Susan Kiernan, 1948-2015

Twelve years ago, before Denise and I were engaged, I moved to Rome, Italy, where she was working as a freelancer and a news producer covering soccer. After we were engaged, we decided to come home to the states for a short visit to meet each other's parents. We saw mine in New Jersey first, then drove down the coast to South Carolina to surprise her mom, who didn't know we were coming. Just as we were driving up to the exit on I-26 that would take us to her door, who should we spy on the highway with us but Mom, driving behind the wheel of her minivan. She was a sales rep who frequently traveled through the region to visit clients. 

We nearly had an accident that day. You can imagine Mom's surprise. The daughter she thought was five thousand miles away was suddenly driving alongside her on the highway, heading home. Of course we didn't wait to get to Mom's condo. We both pulled into the parking lot of a fast-food place to throw our arms around each other. 

I had met her a few times over the years, but now she was going to be my mother-in-law. I suppose I was a little nervous; according to the rules of American comedy culture, mothers and sons-in-law are destined to be forever at odds. I never found that to be the case, at least with Sue. Instead, she always treated me with the same mixture of admiration and love as the day we met up at the exit. I daresay she treated me more fondly than my own mother, who still can't shed the memories of stuff I broke as a kid.

But Sue and I got along, and for nearly twelve years I was privileged to call her Mom. That privilege ended in part Wednesday morning when she left us forever. It had been a long, cruel illness, and for three months four of us--two sisters and their husbands--gave Mom the only gifts we could, our time and our love, to see her through it.

Like all of us, Sue was many things in life. A superb salesperson. A runner and athlete. A devout Christian and a supporter of foreign missions. A daughter and niece. But the role that meant the most to her was being a mom.

I don't share Sue's faith, so I don't know if I will ever see her again. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised someday to find her waiting for me at the exit of a different kind.

Until then, Sue: crack the window, crank the tunes, and ride, ride, ride.

For Your Bouchercon Consideration

The Bouchercon ballots went out Saturday, and it occurs to me that I ought to mention which works of mine are eligible for the Anthony Awards. And yes, I feel icky announcing this to the world, but I’ve seen other authors do it, so why not work with me here for a sec?

Three of my 2014 pieces are eligible for the short story category:

• "Harm and Hammer," October 2014, Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine - This is the crime story of a lonely young woman who obsessively teaches herself how to play a blacksmith's anvil as a musical instrument, with tragic results.
• "How Lil’ Jimmie Beat the Big C," May 12, 2014, Shotgun Honey - This is the piece about the incarcerated cancer patient that was just chosen as a Derringer finalist this past weekend. Profanity alert.
• “Nighthawks,"  April 2014, Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine - My crime story that tries to explain what’s going on in the classic Edward Hopper painting of the same same.

You’ll find free PDFs of all these stories at this link.

Theoretically my novel, THE MARSHAL OF THE BORGO, should be eligible for the novel or paperback original categories because it pubbed in 2014, but it’s self-pubbed; Anthony Award rules are vague on the matter. If anyone knows for certain if it’s eligible, kindly let me know.

For that matter, if you have a story, book, nonfiction/critical work that is elegible this year, kindly leave a comment below or shoot me a note via my contact page, if you prefer to be more discreet. A handful of us authors from the Asheville area are all going to the conference, and we’re looking for great books and stories to nominate. Help us do our job.

There. I’m done. That wasn’t so bad, now, was it?

The Story Behind My Derringer Finalist Story

I've been tied up with family stuff or I would have announced this sooner. We were at lunch yesterday when I got the word that one of my short stories had been chosen as a finalist for  the Derringer Award for Best Flash Fiction. The Derringers, you’ll recall, are one of the top prizes for short mystery fiction. This is the second year in a row that one of my pieces was singled out for this honor. The full announcement is here. Members of the Derringer group will read all finalist stories this month, and the winners will be announced March 31, 2015. 

Regular readers will probably remember the story, How Lil’ Jimmie Beat the Big C, which first appeared on the Shotgun Honey noir ‘zine back in May 2014. It’s the story of an incarcerated man’s visit to an oncology center for a chemotherapy session. It’s short, fewer than 700 words, violent, and chock full of profanity. That warning aside, the story’s free to read online, so please do check it out if you’d like.

And yes, the story was inspired by what I saw on several of my visits with Denise’s mom to her chemo sessions or doctor’s appointments last year. Every time I went, and I mean every time, I’d spot heavily armed corrections officers marching shackled prisoners to their appointments. If you stop to think about it, it makes sense. Prisoners are human. They get cancer like everyone else. It’s just that their doctor’s visits necessitate traveling in chains and being accompanied by guards.

I could go on about how everything you experience in life, good or bad, becomes fodder for your fiction—but I figure I’ve said enough.

I’m proud to be a Derringer finalist again, and equally proud to be part of what looks like a trio of successes this year for Shotgun Honey. They’re a great site; if you enjoy reading or writing short noir pieces, you really out to check them out.

Good News for a Change

Last week I got the nicest note from a reader. This practically never happens, and with all the bad news here lately, it was nice to get this in my inbox:

At the gym today I picked up an Alfred Hitchcock Magazine that somebody had left and I began reading ... I couldn't believe how good the writing was ... one of the best, most enjoyable piece of short fiction that's engaged me since the last blue moon. You were right there with the reader. "Of course it was him." Thanks. President Street, wow.

This reader is referring to "Button Man," my first story for AHMM, which appeared in March 2013. I talked about the story here and here. President Street refers to my protag’s home address in Brooklyn, New York, of the 1950s. I’ve since published the story on its own.

The day after I got this note, I received a contract via email, informing me that Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine had accepted one of my short stories. I don’t usually take the time to announce here when I’ve sold a story, but EQMM is special. Cracking that market has been a goal of mine for nearly, oh, forty years. I first started reading EQMM as a kid, when I got hooked on the old Ellery Queen TV series, starring Jim Hutton. The Queen novels were among the first adult books I ever read. And the first rejections I ever got as a kid writer were from EQMM. So it means a lot to me to finally appear in their pages. I don't want to talk about the story they bought just yet, but I'll definitely let you know when it runs.

Two great pieces of news in the middle of a bleak winter. Not bad.

Five Windows

There are five windows in Mom’s bedroom. Five windows that let in the morning light and allow her a glimpse of the woods and river behind her condo building. There’s a small dam upstream that guarantees white noise nearly every hour of the day. The river flows south to become the Congaree, the larger tributary that rushes past this old southern city of walled burying grounds, grits mills, cotton bale warehouses, and confederate printing plants.

Mom’s decline has been slow yet awful. One morning recently she struggled to get from one side of her bed to the other, her eyes fixed on the bits of the river she could see through the glass. “I just want to get to the edge of the river,” she kept saying. And then she winced, because that isn’t what she meant to say at all. The bed. The bed. The edge of the bed. By now we get it. We know what the potent mix of disease and painkillers is doing to her brain. She confuses words all the time.

That morning, Denise went to prep the morning meds and I was alone with Mom as she sat by the window and watched the river. “Tell me something, Joe,” she said suddenly, grasping my hand. “Is this the end?”

Frankly, I didn’t know how to answer her. I assumed she was wondering if her doctors had told us something that we had not shared with her. (They haven’t.) I said we didn’t know; no one knew. And nervously, I prattled on about how she didn’t have to worry about any of us anymore—her daughters, her son-in-laws, her friends. We could take care of ourselves. I was hoping to relieve what they say dying people always worry about—unresolved issues with their friends and family.

But what the hell do I know? Comes down to it, I know precious little about death. I write about it almost exclusively, but I’ve seen very little of the real thing up close. I absorbed a lot of Catholic theology and schooling in my childhood, but if you tied me down and forced me to tell you what happens after death, the closest I could come to telling you could be summed by this scene in the Cary Grant film, Houseboat. I don’t know when I saw the movie, but this scene made an impression.

And yes, I’m well aware of the stupidity of basing one’s spiritual life on a scene from a Technicolor movie, but my next closest source would probably be several fantasy trilogies I read as a kid. I know my lack of religion disappoints my mother, who is devout. I think I was always a little like my father, who I suspect treated church as an obligation, not an opportunity, and who was more galvanized by the possibility of such things as psychic phenomena. 

But no matter. As I spoke, Denise’s mom gripped my hand tighter and wept. Denise came in and the moment between us passed.

I’ve spent most of the time since then kicking myself for not coming up with a more profound, chipper response. “No,” I could have said, “this is just the beginning,” or something else that would have reinforced Denise's mom’s personal cosmology. She is also devoutly religious. Friends visit from time to time to pray with and over her. One friend, with a beautiful voice, sings hymns. The pastor from her congregation is a welcome sight, too. Some mornings, when the pain has been intense, I’ll find Mom curled up on her side of the bed, clutching her purple plastic crucifix. It comforts her greatly.

Earlier this week, Mom had another question for me. Again, we were alone. (Maybe she waits for her daughters to leave before springing these on me?) She was sitting up in bed, looking heavily drugged and confused. “Hey Joe,” she said, “can you get me out of this?"

This time, I went with the humor. “What do you want me to do, smother you with a pillow?"

She smiled.

“I can’t get you out of this,” I continued. "None of us can. Who can?"

She pointed at the ceiling.

“So ask Him,” I said.

“I do, I do,” she said.

I hope she receives her answer soon, and from a guy who has the answers.

Lockdown

I guess I spoke too soon. The other day I was telling you how we'd happily found a university library to work in, thus breaking the monotony of hanging out at mom's condo. The very next day we went, the University of South Carolina locked down on reports of shots fired. Denise immediately Tweeted a photo (shown above) of the steel gate that slid down, effectively trapping us inside the special collections library, where we'd gone to access some research materials. Within seconds, she was contacted by a reporter at CNN, asking for an interview. Another reporter from ABC wrote to ask if they could use the photo. Weird world we live in.

Wi-fi was still up, so I poked around trying to get more info, but it was sparse. Police and SWAT had closed off major streets in the city surrounding the School of Public Health, where the shooting took place. Students all over the campus were doing the same thing I was doing—taking to social media to describe their experiences. 

From my seat in the special collections reading room, I could peer through the gate into the central floor of the main library. Moments earlier, it was packed with students; now it was deserted.

And then, about an hour later, the cops and university gave the all-clear sign, and school was back to normal. Students flowed out of the elevators and resumed their positions with their laptops, phones, coffees, and sandwiches. I gather they had all been ushered to "safer" rooms on other floors, away from the library's glass entryway.

By then the media was reporting that a murder-suicide had occurred. A few of my Tweets ended up Storified in the Charleston Paper's coverage. The Columbia city paper detailed the slaying of a professor by his former wife.

I was impressed by how quickly the university acted. I've never been in a situation like that. Hope it's the last.

Postcards announcing the university's latest high-profile acquisition.

Sidenote: This library recently acquired Elmore Leonard's papers. I'm told they're not yet accessioned. I'm working on getting a peek.

Letter From Home

A quick update on a couple of things:

* Big Weed, the marijuana book I ghosted, landed two sweet reviews this week, one from Publishers Weekly, the other from Kirkus. The PW review is a starred review, which is quite nice. The author is happy, so are the publishers. The book is out in April.

* I'm driving home Friday to interview mystery writer Jamie Mason this Friday at our local bookstore, Malaprop's, for the launch of Mason’s second book, Monday’s Lie. I liked her first book, Three Graves Full, but Monday’s Lie is something special. The main character was raised by a mom who was a covert ops asset, and who taught her a variety of cool skills. Years later, Mom’s long gone, and our protag must call upon those skills to confront something terrible that’s cropped up in her life. Mason has a beautiful way with the language. A true stylist. If you’re in town, I hope you’ll come check out our “In Conversation With.”

* I just put up a new website. I hope you’ll stop by to look it over, and more importantly, shoot me a note if you spot any embarrassing bugs. From now on, my blog posts will originate at the new site, and be pushed out to Tumblr and Twitter. If you’re already following me on Tumblr, there’s no need to migrate over. The pushes are nearly instantaneous.

* * *  

Thanks for the kind response to my last post. Yes, our family is still hunkered down in Denise’s mom’s condo, acting as her daily caregivers. I don’t think this little apartment was made for five adults and a dog, but we’re determined to wait out this disease to its inevitable, sad conclusion. We are grateful for the friends who’ve stopped by to cheer us (and mom) up. We’ve left up the Christmas tree, thinking it makes nice touch to see those lights from time to time. But since the the holiday season is long gone, it’s a little hard to use that annual break as an excuse for procrastinating on our work. So we’ve staked out the corners of the condo that feel quiet enough to work, and started plugging away again. The nearby university has a great library; we escaped there for a few hours this week and it was awesome. Hope to go again if we can manage it.

As this horror progresses, I’ve been reminded of one of the doctors I once profiled. His story is told in the The Scientist and the Sociopath, but you can read it free here. The doc became closer with his mom following the death of his father and other family members, all in a single year, when he was a child. I was touched that the doc trusted me enough to report how he felt back then:

The mother did not know, and the boy did not tell her, that at night in his bed he bargained with God. He had attended five funerals in little more than a year, and they had terrified him. Over the graves of his loved ones he learned the words of the Lord’s Prayer for the first time. At night, he prayed: Please, God, don’t let my mom die. Please don’t take her from me.

His prayers were answered. She lived long and prospered. When she died four years ago at the age of sixty-nine, she was a wealthy woman. When she took sick with lung cancer, he gave her the greatest gift he could. He shut down his practice and cared for her 24/7 for the last seven months of her life. “It was the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done,” he says.

The Close and Holy Darkness

What a year. It looks like I’m celebrating Christmas tonight. Denise’s mom has been gravely ill and been in the hospital for the last few weeks. She’s  home at last, and we’re finally getting around to sharing presents under the tree and cooking a big meal.

The year 2014 started with news of mom’s diagnosis, and that horror has been running in the background through all our professional successes. The year started with me meeting a new client who wanted to write a book about his business. I wrote the proposal in January, and our agent sold it. The rest of the year was consumed with interviews, research, reading and writing. Publishers keep talking about how they want to be more nimble, right? Well, look: the year’s not yet out and that book is already available for pre-order on Amazon, slated to pub in April 2015, with a couple of Amazon Vine reviews to boot.

I wrote a second proposal for another client this year, late in Autumn. My agent sold that book for an enormous sum. But I ended up walking away from that deal, mostly because I wanted to focus on my own writing. It’s about time I did. I turned 50 in the fall and that has had a bigger impact on my psyche than I’ve been prepared to admit.

I love fiction; it’s why I got into this business in the first place. Ghostwriting aside, I managed to sell or place three short stories this year, and finish a first draft of the second book in my Mesmerist series. I hope to get that out in 2015 if the revisions go well. I’ve also been messing with revisions of a historical fantasy that I wrote in 2013. I may end up scrapping that book and writing an entirely new book with the same premise; deciding that will be the first order of business in 2015.

This is the time of year when we talk about the ones we lost. I don’t really have the time to get into all of them, but I will say I was saddened by the passing of P.D. James. I came to her work at the same time in my life as I discovered Elmore Leonard’s books. Such different writers. I’m amazed I loved them both. To lose them both a year apart grips me. Another writer who passed away was Mary Stewart, a British contemporary of James’s, who is perhaps best known for her Arthurian books set in Roman Britain. I came to those books in high school and they so strongly influenced me that they are probably the guiding force behind my WIP.

But hey, I’m pretty emotional tonight, acutely aware of the passage of time and the aging process, as one of my pals likes to say. I am hugely grateful for those of you who have stopped by this blog to check out what’s going on with me. Thanks especially to Stu, Jack, Kush, Rob, Loren, Hunter, and Candice. I wish I could more properly get down on paper what you all mean to me, but I’ve probably said enough.

I love this line by Dylan Thomas. It’s been running in my head since Christmas Eve.

I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

A Happy New Year to you all.

#AdventGhosts2014

Today I’m participating in the 100-word #adventghosts2014 flash fiction event run by writer Loren Eaton. Here’s my piece. Links to all of this year’s stories are here.

Assassin in Jack’s Backyard, AD 1660

“Are you…a demon?”

I straddled his chest and peered into his eyes.

“I am the frost at the pane. I am the art in the flake. I am the cold that will enshroud your grave forever. My name is Winter.”

“Damn you, then!”

Mine is the touch of the north and south, the touch of the wind, the touch of the tundra, the horrible frigid blade that bleeds feet, frosts toes, stills hearts, and rends minds.

He was a fair chunk of ice, he was, when I smacked his face and sent his head across the drifts of snow.

Copyright 2014 Joseph D’Agnese

My 2013 and 2012 contributions are here.

The Other Joe D'Agnese

Once upon a time another Joe D’Agnese sold commercial stationery in New York and environs. I have no idea who he was, or if he was a distant relation.

The above ad and announcement come from two different stationery trade publications dated 1915 to 1917. I will only note that Mr. D’Agnese’s place of employment, 75 Spring Street in New York City, is a block away from my former place of employment on Broadway in SoHo. I worked in that neighborhood for Scholastic Inc. for nearly eight years. Maybe I passed his ghost on the street?

He sold blank books. I tend to fill ‘em.