We guarantee there are no outrages to public decency in this issue of Orphan Scrivener, nor do we think its contents are likely to cause a riot, civil or otherwise. Neither of us possesses or has ever possessed a garment of this kind so subscribers should feel free to carry on reading, safe in the knowledge the two of us certify this newsletter to be minus any mention of plus fours.
As that nice Mr Google informed me, the very day I began this essay was Paddington Bear's 50th birthday, reminding me a while long ago I stumbled over a reproduction of William Powell Frith's The Railway Station (l862), depicting a train getting ready to leave Paddington Station. http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/frith/paintings/5.jpg
There's a mystery connection. In the far right of the painting http://web.uct.ac.za/depts/philosophy/frith_detail.jpg two well-known Scotland Yard detectives, who have been identified as Detective-Sergeants Michael Haydon (with the handcuffs) and James Brett (who's just laid his hand on a man's shoulder) are arresting a wanted fugitive, close enough to escaping the long arm of the law to have his foot on the step up into the carriage.
The trips I took on the steam trains in my youth were much more orderly -- well, apart from a drunken Irishman who insisted on entering the ladies only carriage at the start of one journey and a couple of men fighting at Newcastle's Central Station at the end of another.
The engine is hardly visible in Frith's painting, but it brought to mind when the train to Newcastle passed through Darlington's Bank Top Station, up to the mid l970s passengers could see a very similar engine, Locomotion Number 1, sitting on one of the platforms http://www.pbase.com/csdesign/image/50705216
Locomotion Number 1 is now displayed in the city's Railway Museum in honour of its having pulled the first steam passenger train on the Stockton and Darlington Railway in the autumn of 1825. Apparently many who had turned out to see this amazing event confidently expected the strange and frightening new machine to explode, steam engines being basically boilers on wheels. It could not have been too comfortable a trip since the majority of the passengers travelled in open wagons formerly used for hauling coal, although dignitaries as usual got a better deal and were trundled along in the shed-like structure shown in the postcard.
Those who remember travelling by steam usually wax nostalgic at the jerky drop of an up signal, recalling stray wisps of steam curling out from under enormous driving wheels while the great iron beast, resplendent in gleaming paint and well polished brass, sits poised to go after the fellow with the long-spouted oil can and peaked visor cap set at a rakish angle has swung down from the driver's cab and carried out his mysterious business. The smells of steam travel, coal smoke, steam, and hot oil, permeate memories of journeys begun after the heavy slamming of thick wooden doors by a waistcoated guard walking the platform along the length of the train, followed by shrill blasts on his whistle to announce an imminent departure and the distinctive chuffing as the train drew away.
What a struggle it was to manage the wide leather strap lowering and raising door windows, the better to get cinders and soot on your person and allow steam and smoke to billow into the carriage when passing through tunnels! Carriage seating was upholstered in stiff, dusty moquette reminiscent of nothing so much as inexpensive carpeting, the walls above the seats adorned with advertising prints featuring maps and beautifully painted views of locations throughout the country encouraging travel and thus, in a promotional masterstroke, more business for British Rail. And can anyone who saw them forget those stern printed notices above the alarm chains in each carriage warning the penalty for misuse was five pounds?
It's a fair bet some of the most vivid steam age memories centre around the powerfully beautiful engines, the drivers' cabs displaying a multitude of tubing, gauges, levers, and stopcocks. Dame Rumour had it bacon and eggs were cooked on stokers' cleaned-off shovels, introduced into the firebox near the end of overnight runs. Lest passengers grew faint from hunger buffet cars provided more varied sustenance. Similar to that offered in railway refreshment rooms, it was solid, if often derided, fare featuring such staples as ham sandwiches with an occasional suspicion of a curl to their bread, stick to the ribs jam roly poly, pork pies, Scotch eggs, and slices of darkly mysterious Dundee cake, washed down with strong tea in thick-lipped cups. There were also fancier restaurant cars featuring the elegance of linen tablecloths and menus but alas las for the profit columns in British Rail's ledgers, I rarely patronised either carriage for the trusty Reed thermos flask, a bag of crisps, and a couple of rolls of Rowntrees fruit gums saw me through the longest journey.
Last month the BBC reported the first steam engine to be built in Britain for half a century had carried paying passengers on a maiden round trip of sixteen miles. Similar to engines that ran on the London & North Eastern Railway, The Tornado was built over a span of eighteen years by a group of enthusiasts based in Darlington, who raised almost three million pounds to cover the cost of the work.
The trip was a resounding success and The Tornado will now go into service pulling special excursion trains -- which is more or less where we chuffed in.
There was a time when I had the radio on a lot. I grew up carting plastic transistor radios around on summer days and with crackly car radios accompanying me everywhere. It was important that a stereo system include a good radio.
During the fifties and very early sixties I only liked novelty songs. My parents had record albums but what did Ray Conniff, Frank Sinatra, or Perry Como have to say to a kid? (Except, maybe, “get lost so the elders can be alone”?) Fortunately the radio stations displayed better taste than mom and dad, playing classics like Alley Oop, Purple People Eater, Little Space Girl, and the whole brilliant oeuvre of David Seville and the Chipmunks.
By the time I was in college my friends and I disdained AM radio, which is where popular music lived in that era, because the Top 40 never contained enough “good” music. In particular, radio lacked the Kinks who didn’t have many American hits. How we reveled in those few weeks when Lola neared the top of the charts and “our” sound was heard in the land.
FM was where it was at in those days. I recall driving at night, headlights illuminating a winding two-lane back road, one hand on the wheel, the other on the tuner, turning the dial back and forth, trying to hold onto a distant FM station which kept threatening to drift out of range. More than once I pulled out of the depths of the night some weird, seemingly endless, psychedelic opus. The title, artist, and station were lost in the deep space radio noise that kept washing up over the music. I never heard those songs again. They might as well have been broadcasts from another world, received only on the tinny radio of the old Plymouth as it rumbled past black empty spaces that were fields, shadowy mountains of discarded coal ash, and dingy houses, one window in each filled with a television’s wavering blue glow.
Long before that, when I was still into novelty songs, my friend Bobby and I decided it would be fun to have our own radio station. We were sure our younger brothers would love to tune in to our station, if they knew what was good for them.
As I recall, the station’s music library consisted of one badly scratched 45 rpm of See You Later Alligator by Bill Haley. For variety we also featured the Chipmunks’ version -- the same record played at 78 rpm. The song is actually about a rough patch in a relationship The singer sees his baby “walkin’ with another man” and nearly loses his head, but it turns out to be a misunderstanding. We didn’t give a 'gator’s tail for any of that. All that interested us was what she says in the chorus:
“See you later alligator, after 'while, crocodile.”
It sure was a catchy chorus, and suitably ridiculous.
“See you later alligator, after 'while, crocodile.”
You can’t listen to it just once!
Simply sitting beside the ancient record turntable and listening does not a radio station make. The magic of radio is that you can’t see where the noise is coming from. Or so we reasoned. In order to create a realistic radio experience we took the turntable down into Bobby’s basement which featured a window level with the lawn. Since we weren’t planning a television station, the window interested us only because we could open it a crack. Then a couple of paper cups attached to either end of a long string extended outside made a transmitter with a broadcast radius of over twenty feet, sufficient to reach our audience at the base of the maple tree. We could have reached the back of the basement but unfortunately our show didn’t have listeners in the oil furnace area.
This worked decently, but not well enough. Almost immediately we switched a more sophisticated broadcast technology -- an old garden hose. Once you put the hose up to your ear -- and shook the water out of your ear -- you could hear what was going on in the basement much more clearly. The depth of sound was superior to the cup and string, especially in the bass register. The equipment even added echo to music, rather advanced for the time.
The audience did have to trade the radio receiver back and forth. And it was necessary to clamp a hand over the ear that wasn’t pressed against the nozzle so as to block out the sound coming naturally through the partially closed window and ruining the effect. But why would our audience need a free hand to enjoy hearing See You Later Alligator over and over? Our demographic was too young to drive, obviating any need to hold onto a steering wheel even if the broadcast had been available on a car radio, which it wasn’t. The hose couldn’t reach the driveway.
We did our best to vary our programming. Aside from playing Bill Haley’s original and the Chipmunks’ cover, we sometimes just set the needle down on the chorus. We also introduced both versions enthusiastically and at great length, and announced the name of our station:
"You’re listening to WGTR. Proudly serving Bobby’s back yard since 2 PM. WGTR. Your only choice for the best reptile tunes. We play the scales."
We also advertised the hand-drawn comics and lemonade which could be purchased by our listeners at the end of the broadcasting day, unless they were yellow bellied sapsuckers who didn’t want to play along.
I’m sure our little brothers remember the radio station as fondly as I do. Unfortunately we only went on the air once. Afterwards, whenever we moved the turntable to Bobby’s basement our brothers never seemed to be around.
It’s too bad our station didn’t have much reach -- so far as we knew. But who can explain tricks of the atmosphere? I like to imagine that somewhere, some time, someone’s driving along a dark road, randomly changing stations and there suddenly emerges, from the hiss and crackle:
See you later alligator, after 'while crocodile,
See you later alligator,
So long, that's all,
Goodbye.
See you then!
Mary R and Eric
who invite you to visit their home page, hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the web at http://home.epix.net/~maywrite/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, lists of author freebies and mystery-related newsletters, Doom Cat (an interactive game written by Eric), a jigsaw featuring the handsome cover of Five For Silver, and our growing pages of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. There's also an Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Intrepid subscribers may also wish to pop over to Eric's blog at http://www.journalscape.com/ericmayer/
Sumacs along the main road are already turning red and the edges of leaves on other trees are distressed. The slanting sunlight is thinner, the shadows longer, and twilight draws its curtain on the day noticeably earlier as the nights start to creep stealthily in at the bottom of the garden. We've seen our resident groundhog hoovering up grass a couple of times this week and he's already rotund, though not quite to the football on legs stage just before he disappears into winter hibernation.
In noting these pastoral vignettes, let us add we have made hay while we may(write) and the fruit of our labours is this latest issue of Orphan Scrivener. Read on....
It's but a short step from avian claws to shoes and I am here to declare if my battered old runners could speak, what footnotes to my history they could reveal. But, as the Christmas cracker joke has it, while they have tongues they cannot speak and so I shall have to be their interpreter.
For every mark on their scuffed once-white surface tells a story. The long smear of rust on the outer side of the left shoe was acquired from the remains of an ancient exhaust pipe that fell off the old buggy in Connecticut. We were on the way to Maine for a family holiday and decided to put the pipe in the right wheel well -- there were five people and luggage aboard and the car was exceeding small -- so that if stopped for disturbing the peace we could produce the relic and explain we intended to get a new one fitted as soon as we arrived at our destination. Fortunately we weren't stopped as we coughed and roared, or rather the exhaust pipe deprived buggy did, through several states. A new muffler was fitted the day after we arrived, and ultimately it outlasted the car.
It was in Maine the runners acquired a tidemark from sea-wading. We spent a fair bit of time on the beach, resulting in my painful attack of Lobster Legs, now passed into family legend. I unwisely remained too long in the sun and wind one afternoon and subsequently the skin "tightened" and blistered so badly I had to shamble about in a semi-crouched fashion for the first few hours after getting up and descending the stairs, child like, on my rear end.
Then there's a scattering of grass stains, picked up in woodlands while out with compass and map at orienteering meets. At least I never had to blow the mandatory whistle to summon aid or get rescued from being lost. In my ramblings through the greensward I saw much wild life, not least annoyed orienteers passing in the far distance muttering about controls being missing from where they should have hung, as sometimes happened when people pinched the orange and white flags. One afternoon a family of deer broke cover as I passed through a thick stretch of trees on a road less travelled. A magnificent buck led a single file of does and one or two fawns across the narrow track and faded away into the distance. It amazed me how their spindly legs could carry such large bodies up and down those really steep declines.
Several dark mud stains decorate my shoes, mementoes of plodging in the clart, as we say up north, in more than one state for more than one reason, although some of the other brownish marks are relics of spilt coffee, imbibing vast quantities of Satan's brew being my only vice. Well, not unless you count reading the Daily Mail online. There are also traces of sun screen oil, not that I ever turn brown as all I accomplish is to turn scarlet and then peel, and the spattering of black splashes are reminders of wet tarmacadam after crossing a rural road newly treated with tar and stone chips.
Years ago an elderly lady remarked to me she could tell a lot about a person by their shoes. That would certainly be useful in a mystery novel, though what could the detective deduce about a character whose footwear exhibited traces of rust, seawater, grass, mud, coffee, oil, and tar? In toto they immediately suggest a sailor newly returned from foreign climes who, in a heat wave akin to that currently roasting much of the US, has refreshed himself before creeping through a wooded estate to lurk in the flowerbed outside milord's study, intent on getting up to no good...but I deny it all! I may have crow's feet but with my dislike of heights, you'd never catch me in a crow's nest, not even to spot the great white whale and be rewarded with the Spanish gold coin Captain Ahab hammered into the main-mast!
I was reminded of Elmore Leonard's silly first rule of his Ten Rules of Writing -- "Never open a book with weather."
What? Never open a book by mentioning the element we're all swimming in? Weather affects how we feel physically and can color our outlook too. Of course, reading what I write, someone might suppose I was a frustrated meteorologist. There's a weather report every other page of our books and if it's not already teeming, rain is in the forecast. My Constantinople tends to be a dark and stormy place.
No doubt what I write reflects my personal preoccupation with the state of the atmosphere. I tend to be very aware of the weather. It affects my moods and changes my perceptions. The world of a cold winter morning is a far different place than that of a humid summer afternoon, and certainly important enough to mention at the start of a book.
Or is that just me? What about other writers? I opened up some books close to hand at random. Here are some first lines I came across in a few minutes:
"On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge." -- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
"To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth." ---John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
"The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting." -- Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
Well, Okay, so what do all those old time writers know? How about someone newer:
"A big noisy wind out of the northeast, full of a February chill, herded the tourists off the afternoon beach, driving them to cover, complaining bitterly." -- John D. MacDonald, The Quick Red Fox
Glancing through Travis McGee books it struck me that every other one began with a reference to the weather. How about something totally different, though -- a fantasy written recently:
"Thunderstorms were common in Sarantium on midsummer nights..."-- Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium
See, someone else thinks thunderstorms are important.
To be fair, as soon as Leonard stated his rule he admitted he was blowing hot air. "Never open a book with weather," he said. "If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want."
Don't start with the weather unless it has to do with the story or you can write brilliantly enough to get away with it. That's probably good advice, generally, but it applies to anything. Not just to weather. And besides, I still think most of the writers I quoted broke Leonard's rule because most of those first lines strike me as being mainly for the sake of atmosphere.
My rules of writing are more concise than Elmore Leonard's:
Rule 1 -- There are no rules.
Oh, and let's not forget that Mike Hammer makes his first appearance coming through a doorway and shaking rain off his hat.
I could use some rain on my hat right now. The office is stuffy. Hot weather makes me curt and cranky. Not that I ought to write about it.
See you then!
Mary R and Eric
who invite you to visit their home page, hanging out on the virtual washing line at http://home.epix.net/~maywrite/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, lists of author freebies and mystery-related newsletters, Doom Cat (an interactive game written by Eric), a jigsaw featuring the handsome cover of Five For Silver, and our growing pages of links to free etexts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. There's also an Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Intrepid subscribers may also wish to pop over to Eric's blog at http://www.journalscape.com/ericmayer/
As if such weather was not enough to chill subscribers' blood, now here comes the latest issue of Orphan Scrivener, itself enough to bring on an attack of the cold collywobbles.
Honore de Balzac opined tradesmen looked upon authors with a mixture of curiosity, terror, and compassion. We trust this isn't how subscribers view this newsletter and its scriveners -- but even if it is you may as well keep reading now you've got this far!
I got a particular kick from this novel I once spent some time in quarantine. However, unlike WAMM no mouthwatering food hampers from upscale emporiums were delivered to our door and we had no officer of the law locked in our furnace room, largely because we had no furnace. Our lumps of honest working class nutty slack fueling our kitchen fire lived in the coal hole under the stairs going down from scullery door to back yard. As for food, we ate our usual fare, heavy on carbohydrates and washed down with highly sweetened and villainously strong tea. Except for my younger sister, who had scarlet fever and could scarcely manage soft nourishment such as jelly or blancmange.
My durance vile, then, was necessary under health regulations vis a vis precautions against the spread of infectious diseases.
Philippa Pearce's l958 classic YA novel Tom's Midnight Garden may be the only such work whose launching point is directly related to these requirements, for Tom is packed off to stay with an aunt and uncle because his brother is suffering from measles. In our case, however, my sister had came down with something much worse. Commonly described as strep throat with a rash, it's more than that. It can be fatal and in some cases lead to rheumatic fever or kidney damage but neither of us knew that at the time. I'd forgotten that in Little Women, Jo and Meg March both recovered from bouts with it but when Beth caught it she never recovered full health and it contributed to her death at a young age. Then too my sister's illness also occurred some years before I read Frankenstein, in which Victor Frankenstein's mother dies from scarlet fever caught from Victor's cousin Elizabeth.
Thus it was that my sibling, flushed and feverish and with the tell-tale "strawberry" tongue and bumpy rash, had to be sent off to the local isolation hospital. She was carried downstairs, looking very small and frail on a stretcher somehow maneuvered around the narrow L at the top of our steep stairs and under the shelf halfway down the flight where our gas meter resided. After she was trundled away in the big white ambulance, disinfection of various items and boiling of bed linen and such got under way. Officially quarantined, I remained off school but at home for three or four days, allowing time for the illness to put in its second appearance at our house if it was going to do so.
But the thing of it was I didn't want my sister to be alone at the isolation hospital. Parents were not allowed to go on the wards and could only look at their ailing children through a corridor window. Patients' siblings of course were not even allowed to set foot on the premises. How then to accomplish the plan?
My mother had warned me that under no circumstances was I to utilise the crockery and cutlery set aside for my sister's use...so naturally when alone I did just that, hoping to fall ill and be hauled off to isolation as well. Just to make certain I had also washed after my sister, using the same water and borrowing her towel. But it was no go. My immune system must have been working on time and a half, as I never caught scarlet fever although it was certainly not for lack of trying.
Before my sister was whisked away with luggage consisting only of toothbrush, slippers, nighty, and dressing gown I gave her one of my dolls to take with her. Alas, another thing we didn't know was the iron-clad rule that when such cherished possessions were taken into the isolation hospital they never came back out. Thankfully my sister got better and came home in due course -- but I'm still annoyed about that doll.
"The authors get everything right in their latest historical. The story is fast paced, the tensions between characters well portrayed; the ending leaves the reader clamoring for more." (2/2/2008)
Read this and other reviews on our page at http://home.epix.net/~maywrite/sevrev.htm
Looking for a great deal on mysteries set in sixth century Constantinople?
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Yes, it's that time again. With Seven For A Secret due to appear in April, Mary and I once again face the dreaded necessity of promotion. Before our first book came out we were under the misapprehension that writers just wrote. We had no idea that they would need to spend as much time shilling their books as composing them. Only when we started to learn about the publishing industry from the inside did we discover that most publishers expect their authors to double as sales representatives, public speakers, and stand-up comedians, not to mention being photogenic and possibly doing a bit of juggling and sleight of hand as well.
Rather than researching the history of the Eastern Roman Empire and figuring out clues we should have been practicing our stage make-up and working on a song and dance routine.
But don't worry! Mary and I won't be doing any gum-shoe soft-shoe in your direction any time soon. We promise not to fill your inbox with spam or your post box with junk mail. We most assuredly will never chase you down a bookstore aisle and force our book into your hands, as some authors have bragged of doing. Alas for our literary ambitions, neither of us are mercenary sorts and Poisoned Pen Press has been unusually willing to accommodate our promotion efforts without insisting on personal appearances. And just as well. There are two of us. While Mary was distracting you with that novel in the bookstore aisle I could be picking your pocket.
I lack the talent for selling anyhow. I sit at home and write precisely because I don't want to be appearing in public. I hope our mysteries are entertaining. I'm certainly not. I'm not being modest, either. There's nothing very entertaining about some guy shuffling his feet and mumbling into his beard. To be fair, if I had to speak in front of a large audience I might possibly pass out, which would be exciting if that's the sort of thing you enjoy. And I realize plenty of people do. When I broke my leg in gym class in Junior High the ambulance came racing to the school. Sirens, flashing lights, a grotesque injury, men with stretchers! I had the audience eating out of my hand even if they were all standing around in their gym shorts. It's kind of a grueling act though. Maybe if I were a guest of honor....
I question whether it is truly necessary for writers to perform in order to sell their books. Okay, so Charles Dickens and Mark Twain were famous for their lecture tours. And, yes, humorist Robert Benchley made movie shorts. Then too, Mickey Spillane played his own detective Mike Hammer on the screen. And, yes, admittedly, Kinky Friedman is his own detective and plays in a band. So what does that prove? Not all of us can be Kinky Friedman. Just because J. D. Salinger never sang Get Your Biscuits In The Oven and Your Buns In Bed does that mean Catcher in the Rye should never have been published?
So maybe Salinger could sell a lot more books and get really famous if he'd just do more signings at Waldenbooks. Maybe he does do signings at Waldenbooks. That's why no one ever sees him. I've sat out in front of Waldenbooks with a stack of new novels and believe me, you become invisible. No one sees an author waiting to sign. Mystery writer Parnell Hall even has a song he sings about this very situation at convention appearances. It's most entertaining. Parnell's another one of those multi-talented fellows. Another exception. They say the exception proves the rule. So the more exceptions the better the proof. I've got more proof than I can shake a stick at, and sometimes I'd like to shake a stick at the whole lot of them. What's the matter with these authors being good at so many different things?
And I don't know J. D. Salinger, by the way. Maybe he sings Get Your Biscuits In The Oven and Your Buns In Bed in the shower, but he sure doesn't do it in front of Waldenbooks, and I'll bet he sings flat and off key too. And he calls himself a writer!
Mary R and Eric
who invite you to visit their home page, hanging out on the virtual washing line at http://home.epix.net/~maywrite/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, lists of author freebies and mystery-related newsletters, Doom Cat (an interactive game written by Eric), a jigsaw featuring the handsome cover of Five For Silver, and our growing pages of links to free etexts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. There's also an Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Intrepid subscribers may also wish to pop over to Eric's blog at http://www.journalscape.com/ericmayer/
