Author: ellen

That sweet familiar face was in the paper again just the other day: Kai Leigh Harriott, smiling her radiant four-year-old smile, her hair pulled back with fancy bows. In the picture you didn’t see the wheelchair. Kai, of course, was paralyzed last July by a random bullet as she played, carefully watched over, on the porch of her home.

If bullets can find them under the watchful eyes of their family, who dares let their children play out of sight? “It’s not a safe world for children unless we plan it that way,” says Irene Smalls. As the author of 15 children’s books, including Jonathan and His Mommy and Louise’s Gift, Smalls has given the subject a lot of thought.

“Play is the work of children,” she says, adding a modern twist on an old axiom that “all work and no play makes Jack an overweight, stressed-out, depressed, and dull boy.” And since, as Smalls points out, children live in a world created by adults, it’s up to adults to make sure that world includes safe and abundant room for play.

Remember summer when you were a kid? There were probably some long lazy unstructured days to ride your bicycle to the library or go to the playground with friends. Now, unless parents are there to watch them, the children are often indoors.

“Children’s play is more restricted now,” says Smalls. “They’re not jumping up and down and playing leapfrog, and there’s an impact on the child and on the whole society.”

Not a good impact. Kids aren’t supposed to be sitting indoors on summer days. Children who aren’t free to play safely outdoors spend their time less actively, and, consequently, we have a new term–childhood obesity–to learn about and deal with.

In a chapter she contributed to the recently published book about Boston, The Good City, Smalls wrote about her first home in the city in the early ‘80s. It was on St. Botolph Street, filled with families drawn to its roomy three- and four-bedroom floor-throughs.

“On our block at that time the street was alive with children playing stickball and ring-a-levio and jumping rope,” she wrote, adding that, within a decade, gentrification had put an end to that scenario and stripped the street of nearly all the families with school-age children. “Simply put, to be a truly good city for children, Boston needs much more affordable housing.”

Twenty percent of Boston’s population is under 18. If they were voting age, they’d be a power to be reckoned with. But what’s good for them is good for us all. Says Smalls, “the good city nurtures its young, and also the young at heart, and embraces the importance of fun and play for all ages.”

So while the tourists’ kids are riding the swan boats and patting the ducklings and throwing the tea overboard, let’s look hard at how our own kids are living. Let’s pay attention to affordable housing and safe neighborhoods so that this city that’s been handed down to us can be handed down to another healthy generation. The businesses may be mostly branch offices these days, but the kids we’re growing here are still the real thing.

Time to stock up on good books to read over the summer. I went back to some of the writers I’ve talked with in City Type to see what they’d recommend. And, this being Boston, of course, the selections are hardly the typical beach reads.

Peter Jay Shippy, who appeared in City Type on August 10, 2003 and who is the author of Thieves Latin, says, “I’d recommend Seven-Star Bird, a book by David Daniel. Daniel has designed a lyric panorama of the present from the tragedies of the past and the limbo of the future. Harold Bloom calls him “an authentic heir to Hart Crane.” His poems delineate “the terrible speed of beauty born and passing.”

The second book I’d suggest is Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos. In 1972, at the age of 20, Gantos was sentenced to serve up to six years in prison. His gripping, dark memoir tackles his period of confinement. We watch Gantos begin to replace his dubious past of crime, drugs, and “life on the edge” for his present, as the prize-winning author of more than 30 books.

Charles Coe, (City Type April 20, 2002), author of Picnic on the Moon, recommends Angela the Upside-Down Girl, by Emily Hiestand. “Smart, engaging essays about people and places. I think of her as John McPhee with a sense of humor.”

Coe’s second recommendation is The Red Thread, by Elizabeth McKim. “Elizabeth’s work is very earthy, very elemental. And her language is direct and unselfconscious; she writes to communicate, not to impress.”

Gary Duehr (Feb. 29, 2004), author of Winter Light, suggests Except for One Obscene Brushstroke, a book of poems by Dzvinia Orlowsky that “fearlessly excavates a marriage on the South Shore. It’s very personal, very funny at times, and always close to the bone.”

Philip Hilts, (December 7, 2003), author of Protecting America’s Health: the FDA, Industry, and 100 Years of Regulation, says, “David Baron’s book, The Beast in the Garden is a great read. David Baron wrote the book after hearing of the case of a cougar killing a man in Colorado. He says he was haunted by the story, and over time thought about the meaning of the event. Such killings have now become far more common in the west—cougars in their disturbed modern environs are now habituated to humans. Relations between the species have changed fundamentally. So eventually David wrote the tale: a thriller-style book about the killing and its investigation. Around the story he wraps discussion about life outside the garden—how we have changed the world and its creatures, and now must live with it. Easy to take to the beach.

“I’m just reading another book which I find intoxicating, E.O. Wilson’s The Future of Life. This is philosophy: an evocative essay on biology, from Wilson’s tales of animalcules living in Antarctic ice to creatures navigating the steaming hot vents on the ocean bottom. Wilson, too, is talking about humans and the planet. He writes, “The living world is dying; the natural economy is crumbling beneath our busy feet…science and technology led us into this bottleneck. Now science and technology must help us find our way through and out.”

Mameve Medwed (August, 2002), author of End of an Error, Mail, and Host Family, says, “Number one is Elinor Lipman’s The Pursuit of Alice Thrift (full disclosure: it’s dedicated to me.) which is just out in paperback. It’s hilarious, touching, with the most engagingly clueless unreliable narrator in the world and a scoundrel who, despite all your prejudices, wins you over.

“I adored Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, which dissects suburbia with a razor-sharp, and yet compassionate, scalpel. It’s familiar territory viewed through a skewed original eye. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Told brilliantly from various points of view, it even has a pedophile you can’t help feeling sorry for. Grab a copy before the Pepperidge Farm fish become chocolate chip cookies in subsequent editions!

“I got Steve Almond’s Candy Freak for my kids who used to spend most of their allowance (and now probably probably a fair amount of their salaries!) on Mars Bars and Snickers. This is the book for anyone (everyone?) who’d pick a Hershey’s Kiss over the other kind.”

Finding the perfect writers’ workshop is like finding the right therapist, and for some of the same reasons. So when you find the right fit, with writers whose professional expertise you respect and whom you can comfortably trust, you’ll do just about anything to preserve it. Even moving the workshop online.

When Kim Ablon Whitney was working on her M.F.A. degree at Emerson, she found that ideal, nurturing workshop.

“We trust each other as readers and as writers,” Whitney says of her five-member group. “We workshop each others’ works in progress and we also definitely offer each other lots of moral support and try to help each other in any way possible in terms of sharing contacts, marketing ideas, etc.”

And, because they all worked in a niche genre, young adult novels, they shared common themes and concerns. The group worked so well that, after the members finished their degrees, they wanted to continue, even though that meant shifting the workshop from their living rooms to their computers.

“Two members moved out of town, so we started the online group in order to keep the group going,” says Whitney, whose first novel, See You Down the Road, won the 2001 Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Judy Blume/Work-in-Progress Grant for a Contemporary Young Adult Novel and the 2002 PEN New England Children’s Book Caucus Discovery Award.

The online workshop was its own work in progress. At first each writer just submitted comments on a work directly to its author. But they soon missed the give-and-take quality of an in-person discussion, so they began using an online tracking function where each person could offer and view comments. Whitney notes it’s still second-best to sitting around a table. But she’s discovered an unexpected benefit, the flexibility of reading submissions and making comments on her own time schedule, as long as she does it within the specified time.

Why go to such lengths for a workshop? For one thing, because it provides community in a lonely business. For another, because a workshop can help you be a better writer and a more perceptive reader. The risky downside is exposing unfinished work to critical review. And, as Whitney says, writers are filled with doubts.

“We’re always wondering if the story is interesting, if we’re telling it the right way. Writing a novel is a long process and it helps to have the encouragement of people saying, ‘I’m enjoying this.’“

Criticism never feels good, but it hurts less among colleagues you’ve grown to trust and respect. Whitney says she may disagree with a comment on her work, “but then a day later, I’ll think, ‘well, yes, they’re right.’”

But she also feels there is another reason workshops are so important to writers right now: they can do what most editors no longer do, help shape a manuscript. Editors and publishers and agents are too busy these days to do the kind of nurturing that writers of earlier generations often relied on. They expect to receive a manuscript that is as close to ready as possible.

“Maybe workshops are taking the place of what the writer-editor relationship used to be.”
Guess that’s what friends–and fellow writers–are for.

When Julia Collins started out to write My Father’s War , she assumed it was an unusual story: a young man full of promise going off to fight, returning physically whole but with a spirit so damaged that he never regained his old life, the damage touching everyone around him. Collins was surprised to find the story more common than she imagined.

It’s what happens in war. It’s an old, old story, one we’ve been immersed in once again this past year. Some soldiers die. Others, even the ones who seem to resume the progress of their lives, return forever changed in body or spirit. And those at home are changed as a result.

Collins’ father had been a young man who loved to joke and sing. He graduated from Yale, joined the Marines, and was part of an intelligence squad in the Pacific during World War II. When he came home to marry and start a family, he was clearly a different person. A spark had vanished. Collins describes the bewilderment of being a child whose father carried a deeply unreachable part.

“The Dad I ended up with was cynical and heartbroken,” she says. “He had lost the feeling that his hopes could come true. He was always proud of being a Marine and serving his country in a heroic way, but he had seen the basest side of human nature while he was doing our dirty work. That human toll, that degradation of body and spirit is what my dad came to understand about combat.”

Still, Collins says her father never lost his yearning to cross over to, in the words of his favorite song, “the sunny side of the street.”

“He was a very hard man to love. He hurt us in so many ways, but I always understood he had been through something I had to respect, something larger than our daily lives.”

I understand some of that. My father was there, too, in the Army, in combat. The shrapnel scars that ran the length of one leg were just the outward sign. But even though his life progressed seemingly undisturbed, he had lost a piece of himself, and we lost that part of him, too.

Any extreme experience–and what is more extreme than war?–burns us down to our essence, exposes the core of who we are. It’s why, decades later, military records become the stuff of political campaigns, why military service remains something to be worn with pride. And we who stay safe at home are touched by the experience of those close to us, or simply by being the ones in whose name they fight.

“In memory of anyone who has lost life in war,” Collins says, “and for the sake of the people we’re going to send to wage combat, we have make sure we’re being honest about our reasons.”

Collins remembers a conversation she had, just before the start of the fighting in Iraq, with the five surviving members of her father’s squad. She describes the men as “all proud Marines with no regrets for their WW II combat roles and ranging from lifelong Republican to liberal.

“They were all dead set against the Iraq war. I was struck by their unanimous disapproval, because the public, at the time, was so gung-ho for war. These old warriors know a thing or two about battle. They know the public’s appetite for vengeance generally means the other folks, mostly young kids, get to fight and die.”

Okay, it looks like the worst is over. The city’s been a construction site for more than a decade. Now that there’s light at the end of the I-93 tunnel, I am thinking that all the digging up and sifting through, the re-envisioning, reclaiming, reshaping makes the Big Dig an irresistible metaphor for writers.

I think of Thoreau ,and Robert Lowell to Sue Miller and Marie Howe–in a different environment, would they have written different works? Do we write differently when our landscape is in upheaval? As pieces of the elevated roadway disappear, I wonder what post-Big Dig Boston will look like in writing.

“The archetypal Boston that writers imagine,” says Gary Duehr , “might shift from the Boston Common/ Public Garden/ Beacon Hill/ Back Bay model to one closer to the water, a Boston of piers and waterfront lodging–something that echoes the original Boston.”

Duehr has thought a lot about the city. Duehr is a poet who teaches poetry and writing at Bunker Hill Community College, Lesley University, and Boston University. One of his three books of poetry, Where Everyone Is Going To, is set in Boston. He is also a founder and director of the Invisible Cities Group, which stages performance events that draw on the history and character of city places.

On a day when snow is in the air, Duehr and I meet in a tiny Somerville restaurant warm with pictures of El Salvador and Guatemala. A few blocks away is Sullivan Square, which, Duehr tells me, was once a green oasis with fountains and playing children and ladies and gentlemen strolling in their Sunday best. What I see in 2004 is a monument to transportation: a large T station and a handful of indomitable buildings hunkered beneath a crosshatch of flying highways. A person living in the area then and now would have quite different experiences. A writer living in sight of it would surely write two very different types of stories, depending on the moment in time.

What is changed when the landscape is altered goes far beyond physical surroundings. We write in a new way, just as we live in a new way. That is why the next phase of the Central Artery Project, the development of the freed-up ribbon of land stretching from Chinatown to North Station, is more important than what we have already lived through. it will affect not how we drive, but how we live.

“The idea that the city is trying to reinvent itself, edit its shoreline, reimagine the face it presents to the Atlantic and to the rest of the world,” says Duehr “gives the whole city, including writers, a sense that anything is possible, that you can make drastic changes and open yourself up to an unknown future. “And, of course,” he adds, “upheaval and messiness are generally good for writing, at least the kind I do. Out of the mess some meaning gradually emerges.”

Well, it’s time for the meaning to begin emerging. By now a writer would be able to see where the novel or the poem is going. Same with the city. At this point, after years of planning, years of detours, the direction for the project should be clear.

The point wasn’t putting the traffic underground. The point was putting it underground for a reason, to reshape the city. It’s time to find the clear route to the new vision of what our city, our writing, and our lives can be.

When I moved here from New York in 1990, I couldn’t believe my good fortune. What a gem of a city! Okay, I noticed a few quirks, primarily traffic-related. “Merge” and “don’t block the box” are unknown concepts here, along with any notion that pedestrians might take some responsibility for their own safety. But the most baffling thing about this wonderful city is how eager it is to feel inferior. Even to Providence, for heavens sake. But mostly to New York.

From dueling sports teams to the summer’s upcoming dueling political conventions, Boston’s gaze seems to leap from navel to Empire State Building in a single bound. Maybe it’s understandable in a city where we live so intimately with an unrivaled past: it used to be all about us.

“Boston has probably never gotten over the southward shift in the country’s center of gravity,” says George Packer, a writer who moved to New York after 16 years in Cambridge. Packer is now a staff writer for The New Yorker, a fact which, as he notes, probably says it all.

Being a writing New Yorker, he finds, has a very different pace. Here he wrote four books, including the novel Central Square. In New York, by contrast, he has written countless magazine articles, including a recent exhaustive and thought-provoking piece on the American troops in Iraq. But no books. Boston, he notes, is a city for reflection; New York, for immediacy.

When I spoke with Packer, he reminded me that the author William Dean Howells wrote about just that in his 1890 novel, A Hazard of New Fortunes. In words that sound right today, two of Howells’ characters have this exchange:

“There’s only one city that belongs to the whole country and that’s New York.”

“Yes I know, and Boston belongs to the Bostonians.”

Packer, whose nonfiction books are solidly grounded in history, points to the turning point. The end of the 19th century was a symbolic moment when Boston’s position began to ebb and New York’s economic growth and openness to immigration began to move it into predominance.

“It’s been a long century,” Packer says. It was a century that saw Boston settling ever more comfortably into its armchair of academic preeminence, old neighborhood loyalties, and storied past. Sometimes it seems the city turns outward, wistfully, only when it notices what fun New York is having.

“Boston never expects to replace New York,” says Packer, “but it wants to be a contender.”

Contenders, though, need to be lean and fast. Boston, for better or worse, moves a little more slowly. While New York razes its history to make room for the newest new thing, Boston is paced for long-haul contemplation, rehabbing its Victorian buildings to house Lucky Brand and Starbucks with wireless Internet access. But Boston also tends to prize doing things the way they’ve always been done, if for that reason alone.

As Packer puts it, “There are ways in which Boston is good for the soul, and ways in which it stifles the soul.”

Boston has been a balm for this writer’s soul, offering me gifts New York never would have given. I am profoundly grateful. As a writer, I’ve found Boston simultaneously large and intimate, its palpable literary tradition both intimidating and encouraging. There is much to be said for the smaller pond. Oh Boston, you’re my home.

From the window of John Shattuck’s office at the JFK Library, you look out to a view of crystal blue sky and the shimmering water of Dorchester Bay. Shattuck looks out that window and sees a city that symbolizes freedom, a city of human rights activists, both past and present. He sees Boston filled with students and workers from other countries, reminders that some of us were handed our human rights–the free speech and equality before the law, the right to basic human necessities, and to living without fear of torture or enslavement–at birth; and others achieved them only after a long, difficult journey.

As chief human rights official in the Clinton administration, as former ambassador to the Czech Republic, and now, as CEO of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and author of Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America’s Response , Shattuck has spent his career focusing on human rights issues worldwide. And he wants Americans to realize that that global concern is in their best interest.

“It’s a practical subject, not just a question of one’s ideals. It’s about the interest we have as a nation to promote international stability,” says Shattuck, noting that “terrorism finds its best breeding ground in countries where human rights are repressed.”

Listening to Shattuck I am reminded of the Zulu word ubuntu . It’s a hard word to translate because it stands for a concept we don’t have in English, though we may need it. Ubuntu means that in order to be fully human, we need to know that others have their rights to be fully human, as well. In his book, No Future Without Forgiveness , Desmond Tutu described ubuntu as “knowing that (we belong) in a greater whole and (are) diminished when others are humiliated or diminished.” A useful model for nations, too. Maybe for one nation in the world to be fully realized and for its citizens to be fully free, all nations and their citizens must live with similar freedom. It sounds like just what Shattuck is talking about, what he feels we have the obligation to promote.

Yet that’s a model we Americans seem reluctant to embrace. Although we feel a little proprietary about human rights, we’ve also been reluctant to act on behalf of human rights on the world stage. The astounding list of international treaties the U.S. is not party to, for example, includes the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women; the Convention on the Rights of the Child; The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of Migrant Workers; the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography; and the Optional Protocol on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict; as well as the Rome Treaty on the International Criminal Court, from which President Bush withdrew America’s signature.

Our national traditions of exceptionalism, isolationism, and unilateralism, Shattuck argues in his book, “have made the United States an ambivalent, and from the point of view of other countries, untrustworthy leader when it comes to human rights.”

Just recently, on December 10, International Human Rights Day marked the 55th anniversary of the U.N.’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Is it just coincidence that the day falls in this season of darkness and light? Maybe the slowly lengthening days will remind us of the imperative for human rights to shine throughout the world.

When we first heard about AIDS, back when it didn’t even have a name, could we have envisioned an epidemic lasting for decades? From the beginning the battle was against not only a virus, but also against silence and lack of knowledge. The only protection was education and writers were among those trying to get the life-saving word out. I remember approaching the editor of an organization’s magazine only to be told they had decided not to cover the subject because, “AIDS doesn’t affect (our members).”

In 2003 AIDS is a household word and 30 million people are dead worldwide. World AIDS Day, observed on Monday, put the disease back in the news, at least for a few days.

Philip Hilts has never stopped trying to get the word out.. Back in 1981, when the Centers for Disease Control made its first announcement of a mysterious new disease, Hilts wrote about it for The Washington Post. Since then he has written 400 stories on AIDS, maybe more than any writer in the world. He is also the award-winning author of five books and hundreds of stories on other medical and public health subjects for The New York Times and The Washington Post. His most recent book is Protecting America’s Health: The FDA, Industry, and 100 Years of Regulation. This year Hilts has been away from his Brookline home, living with his family in Botswana, where he is teaching journalism at the University of Botswana and working on a book on AIDS in Southern Africa.

“I have felt deeply about the subject of AIDS since the beginning. This epidemic is now, as far as I can tell by (statistics), the worst epidemic in human history, and Botswana is the worst nation in that worst epidemic.

“This is not the public disease that the Black Death was. This disease is quiet. This is a virus that, in a peculiar way, seeks out the cultural weaknesses in each place it reaches, then saturates these crevasses of human frailty and produces suffering and death.”

Although Hilts notes profound differences between AIDS in the United States and in Botswana, there are also frustrating similarities to its early days in this country, particularly denial and the role of public policy. Nearly half the population of Botswana is HIV positive and, although medication is available free, many people do not take it because of a widespread belief that the drugs will not work. One of Africa’s richest nations, Botswana had, until recently, an average life expectancy of 70. The prevalence of AIDS has brought that number down to 50, and firm predictions are that it will drop to a heartwrenching 29. Unlike here, however, where President Reagan did not mention the word AIDS for the first six years of the epidemic, the president of Botswana has taken a very public position, getting tested, speaking out often.

The World Health Organization estimates 5 million new infections in 2003. A new generation is at risk for lack of adequate prevention education.

“The denial,” says Hilts, “is still going on. There is still the reluctance to talk about it.”

Even as he works on his book, he worries that it won’t sell. He calls it “message fatigue,” the way we push all talk of AIDS out of our public and private conversation. We know, we know. We just don’t want to hear it anymore.

We have the drugs now to treat the people who are infected. But education remains the only way to prevent new infections. If we don’t talk about AIDS, if we don’t write about it and read about it, we will continue to live in its shadow. The old slogan of the AIDS group ACT UP still applies: silence = death.

Is everyone in Boston a writer? Everywhere I picture people hunched over paper-strewn desks, at laptops in coffee shops, on park benches, at kitchen tables, the ones whose names adorn spines on library shelves and leap from bookstore windows, and those who hardly dare whisper the words, “I am a writer.”

Lesego Malepe has done her share of writing in restaurants and libraries, on the T and standing in lines. She says she wrote her first novel in public, at every place but a desk.

“I can write at a rock concert,” she says. But now she doesn”t have to. These days Malepe does her writing at the Writers” Room, a hushed space on State Street in downtown Boston that is home to a community of writers. Malepe has always thought of herself as a writer, but the journey to writing fulltime has taken her across years and miles.

When Malepe was growing up in Pretoria, language was her “plaything.” Her father, a University of South Africa professor whose specialty was the African language Setswana, helped nurture her love of language. She laughingly recalls how life with four brothers spurred her to use words as a weapon: she wrote short stories in which she was the heroine and the villain was whichever brother was torturing her most at the moment. Later, in her novel Matters of Life and Death, she would sharpen that weapon and turn it against the political system that imprisoned one brother at the age of 18 on a charge of high treason and held him for 22 years on the infamous Robben Island.

“To cope, you make order out of the life you are presented with and the people and places around you,” she says. She put her world into a novel because, “you can get at deeper fundamental truth through fiction.”

At first Malepe tried to make sense of her world by studying political science. She came to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar in 1978, got her Ph.D. at Boston University, then taught political science at Wheaton College until 2001. She wrote op-ed pieces that appeared in major newspapers and wrote short stories, as she says, “to entertain myself.” But the deaths of her parents in the late 1990s, and of a brother in 2000, changed everything.

“I realized I could die any time and I thought if I”m going to die, I want to make sure my book is published. I took stock of my life and decided I wanted to do only what I felt I was meant to do.”

She gave herself two years to see if she could make her living as a writer. She gathered her savings, knowing she had the fallback position of teaching political science in South Africa; rearranged her life; applied to the Writers” Room; and started writing five hours a day.

Malepe”s first name means “you are blessed” in Setswana, and she feels she has had blessing with her writing. When she finished writing Matters of Life and Death, she decided against all advice, to publish it through iUniverse. (“I just wanted the book to be out there.”) It sold so well that it is being reissued by Genesis Press and an agent offered to represent her. She has just completed her second novel, Truth and Reconciliation and is working on a memoir, My Father”s Language. She is a writer.

“Even when I am tired my soul and my mind feel so fresh, so alive. Some days are hard, some are easy. Sometimes chapters just pour out. Those are the times that I live for. Some days every word is a drop of blood. But I”ve trained myself to sit there anyway. This is my writing time.”

It was a dark and stormy night. (Oooh.) She saw a stranger watching from across the street. (Oooh.) Suddenly she heard the slow creak of the front door. (Oooh…and then?)

Scare us, please. Children, whether shrieking with laughter at the adult who says, “boo!” or huddling with nervous pleasure around a campfire for ghost stories, can’t get enough. Neither can adults, who read enough scary stories to make mysteries one of the most popular book categories. It seems to be instinctive: we love being scared. But just a little. Just to the point that mystery writer Jeremiah Healy calls “disquieting.”

“We like to be scared,” says Healy, “but we prefer when it’s vicarious.” He compares the pleasure we take in reading mysteries to the delicious danger we knew as children listening to a scary story, but knowing our parents were there to protect us. “I think people don’t read mysteries to be scared as much as to be entertained. The fear you feel toward the end of the book is like the glass of port or the dessert at the end of a meal.”

Healy is the award-winning author of 17 novels and more than 60 short stories written under his own name and under his pseudonym, Terry Devane. His most recent book is the Terry Devane novel A Stain Upon the Robe. A former military police officer, attorney, and law professor, Healy writes legal and private-investigator mysteries that are often set in Boston. As a college student working in a sheriff’s office, Healy first learned about how people function under extreme conditions.

“I came to appreciate a level of fear I had not known before and how you need to control it in order to function. Now I can put my fictional victim in that mindset.”

It could be argued that, these days, we live in that mindset. Why at a time when world events seem unremittingly frightening–and random–do we still seek out this added dose of dread? In fact, we want something scary to read now even more. Healy says that, in the last two years the popularity of mystery books has soared. It’s understandable. The page, the binding are solid boundaries from which the terrors cannot escape. It’s an implicit contract between author and reader: I’m going to entertain you by scaring you, but in a good way, a controlled way. So don’t worry: on the last page, everything will be all right.

Says Healy, “In difficult times–uncertain economic times, times of war, both of which we have now–people want an organized story they can follow. They want a story that troubles them, but within a certain range. And they want a resolution.”

In a mystery, terror follows a comfortingly predictable course. As Healy points out, a gunfight in the first chapter is not likely to have serious consequences for the hero. As the book progresses, the mayhem quotient will increase.

“It’s like a roller-coaster,” he says, “where the biggest drop is at the end. If the biggest drop came at the beginning, you wouldn’t think much of the ride by the time you got off. The action is in control, but escalating.”

The type of action readers look for may depend on the lives they lead. Healy’s type of mystery often attracts an audience of professionals comfortable with complexity and drawn to more cerebral tensions. Those who feel their work lives are more routine and lacking in excitement may seek out the heightened stimulation of graphic slasher stories.

But whatever our preferences in style, mysteries cut across all lines, socioeconomic, ethnic, gender, and age. As readers, we think a scary trick is a treat to be savored.