The Girl is....thinking about slang

Slang is one of those terms that’s surprisingly hard to define, though I think we all intuitively known what it is and recognize it when we encounter it. It’s, basically, informal language that is often tied to a particular subculture or group. We tend to think of slang and young people’s lingo, but really it’s not restricted to youth. Those of us who adopted slang terms as teens, often continue to use the same terms well into adulthood, much to the horror of our kids. Oh, and it’s hardly an English-speaking phenomena – slang is found in most major languages.

Slang always seemed to be an oral medium, but today, with text messaging and the internet, it’s become increasingly written as well, often starting that way and then filtering into our speech.

Slang can work two ways: it can either invent new terms for familiar objects (in the late 1930s people began referring to a phone as an “Ameche,” in reference to the actor, Don Ameche, who had played Alexander Graham Bell in a film) or it can attribute new meaning to familiar words (using the word “hot” to imply someone’s good looking). The types of terms it often embodies are for “forbidden” things, which is why there are so darn many words for sex and body parts. 

Every era seems to produce its own slang, but the first half of the twentieth-century seemed particularly ripe for it. Part of that may stem from a more clearly defined youth culture. As teens became a population unto themselves after World War I, they may have found it necessary to create their own language. 

In Iris’s world the slang is coming out of the Jazz music and swing dancing phenomena – many of the terms originating in the dance halls and then filtered into other parts of society. Speaking these words means you’re branding yourself as part of that subculture. Suze, Rhona and Maria all use terms that would’ve originally been spoken at places like the Savoy.

But that isn’t the only kind of slang Iris encounters.  Her more upper class friends use teen-speak that probably developed out of their cliques. And the world around her is increasingly using G.I. talk, a unique form of slang developing out of the war. 

It can be a challenge to figure out how to integrate slang into a story without overwhelming the writing. On the one hand, the terms are going to be unfamiliar to your audience and may potentially rip them out of the story. On the other, though, if you’re trying to realistically depict a subsection of the population during a moment in history, you have to honestly depict how they communicated with each other, and that means integrating some of these unfamiliar terms and hoping your audience can suss out the meaning from the context. It can feel forced if you don’t do it delicately and you can, of course, completely overwhelm the dialogue by using too much slang (see my first Rosie Winter novel, when I was enjoying slang a little too much).  Sometimes utilizing the rhythm of how people talked “back then” is just as successful as sprinkling dialogue with unfamiliar words.

The Girl is...thinking about occupational hazards

I’m going to tell you one of the worst things about being a mystery writer. It’s not rejection, or bad reviews, or writer’s block (though all of those certainly make me question my vocation), it’s that writing mysteries has ruined reading mysteries for me.

I was reminded of this last week as I reached the halfway point on a book I was really enjoying reading. Just like that, long before the narrator or anyone else in the story, I was certain I knew who was behind the murders and why. And what had been a pleasant escape for the bus ride to work became irritating: why can’t everyone in this story see what’s so freaking obvious to me?

Probably, because they’re fictional. And not writers. I can’t turn off the writer part of my brain when I read, which not only means that I’m frequently revising other people’s sentences, but I’m also painfully aware of the mechanics of the story: the clues, the suspects, the red herrings. It’s highly unusual for me not to have the culprit pegged before I reach the halfway point of a book. When I don’t, it’s dizzyingly exciting, especially when the novel is well-constructed enough that I should’ve seen it coming but didn’t. But when I do pick up on things too fast, I’m left wondering if it’s the fault of the writer for making the solution so obvious, or if the fault lies with me being more attuned to what to look for than the average  bear.

It’s part of the reason that I don’t write book reviews. It hardly seems fare to lambast a mystery for being too easy when I’m not really sure that’s the case. More often than not, I find myself reading other people’s reviews to confirm if the problem I experienced is widespread or unique to me.

This plot prognostication spills over to other media too: my husband hates watching mysteries or thrillers with me because I’ll peg the culprit early on. I’ve learned not to say it out loud, but he can always tell when that “aha!” has hit me and the rest of the evening devolves into his begging me to tell him what I think is going on.

This sixth sense can be detrimental to my own work. I’m so desperate to make a mystery hard to solve that I worry that I over complicate things so that readers like me won’t be spoiled halfway through the book. I do have rules though: any solution must be supported by the text, so that the re-reader can go back and see that the answer was there, if heavily cloaked, just like in the books I love. I don’t want the reader to feel cheated because I didn’t bother to introduce the culprit until the last chapter. As anyone who’s ever been a debater knows: you can’t have new arguments in the 2AR.

Have you been surprised by a mystery lately (in a good way)?

The Girl is...thinking about historical fiction

As a writer of historical fiction, it probably comes as no surprise that I’m a passionate reader of the genre. I thought I’d discuss some of my favorite reads and why they so inspired me.

1.       Max Allan Collins’s Nathan Heller series. Collins had made himself so ubiquitous through his extraordinary prolificness that I often wonder if he hasn’t cloned himself. The most amazing thing is, despite his constant output, everything he writes is so darn good – he’s definitely not an example of a writer spreading himself too thin. I stumbled upon his Nathan Heller series quite by accident, but it’s one of the things that inspired me to want to write historical fiction. The series starts in the 1930s in Chicago and features not just a delightfully rendered historical backdrop (I learned so much about the World’s Fair from the first book in the series) but three dimensional  depictions of historic figures like Frank Nitti and Al Capone. Later tales tackle Ma Barker and her kin, Dillinger, J. Edgar Hoover, World War II,  the Lindbergh kidnapping,  Marilyn Monroe, the Black Dahlia and many, many many more. I must confess I haven’t read all the books yet, but the ones I have devoured were amazing and his use of real people effective without being hokey. Collins has reissued the series through Amazon’s Encore program.

2.       John Dunning’s Two O’Clock Eastern Wartime. This was the book that started my juices flowing about World War II. Dunning sets his book on the U.S. homefront at a radio station (old time radio is a specialty of Dunning, who's a collector in the field) and creates a humdinger of a mystery involving a 4F writer, saboteurs, Irish nationalists, the Boer War, and the actors and technicians who populate radio sttaion. He’s not heavy-handed with his history but does a beautiful job evoking the era.

3.      Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost. A dear friend recommended this book and I remember thinking he was crazy if he thought  this would even be remotely interesting to me. It’s set in the 17^th century England, a period I never had any interest in, and deals with topics like the invention of blood transfusions, the English civil war, complicated inheritance legalities – things that I didn't give a fig about. But the writing is so amazing, the story so complex, the  mystery so amazing that I devoured all 704 page of this book.
And learned a lot in the process.

How about you? Got a favorite historical novel you’d like to share?

The Girl is...thinking about a pot pourri of things

Just a few quick things that are up and around the web:

I guest-blogged on Coffee with a Canine last week.

I also guest-blogged on Writer's Read.

And, finally, The Girl is Murder now has a teacher's guide! Download the PDF at my homepage, and feel free to share it with any teachers you know who may be interested.

The Girl has...a Book Trailer

The Girl is...thinking about rationing during World War II

In The Girl is Murder, Iris makes reference to the various rations that are currently underway: sugar, gas, butter, coffee, clothing, and other home items. So what is rationing?

Rationing is a way of mandating a reduced use of resources that are either no longer easily attainable, or need to be used elsewhere, usually by the military. Rationing began in the U.S. in 1942 with the tire ration, a necessity since the source for rubber needed to make tires, East Asian countries, had been conquered by the Japanese and was no longer available to the Americans. In order to slow down the wear and tear on tires people already owned, the speed limit was lowered, a gas ration was instituted to limit the amount of driving you could do, along with a ban on pleasure driving and races like the Indie 500.

Other rations, like restrictions on food, were instituted because the troops needed the food. Similarly, clothing was rationed so that the cloth could be used to make uniforms.  Because a lot of factories were converted to make products needed for the war – planes, ammunition, etc. – a lot of products were no longer available, like new appliances, cars, and even typewriters.

In addition to rationing, programs were started to encourage people to collect things for the war effort. People saved fats and turned them in so that they might be used to make things like nitroglycerin for bombs. They turned over their silk and nylon stockings and underthings so that they might be used to make parachutes.  They collected tin cans and newspapers for the effort.

Just like in today’s increasingly green world we’re encouraged to “reduce, reuse, and recycle,” during World War II people on the homefront were told to “use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without” to decrease the amount of waste and demand for various products.

As a way of combating the restrictions on food and contributing to the war effort, a lot of people began creating "V-Gardens." They would can their surplus food and donate it when possible.

So how was rationing controlled? Each person in a household received a rationbook which included coupons for the controlled items. Once you used up your coupons, that was it until the next ration book was issued. Ration stamps were valid only for a set period, to forestall hoarding, though plenty of people tried to hoard certain goods before rations started.

To receive a ration card for gasoline, you had to prove you had a legitimate need for gas and owned no more than five tires (anymore than five tires would be confiscated). You were then assigned a letter than determined how many gallons you would be allotted. An A sticker meant you could receive a piddly 3 to 4 gallons of gasoline per week. B stickers were issued to workers in the military industry, entitling their holder up to 8 gallons of gasoline per week. C stickers were granted to persons who were essential to the war effort, such as doctors. T rations were made available for truckers. Lastly, X stickers on cars entitled the holder to unlimited supplies and were the highest priority in the system. And the most frequently counterfitted.

That was the other side of rationing: a rising black market on those goods that were no longer available. A lot of people, particularly the mob, saw rationing as an opportunity to make money by creating counterfit ration tickets and supplying the restricted goods at greatly inflated prices. And while the government tried to counter these illegal efforts by reminding people that this was illegal and immoral, there were enough people who were tired of doing without to keep this underground effort in business.

It’s entirely possible that rationing wasn’t actually necessary during World War II, at least not the extreme that it was instituted. Instead, it may have been a way to improve morale but letting people who couldn’t serve believe that they were contributing to the war effort. By making a sacrifice people who otherwise felt powerless about the war, believed they were making a difference.

How do you think people might react to rationing today? Do you think instituting rationing would make you feel more invested in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

The Girl is...thinking about fashion of the forties

At the beginning of The Girl is Murder, Iris is thrust into the world of public school, where not only does she have to deal with going to school side by side with boys for the first time, but she’s no longer able to disappear into the comfortable anonymity of a school uniform. And you know what that means: agonizing about what she's going to wear each day.

So what did young women wear in the forties?

Keep in mind that shopping options weren’t what they are today. You could buy off the rack, but it would cost you, especially during the war when the options were severely limited by restrictions on cloth. Your wardrobe tended to be small, and much of it was probably home-sewn, or passed down from an older sibling and adapted to look a little bit more modern (raise the hem, change the buttons, add a belt).

For girls, clean and tailored was the look, whether young or old. Shirt and blouses were tucked in, clothes were fitted, never too big, (clothing rationing, to the joy of men everywhere, meant shorter skirts and tighter sweaters). The exception was the sloppy joe sweater, which was long and loose fitting. For school, you most likely would’ve worn dresses and skirts cut to knee length, and a blazer or a cardigan. 

        

For casual wear, teen girls often wore baggy blue jeans that were often rolled up just below the knee (and sometimes they’d embellish their pants with paint and drawings). In fact, teens were encouraged to wear more pants than in past years, especially girls who got wartime jobs, where clothing (and long hair!) could present a real danger. Plus, pants had the added advantage of being good hand me downs since they weren’t gender specific (of course, try convincing your little brother of that).

Hair tended toward more elaborate for adolescent girls since clothing was so heavily rationed. So if you wanted to express your individuality, you did it by twisting, curling, and teasing your locks like your favorite Hollywood stars, especially Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable. Similarly, hats were a great way to express yourself and they weren’t rationed the way other pieces of clothing were.

Shoes were flat unless you were going swing dancing. Girls would wear loafers, oxfords, or saddle shoes with short, cotton socks. Shoes were heavily rationed too (more on that in a future blog) so odds were good that you didn’t have a lot of pairs to rotate through.

Since nylons were also being rationed, if you didn’t wear socks, you went barelegged. Young women who didn’t like the casualness of this look (which also meant – gasp – having to shave) would put makeup on their legs to mimic the effect of stockings, and draw seams up the backs of the legs to create the illusion that they were fully dressed.

Oh, and as for bras and underwear? They were formidable -- all about creating shape, not ensuring comfort. If you couldn't afford to buy one, or -- gulp -- receive one as a hand me down, yours may have also been home sewn using parachutes or old wedding dresses to provide the silk.