Give Me More Old-Time Fiction

“Noirish” mysteries, crime and horror stories may not be entirely an American genre, but you can’t read them without considering roots that go back to Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, H.P. Lovecraft and the early days of short stories. Happily, this kind of fiction is being published today.

Pulp writing brings back memories to people — mostly men — of a certain age. My recollection is of reading Argosy magazine in the barbershop or surreptitiously under the bed covers. Happily, the magazine founded in 1882 and ending with the last issue in 1978 is back. I was thrilled to discover the publication has been reborn as a digital all-fiction magazine in the U.K. at http://argosymagazine.co.uk/. And, that its Pulp Modern volume 2 is devoted to the stuff of mystery, fear, thrills and horror.

There are four top-notch stories in this issue.

“The Beat of Heavy Wings” by Kurt Newton skirts horror and moves tangentially past myth to tell the current-day story of ancient Thunderbirds. They’re baaack in New England and scarier than ever. Worse, they’ve captured a young boy who was innocently camping out to collect moths. Thirty years later, the boy’s younger brother returns home to resolve the loss and to make amends with his parents. Seeking closure to the disappearance of his brother, Drew repeats their night-time moth-hunting expedition. Wrong! He too is taken by a Thunderbird and, in the process, makes an amazing discovery. On surface, the story simply recounts a tale, but the sub-text is a magnificent job of digging deeply into a person’s guilt and redemption.

James McConnell’s “Your Basic Plot” trades on the bottomless pit of paranoia when a man wakes up in a strange Texas location, doesn’t remember his name, and finds his wallet and belongings have been lifted. It’s the loss of a man’s basic identity. An existential question is raised when a skinny man at the homeless shelter says he can’t eat because of “Discipline. Cain’t live without discipline. Man is a prisoner of his animal appetites.” The crime appears when the wealthy do-gooder Suki Vanderwaal-McCarthy hires the man with no name to murder her husband. Conscience rises from somewhere, and the narrator immediately tells his new friend on the local police force about the plot. He carries a wire, he negotiates with the socialite as to whether he’ll do the murder if he can get laid. But, he confesses to her anger, “I can’t do it.” The tension is “Your Basic Plot” is that the reader learns to care passionately about a “bum” trying to determine his identity before the story segues into the crime plot.

“Illegal Aliens” draws out the trope of Area 51, the Nevada desert, and alien landings. Lloyd Helm takes a novel tack by clearly drawing his main characters — characters who could have jumped straight out of an Elmore Leonard novel. They set out ostensibly to take location pictures for a zombie-alien film (their cover for getting on the restricted base), immediately run into Air Force personnel, and choose to grab a few cold brews at the Spaceship Bar and Grill. Their next conscious thought is of being collared by Air Force police, having no memory of the past evening, and experiencing a certain pain in their backsides. This is a jolly romp, but the narrator begins puzzling out inconsistencies in the military’s explanations. Promising to never mention the incident, they are released — and set off to find that Spaceship Bar and Grill.

“Hidden” by Peter Glassborow begins calmly enough with an Auckland, New Zealand, trucking firm’s security guard trying to find where a driver has been hiding his truck in order to goof off. Cameras, gate checks and radio messaging fail to uncover the hiding place, which is driving George crazy. George is a simple person trying to make sure his employer isn’t cheated, but the driver’s daily disappearances are plaguing him day and night. Carefully, the cheating driver’s routes are reconstructed, leading George to a junk-filled area between two buildings. Tire tracks lead in and then disappear. And, dear reader, you don’t want to know what George eventually finds in the location of the driver’s hiding place.

Some of the novelettes’ success lies in the stories being told in the first person. (“Hidden” is written in the usual third-person singular.) You, the reader, are in the narrator’s mind as he experiences the weird, the unfathomable, the terrifying, and the humorous. This works flawlessly, too, in Glassborow’s story.

It’s not possible for Argosy’s genre fiction like this to succeed without such uniquely drawn characters. Fortunately, the four novelettes will leave you remembering the heroic protagonists long after you’ve turned off your e-book, laptop or PC. In addition, there’s plausibility (could this happen to you?) and sharp dialogue (you’ll wish you’d said, “You’re not a killer… And even if you are, I’m not… Find a killer lawyer, a whole shark school, and be as vicious as you want. But leave me out of it.”). Pulp fiction draws on the darker side of life, but it’s no less realistic. When it’s written well — as these four stories are — they rise to the level of literature.

Who Is That Masked Writer?

J.K. Rowling caused a ruckus when Harry Potter’s creator published The Cuckoo’s Calling under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith. For being “outed” by her own solicitors, she successfully sued. Not every writer is so secretive about his or her pen name. Everyone knew Mark Twain was really that guy in the white suit, Samuel Clemens. Lewis Carroll was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s essence. And, Ann Landers and Dear Abby aren’t one person, but many after 50 years.

Still, there may come a time when you need to consider an alias to hide your real persona. The excellent editor of my story collections, Cruising the Green of Second Avenue, at Wild Child Publishing has adopted several to publish. One for writing to men’s magazines, another when her ex was suing for divorce, and a third for her titillating romances. “Each pen name has its own personality,” she states. She was the one who advised me to take a pen name if it solves a problem and to hell with the critics.

Another friend uses two initials preceding her surname because of rude comments from friends over the several books she’s published. Fans of J.B. DiNizo won’t be too surprised to learn the woman behind the name is Alice DiNizo. Others may find a lot of explaining is needed when their book is read by their mother. Taking on a pen name can raise as many issues as it resolves.

Should you adopt a pen name? You’re surely aware that some fiction sells better if written by a woman — romance, for example. Or by a man, if the subject is dark and violent. Business books generally seem to sell better if written from a male POV. The gender issue relating to who gets published and reviewed is a contentious concern, as noted by The Guardian this summer; males writers far overshadow females in the U.K.

The subject matter may strongly dictate a pseudonym, such as erotic romance. If you’re a published writer of serious material, attaching your name to such “bodice-rippers” can cause negative spillover, reduce your literary stature, challenge reputation, and decrease enjoyment of the reading experience.

There’s another significant reason to use a pen name if the writer is of the opposite gender to his/her main character. Readers can easily be confused when starting a piece of fiction, becoming misled by the author’s byline, and discover the narrator is of the opposite sex. A sense of trust — even Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief — is broken. The reader becomes distracted by the conflict of an author taking on the persona of the opposite sex, detracting from the quality of whatever he/she has written.

A host of other questions need to be addressed — and you’ll probably wrestle with them — before you step into another name. Is using a pen name liberating? (Only you can answer that.) Should you let people know you’re using a pen name? (If you do, why bother with a pen name?) What if people are upset that you’re using a pen name? (Some people will always be upset.) Does using a pen name mean you have multiple-personality disorder? (No, far from it.) Does using a pen name constitute a breach of trust? (Look at your value system and decide if you’re setting expectations that might be violated.) Is it hard to do business using a pen name? (No, unless you feel conflicted as a man trying to sell your book as “Gloria L’Amour” at a library reading.) Is using a pen name legal? (I’m not a lawyer, but most publishers insist on knowing your real name in accepting a work.)

Finally, you can put the whole matter to rest. Don’t use a pen name if you’re not comfortable doing so. And, if you’re going to tell the world your secret identity, why bother?

In the interest of full disclosure, let me add that I’ve published flash under a pen name. Why? My narrator is of the opposite gender, it’s stylistically experimental work, and it doesn’t fit into the body of writing I’m concentrating on. Sorry, I can’t tell you the byline I use.

For further discussion, go to the Men with Pens blog by James Chartrand at http://menwithpens.ca/pen-name-pseudonym/#comment-77581 and an article by Howard G. Zaharoff in Writer’s Digest http://www.mbbp.com/resources/iptech/pseudonyms.html.at

[This essay was published on Jan. 28, 2014, by
Flash Fiction Chronicles at http://www.everydayfiction.com/flashfictionblog/who-is-that-masked-writer/]

Belated Greetings--and Bedtime Reading

Sorry to have been away for so long, but Google wouldn't let me into my blog. Ah, you know the usual excuses. Actually, I’ve been writing. It was a very good year, with some 17 short fiction and non-fiction pieces published in print and online. Let me share those online pieces that are most satisfying as I look back on 2013:

“Waiting to Join the Grey Lady,” is a ghost story published by Short-Story.Me (at ). I was intrigued by the thought that people become captivated by books because they’re preferable to people. This clicked as a story when I learned of the ghost who haunts the town library in a small Ohio town. And, because one of my favorite used bookstores is on Cambridge’s Huron Avenue, the three elements melded together.

Often, reading about a weird psychological or neurological condition will serve as a prompt. Reading Dr. Israel Sacks led to discovering hypnopompic hallucinations, the visions a patient has when wide awake. This was the prompt I needed for “Scouting Alternatives,” published by Bewildering Stories on (at http://bewilderingstories.com/issue553/scouting_alternatives.html). Imagine being followed — or in this case, preceded—by your hallucinated other.

“Rosamonde Calley” was similar in that an editor is on the trail of a pseudonymous best-selling auth. But, the author exists only by being channeled through a failed book collector. This story of frustration was published by The Corner Club Press in its Paranormal Issue (at http://thecornerclubpress.weebly.com/uploads/6/0/5/3/6053731/thecornerclubpress_paranormalissue_updated2.pdf - p. 11).

Perhaps one of last year’s favorites is “The Psychic in the WalMart Parking Lot” simply because I’m extremely rankled by the nefarious spying done by the CIA and NSA. At the same time, a psychic was in the news for losing a lawsuit in which she bilked customers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, what if a psychic were legit in her demonstrated abilities? What would the government do to stop her or him? Guess. (Times up!) The story was published by InfectiveINk (at http://infectiveink.com/?tag=walter-giersbach).

Remember the college football player who was played by a girlfriend who existed only in the social media? The schlunk is known as a “catfish” It’s a shame when you can’t believe what you see on the Internet and social media. It’s even worse when your unseen lover bamboozles you into committing a heinous crime. “You Ain’t the Only Catfish” was published by Every Day Fiction (at http://www.everydayfiction.com/you-aint-the-only-catfish-by-walt-giersbach/ ).

Do we ever truly leave our childhood behind? “Brace Beemer, Please Come Home” is a non-fiction look back at the glory days of radio shows. Mr. Beemer, of course, was the first actor to take the role of the Lone Ranger when radio was in its heyday. The memoirish recollection was published by The Connotation Press (at http://www.connotationpress.com/creative-nonfiction/1929-walt-giersbach2-creative-nonfiction).

Sure, crime stories are a grabber for reader and writer alike. Now, imagine The New York Times writing about the Army’s working on the lightning bug gene for warfare. And imagine your girlfriend was making a few bucks by testing this development — until her body parts started showing up around New York City. “Light up My Life” was published by Short-Story.Me (at http://www.short-story.me/mystery-stories/549-light-up-my-life.html).

I’ve always been fascinated by the Civil War and to a certain extent Southern Gothic culture. This was an entertaining story to write in order to get the atmosphere right, with a dollop of murder thrown in for good measure. “Grammie’s Waiting” was published by Liquid Imagination and narrated by Bob Eccles, at http://issue.liquid-imagination.com/article/grammies-waiting-by-walter-giersbach/

Love those stories that do a U-turn near the end, and then another 180° turn in the last paragraph. Mostly, however, I knew I had to do something about viaticals — those brokered insurance policies that let you collect the payout before you’re dead. “Life Settlement, Finally” was published by Over My Dead Body! (at http://www.overmydeadbody.com/wgbach3.htm).

Bitchy women and dysfunctional families are so entertaining, as long as you don’t have to live with them. Would anything piss off Mother Dearest more than to have her 16-year-old daughter announce she was going to marry an older man from Morocco? And the conversation at the three-star Manhattan restaurant just got louder and louder until…. “Lunchtime Interlude” was published by Short-Story.Me (at http://www.short-story.me/flash-fiction/534-lunchtime-interlude.html).

There was another trip back in time, to my childhood when a Hollywood star introduced an 11-year-old to love. “Marilyn Monroe Loved Me” was published by Writers Haven in its 9th issue (at http://original-writer.com/writershavenissue9page4walter.html).

Hope you can enjoy these short pieces. Send me an e-mail if you have a comment, at w.giersbach@att.net or on Facebook.

German? A Funny Language? Make me laugh.

Last Sunday’s New York Times Review reminded me of my fascination with the German ability to form long compound words that are impossible to express in English.

Is there any synonym for Schadenfreude, the joy we feel at seeing someone else’s pain? Or Zeitgeist and Doppelgänger?

The Times suggests Dornschőenschlaf (dorn-hoos-sh’yen-shlaf) meaning to pretend you’re asleep to avoid having sex. Fetenlauschangriff, for tuning in and out of numerous conversations at a cocktail party. And Tantalusqualerlősung, for the relief that comes from slaking your thirst with the first martini (or drink of your choice).

I confess that I run across these neologisms and then try to find a way to sneak them into a story. Bildschirmbräune refers to screen suntan, for the pasty faces of computer geeks. That appeared in “Who Dares Call It Murder.” (Odd how I remember our bathing nude on the beaches of St. Martin, when Schiller laughed and pointed. “Bildschirmbräune,” he said. “Screen suntan,” referring to the hours you spent on computers, because your unblemished skin remained pale while I — more advanced — colored like a potted lobster.)

And in my as-yet-unpublished novel, Gerde the dental hygienist is made to say to her lover, “We have a word — Vergangenheitsbewaltigun. It means ‘coming to terms with your past.’ Have you come to terms?”

Now, if I can only find a way to shoehorn Verfremdungseffekt . A wonderful word meaning distancing oneself from a suspended disbelief.

If We’re All Heroes, Then Who’s Left?

Every dead soldier is a hero, according to news reporters. A helicopter crashes, a truck blows up, school bus careens over a cliff. “Heroic” and "tragic" are adjectives that have lost their meanings against the press of a deadline.

More disgraceful are the Army’s PR stunts, dressing up a Dad being rotated (alive) from Afghanistan to show up at his child’s (a) ballgame as the catcher (b) school play as a clown or (c) party as Santa Claus. The mask is ripped off, the child screams “Daddy” and rushes tearfully toward the hero parent.

These tricks have simultaneously reduced the meaning of heroism — acting willfully in disregard to personal danger—and masked the horror and tedium of military action. It's a tragedy.

My skin crawls at the manipulation these Army public relations practitioners resort to. It’s almost as bad as the Lassie movies I saw as a child. Invariably, the child says something like, “Lassie, I’ve fallen down the well and the water’s rising. Run and tell Dad to bring a rope.” These are two handkerchief moments.

Similarly, the news media — predictably — sees every drunken teenager who drives into a tree at 3:00 a.m. as a “tragedy. Isn’t it just possible that the youngster acted stupidly, as many young people do with great regularity? (I prefer to believe they should be given Darwin Awards for removing their DNA from the collective gene pool, thereby strengthening our future generations.) Sentimentality in the face of stupidity is lazy thinking.

In response to affected writing, cynicism grows like e. Coli on poultry left on a porch in Texas. It’s not easy to restate a situation to avoid triteness, to break through the platitudes of supermarket tabloid writing and reject the mundane, banal and trite responses to the world around us. The cynicism rises in our gorge because we all have a hardwired response to tragedy, nostalgia and sentimentality. That’s how scriptwriters made Lassie a star. They put the dog through tricks to pull our heartstrings, and the audience responded like puppets.

Stop the next time you see or hear bad writing — or change channels or put down the magazine or paper. Insist on inventing unexpected and serendipitous results as you go along. Take an independent direction, Robert Frost’s “road less taken.” It’s a chaotic and muddled process. A rocky road. But it leads to clearer thinking.

Passport to the Past

Historical novels are an enchanting genre that leads readers into the dark corridors of the past. We walk unseen next to characters — some we’ve heard of and some fictional — who are explorers and adventurers, romantic lovers and nefarious brigands. Politicians are exposed, the self-righteous are quashed, and the meek inherit the earth before everyone goes home for the day.

As much as I enjoy sitting down with a new historical novel (or an old one by William Safire or Gore Vidal), I find one hand on the book and my other hand crossing fingers in skepticism. This doubt, which has led to cynicism, began with Killing Lincoln, written by Fox TV anchor and conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly and wordsmith Martin Dugard. (O’Reilly and Dugard published the formulaic Killing Kennedy soon afterwards. They’ve now given the “portable history treatment” to Jesus.)

They unroll the drama leading up to John Wilkes Booth’s infamous act while unveiling a band of amateur conspirators. In fact, history classes tend to skip over the widespread rabid hatred of Lincoln and the motley group that conspired to murder the President. Perhaps it’s good to be reminded of such things.

But how true is their fictionalized treatment? A seven-page index offers no sources, nor does the prologue, but the authors fill the work with interior thoughts and imaginary conversations the way an éclair is puffed up with cream filling: light and airy, but not nutritionally good.

This is a non-fiction adventure set against a historical backdrop. Dare we imagine the gaunt President walking alone through the cheering throngs, heedless to the warnings that he might be assassinated? Do we gasp seeing General Grant show up at the Appomattox peace table with muddy boots to remind the impeccably dressed General Lee how Grant was upbraided for sloppiness during the Mexican War? Do we titter to hear the conversation between Lincoln and his wife in the closed carriage en route to Ford’s Theatre?

Readers should gasp at having paid for populist literary drama, in which the past and the present exist contemporaneous with each other. It’s branded as “history” that really isn’t history, drawing-room drama that could be played out today in a soap opera or on a cable channel.

Theirs is less a “bad” book than thin gruel after wading through work by Drew Gilpin Faust and Bruce Catton. We’ve embraced the narrative tricks of snappy writing, short sections and quick cutting worthy of “breaking news” on CNN. What the readers have lost is a certain Truth.

Artist and writer Douglas Coupland calls this new literary genre Translit: “Translit novels cross history without being historical; they span geography without changing psychic place.” The contemporary reader is tossed into the past without having to leave the present. It’s almost as if, Coupland says, one “can travel back to Victorian England — only with vaccinations, a wad of cash and a clean set of ruling-class garb.”

William Safire tackled an extremely difficult subject in Scandalmonger, an account of charges against Alexander Hamilton brought by Thomas Jefferson published in 2000. Safire was kind enough to write in the foreword, “The reader of historical fiction wonders: ‘What’s true and what’s not?’ As docudramas blur the line between fact and fiction, the reader is entitled to know what is history and what is twister.” Much appreciated, Mr. Safire. All your characters were real people, the dialogue was based on contemporary letters, diaries, news accounts, and court transcripts. And thank you for an extensive bibliography and indexed epilogue.

Andrew Miller’s Pure ventures into pre-revolutionary France. The book has been hailed for its narrative style and freedom from pastiche. But still, there was the question by The New York Times Book Reviewer that “Some stories are too wonderful — too filled with wonders — to be set in the present. They can’t really be called historical fiction because they don’t serve history so much as plunder it to invent what might have been.”

Readers should plead with writers to tell as much of the “truth” as they can. James Wood wrote in The New Yorker (May 21, 2012), reviewing HHhH by Laurent Binet, that “invented facts — invented characters, for that matter — have no place in historical fiction, and weaken it both aesthetically and morally.” Binet himself writes, “Inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence.” This, Wood stated, would abolish most historical fiction. Yet, Binet has managed to write a historical novel not quite full of invented details that certainly uses invention. His fidelity to the historical record, and obsessive urge to analyze those moments where guesswork and invention replace fact, makes HHhH as much about the technical and moral processes of writing a historical novel as it is a historical novel.

At the end, this is what concerns me. There is a speculative fiction genre called “alternative history.” This, I suspect, is what we are often given in lieu of the real thing.

Reviewers: “Don’t Turn Your Back on Me!”

One negative review does not go unpunished. Back in January of this year I downloaded a copy of Rejection: A Lou Drake Mystery written by Thomas Matthews. The several reviews posted at Amazon uniformly gave it five stars. I was frankly underwhelmed, gave it one star, failed to understand why all the other reviews were five starred, and went on with my life. Take a look, at http://www.amazon.com/Rejection-Publishing-Mystery-Mysteries-ebook/product-reviews/B008J6SWZ2/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_summary?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=byRankDescending


Soon, an e-mail popped up from someone named Stacy Matthews. “As an editor I would beg to differ and so many New Yorkers have come forward and said there was nothing wrong with the way the setting was staged. The structure was classic contemporary fiction. Take at look at Patterson, Kellerman, Reich and other thriller and suspense writers. [non sequitur, Stacy.] Beside two small typos this book was well crafted, well characterized and devoid of the clichés you claim. One question... you seemed well versed on the content. If you hated it so much why finished reading it? There must have something here that held your interest.”

My negative review had resulted in a literary “fatwa” Argumentum ad hominem. Was this a dutiful wife, daughter or sister pumping the book?

A second irritated reviewer said of my critique, “Wow, I don't agree with a single thing you wrote. I got this as a freebie, wasn't expecting much, and ended up thoroughly enjoying the book.

A third irked reader chimed in, “So by your argument we should also avoid any of the Scott Turow books set in the fictitious Kindle County? Please...”

I replied, thoughtlessly thinking this was a literary discussion, “My concerns were for a lack of accuracy and sloppy writing and editing." By then, Thomas Matthews personally sent me an e-mail apologizing for the errors and typographical oversights. But his wife (sister, daughter?) came back with “Wouldn't listen to this guy. The book is great.” and a few days later, “Christopher Reich, Lee Childs, Marry [sp] Higgins Clark and Lisa Genova all may disagree with you. 5 stars across the board. Can all these best selling authors be so stupid they wouldn't know good writing if they saw it? Just saying, you know?” My criticism, I think, was giving her sleepless nights.

Then, as though Jesus Himself came back to crit the Bible, Jerry Shapiro wrote, “You sound like someone expecting to read your morning newspaper. This was a novel. A fictional story. This wasn't an English exam. I doubt you'd have praise for a hack writer like Mark Twain. No, I'm guessing you're a pompous wannabe. Get a life. BTW... I AM the Jerry Shapiro in the novel!”

What have I learned? (a) the Amazon star system is manipulated by friends and family. (b) If you post a review for a very poor book, as I once did for Jerzy Kosinski’s Cockpit, the lap dogs will yip and yap at your heels for months! And (c) Any form of literary discussion and criticism of small-time authors is being held hostage to the rush for sales, ranking and fame.