A Much Needed Return to Meteora the Magnificent

 

Jeff–Saturday

 

A Facebook post yesterday by a friend raving about her trip to Greece's fairy tale-like Meteora reminded me of a journey long ago that I wrote about Meteora on MIE a dozen years ago. Since a dozen centuries have past since it's said to be first inhabited, I figured it appropriate to run the post once more. 

 

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE.  Searching the news these days for anything positive about our world makes me appreciate the position of social director on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. But all was not for naught.  I came across a fifteen-minute high definition aerial view video of Greece set to largely traditional music. It briefly touches upon the environs of Athens, then drifts out to sea and on to Mykonos and Delos before soaring on to other islands (mostly Cycladic) and mainland sites, passing over Macedonia, Mount Athos, Meteora, Delphi, Olympia, and so many others.  I've posted the video at the foot of this post.

 

By the time it’s over I promise you'll be at peace.  To remain that way, I suggest you stay away from all news for as long as you can stand.

 

Now, back to Meteora.

 

Once upon a time, or more accurately sixty million years ago, a sea existed in the middle of northern Greece.  Then the earth started pushing the seabed up toward the sky and, with the help of water, wind, and temperature, massive pillars of gray stone emerged near the northwestern edge of today’s Thessaly plain by the mighty Pindus mountain range (the “spine of Greece”) and the wide and fertile Pineios river basin.

Carbon dating conducted in a cave by those natural rock towers revealed human presence in the area 50,000 years ago.  But that cave of Theopetra is not the big draw to the region (in fact, the cave has been closed to the public), nor is it what makes that complex of sandstone and conglomerate cliffs among the most revered sites in Eastern Orthodoxy, second in Greece only to Mount Athos (See, Prey on Patmos).

To find the reason for Meteora’s significance you must look heavenward two thousand feet or so.

Welcome to the scene of more than twelve-hundred years of monastic life “suspended in air,” the literal meaning of meteora.  The first recorded dwellers among the cliffs were 9^th Century hermit monks, and although no one knows precisely when the first monastery was built, by the beginning of the 12^th Century a rudimentary monastic state had evolved around the church of Theotokos (the mother of God).  That church still stands today.

By the end of the 12^th Century many had come to join the community, but it was not until the 14^th Century that work began on architectural contributions that still stun the imagination.  The Byzantine Empire was crumbling and Turkish pirates were on the rampage—notably against vulnerable Mount Athos monasteries sitting on an Aegean peninsula 150 miles northeast of Meteora.

Three Mount Athos monks fed up with battling brigands left in search of what they’d heard was a place of miracles and prayer in the land of the “great rock forest.”  There they scaled the heights of the cliffs and with the Serbian emperor as benefactor erected the Grand Metereron (aka Monastery of the Transfiguration). By the 16^th Century twenty-four monasteries were built on Meteora, and of the six that survive, Grand Metereron is one of them.

Today, the cliff-side monasteries welcome visitors with roads, steps, and paths, none of which existed in Meteora’s heyday of isolation from the world below.  To shuttle between their fields and flocks down in the valley the monks relied upon ladders as long as 130 feet and hand-cranked hoists to lift baskets and nets well over 1000 feet in the air.  Everything going up and down in those nets, particularly the monks, trusted their fate to the strength of their brethren.

Scary huh?  But wait, there’s more.  Legend has it that the ropes were only replaced “when the Lord let them break.”  Now that’s the sort of workday commute I’d call a true leap of faith.

But the glory years of Meteora’s 15^th Century monastic life faded as the unscrupulous plundered the monasteries, squatters took over, and moral direction deteriorated to where one monk lived in a monastery with two women dressed as monks.  There were brief interludes of monastic revival but by the 18^th Century it was more a refuge for Greeks fleeing Ottoman overlords and later for 19^th Century Greeks fighting Turks in their battle for Independence.  The most serious toll on the monasteries and their treasures, though, came during Greece’s occupation in World War II.

Meterora in the crosshairs

But all that’s in the past, and today Meteora is a UNESCO World Heritage site and an absolute must see for anyone interested in architectural brilliance amid magnificent natural beauty.  Particularly if you’re female, because Greece’s other site of such wonder, Mount Athos, forbids women.  Ibid, Prey on Patmos. 

And for those armchair travellers among us, you can catch a bit of it in the James Bond film, For Your Eyes Only, where one of the monasteries serves as the bad guy’s hideout.  The more things change…

Now, here's the promised video:

Jeff—Saturday

 

Jeff's Upcoming Events;

 

Friday, 17 November 2023 @ 11AM

ICELAND NOIR, Reykjavik

 

SUNSHINE NOIR panel @ Kjarval venue

with Philip Gwynne Jones, Lexie Elliott, and Jackie Collins

 

Iceland Noir 17 November 2023 Reykjavik

 

 

The Writing Life

                                                       

I had a very big birthday two weeks ago, the sort of birthday that makes you reassess a lot of things. And by a lot of things, I mean money.

Reassessing money obviously leads to reassessing the writing career.

The average income from writing of an author in Britain is less than £4000, so that’s not really a lot.

                                              

Fortunately I’m way above that, and the recent royalty cheque was very nice thank you very much.

There’s a deadline for the next book, the hardback of the previous one and the paperback of the hardback before that are doing quite well. The new contract has tightened up the times, so I’m now doing two books every eighteen months which I can do while treating patients. But I can’t do when treating patients and running the business. 

The plotting of an Agatha Christie locked room mystery is nothing compared to the receptionist holiday/cover timetable.

                                          

There was a question on Facebook recently from somebody and it said, ‘I want to be a writer, can someone advise me what I could write?’. I don’t even know where to begin with that statement.

So I won’t bother.

On the birthday cards for the significant birthday there were a few notes about how I could have walked away and left the writers group and gone on to better things, but I didn't and that was a good thing. I think that idea needs a bit more analysis. When I joined the writers group as a unpublished writer, the council paid for a writer in residence. Now, the council won’t even give us a cupboard to work in. 

                                         

I think I’m the most published fiction writer in the group and Brian, who has guest blogged about his bookshop, is the most published non fiction writer. But everybody brings something to the table. We read six pages of our work and the rest of us pull it to shreds. I know I've developed an editorial eye, the American in the group yesterday referenced Encyclopedia Brown in his story yesterday. I tested that with the Bratislava test, it failed (The Bratislava test is a test of universal reference such as "Houston we have a problem" compared to "you’ve been Tangoed").

We’ve a script writer in the group and I think timing is the interesting issue there, screen time is not the same as page time. It might seem like a long lead up before anybody speaks, but in reality it's visual information – much quicker than information on the page. We have a military vet who's very good at weapons, but still struggles with the concept of the words on the page not meaning what he wants them to mean – actually I think we all do that! There’s a self published romantic author who writes for the pleasure of writing. I suspect her characters are her friends and she enjoys their company. They wear designer clothes and fabulous shoes and are usually in a state of emotional turmoil. Her writing is excellent but doesn’t quite want to give control away to become commercial writer in a commercial market. 

They are a motley crew of writers, some who listen very carefully to any criticism and others who just argue back. But even those arguments help to test your own theories about what you’re doing and what you’re writing.

                                       

I’m not sure the people who said 'it's marvellous that you still attend this group' actually get what’s going on. There’s an energy, a creative energy, that burns between us, a cross fertilization of ideas.

There’s discussion on technical points and challenges, there’s computer ludites like me and people that know technical experts that know everything about computers. We test dialogue, ideas spring out from nowhere, writer's block is discussed and the writer is jump started.  It's a very fertile ground for writing full stop.

And, while I tend to be disciplined about writing, there's always an extra push to get something done for the Thursday night.

                                                    

I’m not a short story writer, but I thought I’d try one for the Nashville anthology. I thought it was very funny. The rest of us thought it was very funny. The  American was stoney faced as he had no idea what was going on. Back to the drawing board I guess. My short story failed the Bratislava test!

Bali Why?

 Wendall -- every other Thursday

My newest Cyd Redondo mystery, Cheap Trills, set in early 2007, drops on October 30th. 

 

Here's a quick synopsis: After her mother secretly books an Eat, Pray, Love tour to Bali that goes horribly wrong, travel agent Cyd Redondo heads off to save her, facing down songbird smugglers, snake removal experts, thieving monkeys, a runaway funicular railway, and an underground Tupperware network, all while trying to keep three endangered Bali starling chicks alive in her Balenciaga bag.

To be honest, it’s a miracle that the novel got finished at all, since I could have easily spent the next five years researching this amazing island, its rich flora and fauna, its unique and compelling culture, and its heartbreaking, and often violent, history.

Many of my friends, who write traditional or cozy mysteries, face the challenge of coming up with new murders and storylines in the same location or community, book after book. My challenge, in writing a Romancing the Stone-inspired, “fish out of water” mystery, is that I have to create (and research) a whole new world for every book.

That’s part of the fun, since I love doing research, but it’s also time-consuming and there’s always the temptation to go down a million different rabbit holes and either never get to the writing, or weigh it down with too much information

Cheap Trills was particularly tricky, because the story has so many moving parts. First, I had to try to understand and capture the physical location of Bali—from active volcanos to black beaches, rice fields, monkey forests, and holiday resorts.

The stacked infinity pools at the Hanging Gardens resort, the model for the hotel where Cyd stays in Ubud.

The Balinese are known for the effectively engineered rice fields all over the island.

Then I had to take in and communicate parts of its culture—from cremation ceremonies to daily offerings, cockfighting, traditional dance and theater, the belief that redheads (like Cyd) are demons, and the sacred holiday of Nyepi.

Many Balinese children begin their traditional dance training when they are only three years old.

Cremation ceremonies are extremely important in Balinese culture, and should occur only on auspicious days.

I loved reading books on Bali, especially The Island of Bali by Miguel Covarrubias, which is still considered the ultimate text on Balinese culture, even though it was published in 1937.

 

My Bali research also included questions about how brakes work on a funicular railway, how snake removal experts work, 

Apparently, everyone knows Ron.

why Indonesia was suddenly the largest global market for Tupperware, and whether more people do indeed die from falling coconuts every year than they do from shark attacks.

Many Indonesian women hold "underground" Tupperware parties to create their own income.

Because the book takes place a year after Elizabeth Gilbert’s book hit the bestseller list, I also had to research the effect of the Eat Pray Love phenomenon on the island, as well as all the travel complications possible in the journey from Brooklyn, and what seniors could and couldn’t expect in terms of discounts, ADA,  emergency medical care, and the correct 2007 exchange rates from rupiahs to dollars.

Since the book also takes place soon after Bali made the news for a terrorist bombing as well as the arrest and execution of a group of Australian drug smugglers, I also researched crime in Bali and all the ways tourists can wind up in Kerobokan prison (which discourages escape by being surrounded by grasslands full of cobras!).

An excellent book on both the beauty and the darker side of Bali.

All of my Cyd Redondo books deal with endangered species and wildlife crime, so I needed to know as much as I could about Indonesian bird markets, songbird competitions, and smuggling onto and off the island, as well as the breeding and feeding habits of the threatened Bali starling.

The Bali starling, the only bird indigenous to Bali. In 2007, when the book is set, there were fewer than 10 in the wild.

Songbird competitions are held all over Indonesia. Over 70% of households have a pet bird.

I was extremely lucky to have two experts helping me in this area. Dr. Chris R. Shepherd was the head of TRAFFIC Southeast Asia for twenty years, now runs the Monitor Conservation Research Society, and spent many years actually counting illegal songbirds in the markets of Bali and Jakarta. Lori Rogalski has traveled to Bali to volunteer at the starling sanctuary there, and as part of the LA Zoo’s Avian Conservation Center, helped hand-raise two clutches of Bali starling chicks.

Bali starling chicks need worms (dropped vertically) and live crickets whose legs have been torn off...

And my research wasn’t only for Bali--I feature a Bay Ridge Brooklyn baby shower, so I did a deep dive in the hottest party trends, as well as into how many power outages are sparked by Mylar balloons every year!

A particularly unpleasant baby shower trend in 2007--"chocolate" filled diapers.

All in all, it was a wonderful time, for which I'm grateful.

A Balinese daily offering.

As my other Murder Is Everywhere compatriots will know, with so many research balls in the air, it’s hard not to drop one or two. So, see you on the other side of release day, where, if you are kind enough to read the book, I will await your verdict.

As Jeff mentioned a few weeks ago, pre-orders are vital for an author’s standing with their publisher, so if anyone is interested in the book, here are places you can order it now.  Of course, requesting it from your local library is just as wonderful.

 

LINKS:

Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Cheap-Trills-Cyd-Redondo-Mystery/dp/1960511203/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1697586680&sr=8-1

Barnes and Noble:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/cheap-trills-wendall-thomas/1143827402?ean=9781960511201

Through your local independent bookstore via Bookshop.org:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/cheap-trills-wendall-thomas/20290359?ean=9781960511201

 

--Wendall

When Women Doctors Solve Crime: Introducing Ritu Mukerji

 

Ritu Mukerji

Ritu Mukerji, Murder by Degrees author

Today I'm using my space in Murder is Everywhere to introduce a rising mystery talent: Dr. Ritu Mukerji.I met Ritu at a book signing in the Bay Area and learned about Murder By Degrees, her forthcoming crime fiction debut with Simon&Schuster. The novel featuring the young physician Lydia Weston is set in 1870s century Philadelphia, where a one-of-a-kind medical school founded by Quakers trained female physicians from 1850 until it began admitting males in the 1970s. The Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, later the Medical College of Pennsylvania, is now merged with Hahnemann University and is still going strong as a co-educational medical school. 

Ritu is a beautiful storyteller who skillfully uses her medical expertise to craft some amazing scenes, including an autopsy described with both compassion and Sherlockian rigor. Fans of historical mystery,  feminist fiction, Philadelphia history, and medical thrillers will all find satisfaction in this book that will launch a series.

Sujata

By Ritu Mukerji

Philadelphia, 1875: it is the start of the autumn term at Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Dr. Lydia Weston, professor and anatomist, is immersed in teaching her students in the clinic and the hospital. When the body of a young patient is dredged out of the Schuylkill River, Lydia takes on a new role: amateur investigator. She soon joins the police investigation and in the end, it is her keen clinical acumen and skill at the autopsy table that solves the mystery.

 

My debut novel, Murder by Degrees, combines many of the elements I love in mystery fiction: a strong independent woman sleuth, a few good twists and a setting so evocative, it could be like a character itself. I am a doctor and had been a medical student myself in Philadelphia, walking the same the same cobblestone streets as my characters. Many of the influences for the book simmered in my mind for years, my imagination sparked by a painting or old photograph.

 

When I was a student at Jefferson, the medical college owned Thomas Eakins’s painting The Gross Clinic. At the time, the painting was displayed in Alumni Hall on Walnut Street. It is an unforgettable scene, as Dr. Gross forcefully wields his scalpel during surgery and an onlooker shields her face in horror. I would often stop to look at it on my way to lecture, imagining what it would have been like to practice medicine back then.

 

It was only later that I learned of “Woman’s Med”, a unique institution, founded by Quakers in 1850, that was one of the first medical schools for women in the US. I knew that the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania would be the perfect setting for a mystery novel.

I was fascinated by these trailblazing women doctors. There was Dr. Ann Preston: Quaker, abolitionist, and a pro-temperance activist who was also a children's book author. Preston entered medical college at age 38 and later became its dean. Dr. Caroline Still Anderson, a class of 1878 graduate, became one of the first Black women physicians in the United States. Dr. Mary Putnam Jacob, physician and researcher, was the first female member of the Academy of Medicine. And some of the international students, like Drs. Anandibai Joshi, Keiko Okami, and Sabat Islambouli, graduated and returned to their home countries to practice medicine. 

Even more intriguing are those whose names are less well known. A fragment from a diary entry or record could give hint to their life. Many were delightfully "non-traditional" students. Some had progressive parents and an activist bent, mixing medicine with work for abolition and women's suffrage. Some of the students had careers as teachers and writers before entering the college. One remarkable woman, a widow with grown children, graduated at age 58.

I explored Drexel University’s Legacy Center Archives and Special Collections in Philadelphia, who have carefully preserved photographs and documents from this era. This made it possible to look through many of the papers from the 1870s: graduation announcements, student theses, minutes of faculty meeting, student scrapbooks with photos of the dissection lab and the lecture hall. The wonderful ephemera provided a glimpse into workings of the college.

 

My favorites were the yearly course bulletin, with its list of class requirements and recommended textbooks to buy–it felt oddly familiar to this former medical student. I suppose some things never change…And I am still wondering what a microscopical soiree is and how I might get invited to one.

What makes Lydia Weston unique as a detective is her ability to observe: to see what other don’t. To make that vivid for the reader, I had to think like a 19th-century doctor–what would it have been like to diagnose a patient, using the tools of the time? How it would have felt to be in the anatomy lab doing a dissection by gaslight, or to examine patients on rounds in the hospital, in the early days of antisepsis.

 

I read widely in old medical textbooks and journal articles. In one scene, Lydia treats a patient with glomerulonephritis, an inflammation of the kidneys. According to an 1876 article in The Lancet, the recommended treatments included hot and cold-water baths, purgatives and emetics, the “Imperial Drink” (cream of tartar and lemon) and bloodletting with leeches.

To create the historical detail for the story, I pored over old street maps and photographs of Philadelphia. It was fun to return to the city on a research trip and see familiar sites anew. 

One of my favorite scenes to write was a chase through the Fairmount Waterworks at night. In 1875, the Neoclassical buildings of the waterworks were a graceful screen for the turbines that purified the city’s water supply. It was a popular promenade in Fairmount Park, by the Schuylkill River. And on a recent walk there, I felt transported to another time (minus the roar of traffic on the I-95 across the river, of course).

 

Another scene takes place at Pennsylvania Hospital, when Lydia goes on rounds with a student. The nation’s first public hospital, founded by Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond, opened its doors in 1751. Today it is an ultramodern hospital, part of the University of Pennsylvania system. But walking through the grounds, I could imagine porters opening the large gatehouse door in the dead of night, so that patients could be brought in by carriage.

One of the things I love about Philadelphia is its historic atmopshere. It only takes a moment–a turn down a cobblestone street or a walk through Independence Square–to feel as though you are stepping back in time. I hope readers enjoy the book and the real-life “lady doctors” who inspired it.

 

Ritu Mukerji was born in Kolkata, India, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. She received a BA in history from Columbia University and a medical degree from Sidney Kimmel Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. After residency training at the University of California, Davis, she has practiced as an internist for fifteen years. She lives in Marin County, CA with her husband and three children.  

Veracity in Historical Fiction Redux

 Annamaria on Monday

I have been working on the blog for today for some time, in the knowledge that right now, I would be on deadline with page proofs.  My original intention was to talk about a rabbit hole I fell into while researching Invisible Country, my novel that takes place in Paraguay against the background of the War of the Triple Alliance (1865-1870), also known as the Paraguayan War.  I hope to take up at some future moment the story of the influx of Nazis into Paraguay in the aftermath of WWII.  

But with the the whole world in the uproar over the horror of Hamas's brutal attack on Israel and in its aftermath, the dreadful harm done to innocent Palestinians, I don't think my intended topic is at all appropriate at this moment.  I will save what I have already written for another day, when talking about Nazi history will not be as intensely disturbing as it seems it would be today.  Instead, I am reposting something that I fear is not as engaging, but also not at all hurtful, since for many of us these days are more hurtfulness than we can bear. So here are some philosophical musings from nine years ago on truth and fiction in historical novels.

  

In a few weeks I will be attending the Historical Novel Society Conference in London.  Without a doubt, the conferees will take up the question of how strictly the historical novelist must cleave to the truth of a story’s historical background.  There will be next to no agreement on this point.

Some people at the conference will say that a novelist must never stray from the truth; not even, for instance, to write a scene under the full moon, if there was only a half-moon on the specified date 1567.  I was once on a panel with a woman who began her story with a fourteen-page explanation of just how the story she was about to tell departed from even the minutest facts of the case.  These purists look down their noses upon any writer who takes any liberties whatsoever with what the history books say.

On the other end of the spectrum, are those who take whatever liberties they like.  Some even write alternate histories from the ones we all know.  Books and movies that posit a world where the Nazis won World War II or the South won the American Civil War.  Writers like these, as you can imagine, also feel no compunction whatsoever about completely changing the characters and deeds of historical figures.

  

I fall somewhere in between on this continuum.  Actually, I don’t see myself as a historical novelist, per se.  I am a mystery writer who sets her stories in historical backgrounds.  I know this because I feel at home, among my own tribe, when I am with mystery writers.   This is not necessarily the case when I am with historical novelists.   At HNS conferences, people walk up and ask, “What period do you write?”  “Tudor England” or “Regency England” or “Renaissance Florence” would all be good answers.  My truthful answer: “I don’t write only one time and place” draws frowns, at best, usually annoyance—both from other writers and from readers.

Being a mystery writer at heart, what is most important to me is the story.  If the story requires a night scene under a full moon, it gets it regardless of the planetary alignments at that moment, shocking as that may be to some.

History’s enigmas are what most appeal to me.   No one actually knows what happened to the Alcalde of Potosi’s vast fortune in silver that he stashed away during the King’s investigation of counterfeiting, in 1649.  Nor what happened to the national treasure of Paraguay during the War of the Triple Alliance in 1868.   City of Silver and Invisible Country offer plausible answers to both, but the stories are whodunit’s.  I knew full well while writing them that the average American would have no idea that those treasures were ever lost, much less never found.

Historians are still arguing over what role Evita played in Peron’s return to power during the most dramatic week in Argentine history.   Some say she did nothing because she was powerless until that time.  Others say she did everything, and offer as proof all the power she wielded after the fact.  I love this sort of thing and made a sideline to my story portraying her as a powerless woman who nevertheless found a way to turn the tide in Peron’s favor.

Which brings us to what people think are the rules for introducing real people into historical novels.  There are no real rules, of course.  The writer decides.  But some critics and readers will reject a work if it does not conform to what “history says” about the person.  My problem is whose history are we reading and when?  If you are over forty, you have seen the assessment of historical figures change in your lifetime.  Jimmy Carter.  Richard Nixon.  Need I say more?

I will give the last word on this to the great writer I quoted at length here a couple of weeks ago—John Fowles.  Here is a paragraph that comes a little after what I quoted then.  It answers the question about how novelists should deal with historical figures:

From The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Chapter Thirteen—

“But this is preposterous?  A character is either “real” or “imaginary”?  If you think that, hypocrite lecteur, I can only smile.  You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress sit up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it. . . fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf—your book, your romanced autobiography.  We are in flight from the real reality.  That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens.”

  The defense rests.