BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA…AGAIN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Come to this blog freely, go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring.
   Regularly, I place tree-based data-storage devices on tree-based data-storage devices. Paper books on wooden shelves. Books come in and must be stored somewhere.
   I know, yes, I know. Books come in and books don’t go out, and there’s always a Bookpocalypse looming. New books must be read. Yet…
   Old books can be read again.
   And so…I turned, once more, to Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula. What is a classic? Stoker’s tale is certainly that, but what’s the definition? We might as well go with Alan Bennett’s remark: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
   Have I read this classic work or…did I only watch the move/TV adaptation? In watching an adaptation, would I be shocked and surprised, on reading the book, to discover that diabolical liberties had been taken?
   Classics I’ve read. Time for a very brief list in no particular order. Strong Poison. Tom Sawyer. Jane Eyre. Treasure Island. Wuthering Heights. Dracula. Frankenstein.
   Adaptations, flattened to fit a two-hour movie-slot, are always going to be patchy. Better to go for lengthier TV adaptations, in which fewer diabolical liberties are taken. If you have a dedicated reading-space, and coffee, then stick with the originals if you can’t bear to see a much-loved classic knifed from all directions.
   Curl up with a good book, and pretend the awful motion-picture does not exist. (Round up the usual suspects. You know the drill.)
   Dracula opens with a lawyer, Jonathan Harker, travelling to Count Dracula’s quaint home to assist in legal matters when it comes to moving house. Spoiler. Oh, and the Count is a vampire.
   When we leave the castle behind, things don’t look too good for the abandoned lawyer. London is Dracula’s target, and Stoker fills the text with characters. Fictional London, aye, and Fictional Whitby, are both fair teeming with characters.
   Dracula’s thirst for blood is matched by the workman’s thirst for alcohol, judging by the many friendly bribes that aid the vampire hunters in their investigations.
   In the opening of this tale, at the castle, in the severe vampiric wilderness, there are precious few characters. Indeed, it is Harker’s realisation that the Count’s home is empty of servants that raises more and more suspicion in his fevered mind.
   Harker is left to the lack of mercy of Dracula’s three undead minions. Few other characters visit the castle. Over in the pub-filled stamping-ground of humanity, Stoker throws characters our way thick and fast.
   Here lies the problem of dealing with adaptations of the tale. Many characters are many characters too many. In the book, there’s space for these choir-like assemblies of voices and their different methods of conveying story. Hardly anything truly happens directly in Dracula…
   We are given a collection of notes. Letters. Diaries. Newspaper articles. Stoker warns us of the existence of many receipts and bills of lading and railway timetables, but he doesn’t bog us down in those.
   The novel is written, pencilled in, penned, typed up, noted in shorthand, and gathered at the edges by means of newspaper stories. Characters frantically chronicle that morning’s events while on the afternoon train to the next vampire hunter meeting, which, itself, will be noted in print much later.
   Only with Doctor Seward and his phonograph in action do we occasionally stumble upon an event that is happening while his recording device is in motion.
   That brings me to his patient: R.M. Renfield. Our lost lawyer friend, Mr Harker, arranged Dracula’s purchase of a property right next to Doctor Seward’s very Victorian asylum. Dracula’s new temporary abode isn’t spooky enough by itself. His new lair needs Edward Gorey levels of lunacy on neighbouring soil.
   It isn’t long before Dracula is at the asylum window, having late-night chats with Mr Renfield. They share an interest in blood. There’s a much-used method running through adaptations, to save screen-time, of condensing characters into one role…
   For some reason, it is fated to Renfield, across adaptations, to merge with the character of Jonathan Harker. Renfield/Harker is often the first condensed casualty in a Dracula adaptation. It seems that writers are hell-bent on turning the patient into the lawyer.
   The lawyer is mobile. Renfield, however, is an inmate who engages in brief bursts of movement when he escapes the confines of his cell. It’s a shame that he’s the first of many elements to go, as…
   He’s vital to the plot.
   In movies, Renfield can come across as a minor character. In the book, though, he’s significant. For a novel named Dracula, we find Dracula himself conspicuous by his absence. Stoker wisely has Dracula conspiring offstage for much of the action.
   Various unrelated newspaper accounts track Dracula’s bursts of activity across the map of London. When he appears in person, he takes the centre of the stage.
   Bram Stoker, should you look him up, would be remembered chiefly as a figure of the theatre had he not written Dracula. He kept one eye on adapting his story to the stage, after all. (And his theatrical version predated the book’s publication by the barest whisper of a vampiric sigh.)
   So don’t be surprised by the Victorian theatricality of a Victorian novel penned by a theatrical fellow. Stoker was not just any theatre-lover, but assistant to noted actor Sir Henry Irving. Much has been made of Dracula’s habits and their alignment with the temperament and physicality of Sir Henry.
   Adaptations sent me to the source, and I found I much-preferred the source. Dracula wasn’t the first vampire story, and it certainly wasn’t ever going to be the last. Stoker threw an undead quote into the book by mentioning the poem Lenore, so we see vampiric roots from an earlier time appearing in the novel itself.
   And it is to poetry that we’d look, in search of early vampire tales that were written down. Before that, as usual, to stave off the mystery of the night, you’d be huddled around a campfire trying to keep people entertained.
   If that campsite happened to be the Villa Deodati at Lake Geneva, and you knew Byron or Shelley, then the stories told would chill the very marrow of your bones. From that rain-lashed place, two classic works emerged.
   We’ll call one Frankenstein. And, just like the later Dracula, this tale faces knives from all directions when being adapted. For reasons of cheapness, a trip into the icy wastes at the novel’s end is a trip too far for most movie budgets. That chill journey is often replaced by a lab explosion.
   The other spooky story from out of Lake Geneva, scribbled by John Polidori, is titled The Vampyre. Today we’d call it highly literary revenge-porn against Lord Byron. The Villa Deodati was the prototype of an internet forum where a teenager could publish her grave-robbing fan-fic without fear of cancellation.
   A forum like that always has an edgy character in there, floating on the periphery while aiming barbed taunts at the centre, and that’s pretty much Polidori’s role in the literary space.
   Polidori gave us the aristocratic vampire preying on young women. Lord Ruthven, the vampire, or vampyre, is based on a man who had little time for the undead – Byron, though there’s a cottage industry out there trying to convince us of his own vampirism. But this blog post is about Count Dracula and not Lord Byron, and I fear we must move on before sunrise surprises us.
   In short, it’s a good while after The Vampyre before we reach Dracula, by way of Varney the Vampire and other literary routes most quaint and curious. For completeness, we should add alternative titles to the well-known tales…
   Frankenstein is all about The Modern Prometheus. Varney’s vampiric saga also travels under the guise of The Feast of Blood, and a last-minute change to Dracula deprives us of the story named The Un-Dead.
   If we are to believe the notion that Lord Byron was (and remains to this day) a real-life vampire, then we must go along with the awkward literary notion that Byron wrote everything. He penned The Vampyre, scribbled Frankenstein, created Sherlock, and wrote up his exploits as Varney…
   And then “in retirement” Byron went on to write Dracula, The Railway Children, 1984, The Phantom Menace, several episodes of the TV soap EastEnders, and, in a failed attempt at dispelling the mythology, this very blog post.
   My point, in detouring through this graveyard and that cobbled street, is to consider Dracula against the backdrop of a blood-red sky as we approach the setting of the sun. There’s before Stoker’s novel and after…
   Before, you certainly had the aristocratic vampire in fiction. After, you had a legion of aristocratic vampires. You can hardly move through fiction without encountering Count Orlok (Dracula, hiding from copyright law), Countess Dracula, Count Yorga, or every edgy aristocratic vampire character from the roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade.
   As to that last, I fervently avoided the aristocratic cliché when playing the game. When you think of roleplaying games and aristocratic vampires, you are led in the direction of Dungeons & Dragons and D&D’s very own Dracula photocopy, Count Strahd von Zarovich, ruler of Barovia. (Curiously, Dungeons & Dragons emerged from the American Lake Geneva. Coincidence? Byron wrote the Monster Manual, obviously.)
   Your mileage in subverting vampiric cliché in your own fiction will vary – for the dead ride quickly – but, damn it, over in the fantasy world of D&D, the Hammer Horror treatment comes across as a bite refreshing…
   Moving swiftly on…
   I revisited Dracula. It is a dramatic telling of Johnny Foreigner invading London. You can see the tabloid headlines today…
   EASTERN EUROPEAN CRIME LORD AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT CORRUPTS ENGLISH ROSE…AND MILKS OUR BENEFIT SYSTEM. HE’S EXPLOITING THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE AND HAVING A LAUGH WHILE ABOUT IT.
   Of note, I once stepped onto Ellis Island and straight into the viewing of a play on illegal immigrant Bela Lugosi’s acceptance into America. On his side, he wasn’t an actual vampire. And, today, if a vampire like Lord Byron came out of “retirement” and promised to use his vast and secret fortune to fund his own happy meals from out of a blood bank, would we use vampire as a term of abuse?
   We’re human. Of course we would. (I have to say we’re human. This camouflages the fact that the blog post was written by Lord Byron, and is fresh to print from his holiday hideaway retirement cottage in Transylvania. Cottage. Castle. The terms are interchangeable.)
   There’s so much lore around the creation of Dracula, and of Frankenstein before it, that the best thing to do is ignore all the psychobabble and delve straight into the words. Visit these books. Revisit these books. Judge for yourselves.
   I like Dracula for the framing of the story. Readers are invited to piece together the narrative as the clues come in. It’s a Victorian detective piece, and you are forgiven if you end up wondering where Sherlock Holmes is in all this.
   Stoker’s novel is out of copyright, and the Dracula/Holmes crossover is not the original idea it once was. There’s a well-worn path from Baker Street to Castle Dracula, now. I have at least one comic book adaptation on the shelves, around here, somewhere.
   From time to time, I revisit works. Some books are worth reading again, even though unread books glare at me as I pass them by to remove the stake from Stoker’s novel one more time. In literary terms, Dracula is bound to outlive all of us. The book is still in print to this day, and has taken on an Un-Life all of its own. It’s better for a classic to be an Un-Dead book than an unread one.

MEETING SERIAL KILLERS OFF THE INTERNET: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

If you haven’t pissed people off, you haven’t lived.

   Reader, I’ve lived.

   (Shout out to Charlotte Brunty. Yes, I happen to like that spelling.)

*

The flip-side to making enemies is making friends. I’m going to use the f-word and the c-word in this blog post. If you are offended, it means you are alive and – at the very least – semi-awake.

   As I navigated my way across the internet, I encountered all sorts of authors…and people who would be authors if they turned the spotlight of fancy on the hidden notion of writing.

   For those people, writing is the deer caught in the headlights. Not for long. It darts into the forest and is never seen again. Even the non-writers I encounter online have many a story to tell. It’s not all about author-to-author contact.

   Mostly, but not all.

*

What strange writers do I encounter, if I encounter all sorts? Oh, the usual dead ones: former scribblers who step out of the past with the subtle hello of an atom bomb landing on your plate. The living literary typing types come in many varieties. There are people who just burble merrily along, and you wave as they burble at your wave.

   Occasionally there are writers who reach out for help in a moment of crisis. In response, I furnish as little harm as I can mismanage under the circus tenties. If you can’t do some good, at least avoid doing any bad.

   There are writers who handed me my jaw after I dropped it during a conversation in which I was stunned by the universe-forming eloquence of the non-me part of the chatter. Believe me when I say there’s no such thing as small-talk when writers are involved. I keep reminding myself of that, and I keep dropping that jaw in surprise at momentous thoughts wrapped in casual conversation.

   It’s nice just to show up to a chat like that and stay warm by the fire while the words hit me. (Yes, it’s a cold day as I type this and the heating is effing slow to respond this morning. Sensing a theme of warmth, if not sensing actual warmth.)

   As scribblers, we look for that wonderful thinky stuff everywhere and write it down if we catch sight of a glimmer.

   I’ve encountered tale-tellers who are in another universe. The searing glow from the luminous presence dazzles the vision, leaving an after-image that looks exactly like the scribbler. But that scribbler popped out to the shops for biscuits. All I’m seeing is everything left behind in words, dancing across the internet. Look at a light bulb and look away and you’ll still be staring at the light bulb, even though…

   The bulb popped out to the shops for biscuits. In another universe.

*

With surprise in the hearing of it, I was ambushed by online writers and non-writers who used the f-word and called me friend. An alarming number of people reached for the c-word and called me charming. I’ve been called the other c-word many a time.

   (If you haven’t been called a cunt in Scotland, you haven’t stepped outside your door. In this part of the world, it is a routine form of greeting. If they really like you, they’ll call you a fucking cunt. It’s all just banter until someone takes an axe to you. Then it’s banter…with an axe.)

   I don’t think of myself as charming, and I question the sanity of people who state this of me. As they are writers, I must question their sanity in any case.

*

All of this background material informs my view that I should never meet people off the internet – they are serial killers. Yes, the jaw-dropping writers, the luminous ones, the people who hauled me out of the water to call me a friend. I can’t shake the notion that they are all one sharp axe and a decaying log cabin away from a court-appointed date with destiny.

   That’s just Canadian/American cliché, though. The Canadians and Americans I’ve met online seem to live in cities and not the backwoods. When they aren’t living in armed compounds. You know who you are. Big shout out to you across your walled enclosure. No names – it’s harder to plot drone strikes that way.

*

Why do I think these people live in log cabins, with mass graves out in the backwoods? They are writers. And all writers take bleach to their internet search histories. Writers, far more often than murderers, become unhealthily obsessed with methods of body-disposal.

   There is a healthy level of obsession over methods of body-disposal – it’s about three internet searches in, but you’ll cross the line without even thinking it over. Not a pang of conscience. It’s “research” and not for actual murderising. Anyway…seeking reliable disposal of a body doesn’t automatically mean you offed someone. No, there’s a mere 98% chance of that.

*

How do I appear to these writers? My online persona is that of the perpetual grump, snarling at the world and all its petty nonsenses…but these writers don’t believe any of that guff. With a casual wave, my grizzly bear grump is transformed into the teddy-bear slump. I am dismissed as non-grumpy, and slide under the table…snaffling a few chocolate biscuits as I go.

   Having trouble shaking A.A. Milne from my thoughts.

*

Yes, I’ve been genuinely grumpy on and off. Online and off. If you haven’t pissed people off, you haven’t lived. And if you haven’t pissed people off online, you’ve never been online.

   Occasionally, very rarely, I’ve somehow managed to prove that I am not fictional. I once had this accusation hurled at me…

   You are a real person!

   The author in question was delighted to discover that I wasn’t an artificial intelligence project languishing in an electronic lab, let out onto the internet in search of world domination and great coffee.

   Another author couldn’t decide. Was I an unfeasibly young student treating everything as research for a paper? OR was I the sort of person to set an exam for that type of student, being, instead, a retired American professor? (Complete with Tweedy Outfit and a sideline of investigating murder mysteries. Portrayed by Angela Lansbury/Dick Van Dyke. Delete as inapplicable.)

*

One authorly contact nailed me as an online friend, with the distinction that I wasn’t quite in the real world…the way real-life friends are. I countered with the observation that the hour was late, and I had to return to Cair Paravel for supper with Aslan and the Pevensies.

*

Yes, the internet is in the real world, too, surprise, surprise. Tread far enough from one into the other and you’ll realise that one is patently absurd and nonsensical. The other is patently absurd and nonsensical and online.

*

Why haven’t I met these people on the internet and off the internet as well? Distance. For the Canadians and Americans the distance is great or greater, depending on the coast. My nearest internet contact is on this side of the Atlantic, but still too far away for a casual half-hour visit.

   Planning. Expense. Opportunity. The planning is always there. I accept the expense. But the opportunity isn’t an easy thing to arrange. The closest I came to meeting an author offline was an attempted hijacking, koff, koff, was an invitation to turn up at a concert. For that, a second author decided to fly in and create a literary club rather than treat the whole exercise as an informal meeting.

   But the timing was off, and I was spared the tedium of a transatlantic flight. Travel from here to there is one thing. But travel to and from airports to wait for flights…that’s something else. A something best wiped off the bottom portion of the shoe.

*

I know when I am invited to a town that I am invited to eat out of someone’s fridge. This is unspoken. You are staying with us and all our cats and lizards. Are you allergic to cats and lizards, or bats and wizards? The big question looms.

   What if I turn up and discover that everyone is simply appalling OR that everyone thinks I’m simply appalling and the peasants revolt with flaming torches to hand? I suspect I’d generate that effect by accident.

   It’s a bit much to travel thousands of miles and take up station in a person’s abode on the off-chance that your online persona handled in small doses will match the offline version in living 3D. I know I’d be accused of GREAT RESERVE in flying over and booking into a hotel. And buying touristy tours to go on, just in case everyone is wretched to me. How to fill the hours before the endless flight back to Scotlandia…

   That’s before we get into the business of axes and log cabins.

*

Yes, the prospect of flying to someone’s fridge and then having an awkward hour-long meeting before faking a heart attack and being carried off by a fake ambulance and fake paramedics who must be hired in any event…

   The prospect fills me with gloom. I must accept the expense, of course. Can’t I just fly in, mumble a few words, and eat chocolate cake? We’d all be happy, then.

   There are authors who believe me when I say that I’ve just hired a Scottish actor to impersonate me. It’s that simple. I’m a busty blonde woman in reality.

   That’s not true. But it doesn’t stop authors fearing this is the situation. Don’t you dare. That’s right. I mustn’t dare to be a Scottish actor impersonating a busty blonde woman. No good would come of it. I’d be the talk of the Wikipedia TALK page.

*

And so…

*

Here I am, facing the prospect of meeting an online person in the offline world. The f-word was used to describe me. How do I handle this real-life encounter, bearing in mind that the internet itself is still a subsection of real life…

   Much planning. Acceptable expense. Opporchancity? We’ll see. I’m standing…not sure where I’ll be standing. They’ve taken the map away. (No, seriously. It’ll be back after building work is finished. So I can’t even see a map of how it looked before the building started. That is so online strange.)

   I’m standing…let’s hope I’m standing. Waiting for a sign to pop up overhead. Downloading Online Friend: 9% complete.

   What’s 9% of that? Boots? The boots. Will there be boots? You download online friends into the offline world from the feet up, right? Otherwise, you are into floating head territory. I need to research this a bit more.

   If I go for a meeting with an online person and never return, then I’ve gone shopping for biscuits. In another universe.

BOOK SNOBS.

That term conjures an image of the fur-clad Duchess of Literati sneering at ill-mannered urchins from the safety of her mink-lined Rolls-Royce Silver Spoon. What is a book snob? One who reads only the BEST. No.

   The term was used by fellow-scribblers to worry over the grim prospect of never again reading stories for the sheer fun of it, Jeeves. Becoming a writer may destroy you as a reader, if you let yourself fall into that trap. I’d walked that clifftop path before. What to say of it? Everything has its behind-the-scenes viewpoint.

   If you are a police officer, you will glare at the travesty that is the cop movie. Medical dramas placing emphasis on the heroism of overworked doctors are bound to leave nurses feeling cold. Stories about vampires will, inevitably, piss werewolves right off.

   And writers? Don’t get me started. Oh, if you insist. Crank the starting-handle on the front of that Rolls-Royce Silver Spoon, Jeeves. The Duchess of Literati wants to go for a spin. She has her quota of ill-mannered urchins to mow down, after all.

   My fellow-scribblers bemoaned the occupational hazard a writer must inevitably deal with. This is the business of READING. At some point, readers decide to become writers. A few of those writers actually manage the transition after penning five or six novels.

   How harsh a reader do you become, in reading as a writer? Do you read for enjoyment? Are you prepared to read a story just to see how it was constructed? Do you find a book so badly-written that you simply abandon it?

   Where, along the way, do you transform into a book snob, mowing down lesser books from the back seat of your Rolls-Royce Silver Spoon? (All 0.75 regular readers of this blog will glean that the spoon in question must be non-runcible.) The difficulty for the writer, in reading, is one of being a back-seat driver. You want the story to go in a particular way, but you aren’t the one at the wheel.

   I said that I’d walked that clifftop path before. Luckily, I didn’t fall. I didn’t find myself reading a book for pleasure only to discover, shock-horror, that I was merely reading to study technique. Why not? Was I capable of disengaging the writing brain and using the reading brain to get from start to fart?

   Not exactly. I pulled stories to bits, to see how they worked. And I enjoyed doing that. I decided to read certain authors to see how particular stories were constructed. If I enjoyed the fiction along the way, great. That’s the point I’m getting at. Enjoy reading, even if you are reading as a writer.

   This was the case with the detective novels of Raymond Chandler and the Bond books by Ian Fleming. I read them to see how they were done. Sat down and planned it. I’ll buy these books, and look at particular authors. And I’ll learn. My time in the company of Sherlock Holmes was spent absorbing structure. But it was with one eye on fun, just as the other eye dealt with the mechanical side.

   Reading books and seeing faults in them from a new stance just because you’ve labelled yourself a writer…is a losing game. A clifftop path with a sudden halt. Don’t get too tangled in that pursuit of the BEST in fiction. Oh, I read GREAT stuff. But I also read GRATING stuff. I think you really have to go slumming, same as I did. You have to be prepared to read books that you suspect you may put down and give up on.

   It’s a RARE book I’ve done that with. Once I start a book, I’m meant to go through with it to the bitter end. And sometimes that end has been world-class bitter with a patent pending. I’m struggling to think of the books I gave up on. One, two, three, four. I’ll struggle some more. How many? Not many. Perhaps no more than half a dozen in a reading lifetime…oh, the crap I forced myself to read. And the crap I wrote. The books I should have given up on…let me count the ways. Ah, no time.

   See the positive side of reading. Let your stance as an author enrich your enjoyment of the experience. Better that, than to let your writerliness taint your views. Yes, you’ve read some stinkers. But the ones you finish are the ones you finish. Those finished books, good, bad, indifferent, taught you much I’m sure. I’d hope you came away from reading having enjoyed reading.

   You may demand great fiction, but you won’t always get it. I’ve read great books with appalling typos in them. That didn’t destroy my reading experience. Flip that over. Wonderful typesetting couldn’t disguise a crap book. Who decides whether a book is crap or not? Each reader. Individually. Inside each tiny mind. Thus endeth the lesson.

   So, writerly ladies, gents, and all those caught between or far outwith, are you book snobs? Writers, reading and coughing up blood simply for being writers? I think you are just trying critical hats on for size in an attempt to flog yourselves over your own worst imperfections. Nothing to do with the stuff you are reading. Everything to do with the stuff you are writing.

   Remember, those imperfections of yours may actually be key indicators of your wonderful writing style. Tread carefully. Don’t squash your own unique telling-points. Here are a few books to consider. They are not bad books. Quite the reverse.

   Does it matter to me that the characters in Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth should probably die off from lack of supplies with all the to-ing and fro-ing underground? No. It doesn’t matter to me at all. No book snobbery there.

   What is Dracula’s rationale for avoiding the major population centre of Berlin? It’s closer than his destination of London, and he has a greater grasp of the language in Germany. Why not set up his undead empire as a Berliner? He heads for London. Does this destroy the book’s plot? Certainly not.

   Dare we mention the books that JUST HAPPEN TO TURN UP in front of Frankenstein’s monster? Really, Mary? No, seriously. REALLY, Mary? The monster must be educated, so here’s Paradise Lost. WTF?! I glossed over this. Almost became a writing snob, but I reined the mare in. The clifftop path I walked that day was signposted. So I came back down, unscathed. (I like what Mary Shelley did with that book. She’s a fucking superstar. I gladly say that of the author of the next piece…)

   Okay. I have a slight problem with Jane Eyre, in that she just happens to fall in with her relatives after wandering in the wilds. But the family situation is explained. There is foreshadowing. Even so, it does come across as a thumping geographical coincidence.

   My shameless bias in Charlotte’s favour excuses this literary excess, as Mary Shelley’s excess is similarly excused – but only just. I look askance at the connection, bundled up in a sub-plot concerning inheritance, and move on. The walk along the cliffs is not for me, for there is much enjoyment to be had from Frankenstein and Jane Eyre. (Suddenly, I have a deviant literary mash-up in mind. Dr Phibes, the screens!)

   The Hound of the Baskervilles…plays a very strange game of pitting the occult against Sherlock Holmes. Is there really a huge spectral hound out there on the moors, Sir Arthur? Er…

   In Kipling’s case, style intrudes. Both editions of The Jungle Book contain a story not set in the jungle. Snow and ice intervene. Should we return the books as not representative of content under the Sale of Goods Act…

   The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy L. Sayers, houses a wholly improbable cause of death within its mysterious pages. Yet that sits perfectly well within the self-contained atmosphere of the story. And that’s a few books in on the series featuring her aristocratic detective. She went out of her way to contrive many an arcane scene in her books, did Dorothy.

   Does that matter? Have His Carcase has one of the most outlandish plot-devices going for it. The scramble to secure evidence from a corpse before the sea washes clues away. Mad writing. But it works. Because, as readers, we want it to. As writers, we should want it to, too.

   Find me a book you can’t find fault with, and I’ll find fault with it. Not out of spite. This is just the way things are. A book isn’t a wheel, or a meal. You’ll know a broken wheel, or an awful meal. A book is harder to place. Flip that over. A book is harder to excuse.

   Your terrific book may not be mine. So, I say again. Find me a book you can’t find fault with, and I’ll find fault with it. With that in mind, I warn of the path to the shaky cliff. Don’t go out of your way to climb to that high spot, with its winds buffeting you.

   If you can’t read a book without finding faults, you are reading every book you’ve ever read. Buck up. Enjoy what you read. That is the point of reading. Worry about being a writer when you are WRITING. The Duchess of Literati crashed her Silver Spoon up her own backside. Don’t join her in that pursuit.

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