An Influence on my Novel: Murder My Sweet

It's getting around to holiday card season again. Yes, we still do holiday cards in this little two-person family, and my ritual for some reason is to spread all the cards and envelopes and stamps and my list out around me on the bed and put a film noir on the TV, one that I know so well that it doesn't distract me, just runs in the background like some cozy accompaniment as I address my envelopes and write out my notes.

It's sort of like my version of Christmas music.

Sometimes I go with Scarlet Street, sometimes Too Late for Tears. I think this year, in honor of my book that just came out, I'll switch on Murder, My Sweet. 

I set out to write a novel through the lens of old-time radio detective shows, and I did, but I couldn't help but be influenced by film noir as well—and Murder, My Sweet in particular. It's based on the novel Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler, and Chandler was the master of the campy noir language that my favorite old-time radio detective shows are full of—and which I based my own novel's narrative voice on. 

It's also one of the few classic detective noirs out there. Most people, when they think of film noir, picture a detective alone in his office at night, a neon sign blinking in the window behind him, maybe a bottle of whisky in his top desk drawer. The door opens and in walks a seductive femme fatale.

There are actually very few film noirs that center around the classic detective scenario. But Murder, My Sweet is one. It even has one of those late-night office scenes with the neon light in the window and everything. Although the person who enters is no femme. 

Detective Philip Marlowe (played by Dick Powell) is hired by hulking hood "Moose" Malloy (played by Mike Mazurki) to track down his girl Velma, who disappeared while he was away on a stint in the big house. There are other subplots as well. The film is complicated and convoluted and zany and I love it. For too many reasons to go into now. What I came here to do was talk a little bit about how Murder, My Sweet influenced my novel, and to share a few easter eggs I put in there to celebrate one of my favorite films.

I should mention that my novel Who Killed One the Gun? is not just a classic old-time detective story. My detective, One the Gun, also happens to live in a world where people have numbers for names (Two the True Blue, Three the Goatee...), and he also happens to be stuck in a time loop and trying to solve his own murder. Which might give you an idea why I am in love with a movie that I call complicated and convoluted and zany. 

As I said, Murder, My Sweet was a big influence, because of its classic gumshoe vibe and the terrific Raymond Chandler language: the mid-century slang, the world-weary tone, the colorful metaphors:

She was a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud. I gave her a drink. She was a gal who'd take a drink. If she had to knock you down to get the bottle.

Alright, this example isn't kind to its subject, and is pretty flippant about alcoholism, but I couldn't help but quote it, if only so that I could mention the great character turn of Jessie Florian, played by the fabulous Esther Howard. But it's also a good example of the language style I'm talking about.

But beyond the broader ways in which the film influenced the book, there are a few much more specific ways.

#1
Moose.

At a recent reading event, I was asked by someone in the audience who I thought would play my detective One the Gun in the theoretical movie of my book. I had to say that honestly I didn't know, but that I did know who would play one of my main suspects, the hulking doorman Four the Door.

When I wrote the part of Four the Door, I was thinking of two people, a radio actor named Tony Barrett, and, from Murder, My Sweet, Moose Malloy, played by Mike Mazurki.

The name's Moose. On account of I'm large.

You can't help but be drawn to the character of Moose Malloy. Huge, powerful, but childlike. There's an innocence to his demeanor—and then just as quickly as a child can turn from teddy bear to tantrum, Moose Malloy can get violent.

Four the Door's initial description in my novel:

Six and a half feet tall if he’s a day, a moose of a man who’s built more like a bouncer than a doorman. Even sitting down he’s a towering hulk, all chest and shoulders, but something in his face, some puppy-dog slant in the way he looks at you, makes it seem like he doesn’t at all notice his advantage.

One the Gun, who's drawn to using nicknames on people, calls Four the Door the moose throughout the book in an outright nod to the film.

#2
Language.

Alright, I already brought up language, but there are two places in the book where I use language that specifically references the movie.

For the first instance, we'll stick with the moose for a second. To set this up, in my book, my detective One the Gun is on the murder case of a dive owner named Five the No Longer Alive. (It's One the Gun's investigation of this case that leads to Gun's own murder, which naturally he would also like to solve.) Because Gun is in a time loop, every night at the same time, he goes to the dive, and there he's greeted at the entrance by the doorman Four the Door:

“Business good tonight?” he asks.

“Sure, sure,” Four the Door says, “folks been coming by to make with the respects. Look at all them flowers there in the corner.”

“Very nice,” One the Gun says.

“Prettier than pink ballerinas!” Four the Door says.

Fans of film noir may already know what I'm getting at with that last line. It's a twist on one of the most beloved lines in Murder, My Sweet. From Moose's description of his lost lady Velma.

She was cute as lace pants.

The second piece of dialogue that I reference from Murder, My Sweet, is longer. In my book, there's a detective radio show that comes on every Friday night (and since Gun is in a time loop, it comes on every night), called Who Is the Villain?. When I wrote the narration for that radio show, I slipped in an allusion to my personal favorite line in Murder, My Sweet. Here's the quotation from the film:

I'd been out peeking under old Sunday sections for a barber named Dominick whose wife wanted him back—I forget why. Only reason I took the job was because my bank account was trying to crawl under a duck.

And my own version, with more numbers and fewer names:

I’d just returned to the office after a day snooping under old garbage can lids for some zero named Fourteen who’d been eighty-sixed by his wife, who now suddenly wanted him back. Who could say why? It was a worthless job for a worthless client, but it was better than shining up the vacancy sign in my wallet.

I was proud of all the number-play I piled into that paragraph, but I'm well aware of the fact that nothing, but nothing, will ever be a better landing than the word duck.

#3
Philip Marlowe's shirt.

As a book designer, I was very lucky to be given the chance to design my own book cover. It also gave me the chance to hide one more Murder, My Sweet easter egg in my book.

Now, go with me on this one. It's a bit of a stretch. Or. It's not a stretch, but you have to use your imagination a little.

I devised a cover that would reference old pulp novels and film noir movie posters. At the center of it would be One the Gun lying dead (well, about to be dead—in that moment before the time loop takes him back to the beginning of his day) against a swirling clock. To build the figure in the position I wanted, I found images of bodies and started to piece them together to form one.

For the middle of the body, on impulse, I jumped onto YouTube and put on a scene from Murder, My Sweet, stopping and starting the scene and taking screen shots of Dick Powell's Philip Marlowe in spots where I thought the angle would work.

This is in a scene in which Marlowe has been abducted, taken to a sanatorium, and pumped full of drugs. His clothes are disheveled, perfect for my fallen, newly just-about-murdered detective. I took the screen shot I liked best and maneuvered it into place...

Then added Marlowe's shirt to my body-in-progress. There were more pieces and steps than this as I assembled my One the Gun, but you can see that as he came together, Marlowe's shirt came with him.

There are definitely references to other favorite noirs and radio shows in and on my book, but I'll leave it there. If you haven't seen it, seek out and watch Murder, My Sweet. It's a great film packed full of snappy dialogue, colorful characters, and terrific black and white chiaroscuro cinematography. It's well worth watching, whether you're addressing holiday cards or not.

a moment in the day: list

Just home from an event called Conversing with the Dead at a local bookstore, I put my new books on the top of the chest of drawers in the dining room, then the pretty polished river rock I took from the little basket of rocks they had out with a little card. "Rocks represent strength, stability, and endurance. Please take one home to enjoy!" Stephen puts his rock next to mine and we compare. 

At that same table at the bookstore with the rocks were little cards and pens, and we were encouraged to write notes for loved ones we've lost. Stephen brings his out of his pocket. It's a lovely message for a recently lost friend. He asks to see mine and I bring it out, explaining that I didn't so much make a message as a list. In the moment, at the bookstore, I hadn't known who to pick. There are too many. Especially from the last five years. 

I smooth my list out against my palm. It starts:

Dad
[a little heart]
Kat
[a little heart]
Mara

[a little heart]

Stephen says, "You even have a dog on there."

"Three," I say, and point them out and say their names.

I realize with a little jolt that I missed someone. Well I couldn't have included everyone, of course, especially with dogs in the mix, but this was a special someone. 

How could I have missed them?

It hurts my heart.

There are just too many.

a moment in the day: halloween

The first knock on my door. Halloween night, streets full of rain through my window, and I've been hovering here waiting and wondering if we'd get anyone at all. I grab the candy bowl from the chair and go to the door, pull it open. 

A little devil in red, and, even smaller, a... what is she? All in white, her head and limbs sticking out of a big plush puff. A marshmallow? A round angel? They call "trick or treat" and ask how many they can take as they reach into the bowl. There are waves and thank yous all around as they and their costumed parents head down the porch steps into the rain. No umbrellas.

They turn to head to the next house. Mom says, "We’re going to go to the end of the block and then we’ll go home, okay?"

I linger on the porch. Scan up and down looking for children.

A man dressed as a taco and wielding a baby carriage trucks by, not stopping. 

I call out, "You're a taco."

No umbrella. He turns his head and smiles and nods and continues on.

Coming the other way, passing him, is another man. No costume. No umbrella. Just walking by.

I call out, "You're not a taco."

Book Cake: a photoplay

A couple weeks in the life of the lovely surprise book cake Stephen got me for the pre-event party my good friend Liz Scott threw before my book launch at the beginning of this month. 

The cake was huge. There was no way it was going to get close to being completely eaten during that party. In the whirlwind of all of us heading over to Powell's for the event, the leftover cake got left, in full, to Stephen and me. I shouldn't have continued eating as much of that cake as I did in the days that followed, but it felt too special. 

I don't remember what piece I got at the party.

This is the piece I had at the end of the night to celebrate the book launch.

Eating the moon.

Remnants. If you look close, you'll see the sign of the beast in there. Yipe.

A last little piece before I bit the bullet (pun intended) and put the last of it out for the squirrels to pick over.

a moment in the life of my book: radio

I come down the stairs, teacup in hand, step into the kitchen. It’s a work day and I have a meeting in five minutes, zoom style. Time to top off my cold tea and warm it up.

I can hear my own voice coming from around the corner where Stephen’s sitting in his little office. It’s me on the radio. KBOO’s program Jonesy, which I recorded last Friday, a really fun conversation with host Ken Jones about my book and other books and film noir and old-time radio, a lot of talk about old-time radio, a conversation about radio coming over the radio, or at least streaming live out of Stephen’s computer.

I put my teacup in the microwave. Start it humming.

“Hey!” Stephen’s voice. “What are you doing down here?” And not off somewhere listening to myself, he means.

“I’m warming my tea before a meeting,” I call.

There's a pause and then he calls back, “I’m not listening to you because I’m listening to you.”

Fair enough. I pull my tea from the microwave and start back upstairs.

a moment in the life of my book: dream launch

In my dream, it's book launch night and I've just finished up with my event at Powell's. I am so happy. Everything went well. I read well. I answered questions well. I was surrounded by friends and loved ones.

Oh, but wait! We forgot all about the part where I sign books! 

I look around, and oh no, the crowd is leaving. The room already mostly empty. But we need to sign books! Powell's brought in all these books and they need to sell them!

Quick, I sit down behind a little table. Someone brings over the book cart and sets it up to the front and to the right of the table. The people who remain are trickling around the table, past the cart, not grabbing books, heading for the stairs to leave.

I lean forward over the table. Look at the front of the book cart. It's full of stuffed animals.

______________________________________________

(Book launch is tonight! I'll try to remember to sign books. Powell's downtown, October 7, 7 PM. More information is here.)

a moment in the life of my book: advice

We've been pre-celebrating a little. Thai food and an old film noir. But mostly, tonight, my brain has been wound up tight with where am I going to stumble over my words while reading Tuesday night and what question is someone going to ask that I won't know the answer to and what very good friend am I going to blank on a name for as they hand me their book to sign.

We walk into the kitchen carrying our empty plates. 

"Tell me again," I say, "what you said before?"

"What before?" Stephen asks.

"To make me feel better."

I've forgotten the words he used. By Tuesday night, I will have lost all the words that exist in my brain.

He cracks a smile. "There's nothing you can do to make it bad."

Like a little magic incantation.  

"There's nothing I can do to make it bad," I say. "OK."

______________________________________________

(If you want to see me do nothing to make it bad, join me for my book launch of Who Killed One the Gun? at Powell's City of Books, October 7, at 7 PM. More information is here.)

a moment in the day: thread

It's garbage day and I've dumped the recycling from the can to the bin, dumped the compost from the little kitchen container to the other bin, and as I set the empty compost container in the sink to soak, I go over to our calendar, tacked to the wall, to see if this week is a garbage week or a non-garbage week. The city takes the compost, the recycling, the glass every week, but the garbage only every other. I have garbage day notated on the calendar on every other Monday with a little g.

This Monday has no g. Not a garbage day. But my eyes tick to Tuesday, where Stephen's handwriting says:

Nicholas Day

The words hit like a warm, soft thud in my chest. A whole year tomorrow since we said goodbye.

I think about this as I drag the garden-clipping-and-compost bin down along the side of the house to the curb. My little boy. I should pay some sort of tribute. Share some pictures. What would I say?

What comes to mind is that I feel Nicholas in all the little beings I see, somehow. The squirrels that run across the fence with their question mark tails, the birds that hop in the trees.

I walk back from the curb and along the side of the house.

What comes to mind is, sometimes I worry that I let go too soon. Sometimes I worry that I held on too long.

As I grab hold of the handle of the big blue plastic recycling bin, I see the asterisked translucent threads of a spiderweb running from the bin to the fence. The spider sitting dead center trembles with the movement as my hand tips the bin up just so slightly and then stops.

I stand there holding the bin at that little angle for a moment.

Then set it back down. I'll take out the recycling next week.

a moment in the life of my book: first

My first reading is done. That's what I think as I walk, with my publisher Laura Stanfill, up the steps of movie theater four, where we just finished our presentation, and turn to go into movie theater three, where the novels and memoirs and poetry collections of the authors of the Sisters Festival of Books lie stacked up across a row of tables. My first reading, in public, from my actual book, not my manuscript-in-progress, but my actual, physical book (three weeks ahead of the official publication date but festivals get special privileges), is done.

Laura and I step past the tables of books and down the aisle, past the raked movie theater seats, to the little stage in front of the movie screen, to sidle behind another row of tables, and take a seat next to other festival authors who are waiting to sign books. And before I know it, someone is standing in front of us holding a copy of both Laura's book, Imagine a Door, and mine. Holding mine out to me to sign. 

It occurs to me that I haven't thought about what I'd write to people if they asked me to sign their book. My book. My book that is now their book. Back in the day when I signed copies of City of Weird, I sometimes drew a little cartoon of an octopus like the octopus on the cover. What cartoon could I draw now for Who Killed One the Gun? 

A... gun? 

I take my book from the woman's hand. I ask her name. When I put pen to paper, I write, Thank you for being at my very first reading.

______________________________________________

By the way, if you're in Portland, join me for my book launch of Who Killed One the Gun? at Powell's City of Books, October 7, at 7 PM. I’ll be in conversation with Margaret Malone (People Like You) and my reading will be accompanied by the crackerjack old-time-radio-style sound effects of foley artist David Ian. More information is here. My novel can be preordered now.

a moment in the life of my book: the number that got away

I'm sitting at my computer listening to the song "Pi" by Kate Bush. Her rich, sweet voice sings numbers over the pulse of the music. There's a hypnotic-ness to that pulse that seems to evoke the endless digits of pi as much as her voice does, singing the actual numbers.

The song was shared with me by a friend because a social post I made about my very numbers-heavy novel put her in mind of it. And listening to the numerals slide by, I feel a silly kinship with Kate Bush because of our apparent shared mathematical nerdiness. Most of this song is simply the digits of pi sung beautifully.

"Eight, nine, seven, nine, three, two..."

Then I realize in a blink! A name that I failed to create in the long list of numbered names for the characters in my book... One the Gun, Two the True Blue, Three the Goatee... with all the fun I had coming up with names for characters using that naming system, with all the available numbers and all the available corresponding rhymes, this name was there all the time and I didn't use it.

π the Pie. She could have been a baker.

Oh, man. I'm so sad I never thought of that. Why did I not think of that?

It's so strange, after all the time writing and editing and workshopping and editing again, to be in this place where the book is the book, not yet officially out in the world but set in stone, set in words and numbers and unchangeable.

Kate Bush sings, "Five, nine, two, three, zero, seven, eight, one..."

Pi runs to infinity, of course, but a song can't. How did she decide what number would be the last one to sing? How did she know when the song was done?

______________________________________________

By the way, if you're in Portland, join me for my book launch of Who Killed One the Gun? at Powell's City of Books, October 7, at 7 PM. I’ll be in conversation with Margaret Malone (People Like You) and my reading will be accompanied by the crackerjack old-time-radio-style sound effects of foley artist David Ian. More information is here. My novel can be preordered now.

Book cover: Purgatoire

The next Forest Avenue Press book to come after mine will be Liz Prato's novel in short stories, Purgatoire. Which is interesting because both of us had a connection to the press before we pitched our books. I'm their cover designer and Liz is their editor at large. When both Liz and I were considering who to submit books to, we both separately, unbeknownst to the other, had the realization that "my book is a Forest Avenue book." Not meaning that publisher Laura Stanfill would say yes to us since we each had a relationship with her and the press—because that was definitely not a given in either case—but that knowing the press as intimately as we did, Liz and I could tell that our books would fit well into the Forest Avenue catalogue. And both of us knew deep down that this was where we wanted our books to go.

I love that we had this same thought around the same time and that, joy of joy, Laura said yes to us both.

Here's the official description of Liz's book:

In 1910 Sabé Parella makes the journey from northern Italy to southern Colorado to join her husband who went ahead to work in the mines. But when she arrives along the banks of the Purgatoire River, he is nowhere to be found. As discrimination, extortion, and Prohibition close in on her family, the men succumb to drinking, crime, and mental illness, while the women find strength in themselves, and in each other, to survive.

Based on Prato’s immigrant ancestors, Purgatoire is a novel-in-stories spanning several decades that traces how the shame and secrecy of one man’s abandonment haunts a family for generations. Prato weaves a hopeful tale of sisterhood and the complex relationships between parents and children, expectations, reality and our true desires.

I was excited to work on this cover because I know and love Liz. I've done cover work for her before, actually, for her story collection Baby's on Fire, and the Forest Avenue anthology she edited, The Night, and the Rain, and the River. For Purgatoire, Liz mentioned that she was interested in imagery of a bridge:

My thinking is that there be a bridge over the Purgatoire River. The bridge does myriad work in terms of metaphor—a bridge between countries/across the ocean, between cultures, between Trinidad and Aguilar, between the spirit world and the human realm. And all the characters are crossing a sort of bridge in their lives—they're crossing into something else, while leaving another life behind.

I was intrigued with this—and with a packet of materials Liz put together for Laura early on in the editing process for her book. The packet told the story of the story of her book, in a sense. It detailed ways in which her true family background informed the story, and the research she did around the real and the fictional story. The packet is so cool! Full of old photographs and documents and postcards and newspaper clippings. In there was a photo of the actual Commercial Street Bridge over the Purgatoire River.

I liked the idea of trying to recreate this bridge. And in googling around to see if there was much out there, particularly an image that might be clear and detailed enough that I could try to build the bridge accurately, I found this lovely picture postcard

I loved, too, the texture and the way color worked in the postcard. It seemed like a beautiful way to show the time period in the novel without leaning too heavy into the usual visual tropes of historical fiction since Liz's book is definitely of another era but in less a historical fiction and more a lit fiction way. Not that historical fiction isn't lit, but that Purgatoire falls into a little different genre basket. As I started to build my version of the Commercial Street Bridge, I already had it in the back of my mind that it might be cool to style it like a picture postcard. Liz's packet of historical info was another reason my brain went in a postcard direction when thinking on how to frame this art—all the examples of archival information in there from when she did research for her book.

I started building the bridge by creating shapes in Illustrator.

Putting it all together and using other shapes to cut out and define space.

And then I built a landscape around the bridge using the original picture postcard as a model. The shape of the surrounding land...

Some clouds for the sky...

I liked the idea that you'd be able to see the river going under the bridge and then curving off on its way. As I worked, a color scheme happened sort of organically. I knew we might change it all as I started collaborating more with Laura and Liz, but in order to have something that would be fun to present to them, something more finished looking, I let myself follow the colors where they wanted to emerge. The colors came from a few different places, actually. First, they were a sort of more saturated version of the original picture postcard: blues and golds for water and sky. Greens in the landscape, an eggshell color for the bridge. Too, Liz had said she was drawn toward yellow, orange, gold, brown. I pictured brown lettering across a sky that started out in a wash of orangey gold and rose into blue. Finally there were the colors in the example covers she'd sent us that she liked - and these three in particular that she had selected for color.

Golds, peaches, blues. I liked the way the colors in The Antidote (super cool book, by the way) moved from a peach through gold, through green, and up to a very turquoise blue. And I liked that very soft icy blue in the sky from The World and All That It Holds. I'm sure all of these things informed the color that started to happen.

That color started out light, soft, as I started putting my scene together...

....and added a cat. This was an element that Liz really wanted for her cover. Luna is a recurring character in Purgatoire—and a special one. Not only is she a cat, she's an immortal cat! In wanting to include Luna in my artwork, I thought about putting her in the foreground with her back to us, looking out on everything.

I deepened the colors as I added a paper texture to my scene.

And then I experimented with some type treatments and sent a few samples to Laura to show the direction I was playing with.

I made samples without the cat, too, but let's face it: we weren't going to gaze out over the Purgatoire River without Luna. Laura liked what she saw and passed the samples along to Liz. Liz liked the layout of the bridge and landscape and the inclusion and position of the cat—but this cat was not yet Luna. She needed to be less fluffy, less rotund.

I also hadn't quite gotten the landscape of the area right. "I'd like to see the landscape along the river be less green-green, and more wild," she told Laura. She sent pictures that showed better what the area looked like. And she wanted more blue in the sky, which she felt would also make it feel more Colorado. She gave me thoughts on the fonts I'd played with.

The last thing Liz wondered was whether I could add a representation of a group of souls that form a Greek chorus in the book. I'd thought about this ever since I heard that that was an element in the story. What a lovely idea, a chorus of souls. But how to represent it on the cover?

I started on the easier updates. The blue for the sky, the wilder plant life, the thinner cat.

Honestly, I don't remember exactly how I got the souls to work. A bit of time has gone by between our finalizing of the front cover and my writing this, and some of that process is a blur of experimentation, me trying a lot of things and building on it as I went. I know I started by making a rudimentary human figure and then multiplying and warping it and taking those figures and overlapping them together.

Then it was experimenting with different levels of transparency, blurring, overlaying with clouds, stacking multiple layers and blending them together.

Meantime as the ghosts did their ghost thing, Luna was going through her own transformation. 

There was also more experimenting with fonts and refining of colors, but I don't want this post to be fifty pages long. In the end, we came up with a cover that I hope does honor to Purgatoire the place and Purgatoire the book.

Purgatoire will be out on April 26, 2026. More info on the book is here. More info on Liz Prato is here. And here's a taste.

*

Steve Scavina

January 1935

I drive Joe’s blue Model A across the muddy Purgatoire when the sun’s about as high as it’s going to get in the winter sky. It’s not real cold for late January, but the piñons up on Fishers Peak are dotted with snow. I don’t take my eyes off the road, but you can’t miss the peak rising over Trinidad and all these damn mining towns, like it got nothing better to do.

Joe’s in the passenger seat and Perina’s in the spacious back with her cat in a basket on the seat. I’m the one driving because Joe’s blind in one eye from a fight he was in a while back. Rumor is something to do with goats, a bad price, a bad slaughter . . . no one but Joe and the guy he was in the fight with know for sure. It’s not like he’s blind as an apple, so he can go around Aguilar just fine, but he shouldn’t be doing the twenty miles to Trinidad. Especially since we’ll probably be coming back at dusk.

The reason we’re in Joe’s car instead of in my car is because my car is a rickety old Chevrolet truck. All three of us—and the cat—would’ve had to squeeze in the worn front seat, with dust and chill blowing in through the cracks. Besides, Joe would be embarrassed to be seen in it, thinking it makes him look pitiful. But the reason for our trip to Trinidad is pitiful. See, the reason I’m driving us all from Aguilar to Trinidad is because we’re going to the hospital to see Sabé.

a moment in the day: train

As I work at the computer, I'm listening to the old-time radio detective show Let George Do It. In the episode, detective George Valentine and his assistant Brooksie are meeting with client Casey Foster in the desert on a dark evening.

The voice of Casey Foster: I want to show you something. The most beautiful view I've, I've ever seen. Eh, get out, Miss Brooks. Come over here.

My mind fills in the blanks, watching Brooksie get out of the car and follow George to where Foster stands in the gloom of the radio night.

George: View? View of what, the black shadows of black sand in the middle of a black desert?

[Coyote sound effect]

George: Ah. We're going coyote hunting, eh?

Foster: Over there. In the moonlight. There. By the old, abandoned siding. See?

The voice of Foster is old-time radio actor Junius Matthews, one of the most distinct, most OTR voices out there, the epitome of a cracked, old codger—and his character is, well, a cracked, old codger, so in love with trains that he's endeavoring to buy a railroad for a million dollars. 

Brooksie: A freight train!

Foster (voice full of excitement and reverence): That's the number two engine. Makes the night run.

And it's just a moment. My mind says, wow, what a profound, poetic little statement! The train makes the night run. Like streaming through the dark, a train, in all its mystique and wonder, can power the night, can bring it to life.

Then: wait. 

That's not what he's saying with that line. He's saying that this train runs at night.

Ah. Well. I let the episode stream onward, and I enjoy it as it goes, but I leave that line uncorrected in my head. Because, oh, how pretty it is when you hear it wrong, and it's always worth taking poetry wherever you find it.

______________________________________________

That episode ("This Ain’t No Way to Run a Railroad") of Let George Do It can be found on the podcast The Great Detectives of Old Time Radio archived here.

By the way, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that my old-time-radio-themed novel Who Killed One the Gun? can be preordered now.

a moment in the day: a shot

I'm just pulling the garbage out of the can to get it ready to take it to the curb when my sister texts: "Hey mom and I are gonna have a shot for dad in a min can you too?"

It's August 11. Five years—five unbelievable years long—since our dad left this world. My mom loves good tequila and doesn't drink it much, but she has a nice bottle that she and Edina once in a while, for a special occasion or remembrance, will take down and pour a shot and toast.

I start going through the cabinet. What can I use? There's an open bottle of red wine on the counter but it's 95 degrees out at seven in the evening, and somehow a shot of something hard seems less of a fireball to your stomach than red wine right now. The phone—the land line, we only talk on the land line—starts ringing and I run through the house to grab it. Mom's on the other end, ready with her little shot glass with Edina close by. I tell her I'm looking for what to use, and I pull down from the high cabinet in the kitchen the bottles my hand can reach. 

A pretty blue bottle that turns out to be gin. A brown bottle that looks to be less than a shot's worth of rum. Mom says that Edina says that I can use "three fingers of milk" if I want. That sounds better than the gin.

"I've got Cointreau!" I say and find a pretty shot glass in the lower cabinet and pour. 

I don't know where to go for this moment. I don't want to stand in the kitchen next to my garbage bag. I go out into the dining room, then through to the edge of the living room. There's nothing of Dad in here, but Mom and Edina are waiting, so I stop, and I realize that what I was doing was moving toward the spot in the corner of the living room with Nicholas's painting and Nicholas's ashes, one loss pinch-hitting for another.  

I say, "OK!"

"I'm clinking with Edina," Mom announces. And then, "I'm clinking the phone!"

I clink the phone. "I'm clinking the phone!"

The phone's plastic so it's more like a clack.

And now a sip. Sweetness that tweaks at my nostrils and burns down into my stomach.

"Edina shot," Mom says. "I'm sipping."

"I'm sipping," I say.

"You know, your dad liked Cointreau," Mom says.

And I am so happy. I didn't know that. Or if I knew that, I forgot it. I just remember that when Dad was drinking he liked Scotch, which we don't have. 

I raise my glass to the fact that Dad liked Cointreau.

After we hang up the phone and Mom and Edina go off to make nachos, a fitting dish for a Dad day, I linger to sip a little longer, not yet ready to get back to taking out the trash.

Book Cover: Blackbird Whistling

Blackbird Whistling is the second book in a duology written by Dian Greenwood. Book number one was Forever Blackbirds, and I had the privilege of not only watching that book come to life over many years in our writing group, but designing the cover and interior for its spring 2024 publication. I wrote about the process of creating the cover here.

Back when we were in writing group together, Dian was writing one story, but that one story morphed into two over time. I knew when I offered to design Forever Blackbirds that I'd get to come back and design Blackbird Whistling as well, and now, here I am! It's been so lovely to delve into the story of Marta Gottlieb again, and to take the design we came up with for her story and extend it into the next generation.

With a series of any kind, whether there are two or twenty books in it, you want a consistent look. When it came time to start on book two, I went back to book one for my first inspiration.

And as I had with the first book, I let Dian be my guide. With some projects, I do the concepting on my own before bringing in the author or publisher or client, and with some I let them take the lead. Sometimes it's somewhere in the middle. I asked Dian what she was picturing for this second cover, and she said (with some helpful input from fellow writer Judy Reeves) she was interested in focusing on a landscape again, bringing the blackbird (or blackbirds) back, and adding a new element: gravestones. And in particular the wrought-iron crosses that are prevalent in the part of North Dakota where a lot of Dian's saga takes place. Some info on them is here.

The first thing I did was go on the hunt for wrought-iron crosses. It was difficult to find ones that were royalty free and that we both thought would work. 

When I found something we liked, it came courtesy of Jo Naylor on Flickr Creative Commons. Here's a quick side-note. Just now when I dipped into my files to get this credit, I found I hadn't adequately labeled the original photo. I was pretty sure it had come from Flickr and I was pretty sure of the photographer's name, but when I went to the site and tried to search the original file name, nothing came up. I tried to google the file name. Nothing came up. I went into a bit of a panic because what if the photo I used for this cover was not a free use photo at all? Could I have made that mistake? This led me to a two-hour search, page by page, through her photostream until I found the picture again. But during that search, I found out that the photographer, too, is a book cover designer and writer. Here's her website if you want to check her out.

The next step after finding a photo to work with was to photoshop out the background to isolate the two wrought iron crosses (see the little one behind?). Then I assembled a few very early samples to get us going. In most of the samples I'll share in this post, the iron crosses are going to stick out unnaturally against the background. That's because it took a while to choose our landscape and I didn't want to tinker with the crosses to integrate them until we had officially decided what that landscape was.

I started, actually, with the landscape from book one. The original image for that cover was quite wide, which allowed me to use a completely different portion of it for this early prototype. I liked the idea of the two books being able to sit side by side and show that they take place in the same terrain. I brought back the type treatment from book one as well and gave Dian a few examples of how we might add the crosses to the meadow (she explained that these crosses can be found scattered in fields, not just bunched up in cemeteries). For blackbirds, Dian was interested in a flock flying in the sky, so I found and added those as well.

The original title of book two was Safekeeping. Which is not a monstrously long word as is, but bringing back the style with the big, sweeping first letter made our title smallish on the page, so I also experimented with breaking Safekeeping into two, which is a convention that is often used on book covers.

Oh, and one thing I forgot to mention, which you can see in these samples, is that after I photoshopped the background from my crosses, I extracted the smaller cross and photoshopped it into a completely separated cross so that I could move it around.

Then looking around for usable imagery, I came across a gorgeous picture of a songbird perched on a dying flower. On impulse I grabbed it and added it to my early design and sent a couple more samples. I loved Dian's direction of the field and crosses and sky with birds, but I worried that it needed something more.

I sent my samples to Dian and to publisher Laura Stanfill. Together, the three of us made up the team that was going to be helping birth this book. Dian liked the bird idea but wanted a blackbird, to be more in keeping with the story. She wondered about putting the bird on a gravestone rather than a flower and was interested in finding a sky that wasn't as dark and foreboding. She wanted more gravestones, more of a proper cemetery in the field. 

Side-note: it can take a long time to find just the images you want to use. You think, okay, I'll search cemetery. And then you get loads of closeups of young models draped theatrically across headstones, dressed like vampires.

I tried some new samples with different skies, more gravestones, a couple different blackbirds I found. All of these samples were rough with the gravestones sometimes floating on the field because, again, I wanted to pin down a layout before going in for the detail-work.

Laura had some great feedback that we might want to keep the crosses small enough in the frame that their names aren't readable, out of respect for the families of whoever was buried there. Dian was interested in finding a different bird and a sky that was more serene. The bird I had the most in my samples was probably a baby, very fluffy and unkempt. I went back to look for a blackbird that everyone would love. I was unhappy with landscapes I had found thus far. As I said about my cemetery search, a lot of this project was me sifting through hundreds of photographs looking for the perfect images, images that would show what we wanted to show, balance nicely in the frame, integrate well into the scene, and not have copyright issues. That last one is very important, and narrows down the places you can find images by a lot. Even so, you always think it will be easier to find the right images to work with. Sometimes it takes forever.

During that forever, we had a bit of an update. The title of the book changed from Safekeeping to Blackbird Whistling. All the more reason to find the perfect blackbird for our cover. I searched through photos of birds, skies, landscapes. When I found what we liked, I worked to integrate it all. The final step was Dian's suggestion to change the secondary text (the blurb and "a novel") from the peachy color I'd been using in my most recent samples (a color that came from the shoulder of the new blackbird) to pink. And we finally had our cover.

I love that sweet blackbird!

Blackbird Whistling comes out in just one month! September 2. Dian has a launch event at Broadway Books in Portland on September 10, with conversation partner Joanna Rose. More info about Dian and all her books is on her website here. And here's a tiny taste from the book.

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Angus takes me back to a time when farmers like Great granduncle Herman had all those kids in order to work the farm. An era when folks abided by faithfulness to farm, family, and God. All decisions were based on what was best for the crops, the farm, and the overall good of the family. When young people fell in love and married, they were expected to adhere to the same rules. The way I’ve lived my life and Jennifer is living here—taking off with her grandmother on what could be seen as a harebrained adventure—stands outside their code of conduct. College and living away from the family home is likely contrary to what’s acceptable. Angus, however, is a century past due in terms of picking up the plow and hitching the harrow. . . following a long succession of family who worked this land, living and dying here.