The 20-foot Ball of Yarn

            After more than a year of research and writing, The Borina Family of Watsonville, a history I did for that family’s foundation, will be published next month, and I expect it to make a modest contribution to the knowledge of local history in our area.

            A couple of months ago I blogged about how the research for the book sometimes seemed like chasing ghosts. That piece was about the difficulty of running down information on people who are all gone now, with few others remaining who knew them personally. The handful of people alive who still remember the Borinas will soon be gone themselves, but the book will keep the family’s memory alive to at least some small extent.

            There’s another issue involved in doing a family history like this, and it’s a paradox. In the course of running it down, the author comes across a heck of a lot of information, and massaging and condensing it into some sort of halfway interesting narrative is a true challenge.

The Histories Nobody Reads

            Quite a few people try their hand at writing a family history every year. Most of them can handle the first part of the job, which is ferreting out the information. Whether there’s a lot of information or a little, it’s generally available to anyone who can muster a bit of dogged persistence when it comes to going through raw materials — whether those are online sources or old-fashioned letters and diaries in a box in the attic.

            Figuring out what to make of it and how to use it is the rub, and that’s where family histories can turn unreadable.

In my case one storytelling challenge was that the family patriarch figured out a way to develop a lucrative market for apples in Asia during the 1930s. The details of how he did it eluded me; he never recorded the story, and whatever part of that story his daughters knew died with them.

            There was, however, a considerable body of work about developing markets for California fruit in Asia at the time. One 1930s article on the subject, which I encountered in an archive ran about as long as my entire book. How does something like that get worked into the story in a compelling fashion? (I used the gist of it and a piquant quote.)

The Great Unraveling

            It occurred to me at some point along the way that researching a book like this is a bit like picking up scraps of yarn here and there. At the end of the research process (and it ends when you decide it does, because in theory it could go on forever) you have a ball of yarn 20-feet in diameter.

            The writing process is about turning that enormous ball of yarn into a beautiful Christmas sweater with a reindeer pattern. In order to do that, you have to remember all the individual bits of yarn that went into the ball and spend a great deal of time and effort unraveling it in search of the bits you can use.

            Most of the yarn you’ve amassed never goes into the sweater, and some really nice material inevitably gets left behind. Part of writing involves being ruthless about leaving out good material that doesn’t fit your pattern. I seem to have a mind that’s naturally inclined to do that sort of thing, but I have no idea at all how I would go about trying to teach someone else to do it. All I know is that my way seems to work for me, and in a couple of months, we’ll find out if it works for the readers of the book as well.

The Limits of Realism

            Watching an episode of Elementary recently, I perked up when it got to a scene where the detectives were visiting a witness who had just emerged from a coma after being shot by a multiple killer. Sherlock Holmes had already deduced the identity of the killer and the detective in the hospital room whipped out a photo of the perp and held it up, at which the guy in the hospital bed pointed to it and said “Yeah …”

            So not right.

            Also not so big a deal.

            It wasn’t right because any competent defense attorney could have raised questions about the identification; the victim was essentially asked a leading question of the type not allowed in court. That’s one of the reasons most modern police departments seeking an ID from a photo give the witness a half-dozen pictures of potential perps to choose from. That way the identification does a lot better if the case ever comes to trial.

When a Mistake Doesn’t Hurt Too Much

            On the other hand, the scene occurred in the context of a show in which the basic premise is that the New York City Police Department is using Sherlock Holmes and his associate, Dr. Joan Watson, as consultants on major crimes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s a certain amount of reality avoidance in the show to start with.

            From that perspective, a violation of police procedure for the purpose of wrapping up the story within an hour is at most a minor infraction. Had the scene occurred in a drama that prided itself on being grittily realistic about the details of police work, it would have been a howler.

            Similarly, in the novels of Golden Age writers like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Josephine Tey, a mistake about the effects of arsenic on the spleen is not a deal-breaker, provided, of course, that the solution to the mystery doesn’t revolve around the reader catching the mistake. Those authors were more concerned with the motives of the suspects, and having one of the suspects behave out of character would be far more serious in their books than getting a scientific detail wrong.

Yielding to the Story

            Nobody who writes a book wants a glaring and laughable mistake in it, and a certain due diligence in that regard is important for all authors. But there are ways of dealing with it other than rigorous research. For example, Catriona McPherson, author of the Dandy Gilver mysteries, said in a newspaper interview that one of the reasons she did a series set in the 1920s was so she wouldn’t have to waste a lot of time learning forensic stuff and writing it into the books. Like Christie, Tey, et. al, she wanted to focus on the characters and situation.

            In the course of doing the final revision for my first mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, I had to make a call in that regard. Re-reading the book, I realized that at one point I had the local sheriff doing something the FBI chief on the scene would surely have done himself. The scene was unrealistic in the same way as the one-photo lineup in Elementary.

            On the other hand, the story was at that point barreling toward its climax, and introducing and developing a new character at that point would have sapped its narrative drive. So, reality be damned, I let the sheriff go ahead and do the FBI chief’s job. When you’re writing fiction, there are times you can’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.

The Town Where Nobody Dies

            I was looking through the obituary section of the local newspaper the other day (something I do with increasing regularity, checking to see how many of the players are younger than I am) when I realized something jarring.

            Out of the seven or eight people in that day’s report, nobody died.

            Most of them “passed away” or “passed on,” euphemisms from which my first managing editor quickly weaned me. One of the departed, if memory serves, came to rest in the arms of God, Jesus, or both, to which the same managing editor would have asked, “Who’s your source and how do they know?” There is no good answer to that question.

            But that experience with the local obituaries got me to thinking about my years as an obituary writer for the paper (a job I actually perversely enjoyed) and the way in which the rendering of obituaries has changed over the years. Not for the better, I might add.

When the Family Calls the Shots

            The biggest change in the past couple of decades has been the shift from obituaries being news stories, with all that entails, to being paid notices written and inserted in the paper by families and friends. That, in itself, tends to greatly reduce the amount of interesting information in any given story, such as that the deceased was shot to death by a jealous husband.

            It’s all part of a general trend toward outsourcing, which is something small-town newspapers have been doing too much of lately. Instead of having a paid reporter write a factual obituary, the paper now charges families by the column-inch for putting in their own stories, thereby converting an ongoing expense into a revenue stream. In today’s business climate, I suppose few newspapers (or many other businesses, for that matter) can ignore that sort of financial imperative.

            One problem (out of many) with this approach is that after a while, the handful of remaining reporters and editors at the newspaper stop thinking of deaths in the community as news, unless there’s a police report involved. In the past year there have been several instances of people dying who were active in the community and in the news back in their prime. Yet their deaths merited no news story, just the paid obituary. I shake my head.

Stick to the Known Facts

            In my obituary-writing days there were other rules we had to follow. If the deceased was relatively young (under 60 back in the 1970s), we were supposed to try to ascertain a cause of death, especially if the demise was sudden. That’s something you don’t see too often any more, unless the family wants to make a point of the departed’s “heroic” battle with cancer or some other disease that’s respectable enough to print.

            We also weren’t allowed to editorialize. The first time I wrote in an obituary that someone was a “loving” husband and father, the managing editor deleted “loving” with a vicious stroke of his pencil. (This was before computers.) “How do we know he was loving?” he asked. “For all we know, he was a miserable bastard who beat his kids and drove his wife to drink.”

            The old obituary style was about strict accuracy and a forsaking of wishful sentimentality. When my time comes (not for a while, I hope), the obituary, if I have any vote in the matter, will say that I died, not passed away. I’m also hoping it says I was 90 years old, was shot to death by a jealous husband, and that a 27-year-old suspect is in custody.

           

Finding Two Great Bookstores

            One of the pleasures of traveling is coming across a lovely little local bookstore where you’re staying. I have fond memories of several such places, some still around and some not.

            In the latter category, I’d put the Pink Cadillac bookstore in Chester, CA by Lake Almanor in the mountains northeast of San Francisco and Sacramento. That one’s been gone for some time now (the town’s probably not a big enough market to support it), but I stopped there in the late 1980s and bought a couple of used mysteries. When a nasty, afternoon-long thunderstorm confined me to my motel room, I was glad I had them with me, even though I can’t remember the name of the book I read that day.

            Still with us is the Gallery Bookstore in Mendocino, where I go to recharge my batteries for a few days every couple of years. The Gallery sells mostly new books, and I always make a point of browsing the store and buying a couple of titles when I’m up there.

The Outdoor Bookstore

            On a recent visit to the Santa Barbara-Ojai area in Southern California, I made the acquaintance of two locally owned bookstores. The first was Chaucer’s, which is located in an unprepossessing strip mall on State Street in Santa Barbara. It’s primarily a store that sells new books, and it fits a lot of them into a space not all that large.

            I can’t recall ever seeing a bookstore so densely packed with books as Chaucer’s. The aisles were tight, the shelves were high, and the available space was stuffed to the gills with books shelved sideways and up and down. They had a terrific selection of contemporary mystery authors who are in print but not always readily available because they don’t necessarily appeal to the airport crowd. I scored several books there, including three Dalziel/Pascoe mysteries by the late Reginald Hill.

            Even more interesting was Bart’s Books in Ojai, which bills itself as the largest outdoor bookstore in the world. It doesn’t rain too much in Ojai, so it was possible to build the bookstore around a large, open-air courtyard, with overhangs protecting the inventory from the stray shower.

Phoebe and Father Knox

            Rain was not an issue the day I was there. The high temperature that day was almost 100F, and by 10:30 in the morning, it was pretty oppressive in the store. The books at Bart’s are nearly all used, and the fiction section alone is probably as big as a lot of community bookstores. (Mysteries were included in the fiction section, so searching was a bit of a slog. I checked to see if anyone had turned in a copy of my book, The McHenry Inheritance, but no such luck.)

            This is a place where a patient search of the shelves can turn up books you never heard of or despaired of finding. I was able to come away with several older, out-of-print books by authors in the classical era of the mystery (or closer to it than today).

            Included in the haul, in order of publication, were Emile Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq (1869), one of the first detective novels and an inspiration for Sherlock  Holmes; The Footsteps at the Lock, a 1928 classic by Father Ronald A. Knox, a contemporary and friend of Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, et. al; Beginning With a Bash (1937), a New England mystery by Phoebe Atwood Taylor, writing as Alice Tilton; and Coffin Scarcely Used, a 1958 British mystery by Colin Watson, a master of mordant humor.

            A good day’s shopping, and now, with winter on the way, I have some treats set aside for those long, cold nights.

Good Advice if You Can Use It

            In a recent email exchange with another mystery author, she brought up the late Elmore Leonard’s dictum, quoted in many of his obituaries, that a big part of the revision process on a manuscript consists of getting rid of the stuff the readers will skip over.

            That’s a fairly old line, with a lot of variations. For instance, Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous Theater Company, once did a production of the complete plays of Shakespeare in two and a half hours. Asked how he could possibly condense all those plays into a length of time generally taken up by one (if abridged a bit), he replied, “Easy. I just left out all the boring stuff.”

            And there’s the rub. If someone could argue that the greatest writer ever was boring nearly 98 percent of the time, what hope is there for the rest of us? Not much. And it comes down to the question of how does the author figure out when something is boring. I mean, you wouldn’t have written it in the first place if you thought so, and a line like Leonard’s isn’t much help when the devil is in the details.

To Fish or Not to Fish?

            In my mystery novel The McHenry Inheritance, the protagonist is on a fly-fishing vacation in the High Sierra when he gets caught up in a web of local intrigue, culminating in murder.  Because of his reason for being there, I put in a couple of detailed fly-fishing scenes, describing the scenery and the technique in some detail.

            Is that the boring stuff that readers will skip over? I’ve heard from some who did, but nonetheless said they enjoyed the rest of the story. I’ve also heard from a number of people who don’t fish but said they really liked the descriptions of place and enjoyed learning more about fly-fishing, which was more complex than they had imagined it to be.

            So help me out here, Elmore. Who do I listen to?

            Actually, the decision has been made. I’m halfway through the second book with the same protagonist, and since the running story line is that he goes on a fishing vacation and ends up in the middle of a mystery, I’m including the fishing scenes, a few pages’ worth anyway. If the reader wanders, so be it.

Just Tell the Damn Story

            This calls to mind something one of my mentors at the newspaper, Bud O’Brien, used to say.  Every young reporter would inevitably get carried away with some story and try to overwrite it and be too clever for his or her own good. When Bud was on the city desk, those efforts would get bounced back to the reporter with the following advice:

            “You have a pretty good story here. When you have a good story, don’t try to be clever; don’t try to be cute. Just tell the damn story.”

            Excellent advice as far as it goes, but again, the problem is how does one “just” tell the story? It’s a question of knowing the structure and having a sense for when and where to bring in the piquant details. Not to mention knowing what those details are and being able to separate them from the details that don’t matter and should be left out. That’s the problem with writing and the reason so many people fail at it. Anybody can get the general idea, but figuring out how to make it work one sentence at a time is a bitch.

           

Ojai Revisited

            One of the things my father liked to do when I was growing up was to take us out for a Sunday drive. We’d leave our home in Glendale (or, earlier, Altadena) after breakfast and spend the better part of the day on the road, typically heading up north and getting into the countryside.

            In the 1930s my father had driven a gasoline tanker truck, bringing fuel to Shell Oil stations between Ventura and Paso Robles. A lot of the places we visited on these drives were places he used to cover in his fueling routes. It now occurs to me that he was revisiting scenes from his past and trying to get a sense of how things had changed.

            The rest of us were along for lunch. If we were around Ventura at lunchtime, it would often be at a coffee shop called Loop’s. Again, I’m guessing, but it was probably a regular stop for him back in the day.

The Road to Ojai

            If we were up in Ventura, we might keep going to Ojai (pronounced OH-high). Originally a farming valley with a lot of citrus and avocado trees, it became, early in the 20^th Century, an artists’ colony and vacation getaway for people from Los Angeles. In fact, the first vacation we took as a family was to a place in Meiners Oaks, which is just up the road from Ojai, and we went there on a couple of weekend getaways as well.

            It’s probably been 45 years since I was last in Ojai, but this week Linda and I are there for a short vacation. After a foggy summer along the Santa Cruz coast, we wanted a spell of dry heat, and we’re getting what we bargained for. As I write this, it’s 97 degrees outside.

            We’re staying at the Ojai Retreat, which is on a hilltop just outside of town. Looking out the window of our room, we can see the Ojai Valley below us, and next to the building, with the same view, is a patio area that ends at a stone fence and almost sheer dropoff. We are very quickly getting very relaxed.

Not How I Remember It

            Given how long ago the last visit was, my memories of Ojai are more than a bit sketchy. I had definitely forgotten how high and steep the surrounding mountains are. The town itself is fairly nice, in a Carmel-touristy sort of way, and the powers that be seem to have done a reasonably good job of keeping sprawl and cookie-cutter development from getting too out of hand. Judging from the signs by some of the open areas, there is an active land conservancy at work.

            And already, I’ve had one case of sudden recall. Yesterday, when we were going for an afternoon drive around the area, we took State Route 150 east out of town and over a hill to the next valley, then the one beyond that. Something about it seemed familiar, then a memory came back.

            It was a Sunday in October or November in the early to mid 1960s that we were driving on that same road in the middle of the afternoon, with the car radio tuned to KMPC Los Angeles, where Bob Kelly was calling the Los Angeles Rams football game. I’m sure of it. My mother and sister were no doubt not as enthralled by the football game as Dad and I were, but they raised no objection. And however boring the game may have been for them, they at least had some pretty scenery to look at.

Preserving the Family History

            One of the things I’ve been doing over the past year, when not writing a mystery novel, is a family history, which is now getting close to publication. The family in question died out a decade ago, but left behind a charitable foundation that gives millions of dollars a year to local nonprofits.

            It was the administrator of that foundation who decided a family history would be a good idea and brought me in to do it. He sensed, correctly, that time was running out to talk to people who still remember the family members, and that the story might be lost if it wasn’t captured now.

            Running down that story (or as much of it as possible) has been one of the most interesting and challenging things I’ve ever done. I find myself in the position of trying to bring to life, for a modern reader, a group of people I’ve never met, and of making their story interesting. The latter isn’t too hard because they accomplished quite a bit; for instance, one of the daughters was the first female district attorney in California when appointed to that position in 1947.

Chasing Ghosts

            The finished product resembles an unfinished jigsaw puzzle that conveys a definite image, yet one with a number of pieces missing. Some of the people I wanted to interview turned me down. Some that I did talk to died after talking with me (I’m not implying a connection here), and at times I’ve felt as if I’m chasing ghosts, one step ahead of the undertaker.

            One of the things that made the task difficult is that the family in question wrote down almost nothing. If they kept diaries or journals, none has survived. Correspondence is similarly sparse. The two daughters wrote letters to each other regularly when they were off to college, but the collection the Foundation has is surely only partial. With the exception of the daughter who was district attorney (and even she, not so much) they weren’t often in the newspapers.

            One of the daughters did do an oral history interview with the University of California in 1977, and that was helpful, if far from complete. By and large, putting together this story has been like building a beach one grain of sand at a time.

A Date Would Have Meant So Much

            There are several photo albums, one of which has handwritten captions. But on a couple of the really critical photos, there is no date and the caption information is sparse at best. One, for instance, shows a row of people standing stiffly in front of the family packing house. The caption reads: “Ma with Chinese visitors from Honolulu.”

            Based on my research, I can hazard a highly educated guess as to who the visitors were, but it’s still only a guess. Without their names, I can’t be certain. And if the visitors are who I think they are, the date of the photo would have been hugely important, but it’s not in the caption nor in the processing stamp on the back of the print.

            Experiences like that have led me to some philosophizing. Most of us go through our lives thinking we’re the most important person in the universe, but we don’t act like it in other respects. If we were really that important, we’d figure that people in years to come would be looking at our stuff and needing information. I’ve come to believe that everyone who has family artifacts, should pull them together and catalog them as best possible. You never know who might need the information 75 years from now.