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Back in the early decades of the 20th century, when the “rules of the mystery genre” were being set up during the Golden Age of mystery writing, Ronald Knox included as his rule number 4 (of 10), “No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used…” and probably would have included drug interactions if people had been as aware of them then as we are now. S. S. Van Dine made it his rule number 3 (of 20), “There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.” Van Dine’s rule, if applied today, would render it impossible to include a mystery element in the romance genre. I consider the “undiscovered poisons” rule equally inapplicable to and especially unrealistic in fiction set in an alternate timeline which would certainly have discovered some different poisons and interactions, while failing to discover some familiar to us.
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After being put down on somebody’s list somewhere as a hunter—which I emphatically am not—thanks to ordering dog food from one certain company under the Amazon umbrella, who may possibly have collated my order with my searches on the Wisconsin hunting seasons website (attempting to ascertain when it might be relatively safe to walk my Australian Shepherd mix without putting both of us in blaze orange), there are areas I will not research on the Internet. Our local libraries are wholesome and limited, and I shy from using Inter-Library Loan since the time my borrowing privileges were under threat of revocation if I did not return an ILL book which I had in fact already returned well before its due date.
Nevertheless, while using the ‘Net to check the definitions and spellings of certain terms, I could hardly fail to notice that practices like those of Dante’s Delight do in fact besprinkle our own timeline—and often seem to make those of my purgatorians pale by comparison. I do not endorse these practices! Intellectually, I am in total agreement with Lestrade and Angela: these are at best grotesque, at worst incredibly stupid, and always potentially dangerous. Emotionally, I confess to a certain appreciation of the purgatorians’ and Corwin’s arguments in these matters (Corwin Poe, apres tout, c’est moi…mais Rosemary Lestrade, elle aussi, c’est moi). Philosophically and theologically, I cannot quite rule out the idea of the need for a cosmic balance; nor do I find myself able to lay down a blanket condemnation without discarding a very great part of Catholic, Christian, and other religious tradition. Nevertheless, I hazard the opinion that normal living, with its sorrows, accidents, diseases, and natural catastrophes, provides as much balancing element as we need, without our artificially adding to it with wars and artificially-sought penitential practices. Up until the last few chapters, I’d entertained some nebulous idea that the events of this novel would bring down the final curtain on Forest Green’s Purgatorian group—Kim Little Bird quite took me by surprise when she stepped up to keep it going. Well, at least Dante’s Delight does not attempt to rule its members completely body, mind, soul, discretionary time, and finances.
About four decades ago, in practical research for another novel, I enlisted the help of two understanding friends to try getting myself hung by the wrists, and found it quite as uncomfortable as Corwin intimates. Since that earlier novel never actually got completed, it seemed no more than thrifty to make use of my own experience at last. Virtually everyone knows what it is to get pricked by needles, whether in connection with sewing, splinters, or medical treatment. To try to get some vague notion for the feel of handcuffs with perfect safety, I tried paper-clipping two rubber bands together. The bit about shamanic vision ordeals and sticking with arrows as seen in Paleolithic cave paintings I found in a work entitled Shamanism: An Encyclopedia of World Beliefs, Practices, and Culture, ed. by Marika Namba Walter & Eva Jane Fridman [my own Curly Friedman had already been named before I found this 2-vol. encyclopedia], (Santa Barbara, CA; Denver, CO; Oxford, Eng.: ABC CLIO 2004), vol. 1, pp. 153-160; I located this work in the Dexter Library of Northland College, Ashland, Wisconsin, during a rehearsal break of the Chequamegon (pronounced “che-WAH-m’-gon”) Symphony—a “communiversity” orchestra—early in the writing of All But a Pleasure. For most of the rest, I pretty well had to wing it.
I must confess to being that rara avis among modern writers, a Catholic baptized and bred who has not “fallen away,” who still attends Mass or at least, in the absence of a priest, Communion Service regularly, who holds a Lay Minister’s Certificate in the Diocese of Superior, and when at home lends her flute to the liturgical music ministry. And who perhaps should not be writing a genre nowadays linked so mandatorily with “intimate” scenes at all. I also have ecumenical toeholds in both modern Wicca and my late husband’s Congregational United Church of Christ. Thus, any comments in this novel which might look at first blush inimical to Christianity or any other religious tradition, are to be understood either as the personal sentiments of the character involved, or as cries of the Loyal Opposition seeking to bring an essentially good thing up to its highest potential.
The existence of Catholic women priests in this alternate timeline should by no means be interpreted as an argument contra the papal pronouncements of my own timeline. It simply seemed inconsistent to postulate that the Rome of a world timeline so shaped by egalitarianism in gender-related as in racial matters would cleave to so strict a rule against ordaining women. Or perhaps the Catholic church of the R.S.A. has actually split off from Rome.
At the outset, I aimed this novel and its immediate sequels at the lucrative or so I understand modern romance market. Months of intensive reading in this genre left me with two strong impressions: (1) graphic sex scenes are obligatory, except perhaps in the “religious” or “inspirational” subgenre, which seems heavily into humanoid angels, uplifting miracles, and edifying certainties (none of which I could write about convincingly); (2) there’s a heck of a lot of doggone good storytelling in this modern romance genre anyway, if you get the right ones, which usually seems to mean the thicker ones.
It is clear that the more wildly and passionately intimate graphic sex scenes of All But a Pleasure should belong by rights to Julie and Dave. But I have my auctorial limitations, so contented myself with leaving slots where a pen more adept than mine at this sort of thing could, at editorial behest, dash them in. (It seems that even experienced writers may suffer vainglorious daydreams!) When it came to Corwin and Angela, however, I relucted to trust their intimate moments to anybody’s pen but my own. If the results make the more naive and innocent couple come across as the wilder, I can only beg readers to supply for themselves the passionate intimacies of the more fluent pair.232
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