Carlos Labbe

 

"He'd been mistaken, he said to himself, as he sat back down at his desk: he didn't want to write a detective novel; he wanted to write a mystery."

--Carlos Labbé

Review: Battle Annie

 When Trish MacEnulty writes a historical novel, she’s apt to use a wide-angle lens. So it is with Battle Annie, loosely based on a true character, whose life is fleshed out with great imagination and brio. 

     From the tenements of Hell’s Kitchen to the upper crust of Baltimore and back again, we follow Annie Walsh, the self-styled queen of Hell’s Kitchen’s brawlers fleeing from a murder rap and everything she’s ever known. The writer builds up the slums of New York in 1895 brick by hurled brick, placing us in the middle of rail strikes and gang wars, contrasted with Gilded Age high society, where survival means learning how to use an oyster fork. 

     It’s grit, brains, and most importantly the friendships forged in the lower depths that keep Annie and her ward Cora one step ahead of the law. She provides a wider societal vista by the inclusion of socialist champion Eugene Debs, who sees beyond Annie’s rough façade to the leader she can be.

     This is a picaresque tale with a lot of heart, well worth the read. If you’re like me, you’ll fall in love with Annie and her company of rogues. And you’ll be left hungry for more.

A Drood

 

After publishing three books without an agent, I've been hitting the cyber-pavement searching for a good one. They don't want snail mail submissions any more, oh, no (my first agent must have been the last one on earth to prefer paper) and half of them have abandoned email queries for query forms--very impersonal and efficient.

One recent agent query form asked me what my dream as an author was, which I thought was an interesting question, one I hadn't thought about before. But I decided my dream would be to leave a Drood--a novel unfinished at my death (like The Mystery of Edwin Drood) so intriguing that authors a hundred years on would still be trying to finish it for me.

What's your dream?

The labyrinthine page

"You can always edit a bad page.
But you can't edit a blank page."

    

      I've been seeing this quote on social media a lot lately, and it's true as far as it goes. But there are hazards involved with filling up a page, and they often go unexamined. Because every word choice constrains the next choice. "A" rather than "an" means that you have eliminated all words with a vowel in the choice of the following word. The word "I've" in at the head of my first sentence locked in the tense for the following clause. The sentence "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" casts an entire novel irrevocably into the past. "Once upon a time" sets us in a fairy tale. "Once upon a time there was a Martian" warns us to reassess what we know about fairy tales. Each choice narrows the options for the next choice. A manuscript becomes a labyrinth that we seed which grows up behind us with alarming swiftness so that when we look back it's already too high to see over the top. 

     Can't we go back? Can't we change "A" to "an"? Of course. But then we must change "pachyderm" to "elephant", which is not quite the same thing.  And the further we advance, the more we may need to change, the more tremors are sent out under the structure we're creating, and what if it's not a word we need to change, but a sentence, a page, a chapter? There comes a point where we must change our nail scissors for hedge clippers, or a bundle of dynamite. Then, if you use too much blasting powder, the whole edifice may come down around your head.

     Which is not to say that you can't edit a bad page. You must edit a bad page, and you will have many bad pages. And chances are good you may need that bundle of dynamite. Writing is a dangerous business, not for the faint of heart. If, at the end of building your house, you take off your blindfold to discover that you have positioned the toilet in the kitchen, adjustments will have to be made.

     So while you're contemplating the vast ocean of the blank page, take some time to appreciate its calm, unrelenting beauty. Then recall that there are more vessels under the waves than atop them.