Winter's bones, garden scars

HALLIE EPHRON: It's still a bit chilly here in New England but spring has definitely sprung. The weeping willows have already passed from their beautiful opening number (yellow/lime green buds) to green. Cherries, dogwoods, forsythia, all are blooming like crazy, and cool temps are keep the blossoms on the magnolias. 

But everywhere the remnants of a brutal, late winter blizzard that left my yard buried for weeks in 3 feet of snow, are still in evidence.

Most of the bushes and trees have survived intact and are blooming ferociously.

And my early spring carpet of blue scilla has burst from the ground and is putting on a show.

And then there's this...

This Japanese quince bush should be in full, hot pink bloom. Instead, it's barren. And the bark has been stripped from its branches, starting at about a foot off the ground.

Time will tell whether it will "spring" back next year but I'm not optimistic.

Here's another Japanese quince which only seems to be half dead. 

Consensus here is that the culprits are rabbits. The bane of my garden.

For weeks after that formidable blizzard, a thick blanket of covered the grass and weeds that sustain the rabbits through winter. The snow weighed down the branches and the rabbits climbed aboard, helping themselves to the bark and stripping the branches clean.

And so no flowers formed. No leaves are budding. I'm not optimistic that the bushes will come back. Time will tell.

What do you think? Is there any hope that my Japanese quinces will come back?

Are you having a gorgeous spring, and does your neighborhood bear winter's scars?

Jeri Westerson's Sherlockian Pastiche... with vampires! And a quiz!

 

HALLIE EPHRON: Now for one of our favorite guests, Jeri Westerson, here to reveal all the gory (truly!) details about her new IRREGULAR DETECTIVE MYSTERY. She'll take us to Baker Street with a pastiche blending Holmes and DRACULA!

Over to Jeri...

JERI WESTERSON: My Irregular Detective Mystery series follows the detecting exploits of former Baker Street Irregular Tim Badger and his partner Ben Watson, under the mentorship of Sherlock Holmes.

In my newest novel in the series THE VAMPYRE CLIENT, Badger and Watson’s client is a pale man, with dark glasses, has an allergy to sunlight, and studies bats.

He asks Badger and Watson to go to his estate in Ashwell to convince the suspicious villagers he is not a vampire…when tragedy strikes!

 You know. Just a typical Victorian mystery.

I do like my research, and for this story, some of that research was vampires. I dove deep. And I came away with something I could really sink my teeth into.

Starting from the beginning doesn’t mean we will be starting with Bram Stoker’s novel DRACULA from 1897 (two years after the timeframe of my novel), nor the folklore from the Balkans where some folks are still buried beheaded if they are suspected of being vampires, or with a brick shoved down their skull’s gullet, but rather with 1819’s THE VAMPYRE, by John Polidori, finishing a story that Lord Byron told during that celebrated weekend where Mary Shelley came up with FRANKENSTEIN. This vampyre was a nasty piece of work, breaking hearts and sucking blood.

But it didn’t stop there. In the 1820s, Paris was lousy with plays about sexy vampires. Le Vampire; Le Trois Vampires ou le clair de la lune; Encore un Vampire; Les Étrenne d’un Vampire …and more! These were all vampires of the sexy variety, and boy, did Paris love them!

But in 1897, DRACULA was published. Based a little on lore in the Balkans, and a lot more of imagination, Stoker created something quite different. 

But if you are thinking of a sexy portrayal, you’d be wrong. What Dracula really looked like in the book is someone thin and pale of face, a long, white mustache, pointed nose and ears, protruding teeth, nearly a unibrow, and sparse curly hair on his head but hairy everywhere else, including his palms. Not exactly a sexy times kind of vampire.

With the emergence of early silent films, we begin to see the sexy vamp again. And the scary ones.

London After Midnight, the lost Lon Chaney Sr. silent film where we see Chaney in particularly scary makeup, and then Nosferatu, the copyright violation film that widow Mrs. Bram Stoker fought for decades to suppress and was almost successful (and, incidentally, looked the most like her husband’s creation). And then finally, the 1931 film Dracula based on the play, both starring Bela Lugosi, who was supposed to be considered sexy back in the day.

Do vampires see their own reflections?

Stoker adopted some characteristics of folkloric vampires for his own: aversion to garlic, staking as a means of killing them. But he invented the idea that they must be invited into one's home, sleep on earth from their homeland, and have no reflection in mirrors.

Do they wear capes?

The cape-wearing Vampire with a high collar comes from the illustrations accompanying VARNEY THE VAMPIRE OR THE FEAST OF BLOOD from 1845.

Can they turn into a bat…a wolf…a gerbil?

The lesbian vampire of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872) can transform into a cat, as Dracula can transform into a dog…and a bat. Gerbil’s might be a little too cutesy. And short.

And since we are talking about my Sherlockian Pastiche here, let’s refer back to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes short story The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire It was first published in 1924.

The story -- with spoilers ahead:
Mr. Ferguson tells Holmes that he lived in Peru and married a Peruvian woman while there, bringing back not only the wife to England but souvenirs of Peru. He also has a 15-year-old son, Jack, from his first wife. He was alarmed when he caught his wife sucking blood from their baby son’s neck. Mrs. Ferguson also struck her stepson Jack several times and then sequestered herself away, never telling her husband why. Holmes, of course, worked it out long before he and Dr. Watson arrived to the Sussex home; that Jack was jealous of the new child and had been shooting Peruvian poisoned darts at the baby from the collection his father had, so that the mother was forced to suck out the poison but did not tell her husband about it for fear the family would break up. Boarding school was probably a good option.

Doyle here, as he had in his other two “supernatural” stories, one being the short story The Adventure of the Creeping Man, followed the popular penny dreadful genre; lurid tales of vampires, ghosts, fiends, and non-supernatural villains.

Only in Doyle’s case – even though he was a believer in séances and mysticism – wouldn’t allow his scientific detective to believe in the supernatural, and always sussed out the true cause of these events.

So it is important that when you encounter vampires, you know who you are dealing with; an unsexy white-mustachioed Dracula; a bat-looking Nosferatu; a sparkling vampire in Seattle; or hang-dog Louis in New Orleans. If you aren’t exited around them, a stake through the heart is the way out of that relationship.

Which really could be said for ALL relationships.

And now, a bit of a Sherlockian Supernatural Quiz!

1. Besides the Sussex Vampire, Doyle wrote two other supernatural stories. Was one of them:
(A) The Adventure of the Lazy Ghost
(B) The Dreadful Account of the Deadly Sea Slug
(C) The Hound of the Baskervilles
(D) The Case of the Unpleasant Odor

2. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, what sort of creature did Holmes encounter?
(A) Scooby-Doo
(B) A swearing Parrot
(C) A ghost cat
(D) A gigantic hound

3. In The Adventure of the Creeping Man, why is that man creeping?
(A) He’s constipated
(B) He’s a burglar
(C) He injected himself with monkey extract
(D) He’s lazy

4. The creeping man uses a ‘creeper.’ What is it?
(A) A vine
(B) A walker
(C) A new dance move
(D) A hip replacement

Answers to the Quiz: 1 is C, 2 is D, 3 is C, and 4 is A

THE VAMPYRE CLIENT, book 4 in An Irregular Detective Mystery series, releases today in ebook, paperback original, and audiobook. https://books2read.com/u/3G0w2K

HALLIE: So how was your knowledge of vampire lore? 

Tracing back, themes that repeat

TRUMPET FANFARE!!!
Congratulations to Hank for winning THE SIMON & SCHUSTER MARY HIGGINS CLARK AWARD for her fabulous ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS (Macmillan Publishers – Minotaur Books) !!!

HALLIE EPHRON: Most everyone knows I have a definite familial "through line." My parents were Hollywood screenwriters. My sisters write fiction and movies. I reluctantly succumbed in my 40s and started writing fiction, too.

I also do a lot of teaching, and when I talk to writers about using ChatGPT well, I talk about how concerned we all should be about how it will be putting workers (content creators, in particular) out of work.

The other day, my daughte and I sat down to watch one of my parents' movies: THE DESK SET.

It's a romantic comedy featuring Katharine Hepburn as the head of the research department for a big corporation. Spencer Tracy plays a gruff efficiency expert whose job it is to bring in an enormous computer (think: Mac truck) to take over her (and her co-workers') job.

Needless to say, sparks fly. 

I was surprised at how, even then (1957), people understood how computers and AI could end up putting people out of work. 

Then I remembered something about my father's misspent youth. Before he got himself thrown out of Cornell, he starred in a college production of THE ADDING MACHINE, a play written in 1923 by Elmer Rice.

My dad plays MR. ZERO, a lowly bean counter at a big company, who discovers (after 25 years at his job) that he will be replaced by an adding machine. And, by the way, his wife is cheating on him.

He snaps and kills his boss. And goes to jail. And gets executed. (Not a happy ending.

Here's a picture from the Cornell alumni magazine showing my dad playing the part...

I'd never put together this early dramatic role in The Adding Machine with The Desk Set screenplay he and my mother wrote thirty years later.

And now writers is struggling with the very same implications of machines replacing people. 

When I teach, we often cover how (and whether) to use generative artificial intelligence. Will a machine have written the next mystery novel you zip through and put the next generation of writers out of work? I wonder what my parents would have had to say on the topic.

Are there any through lines for you and your family, going back to parents and on to offspring? Maybe some political activism? Passion for food or travel? Music or art?? Morphing from generation to generation but still a constant.