THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # FIFTY-FIVE -- l5 FEBRUARY 2009

We began writing this issue to the mournful accompaniment of wailing high winds, bringing to mind Wallace Stevens' description of tempests as worse than the revenge bassoons take on music. Had there been wind harps hanging in the surrounding woods they would have long since soared over the horizon and far away. With the arrival of this latest newsletter some subscribers might well wish the same would happen to this issue, but those made of sterner stuff may like to face the music and read on....

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MARY'S BIT or A BIT OF A MISTERY

The winds of fortune brought the two of us to Pennsylvania, but they couldn't dispel the heavy fog that morning.

We'd not long arrived in the state and after several days of rain we awoke to the sort of really thick fog from which patrons of horror films would expect a mummy to suddenly lurch through the French windows, intent on strangling those who desecrated its tomb with its spicy-scented bandages, assuming its parchment-skinned hands were not up to the task.

A quick glance outside revealed that much was concealed by the thick, coiled miasma draping the landscape with swirling wedding veils of white silk. When we went out for our morning walk, we found ourselves in an eerie world, one where sounds were muffled and the light had a strange quality to it. As we ambled along the narrow road up to the ridge overlooking the valley, what little could be seen faded from view as we moved forward in a world of clinging mist. If we glanced back, the tall grass verges and trees marking field boundaries soon disappeared behind a pale wall of vapour, and looking ahead we found ourselves advancing into a curtain of white that seemed to move with us, as if it was subtly shepherding us along the stony road.

We walked onwards and upwards. Numerous spider webs, little parachutes in the wet grass or decorating vines hanging in garlands from telephone lines, were heavy with droplets. Oddly suggestive rustlings came from the undergrowth along both sides of us, where tangles of blackberry bushes grew and rabbits could be counted by the dozen towards sunset most evenings. It was as if something was pacing us. A fox? We'd once seen one cutting through a half-mown field. Perhaps it was a bobcat on its way back to its den, possibly the handsome specimen seen crossing the track up there one time.

We finally reached the crest, where the oil-and-chipped road poises to take a breath before plunging dizzily down towards civilization. In better weather we could have observed six or seven mountains playing footsie with each other on the other side of the valley, but that morning we could hardly see into the nearest field. We stood for a while listening as the clammy quiet thought about departing. Birds began to tune up for their morning concert and somewhere close by a crow with a sore throat started to engage in his usual morning croaking duel with his rival across the way. We looked a little longer into milky nothingness, and then turned back along the foggy way, leaving the hidden heights to honeysuckle and dark aisles of firs and whatever creatures were moving in them. Our little pocket of visibility moved with us. We never reached the barrier of fog hanging across the road ahead, no matter how far we walked towards it.

The philosophical will, no doubt, find this odd effect a perfect metaphor for life.

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

It's been a quiet couple of months but the ticker still has a little news to report, and here it is.

CHIPPING IN or IT'S ABOUT PLACE, NOT PLAICE

Michelle Moran, author of Nefertiti and The Heretic Queen, wrote the cover story for the November 2008 issue of Solander, the magazine of the Historical Novel Society http://www.historicalnovelsociety.org/solander2.htm Her topic was The Power of Place and she interviewed a number of historical novelists about visiting the places in which their works are set. We are honoured to report we were included among them, and thank Michelle for her interest in our thoughts.

FORGOTTEN BOOKS or TAKING TIME TO REED

Patricia Abbott's blog features Forgotten Books each Friday, and a day or so ago Mary contributed a few lines about J. B. Bell's 1917 novel 'Till The Clock Stops. http://pattinase.blogspot.com As Mary said, the book could well have been subtitled The Wandering Green Box, for said receptacle appears and disappears more than once in mysterious fashion. Then there are the peculiar instructions left by a man now dead concerning the titular timepiece and that's not the half of it. Although written at a gentler pace than modern mysteries this and the other forgotten books reviewed on Patricia's blog are well worth a look.

MYSTERIOUS THOUGHTS or IF WE DID NOT WRITE

Jean Henry Mead is the author of A Village Shattered, a senior sleuth novel. In the middle of moving house, she found time to interview us for her January 30th Mysterious People blog http://mysteriouspeople.blogspot.com/ Among other topics we talked about what we'd do if we were not writing and real people who appear in our works. It was more fun than a trunk full of monkeys, so Mary returned to the scene of the crime next day to pass along comments on the genre from six historical mystery authors -- in a 500 or so word blog! It was a struggle to stay within the allotted space -- talk about writing lean! Our thanks to Jean for her interest and for allowing us all to air our thoughts.

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ERIC'S BIT or TEA AT THE PALACE

I recently caught a taxi into town in order to empty our Post Office box.

We get snowed in out here in the countryside, at the end of a steep private right-of-way beyond which lies the top of another drop and a narrow strip of decayed macadam that plunges down to the state road through two hairpin curves. The macadam drive catches the run-off from the mountain. In the summer it's a creek, in the winter a glacier.

So we stock up in the autumn. A huge harvest of tinned goods. Most importantly we make sure there's plenty of coffee. By spring we may be very thin but at least we will be awake.

And, oh yes, cat treats. We mustn't forget those either.

But we can't stock up on mail or even forgo it for months on end. We would just as soon conduct all our business electronically. Alas, there are those who will insist on paper checks and contracts and even a few who refuse to bill except the old-fashioned way. Then there are the junk mailers, the purveyors of fliers for local stores, who take advantage of the box we maintain out of necessity. (No, I do not need three tins of vegetables for the price of two. We still have five dozen in stock.) When we reckon the box must be stuffed to overflowing I call the taxi service.

Until recently, the last time I took a taxi was my last visit to New York City more than fifteen years ago. During the years I lived in the city, when I was going to school, I rarely used taxis. Subway fares matched my budget better. I did, however, learn how to flag down a ride if I really needed one.

My single visit to New York since then only lasted a few hours. A magazine aimed at high school English students for which I'd done some freelance work sent me to interview Nicole St. John, the author of numerous young adult books ranging from mystery novels to histories. While Jane Yolen and Jeannie Moos had been happy to do phone interviews (this being before the age of email) Ms. St. John stood on her right to be interviewed in person, during high tea at the Helmsley Palace.

The train pulled into Penn Station late. Taking the subway was out of the question. I am not normally a very assertive sort of person, but it is amazing what a whiff of those heady Manhattan exhaust fumes will do. My city skills momentarily came back to me. I strode out of the station, barged straight through tourists milling timidly on the sidewalk, stepped into the street, grabbed the side mirror of the first Yellow Cab I saw, and wrestled it to the curb.

The cabby obligingly made an illegal U-turn against eight lanes of onrushing traffic and delivered me to the Palace dining room in plenty of time to juggle tape recorder, pen, notebook, and cucumber sandwiches. Such small sandwiches and biscuits for such a large room! The ceiling must have been three stories high. The place was filled with the sound of unseen violins and the loud conversation of diners whose clothes were obviously worth more than my automobile. Should I have worn something other than jeans, running shoes, and a leather jacket? Ms St. John fit in perfectly, dressed all in black, including a black hat, black cape, and black cane with a gilded handle. There was gilt everywhere. On the walls, ceiling and chairs, and the epaulettes of the waiters who were dressed like the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz.

I thought about all that as I waited for the taxi down by the road and watched a big red rooster peck at the frozen gravel a foot from where I stood.

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AND FINALLY

In the second scene of Act III of King Lear, Shakespeare had the titular character declare he did not tax the elements with unkindness. We hope our subscribers feel the same way about the scribblers of this newsletter when they are reminded the next Orphan Scrivener will flap into their in-boxes on April 15th, the very day when American tax returns are due.

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/

THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # FIFTY-FOUR -- l5 DECEMBER 2008

Sometimes a turn of phrase will make the reader laugh out loud. One such popped up in a short story by Sapper, wherein a young man observes of an obnoxious character's plus fours that to wear them in public would outrage public decency and furthermore would probably cause a civil riot.

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.

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ERIC'S BIT or A HISTORY OF HISTORIES

The past has always fascinated me. While growing up I read incessantly about future worlds imagined by science fiction but I was also intrigued by the equally exotic worlds of previous eras. Babylon was no less alien than Barsoom. Roman siege engines and Tom Swift Jr’s Atomic earth blaster were both wonders of technology. And history possessed a quality science fiction lacked -- it had actually happened.

I was interested in my own past too, almost before I had one. There’s no history closer to hand than our own.

One of my first experiences of personal history involved the child-sized roll-top desk I used to draw at long before I went to school. The top became stuck. I used a bent clothes hanger to fish down the back, into the space where the top should have rolled, and was surprised to pull out ancient artifacts. A plastic soldier. A stick of Black Jack gum so old it was petrified. A badly crumpled and torn sheet of paper bearing a drawing of my friendly chipmunk character.

Had I really lived long enough to acquire such a rich history? I thought the whole bag of soldiers had been lost in the garden trenches an entire summer before. The drugstore didn’t even sell Black Jack gum any more. As for that chipmunk drawing, it was embarrassing juvenilia now that I had moved on to machine-gun wielding squirrels. I could hardly imagine I had once been so unskilled and immature.

How these treasures had fallen into the back of the desk I had no idea. They should have been gone forever, along with the very memory of them. Howard Carter couldn’t have been more amazed when he first peered into King Tut’s tomb.

What is so compelling about history? Perhaps it gives us meaning that time would otherwise sweep away. We are forever locked in a moment that means nothing except in the context of moments which are gone and moments which have yet to arrive. We take our meaning from that which does not exist.

Most of us, in one way or another, are our own historians. We keep diaries, for instance, or family photo albums. We are not just preserving the past, though. By what we write in the diary, which snapshots we preserve, we are, like historians, interpreting our histories. And there is something satisfying, I think, of seeing that we are more than this moment.

As a child I loved reading the Alley Oop comic strip in the newspaper. Why wouldn’t I? Alley was a caveman who time traveled. I started clipping each strip out and pasting it into a scrapbook. After a year, when I looked at the beginning of the scrapbook, I saw vaguely remembered scenes and read story lines which seemed to have occurred an epoch ago, I felt like I had jumped into a time machine and traveled backwards. I guess I had created a historical record for my own enjoyment.

My friends and I created a history for the Horseshoe Club which met in our basements every couple of weeks. The club’s activities consisted of consuming chips and soda, electing new officers at every meeting, and keeping an official record of the elections. Before long we had a history. At the end of the summer we put the official club record in a plastic bag and hiked up the railroad tracks to the edge of a swamp where we buried it.

When we excavated the records the next spring, after the ice sheets had advanced and receded, we not only had a history but an historical artifact.

And what a discovery it was! The bag had split and the precious paper inside was wet, stuck together, and partly rotted. But working carefully, we managed to dry, reassemble, and tape enough together to decipher the strangely childish handwriting. We were astounded. The ancient document revealed that there had once been a secret organization called the Horseshoe club and we’d all been members! Look, I was the 2nd, 4th, 6th, and 9th president!

These days I’m not quite so blatant about making my past into history. I just write essays about it. And sometimes, doing so, I try to place the taste of Black Jack gum and fail.

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

Of news there is none this time around so instead of trumpeting forth the latest scuttlebutt, in the spirit of the holiday season and for the benefit of new subscribers and those who missed the earlier announcement we've reset the ticker to direct readers to our first attempt at that traditional festive mainstay, the ghost story. Written after the fashion of M. R. James, or so we like to think, find it by entering the haunted west wing of Casa Maywrite at http://home.epix.net/~maywrite/thorn05.htm

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MARY'S BIT or WOOLLIES THINKING

It was recently announced the Woolworths chain, which has been present in the UK for almost a century, is failing, so looks as if its bright red signs will disappear from high streets all over the country in the new year.

Hearing the news brought back memories of Christmases past, when as children my younger sister and I did our little bit of Yuletide shopping at the Elswick Road branch of Woollies, up on the main road beyond the cemetery at the top of our street in Newcastle.

Following the basic company design, our local Woollies featured square mirrored pillars, popularly whispered to conceal a space where floorwalkers lurked waiting to pop out to apprehend would-be shoplifters. Items for sale were displayed on vast oblong mahogany counters with tops laid out with low compartments of appropriate size with walls formed of strips of glass a couple of inches high clipped together with metal Ts. Customers picked out what they wished to buy to examine them before sales were rung up on sit-up-and-beg-tills. What's more, single items were sold rather than the now common sets of five or ten encased in packaging needing the bread knife to cut open. This was particularly important for residents in areas such as ours where purchases of two ounces of tea, sugar, or butter were common, especially towards the end of the work week when Friday night's pay packet was still a day or so away.

So around this time of year it was off to the Elswick Road to purchase family gifts with our precious pennies. The first outlay was on a sheet or two of thin, chalky Christmas wrapping paper, printed in pastel shades and like many contemporary Christmas cards highlighted with glitter. Since our local Woollies stacked single sheets of wrapping paper -- it cost a old penny a sheet -- on trapezes formed from broom handles and hairy string, many of the items displayed on the counters below became decorated with shining speckles, little heaps of which drifted into the corners of the aforementioned compartments. The cards I liked best featured a back flap extending about half an inch or so to the right of the front. Printed with a pattern matching the card's illustration, the extra width was ideal for cutting off and using as a bookmark.

Well then, our shopping lists often included calendar booklets with a month to a page. We sometimes made calendars for family members, pasting a suitable picture cut from a magazine or a card to a piece of cardboard -- the reversed front of a Kellogg's cornflakes box springs to mind -- and then hanging the date booklet from a piece of ribbon at the bottom with a matching hanging ribbon threaded through holes punched at the top. For ready made gifts there were presentation trios of gold-foil wrapped bath cubes or toiletries such as boxed sets of matching soap, talc, and a single bath cube. Admittedly the bath cubes were not much use to us inasmuch we had no bathroom. It was the thought that counted and having counted the remaining cash there was usually enough to purchase a pocket diary with a tiny pencil in its spine, or perhaps a bottle of blue after shave or a box of stationery, though I confess I used more of the envelopes and notepaper than its recipient as I had a number of pen pals. Other gifts regularly showing up under the Christmas tree included a square box containing three gauzy ladies' embroidered handkerchiefs so delicate that to this day I am convinced they were intended for display rather than use, unlike the thicker manly linen hankies with an initial worked in blue thread. Since my father and brother had the same name sometimes one received hankies with no initials to avoid confusing the issue or should I say the atishoo. The shape of these gift boxes revealed their content before unwrapping as did the rectangular type containing a tie, another standby for male relatives at a time when ties were worn more commonly than today, but everyone played along and expressed surprise when the contents were revealed.

The Woollies chain sold broken biscuits by the pound from cube-shaped tin boxes, containers that proved ideal for all sorts of storage particularly in mice-infested houses. While my brother was in Egypt serving in the RAF we sent him a home-made Christmas cake and his presents each year in one of those sturdy biscuit boxes. There are abiding recollections of big jars of plum and apple jam from Woollies, not to mention their large tins of golden plums, one of the sparse choice of fruit available at the time when tinned pineapple was a luxury and more exotic fruits undreamed of by greengrocers.

Woollies sold just about everything for the home from ceiling to floor, from light bulbs to door mats, so store vignettes pop up throughout memories of succeeding decades. In our teens the paste jewelry, faux gems, and plastic bangles of the costume jewelry counter beckoned, and it was at Woollies we purchased packets of cobwebby nylons which laddered so easily we carried a bottle of nail polish around to effect emergency repairs by dabbing a spot on a new snag to prevent it running the length of the stocking. Then there was the makeup counter, purveyor of the white lipstick and pan-cake makeup that made us look, well, half dead at best. Catering to our age group Woollies also offered black and white postcards of current heartthrobs. We bought many but never posted any. Nor must we overlook their Embassy brand cover versions of popular hits, an enterprise of which John Lennon reportedly said if the Beatles could not get a contract with a real recording company they could always record for Woollies.

Fittingly, it was at Woollies that I purchased the thick navy blue wool with which I knitted the only sweater I ever produced, created with much labour and muttering on wooden knitting needles nigh as thick as my little finger. I could never master how to control the tension so when made up, the garment was too wide, too short, and its sailor collar too long at the back though virtually non existent at the shoulders. Callous friends dubbed this work my disgusting horse blanket. But what cared I? It was my pride and joy and I wore, nay, flaunted it in an ensemble consisting a tube skirt, stiletto heels, and one floral earring, for dear me, to misquote Louisa May Alcott, when we are teens let us believe we are fashionable or croak.

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AND FINALLY

Speaking of teens reminds me that Scottish poet James Thomson's description of the current season -- he reckoned winter sullen, attended with storms, clouds, and vapours -- might equally be applied to those awful years. awful both for us and those around us. While winter currently has many of us in its sullen iron grip, we trust this latest Orphan Scrivener has not given subscribers the vapours, and that the knowledge our next issue will storm into their email inbox on February l5th will not cloud festive celebrations.

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/

THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # FIFTY-THREE -- l5 OCTOBER 2008

H. P. Lovecraft certainly had a memorable way with a word. At one point in The Unnameable he talks about ghastly festering and gibbering hideousness in Massachusetts during the Puritan age in Massachusetts. He was not referring to the Orphan Scrivener, though some subscribers may beg to differ, if only because this particular horror has a name. We've undertaken not to gibber too much and given hideousness is in the eye of the beholder, we'll leave subscribers to judge for themselves as they read on. Just try to ignore the occasional burst of monotonous piping on a demoniac flute....

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MARY'S BIT or SOOT AND CINDERS

I must be one of only a handful of mystery writers who've been aboard a steam train held up by a gang of desperadoes on horseback. I must confess however it was a put-up job during a special Age of Steam excursion. The bad guys strutted the length of the train after swinging aboard, glaring at all and sundry over red kerchiefs hiding their lower faces, much to our delight, only to be arrested by a brave sheriff and locked in the caboose for the return journey to the home station. There the entire gang were incarcerated in a small cell where small fry jeered at them while adults congratulated the law man on his sterling work keeping the railway safe from marauders.

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.

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

We seem to have been popping up here and there around the internet landscape a fair bit of late, and here are our latest landings.

GOLDEN PROSE or SOME MUST READ

Back on August 22nd Mary contributed the l9th installment to the Rap Sheet's ongoing Friday blog highlighting great but forgotten books. She chose Ethel Lina White's Some Must Watch (1933) wherein eight persons lock themselves into a shuttered house for mutual protection as a gale howls around it and a multiple murderer prowls somewhere outside. Then one by one the occupants of the house leave their sanctuary for understandable and indeed inevitable reasons... Interested parties might wish to note Mary's essay at http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2008/08/book-you-have-to-read-some-must-watch.html includes a link to an etext of the novel.

HISTORICAL RESEARCH or A STROLL IN PARADISE

Eric recently wrote an article about researching historicals for Bob Sabella's 'zine Visions of Paradise. Readers can find Issue 132 over at the Visions of Paradise page : http://efanzines.com/VoP/index.htm at eFanzines or download the issue directly (It's 971 kbs): http://efanzines.com/VoP/VoP132.pdf . Eric also revealed a little about how our approach to research and writing is influenced by the fact both of us are former fans of science fiction.

ORAL BEQUESTS or WHERE THERE'S A WILL THERE'S A SAY

Postcard Mysteries is historical-mystery writer Catherine Mambretti's blog on the jury system and courtroom rhetoric. At the beginning of October Mary contributed a few lines http://blog.thejurorinvestigates.com/2008/09/30/guest-blog-historical-mystery-writer-mary-reed.aspx about those most unusual affairs, nuncupative wills, from the Latin meaning roughly name-to-take and usually referred to as oral wills. One such will underpinned the plot of Five For Silver, set during the Justininiac plague of 542, although readers may be surprised as Mary was to learn that, while uncommon, such wills are still legal in some locations under certain conditions.

A CLUTCH OF CHAMBERLAINS or EXPOUNDING ON EXTRAPOLATION

Eric is honoured to report his essay dealing with that perennial vexed question of accuracy in historical mysteries has been reprinted in the October issue of Gayle Trent's Writing Up A Storm Newsletter. In his essay he explains how we extrapolate certain matters for the benefit of our series while keeping them within the bounds of reason. Visit http://www.gayletrent.com and follow the newsletter link at the bottom of the page.

GOLDEN OLDIES or COSY REEDING

Diana Vickery runs the Cozy Library, a website for readers who enjoy that particular child of the mystery family. Some time back Mary contributed an essay entitled In Praise of Golden Age Mysteries, contending many cosy readers would enjoy works written during the Golden Age of Detection, although certain caveats apply for modern readers. This essay has just been distributed in the October issue of the Cozy Library Newsletter, and readers might like to point their clickers at http://www.cozylibrary.com/default.asp?id=613 for Mary's comments and links to a couple of resources for those interested in mysteries written during that era.

STOP PRESS

An interviewlette with Mary was uploaded yesterday to the Suite 101 website at http://research-writing-techniques.suite101.com/article.cfm/writers_rituals_mary_reed Written by Janice Hally exclusively for Suite 101, it's part of her series The Mysterious Writing Habits of the World's Top Crime Writers at http://www.suite101.com/reference/writers__rituals Though short, it reveals such info as what's on our bookcases and when we write, so if that's of interest, feel free to pop over there and take a look.

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ERIC'S BIT or STRINGING LISTENERS ALONG

I don’t listen to music on the radio any more. The short snatches I’ve heard recently seem to consist of homogenized play lists of commercially successful songs (few of which appeal to me) interspersed with D.J.s straining to sound loud, frantic, and aggressive.

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.

---

AND FINALLY

As this newsletter is about to hit the aether the autumn colour is at peak, although now and then flurries of oval yellow leaves scudding past the dark pine background remind us October has been called both the sunset of the year and the month when the earth unrobes. For those who dislike the season, the advancing prospect of bare trees and withered leaves heralding winter's near arrival can be depressing. But the wheel of the year turns inexorably and in two months' time will bring around yet another matter to dampen readers' spirits, to wit, the next issue of Orphan Scrivener will thud into your in-box on December l5th.

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/