Enduring prose

Rhys on a bright, blustery Wednesday morning in California.
I have been enjoying the posts this week--Ann's on food for thought, Carola's on stupid criminals and Jane's on nitty gritty history. This kind of discussion would have made history interesting to me. I always wanted to know how they could go to the bathroom while wearing all those skirts, or in all that armor but I never dared ask those kind of questions. I would have been sent straight to the headmistress for being cheeky and disruptive, I suspect.

My own thoughts this morning are turning to cyberspace and to how email has changed the world. What brought on this contemplation was a thank you note from Malice Domestic, our recent convention, for the item I'd donated to the live auction. In my case it was the right to name a character. But the highest bid of the evening went for a letter written by Nero Wolf to Peter Lovesey.

My immediate reaction was that this will never happen again. I have corresponded with some very famous writers recently. We may have even exchanged words of wisdom, but those words are all lost to my trash folder. I remember the first message I received from Margaret Maron when my first Evan book came out and how chuffed I was that an Edgar and Agatha winner should take the trouble to write to me about how much she liked my book. Unfortunately I never printed out that letter. Nor my letters from Michael Connelly when he was telling me about a hurricane heading toward him in Florida. I correspond with some pretty well known female writers on a daily basis. We offer advice, sympathy, encouragement to each other but by the end of the day it is all gone. Consigned to the trash folder and zapped out of existence.

So there will never again be those letters from one luminary to another presented on the antiques roadshow or the collected correspondence between Rhys Bowen and Jane Finnis coming out in book form for future generations to have to study. And worse than this, the art of the letter is gone. We correspond in quick notes. We use emoticons to show whether we are feeling happy or sad, and some of us (not any of us here, of course) have resorted to text messaging abbreviations. Glad U R coming. Ugghh.

When I think of the letters we still have, written by my father-in-law from various parts of the world as he helped make history with the first commercial flights to South Africa or India, I realize those reports would now be text messages or emails that would not survive for future generations. Or the letters his mother wrote to him when he was a boy at school, the complete formality of the form and the signature, Your affectionate mother, B. Quin-Harkin.

So the letter has gone the way of the dodo. Probably a cause for rejoicing for those children who had to sit down after Christmas and churn out all those thank you notes, but otherwise a great loss to the whole extended field of literature.

So don't forget to print this out. Someone writing my biography in the future may need it!

Rhys Bowen
www.rhysbowen.com

Comments

[Sue T.]

The email program I use, gmail, archives every single piece of email I send & receive. You'd be amazed how often that archive comes in handy. A lot of people use Outlook or Eudora and save all their email to their hard drive. I've actually wondered if future biographers will somehow be able to gain access to their subjects' email accounts. Of course, one disk crash and it's all gone...

[Jane Finnis]

Rhys, I've got a box of bits and pieces saved from College days somewhere - I must dig it out and see if there are any extant examples of correspondence between you and me! Holiday postcards...scrawled lists of possible guests for our joint 21st birthday bash...who knows? I bet you never kept that handwritten note you got from Punch magazine. They didn't publish your piece - you and I had various comic pieces not-published by Punch in our student days, as I recall. But you were the only one who got a handwritten encouraging word or two on your rejection slip!

[Becky Hutchison]

I know what you mean about the emotional and historical importance of hand-written letters. Even though I hate to hand-write notes and prefer to write emails instead, I cherish the letters I received from my mom and dad when I was away at summer camps. My mom was pretty mushy and my dad was very funny...and I'm so grateful to still have their letters to me.