Category Archives: SUSAN KELLY

IT’S BEEN REAL

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Zachary Klein & Susan Kelly

For about five years Just sayin’ and Kelly & Klein have been pretty consistent with our weekly eclectic columns. For most of that time readership has held pretty steady, hanging with us as we tried to make our way through the arts, music, politics, and sundry other subjects. And it’s been fun.

But there something about overstaying a welcome that leaves a bad taste on everyone’s lips. Well, frankly, we’d rather pass on that given the warm welcome we’ve received throughout all these years.

Here’s the rub. We still enjoy writing but neither of us is interested in a weekly deadline—especially since that deadline has begun to feel like required writing rather than an act of pleasure. So, given the feedback we’ve received, Susan and I have decided to forgo the weekly column and will write when and if we feel like it. If either of us decides to write a column we’ll send out the usual notices to the usual places so folks, if they so choose, can drop in to see what’s on our minds.

To be sure, Susan will cast her humorous eye on the world around us and, no doubt, I’ll get pissed off enough to whack on someone or something—as well as continuing my INTERVIEWS WITH THE DEAD.

Since I’m not at all sure when I’ll be here next, I want to thank all the guest contributors who have helped maintain a diverse and interesting Monday. And of course I want to thank ALL our readers, especially those who have commented at various times about our column’s content.

For those of you who might be interested in our books, Susan’s can be found at http://www.susankellywriter.com and mine are here: http://zacharykleinonline.com/matt-jacob-ebooks/

These columns have been a joy for us to write and hopefully for you to read, so since “It’s so hard to say au revoir, let’s just say hors d’oeuvre.”

Kelly & Klein

 

Great Inventions of Our Time

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Susan Kelly

Susan KellyActually, this column is going to be—mostly–about great unheralded, or at least underappreciated, inventions of our time. Do I need to talk about antibiotics, which have saved countless millions of lives? (Unfortunately, about 10% of the population of the planet is allergic to them.) Or Novocain and its successors, which have made trips to the dentist, if not a joyride, far less unpleasant? Or the Salk vaccine? The internal combustion engine? (Yes, it pollutes, but seriously—in the event that it’s necessary, do you want to be conveyed to the hospital via horse-drawn buggy?) Civil rights? Universal education? Computers? Telephones? Refrigeration, which has also saved countless millions of lives? Air conditioning? Vodka martinis? Mel Brooks’s movies?

No. I don’t need to talk about those things.

What I want to write about are those little things that make life so much easier, that we take for granted (our grandparents wouldn’t) and never acknowledge. The following list is not in any order of importance.

  1. Suitcases with wheels. Whatever genius invented rolling baggage deserves the Nobel Prize for so doing. I’m not sure which Nobel Prize. In my case, the Peace Prize, since it prevents me (and zillions of other people) from having meltdowns in airports as a result of having to carry all that stuff.
  2. Salad spinners. How did we prepare salads before these were invented? Well, we did, but it was considerably more work than necessary. I’m old enough to recall the time when you had to use a roll of paper towels to dry the lettuce you just washed. Or soggy-up a bunch of clean dish towels doing the same thing.
  3. Stamps that you don’t have to lick before you stick them on an envelope.
  4. Carpet-sweepers. These have been around a long time, but I really like them better than vacuum cleaners. They don’t jack up my electric bill and I don’t have to buy bags and change them.
  5. Rolled oat cereals. (These are commonly known as Ch—rios, but I don’t want to get into potential trademark violation. I wasn’t allowed by my editor to use the word Sty—f-am in a novel to denote a disposable coffee cup, so I’m careful about these things.) No, not for the fact that rolled oat cereals are apparently a heart-healthy breakfast food, but because they endlessly entertain babies. As soon as the kid’s able to maintain an upright position, buckle your infant into a high chair, sprinkle the pristine-clean high chair tray with you-know-whats, and the child will be absorbed for hours trying to pick up the things and insert them in his or her mouth while you occupy yourself with other matters. (Of course you don’t leave the kid unattended. I suppose I need to say that, just as blow-driers now come with instructions NOT to use them while one is taking a shower.) Babies seem to be able to pick up only one Ch—rio at a time, which is why I say they provide hours of entertainment for her or him. Full disclosure: I don’t actually like to eat this cereal, and never did.
  6. Plastic ice cube trays that you twist to release the contents. When I was a kid, ice cube trays were metal, with levers that you yanked back in order to relieve the cubes from their confinement. But you had to be Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime to do this successfully.

Here are some modern inventions I could do without:

  1. Reality television
  2. Ice tea or lemonade that purports to be kiwi-strawberry-flavored. This is not a beverage. It is what you pour into the anti-freeze compartment of your car.
  3. Boy bands
  4. Microwave pizza. This is not food. It is mattress stuffing compressed into a circular shape and topped with ketchup and a sprinkle of cheese product.
  5. Any carbon-based alleged life form calling itself Kim Kardashian

Neither of my lists is by any means comprehensive. In fact, as soon as I send this column to Zach, I’ll probably think of a dozen other unheralded but vital inventions that I love. And even more inventions that I hate. That being the case, I invite you to list your own loved and hated inventions. It’s still summer: This is the silly season, as they say in the news biz. So go for it.

I’ll be back later in September with some, ahem, more serious commentary. Promise.

But in the interim, tell us what you love. And hate.

House Hunters, Part Deux

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Susan Kelly

Susan Kelly When I wrote about the show House Hunters a month or so ago, I didn’t mention that I myself was, at that point, a house hunter. Or, rather a condo-hunter. Anyway, after about six months’ of searching, I found one, made an offer on it, had the offer accepted, and sealed the deal on July 22. I am now a woman of property, having not been one since 1999. It feels good. Not because I want to be a real estate magnate, but so I can have my own place that I can make my own. That it’s a condo means that I don’t have to shovel my own snow.

So…let me tell you about my condo and what it doesn’t have in terms of those things the show House Hunters deems essential in terms of civilized living:

  • A “spa tub” in the “master suite.”
  • Double sinks in the bathroom of the “master suite.”
  • Anything resembling a “master suite.”
  • Granite counter tops in the kitchen.
  • A “desirable open floor plan.”

I must confess that the condo does have a walk-in closet, but not in the non-existent “master suite.” It’s situated in an alcove off a hall that leads to the entrance to the kitchen on the east and the living room on the south. And that forms yet another alcove.

The condo is in fact lousy with alcoves, which is one reason I decided to buy it, literally twenty seconds after I walked into it. It also has eleven-foot ceilings, hardwood floors, working light fixtures from 1910 (they’re up to code), and big windows. The building dates from 1900, and was constructed originally to house the executive offices of a woolen mill. It was converted to apartments sometime in the 1930s (I think), and then into condos sometime in the 1980s. Every antique feature that could be preserved or restored has been. The building foyer looks like that of the Palais Garnier, and was probably modeled after it. (Look up Palais Garnier on Google images. The resemblance is astonishing. Really. I am not exaggerating.) There’s a mail chute on each floor that actually works, and each apartment/unit door has a functioning transom. When was the last time you saw a functioning transom? Don’t tell me. It was Humphrey Bogart’s office in The Maltese Falcon. And the Casablanca fan hanging from the living room ceiling is straight out of….Casablanca. It’s all so noir I could just scream. Put that together with the Palais Garnier foyer and…we’ll always have Paris.

What could be better?

I’ll tell you what’s better. The kitchen is small. Really small. It’s perfectly equipped, with much better cabinet space than I’ve had in larger kitchens. But it’s only big enough for me. This is the opposite of the House Hunters ideal, of course, which mandates that you can’t possibly prepare a meal in a kitchen that’s not big enough to hold all your family and friends milling around and hanging over your shoulder while you’re trying to broil their lamb chops and bake their potatoes. Or toss the salad. In this galley, the salad might get tossed on you.

So…guests be warned. There is no room for you in my new kitchen. You’ll just have to sit in the living room drinking your vodka martinis, gin martinis, Scotch on the rocks, bourbon and soda, wine, whatever floats your boat, and chomping on hors d’oeuvres while I gracefully excuse myself, waft to the oven, and put the finishing touches on dinner. You can’t follow me there.

I’m thrilled.

Don’t Like Me on Face Book; Don’t Follow Me on Twitter

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Susan Kelly

Susan Kelly       …And, for Gawd’s sake, don’t expect me to post any photos on Instagram.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I should get with the zeitgeist. But for whatever reason, I just can’t. At least in terms of social media.

It’s not that I’m a Luddite. I love technology. I love the Internet. I love being able to take my cup of morning coffee to the computer, sit down, and read any newspaper in the world that has a website. (I lived in Scotland for four years while in graduate school, so anything going on in the U.K. is interesting to me personally beyond the regular attention I pay to world affairs.) I love being able to go to the Mayo Clinic or Massachusetts General Hospital online for medical advice. I love IMDB for movie reviews, goofy as some of them are. I love the website that told me that one of my ancestors, whose name I never knew before the site posted it, was injured at the Battle of Gettysburg, mustered out the following September, and then re-enlisted in the Union Army the following December, presumably having recovered from his wounds. (Either he was a true Union man, or he thought being shot at by the boys in gray was better than facing another Vermont winter. But no matter.) I love email. I’ve participated in some lively political, literary, and cultural online forums. There are many more things I love about the process of instant worldwide communications. It’s made my life so much richer.

But I just can’t get into social media. All writers are supposed to have Facebook pages, or sites, or whatever you call them. Publishers insist on it. In fact, I have one. It’s there for the sole purpose of advertising my books. I don’t think it sells many books. When I glance at it, which may be once every six months, if Facebook is lucky, the “news feed”—whatever the hell that is—is filled with messages from total strangers posting photos of baby animals, places they’ve been to, birthday parties they threw for their two-year-old kids, some fabulous bargain they got at T.J. Maxx, a review of some restaurant I’ll never go to because the cuisine sounds appalling, and painfully (as opposed to painstakingly) detailed instructions on how they trained their kitty-cats to use the litterbox. I don’t know these people. They don’t know me, but they insist on sharing the intimate details of their lives with me. I live in dread that the next time—maybe sometime in 2018—that I check my FB page, I’ll be treated to a graphic description of someone’s menopause, supplemented with captioned photos of clots. Or a home video of a prostatectomy.

I have been assured that there is a way to control who sees your Facebook page, and who posts there, and who doesn’t. But the point is, as an author with a product to sell, I’m supposed to keep the page open to all comers. Perhaps there’s a way to limit the comers to people who want to talk about books. But if there is, at this stage in my life, I’m too bored and busy to find out what it is.

I have a Twitter account. I have posted exactly one message on it, which instructs people to visit my website (www.susankellywriter.com). As far as I know, I have no followers. I also have a LinkedIn account. When I started it, I got bombarded immediately by people advertising their self-published self-help books. There would be—and I am not kidding—at least 40 messages apiece from the same three or four people, none of whom, of course, were known to me. The same message. Over and over and over again. I resented the fact that they were using my account to advertise their products. That put me off looking at my LinkedIn account for at least a year or two.

As with Facebook, there’s probably a way to control LinkedIn and Twitter. But again, as with Facebook, I’m too bored by the whole prospect to do whatever work is involved to find it. And, mind you, this is coming from someone who has been asked by others to fix their computers when there was some sort of glitch, who’s test-driven academic software, and who has the kind of psychotic patience required to read through an 800-page trial transcript and take notes on it.

I used to blog on my website. But I got bored with that, too, because it seemed as if I was talking to myself, although I knew I wasn’t. And I am still very happy to respond to any questions or comments people post there. I ignore, of course, obvious raving lunatics; those who promise to tell me who the real Boston Strangler was if I meet them in a dark alley at midnight; and any person who asks me for a date that involves the deployment of squirt-can whipped cream and chainsaws.

Here’s the final irony about my Facebook site: People I actually know, personally, who’ve looked for it say they can’t find it.

So if you want to read me, follow me, like me–I’m here at Zach’s website, which seems to me more like a small magazine for a select readership, one to which I’m pleased to contribute.

And remember: No canned whipped cream, no chainsaws.

Why I Wrote The Boston Stranglers

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Susan KellyBy

Susan Kelly

Well, as the man said when they asked him why he climbed Mount Everest: “Because it was there.”

That answer might require some back story. Longer ago than I want to recall—oh, okay, it was 1981—I was embarking on my third attempt to write a mystery novel. (The less said about the first two attempts, the better, I assure you.) I wanted to know about investigative work as it is done by actual police detectives. So I made an appointment to talk to a lieutenant of detectives in the Cambridge Police Department. I remember the day itself well; it was one of those typical Massachusetts November afternoons when the sky looks like a dirty old mattress.

When I got to the station, I had to wait; the lieutenant was interviewing a witness to a crime. So I cooled my heels in the anteroom to the chief’s office. Sitting there with me were two detectives, socializing with the chief’s secretary, very genial white-haired men who introduced themselves to me as “the two Billies.” (Each had the first name of William.) They asked me what I was doing here in the police station. I explained that I was researching police procedure.

They told me that they’d been detectives for thirty years and had some great stories. I assured them that I was very, very eager to hear anything they wanted to tell me.

I added, then, that I was particularly interested in serial killers.

“Like Ted Bundy,” I said.

The two Billies looked at each other with odd little grins. Then one of them asked me, “Who do you think the Boston Strangler was?”

The question was a little startling, because I thought it had been long since settled. “Albert DeSalvo.”

Both Billies laughed.

“Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler like my dog was the Boston Strangler,” one of them said.

Oh, my.

I asked them to tell me about it. And they did.

Well, the upshot of this conversation was that I kept on interviewing people involved, one way or another, in law enforcement: cops, district attorneys, defense lawyers, etc. And always, the subject of The Boston Strangler arose. And inevitably: Not one of these people thought DeSalvo was the guilty party.

It was one of the strangest disconnects I’ve ever experienced: A received truth was being roundly denied by those people in the best position to know the facts of the matter.

Well, anyway, I filed all this away, and went on to write novels, and my novels got published. But the Strangler story always stayed in the back of my mind. And so, in 1992, I decided to do something about it. I did the research, did the interviewing, and wrote the book. It was a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun.

(Maybe it wasn’t work. I love writing. It makes me feel really alive. Nothing involved in the process is tiresome to me.)

And…doing the book accorded me a rare privilege: that of revising a small piece of history. I read every single one of the case files regarding the murders that took place between June 1962 and January 1964, and my position on the case remains the same today. These murders were not serial killings, although a quite reasonable case can be made that the first four victims—older white women—might have been murdered by the same person.

Now I realize that some of you—with absolute justification—will point to the DNA testing done in the summer of 2013 on a blanket found in the apartment of Mary Sullivan, the final Strangler victim. It indicated that DeSalvo’s DNA had been found on the blanket. And I would understand perfectly if you concluded that this proved DeSalvo’s guilt of, at least, the Sullivan murder.

But…there were two samples of DNA found on Sullivan’s body—one in the pubic area–that did not match DeSalvo’s. One of them matched the DNA of the original prime suspect in her murder, who was not DeSalvo. The state declined to test these samples.

I should also add that DeSalvo’s DNA was not found on the blanket during any previous testing. I should further add that there were plenty of other reasons to assume that the prime suspect was guilty, such as the fact that he flunked two lie detector tests.

I believe that DNA is an incredibly useful tool in crime investigation. It is unique to an individual, and therefore irrefutable as a means of identification. If you find the DNA of a suspect in the vagina of a rape/murder victim, and under her fingernails from shreds of his skin that accumulated there as she tried to fight off her assailant, and on her face or anywhere else that his saliva or sweat or mucus or semen may have dripped…well, that’s very inculpatory. But the presence of DNA at a crime scene does not necessarily indicate guilt, particularly if it’s not on the victim. Let me tell you why.

We drop our DNA, in a variety of ways, everywhere we go. You’ve just returned from a trip to the grocery store. Your DNA is on anything you touched there, including that head of Romaine you returned to the produce bin because it didn’t look quite fresh enough. It’s on that bottle of ketchup you put back on the shelf because you just remembered you have an unopened bottle of ketchup in the cupboard at home. It’s on the money or credit card you handed the cashier at the check-out counter. And your DNA is all over the cart you used.

In the course of the day, did you go to your dentist? Your doctor? Your lawyer? Your DNA is all over their waiting rooms, consultation rooms, or examination rooms. If you went to the public library, you left it in their stacks.

Okay. Suppose you visited a friend and had coffee or a drink with him or her. Your DNA would be on the cup or glass you used, on the chair or sofa where you sat, in the bathroom if you used the sink, toilet, tub, or shower…it would be on anything you touched. And so would your fingerprints, for that matter.

Now suppose—horrific thought—your friend is murdered shortly after you leave his or her house or apartment. Your DNA is all over the place. It may also be on your friend’s body, if you hugged or kissed or shook hands. Suppose you and your friend engaged in some form of sexual activity. You have left your DNA all over your partner’s body, and on the bed, if you used the bed. Does that mean you’re the murderer? Of course it doesn’t. Sure, you might be. But more is required to prove your guilt. And that is exactly as it should be.

Well, I am not going to try your patience with a long list of reasons why Albert DeSalvo probably didn’t kill Mary Sullivan, nor anyone else. If you like, you can read the book (The Boston Stranglers). Or the article I wrote and posted on my Amazon author page (amzn.to./18wHstx; just type that address into your browser exactly as I’ve written it). Get back to me with any questions.

The Strangler case is fascinating for a lot of reasons. It became a social and cultural phenomenon, generated in large part by press hysteria. Boston had more newspapers then than it does now, and they were all competing for the same audience. (Sample headline from the time: PHANTOM FIEND STRIKES AGAIN.) The case also became a political football, and an opportunity for various people to make names for themselves. It was the perfect venue for showboaters. And, as the late Robert B. Parker once observed, for psychics and dancing chickens as well. In all this, the victims became…just bodies. They deserved better than that.

I am not an apologist for Albert DeSalvo. He wasn’t a good guy; he was a serial sex offender. But he wasn’t a serial killer.

So here’s the thing: We are all innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.