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”First Images From S&S 2026
(Regarding the Austenian series of posts, it’s going to take some time for me to get the Elliots, Musgroves and Hayters straight in my head and write them up. In the meantime, here’s a followup on the latest Sense and Sensibility adaptation).
These are about a week old or a little more, and I was hoping to find some source other than a reddit thread, but I didn’t, so here we are. I’d been a little anxious about costume designer Grace Snell, who didn’t seem to have much in the way of period work, but I like the clothes so far, which look solidly Regency (don’t ask me to match them to a particular year) and have some cool details in terms of embroidery and lace. Wealthy Mrs. Jennings (Fiona Shaw) wears flamboyant green and gold. Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Marianne (Esme Creed-Miles) wear shades of gray/black and purple/lavender, with Elinor being the more somberly dressed of the two. I’ve seen conflicting claims about whether these were in fact “half-mourning” colors as far back as the Regency, or whether they were more of a Victorian thing, but it’s a useful visual shorthand for “our dad has been dead between six and nine months,” and it looks good on them.
A couple pictures include Ceara Coveney (Elayne in Wheel of Time, one of the brighter points of Season Two and Three), wearing a very pretty light gray outfit. Possibly our Lucy Steele? One shot has a very tall, well-dressed man in the background with a slight receding chin. He might or might not be Herbert Nordrum as Colonel Brandon. If so, cause for rejoicing, dude does have enough neck for Regency collars! The group shot of Mrs. Jennings with the Dashwood sisters also has a couple of men in the background, although it’s not really clear who they are.
All in all, good job so far. My main beef with what I’ve seen of the Netflix Pride and Prejudice costumes is that they don’t really feel like a unified aesthetic, just “here’s a bunch of clothes from about the right period, with some effort to distinguish between characters who care about their looks and those who don’t. Hope you like them!” These S&S clothes do feel like there’s more of a coherent idea behind them, if that makes sense. Unlike the P&P first look, these seem to be informal behind-the-scenes shots that aren’t meant to give a sense of the production’s cinematography. As a result, I don’t know if the final film will be as gray-toned as these images suggest. On the one hand, S&S lends itself more to that kind of somberness than P&P. On the other hand, the last BBC S&S, which is admittedly 17 or 18 years old at this point, did something similar. We shall see.
State of the Dictator, 2025
When I was talking to another writer on Discord, I realized that I tend to be somewhat vague and off-handed when I talk about my writing process, and assume people already know what I’m talking about, so I’m going to walk through the whole process here for transparency’s sake. This process includes the use of AI software for transcription and cleanup of dictated content, but it doesn’t start or end there, so if you are interested in that part, please, bear with me until I get there.
Continue reading “State of the Dictator, 2025”Austenian: Harriet Smith and the Case of the Missing Parents
Let’s get the book’s official statement on the subject out of the way first. Late in the novel, Harriet’s father is stated to be a tradesman, marital status unknown, who is “rich enough to afford her the comfortable maintenance which had ever been hers, and decent enough to have always wished for concealment.” Her father approves of the match with Robert Martin, and there’s a suggestion he possibly settles money on Harriet on her marriage. Nothing is said of the mother. I personally do not think Harriet is related to anyone we meet in the book. No named character in the book is high enough in status to weather the scandal of being known to have fathered or given birth to an illegitimate child. This doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have done it, just that they wouldn’t have kept the child, and the accompanying risk of gossip and scandal, in the neighborhood of Highbury. However, the alternative theories are potentially of interest to people writing Jane Austen spinoffs, so let’s go over them. You’ll notice I don’t really address the question of whether particular character seem moral/immoral enough for certain behaviors; a lifetime of reading murder mysteries makes me unwilling to go that route in discussing what fictional people are capable of.
Continue reading “Austenian: Harriet Smith and the Case of the Missing Parents”
Jaglion Press 