The Mystery of the Right Rear Gunner–and Merry Christmas!

by Nancy Means Wright

For Christmas this year I’ve wrapped up for my book-loving son Kate Atkinson’s novel, A God in Ruins, about Teddy Todd, an elderly man thinking back on the World War 2 experiences that colored his life. His British bomber he called J-Jig was caught by flak as it approached the French coast and a shell blasted through the fuselage, almost knocking it out of the skies. Smoke was coming out, though no sign yet of flames. As pilot, Teddy did a crew check and heard from everyone but his rear-gunner, huddled at the very back “in a cold and lonely nest,” a distance from the rest. He always worried about Kenny, an usually cheerful Australian, in that “cramped, claustrophobic space.”

Because there was already a good deal of damage to the plane, it was flying lower and slower with each mile and he felt they should abandon ship. But no one wanted to ditch, especially over the sea, and they struggled on, overshooting the runway, smashing through hedges and ploughing up the field where they finally landed. The aircraft filled with smoke and Teddy urged them to be “as quick as you can, lads.”
When most of the crew got out, he saw that the rear-turret was still attached, but the rest of the plane was in pieces. “J-jig had left a trail behind her—wheels, wings, engines, fuel tanks, like a wanton woman divesting herself of clothing.” The fuselage was burning fiercely, and not a word from his rear gunner, who appeared to be trapped.

Oh my! The story brought me back to a memoir by my older brother Donald who was a 19-year-old flight navigator in that war. I was too young at the time to know much about his life, flying B-29s over the India “hump” to bomb the Japanese. But I recall the story he told and retold through the years about Sgt Oren, the rear gunner in the aircraft they’d named “Bachelors’ Quarters.” In 1944 they were flying over China when they lost #3 engine, fell behind their formation (like Teddy’s fictional plane), but carried on, dropped their bombs, made a 180 degree turn toward “home”– when #1 engine quit. They were still flying through flak, over Jap-held territory. Flight engineer Shoales had been desperately transferring fuel from one engine to another (today was his December birthday). To conserve fuel, they threw everything they could out of the plane: a chopped up radar set, a bomb sight, an empty bomb bay gas tank. It became obvious that they’d have to abandon ship by bailing out of the bomb bay in the rear.

It was a tight squeeze, according to my brother, because they were wearing parachutes with jungle kits, shoulder-holsters with a 45 pistol filled with ammunition, and leather flying jacket. On the back of the jacket was a silk flag with words in Chinese noting they were friends helping with the fight against the Japanese. Pilot Malone gave the order to bail out, and my brother had the gunners and others standing on opposite sides of the bomb bay. Through an open bulkhead door he saw Sgt Oren at his gunner’s position, head set on. Looking down, Donald, who would be the last to jump, saw bodies floating in the air and chutes opening. He signalled to Oren in his rear turret, but no response. The plane was already in flames–and no time or way to yank him forcibly out of his hole. So Don jumped,too, with a last shout to Oren, hoping he’d follow.

Don landed on a grave marker in a peasant farmer’s field, coming up with a fractured ankle and leg. Greeted by a group of suspicious men, he gave a thumb’s-up, saying the only Chinese he knew: ‘Ding how.” And they fed him soup and chicken. The next day he discovered the plane had crashed into a tea house, killing several people. And the rear gunner went down with it.

Why didn’t Sgt Oren bail, the only married man with a wife and young children? Or was it because of that family—afraid he’d be captured on the ground and leave them abandoned? Or was he frozen with fear, a panic attack that kept his legs from moving, his voice from calling out on his intercom? Perhaps he’d swallowed poison to avoid what he felt “the very worst”? Or was it a moment of acrophobia, a desperate fear of heights that wouldn’t let him even look at the far-off ground? No one will ever know the truth. Later his fellow crew members held a funeral service in Kunming where they buried his remains, and after the war, they met with his grieving family.

As for the rear gunner in Atkinson’s novel, I won’t be a spoiler. Except to say that he got out alive–but only after a crazy, explosive escape. I wrote a “Sgt Oren flight situation” into my new historical novel, Queens Never Make Bargains—based on reality, but nevertheless fiction. For young Oren, though, it was one more tragedy of a real war, and the sick minds that had started it.

May this be a Christmas of peace across the world, and may the new year be one of brotherhood for all–with no need for gunners, wherever they may be seated in a war plane. Wishful thinking perhaps, but we’re all fiction writers here. And so, farewell to the old year.

THE JULY 4TH OUTHOUSE PARADE AND BERNIE SANDERS

My part of the world has had an unusual amount of press lately with the mind-boggling, stranger-than-fiction escape and re-capture of two murderers from an upper New York state prison, and with our independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who is running for president and attracting huge crowds. The Fourth of July celebrations have only added fuel to the flames with their patriotic parades that have grown ever more crazy and creative.

For the past two decades our family has converged on the Fourth in the small town of Bristol, Vermont, on Pleasant Street where my daughter and husband lived and where the parade traditionally marched through with its bands, floats, clowns, fire engines, and politicians. My daughter would throw together an abundance of brown rice and lentils, greens, and strawberry shortcake, and we’d line up our lawn chairs on the edge of the street for a close-hand view. The kids, too excited to sit, would leap up and down, water pistols in hand to squirt back at the clowns or at the redneck kids on their dairy farm floats for whom the Fourth meant battle. My daughter always had dry shirts ready to throw on her overexcited adolescents.

This year my daughter and family have moved to a small farm in Leicester, Vt and rented out the Pleasant Street house—but the family tradition goes on, and most of us make the trip back to Bristol for one of the oldest and most colorful July Fourth parades in the country.

The 2015 excitement began, as always, with an outhouse race where teams of ingenious pairs, in four suspenseful heats, maneuvered a fabricated, boxy outhouse on castors: one guy pulling in front, one pushing from behind, and one waving at the crowds from his or her triumphant seat on a shiny white toilet. The two inch castors rotated 360 degrees, so that keeping the unit rolling forward was a challenge. One outhouse veered to the right early on, barely missing a photographer–then its cardboard roof and sides blew off. Nonetheless, like the presidential race, the betting was high, the competition keen, and the cheering loud and wild.

Next came the parade of horse-drawn carriages, fire engines, colonial militiamen in tricorn hats, exploding their ancient muskets; the Bristol Band tooting away on a red and white be-ribboned flatbed; a fat, straggly-haired clown equipped with drum, horns, bells, whistle and sticks to smack the dinger on his head; the Monster buggies from the Freemason Shriners zooming in and out of the road, their drivers tossing candy to our kids; and Bristol’s own horse-drawn trash disposal cart, with its driver stopping every few feet to scoop up the poop into a plastic bag.

Then a shout: “Here comes Bernie!” But no–it’s not Senator Sanders but old Harold Allen from up in Lincoln, with a white wig, red striped tie, one arm gesticulating wildly as the real Bernie would do to make a point. And behind the impersonator a band of buzzing membranophone kazoos blasted through, with a happy-go-lucky dancing gaggle of folks shouting “Bernie! Bernie!”

Then to my amazement: my two young granddaughters appeared among the Kazooers, bearing a huge placard touting BERNIE FOR PRESIDENT! The girls were obviously thrilled to be part of the spectacle, forgetting no doubt, that Bernie himself was not with them. For Bernie, someone called out, was marching in Iowa that day, with even louder crowds trumpeting in his ears. “Bernie tells the truth,” these fans allege: this middle class fellow whose immigrant dad came to Brooklyn from Poland, penniless at age 17. Plain-speaking, “democrat-socialist” Bernie Sanders who wants only to reverse “the obscene levels” of income and wealth inequality, and who thrives not on the Super Pac like most presidential candidates, but on small, grassroots donations.

Finally the parade wound down, the last fireman drove his big truck back to the starting point, and my dancing granddaughters settled down with family to devour the strawberry shortcake my daughter had brought. The ice cream had pretty much melted, but spirits were soaring and even the youngest of kin were released by their parents to run into town and enjoy a day of freedom—the two syllable word that pretty much summed up the whole day.

A MURDER MYSTERY CLOSE TO HOME

by Nancy Means Wright

I was shocked and horrified back in 1971 when an 18-year-old freshman at Middlebury College (in my home town) went missing just before her 1 o’clock December exam. According to a friend, she had run back to her dorm “for a favorite pen.” But she never got to the exam.  Her roommate left for home on semester break without realizing that Lynne Schulze would not be back to claim her things.

At about 12:30 p.m. someone spotted Lynne standing near a gas station in town eating dried prunes purchased across the street at a health food store called All Good Things, owned and operated by young millionaire real estate heir, Robert Durst and his wife Kathy. A second spotting came that same day at 2:30 p.m. outside the store across from the bus stop. But was it Lynne?

No one had seen Lynne since.

At the time, I had a 17-year-old daughter Lesley, 5 foot 3 and brown-haired like Lynne, who had already applied for the liberal arts college.  After she began her freshman year at Middlebury, my Lesley became Lynne in my nightmares of abducted girls. Yet Vermont is safe, my reason told me–who would harm a vibrant young girl in the small, congenial town of Middlebury? If Lynne had been abducted, well, it would have been someone “on the outside.”

In her last photograph, Lynne sits in the lotus position (as my daughter often does), a pretty girl with long shiny hair, smiling confidently into the camera.

Police inquiries turned up nothing for almost 43 years. The case was handed down to a number of town investigators, each one taking a fresh look, but finding no evidence of foul play. If the girl had run off, her parents heard nothing from her. Odd, we all thought. And such a close-knit family.

Durst sold the store the following year, left the state, and unbeknown to many of us, became a suspect for killings in Texas and California (for the death of a 16-year-old girl)–including a recent arrest in New Orleans for the possible murder of his wife. A documentary, “The Jinx: the Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” shows him muttering to himself: “There it is. you’re caught. What the hell did I do? Killed them all of course.”

In 2012, almost thirty years after the disappearance, local police had an unsolicited phone tip about Durst’s connection to our town and to the young girl who shopped at his store; and our police chief, recalling the unsolved case of Lynne Schulze, termed Durst “a man of interest.”

My daughters and I had shopped on occasion at All Good Things with no suspicion of the man, who seemed pleasant enough. A retired county sheriff recalls buying peanut butter there and chatting with Durst. Another local store owner called him “kind of quirky…but with a wry sense of humor.” A dozen questions now bubble up in my head. Had the then young, attractive store owner charmed Lynne with prunes, presents, and peanut butter? Then tried to seduce her? Had she taken the next bus out, met him somewhere and then been “dumped,’ so that his wife, living in their nearby Ripton home, wouldn’t suspect?

All as yet unanswered questions. One can only make up scenarios of what might have happened. Calling the case “a possible homicide,” our local police have not, at the time of this writing, found any tangible evidence. Lynne’s parents are dead, and her bereft siblings want justice, but also privacy. Our dedicated police, however, are determined to “investigate all leads until Lynne can be found and resolution can be given to her family.”

A resolution I, too, would like, as a grandmother living near the college with a granddaughter at that school, about to take her final exams.

Tuck a madcap teenager into your manuscript?

by Nancy Means Wright

As a youngish mother with four lively children teaching high school and trying to write between classes, I was losing weight and, all too frequently, patience.  My oldest son had been expelled from his pre-school for breaking the toys, and was too fidgety to concentrate in first grade, so I had to teach him to read–with the help of Dr. Seuss.  I hadn’t yet heard of ADHD or the drug Ritalin. My daughter, two years his junior, was  a teacher’s darling in school but a mother’s nightmare at home with her negativity and a closet full of rabbits, guinea pigs, and white rats. When her clothes got too smelly she would raid my closet/bureau for school apparel–usually just what I was planning to wear. How many rainy days I’d come home, exhausted from teaching, to find the living room window glass shattered by flying pucks from an indoor hockey game organized by my eldest!

If they were wild as pre-teens, they were beyond control as young adults. My daughter graduated high school with ease, then took a gap year before college to wander, alone, through Europe, then into the explosive Middle East. My oldest son poured all his energy into hockey–his college coach phoned with abject apologies when the lad crashed into a goal post and knocked out half his teeth (another “gap” year and don’t ask about the cost.)

I got my revenge by writing them into stories and books. Teens appear in almost all my twenty books–mysteries, mainstream novels, poems.  My daughter howled when I wrote up her risky gap year adventures in a local newspaper column. “How could you?” she’d cry, “that was my story!”

Well, we’re all familiar with the “my story” syndrome, yes?

They’re grown up now with wilding kids of their own. This year I’ve four grandchildren doing their thing in the developing countries of Central America, Africa, and the Near East. And I worry about them as they wander. Because adolescence, I recently read in a piece by a professor of clinical psychiatry “is synonymous with risk taking, emotional drama, and all forms of outlandish behavior.”

Apparently, the professor says, we afflicted elders have never understood the dark side of adolescence, the “surge in anxiety and fearfulness.” For the brain circuit, he claims, develops far ahead of the pre-frontal cortex (the seat of reasoning and control). In other words, teens are overwired for anxiety but underwired for calm reasoning.

I could have told him that years ago! But if my daughter was so afraid and anxious, why did she keep traveling through Iran, Afghanistan and India, where they threw pebbles at her, a young woman daring to explore the world–alone?  And why did my eldest hurtle his body into contact sports that might injure his brain and eliminate his teeth? (Even as a college hockey coach, he was recently hit by an errant puck and bled all over the ice.)

The three top killers of youth, I’ve heard, are homicide, accidents, and suicide. My offspring, and now my grandkids, have all had accidents. One granddaughter was a passenger in a rented car en route to Duke University when the car was rear-ended and a heavy suitcase fell and killed a girl in the back seat. Even though it wasn’t my granddaughter driving, she still suffers PSTD from the death of her close friend.

I’m not surprised to see the increasing popularity of young adult novels these days, as we authors write about  this risk-taking circuit in the adolescent brain. One might  add a world filled with guns, bombs, drugs, civil wars and children fleeing violence to travel on their own to a U.S. that is trying to keep them out. And the young brain has gone crazy with it all–wanting to escape–not like me as an aging writer into books–but physically: to another part of the untamed world, not knowing what the welcome might be.

All I can do now with my tired brain is to stand out on the village green in my Vermont home town and wave a petition for universal background checks for guns. And then go home and work on a story about–well, yes, a runaway teen.

Green Gas, Video Games, and Great Writing on The Great War

by Nancy Means Wright

100 years ago this summer, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo, setting off (for complex reasons) one of the cruelest wars in history.  Whole generations of young men were lost on all sides, and I, for one, can’t stop reading and writing about them. I wept through the heartbreaking novel All Quiet on the Western Front when a disillusioned German soldier in the last months of the war stands up out of his trench to gaze at the fall foliage–and is killed.  I thought about that young German a fortnight ago as I heard the Stuttgart Boys’ Choir sing (on tour from Germany). Ah, those pure high voices–one sweet-faced pre-teen with blond hair falling to his shoulders–no soldier there! And now I’m rereading Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms in which he recreates his WW1 months in an Italian ambulance unit, the agonies of war, and the role of a deserter.

I think of the poems of British poet Wilfred Owen, who wrote of a soldier in a gas attack “floundering like a man in fire or lime… / Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light / As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.”  The poem ends with the irony of “The old lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.” (It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.”) Tragically, Owen was killed just days before the November Armistice–as were the brother and fiance of British nurse Vera Brittain, who wrote in her classic Testament of Youth of tall Americans marching jauntily along “like young gods” to the killing front.

On a happier note, my father-in-law dropped out of Middlebury College in 1918 to “join up” and fly an observation biplane over enemy territory. Luckily for him it was a short war, and he returned to college a student hero, and began barnstorming at country fairs.  He loved to bellow out euphemistic war songs like “It’s a Long Long Way to Tipperary” and “Over There.”  Then there was old Charlie Willson, our octogenarian family carpenter, who was gassed in that war and for the rest of his life had nightmares of “shrieking shells and cries of the wounded.” While he was working on our roof or barn, he would shout down war stories to anyone who’d listen–as though compelled to tell them.

TV productions like Downton Abbey and Mr. Selfridge  move their characters in and out of The Great War, and we hold our breath, praying our fictional heroes will survive–even if it’s with a missing arm or leg. The characters in my new multi-generational novel, Queens Never Make Bargains, endure the war at home and in the trenches, where in the confusion of shell fire and greenish gas, my protagonist’s soldier-lover stumbles off, his legs taking over his brain–away from the terrible war.

And we all admire Charles and Caroline Todd who write two award-winning mystery series set during and after WW1, featuring the shell-shocked veteran inspector Rutledge (Hunting Shadows); and Bess Crawford, a nurse in France (A Question of Honor). Mother and son make us relive all the passion and panic of the times.

Finally, I was surprised to read about a new, interactive, virtually non-violent French WW1 video game, “Valiant Hearts,” in which a young soldier named Emile must choose  between his officer’s orders to charge to the right, through gas and shells–or run left (to desert)  and onto an officer’s sword. Tough choices! The game depicts four years of war as lived by Emile, by an American volunteer Freddie, a field nurse Anna, and a dog–among others. One discovers the brutality of the trenches but also the human drama. Instead of firing rifles, players dress wounds, dig trenches, duck aircraft fire, and liberate prisoners. They hear the night quiet–or the muttering enemy, and they fear what’s ahead. They run, hide, and solve puzzles, all in real life locations and scenes from the war.

Surely a video I’d want to buy for my grandchildren! To keep the memory alive, yes–although a video game can never wholly emulate the horror of a war the did not, as hoped,  end all wars.

 

LATE BLOOMERS: WRITING ON INTO THE SUNSET

In fifth grade I picked up a novel my mother was reading called Life Begins at Forty. At that time the age of 40 was too far in the misty future to even contemplate, and I discarded the book and went back to my beloved Anne of Green Gables. Now, of course, I look  back at the age of 40 with nostalgia. My first novel had just been published by Ace Books: I called it an autobiographical feminist novel, while Ace labelled it a romance and hoped we might have a future together. Our paths soon diverged, and I started writing and publishing mystery novels; Ace moved to science fiction, and our relationship  ended.

But not my writing. A late bloomer to the publishing world, I became a perennial writer as time went on. I’m winging along through Medicare now, with 18 published books, and two more coming to fruition this spring–one, a small collection of poems, using, in part, the voice of 18th-century Mary Wollstonecraft, who looms large in my Perseverance Press mysteries.

How long, I ask myself, can I keep going? Who will want to publish me? How long does a flowering weed like blue vetch keep blooming?

Well, I answer myself: consider that hot pink bleeding heart in my garden. It has been coming up spring after spring, and it still looks robust.

A romp through Google brings up dozens of brave hearts still writing and publishing past 65. Wallace Stegner, 62, when his prize-winning Angle of Repose appeared, was 78 when his beautiful novel, Crossing to Safety came out. The British novelist Mary Wesley wrote her first novel, The Camomile Lawn at age 70, and went on until she died at age 90 to publish three million copies of her books, including ten bestsellers. Her popular work has been described as “arsenic without the old lace,” and “Jane Austen with Sex.” And speaking of arsenic and Austen, we now have P.D. James’s latest mystery, Death Comes to Pemberley, published when Dame James was 91!

The list goes on. James Michener wrote forty novels after the age of 40 when Tales of the South Pacific wowed the world. I met his editor once, who claimed she had to do a good amount of editing in his latter years, but he was still publishing when he died at 90. And we can’t forget late blooming debut novels like Harriet Doerr’s Stones of Ibarra, which she wrote at age 74–a national Book Award winner. Or Katherine Ann Porter’s award-winning Ship of Fools, which debuted when she was 72. And then there is Helen Hoover Santmeyer, who published her first book, And Ladies of the Club, at age 88.

Ah, but then I read a N.Y.Times essay, “Writer of a Certain Age,” in which the famous Fay Weldon, novelist and playwright,  laments the continuing prejudice against older women writers. Write two mature women into a conversation on stage, she complains, “and audience members would cough and shift in their seats.” A fiftyish female writer trying to describe “the sexual and social predicaments of a woman her age,” Weldon says, would “find it hard to get a publisher.” Her agent, she allows, would invariably suggest that the protagonist’s age “be taken down 20, even 30 years.”

Do I  want to do that? Don’t older women make up the larger part of fiction readers? Don’t I myself prefer to read about a character, male or female, who  is closer to my age? Yes, I do! Chick lit isn’t for me. Is there no solution here?

Well, sort of. Old age, Weldon thinks, is “a salable proposition” for publishers, in that one is considered “remarkable” for having produced such a work. Indeed, a writer acquaintance of mine who has just published her first book of stories at the age of 80, throws her age out to the reading public like bits of confetti. “I’m proud of it!” she exclaims, and reminds me that she had a “long gestation period” before the book came out.   Well, of course she has a point. A book published in a certain year may have been conceived a decade earlier. As for e-books, Weldon goes on, without an author photo one can be “as old or young as she likes.” The quality of the writing will prevail, and we’ll be judged “by our words and ideas, not by our looks.”

I’ll close on that optimistic note. How long would you as reader want to write on?

Reflections on Real, Romantic, and Online Book Pirates

     When I was a small girl, my father gave me an orange book of 100 Best Poems for Boys and Girls. One of my favorites was Pirate Don Durk of Dowdee by M.P. Merryman. Don Durk thrilled me with his crimson coat, purple tattoo, a dirk and dagger in his belt–and “a conscience as black as a bat.” 

     I soon became addicted to literary pirates with parrots on their shoulders who would mimic the colorful language I wasn’t allowed to use. I was enamoured of the villanous Cap’n Hook in Peter Pan, whose only fears were the sight of his own blood, and crocodiles–one of which eventually swallowed him whole. Hook was the only person Long  John Silver in Treasure Island ever feared.  I recently wrote an adaptation of the novel for my son’s Very Merry Theatre, along with lyrics for six songs. One of my verses was sung by Silver’s parrot: “a red rebel–who’s seen more mischief than the devil!”                                                                            

     Since more girls than boys tried out for that play, I had to include female pirates, like 18th-century Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who dressed and swaggered like men. Mary Read had earlier joined the British Army and fought in a war. She later married, but on her husband’s death, boarded a ship bound for the West Indies. She was captured by pirate Calico Jack, joined his crew, and ultimately, alas, died in prison. Both females roles were eagerly sought after by my son’s players.  

     Despite their bloody pursuits, I found myself rooting for pirates in books, plays and films. I even laughed at them, particularly the scene in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance in which pirates defeat the zany policemen, and the handsome pirate-apprentice Frederick wins his girl. But I didn’t laugh the day my seven grandkids dressed like pirates, went out in two rowboats to pick up “treasure” they’d left on a nearby island–got caught in a wild wind and rain storm–and had to be rescued by life guards! 

     My romance with pirates really began to fade when Somali pirates hijacked large cargo ships and oil tankers in the Arabian sea and Indian Ocean region, capturing seamen and demanding huge ransoms. And worse, killing their victims when the ship’s owner couldn’t, or wouldn’t, pay the fee. The Somali government did little to stop these villains because pirate leaders had more power than the government! In 2011 four Americans were killed on their own ship by the self-styled “ocean robbers.”

     The horrors of piracy came closest to me a few months ago when Google Alert announced that the ebook of my mystery novel, The Nightmare, was free on a website of lalulock, Jimdo.com. I clicked on  it, and there it was: the kindle edition of the novel’s cover, and below, in large letters: DOWNLOAD NOW. The website boldly offered background on my protagonist Mary Wollstonecraft, and sources for information on her life.

     How did I feel about this act of book piracy? At first there was a flurry of excitement. Should I be honored that they chose my books to download for free? After all, hundreds of writers offer their ebooks for free on Kindle Select–why shouldn’t mine be in that company?  I wanted people to read it, didn’t I? What about those who couldn’t afford to buy the book and who lived far from any library?

     But then I recalled the lamp and oriental runner stolen from a craft shop I once operated in my Vermont barn, and I felt violated. Wasn’t this, too, a blatant act of “shoplifting”? Not gloves or pearls, no, but “intellectual property”? I thought of my publisher, Perseverance Press, who was losing a rightful share of the book’s sales. I e-mailed publisher-publicist Susan Daniel, who , in turn,  contacted her distributors. And none had dealt with or even heard of lalulock, jimdo.com.   “There is nothing we can do,” she responded. I imagined her leaning back in her deskchair, sighing, and thinking: “Now what?”  

     I’ll end with that question. Does anyone out there have an answer?

Writing the Regional Novel. (Is regional a degrading word?)

by Nancy Means Wright

     When my first mystery came out in 1996, Kirkus Reviews wrote: “Regional fans should keep an eye out for this one.” Although it was a complimentary remark, I worried about the slightly derogatory word: “regional.” How far, I wondered, does the “region” extend for my particular setting? Is it all of New England, or just Vermont? Is it limited to Addison County in which I’ve situated my fictional Branbury–a place used in fourteen books to date? 

     I’m wholly at home in this Vermont town composed largely of dairy farms and apple orchards. In the mid-19th-century Victor Wright made a comfortable living with his merino sheep; he helped the nascent Middlebury College grow through gifts of steaming manure–a fact exploited by my offspring in their college application essays. A neighbor’s  herd of Holstein cows grazed in the pasture behind my former house. An apple orchard, ripe with Jamaican pickers like dark birds in the trees each fall lay next door to our fifteen-acre tree farm. I helped write a town history, which included the tale of Victor’s horses running away with his gig on an icy hill, and hurling Vic off to a frosty death.  

     As I considered a setting for my first mystery, I thought of William Faulkner in Virginia, who drew on the local geography and family history (notably his great-granddad’s Civil War adventures) to create his now famous Yoknapatawpha County. He found it liberating to use his own “little postage stamp of native soil worth writing about.”  His publisher didn’t think so, but we all know that Faulkner proved the fellow wrong.

     I had already set a YA novel and a family memoir in “Branbury.” And recently I exploited my husband’s ancestors, who in 1767 walked up into Ethan Allen’s Republic of Vermont to make their pitch. A regional novel for tweens, Walking into the Wild is the story of three young  siblings braving an unsettled wilderness filled with wolves, catamounts, Tories and Indians. I think of them when I travel Route 7, once the rooty “cow path” they walked.

     To me Vermont had always seemed a contemporary Eden, a land of milk, honey and mountains, a garden for healing and meditation. But as I began to research, I discovered the snake in the garden. Small farmers were being forced to sell; a high school girl’s letter to the editor complained that her kid brother was being bullied in school because his boots smelled of manure when he got to class.” I put that boy in my novel and named him Vic (for victim).

     In my series, Vic complains of farm chores, but grows, like his farmer mother, to love the land itself.  A Boston Globe editor who reviewed my novel, said that locale should be “a reason, not merely a setting for plot,” and I agreed. Vermont is a land of extremes: ice, snow, heat, mud. Winters we huddle beside our woodstoves; when claustrophobia sets in, tempers tend to explode. The perfect setting for crimes of passion? Setting becomes character as weather, seasons, local history and landscape influence one’s actions–and not always for good. Only months ago a Vermont couple who had mowed grass for a young schoolteacher and her toddler lured them to an isolated spot, crying help. And then raped and strangled her in front of the helpless child.

     My single mother dairy farmer embodies all the old New England tenets of self reliance and faith in an ideal justice. She sees her state as a kind of liberal Utopia where legislators have voted equal rights for all citizens, regardless of race or gender. She tends thirty cows, broken fences, and veggie garden, hoping for a just world. But she watches Branbury farms die off, and her town sprouting fancy restaurants and boutiques. Flatlanders build monster homes and send her own taxes to the moon.

     Yet in my first mystery, Mad Season, her son Vic is kidnapped by a “local.” Hometown Vermonters differ little from out-of-staters. While researching Stolen Honey,  I discovered the 1930s eugenic project, whereby poor French Canadians, Abenaki Indians, and so-called “degenerates” were sterilized in order to “breed better Vermonters.” So no, Branbury is not the mythic land of milk and honey. The archetypal apples in my favorite orchard are also prey to maggots and bagworms. Regional writers don’t need the international suspense novel to show greed, jealousy, hate, violence in the world. It’s all embodied here in our small “postage stamp.” We regionalists can address social and political contexts just as broad as any novel set in the great cities of the world.

     But  we can’t transplant our stories to the cities without losing the local color that makes them unique: The hills and lakes where 18th-century Green Mountain Boys once ambushed the Redcoats; the vibrant reds of autumn and the maple sap dripping each spring into the wooden buckets. Global warming may eventually kill them off, but while they last, the regional novel can dig deep into their roots.

Scheherazade: the Modern Mystery Maven

by Nancy Means Wright

When I read of another tragic loss of life in the vicinity of Bahgdad, I think back to Scheherazade and the magical, mystical tales in The Arabian Nights, and recall how a suspenseful story saved a life.

After hearing his brother’s account of an unfaithful wife, Shah Shahryar discovered his own wife in a stranger’s embrace and, fed up with women, ordered her death. “Henceforth,” he told his minister, the Wazir, “you must fetch me a new bride, then each morning, lead her to her execution.”

Such suspense already!

Frightened parents hid their daughters, and soon the only girls left in the kingdom were the Wazir’s own two daughters, Scheherazade and Dunyazad.  Scheherazade, the eldest,  was bold, beautiful, and inventive, rather like a female sleuth from a modern mystery. Seeing her father the Wazir, panicked because of the dearth of brides, she said, “Just send me, Papa, to the  callous fellow. Either I shall live–or die a death for all women (I think here of feminist Mary Wollstonecraft) and whatever happens, there should be nothing but pride for you.”

Naturally the Wazir calmed down a little.

And naturally, the Shah was captivated by the plucky Scheherazade. Yet remained resolute in his decree of death–he couldn’t lose face by going back on his word.  But he promised his shocked countrymen that the executioner would use only the sharpest axe. Entertainment for all? So here’s the big question: Would she live–or die?

Scheherazade climbed into the sultan’s bed in the most translucent of nightgowns (a little excitement here), and the couple made love as though the world might end at first light–as indeed it would for the average exploited female.

But not for our crafty heroine.

For Scheherazade had a plan. She’d awaken her lord at midnight and beg to see her sister Dunyazad for the last time. Entering the shah’s bedchamber, the sister would ask for a story to while away the final hours–and Scheherazade would take it from there.

“One day,” our heroine began, “a fisherman removed the sealed stopper from a brass jar he’d pulled up out of the deep, and from its neck a giant plume of smoke poured forth and took the form of a figure with hands like pitchforks and teeth like tombstones.”

It was the wicked Jinni, furious at the world after his “century of bondage,” and vowing that the first man he laid eyes on after his release… “should die!”

“Oh, no…”

On the story continued to its hair-raising climax.  Then stopped. 

“What happened next?” the fevered king shouted. “You can’t stop now. Go on!”

But alas, pink-faced dawn was creeping through the windows. “And now,” said Dunyazad, “my poor sister must die.” And she burst into appropriate tears.

“But if my good lord will let me live till tomorrow night,” murmured the wily Scheherazade, “I promise to tell you the end of the story.”

Whereupon the sultan, hungry for the tale yet overcome by the good smell of coffee, cried, “By Allah, I shall not kill her till the tale be told!”

So it went, night after night: Scheherazade completing the old story, then beginning a new.  The king wholly enmeshed in the storyteller’s web. A thousand and one nights, hardly interrupted by the births of seven babes (midwives there to cut the cords, but never the narrative flow).

Then one eve our heroine gathered the sweet offspring to her breast, asked for a pardon, and the sultan, like many an avid reader, came to realize that he couldn’t live without his storyteller to stimulate his imagination with romance, suspense, and conflict–because life was too dull without it.

So he ordered his scribes to write down the stories on scrolls that others might enjoy them, and told Scheherazade to teach all the would-be storytellers the art of suspense. In this way the art was passed down through the ages to this very day. For storytellers must know, he said, how to tease their readers with a provocative pause–that the latter might come back again and again to find out “what happens next.” For without suspense, the axe would fall.

Today’s Scheherazades, both female and male, have learned this, have they not? See below for a few chapter-end teasers:

“For the first time in this annoying case, he felt the vague stirring of the waters as a living idea emerged slowly and darkly from the innermost deeps of his mind.” (Dorothy Sayers)

“Jackson sat bolt upright and grabbed the nurse’s arm. ‘My wife,’ he said, ‘where’s my wife?'” (Kate Atkinson)

“My master looked at me and said, ‘I fear something has happened to Severinus.”” (Umberto Eco)

“The pressure was building, he could feel it, and the parting words of the maitre d’ came back to him.//’Tomorrow’s going to be a killer.'” (Louise Penny)

“Everyone of them, including his brother, had a pistol pointed at Billy’s heart.” (John Daniel)

“‘Lock up,’ he said. // Like never before, I thought.” (Camille Minichino aka Ada Madison)

“Then he looked at the three young women on the porch. ‘This isn’t over,’ he said. ‘You may think it  is, but it’s not.'”

I thank Janet Dawson, above, for the perfect ending to this story-blog.

Turn Your Page into a Stage: a Little Theater in Your Fiction

by Nancy Means Wright

Ever since I played 18th-century Mrs. Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer in high school I’ve been in love with theater. Decades later I can still recite the opening lines–in a British accent, of course: “I vow, Mr. Hardcastle, you’re veddy particulah!”  I recall the struggle to relate not only to a frustrated mother with a son my age, but to a female from a different century and culture. What could she and a 16-year-old girl possibly have in common? But then our director introduced us to the Stanislavsky method of acting, based on the concept of emotional memory in which an actor goes deep inside herself to recall moments of anger, sorrow or jealousy, and then transfers these feelings onstage, both physically and psychologically. In this way, the actor becomes not only the characters but her own self.

So I recalled the anxieties I had living in an all-girls school boarding school where my mother was a disciplinary housemother; and before that my older brothers, teachers, pastors, uncles who were forever, it seemed, shushing and telling me what to do. And I poured all these restrictions into the character of Mrs. Hardcastle, who was always being put upon.

Since then I’ve acted in or directed dozens of plays for amateur (mostly) and repertory theater. My son has inherited my passion and has his own Very Merry Theatre for children and young adults in Burlington, Vermont. Summers his ancient van travels the state, pulling a stage on a flatbed trailer. Many of the plays in his repertoire are adapted from Dickens and Shakespeare, keeping the original language, and a few are plays I’ve adapted for him from my own novels. For theater has crept into my writing as well; I can’t seem to keep my fictional characters from putting on amateur shows. In Midnight Fires, set in an Irish castle, my sleuth discovers a clue to a killer through a family rehearsal of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a local village presentation of Macbeth heightens suspense as my sleuth observes the spectators’ reaction to Macbeth’s imaginary dagger.

Of course I use “the method” to physically set the scene and to become my character(s).  I’ve always thought of a novel as a play in three or five acts, with each scene propelling the action forward. As I write, I’ve taught myself to envision the scene as if on a stage: to see how the characters use their props, to observe gestures, reactions to a bit of action or dialogue. To watch the body language: a shrug, a roving eye, a frown or grimace that suggests conflict. And then to show it as one does in theater.

It’s fun, for instance, to see how relationships alter as a character enters or exits a room. And I try to set a goal for each scene–a character’s desire or plan that either works or fails; at chapter’s end I leave a hook as a play might do. My spouse and I have been watching reruns of the 70’s Poldark, in which each episode ends with a gasp. Will Poldark escape when the smugglers are betrayed and the soldiers come charging? Will pregnant Demelza drown in her fishing boat when the storm blows up? We know the main characters will persevere, but oh, the suspense and conflict!

Most of all I use memory and transference to morph into my main character. It helps to nurture a close connection with the protagonist–a little empathy goes a long way. This has been easy with my historical Wollstonecraft series. For though far less famous, I have quite a lot in common with Mary: our writing and teaching, our conflicted nature (reason versus the hormones), our empty pockets, the faux pas we’ve made, and yes, the rejections. So through that connection I feel free to imagine and invent. In a new memoir, A Memory Palace, author Mira Bartok describes her traumatic brain injury after an 18-wheeler plowed into her car on the NY Thruway. To write her award-winning book, she employed a method called a “mental walk,” using visualization to recall information: faces, lists, emotions. She’d imagine the layout of a building, or placement of objects within a room, and then create links to things she wanted to remember. She’d take an imaginary journey through a house, recreating each room, letting it act as a memory peg: the kitchen might bring to mind a special event, or recall a person, an emotion.

In much the same way the mental walk might help us to turn into our fictional characters and thereby live alternate lives. Truly, I can’t think of any career, other than the actor’s, in which one writer can live so many lives–and in one book!