Falling in Love With the Wrong Movie

            In 1939 and 1940, Hollywood turned out two memorable movies about American politics, with distinctly different points of view. Unfortunately for the state of our political discourse, most people fell in love with the wrong movie.

            The movies in question were Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in 1939 and Preston Sturges’ The Great McGinty in 1940. Almost everybody knows about the first one, but few people are familiar with the latter, probably because its message didn’t reverberate with audiences.

            In Mr. Smith, the story line is that a U.S. Senator dies unexpectedly, and the governor who has to appoint his replacement is torn between factions. To get out of a political pickle, the governor appoints an innocuous nobody as a placeholder, leaving the factions to slug it out at the next election.

Naivete as Virtue

            That innocent placeholder, the eponymous Mr. Smith, played brilliantly by James Stewart, decides to try to do one good thing while in office — secure an appropriation for a boys’ camp in the mountains. In moving forward with that project, he is utterly clueless about the fact that various moneyed interests have other ideas for the land, and as a consequence is nearly run out of office. But it all ends happily, when the bad senator (Claude Rains) has an inexplicable change of heart and decides to withdraw his opposition to the camp.

            In real life, of course, hardened politicians don’t have that sort of change of heart, and since the James Stewart character had no idea of how to move the levers of power, he could win only with the aid of the sort of psychological miracle the film calls on. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be represented by elected officials who are on the right side of issues but need a miracle to get something done.

            Yet there are quite a few people in this country, generally unlearned about politics, who think that what we need are purer elected officials. In the area where I live, voters recently re-elected, by a wide margin, an incumbent politician who has been utterly ineffective on the people’s behalf, but who is widely loved because he walks the neighborhoods and talks to people and because he makes a point of giving a chunk of his salary to charity. Voters chose personal virtue over political savvy.

Grimy But Effective

            The Great McGinty presented a far more realistic (and cynical) point of view. McGinty (Brian Donlevy) gets the attention of a big-city political machine by voting for mayor more than 30 times in one day. He rises through the ranks to become mayor himself, then governor.

            Through it all, he’s taking bribes and kickbacks, which makes him a crook. Hey, nobody’s perfect. He does, however, get an extraordinary number of good things built and done, creates good jobs for the working people he serves, and is able to at least somewhat restrain capitalist greed. McGinty is everything Mr. Smith is not, but he gets what he wants through political savvy, without the aid of miracles.

            In the end, McGinty is undone by honesty. He marries a good woman, and when she entreats him to go straight, he does. The other politicians ruin him so thoroughly that he has to flee the country, and at the end of the movie, he’s tending bar at a joint in a banana republic. In real-world politics, that’s what would have happened to Mr. Smith, but Hollywood didn’t want that ending. In Mr. Smith, Hollywood got the politics wrong, but read the public sentiment perfectly.

Making Bank Tellers Swoon

            Manual dexterity and I have never been boon companions. As a kid, I enjoyed sports, so I learned to be reasonably adept at catching and throwing. And because I wanted to write, I mastered the art of typing pretty well, though I had to take the class twice to do it.

            That’s about as far as it goes in the manual skills department. Put a screwdriver in my hands, and I get the cold sweats. And drawing? Forget it. If I draw a cat and it’s recognizable to someone else as an animal of any kind, I’ll put that down as a win.

            Those difficulties with drawing carried over to penmanship of any stripe. When I look at something I wrote or printed in elementary school (and by and large I try not to), I shake my head. It was a struggle to make the hand do what the mind wanted, and though I got A’s in almost every subject, I never got better than a B in penmanship.

Just Keep Doing It

            A funny thing happened in the course of living a life. Writing, because it’s what I do, called on me to keep using my penmanship in one way or another. As with typing, I found that the more I did it, the better I got.

            This is surprising in several ways since a fair part of the handwriting I’ve done has consisted of taking high-speed notes in a classroom or interview situation. Speed is the enemy of elegance, and I would defy almost anyone to make sense of my notes in those situations. A week after the fact, I can barely do it myself.

            Those hasty notes, however, weren’t the only writing I did. I’ve always been someone who writes notes to himself and keeps records and notations by hand. With those, I took, and still take, my time. I enjoy doing it and find I remember things better when I write them down by hand. Plus, over the years, I’ve written too many checks to count, and I put care into those, if for no other reason than to avoid error.

A Receptive Audience

            The result is that my handwriting is now pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. And I don’t. Bank tellers compliment me all the time, and so do other people who come across a sample of something I’ve written out. I’ve come to take pleasure in the physical act of writing and have lately been doing more of it with fountain pens because I like the feel of them.

            Few schools teach cursive any more, so being able to do it at all — never mind well — is a vanishing art. Too bad in a way. It’s good for note taking, and for those of us who use it, it’s an expression of our personalities. In the movie My Little Chickadee, Mae West famously said, “A man’s kiss is his signature.” These days she’d have to say keystroke instead of signature. If you ask me, it’s a hell of a thing to compare a kiss to.

The Books That Last Over Time

In my teenage years I embarked on a self-improvement project, part of which was to read good books. At that point, I didn’t figure I was ready for the ancient Greeks and Romans, or even the Victorian authors, but I did think I could handle American fiction.

            So in an attempt to put together a list, I decided to lean on expert opinion and buy American books that had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I figured that those books had been vetted by smart people at the time and surely were worth reading. And besides, they’d probably look good on the bookshelf.

            Armed with that list, I went to Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena to begin building my library. Imagine, then, my surprise, when I discovered that most of them were out of print and unavailable. At this point, it was less than half a century since the Pulitzer Prizes were first awarded, yet some of the honored books had sunk without a trace.

Julia Peterkin? Caroline Miller?

            To look at some of the titles and authors on the Pulitzer Prize list from 1918 to 1940 is to get a sense of the fleeting nature of literary fame. Here’s a partial list of winning books and authors:

            His Family by Ernest Poole, Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia M. Peterkin, Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes, The Store by T.S. Stribling, Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller, Now in November by Josephine W. Johnson, and Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis.

            Maybe one of those books or authors will enjoy a comeback, but right now you look at that list and say to yourself, I wonder what the competition was like. Well, in 1929, when Scarlet Sister Mary (now unfindable) won the award, a fellow named Hemingway wrote a book called A Farewell to Arms, which you can still buy today in any bookstore.

            The Pulitzer committee didn’t get it entirely wrong. Also on the list are books by Booth Tarkington, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, and Edna Ferber, all of whom are at least somewhat known and read today. But the only two books on that list that are widely known and read 75 years later are Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind.

The Mysteries Lasted Longer

            An interesting sidelight to that Pulitzer list is that a couple of those forgotten authors wrote mysteries. I’ve never so much as seen a copy of T.S. Stribling’s The Store, but I own his Clues of the Caribees, a selection of mystery short stories that’s actually pretty good.

            And I did read John P. Marquand’s The Late George Apley, winner of the 1938 Pulitzer Prize, which is a decent period piece. But to the extent that Marquand is still known today, it’s probably for his Mr. Moto mysteries.

            All this serves as a reminder that every book is subject to the test of time, and the failure rate is high. I read Honey in the Horn, which I think was about early settlers in Oregon, and I can’t remember a single detail about it. But even though it’s been more than 40 years since I read The Grapes of Wrath, I can still recall the Dust Bowl scenes, the entry into California, and the farm labor camps in the Central Valley. What I remember of the two books is probably a good indicator of why one lasted and the other didn’t. It’s one thing to impress your contemporaries, but it’s tough to fool posterity.

Teachers Who Mattered

                  The late, great American fiction writer Flannery O’Connor once observed, “There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” That quote was put out recently in a writers’ affinity group to which I belong, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

                  It so happens that my next Quill Gordon mystery, still untitled, features a retired English teacher as the murder victim. In the book, I’m trying to portray her as a carrier of the highest standards — definitely someone whose students would never grow up to write Valley of the Dolls. Come to think of it, does anyone under 60 remember Valley of the Dolls? It was a sixties-era sex-booze-and-drugs shocker that was the sort of bestseller O’Connor was probably talking about.

                  But I digress. My point is that in my boyhood, teachers like the one in my book roamed the hallways of nearly every public high school, but, alas, no more.

Swift and Sure Punishment

                  My wife, Linda, teaches biology at a state university. One of her classes is a lower-division course intended to teach students the correct techniques for writing a scientific paper. She sometimes finds it frustrating when it’s clear she’s dealing with a student who seems never to have been instructed in the basic techniques of writing of any kind.

                  At the public high school she attended decades ago, the teachers were unforgiving of gross errors. She recalls that Mrs. Roark, an English teacher, and Mr. Hashimoto, a history teacher, demanded good writing. Another English teacher would give a student an F on a paper if it contained a single run-on sentence. Or a sentence fragment. Late at night, reading a muddled effort by one of her students, Linda is given to putting her head in her hands and saying, “This poor kid never had a Mrs. Roark or Mr. Hashimoto in high school.”

                  Attending public schools in Southern California in the 1960s, I was blessed to have three outstanding English teachers between ninth and twelfth grades.

Three Who Mattered

                  Mr. McDonald, who taught English and journalism in ninth grade, probably was more responsible than anyone else for setting me on my career path. He also assigned Gone With the Wind as a book in the English class, which was hugely valuable. No one who took that class would ever again be intimidated by the length of a book.

                  Miss Irwin, who taught American Literature my junior year in high school, taught us how to appreciate The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick. She also showed how to handle the racially-charged issues of the former book in an enlightened and sensitive way.

                  Mrs. Carruth was my senior year English Literature teacher, who had us read Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens, among others. The way she drew us into Austen’s moral world was a triumph of good teaching.

                  Reflecting back on those wonderful teachers, I’ve decided to dedicate my next mystery novel to them, in appreciation for what they taught me about how to write and how to read a book. The more I think about it, the more I figure it’s the least I can do, really. After all, if not for them, I might have written a bestseller.

The Things You Hear at Breakfast

            When you publish a book, the reactions you get from people can be one of the positive, and sometimes surprising, benefits. After my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, came out, some of the remarks people made were a test of my well known ability to maintain a poker face.

            One of the comments I got from a couple of people was something along the lines of “You must have done a lot of research on this.” The first time I heard that, I had the Tony Soprano reaction (WTF?) but I quickly realized that it was intended as a compliment. It was a way of saying the book felt real to them as they were reading it, and that’s high praise indeed.

            The reason for channeling my inner Tony when I first heard the remark was that I was thinking of research as diligently looking into specific issues through authoritative sources — something I did very little of. But there’s another type of research, of which I had done quite a bit, and I suspect that’s what people were responding to.

‘Everything’s Copy’

            I’m speaking of research through observation. Well before I wrote the book, I had made many visits to the mountains, going to places similar to the fictitious setting of the book. While there, I’d paid attention to, and mentally filed away, details about those areas. To the extent that the small town, the cattle ranch, the streams and meadows in the book seemed real, it was largely owing to my recall of that prior observation.

            Nora Ephron once said that one of the great lessons her parents had taught her is that everything’s copy. In other words, everything you see, everything you hear contains details and information that can be put to some good use in future creative work. A good writer creates a large storage locker within his or her brain in which all that information is safely preserved until an occasion comes up for using it. A great writer knows precisely when and where to use it.

            In addition to just looking, there’s a lot to be learned from casual conversations. In the mountains I’ve talked to store clerks, bartenders, sheriff’s deputies, campground hosts and many others. A brief exchange can yield a fine nugget, and most people like being asked about what they do, which can yield multiple nuggets.

Get Out of the Hotel

            On a more passive level, good old-fashioned eavesdropping can produce a bonanza, and the best place to do it is in a local café. If you keep your eyes on your food or your coffee cup, no one pays the least bit of attention to you, and you can listen in on other conversations with total impunity.

            Recently, Linda and I were in the mountains, and one night we stayed at a chain motel. Breakfast was included, but if you’re a writer, having breakfast in the motel is like looking for gold in the dog food section of the supermarket. We went to a local coffee shop, and as fate would have it, the people at the next table were talking about a local character. In considerable lurid detail.

            That local character is going to end up in the next Quill Gordon novel, even if I have to stop the forward progress of the story to get him in. The detour will be worth it, and I could never have made up what I heard at the café that morning. We spent $25 more on breakfast than if we’d eaten at the motel, but it was worth every penny.

What It Was Like in 1970

            In my third Quill Gordon mystery, due out next summer, one of the clues is the murder victim’s journal for the period covering September 1970 to February 1971. I just got through writing the first draft of the section that quotes excerpts from that journal and found that I enjoyed the trip down memory lane.

            As you might guess from the photograph that accompanies this blog, I am old enough to remember 1970 and remember it fairly well. But that good personal memory is only a starting point for accurately depicting the time in a book, even a work of fiction.

            To be convincing, that section would have to be correct in relevant details, some of which are critical to the story itself. What I found in the course of writing it over the past couple of weeks was that my memory told me what I needed to look for and check, and that, in the process of checking it, I struck some gold I wasn’t even prospecting for.

God Bless Wikipedia

            I’ve said before that there are days I love the internet and days I hate it. Looking up stuff from the 1970s made it all the first kind of day. How did an author ever survive without Wikipedia? Without it, I could have spent weeks trying to pin down one little fact that was at my fingertips online.

            It struck me, for example, as I was writing the section, that the woman keeping the journal would likely have been a fan of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” My memory told me it was on in the early seventies, but would it have been on the air during the window covered by the journal? Yup. In fact, I had the keeper of the journal watching it the night of Sept. 19. 1970, and checking Wikipedia, I found that this was the date the first episode aired. How good does it get?

            Elsewhere on the internet, I was able to quickly pin down the years in which two pieces of legislation were passed in California, both of which were critical to the plot. Whatever else the reviewers on Amazon might ding me for, it won’t be getting the facts wrong about the timing of those laws.

The Serendipitous Finds

            Despite what some people think, not everything is online, and I had to get some information the old-fashioned way. Three days of the journal describe events in San Francisco just before Christmas, so one morning I went to the Santa Cruz public library and looked up the San Francisco Chronicle for late December of 1970 on microfilm.

            They had great columnists then — Herb Caen, Art Hoppe, Charles McCabe, Stanton Delaplane, Royce Brier, William Hogan, and even that over-the-top sexist Count Marco. A two-line item in Caen’s column became a scene described in the character’s journal. The movie listings prevented the character from seeing “Love Story” before it actually opened. And an ad for a long-gone department store provided a window into what things cost in those days.

            The internet is great for looking up specific things, but it’s lousy for stumbling across things by chance. The three issues of the Chronicle that I looked at on microfilm provided a snapshot of San Francisco at that moment of time. As with any picture, there was a lot of stuff that wasn’t in the frame. Still, the details I came across will, I believe, enliven my book, and coming across them in that way was a reminder of what we will be missing if (or when) newspapers go the way of dinosaurs.

To Buy or to Borrow?

            When Amazon offered its new Kindle Unlimited program, which allows customers, in consideration of a fee, to borrow a considerable part of the library, my reaction as a reader was “No thank you.” My reaction as an author was “Hmmm.”

            Borrowing is great for some people, but it doesn’t fit the way I read. I’m a long-term guy, and when you borrow a book, you have to get on it pretty quickly. If I’m considering four books and pick two to borrow, I’m likely to forget about the other two before I come back again.

            So over the years I’ve gotten into the habit of buying any book I come across in the bookstore, whether brick-and-mortar or online, if I think I’d eventually like to read it. That way, I have it, and it’s in front of me as a constant reminder. I may get to it fairly quickly or not for years, but it’s there.

So Many Books, So Little Time

            At the moment, I have a bit more than 120 mystery novels on my shelf or in my iPad, awaiting their turn to be read. That’s about a two-year backlog, and two years from now I expect the number to be the same or greater. I’ve accepted the fact I’m going to die with books unread, so I’m all right with that.

            That does mean, however, that I have books for all occasions. If I’m ill and decide to read a mystery rather than working, I have plenty to choose from. If I’m on vacation and bad weather is keeping us inside, I know I can find something to read on my iPad. In both cases I can choose from a small number of books that already interested me, rather than looking blind through everything out there to find something that feels right in the moment. Having that sort of freedom is one of the great benefits of owning, rather than borrowing, your books.

            As an author, I also prefer readers who buy, rather than borrow, my mystery novels. The obvious reason for that is that the author gets more money for a book that was purchased than for one that was borrowed. But the reasons go deeper than that.

The Case for Borrowing

            Let me say at this point that I welcome people borrowing my books. That’s far better than ignoring them altogether, and a reduced payment to the author is better than no payment to the author. And there’s one other definite positive to borrowing on Kindle: It introduces a sense of urgency to reading the book. If you don’t get to it in a few weeks, it disappears. I look at borrows as a positive sign that someone is seriously ready to read one of my books now.

            If that reader posts a review or tells a friend, the borrow has paid for itself by building readership. I think, though, that it’s harder to share a borrowed book than a bought one, and what becomes nearly impossible is the notion of a serendipitous read.

            One of my daydreams is that some day, years from now, someone who bought one of my books will die with that book still on the shelf or in an e-reader. A dutiful child comes to clean out the possessions, and in the course of doing so, comes across, say, Wash Her Guilt Away, starts to read it, and likes it. That happened to me with a couple of books I found while cleaning out my mother’s apartment after she went, and they meant a bit more because they were hers. Never would have happened if she’d borrowed them.