When an aspiring author asks me for my best advice, I always say the same two things: “Butt in chair, fingers on keyboard” and “Reading is the best teacher.” It’s the latter that resonates with Robert Weibezahl, author of ‘Just Like Peg Entwistle’ in Moonlight & Misadventure. As always, I’ve included the intro to his fiction-based-on-fact story, but first, here’s Robersons:
I haven’t written all that many short stories—“Just Like Peg Entwistle,” which appears in the new anthology Moonlight & Misadventure, is only the fourth to be published. For many writers, the short story is a first step, but it can be a deceptive gateway-to-hell because, in fact, writing a good short can be infinitely harder than writing a novel, where concision does not matter and there is plenty of room for excess. My earliest (unpublished) stories, I wager, were overstuffed and half-baked. Two of them, in fact, later provided the kernels for full-length plays, which suggests how much I tried to ram into them. I’ve always yearned to write good short stories, and despite my paltry publication rate, I was a finalist for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Derringer Award for my story ‘Identity Theft,’ which was humbling and encouraging. But my track record hardly qualifies me as a “short story writer”—that moniker is best left for more seasoned practitioners of the art. Still, I have always been an avid reader of short stories, and I appreciate the special magic conjured by wizardly practitioners of the art.
When the pandemic hit, and much of my sustaining freelance work as a copy writer for book publishers evaporated overnight, I needed something to do. I had never thought about teaching (hadn’t really thought I had the skills), but I had recently earned my master’s degree (I’m a late bloomer) and was back in an academic mindset. I had heard about the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at my local university—a national program for people over 50 who want to keep learning—but had never had the time to look into it. Now I had time. Like so much, the program had converted to online instruction. I contemplated what I might teach via Zoom. The short story seemed a wise choice—a friendly reading load that wouldn’t tax the non-credit learners. My course proposal was accepted and I blindly ventured forth. Turns out, the students loved being reintroduced to the short story genre, in many cases reading shorts for the first time since high school or college. Before long I was teaching the short story class (and some follow up courses) at Osher programs in five states.
I discovered I wasn’t bad at teaching after all, but the true discovery for me was how teaching short stories can make one better at writing them (at least in theory). After years of being the often passive student or reader, I now had to step up and steer the analysis. I was, after all, the expert (cue: laughter). Together, my students and I discovered all sorts of different ways that great short story writers work. Then, in the midst of all this, Judy Penz Sheluk accepted my story for this anthology, and although “Just Like Peg Entwistle” had been in the works before these newfound teaching gigs materialized, Judy’s trust in it bolstered my determination to write some new stories and return to some I long ago abandoned. Perhaps someday I’ll be able to list more than four published short stories on my résumé. Thanks to teaching the greats, I expect those stories will be better for it.
Robert Weibezahl’s stories have appeared in CrimeSpree, Beat to a Pulp, Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine, Mouth Full of Bullets, Kings River Life, and the anthology, Deadly by the Dozen. He has been a Derringer Award finalist, and has also been twice nominated for both the Agatha and Macavity Awards in the nonfiction category. His two crime novels, The Wicked and the Dead and The Dead Don’t Forget, feature screenwriter-sleuth Billy Winnetka. Robert is also an award-winning, internationally produced playwright, and a book critic whose monthly column appears in the national publication, BookPage. He is a member of International Thriller Writers, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and the Dramatists Guild. Find him at www.robertweibezahl.wordpress.com.
And now, here’s the beginning of ‘Just Like Peg Entwistle’:
Girl Leaps to Death from Sign
—Los Angeles Times headline, September 19, 1932
Suicide Laid to Film Jinx
—Los Angeles Times headline, September 20, 1932
Hollywoodland Sign Suicide Identified as Actress
The body of the young woman found at the base of the Hollywoodland sign on Sunday morning has been identified as that of Peg Entwistle, an actress under contract to RKO. The identification was made by the woman’s uncle, Harold Entwistle, of Beachwood Drive. Mr. Entwistle said that his niece had gone out on the night of the 16th, saying she was going to the drugstore. She never returned home. Police found the body after receiving an anonymous call from a hiker. A coat, handbag, and one shoe found by the hiker, and identified as belonging to the dead girl, were left on the steps of the Hollywood police station. A note signed by the victim was found in the handbag. The coroner ruled that Entwistle, who had her first role alongside Irene Dunne and Myrna Loy in the film The Thirteen Women, released last Friday, committed suicide by jumping from one of the fifty-foot-high letters of the sign on Mount Lee.
—newspaper account, September 20, 1932
Moonlight & Misadventure is available in e-book and trade paperback at all the usual suspects.