The Spy Who Wrote Mysteries

The Spy Who Wrote Mysteries

 

There are some famous writers who drew upon their personal experiences with spycraft in their novels.  John le Carré and Ian Fleming both had backgrounds with espionage.  So did Joyce Porter.

 

Joyce Porter was a Cold War spy for Britain.  Though the details of her exploits are largely hidden from the public, she served in the women’s military branch during the closing years of the Second World War, leading into work in the Women’s Royal Air Force, learning Russian, and then serving Britain’s interests in the Cold War.

 

We don’t know many details about her exploits, though it has been released that towards the end of her career she was involved in recruitment.  At one point, she was on a mission to a secret collective in the Soviet Union, where as a “reluctant guest” she was “entertained with enough vodka to kill anyone but a Russian.”  

 

Porter drew upon her professional experiences in her four Eddie Brown spy thrillers, particularly Sour Cream with Everything and Neither a Candle Nor a Pitchfork and in her comedic takedown of the Soviet Union, The Package Included Murder, where the Hon Con goes on a cheap vacation and comes across repeated homicide attempts and a dysfunctional socio-political system.

 

 

My book on Joyce Porter, Murder Most Grotesque: The Comedic Crime Fiction of Joyce Porter, will be released by Level Best Books later this summer!

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

 

Chris Chan’s first book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” was released on August 27^thfrom MX Publishing, and is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).  It is also available in a Kindle edition.

The Chan Test

The Chan Test

 

One of the problems I have with much of contemporary literature and popular culture can be summed up in four words: The young characters stink.  They’re boring, one-dimensional, and have no agency of their own.  They’re peripheral to the plot and aren’t allowed valid emotions, other than to back up the life choices of the adults in their lives.  I was disgusted by the ending of a famous novel, where a young boy sees one parent cheating, and is totally fine with it because based on no hard information whatsoever, he assumes they’re in love, and the kid tacitly supports the dissolution of his family because the parents are pursuing their own happiness, and one parent’s total abandonment of the family produces no signs of distress from the boy.

 

This is not how real children think.  A real child would feel betrayed, frustrated, and furious, even if he couldn’t find the words to express his emotions.  This is lazy, shoddy writing, created to create the result the author wanted at the expense of psychological truth.  It’s part of a silly trend, where children have no part to play in the plot other than to validate their parents’ questionable decisions or to be briefly adorable.

 

Much has been made of the Beschdel Test, which judges the way that women are written in a creative work by asking if two women have a conversation with each other that is not about a man.  The Chan Test asks how children are treated in a creative work by asking: “Would there be any real difference to the work if the kid were replaced with a cute puppy?”  If the answer is “yes,” the work passes the Chan Test.  Think about it.  In how many TV shows, movies, and books could the child be replaced with a little dog with no serious changes to the plot?  Many of, say, Roald Dahl’s books, like Matilda, Danny the Champion of the World, and The BFG feature a strong young character who is instrumental to driving the plot or righting a wrong.  Many prominent movies, TV shows, and books fail the Chan Test miserably.

 

I’ve tried to address this in my own writings, and in these recent reviews for The Strand of Big Little Lies Season 2 and Hellfire, I talk about works and how they connect to the Chan Test.  

 

Can you think of any recent examples that pass or fail the Chan Test?

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

 

Chris Chan’s first book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” was released on August 27^th from MX Publishing, and is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).  It is also available in a Kindle edition.

Story Profile: “The Switched String”

Story Profile: “The Switched String”

 

In one of the latest entries in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, (Part XXV: 2021 Annual (1881-1888)), my story “The Switched String” starts out with an intriguing situation.  Holmes is playing his violin, when he discovers something is amiss.  One of the high-quality strings on his Stradivarius has been replaced with a cheap, inferior string.  Why would someone do that?  What could possibly be gained by tampering with Holmes’ violin?  How did someone break into 221B to do so?  Is this all a prank, or is something more sinister the motive?

 

The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, Part XXV: 2021 Annual (1881-1888) is available through Amazon and the MX website.  To reiterate, the proceeds of this book and all other books in the series go to support Underhill, a school based in one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s former homes that helps children with special needs.

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

 

Chris Chan’s first book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” was released on August 27^thfrom MX Publishing, and is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).  It is also available in a Kindle edition.

 

What the Heck Did I Just Read?

 What the Heck Did I Just Read?

 

I got the idea for this blog post based on a conversation I just had with friends on the Golden Age Detection discussion forum on Facebook.  The topic of conversation was sub-genres of the mystery story.  An old issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine divided stories into “Detective Stories” and “Crime Stories.”  In my way of thinking, all detective stories are crime stories, but not all crime stories are detective stories.  A detective story centers on a character trying to solve a crime, whereas a crime story might be told from the perspective of the criminal, or the victim, or innocent bystanders, or one of many other possibilities.  I suppose that there are other subgenres, including “Heist Stories” and “Mysterious Goings-On that Don’t Turn Out to be Actual Crimes” as well. 

 

Many crime stories I’ve read recently seem to include a crime as an afterthought.  Not even an afterthought.  A veiled, hinted possibility.  I recently wrote:

 

Some of the stories I read didn't really fit a genre. Some were "A guy rambles on about his crummy life for three pages and then hints he might commit a violent act but it's ambiguous" stories, and there were also, "Two guys have a conversation that might or might not lead to a crime but the end scene featuring one of the guys freaking out is too vague to be clear on what's happening." Sometimes I think there should be a genre called "What the heck did I just read?"

 

Indeed, this seems to be very popular in the short story field, not just in the mystery field.  A tale rambles on for a while, and then concludes with a final scene that is deliberately unclear.  Now, this can be very effective if done well– not knowing for sure how the narrative plays out can make a story more memorable or more haunting.  I don’t demand that everything be tied up with a nice little bow– even Agatha Christie ended a Miss Marple novel by making it ambiguous whether a death was suicide or homicide.  But a lot of these stories seem as if they can’t be bothered to come of with a proper ending.  When I have to read the last two paragraphs ten times and still can’t tell what’s going on, well… it leaves me unsatisfied.

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

 

Chris Chan’s first book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” was released on August 27^th from MX Publishing, and is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).  It is also available in a Kindle edition.