Guess What Time It Is!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: You know what time of year this is! And I am so excited. 🦆

If you are new, let me explain. This is so fabulous.

Every year, for the past oh, 25 years, wild ducks come to our backyard pool.  The pool is covered with its winter tarp, and it fills with rain and melted snow, and I guess it looks like a pond on the duck maps. The main two ducks, the very first ones, were Flo and Eddy.

Flo is the male, don’t ask me why, that’s just how they got named. Eddy is the female, and she is hilarious. She waddles to our back door and demands food if we don't feed them fast enough. (We give them wild bird food, of course, not bread.)

So far, the mallards have arrived every year, right around this time of year. It is quite amazing, and I will tell you much more about them as the time goes by. We adore them, and often they bring their friends, and it’s such a rite of spring. 🦆

Now is the time that I am worrying that this is the year they will not arrive. This is such a fear. But I am trying to trust in nature.

There is still ice on the pool,as you can see, but you can also see how the ripples are looking spring-like now, and that is a sign that they are potentially on the way.

Shall we have a duck pool? Like we always do?

Just guess what day the ducks will arrive, and you will entered to win a very nice prize.

You don’t even have to guess the right date to win! (But you get an extra prize if your name is selected at random, and you have chosen the right date! I will choose the winner on the arrival date. )

And send good vibes for the arrival of Flo and Eddy! I'll post pictures of them in Insta and Facebook when they arrive. I am continuing to be optimistic about this.

Anyone remember what date they arrived last year? Often it has been March 14, but last year I think they were a little late.

Also this spring, as the snow melted, I noticed that the rabbits, although completely cute and adorable to see hopping around, have ravaged our rose of Sharon bushes. Look at that!  (Those bushes were as tall as the fence last summer.)

The garden people came, and put up fencing, but the rabbits did not care one bit, and still got inside. I asked the garden person whether the rabbits were hungry, and said maybe I should put out carrots to deter them from the bushes, but she said no, it would just bring more rabbits.

And look! Snowdrops!

So Reds and Readers, what are your guesses for the duck pool? And are there signs of spring where you live?

Can This Be True?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I’m not sure what my reaction is to this. It’s either: duh, I could’ve told you that very easily. 

Or: wow, see, I knew it!

See what you think.

I read an article in The Washington Post about “hasslers”. That’s how the article terms people who are hassling you. And the jist of it was basically, that there is medical research that shows the difficult people in your life might make you age faster.


That while positive relationships, this article says, make you happier and healthier, hasslers have the opposite effect. So it says this article. Because they increase chronic stress.

According to this article, negative relationships actually make your cells age more quickly.

Here’s a quote from the piece:  “Researchers found that for every additional hassler, participants regularly interacted, with their pace of aging increased by 1.5%. In other words instead of aging one biological year per calendar year, a person with at least one extra hassler would age around 1.015 years during the same time. It gets worse, the more hasslers you have.”


It also says (I’m shocked! shocked!) that women typically have more hasslers than men. Not even going to go there. And, that women tend to be disproportionately affected both positively and negatively.


See what I mean? I can’t decide whether this is obvious or groundbreaking.

Plus now I am even more annoyed with the one-time co-worker who I asked whether she’d like me to tell her what happened in a certain meeting.

Her reply was “I already know what happened in the meeting but I’m happy to hear your version of it if you’d like to tell me.”

Whoa.

Or another co-worker who was producing a story I was investigating, and I called her to say I was at the scene of the crime, but that there was no way to get ot he actual place without going on private property.

She told me, "Well, I’m looking at Google earth on my computer, and it looks to me like there’s a way in. Just go ahead, and then turn left.”

I said: "You are in your office looking at a computer, and I am in the real place! I’m right here. And there’s no way in. I can see  how it might once have been, but there’s no left turn anymore, it’s been changed.”

She said: "It shows it on the map."

And I said: "I am actually HERE."

And she said "Well, I guess you aren't really interested in this story."

So. AH. I am not going to do the math about this, but she lost me some time.

I’m trying to figure out how to ask you about this without having you throw your theoretical father-in-law or second cousin or boss under the bus. So I’ll just ask you this. Do you think this medical finding is shocking? Or obvious?

(And if you want to tell us the best hassly line you’ve ever heard from anyone, we’ll commiserate…)

A Field Guide To Murder

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Reds and readers, no matter where you are, stop and give Michelle Cullen a standing ovation! Michelle is a super-talented writer, and a wonderful person, who has steadfastly and determinedly gone after her dream of writing a successful published mystery, and wow she has succeeded spectacularly.

Her brand new book, A Field Guide to Murder is out right now-- isn't that a great title and such an irresistible cover?--and it is exactly what you want to read.

But. Read this first. and then you'll understand why her book is so terrific.


From the Field to the Crime Scene: What Anthropology Taught Me About Detection

        by Michelle L. Cullen

In the early days of my career, I spent a decade helping to rebuild communities after war across Africa, East Asia, South Asia, and the Pacific. My job was to use my anthropological training to help design and evaluate projects so they didn’t enflame existing tensions. This involved engaging with varied walks of life and observing the best and worst of human behavior. What I didn’t realize at the time, is that this fieldwork doubled as a solid education for writing crime fiction. Many of the skills that I needed are the same as those inherent to good detectives.

A critical part of my job was to notice details. Small things like how people enter a room, where they sit, who speaks first. When I couldn’t conduct an interview in English or French, I had to rely on an interpreter. This forced me to notice elements around the words spoken: body language, tone, hesitation, nervous tics, conversation rabbit holes and shifts. I became attuned to what was said, what wasn’t, and what might be significant about the gap between the two. This type of attention to detail is the utmost skill required for detection.


I also learned that context means everything. Anthropologists are wired to ask why something exists in its particular form: why this object, in this place, used in this way, at this time. A similar line of questioning is used at crime scenes. Every detail is a clue to something larger.

 For example, in anthropology, the contents of a purse can be used to shed light on someone’s personal life, social structure, economic status, and even belief system. For a detective, that same purse at a crime scene can provide insight to the victim, why they may have been killed, and clues that point to the killer.

Another important facet of anthropology involves striving to suspend judgment. I learned firsthand that the world is rarely black and white. I witnessed the aftermath of unimaginable violence, but I also came to understand that the history that sparked that violence was not a clean story of victims and villains, rather a conflation of the two. Holding that complexity without collapsing it into something simpler is hard, but essential – for good fieldwork and for good detection.

Additionally when in the field, I had to seamlessly move between worlds. I’ve sat across the table from government ministers and subsistence farmers, community visionaries and stone-cold killers. Each conversation required a different technique to forge connection, a different kind of trust-building, a different way of making someone feel safe enough to confide in me. These abilities are also important skills for a detective to possess.

Finally, I learned to trust my instincts. When my gut told me there was something wrong, there was. Possessing this live or die reflex is crucial if a detective is going to move onto their next case.

Given all of this, it was hardly a jump for me to want to make one of the main characters an anthropologist. I was able to apply what I’d learned through my work overseas to my amateur sleuth, Harry Lancaster. But anthropology is hardly the only profession that provides a good foundation for detecting. 

What other non-law enforcement careers jump to mind? Which are your favorites when it comes to reading amateur sleuth mystery novels?

HANK: Such great questions! And again, congratulations! Me?  I always love a good reporter book--when the author gets it right, of course. How about you, Reds and Readers?



 

 

A FIELD GUIDE TO MURDER

A cranky widower and his spirited caregiver team up to solve his neighbor’s murder in this charming and original mystery, perfect for fans of Richard Osman and Benjamin Stevenson.

Once a globe-trotting anthropologist, Harry Lancaster is now certain that all his grand adventures are behind him. Recently widowed and suffering from a fractured hip, Harry spends his days and nights behind a pair of binoculars, nose-deep in his neighbors’ affairs. His millennial caregiver, Emma, is determined to get him out of his armchair and back into the world.

Fate intervenes when Harry’s mysterious neighbor, Sue, phones, pleading for help. But instead of rescuing her, Harry and Emma find Sue dead: poisoned, days after a break-in at Sue’s house. Harry resolves to find out what happened, and Emma insists on going along for the ride. Together, they discover motives and suspects abound in Harry’s quaint condominium community—putting them both in the crosshairs of a cold-blooded killer.

Michelle L. Cullen has lived and traveled all over the world: from working as a (decent if powered by enough espresso) bilingual secretary in Paris to backpacking around Europe, Central America, and Southern Africa, to helping rebuild communities after war throughout Africa, East Asia, South Asia, and the Pacific — where she saw the best and worst of human behavior. Her lifelong fascination with people, and why they do what they do, was further fueled by her academic training. She obtained her Ph.D. from the London School of Economics' Sociology Department and her master’s degree in Anthropology from Melbourne University in Australia. A fan of adventure, she has a black belt in Taekwondo, has summited 900 feet rock climbing, and has flown a helicopter (once, during a lesson, for five terrifying minutes). She currently lives in Annapolis, Maryland, where she’s either doing yoga, playing outside, or plotting murder.