I want them all. I want the...

 Earlier this week, I hosted a guys' night at a local theater to watch on the big screen, the 70s classic, The Warriors.

Though I've heard of the movie, I'd never seen it before. In many ways, it didn't disappoint, being the cheesy, low-budget popcorn thriller people talked about. Plenty of contrived moments, like when the gang members are on the run for their lives, yet they stop to pick up girls. Teenage hormones, I suppose. What the movie did capture was the decrepit urban of landscape of New York City at the time, where the Big Apple seemed poised on the brink of collapse. I was there in the early 70s and vividly remember the squalor, the desolation, and the fear of imminent violence. Times Square was a cesspool of humanity. Boarding the subways--covered in graffiti inside and out--was like tempting fate, even in the middle of the day. I saw people attacked on the subway, kept out of the way during spontaneous brawls in McDonalds, witnessed muggings on Park Avenue and 42nd. It was a mess.

When I heard that the city had cleaned up, I returned in 1999 for a family vacation. The change for the better was shocking. It seemed futile trying to explain how bad things had been. My sons though, were expecting to find bodies floating in the East River.  One son even remarked, "This is New York? People are so friendly."

That was then, and NYC, like too many other big cities, Denver included, is staggering under rampant homelessness, drug trafficking, overdose deaths, and violent crime. Doesn't make for comfortable living but is fodder for good stories.

Writing in a Hotel Room?

 By Thomas Kies

We just got back from New York City this weekend and I have all those mundane things that need to be done…laundry, finish unpacking, go through the mail, and pay bills.  So, this week’s blog will be blessedly short.

We attended the Edgar Awards last Thursday. I’ll write about that in my next blog.  Needless to say, it was an incredibly classy affair, and it was the first in-person event that the Mystery Writers of America has hosted since the beginning of the pandemic.  I was honored to be invited. 

And this was the first trip we’ve taken since March of 2020.  As you know, mask mandates have been suspended on airlines and in most airports and it was with some degree of anxiety that we flew from North Carolina to the Big Apple.  

The cab we took from the airport still required a mask, but the hotel didn’t. The Edgar event required that you show proof of vaccination and that you wear a mask. The MWA gave out really cool black masks with their Edgar logo on the side. 

The masks lasted only a short time in the champagne reception for the nominees, and it wasn’t long before we were all maskless.  Ditto the mask situation for dinner. It’s just difficult to eat and wear a mask and after a couple of glasses of wine, masks are generally forgotten.

We managed to score a couple of tickets to see HAMILTON on Friday night.  They were serious about covid precautions.  You had to show proof of vaccination and wear a mask the entire evening.  No exceptions. 

The show was well worth it and everyone in the audience was in compliance.  

It’s been a number of years since we’ve been in NYC and the one thing we noticed most (other than the incredible amount of scaffolding and building and remodeling going on in the city) was there was a free Covid testing site on nearly every street corner. I think we have only one for our entire county here where I live. 

And it was cold there.  Dear God, it was cold.  I’m now sitting in my North Carolina home office in my shorts and t-shirt and the windows are wide open.  I forgot just how cold April can be “up north”. 

I’ll write more about the Edgars in the next blog as well as the party and anthology kick-off event at the Mysterious Book Shop.  Forgive me if I drop a few names (I get star struck when I meet mystery writing legends).  I’m in my sixties, but I still felt like the country boy in the big city this past week.

Did I do any writing at all?  In a hotel room, overlooking Times Square?  Fat chance.

But now, I’m glad to be home, where I can write in peace.

Back to the 70s

A few years back, I was at a board meeting of the Mystery Writers of America. After the big dinner (with an open bar), several of us had gone to Times Square to continue the festivities. At about two in the morning we piled into a taxi for the ride back to the Roosevelt Hotel. Along the way we spotted a single young woman strolling along 47th Street. She going somewhere that was none of our business but her relaxed attitude and that she was alone astounded us. We were a bunch of old timers who remembered New York City from the 70s and 80s, the Death Wish years. Back in the day, as young men, we would not have ventured going out even as a group at this time of night without risking injury or death. This woman's blasé manner showed how much the city had changed, for the better.

More recently, my sister took a job in Manhattan and during a visit to see her, I noted how much things had improved since I was first there. When I told her about the crime, the graffiti, the squalor, the decay, the homeless and prostitutes, that you could stand on any street corner and within ten minutes, witness a theft or mugging, she looked at me like I was talking about Bigfoot or UFOs. She pointed to a spray painted mural. "You mean graffiti like that?" Not even close.

I was convinced that the Big Apple would inevitably collapse like a rotting piece of fruit. But New Yorkers loved their city too much to let it deteriorate into complete ruin and through decades of hard work and persistence, swept away the crime and cleaned the place up. No small feat as with over two thousand murders per year, New York City had the reputation of being the most dangerous city in America. At times, its streets tallied a higher body count than Beirut, which was in the middle of a civil war!

By 2018, New York City was deemed the safest big city in America. True, Manhattan resembled a theme park for the rich but you could've trekked out at any hour and not feel like you should've prepared a toe tag in advance.

Now within days, New York City, like a lot of other urban centers, Denver included, seemed to have been flipped upside down. Riots. Vandalism. Mob rule. A rash of violent crime. Homeless camps that stretch for blocks. Boarded up windows where vibrant stores used to be. Decades of progress, BAM! wiped out. And a pandemic on top of all that. It looks like we're back to where we were forty years ago and everyone's forgotten the tough lessons that made our cities worth living in.

As It Was, But Not Much Better

Lately I've been feeding my nostalgia for the 70s by watching contemporary crime movies. Mind you, I graduated from high school in 1973 and I hated the time (just as most teenagers hate their high-school years).  What jumps out from those movies set in New York City is how much has changed there since then. I have first-hand knowledge because I was actually in NYC in 1973-75 and was overwhelmed by the grit, filth, and crime. In Times Square, you could stand on a street corner and watch violent crimes happen. Everything seemed smothered in graffiti. The ambiance was of inevitable collapse. The movie Heavy Metal has a scene of a science-fiction New York rife with corruption and decay and there was no reason that it wouldn't turn out that way. Of course, the Big Apple has since morphed into a theme park for the rich and is America's largest gated community. My sister lives in Midtown Manhattan and when I tell her how it was back in the day, I might as well be talking about mastodons and saber-tooth tigers. In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) holes up in a tiny studio apartment that can best be described as squalid. Today, the same space would be a million dollar condo. Easy. Al Pacino's character in Serpico rents a garden-level apartment in Greenwich Village, then the bohemian nexus of the East Coast. By modern standards the place is run down but was acceptably chic for its day. Nail boards together, paint everything white, and decorate it with eclectic flourishes.

What else jumps out from these movies is the undercurrent of racism. Pretty much all the riff-raff criminals in The French Connection, Serpico, and Death Wish are black. In those days that was actually seen as progressive because in prior years, blacks weren't even portrayed as that. Sadly, if you go back further, the situation was worse. I was watching one of Humphrey Bogart's lesser known titles, High Sierra, and was dismayed by the character Algernon, played by Willie Best. Given his role as the mountain camp caretaker, Best could've been allowed to play his part with more dignity and realism. But he was costumed in threadbare clothes, shuffled about, was inclined to laziness, and spoke the required "sho nuff" dialog. At least, I suppose, he got a substantial speaking part. Unfortunately, like most black actors from that era, in later years he was denounced as a witless stooge, though, as he pointed out, he didn't have much choice. Either take the part as is, or get out.

Which makes me think that despite our "wokeness" in this hyper-PC environment, future generations will look back at us and ask, "What were they thinking?"

Guest Blogger: John McFetridge

Type M would like to welcome our guest this weekend, John McFetridge. He’s written a very interesting piece about the “fiction” surrounding the brutal murder of Kitty Genovese in New York in 1964.

John McFetridge is the author of three Constable Eddie Dougherty novels set in Montreal in the 1970s, where he grew up, and four novels in the Toronto Series, where he now lives. John will be appearing at the ImagiNATION Literary Festival at the Morrin Centre in Quebec City on April 9th, 2017.

 Based on a True Story

By John McFetridge

Pretty much every crime novel, every novel, every piece of fiction, has some real event as its inspiration.

My own novels have gone from having only a slight connection to the real events that inspired them to containing many specific details about real world events. And often I wonder if I have any responsibility to these events. Do I need to get them right?

The short answer is, of course, no. The first priority is always the story.

But sometimes I wonder how big a gap should there be between the first and second priorities? And third and fourth?

Because how real events are portrayed in fiction has a very big effect on how they’re remembered. If the fictional accounts are wrong it can have serious consequences.

In recent history maybe the best example is the Kitty Genovese murder in New York.

“37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call Police.”

That was the headline on the New York Times article. That’s the way the story was told, in journalism and in fiction. In making the story the number one priority, that was very successful.

But it wasn’t true.

In fact, the newspaper article with that headline wasn’t published until a few weeks after the murder. There had been small stories about the murder in newspapers after it happened but none mentioned witnesses not coming forward. It wasn’t until the Police Commissioner talked about the story while having lunch with the New York Times city editor and said, “Brother, that Queens story is one for the books. Thirty-eight witnesses. I’ve been in this business a long time, but this beats everything,” that the story of the witnesses first appeared.

As Kevin Cook writes in his book, Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America, the editor, “felt a spark running up and down the back of his neck, the spine-tingling sense that he was onto a story readers would never forget.”

The story wasn’t the murder, the victim, or the perpetrator; the story was the witnesses. That’s the story that got told and retold for decades. It even led to something called the Bystander Effect or the Apathy Effect.

Thirty-seven people were aware that a woman was being brutally murdered and chose not to do anything about it. Not to get involved. Not to even pick up the telephone and make an anonymous call to the police.

That’s the story that was accepted uncritically.

Does it matter that it wasn’t true?

The first fictionalized account I remember was a made-for TV movie in 1975 called Death Scream starring Cloris Leachman and Ed Asner. The imdb description says it’s about a murder committed “while nearby residents watched but did nothing to help.” The story had already been used for the basis of an episode of Perry Mason in 1965 called, “The Silent Six,” in which a woman “is beaten within an inch of her life while her neighbors sit and do nothing.” The TV show Law & Order has used the story more than once.

Harlan Ellison wrote a short story called  “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” in 1973 and wrote in a number of articles that thirty-six people, “stood by and watched” Genovese “get knifed to death right in front of them, and wouldn't make a move.” (the difference in number of witnesses is an odd minor point. Sometimes it’s 37, sometimes 38, Ellison uses 36 and later research discovered the police had taken statements from over 40 people).

The story has been retold in novels, comic books, and in movies made in France and Denmark.

It seems that witnesses knowing a murder is being committed and not doing anything about it is a story that we can easily believe.

Does it matter that it wasn’t true?

Background and context are important. We say things like, “I just like a good mystery,” and don’t want there to be too much politics, which I certainly understand, but if we’re going to use real world events in our fiction maybe we should be a little concerned about the context. In 2015 Marcia M. Gallo published a book called, “No One Helped”: Kitty Genovese, New York City, and the Myth of Urban Apathy.

As the publisher, Cornell University Press, says about the book, “No One Helped places the conscious creation and promotion of the Genovese story within a changing urban environment. Gallo reviews New York’s shifting racial and economic demographics and explores post World War II examinations of conscience regarding the horrors of Nazism. These were important factors in the uncritical acceptance of the story by most media, political leaders, and the public despite repeated protests from Genovese’s Kew Gardens neighbors at their inaccurate portrayal.”

In 2015 Kitty Genovese’s brother Bill Genovese was the subject of a documentary film, The Witness, and he says, “I think we now know for certain that this description was inaccurate. Most people were ear-witnesses rather than eyewitnesses: They didn’t see what was going on in the dark parking lot, and they didn’t realize a murder was taking place. A neighbor named Karl Ross called Kitty’s friend, Sophia Farrar, who ran down as fast as she could to help my sister. So the reality of Kitty’s death was substantially different than the description in Gansberg’s report. We now know that Ross also called the police shortly after Moseley left, but it was too late… The police log only showed Karl Ross’ phone call, but maybe other neighbors called. A woman named Patti said to me that she called the police that night and was told that they’d already received a call about this case. Another neighbor wrote an affidavit later on, claiming that his father called the police around 3:30 A.M., but this didn’t appear in the official police records. So who do you believe? Did the police operator forget to log some phone calls or simply ignore them, thinking it was just a ‘lovers’ quarrel’? Eventually, the New York Times’ inaccurate report shaped the collective memory of this event as ‘38 saw murder and did nothing.’”

In 2016 the New York Times finally called its initial story flawed. “While there was no question that the attack occurred, and that some neighbors ignored cries for help, the portrayal of 38 witnesses as fully aware and unresponsive was erroneous. The article grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived. None saw the attack in its entirety. Only a few had glimpsed parts of it, or recognized the cries for help. Many thought they had heard lovers or drunks quarreling. There were two attacks, not three. And afterward, two people did call the police. A 70-year-old woman ventured out and cradled the dying victim in her arms until they arrived. Ms. Genovese died on the way to a hospital.”

How different would things be now if the true story had been the one told over and over? How different would it be if we didn’t believe so easily that all of our neighbours would turn a blind eye?

When I made the move from writing novels vaguely inspired by real events to novels that include some detailed descriptions of the real events I never even thought about the need to get the facts straight. The story is always the number one priority.

But is the fictional story the only priority?

What are some of your favourite novels based on true stories? And do they get the facts straight?