The Play of Light and Shadow & Writing (8 page)

by Barry Ergang

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Barry Ergang

Originally published in
Mystery Readers
Journal
in slightly different form,

Volume 21, No. 1, Spring 2005

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Whether it was “inevitable” that I’d develop
a love of imaginative writing is something for psychologists to
determine. In early childhood I watched innumerable “B” westerns
starring Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Lash Larue and other cowboy stars;
cliffhanger serials (Larry “Buster” Crabbe as Flash Gordon was my
first boyhood “hero”); and early TV series like “Space Patrol” and
“Ramar of the Jungle”. Super-hero comic books ranked high on my
reading list. Playtime with friends frequently consisted of acting
out our own versions of these adventurous fantasies, yours truly
usually being the creator of the scenario and assigner of roles. (I
invariably played the leading man.)

It therefore doesn’t strike me as odd
that one morning in 1959 during the summer between seventh and
eighth grade, for no particularly good reason, I picked up a pad
and pen and wrote a hardboiled detective story. Please note: I had
never read one. I only knew private eyes from television programs
like “Peter Gunn,” “77 Sunset Strip,” and others that were popular
at the time. For that matter, the only mysteries I’d read at that
point were the Hardy Boys and some Conan Doyle, most
memorably
The Hound of the
Baskervilles
. The pleasures of Dashiell Hammett,
Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, John Dickson Carr, Hake Talbot,
Clayton Rawson, and Edward D. Hoch—among countless others—lay ahead
of me.

Be that as it may, I grew addicted to
writing creatively, mysteries being my preferred genre, and began
reading Erle Stanley Gardner and Agatha Christie while cranking out
stories of my own. After reading
The ABC
Murders
, I wrote a would-be Christie-type story and
submitted the handwritten manuscript to
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
, thus garnering
my first rejection slip at the age of twelve.

(As a
bar
mitzvah
present, my parents gave me an Olivetti
portable typewriter—enabling properly formatted, legible
submissions—which served me well till the early
Eighties.)

It was 1970 when I first had a story
accepted for publication outside of a high school literary
magazine. Appearing in a long-forgotten local periodical
called
Philly Talk
, “Slow and
Quiet, Drift Away” was not a mystery but did involve a
crime.

Flash forward to 1999. In the
intervening years I’d placed a few short stories, a few non-fiction
pieces, and a fair number of poems with magazines, most of which
were small-press and nearly all of which are now defunct. The only
detective story in the bunch was a satire of the high-end audio
business, in which I’ve worked on and off over many years. “The
Audiophile Murder Case” was written as a pastiche of S.S. Van
Dine’s Philo Vance novels and serialized in
Stereophile
in 1982/83.

You may have discerned from the
aforementioned list of authors that in addition to hardboiled
private eye stories, I have a fondness for tales which involve
“impossible” crimes. I always wanted to write at least one such
salable story. In March 1999, for the first time in more than
thirty years, the germ of an idea that might lend itself to one
occurred to me.

John Dickson Carr once pointed out that
locked rooms and other seemingly impossible situations have to
arise logically within the story; they cannot be added simply for
the sake of mystifying the reader. Thus, the impossible situations
must occur from a fortuitous convergence of circumstances or be
contrived for plausible reasons by the villain. If the author
throws in an impossibility for its own sake, he or she is violating
the writer-to-reader contract.

In developing what became “The Play of
Light and Shadow,” I needed a venue in which a locked-room
situation could logically occur. Most locked-room stories feature
murder or theft in a room sealed—doors and
windows—
from the inside
, so
it’s apparently impossible for a killer to have slain his victim or
a thief to have stolen an object and escaped from the room.
Initially I’d hoped to include both crimes. As the story took shape
in my mind, I realized I’d have to confine the impossibility to
theft, with the less “exotic” homicide occurring later
on.

“
The Play of Light and Shadow” concerns
a renowned professor of art history who has acquired a painting by
a deceased artist whose work he admires and about whom he’s writing
a critical study. The artist had a criminal past: a felonious
association with a legendary thief who specializes in pilfering
artwork. The artist and thief had a falling-out which resulted in
the thief vowing to destroy the artist’s every extant painting to
prevent him from attaining the reputation to which he aspired. The
flamboyant thief is reputed to have stolen the artist’s work both
from private collectors and from museums, despite state-of-the-art
security systems, on the day of private delivery or museum
debut.

The art professor engages the services
of a private detective to guard the gallery in his home, which is
filled with expensive paintings and sculpture, on the day he
intends to celebrate the painting’s acquisition by throwing a party
for family and friends. The gallery is windowless and locked
from the outside
. Ten minutes before
the party guests are admitted, the room is inspected and found
empty of intruders, the artwork safe. Yet when the guests enter,
the room—which the detective had under constant surveillance in the
interval—is discovered to have been invaded. The painting is
missing. The detective’s prime witness—or suspect—is subsequently
found strangled.

A note about the title: it alludes to an
aspect of the fictional artist’s technique but also describes the
essence of the formal detective story: a drama in which umbrageous
actions, motives, characters, and events are ultimately
elucidated.

I’m not certain how the art angle came about.
At eleven years’ remove from the story’s conception and
composition, I can only surmise that it arose partly because I had
customers from the audio business whose house was filled with
expensive paintings and sculpture. Although I’ve never known anyone
who’s done so, it struck me as feasible that some collectors would
have galleries in their homes. I confirmed this with a friend,
Andrew (a.k.a. Drew) Wilson, who majored in Art History in college,
and with a gentleman at the Philadelphia Museum of Art whom I
consulted about lighting.

I’m indebted to Drew for his patience
because, as the story started to take shape in my mind, I phoned
him frequently to throw ideas and questions at him. Assimilating
his answers and suggestions enabled me to develop the setting,
populate it with appropriate characters, and fabricate background
information about the artist and the thief. To the latter end, Drew
sent me the July 18, 1999 issue of
The New
York Times Magazine
, which contained an article by
Peter Landesman titled “A
20
^th
-Century Master Scam.”
Apart from its overall usefulness, it cited a statistic about art
forgeries I used in the story—adding a footnote so readers wouldn’t
think I’d made it up. “To Catch a Thief” by Susan Caba, in the
November 7, 1999 issue of
The Philadelphia
Inquirer Magazine
, provided additional information
about art theft.

Now that I had the story’s principal
location and a general outline of its events, I had to devise a
locked-room method that was plausible but not
too
far-fetched. I wrestled with and rejected
several notions; then, while walking the dog one evening, I
realized that something I’d seen nearly every day of my life but
hadn’t attached any significance to was the key. I don’t want to
reveal specifics, but it’s not giving anything away to tell you it
pertains to closets.

After several false starts, and still having
only a general plan in mind, I started writing, groping my way into
the story and its characters. (The hardest part about writing a
fair-play whodunit is planting clues the detective—and reader, if
he or she is astute enough—can identify and assemble to solve the
mystery. You hope you’re subtly misdirecting the reader instead of
limning the clues in neon letters.) The first draft was completed
at the end of December 1999, coming in at nearly 20,000 words—a
length not viable in today’s magazine marketplace. It took nine
months to write because I was rusty, not having written fiction in
about ten years; I was working full-time; and my mother was in poor
health and needed looking after. I put the manuscript aside to
“cool” for a month or so before starting revisions but they had to
be postponed for a couple of years. In early 2000, my mother’s
health took a turn for the worse, and between then and September
11, 2000, when she died (yes, a year to the day prior to the
WTC/Pentagon/Pennsylvania tragedies), I spent my days running to
work, to a hospital or nursing facility to visit my mother, and
home to take care of the dog and get a little sleep. A month and a
half after my mother’s death, major changes occurred in the
workplace that further delayed my getting back to the story. For
reasons not relevant to this article, I left the workplace in
February 2002. My priority? Turn “The Play of Light and Shadow”
into a salable piece of work. I spent the next five months
restructuring, tightening, pruning, eliminating some characters and
better defining others. The final draft was the eighth.

I sent the story out, received two
rejections—one of which included a note complimenting the story‘s
plot, characters, and prose style, and telling me “try us
again”—then sent it to
Futures Mysterious
Anthology Magazine
(now
Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine
).
FMAM
was my last hope: the story was
just under 14,000 words, I couldn’t cut it further—try though I
had—and no other markets were amenable to stories of this length.
In October 2003 I received an e-mail from the then-Mystery Editor,
Mark Orr, accepting the story. Subsequently the publisher, Babs
Lakey, notified me that it would appear in Issue 35, the
3
^rd
quarter 2004
issue.

In 1970, when I made my first sale, I told
myself to savor the elation it engendered because it would never
come again. I was wrong. I felt it when I first had a poem accepted
for publication.

Seeing “The Play of Light and Shadow” in
print was the most satisfying triumph of all, the fulfillment of an
adolescent goal: publication of a fairly-clued detective story that
includes a locked-room puzzle.

It only took 45 years.

About the Author

Former Managing Editor of
Futures Mystery Anthology
Magazine
(which position he attained long after the
publication of “The Play of Light and Shadow”) and First Senior
Editor at
Mysterical-E
, Barry Ergang’s fiction, poetry and
non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications, print and
electronic. He was the recipient of a Derringer Award from the
Short
Mystery Fiction Society
for the best short mystery story
of 2006 in the Flash Fiction category. His website address is
http://writetrack.yolasite.com/

Discover other titles by Barry Ergang at
Smashwords.com:

Slow
and Quiet, Drift Away

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/23417

PUN-ishing Tales: The Stuff That Groans Are Made
On

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/24380

Stuffed Shirt

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/24385

A
FLASH OF FEAR: Six
Very
Short Stories

(http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/22337)