The Case of the Foolish Protagonist

 

Since my past few blogs have talked about being selective in what I read, I thought this might be a good time to reprint a post from February 22, 2016 that talks about why I read some cozy mysteries (loosely defined) and not others.

The Case of the Foolish Protagonist

Why do so many female cozy mystery writers insist on demeaning their own sex by creating a protagonist who does rash things that put her in danger? That’s the fastest way to make me abandon the story. Yes, some females are foolish, and so are some males. But don’t glorify that foolishness by making it the preeminent characteristic of a protagonist I’m supposed to admire.

As a teenager, I was an avid mystery fan. I read detective stories like Ellery Queen and Nero Wolfe and police procedurals like the 87^th Precinct books by Ed McBain. And at a time when money was tight in my family, I even had a subscription to the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. But my all-time favorite mystery writer was—and is—Agatha Christie.

I like puzzles, not chases. Whodunits, not thrillers. P.D. James, not John Grisham. And for me, the best mysteries include the characters’ psychology as part of the puzzle.

That’s one of the reasons I like Agatha Christie so much. The solution arises inevitably out of the murderer’s inner character, and sometimes out of the victim’s character as well. Even if I know who did it from the beginning (as I do now that I have read each book several times), I always enjoy that exploration.

But none of the books I enjoy have a protagonist who does stupid things.

Ellery Queen and Nero Wolfe and Hercule Poirot all fall into their mysteries naturally. Because they are professional detectives/private eyes, people bring cases to them. And because they are professionals, they rarely take unnecessary risks. The Miss Marple books start differently. Her involvement in so many murders is an epic coincidence. But once you get beyond that, the rest of the story follows naturally from the situation and the characters.

More importantly for my point, like the detectives mentioned above, Miss Marple doesn’t take unnecessary risks. She listens and silently analyzes the case, comparing the characters involved in the murder to other people she has known, but then she tells her conclusions to the police and lets them take it the rest of the way. She seems such a sweet—although cynical—old lady, that the murderer never realizes she is a danger to him.

Cozies with foolish protagonists may be popular in the short run, but they will never last the way Agatha Christie’s works have.

And I’m glad about that.

Permission to Stop Reading

No, I’m not giving you permission to stop reading altogether. Rather, I’m giving you permission to put an individual book down before you finish it and to never pick it up again.

Growing up, I knew it was okay to be selective about which books I read, but I thought it was a crime to start one and not finish it. I even made it through Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence in a college class on English novels. (Well, maybe putting that one down would have been a crime since it was part of the grade, but I hated every word.)

Then I got to graduate school, where new students in the psychology program were required to take an introductory seminar. The only thing I remember about the seminar is that we were assigned Portney’s Complaint by Philip Roth. Hard as I tried, I could not get through it. Fortunately, the seminar was ungraded, but that was the first time I gave myself permission to leave a novel unfinished.

Even after that, I felt guilty whenever I didn’t complete a book. It got easier after that, however. Now I believe it’s a crime to waste my time on a book that I don’t enjoy unless it’s research or there is some other educational reason for reading it. For example, reading a highly-rated book that I find totally boring may give me insight into how readers think. Or it may not. If it isn’t doing even that, I won’t keep reading.

That’s one of the lessons I’ve learned in life. If a book isn’t worth reading, don’t waste your time on it.

You have my permission to stop.

Free Books are Worth What You Pay for Them

Following up on last week’s blog post, one of the ways I evaluate a Kindle book is by the price, by which I mean that I rarely download a free book. There are exceptions, such as classics that are in the public domain and some Amazon “First Reads” selections, but mostly my experience has been that free books are worth what you pay for them.

I subscribe to a service called BookBub, which notifies me of daily e-book deals. The prices for a Kindle version range from $2.99 to free. It often lists books by authors I am familiar with and enjoy, and I’m happy to pay for them.

On the other hand, the free books are by unfamiliar authors or, once or twice, by authors I have read and vowed never to read again. Sometimes they are even touted as having “over 5000 five-star Goodreads ratings.” I’m convinced that those authors join a network of writers who agree to give five-star ratings to each other’s books without even reading them.

Still, there have been times in the past when I was suckered into “buying” a free book, such as the one in the photo at the top of this page. After all, what did I have to lose? A lot, as it turns out.

I’m a busy woman who already has a long reading list. Any time spent on a bad book is time I can’t spend on a good one. And although I’m much better than I used to be, something in me still balks at putting a book down before I’ve finished it. (That’s the subject of next week’s blog post.) So I don’t usually buy free books.

As I said, there are exceptions. Classics that are in the public domain are often turned into e-books as a public service, so you can find novels by Charles Dickens and Jane Austin for free. Some of versions are better than others (e.g., fewer transcription errors), but the content is there.

The other exception is Amazon First Reads. This is a benefit available to Prime members that provides early access to books that will be released to the public the following month. Members who have signed up for the benefit usually get one free book out of about eight choices each month, although occasionally Amazon ups it to two free books. There are some months where none of the books sounds interesting, so I don’t take any. If something does sound interesting, I wait until a number of people have read it and posted reviews, and I decide then. Sometimes I download a book, start reading it, and decide it wasn’t worth the price, but many of them are. And at least I know that a traditional publisher has vetted it.

Most of the time, however, a free book is worth what you pay for it.

 

Choosing a Good Read

 

I read approximately ten books a month for fun, which does not include the ones I read to research my own books. Granted, those ten books include some middle-grade novels that aren’t as long as adult novels, but it’s still quite a bit. The problem, though, isn’t that I read so many but that I can’t read more. Even though I’m choosy about what goes on my “to read” list, it never seems to shrink and sometimes grows. So how do I ensure that the books on the list are worth the time?

Mostly I take advantage of two tools offered by Amazon and other book sellers: the “look inside” feature and customer reviews.

I generally start with the “look inside” feature to get a feel for the author’s writing style and word use. Sometimes that’s enough to tell me that I don’t want the book on my reading list. For example, if the author consistently uses bad language or throws the heroine into bed in the first few pages, then I know it’s not for me. But my experience has been that many authors wait until they think they have you hooked before they go there, so if I’m still interested after reading those first pages, I put most of my reliance on the reviews.

Reading tastes differ, and I don’t usually find the more glowing reviews to be helpful for books. So although I look at the overall rating (4.1 in the example above), I go straight to the one-or-two star reviews. Among those, I discount the ones that show a general dislike for the author’s style since, as I said, reading tastes differ. Instead I look to see if any of the reviews point out excessive swearing or explicit sex or—perhaps worst of all—bad research. Those reviews tell me that the book would be a waste of my time.

Unfortunately, there are still times when I start reading a book only to discover that it was a mistake, but the “look inside” feature and the customer reviews weed out most of the bad ones.

And I’m grateful for that.

Don't Get Scammed

 

In Bible class last week we were talking about how Satan operates by telling subtle lies. Not outrageous ones, but “little” lies that counterfeit the truth so closely that many people are deceived.

Scams work that way, too. I’m not sure how well the Nigerian prince’s plea succeeded in the beginning, but few people fall for it now. What we do fall for are the scams that use the logo and email letterhead of a real bank to tell you that you are overdrawn or of a real credit card company to say a payment has been declined.

Or the new one that I almost fell for. I typed in my bank’s web address on my computer and tried to sign in, only to receive a notice that my account had been compromised. The notice included a telephone number to call so that they could remedy the situation. Since the web address I had entered was real, I was fooled into calling the number. The person who answered asked for permission to log on to my computer remotely so that he could check for other breaches and fix them. I continued to act like a fool and gave him permission, and he showed me the many “breaches” that had occurred on various popular sites, such as Amazon, where I have accounts. An hour or two later, I was getting both impatient and suspicious, so I shut down my computer and didn’t answer the phone when he tried calling me back. Fortunately, I figured it out before any damage had occurred, but I later saw a notice from a government agency warning people about this fraud.

Poker players talk about “tells” that give clues to someone’s hand. One player’s right eye might twitch whenever she has good cards, while another player may unconsciously scratch behind his left ear while bluffing. There are usually “tells” in scams, too.

If you go into those emails that appear to be from your bank and hover your cursor over the “From” address, it will tell you who the real sender is. Most of the time, anyway, since I can’t guarantee that no scammer can figure his or her way around that. But hovering your cursor there tends to give the scheme away.

Or, in the scam I almost fell for, after I shut the computer down I went into the bank’s app on my cell phone and got in fine, with no warnings that anyone had broken in. So even though I had already figured out that something was wrong, that confirmed it.

Satan’s lies have their own “tells.” If something leaves you wondering, check it against the Bible. And not against a single verse, such as Mark 11:24, but against the Bible as a whole. The prosperity gospel claims that God rewards faithful believers with health, wealth, and overall well-being in this life, which is directly contrary to what Paul suffered for Christ (see 1 Corinthians 4:11-13 and 2 Corinthians 11:24-30) and to verses such as Matthew 16:24-26 and John 15:20. Following Christ does bring great rewards, but they are promised for the next life, not for this one. (See Matthew 5:12 and John 14:1-3.)

So look for those “tells” and don’t get scammed.

Doesn't Count

 

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of commercials from a company called “Trust & Wills.” A couple are talking about who will be guardian for their children, or a man tells his wife that he wants part of his money to go to a wildlife charity, and suddenly a man pops up and says, “Doesn’t count.” The point of the commercial is that the only way to guarantee that your wishes will be carried out is to have a will.

That’s true, but it’s also over-simplified. Roland and I have had wills for years and paid for our funerals and our final resting place a long time ago. (The photo at the head of this post shows the columbarium where our ashes will go.) We had also put together written funeral instructions and slide shows for our visitations.

But that isn’t enough. A complete estate plan doesn’t just cover the period after death—it also comes into play before then. What neither of us had were a living will, an advance health care directive, and (most importantly from my point of view) a durable power of attorney. We’ve been talking about completing those documents for a long time but just never got around to it.

Until now. I won’t go into the circumstances that prompted us to get it done, but we contacted an attorney and completed our estate plan, updating our wills at the same time. I’m particularly relieved to have the durable power of attorney, which authorizes somebody else (initially each other, and then our children) to make financial decisions while we are still alive. That way, if either of us gets Alzheimer's disease or is otherwise unable to make sound decisions, we won’t have to ask a judge to appoint a guardian.

An online service such as “Trust & Wills” may be adequate if you want something simple, and it is certainly better than not having a will at all. But my wishes are more complicated, and it takes a live human being licensed to practice law in the jurisdiction where I live to understand them. Even the lawyer we hired had a little trouble following my requirements, especially since I rethought some of them during our initial conversation.

The bottom line, though, is that waiting to put an estate plan together is a bad idea. You may think you have all the time in the world, and then you have an unexpected stroke or are killed in a car accident. Too many things in life are unpredictable.

I’m feeling much better now, and you will too if you get your estate plan in order.

Friend or Foe? Technology and Historical Research

 

Is technology a friend or foe of historical research? It depends on the use to which it is put and how well it retains information for future generations.

Some of my best historical research comes from letters, diaries, and journals. I’m very concerned that they are being replaced with electronic documents that may not have the same permanence.

Let’s start with the telephone.

Before the telephone and afterwards while long-distance calls were still expensive, most people used letters to communicate with those who were far away. Although letters are often lost or destroyed, some remain and are valuable historical resources. Consider, for example, the letters between James Madison and Thomas Jefferson while Madison was drafting the Bill of Rights. Jefferson was in Paris at the time, but we know his thoughts because he put them on paper and sent them to Madison. Unless they are specifically recorded, telephone conversations don’t have that same permanence.

On the other hand, the telephone does has some advantages for historical research. Interviews can be conducted over the telephone so the researcher does not have to spend time and money on travel, making it possible to conduct interviews that might not be feasible otherwise. Furthermore, the interviewer gains additional knowledge about the interviewee’s thoughts and feelings from hearing the person’s inflection during the call. With ZOOM and similar services, even more information can be obtained by watching the interviewee’s facial features, nervous hand gestures, and so on.

Then there is photography. In the days of film cameras, the only way to see your pictures was to develop them. That increased the chances that the negatives and the prints would be retained as historical records. Think of the photographs taken by Dorothea Lange and her colleagues to record the Japanese-American experience in the internment camps during World War II, as shown by the second image above. With the advent of digital cameras, there is no need to create a permanent copy of a photo unless you want to hang it on your wall. And if you take the photo on a cell phone, you don’t even need a hard copy to share with friends and family.

On the other hand, digital cameras do have their advantages. Every image on a film camera costs money to develop and print, so my father rarely took more than one shot per subject on his 35 mm slide camera. Since he couldn’t see the images in advance, he missed some good pictures because he didn’t realize the one he took hadn’t come out. With digital cameras, you can not only see a low-grade copy of the image immediately but you can take dozens of shots of the same subject, increasing the likelihood that you'll get a good one.

Word processing programs also have their pros and cons. In this case I’ll start with the pros, which I believe far outweigh the cons. I remember the days when I had to type on a typewriter. Correcting errors was miserable because I had to erase them and type the correction in the same spot as the original. If there were significant changes, it was a matter of retyping the entire page, which was a disincentive to rewrites. (I won’t even get into the misery of using carbon paper.) Now, with word processing programs, changes are easy and my manuscripts go through several drafts.

The con for word processing is that it’s too easy to rely on it to preserve your work. Unfortunately, systems crash, or human error can erase an entire document. That’s why I back my work up with a print copy and one on a thumb drive. Of course, it’s possible to lose paper manuscripts, too. Hemmingway tells of the time his wife put both the original and the carbon of most of his unpublished manuscripts in her suitcase to take on vacation. She thought she was doing him a favor, but when her suitcase was stolen (and never recovered), those manuscripts went with it. (The story is from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.)

The final piece of technology is the web. Many people replaced letters with email, although those are becoming outdated, too. People used to write diaries and journals in blank books, and many of those have survived to increase our knowledge of history. Now they have been replaced by blogs. Obviously, there are ways to retain both emails and blogs for perpetuity, and I’m thankful for the ones that have been archived. Still, many of them seem to eventually disappear into the ether.

Again, however, the pros are significant. Many historical documents have been scanned and are available on the internet. This means that a researcher does not have to travel to a distant library (which may be cost prohibitive) but can read them in the comfort of his or her home. There are still some documents that can only be read in a brick-and-mortar facility, such as when I spent several days at the Concordia Historical Institute in St. Louis while researching a story about a German-Lutheran girl living in Illinois during World War I. I enjoy that kind of research, but it isn’t always practical. So it’s nice to be able to find historical documents online.

Still, it will be a loss to researchers from subsequent centuries if we don’t leave enough permanent records for them to discover more than dry facts about our lives in this one.

Bottom line? Technology is both friend and foe of historical research.

I’ll leave it to you to decide how it balances out.

__________

The first image at the top of this page is a Frank T. Merrill illustration for the 1896 edition of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It is in the public domain because of its age.

The second image shows a mess line at Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California. It was taken by Dorothea Lange on June 16, 1942 as part of her official duties as an employee of the United States government. Because it is a government document, the photo is in the public domain.