This morning, I wrote the first two paragraphs of a new short story I’m still developing in my mind simply because I wanted to get them out of my head, where they’ve been bouncing around for a couple of days. I still need to do a fair amount of historical research before I go farther.
I also wrote at least half of a proposal that I want to get finished by the end of the weekend. It’s not as detailed as some of the other proposals I’ve done in the past, but my agent tells me it doesn’t need to be. We’re baiting the hook—let’s see what we’ll catch.
I posted my review of The Silent Land by Graham Joyce on Onyx Reviews last night. I hope he sells a kajillion copies when it comes out here in the US.
Valley of Fear is a strange Sherlock Holmes novel. It introduces Moriarty, but makes almost no use of him except to conjure him as a bogeyman, which I guess was the point. The first half of the novel is a fairly traditional Holmes crime investigation, with the usual clever deductions. Then, halfway through it branches off to a long flashback that takes the story (but not Holmes or Watson) to a California village during the gold rush. The local lodge members run the town, murdering anyone who doesn’t see things their way. They have a deal with neighboring lodges to exchange assassins to remove the killer from the motive. I think I’ve figured out what’s going on, but I still have a couple of dozen swipes left to go (I’m reading it on my iPod, so I can’t really say pages). One of the best things about the book is that the local police in the first half of the book aren’t depicted as buffoons. It’s traditional for Lestrade be slow and lumbering and thick, but the cops in this one are decent at their jobs. They analyze the facts and come up with reasonable assumptions, even if they don’t have the cosmic brilliance of Holmes. That makes them more interesting than idiots.
CSI was fun last night. At first it seemed like they were recreating “The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix.” The killer was driving around with a portable electric chair in the back of a box truck. His first efforts didn’t work out so well because he used a synthetic sponge instead of a real one, which set his victim’s head on fire. The recreation in the lab was very much like what happened in The Green Mile. The killer improved with each murder, though. However, the story was also very noir, reminiscent of The Maltese Falcon, hearkening back to the days of Bugsy Siegel. The woman who flirts with Greg reminded me a lot of Brigid O’Shaughnessy, especially at the end. At least Greg didn’t promise to wait for her when she got out. Her parting line revealed the depth of her craziness: For what it’s worth, I’ve loved you since Tuesday. And I liked Greg’s comment to Catherine: Why do the rotten ones smell so good? Jumpy moment when the “dead” guy proved he wasn’t. That’s been done a few times, including on NCIS, but it almost always works. And it was Nick’s fault that Greg got tangled up with her in the first place, goading him to get her number when she showed some interest.
