Truth in Fiction?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  We’ve been talking about how to weave reality into fiction—what we want to read about, and think about. How much we want to escape, versus how much we’re interested in real-life-based decisions fictional characters make. Maybe a veteran experienced journalist like Dick Belsky is the perfect person to tackle such a tightrope topic. His new book THE LAST SCOOP  is, okay, ripped from the headlines. But as all of Dick’s fast-paced investigative thrillers, it goes way deeper than that.

See what you think.

 

#MeToo & The Modern Mystery

By R.G. Belsky

         My character TV news director Clare Carlson falls in love in my latest thriller THE LAST SCOOP.

         And the new man in her life is crazy about Clare too.

         So this is one romance that should be smooth sailing, right?

         Not so fast.

         I’ve written about a lot of romance and love affairs in my crime novels before, but this is the first time I’ve dealt with all the changes in our society in recent times when it comes to these relationships. You see, the man in Clare’s life is a media consultant who has been hired by her TV station to improve the ratings. So, as news director, she is technically his boss. Which raises a myriad of issues in this #metoo era.

         Clare has an attorney friend named Janet who explains this all to her at one point in the book:

         “That’s a situation filled with potential downside for you, Clare. You’re his boss. If the relationship breaks up and the station decides to fire him - or even just doesn’t renew his contract - he could say that’s retaliation from you because of a personal relationship. It’s not as common for a woman supervisor to be accused of sexual harassment as a man, but it can happen. You could find yourself in a legal mess. That’s one scenario.”

         “What’s another one?”

         “He comes up with a plan for the station that doesn’t include you. Based on his consultant advice, the station fires you and gets a new news director. You claim it’s because you refused his sexual advances and wouldn’t sleep with him. Under that scenario, you would have a legitimate sexual harassment lawsuit again him.”

         “Uh, Janet, is there any possible scenario here that doesn’t wind up in a lawsuit?”

         “Well, you could live happily ever after but....” 

That isn’t the only office romance I deal with in THE LAST SCOOP. There’s also an affair going on between the station’s two glamorous co-anchors Brett Wolff and Dani Blaine. Which is complicated by the fact that Brett is married to someone else.

          For Clare, this presents another tricky situation. It’s not an unprecedented happening in TV newsrooms, of course:  MSNBC Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski had a love affair and wound up getting married in a real life on-screen romantic story not long ago.

         And, no question about it, that kind of sex between two star co-anchors sure provides a lot of sensational publicity which can translate into big ratings.

         But - like with her own office romance - Clare is left struggling to figure out what her role as a supervisor should be in all this.

         “Isn’t that a problem - a situation like that in the office - with all the controversy these days on sexual relationships or affairs in the workplace?” she is asked by someone at the TV station.

         “They say they’re in love.”

         “What exactly are the rules about that for two people working in the same office?”

         “I’m not sure what the rules are anymore.”

         She’s not the only one.

         I have another incident in the book where a longtime cameraman makes a joke about a woman newscaster’s breasts in front of other people in the office. Clare suspends him for two weeks and orders him to attend sensitivity training classes. He doesn’t understand why, complaining that no one had ever gotten upset before when he made those kinds of jokes to women. “Times have changed,” Clare tells him. “You need to change, too.”

         Now I’m not one of those authors who normally deals with real life political or controversial issues like this in a mystery novel. I don’t have people wearing MAGA hats or dealing with impeachment or universal health care in my books. And I certainly don’t plan to ever write about something as serious as the coronavirus pandemic.

         But - in an era where major media figures like Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose and Bill O’Reilly have lost their jobs because of sex scandals in their newsrooms- I find it difficult to write about a woman character like TV news director Clare Carlson without dealing with this important (albeit at times confusing) issue.

         What do you think?

         Would you prefer to keep all this out of a mystery novel and just focus on an old-fashioned romance for a woman character?

         Or do you like the idea of a woman like Clare Carlson dealing with real life issues such as sex in the workplace at the same time as she’s solving the crime?

         Tell me your opinion...

HANK:  Did any of you watch THE MORNING SHOW on  Apple TV? I thought it was terrific--a semi-fictionalization (with embellishments and accessories) of the Matt Lauer story--from the point of view of the Lauer character's coworkers.  Truly thought-provoking. But as Dick asks--what's your opinion?

THE LAST SCOOP

The scariest kind of serial killer—one you don't know exists

Martin Barlow was Clare Carlson's first newspaper editor, a beloved mentor who inspired her career as a journalist. But, since retiring from his newspaper job, he had become a kind of pathetic figure—railing on about conspiracies, cover-ups, and other imaginary stories he was still working on. Clare had been too busy with her own career to pay much attention to him.

When Martin Barlow is killed on the street one night during an apparent mugging attempt gone bad, it seems like he was just an old man whose time had come.

But Clare—initially out of a sense of guilt for ignoring her old friend and then because of her own journalistic instincts—begins looking into his last story idea. As she digs deeper and deeper into his secret files, she uncovers shocking evidence of a serial killer worse than Son of Sam, Ted Bundy, or any of the other infamous names in history.

This  is the biggest story of Martin Barlow's career—and Clare's, too—as she uncovers the path leading to the decades-long killer of at least twenty young women. All is not as it seems during Clare's relentless search for this serial killer. Is she setting herself up to be his next victim? Clare Carlson is perfect for fans of Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone and Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski.

R. G. Belsky is an author of crime fiction and a journalist in New York City.

His newest mystery, THE LAST SCOOP, will be published in May 2020 by Oceanview. It is the third in a series featuring Clare Carlson, the news director for a New York City TV station. The first Clare Carlson book, YESTERDAY'S NEWS, came out in 2018. It won the David Award at Deadly Ink for Best Mystery of 2018.  The second Clare Carlson book, BELOW THE FOLD, was in 2019.

He also is the author of two thrillers written under the pen name of Dana Perry - THE SILENT VICTIM 2019) and THE GOLDEN GIRL (June, 2020).

Belsky previously wrote the Gil Malloy series - THE KENNEDY CONNECTION, SHOOTING FOR THE STARS AND BLONDE ICE - about a newspaper reporter at the New York Daily News. Belsky himself is a former managing editor at the Daily News and writes about the media from an extensive background in newspapers, magazines and TV/digital news. He has also been a top editor at the New York Post, Star magazine and NBC News.

Belsky won the Claymore Award at Killer Nashville in 2016. He has finished several times as a Finalist for both the Silver Falchion and David Awards. YESTERDAY’S NEWS, was also named Outstanding Crime/News Based Novel by Just Reviews in 2018 and was a Finalist for Best Mystery of 2018 in the Foreword INDIES Awards.

His previous suspense/thriller novels include LOVERBOY and PLAYING DEAD. Belsky lives in New York City.                 

The Girl on the Cover

-->

You go to the bookstore. 

You see the array of books on the “this just in” or “new releases” shelves—and what might you notice? There’s a certain word that seems to appear again and again.

And Elizabeth Zelvin has one word for that word. She says: Enough. And her new short story anthology is not just an illustration of her frustration—she hopes it’s the beginning of a solution.

The Girl Book Conspiracy

 by ElizabethZelvin

I’ve had a revelation about the spate of Girl books in the crime fiction market: Gone Girl, Girl On A Train, Girl in the Window, The Girl Next Door, The Lost Girls of Paris, gathering momentum ever since The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I don’t think it’s simply the marketing ploy that many have called it, with publishers jumping on the bandwagon of one megahit with more of the same. 

As a Second Wave feminist—“Really? I studied you in school!” an awed young person told me recently—I remember how hard we had to kick and scream to get everyone to stop calling those of us who weren’t fifteen and under “girls” and start calling us “women.” Yet all of a sudden, on the covers of books in airport bookstores and big box stores—which as every author knows, means hundreds of thousands of copies sold—they’re calling grown women girls again. 

Oh, but they didn’t mean it that way! They’d never do that! As a brilliant therapist, (not me), once said, unconsciousness is no excuse. So what’s the big deal? For one thing, books are culture bearers, or in the pop-up vernacular, influencers. And the titles of bestselling books have exponentially more influence than the books themselves, because, through word of mouth and the media, they reach so many people who never read the books. 

I’ve never read Gone Girl, because even its greatest admirers assure me I'll dislike the protagonists. I don’t do unlikable protagonists, not if I see them coming. But I’ve heard the book mentioned hundreds of times and participated in dozens of conversations about it, each reinforcing the concept that a grown woman is a girl, girl, girl.

But why does “girl” vs. “woman” matter? What difference does it make? I say it makes a huge difference in our unconscious assumptions and biases, which is why we fought so hard to change it in the first place.  Girls are—supposedly-- immature. They’re naive and weak. They don’t know much. They need things explained to them. They can be dismissed and patronized. They can be manipulated. They need authority figures to make decisions for them. They need to be protected, i.e. controlled “for their own good,” --which I think we figured out fifty years ago was how the patriarchy disempowered us while feeling good about themselves. Some of those generalities may work if the girl is ten years old and the adult responsible and ethical. But it’s not right to make such assumptions about grown women.

I'm not asking anyone to abolish the word “girl,” of course. Just use it when you’re talking about real girls! When I planned Me Too Short Stories: An Anthology, I was looking for stories about women. But girls as well as women showed up. The cycle of abuse is ongoing unless we find ways to break it. Some of the girls whose voices you can hear in these stories have experiences that may seem unimaginable to women who were nurtured and protected during childhood. Yet others may hear such voices and, as in the #Me Too movement, recognize parts of their own experience that they have never dared to examine. These are girls whose stories we need to tell, so readers can hear and believe them.

As a therapist in my "other hat," I know these stories are common in real life. Yet they seldom show up in short crime fiction, even in the darkest e-zines. Maybe they don't realize that young survivors can change the story. When I myself wrote a short story about such girls and the women they grow up to be, I couldn't think where to submit it. So I created a market of my own and invited other women writers to join me.

What do you think when you see “girl” on a cover?  

HANK: I will confess to loving my title THE WRONG GIRL—that book came out in 2013.  It is, however, about an infant daughter.

What do you think, Reds and readers? Is "girl" more than a word?

 ******************************************

Me Too Short Stories: An Anthology—crimes against women, tales of retribution and healing—is editor/ author Elizabeth Zelvin's plan to strike a blow for abused and intimidated women and girls in short crime fiction, making them the protagonists of their own stories. Fifteen women mystery and crime short story authors created fictional sisters who take charge of their destiny.

Elizabeth Zelvin, three-time Derringer & three-time Agatha nominee  

Editor, Me Too Short Stories: An Anthology 

OUT NOW!

Crimes against women, tales of retribution and healing

Editor, Where Crime Never Sleeps: Murder New York Style 4 

The Bruce Kohler Mysteries

The Mendoza Family Saga

http://elizabethzelvin.com

Hannah Canter Goes to Hollywood

Hannah, Lucy, and David

LUCY BURDETTE: I love all of our guests (or we wouldn't have them visit!), but today's is especially dear to me. Hannah Canter is my darling nephew's bride--we figured he'd choose someone cute and smart as a whip, and boy were we right! Hannah's a Hollywood woman with so many exciting projects in the works, it was hard to narrow down the questions.

LUCY: You worked on the Netflix's SEEING ALLRED, a documentary about women's rights activist, Gloria Allred, which made its debut at Sundance last month. What a moment for that to happen, with #metoo going viral! Can you tell us a little about making the film, and then the experience at Sundance?

HANNAH: The synchronicity of the entire filmmaking experience could not have been better or more profound! In fact, the directors Roberta Grossman and Sophie Sartain approached Gloria three years before Gloria eventually gave her blessing for the documentary, and I find myself constantly thinking about how if she had given the go-ahead when she was originally approached, we would have made an entirely different film – one that still captured her tireless fight for the oppressed but I doubt it would have felt as resonant and relevant as it does in this #metoo era. And when we did eventually start shooting, the Cosby case wouldn’t break for another couple of weeks, an event that we see as the earthquake that brought on the tsunami of #metoo. 

L to R: Marta Kauffman, Hannah, Roberta Grossman, Gloria Allred, Sophie Sartain, Robbie Rowe Towlin

We feel really lucky and really proud to have been able to capture a soldier on the front line of this movement as it was building. And then, on top of this production journey, to be in the US Documentary Competition at the first post-Weinstein Sundance Film Festival – Gloria happens to also represent a few Weinstein accusers – on the one year anniversary of Trump’s Inauguration and the Women’s March, with Gloria making impassioned remarks at the Park City Rally for Respect… it was kismet. An absolute dream.

LUCY: The TV show Grace and Frankie launched its fourth season on January 19th and its fifth season was just announced. Congratulations! Tell us a little about your role as this launches and what it's like working with those icons.

HANNAH: Thank you! It’s hard to believe we’ve been at it for over four seasons now. I am a producer on the series, but my involvement actually goes all the way back to the development of the show, over four years ago, when we at Okay Goodnight (our production company) caught wind that Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin were interested in doing a television project together. I had just starting working for Marta Kauffman at the time, and we were in the car together and I turned to her and said “What if their husbands are gay and leave Jane and Lily for each other?” 

From there we fleshed out the concept that became GRACE AND FRANKIE, pitched it to Jane and Lily who loved it, and not long after we set it up at Netflix. That whole process was totally surreal for me, a veritable newcomer to producing. I felt like it was the epitome of beginner’s luck. Since then, my role as producer is essentially to maintain the vision for the show throughout all the elements of the creative, always in deference to our Showrunners, Marta Kauffman and Howard J. Morris. In practice, that means everything from giving feedback on stories and scripts, to working with the production departments like art and locations to make and approve creative and budgetary decisions, to working in the cutting room with the editors to execute our internal and studio/network notes. Luckily, between myself, Marta, our colleague Robbie Rowe Tollin, and our incredible crew, we are able to divide and conquer to preserve our sanity, and the creative collaboration is off the charts. 

Devorah Herbert (production designer), Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Allyson Fanger (costume designer)

It’s hands-down the most fulfilling and inspiring professional experience of my young career, in no small part because of Jane and Lily themselves. They are consummate professionals, always prepared, always on time, always eager to do their best work. They are so immensely talented and elevate everything they touch with their work ethic and their spirit – it makes you feel like you’re a part of something big, something meaningful. And work aside, they still manage – at 78 and 80 years old! – to carve out time to volunteer and organize for causes they hold dear to their hearts, that benefit the victimized and underserved. AND they’re hilariously funny! I have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for them, and I hope a small fraction of their vitality and amazingness has rubbed off on me over these past couple of years.

LUCY: We have both writers and readers who regularly visit our blog. I suspect we'd all be interested in the process of how you choose projects to develop. Where do the ideas come from, and how many books do you look at, and what catches your eye about something that might translate well into film or TV?

HANNAH: For us, it’s all about passion. The ladies of Okay Goodnight (myself, Marta Kauffman, Robbie Rowe Tollin, and our two amazing coordinators) are voracious readers, so the way we typically find the books we want to adapt is just by working through the towering stacks of leisure-reading books on our nightstands. When one of us falls madly in love with something and we think it might be a viable adaptation, we stop the presses and make sure everyone at our company gives it a read to see if there’s consensus. An adaptation is really hard work – it requires so much heavy lifting creatively – so whatever the book is has to completely consume us, mind and soul. Being a small and very hands-on production company, we only have the bandwidth to pursue a handful of projects at a time, so we only take on the projects that we feel in our bones, the stories that we can’t imagine not telling, content that has an important and rightful place in the culture at this moment. We tend toward female-driven content, which I don’t think is a coincidence, us being a company of women, but I think it’s also because we see a need in the culture for more stories by and about women. 

So to answer your question more directly – we are constantly reading fiction, but at any given time we are seriously considering only a few books to adapt. These books would ideally have some dynamic female characters, compelling visual setting or style potential, something about it that feels totally unique or never-before-seen on screen, and the story would have substance and sophistication and its telling would promote our core value of common humanity.

LUCY: I could ask a million more things, but here's one last question. You've had a little experience with screenwriting and are probably interested in doing more. what are the challenges of adapting a book to a script?

HANNAH: I’d say the biggest challenge I personally faced is how to externalize or dramatize internal thought and character development. For example, if you have an introverted protagonist in a book, the way you get to know her or him on the screen would have to be creatively reconceived in order to achieve the same intimacy with the character. In a book, being let into a character’s thought processes, or an anecdotal memory where its significance is explained to us in its unfolding, or any tangential musings that are never spoken aloud can hold our attention for hours and hours on end. In a visual medium like film or TV, we learn about them more by what they’re doing and saying, unless you employ voice over narration, which is a slippery slope but when used thoughtfully can be very effective. I also think that translating tone provides a special kind of challenge – because so often when we fall in love with a book, what we’re enamored by is so much more than the beats of the story or the arcs of the characters. It’s the unfolding and intertwining of it all, the atmosphere and world building, the unique combination of our synapses that fire off in symphony. And sometimes in order to recreate that intoxicating experience you have to move away from the source material, which can be a painful but necessary step in honoring the book you fell in love with in the first place.

LUCY: Reds! Isn't she amazing? She's got a busy busy day and is of course on California time, but will try to pop in to answer comments and questions as she can, so fire away...

RHYS POSTS ON THE #METOO MOVEMENT

RHYS BOWEN: Usually on Jungle Red Writers we stay well clear of controversy. We are, after all, a welcoming and friendly community. But last week Time Magazine made those women who broke the silence about sexual abuse in the world-place people of the year and I felt I couldn't let this moment go by without commenting, based on my experience of writing historical novels.

It seems as if the flood gates have opened with the #metoo movement and the only thing that surprises me is that so many people (mostly men but not all) are surprised. 'This can't really be going on to this extent' is one comment I've heard. Those women are making it up for personal gain or revenge. I've heard that too.

But I think all of us who have ever been in the work place can think of at least one occasion when we were made uncomfortable by a man's comment, even if we weren't physically abused. I used to work in BBC drama and of course actors are terribly touchy-feely. It never really bothered me but then it wasn't the same as being put into an embarrassing position by a boss--one who had power and could terminate or damage a career.

Those who act surprised should realize there is a long history of men using power over women. In my Molly Murphy novels, set in early 1900s New York City women cannot vote. They can't own property. They can legally be beaten by their husbands and it only takes a husband plus one doctor's signature to have a woman committed to an insane asylum for life. (And one of the reasons for mental instability was listed as READING NOVELS, so beware!)

This was really long ago, you say and yet let's skip forward to the 1950s. A popular song was Wives and Lovers. The first verse went, Hey, little girl, fix your hair, fix your makeup. Soon he will open the door...."
And the second verse said, "Day after day there are girls at the office and men will always be men."

There are two things I'd like to point out about this. The first is that she's addressed as "Little girl". Not "Hey, grown woman, fix your hair...."  And the female employees are also "girls.'
But it's not Boys will always be boys.
It's "men will always be men."

And that's the excuse. The age-old excuse. Men will always be men. It's in their nature. If a man and a woman are in the same room the man will want to grab the woman. Nothing you can do about it. This has excused bad behavior for centuries. It's the same rationale that puts Muslim women into burkas... because the sight of them could inflame the passions of strange men.

So I hope this current awakening will change things. I hope men will be told "When you are at work you control your passions. You save them for a female who is interested in pursuing a relationship with you!

Will things really change now? Maybe they will if every woman, on every occasion, looks the man calmly in the face and says, "That is not an acceptable remark. That is not an acceptable action" And our girls are brought up to understand that they never, ever have to do anything they don't want to. That no means no. Calm and confident refusal is probably the biggest turn-off anyway! There is nothing more scary than a calm and confident woman.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this! Do you have stories you'd like to share?