Fanfiction And (Not Vs.) The Hexslinger Series

Four days to go! So here's a new essay on a complex topic, one which hopefully won't draw too many trolls. I guess we'll see.

A new piece from Alyssa Rosenberg, here (http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2012/05/10/480506/does-fan-fiction-really-make-us-more-creative/), got me thinking about the role of fanfiction in the Hexslinger Series' development. Or actually, more accurately, it was the juxtaposition of this article—just one more in roughly a million ruminations on the potential impact of 50 Shades of Grey and its success—and the fact that while I was searching under the tag-term “hexslinger” on Tumblr, I cam across this (http://macarism.tumblr.com/post/22069296125/cheeessss-paaarrrrgeterrrr).

In case you're wondering (or are too chicken to click), it's a screen-grab from the “Making Of” feature on James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma remake which highlights the part of Charlie Prince (Ben Foster)'s outfit you almost never get to see, ie the lavender shirt, royal purple brocaded waistcoat, purple, gold and lavender-patterned neckerchief, plus a nice watch and chain—probably the one he took from that dead Pinkerton after the stagecoach robbery—and some sort of double-strand necklace of silver and little jet beads that sort of looks like somebody's stolen rosary put to bad usage. Underneath it, the poster (http://macarism.tumblr.com) has written: “CHEEESSSS PAAARRRRGETERRRR.”

Which is hilarious on the face of it, and beautifully apt, and generally makes my heart soar with squee, just like the couple or so times I've run across Hexslinger series fan-art, or every time I Google my name and get somebody raving about how much they like the story/Chess in particular. That frilly little sociopath really seems to have connected with a lot of people, which makes me vey happy indeed. But it does open up an interesting line of inquiry, one which never really goes away.

When A Book of Tongues was first going to press, I had to make a quick tactical decision about whether or not I would publicly “own up” to A) having written fanfiction in the past, B) still writing it now and then and C) the fact that if I'd never become obsessed enough with 3:10 to Yuma to write fanfiction for it, the Hexslinger Series probably wouldn't exist. In fact, it goes even deeper than that, because when I first started work on the novel, I was integrating a bunch of magic-system notes I'd previously made for a series which would have taken place in 1870s New York, a la my then-obsession du jour, Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York. So there would always have been a fanfiction-based influence on the series no matter what, because frankly, that's the way my magpie mind tends to operate: I find something I like, I fixate on it, figure out what the draw is, boil it down for parts and start over, effing with it until it's hopefully not that thing anymore, not really.

So the decision was easy, in a way. As I told Torontoist, in one of my first interviews on A Book...: “I’ve never made any attempt to conceal that the originating template for Chess Pargeter was definitely Ben Foster’s performance as Charlie Prince, Ben Wade (Russell Crowe)’s ambiguously gay sidekick. But as I went further, Chess started to change, along with the narrative—I mean, just making him aware of his own motivations makes him very much not Charlie…”

In other words, I've never seen much point in lying about this process, not least because I've always been quote-quote “stupid” enough to post my fanfiction under my own name rather than making up a pseud, like everybody else and their sister. I mean, the most rudimentary Internet search turns up an archive a friend constructed for me as...third on the list, I think. As secrets go, it's not exactly a closed one, though since my interests tend to be pretty non-mainstream—I think the most juggernaut fandom I've ever written for was X-Men: The Movie, and that was only twice—I tend to get a flattering mixture of small yet extremely positive response. In retrospect, I've been told that I was apparently a “BNF” of HBO's OZ fandom, for example, and while I don't quite remember it the same way, I certainly had a hell of a lot of fun while I was in it.

Possibly, it's the fact that I was already a published author—making my living from nonfiction, placing short fiction in various venues, seeing my stories adapted for TV by Telescene's The Hunger—when I first started posting fanfiction and interacting with Internet fandom which keeps me from completely coming down on either part of the amateur/professional divide that you constantly observe at work in articles like Rosenberg's. The notion that fanfiction is a phase you outgrown or a place to practice your craft until you're ready to “graduate” to the heady heights of paying work is one which some people believe devoutly, while other people find it reductionist and insulting. Why should somebody like Joss Whedon be more respected than I am, they ask, just because he played with the Powers That Be's toys under contract, in their sandbox, and made the exploitative hegemony which keeps information unfree $200 million dollars over a single weekend doing it? Aren't I doing exactly the same thing, in far less tethered ways, and then making the result available to anybody with an Internet connection?

And then there are the authors who believe that fanfiction is injuring them somehow—either personally, by violating the characters and worlds they consider their “children” (ick), or simply by devaluing their brand and/or opening them up to potential legal action. (Which works both ways, of course; fanartists everywhere still live in vague fear of a Cease and Desist order from any given iteration of “...the TV show I cannot name, for fear of legal action...”, as the writer-director of William Shatner Leant Me His Hairpiece puts it, and rightly so; copyright can be a harsh mistress, at least in theory. Though there are plenty of acafen and fen with genuine legal experience around who can spend literal hours demonstrating the many ways in which “transformative work” not only hearkens back to a long line of historical precedents—Shakespeare, mythology, satire, homage, etc., from The Wind Done Gone to March—but also falls into cracks which make it remarkably difficult to do anything about, even when money actually does start changing hands.)

My position is personal rather than philosophical, however; I don't believe moral force automatically rests with either side, generators or samplers, not least because the balance of who exactly qualifies as what tends to shift back and forth so erratically. We're all creators, after all. But I also grew up in a freelance culture (both my parents are actors whose ability to make a living “from their art” has ebbed and flowed with the currents of two extremely volatile forty-year periods), so the idea that wanting to get paid for what you produce makes you some sort of whore for The Man is one I will never be exactly down with. There has to be some way to reduce the polarization effect, if only so we can go five minutes without somehow damaging each other's ego-integrity.

What I do know is that without fanfiction as an outlet, a form of writing I didn't feel I needed to monetarize, I wouldn't have been able to explore some of the currents which lead me, eventually, to where I am now. I wouldn't have eventually become familiar and comfortable with the idea of writing a long-form narrative in chunks, of not constantly checking and re-tooling things until they were “perfect”, of simple having the confidence to write End Chapter Whatever/Begin Chapter Next, and move the eff on. So my involvement in fanfiction was utterly integral to my process, in terms of bringing the Hexslinger Series to birth—and in a lot of ways, it remains integral to my process: Obsession, inspiration, alchemical combination, numbers-filing, brave new content, ta dah! Something fresh, something alive. Something “mine”.

And as should probably go without saying, I look totally forward to the day I trip across evidence of someone playing in my sandbox, for a change. I may not be able to acknowledge it directly, but that's what Creative Commons is for, man—it's flattery, not damage. It means, essentially, that somebody fell in love—however indirectly—with “me”. How can that ever be bad?   

A Meme of Alphabet, Conclusion

Damn you, Avengers! You were so good, you totally made me forget to post this.;)

Part Thirteen, And Last:

Y is for—Yu Ming-ch'in

Aka, the hex formerly known as Songbird, who I frankly made up as a bit of a human plot twist, the way you do—she appears early on in A Book of Tongues to basically perform three functions: Confirm the parasitical nature of most hex-on-hex interaction, deliver exposition along with a particular item and be creepy, with a side-order of demonstrating just how effed up someone else raised in the same whorish San Francisco subculture as Chess Pargeter was could be. I made her Chinese because of the San Francisco connection, made her an albino because I was thinking of Bridget Lin Chin-hsia in The Bride With White Hair, and made her twelve-or-thirteen because I liked the idea of this tiny little girl who happens to have been raised in a tradition that makes her far more knowledgable about hexation than the Rev is topping a guy the size of Clancy Brown. And since I thought I wasn't going ever to see her again, I convinced myself that that meant the fact that she conforms to a bunch of Wily Oriental stereotypes wasn't quite as gross as it might be...but even then, I think I also knew I was fooling myself.

One way or the other, by the end of A Book I'd realized that Songbird was far too useful and snarky a character to dispose of that quickly, and by the beginning of A Rope of Thorns, she'd even grown an actual name (though again, if I had a dollar for every time I had to cross-check whether her family patronymic was Yu or Wu, I'd have at least enough for dinner and a movie). We discovered that she both reveres and resents her upbringing, that she thinks of herself as a thousand years of breeding made flesh, a general who is also a slave—that while she doesn't exactly like having been sent to America to manage a whorehouse (and potentially whore herself out as well, on top of it), she just doesn't see any other paths to take. So her partnership with Pinkerton, while mainly entered into to avoid the prospect of being fished in and devoured by Ixchel, is a sort of liberation for her; like Chess, she's young—very young, and triply disadvantaged in her gender, her race and her albinism. And for all her power, she does like being taken care of.

In A Tree of Bones, meanwhile, we rejoin with Songbird at her lowest possible ebb, the point at which most characters start to change in interesting ways; she's been forcibly de-powered by a well-meaning Doc Asbury, captured by a coalition of long-nosed barbarians and American savages, and wakes up every day stranded in the middle of a desert, a bad place to be if you're equally melanin- and friends-poor. In order to survive and prosper, she has to discard some of her assumptions, her hereditary Chauvinism very much included, and form new alliances...indeed, much like Chess in A Rope, what her journey's all about is basically having to grow up, which in her case is about becoming a fully-realized human being, as well as a hex. It was a joy to write, really.

Z is for—Zoroastrianism.

This is something I strive to avoid in narrative generally, because a system in which absolute Good always struggles with absolute Evil frankly bores me silly. It's particularly pernicious when you're writing horror as opposed to fantasy, because a certain moral weight tends to creep in—ie, one set of values is identified with Good/Right and thus another set of values is identified with Evil/Wrong. Given my propensity to write about people who are antiheroes at best, I much prefer the Mexica idea that certain values are simply inherent in the system, and cannot be “gotten rid of” in any permanent way. Or, indeed, the Diné concept of Balance being the most important thing to maintain, especially as the tides of natural and supernatural energy eddy back and forth.

All of which is, I suppose, just to say this: If you're expecting A Tree of Bones to end with a bang, you're half-right. If you're expecting it to end for good, however...not so much. Nothing ever ends.

It's been a fun ride, though, and it's definitely over. For now.  

A Meme of Alphabet, Part 12

W is for—War

I'm no Harry Turtledove, so the minute I realized that pretty much the entirety of A Tree of Bones was going to take place during all full-on clash between Hex City and the forces surrounding it (hexacious, as well as non-), I knew I was at least partially boned. So I opted for both a flash-forward which would skip a fair amount of build-up and establishment—a bit of an HBO's Game of Thrones model which would jump my characters right into the battle (or string of battles), ensuring I could hit the ground running with my tools already assembled—and a certain timeline compaction which would force me to keep bulling on through, finishing things up with a spatter of plot twists and a multi-part climax. While A Book of Tongues takes place over roughly two years, folding back and forth through time throughout, A Rope of Thorns takes place sequentially over roughly a month, and A Tree's action is the shortest yet—four days at the most, barring an epilogue.

X is for—Xenogenesis

In case you haven't noticed, “X” words are pretty damn hard, both to find and to define. But since we've already established that hexation has a genetic component (which is how the Chinese maintain their breeding-for-hexation program, one assumes, as well as the main reason it's generally considered a bad idea for hexes to hook up with each other), and because this one means “the supposed generation of offspring completely and permanently different from the parent”, I'm going to use it as my opportunity to talk about the problem of hexacious kids, in general.

At the start of A Book of Tongues, Doc Asbury tells Ed Morrow and a bunch of other agents that most hexes “express” either at puberty (if female) or after suffering life-threatening injuries (if male). So you might think that there are very few hexes who express as children...except, of course, for the fact that our story is set during a time-perid when infant mortality was crazily high. One can't help but think that there must be a fair portion of people who express as children, or even as infants. Most of them probably don't make it to adulthood, because either they're killed by the non-hexacious around them once their power is recognized, or because other—older—hexes suck them dry, sometimes even their own parents, sometimes without even knowing they're doing it. Mrs Followell admits as much, in her brief back-story.

With these possibilities always looming, it makes sense that much more of A Tree than you might think is predicated on the idea that the Hex City Oath may make it possible for hexacious and non-hexacious parents of hex-babies alike to deal with their dangerously unpredctable offspring in a slightly more humane way—to bond together in a literal way, facing the future as a unit, nurturing, tutoring and supporting each other. And given that (as Asbury also observes) much of the general misery hexes have inflicted in the past springs from their sense of themselves as spiritual lepers feared and hated wherever they go, forever aloooone, this may bode well for human/hex relations in future...once this current war is put to bed, that is.

Tomorrow: Our alphabetized tour of the Hexslinger-'verse concludes, with Y and Z!

A Meme of Alphabet, Part 11

U is for—Underworld(s)

Given how A Rope of Thorns finished up, it's no kind of spoiler at all to say that at least one subplot of A Tree of Bones takes place almost entirely in the Underworld. Not quite Mictlan-Xibalba, so much, as a larger, linked constellation of Afterlives, a Hell-spectrum whose individual parts mirror each other. Parts seem a bit more like Limbo, while other parts seem like Purgatory, and where you end up definitely depends not only on who you are while alive but what sort of business you leave unfinished when you die. At any rate, I had fun designing and referencing the various sections Chess and his Ma have to pass through on their upwards journey. Having a fairly good grasp on both myself and my druthers, though, I guess I always knew that one of them would end up “having” to be Valhalla.;)

V is for—Victory (Ambiguous)...a nebulous concept in most modern Westerns, since we all “know” that this is an era in flux, a moment which is already being overtaken by its own entropy. Also difficult in terms of the shake-down from Pinkerton's Skirmish is the fact that no matter who wins, the world has already been irretrievably altered: Mages now can meddle, just like it's been amply demonstrated that the non-hexacious can fight against hexes, with arcanistric help. Which is probably all just a roundabout way of saying don't expect anything quite as unequivocal as the end of your basic superhero movie, because I don't have much interest in that. This is horror, after all—or at least dark fantasy, depending on where it's shelved.

Tomorrow: W and X!

A Meme of Alphabet, Part 10

S is for—Seven Dials

As the Five Points was to Gangs of New York-era Gotham, so Seven Dials was to 1800s London—the centre of the rats' maze, a place where the city's criminal underclass had congregated and bred since long before Transportation to Australia was enacted into the Criminal Code. It was, in other words, a truly superlative slum which gave rise to a culture and language of its own (Thieves' Cant, whose roots are still recognizable even today in Cockney rhyming slang, and indeed also made the jump over to Amerikay along with various immigrant groups, forming the base of the flash palaver Amsterdam and Bill the Butcher speak), and it's here that Chess's Ma Oona was born and raised. Which is why he ends up in a sort of half-memory, half-parody version of it at the end of A Rope of Thorns, his own personal Hell into the many-roomed prison of Hell Proper. I was particularly interested in how claustrophobic and gross Chess, who's spent his entire life in a series of non-industrialized places—many of the empty of almost everything except landscape—would find the fog and soot-saturated, black-and-grey heart of London's steam- and coal-driven machine. I guess it also stands in for the unrecognizable truths about our own backgrounds and histories we sometimes have to have our faces rubbed in in order to progress, literally or figuratively...but in a lot of ways, this was mainly for the lulz.

T is for—Two-Spirited

At the end of A Rope of Thorns, we were introduced to Yiska, aka The Night Has Passed, a “woman chief” with magic-worker genes who has deliberately chosen not to pursue that part of her heritage, mainly because she really enjoys kicking ass in a way her culture labels specifically “male”. This makes her effectively “Two-Spirited”, a category left open for people who don't respond well to gender norms—men who want to be wives, for example, as well as women who want their own. And while I'm not sure whether or not I'd categorize Yiska as FTM transgendered per se, what I found increasingly fun about her existence is that it offers an alternative to the automatically antagonistic way Chess has been living his life. As Grandma points out, they're pretty similar people, except for the fact that Yiska was raised with a certain sense of responsibility which comes out of having a community to call her own. And while it may well be too late for Chess to develop anything of the same sort, the hexes and hex-allied in and around New Aztectlan could do far worse than to copy her example.

(Then again, he is young, as even he probably forgets, most of the time. It's possible he may yet settle.)

Tomorrow: U and V!

A Meme of Alphabet, Part 9

Q is for—Queerness

As I've stated, my motivation for writing a trilogy in which the main character is gay was two-fold: A) I was writing A Book of Tongues “for me”, and as a slasher, that's my bag, baby, but B) around the same time I began, I also ran across some of Hal Duncan (Vellum, Ink)'s writing about QUILTBAG representation in popular media, and though “yes, I can do that—complicated, tough gay dudes whose tragedy doesn't necessarily come attached to their sexuality ahoy!” By the end of A Book, however, I was happy to see that the spectrum of non-default character sexuality already seemed to be expanding far beyond the “hard gay” axis, embracing functional bisexuality and straight-with-an-exceptionality alike. This has continued to happen throughout the rest of the series, with A Rope of Thorns adding polysexual relationships and lesbianism with a hint of transgender issues, depending on how Yiska actually sees herself (more on that later); in A Tree of Bones, those existing currents are continued, hopefully remaining emotionally front and centre as the characters those sexualities come attached to stay in play. And while I'm sad to say I wan't quite able to push it far enough to include any overtly asexual characters, who knows? I already know this universe ain't completely done with me.

What's become particularly interesting for me, however, is that while my original impulse contained a healthy dose of prurience, the actual ratio of sex-to-action has gone down in each instalment, partly due to lack of time vs. intensity of immediate physical threat. This hopefully reduces the fetishistic angle somewhat, which I'm happy with, but it also goes back to Duncan's observation that while sexuality is obviously a cornerstone of most people's motivations, it's not the be-all and end-all we privilege it as in most narratives. And since queerness is a concept which has its roots in a reclaimed slur, a way of self-definition which says: “Yes, I am 'different', but there's nothing wrong with that”, how much further do you have to push before you can note that that sounds as much like hexes defining themselves “against” non-hexes and vice versa as it does like it necessarily has anything to do with who does or doesn't sleep with whom? So the spectrum widens further, hopefully, the default shifting, until you end up in (to my mind) an interesting world where maybe even the non-default characters can feel pretty “queer” themselves, in certain contexts.

(Apologies, of course, for any interesectional toes I may have stepped on with this line of rumination—as a straight person with a particular kink, it's never my intention to co-opt anyone's identity, except in fiction.)

R is for—Red Weed

By A Tree, the Red Weed—Datura nazacul, as Doc Asbury calls it, that parasite infestation of Hell Kudzu spawned by Chess Pargeter's Xipe Totec incarnation throughout A Rope of Thorns—has become a bit of a non-speaking supporting character in some ways, a plot device in others. Some people have rightly noted that it's reminiscent of the trickster predator vines in Scott Smith's The Ruins, which I'll totally cop to; frankly, I don't see how the two couldn't have had some sort of relationship, considering said ruins are those of a Mayan temple. I'd say the main difference in presentation with the Weed this time 'round is that in Rope, Chess didn't know how to control it, and didn't want to know—but here it's being wielded by the Enemy, who understands innately how best to let it do his bidding. Also, given that I'm not a big fan of the re-set mode in storytelling, the Weed is probably here to stay, even by this part of the saga's end...a severe ecological shift, a sort of lasting hex-pollution. Which will have interesing implications for my version of the Weird West in future, no doubt.

Tomorrow: S and T!

A Meme of Alphabet, Part 8

O is for—Opera

There's a reason I keep on calling the Hexslinger series my “blood-soaked black magic gay porno horse opera” (or various recombinations thereof), aside from the fact that it obviously amuses the crap out of me. And essentially, that reason goes right back to my formative years, when I would tell people I liked horror and people would wrinkle their noses and ask: “Uh...why?” The implication always being that horror is (to any reasoning human being) a disgusting, exploitative genre which aims to make entertainment out of our most intimate and dreadful fears—it's sexist by nature because of fetishizing female victimhood, often -ist of multiple other stripes through exoticization-of-evil tropes, heterosexist and heteronormative, nihilistically bleak, etc. Also just plain gross, with all those bodily fluids. What kind of a person are you, tiny Gemma?

Answer: I'm the kind of person who likes opera, lit and fig. I don't see these things as icky or wrenching. They uplift me in a literally awful way. I don't know why, but each succeeding clusterfuck is like yet another aria, black and red and purple all over. It's glorious. Expect more of the same.

P is for—Pinkerton

Oh Allan Pinkerton, you probably weren't a good guy, exactly, but you sure weren't as bad as I've spent three books making you out to be. That being said, I think the way Pinkerton's degenerated by the beginning of A Tree of Bones is set in stark, fairly intentional parallel with Ixchel's degeneration on the other side of the War on Hex: He's the same sort of villain, the same sort of monster, the same sort of addict, but he thinks he's different, because he's using science rather than superstition to tap into that massive field of what one can only assume is a natural force, hexation. But just like her, he's sacrificing other people right and left to his “cause”; just like her, what he really wants at base is to usher in a bold new era of parasitism and slavery. And half my people have to work with/for him!

Then again, lurking in the background, we do have those two agents who've broken from the fold and are now working against Pinkerton, Frank Geyer (first introduced in A Rope of Thorns) and George Thiel, who we've heard of but not from, thus far. Like Pinkerton, both are actual historical characters who I seized on and bent to my own ends; Thiel, for example, is mainly known as the guy who split off to form his own detective agency, but didn't manage to eclipse Pinkerton's original brand. The great part about alternate universes, however, is that things can end up very differently—and to me, in both cases, the true legacy of Allan Pinkerton is the “detective agency” concept he pioneered, an unacknowledged branch of the government with ties to the Secret Service who functioned as a sort of proto-Federal Bureau of Investigation. A very useful thing to have control of, in any universe that contains hexation.

Tomorrow: Q and R!

A Meme of Alphabet, Part 7

M is for—Mommy Issues

Though not exactly otherwise describable in any way, shape or form as a typical Mama's boy, our frilly Mister Pargeter is nevertheless doomed from his first appearance in A Book of Tongues—when a drunken San Francisco idjit tries valiantly to insult him by explicitly comparing him to his drug-addicted (literal) whore of a mother, “English” Oona—to always be thinking about the ways in which they're either similar or different. Doesn't help that they're both small, red-headed, vicious and apt to trade sex for favours, of course...but from the very minute I decided to have Chess let his boyfriend dispose of Oona long-distance, I knew that the worst place he could ever end up after that would be getting stuck in some version of Hell with only his dead Ma for company. Not exactly coincidentally (and not a spoiler, per se), it is this exact situation Chess finds himself in at the end of A Rope of Thorns/beginning of A Tree of Bones. Cue bonding! Sort of. Let's put it this way: Oona and her flamin' molly of an only child will never not have far more in common than either of them are happy to admit. And frankly, I like it that way.

N is for—Normals (Badass)

Much like Hawkeye, Black Widow and Nick Fury when compared with the rest of the Avengers, “normal” people often tend to take a certain background stance when everybody else in a given narrative has genuine superpowers. Except, of course, that all three of the above-mentioned actually do have a shared superpower: Being badass. In a funny way, part of the internal debate driving Chess Pargeter at this point has a lot to do with the fact is that while he started out thinking he was awesome/cursed for being so special-snowflake different, it actually turns out he was part of a bigger picture all along—that at least part of him, possibly the most important part, comes with a semi-predictable set of rules attached. Having always been a hex explains his ridiculous way with guns, if not the inclinations that prompted him to take them up, in the first place; does it automatically dismiss every other ingredient of what makes him him?

Meanwhile, my favourite badass normal—Ed Morrow—just keeps on keepin' on, even surrounded as he is by magic-addicted once and future bosses, drunken arcanists, various hexacological consorts, his demigod pal with benefits and the not-exactly-girlfriend he thought was normal when they first hooked up, but is now carving out a corner of the board for herself, using a completely different set of powers. Luckily, he has good instincts, stamina and a fair sense of humour to support him, so I'm pretty sure he'll manage to come out of things all right.

Tomorrow: O and P!

A Meme of Alphabet, Part 6

K is for—Kill Your Darlings

The great part about making a horror movie, director Bernard Rose (Candyman, Paperhouse) used to say, is that you can kill off your entire cast, if you want/need to. To that observation I would add a paraphrasing of Stephen King's explanation of The Ghost Trick, as used in the supernatural soap Dark Shadows: Yes, but the problem is—especially when you're dealing with magicians, in a universe already full of both resurrected gods and simple human ghosts—killing people off doesn't always take. So the lure is knowing that you can exploit at will the narrative emotional outpouring which accompanies the “death” of any given character, without ever actually having to permanently shift them off the board at all. Do that too many times, however, and you end up being Marvel (or DC); nobody believes the stakes anymore, because you've bent them so many times in order to bring your darlings/franchises literally back to life. Nothing matters.

I told myself many times that if I pushed the Hexslinger series to where it should logically go, I really would have to kill a lot of people. Which is why it didn't surprise me when the characters I knew I knew in my gut were probably going to survive did, but I must admit, it did surprise me how much the other ones not doing so actually hurt. Which is good, I guess...

L is for—Love's A Curse

Or so Chess Pargeter's Ma always used to say, and she'd certainly know. It continues to interest me how much of my idea of epic love seems to have been inextricably influenced by listening to way too many Joan Baez albums as a kid, in that I just can't reconcile myself with the concept that a love big enough to kill or die for is ever a good thing, exactly. Instead, it strikes me as a sort of wound, a two-person trauma which inevitably hurts as much as it heals. Within the context of the Hexslinger series, for example, I don't think it's debatable that Chess has learned a lot from loving Reverend Rook, and that the people around him have benefited from that same sorrowful tuition in self-knowledge. And once upon a time, Chess's automatic reply to that observation would've been a simple: Oh yeah? Well, fuck 'em all, anyhow...but the fact that he isn't quite as inclined to do so anymore (or rather not as inclined to act on it, because he'd probably still say it, if only to be a bitch) is another consequence of the same scar tissue. Ash Rook has changed him, irreparably, making him a different person. Yet in much the same way Chess has already benefited from the damage he took in loving Rook, by the beginning of A Tree of Bones, Rook—who still justifies the worst of his betrayals by saying he only did what he did in order to “save” Chess from future harm—has already begun to accept that his baseline ideal of love may be exactly as hollow as his hypocrite preacher's faith ever was...and that if he wants to redeem himself at all, if not his choices, he has to give up on the idea of getting any sort of return on his investments, to serve without expectation—or even hope—of gain, like the “true” Christian he's never really felt himself to be. Which really can't help but get messy, as a strategy.

Tomorrow: M and N!

A Meme of Alphabet, Part 5

I is for—Ixchel

I think we can all probably agree that by this point in the narrative, no matter her dreamlike seductiveness earlier on, Dread Lady Ixchel has become very firmly a monster, both morally and visibly. This mostly has to do with the degeneration of her chosen vessel, poor Miss Adaluz, whose suicide and resurrection Rook oversaw in A Book of Tongues. Now she's looking for a replacement body, but just as Larry Cohen noted in his film Q: The Winged Serpent, Mexica faith-based magic has one very particular limitation—nine times out of ten, it requires a willing sacrifice. And trying to make someone “love” you enough to lay down their life “for” you so that you can possess their body after it's vacant is sometimes a little bit harder than it seems. Luckily for Ixchel—and unluckily, for everybody else—she always has a fall-back position.

J is for—Johnson (Andrew)

Who was President in 1867, exactly? Chances are, if I was actually American, this might not have proved such a goddamn stumper. As it is, if I had a dollar for every time I mistook Andrew Johnson (1986-1869) for Andrew Jackson (aka “Old Hickory”, 1829-1837) while writing and editing all three books, I'd have a nice little nest-egg. One way or the other, Johnson comes a little more directly into the narrative in A Tree—I vaguely discuss his failed impeachment, have him conferring with Allan Pinkerton via ectoplasmic avatar, and note that his admission of Nebraska to the Union makes him the sort of guy who might be okay with signing off on a new state, in theory. Given the timing, he seems like a President who'd understand that in a world where hexes can suddenly cooperate, matters hexalogical would really have to be put on the table from now on, along with whatever arcanistric measures could be raised to deal with them. (I also make him a bit of a racist, for which I apologize, especially if it wasn't true.)

Tomorrow: K and L!

A Meme of Alphabet, Part 4

G is for—Gangsters

When I first got the idea which would become the Hexslinger Series, I was deeply in love with Martin Scorsese's epic Gangs of New York. I did scads of historical research, wrote a bunch of fanfiction you can probably find pretty easily (as usual, I was almost the only person doing so), and started putting together a completely different book that I will probably return to, though not immediately. But nothing caught fire. Maybe it was the scope, or the fact that you need to be far more careful in terms of metropolitan geography than you do when writing a Western, because in the latter case it's an option to just claim the interiors of Arizona and New Mexico are mainly empty space unless you tell the audience different. By the time I got to A Rope of Thorns, however, I had to come up with some new hexes, and my mind defaulted to Gotham. Thus was born dapper pimp Three-Fingered Hank Fennig, late of the Glorious Know-Nothing Order of Native Americans, along with his three lovely Missuses, Clodagh Killeen, Eulalia Parr and Roberta Schemerhorne. Fennig, being well-used to gang dynamics, supports Rook and Ixchel overtly while studying them for flaws he can press on if needed, especially her; his true interest is in the city Ixchel sees mainly as a flabby meat by-product of her quest to restore the Mexica Fourth World, not least because it's the only place he and massively pregnant Clo could ever raise their probably-hexacious baby without being afraid they'd be tempted to suck it dry. And in A Tree of Bones, these considerations only become stronger, making Fennig and company a surprisingly integral part of the plot.

H is for—Hex City

Like I said before, storytelling is alchemical; nothing stays the same, and really, nothing should. So while I'm not entirely sure if I knew from the start that I was going to shatter one of the key assumptions of the Hexslinger-'verse by the end of A Book of Tongues—the idea that “mages don't meddle” because there are simply no circumstances, ever, under which they might be able to work together—when A Rope of Thorns rolled around, I found myself in the unenviable position of having to figure out how a place like New Aztectlan/Hex City would actually function. Who would seek it out, and why; how would it be constructed; what would be the division of labour; how would the mechanics of the Ixchel-imposed Oath be enacted. I had had the impression that there were occasionally circumstances under which hexes would agree to work together, but that those were few and far between because at any moment, either of those involved might turn on the other. But once the Oath itself was sketched out—in A Rope—I began to see the ways that it might be modified or twisted to fit a bunch of different circumstances. Thus the “problem” of both Hex City—ie, the fact that its inhabitants want it to survive more than they want its founder to triumph—and how the Oath might be translated out into the wider world of hexes who don't happen to be New Aztectlites becomes front-and-centre in A Tree of Bones, with hopefully interesting results.

Tomorrow: I and J!

A Meme of Alphabet, Part 3

E is for—Enemy

It took me almost the whole of A Book of Tongues to decide that I was, in fact, going to bring Tezcatlipoca (the Smoking Mirror, Mexica Trickster god of magic) on board as Ixchel's not-exactly-opposite number, but once I did, things fell into place with surprising ease. One thing I've learned to trust about my process is that just as things always change alchemically while making their way from here to there, what we originally think are mistakes are sometimes plot twists in disguise. So when I realized—as a reviewer recently kindly pointed out—that I'd initially mistaken the Mayan goddess Ixchel (goddess of the moon, of the rainbow, of childbirth) for the Mayan goddess Ixtab (She of the Rope, Mother of Hanged Men), what occurred to me as a way to “fix” this assumption was the idea of Ixchel having “eaten” Ixtab (along with a bunch of other Mexica and Mayan goddesses), consuming her essence vampirically, the way living hexes do with other hexes. With that in mind, it turns out that “The Enemy”—or T-Cat, as I call him—is already acknowledged by Mexica mythology to be four gods in one: Xipe Totec (god of corn, of new growth, Our Lord the Flayed One), Quetzalcoatl (the Feathered Serpent or God Who Dies), Tezcatlipoca (as she wrote) and Huitzilopochtli (god of royalty, of lightning, of war)...and by the end of A Rope of Thorns, we'd seen all these aspects represented except one. So Chess Pargeter, having completed his Xipe Totec cycle with a self-sacrifice so huge it brings an entire town back to life, enters A Tree of Bones as a man divided: His soul is stuck downstairs in the Underworld, while his body struts around being occupied by Tezcatlipoca-as-Huitzilopochtli, blue skin, Red Weed underpants, lightning-snake whip and all. So the Enemy becomes the real enemy, one more wild card added to the deck, both on and off the battlefield; untrustworthy by nature, but always interesting. Just the way a Trickster should be.

F is for—Faith

Like a lot of people not raised with any sort of religion, I find Fundamentalist Christianity both fascinating and slightly scary. But seeing how I'd already had Nazarene preacher-turned-Sheriff Mesach Love rampaging 'cross the landscape as a secondary villain in A Rope, I felt it was high time for someone of similar philosophical leanings to be developed as a character who was complicated and human yet essentially positive. This, then, is why Mesach's widow Sophronia Love starts A Tree having already assumed the position of Bewelcome township's unofficial Joan of Arc; by showing how her compassion, sense of responsibility, and rectitude counterbalance the ruthlessness of ostensible “good guy” Allan Pinkerton, we retroactively get some idea not only what kind of man Love must once have been and why the Bewelcomites followed them out here in the first place, but why faith and devotion were such driving forces in settling the West generally. In the Hexslinger-'verse, of course, faith—a powerful, deliberate commitment to something “higher”—can be used both to actively neutralize hexation or (if the faith itself allows this, as with Grandma's Diné traditions) support and enhance its effects; the parallels between the commitment of true faith, and the commitment of the binding Hex City Oath, are completely deliberate, eventually playing out for Sophy in an intensely personal and shocking way...

Tomorrow: G and H!

A Meme of Alphabet, Part 2

C is for—Colour (People of)

Since A Book of Tongues was frankly a bit of a sausage party, in A Rope of Thorns, I began by deliberately developing at least one awesome lady character, only to watch others start spilling out of the woodwork by Act Three. And while I genuinely tried to make sure there were Native characters involved from the beginning of the story (more on this later), as well as at least some other People of Colour here and there, by the time Tree rolled around, two things were obvious: A) A lot more of said PoCs had thus far been represented as “monsters” than I felt comfortable with, overall, and B) I was also starting to find the lack of straight-up African-Americans in my own narrative disturbing, especially since it was explicitly set post-Civil War. So one decision I made before even starting the book was that if any portion of the U.S. Army was assigned to support Allan Pinkerton's war against Hex City, it would probably consist of one of those legendary Coloured Brigades like the one showcased in Edward Zwick's film Glory. This allowed me to bring in new characters such as the 13th Louisiana Regiment of Infantry (African Descent)'s commander, Captain Washford—definitely a departure from historical accuracy, I'm sad to say—and a soldier who becomes friends with Ed Morrow, Private Carver. I'm also fairly proud of a lady who calls herself Sal Followell, using that post-slavery shorthand of taking your former owner's last name, who emerges as one of the backbone mages on the Hex City Council. She's nobody's “auntie”, and knows more about the cannibal mechanics of hexation vs. hexation than some of her more idealistic comrades have ever dreamt of, so she makes a damn good devil's advocate without actually advocating for the Devil.

D is for—Diné

Like I said, I really wanted to have Native/First Nations characters from the get-go, difficult and potentially problematic as I knew that would be. In A Book of Tongues, the main representative from this group was the Diné Hataalli known as “Grandma” or “Spinner”, a devotee of the Great Spider Mother, the Weaver, the Changing Woman—sworn enemy of all Anaye, and of every hex who makes him- or herself a monster by walking the Witchery Way. One of the reasons I love writing Grandma so much is that I've tried throughout to make her as little like the Magical Native Person stereotype as possible; she's a crusty old lady, blunt and bruisingly practical, with about as little inherent respect for Stupid White (People)/Bilagaana as Gary Farmer's character Nobody from Jim Jarmusch's Acid Western Dead Man. This attitude gets her killed by the end of A Book, but being a hex, that's not the drawback it might be: She returns at the end of A Rope, and enters A Tree as a grumpy ghost trapped inside a gigantic, haphazard golem made from bone-dust. Like a lot of hexes, Grandma devoutly believes that her way/tradition is the right one, and while her ideal of Balance between natural and unnatural forces does indeed seem smart—antithetical to Ixchel's blood-soaked craziness, at any rate—part of her overall journey has always been towards the realization that she does not have all the answers, just because she has one or two. But then again, none of the hexes, or even my characters, do; the final lesson is, I suppose, that the best version of an “answer” can really only be assembled by committee.

Tomorrow: E and F!

A Meme of Alphabet, Part One

It's official—May 15, 2012, is the release date for A Tree of Bones, the third and final Hexslinger Series instalment. As our blood-soaked gay porno black magic horse opera trilogy reaches its intense conclusion, meanwhile, I'm going to be counting down the days with various supplemental goodies, starting today with the beginning of a Hexslinger Alphabet Meme: Two letters per day, one concept per letter. Without further ado, then...

A is for—Arcanistry

As A Tree of Bones begins, Columbia University Doctor of Sciences Joachim Asbury—by now known colloquially as “Doc Hex”—is widely considered America's foremost expert in the relatively new field of Experimental Arcanistry. He's attained this position through the invention of Asbury's Manifold, a device which (in A Book of Tongues) finally gave non-hexacious humans the means to both identify unexpressed hexes and measure the power-fields of expressed ones by tracking the flow of “what the Celestials call ch'i” through the body. From there, the Manifold's applications have only widened: Latest-generation models can be used to deflect hexes' magic, channel it, or even momentarily suppress it, while Asbury's battlefield researches have created an entire sub-class of collared hexes who wrangle their own kind under Pinkerton Detective Agency supervision. While there's no doubt that this sort of black science may seem like the only logical weapon of choice when arrayed against the wild chaos-power of demigods like Ixchel Rainbow and her Enemy, however—plus the scarily organized “smaller” mages of Hex City itself—even Asbury has to admit that the technological learning curve has accelerated under pressure far past the point where he can predict it anymore, let alone control it. Can a full-bore magic vs. anti-magic Second Civil War be far behind?

B is for—Blood

Blood, bright-hot and flowery, is the fuel Dread Lady Ixchel's Machine runs on, the coinage that New World she wants to “bring on” will be paid for in. What's becoming clearer, however, is that the mostly-American hexes she and Reverend Rook have gathered around themselves to help Make It So are far less enchanted with the basic principle of self-sacrifice than the Mexica and Mayan flocks who once supported Ixchel's pantheon ever were. (Hell, even the Chinese and Shoshone ones don't like it much, for that matter.) As Rook notes, Americans—however hexacious in nature—are universally raised to expect to be paid for what they do and to keep what they've earned. And while they're perfectly willing to spill blood to get what they want—both their own, or that of anybody stupid enough get in their way—they also have very specific ideas about what constitutes the best use of that blood, once shed. Ixchel expects her hungers, being god-sized, to trump theirs; Rook thinks she may be fooling herself, though he isn't about to say that out loud. Not yet, anyhow.

Tomorrow: C and D!

I'm-A Gonna Tell Ya How It's Gonna Be...

We're moving towards a shiny new era, here at Music at Midnight: Actual content! Yes, boys and girls, there really is no earthly point in maintaining a “professional” blog if you don't actually put stuff in there on a fairly regular basis, and believe you me, I get that. I guess I could stamp my little foot and say: But I've been working, which I have, but that really is no excuse, because I'm always working. There is no point at which I am not working, these days. So yeah, no.;)

Okay, so: Here's what you're going to see, over the next month or so—

1. Interstitial posts about A Tree of Bones: Volume Three of the Hexslinger Series, as we ramp up to publication. Think I'll probably start with the usual playlist post and go from there, but look for later coverage of the problems inherent in writing multi-part action scenes, breakdowns of Camp Pink, Bewelcome, the Underworld and the Hen Party camp, plus the long-awaited Hex City post, with sketches of all sorts of new and old characters along the way.

2. Reviews of various other things I like, starting with cow/steam/magicpunk webcomic Next Town Over (http://www.nexttownover.net/), though this will definitely branch out into things far beyond the realm of the Weird Western.

3. Meta: This could be me talking about various projects, or various issues, or any of the stuff I more often raise over in established spaces like my Livejournal (http://handful_ofdust.livejournal.com): Smurfette Syndrome in mainstream TV shows, for example, or the challenge of trying to write something strikingly different from what I'm now best “known” for. Or hey, the debatable foolishness of continuing to write fanfiction even though I'm supposedly past that stage in my professional evolution (tell that to the 15,000+ words' worth of Lackadaisy slash I pumped out while finishing the last part of Tree). All that.

These things will probably come your way three times a week, though I don't want to promise anything about when those three times might turn out to be. Call it the reason why I kept being defeated by the idea of doing a serial novel, David Wellington-style; it's hard enough for me to make myself write the deadlined stuff, without making myself write things I set my own deadline for.

All right, back to that short story I have to get done sometime in the next two days...

A Book of Tongues Interstitial: Music, Music, Music

Whenever it comes to music, like Laurence-as-Prince-Naveen in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog might say, “I’m for it.” It’s undeniably important to my process—setting a mood, giving me character insight, helping me explain things to myself. For years now, the second thing I always do when I start a new project (after my initial notes) is to cobble together a play-list of songs that remind me of my characters.

What was particularly pleasant with A Book of Tongues, however, is that because it’s ostensibly a historical piece, I was able to cross-breed my bone-deep love for folk, alt-country and stuff that simply hit the right chord. Plus, my beta readers—all great cataloguers of various tracks and artists themselves—were able to recommend and share the things that came into their heads as they followed along with me at every point in the curve, widening my spectrum of influences substantially.

As the year wore on, many original tracks were dropped and replaced, but the backbone remained firm: A soundtrack emerged that revolved specifically around themes of bad love, loss of faith, betrayal, pain and revenge. Some parts of it even began to suggest plot twists and/or character developments, which is (for me) the hallmark of truly great/useful music. Here’s the result:

The Essential Book of Tongues Playlist

1. “Two Sisters,” Roger Wilson

I’ll be true to my love/If my love will be true to me…

The only song to be quoted directly in the text, this is the single most despairing version of an already amazingly sad narrative—a version of the same story told in “The Bonny Swans” by Loreena McKennit and “The Cruel Sister” by Kerstin Blodig, except without the miraculous harp or the denouncement from beyond the grave, let alone any sort of reconciliation or regret. Instead, we’re left with a coda which “proves” humanity’s guiding emotions to be jealousy and greed; only makes sense that this is the one “English” Oona chooses to sing when she gets so low down even the opium isn’t enough to help her forget.

2. “I Go Like the Raven”, Dave Carter and Tracey Grammer

Sonya Taaffe first introduced me to these sadly unsung bluegrass folk artists through “Cat-Eye Willie Claims his Lover”, then supplied me with a flood of supplemental material. I glommed onto several tracks, many of which came to remind me specifically of Chess’s sprightly nastiness—“Crocodile Man”, for example, and “41 Thunderer” (a dreamier version of “The Devil’s Right Hand” which casts a man’s gun as his femme fatale). But then there’s “When I Go,” which would do just as well as a eulogy for “Grandma”, and spat up the image of a swirling column of bone-dust and sand which eventually became the pillar of blood Ixchel peeps out at Rook through. So it all fits.

3. “Black Soul Choir”, 16 Horsepower

Oh, every man is evil, Lord, every man's a liar/
Unashamed with a wicked tongue, singin' in the black soul choir...

As I’ve said, 16 HP quickly became both the inspiration for Sheriff Mesach Love in particular and the quintessential “Fear of God” material embodying Reverend Rook’s ambivalent fascination with the way his own growing power seems to eat away at his always-hypocritical, ever-diminishing faith. Also recommended: “Brimstone Rock”, “Splinters” (Yeah, you saw it comin’/And yet you did not flee…), “Horse-Head Fiddle” (for Rook’s not-exactly-alone-time in the desert) and, naturally, their awestruck, painful, churning live version of “Sinnerman” (And the rock cried out…).

4. “The Bachelor”, Patrick Wolf

Another Chess song, embodying his utter lack of ambivalence about his own contrary nature, particularly as regards his queerness. I love the fact that Wolf really does seem to be writing it like a slightly perverse Childe Ballad (Poor little turtledove, sitting up in pine/Dreaming of your own true love, so why not me for mine?). If I had to put a time and place on it, it’d probably fit best with Chess at War, flaunting himself around and enjoying the mess his new trade gives him license to create. But the Rook comes in view, and it all goes to shit.

5. “There is a Ghost”, Marianne Faithfull

This track, from her album Before the Poison, is very much about the connection Chess and Rook make with each other and the aftershocks which linger behind its severance: Memory, pain, literal nostalgia. (Oh my lover, oh my lover/Never was there another/Where has my lover-man gone?/Away…away…) Not to mention how it twins extremely well with the far more overt violent fatalism of—

6. “Furious Angels”, Rob Dougan

Yes, yes—based on a track from The Matrix: Reloaded, all that. Like “Apologize” by OneRepublic (with or without Timbaland’s participation), this would maybe fall under the “crack” portion of the mix, if I was genuinely ashamed to have it here. But I’m not, since in a lot of ways, this became the emblematic Chess/Rook OTP song of choice; the one that says that by loving this person—or anyone, maybe—it’s like you made a mistake, a whole big heapin’ pile of ‘em, and now you can run, but you can’t hide. Because you better be extremely sure that if you do, God (or the gods—a god, anyhow) is going to find you, no matter how far you go, and fuck your shit up.

Like a sentence of death,
I got no options left,
I've got nothing to show now.
I'm down on the ground,
I've got seconds to live,
and you can't go now.
'Cause love, like an invisible bullet shot me down
and I'm bleeding, yeah I'm bleeding
and if you go, furious angels will bring you back to me.
They will bring you back to me.

You're a dirty needle,
you're in my blood and there's no cure in me.
I wanna run, like the blood from a wound
to a place you can't see me.
'Cause love, like a blow to the head has left me stunned
and I'm reeling, yeah I'm reeling
and if you go, furious angels will bring you back to me.

You're a cold piece of steel between my ribs
and there's no saving me.
And I can't get up,
from this wet crimson bed that you made for me.
That you made for me!
'Cause love like a knife in the back has cut me down
and I'm bleeding, yeah I'm bleeding,
and if you go, angels will run to defend me, to defend me.

'Cause I can't get up, I'm as cold as a stone,
I can feel the life fade from me.
I'm down on the ground, I've got second to live,
and what's that waits for me, oh that waits for me!
'Cause love like a sentence of death, left me stunned,
and I'm reeling, yeah I'm reeling,
and if you go, furious angels will bring you back to me.

See also: Dougan’s own “Nothing at All” and Dave Matthews Band’s “When the World Ends” (also from TM: R’s soundtrack), plus Snow Patrol’s “Run” and “Set Fire to the Third Bar” (featuring Martha Wainwright). They’re mainstream pop apocalyptastic!

7. “Las Cruces Jail”, Two Gallants

Well I...spent last night in Las Cruces Jail, rainin' hail, born to fail/
Nobody comin' for to go my bail, sun, don't you rise tomorrow.../
I see the gallows' altar, a circle 'round the sun/
They gonna hang me if I stay and shoot me if I run...

Like “Sam Hall”—I prefer the Johnny Cash version, because that is how I roll—this is a song about being fast, bad and doomed in the Old Wild West, and illustrates the point that much as I like Chess (and the Rev), it can never be forgot that between ‘em, they’ve killed a whole lot of people who may not have really deserved it. Dicey! Similarly recommended, therefore, for similar reasons: “Train to Jackson”, by Jeffrey Foucault, and “Black River Killer”, by Blitzen Trapper, with its almost John Connolly-esque implications of serial killer as wandering, flesh-trapped fallen angel (I’ve been wanderin’ in the dark about as long as sin/But they say it’s never too late to start again…[but] I killed the first man that I came upon/’Cause the Devil works quick, you know it don’t take long).

8. “Water to Sky”, Thea Gilmore

Along with “Lucinda” by Tom Waits, this is a song I associate specifically with “English” Oona Pargeter, both in her Before and After phases. Indeed, the constant steampunk whoosh-THUNK of percussion behind “Lucinda” even reminds me of the sound the Enemy’s wood-slat ribcage makes when pumping open and closed, open and closed, as well as the Manifold’s nasty chatter. The trick here is that while “Lucinda” casts Oona and her like as infectious forces of negative predestination, “Water to Sky” is about a woman who could be seen as either a weirdly innocent victim or a force of nature untameable even in death—someone worthy of being remembered, either way. Thus moving us subtly towards where Chess needs to eventually end up, vis a vis the ladiez.

9. “Alphabet of Hurricanes” by Tom McRae

Caught in a whirlwind/
Of broken sticks and bones/
An alphabet of hurricanes/
Can’t blow this drifter home…

McRae’s transplanted British voice--hoarse, light, yearning--beautifully echoes the open spaces of my fake Arizona and parts Weird West, a haphazard mixture of scrub and desert and bare, broken rock, buttes and fossils, all ceaseless, mapless movement and activity with no particular aim in mind but chaos. Also good for that: “Me & Stetson”, “Mermaid Blues”, “You Will Rise”.

10. “America”, Tracy Chapman

And here we (finally) have a song representing things as seen from the slightly less white dude-centric portion of our narrative—the “secret” history of the not-exactly-New World, equally suitable for indigenous types like Rainbow Lady Ixchel and the Dine Hataalli known as “Grandma” as it might be for Songbird herself, the first-gen immigrant witch-queen of San Francisco’s Chinatown. One way or the other: You were lost and got lucky/Came upon a shore/Found you were conquering America…

Okay: Way too long, at this point. But here’s eleven more tracks well worth your while, if you want something to read along to--

“Blackest Crow”, Angi West
“Hole in the Middle”, Emily Jane White
“Bad Man’s World”, Jenny Lewis
“Black Hearted Love”, PJ Harvey and John Parrish
“One More Cup of Coffee”, Bob Dylan
“Black Acres”, Elysian Fields
“Up Jumped the Devil”, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
“From a Shell”, Lisa Germano
“Damned to Hell”, John Butler Trio
“Sunken Waltz”, Calexico
“Ten Million Slaves”, Otis Taylor

A Book of Tongues Cast of Characters (III): Pinkerton, the Pinks, Ed Morrow

Allan Pinkeron and his “Pinks”

Since we’ve spent a fair deal of time on the opposite (considering that my two great fictional loves are the motivations and internal lives of villains and antiheroes), it only makes sense that we should perhaps take a brief moment to talk about “good guys”. But then again, in A Book of Tongues, the forces of law and order are mainly represented by Allan Pinkerton’s Pinkeron National Detective Agency, a state of affairs which hits the ground already dicey, and never really recovers.

It all started back in the 1840s, when former Glasgow cooper Pinkerton—disillusioned by the failure of the British Chartrist movement—came to America, where he was appointed the first police detective in Chicago. In the 1850s, he then partnered with Chicago attorney Edward Rucker to form the North-Western Police Agency, later known as the Pinkerton Agency. Or, as historian Frank Morn writes: "By the mid-1850s a few businessmen saw the need for greater control over their employees; their solution was to sponsor a private detective system. In February 1855, Allan Pinkerton, after consulting with six midwestern railroads, created such an agency in Chicago."

Pinkerton developed several investigative techniques that are still used today. Among them are "shadowing" (surveillance of a suspect) and "assuming a role" (undercover work). Following the outbreak of the Civil War, Pinkerton became head of the Union Army Intelligence Service in 1861–1862, foiling an alleged assassination plot in Baltimore, Maryland, while guarding Abraham Lincoln on his way to his inauguration. His agents often worked undercover as Confederate soldiers and sympathizers, in an effort to gather military intelligence; Pinkerton himself served in several undercover missions under the alias of Major E.J. Allen. Pinkerton was succeeded as Intelligence Service chief by Lafayette Baker. The Intelligence Service was the forerunner of the U.S. Secret Service

As the agency’s scope grew, its ruthless yet only sometimes efficient methods soon attracted the notoreity that Pinkerton—a genius at self-promotion who literally wrote his own pulp history—so craved; the Pinks were soon universally feared as well as somewhat despised, since their services always went to the highest bidder. Pinkertons were often hired to protect banks so large they feared robbery, and also rode shotgun while trains and stagecoaches transported money and other high quality merchandise between cities and towns, making them vulnerable outlaws. Pinkerton agents gained a reputation for resistance to bribery, easily explained less by their high moral standards than by the fact that they were usually both well-paid and well-armed.

In 1871, Congress appropriated $50,000 to the new Department of Justice to form a suborganization devoted to "the detection and prosecution of those guilty of violating federal law." The amount was insufficient for the DOJ to fashion an integral investigating unit, so the DOJ contracted out the services involved to the Pinkertons—thus effectively making the Pinkertons an arm of “the government”, a status which Pinkerton hastened to exploit.

In 1872, Franklin B. Gowen—then president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad—hired the agency to investigate the labor unions in the company's mines. A Pinkerton agent, James McParland, infiltrated the Molly Maguires using the alias James McKenna, leading to the labor organization’s downfall. The incident was the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novel The Valley of Fear.

Perhaps on the strength of this nonfiction-to-fiction crossover success, Pinkerton agents were also hired to track western outlaws Jesse James, the Reno Gang, and the Wild Bunch (including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). On March 17, 1874, two Pinkerton Detectives and a Deputy Sheriff Edwin P. Daniels encountered the Younger Brothers (associates of James Gang); Daniels, John Younger, and one Pinkerton Agent were killed. The Pinkertons later retaliated by blowing up a house where the James boys were “known to stay”—understandably, since it belonged to their mother, Zerelda. But since they weren’t there at the time, all the Pinks managed to do was blow off Zerelda James’ leg and kill Jesse and Frank’s retarded half-brother; not the world’s most useful P.R. event, in retrospect.

(In 1872, meanwhile, the Spanish Government hired Pinkerton to help suppress a revolution in Cuba, which intended to end slavery and give citizens the right to vote. Pinkeron said “yes, please!”, thus further endearing himself to many, many people who thankfully weren’t of much import, because they didn’t speak English.)

In late June, 1884, Pinkerton slipped on a pavement in Chicago, biting his tongue as he did so. He didn't seek treatment and the tongue became infected, leading to his death on July the first. At the time, he was working on a system that would centralize all criminal identification records, a database now maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The Agency continued ever onwards, pursuing Pinkeron’s original methodology. On July 6, 1892, during the Homestead Strike, Henry Clay Frick called in a force of 300 Pinkerton detectives from New York and Chicago to protect the mill and replacement workers. This resulted in a fight in which 16 men were killed (7 Pinkertons and 9 Strikers), and to restore order, two brigades of the state militia were called out.

The next year, Anti-Pinkerton Act was passed, and since then federal law has stated that an "individual employed by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, or similar organization, may not be employed by the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia."

In 1895, detective Frank Geyer restored the Pinkertons’ reputation somewhat by tracking first known American serial killer H.H. Holmes to Toronto, Canada, where he also uncovered the bodies of the three murdered Pitezel children. This lead to Holmes’ arrest and execution, but also exposed the fact that the Agency had previously apprehended Holmes just a year before in Boston, on an outstanding Texas warrant for horse theft.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the Pinkertons slowly drifted away from spying and union-busting, eventually dropping their criminal investigation work altogether, and removing the word “detective” from their letterhead and becoming primarily involved in protection services. In 2003, Pinkerton's was acquired—along with longtime rival the William J. Burns Detective Agency (founded in 1910)—by Securitas AB, and the two were folded together to create Securitas Security Services USA, Inc., one of the largest security companies in the world. Securitas and several other major security companies are now under union organization, through the SEIU (Services Employees International Union).

Here’s a .jpg of the Pinkertons’ famous logo, the Unsleeping Eye:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/We_never_sleep.jpg

Since he was still alive at the time, I thought it only fitting to involve Allan Pinkerton directly as one of the characters in A Book of Tongues. I see him as reasonably young and energetic at this point, having just emerged from the furnace of the War, and extremely excited by the possibilities attendant on finally being able to track, apprehend and control hexes. It only makes sense that he’d be concentrating on hexslingers rather than human outlaws, since there’s almost no fair degree of competition between the two (especially in terms of attracting positive media attention). Physical template: Maybe Gerard Butler, but definitely in his slightly puffy Law Abiding Citizen mode rather than his ripped-to-hell-and-back 300 mode. So just try superimposing Butler’s face onto this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Pinkerton_allan_late_harpers.jpg

Ed Morrow

Pinkerton Detective Agency man Edward Rumsfield Morrow is, on first sight, about as close as we come to a “hero” in A Book of Tongues. Granted, he spends a lot of his time A) lying through his teeth and B) letting Chess and the Rev ride rough-shod over everything in sight, but that’s the nature of his game: He’s gone undercover with the West’s currently most-feared hexslinger, and spends much of his time standing within easy killing distance of a man who’ll pretty much shoot you for looking at him, the Rev, or virtually anything else in a manner he considers funny. When the chips are down, however, this is definitely the guy you want in your corner—someone who’s perceptive, sympathetic and loyal to a fault.

It goes without saying (though I’m saying it anyhow) that Morrow is also the default audience POV character here--the person whose innate decency allow us to be slowly tricked, much as he himself is, into feeling something for far less agreeable characters like the Rev and Chess. And in Chess’s case, eventually, that understanding comes to extend far further beyond the bounds of propriety than a big, straight dude may initially care for—but while I can certainly appreciate the results, I’ve actually come to find the mechanics of Chess and Morrow’s odd little workaday partner/friendship far more interesting, overall.

Finally: Though Morrow originally derived much from a minor character in 3:10 to Yuma named Jackson, the physical template he’s since come to resemble most is that of Liev Schreiber, probably best-known at this point either for playing Sabretooth in X-Men Origins: Wolverine or knocking up Naomi Watts (twice!). He was also the latest iteration of hapless political Cylon Raymond Prentiss Shaw, in Jonathan Demme’s unjustly overlooked/decried 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, and I always see Ed as slightly more Raymond than Victor Creed, except in the sideburns department.

Here’s some mainly-shirtless Liev Schreiber goodness, to see us out:

http://www.topnews.in/light/files/Liev-Schreiber.jpg
http://cdn.buzznet.com/media-cdn/jj1/headlines/2008/03/liev-schreiber-shirtless.jpg
http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2008/startracks/080317/liev_schrieber.jpg