
There is only one case where there is any indication of an attraction between Vance and a woman (and she is always described in very masculine terms, including her body language and clothes), and at the end Vance tells her that it can never be, because of his other interests and commitments (including his “intimate masculine friendships”).
I think Vance was an influence on Jan Sleet (Van Dyne was definitely an influence on me, but I’m talking about the influences she drew on to create her persona). Her reliance on tobacco can be traced to several fictional detectives (Holmes, Vance, and Queen come to mind), but her extravagant way of dressing is probably traceable to Vance and to Nero Wolfe. Thank goodness she dresses a lot like like Wolfe and not so much like Vance.
January 30th, 2012
Emerald Barnes over at Dreaming Awake has graciously allowed me to write a guest post on her blog. It's called "Anthony Lee Collins talks about Indie authors and Self-published authors."
So, check it out. I think I already know somebody who will disagree with me. 
January 27th, 2012
I was going to write about another of my non-guilty pleasures, but some interesting things have come up on some of my favorite blogs. Maybe I’ll do the other post in the middle of the week.
1. There was an interesting connection between Maggie’s post “Anonymity,” and Tiyana’s post, “Consistency.” People are different in different situations and contexts, and writers need to write their characters that way, too. Nobody is the same all the time (thank goodness), but when you’re writing it’s easy to forget that and give your characters an unrealistically narrow range of actions and reactions.
2. Stephen at The Undiscovered Author wrote a post called, “A Writer’s Ambitions.” It was very thorough and thoughtful, talking about different types of ambitions that writers can have (material, output, creative). I don’t really seem to have any of them (as I detailed in my comment to his post), which leads me to a question for any writers who read this.
If you were in some situation where you knew you’d never have any readers other than yourself (desert island, space capsule, last human survivor, etc.), would you write? I guess Output Ambition could still apply, Material Ambition definitely wouldn’t, and what about Creative Ambition? Would it matter if you were breaking new creative ground if you were the only writer left?
So, anyway, that’s the question for this week. [Addendum: or you can answer the less apocalyptic and more reality-based version of the question in the Comments below.]
3. Oh, and T.S. Bazelli over at Ink Stained wrote a post called “Stir Fried Thoughts,” where she talked what it takes to interest agents and publishers these days, and how you have to be able to identify other (successful) novels that your novel is like. So, sort of like a Hollywood pitch meeting (“It’s like Harry Potter meets Twilight!”).
Unfortunately, this would seem to indicate that too much Creative Ambition might not be a good thing these days.
And it also indicates that my assessment (in my comment on Stephen’s blog) of the commercial potential of my stuff is probably right. If somebody asked me what my books are like, what successful books they’re similar to, or even exactly what commercial genre I work in, I’d be a bit stumped.
It probably also relates to my question about whether Henry James or Thomas Pynchon would get a contract if they were starting now.
January 22nd, 2012
The phrase "guilty pleasure" has always puzzled me. If it gives you pleasure, why be guilty? Of course, it's one thing if your "guilty pleasure" involves clubbing baby seals or tying girls to railroad tracks, but mostly when people say they have a guilty pleasure, it turns out to be that they really like Journey or Foreigner, or maybe Two and a Half Men.
Stephen Watkins just did a post called "Why Yes, I AM a Fan of the Old Rankin & Bass Hobbit Movie, And I’m Not Afraid To Admit It" and so I thought I'd write a post about my particular enthusiasms, about which I am not guilty in the least.
Dark Shadows
A late 1960s soap opera, it ran for 1,225 episodes (which is a very short run for a soap opera, though it's more episodes than all of the Star Trek series put together – daily broadcasting every week of the year will do that). It started out in Jane Eyre/Turn of the Screw territory, with a new governess showing up to serve a mysterious family. The family secrets might have supernatural elements, but they might not. Ghosts are seen, but are they real, or in the imaginations of the other characters?
But then, with ratings falling and the series in danger of cancellation, the writers decided to go all out, and they introduced a vampire. Barnabas Collins. And he became a cultural phenomenon, almost like a rock and roll star.
Meanwhile, although now much more successful, the show continued to be produced in the same way: shot in a few sets, in real time, on video, all of the special effects (and there were a lot) done in-camera. No post-production, and no retakes, so there were occasional flubs. Actors blew their lines and called each other the wrong names (especially unsurprising since each actor played multiple characters in different time periods and alternate dimensions). Eternal flames blew out at the wrong time. "Outdoor" scenes were obviously shot on a very small sound stage with a few fake trees standing around and a lot of darkness. Stage hands were occasionally seen walking past the windows, or even sleeping on the sets.
Was it good? It was sort of great without actually being good in the usual sense. But, seeing it at an impressionable age (every day after school at 4:00pm), it bored its way into my brain and it's never left. As I talked about here, I saw an episode after at least 25 years, and immediately recognized the head of Judah Zachary when I saw it. Johnny Depp was infected in the same way, which is why there will be a Dark Shadows movie in a few months. It has been his lifelong dream to play Barnabas Collins, and I can understand that.
(I was never a Barnabas fanatic, actually. Barnabas, like the original cast of characters, was pretty much all suffering and gloom. I preferred the later characters Quentin Collins and Professor Stokes, who had a rather sardonic humor about all the goings-on.)
Big Finish has been doing audio plays, new stories based on the existing history of the series, including many of the original cast members. There was even one where they lured Jonathan Frid, the original Barnabas Collins, out of retirement to play the character again. He's in his 80s, and he nailed the character as nobody has since his original performances back in the 1960s. Johnny Depp has a lot to live up to.
Other than some names I've used, I don't think DS has had a huge influence on my writing, with one exception. I do have a character who pretty definitely has Angelique Bouchard in her DNA, along with the comic book characters Emma Frost and Jeannette (both of whom also have elements of Angelique). She's in the project I'm writing now, so I don't want to say any more than that.
Oh, and in addition to Johnny Depp, it would seem that Thomas Pynchon was also a DS fanatic. Inherent Vice refers to DS three times, and a couple of peculiar events in the novel can be explained by assuming that Doc, the detective, has wandered into DS-type "parallel time" for a while, as I talked about here.
I was going to write about some other of my non-guilty pleasures, but I think this is long enough already. Maybe this will be the beginning of a series.
January 15th, 2012
When I was young, I was really into the mystery novels of Ellery Queen. There was one book in particular that always stuck in my mind. In it, a famous novelist was murdered, and the detectives discovered a locked room in her house, adjoining the room where she wrote. Another woman had lived in that room, in secret, apparently as a prisoner, and she had actually written the books which had made the novelist rich and famous.
This setup stayed in my mind for years (decades, really), but I didn’t know the title of the book. I didn’t remember anything else about it, and I wasn’t even 100% sure that it had been written by Ellery Queen. In the pre-web days, it was a lot harder to find out the answers to these sort of questions, and in any case Ellery Queen books are not much talked about these days (and there are a lot of them – quite a few of the later ones ghostwritten – and most of them are usually out of print).
But then I found it, I think from a summary on Amazon. It’s called The Door Between. I immediately bought it and read it, of course, and I quickly realized two things.
One was that I had remembered those few details accurately. The other was that it was badly written.
The early Queen novels were pretty classicly cerebral, but this one appears to reflect a desire to be more muscular. All the male characters seem to yell all the time, and mostly they seem to be about to punch each other. There’s a hard-boiled detective character who’s a pileup of cliches. He’s apparently there as a foil and contrast to Ellery Queen, who’s so unmuscular that he’s still wearing his pince-nez glasses (they would be done away with soon after).
There are some cringe-worthy Asian stereotypes, too (both Japanese and Chinese). And I don’t accept the argument that this is just a reflection of the times (the book was written in 1936), since the Philo Vance books – which were earlier and which were a big influence on the Queen books – are almost completely free of this sort of thing. In fact, Vance often earns the scorn of the official police by treating people of other races, including servants, the same way he treats white people.
The main character in The Door Between, a teenage girl, spends most of the early pages being unaccountably grumpy (after an early life which is reported as being entirely sunny). Then she realizes that she Needs To Be Marrried. She pursues and catches a fiance (this whole part of the book is pretty painful), and then she spends the rest of the book being accused of murder, repeatedly. She reacts to each accusation by weeping, usually clutching the lapels of some man’s jacket, and feebly protesting her innocence. All the man around her seem to fall in love with her, for no apparent reason, even to the point of fiddling with the evidence to keep her from being accused again. Which never works, of course.
But, that being said, the story is great. The cental premise (the prisoner who actually writes the books) is powerful and plausible. The solutions are clever and well set up (it was a standard trope in Queen books that there would be a series of solutions revealed, each one completely airtight but each one then exploded by new evidence being discovered). And the book ends as some of the Queen books from this period did, with a public reveal of the “solution,” and then a scene where Ellery confronts the actual murderer with the final explanation, which will never be made public.
This was the great theme in the middle-period Queen books, that revealing the truth behind a murder can often cause more harm than good. Quite a few of the books in these years explored different aspects of this idea. I haven’t really used this yet in the Jan Sleet mystery stories, but I’m sure I will. I’m quite influenced by Ellery Queen, as I’ve talked about here and here and here.
But there’s a reason I’m writing about this here, which is that, as I re-read The Door Between now, I wonder how’d react if I was reading it for the first time now. I’m a lot more discriminating than I was when I was a kid, after all. Would I stick it out, getting past the bad writing, to find how how good the story was? Maybe not.
I was thinking about that when reading an indie novel recently. Within a few paragraphs, two words were used incorrectly, one sentence was very badly constructed, and one word was misspelled. I was tempted to chuck it. No matter how good your story is, if people get turned off by your words and your sentences, they may not finish your book, and in any case they’re much less likely to buy your next one.
As we’ve talked about before, here and elswhere, indie books don’t get the benefit of the doubt. So, my point is that indie writers need to be sure everything is correct, particularly things which really only require a dictionary.
“Ellery Queen” was actually two men. One did the plots and the other wrote the words. With The Door Between, one was firing on all cylinders and one wasn’t. For those of us who do both (which is most writers, of course), we need to be sure our words live up to our ideas (and vice versa – I’ve read blogs for example where every word is used perfectly and every sentence is a thing of beauty, but the writer has absolutely nothing to say).
Anyway, there’s my point. The Door Between has given me a lot of pleasure, but only because I read it for the first time when I was very young. Otherwise, I would have missed out on all it had to offer me.
January 8th, 2012
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