THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SIX -- 15 DECEMBER 2020

Frigid weather or no, in a couple of weeks Eric will again serve as our first foot. Tradition demands the first set of pedal extremities over the threshold in the new year should be that of a dark-haired man, whose entry into a household brings with him good fortune for the coming twelve months. In northeastern England he usually carries a piece of coal and a silver coin to ensure enough of such necessaries during the year he brings in with him. Since he fitted the requirements of this important function, Mary's brother was always sent outside just before midnight on 31st December and only allowed back in after the year turned. This year many will doubtless view their first footers as not only ushering in the new year but also symbolically kicking out the terrible old one.

Meantime, as holiday preparations start cranking up subscribers may care to sit down for a while to give their shanks' ponies a rest and glance over this latest issue of Orphan Scrivener...

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MARY'S BIT or AH, THE DREAMS OF THE YOUNG!

A week or so back I toyed with the idea of dragooning The Silent Partner into co-forming the Maywrite Inkstained Wretches Concert Duo and Jug band, but he pleaded he cannot hit a note even when equipped with a large carpet beater. Though as he mentions below he played triangle along with his similarly equipped elementary classmates' performance of The Anvil Chorus. Where anyone could obtain that many triangles at the same time remains a mystery for the ages.

A bit of trivia: Elswick, my home area in Newcastle, forms the setting for our WWII Grace Baxter novel Ruined Stones and the living quarters in our fictional streets are based on the housing in which we lived when young. Indeed, the cramped cold tap scullery with sloping roof featured in Grace's lodgings is a mirror image of my older sister's when she was first married. However, none of those fictional homes were ever visited by the piano fairy, as happened when my younger sister came home from school one day to find said fairy had left her an upright second-hand joanna in our scullery.

For my younger sibling is a talented musician. She can play not only piano but also violin and indeed just about anything with strings, not to mention clarinet and recorder. She reads music, which I cannot. She is also a better singer. I just croak along for the ride. Well, OK, I did sing in the mass choir greeting the Queen Mother when she visited Tyneside, but when among a large group of organised singers or any similar crowd is concerned one voice among many is not usually individually distinguishable. And really mine is not quite as bad as that.

One day just for the heck of it said sister and I had a bash at recreating the Everly Brothers type of harmonies in the The Allisons' ancient hit Are You Sure? We never got past pinning down the first few lines of the chorus and just as well considering we agreed should we have landed a recording contract we were going to be called The Fyddling Four. With a y, yes. Ah, the dreams of the young! Of course there were only the two of us but ya gotta think big in this crazy biz, right?

Such musical skills as I possess extend to playing a mean kazoo. I have only performed on that curious instrument once in public and that was with a group of similarly equipped friends at an sf conference. One (not mine!) was played partly submerged in an almost empty beer mug which, if aural memory does not play me false, produced a strangely strangled buzzing sound that would have surprised the BBC Radiophonics Workshop. If any of us were to be reminded of it now, we would probably plead youthful exuberance as an excuse. Fortunately no recording of our impetuous and improvised concert exists. Another mystery for the ages is who arrived equipped with enough kazoos.

Not long after that I had a bash at learning to play the more complicated harmonica but only succeeded in producing sounds causing the cat to flee the room. However, I have been known to shake a mean (rather than green) tambourine, a skill bound to be useful were I ever to join the Salvation Army. Many subscribers will remember Mr Bean conducting a Salvation Army brass band in a Christmas episode of his titular programme. The organisation is and has been a continuing blessing to many, but my chief memory of them is when they would send one of their bands around Elswick to play on street corners on Sunday mornings at a time probably far too early for those whose last musical performance was harmonising the well-known chorus of Nelly Dean when the pub on the corner of our street emptied after chucking-out time was called the night before.

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

...It's been said most domestic repairs can be accomplished by application of either WD40 or duct tape or, in advanced cases, both. Looks like we need to follow the former course as the BSP ticker is so still it's as if it's rusted up. Hopefully it'll be ticking again next time round...

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ERIC'S BIT or A NOTEWORTHY PROBLEM

Elsewhere in this issue Mary impugns my musical abilities. As much as I hate to quarrel in public, I must take issue with this. In point of fact I have absolutely no musical abilities to impugn. If one were to say that I was a bad singer that would be demonstrably false since I cannot sing at all, if singing is defined as emitting a string of notes.

The very concept of a "note" is alien to me. What are notes? Where do they come from? Not out of my mouth, that’s for sure. I’ve got plenty of mumbles in there, and grumbles, rumbles, squawks, and croaks. All sorts of unpleasant noises, but not a single note. No matter where I try to start a song it always ends up going too high or low. I’ve suffered a lifetime of public shame, lip-syncing the National Anthem and Happy Birthday and The Old Wooden Cross while everyone around me warbled and boomed in joyful tunefulness.

It is true, as Mary says, I did bang on a triangle during grade school music class. Did you know it is possible to play a triangle flat? My triangle sounded more like a polygon.

My musical ineptitude was not inherited. My dad was first trumpet in a Seabees band in Hawaii at the end of World War Two. When I was in fourth grade the shiny horn that had wafted Stardust out across the airways to troops in the pineapple fields was removed from its velvet-lined case and pressed into my sweaty little hands.

"Just remember," said my father by way of last minute instruction, "keep a stiff upper lip."

Apparently I would’ve been one step ahead of the game if I’d been born British. Sucking cherry cokes through straws at the corner drug store does not give you the musculature you need to tighten your lip into the brass equivalent of a vibrating reed. Maybe Mary, being from the UK, should take up trumpet.

The trumpet was not my instrument (any more than the triangle had been....) I managed to finger the valves. I could even operate the gadget that let the spit out of the tubes. Trouble was, I couldn’t get any into the tubes -- or air for that matter -- let alone force it clear out the other end.

I huffed and puffed to no avail. I might just as well have tried to blow the Eiffel Tower over from my back porch. There must have been ten miles of tubing between the mouthpiece and the bell -- stuffed full of concrete. My face turned blue, my cheeks puffed up until I was afraid they were going to split like overinflated footballs. The only sound I heard was bells as the room started to whirl around me and go dark due to my lack of oxygen. Once I did get some air through or maybe I only displaced a few of dad's breaths left over from 1944. It sounded like asthmatic geese coughing.

Eventually my parents let me quit. They were probably afraid I’d do myself a mischief.

That was my last crack at music, so there will be no Maywrite Inkstained Wretches Concert Duo and Jug band. Unless we perform 4'33" by John Cage, which consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence.

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AND FINALLY

Speaking of chucking-out time as we were, that for 2020 will be here in a couple of weeks so we'll close by reminding subscribers the next issue of Orphan Scrivener will be found lurking on their virtual doorsteps on 15th January.

Meantime everyone stay safe, and see you next year.
Mary R & Eric

who invite you to visit their home page, to be found hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at http://reedmayermysteries.000webhostapp.com/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, a bibliography, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. It also hosts the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Our joint blog, largely devoted to reviews of Golden Age of Mystery fiction, lurks about at http://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/ Intrepid subscribers may also wish to know our noms des Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in some time!

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THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE -- 15 OCTOBER 2020

It's dead calm as this newsletter is written and a fine crop of orange to yellow leaves is still on display, almost glowing against a sullen sky. Inevitably the winds that howl around Casa Maywrite will decimate them but when tempests visit, Wordsworth's describing autumnal winds in faded woods as wild music comes into its own, despite stray cold gusts of air chilling the ankles. And speaking of chilling, here's the latest issue of our newsletter. Read on...

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MARY'S BIT or A TALE OF TWO LADDERS AND SOME WHITE PAINT

Matisse opined those who devoted themselves to painting should begin by cutting out their tongues. He was of course talking about a different type of painting than that involved in the tale I am about to relate, but being as this is Liberty Hall we shall talk of our recent job: painting the inside of the sun porch.

But first the background . It is some time since the flat roof of the sun porch was repaired, a task that grew into a major operation since at the time we were arranging it we didn't know it was not just the northern corner of the roof that had rotted but also half the front wall. It seemed solid enough until a crew member tripped, banged his head on the wall, and half of it collapsed.

The construction work was accomplished mumblety-mumple months ago and a fine job it was too. We kept saying we really should paint the inside...and finally, a couple of weeks back, we went so far as to purchase paint, brushes and tray, drop cloths, masking tape, and one of those handy stirring sticks. We already had latex gloves and two ladders, as well as a screwdriver and hammer for prising open and tightly sealing the paint tins' lids. Not to mention a utility knife the better to scrape splashes off windows, which did not get much use since most of the dropped paint landed on the appropriately named drop cloth. Well, except when they landed on our clothing and shoes and occasionally our heads. The paint itself was wondrous to behold: it served as both undercoat and final coat all in one go. Talk about efficiency! And so we began the task.

It turned out the twirly stirrer was supposed to be attached to a drill, which we do not possess. So we just vigorously stirred the paint by hand as if it was Yorkshire pudding batter. On reflection perhaps we were too enthusiastic, since the operation caused the first minor splashes of white to spatter the drop cloth. Never mind, we said, on with the job in hand.

What we forgot was standing on even a small amount of wet paint leaves tracks.

We soon realised that although the paint was of the one-coat persuasion, what we had not reckoned with was the roof itself correctly had the rougher side of its boards facing inwards, while the stretch of new wall had its smoother side towards us and thus was easy to paint. But when we began to paint the roof this rough side drank up paint something shocking.

It was at that point we discovered one ladder was too short to comfortably reach the roof area and the other too long to be fully erected in one corner where the floor is slightly uneven. A burst of creative thinking produced the solution: duct-taping a brush to a broom and the roller to the handle of a plunger-less plumber's friend kept in case it would be useful for something some day. As indeed it was. Those parts of the roof and beams not reachable by ladder were dealt with by standing on the increasingly paint-spattered drop cloth with our heads at awkward angles, extending stick and broom with aching arms.

And so the job was done, although taking two days rather than just one as anticipated. It really doesn't look too bad so despite a few rough patches where less paint remains on the surface of the wood than elsewhere we may not need to give it another coat after all. But just in case we've stored the remaining tin of paint, the speckled duds we wore, and the plumbers' friend's handle.

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

The ticker is showing some signs of life this time around!

SHORT MYSTERY STORIES or THOUGHTS ON THEIR POPULARITY

Of late short mystery stories have become an attractive choice for readers because, as so many are finding in the current difficult situation, our concentration has not been of the best. Many readers are fans of this type of fiction even in better times. Among them is Jane Finnis, author of the Aurelia Marcella series, who contributed her thoughts on the topic to our blog last week. Point your clicker to

https://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/2020/10/jane-finnis-on-why-she-loves-short.html

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ERIC'S BIT or A PROCLIVITY FOR PURPLE

Purple is my favorite color.

It's probably the only thing I have in common with Roman emperors like Justinian. Tyrian purple came to represent the emperor, who maintained a monopoly on the production of purple silks. In 532 when Justinian prepared to flee rioting mobs in Constantinople Empress Theodora convinced him to remain steadfast and face death because "the royal purple is the noblest shroud."

But my proclivity for purple predated any knowledge of, or writing about, Roman emperors. The color caught my fancy thanks to the Purple People Eater.

That Sheb Wooley number was my first Favorite Song. A lively beat, funny lyrics, a science fiction theme, and the silly voice of the alien himself. What more could a kid want?

In the summers, until I was in fourth grade my parents ran a lakeside picnic spot. It was summer when the Purple People Eater landed. My parents had their orders. I wasn't to miss a single radio play. If the tune came over the car radio while my dad drove around the park doing his morning clean up, or on the radio in the cottage as my mom cooked breakfast, or crackled out of a transistor radio while my parents were taking a break down on the beach, I had to be called so I could frantically race the opening notes in time to hear the first chorus. The alien invasion cost me more than a little skin off my knees.

Eventually I owned a plastic Purple People Eater, which, like most of the artist's conceptions that appeared in Look Magazine (if I recall) was colored purple, even though the lyrics make it clear that the people he ate were purple.

I suppose he might've been purple, too, due to his diet.

I have to admit I have always been a bit circumspect about my love for purple. I once used a purple theme for a blog but I never wore purple clothing. Mary is fond of the Jenny Joseph poem that begins "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple." Well, maybe someday, I'll be an old enough man to wear purple. But I doubt it.

The one time I dared to emulate the emperors and don the imperial purple was a debacle. My dad made me a Purple People Eater costume for the annual Halloween parade. To me it was the coolest costume ever. Unfortunately, I didn't win any prize at all. Not even an honorable mention. A big pair of dice won. Can you believe it?

Don't tell me a giant purple papier-mache head is the noblest shroud.

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AND FINALLY

It was, relates Poe, in a bleak December when a dark-hued avian visitor came a'tapping on the latticed window, reminding us we should mention the next issue of Orphan Scrivener will flap into subscribers' in-boxes on 15th December.

Meantime, stay safe, everyone, and see you then!
Mary R & Eric

who invite you to visit their home page, to be found hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at http://reedmayermysteries.000webhostapp.com/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, a bibliography, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. It also hosts the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Our joint blog, largely devoted to reviews of Golden Age of Mystery fiction, lurks about at http://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/ Intrepid subscribers may also wish to know our noms des Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in some time!

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THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FOUR -- 15 AUGUST 2020

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe penned a piece of excellent advice as timely today as it was in his time. As we all struggle to cope as best we may with truly terrible ongoing difficulties rooted in the current national situation, his words make a good motto to adopt: we should enjoy what we can and endure what we must. We hope subscribers will do the former rather than the latter...

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ERIC'S BIT or CRYING OVER WERTHER

Although neither Mary nor I are big Goethe fans, old Mr Sturm und Drang has somehow insinuated himself into this edition of our newsletter, perhaps appropriately since his birthday is August 28, less than two weeks hence. I remember reading The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe's 1774 novel about a heartsick youth that had a huge influence on the later Romantic literary movement. I mention it only because it's been on my to-read pile for forty years. Figuratively speaking. What happened to the enticing trade paperback I bought for a "German Literature in Translation" class back in college, many changes in residence ago, I have no idea. Werther and the other books on the reading list sounded enticing to me, but as usual I found myself in a tiny minority. Only one or two other students signed up so the class was canceled.

The previous semester I had reveled in "French Literature in Translation" which covered authors ranging from Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (Les Liaisons Dangereuses) and Voltaire right up to New Novel proponent, and literary gadfly, Alain Robbe-Grillet. I've always been eager to read something which to me is new and exotic. So, I kept my class books rather than returning them for a refund.

But as an English Lit major I was too snowed under by actual English literature to get around to reading translated German. For the "Early English Novel" alone I ran through a marathon of twelve or fourteen books, mostly the size of Vanity Fair and Tristram Shandy. Luckily we were given a severely condensed version of Richardson's Clarissa, estimated to be the longest novel in English at 984,870 words. Even at that it was a monstrous tome, though not as monstrous as Lovelace who...well, I don't want to give anything away in case you plan on reading it soon!

Thus the years passed and Werther remained unread. I was reminded of him during a summer when I engaged in an orgy of nineteenth century French literature. One author after another expressed a debt to Goethe's protagonist. Though my class book was long vanished, the text is readily available on Gutenberg.

The question you're probably asking is whether the forty year wait was worth it? As an insight into literary history, yes. As a reading experience...well....

Not that it wasn't fascinating in its way. But I found it hard to believe that even a callow youth could be quite as obtuse, whining, and cruelly self-centered as Werther. Although, considering some of the poetry people have committed on the Internet, I might be wrong.

Maybe I would have felt more sympathy had I read about Werther's tragic crush when I originally intended to, when I was nearer Werther's age. Then again, I had enough sense to never write poetry.

I wonder what Goethe's attitude was while writing the novel? It was based on his own youthful infatuation with a woman already spoken for and he did not seem to stress Werther's abject stupidity. In his later years he claimed at least to regret airing so much autobiographical material in public, saying that "if Werther had been a brother he had killed, he could not have been more haunted by the vengeful ghost."

If only we could all be haunted by having written in our feckless youth one of the most influential books of all time, however embarrassing. When I was twenty four I was writing unpublishable science fiction like "The Blue Centipede of Happiness."

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

With the pandemic still raging there is probably enough evil loose in the world without our adding more, "necessary" or otherwise. However, in case, for a few hours, you would rather read about a different plague, long since conquered, we remind you that our mystery Five For Silver is set during the Justinianic plague.

As described on the Poisoned Pen Press website:

"In 542, Peter, John the Lord Chamberlain’s elderly servant, claims a heavenly visitor revealed a murder to him. It transpires that Peter’s old army friend has indeed been stabbed, but then John discovers that Gregory was not what he appeared to be.

"John’s quest for the truth leads him to churchmen and whores, lawyers and bear trainers. Suspects include a dealer in dubious antiquities, a resourceful bookseller, a court poet fixated on bereavement, and a holy fool who outrages the city by dancing with the dead and invading the empress’ private bath…."

https://poisonedpenpress.com/books/five-for-silver-a-john-the-lord-chamberlain-mystery-5/

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MARY'S BIT or WHEN THE LIGHT FAILS

The other day Mr Maywrite came into the cubby-hole we are pleased to call an office. "I just opened the fridge and the little light didn't go on," he announced.

Bear in mind this is a fellow who hardly blinked when he happened to be looking out a Brooklyn window at the very time blackness suddenly descended as far as the eye could see. It was the start of New York City's massive 1977 power outage.

Lack of a fridge light is small beer compared to the crushing difficulties we all face these days, but it's just another part of a saga horribly reminiscent of poor HAL's slow motion breakdown in 2001. Samuel Johnson observed misfortunes are to be expected but in this case we were taken by surprise because things unraveled so quickly.

A couple of weeks ago in the middle of a heat wave the fridge door started creaking in an ominous fashion when opened or closed. It then developed an annoying habit of occasionally edging open, so at that point we held it shut with strategically placed lengths of duct and parcel tapes. It's a makeshift get-around we found useful when, as subscribers may recall, our cooker door took to falling open at odd times.

Last week the fridge door just up and fell off, missing said cooker and yours truly by a margin narrow enough to make me creak. Fortunately our newly purchased eggs had not been placed in the door's egg tray.

To be fair, we can't complain about the length of service the fridge had given us. It was here when we arrived and was already elderly even then, as shown when Sanyo was not able to sell us a new crisper drawer. The other indication: its freezer door was held on with wire, which we'd renewed more than once. Incidentally, this lead to the discovery stretchy hair bands are immensely useful in effecting freezer door repairs. Stock up now, just in case.

Ladies and gents, do we see a trend involving misbehaving appliance doors developing?

In the last 18 months or so we've replaced both cooker and washer, and most recently the water heater. It's wise to remember when Fortuna is sleeping it's best not to interrupt her slumbers, so let me whisper it quietly: this latest difficulty with household machinery leaves only the heating boiler to conk out.

At the time of the latest dramatic twist in the fridge saga, we were already searching for its replacement. Sounds simple, no? Ha! Because of the eccentric layout of Casa Maywrite, the only place a fridge can go is in the niche under the stairs. This in turn means a new appliance cannot be taller than 57", placing it in that truly awkward and largely untenanted space between a full sized fridge and a compact model.

The day after the door fell off we purchased a compact fridge as a temporary measure...and on arrival home found it needed an extension cord because the appropriate receptacle is placed a shade too far from the fridge for its power cord to reach. Another journey to town, and now the new arrival is purring away downstairs. Its capacity is smaller than we prefer, but as Goethe also observed the solution to every problem is another problem.

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AND FINALLY

This now closes the door on another Orphan Scrivener, the next issue of which will arrive on subscribers' virtual doorsteps to stroll through the portals of their in-boxes on October 15th.

Stay safe, everyone, and see you then!
Mary R & Eric

who invite you to visit their home page, to be found hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at http://reedmayermysteries.000webhostapp.com/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, a bibliography, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. It also hosts the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Our joint blog, largely devoted to reviews of Golden Age of Mystery fiction, lurks about at http://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/ Intrepid subscribers may also wish to know our noms des Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in some time!

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THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-THREE -- 15 JUNE 2020

Society has undergone quite an upheaval since we last showed up in subscribers' in-boxes, but through the remote magick of the Internet, subscribers won't need to grasp this issue with tongs in order to read it. And we do hope you will...

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MARY'S BIT or ADDRESSING HISTORY

Oscar Wilde was of the opinion memory is the diary we carry with us and the same can be said for address books, for in the old days I carted my little black book around in my handbag, a habit I confess I find strange in retrospect. It would have been far better to leave that indispensable record at home, but youthful notions are oft times inexplicable.

The multi-amended addresses mean every entry represents a history of lives of which I am a part. Were a subscriber to look over my virtual shoulder they'd see, for example, the names of two of my oldest friends. I met the first when we were both in the first form of grammar school and though I have lived in a number of places both here and in England, she never left Tyneside. The second once resided in an ancient Oxfordshire village pub which formed the model for Noddweir's pub in The Guardian Stones. Our paths converged because she worked in an office connected to my third job. Alas, there will never be address changes for either of them as they both died far too young.

I like to hear how people first met, so I'll mention a couple of examples of my own. Some friendships have roots in my liking for science fiction and fantasy. Readers of these genres have a tendency to be keen letter-writers and in fact that very trait was how Mr Maywrite and I came to meet. I finally met another correspondent, a resident in a Yorkshire village, in person for the first time at a London convention for fans of the two categories of fiction. Another friendship originating in similar circumstances involves a chap who when we originally met in London had a slightly menacing air, since at the time he went in for the full Goth look years before it came into vogue. Needless to say he still gets his leg pulled by those who remember those days because he eventually went in for a career as an accountant.

A glance at one or two other pages demonstrate not only how mobile we have become but also how small the world is by contrast to years ago, when the notion we would live halfway across the world from each other would have been laughable. But now one chap who originally lived in Cornwall resides in Sweden. There's a Londoner whose acquaintance I initially made at The Globe pub in London's Hatton Gardens -- I assure subscribers it's not as lurid a story as it may seem at first sight -- and he moved to Hawaii just a couple of months ago. It was my now oldest friend (our paths originally crossed when we both attended the same pre-secretarial course as teens) who introduced me to a friend who lived down her street, who subsequently lived in Germany, the UAE, and Spain before recently returning to the old country.

All in all, Bob Dylan's Dream is a particularly poignant recording for me, especially his line recalling "our choices they was few so the thought never hit / That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split."

It's a strange thought too that address books give us a ghostly second life because as long as we have an entry in those belonging to family and friends we can be said to still exist, even when we are no longer physically here.

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

Hurrah! The ticker has coughed into life again!

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES or AN OLD ADVENTURE BECOMES ALL TOO TIMELY

Lois Winston, author of the Anastasia Crafting Mystery series, kindly hosted an essay from Maywrite Towers on her blog a few days back. The topic was Five For Silver, the setting during the Justinianic pandemic, and thus timely in a most uncomfortable way. The plague's symptoms and its effects form an important part of the structure of the plot, and A Circumstance Such As Has Never Before Been Recorded describes the historical sources we consulted for needed info.

https://anastasiapollack.blogspot.com/2020/06/historical-mystery-authors-mary-reed.html

RETURN OF THE REAPER or YOU REAP WHAT YOU MOW

We're happy to report The Grim Reaper's Lawnmower was accepted by editor Michael Bracken for reprinting in the November 2019 issue of Seeds, a free weekly electronic newsletter for Texas gardeners. Due to an email problem we didn't hear about it until just after the last Orphan Scrivener was sent out, but here's where to point your clicker if you'd like to read it.

https://texasgardener.com/texas-gardeners-seeds-november-27-2019/

Should any subscribers interested in gardening happen to live in Texas, information about Seeds may be accessed at

https://texasgardener.com/newsletter/

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DIGITAL FOSSILS or AN INTRUDER IN A FAMILIAR PLACE

Mary and I have been cranking this newsletter out for more than twenty years now, emailing it, then archiving it on our website. Sometimes I browse through my past essays to see if the brilliant subject I've decided to write about is one I covered already ten or fifteen years ago. It often is.

Those visits to ancient Internet files remind me of when I broke into the house I had rented for eight years and recently vacated. It wasn't as bad as it sounds. I'd turned the keys over to the landlord but the place was unoccupied and due to be demolished. I thought I'd forgotten to pack something during the confusion of moving day. (A ceremonial sword, actually, but that's another story...) I knew that the door to the sun porch didn't close properly. The landlord had never fixed it, nor had he replaced the broken latch on the basement window inside the porch. So rather than bothering him about the key I got into the cellar as easily as a burglar might have done.

It was strange coming up the cellar stairs to find empty rooms. The late afternoon sun coming in through partly closed Venetian blinds laid patterns of light and shadow across floors and walls where carpets and paintings had been. Vague patterns in the dust were all that remained of familiar furniture. Upstairs the loose floorboard in the hallway outside the kids' bedrooms creaked more loudly than I remembered. I felt like a trespasser in my own memories.

I always have a similar feeling stepping back into my Internet past, a sense of being an intruder in a familiar place grown strange.

One way or another we will all, eventually, abandon our writings on the web. I suppose they will remain as long as their hosts are functioning, perhaps for longer in the Google cache or via sites like The Wayback Machine. A day will come when everyone who used the Internet in its first decades is gone but their blogs and websites and interactions with one other will linger. More and more of the worldwide web will become a phantom web. Ghosts and the living will mingle, indistinguishably.

I suppose there are technical reasons why phantoms will never overrun the Internet but it seems likely to me that if humanity and the web survive long enough an electronic past will accumulate which is far more alive, immense, and accessible than the physical past, the ruins and scraps of writing to which we have been limited up until now. And as the future continues to pile up, all of us are going to be in the layer at the very bottom.

I wonder what sort of digital fossil I will make?

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AND FINALLY

It was Victor Hugo who observed that caution is wisdom's eldest child, and in the current pandemic it is sound advice. Stay safe, subscribers, as we close with a reminder the next Orphan Scrivener will appear in your in-boxes on August 15th.

See you then!
Mary R & Eric

who invite you to visit their home page, to be found hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at http://reedmayermysteries.000webhostapp.com/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, a bibliography, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. It also hosts the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Our joint blog, largely devoted to reviews of Golden Age of Mystery fiction, lurks about at http://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/ Intrepid subscribers may also wish to know our noms des Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in some time!

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THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-TWO -- 15 APRIL 2020

Henry Miller declared chaos to be the score on which reality is written, a comment particularly appropriate for the current situation. During this time of chaos and social distancing we decided to make Orphan Scrivener the Special Quarantine Edition and reprint two essays dealing with early experiences of isolation due to illness. Our new slogan is Keep Calm and Read A Book or, if subscribers prefer something shorter to read due to what appears to be a nigh universal loss of concentration, there is always this latest issue...

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ERIC'S BIT or PLAYING CHICKEN WITH MY MEMORY

Cooped up in the house with Mary during this COVID-19 outbreak I can't help recalling the time I was confined to my room with a less attractive companion -- a chicken.

It was shortly after Easter and I was suffering from measles, one of those illnesses that was accepted as a sort of natural pandemic among children in that distant era. My bedroom was dark except for a bright sliver of light along the edge of the drawn curtains reminding me of the spring weather outside. What should have been my first chance in months to run around the yard without my coat on and I was sick in bed. With a chicken.

To be clear, the chicken was not in my bed. Chickens will not lie at your feet like a dog or cuddle up against your face like a cat, and a good job too. It occupied a cardboard box in the corner of the room. (If I gave him a name -- he showed signs of being a rooster -- I can't recall it.) The newspapers at the bottom of his box were encrusted with whitish droppings and littered with seeds and husks. A rather unhealthy look for a sickroom. My fowl little buddy was a juvenile, a scrawny, clumsy, pin-feathered vision of ugliness in no way identifiable as the adorable little peep my parents had given me for Easter. They meant well, but I can tell you from experience that when you're missing the best part of spring there isn't much solace to be had in a half-grown chicken.

My grandparents had at one time made sure that chicks hatched out in the barn in time for Easter and even supplied baby bunnies some years but this chick had been procured at a gas station. Back then, gas stations gave chicks away as an Easter promotion. For my family it made sense. Easter chicks could eventually join the chickens in the barn. But what would most people have done with a cute little ball of fluff that has suddenly grown into a hideous clucking monstrosity? I hate to think.

Then again, looking back I suspect that some of the fried chicken my grandmother served us was really rabbit and more than one roasted chicken wasn't really from the supermarket. I hope my Easter chicken didn't meet such a hideous fate.

Thinking about it makes me queasy. That isn't a symptom of COVID 19 is it?

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

Avian life has become increasingly noisy these mornings, a sure sign of spring's arrival, but alas we haven't a dicky bird of news to announce. Given traditionally hope springs eternal (no pun intended) hopefully next time around the ticker will oblige!

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MARY'S BIT or NEVER A DOLL MOMENT

As a devotee of Golden Age and locked room detections, I enjoyed Mary Roberts Rinehart's When A Man Marries, a blending of both. As I related in a review over on Mystery File, http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=108 as the plot unspools one of several young folk who suddenly find themselves quarantined in a large house because the butler has just been stricken with smallpox wagers a large sum they'll all escape from quarantine within 24 hours.

I got a particular kick from this novel as 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.

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AND FINALLY

Since we're all in this mess together even though socially apart, we liked the advice from Bill Preston in a certain time-travelling adventure with best friend Ted Logan: be excellent to each other. Meantime, the next issue of Orphan Scrivener will travel to subscriber in-boxes on June 15th.

See you then!
Mary R & Eric

who invite you to visit their home page, to be found hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at http://reedmayermysteries.000webhostapp.com/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, a bibliography, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. It also hosts the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Our joint blog, largely devoted to reviews of Golden Age of Mystery fiction, lurks about at http://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/ Intrepid subscribers may also wish to know our noms des Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in some time!

THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONE -- 15 FEBRUARY 2020

According to the source consulted, it was either Anonymous or Aristotle who remarked it was necessary to stand in the cold to appreciate a snowflake's beauty. There's been plenty of opportunity this past couple of months to do so, preferably from inside the house. We are currently snowed-in, but this gives us more spare time to compose this latest Orphan Scrivener and we are grateful for that. Subscribers may however feel differently after reading it...

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MARY'S BIT or REFLECTIONS ON MIRRORS

There is something disturbing about mirrors, especially the way they reverse their image. A useful visual effect for mystery clues this may well be, but I find those common household artefacts to be, well, strange.

Alice was able to enter the looking glass world because, as Lewis Carroll relates, the mirror over the room's fireplace turned into an easily penetrated silvery mist. She certainly had an less fraught method of passing into another world than similar entrances and exits as presented in Jean Cocteau's Orphee. But then Alice did not meet Death -- or at least his messenger -- as portrayed by fashionably dressed Maria Casares to well-known poet played by Jean Marais in the title role.

Orphee and other characters pass between this world and the other by stepping through mirrors. To do so Orphee must first don a pair of gloves, extending his arms so his hands go through the reflective portal before the rest of him. I wondered at the time why gloves would be necessary but after the intertubes arrived Mr Google kindly provided the answer. Cocteau's technical wallah invented fairly simple special effects. Thus hands through the mirror images (no pun intended) were created by the actor dipping his gloved hands into a large container of mercury, followed by judicious cutting and tilting of the footage of the act which, combined with close-up focus camera work, apparently depicts his hands going through the mirror. Still unanswered: how did the producers got hold of the necessary amount of mercury to set up the shot?

Folk customs connect mirrors with entrances to another world. For example, when I was growing up mirrors were covered or turned to the wall when household deaths occurred, a custom usually explained as intended to prevent the soul of the deceased becoming trapped. In writing that, I am reminded Cocteau pointed out mirrors reflect our aging.

Local tradition in our area meant neighbours drew their curtains as a mark of respect when the funeral cortege left the bereaved household, whose curtains were closed when a death occurred. We might speculate the custom grew up from a wish to prevent reflections from window panes serving as a mirror, although there are those who point to its origins in the natural wish for privacy at a time when keeping the departed at home until the funeral was widespread. That custom was mentioned in Ruined Stones, as well as one I experienced: it was frowned upon for females to attend funerals, even a new widow and close family members.

I still run a search now and then for a radio presentation from some time ago but not being able to recall its title, I shall briefly describe its content and hope a subscriber recognises it and can provide that information. . The narrator visits a friend for a chat and to bring him fresh library books. The former relates his experience with an Indian curse whereby when looking into a mirror the viewer sees someone looking over their shoulder although there is nobody standing behind them. The sufferer can only free themselves from the curse by telling someone else, who then inherits the nasty thing. A moral dilemma if ever we heard one, no? And why is this fellow describing the curse to his friend, knowing full well what will result? No doubt subscribers have already guessed: the narrator eventually reveals the library books he has brought with him are written in braille.

Could the plot have been inspired by the old belief a girl will be able to see the face of her future husband by sitting in front of a candlelit mirror combing her hair and eating an apple -- presumably not at the same time -- causing an image of the man she will eventually marry to appear behind her? I have no idea, but for a time after that broadcast I felt uneasy if I passed a mirror in the dark. Talk about effective writing!

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

It's still quiet on the news front, as happens from time to time in even the best-ordered life. And speaking of time, today we celebrate our newsletter reaching a milestone. It was on February 15, 2000 we launched the good ship Orphan Scrivener for the first time, and since then every two months without fail we've been down at the docks waving our hankies to it as we sent it off to go a-voyaging. That debut issue was dedicated to the folks at Poisoned Pen, who as we put it rescued John from slush pile Hades. Subscribers who came on board later who are interested in taking a dip into the history of our writings and other assorted ramblings will find it archived on our website along with the whole run of issues at http://reedmayermysteries.000webhostapp.com/toc1.htm After that little speech, now's the time to throw handfuls of confetti about accompanied by good long blasts of tooting before the glasses of virtual champagne are brought around!

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ERIC'S BIT or LITERARY COMPANIONS OF THE SCOURGE OF RIVER CITY

When Mary said she was going to write about mirrors the first thing I thought of was The Hungry Glass, an episode of the television series Thriller, which scared my very young and sensitive self out of my overly active wits. A married couple moves into a house that is haunted by images reflected in glass and mirrors. Eventually the hazy phantom in an attic mirror reaches right through the glass to grab the inquisitive wife and draw her into the mirror. Well, I don't mind telling you, that just about did me in.

Okay, I was eleven. The Hungry Glass was not exactly Orphee, though it was written by Robert Bloch who was pretty darned good, and Donna Douglas and William Shatner were not quite Maria Casares and Jean Marais. Yes, the protagonist in the drama that scared me silly went on to play the only wooden Star Fleet captain in Federation history and the terrifying ghost in the mirror turned out to be Elly May Clampett of the Beverly Hillbillies. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

Mirrors are disturbing. I never understood those diagrams showing how light enters a mirror and is reversed. They made it look like the light passes right through the mirror, only adding to the mystery. Thanks to mirrors I'm not even sure what I look like, since the image I see in the bathroom mirror is the reverse of what the world sees. Is that a good thing or bad? Do most people see themselves as looking like they do in photographs or in the mirror? I never look at photos of myself, if I can help it.

A few days ago I read Low Heights, a 2003 mystery by the French author Pascal Garnier. A character botches his impersonation of another man when he forgets about the perversity of mirrors and puts a distinguishing scar on the wrong side of his face. He'd had a stroke and maybe his mind was deteriorating. It is a strange book. The poor fellow retires to the mountains with his nurse. One day a man arrives claiming to be his long-lost son. Then the vultures show up. Literal as well as figurative.

"In the tradition of Simenon" the blurb said. As do the blurbs on most French mysteries in translation. Georges Simenon is far better known outside France than any other French mystery writer. He is one of my favorite authors, French or otherwise, not just for his mysteries but for the non-Maigret books he dubbed "hard novels" as well.

There are an immense number of Simenon books available in English, but not so many by other French mystery novelists. As far as I know publishers have not stampeded to translate them as they have Scandinavian works. A shame, because I developed a liking for French literature back in college when one of my courses introduced me to everything from Voltaire and Balzac (the scourge of River City, you might recall) up to Louis Ferdinand Celine and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

During the last couple of weeks I thought to read some French mystery authors. I mentioned Pascal Garnier. I also read Three to Kill, one of ten mysteries written by Jean-Patrick Manchette in the seventies and early eighties. He is said to have reinvigorated the French mystery. In Three to Kill businessman Georges Gerfaut witnesses a murder. He's a typical man on the run until he decides to turn the tables and track down his pursuers. The plot does not develop as formulaically as you might expect. Manchette's style and ironic perspective make for a different kind of reading experience than you would get from the usual English language bestseller.

Perhaps it is only the result of cultural differences but French writers have always struck me as rather eccentric in the way they write, the characters they write about, and the stories they tell. There is a certain (don't hate me for saying it) je ne sais quoi about their novels. For example, consider Fred Vargas (the archaeologist Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau) whose series sleuth Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg doesn't use deductive reasoning. Whereas Simenon's Inspector Maigret solves crimes by discovering the true natures and motivations of those involved at which point the murderer becomes clear, Adamsberg doesn't even do that. He purports to be able to sense the evil and cruelty oozing out of perpetrators. In The Chalk Circle Man this peculiar detective -- who still carries a flame for a vanished mistress who had a pet monkey named Richard III -- seeks a man who is drawing blue chalk circles at night around stray objects in Paris streets, sensing that a circle will soon surround a corpse.

Whether these French mysteries are representative or not I can't say. Next up on my list is a mystery by Patrick Modiano which ought to be good since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. At any rate it is sure to be different from what I'm used to and maybe that's why I enjoy French authors. They offer me a slightly disorienting view of the world, like looking at the reversed image in a mirror.

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AND FINALLY

Just to add to the cold collywobbles experienced by most of us when contemplating April 15th aka US Tax Return Day, a quick reminder the same date will also see the arrival of the next issue of Orphan Scrivener.

See you then!
Mary R & Eric

who invite you to visit their home page, to be found hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at http://reedmayermysteries.000webhostapp.com/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, a bibliography, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. It also hosts the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Our joint blog, largely devoted to reviews of Golden Age of Mystery fiction, lurks about at http://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/ Intrepid subscribers may also wish to know our noms des Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in some time!

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