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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