Everything Old Is New Again

by Linda Triegel

Once upon a time, not that long ago, all books were printed on paper. Then came the Internet, quickly followed by "e-books", or books not printed at all but readable electronically. At first, these were not considered "real" books, the presumption being that if an author could not sell her novel to a "real" publisher, it couldn't be very good.

How things have changed.

Once upon a time - in the 1980s - I had several romance novels accepted and published by "real" publishers and printed in book form. I was thrilled. My creations would become immortal--or at least make pots of money.

Neither happened, of course. My nine books made their advances back (just), got some good reviews, and quickly went out of print.

A few years ago, some anonymous kind reader, to whom I am forever grateful, recommended one of my novels to Elizabeth Neff Walker. Circa 2000, she started a website called Belgrave House, named after the street she lives on in San Francisco. Belgrave House offers her own books and those of writers belonging to Novelists, Inc., in e-book form.

Ms. Walker wrote Regency romances under the name Laura Matthews. She recalls "...only when I realized that Regency romances were far outselling the other books, did I break out Regency Reads as a separate site. I hired a webmaster to do the sites, offering Paypal and instant downloading. We now offer the most popular formats for e-books."

Most of my books, written as Elisabeth Kidd, are Regencies - romances set in the English Regency (1811-1820). Regencies are a kind of drawing-room comedy historical romance that depend a good deal on just the right language, humor, and attention to historical detail. True modern Regencies - modeled on the novels of Georgette Heyer - are gentle, avoiding explicit sex and violence.

In no time, my Regencies, including a tenth book I was finally inspired to finish, were up and running on www.regencyreads.com. So I looked at my remaining backlist - longer historical romances that are set in other eras and locations, and sexier. These are now available on www.belgravehouse.com, which also publishes contemporary women's fiction and mysteries.

"Our intention is to run a casual publishing partnership with authors (not agents) interested in making their backlist available as e-books," according to Ms. Walker. If you'd like to see your own out-of-print books, including mysteries, given a second life, check out the submissions guidelines at Belgrave House.

Love is All You Need

Croak & Dagger member Linda Triegel has a short story in e-anthology Love is All You Need available now on Amazon, scheduled to be published in book form August 4th.

Linda's story "Working It Out" is one of ten short romance stories that won top honors in the 2014 Sophie King Prize Contest sponsored by Corazon Books/Wyndham Media Ltd. of London.

As Elisabeth Kidd, Linda previously had published nine historical romances, seven of which are available in e-book form from www.regencyreads.com.

Linda grew up in Connecticut and has lived in several states and countries, calling Albuquerque home for the last eight years. She didn't think of becoming a writer until she graduated from college and embarked upon a career in...well, there was the problem. She hadn't yet decided what she wanted to be when she grew up.

An avid reader as a child, it was perhaps inevitable that she would turn to writing, but this happened only after she stumbled into her first job, in banking, which had the advantage of being in London. There she discovered the English author Georgette Heyer - and was hooked.

On returning to the States, she practiced her craft reporting for her hometown newspaper and eventually published several stories and travel articles as well as numerous theater review in addition to her novels. She is currently working on another Regency and a cozy mystery.

For more on the Sophie King prize, go to: http://www.thesophiekingprize.com

Grande Dames and Great Detectives

by Linda Triegel

Most writers grow fond of the characters they create, but there must be a special relationship between writers and series characters that, with skill on the writer’s part and staying power on the character’s, appear to change and mature through the life of the series.  Between female mystery writers and their detectives, there is an even more finely tuned rapport.  These ladies must be at least a little in love with their creations.

Was Roderick Alleyn Dame Ngaio Marsh’s ideal man?  In fiction, reader identification is crucial; the reader, if male, must want to be the hero, the female reader must want to meet him.  In order to create so admirable and desirable a character on the printed page, the writer must see him clearly in her mind before ever she sets fingers to keyboard.

Alleyn first appeared in 1934 in A Man Lay Dead and last in 1982 in Light Thickens, having aged gracefully in the interval by no more than a dozen years. 

Doubtless his marriage to painter Agatha Troy—they met in Artists in Crime and became engaged in Death in a White Tie—accounts for his ageless grace.

Alleyn is Eton and Oxford-educated; his father was in the diplomatic service, but Rory unaccountably chose to be a policeman. 

He is described at 6’2”:

“his eyes grey with corners that turn down; they look as if they would smile easily, but his mouth doesn’t” (A Man Lay Dead),

“terribly good-looking and remote” (Death in a White Tie),

“monkish-looking with a fastidious mouth and well-shaped head” (A Wreath for Rivera), and frequently as looking like a grandee. 

Troy finds him a perfect subject, and painted him from memory after their first meeting.

Personally, I find Alleyn a little too good to be true, or comfortable to be around.  Josephine Tey’s Alan Grant, on the other hand, perhaps because he is less graphically defined, seems easier to live with.  Grant too doesn’t like the conventional idea of a policeman (none of these heroes do; one wonders what the genuine article does look like.) 

Grant is a bachelor,

“six-foot-odd” (in The Daughter of Time),

“slight of build” and “chic” of dress (The Man in the Queue). 

He is well-off financially, having inherited money from an aunt in Australia to supplement his salary from the Yard.

He is human enough to have a hobby (fishing, which he describes to his doctor as “somewhere between a sport and a religion”), to be a little on the clumsy side (falling through a trapdoor while chasing a crook land him in the hospital where the discovers the perils of historical research in The Daughter of Time), and to suffer from overwork like any other civil servant (the fishing was prescribed for an attack of nerves leading to Scotland and The Singing Sands).

P.D. James’s ideal man is Adam Dalgliesh, who is also 6’2” and dark (I’d hazard a guess that all these writers are petite blondes).  He has a “detached, ironic, and fundamentally restless spirit,” which is reflected in the poems he writes to get his mind off his cases.  Dalgliesh is a widower, with no family but an elderly Aunt Jane in Sussex. 

James herself has described him (in an article in Murder Ink) as

“a very private person, self-sufficient, uninvolved, a professional detective dedicated to his job, totally unused to the claims, emotional and domestic, which a wife and family would make on him.” 

He does have a lady friend to whom he is on the verge of proposing in Unnatural Causes, but she wises up and dumps him (if any lady may be said to do such a thing to Adam Dalgliesh).

There are other detectives in this mold—Margery Allingham carries on an on-again-off-again romance with one Albert Campion—but not all female writers by any means are devoted to them. 

Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey is another kettle of red herring altogether—an amateur detective, not a professional, he is small, with straw-colored hair, a long face and pointed chin, grey (sometimes blue) eyes, attractive or not depending on whether you are Harriet Vane observing her sleeping lord in a punt on the Cherwell or a murderer having been caught by Peter’s formidable intelligence and skewered by his sharp wit (or depending, if you’ve seen the TV series, whether you prefer Ian Carmichael or Edward Petherbridge as Wimsey.)  Readers, like other impressionable adolescents, are subject to crushes on the likes of Peter Wimsey, but they don’t last.

Some writers, of course, prefer sleuths of their own gender, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple to Janet Evanovitch’s Stephanie Plum, but this takes us into almost another genre.  For a romance writer turned mystery reader, I retain a lingering yen for a hero.

The Writers Block: Figures of Speech

A column on craft by Linda Triegel

Figures of speech, or figurative language, are the sound effects added to writing to make it richer and more colorful.  The most common figures of speech are:

SIMILE

A comparison of two different things, introduced by like (“My luve’s like a red, red rose”) or as ("Her dress was as plain as an umbrella cover"). Similes that are around for a while tend to become clichés ("mad as a hatter", "fit as a fiddle", "drunk as a lord").

METAPHOR

A comparison of unlike things by stating that one is the other (“You are love”) or by giving one the other’s name and letting the reader make the connection “(You are Polaris, the one trustworthy star”).  Sometimes both things are mentioned (“All the arts are sisters”), sometimes only the “other,” or non-literal thing (“Green Buddhas/On the fruit stand./We eat the smile/And spit out the teeth”), leaving the reader to figure out what literal thing is meant.

PERSONIFICATION

Related to metaphor, personification gives human form, powers, or feelings to non-human beings or things. (Keats calls his Grecian urn “a sylvan historian.”)

METONYMY

The use of a word for another with which it is closely associated, as “crown” with the monarchy, an author for her work (I am reading Austen again), or brand names (Kleenex) for the product (tissues).
Read good writers in a variety of genres. Learn how the masters have handled figures of speech. Train your ear to hear literary language just as you train it to help you write more realistic dialogue. Eventually you will be able to “hear” when a metaphor sings—as well as when it clangs.

Any questions? Write to prosepolisher@earthlink.net

Mothers of Sisters: Josephine Tey

by Linda Triegel

Elizabeth MacKintosh, who wrote mystery novels under the name Josephine Tey, was an intensely private person. Little is known of her life, but her fans are more than satisfied with reading her eight classic short mysteries over and over.

What is known is that she was born in 1896 in Inverness, Scotland and she attended school there. She studied and taught physical training, a background that comes to light in Miss Pym Disposes (published 1946).

The Daughter of Time, perhaps her most famous novel, was the last of Tey's books published during her lifetime. She died in 1952. A further crime novel, The Singing Sands, was found in her papers and published posthumously. Proceeds from Tey's estate, including royalties from her books, were assigned to the National Trust.

In five of her eight mystery novels, the hero is Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant. I personally find Grant more appealing than the detective heroes in other period mysteries (Peter Wimsey, Roderick Alleyn, et al), in part perhaps because he is less graphically defined in the books.

Grant, like the others, doesn't fit the conventional idea of a policeman (one wonders what the genuine article looked like). Grant is a bachelor, "six-feet-odd" (in The Daughter of Time) "slight of build" and "chic" of dress (The Man in the Queue). He is well off financially, having inherited money from an aunt in Australia to supplement his salary from the Yard.
 

He is human enough to have a hobby, (fishing - which he describes to his doctor as "somewhere between a sport and a religion"), to be a little on the clumsy side (falling through a trap door while chasing a crook lands him in the hospital where he discovers the perils of historical research in The Daughter of Time), and to suffer from overwork like any other civil servant (the fishing was prescribed for an attack of nerves leading to Scotland and The Singing Sands).
 

Grant also appears in A Shilling for Candles (1936) and To Love and Be Wise (1950), but only fleetingly in The Franchise Affair (1948) and not at all in Miss Pym Disposes and Brat Farrar (1949).

MacKintosh wrote plays and other works under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot, most famously Richard of Bordeaux (about Richard III), which made a household name of its young leading man and director, John Gielgud. The Man in the Queue was first published under her Daviot pseudonym in 1929 as A Killer in the Crowd.

Tey was, in my opinion, terrific at characterization, particularly of minor characters, from Grant's glamorous actress friend Marta Hallard to his sergeant, "large and pink and scrubbed looking", to the charming young men in several of her novels, including Marta's "woolly lamb" in The Daughter of Time and the artist eager to abet Grant in The Man in the Queue. This is part of what makes her books so re-readable, and my favorite novel changes from time to time based largely on the characters. It's currently The Singing Sands.

Mothers of Sisters - an occasional personal look at the classic mysteries of the writers who helped make our genre "a suitable job for a woman"

The Writer's Block

A column on craft by Linda Triegel

Here are some common words that confuse everyone, not just those of us who want to write professionally (and we should know better):

AFFECT / EFFECT
The verb affect means to influence or have an effect on. Effect as a verb means to bring about or cause; as a noun, it means result. (His opposition affected the outcome of the vote. The vote effected a change in policy. The effect of the change was staggering.)

FEWER / LESS
Use fewer when referring to units that can be counted. Use less when they can be measured but are usually considered in bulk. (Cottage cheese is less fattening than ice cream because it contains fewer calories and less sugar and fat.)

ITS / IT'S
Its is the possessive, just as his, hers, and theirs are. (The cat licked its paw.) It's is a contraction (like can't and won't), short for "it is". (It's a lovely day tomorrow.) Remember one and you'll remember the other. Don't be confused by the rule that tells you to form the possessive by adding 's. Its is the exception that proves the rule.

LAY / LIE
Lay means to place, put down, or deposit. As a transitive verb, it requires a direct object (the thing you lay down). The past tense of "lay" is laid. (Lay the book on the table. He laid it down. She has laid her books next to it. They have been laying things down all over the house.)

Lie means to be in a reclining position or to be situated. It is an intransitive verb and does not take an object. The past of lie is lay. (Let it lie. He lay there without moving. She had just lain down beside him. They have been lying there for hours.)

Lie, of course, also means to tell a falsehood, in which case it is conjugated differently: I lie; he lied; we have lied like troopers; they have lied to us all along.

THAT / WHO
That refers to things (The apple that I gave the teacher had a worm in it); who to people (The teacher who screeched is the one who bit into the apple). If this were not so, Who's Who would be called That's That.

WHO'S / WHOSE
Who's is the contraction of "who is". (Who's there?) Whose is the possessive form of who. (Whose is this blood-stained handkerchief?)

YOUR / YOU'RE
Your is the possessive form of you. (Did you find your keys?) You're is the contraction of "you are". (While you're up, get me an Oreo.) This also applies to their and they're, which is additionally complicated by there, which is neither possessive nor a contraction, so don't use it for either.

Any questions? Write to prosepolisher@earthlink.net

Angel Street

by Linda Triegel

Albuquerque’s little theaters frequently perform mystery plays, which is a boon to us fans. Croak & Dagger chapter members have had the opportunity to see several in recent years—at a reduced ticket price for members—including Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution earlier this year at ALT, and just this July a production of Angel Street at the Adobe.

Angel Street by Patrick Hamilton
directed by Paula Stein
at the Adobe Theater

Angel Street, despite its Victorian setting, was written in the 1930s by British playwright Patrick Hamilton and is probably best known in its 1944 movie incarnation titled Gaslight starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. This reviewer saw the play years ago in Florida, but it's not often produced. 

That’s too bad, because the story is suspenseful, with several unexpected twists and turns, even though you know who the villain is from the outset. The problem is that the characters are hard to empathize with unless exceptional actors can transform them into real people. The Adobe gets one—well, maybe one and a half—out of three right.

Jack and Bella Manningham live in a mansion in London, the top floor of which has been closed off. Nonetheless, Bella often hears strange noises from above, and the gas lights flicker ominously after the noises cease. Her mother died insane, so it doesn’t take much for Bella to doubt her own sanity, and when Jack berates her for her forgetfulness and withdraws his affection as quickly as he bestows it, she doesn’t see that he is manipulating her.

One evening when Jack is out, Bella is visited by former police detective Sergeant Rough, who tells of a violent crime that took place in this very house 15 years earlier. By the end of his tale, Bella realizes that she may not have been imagining things at all. She finds a sympathetic ally in Rough, who is determined to solve the crime that baffled him so many years ago. Rough not only sets the plot in motion, but as played by Stephen Zamora, he is the most believable and enjoyable character in the play (he also has the most natural English accent).

Dale Simpkins as Jack, alas, may just be too young to be a convincing Jack, but speaking to Bella at pretty much the same angry pitch the whole time doesn’t help, when a little French charm a la Charles Boyer would have gone a long way toward showing his second face, of solicitous concern. Teresa Kizziah as Bella does the best she can with the part, which isn’t written with any spunk or even common sense. This is the kind of heroine that helped put the gothic romance out of business.

Two servants round out the principal cast. Madelon Brown is solid as a housekeeper loyal to Bella, and Anne Sheridan is a saucy maid (memorably played by a young Angela Lansbury in the movie), who wouldn’t mind stealing Jack from his wife and helps him in his machinations.

The set, designed by Bob Byers, is excellent, particularly given the small stage, full of Victorian knickknacks and even including a staircase, tea table, and fainting couch, all put to good use—especially, of course, the gas lights. The costumes are also superior; I was especially taken with Bella’s skirt, which fell in graceful folds behind her whenever she moved.

If you need only one good reason to join Croak & Dagger, it might be the opportunity to come to our theater parties!