Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe and Claire Trevor as Mrs. Helen Grayle (Velma Valento) in “Murder, My Sweet” (1944)

I never liked Halloween. I think it’s because my childhood was one long Halloween night. However, I did love being a witch. When playing games of pretend I was glad to play the part of the “bad” person. The villain. I instinctively knew where the power lay.

This was made clear to me last week when a newscaster, trolling in a costume store, was interviewing children about what they wanted to be for Halloween. They all gave the usual answers from princess to Spiderman. But one little boy said, “ A monster!” And he meant it. The newscaster, taken aback by his vehemence, asked in that cloying adult voice of a woman who has never raised a child, “Why do you want to be a monster?” The little boy said, “Because it’s my turn to scare the adults.” “Why do want to scare the adults?” “Because they get to scare me all year long.”

To not be scared is to be in control, to not be dominated. So one night of the year this little boy will feel what that is like. Only a child can turn a scary monster into a positive, at least for one night. So can the mystery writer.

We depend on monsters. They propel our stories. We’d be out of business without them. If not for the villains, our protagonist would have nothing to fight, to fear, to triumph over. Like all evil doers they come in various shapes, sizes, and sex. And we have an ambivalent admiration for many of them.

I would rather watch Richard the Third connive, deceive, and kill than wait for Hamlet to make up his mind while he bumbles around the castle creating havoc. When Richard screams, “My kingdom for a horse!”, I’ve always longed for a stray steed to lope by so he could leap on it, and ride away to deceive for another day.

Greta Garbo was in the selected audience for the screening of Jean Cocteau’s film, The Beauty and The Beast. After the beast turned into the prince and the movie ended, it is said that Garbo’s low sultry voice could be heard in the still dark room moaning, “I vant my beast back.” The raging dangerous beast was more seductive than the perfect prince.

Richard had a hump and the prince was imprisoned in his furry animal body. But these qualities, some might say infirmities, makes them more human and more threatening. I think Richard M. Nixon had an invisible hump.

One of my favorite villains is Veda Pierce in the novel, Mildred Pierce. I must apologize because I read it many years ago and I’m afraid the movie (a must see) and the book have merged in my mind. Mildred has two daughters. The good one dies, the evil one lives. Veda is as conniving as Richard the Third. In the movie she kills, in the book she doesn’t. Her ruthlessness is captivating; a young woman without a conscience. In the novel she goes on to live her cruel life, in the movie she is arrested. Veda is completely free of principle and shame. She’s the monster we might want to be for one Halloween night.

Another villain is Waldo Lydecker in Vera Caspary’s novel, Laura. Again the book and movie blur. I remember him as a fat obsessive lurking antique dealer in the book. It is the villain acted by Clifton Webb in the film that I think is the best. He is urbane, loathingly honest, and brilliant in his brutal wit. A man who prides himself on the best and the perfect, except he makes one very human mistake and falls in love. Wanting to obliterate his love object, and with her all his human emotions, he kills the wrong woman. Another controlling monster disguised as a seductive charmer.

As villains go I find Gutman more interesting than “Miss Wonderly” in The Maltese Falcon. She’s clever in an instinctive ruthless way, but he is sophisticated and knowledgeable. I’m a pushover for a villain who is philosophical about what he has to do to get what he wants.

Hannibal Lecter is one of the best villains ever. He has all the characteristics I’ve already mentioned and more. He is King Richard The Third on steroids. It is also his relationship with the protagonist Clarice Starling that gives him a human dimension. Without these two beautifully drawn characters The Silence of the Lambs would just be another good serial killer novel. And I never would have read it.

The villains in Chandler’s work don’t stand out to me in any grand way, except for Moose and Velma in Farewell, My Lovely. Moose is the exact opposite of the brilliant witty villains. He is an animal. He only knows how to get what he wants by being a brute; yet in that enormous frame is a heart and it yearns for Velma. He has to find her. Again, love for a woman is his downfall. Moose is a poignant thug. Velma is the epitome of the villainous woman of Chandler’s time. “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”

Velma is running from her past and is struggling to keep her position as a wealthy man’s wife. Even in Los Angeles you can’t change who you are completely. There is always somebody to search you out. Together Velma and Moose make one fascinating villain.

There are so many good evil characters I could on and on, and I’m sure you all have your favorites.

If you’re a new struggling writer having trouble with your plot take a good hard look at your villain. See what he wants (villains are very goal- directed), figure out why he wants it, and how he can get it. Your plot will begin to gel. Remember, the villain moves the story.

On this Christmas Day I would like to share a spiritual moment I experienced recently, even though I am not a spiritual person. Funny how many non-spiritual people have spiritual moments, isn’t it?

My friend, Lenore, and I recently drove to Amherst, Massachusetts to visit Emily Dickinson’s house. The great poet lived in an unpretentious brick home that was painted a deep yellow and decorated with green shutters. Trudging through drifts of snow we made our way to the entrance. The door was locked. We began to knock but no one answered. Then I read a sign that said: We are closed after Dec. 6th. I tapped Lenore on the shoulder who was now banging on the door with her fists.

“They’re closed after Dec. 6th.”

She turned to face me. “Well, what’s the date today?”

“I don’t know, but it’s not Dec. 6th.” I was on vacation. Dates, days and time had left my head. “We can’t get in.” I blinked snowflakes from my eyes.

Lenore’s dark hair was covered in a white cap of snow. She espied a lone car in the driveway. “There’s someone in this house. We’ll get in.”

To tell Lenore she can’t do something or have something is like igniting a brush fire. This is woman who bought and sold with the sharks on Wall Street. She has more mink coats than minks do. Now she is retired and one mink coat has been made into a throw for her sofa. And she does what she calls “the Lord’s laundry.” She washes and irons the Corporal, the Purificator, and other altar linens for her local Catholic church. Which she has also redecorated. But her fierceness and doggedness have never taken a day off.

“You must see where Emily wrote, Melodie. You have to see her desk.” She gave the door a few more loud bangs and then shook the door knob. Silence. We tromped around to another entrance and started banging on this new found door. I began to imagine the reclusive Emily Dickinson hiding in her bedroom. Trembling against our loud rapping.

“Lenore, I think we should go.” All ready Emily was slowly coming alive to me. I didn’t want to frighten her.

“You’re going to see this, Melodie.” Lenore was undaunted.

Suddenly the door opened. Startled, we both leapt back. A young woman with a lovely sweet face peered out us. I looked contrite. Before the woman could tell us the obvious — that they are closed for the winter — Lenore began her sales pitch.

“I was here in the spring. And the minute I saw Emily Dickinson’s bedroom I knew my friend had to see it too.”

“I’m sorry but … ”

“She’s a writer.”

I tried to look like a writer.

“I can’t let…”

“It will mean so much to her. You know, an homage.”

“ . . . let you in . . . ”

“She’s come all the way from California to see where Emily Dickinson wrote.”

I tried to look as if I’d walked from Santa Barbara to Vermont.

“That’s how much it means to her. You know how difficult it is to fly these days.”

She smiled at us. “I’ll have to get permission. If you could come back in an hour. I’ll let you know if it’s okay or not.”

In exactly one hour we were inside the house. It was cold and eerily quite. The floor boards creaked as we made our way up the stairs to the top landing. And there in a glass case was the white dress that the very petite Emily often wore. On a cold winter day it looked as fresh as a linen sheet drying in a summer sun. On her long skirt she had sewn a big patch pocket. It was in this pocket that she stuffed her pieces of paper with her ideas jotted on them. The young woman led us into Emily’s bedroom. The three of us treaded softly as if she might be asleep on her narrow Spartan bed. As if we might wake her. A fireplace, long unused, was opposite the bed. And there it was. Under a large sash window was a small unvarnished straight legged table about the size of a bed stand. A plain wooden chair sat in front of it. Emily’s writing desk. It was surprising in its simplicity. There were no drawers, no locked secret places to hide her poems. I thought of the pocket on her dress. I placed my hand on the table and stared out the window over the snowy gardens to her brother’s house. A house where life was lived. This was her view. The table though sturdy, even puritanical, had a softness to the wood as if it might yield under the pressure of a pen.

“How could she create all those poems and not go anywhere?” Lenore asked.

The young woman shrugged. “We don’t have an answer for that.”

But I knew Emily Dickinson was transported through her fears, her longings, her denied love, by a single passion for putting a word to an image, to a feeling. She could travel anywhere on that passion.

    I dreaded that first Robin so,
    But he is mastered now,
    And I’m accustomed to him grown, –
    He hurts, a little though.

(from IN SHADOW)

Next to her bed on a stand was a basket. In it were copies of quickly scrawled lines of poetry she had written on the back of butcher paper or whatever was close at hand. I tried to imagine the room with her alive, with a fire going, with the voices of people drifting up to her from downstairs. I could feel her creative energy on that cold gray day. I could feel how strong it was, stronger than her isolation, stronger than her life. I could feel her inside of me. I smiled at Lenore. She smiled back.

    I lost a world the other day.
    Has anybody found it?
    You’ll know it by the row of stars
    Around its forehead bound.
    A rich man might not notice it;
    Yet to my frugal eye
    Of more esteem than ducats.
    Oh, find it Sir, for me!

And now on this Christmas day I’m going to do something that can only be called chutzpah, especially after just quoting Emily Dickinson’s poem LOST. I’m going to let you read my one and only poem. I wrote it in 1972 and it has all the youthfulness of a Christmas wish.

    Jingle the bells on your red dancing slippers
    Swirl yourself in tinsel
    Hang Christmas balls in your hair
    And bright shining stars in your eyes.
    Place angels on your shoulders
    And lay golden gifts at your feet.
    Then reach out
    Catch the falling soft-white bird.
    Tuck his broken wing to your candle-glow breast
    And whisper hope.
    For you are Christmas.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Last Sunday I was walking with my friend Kathleen Sharp, a nonfiction writer. She said if I could pick any dead writer to discuss my work with, or use as a sounding board, who would it be? I immediately asked if I could have two writers, and knowing my proclivity for always wanting more, she agreed. I tried not to think too long about my answer; otherwise I would never have picked one let alone the two I had asked for. There are a lot of dead writers who are in one way or another great.

But there are some I wouldn’t want to discuss my work with. Hemingway, for instance. He’d leer while tearing it apart. Though I would like to spend a drunken evening with him. And Fitzgerald? I think we’d end up talking about him and it would turn into tearful self pity. I considered Nabokov because I am a fan and he wrote a wonderful series on the great novels: Lectures on Literature and Lectures on Russian Literature. I highly recommend these two books. But Nabokov pinned butterflies to boards and I wasn’t sure if he’d do the same to me.

I finally answered, Raymond Chandler and Jane Austen. Kathleen looked surprised. She could understand Chandler, but Austen? Actually I could understand Austen better that Chandler. But once I said both names out loud I knew I had made the right decision.

Jane Austen has a sly wit and is a writer of manners. I am egotistical enough to identity with her. I think of myself as a mystery writer of manners in a society without manners.

I imagine Jane and me sitting in a tea shop looking out a fogged window at Bath Street and the curved sweep of white stone buildings. We are in her time. She points out a handsome slightly pompous looking man and whispers, “Mr. Darcy”. Then she leans across the table, her plain face bright with intensity, and says, “Mrs. Ann Radcliffe is much more successful that I, wouldn’t you rather talk to her?” And I inform her that nobody remembers Mrs. Radcliffe, only her Jane Austen. She beams.

But would I dare give her my work to read? And if I did what would she think? Could she understand this ruthless century of mine? A hard glint in her assessing eyes lets me know that cruelty, betrayal and murder are things she knows only to well. She tells me what she once told her sister. “Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick and wicked.” Stirring her tea she adds, quoting from her novel Emma, “There are secrets in all families, you know.”

And, when I ask, what is the best advice she could give me? She relates what she had told her publisher. “I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way.” She looks up from her tea and smiles slightly. “So should you, Melodie.”

And Raymond Chandler? Well, I know we wouldn’t discuss plot unless to joke about how we both hated it and had chosen to write in a genre that demands it. Yes, that would create a bond. As with Jane Austen, I would be in his time.

Chandler and I drive in a roadster past the lounges, bars, up into Beachwood Canyon and down to Central Avenue. In Pasadena we glide down the quiet streets lined with stately homes and the less than stately people who reside in them. Southern California looks new to me again. Without saying a word he has helped me. The past is always present in mysteries.

On Hollywood Boulevard he looks bleakly around and says, “There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.”

I say, “But your works have endured.” He shrugs and asks if I’d like a drink.

We settle in a dark lounge in a red leather booth. He orders gimlets. But Chandler is nervous and wants to get home to his wife. He needs to know what’s on my mind. I down my gimlet and, embarrassed, ask how to keep the poetry in my prose and still sell?

“A long time ago when I was writing for the pulps I put into a story line like, ‘He got out of the car and walked across the sun-drenched sidewalk until the shadow of the awning over the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cool water.’ They took it out when they published the story. Their readers didn’t appreciate this sort of thing—just held up the action. I set out to prove them wrong. My theory was that the readers just thought they cared about nothing but the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, the thing they cared about, and that I cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description. The things they remembered, that haunted them, was not, for example, that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of the desk and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn’t even hear the death knock on his door. That damn paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers.”

I smile and we order more gimlets. He calls his wife. I definitely picked the right writers to help me.

I bought a pair of leopard shoes. I thought at the time that this was either a fashion statement or a cry for help. The shoes sat on a shelf in my closet for weeks, saucily taunting me. Glaring at them one morning as I put on my tennis shoes, I wondered which of my female characters would buy these animal-print-opened-toed wonders. Would they react with the same ambivalence as I had?

Maggie Hill (narrator of my novels) would never purchase them, but she would stare at the shoes longingly, lovingly. She’d wonder about slipping her feet into the shoes and where would they take her? What would be the possibilities? And then she would sadly say good-bye to them.

Diana Poole (narrator of my short stories), a woman of a certain age, would think that buying the shoes was a cry for help, and then wear them defiantly.

I laced up my sneakers and started my morning walk up our hilly road.

I thought about my characters. I pondered writing in the first person, which is what I do. I love short stories written in the first, third, fifth, or sixth person. It doesn’t matter to me as long as they are good and work as a short story. But I only write in the first. When I try to write in the third or the omniscient I feel removed from my work. I lose my sense of pace and actually find myself getting bored. As a woman who has many stories in her head, I know they can’t all be told from the first person. I know that this point of view by its very nature is constricting — you can’t go into other characters heads, and it can narrow the breadth of the story.

I have written a novel both ways. The omniscient point of view is fine, but to me the first person version is the one that has heart. Maybe it’s because I was once an actor who had learned to internalize the writer’s words and then speak them. It’s a process I am comfortable with. But now I am the writer so I had to invert the process. I create narrators that can internalize my words and then speak them.

I guess that’s why I view my short stories as monologues. Yes, they have a plot, character development, and all that good stuff. But for me they are monologues. That is how I tame the structure, conquer the genre and avoid the fear of the empty page. I need to hear a voice talking.

Back to my walk … at the crest of the hill a woman in a Hummer barreled toward me. I flattened myself into a hedge and caught a glimpse of her face as she careened by. It was lifted, but no burden had been removed. She looked tired and angry. Her Santa Barbara-blonde hair was fluffed yet didn’t move. She never saw me pressing deep into the hedge to save my life. I did not exist for her. I wondered what she was afraid of. Why she needed so much protection around her. And did she realize how small and fragile she looked in that tank-like vehicle? Someday she’ll be a character in one of my short stories. But she’ll never be one of my narrators. You have to love your narrator. Otherwise you’re just putting words into a stranger’s mouth. God, I hoped she didn’t have leopard shoes on.

Speaking of which, I finally wore my saucy pair on Mother’s Day.

It’s difficult to do Yoga and plan a murder at the same time.

Along with my three classmates I’m in Tree pose. We are in a light-filed home studio situated on a ridge in Santa Barbara overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the Channel Islands. It is a spectacular view. But the ridge is caving in, and as we try to stay in the now by yoga breathing there are men in hardhats installing enormous steel I-beams into the crumbling hillside.

Our instructor tells us to focus on an unmoving object. We are standing on one leg with our hands in prayer position. Focusing will help us not to tip over. I focus on an outside wall that I pray is not moving.

The LAPD Detective has to die. That’s the problem. He is a son-of-a-bitch, but I like him.

“Stop clenching your jaw, Melodie,” the instructor tells me.

I try to unclamp my teeth. A gentle wind blows a flower near the wall. I begin to tilt sideways. Was it the flower or the wall moving? Then all four us seem to go like dominos and we laugh as we regain our balance.

Now we bend over, hands touching the floor, staring at our ankles. When did my ankles get wrinkles?

My jaw tenses. My short story has come to an absolute stop. “When in doubt have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.” Raymond Chandler gave this advice, slightly tongue-in-cheek, to writers who were blocked or stuck in the middle of a scene. I think it’s a brilliant observation. It’s Chandler at his best: sledgehammer imagery, witty, ironic, and right.

I need a man to come through the door with a gun in hand. To shock my short story into life. No. A woman. And not with a gun. Something more personal, intimate. A knife. It might be difficult to kill an LAPD detective with a knife. Element of surprise. The unexpected. But what about motivation?

We are on our hands and knees doing Cat Curls. I love this position. It doesn’t hurt my knees, my shoulders, my back, or my neck. Though my wrists feel a little sore. Who is this woman with a knife? It’s one thing to write about murder looking through a microscope, searching out the strands of DNA, the fingerprints, matching of the shattered bone pieces. But a good murder mystery novel or short story should be enjoyed even if there is no solution, or denouement. Again Raymond Chandler. In other words it is the complexity of the story, the characters, and the good writing that counts. Not the DNA. Of course Chandler didn’t have to worry about forensics and the public fascination with the absolute truth it appears to bring to a case. He was dealing with a public who had been through WWII; who knew about the brutality and deep loss of death, not the lingering bits and pieces of it.

We are in Child pose. This pose is very much like the prayer position of Muslim men. I instinctively feel uncomfortable in this pose. My dormant Calvinistic roots begin to stir, telling me to get off the floor and sit up straight in a hard pew. Besides I’m a woman. I have breasts. They get in the way in this pose. I also feel like a traitor. I know this is irrational. I’m doing yoga. I am searching for inner peace, especially if I can’t have world peace. Why don’t we see Muslim women praying? Stay in the now, I tell myself.

A woman comes through the door with a knife in her hand. She has lost something so important to her it has transformed her into killer. What has she lost? A man she loved? A child? A way of life? Her own identity? Is she stripped of all freedom in the name of love and respect?

Now we rise up on our knees, our arms in the air, and then we bow back down. Not only does this kill my knees, but my Calvinistic roots are in complete rebellion. Breathe, Melodie

This woman comes through the door with a knife in her hand. The man’s back is to her. She whispers his name. He turns. She slips the knife behind her. He doesn’t see it.

We are in Down Dog position. I have dogs so I know what this pose is supposed to look like. The closest I can get to it is the dopey look on my dog’s face.

The cop whispers her name and holds out his arms. She moves into his embrace. “You have forgiven me.” No, no. Too arched. “You forgive me?” he asks. “You must forgive me.” A demand.

We are on our backs. Stretching our legs in the air.

“Relax your shoulders, Melodie.” My instructor’s gentle voice reminds me. How do you relax your shoulders? It’s like trying to relax your elbows or your ears.

“Stay in the present,” she announces. “Don’t let your mind wander to the past or the future.”

I am aware of my heart beating. This is the present. “My heart is my least vulnerable area.” Claude Raines. Casablanca. Stop thinking. Embrace the nothingness. I can’t. I fear the void. I think that’s why I’m a writer.

She feels her heart beating. She knows it’s the last time she’ll feel vulnerable. The last time to feel human. She cannot forgive. In her own sick way she is trying to bring a morality back into her life. That’s what she wants. Morality.

We lie down and cover ourselves with white blankets. We put on lavender colored eye mask to block out the California light. This is Savasana, sometimes called the Corpse pose. The only sounds come from outside: the ding, ding, dinging of a large truck in reverse. And the pounding of steel beams into earth: thud, thud. We lie in repose each in our own dark peace.

She kills him. She jerks her arm back and thrusts the knife into the softest part of his belly. It is revenge. It is redemption. And her own demise. She tries to cover up the murder, tries to live out a shadow life. She pretends she is still a human being with a soul. But my private detective finds her. Private detectives always do. That is the inevitable beauty of the genre.

When I get home I will sit down at the computer and give this woman, who came though the door with a knife in her hand, her own name, her own history. I will grow to like her. Then I will grow to hate her sick power of death. And I will have created her.

We sit up and bow our heads and clasp our hands in prayer. And whisper: “peace, peace, peace.”

Posted September 19, 2012 on Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s blog somethingisgoingtohappen

Every time I finish a short story I feel as if I just completed a magic trick; pulled a rabbit out of a hat; turned a scarf into a dove. I’m the hapless magician who doesn’t know how the rabbit got into the hat in the first place. Yes, I’m a professional writer, meaning I get paid for my work, and therefore I should understand exactly what I’m doing—but I don’t.

When I was an actress I had a script. I knew where the camera was. I knew my marks. I knew if I kept my focus and listened, or at least pretended to listen, to the other actors in the scene I could create a sense of reality. I also knew the camera loved me. And if the camera loves you, in Hollywood little else matters.

There is no camera, not even a net, when I’m writing. I sit in my chair and I begin. Poof! A rabbit. Poof! No rabbit! A good shake of the hat. Still no rabbit. File the story away.

In spring 2013, City of Mirrors, A Diana Poole Thriller, will be published. Diana Poole would not exist without the short stories I wrote about her for EQMM.

When I first began to write the novel I thought great, I have my rabbit in a hat. I’ll just plop Diana Poole down in a brand-new, suspense-ridden plot and I’ll be off to the races. But like so many of my ideas about writing, this didn’t work out that easily. I quickly learned that Diana Poole was born out of the short-story form. She was in essence a short-story character. What do I mean by that? A few sharp brushstrokes described her: “My husband Colin, a screenwriter, had died suddenly of a heart attack over a year ago. He left me with what the realtors euphemistically call a ‘tear-down’ in Malibu, an old Jaguar, two Oscars—each for Best Screenplay—an empty bank account, and an emptier heart. So I had gone back to what I had been doing before I married him—acting. Except now I was older and the parts were fewer.”

That is all I know about her. When I placed her against a much larger canvas, Diana dwindled. There was no rabbit in my hat.

Where did Diana come from? She needed to be fleshed out. I spent days trying to figure out how to do this. Give her a sister? A mother? A father? Multiple lovers? She had to have some connection to the real world. But if I gave her family members, then her aloneness would disappear and she’d just be barraged with the problems of relatives. Then I had an idea.

In an old manuscript I could never make work, I had created a wonderful character—an aging, ex-movie star. She had smarts, and a ruthless flair. I’d always regretted that she languished in a file on my desktop. So I took her out, dusted her off, and put her in the novel as a friend of Diana’s. But that didn’t work either. As friends, the scenes didn’t go anywhere: There was no tension. I couldn’t connect her to Diana’s life or, for that matter, the plot.

This is where hard work pays off. I had an epiphany. (My moments of insight rarely happen without the tossing away of many stupid ideas.) I would double-down, to use a popular phrase. If Diana had a dead husband why couldn’t she have a recently dead mother? A mother that had been a famous movie star. Diana’s early life was set. She grew up alone in boarding schools, coming home on vacations. Home was wherever her mother was filming at the time. And the house was always rented. And with each new house there was a new strange man. Diana earned her singularity and grit early in life.

The novel opens with her returning to one of these houses and sets the tone for the entire book.

If a dead husband is painful, a dead mother is powerful. Diana is riddled with memories. The character I rescued from an unfinished book not only defined Diana’s past, but also opened up the novel in unexpected and surprising ways. Because of these discoveries I was able to make connections that turned my narrative into a multi-layered piece. And isn’t this why writers write?

Will I still feel like a magician on tightrope the next time I sit down to write? Yes. I’ll be shaking that hat looking for the rabbit. After all, writers are always beginning.