Time to Shove 2013 Out the Door

I've heard very few comments from people about their desires to keep 2013 going forever. They seem to be more likely to say it would be wise to move forward.

After looking at a review of huge news stories I can certainly see why. It probably doesn't help that the news media business realizes that strife and conflict sell advertising. We witnessed bombings, floods, fires, typhoons, property and life destruction, continued strife in the Middle East, chemical weapons, and a Congress at home with the lowest ratings in history and no statesmen in sight. Those are only the top seven on my list. Of course, we also saw miracles too: children pulled from the rubble alive, acts of kindness, a royal baby, and a new Pope who seems to resemble the humility of his faith.

And, let me repeat, very few people have told me they

enjoyed this past year and they are ready for 2014.

If I could put in my own two cents' worth, at the risk of sounding like a grumpy senior citizen, I would add that I hope the world becomes a little warmer in 2014. No, I'm not talking about the weather or global warming. When I think about the past year, I remember so many situations where it became obvious to me that both technology and huge corporations are contributing to our lack of humanity and our increase in coldness. Trying to find anyone who will help you with a problem has become almost impossible. No one really seems to care.

Corporations are reaping tremendous profits at human costs. People are laid off because a streamlined company means lots more profit for those at the top. Downsizing leaves remaining employees to pick up the slack in the familiar 24-hour window with no pay increase and a lot less sleep. And if you have a problem with the phone company or the power company or your internet provider or your insurance company, good luck. You are simply one of millions and your problem is not their concern. This is especially true if they have no competition where you live.

Despite the new laws that govern cell phone use while driving, drivers continue to text and have accidents. Restaurants and homes are filled with families sitting around tables using their cell phones rather than having conversations. Go to any public park or

children's play area--like Discovery Depot back home in Illinois--and you will see parents sitting with their cell phones while their children play alone. An opportunity to learn together is once again thwarted. Please, don't get me started on video games and college students.

Oh, yes. Grumpy senior citizen emerges in this post. Time to tuck her away.

Instead, at the end of 2013, I will be grateful for the things over which I have some control that soften the whole first half of this post: children and grandchildren who continue to amaze me in so many ways; friends I have had for over thirty years who have given me gifts beyond imagining; the supportive colleagues with whom I have worked; a small town I love and enjoy returning to after the deep freeze of winter; the warm weather in Arizona that keeps my vitamin D level up;

my last aunt who died recently, joining a whole generation who raised me and is now gone but fondly remembered;

the people who have helped me along the way on this new writing career; the publishing company that said "yes"; and the authors who have inspired and taught me throughout my life.

There. I feel better.

Yes, perspective helps.

Bring on 2014 and may we all help make it a little warmer.

Seeking Mr. Connelly

It's been four years since I set out to see crime writer Michael Connelly at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale. The creator of Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller, Connelly has generally launched his new books from here. Since he's written twenty-six novels, you'd

think I would have caught him sometime. But no. He's always here when I'm not. This year I laid my plans to be here ahead of him, and I succeeded.

Connelly has a new book called The Gods of Guilt. It's a Lincoln Lawyer (Mickey Haller) book and he's just

starting a tour to discuss it and sign copies. He spoke to an audience of several hundred people at the Arizona Biltmore last night (12/2) and was interviewed by Robert Anglen of the Arizona Republic. If you'd like to read an extension of that interview, check out this site: Anglen Interview.

The first Connelly book I read, years ago, was The Poet. I loved it. The story of a serial killer using clues from Edgar Allan Poe's writing, The Poet was a product of Connelly's crime reporting days working for newspapers. After that job in the early 90's, he became a writer full time and has written books primarily about two men: homicide detective Harry Bosch and defense lawyer Mickey Haller.

His new book, The Gods of Guilt, is the fifth Lincoln Lawyer book and it could be described as a character study. Mickey Haller is usually able to bend the law and use it to his advantage, but now, through a set of circumstances, he's dealing with an unhappy look back at his often shady legal career and what it has cost him. An attorney friend of Connelly's referred to a jury on a case he was discussing as "the gods of guilt" and it stuck with the author. But it refers to more than the jury in his new book. According to Connelly, lawyers leave law school with lots of noble ideals about the law, but Haller's stories show how lawyers handle cases and what really happens when they go to court. Not always a pretty picture.

An earlier Haller book, The Lincoln Lawyer, was made into a film starring Matthew McConaughey. Connelly was very complimentary about the job McConaughey did, but said the actor did not really resemble Heller physically, nor did Heller have a soft Southern accent.

Connelly's more heroic character is Harry Bosch who is easy to like because he is a good guy--a light going after and into darkness. I've always loved this character because he isn't perfect; he has his flaws and his darkness, much of it beginning as a tunnel rat in Viet Nam. Bosch is due to retire in 2015, but Connelly says that will not be the end of his stories. Yay!

The author is working on an exciting project with the Bosch series. Like Netflix with its new original programming, Amazon Prime is going to start creating its own original programming that you will be able to

Titus Welliver

see streamed on your computer. The new film, just shot, is being edited and stars Titus Welliver as Bosch. CBS This Morning did a story on this project and you can see it here. The new film is based on City of Bones and is being shot exclusively in Los Angeles. Connelly has total control over the project and he promises that Bosch fans will love this pilot.  He enthusiastically described a scene where the camera pans across the hills of LA and focuses on Boschs' house while the jazz piece, "Lullaby," plays in the background. The film is currently being edited.

One of the more unique stories of the night concerned how Connelly's interest in cops, police stations, and crime began. When he was 16 years old, he was working as a dishwasher in a restaurant. Driving home one night, he stopped at a red light and watched a teenager on the sidewalk take off his shirt and fold an object in it. He placed it in some bushes. Then, wearing his tee shirt, he left, and an intrigued Connelly followed him by car to a biker bar. Once the boy went inside, Connelly doubled back and checked the bushes: the object was a gun. He called his dad from a pay phone and asked him what he should do. His father advised him to call the police and then he met Michael at the location. Connelly spent the night at the police station looking at mug shots and listening and watching.

He was hooked from that night on.

The audience asked several questions about Connelly's writing process. The author said that usually he wrote three or four early books about each man, concentrating on plot, before he was able to delve more deeply into their psyches. It generally

takes him ten months to write a book and it is a long process and a solitary one. He can't write books about LA in Florida, where he lives much of the time. So he has to return to LA when it's time to write.

Connelly had already signed hundreds of copies of his new book before the night began, but he was willing to personalize signatures and so I stood in line for quite some time with lots of others who are Connelly fans. He was very gracious, allowing anyone to take photos while he signed books.

It was a wonderful night, definitely worth the trip to AZ a little early so I could finally meet this author I've so admired. It's good to know he doesn't see me as a stalker.

November 22, Fifty Years Later

National Geographic Channel recently aired the first of several documentaries and movies about November 22, 1963. I'd like to say that date seems like yesterday, but in actuality it seems like long ago. At the time I was seventeen, a junior in high school, on the way to a debate tournament at Bradley University. We heard of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy's death on the car radio.

As I watched those documentaries today, I thought about how ill prepared we were for such a tragedy. And now we have lived through so many more in the

intervening fifty years. I also considered how much life has changed all around us, but those images have stayed frozen in time in our heads and in our hearts. Watching the horrified faces and tears of people outside Parkland Hospital in Dallas brings back the same feeling of grief and dread, even after fifty years.

The black and white footage shows immense changes

in media coverage. Without the technology we have today, information was sparse and often inaccurate. The President was reported to be receiving blood transfusions and his eventual death was actually disclosed by one of the priests who gave him last rites. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was reported to have had either a heart attack or been shot also. Neither report was true. Long after Lee Harvey Oswald (often called "Lee Harold Oswald" by reporters), left the Texas Book Depository, the Secret Service was still looking for him in the building because he was reportedly still there.

Besides so many inaccuracies, the way the 1963 news media operated is also startling from a 21st century perspective. The local Dallas news station shows reporters on camera smoking cigarette after cigarette and interviewing people while holding telephones to their ears--often both ears. No unseen ear phones here. The news anchor actually explained that they would have an update on Texas Governor Connolly's condition the following morning since the news went off the air at night. [Why, oh why, did they have to invent the 24-hour news cycle?]

The news footage told me things I didn't know. I thought that people leaving massive flowers in someone's memory was a phenomenon of more recent times like Princess Di's funeral. But many people left memorials for Kennedy outside Parkland Hospital and at the location where he was shot.

I also learned that a casket was brought to the hospital to transport the body, and the funeral home's employee reported that the First Lady took off her wedding ring and put it on the President's finger before they closed the casket. During these early hours no one knew where Lyndon Johnson was. He had been whisked away to "an unknown location" to keep him safe and he would soon be sworn in. It was ironic to hear Mrs. Rose Kennedy talking on the phone to LBJ on Air Force One and telling him how much she knew he loved her son. In the intervening years the truth of the Kennedys/Johnson relationship would say otherwise.

Finally, I didn't realize that Lee Harvey Oswald's funeral was held in secrecy in Fort Worth with only the family attending. News men acted as pall bearers since there was no one else. It was not open to the public.

Even now, after fifty years, the images persist. It was mayhem when Kennedy was shot and his car left the motorcade and rushed him to the hospital. We have watched the home video of that scene over and over. Also seen and remembered is the footage of people waiting outside Parkland Hospital for word of the President's condition, tears streaming down their

shocked faces.

Even the Secret Service men were in tears, as was the judge, Sarah Hughes, while she performed the oath of office to LBJ on Air Force One. I saw the shooting of Oswald by Jack Ruby live since the television station covered it as he was transported to Dallas County Jail. I remember my total disbelief as I rose from a chair in our family room.

That same day we learned a new vocabulary of state funerals: the rider-less, black-draped horse with the

boots on backwards; the casket lying in state in the Capitol rotunda; the mournful notes of the funeral dirge; Mrs. Kennedy in black with her young children, and,of course, John's salute; and the internment at Arlington Cemetery near the Eternal Flame. So many of the participants that day are now gone too.

I'm not sure my children or grandchildren will ever understand the shared grief of my generation over what we lost that day. Oh, I know we're baby boomers and prone to re-examining and whining over the memories of our lost youth. But on November 22, we shared the total disbelief that this could happen in our country to a young, vibrant, and handsome president, leaving behind a grieving widow and two small children. We shared the loss of innocence from those three shots fired that day. We shared the loss of what might have been.

And we will always share the images of that dark procession down Pennsylvania Avenue when the world and its leaders came to Washington, D.C., and shared our loss too. 

A Review of Thomas H. Cook's "Sandrine's Case"

Seldom has a book moved me to tears, but Sandrine's Case did because of the beauty of its prose and its exquisite ending. Do NOT read the ending first!

Professor Sam Madison is on trial for the murder of his wife, Sandrine, who was found dead, naked, in their bed in a posed position. But did he murder his 46-year-old wife, who was also a professor at Coburn College in their small Southern town, or did she commit suicide?

While this book might be called a mystery, it is

actually more of a character study of Sam Madison. It is also the story of a marriage, an institution best understood by the participants and largely judged or misjudged by those on the ouside observing the marriage. This is especially true in the small town of Coburn. At one point his daughter, Alexandria, tries to define marriage. She says, "Maybe that's why married people try so hard to make things work. It's not that they love each other every day, right? It's that they love each other enough to stay through the days they don't." The Madison's marriage and their history are tightly wound around the outcome of Sam's trial.

Through Sam's thoughts and seamlessly perfect prose journeys back and forth in time, we learn the story of Sam and Sandrine's marriage and their history together. Hardly dead in the true sense of that word,

Sandrine is a living presence in Sam's mind and in the story. She was lovely, vivacious, brilliant, utterly dedicated to her students, and kind.  So what had attracted her to Sam Madison, who is so cold that she calls him a sociopath shortly before her death? What are we to think when he begins to suspect that his dead wife has actually put into motion a plan that will frame him and lead to his own execution and his loss of their daughter's love?

Each chapter of the novel is another day in the short murder trial of Sam Madison, a trial seen through his eyes. Despite Cook's flawless prose, Madison is hardly a narrator we can like. Cold and cynical, he has always thought of himself as far superior to other Coburn inhabitants. As each neighbor, lover, or co-worker testifies, we actually hear his/her testimony from Sam's point of view. Sam's dark thoughts seem to lend credence to the theory of the police detective sworn to pin the murder on him. Cook creates suspense as only he can, and the reader is turning pages quickly to find out whether Sam will be found guilty.

As the trial plays out, the reader goes back and forth.

Did he do it? Did she do it? Who is guilty and who is innocent? How do their past and their marriage play such a significant role in the final outcome of the trial? In the end this beautiful novel is a story of redemption. I loved Thomas H. Cook's The Chatham School Affair, but his lyrical prose, his flawless movement back and forth in time, his utterly surprising ending, and his masterful use of suspense put Sandrine's Case at the top of my list.

Upstairs at the McCullough House

After my sojourn across the pond, it's back to the

McCullough House, a Victorian home that will be an 1893 setting in my second mystery. We've explored the public rooms downstairs. Now it's time to take the broad staircase to the second and third floors.

The wealthy of the late 1800s generally had sparsely furnished bedrooms. These were private areas of the house so ostentation wasn't necessary. Usually the bedrooms on the second floor contained an easy chair, table, washstand with pitcher, bureau, and chamber pots.

The beds were made of brass, iron, or woods such as

mahogany, oak, cherry, or ash.  I imagine the McCulloughs had high-posted beds because the ceilings were high and the floors cold. They probably had feather beds since the wealthy could afford such luxury. The walls in the rooms were painted or wallpapered in a hardly memorable pattern. They may have had three or four bedrooms on the second floor, but the master bedroom was in the front with windows looking out over the street. At some point the owners also added a bathroom in the 1800's sense of the word.

A bathroom was separate from a water closet. Let's consider first the lowly water closet. Through most of the 1800s, the privy was outdoors and was called an outhouse, a house of office, or a necessary house. In fact, there was much resistance to bringing this whole unsanitary business inside the house. Not until WWI did "bathrooms" become tubs, sinks, and toilets. In 1910, Sears, Roebuck sold the three together as a "suite" with standard parts put out by, appropriately, the American Standard company. So perhaps the McCullough house began with an outside privy that was later moved into a small closet on the second floor.

Also on the second floor was the bathroom. This was strictly for bathing and when we lived there in the late 1960s, the second floor did have a large bathroom that accommodated a claw-foot tub. But in the late 1800s, this tub was made of wood, zinc, or painted tin. Often a bathroom had a fireplace and might have started as a small bedchamber. The Victorians avoided wallpaper or wood paneling in their bathrooms because of roaches. Instead, they used glazed ceramic tile in white, gray, or buff colors. The more expensive--I'd like to think the McCulloughs fit this category--used pearl, gold, or rose hues in their tiles. Can you imagine, as a domestic, making multiple trips carrying water up the back stairway from the kitchen to fill this tub and keep it warm so the owners could bathe? You would probably have been thankful people didn't bathe as often in the 1800s.

Probably a bit larger than the McCullough House,
 but you get the picture!

The second floor is not as interesting as the top floor of the house--the ballroom. It's possible the third floor also had a couple of small, lackluster rooms for servants' quarters too. But the top floor was a ballroom with windows overlooking the main street, Broadway. Refreshments would have been available in the ballroom and possibly they had a midnight supper on the first floor followed the dancing.

All young ladies were given a dance program and

gentlemen wrote their names in for specific dances. Never would an unmarried woman dance more than twice with the same man. Until the late 1880s, husbands and wives never danced together in public (disregard what you see from Hollywood.) The favored dances were the waltz, polka, quadrille, gallop, cotillion, and Virginia Reel. But young ladies were warned against overexertion in Godey's Lady's Book. This was probably prudent since they were in corsets that cut off their lung capacities. 

The finest evening wear would have been essential for the McCullough's dance invitations. 



Gloves and fans were required. The fans were made of silk, tortoise shell, lace, or ivory, and often had beads, hand-painted designs, or feathers. A lady suspended her fan on a chain from her waist while dancing. She also learned the "language of fans" so she could flirt with young men.

It would be easy to imagine the evening promenade of

men and women in fancy dress walking up the main staircase of the McCullough house to spend a pleasant evening dancing in the ballroom and drinking punch. Tightly enforced social codes required the unmarried to move through their regulated lives under the watchful eyes of the married adults. (Egads, another reason marriage was the ding dong bell of doom.) And, when the dance ended, the ladies would obtain their evening wraps, be escorted down the staircase once again, and climb into their conveyances to go home through the quiet streets of Monmouth.