P.M. Castle

Colorado Author

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A hardboiled Christmas Carol

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I’m a big fan of Charles Dickens. I mean, what writer isn’t envious of the opening lines of “A Tale of Two Cities?” It really was the best of times and worst of times. But I’m especially fond of Dickens when the holidays bring to mind “A Christmas Carol” and the transformation of the miserly and miserable Ebenezer Scrooge into a kinder, gentler man. Talk about character arc.

But here’s the thing. As a mystery novelist, I’m also a fan of Raymond Chandler and his books featuring the iconic private detective Philip Marlowe.

I’ve often wondered what would have resulted if Dickens and Chandler could have collaborated. Here’s what I imagined … .

A Hardboiled Christmas Carol

Marlowe was dead to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that.

He was decked out in a powder blue suit, dark blue shirt and black socks with dark blue clocks on them. He would have looked sharp if he wasn’t crumpled face down in the middle of Bourbon Street in a pool of blood. Three bullet holes ruined the back of his jacket. They couldn’t have done much for his health, either. He’d built a reputation as a tough private eye in LA, an honest one in a corrupt world. Problem is, the Big Easy is anything but. Somebody got to him.

It was my job as a police detective to figure out who.

It was late afternoon. I’d planned to knock off early. Enjoy a quiet evening in my apartment off the Quarter. Just the two of us. Me and a bottle. After all, it was Christmas Eve. Now I faced a murder investigation as welcome as a lump of coal in my stocking.

“Hey, Scrooge. Got what you need? Coroner’s boys gettin’ antsy to haul the deceased to the morgue and head for home. It’s a holiday. Remember?” 

I’d seen everything I needed to see. I questioned the bystanders who, as it turned out, hadn’t seen a damned thing. What I didn’t need was a flatfoot and some lackeys rushing me.

“It’s Lieutenant Scrooge, sergeant. Remember? So you and your pals will just have to wait to clean up this mess until I tell you to.” I hesitated for effect. “OK. So clean it up.”

Judging by the scowl that twisted his face, the sergeant wasn’t amused. “You’re a real prince, aren’t you lieutenant? Heard that about you. Well merry friggin’ Christmas to you, too.”

#

It was nearly midnight before I shambled past the sad brick building on Villere Street full of cheap apartments, one of them mine. I scaled the rickety stairs to the third floor, turned the lock and fell into a sagging couch with worn cushions. Most nights I slept on that couch with a blanket and pillow for company. Tonight would be no different. I was dead tired. But my head kept spinning like I was stuck on a merry-go-round that wouldn’t stop. Who killed Marlowe? I beat on some doors and threatened to beat on some heads. It was difficult, though, to find out much of anything on Christmas Eve.

#

I awoke to a pounding on my door. The luminous dial on my wristwatch told me it was 1 a.m. I reached for the .38 stashed in a drawer in the end table by the couch.

I stood well to the side of the door, a finger tickling the trigger of my pistol.
“Who’s there?”

“Bob. Bob Cratchit.”

I hadn’t heard that name in years. We worked homicide together before he transferred. Last I heard, he’d moved to Peoria. Showing up unannounced at my apartment, he might as well have been the Ghost of Christmas Past. I invited him in anyway.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Not staying long, if that’s what you’re asking. Came back to town to see the in-laws and just heard about Marlowe. Thought you might want to know I saw him yesterday morning at Cafe du Monde. Remember Fizziwig, that strange fella we used to work with? Always joking around? He was there and they were yucking it up over coffee and beignets.”

#

I must have dozed off, because the pounding woke me again.

I resumed my stance at the door, gun at the ready. “Who’s there?”

“It’s Belle. Let me in.”

She sashayed past me on long, shapely legs below a tight red dress. She was an ash blond with greenish eyes. And until our latest fight, my girlfriend. She was like the Ghost of Christmas Present paying me a visit to show me what I was missing. There was no need. I knew.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?” I inquired.

“There’ll be no pleasure, mister. I thought I made that clear the last time you stood me up for one of your damned investigations.”

“If you don’t want to kiss and make up, then what are you doing here?”

A face flush with anger turned pallid. “To warn you, Ebenezer. You’re in danger.”

#

I stretched out on the couch to contemplate the parade through my apartment and everything I’d heard. I closed my eyes to rest them for a moment, then didn’t open them again until my cell phone rang. I checked the number. It was the captain. At this hour, it must be something monumental.

“Scrooge here.”

The captain’s patient and empathetic voice came through my phone loud and clear. “Get your ass down here. There’s been a break in the Marlowe case, and it can’t wait.”

“Right now?” I asked. Stupid question.

The captain replied as though he was the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, predicting in exacting detail what would happen if I didn’t heed his summons. It wasn’t pretty.

#

Christmas dawned bright, clear and sunny. For once I didn’t wake up with a hammer pounding my brain and a sweaty gym sock stuffed into my mouth. I felt light as a feather and happy as an angel.

It came back to me. Bob Cratchit. Belle. The captain’s urgent phone call. As if the spirits had done it all in one night. What seemed so real must have been the fever dream of a man sick with the strain of a mystery he couldn’t solve. One desperate for redemption. But it got me to thinking. Suddenly, I realized who murdered Marlowe. The only suspect with connections to Marlowe, Fizziwig and Belle.

He was a short man with a limp. A bookie I heard had cheated some rich football fan out of a big payoff on an improbable Saints victory. A fan who must have hired Marlowe to get the money back. Fizziwig was a gambler, too. A notoriously bad one. As for Belle, her work as a Bourbon Street bartender brought her into contact with all sorts. The worst sorts.

I didn’t know the bookie’s name. Only his nickname. They called him Tiny Tim.

#

I stepped onto Villere Street and headed to the station to round up some help to bring in Tim. I drew in a breath of morning air still crisp and clean. An elderly couple walked by hand in hand. The old man looked at me and smiled. “Merry Christmas, son. God bless you.”

I smiled back. “God bless us, everyone.”

I’m gobsmacked by cockamamie language

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As a newspaper editor and mystery novelist, I’m by necessity also a student of language. I’m fascinated by the information I come across about words and the ways they’re used.

Did you know, for example, nikhedonia describes the emotion you experience when you’re playing a game or watching your favorite sports team compete and realize you or your team is about to win. Unfortunately for me and my fellow Denver Broncos fans, we seldom anticipate success. Especially come the fourth quarter.

How about crapulence? The word sounds every bit as dreadful as its definition for the sickness or indisposition that results from excess drinking or eating.

I suspect a lack of nikhedonia leads to crapulence. Particularly on Monday mornings.

I also found on the internet a list of slang terms from the 1930s. In the event you’re wondering what happens when some kaylied up nogoodnik blows your wig at the juke, it means a troublesome drunk infuriates you at a nightclub.

I’m determined, by the way, to perpetuate some of the other slang terms on the list through their more frequent use, including gobsmacked and cockamamie. Those are good words.

What really caught my attention, though, was a news release I received about a book written by Jo Anne Preston titled “Lead the Way in Five Minutes a Day: Sparking High Performance in Yourself and Your Team.” A workforce and organizational development manager, Preston believes business executives and other leaders should pay more attention to what they say and how they say it. It’s difficult to argue with that. The news release went on to enumerate the common words and phrases leaders use that turn people off. The list made me wince. Which, I guess, was the point.

Consider, for example, subordinate. That applies to anyone who works for or reports to someone else. But the word sounds about as appealing as minion or flunky. How many people want to put one of those titles on their business cards? As the sole member of the editorial staff at the newspaper where I work, I could be subordinate-in-chief.

Here’s a phrase from the list. “I’m a perfectionist.” Oh really? Or does that actually mean you hold others to unrealistically high expectations you wouldn’t impose upon yourself? Rather than strive for perfection, shouldn’t we all strive for excellence? That leaves room for recognition for jobs well done, even when they aren’t perfect.

I’m fortunate to communicate most often in writing. That enables me to choose more carefully the words I use. Or is it assess or select? There are a lot from which to choose. By one estimate, there are more than 750,000 words in the English lexicon. Many are versatile. Few are interchangeable. The American writer and humorist Mark Twain supposedly equated the difference between the almost right word and the right word to the difference between a lightning bug and lightning.

As a newspaper editor and mystery novelist, I advocate for clear and compelling communication. I admit, though, I’m seduced by obscure words even though I know I should avoid the huckmuck that results from ackamarackus or nitwittery.

Go ahead. Look it up. If you’re as much a student of language as I am, I bet you want to.

Given trends, when will a terminator come for my job?

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Like most members of my nearly geriatric generation, I watched on TV and in movies the evolution of artificial intelligence. The robot that warned Will Robinson about impending danger on “Lost in Space.” The HAL 9000 computer that refused to open the pod bay doors in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” And, of course, the eponymous T-800 that wreaked so much havoc in “The Terminator.”

That was science fiction, though. Thoroughly entertaining. Even thought-provoking. But scarcely credible. I’ve since learned if you wait long enough, truth becomes stranger than science fiction. And sometimes more troubling. In particular, the latest, real life iterations of artificial intelligence and their implications for, well, real life.

Not to downplay the significance of existential threats on a global scale, but what about me? What about the use of AI to write news stories or, for God’s sake, fiction? Count me among the nervous newspaper editors wondering when an almost indestructible job-killing machine will come along to terminate us. As if that wasn’t bad enough, now I’ve also got to compete with computerized novelists penning mysteries? C’mon.

Like so many advances going all the way back to fire, technology offers the promise of both prosperity and destruction, of life-sustaining warmth as well as deadly conflagration. It all depends on how technology is used.

In the case of artificial intelligence and journalism, the Associated Press and other news organizations already use AI to report corporate earnings and sports scores — functions deemed important, but also formulaic enough to complete without humans. That’s one way to use the tool. To take on tedious tasks and devote precious time and resources to more useful purposes.

But AI also has been used to create other types of content. And here’s the concern. There’s an incentive for companies that make money to create content to use AI to cut costs and, therefore, make more money. One technology news site published stories written with the help of AI that contained errors and were subsequently discovered to have plagiarized other content. While AI might mimic human-created content, it also can produce what’s been described as pink slime journalism. Yuck. That’s another way to use the tool.

AI similarly has been used in various ways to produce fiction. Mostly in analyzing work and suggesting what could be helpful changes. But also in more profound ways. By one estimate, AI wrote 95 percent of a murder mystery with the ironic title “Death of an Author.”

I’m no Luddite. I have no desire to return to good old days that were anything but. Banging out news stories on typewriters and editing copy with a pencil. For that matter, I wouldn’t trade my trusty MacBook Pro for anything when it comes to the ease the computer affords in writing and researching. Technology has made my work far more efficient and my job far easier.  

Still, I’d argue journalism and fiction should remain human endeavors. 

A thoughtful process is required to not only report news stories, but also convey an understanding of what those stories are about. What’s important. Why it’s important. That’s not to mention the thought that should go into determining what stories to report in the first place.

I’d also like to believe I imbue every page of my fiction with the stuff of human experience in all its glory and shame. Triumph. Failure. Joy. Sorrow. Amazing grace. Despicable assholery.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence continues to evolve in TV shows and movies to portend dystopian futures, including one in which AI turns humans into batteries. That’s still science fiction. But also a real-life prospect that’s raised growing concerns.

I’m concerned myself. There’s danger. And not just for Will Robinson.

Will technology warn us of our peril? Or be the cause of it?

Literally a problem that makes my head explode

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I loathe the imprecise use of words. My head literally explodes at the mere thought of it. 

I’m exaggerating, of course, to make a point. But no less so than the growing number of people who use literally when they mean figuratively.

I admit it. I’m a grammar curmudgeon whose knickers twist over matters important only to English teachers, newspaper editors and certain mystery novelists. Confusion over there, their and they’re. Subject-verb disagreement. Incorrect capitalization. Don’t even get me started on Oxford commas. I loathe them, too.

Lest my latest lament go unheeded as yet another screed from a supercilious word nerd, consider the impressions people make with words spoken and written. I’m not foolish enough to judge people by the ways in which they talk and write. I contend nonetheless there are benefits to precise communication. If nothing else, it increases the likelihood of getting what you ask for — whether that’s a raise, a bank loan or a date on a Friday night.

That brings me back to what’s literally the most misused word.

By strict definition, literally means in a literal manner or sense. But literally also has come to serve as a replacement for figuratively as well as an intensifier intended to add force to another word.

Given trends in popular culture, it’s understandable to believe the misuse of literally constitutes a recent compulsion. But literally has been used in a figurative sense for hundreds of years.

Even famous authors used literally when they meant figuratively. Take a scene from “Little Women” in which Louisa May Alcott described an outdoor supper in a land literally flowing with milk and honey. Really? Wouldn’t that make it difficult to eat, not to mention awfully sticky? Or a line from “The Great Gatsby” in which F. Scott Fitzgerald stated his eponymous protagonist was literally glowing. From what? Exposure to radiation on Long Island? Even Mark Twain had Tom Sawyer literally rolling in wealth after duping a group of boys to pay him for the privilege of whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence. Better wealth than something else, I suppose.

In comparison to such literary luminaries, who am I to question the uses of literally in some of the best novels ever written? A persnickety wordsmith. That’s who. One who remains unconvinced. I’m more like another famous author,  Ambrose Bierce, who decried: “It is bad enough to exaggerate, but to affirm the truth of the exaggeration is intolerable.”

I confess. I’ve given in on occasion to the temptation to use literally. I’m particularly fond of what I deem a well-turned phrase describing someone who literally wrote the book on the subject. But only if it’s true in a literal sense. The person actually wrote a book and wasn’t just an authority in an idiomatic sense.

What annoys me is the more widespread misuse of literally with such disregard as to render the word meaningless and those who do so almost comic.

Here’s the thing about English. If a word is used incorrectly often enough for long enough, it gains acceptance and new meaning. By some estimates, literally has entered the third or fourth stage of a five-stage scale. In the first stage, mistakes are widely rejected. By the time a word reaches the fifth stage, its misuse has become so ubiquitous only people derided as eccentrics reject it.

Count me among the eccentrics.

It’s impossible for people to claim their heads literally exploded. Even if they swallowed the dynamite that caused the blasts.

But it’s no exaggeration to complain I loathe the imprecise use of words.

I do. Literally.

The debate rages on: Who’s got the write stuff?

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Who’s your favorite writer?

It’s something of a dubious question. Isn’t it?

It’s like asking who’s your favorite rock ’n’ roll guitarist. Is it Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton or Mark Knopfler? What about Eddie Van Halen? Or Chuck Berry for heaven’s sake? How about your all-time favorite situation comedy on TV?  “The Honeymooners?” “Friends?” “Seinfeld?” What about “The Simpsons?”

Here’s the problem: There are too many good ones from which to choose to make any kind of intelligent judgment.

I can think of dozens of favorite writers off the top of my head. Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, E.B. White, Ray Bradbury and Robert McCammon to name a few. Harper Lee created some of the best characters — not to mention character names — in American literature in Scout and Atticus Finch. Of course, Stephen King ranks for many readers as the greatest writer of all time. I wouldn’t dare argue based on the quality or prodigious quantity of his work.

For that matter, the eclectic group of writers with whom I’m privileged to meet once a week have become favorites as well. Although I’m envious of their flagrant talents.

As if choosing a favorite writer wasn’t difficult enough, I recently came across a list that takes the debate to another level: Who’s your favorite fictional writer? By fictional, I mean writers who appear in literature, movies and television. Think Jo March in “Little Women,” Jessica Fletcher in “Murder She Wrote” and George McFly in “Back to the Future.”

Emily Temple compiled a list of no less than 50 fictional writers for the Literary Hub website. As Temple points out, writers love to write about writers.

Some of Stephen King’s most popular novels feature writers as prominent characters — Jack Torrance in “The Shining” and Paul Sheldon in “Misery.” King even turns a killer for hire into a writer in “Billy Summers.” Torrance ranks 34th on Temple’s list, by the way. And Sheldon 12th.

As for the top-ranked writer on Temple’s list, it’s Benno von Archimboldi from the novel “2666” by Roberto Bolaño.

I realized as I was writing this blog I’m no less in love with writing about writers in my mystery novels. To wit: Tucker Preston, editor of the White Mountain Mail.

I’m reluctant to believe I’ll ever become someone’s favorite writer. Or Tucker will ever make the list of the top fictional writers. But it’s something to which to aspire. Something to keep me herding words on nights and weekends.

So tell me. Who’s your favorite writer?