67000 words, so a bit longer than my usual. Usually, I’m pretty happy to wrap things up with whatever set of characters I’m working with, but for some reason, I feel like I’m going to miss Chloe and Maxim. Maybe it’s just because the dual first person POV put me in their heads in a more intense way than any of my other characters. The fact that I managed about 20000 words on other writing projects in the eleven months or so it took me to write this one can probably be attributed to the new workflow. Current publication target is “before the end of the year,” but I have relatives who are gearing up to move and who may need my help, so publication is kind of a moving target. I’ll keep you all posted. In the meantime, not one but two triumphalistic Bollywood songs are in order:
Friday Fragments
I just finished reworking a core setpiece late in Hunter Healer King 3 and am now writing the bridge from that into another pre-written scene. This part below (slightly censored for spoilers) was part of the prewritten scene, but no longer fit in for continuity reasons.
Continue reading “Friday Fragments”The Golden Age of Adaptations
(Note: This is adapted from a comment I made elsewhere.)
A good adaptation from book to movie or tv, honors what is worthwhile about the source material, and changes the things that need to be changed for coherence in the new medium or for the audience’s comprehension. It follows therefore that you can’t make a good adaptation of a work that you believe has no merit. For instance, I would be the wrong person to adapt Frankenstein by Mary Shelley,
Continue reading “The Golden Age of Adaptations”Andrew Davies Strikes Back (Maybe)
I wrote 3500 words on Hunter Healer King 3 last week along with 500 words on the space regency. Yesterday and today I wrote the opening chapter (~2500 words) of a mystery that’s been in the planning stages for several years. Where was I going to find the mental energy to do a bit of Austen blogging for Wednesday? And there goes Andrew Davies shooting his mouth off in the presence of people with microphones, aaaaand we’re off to the races.
Continue reading “Andrew Davies Strikes Back (Maybe)”Music by Suno Tuesday
If you know, you know. Lyrics adapted from the Chesterton poem.
Music by Suno Monday
So one time I put the style prompt in the lyrics area for Suno, and got one of the most fun songs it’s ever generated for me: https://suno.com/s/R77XahFygGLviyWC
Old School Mysteries: Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning
This husband-wife team were reporters in New Orleans, Louisiana until they wrote The Invisible Host, about a mysterious person who summons eight people to an Art Deco penthouse apartment, prevents them from leaving and tells them via radio message that they will be killed off one by one. This was published in 1930, nine years before Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, and although it’s not a perfect match by any means, there’s enough plot elements in common to make people wonder if Christie could have known about it. The Invisible Host did not get published in England at the time, and there’s no evidence for Christie seeing either the play version or the 1934 movie adaptation (entitled The Ninth Guest). That being said, I think people underestimate how much an author can pick up by osmosis, especially if they have friends who write or review in the same genre. Perhaps some more cinema-inclined member of the Detection Club had seen Ninth Guest, and made snarky comments about it, and Christie had thought, like any hardcore Star Wars fan sitting down to Episodes I, II, III, VII, VIII, or IX: “That’s an interesting notion but not what I would have done with it!”
The Invisible Host is not a masterpiece of suspense and psychology, like And Then There Were None, but in some ways it’s a more likable book: pretty good fun in its pulpy way,
Continue reading “Old School Mysteries: Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning”PSA to Sherlockians
Ladies and Gentlemen, going forward in my travels on the internet, I am going to take any complaint that Peter Cushing was “too slight” or “too fragile” “or “weedy-looking” or otherwise some version of “too thin” to play Sherlock friggin’ cocaine addict Holmes, as a concession that he absolutely crushes your preferred interpreter of Sherlock Holmes in every other way. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
The Mysteries of Msgr. Knox
Knox came from a prominent line of Anglican clergy, and would probably have risen all the way to bishop or archbishop in that religion if he hadn’t converted to Catholicism, but he was named protonotary apostolic by Pope Pius XII, an honorary rank which allowed Knox to use the title “Monsignor/Msgr.” Knox was a biblical and classical scholar, a friend of G. K. Chesterton’s, and a member of the Detection Club alongside Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Baroness Orczy, et al. He presented “Broadcast at the Barricades,” a satire from BBC Radio depicting a Bolshevik revolution in London, which caused widespread panic when people mistook it for the real thing, and inspired Orson Welles’s famous “War of the Worlds” broadcast. Knox also originated the “Sherlockian game” of writing mock-erudite essays that treat Holmes, Watson, etc as historical rather than fictional figures.
His “Ten Commandments of Crime,” which laid out the rules of Golden Age “fair play” mysteries, are widely quoted. In the days before ebooks, I found it impossible to find any fiction he’d written by himself, as opposed to The Floating Admiral and the other tedious “chain-written” collaborations that the Detection Club put out in its heyday. Recently, I had the chance to snag his entire Miles Bredon series as a $0.99 ebook, and the standalone mystery the Viaduct Murder for I think the same amount.
The short verdict is that as a mystery writer, Knox was strictly a “puzzle” man.
Continue reading “The Mysteries of Msgr. Knox”At Bertram’s Hotel: Review plus More AI Fanficcing
(Note: this post contains spoilers for a late-period Agatha Christie novel. I only discuss whodunnit below the cut, but above the cut I do discuss some other story elements and the mechanics of how Christie resolves, or rather fails to resolve, a major storyline. You have been warned.)
I recently read the late-period Agatha Christie novel At Bertram’s Hotel for the first time, and I was probably in the best possible frame of mind for it. I’d read up on Brown’s Hotel (reputed to be a favorite of Christie’s, although supposedly NOT the hotel Bertram’s is based on) a while back, so I knew a little bit about this style of aggressively English, aggressively Edwardian midcentury hotel. More recently, I’d read up on the Great Train Robbery of 1963, a pretty obvious inspiration for one of the book’s events. Terence Stamp had just passed away, and the obits informed me that he would have been playing the lead in Alfie onstage around the time Bertram’s Hotel had been written. That in turn gave me some idea of what Christie might have had in mind when she described race-car driver Ladislaus Malinowski and his “cruel, handsome, hawklike face.”
(Normally when I see those last four words together, I’m imagining Basil Rathbone or one of a couple of similar actors, who were not at all suitable for leather jackets, hot rods, and Malinowski’s other accoutrements. Or, I’m imagining this guy, who was American, and due to the vagaries of his career would not have been on Christie’s radar in 1964-1965. And regardless of who I’m imagining, they’re people somewhere in their forties or late thirties at best; not the kind of young, reckless chick magnet Christie had in mind.)
Anyway, I liked At Bertram’s Hotel reasonably well, although a lot of it felt like it needed a weirder, more surreal touch. Maybe it should not have been written by Agatha Christie, but by Margery Allingham around the time of Tiger in the Smoke. I did not like the ending, because it’s neither “justice done,” nor “justice tragically withheld by the sad facts of life.” Miss Marple debunks the last red herring in the murder subplot and supplies the true solution. Then she and Main Police Guy make a somewhat gormless and unsuccessful attempt to rattle the real murderer, and then Main Police Guy, after being prodded by Miss Marple, resolves that he will catch that confusticated murderer yet! The. End. It was infuriating, partly because I could see which Shady Character, already established in the plot, could be used for leverage against the murderer. Another few thousand words would have wrapped up the story reasonably well.
But, it’s a Miss Marple novel, which means that I didn’t care enough to sit down and write my own ending, so I enlisted Claude.ai’s help. After a few arguments with Claude (who kept trying to give Shady Leverage Character a more active role in the murder and its aftermath than I think the character actually had) I got something I could tweak to my own satisfaction. I made a few deletions, minor rewrites and reshufflings to establish Shady Leverage Character’s true role (or lack thereof) in the proceedings, and I gave Miss Marple a parting speech that wasn’t great but at least tied in with themes and concerns she’d raised earlier in the novel. Even better, Anthropic didn’t throttle my account this time. I’m not going to post the end result here, because what would be the point? It’s not Christie grade. It’s not (for the most part) written by me, and it’s tailored to my ideas of what I think At Bertram’s Hotel needs by way of resolution, which may or may not work for anyone else. I don’t think AI is terribly likely to put actual working writers out of a job, but this is the kind of thing it’s good at: scratching specific fannish itches for weird little things the end-user wants to read, but can’t or won’t write for themselves.
My original prompt, which contains MANY SPOILERS, is after the designated spoiler space, below the cut. If you want to use it to roll your own ending to At Bertram’s Hotel, you may want to adjust the second part of the prompt (after the words “in Agatha Christie’s style”) to reflect your own vision of what happens.
Continue reading “At Bertram’s Hotel: Review plus More AI Fanficcing”
Jaglion Press 