Word Count 78: John Finnemore's cryptic murder mystery, eight gorgeous Detectorists book covers

Plus writing better dialogue, the tide's turning against AI, paper book vs e-readers, and video of Copurrnicus & Mewton.

Hi there, 

Sumer is icumen in and sumer is igoen straight back out again. I’ve certainly heard cuckoos of late, if not buck-goats farting, but I could definitely do with a bit more sunshine and warmth rather than summer promising a run of nice weather and then reneging! 

Still, lots of fun links for you this week, so here goes! 

Stop, look, listen: Allusionist, E195 – 100 Pages of Solvitude

Helen Zaltzman talks to comedy writer and crossword setter John Finnemore, the man behind the marvellous Cabin Pressure, about his latest project, The Researcher’s First Murder. 

A murder-mystery puzzle-novella, The Researcher’s First Murder is presented in the form of “one hundred cryptic picture postcards” which the reader has to decode and put in the right order so as to solve ten murder mysteries. It’s based on the format of Cain's Jawbone by Edward Powys Mathers, aka Torquemada, which was published as a jumbled up 100-page novella back in 1934. 

Cain’s Jawbone originally offered a prize of £15 for the first person to solve the mystery, and when it was republished in 2019, the prize was bumped up to £1,000. Finnemore won that prize in 2020 and the experience set him on the path to writing his own version, which will be published in August. 

The conversation between Zaltzman and Finnemore is fascinating and funny, and well worth a listen, not least for the insight into the complexities of not just solving Cain’s Jawbone but creating a similar project for modern puzzle solvers. 

Design delights: Imagined Detectorists book covers

Sean Coleman has imagined eight possible Penguin and Puffin Books style covers for Detectorists, the TV show, as if it had been published as a book. Coleman has made them available as a pack for just £12 + P&P, a bargain at twice the price! They are just gorgeous, and I can’t wait to own a set. 

Tip-top tip: How to write better dialogue

I absolutely love this advice from

Cole Haddon

on how to improve your dialogue by interviewing real people.

What does [make a book or script readable], at least for me, is an understanding of how people speak to each other, what they say, what they don’t say, what they’re really saying when they do either. In fiction, it’s often how we express the interior lives of these characters, which follow similar rules, I find. There’s what we’re thinking, what we’re trying to avoid thinking, and what we’re trying to convince ourselves about the previous two. In all these cases, this is how characters move through their lives/stories, how they drive the story/plot, which means if they’re written in some way that defies how humans actually use language to communicate and understand themselves, then I stop reading.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the Fieldwork project has been the time I’ve spent interviewing ecologists about their experiences in the field. One of my favourite questions to ask is “What piece of fieldwork has made you the most proud?”, because it really opens up a whole new world into their motivations and different definitions of what ‘success’ might look like.

Read this: The tide is turning against AI

The tide of public opinion is turning against AI. A few data points: 

The Prince Charles cinema cancelled the London premiere of The Last Screenwriter, which had a screenplay “credited to ‘ChatGPT 4.0’”.

In its statement the Prince Charles said: “The feedback we received over the last 24hrs once we advertised the film has highlighted the strong concern held by many of our audience on the use of AI in place of a writer which speaks to a wider issue within the industry.⁠”

I have no doubt that director Peter Luisi thought he was being clever and edgy, and certainly he seems to think that he’s being misunderstood, but writing a film “where a screenwriter realizes he is less good than artificial intelligence in writing” is a slap in the face for every screenwriter who’s laboured for months or years over a script. 

Ironically, by their own admission, they had to do a lot of work to create a coherent script out of ChatGPT’s scenes, thus proving that it really isn’t so capable. 

Meanwhile, back in March, the crowd at SXSW, the tech-culture festival that has always been incredibly open to new ideas, booed a “sizzle reel that featured several industry leaders speaking positively about AI”. 

I learnt about that from technologist Jürgen Geuter, who wrote about “the growing backlash against AI” which has been doing the rounds recently. 

Famous film critic Roger Ebert once said “The Muse visits during the act of creation, not before.” and the booing is people coming back to realizing this simple fact. You are not creative and then create something, you become creative by working on something, creativity is a byproduct of work.

In this way “AI” is deeply dehumanizing: Making the spaces and opportunities for people to grow and be human smaller and smaller. Applying a straitjacket of past mediocrity to our minds and spirits.

Last week, The Verge has criticised AI search company Perplexity, calling them “a rent-seeking middleman on high-quality sources” and accusing them of copyright infringement. Instead of pointing people to authoritative sites, Perplexity wants to take the content from those primary sources and serve it as an answer to the search questions. 

[…] these so-called “answer engines” starve the primary source of ad revenue — keeping that revenue for themselves. Perplexity is among a group of vampires that include Arc Search and Google itself. 

But Perplexity has taken it a step further with its Pages product, which creates a summary “report” based on those primary sources. It’s not just quoting a sentence or two to directly answer a user’s question — it’s creating an entire aggregated article, and it’s accurate in the sense that it is actively plagiarizing the sources it uses.

And there was widespread outrage when OpenAI’s CTO, Mira Murati, said that so-called AI would destroy some jobs, but that, hey, everything’s fine because those jobs "shouldn't have been there in the first place."

In doing so, she not only outraged people at risk of losing their livelihoods due to technological advancements but also seemed to reveal that she doesn't even know what AI is good for

So-called AI is snake oil driven by tech leaders’ and investors’ greed. The sooner the whole thing collapses, the better. 

Read this, two: Paper books vs e-readers – What’s best for the climate? 

NPR’s Chole Veltman takes a look at the environmental impacts of both paper books and e-readers to see which has the lower carbon footprint. If you want to do your bit* to look after the world, which should you choose? 

Veltman takes a look at the various initiatives that are helping publishers reduce the impact of paper books, including donating unsold books which would otherwise be pulped and changing their design practices to reduce paper use. And whilst e-readers don’t use paper, they do have quite a lot of environmental costs at the device production stage. 

So which is better? The answer is that it depends on how many books you read. 

* Note: I don’t believe that individual actions will ever result in the scale of change we need to fix the mess we’re in. Rather, we need entire industries to take their responsibility to the environment more seriously and to be forced into change by regulation if they won’t do it voluntarily. So don’t feel guilty if you prefer to buy books over using an e-reader, or if you have unused e-readers lying about. 

Obligatory cat picture

Today’s picture is a video, taken on 24 April 2019 back in Cleveland, OH. We’d had Copurrnicus three months and he had developed quite a tom-crush on Sir Izacat Mewton which wasn’t entirely reciprocated. As a likely ex-feral that had been separated from his mother too young, Copurrnicus really didn’t know how to interact with other cats and hadn’t understood that you start with grooming, not swatting atop the head.

I think Mewton did bond with Copurrnicus to some extent, certainly more than Grabbity did in those early months (years), and I think that they would have been become close companions given enough time. Sadly, time wasn’t on Mewton’s side and we lost him that December. It is a lovely thing to have so many photos and videos of him, though.

That’s it for this newsletter! Don’t forget to come along to the Substack website to comment, share and mash that ‘like’ button!

All the best,

Suw