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This in from our humour and now crime correspondent, to prove that fact is indeed stranger than fiction, although I have been trying to prove that fiction is as equally strange and important as fact. I doubt the tricksiest crime novelist, least of all Agatha Christie, or any from Thumbmarks could have thought this one up.

Murder Mystery – a true story from Associated Press

At the 1994 annual awards dinner given for Forensic Science, (AAFS) President, Dr. Don Harper Mills astounded his audience with the legal complications of a bizarre death. Here is the story:

The son, Ronald Opus, had actually murdered himself. So the medical examiner closed the case as a suicide.

–This article is under copyright to AP and will be removed under request.–

Such memories of Las Vegas, even if what happened there didn’t stay there. Actually, nothing happened there at all, except memories of the dancing Bellagio Fountain, like beating hearts, the atrocious ersatz skies in The Venetian and crossing the Painted Dessert, that of Ten Thousand Maniacs song fame, ‘Hey Jack Kerouac’, in the days when love was love, truth in every lover’s tongue, editors were actually people, and I was an author. I will avoid the ribald humour, or sheer humiliation of yours truly approaching the Excalibur Hotel with a suggestion of hosting, or doing a book signing, because my publisher who shall not be named had brought out an Arthurian Fantasy called The Telling Pool. Have a go sometimes, but really, leave it to the professionals. You could imagine mafiosi rushing in from their own murderous desert trips for a canape and a growling chat about mythology. ‘Hey Mickey brown eyes, who was dis Arthur guy, anyhows?’ Such heady, innocent times!

It all came back because TV are getting more and more exciting with their art programmes, even if they only make the twelve O’clock late night slots. Not only Fake or Fortune, but The World’s Top Ten Most Valuable Paintings. The presenter was articulate, passionate and entertaining and it does show you that the art world has everything for a great story, or nothing, in the Emperor’s New Clothes vein, even Geoffrey Archer! Money, greed, glamour, the mystery of markets, truly wonderful art, even mad Japanese Billionaires threating to destroy Van Goghs. The link of powerful provenance proved that a Rothko, but owned by Rockerfeller, meant and means money certainly follows money, more madly than according to simplistic ‘investment’ rules, but the top three were Picassos.

Hence the Vegas link, because the shiny American faced Steve Wynn owned so many, to theme his restaurant at The Bellagio, and put his elbow straight through one nearing $100 Million. He was nice enough to say that at least it was a good thing no one else did it. Incidentally, we used to spend family holidays with hotel owning friends in the real Bellagio, on Lake Como. What do you say about the struggling artist, or those dying in obscurity and poverty, achieving such extraordinary sums posthumously? You say the world was ever thus, in one way, except now it seems to be more thus than ever!

Two items about books. First the challenge to Amazon’s purchase of The Book Depositary on Monopoly grounds. Good Job. Secondly, the awful development of ‘soundtracks’ linked to digital books. Isn’t the Audio book enough? Most will probably be aimed at children, forgetting that it is in the power of pure reading, of actually using the pure imagination that real imaginative force, and atunement to language, forms. Don’t kids have enough forms of interactive or all consuming entertainment already? It is one of the problems with the proliferation of books, but decline of serious reading.

But Daisy Goodwin was very funny about the track attached to Jay Macinierny’s Bright Lights, Big City. In the novel he uses the phrase ‘Bolivian Marching Powder’, as a metaphor for Cocaine. The dorks doing the tracks attach the sound of marching boots! I suppose it might have been worse if there was the sound of snorting, or Homer Simpson was probably in charge, but apart from the double meanings of language, the power of metaphor at the heart of language, one of the reasons readers often get so upset about films of books is that it is the unique union of the author’s creative vision and your own imagination bringing it to life, off the magic page, that makes reading such a uniquely personal and vivid experience. If a writer is any good, you will hear that wind in the trees, those screams, those shouts of joy, deep inside the mind, but also have constructed a world that is somehow uniquely yours.

No, now is not the time to make any cheap shots about 9/11. Bush was right to talk about terror as the act of ‘the faceless coward’. 3000 killed is almost unimaginable, and it is the human we should be talking about. In those unseen effects, we are only now too learning about the 20,000 and more affected by the toxic dust produced in the attack. But it is important too how that understandable human outrage came out. For instance, how a documentary highlighted how almost immediately Bush linked a war on Terror not with Bin Laden in Afghanistan or Pakistan, but with bombing Iraq.

THE NEW WORLD

Then I’ll speak to you of love,
And sight,
A love so deep it might burst everything.
Or heal a wider wound,
The emptiness of air,
Beneath unhearing heavens.

Rearm in silence.
Creep away.
The world apart is like some plashing tear drop,
That should be a globe of shining, spinning light,
Connected,
Filled with a sea of rising waters,
To souse the dryness of our cracking earth.
Then in right falling tears, of love and joy,
Right seeing,
There comes the flower,
And all our quenching.DCD

It’s to my shame, or sorrow, that I spent nearly a year walking past the Imperial War Museum in London, trying to take the boy inside me gently by the hand and walk him safely towards the balanced love I needed, and a woman in America. It was not necessary, but for whatever reason, I found someone else’s absolutes so extreme, and the split between the aggressive energy in me, and the gentle and tender love I craved, so great, I could not do it until it was far too late. I had to drum up an effective excuse to fly out to New York at all, a meeting with a new agent, funnily enough over a Vampire novel I was writing to try and bring in more money, that was its own journey into hell. It is either a little pathetic, sometimes funny, or just rather sad.

One of the most moving programmes last night was a documentary on The Children of 9/11. It shocked me to realise that over 3000 suffered in that attack and lost a parent, but they are the future we forget. The emotions were very mixed, in listening to them, about the vital roles parents play in our lives. The cruelty that sometimes came from their peers, because children can be enormously cruel, and the fact they both wanted to grieve and live normal lives, so not be defined by what happened. The chains of interconnections in any event in life can be very great, but it was deeply effecting, and many have moved on and some been left behind. Then came something absolutely shattering, the film of The Boy In Striped Pyjammas. It’s the story of the son of the Nazi Camp commandant, who befriends a little Jewish boy and is pulled into the horror. Remembering Michael Murpugo’s brilliant Dimbleby lecture about Palestine, even in remembering 9/11, it might remind us of the best in childhood, and the most terrible, and that children everywhere are constantly growing up into a world future we might all try to make better. That in any fences, even for protection, there are always reflections of ourselves on ‘the other side’, and life is always made in the best union, even the best trade of worlds. We all want to grow up in safety to be the fullest and most complete human beings we can, and effectively the best parents of others and ourselves.

“I will take you at your word to never mention Abrams again. I believe you are focusing so much on these past hurts that they continue to follow you into the present with like results. The energy is low and the vampires are attracted. You have, in a sense, invited them in. Focus that valuable attention to work on the new beginnings you have created for yourself and your loyal readers.” WiseWolf

As a fantasy author, to a reader, WiseWolf, we take the understood metaphor, and the value of it too. You are right, and thank you. I lost my own Patronus charm, and beautifully balanced love, the gateway to a world of creativity and happiness, a new world too in the States, but in the end, and this is what I was saying in a mounting crisis that someone refused to hear, I had and have only myself to ‘blame’. Then I began to shout. Well, there was another ‘vampire’ who got in, a so-called ‘best friend’ in London, and as someone I loved and trusted slammed a door, that was impossible to cope with. The vampires too were in the pasts and private lives of several people who made me their scapegoat and their easy ‘evil’. Who also breached real professionalism, under contract. I don’t need ‘loyal’ readers, I don’t deserve you, and I should not have asked for too much support, but if I can give back some positive strength and meaning in future, I will. A story, a fiction, is a contained adventure that carries meanings, answers, risks, hopes and inspirations reflecting but also beyond ‘the real world’. Separate from it, like a hopefully good mirror, beyond all life’s and nature’s difficulties. It is about the making of meaning, we have in all of us. When I faced such awful personal blocks, right at the second most sacred place, the place of work, then such invasions, the negatives began to spill not only into emails, but everywhere. I know I should have been stronger, strength contains, especially male strength, action was the answer, but I was tied there and I wasn’t strong. No one should have seen it or heard it, except that it is an extraordinary true story as well, when you hear it all. But that was then, and it is only returning to the dead past that ties me anywhere at all. It is in the head, but it is quickly reflected in reality too, in some strangely karmic way. Those vampires of the mind and heart can become enormously real, crippling for us all, but let them come still, if they dare, and with thoughts of a spirit like yours, I’ll knock them into eternity. We can all blaze with love and light, if we know the true places of our whole selves. DCD

Dear Reader,

you must, or may, forgive my diatribes. The reader does not want to know about the author, not really, only the stories, if they’re any good. The author is the mystery behind the scenes, the spirit that is not quite their books, the voice behind the art and artifice. My frustration is not unconnected though. We all know the stories of author’s walls pasted with publisher’s polite and often easy rejection notes, but that has been happening behind the scenes here, again and again, and perhaps it is more disheartening when you have achieved a measure of success and joy in writing. More a bullet in the soul, each exhausting time. It’s just the good old bad world, but work takes a measure of support, and in the end the spirit wears out the breast.

The past is so pointless, isn’t it, and telling a story of failure even worse? That search for the ‘truth’ of the failed moment, the day energy vanished inside itself, the day you didn’t kiss the girl, get the job, get on a plane, win the match, is as impossible as time itself. Only fiction can encompass some whole, and the rest is perception only from one dwindling, darkening perspective, travelling away from the centre of the Universe at the most phenomenal speed. Eeeeeeeeeek, not waving but drowning! Beware of the Sliding Door moments for yourself, sure, but on the other hand, living in constant fear of them too is also impossible. Just get it right, or slightly righter.

The stories of three women across time, and the men and people around them, in the film of The Hours, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Michael Cunningham, is humane, moving and triumphantly acted. It threads together around that Life in a Day masterpiece, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, to explore Woolf’s fiction and ‘madness’, the pain of the poet crossing the lines of sexuality and propriety, and a book’s link to lives across time. Perhaps the perception of our own ‘happiness’ is too often at the expense of others, but this is about the struggle for both fulfilment and freedom and its tragic human limits.

So it takes us from a straight-laced age of duty and social structure, where the ache for understanding, connection and expression are as great as in any other, certainly in the person of Woolf, to a suffocating fifties style American Stepford-Wife marriage, to present day New York and a ‘gay’ editor preparing a Dalloway style party for her male poet and former lover, dying of Aids. Part of its human genius is that sexuality is only incidentally relevant. This is not about sex, but the ache of people and the way they can find some kind of balance and fulfillment with each other. It is not only about the liberation of women, but the isolations of the human condition.

The echoing of connections and disconnections, of moments of beauty and sparkling perception, across shifting sexual and social structures, are subtle and convincing and use the beauty of film to show the light and the dark. No wonder Nicol Kidman won the oscar too. Though in real life Woolf finally drowned herself, a story that frames everything, in her artistic reaching she at first decides to write of Mrs Dalloway’s internal crisis, despite the social veneer of success, looking after everyone in life’s great party, and ‘kill’ her heroine, by having her kill herself. But that artistic intention changes, as Woolf struggles with life and meaning, and reflects a change in the actions of a boxed and despairing pregnant woman, twenty years later, also reading the book, who at first decides to do the same, but then to live. But her thread to the future is as the mother of the Aids isolated poet, who does kill himself brutally, in front of his ‘Mrs Dalloway’, echoing Woolf’s decision in her book that ‘the poet must die’. Why, asks her devoted husband, why does anyone have to suffer or die? The answer is not only that it happens, but effectively the crisis and purpose of art, to show everyone else the pain that can develop inside, so the preciousness of each day, and what they can only touch artistically about evanescent life. So even in destruction, real or fictional, the artist is the flawed ‘hero’ too, and Woolf cannot ultimately escape the fact she is the poet as well, writing of her own tragedy.

The links across time, shadowed by the subtle questions of human responsibility, are ultimately tragic, but there is no attempt to easily condemn anyone. The implication that the mother’s crisis and effective abandonment of her little boy led to the poet’s life crisis and isolation is militated against by the discovery she decided to live, after her aborted suicide attempt, and save the second baby inside her, but then had to leave in order to breathe and live herself. There is a realism and humanity in the fact she is not portrayed as haunted by guilt for doing it, against the expectations of some over moralistic plotting, and despite the consequences beyond herself. Perhaps it points to the purpose and often needed strength of some ‘selfishness’. Equally the poet’s need, feeling and passion, his burning love of life, does underline the intensity of the editor’s own moment of life happiness and connection with him, but is also too much to bear, just as his boyfriend finds in leaving him, his freedom for the first time. People, like Art, like Life, hurt. Or perhaps a better point is that the beauty and growth we can touch, at moments, we perceive as the beginning of ‘life happiness’, when it is only the thing itself, the best happiness we can touch or share, and must move back into life’s coming shadows, as we define ourselves and our needs and try to survive. At least these are people who may be flawed, may hurt each other, but who try to look after each other too. As for the pain or madness of the artist, as Woolf says, upbraiding her sister for not inviting her to the party – ‘even mad people like to be asked!’

If the conclusion is bleak, especially for the nuclear family, it is also profoundly real and echos Woolf’s cry to her husband that we can’t escape life, but must look it hard in the face. That perhaps we must ‘love life, but see it for what it is, and let it go too’. But if the story is also about the liberation of women, their special kind of strength too, it is about the crisis of men. Woolf’s husband, at once part Victorian and domineering, and devoted and tender, is in as much pain as his wife. The fifties husband consumes another human being in his cliché of what happiness is, underlined by his own Patriarchal selfishness, but he is really a little boy. The poet is caught right in the middle of men and women, and his own disease, in a new, ‘liberated’ age, and perhaps there lies his agony and the end of his road. The script is wonderful, brilliantly crafted artistically, as Woolf’s editor husband turns across time into the woman editor, trying to be herself and save the male poet too, and if there are conclusions Cunningham may have been reaching for that the film doesn’t express, we haven’t read the book. It certainly captures the risk and need of art and the acting is flawless across the board. It is just marvellously real.