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.

Don't Even Ask Me This

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I'm sure my memories are tinged with the bitterness that comes from abject rejection. Okay, I'm sure that's not exactly true, but if someone offered me ten million dollars to go back to high school--and without the wisdom I hope I now have--I might need to think about it.

There were some wonderful parts, and people who are lovely friends now. And teachers who completely changed my life, and for whom I am grateful every day. But basically: thanks, but no thanks.

That's why our dear friend Leslie Wheeler has such a perfect setting for her new mystery! 

And ooh, leave a comment and you could win a copy
of her brand new Wildcat Academy. SO much fun to go back to high school...if you don't actually have to go.

Back to School in a Mystery

By Leslie Wheeler

My mystery novels and short stories are what you could call place-centric.

I start with a place I find intriguing and the plot and characters grow from that.

In the first book of my Berkshire Hilltown Mysteries, that place is a hill (Rattlesnake Hill), in the second, it’s a road (Shuntoll Road), in the third, it’s a bog (Wolf Bog). For my fourth book, I chose a school, but not a regular public school.

Wildcat Academy is set at a private boarding school. I went to a private school myself and so did my son, and we both had good experiences—though my son probably didn’t think so at time. In any case, the type of private schools I decided to write were called therapeutic boarding schools, or schools for troubled teens, or tough love schools. This was because they resorted to punishments and restrictions they claimed would help students in the long run. Instead, these tactics only made things worse for some students, leading to lawsuits and closures of the schools, amid charges of abuse.

My first encounter with such a school happened shortly after I’d moved to the Berkshires. My husband and I went to see a musical comedy performance at a school in a different town from where we lived. The main building was a mansion at the far end of a huge lawn with a gated fence.

We were ushered into a screened-in porch before the performance began. There, a man wearing multiple gold rings on his fingers, who turned out to be the head of the school, relaxed in a lounge chair like the shah of a foreign country, while students milled around him waiting for the show to start. Sensing there was something different about this school, my husband asked a couple of students we were talking with what kind of school it was.

After exchanging glances, one of the students said, “It’s a place for kids who don’t always go with the flow.” And that was all they would say, although obviously there was more to it. Only later did we learn just how unpleasant that “more” could be.

Meanwhile, I discovered there was a similar school in our Berkshire town, and many residents were not happy about it. I attended an angry town meeting in reaction to an incident where a group of students from this school broke into a neighboring house, when the owners were away. They got drunk on the booze they found, stole a car and smashed it on their way into town. Tempers ran so high at that meeting that some people were ready to run the school owners out of town. That didn’t happen, but a few years later, the school shut down.


Given my town’s experience with that school, it wasn’t surprising that the townspeople were adamantly against another tough love school moving in. One person even put together a pamphlet, detailing all the awful things that had happened at the school in its current location. That pamphlet added grist to my fictional mill as I began to write Wildcat Academy.

Still, as I’ve learned, most things in life aren’t totally bad. There are glimmers of light in the darkness. While the headmaster of my fictional school is not a nice guy, nor are the school bullies, I’ve given it two good people in the characters of a student and a teacher. I was an English major, so naturally she’s an English teacher. The teacher and the “good” student help my main character, Kathryn Stinson, solve the mysterious death of another student, who happens to be the son of Kathryn’s sister-in-law.

Readers, what was your high school experience like: good, bad, or a mix, and why? One of the commentators will receive a free copy of Wildcat Academy.

HANK: Oh, I absolutely cannot wait to hear this. (I have a theory.) Tell all, Reds and Readers!

An award-winning author of books about American history and biographies, Leslie Wheeler has written two mystery series. Titles in the Berkshire Hilltown Mysteries are Rattlesnake Hill, Shuntoll Road, Wolf Bog and now, Wildcat Academy. 

Titles in the Miranda Lewis series include Murder at Plimoth Plantation, Murder at Gettysburg, and Murder at Spouters Point. Her mystery short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Best New England Crime Stories series, published by Crime Spell Books, where she is a co-editor/publisher. Leslie is a member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, serving as Speakers Bureau Coordinator for the New England Chapter of SinC. She divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Berkshires, where she writes in a house overlooking a pond.