[Note from Steve: I usually don’t write about the paranormal.  But those of you who’ve read “The Town Hall Gang” and “The Bridge,” short stories in Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape, my anthology of tales of speculative fiction, know I CAN write them.  You also might be familiar with hard-boiled Detective Rolando Castilblanco, of the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” though, so here’s one of his most unusual cases, a cross-genre short story, if you will.  Enjoy.  And, don’t miss the intrepid detectives in my new novel, Aristocrats and Assassins, or The Collector, which is coming soon.  More of the detectives’ cases can be found in the short story collection, Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java.]

Singing Ghosts

Steven M. Moore

                I hate old houses.  Creaks and groans.  Radiators wheezing strange country’s national anthems.  Windows painted tightly shut with old lead paint.  Damp basements, dark attics, and cubbyholes.  The East Coast has old houses in abundance, some dating back to the early 19^th century.  And people still live in them and sleep in them alone at night.

Ghost?  I put down my sandwich and stared at Tia Lucia who sat at the end of the long dining room table.  Heard Stuart try to stifle a chuckle so my aunt wouldn’t hear.

Lucia Castilblanco had married Samuel Lloyd and lived in that Long Island house for more than forty years.  Uncle Sam was police chief; Tia Lucia ran a bakery.  They’d enjoyed a long and happy marriage, but she was a widow now, retired from the bakery, and living all alone in that house that was already old when they bought it.

Through lunch, we had chatted about police work while we munched on ham and Swiss cheese on rye with spicy mustard, taco chips, and drank lemonade.  Because Stuart was a crime reporter for a local TV station and I was a cop, we were interested, but Lucia knew more about forensics than either one of us.  I’d long suspected Tio Sam had tested ideas about cases with her.

My father was only slightly shorter than I am, but Lucia is tiny.  Genetics plays tricks in all families, I suppose.  She was well-proportioned, although barely five feet tall, but she had a big personality.  She still but infrequently drove her lime-green Caddy with the huge fins on the back, using a couple of old Yellow Pages to see over the huge steering wheel.  She’d picked us up at the train station.  I had put Stuart on the front bench seat with my aunt because I didn’t fit; I sprawled in the back amidst grocery bags that she obviously had picked up on her way.  Tia Lucia was organized.

But my father had always said his sister was crazy.  As a kid, I thought she was crazy like a fox, and always enjoyed my visits with my Long Island relatives.  Did I say she ran a bakery?

Long Island has seen better times.  It was still a rich person’s playground, especially in the Hamptons, with huge estates reminiscent of Gatsby’s.  But other parts were becoming run down.  The cops had closed down a meth lab less than a mile away from my aunt’s house, and parts of the island were having heroin-addiction problems, including a few deaths by overdoses.  I didn’t like that Tia Lucia lived alone in that environment in a house that was too big for one person, especially an elderly one.

“Aren’t you just hearing old house noises?” I said.

“Oh, no, this was humming.  Sometimes there are songs with lyrics in some foreign language, but I could tell they were words.  They’re a little sad, like those songs I like so much in the Village.  Someone’s in the house at night, Rollie.”

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(Sandra Parshall, Poisoned Ground, Poisoned Pen Press, 2014, ISBN 9781464202247)

Although Sandra Parshall is an Agatha-award winning author, she exemplifies how much mystery writing has evolved since Ms. Christie penned her characters Miss Marple and Hercules Poirot.  The lines between mystery, thriller, and suspense have blurred, not only in more hard-core police procedurals but also in books that focus on the quiet, rural violence so prevalent in Ms. Christie’s books.

Dr. Rachel Goddard, veterinarian and protagonist in the author’s series, belongs to that old class of sleuths, neither cop nor agent but concerned citizen.  All the action takes place in a rural mountain community in Virginia, but this book has plenty of action and misdirects to keep any reader of the mystery genre intrigued and entertained.  Goddard is married to Sheriff Tom Bridger, and the two form a mystery-solving power couple.

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[Tom Pope is a writing teacher—see the interview with him in a post from a few days ago—and yours truly writes thrillers.  We put our emails together to produce this Socratic discussion about several elements associated with writing thrillers.  This is the first part of that discussion.  Enjoy.]

Tom: What are your impressions on the role of the clock with the threat?  I think that a threat should be a major one and the protagonist should face some time limit before all havoc breaks out.  Example: The protagonist has to stop a nanite infection of fifty cases in a major hospital within twelve hours or the infection spreads to the entire country.

However, the role of the clock does not end there. I think the clock can work with segmenting the conflict into mini conflicts.  Example: Your protagonist has one hour to find the exact nature of the nanite, but doctors block every step.  He solves the nature of the nanite, but then faces a two hour window to find how the nanites are being activated by outside EM frequencies.

Of course, those are just the beginnings of the major problem, but the use of the clock and threat seem to work hand in hand.

Steve: The first movie I ever saw was High Noon, the quintessential “clock movie” and a thriller in its own right (my father let me tag along—he was a Gary Cooper fan).  Of course, there was that famous Fox series too.  In my thriller, The Midas Bomb, Detectives Chen and Castilblanco are working against the clock to stop a terrorist strike.  In the last tale of my short story anthology, Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java, Castilblanco is waiting for a drug-crazed killer to return home.  The clock is almost a protagonist in this yarn.

A thriller without any time crunch lacks suspense.  It’s a critical element.  It also provides a key distinction between mystery and thriller.  In the former, something bad has already happened and the protagonist has to figure out the how’s, why’s, and who’s.  In the latter, something bad is going to happen and the protagonist has to try to stop it, usually with a time constraint.  Of course, there are other differences between the two genres, but these are key.  In brief, the time crunch makes a thriller differ from a mystery.

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Believe it or not, this is a book review (see later), but first a bit of history.  I’m not into fancy GUIs and sliding icons.  The work in my old day job required mostly UNIX workstations.  There was a GUI, but it was primitive compared to today’s Apple and smart phone GUIs.  No sliding icons or touch screens, but there was enough firepower to handle terabytes of data.  That’s science, or, at least, the dirty kind where you’re given lots of data and you’re supposed to make sense of it.

I hate to admit it, but I don’t have a smart phone.  My fingers are too big and I’m too much of a touch typist to use the primitive keyboards they contain (I suppose touch typing will disappear as people’s thumbs grow longer in future generations).  In fact, touch typing and speed reading were the most useful skills I learned in high school, discounting the ability to run fast when a gang member whipped out his switchblade, or resisting the temptation of getting on the back of that Harley when the driver was stoned (I couldn’t afford my own–Harley, that is).

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[Note from Steve: This is the third post in preparation for Tom Pope’s and my Socratic dialogue on writing thrillers.  It’s more about reading, though, not writing.  The title is a bow to Pete Seeger.]

I read and review in many genres, including non-fiction.  Every author should be an avid reviewer.  And, if you want to give something back to the community of readers and writers, honest reviews help those readers who are looking for new and interesting books to read.  Of course, they help writers too, but I’m pleased when I receive that note from Amazon saying that one of my reviews helped a reader make a reading decision.  That’s my reward.  (I never charge for reviews because money can’t beat that kind of reward.)

Many writers don’t share my views on reviews!  Some will say that they’re busy writing and that they can’t take time to write a review.  Some will say that they have a policy of not reviewing other authors because they’re afraid of being accused of practicing review exchanges, aka a you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours review policy.  Whatever the reasons, I respectfully disagree with them.  Authors should write reviews.  They can do them on review websites or places like Amazon and Smashwords and avoid the review exchange criticism (many accept clever pseudonyms for their reviewers).  They can be technical without being erudite.  And their reviews will be useful to the reading public.  Above all, writing reviews shows that the author is also a reader and not just a person interested in selling books.

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Even in this age when “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is our foreign policy mantra (maybe it always was?) and Putin seems hell bent on returning everyone to the Cold War (or World War III?), Pakistan lurks as not a true friend and probably a die-hard enemy.  I’ve said this many times before in these blog posts, but let me list the reasons yet again.  You will see that I’m not just being paranoid.  This country takes our aid and military help and basically uses it against us.  Its duplicitous actions have a long history.

The most obvious and egregious sin of the Pakistani government (being Muslims, they should understand sin, right?) is how they support both al Qaeda and the Taliban.  In an article in the Sunday (March 23) NY Times magazine, adapted from The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 (scheduled to be released next month) and titled “What Pakistan Knew About bin Laden,” author and reporter Carlotta Gall presents damning evidence that ISI, the nefarious Pakistani intelligence agency, had a desk whose occupant was bin Laden’s handler.  This confirms suspicions I’ve always had.  No wonder bin Laden felt comfortable living only a few hundred yards from Pakistan’s top military academy.

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[I might seem remiss with my lack of movie reviews, but 2013 wasn’t all that memorable for great movies beyond those already reviewed, in spite of the hype from Hollywood.  My attendance has diminished to, due to bad movies, ticket prices, too many trailers, and commercials from TV that have kept me away.  But here are a few reviews.]

#6: Blue Jasmine.  Blanchett seemed all too real in this flick while she was two-dimensional and boring in the next.  The rest of the acting is boring, the plot is boring, and the dialogue is stilted and boring.  In other words, the screenplay should be used to paper the bottom of your birdcage.  If you go to the movies to be depressed, though, this is your movie.  Otherwise, forget about it.  Unlike Dallas Buyers’ Club, there are no real lessons to be learned here—well, maybe that Woody Allen likes to beat us over the head with his New York City angst.  The comedic Woody of the old days was much better.  I can only recommend this one to the masochists among you.

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Teachers’ unions and evaluations, Common Core, SAT reform, charter schools…education has been making the news lately.  In a week-ago Sunday’s NY Times magazine, there’s an article about Common Core champion and SAT reformer Dave Coleman.  He calls for data-based reform, a strange clarion call from a non-scientist who admittedly studied things generally considered impractical.  For the needed overhaul of our educational system, what works?  What doesn’t?  Not only here, but outside the U.S.  Coleman basically ignores the latter, by the way, committing the usual Ptolemaic sin of thinking that the U.S. is the center of the educational universe and looking for the epicycles to fix it within the same system.

The balance for the U.S. is negative, of course; the balance for everywhere else isn’t.  Our graduates rank far below many countries we compete with.  Is this a bad thing?  Is it possible that we’re right and the rest of the world is wrong?  Maybe the rest of the world is producing unthinking students who can’t really create new ideas or risk losing their positive human qualities.  In fact, is it even possible to compete in a cutthroat capitalistic world and still maintain our humanity?  These are the big questions the Times article ignores.  Maybe dumbing down the SAT is just what’s required to make our students happier and more human.

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Item: Putin’s ventriloquist dummy.  Foreign Minister Lavrov uttered these words in Paris: “We don’t have a common vision of the situation.”  You think!  He was analyzing the difference between Putin’s, and ergo the official, viewpoint of the Ukrainian situation and the point-of-view of the rest of the world.  Some idiots are saying that a vote in Crimea for independence is just the expression of democratic choice.  What BS!  It’s the typical strong-arm approach to neocolonialism in the world, the desire for some countries (in this case, Russia) to steal territory (or even justify a complete invasion?) at the cost of a weaker one.  It’s how Hitler took Poland and Austria (the former sits right next to the Ukraine, by the way).  It’s how we justified taking Texas, Panama, and the Phillippines.  It’s how the Chinese justified taking Tibet.  The fact that all the bully countries in the world have done it or are doing it doesn’t make it right.

Moreover, Putin is giving the West his middle finger and mooning everything about international treaties…and the stupid Russians love it!  Crimea voted to secede.  Welcome back, Soviet Union!  Never mind that the Ukraine gave all those nukes back to Russia on the condition that Russia would always respect Ukrainian independence.  Clearly you can’t trust Putin and you can’t trust Russians, who yearn for the old days of Stalin when the Soviet Union was feared round the world.  Are we heading for WWIII?  Possibly.  I sure wish now that the Ukraine had kept some of those nukes.  It would have leveled the playing field a lot and possibly kept any conflagration local.  Apparently that’s the only thing the Soviet Union—oops! I mean Russia—respects, good old-fashioned détente.  Now gay-bashing ex-KGB dictator Volodya holds all the cards and the Ukraine is out of chips.

Item: Go Everywhere!  While the stereotypical Ugly American still exists and is often enforced by U.S. tourists brandishing their ignorance overseas, Americans who spend time living in foreign countries often develop different perspectives that provincial stay-at-homes are lacking.  Nicholas Kristoff in the op-ed “Go West, Young People! And East!” in last Sunday’s NY Times Review suggests that every college in America should require students to study abroad as part of their education.  (This is something I should have mentioned in my post “Education Overhaul” that will appear tomorrow.)  In fact, I’d go further than what Kristoff said.  I’d also reinstate the draft but have the option of soldiering AND community service, either in the U.S. or overseas.  College study abroad tends to be prohibitively expensive.  Unless colleges and universities become all public here and overseas semesters are competitive and government-funded, that’s not a viable option for already cash-strapped parents.

Item: Speaking of living abroad….  The Irish have been doing it for years.  First, there was the forced splitting up and resettling of Irish families engineered by Cromwell—the Irish haven’t been treated nice by the Brits long before the Troubles.  Then there was the English indifference to the potato famine that made Irish flee elsewhere…or starve.  Then there were the Troubles.  These are three major reasons for Irish leaving their homeland, but it’s been going on forever, at least since Irish monks saved Western civilization by copying and protecting all those ancient manuscripts from the great Western cultures.  Of course, you’ll find Irish in the U.S., from gangsters (remember Goodfellas, based on a true story) to football players (e.g. the fighting Irish of Notre Dame) to cardinals and other heavyweights in the Catholic Church (often literally), but also in the Caribbean and Latin America, not to mention in the Far East and the rest of the world.  One of my favorites is Bernardo O’Higgins who, along with Jose de San Martin, is the father of Chilean independence accused of becoming a benevolent dictator (often by the Church) and kicked out of Chile by a coup d’etat.

Item: Knowledgeable about his roots?  One person who is confused about his Irish heritage is GOP budget wonk and mean-kid wannabe-leader of the Tea Party, the most dishonorable Paul Ryan.  Timothy Egan in the op-ed “Paul Ryan’s Irish Amnesia,” in last Sunday’s NY Times Review, analyzes Ryan’s historical hypocrisy:  “…can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify an indifference to an epic tragedy.”  Egan and Sons is one of my favorite Irish pubs in Montclair NJ, but this Egan (presumably no relation, except that he’s Irish) is talking about GOP stinginess, led by Ryan, in refusing to continue federal unemployment, cutting food stamps, attacking any raise in the minimum wage, and voting against Obamacare (how many times?  Was it 40?)  Maybe he’s really ashamed of his humble origins.  If so, why not shut up about it?  Happy St. Paddy’s Day, Mr. Ryan!

Item: Tooting My Own Horn.  Here’s a press release about my new book Aristocrats and Assassins.  Klesc’s New Book Journal is useful for this—Raymond posts to other sites besides his own.  And it’s all free, bless his soul!

And so it goes…Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

[Second post leading up to Tom Pope and my Socratic to-and-fro about writing the thriller.  In “The Eightfold Way” I listed eight things a writer should NOT do.  Here I take the tack of analyzing what he or she can do.]

Given my sales and/or my number of readers (easy to measure the first, hard the second), any secrets I might reveal about the writing business are probably suspect.  Caveat emptor: The word “secrets” implies that there are magical actions you can take to become a successful writer—in other words, that there exist sufficient conditions for success.  (Let’s agree to measure “success” as a book that has had N readers since its release, where you pick N > 1000 to fit your own criteria.)  I hate to say it.  There are NO SECRETS—there are no sufficient conditions.  There seem to be necessary ones, but some outliers often don’t satisfy many of those either.

Take the Fifty Shades trilogy.  It doesn’t meet any of the necessary conditions I outline below, yet you can’t argue that it wasn’t successful.  Call it prurient interest among readers; a rebirth of sloppily written, commercial erotica; a naïve, 19^th century portrayal of S&M; or something else—but the books fail to satisfy so many necessary conditions that they leave me shaking my head in wonder.  If you ever needed proof that having a successful book is akin to winning the lottery, this is it.  While many authors including me are turned off by this badly written drivel, readers read it—maybe not you, but plenty of others.  Each book in that trilogy is what I call an outlier.  Authors in general shouldn’t worry about them—they’re statistically improbable events.  You should worry about the necessary conditions, unlike the author of that trilogy, who didn’t, but still won the lottery.  She won the big prize.  Writers in general should be content to go after the smaller prizes in the lottery—as many times as possible.

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