Thinking over the settings for the golden age of detection fiction, it was relatively common for a detective to run into a mystery while on vacation. I think that this served two primary purposes, which I’d like to consider in turn.
The first function of encountering mysteries while on vacation is to spread the murders out, geographically. You can see the reverse of this problem in Murder, She Wrote when Sheriff Metzger asked, after the third or fourth murder since he moved from New York City to get away from the constant violence, whether Cabot Cove was the death capital of Maine. Unless you put your detective in a huge city, as Sherlock Holmes was in London, it is rather limiting to have to set all of his cases locally.
That said, a consulting detective can be called in by someone who does not live near him, just as Sherlock Holmes often was. Vacations, then, serve another purpose, too. Vacations give us interesting places as settings.
This is related, I think, to Lord Peter being very rich. It’s worth looking at the quote from Dorothy L. Sayers on why she did this; the detective’s vacation fulfills a similar function:
Lord Peter’s large income… I deliberately gave him… After all it cost me nothing and at the time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare I presented him with a Daimler double-six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it. I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes. It relieves the mind and does no harm to anybody.
There’s an element of this which I think applies to all writers, or at least almost all writers. We are not a bunch known for actually going on many vacations. Fictional writers do, of course. They travel to book signings the world over to meet legions of adoring fans who wait in long lines to see them for a few seconds. (To be fair, book tours were a thing, once, though like the Wild West they may have lasted longer in fiction than in reality.) Be that as it may, since giving up their personal secretaries and learning to type for themselves, real writers spend a lot of time alone. That’s how the books actually get written.
Sending one’s detective on a vacation can be a good substitute. It also does away with many of the disadvantages of traveling. Plane rides are something to be endured, not enjoyed. The Caribbean may be beautiful, but it is hot in the sun, and for some of us, at least, sunburn is not a highlight of one’s day. No one enjoys donating blood to biting insects. All these inconveniences, and more, can be placed onto the shoulders of our long-suffering detective, while we, in our imaginations, can enjoy only the highlights of the vacation.
What is true of the writer is also true of the reader; it is a pleasure to read about places that incur inconvenience to actually go to.
This question of setting is one that I think mystery writers (though not the great ones) sometimes neglect. That probably sounds like a more sweeping generalization that I mean it; to stand on firmer ground: I, at least, am prone to neglecting it. I tend to be very plot-focused, and as a result think of the setting primarily as it impacts the plot. Obviously, a setting does need to work with the plot and not against it, but I suspect that a good starting point for a mystery is an excellent setting, and then one can consider what sorts of plots would work well in it. At that point selecting characters becomes easier because one has the guidance of the question: who would do such a thing, at such a place? Then just add in some eccentric acquaintances, a romantic sub-plot, and you’re good to go!
In The Well and the Shallows, Chesterton has a chapter on writing styles and egotism. (It is called An Apology for Buffoons, for those interested in reading the whole thing.) In it, he talks about style and what is true egotism; the problem comes up that people are amusing may seem to be drawing attention to themselves, when actually they are drawing attention to the their subject. Conversely, there are people who may seem to be not talking of themselves and yet talk of little else. The second part contains the quote I’m writing this post to to quote, but the first part is worth mentioning.
As an example of someone who draws a great deal of attention to himself through his wit, the purpose of which is to draw attention away from himself and onto his subject, Chesterton uses Mr. George Bernard Shaw. The paragraph where he does is worth quoting in full, because it sets up the last sentence very well.
It is not an idle contradiction to say that Mr. Shaw is flippant because he is serious. A man like Mr. Shaw has the deliberate intention of getting people to listen to what he has to say; and therefore he must be amusing. A man who is only amusing himself need not be amusing. Generally, when he is a perfect and polished stylist, he is not. And there is a good deal of misunderstanding about the relative moral attitude of the two types; especially in connection with the old morality of modesty. Most persons, listening to these loud flippancies would say that Mr. Bernard Shaw is egotistical. Mr. Bernard Shaw himself would emphatically and violently assert that he is egotistical; and I should emphatically and violently assert that he is not. It is not the first time we have somewhat tartly disagreed. And perhaps I could not more effectively perform the just and necessary public duty of annoying Mr. Shaw than by saying (as I do say) that in this matter he really inherits an unconscious tradition of Christian humility. The preaching friar puts his sermon into popular language, the missionary fills his sermon with anecdotes and even jokes, because he is thinking of his mission and not of himself It does not matter that Mr. Shaw’s sentences so often begin with the pronoun “I.” The Apostles Creed begins with the pronoun “I”; but it goes on to rather more important nouns and names.
Now that Chesterton mentions it, there is something very interesting in the fact that the Apostles Creed, as too does the Nicene Creed, starts with the word “I”. In fact, the Nicene creed has it more than once. And yet it is the very opposite of egotistical.
This is related, I think, to how the most momentous things a human being can do is to subsume himself into the mass of humanity. In a strange way, a man becomes most individual when he is in a group of people and reciting the same creed, word for word, all of the other men are reciting too, and which Christians have recited for many centuries.
Be that as it may, it’s really the second part—the disguised egotist—which is why I’m writing this post. Chesterton introduces this with:
Father Ronald Knox, in his satire on Modernism, has described the courteous vagueness of the Oxford manner which …. tempering pious zeal Corrected, “I believe” to “One does feel.”
It is quite true that “I believe” is a statement about other things, though admittedly with a bit of a caveat as to who the authority is. “One does feel” is just a description of an experience, if, still, in this more original form, a somewhat generalized feeling. In our own times it has become “I feel.” There is much that can be said about the move from thought (“I think”) to emotion (“I feel”). Suffice it to the moment, though, the timidity which drives it does change it into something that is about the person speaking far more than about the thing spoken about. And the epitome of this is what Chesterton calls, “the essay,” though that term now refers to other things. It is well known, even, now, though. It is a thing with great style and no substance, though often the pretense to substance. The style is unmistakable, and Chesterton imitates it rather well:
“The pond in my garden shows, under the change of morning, an apprehension of the moving air, hardly to be called a wave; and so little clouding its lucidity as to seem rather vacuity in motion. Here at least is nothing to stain the bright negation of water; none of those suburban gold-fish that look like carrots and do but nose after their tails in a circle of frustration, to give some sulky gardener cause to cry ‘stinking fish’. The mind is altogether carried away upon the faint curve of wind over water; the movement is something less solid than anything that we can call liquid; the smoke of my light Virginian cigarette does not mount more unsubstantially towards the sky. Nor indeed inaptly: it needs some such haven of patriarchal mildness to accent sharply the tang of mild tobacco; alone perhaps, of all the attributes of Raleigh’s red-haired mistress, rightly to be called virginal.”
Today I received a hilarious spam message. It was from “jose.ferrer@gmx.de” (almost certainly wasn’t, of course) and had the subject “OHFVQO3N51RUEBV3”. This was, of course, promising. Then I opened the email and couldn’t help but laugh. Here’s the body of the text (I cleaned up the punctuation):
Hi, how are you? I write with with firm intention, if only you would be interested in this letter. Call me Aimeny. Im a very gentlemanlike person. Its not a new for me I look pretty. Have you ever heard about Azerbaijan? Its country I live in. I a just a 25 year old lady. Why am I here? I need a friend! To be honest I want to find a betrothed. Its time to start a family. My best personality traits are sense of humor and kindness. Do I deserve a chance to talk to you? I know that I may be not interesting for you. You can just delete this message. However it would be pleasure to talk to you. I am open for conversation. Ask me anything. Interesting, what will you say to me? It would be great if this is the beginning of something magical. Stay safe, my friend! I will wait for you! Sincerely yours
So, according to this email, Jose Ferrer, who has a German email address, he lives in Azerbaijan and wants me to call him Aimeny. (For what it’s worth, there is an attached picture of a woman in far too much makeup.)
I do understand that these things often are implausible as a feature, to filter out the non-gullible so that the crooks on the other end of the spam don’t need to waste time on people who will figure out what’s going on, but this one seems like it’s taking that to extremes. Even if some lonely man is so desperate he would fall for the body text hoping against hope that it’s real, why would he open the email with a man’s name?
Also, what on earth was the sentence, “Its not a new for me I look pretty” supposed to mean?
I’m working on the what-really-happened story for the third chronicle of Brother Thomas, tentatively titled He Didn’t Drown in the Lake. (As I’ve mentioned before, I think of a murder mystery as a story-within-a-story, except that the interior story is told backwards; I write that interior story first to ensure consistency.)
I’m up to about 3,000 words so far. The murderer killed the victim and the search party is out looking for the murdered man (because he didn’t come home for hours from his short evening walk). It’s coming along well and I’m happy with it so far, but man is it a lot of work, on a per-word basis.
The reason it’s a lot of work is, of course, because it’s compressed. I’m only describing the parts that will be relevant later, and so I’m having to make a lot of decisions per sentence. To give an example, how does the search party split up? That will certainly come into play later, and having influence on suspicions. Another big one I had to decide was whether the search party found the body that night, or in the morning. That determines whether the footprints down to the lake where the body went in are easy to find, or not. The problem is, since the search party doesn’t know that this is a murder investigation, if the footprints are easy to find they will be mostly obliterated by the search party walking over them. If they’re in good condition, it will be because the search party didn’t find them—but then the body will have drifted in the lake and the spot where he went in will be hard to find. Both of these are very workable, but I have to decide which one to go with. (I’ve about 95% decided on the search party finding the footprints.)
This decision also affects the timing of the story; the police need to be called in and some suspicion of murder has to arise before the brothers can be called in. I have a preference for them to be called in sooner rather than later, since the evidence will be fresher and guests won’t have left yet, etc.
For all of the jokes about people dropping like flies wherever Jessica Fletcher went, it certainly saved a lot of time and effort over having to have an excuse for her to be called in.
One White Rose For Death is the fourth episode in the third season of Murder, She Wrote.
It’s not one of the most memorable episodes, probably because the setup of Jessica being used to help a classical performer from behind the Iron Curtain to defect while on an American tour was used in the first season (Death Takes a Curtain Call) and had the extremely memorable Major Anatole Karzof of the KGB. That said, this is a fun and interesting episode.
The plot is very different; instead of a former Russian defector and relative of the performer, who brought Jessica to the theater, being the one to help the couple, it’s a British secret agent they met at the theater, and instead of hiding out at Jessica’s house they end up hiding out at the British embassy in whatever country they’re in (most everyone has a British accent, but they hide out at the British embassy so the one country they can’t be in is Great Britain). It’s this later part that makes the episode so interesting: since the murder is committed inside of the embassy, it becomes a closed-mansion mystery.
The murderer is one of these people (or the host’s wife, not pictured).
There is the added tension from the defection story; only the brother (Franz) defected—he had been a spy for the British after the secret police murder his wife—while his sister (Gretta) was dragged along and isn’t happy about it. Then they find out that the East German secret police is holding their parents hostage. This spy-thrilleresque thread vies with the murder mystery thread to be the main plot; it keeps the tension up for the entire episode.
The murder victim gives us a clue—his dead hand clutches the titular white rose.
Jessica overheard the victim asking spy headquarters for information on a mission that had been called White Rose. Fortunately, Michael, the spy who got Jessica into this mess, knows what it was about—it was a failed mission to protect an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa, ten years before. (The activist was assassinated.)
The victim was also a spy, in fact Michael had recruited him into the spying business, so he took the murder very personally. He came from a long line of stuffy bankers and his “banker’s face” made him perfect for the spy businesses. The most important thing about being a spy is to be able to pass oneself off as anything, such as a tradesman.
Fortunately for everyone, not least of all the audience, because everyone in the embassy is a suspect, the diplomat in charge of the embassy gives Jessica free run to investigate the murder. I didn’t quite follow his logic, here, but it’s always more pleasant when the detective has the right to investigate, so I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Initial investigations turn up that:
the doctor had ties to anti-apartheid activists in South Africa
the diplomat’s wife is from Rhodesia
the victim’s fingernails and eyes show “moons”. He was killed with a fast-acting poison, which Jessica takes to mean a poisoned weapon.
#3 means that the murder weapon was probably professional; not many people besides professionals carry poisoned stabbing weapons. With the white rose connection, it seems likely that the victim recognized the assassin from operation White Rose. #1 gets dismissed fairly quickly because he was on the wrong side to have assassinated the activist being protected in operation White Rose. #2 bears more investigation, which happens fairly quickly.
The diplomat and his wife come clean.
While she came from Rhodesia, she was the daughter of a light-skinned servant who had been raped by one of her white masters. She was taken from Rhodesia as a child and grew up in England; she hadn’t been near South Africa in over a decade when the assassination happened. The diplomat was stationed in Hong Kong back then. They had been secretive and not forthcoming with their alibis because they wanted to keep the wife’s background a secret due to the diplomat’s needing social standing for his job. After this is revealed Michael walks in with the news that the doctor can be ruled out too because he was in prison (for having participated in a peace march) the day that the activist was killed.
Michael declares the theory that the victim was killed because he recognized the assassin a bust. “I mean, what would a professional assassin be doing here at the embassy?” This question is the spark which gives Jessica the answer. “Unless here is not where he was supposed to be,” she replies.
At this point we can figure out who did it by simple process of elimination. There’s no way it could be the East Germans, so the only person left is the literary agent who met Jessica at the airport and accompanied her to the concert.
Fans of Hogan’s Heroes will recognize him as Colonel Crittendon.
There’s a brief scene at the beginning where we meet the literary agent who escorts Jessica and he apologized for the person, Jeffrey, who she expected wasn’t able to meet her because he got tied up in some meeting. Jessica reveals that she just called her agency and they knew nothing about Jeffrey being on any sort of assignment. The police went to his apartment and found him strangled in bed.
The literary agent pulls out his pipe, which the secret agent grabs from him. It turns out that there was a secret stiletto blade in it, presumably poisoned. Later on, we see him arrested. Jessica complains to the British spy that the faux literary agent used her to try to get at the Prime Minister to assassinate him, and it would have worked had the British spy not brought them to the embassy at gunpoint.
The setting of this episode is really excellent. Especially when it comes to a TV show, the embassy of a reasonably rich country like Great Britain makes for a spectacular setting. It’s one of the few places where you can have an ornate, old-fashioned mansion outside of England. Even more, it’s one of the few places where you can have a sealed mansion in America that’s not on a private island. It’s a really great setting. It’s not surprising that embassies are a popular place to set a murder. Really, it’s only surprising that they’re not more popular. After all, there are a lot of embassies in the world.
The construction of this episode is interesting. The dramatic event of an East German trying to defect to the west is merely the setting for the murder. This complicates the plot and serves as an excellent distraction. Further, it does a very good job of hiding the murderer to have him brought along at gunpoint to where he would rather not be. As Chesterton put it:
A great part of the craft or trick of writing mystery stories consists in finding a convincing but misleading reason for the prominence of the criminal, over and above his legitimate business of committing the crime. Many mysteries fail merely by leaving him at loose ends in the story, with apparently nothing to do except to commit the crime. He is generally well off, or our just and equal law would probably have him arrested as a vagrant long before he was arrested as a murderer. We reach the stage of suspecting such a character by a very rapid if unconscious process of elimination. Generally we suspect him merely because he has not been suspected. The art of narrative consists in convincing the reader for a time, not only that the character might have come on the premises with no intention to commit a felony, but that the author has put him there with some intention that is not felonious.
Now, the device of the murderer having to improvise a murder because he was recognized by someone he was thrown together with by chance fulfills this criteria exceedingly well. It does so with a trade-off, of course. That trade-off is that there is exceedingly little that could point to one person instead of another as the murderer. Structurally, the murderer could be anyone since he has an entirely secret relationship to the victim. There is no alternative to examining each person in turn and arriving at the correct conclusion by a process of elimination.
The best the author can do is to eliminate all of the suspects, in which case there is some deductive work to do in figuring out which suspect should not have been eliminated. The second best one can do is what was done in this episode, where it merely seems that all of the suspects have been eliminated because there was one we never thought of.
There is a difficult question which comes up here of giving the murderer an opportunity to murder the victim. This is difficult precisely because it must be done in a way that the reader sees, but not in a way that he notices.
That was done in this episode by an exchange where the faux literary agent demanded to leave and when he was told that he was not yet free to leave no matter who in the home office he knows, he excused himself to go to the bathroom. This exchange was colorful and mildly humorous, which seemed to explain its presence. It did put him alone for a time, which gives him opportunity, but it didn’t give him much opportunity. The body is discovered about two and a half minutes later in the episode, which is close to what it would have been in the story. There’s only one scene break, and it’s Jessica going to find Gretta—they discover the body together after their conversation. This gave the faux literary agent very little time to find his man, stab him, and make his escape. Other than that very brief time, he was always in the lounge, at least as far as we can tell, and always with one or more others there with him. It was enough time, but only if he was lucky and ran into his man, alone, almost immediately.
One thing that was never explained—and possibly because this would have been difficult, never questioned—was what the victim was doing in the garden. We last saw him trying to dig up information on operation White Rose on the telephone. There’s no obvious reason for him to go into the garden. And the body was not hidden, so it pretty much had to have been killed in the garden. If the body was moved to the garden, it would have been hidden. The last thing that the faux literary agent wanted was for the body to be found. The garden was clearly large enough to hide a body such that it would take a while for people who weren’t looking for it to find it. Where it was, Gretta only found it by tripping over an extended foot. (Also, had the body been moved, the killer would presumably have removed the white rose which pointed to him.)
The final thing to discuss, I think, is the choice of killer and victim. The killer was a professional assassin and the victim a professional spy. Granted, the professional assassin murdered the victim only in order to protect himself from being recognized and not because he was being paid for it, but it still removes the murder from those ordinary motives and passions which make murder mysteries morality plays. It’s just difficult to relate to someone being able to identify one as a professional assassin when one has never killed for money.
(Also, come to think of it, how on earth did the victim recognize the killer? The activist who was killed during operation White Rose was stabbed to death, but the assassin escaped into the crowd “before anyone knew what had happened”. That’s not really the sort of circumstance under which one will get a really good look at the assassin, to recognize him 9 years later in a completely different context. And, given that the victim did recognize him, why did the victim let him get within stabbing range in the garden? He was stabbed in the chest, not in the back. A solitary garden, even in the dark, is a sub-optimal place to sneak up on a man to stab him in the chest. I suppose he could have sneaked up on the victim from behind and at the last moment the victim heard him and wheeled around, too late to defend himself.)
Overall, I think that the plotting and structure of this episode are above average for Murder, She Wrote. It’s a fun episode, though of course part of that is the setting. That said, the setting is a choice, and it was a good one. A good setting can go a long way to making a good plot easier to pull off.
I first watched Murder, She Wrote when it aired on television and had seen more than a single season before reaching my tenth birthday. Most episodes, though enjoyable, are not all that memorable, but some really stick with me. One such episode is The Night of the Headless Horseman.
It’s an episode in the middle of the third season and borrows heavily, as the title implies, from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It’s a very interesting episode and I’m going to discuss its plot and characterization, but first I’m going to give a brief recap of the plot in the reader has not watched this episode recently.
We begin by being introduced to Dorian, a tall, gaunt poetry teacher in a rural boarding school/horse riding academy. He is very much Ichabod Crane. He is reading a poem to the lady he’s courting, Sarah, who is the daughter of the wealthy owner of the school/riding academy. She, too, is very much Katrina Van Tassel (Ichabod’s love interest, if you don’t remember).
The school is set in the south, at least to the degree that the actors can do southern accents (it varies), so we even have the plot element of Dorian being a Yankee outsider (in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Sleepy Hollow it was a Dutch settlement). Further borrowing from the famous story, as Dorian walks home, he is comes to a covered bridge:
And then, to pay off the title, out of nowhere a headless horseman carrying a jack-o-lantern rides up.
The rider chases Dorian onto the bridge and throws the jack-o-lantern at him. As the rider rides off, Dorian shakes his fist and exclaims, “Damn you, Nate Finley!”
So far, we have a remarkable homage to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. We’re only about three minutes in, however, and things will begin to diverge, as they must, when Jessica arrives. Speaking of which…
The scene now changes to Jessica arriving from Cabot Cove via the train; Nate picks her up at the station. They begin to catch up, then in what is ostensibly an explanation of what Dorian is doing at the prestigious Wenton Academy (the school/riding academy), we get some obviously important backstory.
Dorian has the job because over the summer the previous poetry teacher, a beautiful young woman named Gretchen, died under mysterious circumstances. The daughter of the Academy’s stable master, she drowned in the river, and—hint, hint—rumor has it that there was a man with her who was the one behind the wheel. If you can’t guess that the earlier mystery will drive the murder we haven’t seen in this episode, you clearly haven’t been watching Murder, She Wrote for long. They do work it in as backstory and gossip well enough that you can feel clever for spotting it, though.
Next, Dr. Penn Walker, the town dentist, shows up:
In this encounter we learn two major things:
The doctor has a strong interest in jewelry; it’s a hobby of his.
He thinks that Jessica is Dorian’s mother.
On the car ride from the train station, Dorian tries to stall Jessica with conversation, in which we learn that the good doctor was engaged to Gretchen, the poetry teacher who died under mysterious circumstances. Also, he was in Europe when it happened. (This simultaneously clears the doctor of being the man behind the wheel and also sets him up with a very strong revenge motive.)
After these important details, Jessica forces Dorian to come clean, and he admits that he’s fallen in love but his intended fiancé’s father has a fixation with pedigrees and so, being an orphan, he wanted to present at least one parent and so lied that Jessica is his mother. This conversation is interrupted by Nate Finley, who rides his horse in front of their car for no reason, then laughs at them.
Clearly, we’re not meant to feel sorry for him when he turns up dead.
(Nate Finley does match the character of Abraham Van Brunt, in being the other suitor for Sarah’s hand and a far better physical specimen, though less socially adept. His character does depart from Van Brunt’s, though, as we’ll see.)
Jessica and Dorian get to the school where some awkwardness ensues as Jessica isn’t sure whether to play along with the lie of being Dorian’s mother. We then get introduced to a trio of boys who play a prank on the stablemaster (driving the horses off, out of the stable). The stablemaster appears to be German; he is named Van Stottard and has a thick German accent, anyway.
Nate Finley happens to be around and threatens the stablemaster that he will find a new stablemaster if the current one cannot keep control of the horses. It’s a noble effort on the part of the writers to distract from the characters just introduced by highlighting what a bad guy Nate Finley is, but one of the problems that Murder, She Wrote writers labor under is that they don’t have the budget for unimportant characters. That said, they do at least have the freedom to make characters important for surprising reasons, so we don’t really know what part the boys play in this.
Dorian accuses Nate Finley of being the headless horseman, which he doesn’t deny. Finley then rides off.
In the next scene, we get the owner of the school telling the headmistress that he wants Nate Finley fired.
This is an unusual move for a television show; ordinarily bullies on TV have the unconditional support of authority figures. The headmistress tells him to calm down; he knows as well as she does that Nate Finley is as good as they come in the saddle, and their riding program is, for some reason, of the utmost importance to the school. Why, is never explained. Even in the 1980s it was a bit of a stretch that wealthy parents would choose to send their children to a boarding school primarily on the basis of its riding program.
The headmistress surmises that the owner is afraid for his daughter, and suggests he should look out for the new English teacher instead. Some more introductions are made and the stablemaster barges in holding all three boys we met earlier. He charges them with committing pranks and they do not deny it; the headmistress says that she will deal with them later.
That night, the headmistress interrupts Nate Finley saddling up his horse to tell him to stay away from the owner’s daughter.
“I want you to stay away from Edwin’s daughter. Satisfy your needs elsewhere.” “Is that an order, or an offer?”
This dialog is a bit odd in that we learn moments later that the two were involved with each other; she threatens to fire him if he doesn’t stay away from the owner’s daughter and he threatens to tell the owner that they were together. Either way, though, Nate Finley clearly deserves the murdering he’s about to receive, and I suppose that this scene serves to establish the headmistress as a possible culprit.
The next scene moves to a restaurant in which the wait staff dress up in period costume for some reason, and we meet the waittress, Bobbie.
She seems to be set up almost as a love interest for Dorian, except that he never really pays any attention to her. The dentist comes in and sits down with Jessica and Dorian. He notices Bobbie’s neclace, and asks where she got it. She replies, “Nate Finley, Doc. Guess he figures it will get him somewhere, which it won’t.” And before anyone else has a chance to speak, Nate Finley walks into the bar. Jessica warns Dorian not to start anything, but in vain, because Finley starts it.
Finley tries to warn Dorian off of Sarah, but Dorian punches him in the mouth. They fight for a while, and Dorian gets shoved against the wall where he knocks down an old saber. He picks it up, as several of Nate Finley’s friends are standing around him.
If you think that there’s any chance that Dorian isn’t holding the murder weapon, you haven’t seen Murder, She Wrote before. Nothing happens here, though, because the Sheriff—who had been conveniently on his way to dinner, I suppose—breaks up the fight.
The fight over, Nate mentions that he thinks he broke a tooth, and a raw nerve in his mouth being exposed, he does the logical thing and asks for a stiff drink from the bartender.
Dorian leaves. As Jessica leaves, she notices the leader of the three trouble-making students feeding Nate Finley’s horse. She says hello to him, but he just walks off.
Dorian goes to Sarah’s house, but no one is home. On his way back, right before the covered bridge, Nate Finley’s friends show up in a yellow pickup truck. He asks them for a ride back to the academy but instead they give him the murder weapon.
They drive off. Dorian only makes it a few more steps before the headless horseman rides again. Dorian tries to defend himself with the sabre…
…but only gets knocked down. His head hits a rock and he falls unconscious.
The next day the stablemaster and headmistress are concerned about Nate Finley’s horse. He had been ridden hard but not cleaned. The sweat has dried into his fur. (This is a problem for horses because the tack the wear—bridle, saddle, etc—will tend to rub the sweat into their skin, causing irritation. Any good horseman will always clean his horse after riding him, for the horse’s sake.) The attentive viewer will infer that Nate Finley has finally been murdered, though the characters don’t catch on just yet. This does yield an interesting problem for the viewer, though, since as far as we know Nate Finley was the headless horseman, and the headless horseman was the last person we saw alive.
Dorian stumbles into the stable and announces his intention to get even with Nate Finley. No one knows where Finley is, though.
Jessica, out on her morning bike ride, runs into the police who have found Nate Finley’s body. The Sheriff asks if Jessica knows where “her son” is, but she doesn’t. No sooner has she said this than a car pulls up with the headmistress and Dorian in it. Dorian launches into a complaint at the Sheriff about how Nate Finley had attacked him the night before. The Sheriff is interested, and asks questions that don’t seem entirely related. Jessica puts two and two together and realizes that Nate Finley has been killed. They see the body under a tarp, or possibly a black cloak. Jessica notices something about the feet:
The boots are on the wrong feet! I’m not giving anything away here, at least by more than a few seconds, as Jessica starts pointing this out to anyone who will listen almost immediately.
It is revealed that Nate Finley was decapitated, so the Sheriff arrests Dorian as having recently threatened Nate Finley with a saber. Curiously, it never occurs to anyone to ask whether a wall decoration at a restaurant was actually sharp. It’s actually pretty rare for wall decorations to be kept in fighting condition. I suppose we’re meant to assume that it was, since the saber is later referred to as “bloody”.
Jessica argues with the Sheriff, pointing out problems with his case, and finishes with the fact that Dorian has sworn that he didn’t do it. That’s supposed to hold weight because Dorian doesn’t lie. When the Sheriff points out that of course she thinks that, being his mother, Jessica accidentally admits that she’s not his mother. As he puts Dorian into the jail cell, he tells Jessica that it’s encouraging to hear that Dorian doesn’t lie.
In the next scene, Jessica and Dorian talk over the situation.
A little bit is added to what we already know. Dorian saw the owner of the school driving off from his house in a hurry. When Jessica talks to Sarah about it, Sarah claims to be the one who drove off, but is obviously lying. The owner comes out and admits to being the one who nearly ran Dorian over. He had gotten an anonymous note that the headmistress was embezzling funds, so he waited until his daughter was asleep and drove off in a hurry to confront her. He did, she denied it, the owner said he would retain an independent auditor, then returned home. (The owner also asks her to tell Dorian to stay away from his daughter or there would be another killing.)
Back at the academy, Jessica runs into one of the three boys, but he runs off when he’s questioned. She runs into the stablemaster, but he refuses to answer questions, except to say that he had no reason to kill Finley but there are others who did. He walks off when Jessica asks if he meant the headmistress, perhaps. So, on to the headmistress.
We get a small scene of the three boys in a secret room at the top of the stables, where one says that they need to tell someone, and the ringleader says that they won’t tell anyone. What won’t be told is, of course, suggestively left off.
When Jessica talks with the headmistress, she says that there is a problem but she’s not the thief. Jessica wonders who knew about the problem and the headmistress gets defensive, asking if she’s trying to implicate her in Nate Finley’s death. Jessica deflects by asking if she’s seen the note.
The spelling is so bad it could even be written by a German! (The stablemaster, you will recall, is German.)
The next scene takes place at the restaurant; it turns out that Dorian has been released from jail, though whether on bail or what is unclear. The waitress, Bobbie, comes over and tells Dorian that she believes that he’s innocent, but if he did kill Finley she could totally understand. It comes out that Bobbie saw Nate riding through town with his black cloak and black floppy hat pulled down low. This was at 11:30, but the Sheriff said that Nate was at the restaurant until 10:30. What happened in that missing hour?
Dorian then breaks a took on an olive, which necessitates a trip to the dentist.
It turns out that he only loosened a cap, which the dentist can re-cement for him. Jessica asks if the doc noticed anything odd about Nate’s dress last night, as he was found with his boots on the wrong feet. The doc observed it would be hard to walk like that; perhaps he had gotten undressed and re-dressed in a hurry. He heard Nate did that quite often, usually with an irate husband in the vicinity.
Jessica then notices a picture on the Dentist’s bureau.
(The inscription reads, “Love Forever, Gretchen”. It’s curious how often people in TV murder mysteries give each other signed headshots as keepsakes.)
That night we see a fight between the owner and his daughter, then one of the three boys spies the stablemaster burying something in a horse stall.
The next morning Jessica is with the headmistress, who tells her that it is the stablemaster who stole the money. Jessica goes to talk to him, but can’t find him. She does, however, hear the boys in their secret loft in the stables, and goes to investigate. She uses the secret knock she heard earlier, then as she opens the door tells them, “When I was a little girl, if you knew the secret knock it entitled you to enter.”
She talks to the boys and they admit to having been the headless horsemen who harassed Dorian the first time, but had nothing to do with the second time. Also, one of them saw the stablemaster bury something (he took to be Nate’s head) in a sack.
In the next scene the Sheriff has his deputy digging up the spot. As the Sheriff goes to open the box that had been buried, Jessica shields the boys from the terrible sight, but it turns out that the box contains only money. The stablemaster had been embezzling money in order to pay a detective to investigate the death of his daughter. He hands over the file that the detective had assembled. There was nothing of value in it, but for some reason it did include another headshot of Gretchen.
Luckily for Jessica, this time Gretchen was wearing a necklace. Jessica recognizes it and solves the puzzle.
In the next scene the dentist comes to visit Jessica in the restaurant which hasn’t yet opened. Dorian told him that Jessica wanted to talk to him.
Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.
This can mean only one thing. If you hadn’t figured it out from the clues or by simple process of elimination, the doctor is the killer.
She realized that the necklace Gretchen was wearing in the headshot was the same necklace that Nate Finley had given to Bobbie. The dentist, who makes jewelry as a hobby, had made it and given it to Gretchen and recognized it when it was on Bobbie’s neck. He couldn’t help but know what it meant—that Nate Finley had been the man with Gretchen when she died. (Presumably he snatched the necklace off of her neck before swimming to safety and leaving her to drown.)
Finley had complained of a busted tooth after his altercation with Dorian, and presumably went to a dentist about it. A lot of things in the case didn’t make sense, like the severed head, unless there was something about the head that would instantly point to the killer, such as fresh dental work.
The dentist broke down and told Jessica what happened. Finley did come, and, seeing the picture of Gretchen, started laughing and telling the dentist all about how he had been drunk and drove the car into a lake and abandoned Gretchen to die. Finley was apparently very drunk, because in the re-enactment, he found the whole thing very funny.
At his bragging about leaving Gretchen to die, something snapped in the dentist and he jammed a pick into Nate’s neck. He died quickly. The dentist then figured that he had to make it seem like Nate died elsewhere, so he stripped Nate, put on the clothes, and rode Nate’s horse out of town, making a lot of noise to ensure he would be noticed. He ran into Dorian and knocked him out, then got the idea to frame Dorian using the saber Dorian was holding. The rest, we already know.
The use of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow setting is definitely very interesting, but it faded pretty quickly. Really, after the first few minutes the only thing that was left was the headless horseman. To some degree this was inevitable as they made the horseman the victim, rather than the murderer. That is simply unrelated to the original story.
Now, variation from Sleepy Hollow was inevitable, since that was not a murder mystery. However, I can’t help but think that they didn’t really make as much use of the headless horseman as they could have. First, I’d like to explain why, then I’d like to talk about how they could have made more use of it.
The big problem that the writers had was that in the original story, Ichabod Crane was not the hero. He was wooing Katrina Van Tassel for her money, not out of love. Worse, Katrina didn’t love him, either. The original story isn’t explicit, but it is very strongly hinted that Ichabod proposed marriage to her and she rejected him. It is further implied that her reason for encouraging Ichabod was to stoke the interest, by jealousy, of Abraham Van Blunt. Van Blunt is not as smart as Ichabod, nor as socially graceful, but he was the man Katrina wanted. This, coupled with Ichabod’s mean motive for wooing Katrina really make him a thoroughly unsympathetic character. So right off the bat, making Dorian the underdog-hero of the story creates a lot of distance from the original.
Further, the structure of the story just isn’t paralleled, because the headless horseman (a decapitated Hessian soldier) was a local legend and Ichabod Crane was an extremely superstitious man. Van Blunt used the legend and Ichabod’s cowardice and superstition to drive him out of town. Indeed, for all of his quicker wits, Ichabod was in a way the intellectual inferior for being superstitious. It’s an evocative story in which a pretentious man was shown up for what he truly was. Except for the way that Dorian is a bit full of himself—which is portrayed in a sympathetic way by the writers—none of this comes forward.
To now consider how it could have been used: the more traditional approach to dealing with this sort of thing is for the murderer to try to use the legend or story which everyone knows and to use it to divert suspicion onto the person who most fits the villain of the original legend or story.
If this were a Scooby Doo episode, then someone could pretend to be the headless horseman in order to try to get people to believe that it was actually the headless horseman who committed the crime. Since this isn’t Scooby Doo, we would need the Ichabod Crane figure to be the victim and the Van Blunt character to be the suspect.
Now, obviously the setup in this episode is nothing like that, but that’s why the episode didn’t really live up to its first few minutes. In fact, they stuck to it too closely at the time of the murder—it really makes no sense for the victim to have knocked the killer unconscious immediately prior to his own murder.
There is, admittedly, something interesting about the idea of the headless horseman turning up to be really headless, but I don’t think that idea can really be made to last any longer than the words necessary to describe it.
The other typical way to handle something like this would be to have someone who rides as the headless horseman then try to frame the victim as the headless horseman, and frame someone else for the murder, as revenge.
This approach would still entail a large divergence from the original story, but it would at least keep up the appearance of being related to the original story, and on purpose. The killer would need to benefit from getting rid of both the victim and the person he frames for the death, of course. This motive would be obscured behind the bigger grudge between the victim and the one framed.
This approach could have been made to fit much better with the setup, though it would need to be the horse instructor who was Jessica’s friend, not the Ichabod character. The doctor, instead of seeking revenge for his dead (unfaithful) fiancé, would be in love with Sarah, too. The doctor would have ridden as the headless horseman, possibly two or three times, then would have killed the Ichabod character. The riding instructor friend of Jessica would then come under strong suspicion of the crime, and she would need to clear his name. The gullible Sheriff could actively point to the legend of sleepy hollow, and how it pointed to the riding friend as the guilty party. If they wanted, they could even have made the parallel stronger by making the death accidental, with the doctor only meaning to scare off the Ichabod character and instead frightening the coward into jumping into the river, where he drowned because he couldn’t swim, or the river was too fast, or whatever. His original plan could have been to just frame the riding instructor for being mean to the poet, and using that to make Sarah dislike him as a suitor, with the homicide and subsequent framing of the riding instructor for murder being accidental.
All that said, this is a very memorable episode, owing largely to the first few minutes and how well they remind one of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. However much they could have done better, it is a testament to the power of being evocative that this episode sticks with one.
Give people something to remember you by, and they will probably remember you.
I’ve mentioned before that my general approach to mystery writing is to first write out the murder from the murderer’s perspective, including whatever mistakes the murderer made. This is basically a prose story of only mild interest in this form—what makes it interesting is being told (more or less) backwards, from the detective’s perspective. He starts with the murder and the clues and works back to what happened before and during the murder, then eventually to further back about why it happened.
I’m currently on that stage in (the tentatively titled) He Didn’t Drown in the Lake. I’d love to talk about how I’m working it out, except I can’t really do that with anyone who might actually want to read the book, since it would spoil the book. That leaves me with people who wouldn’t want to read the book, but they probably don’t want to read it because it doesn’t interest them. So there’s really no one to talk about it with.
That’s not quite 100% true, as I do have a nerd friend or two who are sufficiently interested in biology and chemicals and what-not that they will discuss the very narrow aspect of poisons, if I wanted to go the route of poisons.
Just as an aside: one of the real problems with poisons, from a mystery writer’s perspective, is that getting reliable information on dosing and effects is very hard to come by. Take this like from the Wikipedia page on nicotine poisining:
Standard textbooks, databases, and safety sheets consistently state that the lethal dose of nicotine for adults is 60 mg or less (30–60 mg), but there is overwhelming data indicating that more than 0.5 g of oral nicotine is required to kill an adult.
Wonderful.
The other problem is that poisons almost require being passed in food or drink. Aside from skin-contact poisons, which are rare, hard to get, and dangerous for the murderer, other routes of delivering poison will let the victim know, and it takes a while to die or pass out from any sort of reasonable dose. This gives the victim a lot of time to call out for help or mark the murderer, both of which are sub-optimal from the murderer’s perspective.
In a great many detective stories, the detective will seize upon a single clue that, to him, does not fit, but—if we’re being honest—readily has an innocuous explanation. A partially drunk cup of tea, a single dumbbell, no bookmark in his book—it can be anything. The people around him will often scoff that there are many simple explanations, but he will persevere. Until that detail is adequately explained, we do not have the real solution.
This trope is often quite a lot of fun, but it can be a tricky rope to walk.
On the one hand, if the clue is too readily explained, the detective is not justified in clinging so tightly to it. On the other hand, if there is no reasonable explanation for the clue, then it becomes an obvious clue and no one is justified in scoffing at the detective. The main fun of this sort of clue consists in walking right on the edge—the detective being justified in clinging to it, but just barely.
A fun variant of this approach is for the detective to set the irksome clue aside and focus on other things, only to discover, in the end, what the meaning of the irksome clue was. This, I suspect, works best in detective stories that have the structure of a short story—clues, then turn the page for a denouement. (TV murder mysteries tend to have this structure, spread out over a little more time. This is why the detective so often figures out who did it after some almost meaningless clue which gets him thinking of things the right way—it’s the pretext used to give the audience some time to consider the clues presented up to this point and guess before the detective reveals it.) I suspect that the Poirot-style mystery where the clues are gathered in a confusing order and then Poirot sets everything straight in the accusing parlor would work to.
I tend to favor a more gradual process, where the reader is closer to the detective’s thoughts, so I haven’t used this sort of clue in my murder mysteries yet. I’ve also tended to stay away from solutions that hinge in a single piece of physical evidence. That’s not a policy, it’s just where I’ve gone. The critical piece of physical evidence is very tricky to pull off right—it’s very difficult to make it both conclusive and yet non-obvious.
The one clue which doesn’t fit is even harder to pull off in a novel, since it (more or less) has to be the key to looking at things from the correct perspective. From the correct perspective, things make sense and the evidence to get leaps to mind; in a novel it is hard to have this perspective but never have anyone consider it. It is, of course, doable—the key seems to be to have an alternative perspective which seems more plausible and almost makes sense, in which the detectives can labor until they come at the problem from the right angle. The problem with this approach is that though it does have the effect of startling the reader, I think that it diminishes the enjoyment of re-reading the story, since one knows that the detective is walking down useless paths. (To make them non-useless basically requires lucky discoveries, and luck is not what fun is made of in a detective story.)
It is interesting to consider how to use this sort of clue well. It can be a lot of fun, and I would enjoy working one into a novel that I write.
I spoke with Russell, the owner/operator of Silver Empire publishing (and a friend), and he agreed that if the cover still hasn’t been made in time, we can go with a limited edition cover for a Silver-Empire-store-only release, until we get the real cover for a full release.
So, one way or another, Wedding Flowers Will Do For a Funeral will come out on April 7th.
One of the great problems in the modern world where distribution is (by historical standards) extremely cheap is discovery: it’s very hard to sift through all that is available in order to find things one wants. Russell Newquist, owner of Silver Empire Publishing (who has published several of my novels and will soon publish Wedding Flowers Will Do for a Funeral) has been wracking his brain trying to come up with a solution to it, and he’s hit on a partial one: he’s launching a book club for the modern era.
Book clubs, back in the day, sometimes worked and often didn’t because of technological limitations. In the modern age of ebooks and print-on-demand, the technological limitations which pitted the interests of the people running the book club against the interests of the people in the book club are gone. Book clubs can now be win-win.
Unlike Amazon, who ten seconds of looking at their website will prove doesn’t care about books, Russell is passionate about books. In his youth, he used to spend so much time in his local bookstore they jokingly offered to lend him a cot to save him the trouble of going home at night. One of his big goals is to make sure that the book club will enable readers to find books that they would enjoy reading.
Here is their press release:
Huntsville, AL March 1, 2020 — Today, Silver Empire, publisher of heroic, wondrous, adventure fiction, launches its new Book Club service. Fans of fantasy, science fiction, and other genre fiction will now be able to save money on ebooks, paperbacks, or hardcovers of their choice through our new subscription service.
“We wanted to give our fans a way to get all of our latest stuff easily and at the best possible price,” Russell Newquist, Co-founder and Publisher at Silver Empire confirmed.
Subscriptions come in the forms of monthly or annual credit allotments. Monthly plans provide a monthly allotment of credits suitable to purchase a book in the user’s preferred format – ebook, paperback, or hardcover. However, credits can be used interchangeably on alternate formats and they never expire.
Silver Empire found that Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service fails to provide many readers with books they actually want to read. Furthermore, it means that readers are only renting books rather than owning their favorites. Most of all, it had no options for those readers who still prefer the feel of an actual book in their hands.
Subscription services are live now and can be purchased here. Early subscribers will be able to score notable savings on hardcover subscription plans through March 31.
In the golden age of mystery writing there was the idea that a murder mystery was a game between the author and the reader. The author would give all of the clues necessary and would win if the reader couldn’t guess the solution before the detective reveals it; the reader would win if he guessed first.
The idea was all over the place at the time. For example, you can see aspects of this in Fr. Ronald Knox’s 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction. Most of the rules ensure that the necessary evidence is actually given to the reader.
Fair play is a great idea, and makes for good books. The only problem is that it—mostly—doesn’t actually work for its intended purpose.
The problem with “fair play” in murder mysteries, as a game, is that there are usually too many degrees of freedom. Ambiguity can be resolved in too many ways. For example, it is possible that the murderer managed to pretend to come into the room he was already in, but then it was also possible someone in the séance circle holding hands with the victim could have let go and stabbed the victim before he could cry out. Neither is probable and neither is impossible. Which is more likely? The reader is not really solving the problem, but instead reading the mind of the author.
This sort of ambiguity comes up a lot because ambiguity is the heart of mystery. If there’s only one interpretation, there’s nothing to detect, or at least there’s no value in the detective being brilliant. More than that, there is always ambiguity so long as there is a next page—it is always possible that the next page will contain new evidence which changes the meaning of evidence which showed up before.
On the flip side, if sufficient evidence to obtain a criminal conviction is given prior to the suspects gathering in the accusing parlor, the game will be too easy. If there is insufficient evidence for a conviction, the solution will be unsatisfying. It seems like there should be a happy medium, but there isn’t. The most common attempt is for the detective to withhold from the reader some conclusive peace of evidence and only present it when the formal accusation is made. This does not solve the problem, though, because it is almost always the case that a different piece of conclusive evidence could be given for at least one other suspect. In short, if there is any point in guessing, there will always be more than one reasonable guess.
Fair play doesn’t really work for its intended purpose, but it does make for good book.
There are two main reasons for this. The first is that fair play unites the reader with the detective. The second is that fair play forces the writer to make the mystery mysterious because it is clever.
When the author hides clues from the reader, it means that the reader doesn’t know why the detective does what he does. The detective, himself, becomes a mystery. In this case the reader is united, not to the detective, but to the Watson. (To some degree this explains the original Watson, who was, in theory, the author of the stories and hence they were from his perspective.) On the plus side, this multiplies the mysteries. The downside is that it makes the detective an unsympathetic character, in the strict sense that the reader cannot sympathize with him.
Interestingly, Sherlock Holmes was originally meant to be an unsympathetic character in the other sense—aloof, unapproachable, eccentric in the extreme. It did not last; Holmes was humanized, over time. Part of this was that there were often sub-mysteries which Holmes would explain, allowing us to get close to the detective.
The other aspect of fair play—that it forces the writer to write good mysteries—is also important to a good novel. A mystery in which the mystery is maintained only by withholding clues is, generally, a very simple mystery. If there is nothing much for the detective to think about, the solution will not be very satisfying when it is finally offered.
Another effect fair play has on plot construction is that it forces the author to be careful with the rate at which clues are given, and the circumstances which produced them. If the author has to reveal what the clue is when the reader has time to think about it, it being unreasonable for the culprit to have left the clue will stand out more.
For these reasons, and probably for others, too, fair play is as important now as it ever was. I think we merely lack the societal explanation which was never really adequate, even in its own day.
It has been said that the two main motives for murder as sex and money, especially money. The problem this produces is that it tends to make it relatively obvious who the murderer is—whoever gets the money or gets the lover.
One of the traditional solutions to this problem is for the murderer to invent a clever way to kill the victim without being there. Another is for them to fake an alibi, or to fake the time of death so that they can establish an alibi.
The final of the classical solutions is for the murderer to have an accomplice. This produces the problem of motive for the accomplice.
Probably the simplest solution is economic—for the accomplice to share in the proceeds through the primary murderer’s discretion afterwards. Other motives involve love, a shared desire for revenge, and being tricked into it without understanding what was going on (then either not being aware of the significance of the help or being afraid to speak up).
An interesting alternative was used in the Death in Paradise episode, A Dash of Sunshine (Series 2, Episode 6). Here, the murder was perpetrated entirely by an accomplice, in exchange for the murderer having murdered the accomplice’s victim in another country, several months before. That is, each murder was committed by a person with no connection to the victim, as a quid pro quo. This was a very interesting setup, as it led to some unusual qualities in the murder.
Ordinarily, a murderer who has no connection to the victim is impossible to catch. In these modern days of DNA evidence, that may be somewhat less true, if the murderer has been foolish enough to use an online DNA service, or if a close relative has. Even there, though, that isn’t tremendously useful if there was no other evidence linking the murderer to the crime. Moreover, it’s not overly likely to be present.
There was a time, in the dawn of forensic science, where fingerprints were new technology and criminals did not know to wear gloves. That time did not last long. Similarly, there was a time when criminals did not know to avoid letting their DNA get onto a crime scene, but they do know it now. Admittedly, avoid fingerprints is easier than avoiding leaving any DNA, but at the same time, it’s not that hard. Gloves will do it for anything that one touches, and beside that, some simple precautions like wearing pants and a long-sleeved shirt, and ensuring that one’s hair doesn’t shed (a hat, a hair net, etc) will generally suffice. It’s not like the police are going to swab every inch of the floor in the hope of catching a stray skin cell. Tests cost money.
DNA evidence is much more of a problem for the mystery writer in crimes of passion, where the murderer would not have thought to take precautions beforehand. On the other hand, it is far more likely in crimes of passion that here will be an innocent excuse for why the murderer’s DNA is present at the crime scene. If a man lives in the same mansion as the victim, it is of no significance that his DNA was found in the same room as the victim. It would almost be odd to not have found it.
All that allowed for, it is still nearly impossible to catch a murderer with no connection to his victim. This makes the quid-pro-quo murderer very difficult to catch—unless the murderer makes a mistake and leaves physical evidence, the only way to catch him is through his connection to his partner—the one who benefits.
Interestingly, in the Death in Paradise episode, the killer made mistakes and left forensic evidence and this is how the detectives caught the pair. Perhaps the biggest of these mistakes was killing the victim in his own rental house. This was especially odd as the other murderer had made the reservations at the rental house, meaning that they cooperated in the terrible decision to proceed with a link from the murderer to the victim. It was explained, and I think reasonably, that the murderers were careless because they were arrogant. They assumed that across the ocean, in a country with a minimal police force, a staged robbery would be accepted as such and murder would not be suspected. It was still a terrible idea, and one that they didn’t make with the first murder, back in England.
I can’t think of any examples of the other way around—of finding the connection between the murderers then finding the connection between the killer and the victim. Given how many murder mysteries have been written in the last 100+ years, it probably has been written, of course, but it would be interesting to write the second.
Efficiency and robustness are enemies. The more you have of the one, the less you have of the other.
Intrinsically.
Efficiency means that every part is producing an effect. Robustness means that damage can happen and the effect can still be produced. The only way that it is possible to take damage and keep productivity up is if there was some spare capacity which was activated to take the place of what was damaged. That spare capacity was, by definition, inefficiency.
(The subject is sometimes confused by there being standards of robustness, and efficiency being contextually defined to be having no more spare capacity than that standard; this context-specific usage is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about efficiency and robustness as such.)
You can see this trade-off very well in birds. Birds, in order to fly, must be extremely efficient. The price that they pay is that they are very fragile. Their bones are famous for being hollow, which is awesome, but their bones are also extremely easy to break with blunt-force impact. Birds are very muscular with little fat, but the cost of that is that they need to eat frequently and can starve to death quickly.
This same thing applies to large organizations. Young people are often astonished at the inefficiency of large organizations. They are right that large organizations tend to inefficient. What they don’t realize—because they’ve never experienced it—is how much inefficiency is required for the organization to survive when things go bad. And things can go very bad.
Probably the most frustrating example of this is the small amount of trust typically placed in employees and in consequence the difficulty they have actually getting work done. This must be understood in the context of how many problems a single employee can create.
It is not merely a rogue employee who intends to do evil which is the problem. They can cause truly enormous amounts of damage, but they are also vanishingly rare. Far more common are things like:
Taking vacation
Getting sick
Personal problems
Leaving for another job
Incompetence
All of these things create problems, and some of them are so predictable as to be reliable (like taking vacation and getting sick). The result is that organizations which have protections against these things tend to be far more robust and thus last longer.
These protections will tend to look like:
Having multiple people who can do the same job and are sufficiently involved with the particular job that they can take over while the other person is away or otherwise not doing his job.
Requiring non-trivial decisions to be filtered through at least one other employee, so that there is a sanity-check in place.
Requiring extensive documentation of what’s going on so that others can take over
Using tools which, while not the best suited to the task, are wildly used, so that replacing a person who uses them is easier
Having a corporate culture, created by things like too many meetings, so that people tend to solve similar problems in similar ways, so that people are more replaceable
All of these things are inefficient, but they do create robustness.
It should be noted that there is something of a catch-22 here, too. These practices are not pleasant to work under, so they tend to create a culture of zero loyalty to the organization, and in many cases encourage people to leave to find something better elsewhere. In more extreme cases, they actually create a selective pressure for only awful people who couldn’t get hired elsewhere to remain, which is a vicious cycle since they make the workplace worse for competent people.
I want to be clear that I am not saying that these things are actually good, or a good way to run a business. I’m only saying that we should understand that they do exist for a reason, and it is important to know what that reason is if one wants to try to prevent smaller companies that are growing from falling into the same traps.
I also want to note that not all behaviors of large companies are ascribable to this cause. In some cases, I think that there are behaviors which are analogous to cancers and autoimmune disorders.
An example of the former would be divisions which pursue growth over profitability and suck resources away from profitable divisions, often to cause enormous damage when they fail and have to downsize.
An example of the latter would be an accounting department becoming so hyper-active in combating waste that they make it nearly impossible for employees on trips to get reimbursements for anything, resulting in lost opportunities and costly workarounds.
I’ve only written about 1 paragraph of the Third Chronicle of Brother Thomas (edits are finished on the Second Chronicle of Brother Thomas and Silver Empire has it slated for publication in March). And it’s got a great setting: a remote vacation resort in the Adirondack mountains where there isn’t internet, cell service, or even electricity. I’m really looking forward to writing that one. (The very tentative title for the book is “He Didn’t Drown in the Lake”.) But I thought of a great setting for Book 4.
A renaissance fair.
I was thinking that the fair grounds could be next to a benedictine abbey, and the fair itself could be named after the abbey next to it. So the book could be titled, for example, Saint Paul’s Fair. Or Saint Anselm’s Fair (that one has a ring to it). Or Saint Benedict’s Fair. (All three are real Abbey names in the US.)
An especially fun coincidence would be that my favorite Brother Cadfael mystery, Saint Peter’s Fair, happens to be the fourth chronicle of Brother Cadfael.
I have no idea who the victim or the murderer will be. For stuff like that I probably should get a lot further in book 3, first.
My four year old daughter was lent a DVD of the Disney movie Frozen, and in consequence I’ve seen it about a dozen times (so far). It really surprised me just how Christian the movie actually is, especially because it’s almost certain that was not intentional.
I’m going to run through the main plot elements to show what I mean.
The plot begins with two princesses, Anna and her older sister Elsa, playing at night. Elsa has the magic power to create ice is various forms, both solid and snow. Right away, there is an interesting sort of contradiction contained in this power, since on the one hand cold is negative—the absence of heat—and on the other hand she is able to create water, though frozen, from nothing. She has the power to create, but in a very limited way.
Now, normally when a female character has some sort of power, it tends to be a symbol for that great feminine power—fertility. You can generally see this because in the typical case everyone loves her for it (except for other women who are jealous, of course). That is not the case, here. Her ice powers work much better as a symbol of intellectual power and as we will see later, like intellectual powers her ice power isolates her from people.
As the children are playing with the snow Elsa creates, she slips and accidentally hits her sister in the head with a blast of ice, freezing her head. Anna lays comatose and cold as ice, and Elsa calls out to her parents for help. They come and take the children to the trolls, who as magical creatures can deal with magic. The chief troll tells the King that it is fortunate that she was not hit in her heart:
You are lucky it wasn’t her heart. The heart is not so easily changed. But the head can be persuaded.
Here, we really see the symbolism of Elsa’s power almost explicitly. She has the ability to affect the heart and the head. Of the two, it is more fortunate to be injured in the head, because the head can be more easily changed. This is quite correct. Purely intellectual errors can be fixed relatively easily, and even somewhat adversarially. By forcing a man who holds an idea merely as an idea to defend it, one can force him to realize that it is indefensible. Rarely, it is true, will he admit it in the heat of argument, but if it was purely an intellectual attachment to the idea, it will happen soon afterwards, when he has had time to think it through. To change his heart, he must repent.
The chief troll gives Elsa a warning:
Listen to me, Elsa. Your power will only grow. There is beauty in it but also great danger. You must learn to control it. Fear will be your enemy.
While giving this warning he conjures up a vision of people turning on her because of her power, and she’s scared. Her father, not she, responds:
We’ll protect her. She can learn to control it, I’m sure. Until then, we’ll lock the gates. We’ll reduce the staff. We will limit her contact with people, and keep her powers hidden from everyone. Including Anna.
There are several things wrong with this. The biggest problem is that it is a fundamental misunderstanding of what control is. Control is the ability to use force precisely—to accomplish one’s intentions without causing other effects. Control is what allows an adult that can snap a tree branch in half to make a crib for a baby then caress it while it’s lying down to go to sleep. What the King intends is for Elsa to suppress her power.
The difference between those two is stark. Elsa’s power is natural to her—this was made explicit when the troll chief asked if she was born with the power or cursed, and her father answered “born with it”. To control her power is to become fully herself, that is, to act in full accord with her nature. To suppress her power is to act against her nature and to be less than herself.
The other major problem is that the King is entirely passive in this, despite being Anna’s father. He uses the passive voice, “She can learn,” not “We will teach her.” He wants the problem to just go away—he wants Elsa to raise herself.
Indeed, his only real contribution to helping Elsa even to suppress her powers as she grows is to give her gloves and the extremely unhelpful advice:
Conceal it. Don’t feel it. Don’t let it show.
A person can direct their attention, to some degree at least, but cannot control what they feel. What they can do is control how they act in spite of their feelings. Control requires some positive goal, however, that can be focused on in spite of whatever feelings the world may thrust upon one. This, Elsa is not given. (We’ll come back to this, because the movie does.)
We then fast-forward in time, and the King and Queen die in a storm at sea, leaving the two girls orphans. Some time later, it is “Coronation Day” when Elsa is old enough to be crowned queen. (How the government of Arandel works is not explained, and even the technology is a weird mismash of the mid-1800s, the late middle ages, and everything inbetween.)
At the coronation party, Anna spends time getting to know a man she met earlier that day when he bumped into her. His name is Prince Hans, of the Southern Isles. They have a whirlwind romance in the space of an hour or two, culminating in Prince Hans proposing marriage and Anna accepting. When they ask the new Queen for her blessing, she refuses, and getting angry in response to Anna’s anger, she impulsively creates a large wall of ice as a barrier to keep Anna way. Her powers revealed to everyone, she runs away into the mountains, where we get the most famous song of the movie:
The snow glows white on the mountain tonight Not a footprint to be seen A kingdom of isolation And it looks like I’m the queen The wind is howling like this swirling storm inside Couldn’t keep it in, heaven knows I’ve tried Don’t let them in, don’t let them see Be the good girl you always have to be Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know Well, now they know Let it go, let it go Can’t hold it back anymore Let it go, let it go Turn away and slam the door I don’t care what they’re going to say Let the storm rage on The cold never bothered me anyway … It’s funny how some distance makes everything seem small And the fears that once controlled me can’t get to me at all It’s time to see what I can do To test the limits and break through No right, no wrong, no rules for me I’m free Let it go, let it go I am one with the wind and sky Let it go, let it go You’ll never see me cry Here I stand and here I stay Let the storm rage on My power flurries through the air into the ground My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around And one thought crystallizes like an icy blast I’m never going back, the past is in the past Let it go The cold never bothered me anyway Let it go, let it go And I’ll rise like the break of dawn Let it go, let it go That perfect girl is gone Here I stand in the light of day Let the storm rage on the cold never bothered me anyway
The music and Idina Mendel’s singing sound great, but if you pay attention to the lyrics, they are basically the lyrics of a villain. And, in fact, Elsa is the villain of this movie. She is a realistic villain, though, not a cartoon villain. I think the reason that has confused so many people is that this movie is a cartoon. Still, it is what it is; Elsa is a realistic villain, who is scared and afraid and wrong and doesn’t really mean anyone any harm even though she causes them harm she is culpable for.
Anna goes after her sister to try to bring Elsa back. (Along the way she finds Christoff, who agrees to help her in exchange for carrots for his reindeer.) When she finds Elsa, Elsa tells her to go away, that she’ll be safe as long as Elsa is alone. Anna tells Elsa that in fact Elsa has created a perpetual winter of Arandel, and no one is safe. Elsa is distraught, partially at what she’s done, but mostly that it means that she can’t be free. During a musical number when Anna is singing that they can solve the problem together and Elsa is complaining that she can’t be free, she lets out a blast of her power that hits Anna in the heart. She tells Anna to leave, then when Anna refuses to abandon Elsa, she creates a snow monster to force Anna to leave.
Here we see Elsa more-or-less explicitly choosing to be a villain when confronted with the choice between selfishness and love. She does, after this, try to stop the snow on Arandel by repeating to herself, over and over, “Don’t feel. Don’t feel,” as if that could somehow do some good. It’s not that she doesn’t care about Arandel at all; the problem is that she will only care about it on her terms. Even if she couldn’t stop the eternal winter, her power, used in Arandel, could do much to alleviate the suffering the eternal winter is causing. She doesn’t even consider this, because she lets her fear control her.
Anna begins to feel the effects of Elsa’s blast, and Christoff takes her to the trolls to get her help. There the troll chief tells her:
Anna, your life is in danger. There is ice in your heart, put there by your sister. If not removed, to solid ice will you freeze, forever.
Christoff asks if the troll chief can remove it.
I cannot. I’m sorry, Christoff. If it was her head, that would be easy, but only an act of true love can thaw a frozen heart.
One of the trolls suggests that a “true love’s kiss” might be such an act of love, and Christoff takes Anna to Prince Hans. He leaves her in Arandel, trusting that she will be taken care of. Anna is brought by the servants to Prince Hans, and there left alone with him. He reveals that he never loved Anna but only sought power, and her desperation to be loved made her easy prey. He douses the fire and leaves her to die while he goes off to kill the queen and usurp the throne.
However, Elsa escapes from the dungeon and creates a raging storm that obscures most things. Christoff sees the storm and comes back to help Anna. She sees him riding his reindeer toward her and stumbles out of the castle In the climax of the movie, just as Christoff and Anna almost find each other Anna sees Prince Hans about to kill Elsa. Anna rushes in and protects her sister with her body. She turns to solid ice a moment before the sword hits her, and in a magic blast from her turning to ice the sword is shattered and Prince Hans is knocked back, unconscious.
Elsa, seeing her sister turned into an ice statue, weeps over her, but a moment later Anna begins to thaw. Elsa asks Anna why she sacrificed herself for Elsa, and Anna replies, “because I love you.” Elsa, enlightened, realizes that love can end the raging storm, and she thaws Arandel, ending the permanent winter.
It is tempting to take all this as a mere reversal of the common trope; instead of the man saving Anna she saves herself. It is entirely possible that was how this plot came to be. It doesn’t matter. Whatever the writer was trying to do, what she did was to write a very Christian story.
Anna was saved, not by another creature’s romantic love for her, but by her generous love for another. “Greater love hath no man,” says Christ, “than to lay down his life for a friend.”
Anna was not, however, alone. Had Christoff not first loved her (in the sense of generous love) enough to take her to Prince Hans, what followed would not have happened. Had he not loved her enough to come back for her when he saw that Arandel was in danger, she would not have left the castle where she was huddling next to the fire for warmth, and would not have been near Elsa when Prince Hans moved to strike her down. In short, she was only able to make her sacrifice for her sister because of the love she was shown.
And then we get to the fascinating metaphor of there being ice in her heart put there by her sister. Here we have a recognition that a person can, if they let themselves, become twisted by another. Eve Keneinan has pointed out, more than once, that in the modern world we like to believe that victims are, by virtue of their victimhood, virtuous. Quite the contrary, victims often become vicious. And here we have that acknowledgement—Anna will die, if she cannot love, because of her sister’s hurting her.
We also, in all this, see how well Elsa’s power works as a metaphor for intellectual power. When she merely, through her power, gave her sister a wrong idea, the troll chief could fix that. But when, through her selfishness, she hurt her sister’s heart, fixing that could not be done by another. It’s an excellent metaphor for Modern Philosophy and things like Classical Liberalism (a la Voltaire). Where someone is merely wrong about these things as an idea, he can be set right by another through simple argumentation. When people act on these bad ideas, they injure themselves and others in ways that mere argumentation cannot fix. Having put theory into practice, it no longer suffices to change the theory. They must now repent. The Greek for “repent” is μετάνοια (metanoia). More literally, to turn around. Ideas are dangerous, but practice is more dangerous. Ideas have consequences.
There is another fascinating bit, when Christoff brings Anna to the trolls to heal her, they misunderstand at first and think that he brought Anna as a potential wife. When they find out that she’s reluctant, they sing a song asking her why. In this song they say that he’s a bit of a fixer-upper, and talk about some of his superficial flaws, but point out (obliquely) that these are merely superficial. There is, however, a very curious caveat that they put into the song:
We’re not saying you can change him, ’cause people don’t really change We’re only saying that love’s a force that’s powerful and strange People make bad choices if they’re mad, or scared, or stressed Throw a little love their way (throw a little love their way) and you’ll bring out their best True love brings out their best!
The first thing to note is that this caveat, though important, is (as stated) wrong. People do change. People can also change each other. Heck, the main plot point of the movie is that Elsa changed her sister (“put ice in her heart”).
What is true is that people can very rarely change other people according to their intentions. Most of the time the effect we have on others is not the effect we intend to have. The other important thing to note is that we can only change others when they are ready to change. You can’t take a drunkard and make him sober. You can, possibly, help him to become sober when he’s ready to become sober. And you probably won’t know when that is.
This is especially true with romantic partners, because (God willing) romantic partners are soon to become parents. They will soon have a ton of work to do in raising new people to be human beings. This means that they will both be under a lot of stress, rely on each other constantly, and will have very little in the way of energy left to try to change each other anyway. In short, the last people who can intentionally change each other are romantic partners.
Except about superficial stuff. Then they’re really good at it.
A husband and wife, if they’re even quarter-way decent human beings, want to get along with each other. They need to be tolerant of each other’s failings, but in general they will be pretty willing to load the dishwasher differently or accommodate themselves to toilet paper being put on the roll incorrectly, or what-have-you. Superficial similarities are worthless, because the superficial stuff does change pretty readily.
The big problem, in mate selection, is mistaking something important like character or honesty for something superficial like how one prefers the toilet paper to be on the roll. Unrefined people can become refined fairly readily, and if they don’t, it doesn’t actually matter all that much. People can compromise that muddy clothes can come into the basement, but they have to stay there. By contrast, vicious people can become virtuous, but it’s a terrible bet to make with one’s children’s future.
Plus, vicious people becoming virtuous often requires something dramatic, like sacrificing one’s life for them.
In a very interesting video, Jonathan Pageau (of The Symbolic World) discussed the question of whether Christianity is a Cuckold religion:
He did an excellent job discussing cuckolding in human society and patterns related to it one sees in human society (such as war rape and sexual taxes to a chief/lord). He also did a good job talking about how Christianity got rid of those patterns.
What’s really weird is that he didn’t talk about the symbolic structure, either of cuckolding, or of Christianity. That sort of thing is usually his bread and butter.
So let’s do that.
In order to see the structure of cuckolding and why Christianity is not a cuckold religion, it will be helpful to start with etymology. The word “cuckold” comes from the Cuckoo bird.
The common Cuckoo
The Cuckoo is a nest parasite. It looks for the nests of certain other species of birds and when it is unguarded, it throws an egg from the nest out and lays one of its own in its place. When the baby Cuckoo hatches, it generally throws the rest of the eggs, or if it didn’t hatch first, the other baby birds, out of the nest, too. The parents of the nest then feed the baby Cuckoo until it is old enough to care for itself.
The much larger bird, sitting on the nest, is the baby Cuckoo.
(Both images are from the Wikipedia page on Cuckoos.)
The symbolic structure of the Cuckoo’s nest parasitism is replacement. The Cuckoo replaces the offspring of another bird with its own offspring; its line continues at the expense of the line of the other birds. They do the work of raising it and get nothing out of it.
In humans, by analogy, cuckolding is when a woman is unfaithful to her husband, and another man fathers a child with her that her husband raises as if it were his. Here, too, we see replacement, but in humans it is an incomplete replacement. Human beings, when we raise children, do a heck of a lot more than just feed them. We raise our young; we teach them and shape them. An extremely large fraction of who they are as an adult is given to them not by genetics, but by their upbringing. An adopted son is not a biological son, but he is still a son. When his adopted father and his biological father are old, he will care for his adopted father, not his biological father. This does not make cuckolding OK, but it is important to note that the replacement is incomplete. This will be relevant later.
So now we come to the part of Christianity which some describe as Cuckolding: the virgin birth, and Joseph raising the child as his own.
In order to see whether the virgin birth of Jesus was cuckolding, we need to look at the structure of what happened. Recall, cuckolding is replacement. Was there replacement? The answer is: no.
In a normal birth, God creates a new human being, giving a portion of the creation of his body to a father and a mother who come together to make it. The technical term for what the parents do is secondary causation. God could create a new human being entirely on his own, but instead he gives it to human beings to be part of his act of creation. In the case of Jesus, only one human being was given the privilege of secondary causation—Mary, his mother. What’s important to notice is that this does not change God’s role in the creation of the Jesus’ human nature. God is not more active, as if he somehow normally depends on a human father and without his help he had to do more work.
A useful analogy to consider is an author writing a story. If the author normally has two characters have sex and this gets the woman pregnant, the author does not do any less work than if he writes the woman getting pregnant without a man. (If anything, he does slightly more work, in that it would take more words to set up and describe, but this may just be the analogy breaking down.)
So in the conception of Jesus, there is no replacement of Joseph, he simply is not given a part in it. There is no other creature who has taken his part. There is just no father at all. Importantly, God did not take the part of the human father, he took the part he always takes in giving existence to all of creation at every moment of time. He simply didn’t give a portion of that work to a creature to be part of.
So the conception of Jesus was not cuckolding, because there was no replacement. What of the other aspect—of raising a child as one’s own?
This Joseph does with Jesus. However, this is the same raising of a child as one’s own that happens in any case of adoption. And, indeed, Joseph raising Jesus is clearly a case of adoption:
This is how Jesus Christ came to be born. His mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph; but before they came to live together she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being an upright man and wanting to spare her disgrace, decided to divorce her informally. He had made up his mind to do this when suddenly the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son and you must name him Jesus, because he is the one who is to save his people from their sins.” Now all this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: “Look! the virgin is with child and will give birth to a son whom they will call Immanuel,” a name which means “God-is-with-us”. When Joseph woke up he did what the angel of the Lord had told him to do: he took is wife to his home; he had not had intercourse with her when she gave birth to a son; and he named him Jesus.
God clearly asks Joseph to be a father to Jesus, and Joseph accepts. And this is the key: in so doing, Jesus becomes a son of Joseph. Joseph gives Jesus his name. Not only his first name, but his family name—Jesus is in the line of David through Joseph.
So if you want to say that Christianity is a religion of adoption, you won’t be wrong. In fact, adoption is one of the main themes of Christianity. You might almost say that God was adopted by man so that man might be adopted by God.
This is why—among other reasons—Christianity had the effects which Jonathan described. God is not merely the highest, but unlike human beings. As Bishop Barron might say, God cannot cuckold a human being because God is not in competition with human beings. The milkman can cuckold a human being. Ghengis Khan did. Zeus could have, if he was real. God simply can’t. All things have their limits, even omnipotence. In particular, omnipotence can’t be limited.
Well, except for the incarnation. But when he could compete with people, Christ didn’t.
Occasionally my ten-year-old son and I will watch an episode of Murder, She Wrote together. I received the DVD complete box set for Christmas last year, which means that we can watch an episode whenever we want. Curiously, the result has been that we don’t watch all that often.
When I was a kid my parents and I would watch Murder, She Wrote with absolute regularity. We never missed an episode. So I got to thinking about why it is that my Son and I watch it so irregularly.
Part of it, of course, is that he likes it, but doesn’t love it as much as I do. There are a myriad of reasons for this, but it’s natural enough, since I love it quite a lot—most people will tend to be less extreme than that. But there is another reason.
When I was a kid, you had to watch the episode when it came on or you missed it. It would eventually be available as a re-run, but that would be in months, and without great predictability, as the TV stations didn’t do something simple (so far as I can recall, anyway) like air re-runs in the same order they ran in. Plus, you could never be certain you would catch the episode when it re-ran, which meant a longer and still less predictable time till you could watch it.
All of this produced an urgency to watching the episode when it aired that was both a good excuse for making it happen but also helped to make it happen. When one can watch an episode whenever one wants, one needs a good reason to watch now, as opposed to tomorrow. And tomorrow can easily turn into the day after. And the day after can easily turn into next week. And next week can easily turn into next month.
In some sense, this is just removing an artificial limitation which made the episodes seem more important than they were. It is, in a real sense, regarding TV episodes with their actual value. Because, truth be told, TV episodes just aren’t that great. They were made in a hurry. Regularity was more important than quality. Getting people to sit through commercials and come back was more important than quality, too.
In spite of that some TV shows really were special; there were TV shows with genuinely good episodes. Murder, She Wrote did have some well constructed mysteries. They couldn’t really compare to a good mystery novel, though, and when one can watch the episode any time, it quite frequently seems like a better use of time to read the novel. The episode will always be there tomorrow, if one really wants to watch it.
There is something lost in all this, which I think is no small part of the fondness which people like me who grew up with broadcast television feel the loss of. Broadcast television gave a rhythm to life. When favorite shows were on Monday at 6:00, Tuesday at 6:30, and Thursday at 7:00, these made Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays feel like Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Even if one went into another room and read a book because one didn’t like a show, one went into that other room and read a book every Monday. There was not only a rhythm, but a shared rhythm.
There are much better places to get shared rhythms for life than from entertainment paid for by copious commercials. I am not here saying that the death of broadcast television is not for the best. It is. I’m only saying why it doesn’t entirely feel like it.
(And yes, this phenomenon still applies in its entirety to the practice of watching live sports, and may explain a portion of that activity’s ongoing popularity.)
Today’s XKCD on the South America map projection is pretty funny:
The thing is, you have to read the alt text to really get the joke. It is:
The projection does a good job preserving both distance and azimuth, at the cost of really exaggerating how many South Americas there are.
(If you aren’t familiar with the debates over map projections, the fundamental problem a map has is that it’s impossible to correctly project the surface of a sphere onto a flat (uniform) 2-dimensional surface like a piece of paper. Something must be distorted in order to do it; the typical Mercator map greatly exaggerates the size of things at extreme latitudes. Other projections, such as the orange peel projection, tend to get relative sizes more correct at the expense of not being able to measure distances accurately. There are other kinds of map projection with other tradeoffs, too, each with those who strongly favor them while criticizing the rest.)
The song is a bit hit or miss, and I’d never heard of Charles Nelson Reilly prior to the Weird Al song and so have grave doubts that the man lives up to the legend nearly as much as Chuck Norris lives up to his. Still, I do like one of CNR’s achievements mentioned in the song:
Charles Nelson Reilly won the tour de france with two flat tires and a missing chain.
(If you don’t know, the tour de france is a bicycle race, possibly the premier bicycle race in the world.)
I recently introduced my children to the style of humor called Chuck Norris “facts”. If you don’t know who Chuck Norris is, here’s him as a young man fighting Bruce Lee:
And here is an older Chuck Norris playing Walker, Texas Ranger:
Since he (that is, his character) eventually loses in the fight with Bruce Lee, I presume that Walker, Texas Ranger has more to do with Chuck Norris’s reputation. Be that as it may, there is a popular style of humor which is a list of facts about Chuck Norris that describes how tough and good at fighting he is. For example
A cobra once bit Chuck Norris on the leg. After five agonizing days, the cobra finally died.
Another great Chuck Norris fact is:
Chuck Norris’s periodic table only has one element on it: the element of surprise.
My boys (at the time of writing, 10 and 7) have really taken to these facts, and even tried inventing their own. The seven year old understands the element of exaggeration, but he (unsurprisingly) has difficulty with the element of setting up an expectation. So his versions tend to be things like:
Chuck Norris can punch a black hole and blow it up.
I’m not normally one for puns, but it lacks punch. Anyway, there are a lot of great Chuck Norris facts. I’m not going to reprint an entire archive of them (many of which can be found with a simple google search), but here is a selection of my favorites:
On a math test, Chuck Norris answered “violence” for every problem and got an A+, because Chuck Norris can solve every problem with violence.
Chuck Norris can speak French, in Russian.
Chuck Norris can kill two stones with one bird.
Chuck Norris can strangle you with a cordless phone.
Chuck Norris can pick apples from an orange tree and make the best lemonade you’ve ever tasted.
Chuck Norris tells Simon what to do.
When the Bogeyman goes to sleep at night, he checks under his bed for Chuck Norris.
Chuck Norris doesn’t cheat death. He wins fair and square.
Bigfoot claims he once saw Chuck Norris.
Superman owns a pair of Chuck Norris pajamas.
Chuck Norris once won a staring context with the sun.
Fear of spiders is called arachnophobia, fear of confined spaces is called claustrophobia, and fear of Chuck Norris is called common sense.
So despite the fact that I’m supposed to be taking a break, I’ve begun work on the characters and plot of the third chronicle of Brother Thomas, tentatively titled He Didn’t Drown in the Lake.
The murder takes place at a rustic resort in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York where there is no internet, no cell reception, and not even any electricity. I’ve worked out who the victim is, who the murderer is, and why it was done. I’ve still to figure out how it was done, but I’m working on the other characters, first, since that may well impact how it was done.
So now I’m working out a list of who will be vacationing at the mountain resort. There are a lot of possibilities. So far, I’m considering having two novelists on a writing retreat, one in his twenties and the other in his forties.
As I’ve mentioned, I’m reading the book Masters of Mystery: A Study of the Detective Story, written by H. Douglas Thomson in 1931. One of the things which I’ve been getting out of it is an idea of what the popular mystery novels were at the time, which I’ve never heard of.
For full disclosure, the mystery authors I’ve actually read something by, from the early days and the golden age of mystery, are, in no particular order: Edgar Allen Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, Fr. Ronald Knox, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, S.S. Van Dine, and Mary Roberts Rinehart.
It’s not a long list, and not all of them have been by recommendation. I read Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue because it was the first detective story. I read S.S. Van Dine’s The Benson Murder Case out of curiosity since Van Dine had written up a set of rules of detective fiction I’ve seen referenced numerous times on Wikipedia. I read The Door by Mary Roberts Rinehart because it was supposed to be the origin of the phrase, “The Butler Did It”. (See my series on that phrase, if you haven’t read it yet.) And I’ve read most of Fr. Knox’s mysteries, but I started because he was a friend of G.K. Chesterton and because he wrote a famous ten commandments of detective fiction.
So if we subtract those, the mystery writers from that era which I’ve actually read because someone recommended them to me are: Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Sayers, and Christie. In my youth, that was my impression of the time period.
As I grew older, I realized that there must be other mystery writers of the time period that I was just unfamiliar with, but it was only in recent years that I came to appreciate just how popular a genre mystery was in those days, both to read and to write.
The thing which really drove it home to me was a short story entitled What, No Butler? about the accidental detective, Broadway. Here’s what I wrote about it at the time:
Incidentally, I looked up the two works cited. “What, No Butler?” seems to be a short story by Damon Runyon. I can’t find much information about it; according to Wikipedia it was in a book called Runyon on Broadway. It was performed on radio in 1946 and that performance is available on youtube. I don’t know when it was originally published. The story does have humor in it, but to call it satire seems like quite a stretch. Early in the story, the character Broadway (who I believe is a theater critic) says authoritatively upon finding out that a man was murdered that the butler did it. When he’s told that the victim didn’t have a butler, he insists that they have to find the butler, because in every play he sees with a murder in it, the butler did it.
What caught my attention was the reference, not to novels or even to magazine stories, but to plays. I know of literally one detective play, The Mousetrap, by Agatha Christie, which I only know about only because I was reading the wikipedia article about Ms. Christie. (Incidentally, it is the longest running play ever put on, being continually put on since 1952. Its 25,000th performance was in 2012.) There is evidence, though, that detective plays were fairly common.
This escaped me in no small part because plays have largely gone away as a form of common entertainment. Aside from high schools and community theater, plays are mostly a broadway affair for wealthy people and tourists in NYC. (This is not quite true, as there are actually plays elsewhere, but it is approximately true.) Back in the day, however, they seem to have had more of the role of television, these days, with plays being frequently written and performed for only a short time to be replaced by others. Television is a superior medium for this sort of fast-paced churn of mediocre writing, so it is natural that it would have eliminated it. But in that vane, we might take all of the episodes of a show like Murder, She Wrote to be somewhat representative of what plays of the era might have been like. Here today, gone tomorrow, and only meant for an evening’s entertainment.
Another blind spot in my knowledge of the time were short stories printed in magazines. Because novels are the dominant form of written fiction in our day, I tend think primarily of the novels written during the early days of detective fiction, or of collections of short stories. But in the late 1800s and early 1900s, magazines had enormous circulations and were apparently where the real money was in writing fiction. Even novels which we read today as novels, from the time period, were frequently originally published as serializations in a magazine. But of course short stories were extremely popular.
Of these blind spots, I was to some degree cognizant. What Masters of Mystery really drove home to me was the great number of popular detectives even available in novels which I had never heard of.
I had seen a few references to Dr. Thorndyke in the Lord Peter Wimsey stories—it turns out that he was a character in Dr. Austin Freeman’s popular detective stories. There were many others I had not heard of, though, and the push and pull of what constitutes the ideal detective story, as each writers takes in his turn to write his own detective, is quite interesting to see.
Possibly the most interesting to me at the moment is Mr. A.E.W. Mason’s Inspector Hanaud. First appearing in a story published in 1910, he is thought to have had some influence on Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, especially when it comes to physical description, but also to brilliant intuition and a psychological approach. Interestingly, in looking this up to confirm some points on Wikipedia, I ran into this:
Poirot’s name was derived from two other fictional detectives of the time: Marie Belloc Lowndes’ Hercule Popeau and Frank Howel Evans’ Monsieur Poiret, a retired Belgian police officer living in London.
So it seems that perhaps the second most famous detective of all time (the most famous being Sherlock Holmes) drew very heavy inspiration from a number of sources, most of which (aside from Holmes) have been long forgotten.
It is yet more evidence that it is not originality which matters, but the quality of execution.
That said, Agatha Christie was a very original writer. Not, precisely, in her subject matter, but in her approach to it. She managed to pull off things which others could not. Perhaps the greatest example of this is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Prior to this, Fr. Knox, in his decalogue, had given two rules which are here relevant:
(1) The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
(7) The detective himself must not commit the crime.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd broke both, and did so not only well, but even fairly. So well and so fairly that in a 1938 commentary on his rules, Fr. Knox said:
The second half of the rule is more difficult to state precisely, especially in view of some remarkable performances by Mrs. Christie. It would be more exact to say that the author must not imply an attitude of mystification in the character who turns out to be the criminal.
One such ingenious story would be enough for everyone, but Mrs. Christie pulled off at least a second, with her Murder on the Orient Express. This one did not break one of the rules of the decalogue, but it did break the generally unstated rule that there should be one or two murderers. Instead, Mrs. Christie pulled off a story in which everyone (with a few minor exceptions) did it. Every suspect (and several non-suspects) turned out to be guilty. Her originality consisted not in the idea—”everyone did it” is the sort of thing anyone might think of—but in figuring out how to make it work.
This is something those of us writing today should take to heart. In English class in high school we hear much about originality and genius. The reality of writing novels is that what really matters is doing a good job.
One of the downsides to blog statistics is that one gets relatively little information about what people are reading. (Except in the archives, but that’s +/- more about search engine results than anything else.) So I have a question for you, gentle reader.
Of the various things that I write about, is there anything you’d like to see me write more about? Or, somewhat equivalently, when do you think this blog is at its best?
I thank you in advance for any answers you might give.
As I mentioned, I’ve been reading the book Masters of Mystery: A Study of The Detective Story. The first chapter deals with the question of whether the detective story is literature, and if so, whether it is good literature. There are two things that particularly caught my attention: the enormous popularity of the detective story, and the basic morality of the detective story.
The first is very interesting because I’ve seen it in detective fiction from the era, but I never knew what to make of that. The example which most leaps out at me is Harriet Vane’s reception by the dons in Gaudy Night. A great many of them had read her books and were fans. It almost has the same feeling as the near-universal name recognition of Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote. In Jessica’s case, however, we know this to be a tremendous exaggeration. It was more plausible in the case of Harriet Vane, though, because television had not yet been invented and talkies (movies with recorded dialog) were only in their infancy. It is, therefore, interesting to see a description, if, granted, from an interested party, of how widespread was the interest in detective stories around the time of 1930. It was popular with educated people, with common people, with respectable people—in short, there was no notable group of people not reading detective stories at this time.
The other interesting thing which leapt out at me was the critique of the detective story as dangerous to morals, and the response that the detective story was, fundamentally, a moral story. That is, the detective story takes as given the ordinary moral framework of right and wrong and man’s duty to do right and to refrain from doing wrong. This interests me so much, not because it is a revelation—it is, after all, obviously true—but because I’ve seen it used as an explanation for why the detective story is so enduringly popular even until our own times (I write this at the end of the year of our Lord 2019).
It has been argued (possibly even by me) that the detective story and its modern television cousin, the police procedural, is the only modern story in which basic morality is taken for granted. It is curious to see that this was to some degree true even in the early days of detective stories.
An example given as contrast was An American Tragedy, which was the only assigned reading in highschool I never finished. I just couldn’t stand the book; I made it about halfway through and gave up, reading the Cliff’s Notes instead of finishing the wretched thing. The short short version of it is that a young man makes all sorts of awful life choices during the great depression and is eventually executed for murdering a woman he seduced (in order to be available to marry a rich woman). The main character is a bad man who learns nothing, and the book does not even appreciate the justice of him paying for his crime.
A few years ago a dear friend of mine gave me the book Masters of Mystery: A Study of The Detective Story, and I’ve finally started reading it. I’ll be writing about what it says about the detective story in another post; here I want to talk about something interesting in the timing of the book, and of the introduction which came later, as the copy I was given is actually a reprint.
Masters of Mystery was written by H. Douglas Thomson and originally published in 1931. The reprint and its foreward were made in 1978, three years short of the book’s fiftieth anniversary.
The book itself was written at an interesting time, given that 1931 was only the middle of the golden age of detective fiction and had yet to see most of the work of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, to name just two giants of the genre.
Further making it an interesting time, detective fiction was not that old. Granted, the first detective stories are generally reckoned to be Edgar Allen Poe’s Dupin stories, the first of which, Murders in the Rue Morgue, being published in 1841. There seems to be fairly little—in English—before Conan Doyle published Sherlock Holmes in 1887. 1931 was a scant 44 years later. That is enough time for much to have happened, but it was still early days.
We come, now, to the foreward which interests me, being written a slightly longer time in the future, and taking a historical look at how Masters of Mystery held up. It was written by a E.F. Bleiler, who according to Wikipedia was “an American editor, bibliographer, and scholar of science fiction, detective fiction, and fantasy literature.” He worked as an editor at the American publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons at the time of the reprint, but as he only left Dover in 1977 and it was Dover that did the reprint, it is possible that he wrote it while an editor at the publisher. He may have been, therefore, less an expert sought out for his opinion and more a man who happened to be around.
He praises the book, but also notes some weaknesses. Some may be fair, such as noting that Thomson leaves off much about the early days of detective fiction—for the understandable reason that not much was known, especially then and even now, of it.
He makes the somewhat odd claim that Detective mysteries were at the time Thomson wrote predominantly “house party” crimes. This is odd in that it’s simply false if predicated of the famous stories of the time. It was a common enough setting, but among the detective stories which have come to us at the time of my writing, it certainly did not predominate. How common it was amongst the stories which have long since been forgotten, I cannot say.
The really interesting claim, though, is rooted firmly in its time:
Thomson’s critical standards were often a function of his day, but two more personal flaws in his work must be mentioned. His worst gaffe, of course, is his failure to estimate Hammett’s work adequately. While Hammett-worship may be excessive at the moment, it is still perplexing that Thomson could have missed Hammett’s imagination, powerful writing, and ability to convey a social or moral message. Related to this lacuna is Thomson’s lack of awareness of the other better American writers of his day, men who stood just as high as the better English writers that he praises. It was inexcusable to be unaware of the work of Melville D. Post, F.I. Anderson and T.S. Stribling. It is also surprising, since all three men were writers of world reputation at this time.
To deal with the last, first: I’ve never heard of Post, Anderson, or Stribling. F.I. Anderson does not even have a wikipedia page. Such is the short duration of fame, I suppose, that a man can be castigated for not talking about famous men 48 years after his book that, 44 years later, are generally unknown.
Dashiell Hammett, I do of course know of. That said, it is funny to me to speak of Hammett as some sort of master that everyone must talk about. I’ve met exactly one person who seriously likes Dashiell Hammett’s writing, and I don’t even know his name—I struck up a conversation with him while waiting to pick up Chinese food one night.
I suspect that Hammett’s reputation in the 1970s was a product of the success of the movies based upon his books. The casting for The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man were excellent, and anyone having seem them—as an editor working for Dover in 1977 almost certainly would have—cannot help but read the tremendous performances of the actors into the words on the page. If one does not picture Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, much of the magic is lost.
Again, I should note that in the main Blieler’s foreward is positive and mostly about how Masters of Mystery is worth reading. I was merely struck by how much the retrospective criticisms of it were a product of their time, but were phrased as if they were now timeless.
There was a very interesting character in Star Trek: Deep Space 9 who was a deeply enigmatic character that was basically a spy and/or secret police officer who had possibly defected. More or less he was in the position of possibly being a gestapo agent who fled from Nazi Germany prior to the Nazis losing WWII. Instead of the Nazis, it was the Cardassians, and instead of the Gestapo, it was the Obsidian Order, but the basic structure holds.
This is an interesting character because one doesn’t know whether he left as a matter of principle, or if he was driven out merely by political considerations, or if he never left at all and his job as a tailor and status as a refugee is merely a cover. He is, of course, charming and charismatic, and denies ever having been of any importance, or a member of the Obsidian Order, and always claims that he’s “Just plain simple Garak.”
There’s an episode (or possibly a few episodes) in which his past is explored. I should note, in passing, that my suspicion is that in usual TV fashion, I don’t think that the writers ever did decide on a backstory. TV writers are much better at hints than worked-out ideas. Be that as it may, it was interesting, and there were a number of highly conflicting stories that surfaced about Garak’s past. When the episode (or arc) ended, Garak spoke with his friend, Dr. Bashir, who asked him about the stories.
Bashir: You know, I still have a lot of questions to ask you about your past. Garak: I’ve given you all the answers I’m capable of. Bashir: You’ve given me answers all right, but they were all different. What I want to know is: out of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren’t? Garak: My dear doctor, they’re all true. Bashir: Even the lies? Garak: Especially the lies.
If you want to watch the exchange, here’s a clip of it on YouTube:
This was a great exchange, and, in a different context, it would have been a brilliant conclusion. The problem, of course, is that it gets its power by hinting at a cohesive story behind the fragments Bashir (and hence, the viewer) are allowed to see. This is a problem because there was no cohesive story behind the fragments; they were just fragments thrown out in order to contradict previous fragments.
I don’t mean that they had literally no ideas; it was clearly established that Garak was in fact, at least at one point, a high ranking member of the Obsidian Order. What was not established was what principles he actually had.
Nebulous hints are only interesting if there is something good at the back of them. If a man simply lies because he is so warped and twisted that he doesn’t know the truth, this is not interesting. This gets back to something I’ve said more than a few times: it is a man’s virtues, not his flaws, which are interesting. Flaws are, at most, a crutch to make it easy to show off a man’s virtues.
What would have made this great is if there was some principle—that was not just loose consequentialism plus a goal—which was being served, and, therefore, all of the lies actually conveyed a truth, if properly understood. That is, this would be great if all of the lies were actually cyphers, and at some time later the key would be given which would decypher the lies into truths.
You can see an example of this, though not a great example, in the retcon of how Obi Wan Kanobi explained why he said that Anakin Skywalker was killed by Darth Vader. When he said it, he meant that the good man who called himself Anakin Skywalker was gone forever, replaced by the evil man who called himself Darth Vader. It wasn’t great, but the lie does make sense as containing a truth, when interpreted under that rubric.
That’s what enigmatic characters should all be, though in general it works best if the writers create the cypher key before encrypting things with it. When the writers do that, they do have the potential to create something great.
For it is good, indeed, when it turns out that the lies are all true.
I’m a fan of Tom Naughton, and his movie Fathead helped me out a lot. But recently he had something of a headscratcher of a blog post. Mostly he just mistake coaching cues that happen to work for him with the One True Way to swing a golf club—which is a very understandable mistake when in the grips of the euphoria of finally figuring out a physical skill one has been working on for years—but there was this really odd bit that I thought worth of commenting on:
If you ask someone to throw a rock or a spear or a frisbee towards a target, he’ll always do the same thing, without fail: take the arm back, cock the wrist, plant the lead foot, rotate the hips, sling the arm toward the target, then release. Ask him exactly when he cocked his wrist, or planted his foot, or turned his hips, he’ll have no idea – but he’ll do it correctly every time. That’s because humans have been throwing things at predators and prey forever, and the kinematic sequence to make that happen is hard-coded into our DNA. We don’t have to learn it. Our bodies and brains already know it.
The basic problem is: throwing is not automatic. It’s learned.
I can say this with certainty because I’ve spent time, recently, trying to teach children to throw a frisbee. They do not, in fact, instinctively do it correctly. Humans have very few actual instincts, at least when it comes to voluntary activities. We instinctively breath, and we will instinctively withdraw our hand from pain, but that’s about it. Oh, and we can instinctively nurse from our mother, though even their we need to learn better technique than we come equipped with pretty quickly or Mom will not be happy.
Now, what we do, in fact, come with naturally is the predisposition to learn activities like throwing. This is like walking: we aren’t born knowing how to walk, but we are born with a predisposition to learn to walk. We’re good at learning how to walk and we want to do the sorts of things that make us learn how to walk. Language is the same way—we’re not born speaking or understanding language, but we are predisposed to learn it.
Another odd thing is the “he’ll do it correctly every time”—no he won’t. Even people who know how to throw things pretty well occasionally just screw up and do it wrong. When teaching my boys to throw a frisbee, occasionally I just make a garbage throw. It’s not just when my conscious thoughts get in the way of my muscle memory—muscle memory needs to be correctly activated, and not paying sufficient attention is a great way to do that wrong.
Finally, the evolutionary biology part is just odd: “That’s because humans have been throwing things at predators and prey forever, and the kinematic sequence to make that happen is hard-coded into our DNA.”
There’s an element of truth to this, in that we can find evidence of spear use in humans going back hundreds of thousands of years. The problem is that the kinematic sequence to throw a spear and the kinematic sequence to hit a golf ball is not the same thing at all.
Here’s a golf swing:
By contrast, here’s someone throwing a javelin:
And just for fun, here are some Masai warriors throwing spears:
Something you’ll notice about the Masai, who throw actual weapons meant to kill, is that the thing is heavy, and they throw it very close. Alignment is incredibly important, since a weak throw that hits point-on is vastly more effective than a strong throw that hits side-on. The other thing is that the ability to actually throw quickly without a big wind-up matters, since they’re practicing to hit moving targets. They don’t have time for a huge wind-up. Also, they tend to face their target, rather than be at a 90 degree angle to it—when your target has teeth and claws, you need to be able to protect yourself if the target starts coming for you.
Anyway, if you look at these three activities, they’re just very kinematically different. Being good at one of those things will not transfer to being good at the others. The Masai warrior needs accuracy, timing, and power on a heavy projectile. The javelin thrower needs to whip his arm over his body as fast as possible, from a sprint. His arm is straight and his shoulder hyper-extended. The golfer needs to whip the head of a long stick as fast as possible, below his body, from a standing position. His arms are bent and his elbows are kept in to generate more force than arm-velocity, since the greater force translates to greater velocity on the end of the stick. The golf swing probably has more in common with low sword-strikes using a two-handed sword than it does with swinging a spear.
Anyway, I don’t have a major point. I just think it’s interesting what we will tell ourselves in order to try to figure out motion patterns.
This is an interesting thing to contemplate since as a American Northerner, I don’t really understand the concept of rest.
Granted, every now and again I take breaks, and every night I sleep. The thing is, I can’t help but think of these as weaknesses, as concessions to a fallen world. Chesterton described this attitude toward work and rest very well in Utoptia of Userers, though he was talking about employers and not individuals:
The special emblematic Employer of to-day, especially the Model Employer (who is the worst sort) has in his starved and evil heart a sincere hatred of holidays. I do not mean that he necessarily wants all his workmen to work until they drop; that only occurs when he happens to be stupid as well as wicked. I do not mean to say that he is necessarily unwilling to grant what he would call “decent hours of labour.” He may treat men like dirt; but if you want to make money, even out of dirt, you must let it lie fallow by some rotation of rest. He may treat men as dogs, but unless he is a lunatic he will for certain periods let sleeping dogs lie.
But humane and reasonable hours for labour have nothing whatever to do with the idea of holidays. It is not even a question of ten hours day and eight-hours day; it is not a question of cutting down leisure to the space necessary for food, sleep and exercise. If the modern employer came to the conclusion, for some reason or other, that he could get most out of his men by working them hard for only two hours a day, his whole mental attitude would still be foreign and hostile to holidays. For his whole mental attitude is that the passive time and the active time are alike useful for him and his business. All is, indeed, grist that comes to his mill, including the millers. His slaves still serve him in unconsciousness, as dogs still hunt in slumber. His grist is ground not only by the sounding wheels of iron, but by the soundless wheel of blood and brain. His sacks are still filling silently when the doors are shut on the streets and the sound of the grinding is low.
Again, Chesterton is talking about employers, but this also encompasses an American attitude toward the self which need have nothing to do with money. Chesterton goes on:
Now a holiday has no connection with using a man either by beating or feeding him. When you give a man a holiday you give him back his body and soul. It is quite possible you may be doing him an injury (though he seldom thinks so), but that does not affect the question for those to whom a holiday is holy. Immortality is the great holiday; and a holiday, like the immortality in the old theologies, is a double-edged privilege. But wherever it is genuine it is simply the restoration and completion of the man. If people ever looked at the printed word under their eye, the word “recreation” would be like the word “resurrection,” the blast of a trumpet.
And here we come back to where I started—that on the seventh day, God rested. We are not to suppose, of course, that God was tired. Nor are we even to suppose that God stopped creating creation—for if he were to do that, there would not be another moment, and creation would be at an end. Creation has no independent existence that could go on without God.
So what are we to make of God’s resting on the seventh day, for it must be very unlike human rest?
One thing I’ve heard is that the ancient Jewish idea of rest is a much more active one than our modern concept of falling down in exhaustion. It involves, so I’ve heard, the contemplation of what was done. Contemplation involves the enjoyment of what is done. What we seem to have is a more extended version of “and God looked on all that he had made and saw that it was good”.
There is another aspect, I think, too, which is that God’s creative action can be characterized into two types, according to our human ability to understand it—change and maintenance. In the first six days we have change, as human beings easily understand it. There are arising new forms of being different enough that we can have words to describe them. We can, in general, so reliably tell the difference between a fish and a bush that we give them different names. But we cannot so reliably tell the difference between a fish at noon and that same fish ten minutes later, even though it has changed; we just call them both “fish” and let that suffice because we cannot do better. Thus God’s rest can also been as the completion of the large changes, which we easily notice, and the transition to the smaller changes, which we have a harder time noticing or describing.
I’m thinking about this because I recently sent the manuscript of Wedding Flowers Will Do for a Funeral off to the publisher. It’s not done, because there will be edits from the editor, but for the moment there is nothing for me to do on it. I finally have time—if still very limited time owing to having three young children—to do other projects, but I’m having a hard time turning to them.
My suspicion is that I need to spend some time resting, which is what put me in mind of this.
For anyone who is interested my my novels: a few days ago I sent the manuscript of Wedding Flowers Will Do For a Funeral (the second chronicle of Brother Thomas) off to Silver Empire publishing (they published the first Chronicle of Brother Thomas). Next comes edits, and if all goes well it will be published in the first half of 2020. It’s been a long time coming, and I’m really looking forward to finally having it published.
One of the great problems that writers have when writing sequels is that, if there was any character development in a story at all, its sequel begins with different characters, and therefore different character dynamics. If you tell a coming-of-age story, in the sequel you’ve got someone who already came of age, and now you have to tell a different sort of story. If you tell an analog to it, such as a main character learning to use his magical powers or his family’s magic sword or his pet dragon growing up or what-have-you, you’ve then got to start the next story with the main character being powerful, not weak.
One all-too-common solution to this problem is to reset the characters. The main character can lose his magic powers, or his pet dragon flies off, or his magic sword is stolen. This can be done somewhat successfully, in the sense of the change not being completely unrealistic, depending on the specifics, but I argue that in general, it should not be.
Before I get to that, I just want to elaborate on the depending-on-the-specifics part. It is fairly viable for a new king with a magic sword to lose the sword and have to go on a quest to get it back, though it’s better if he has to entrust it to a knight who will rule in his absence while he goes off to help some other kingdom. Probably the most workable version of this is the isekai story—a type of story, common in Japanese manga, light novels, and animation, where the main character is magically abducted to another world and needs to help there. Being abducted to another world works pretty well.
By contrast, it does not work to do any kind of reset in a coming-of-age story. It’s technically viable to have the character fall and hit his head and forget everything he learned, but that’s just stupid. Short of that, people don’t come of age then just become people who no experience who’ve never learned any life lessons again.
So why should resets be avoided even when they work? There are two main reasons:
It’s throwing out all of the achievements of the first story.
It’s lazy writing.
The first is the most important reason. We hung in with a character through his trials and travails to see him learn and grow and achieve. If the author wipes this away, it takes away the fact that any of it happened. And there’s something worse: it’s Lucy pulling the football away.
If the author is willing to say, “just kidding” about character development the first time, why should we trust that the second round of character development was real this time? Granted, some people are gullible—there will be people who watch the sequel to The Least Jedi. I’m not saying that it’s not commercially viable. Only that it makes for bad writing.
Which brings me to point #2: it’s lazy writing to just undo the events of the original in order to just re-write it a second time. If one takes the lazy way out in the big picture, it sets one up to take the lazy way out in the details, too. Worse, since the second will be an echo of the first, everything about it will either be the first warmed over or merely a reversal of what happened the first time. Except that these reversals will have to work out to the same thing, since the whole reason for resetting everything is to be able to write the same story. Since it will not be its own story, it will take nearly a miracle to make the second story true to itself given that there will be some changes.
A very good example of not taking the lazy way out is the movie Terminator 2. Given that it’s a movie about a robot from the future which came back in time to stop another robot from the future from killing somebody, it’s a vastly better movie than it has any right to be. Anyway, there’s a very interesting bit in the director’s commentary about this. James Cameron pointed out that in most sequels, Sarah Connor would have gone back to being a waitress, just like she was in the first movie.
But in Terminator 2, she didn’t. James Cameron and the other writer asked themselves what a reasonable person would do if a soldier from the future came back and saved her from a killer robot from the future, and impregnated her with the future leader of the rebellion against the robots? And the answer was that she would make ties with gun runners, become a survivalist, and probably seem crazy.
We meet her doing pullups on her upturned bed in a psychiatric ward.
Terminator 2, despite having the same premise, is a very different movie from Terminator because Terminator 2 takes Terminator seriously. There are, granted, some problems because it is a time travel story and time travel stories intrinsically have plot holes. (Time travel is, fundamentally, self-contradictory.) That said, Terminator and Terminator 2 could easily be rewritten to be about killer robots from the Robot Planet where the robots have a prophecy of a human who will attack them. That aside, Terminator 2 is a remarkably consistent movie, both with itself and as a sequel.
Another good example, which perhaps illustrates the point even better, is Cars 2. The plot of Cars, if you haven’t seen it, is that a famous race car (Lightning McQueen) gets sentenced to community service for traffic violations in a run-down town on his way to a big race. There he learns personal responsibility, what matters in life, and falls in love. Then he goes on to almost win the big race, but sacrifices first place in order to help another car who got injured. (If you didn’t figure it out, the cars are alive in Cars.)
The plot of Cars 2 is that McQueen is now a champion race car and takes part in an international race. At the same time, his buddy from the first movie, Mater, is mistaken for a spy and joins a James Bond-style espionage team to find out why and how an international organization of evil (I can’t recall what they’re called; it’s C.H.A.O.S. from Get Smart or S.P.E.C.T.R.E. from James Bond) is sabotaging the race. McQueen is not perfect, but he is more mature and does value the things he learned to value in the first movie. The main friction comes from him relying on Mater and Mater letting him down.
As you can see, Cars 2 did not reset Cars, nor did it try to tell Cars over again. In fact, it was so much of a sequel to Cars, which was a coming-of-age movie, that it was a completely different sort of movie. This was a risk, and many of the adults who liked Cars did not like Cars 2, because it was so different. This is the risk to making sequels that honor the first story—they cannot be the first story over again, so they will not please everyone who liked the first story.
Now, Cars 2 is an interesting example because there was no need to make it a spy thriller. Terminator 2 honored the first movie and was still an action/adventure where a killer robot has come to, well, kill. But there was a practical reason why Cars 2 was in a different genre from its predecessor but Terminator 2 was not: most everyone knows how to grow up enough to not be a spoiled child, but pretty few people in Hollywood have any idea how to keep growing up to become a mature adult from a minimally functioning adult.
If one wants to tell a true sequel to a coming-of-age film, which mostly means a film in which somebody learns to take responsibility for himself, the sequel will be about him learning to take responsibility for others. In practice, this means either becoming a parent or a mentor.
This is a sort of story that Hollywood has absolutely no skill in telling.
If you look at movies about parents or mentors, they’re almost all about how the parent/mentor has to learn to stop trying to be a parent/mentor and just let the child/mentee be whatever he wants to be.
Granted, trying to turn another human being into one’s own vision, materialized, is being a bad parent and a bad mentor, just letting them be themselves is equally bad parenting and mentoring. What you’re supposed to do as a parent or a mentor is to help the person to become themselves. That is, they need to become fully themselves. They must overcome their flaws and become the perfect human being which God made them to be. That’s a hard, difficult process for a person, which is why it takes so much skill to be a parent or a mentor.
There’s a lot of growth necessary to be a decent parent or mentor, but it’s more subtle than growing up from a child. Probably one of the biggest things is learning how much self-sacrifice is necessary—how much time the child or mentee needs, and how little time one will have for one’s own interests. How to balance those things, so one gives freely but does not become subsumed—that is a difficult thing to learn, indeed. That has the makings of very interesting character development.
The problem, of course, is that only people who have gone through it and learned those lessons are in a position to tell it—one can’t teach what one doesn’t know.
At least on purpose.
Art is a great testament to how much one can teach by accident—since God is in charge of the world, not men.
But I think that the world really could do with some (more) decent stories about recent adults learning to be mature adults. I think that they can be made interesting to general audiences.
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