Digging around on my cloud accounts, I found a couple of fanfics that had survived the Great Purge mentioned in a previous post. Both of them were a bit longer and more carefully executed than the quick-hit fanfic I discussed in that post, and both were for a heist movie from India which I saw about twelve or thirteen years ago, and was briefly obsessed with.
Continue reading “Fanficcing With Claude.ai: Bollywood Edition “Category: Mystery
State of the Author, 4Q2025
It’s been roughly three months since the last State of the Author, so here’s where I’m at:
Continue reading “State of the Author, 4Q2025”Hunter Healer King 3 blurb
This was a collaboration with Claude.ai, but a bit different from my usual. I had a chat going covering several aspects of the final stretch of the book: dictation cleanup, brainstorming and revision thoughts (basically me feeding it my revisions and seeing if it caught anything obviously wrong like typos, awkward sentences or me losing track of the characters’ movements). The reference docs included a summary of our previous chat, covering the “darkest hour” stretch of the book. Claude’s cheerleading had been very helpful through both these stretches of story, which were difficult to write. I fed the blurbs from the past two books into this chat (which had gotten long enough in terms of total tokens to where Anthropic was throttling it every few messages for a couple of hours). Claude naturally focused way too much on the spoilery third act it knew best, so I had to summarize the earlier stages of the story for it. It then gave me a rough draft I could use, and we went through several rounds of me tweaking it, asking the AI for feedback from a book marketing POV, and me tweaking it some more. The final (for now) version is below the cut, with human text in bold. The taglines for each character are carryovers from earlier blurbs, and have been italicized.
Continue reading “Hunter Healer King 3 blurb”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”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”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”Friday Fragments
A conversation elsewhere reminded me that Whisper’s raw transcriptions of dictation can be a bit…alarming, so I am showing three versions of a text chunk below. This demonstrates my dictation workflow but in reverse order. For clarity, the first thing you will see is my final-ish draft, followed by what I was working from: Claude’s cleanup of a Whisper transcription, using the commands I’ve shown in the past. The last thing you’ll see is what Claude was working from: Whisper’s transcription of an audio file I dictated.
Continue reading “Friday Fragments”State of the Author, 3Q2025
This really should have been “State of the Author, Mid-Year,” but I was dealing with health issues for most of June (nothing serious, just distracting) and then July was kind of busy at work, so here we are…
Continue reading “State of the Author, 3Q2025”Summer Book Sale Is Here!
Hans G. Schantz has put together one of his massive book sales, and has graciously agreed to include my novel Wolf’s Trail in the sale. Hans’s book sales always cover a wide range of genres and possibilities, so take a look! Happy Summer Reading!
Jaglion Press 