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You already know that Season 2 of Poker Face is coming to Peacock on May 8th! And now we have the full trailer!! Maybe the trailer shows a bit too much. You don’t have to watch it if you already know. But! This trailer reveals the most comprehensive list of guest stars we have so far! Giancarlo Esposito, Kumail Nanjiani, John Cho, Melanie Lynskey, GaTa, Haley Joel Osment, Adrienne C. Moore, Patti Harrison, Awkwafina, B.J. Novak, Carol Kane, Katie Holmes, Cliff “Method Man” Smith, Cynthia Erivo, David Alan Grier, Taylor Schilling, David Krumholtz, Ego Nwodim, Gaby Hoffmann, Sam Richardson, Geraldine Viswanathan, Giancarlo Esposito, Jason Ritter, John Mulaney, Alia Shawkat, Justin Theroux, Kathrine Narducci, Kevin Corrigan, Lili Taylor, Margo Martindale, Melanie Lynskey, Corey Hawkins, Natasha Leggero, Rhea Perlman, Lauren Tom, Simon Helberg, Sherry Cola, Simon Rex, and Richard Kind. And at least one of the Please Don’t Destroy boys. This is fantastic. This is how you do a “howcatchem,” in the style of Columbo. Columbo was packed to the gills with guest stars. Johnny Cash was on Columbo. Faye Dunaway was on Columbo. Janet Leigh was on Columbo. Dick Van Dyke was on Columbo. John Cassavettes was on Columbo. Anyway, you get the picture. I’m over the moon. As CrimeReads contributor Justin Hairston said to me after seeing the Poker Face Season 2 trailer, “we are so back.” Indeed… we are SO back. No bullshit. View the full article

When I was in college, my roommate lent me a book, A Wild Sheep Chase, by Haruki Murakami. He knew I loved noir and thought I’d also love this postmodern Japanese mystery. I did not. In fact, I threw the book across the room (Sorry, Raj). Yes, it started out in a very hardboiled style with a scarred narrator searching for a missing person, er, sheep (or maybe both). Weird, wonderful. But by the end, the mystery wasn’t really solved, not in any satisfactory way. Sure, I knew more about the sheep and the missing friend, but I also knew less. I felt tricked. I had expected something different, perhaps some feeling of mastery or order that we get when most mysteries are resolved. I picked up the book and read it again, angry. I have read it many times since. I was tricked! I love that trick. Since then, I’ve come to seek out books that I call Unresolved Mysteries, stories that borrow from the detective genres, then go a little crazy without ever tying things up in neat bows. My novel The Fact Checker follows a magazine-nitpicker-turned-hapless-detective through a series of misadventures concerning secret eating clubs, anarchist parties, and cultish farms. It owes a lot to these off-kilter detective stories. It even has a mysterious sheep (Thanks, Haruki). Perhaps I like these books because, in life, mysteries don’t begin and end with who-done-it. Everything worthwhile is a mystery, and nothing is ever resolved. Books don’t have to be “postmodern” to remind us of this. Noir has always been pointing to the strange unknowables lurking in the everyday. Raymond Chandler, for one, filled his novels with as many descriptions of furniture and buildings as he did of clues. Are they clues? (Yes!) I often think of a moment in The Lady in the Lake. Philip Marlowe is watching the house of a doctor who happens to live across the street from a suspect. The doctor is not yet a suspect himself, but Marlowe can’t help but watch his every move: “He was on the telephone now, not talking, holding it to his ear, smoking and waiting. Then he leaned forward as you do when the voice comes back, listened, hung up and wrote something on a pad in front of him. Then a heavy book with yellow sides appeared on his desk and he opened it just about in the middle. While he was doing this he gave one quick look out of the window, straight at the Chrysler.” Marlowe thinks there is something suspicious about him, but what? Suddenly he switches tone: “Doctors make many phone calls, talk to many people. Doctors look out of their front windows, doctors frown, doctors show nervousness, doctors have things on their mind and show the strain. Doctors are just people, born to sorrow, fighting the long grim fight like the rest of us.” It’s a strange moment: Chandler’s plot-driven surveillance swerves into metaphysical empathy. Then he moves back: “But there was something about the way this one behaved that intrigued me. I looked at my watch, decided it was time to get something to eat, lit another cigarette and didn’t move.” Is surveillance just a form of being nosy? In other words, is it like reading a detective story? Finally, is the real mystery: What are other people? I’ve put together a list of Unresolved Mystery books that ask that question in different ways. What are other people? A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami A divorced advertising copywriter and his girlfriend with magical ears set off to Hokkaido in search of a missing sheep and the narrator’s Bohemian best friend. Stuff blows up. Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen A psychiatrist believes that his wife has been replaced by an exact replica whom he calls the simulacrum. He also indulges in a meteorological conspiracy theory related to the Doppler effect which sends him on a quixotic quest to Argentina while his wife searches for him. It’s a brilliantly funny, tender, and strange portrait of knowing and unknowing, of intimacy and its limits. Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marías I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to reveal the premise of this book which is laid out in the first chapter, but if you don’t want to know it, stop reading here and start the book. The beginning is amazing! The narrator is on a date at the apartment of a married woman – her young son is sleeping in the next room – when she dies in his arms. The rest of the novel is an obsessive surveillance of the dead woman’s family. If you have not read Marías, whose sentences unfold in erudite stream-of-consciousness, qualifying, defining, redefining, and circling back on themselves, this is a good place to start. It’s like a really suspicious Proust stuck inside a thriller. Riverman by Ben McGrath In the only nonfiction book on this list, McGrath befriends a vagabond canoeist on the Hudson River. When authorities find his canoe overturned (but no body) in North Carolina, McGrath investigates. He traces the life and wanderings of Dick Conant, a charismatic eccentric, and all the people he met on his watery way. While we never really solve the riddle of Conant, we get a portrait, alternately heartening and disturbing, of America and its castoffs. Memento Mori by Muriel Spark “Remember you must die.” This is the message that a mysterious voice delivers to a variety of old people in Spark’s crazy 1959 novel. An inspector is on the case, but for what? The message is true! But, as the inspector says toward the end “If you look for one thing… you frequently find another.” Here we find sociological insight, a comedy of manners, and death. Death is everywhere. A Separation by Katie Kitamura After the narrator’s estranged husband disappears, she travels to a Greek island to track him down, or, rather, to wait for him. She doesn’t do much tracking. Instead, the narrator muses, in cool, cutting tones, on the forest fires and class resentment around her and her missing man. She feels the chasm between them: “between two people there will always be room for surprises and misapprehensions, things that cannot be explained.” In the end, nothing is fully explained. “All deaths,” the narrator tells us, “are unresolved.” The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler This one is a totally resolved mystery. Marlowe gets his man, or actually that man is randomly shot by the military, we think. Meanwhile, the women who keep masquerading as other women are all sorted out. One corpse is revealed to be another corpse while a second corpse is the first corpse. Wait. What? *** View the full article

Living on 151st Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive in 1973, there were more than a few shops in the community where chattering kids bought all types of cavity inducing treats. My favorite spot was Jesus’ Candy Store, where the Hispanic owner and his wife watched over us kids as though they were our surrogate parents. Jesus’ place overflowed with toys, school supplies, Spalding rubber balls, comic books, chips for Skully tops and, of course, candy. However, Jesus didn’t unlock his door until the afternoon, leaving the morning trade wide open. In the summer of 1973 a new shop opened on Broadway owned and run by an overweight brother man named Jesse Powell. His store was minimalistic in comparison to Jesus’, but he opened at 7 AM. Weighing about 300 pounds, Jesse sat on a strong stool behind the counter. Nailed to the wall behind him was an album cover, but many years passed before I realized that it was the cover to his album It’s Party Time With Jesse Powell (1962). In the photo he wore a suit, his hair conked and sharp as a tack. Jesse had once been semi-famous saxophone player who had toured with Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie before giving it up to open a sweet shop on Sugar Hill. From where he sat, Jesse could see downtown traffic moving steadily as kids played. Sometimes Jesse’s wife Maxine was in the store helping. She was a tall, friendly woman with long blonde hair who had hippy vibes. Jesse was obviously years older than Maxine, and the couple had a son and a daughter. My homeboy and former next-door neighbor Darryl Lawson recalls Jesse’s car was usually parked in front of the store. “When he got in that Cadillac, it just leaned over to the side,” Lawson laughed. In the mornings, on my way to St. Catherine’s grammar school three blocks away, the store would be packed with school children stocking up on sweets that had to last the day. Rowdy kids from my 4th grade class would be buying Now & Later, Mary Jane, Charms Blow Pops, Fun Dips and other brands that they buried in their book bags to sneak eat during class. A few friends were into sports, and they bought stacks of baseball, football and basketball cards that were produced by the Topps Company out of Brooklyn. For those too young to remember, Wacky Packages was a back in the day craze – irreverent stickers mocking commercial products in the same way MAD magazine parodied popular culture. The Wacky parodies included Weakies Cereal (Breakfast of Chumps), Liptorn Soup, Jail-O (Sing-Sing’s Favorite Desert) and many others. The creator of Wacky Packages was underground comic artist and illustrator Art Spiegelman, who introduced them to the company in 1967. “It was printed cardboard with a gummed back,” artist Jay Lynch, who too contributed to the product, wrote in a 2016 issue of Comic Book Creator. “The kids would punch out the product images and lick the back to stick’em on stuff. But the Wacky Packs didn’t really take off big until the early ‘70s, when Topp’s began printing them on peel-back-pressure-sensitized sticker paper.” Spiegelman came of age in the EC era when publisher William Gaines launched the infamous humor comic. Almost two decades later Spiegelman made history as the first comic book artist to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the graphic novel Maus in 1992. He also edited the cutting edge graphic arts magazine RAW with his wife Françoise Mouly. “As a child, Spiegelman was obsessed with MAD magazine and its founding editor, cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman,” Arie Kaplan wrote in “MAD Maus,” an essay in the Jewish Review of Books. “It is easy to look at (Harvey) Kurtzman’s early MAD and see cheap, disposable children’s entertainment. But MAD was the holy grail of subversive kid lit for the generation that came of age during the 1950s and 1960s.” Artists Jack Davis and Wally Wood, both former EC cartoonists, also contributed to Wacky Packages. Later, Kaplan quoted Spiegelman’s memoir essay in MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic: “My Topps Bubblegum job consisted of feeding back my MAD lessons to another generation in the form of Wacky Packages… sometimes illustrated by the same artists—my childhood idols!—that Kurtzman collaborated with at MAD.” Selling for five-cents the Wacky Packys (as we called them above 145th Street) soon became a city-wide sensation that included news reports and a cover story in New York magazine, a goofy tongue-in-cheek feature that was as informative as it was condescending. Wacky Packs: New Fad for the Children of the Skeptical Seventies was published on October 1, 1973 and basically attributed the stickers’ success to cynical children living through the age of Watergate hearings and hating everything their parents loved (and respected). Personally I liked them simply because they were funny as hell. Released the same year as the offbeat DC comic horror Plop!, which was also inspired by MAD, sick humor was in and kids loved it. According to Jay Lynch’s article “The Wacky Pack Men,” they worked out of an office located in the Brooklyn Navy Yards with a team that consisted of future underground and strip artist Bill Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead), writer Stan Hart (Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In) and illustrator Norman Saunders, who did the final paintings from Lynch and Spiegelman’s layouts. Saunders was a respected artist who had painted hundreds of pulp magazine and paperback covers. He’d also been the artist been Topp’s popular Mars Attack in 1960. * One Saturday afternoon my stepfather Carlos stopped by the apartment to drop off a color TV for our living-room. My brother and I got him to agree to take us to the store for candy. When we walked into Jesse’s shop, he and Daddy glanced at one another and erupted in a joyful noise. The two men screamed each other’s name and shook hands. “What you doing over this way Carl?” Daddy laughed. “My wife lives around the corner. Just came over here to get the kids some candy.” “These your boys?” Jesse asked. “Sure are,” Daddy replied. Though he’d been in America for decades, his Puerto Rican accent was thicker than Guava slices. “Show Mr. Jesse what you want.” Me and little bro Perky both pointed to the Wacky red box inside the glass counter. Daddy bought us five each, which made us kid rich, our pockets bulging with stickers. After Jesse found out that he knew my father, he was a bit nicer to me and baby brother, sliding us an extra Wacky Package whenever we bought a few. However, two incidents occurred that soon put an end to my visits to Jesse’s. The first was his purchase of a mean Doberman Pinscher that he kept behind the counter. Perhaps someone tried to rob the store or the dog was supposed to be a deterrent for criminals, but that canine scared me to death. The other happened at St. Catherine where a crew of upper classmen went crazy and stuck Wacky Package stickers on their desks, on the walls and the lunchroom tables. I’m sure the school’s custodian Mr. Cafiero must’ve blown his top which led to Principal Sister Mary Riley banning the product completely. “Anyone seen with these Packys will be suspended for three days,” she said. Evidently the Wacky fad faded, and though the Topps Company continued to make the product for decades, most of kids I knew stopped buying them. These days there exists a large collectors market with fans selling rolls of stickers and unopened packages online. View the full article

“Wow, it was a page-turner.” “I stayed up all night reading it.” “No idea what would happen—I couldn’t put it down!” Comments about my recent thriller? Well, possibly, but in fact, these were reactions to my memoir about my experience founding Comedy Central (Constant Comedy: How I Started Comedy Central and Lost My Sense of Humor, Ulysses Press, 2022). There are no chase scenes, no shootouts, just people in a television company undertaking a big project. It doesn’t sound very thrilling, so how did I get it to read like a thriller? And why would I want to? Telling stories about our experiences is what most of us do all the time. Now and then the story falls so flat that someone comments sarcastically, “Good story…” When standing in front of a group telling a story, we want our audience to listen attentively, so we embellish, use humor, gesticulate, and act the whole thing out in our attempt to engage the listeners. Writing creative non-fiction requires skilled storytelling techniques as well. It’s not enough to give “just the facts, ma’am.” Below are five techniques found in fiction that I use to hold my readers in my creative non-fiction writing. 1. Use Cliffhangers If you’re anything like me, you find it convenient to read until the end of a section before you put the book aside. But if you absolutely need to know what happens next, you turn the page. Keeping the reader turning pages is a must for thriller writers and I’ve found it’s also a great technique for non-fiction. In Constant Comedy, many chapters end with being told an all-comedy channel would never work, or that something has gone wrong and we’d have to shut the channel down, or just that things weren’t going well, as in the chapter ending below: “When Dom didn’t laugh at my joke, I flushed, not out of embarrassment, but from a sense of dread. Something was bound to go wrong. I just didn’t know what it was. I was about to find out.” 2. Find Interesting Ways to Describe Your Feelings When I’m writing a memoir, my first draft is often full of lazy descriptions of how I was feeling: I felt terrible, I felt lonely, I was frustrated. So instead of leaving those, I try and integrate clues about my feelings into the scene. I’m a big believer in using dialog in both fiction and non-fiction. So, for example, instead of writing that I felt miserable, I might have someone say, “Man, you look so miserable I just want to give you a hug.” 3. Avoid Exposition Nothing slows a story down like long passages of exposition, so I avoid it. Of course, there are times, like when you are setting a scene, when you just want to get the critical information out of the way. While there are ways to make exposition interesting, remember that creative writing class chestnut, “Show, don’t tell.” It’s a guideline rather than a rule, but whether you are writing a thriller or a memoir, it’s worth keeping in mind. 4. Make Every Scene Interesting I keep a copy of Elmore Leonard’s “Ten Rules of Good Writing” taped to the wall above my desk. Rule number 10 is my favorite: “Leave Out the Parts That Readers Tend to Skip.” My own corollary to this rule is, “Find a way to make every scene or description you write interesting.” In a thriller, that means eliminating long stretches where not much is happening and instead making sure the action ramps up before your reader has the urge to skip ahead. When I write memoir, if some of what I’ve written is putting me to sleep, I make sure to go back and liven it up somehow. I start with a checklist of things to add, including dialog, humor, and using metaphors and similes. If nothing seems to help, I consider cutting the section altogether. 5. Raise the Stakes One lesson in storytelling that I learned when I did improvisational comedy was that it was every performer’s job to raise the stakes. Consider an improvised sketch that begins with a husband scrambling to find his wallet. That’s a relatable setup, but not all that interesting. If the improvisor playing his wife raises the stakes by saying, “Honey, just so you know, I put our winning lottery ticket in your wallet for safekeeping,” the scene had added depth, possibility, and dramatic tension. Continually raising the stakes makes the sketch more interesting and, hopefully, presents more comic opportunities. In mysteries and thrillers, what’s at stake is often a matter of life and death, and action, chase scenes, and gunplay all keep the reader immersed in the story. Of course, not all of us experience those things in real life, so our creative non-fiction needs to find ways to make the stakes seem high. In Constant Comedy, I often reminded the reader what was at stake for me: my job, career, self-esteem, and the fear of colossal failure; I endeavored to make those stakes resonate by pointing out that I had a mortgage and a family, so losing my job would be a catastrophe, and failure wouldn’t enhance my resume if I needed to find a new job. So, make sure whatever’s at stake, even if it’s not life and death, is sufficiently amped up. I know I said five techniques, but here’s a sixth. Surprise! 6. Secrets, Surprises, and Twists. Readers love secrets, surprises, and twists in their mysteries and thrillers, and these are also very satisfying in creative non-fiction. When writing memoir, think about what information you can withhold in such a way that, when revealed, might make the reader jump. Often this is something that you were surprised by, like a bequest from a wealthy distant family member you’d never met, or running into an old boyfriend you thought had moved abroad. Secrets, surprises, and twists sometimes show up in real life. Identifying them as such when writing non-fiction can help you to structure a more captivating story. This gives you an idea of the tools I use to make my creative non-fiction writing as exciting as a thriller. Keep them in mind the next time you sit down to write. Your readers will love you for it. *** View the full article

I drank the high school English teacher and college lit prof Kool-Aid from jump. Never mind the glitzy-gauze then circus bigtop film adaptations. This was the great American Novel. One term paper and I was done with it and frankly neither the story nor its Minnesota author had anything in common with me but Princeton and his exposé thereof, This Side of Paradise. Likewise, paeons to F. Scott Fitzgerald from my mystery idols didn’t find much purchase with me as I began my own writing journey. “He was a dream writer and my master,” gushed hard-ass Ross McDonald. Great. “It’s a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite,” opined Raymond Chandler. So? “Hemingway, Dos Passos and Fitzgerald,” mused my man Chester Himes. Cool. And indeed, to a drunk Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett—about as anti-West Egg and Tom Buchanan oligarch as one could get—scolded, “Why don’t you go back to bullying Fitzgerald? Too bad he doesn’t know how good he is. The best.” Interesting, but is he one of you? One of “us?” But then came Hoya professor and Fitzgerald scholar Maureen Corrigan’s book And So We Read On, How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures (note the play on Nick Carraway’s hopeless words at the novel’s end). And recently, Lisa Levy’s essay here in Crimereads. These critical flexes put me on my heels. Is The Great Gatsby a literary Tootsie-Pop…a crime story buried in the Great American Novel? Well, Levy says it’s all noir, citing Laura Lippmann’s definition wherein “Dreamers become schemers.” Levy even dips a toe into my genre, quoting a character from HBO’s “The Wire” speaking to real-life crime master Richard Price (playing a prison lit teacher): “Gatsby, he did what he did. Because he wasn’t ready to get real with the story, shit caught up to him.” Hell, look at Gatsby’s killer Wilson and his wife Myrtle, scheming and hustling in Queens, home of the ash heaps and landfills as Dr. Echelberger peers on, unblinking. “Fitzgerald’s writing might be soft-scrambled rather than hardboiled, but the argument for a reading of Gatsby as noir is complex and compelling.” Sure, Corrigan’s deeper dive illuminated themes of the deception and destructive self-delusion. Yet evidence of Gatsby’s crime pedigree was common sense: “Fitzgerald chose to make Gatsby a gangster.” Moreover, the man’s very name “Gat” was slang for gun and remains so for a nine-millie in some communities. The obscure 1949 film adaption based on George Cukor’s 1925 stage version has Alan Ladd in full film noir trenchcoat gear, his crew in tow, toting a smoking Tommy Gun…with Daisy filling the femme fatale trope. No accident, as this was how the story was perceived a century ago: a Jazz Age patina encrusting a bit of domestic suspense or telenovela longing, fakery, rage, lust making people do base things. Indeed, Corrigan shows how, in addition to The Curious Case of Benjiman Button, Fitzgerald published mystery and proto-psychological thriller short fiction, pre-Gatsby and even pre-Princeton as a sort of warm-up to novel-crafting. Case closed? Not quite. Okay, the novel’s a Tootsie-Roll, I’ll admit—yet what was truly the chewy center and what was candy? I began to look at Gatsby as Fitzgerald’s stylized, slightly sterilized selfie of that moment in America, his true “echo” of the “Jazz Age.” And that moment wasn’t about flappers, flivvers, gin and orgies. No wonder writers like Hammett and Himes could also find co-sanguinity. Instead, the “patina” was the Roaring Twenties idyl, masking the bigotry, want and violence of the times. The “reality” as teased by Corrigan was that this man was laundering gangster blood money through the allegorically phony bond market (poor Nick’s chosen Wall Street hustle). He was a handsome vanilla front, a homunculus, an artifice beyond “James Gatz” …floating above the blood and bullets on the street until a bullet claimed him. “Whiteboy Rick” with a better wardrobe. Michael Fassbender in Cormac McCarthy’s The Counselor; Bendini Lambert & Lock in Grisham’s The Firm. Wolfsheim, with his dental cufflinks, is real-life Arnold Rothstein viewed through Fitzgerald’s soft filter. Beneath the Tom Buchanans and even the Midwestern Fitzgeralds were huddled masses of immigrants who bore as parasites Rothstein’s mentors Jack Zelig and Kid Twist. Rothstein built on their legacy to invent a hedge fund form of mobstering: laundering money earned from thuggery—heroin and opium, gambling, brothels, hijacking—through legit enterprises with a return-on-investment. With Prohibition the model went super-nova. Rothstein’s bloodthirsty contractors were “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer, “Lepke” Burkhalter, Johnny Torrio; his eager proteges were Meyer Lansky, Benny Siegel. And he mentored Lansky’s young Italian friends—boys named Luciano, Costello, Capone. He taught them how to dress and how to topple the old-world farts who’d been his clients—Masseria, Maranzano, Colosimo. All this while innocent Italian immigrants endured slums and abuse: lynchings in New Orleans, hatred as exemplified by the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Yet was Wolfsheim more diabolical than Dan Cody, the young Gatz’s first mentor? Cody gouged copper from the bowels of West. Yes, on the backs of miners and the poor like young Gatz’s own family, on the land of exterminated indigenous people, or where Mexican mestizos were expelled, abused, lynched… …and speaking of lynching, what of the inventors of Jazz? During the First World War, Gatsby/Fitzgerald was stationed in the brutal Jim Crow South, from which huge numbers of black families were escaping in the Great Migration north. This Jazz Age witnessed thousands of Klansmen marching proudly down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. This Jazz Age suffered murderous race riots, from the South to Chicago and Indianapolis. It was Rosewood, it was Tulsa. It was thousands of men, women and children forced into chain gangs or peonage servitude. Lynched, raped, even burned at the stake for attempting to vote, for a reckless look. And yet the suffering begat blackfolk’s musical gift to a nation that shunned or reviled them. Just so Gatsby could bait Daisy with parties. A soundtrack to excess, murder and graft. Indeed, Arnold Rothstein bankrolled countervailing black criminals of Gatsby’s Jazz Age Harlem: Madame Stephanie St. Clair and her teenage enforcer Bumpy Johnson, or Caspar Holstein, the Bolito King. Outside of West and East Egg, most people didn’t have the luxury of dreams. Only survival. For the ones who morphed into thugs, mob bankers, murders, swindlers—their schemes begat hustles, violence or peddled flesh, weed, blow, heroin, booze…and now fentanyl, pills, crypto-grifts. Who says crime doesn’t pay…so long as it allows you to dream, for it’s means to make those dreams come true. The only difference between Gatsby and such bad folk— expounded on through Fitzgerald’s poetry—is that Gatsby’s dream was the antecedent to the ugliness of the times, rather than the product. Aspiration, packaged in Daisy, was his obsession, not the trappings or tools. He could have had Tom Buchanan wacked in a drive-by at the Yale Club. He didn’t. His dream was deeper, and he died for it. The English teachers and the lit profs weren’t deceiving us—they merely got us tangled up in studying the dream. Accordingly, this literary Tootsie-Pop is not a crime story chewy center surrounded by the candied Great American Novel. Just the opposite. Fitzgerald wrote the Great American Novel…and buried in another American construct. A crime story. I’m convinced… *** View the full article

FIRST ASSIGNMENT: write your story statement. Arlie Wynne hoped that starting over at a new university in Ocean Grove, California would give her a quiet, uneventful life after the chaos she left behind at UCLA. She’s stayed off social media and resisted cyberstalking anyone from her past life. She’s kept her focus on her homework and her waitressing job. So it just isn’t fair when the groom at the worst bachelor party ever turns out to be her ex. And although she’s often wished him dead, she finds herself trying, and failing to save his life. She’s made all the smart choices, lately, and now she’s the one accused of murder. Twice. Preferring to rely only on herself, she’s reluctant to accept help. But there’s the handsome nepo baby who joined in her failed CPR attempts, along with his charming marine biologist grandmother. And the large, grumpy librarian who, apparently, considers finding a murderer to be just another reference question. Since constantly adapting to fit in has only led to trouble, maybe she should finally listen to her own instincts about who to trust and when to speak out. But with a murderer on the loose, is now really the time to stay and fight, or should she just move on to the next new town? SECOND ASSIGNMENT: in 200 words or less, sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force in your story. Keep in mind their goals, their background, and the ways they react to the world about them. Nora Fox: More of a Marilla character, Nora is slow and thoughtful to Arlie’s quick to action and judgment. She is exactly who she appears to be, and doesn’t hide her opinions. Arlie needs Nora’s help to find the true killer, but she chafes at Nora’s structure and refusal to jump to conclusions. Nora’s past has led her to value security, predictability, knowledge, and comfort. She is willing to fight for justice, but she will only act as a last resort. She prefers to use her intellect and her connections with others to assist in the fight. Dan White: The murderer, has waited in the wings his whole life. Stepping in to his father’s job of financial advisor and overall life manager for the Doring family, he is sure his loyalty will eventually be repaid and his lifelong love of Barb Doring reciprocated. After all, he deserves it. But when Barb’s son Chet announces he is getting married, entitling him to the remainder of the family trust, Dan’s dreams are in danger. When he realizes a simple tweak to a bachelor party prank could save his job and allow him to play hero, he decides to finally take action. His murder plot is successful, but no one is reacting the way he imagined. Barb is doting on a newcomer and has no time for him. Chet’s fiancée is making demands and bringing unwanted attention to what should be private matters. That pesky librarian and the outsider he had hoped to pin Chet’s murder on are poking around where they don’t belong. And family secrets being revealed means he needs to kill again to secure his future with Barb. THIRD ASSIGNMENT: create a breakout title (list several options, not more than three, and revisit to edit as needed). Ask Me Anything Don’t Ask I would love to find something better! FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: - Read this NWOE article on comparables then return here. Develop two smart comparables for your novel. This is a good opportunity to immerse yourself in your chosen genre. Who compares to you? And why? The Postscript Murders by Elly Griffiths Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jessie Q. Sutanto Both of these authors write modern cozy-adjacent mysteries with a cast of diverse characters who become found family. Amateur sleuths combine their skills to provide justice when the regular channels fail. FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: write your own hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound following the format above. Though you may not have one now, keep in mind this is a great developmental tool. In other words, you best begin focusing on this if you're serious about commercial publication. Hoping to escape the drama of her recent past by moving to a new university in a quiet beach town, a young woman finds even more trouble when she is accused of killing her ex-boyfriend and another person she’d tried to forget, and must learn to trust her own instincts about others to save herself. SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: sketch out the conditions for the inner conflict your protagonist will have. Why will they feel in turmoil? Conflicted? Anxious? Sketch out one hypothetical scenario in the story wherein this would be the case--consider the trigger and the reaction. Conflict: A Navy brat who has lived all over the world, Arlie is great at reading the room and fitting in. Sometimes too well, so she’s not sure anymore who she is versus who she has adapted herself to be. The one time she let her true self shine through, calling out her frat-boy boyfriend for his potentially criminal treatment of young women, she is shunned on social media and in person. Determined to blend in and just get through her classes at her new school, she avoids attention and getting close to anyone, until she’s back in the spotlight and accused of murdering the very same ex she had hoped would die. Arlie bristles when she sees injustice, but she has promised herself she wouldn’t get involved in anything that wasn’t hers to do. Scene: Working her part-time job as a waitress, Arlie finds herself dealing with the frat-boy types she knew all to well at a bachelor party at the golf club bar. Listening to the crude jokes about the bride and enduring lude comments, she sucks it up and puts on a glowing smile instead of delivering the punch in the nose she knows they deserve. That never ends well. When the groom ends up being her ex, she wants to scream but doesn’t react, except to spill a glass of water on him. And when he falls to the ground with convulsions, she knows she can’t just watch. Her dad taught her to step up, so she has to try to save even his worthless life. When he dies anyway, Arlie wonders why she bothers and longs to crawl back into her dorm room bed. But when she’s accused of killing him, she knows she has to fight, no matter what the consequences. Next, likewise sketch a hypothetical scenario for the "secondary conflict" involving the social environment. Will this involve family? Friends? Associates? What is the nature of it? Lyle Rowan was the only other person at the bachelor party to step up and try to save Chet. He is charming and funny, and Arlie finds herself attracted to him. But she doesn’t trust her own instincts or anyone else, especially a handsome, charming, rich guy. The push and pull of Arlie’s feelings and inability to trust cause tension and conflict throughout the story, especially when Lyle could also be the murderer. Here are some of Arlie’s thoughts: Sure, this guy Lyle jumped in to help with CPR when no one else would. But he’s a nepo baby with a bad reputation, and grew up with Chet. Why should he be any different? He’s handsome and charming, and he knows it. Okay, he has spent his time learning to be a top-notch nature photographer instead of partying all the time like Chet. But he’s left two powerful women, an Oscar-nominated actress and a tennis player who beat Serina, at the altar. But he’s polite to his grandmother and fed me rather than griped when I was starving. He seems like he might actually be a nice guy. But I thought that about Chet once upon a time, didn’t I? Or did I just think he was fun and exciting? And that being seen with him would get me access to the best parties in LA? I saw the pecking order at UCLA and made my choice. I was as attracted to the glamour and the instant circle of “friends” in the top sororities as the next college freshman. I lightened my hair and scoured the internet for the right dresses and jewelry before I even landed in LA. So who was I to judge? Aunt Linda was always good at knocking some sense into me when my desire to fit in got bigger than my sense of right and wrong, but she’s gone. And I certainly can’t trust myself, let alone anyone else. FINAL ASSIGNMENT: sketch out your setting in detail. What makes it interesting enough, scene by scene, to allow for uniqueness and cinema in your narrative and story? Please don't simply repeat what you already have which may well be too quiet. You can change it. That's why you're here! Start now. Imagination is your best friend, and be aggressive with it. Ocean Grove, California looks like Mayberry on the beach. A tiny, quiet town nestled between Monterey and Carmel, few people even realize it exists, and just think it’s another neighborhood in Monterey if they think about it at all. But for centuries, there has been more going on here than meets the eye. Women have held roles from mayor to architect. And when they couldn’t wield direct power, they formed the Society of Helpful and Enquiring Women to get things done more discreetly. Tourists come to walk the gorgeous coastal trail and admire the charming bungalows, but most never realize the intricate structure of women supporting truth and justice that hold the town together. Ocean Grove Public Library has a reference desk like most public libraries, with the “Ask Me Anything” sign. But no other library has Nora Wolfe sitting like a queen on her throne, answering any question a patron dares to ask. Lost children have been found, cheating husbands exposed, and murders solved, at this desk. Except for the never-ending line at the reference desk, the library is quietly bustling like most small libraries. The large windows that overlook the bay in the reading room attract students and retirees. Story times and local history lectures are regularly scheduled. But Arlie quickly realizes that, more than any other library she’s been to, this is a place where she belongs. Nora’s home, aka the Society Clubhouse is a solid craftsman bungalow two blocks from the library. Owned by SHREW, the comfortable living and dining rooms on the first floor are where members meet. Filled with decades of well-build hand-me-down furniture centered around the huge tiled fireplace, these rooms contain photos of past members, books they’ve written, and memorabilia of member successes. Mitzi, Nora’s wife, reigns over the kitchen, providing food for meetings along with meals for the customers lucky enough to be on her weekly food delivery list. Mitzi is the best chef in town, but you have to be willing to eat what she’s in the mood to make. Nora and Mitzi live on the second floor, behind the bright red door few are invited to pass beyond. The third floor is available, according to Society charter, to those in need, for as long as that need exists. This is where Arlie ends up when she is unable to return to her dorm, in a cozy attic bedroom with a window seat that has peeks of the bay. Isla’s Shell House is Lyle’s grandmother’s house. Isla, a marine biologist who worked with Jacque Cousteau when she was younger, had it built for her on the coast in Cobble Beach by an architect friend in the 1960s. Small but perfectly designed for its environment, every room has a view of the ocean, and no space is wasted. When Arlie gets a chance to stay the night in the Pearl Room, she never wants to leave. Presidio University is the small university in Ocean Grove where Arlie enrolls after leaving UCLA. It is where her Aunt Linda went to college, and the reason her aunt brought her to Ocean Grove every summer. It is located at the top of the hill, furthest away from the ocean you can get in Ocean Grove, in the Grove part of town. Nestled high in the trees, PU is a world unto itself, where few students bother to venture into the rest of the quiet town. Due to her last minute decision to transfer, Arlie is stuck in a triple dorm room in one of the oldest dorms, on a floor full of freshman. As a transfer junior, she feels older than her years and overwhelmed by the chaotic energy of 18-year-olds on their own for the first time. Her roommates, best friends from Turlock, thinks she’s strange even before she’s accused of murder, and the college grapevine makes it impossible for Arlie to stay on campus once Chet is killed. Various Local Restaurants: Since most of the local restaurants are owned by one conglomerate and Arlie only works part-time, she is sent to various restaurants for her shifts, each with different vibes and staff expectations. La Rue is quiet and French. Shenanigans, the golf bar, is rowdy and loud. Arlie’s skills at reading a room and adapting enable her to work at both, and other restaurants, without a thought. And getting to know staff gives her insight from locals that she otherwise wouldn’t have. The Coastal Trails through Ocean Grove and Cobble Beach are Arlie’s escape. She can run for miles, get away from the dorm drama, and hold onto her memories of her many visits here with her Aunt Linda. Often the trails are bustling with tourists and bicyclists, but early in the morning or late at night, she can have them to herself, except for the occasional sea lion or pelican.

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A bullet on the music charts can make a recording career—“number seven with a bullet!” A bullet in the chamber of an assassin’s gun can cost a young man his dreams of a career in the music business. A bullet scooped up from a homemade target range can bring a killer to justice. Late on the evening of March 9, 1989, Kevin Hughes, twenty-three, chart director at Cash Box magazine (a music industry trade publication competing with Billboard), was hanging out with Sammy Sadler, a recording artist and promoter associated with Evergreen Records. They were leaving the Evergreen offices just before 10:30 when a man dressed in black stepped from the shadows and opened fire. Sadler was settling into Hughes’s car when he took the first round in the arm and shoulder. Hughes fled south on 16th Avenue, but two bullets in the back brought him down. The shooter left Sadler wounded but alive and hobbled to where Hughes lay, fired two rounds into the back of his victim’s head, and disappeared into the shadows. Initial speculation about the murder ranged from a mugging gone wrong to a hit to protect some dark music business secret. The dark secret scenario came closest to the truth. Kevin Hughes was an honest man with a passion for the business of music, particularly for the metrics that go into creating chart rankings. He was responsible for receiving airplay information from radio stations and using that raw data to create the weekly charts. While other chart sources were making the move to computers, Cash Box continued to build charts essentially by hand, which opened the process to abuse. Chart fixing schemes took place in a variety of ways, but in a typical scenario, a starstruck country music wannabe (actual talent optional) would pay several thousand dollars to an individual to record and promote a song to radio stations. The producer/promoter would then pay personnel at some payola-friendly stations to exaggerate the number of times a song played in a given airplay reporting period, during which they might not have been spinning the record at all. Exaggerated reports landed songs on charts such as Cash Box’s Country Music Independent Chart even though nobody was playing or hearing them. When Kevin Hughes recognized that the charts he managed weren’t agreeing with his research, he began to take action. He dropped several of the stations he suspected were making false reports. This threatened to remove songs from chart positions already bought and paid for. Then, when it seemed Hughes was considering blowing the whistle on a scheme raking in significant under-the-table dollars, he was murdered on Nashville’s 16th Avenue South, part of famous Music Row. In March 1989, I’d been living in Nashville for eight years. I came to town to write songs and pursue a recording career. I arrived in the company of—and under a ten-year contract to—an amateur, possibly shady manager. He soon hooked us up with a guy who offered me a recording and publishing deal. Within a year, this Nashville guy maneuvered me out of the binding management contract and into five-year contracts with him. We recorded two albums’ worth of my music, in 1982 and 1984, neither of which saw the light of day. When my five-year contract expired, I walked away from that situation but not from Nashville, spending the next few years continuing to write songs, playing in bands, and working a succession of jobs (retail clerk at Cat’s Records, cleaner of swimming pools, driver of the equipment truck for a country music star, and staff songwriter for a couple of other small music publishing companies). To my knowledge I was never directly caught up in the kind of scheme Kevin Hughes threatened to expose at Cash Box, but I suspect my producer/publisher worked close to that dark edge. Still, I was thrilled to live in Music City. During my time there one of my regular activities was walking 16th and 17th Avenues—Music Row—and imagining all the music and deals taking place in the Row’s record label offices, recording studios, and publishing houses. I think it more than likely that one of these walks took me by the Cash Box offices where Kevin Hughes worked. I might have even passed him on the sidewalk or stood behind him in line at the International Market near Belmont College, which we both briefly attended (but not at the same time). When I began writing my thriller, Streets of Nashville, more than thirty years later, the story I had in mind wasn’t that of a murdered young Cash Box chart director. Yet that death still haunted me. The novel begins with a fictionalized account of the attack on Hughes and Sadler. Then, fifteen days later, gunfire echoes again along the Row when four people are shot—three fatally. Tenderfoot songwriter Ezra MacRae—out on the town to celebrate the first good fortune he’s had with his songs—witnesses the triple homicide. But the masked gunman spares him. Why? My more mature reflections on that time shone a new light on the events of March 1989. Nashville was on the knife edge of uncertainty. As the digital age loomed, changes to Music Row’s traditional business practices—legal and illegal—were imminent. Crime was skyrocketing, even on the hallowed Row, where sidewalks began to fill with strangers—transients and tourists and starry-eyed hopefuls with guitars on their backs. The old facades of “Music City, U.S.A.” and “Athens of the South” cracked as Nashville exploded. By the time the 1989 murder of Kevin Hughes was solved, Nashville had become home to the NFL’s Tennessee Titans, the NHL’s Nashville Predators, and almost a quarter million more residents. In 2002, Nashville detectives working the Kevin Hughes cold case received a tip that destroyed the thirteen-year-old alibi of Richard F. “Tony” D’Antonio, who had been Cash Box’s chart director before Hughes. Investigators were led to a backyard target range where the ground was littered with years’ worth of bullets and casings. The informant had sold a .38 caliber handgun to D’Antonio the afternoon of the Hughes murder and promised to provide the alibi. A Nashville detective took a single scoop of bullet fragments to the lab and was shocked that within twenty-four hours one wadcutter bullet was determined to be a perfect match for those taken from Hughes’s body thirteen years before. While D’Antonio was finally convicted of the murder in 2003, however, he was believed to be only the executioner. Allegedly Chuck Dixon, record promoter and Cash Box executive, was the one who wanted Hughes dead for threatening his lucrative chart fixing revenue stream. But Dixon could not be tried, as he’d died of cirrhosis of the liver in December 2001. In January 1990, ten months after that fateful March, Robert Stack narrated the investigation and reenactment for Unsolved Mysteries. One of the interviewees was none other than Chuck Dixon, believed to be ultimately responsible for the death of Kevin Hughes. In a segment showing him sitting with crossed legs in a black leather armchair, he says of Hughes’s position as Cash Box chart director, “It’s a lot of work, and in my tenure as a promoter, I’ve been through probably twelve, fifteen, maybe even more chart directors. And [Hughes] was probably, overall, not only the best but the most fair.” Yet outside the minds of Dixon and D’Antonio, nothing was fair about that murder on Music Row. *** View the full article

I wish I could remember when I first read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time—I must have been around twenty—but I certainly remember how much I loved it, which has only grown with every reread. I had already become a serious reader of crime fiction, immersed in the works of contemporary crime writers in addition to the usual Golden Age suspects like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Still, I simply could not comprehend how a mystery writer had produced a book like The Daughter of Time, one perfectly attuned to my love of research, that upended traditional historical wisdom without devolving into outright conspiracy theory. One that featured a wonderful array of supporting characters who only entered a single room to pay court to an ailing detective recovering from a broken leg, bedridden and confined to that space. Imagine how it felt when readers first encountered The Daughter of Time in its year of publication, 1951. Detective fiction had certainly already bent traditional structures in all sorts of directions, whether through satire (think E. C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case, published in 1913), narrative misdirection (Agatha Christie’s still hotly debated 1926 Poirot tale, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), tone (the hard-boiled works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and Dorothy B. Hughes’s In A Lonely Place)—or by jettisoning order out of chaos altogether (any kind of noir, starting with James M. Cain’s 1934 debut, The Postman Always Rings Twice.) The genius of her fiction…is how well [it] explore[s] the ideas of narrative falsity and hidden truths, and the distance between the author and her characters. But a novel like this? Where the detective, Alan Grant, is desperately bored, in need of something to occupy his brain because he can’t go out into the world to do his actual job? Where a question that haunted Britain for centuries—did Richard III really kill his two young nephews, the princes in the tower, in a single-minded late-fifteenth century quest for power?—is actually, credibly solved? The Daughter of Time was a mystery novel like no other before, though plenty since have copied its irresistible structure: rather than a locked-room mystery in which the murder is an impossible crime, the detective is in (and becomes) the locked room, using cerebral means to reason his way into a solution to a genuine historical conundrum. It is, as the author Robert Barnard wrote, “an unrepeatable success,” one that has garnered innumerable accolades since its publication. Some of those accolades: Anthony Boucher, in his Criminals at Large column for The New York Times, deemed the book “one of the permanent classics in the detective field…one of the best, not of the year, but of all time.” Dorothy B. Hughes, in her capacity as a critic, called it “not only one of the most important mysteries of the year, but of all years of mystery.” The Crime Writers’ Association in the UK named The Daughter of Time its number one choice in The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time (1990), and Mystery Writers of America ranked the novel fourth in its own similar compendium in 1995. If I ever get around to formulating my own Top 100 list, The Daughter of Time will rank near the top—not only for quality, but for the sheer number of times I’ve reread it in the quarter-century since my initial discovery. Why do I keep going back? For the wondrous rush of tagging along as a centuries-dormant mystery is revived again, but also the prospect of unspooling another mystery at the novel’s heart: one about the author herself. * Let’s start with Josephine Tey’s name, which she adopted later in life. Elizabeth MacKintosh (1896–1952), born and raised in Inverness, Scotland, took it from her great-great-grandmother (her mother was also named Josephine). Tey was not MacKintosh’s first pseudonym, nor the best-known during her lifetime; each name she took on carved out a different identity wholly separate from her initial self as Elizabeth, or Beth. As Gordon Daviot, she wrote historical novels, short stories, poems, and radio dramas beginning in 1925, but her true calling was in playwriting. Her debut play, Richard of Bordeaux (1932), starring a young John Gielgud and a West End theater staple for the next two years, made Daviot famous—and it wasn’t exactly a secret that Daviot was a woman, whose face was sometimes advertised and who went about freely among friends under that name. Still, the Daviot pseudonym kept Beth MacKintosh deliberately under wraps. Daviot was all about performance; Beth stayed most of the year in Inverness caring for her ailing mother, and then, after her death, keeping house for her father. This hadn’t been her original intention, of course—she’d left Inverness in 1914, at the age of eighteen, to work as a physical education teacher (an experience she would mine for the 1946 standalone Miss Pym Disposes). But the outbreak of World War I, losing an early love to the battlefield, and a powerful sense of duty brought Beth back to her hometown, to which she would stay rooted for the rest of her life. Sequestered in Inverness, Beth still found a way to realize her writerly dreams, first as Daviot, and later as Josephine Tey. The latter pseudonym first emerged in 1936 with the publication of A Shilling for Candles—a follow-up to The Man in the Queue (1929), originally published as Daviot—but did not become her preferred publishing moniker for another decade, one which saw Beth visit her theater friends and peers in London, subsuming herself in a social whirl before returning to Scotland, where parental care and work—and a strong sense of privacy—took precedence. This sense of compartmentalization is what drove Beth to invent her mystery-writing pseudonym. Tey could publish novels and stay out of the publicity fray, merely offering up an author photo (or not) and scant biographical details to readers chiefly interested in the books. Daviot, by contrast, grew under pressure to become more of a public figure thanks to the demands of the stage. This made her something of a slippery figure, in conversation with but set apart from her crime-writing contemporaries. Readers would have to be content with judging the works, and Beth, as Tey, made certain that these works would include carefully plotted narratives, evocative settings, and diamond-precise prose. Consider the opening of The Daughter of Time, which sets matters up immediately and reveals Inspector Grant’s state of mind: Grant lay on his high white cot and stared at the ceiling. Stared at it with loathing. He knew by heart every last minute crack on its nice clean surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He had made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood: theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it. This paragraph lands with even more force after the pandemic year of 2020, when much of the world was shut inside, involuntarily educated on every facet, nook, and cranny of their living space. But anyone cloistered in convalescence will recognize the sense of tedium, the need to do something, anything, with one’s mind when all the usual methods have long since curdled, as a universal one. Even for those who had not encountered Inspector Grant in his prior outings—particularly his brief appearance in The Franchise Affair (1948) and To Love and Be Wise (1950), this paragraph makes clear this is a person worth spending significant readerly time with. Thankfully, Grant’s friend, the actress Marta Hallard, lands upon a brilliant suggestion: if everything in the present is boring, why not venture deep into the past? A vexing historical mystery ought to do, and Grant lands on the story of the two Princes in the Tower, allegedly confined to the Tower of London in 1483 after the death of their father, King Edward IV and subsequently murdered by their uncle, Richard III, who soon ascended the throne—and made infamous for his supposed villainy in Shakespeare’s play more than a century later. Grant is surprised at his own investment in solving the long-ago mystery, but “it did simplify things when you were just a policeman with a game leg and a concussed spine hunting up some information on dead and gone royalties to keep yourself from going crazy.” He even enlists a research assistant of sorts, the American academic and British Museum employee Brent Carradine, who is soon caught up in proving Richard III’s innocence as much as Grant is. Together, the two men not only explore what they believe didn’t happen—that the Princes were killed during Richard’s reign—but also how history is constructed, propagated, bent, and stretched and sanded over so much that lies eventually become presented as truth. And Grant, so long a convalescent, confesses that he is finally “feeling like a policeman. I’m thinking like a policeman. I’m asking myself the question that every policeman asks in every case of murder: who benefits?” The Daughter of Time takes hidden truths to a new level, one infused with a sense of post-modern fun. Far too many of the history books he reads can be dismissed with the epithet “Tonypandy,” Grant’s word for the kind of historical confabulations that accrue over time. History is a milieu that Grant, even after he goes through his investigation and lands on his theory of what really happened, can never fully comprehend. So, he would “go back to [Scotland] Yard, where murderers were murderers and what went for Cox went equally for Box.” That is Grant’s thinking. But is it Tey’s? Hardly so. The genius of her fiction, particularly the run of novels beginning with Miss Pym Disposes and ending with The Singing Sands, published a few months after her death in 1952, is how well they explore the ideas of narrative falsity and hidden truths, and the distance between the author and her characters. The barrister’s dogged pursuit of what he believes to be a false rape claim in The Franchise Affair (1948) would sit uncomfortably today if there wasn’t the nagging sense that Tey herself is toying with the reader, inviting them to identify a little too closely with the barrister and not enough with the girl. Tey slyly reinvents the story of Martin Guerre, one of impostors and those who wish to believe in them, even when it leads to murder, in Brat Farrar (1949) while in To Love and Be Wise (1950), she explores the concept of gender fluidity with such subtlety and care that it serves as a potential clue to why the male-coded Daviot pseudonym was so important to her. The Daughter of Time takes hidden truths to a new level, one infused with a sense of post-modern fun. As Tey’s biographer Jennifer Morag Henderson reveals in her exemplary 2015 biography, Grant knows about Richard III in the first place “because he saw Gordon Daviot’s Richard of Bordeaux (four times).” Marta Hallard grows anxious at the lack of new work from a playwright “concentrating on her detective fiction.” Topics like Mary Queen of Scots and the Covenanters—subjects of a play and biography, respectively, by Daviot—are also discussed. There is a sadder hidden truth as well: Tey wrote and published The Daughter of Time when she was becoming ill with cancer, a fact she revealed to almost no one at the time—leading to the shock of her friends and fans at her death on February 13, 1952. It was a life cut short, denying readers the more exemplary work Tey undoubtedly would have written had she lived longer. But the work we do have, and particularly The Daughter of Time, shows a writer in deep communion with what she thought and how she thought about it. That is the truest gift Josephine Tey continues to give readers old and new, and what a delight is in order for those about to experience her voice and style for the very first time, as I did a quarter-century ago. __________________________________ Excerpted from Sarah Weinman’s forward to The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. Forward Copyright © 2025 by Sarah Weinman. Copyright © 1951 by Elizabeth MacKintosh. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. View the full article

It is a truism that children imitate. You do what you see. If I had grown up the child of an electrician, possibly I would be rewiring something right now, rather than writing this essay, but as the child of a mystery writer… here I am. My mom is Paula Gosling, who published 15 mysteries during her career, both series with returning detectives and stand-alone novels. She was pretty successful, she won the Gold Dagger (the British Crime Writers Association’s top award), the John Creasey award for best first crime novel, and one of her books was turned into not one, but two absolutely terrible movies. (Fair Game, featuring Cindy Crawford and Cobra, a cult classic with Sylvester Stallone, which featured an axe-wielding biker gang that I can assure you was NOWHERE in the novel). She worked for thirty years and retired quite happily, having supported us with her work, and ready to hang up her keyboard. She says she ran out of things to say. However, while her career success was pleasing and interesting to watch, that’s not where her main influence lay. The first and most important thing I learned was that writing is a job, one that you do every day, more or less, and that it’s hard. Fun, sure. Rewarding, occasionally. But hard. And that if you’re a writer you’re going to write whether you like it or not, and maybe you’ll get lucky and get published, but it’s not guaranteed. And that secondly, if you’re a crime writer, you’re a bit bananas. A weirdo, albeit gently. Let me be clear. My mother was, and is, a sweet and charming woman. However, she and her crime writing friends tended to look at the world as a constant, teeming pond of potential murder and violence. I would often find her sitting with the newspaper, gazing into space, because the brief overview of a recent death had sent her into a reverie of speculation. Why was the fishmonger found in the library? Why were there chopsticks in his pocket? And why were his hands so clean? It wasn’t even that she especially liked murder, or violence, she wrote ‘cozies’ because she was pretty squeamish actually, but she was…deeply interested. She would watch people talking to each other and narrow her eyes. Possibly they were planning a hit. She made friends with policemen whenever possible, and asked our doctor about decomposition after he’d checked us for chicken pox. She liked puzzles and weird facts and wore a poison ring (whose little compartment she would demonstrate gleefully). She was…a little strange. Her work also meant, on a practical level, that there were a lot of questionable books in the house, books we had ready access to. Books about forensics. Books about weaponry. Books about autopsies (with pictures, and yes, now I know what someone looks like when they’ve been hit by a train, don’t google it). She loved to research, to get the details right. She essentially retired before the internet became what it is, so everything was at the library, and we spent a lot of time in the children’s section while she requested books that made the librarians look at her strangely. And of course we read mysteries. Our house was full to bursting with books, because along with everything else our Mom was a Book Hoarder. So we read Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout at al, alongside Flat Stanley and the Oz books. It was a childhood filled with wonder, but also with violent, unexpected death. When I started writing novels myself, my first was a mystery. It was dreadful, truly. I believe there were hidden passages and a twist that was foreshadowed from the dedication onwards. Then I wrote a mystery that was better, but in the process realized that plotting a crime and then hiding it, which is essentially the task at hand for a mystery writer, was difficult, and not my strong suit. So I switched, like the lazy candy-ass I am, to what I call domestic fiction: light-hearted novels about real life, about love, about family and children and romance. I wrote what I knew, and I got lucky and got published. But the mystery haunted me, and with every book I published I would ask my editor if we could work on it…and she would kindly say no. My agent concurred: The rom coms, she said, are going great, stick with what’s working. So I did. And then the market changed, as markets will, and Richard Osman’s books came out, and Only Murders in the Building was successful, and suddenly the window for my mystery opened. I went back and completely rewrote it. About fifteen times. I hired a friend of mine, a very successful TV writer, to read it and make suggestions about the plot. It was enormously helpful. I struggled and stuck post cards on a board and tried to make everything fit. Having pushed so hard to be able to write a mystery, I started to question my own sanity. But I remembered my mom. She was unusual, she talked openly about how to get away with murder, but she never quit. She would have long conversations with my step-dad, overheard in the kitchen, in the living room, through their bedroom door, about the plot. He was not a writer, but he would make suggestions, or ask questions, and she would push through and make it all work. I knew it was supposed to be challenging, so I kept going and got as much help as I could. I also stuck with my strengths, creating strong characters first and building the crime around them. Hopefully, it works. After all is said and done, writing crime fiction was clearly something I was predisposed to do, and I have my mom to thank for that. I hope she enjoys my first mystery as much as I enjoyed reading hers. And when I look at my kids, watching me go through this process, I can safely assume they think I’m weird too. It’s ok, it runs in the family. *** View the full article

Much has been written about Villanelle, the mischievous, fashionable millennial murderer at the center of BBC America’s beloved series Killing Eve. Villanelle (Jodie Comer) contains multitudes: she is spunky and surly, mischievous and malicious, sardonic and sentimental. Mostly, though, she’s self-obsessed, in constant pursuit of a lifestyle which affords her the maximum amount of enjoyment. Villanelle is a psychopath, employed as an assassin by an international criminal organization which pays her well—allowing her to have the highly stylish life she wants. But killing people is not only her job, it is also her pleasure; throughout the season, she resembles an assassin less than a serial killer. And her flamboyant, creative murders catch the eye of Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh), a flustered MI6 agent with whom Villanelle becomes infatuated. As the show progresses, Eve becomes as obsessed with the idea of catching Villanelle as much as Villanelle becomes obsessed with the idea of Eve catching her. Season One plays with a cat-and-mouse template, with Eve chasing Villanelle while Villanelle tries to get as close as possible to Eve without risking capture. The Second season draws the two women together more directly than the first, allows them to have the romantic and sexual relationship teased throughout Season One. Season Three splits the women apart again and shows them each attempting to live lower-profile lives independently, and Season Four offers Villainelle the dangling carrot of moral redemption. But I want to dwell on Season Two for a bit. These women have to work together, it turns out, to handle another female assassin hired by the criminal organization that has by now effectively sacked Villanelle. While the fatigued and stressed Eve has grown accustomed to Villanelle’s histrionics, she is startled to find that the new killer is Villanelle’s antithesis: stealthy, pristine, minimalist, and effectively invisible. For these reasons, Eve’s team nicknames this killer “The Ghost.” And the addition of the Ghost becomes essential in illuminating one of the show’s key practices: dividing all its female characters into two camps—women who stand out in crowds, and women who blend in. This organization is one aspect of Killing Eve’s larger investment in reading female power as directly related to noticeability. The show offers the (sad) determination that women who are the most glamourous also achieve the most power. But beyond this, specifically by arranging Eve and Villanelle as opposites, the show is able to redefine what “glamour” and “visibility” actually derive from—an appreciation of, and instinct to preserve, the self above all else. Villanelle lives in a “chic as shit” Parisian apartment (Eve’s words), owns a giant wardrobe of exquisite clothes, and has endless photoshoot-ready hairstyles. The most fundamental breakdown between the two women in Killing Eve is that Villanelle constantly practices “self-care” while Eve absolutely does not (it might be said that Eve herself, with her sacrificially-intense work ethic, is what’s killing Eve). Killing Eve renders self-care (in all its forms, from skincare routines to wearing beautiful clothes) as a kind of high-stakes gamesmanship—one that ensures attention, which then allows for manipulation, control, and power. Simply, characters who garner the most attention for being put-together and fashionable are the show’s most commanding. One such woman is Eve’s indomitable boss, Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw) a steely-eyed, elegant executive who wears unwrinkled blouses and impeccable car coats. When seeing Carolyn one morning before a meeting, Eve blurts out, “How do you always look so good? I mean, do you even sleep?” Without missing a beat, Carolyn offers, in complete deadpan: “It’s my moisturizer. It’s made of pig’s placenta. Costs a fortune, smells like arse, but it is exceedingly effective.” Then she turns and walks away. Like Villanelle, Carolyn values her own aesthetic, enough to use a disgusting, expensive product in order to perfect herself. And Carolyn’s demystification of her beauty routine is additionally a power move—in breaking down how she is able to look so good, she dwells on the product’s qualities that would prevent its mainstream assimilation. Carolyn’s particular visibility is clearly linked to her status, and reminds Eve that Carolyn is above her. The show reveals the (exhausting) labor and complicated measures taken by women to attempt to become their most “glamorous,” but it plays with “glamour” as appearing effortlessly attainable for some while seeming strenuous and obtuse for others—revealing, by these different levels of participation, a cultural reading of power accessibility. True female power, the show interprets, lies in the ability to naturally appear alluring—and this is highly desirable. “I don’t mind smelling like arse,” Eve calls to Carolyn from behind her, after Carolyn describes the moisturizer and walks away. “I’ll send you the link,” says Carolyn casually. When Villanelle is in Amsterdam, relaxing at a table overlooking the water, wearing a light pink shirt tied at her midriff and a sweeping tapestry of a skirt, which she’s paired with a pair of large gold earrings, she is approached by a well-dressed young woman, who tells her she looks amazing. “Can I take a picture of you for my Instagram?” the woman asks Villanelle. “No, of course not,” Villanelle barks, sending the woman away. Extravagant and photogenic as she is, Villanelle dresses for herself, alone. The show features countless shots of her, triumphant after completing a job, carrying designer shopping bags, and trying on her spoils—but these constitute her everyday wear, including what she wears when she’s totally by herself. But it is only by wanting to look spectacular for one’s own satisfaction and pleasure, as Villanelle does, that true glamour, and corresponding power, will grow. Villanelle easily attracts the attention of Aaron Peele (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), a suspect she and Eve are surveilling, precisely by negging him—she doesn’t seem to care about him, so he grows obsessed with her approval. In Lit Hub, Rachel Vorona Cote has analyzed Villanelle as a kind of “cool-girl” “Instagram-influencer” personality, but Villanelle rejects the actual promotion of herself—the labor of asking for attention. Her power comes from the fact that she draws attention, seemingly without having to try to be noticed. In this reading about which women have access to power, the show is wise to connect “visibility” beyond simple fashion and a corresponding illusion of effortlessness, to race, class, and accordingly, effort. The women who are not noticed are working women of color, while the women who are noticed, and receive capital for this, are exclusively white and wealthy. The Ghost (Jung Sun den Hollander), like Eve, is Asian. When building a profile on the anonymous killer, Eve suggests, “We’re working on the assumption that this is a woman, late to middle-age, looks like an immigrant worker, so, you, know she’s not white…” Her much-younger colleague Hugo, a white man, cuts her off to ask, “What makes you think that?” Eve responds, “The fact that you just interrupted me, mid-sentence, makes me think that.” Eve’s daily existence as an Asian woman provides insight into the Ghost’s identity—but it also allows her to identify with her slightly. The Ghost, Eve says is “the kind of woman people look at and never see.” They are the “invisible” women in this exclusive world of espionage. Eve is even able to help capture the Ghost through this identification, by speaking near her in Chinese, to form a bond enough for Eve to approach her and chat. Later, to sneak into a high-security home in an emergency, Eve dons a cleaning woman’s uniform and only speaks in Chinese. No one notices her. Moreover, Eve and the Ghost—as well as Eve’s two colleagues, Jess (Nina Sosanya, in Season 2) and Elena (Kirby Howell-Baptiste, in Season 1), who are both black—are singled out among the other women in the show for being practical, responsible, and utterly professional. They use these qualities to gain access to the exclusive spaces inhabited by the other women who have, in turn, gotten there by not playing by the rules. Moreover, these hardworking women (Eve, the Ghost, Jess, and Elena) are all pawns—the women who are seen as glamorous are the ones calling all the shots. Season 2 features a scene in which Carolyn easily manipulates her superior, a frumpy (white) woman behind a desk. Furthermore, the show presents that women who are invisible, even if they are more talented or professional than their glam counterparts, are doomed to fail, or worse, take the fall. Thus, the show makes an essential determination about the nature of “glamour”—that it is nearly impossible for women to become effectively glamorous if they want to be seen that way. Gemma (Emma Pierson), the girly and silly schoolteacher crushing on Eve’s husband Niko (Owen McDonnell), is killed precisely because she tries to be noticed by him—inviting him to stay with her after Niko leaves Eve (who has grown far too obsessed with her scary job for Niko’s preference). Villanelle grows annoyed that Niko, the man loved by Eve, is unfaithful, so she murders Gemma in front of Niko. In the Killing Eve, women who want to captivate others will (literally) die trying. Tech mogul Alistair Peel’s secretary, assassinated by the Ghost, is killed while bleaching her upper lip—a noxious inhalant is blended into the dye and as she breathes, she dies. But the show itself is clear not to judge the women who try to be beautiful, alluring, or desirable (after all, its heroine is one such woman—most notably, in this season, when she purchases a dress specifically because her husband says it would look sexy on her, and then wears it to his work event). Instead, Killing Eve is more than aware that these women live in a kind of patriarchal fishbowl—an environment scrutinized by outside male governance—and how this warps their behavior and psychologies. Season Two gives us not one but two very creepy, objectifying men—Julian (Julian Barratt), the “Good Samaritan” who rescues Villanelle after she escapes from a hospital and allows her to stay with him in his house of a million china dolls, and Aaron Peel, a billionaire tech tycoon who gets sexually aroused by staring at women (and never wants to touch them). Both men want to “take care” of Villanelle—style her (Julian combs her hair, and Aaron gives her a closet of designer clothes), view her, and, later control her body in some manner or other (Julian demands that she pay him back for taking care of her, while Aaron plans to have Villanelle murdered in her sleep, so he can watch). The Male Gaze, the show maintains, is ubiquitous and violent—the only antidote is the bulwark of female self-objectification, which becomes an ultimate source of power, because it then facilitates the effective handling and manipulation of others without the concern of being manipulated, in turn. The sociopath Villanelle loves objects, and starting in season one, she attempts to train Eve into appreciating beautiful things enough to become a beautiful thing, herself—not for Villanelle’s viewing pleasure, but to help Eve grow into the type of woman who thrives in this world. In Season One, she steals her suitcase only to replace its contents with gorgeous garments. In Season Two, she mails Eve a striking tube of lipstick. Though Villanelle is the show’s villain, Killing Eve smartly unites both women (along with a host of others) as universally being victimized by a cultural obsession with appearance—an obsession with being able to appear cool and alluring in front of others, rather than disappear when in plain sight. Killing Eve reads visibility as tragically linked to autonomy—to be seen is to have control over others, and therefore, finally, one’s own life. View the full article

A look at the month’s best debut novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers. Rav Grewal-Kök, The Snares (Random House) The Snares may be the most cynical take on government actions I’ve ever come across. In Rav Grewal-Kök’s brilliant and tragic sendoff of the post-9/11 world, a bored bureaucrat is recruited to approve suggested targets for the nascent drone program, and instead finds himself set up as the patsy for a deeply racist and bloodthirsty initiative. If Graham Greene had written a Shakespearian tragedy, it would read something like this. –MO Liann Zhang, Julie Chan Is Dead (Atria) Julie Chan was separated from her twin sister Chloe after a horrendous car crash left them orphaned; Chloe’s adoption by a wealthy white family gave her the in to become a hugely successful influencer, while Julie, raised by a cantankerous and cruel aunt, has a terrible job and few prospects for the future. That is, until she finds her sister’s corpse and decides to take over Chloe’s life with the glitterati. Julie is, of course, signing up for something much darker—hilariously so, in a way that would transfer quite well to the big (or small) screen. Perfect inspiration for a social media cleanse! –MO Austin Kelley, The Fact Checker (Atlantic Monthly Press) From a former New Yorker fact checker comes this debut novel about a magazine fact checker and a missing woman. The novel follows an odyssey through New York and strikes a perfect balance of mystery, humor, and literary ingenuity. –DM Lauren Haddad, Fireweed (Astra) Set in Prince George in Canada’s version of the rust belt, Fireweed follows a stifled housewife as she searches for her missing neighbor, a widowed mother of two and the only indigenous woman in the neighborhood. What follows is a complex examination of injustice, performativity, and intersectionality. –MO Elizabeth Kaufman, Ruth Run (Penguin Press) Kaufman’s heroine is a clever digital thief who’s managed to steal millions from banks across the nation and stashed her winnings across the world. When one of her transfers trips an alarm, she grabs her blond wig and her bundles of cash and goes on the run. Can she escape the men following her? And do they want to recover the stolen money, or are they more interested in the thief herself? Elizabeth Kaufman uses her time in the tech industry and deep knowledge of information networks to inform the plot without detracting from the relentless forward motion of her story. –MO View the full article

What comes to mind when one thinks of a “crime story” is probably something that’s thrilling and gritty, involving police detectives and yellow tape and pulse-pounding excitement. But because the spectrum of crime is so broad, encompassing everything from vandalism to murder, the array of crime stories on offer has become appropriately diverse—and one unexpected source of crime fiction happens to be the young adult coming-of-age genre. For example, I’ve written a young adult novel called Pride or Die that follows a group of ordinary high-schoolers who find themselves wrapped up in an attempted murder mystery. In addition to this, there are scenes of our protagonists illegally purchasing alcohol and throwing a wild party, which are criminal acts inspired not by Agatha Christie, but by Superbad. It’s not often talked about, but criminal activity is kind of a hallmark of YA as a whole: kids breaking into buildings, beating one another up, cutting class, stealing, sneaking out past curfew, and the list goes on. The most iconic scene in The Perks of Being a Wallflower involves a misdemeanor traffic violation. Ferris Bueller’s whole thing is chronic truancy. It’s just rare that these teen crimes are actually addressed (or appropriately punished) within the narrative. In fact, with the Superbad example, the police are so desperate to seem cool that they not only let the teens get away with their crimes, but commit more crimes, offering up their guns for the leads to play with. It’s like the screenwriters created this alternate universe in which the law doesn’t exist solely so that criminal behavior can exist as a fun new consequence-free way for teenagers to rebel. Breaking the law is a form of standing up to authority, which tends to be a major aspect of any coming-of-age narrative. It’s all about seeking autonomy and independence, even if mistakes are made along the way. It makes sense that teens committing crimes is a more interesting and dynamic way to express that point than, say, a series of repetitive “but Mom, I swear I’m old enough to go to the mall with my friends!” arguments. It’s just funny how trivialized crime can be in these stories while acting as a major source of tension in others. It’s actually challenging for me to think of any recent coming-of-age media that doesn’t include a crime of some sort. Even Heartstopper, known for its sweetness, depicts underaged drinking (even for the UK) and mild violence. Part of this is because certain crimes are considered to be more widespread and/or acceptable than others, even something intrinsic to the process of growing up. Flirting with danger is almost a rite of passage in life; perhaps we only learn where the boundaries are once we’ve properly tested them. But of course, Heartstopper only reflects the lighter end of these stories. Many of them are much angrier. Understandably, the sociopolitical landscape of the 2020s has only amplified these feelings of powerlessness in teens. Civil arguments do little in the face of obstacles like pandemics, recessions, and rampant fascism, and a lot of young people are furious right now. As Havana Rose Liu says in Bottoms, “I’m getting revenge. I’m gonna f— up some football players and I’m buying a gun.” While youthful joy is also something to be cherished and nourished, coming-of-rage has been steadily gaining popularity, and rightfully so. I’m often asked how I tackle the combination of mystery/thriller and teen comedy, but this discussion illustrates just one of the many reasons why that seemingly-paradoxical pairing is actually perfect together. Pride or Die centers around a group of teens who are dealing with injustice and mistreatment from the authority figures in their lives. The further one goes up the ladder of power, the more likely one is to have to dismantle the “rules” entirely to create change—in this case, it’s a school principal at the forefront. Adding in a more classic crime for the mystery genre (attempted murder) doesn’t change much—while this act requires heavier involvement of law enforcement and adds an undercurrent of fear for the protagonists, the core of the story remains the same. The characters being accused of committing attempted murder only amplifies the same struggles that they’re already facing—being villainized and otherwise mistreated due to bigotry. While Pride or Die does get a little darker and heavier than Ferris Bueller, there’s still fun to be found in stories like mine. Breaking the rules often leads to hijinks, and what might be scary in a different context turns humorous under the right circumstances. There’s Jennifer Lawrence beating up a bunch of teenagers in No Hard Feelings and getting into a weird naked police chase. Even those douchey football players being impaled to death in Bottoms gets a lot of laughs. Either the protagonists are the ones inflicting negative consequences upon themselves, or their victims “deserved it.” Often enough, the victims in mysteries and thrillers “deserved it,” too. The main distinction is how far separated we are from the act; a story that’s outrageous and irreverent puts distance between us and those consequences. If the media itself doesn’t care about a character who was harmed, we’re less inclined to care, either. At the end of the day, it’s fiction. It’s a form of catharsis. It’s a safe way to say “eff it!” to the man while knowing nothing bad will happen to you in return. And again, I think that’s also why it’s so appealing to teenagers. There are few places where a teen can just scream in peace. Each example I’ve given in this essay is, to me, its own scream. And maybe a scream isn’t enough to scare away the world’s cruelty, but at minimum, it’s a release. It’s a cry of “I’m here, and I’m angry.” So, whether we’re talking about kids smoking weed in a cheesy rom-com or committing mass murder in a thriller, I get it. A lot of these feelings are coming from the same place—it’s just a matter of how we choose to express them. As for me, I’m feeling more pissed-off by the day, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I would love for there to be a day when a completely joyous and innocent PG narrative is in fact the most authentic way to represent being a teen, but this isn’t our reality. For now, I’ll keep writing kids doing crimes, and I look forward to others doing the same. *** View the full article

When I set out to write my newest horror novel, When the Wolf Comes Home, I knew a few things. I knew I wanted it to be as fast-paced and adrenaline-fueled a chase story as any I’d ever read; I knew I wanted it to be about shapeshifters and fathers and other incomprehensible creatures; and, most of all, I knew I wanted it to be about Fear. Fear with a capital F. Fear as a phenomenon, as a character in our lives we all have to deal with, make space for, even sometimes learn to use to our advantage. Because the story’s premise centers around the uneasy alliance between a woman and the mysterious little boy she finds herself protecting, I knew I had an opportunity to look at Fear through both an adult’s and child’s perspectives. I could get a panoramic view of how it grows and changes and tests us . . . and how sometimes being afraid is exactly the correct way to feel. It probably goes without saying that, as a horror writer, Fear is something of an obsession for me. It’s the thing I work every day to evoke in all its different flavors (dread! terror! startlement! unshakeable trauma! I love ‘em all!). It’s also the thing I most look forward to feeling in the stories I consume. Is that strange, considering I’m a pretty anxious person in my day-to-day? Have been, ever since I was a little kid myself? I don’t think so. In fact, I think it’s a unifying quality amongst most horror fans in general. We’re an anxious bunch! Horror not only lets our anxieties have a place to work themselves off a little—like a dog park for the restless dread inside us—but it also affirms our suspicions that the world is a scary place where bad things happen. And sometimes, our stories teach us, the only thing to do with Fear is learn to live with it. Here, then, are some books with similar preoccupations as Wolf—not just books that induce fear, but books that specifically examine the phenomenon of Fear itself. Some are tragic and cautionary tales. Others are more heroic. But they all shine light on that dreadful feeling we’re forced to reckon with whenever we’re truly all alone in the dark . . . The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson Look, I’ll always welcome an opportunity to wedge this brilliant, landmark novel into a conversation—but in this context, it’s absolutely warranted. One of the (many) things that makes Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece so timelessly effective, so capable of surviving the decades upon decades of analysis and praise, is, despite its appearances, it’s not about a haunted house at all. It’s about one unfortunate woman’s neuroses, her all-consuming fears and anxieties and how they react to the possibility of supernatural phenomena. Jackson manages to both subvert and fulfill our expectations in the most satisfying ways. Is Hill House even actually haunted? Or is the titular haunting the cloud of dread and disaster Eleanor herself brings to it upon arrival? Do excesses of fear and worry make us ghosts before we’re even dead yet? It, by Stephen King Fear as a condiment. You can boil the entirety of King’s 1100-page magnum opus down to that one simple idea. You’d be wrong to do it . . . but you wouldn’t necessarily be incorrect. Because for all the memorable characters and set pieces and details and backstories and observations about childhood and monsters and memory and friendship and the differences between the 1950s and the 1980s and success and failure and love and heroism and the decay of the American small town and and and . . . that’s ultimately what King’s killer clown is all about. Your worst fears are nothing more than smoked paprika to good ol’ Pennywise—and there’s a primal, visceral suspicion encoded into our very DNA: what if I’m nothing more than just a tasty little morsel for something much bigger than me to eat? “Dread,” by Clive Barker In a milestone short story collection (or collections, really, since there are six volumes of the Books of Blood and each one is as indispensable as the last), replete with the most ghoulish, garish, psychedelic, abso-friggin-baroque monstrosities and mutations ever put to page, it says a lot that “Dread” is still often cited as one of the strongest and most memorable installments contained therein. There are no multi-phallused demigods or Candymen or body-goliaths striding across the countryside here; just two men discussing the philosophy of dread, only for it to be revealed that one man is conducting experiments on people, exposing them to their greatest fears. That’s no spoiler, since there are plenty more twists to come, but overall it’s still the most mundane, spectacle-free story you’re gonna find from this author. And yet it’s still utterly terrifying. It’s Clive Barker by way of Hitchcock (or perhaps vice versa) and it cautions us that fear is a combustible fuel source; show it respect and handle with care. This Appearing House, by Ally Malinenko Sometimes fear isn’t the feeling you feel right before the bad thing happens . . . it’s the feeling you carry with you for the rest of your life after you survive it. And that bad thing doesn’t have to be some near-miss with a guy with a chainsaw; it can be the very real, very quiet understanding that your body can betray you. Call it PTSD, call it growing up. Either way, it’s a form of fear that can be both inescapable and all-consuming. That’s the premise of Ally Malinenko’s brilliant middle grade haunted house novel, in which a brave young girl named Jac is nearing the fifth anniversary of her cancer diagnosis, after a long but hopefully successful treatment regimen. She’s starting to exhibit strange symptoms, which may be related to disease recurrence . . . or may be related to the mysterious house that’s just appeared in her neighborhood, which she’s determined to explore. This book might sound heavy—and it can be at times—but Malinenko keeps the narrative grounded in Jac’s sense of determination to feel fear, but not be consumed by it. An important lesson for readers of any age. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky Because that’s the thing about fear (and this was a big part of what I wanted to depict in When the Wolf Comes Home): it can be insidious. It’s not always a big fight-or-flight flashbang that hurtles your heart into your throat and turns your rib cage into a steel drum. Sometimes it slithers. Sometimes it creeps. Sometimes . . . it wears disguises. Raskolnikov is convinced of his own superiority. He’s a good person. A smart person. A rational and morally correct person. But it doesn’t take much to see that, really, he’s just terrified of his own meaninglessness. His belief that he’s superior to any common murderer leads him to conduct a little experiment, which involves him murdering a pawnbroker . . . and then an unexpected witness. But if he’s such a smart, rational guy, he shouldn’t need to worry about feeling guilt or getting caught, right? Little by little, fear disrobes its pretenses, and, like a good Poe story (another author OBSESSED with fear and anxiety and who could have any number of stories in this list), our hero begins to crack. It’s not just his fear of punishment, though. It’s his fear of true self-knowledge: that he is as meaningless and unexceptional—and as needing of salvation—as anyone else. There’s a wide gulf between contemplation and experience, and it’s deep enough to drown in. Dostoevsky’s 1866 masterwork is a lot of things—including, some might be delighted to discovery, a sort of proto-Matlock—but, as a prolonged exercise in one man’s nightmarish journey into fear, it’s a reminder that rationality is no match for emotion. You can’t just think your way out of terror. Bird Box, by Josh Malerman “Just don’t look. Whatever you do. Don’t. Look.” The answer to most people’s fear response since we first grew eyelids. But sometimes, even when you know you mustn’t . . . you still have to look. Fear evolved with us as a survival tactic to keep us alive in the midst of threat. But a strange death drive evolved with us, too. A curiosity that fear can’t always override. And it’s that doomed tension which pulls the strings taut enough for Josh Malerman to play in his iconic hit. Sometimes, as that primal instinct is constantly trying to remind us, facing your fear in the wrong kind of way can also mean your doom. Macbeth, by William Shakespeare “Full of scorpions is my mind.” We’ve all had nights like that, right? Nights where the thoughts won’t cease? Those “cursed thoughts which nature gives way to in repose?” I discuss in the afterword of Wolf how, in my early twenties, I went through a period of intense anxiety attacks and intrusive thoughts. I was marinating in capital-F Fear—a kind which I’d never experienced before. But it was actually doing a production of Macbeth which finally started to pull me out of that awful spiral. As is so often the case, Shakespeare articulated something I didn’t yet have the language for and helped shrink what I was feeling down into a more manageable size. Granted, in my case, I was just experiencing a severe form of seasonal affective disorder, I wasn’t roiling in guilt over committing regicide and kickstarting a series of murders to keep my ambitions safe . . . but still, there was something helpful in realizing that I wasn’t the only person who had ever experienced these strange bouts of waking night terrors. (Hell, watching Macbeth and his wife’s Fear-riddled downfall every night also helped put my own lack of transgressions into perspective.) As with The Haunting of Hill House, I’ll always look for an excuse to cram a little Shakespeare into a conversation, too. (Sue me; as a once-and-forever classical actor, it’s my vocation, and ‘tis no sin to labor in my vocation.) But also as with The Haunting of Hill House, this isn’t some arbitrary pick here; Macbeth is out-and-out Shakespeare’s most capital-H Horror-coded play, and it’s all about Fear—so much so that we don’t even dare speak its name in a theater. Similar to Crime and Punishment, the Scottish Play is a story about the corrosive powers of anxiety and guilt, but unlike Dostoevsky’s novel, Shakespeare leans fully into supernatural manifestations. Ghosts, witches, twisted prophecies, phantom daggers, phantom bloodstains, moving forests, even the Greek Goddess of Witchcraft herself (depending on whether you believe the Hecate scenes weren’t added later by another author). Sure, many of these manifestations have potentially rational explanations, but when they’re still overwhelming enough to make Lady Macbeth, one of the flintiest characters in Shakespeare’s canon, ultimately throw herself off of a tower to escape them, those explanations do nothing to soften the blow. Macbeth is a nightmarish story about how, in the end, no matter how high you climb, you’re only ever left with your thoughts when the lights go out, and while your worst sins are creeping ever closer for payback, there are forces laughing at your anguish as you twist. In some ways, that’s actually the more optimistic interpretation! What if, as Macbeth himself posits, fear is simply our natural state as mortal detritus blowing about in the maelstrom of happenstance, and there are no real lessons to be learned because life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying . . . nothing? I guess in that case, there’s nothing to do but screw our courage to the sticking place and try to enjoy the ride as best we can. Maybe with a scary story or two to pass the time? *** View the full article

Assignment 1: Story Statement Discover her true identity and find her grandparents’ murderer. Assignment 2: Antagonistic Forces The main antagonistic force is found within the protagonist herself, Rosalind. To shield her sensitive heart from the tragedy of her father’s death and her mother’s emotional neglect, young Rosalind circumscribed her world, creating a small, safe sphere with few friends and rigid goals. Her tightly controlled reality is shaken when she meets a boy who wants to love her. In this burgeoning romance, Rosalind’s inner conflict is her primary enemy. But, even as she starts to open her heart, Rosalid accidentally learns of a shocking secret her mother has been keeping from her, a secret that threatens Rosalind’s newfound security and hope. To determine the origin of the forces that harmed her family and to embrace the chance to remain with the boy she loves, Rosalind must return to her mother’s homeland, solve the mystery of her grandparents’ murder, and understand her true identity. Assignment 3: Working Titles The Legacy of Light: The Awakening The Legacy of Light: Illumination The Legacy of Light: Book 1 Assignment 4: Comparables My first comparable is Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me. In both books, the main characters face the loss of their father and must solve a mystery relating to it. Elements of science fiction are interwoven into an otherwise realistic story. Two differences are that my character is older, and the tone of my writing is, at times, softer and more emotional. For its tone and tenor, a second comparable would be “Sarah Dessen Meets Science Fiction.” At its core, “Legacy of Light” is about a girl navigating her relationship with her mother, her hopes for the future, and a boy who genuinely loves her. Told from the main character’s perspective and set in 2003 middle-America, this coming-of-age story deals with love, loss, and family secrets. It so happens that these secrets relate to paranormal abilities and result in a struggle with a secret society. But these are secondary facts. The heart of the story is the protagonist’s journey to find her true identity and accept her place in the world. Assignment 5: Core Wound and Primary Conflict After a secure childhood shattered by the sudden death of her father, a teen girl constructs a safe reality for herself only to have it unravel when she discovers a shocking secret about her identity, an identity she must confront to protect her life and her chance at love. Assignment 6: Conflicts The protagonist’s inner conflict: After her father’s sudden death and her mother’s subsequent emotional withdrawal, Rosalind found solace in her best friend and created an identity centered on academic success. However, Rosalind’s rigid world is shaken when the new boy in town, Reid, expresses interest in her. The fact that Reid is her academic competitor further contributes to her inner struggle. Despite her intense avoidance, Rosalind is attracted to Reid’s sincerity and his own experience of childhood loss. Scene that triggers protagonist: Rosalind’s defenses against Reid crumble in the scene when she is exhausted and argues with Reid about the yearbook, for which they are co-editors. After she storms off, Reid follows her to comfort her, and when she accuses him of having an easy life, he opens up about his younger brother's death from leukemia. Reid’s grief and suffering, which so closely mirror Rosalind’s own experience, touch her core trauma, causing her to lower her guard. Simultaneously, this connection to her core releases Rosalind’s paranormal abilities, propelling another layer of the story. Secondary conflict: Rosalind’s newfound powers, ones she does not yet understand, dangerously explode when she accidentally meets another member of the secret group to which she belongs, unbeknownst to her. This leads to the revelation that her mother has been lying to her. When Rosalind is integrated into this secret group, the Light Seekers, she meets the leaders, one of whom is her mother’s childhood best friend, Mildred. Though her mother feels only gratitude and comfort in her reunion with her long-lost friend, Rosalind is wary of this powerful and capricious woman who holds no fondness for her. Rosalind is forced to keep her powers a secret and surreptitiously begins a journey to discover the cause of her grandparents’ murder over 20 years ago. Assignment 7: Setting Rosalind’s journey and her setting are intertwined. As one expands, so does the other. Rosalind’s story begins in a small town in Iowa where her father grew up and runs the family farm. She lives down the street from her elementary school, her parents work at the local community college, and she takes swimming lessons at the YMCA. It is safe, cozy, and mundane. The summer following her father’s tragic death, the house across the street is remodeled into a beautiful fairy tale home, and an equally perfect family moves into this jewel. Enamored, Rosalind becomes best friends with the daughter, a girl her age. This magical and beautiful house is the first seed of change in the setting. Rosalind’s feelings for a boy are the catalyst that expands the setting beyond her safe Iowa town and beyond what she can perceive with her senses. She begins to see lights that are not there, and when she takes a trip to Des Moines, her visions explode into the real world. Rosalind discovers that reality is not as it appears, and she can see what is underneath the surface. Prompted by these events, Rosalind travels to a mysterious castle in Ireland and then to beautiful Sardinia. These exterior settings, the all-American town, chilly Ireland, and sunny Sardinia, are the platforms for her journey to a deeper reality, one where she might find the answers she seeks.

I’m going to offer a few thoughts on why and how I went about writing Return of the Maltese Falcon. But, before doing so, I need to acknowledge a few books and their authors upon whose work I depended. Dashiell Hammett obviously towers over that list. The 1961 paperback edition of The Maltese Falcon I read at age thirteen sported a Harry Bennett cover with Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Casper Gutman and Wilmer Cook portrayed in a then-modern manner. The publisher presented this great book as just another mystery novel, only twenty years after the John Huston film adaptation had been in theaters. I first saw Bogart’s breakthrough movie on a Sunday morning when I skipped church by faking stomach flu. Two of the novel’s many editions were of enormous help to me. First, the Modern Library publication (1934) includes an introduction by Hammett, already not writing much anymore, which shares insights on how the novel derived from the writer’s experiences as a private operative for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, including suspects and other individuals he encountered on the job. He discussed reworking elements from short stories he felt hadn’t lived up to their potential. The author also essentially admits writing The Maltese​ Falcon without “the help of an outline or notes or even a clearly defined plot-idea in my head.” The notion that this seminal tough mystery novel could have been, and apparently was, produced in a written-by-the-seat-of-the-pants fashion is frankly astonishing. The other edition I depended upon comes from North Point Press, appropriately enough a San Francisco publisher; it’s a handsome 1984 volume generously illustrated with full-page, mostly period, photos of the locations mentioned or implied in the novel. The twelve pages of end notes, printed in small footnote form, are packed with useful information. (The hard- bound edition of the book grows increasingly pricey, but the trade paperback—its size and cover art identical to the hardcover—still can be found reasonably at this writing.) I also read the somewhat different version of the novel’s initial pulp serialization in editor Otto Penzler’s The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (2010). As a native Iowan who has visited San Francisco only a few times, I am no expert on the City by the Bay, so I was aided enormously by Don Herron’s The Dashiell Hammett Tour. Mr. Herron conducts a by-appointment-tour that I have yet to take, but I feel as though I already have, thanks to his guidebook (thirtieth anniversary edition, 2009). This is an essential work for Hammett fans, beginning with a fine biography of the man and the writer, taking up a quarter of the book’s pages, and worth the price of admission. Over the years, I have read every Hammett book-length biography I could find, and that’s more than a few; but the guidebook’s exceptional “brief” bio is the only one I referred to before I began (and during the writing of) this novel. Like the North Point edition, the Herron guidebook is lavishly illustrated and written in an easygoing, accessible style as​ it delineates the various theories as to which locations are actually real ones. Hammett tends in The Maltese Falcon to rename the hotels but use the actual restaurants, sometimes thought to be the author trying to earn himself a free meal (a theory Herron dismisses). With its walking and driving maps, The Dashiell Hammett Tour is required reading for the Hammett enthusiast. Article continues below cover reveal. Cover design by painted by Irvin Rodriguez. The bedrock of the research for my long-running Nathan Heller series has always been the WPA guides, not just for Nate’s Chicago but the various cities he visits. The Heller novels put a private eye into the period in which the archetype for this sort of character was first created (largely by Hammett), and after which that character flourished in popular culture, a context in which my protagonist investigates real, often famous unsolved (or controversially solved) cases. It’s hard to imagine being able to write those books without the American Guide Series, and that also proved to be the case with Return of the Maltese Falcon. California: A Guide to the Golden State (1939) and San Francisco: The Bay and Its Cities (1940) were predictably helpful. Mystery fiction authority J. Kingston Pierce— knowing I was setting out to write this novel—generously sent me his excellent book, San Francisco: Yesterday and Today (2009), which proved most helpful as well. That said, any inaccuracies and inconsistencies regarding the geography of San Francisco in Return of the Maltese Falcon are my own. I chose not to revisit the film versions of The Maltese Falcon— the 1931 feature directed by Roy Del Ruth, somewhat forgotten today; a loose remake, Satan Met a Lady, in 1936; and then of course the classic John Huston-directed masterpiece in 1941— or any more recent works inspired by the book. (Joe Gores, a fine mystery writer and like Hammett a real-life private eye in his younger days, wrote a prequel novel titled Spade & Archer​ in 2009. A 2023 AMC television series, Monsieur Spade, apparently relocated the character to France.) My novel is strictly a continuation of Hammett’s original and does not incorporate elements introduced in any later adaptation (or in Hammett’s own later writings, for that matter). In writing this novel, I did not wish to be influenced in any way by anything other than The Maltese Falcon as readers first encountered it back in 1929. To any who may think I am a buzzard picking at the Falcon’s bones, I can only say this is a novel I dreamed of doing for many years, and have been keeping an eye on the clock (as it were) as to the original’s public-domain status. I am something of an old hand at working in the vineyards of creators I admire, having taken over the writing of the Dick Tracy comic strip from Chester Gould for fifteen years, and finishing various works-in- progress of Mickey Spillane, including fourteen Mike Hammer novels, fulfilling the writer’s request of me in his last days. My fascination with the work of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane goes back, again, to around 1961. Two TV series sparked this trend—Peter Gunn (1959–1961) and 77 Sunset Strip (1958–1964)—though two series preceding those lit the fuse (Perry Mason, 1957–1966; and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, 1957–1959). As an adolescent and then a young teenager caught up in those shows, I was aware that many, even most, of them had literary roots. Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane had series derived from their popular books; even 77 Sunset Strip came from television giant Roy Huggins having started out as a Chandler imitator with a Stuart Bailey novel (The Double Take, 1946) and three novellas (collected as 77 Sunset Strip, 1959). Though not credited on screen, this TV afterlife is true of Dashiell Hammett as well, with the Peter Lawford-Phyllis Kirk-starring The Thin Man, 1957–1959. My tendency in those days, and to a degree now, was to look​ at the literary source of any movie or television show that had caught my attention. When I was 13, that impulse is what led me to Hammett, Chandler and Spillane, the three writers who—in their respective decades—defined the private eye in popular culture. Among the things that fascinated me then, and still does, is how different these three writers are in their approach and style. Hammett with his characters the Continental Op and Sam Spade is a former trained operative who brought a terse, informed eye to the crime story; Chandler, raised in Great Britain, with his slightly tarnished knight Phillip Marlowe raised first-person narration to a level rivaled only by Mark Twain in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); and Spillane brought a rough-hewn pulp energy inspired by Hammett’s Black Mask magazine contemporary, Carroll John Daly, to new heights of popularity (and new depths of controversy). What I have attempted to do in Return of the Maltese Falcon is honor the original novel and its author without writing strictly pastiche—allowing some of my native style to creep in while honoring the original’s. When I reread The Maltese Falcon with writing this novel in mind—designing it more as a continuation than a sequel—I was surprised to see how subjective the Spade-centric omniscient narrator is. The objectivity of Hammett’s refusal to go into the point of view of his characters, including (especially) Sam Spade himself, is what makes the author’s approach so distinctive. He had written the Continental Op stories and two novels in the first person, after all; and only his later three (and unfortunately final) novels employ that technique, though some non-Spade short stories use it as well. This observation was freeing to me. I also allowed myself, to a certain degree, to do more place description than Hammett. On some level, Return of the Maltese Falcon is a historical novel, or at the very least a period one. This hopes to honor Hammett’s style as well as stay faithful to the period in which the original was written—for example, women are often called “girls” and Sam Spade smokes to an alarming extent. To maintain a sense of the continuity with the original novel, I attempted as much as possible to operate within Spade’s world—the places he inhabits and goes, as well as the characters he meets, sometimes characters mentioned in Hammett appearing on stage for the first time. Among Hammett’s stylistic quirks that I have followed is a tendency to always call certain characters—primarily female ones—by their full first and last names. He also frequently uses colons and not commas after “said”—I do this occasionally here myself. It’s part of what’s commonly thought of as Hammett’s terse style, but a writer who starts a novel with the omniscient narrator describing the protagonist as looking “rather pleasantly like a blond satan” isn’t really all that objective. Sam Spade’s impact on popular culture and the private eye genre is remarkable considering the character only appears in one novel and three short stories. John Huston’s enduring film, with its iconic cast, cannot be underestimated in having extended Spade’s impact. But the character also went on to headline The Adventures of Sam Spade (1946–1951), an enormously popular radio show, as spoofy as The Maltese Falcon was straight. The money that series and The Adventures of the Thin Man (1941–1950) made, plus that of the Hammett-created The Fat Man (1946–1951), a combination of Sydney Greenstreet’s Casper Gutman and the Continental Op, freed Hammett from the need to make a living from his fiction, as did income from film adaptations. It’s my hope that readers—frustrated by this great writer only giving us five novels, and no further Sam Spade ones—will​ enjoy and accept this effort as a kind of love letter to Dashiell Hammett and the private eye form. *** From the afterword to RETURN OF THE MALTESE FALCON, by MAX ALLAN COLLINS, to be published by TITAN BOOKS in January 2026. Copyright ©2025 by Max Allan Collins. All rights reserved. View the full article

Six years ago, when I first saw the flier pinned to the wall of the pizza place, near a shambolic shelf of board games, I was skeptical. It held a clip-art silhouette of Sherlock Holmes, with his familiar deerstalker and pipe, and invited any and all to join The Dogs in the Nighttime: a monthly Sherlock group in our small island town in the upper left corner of the country. Like the detective himself, I’m not much of a joiner, a trait that makes me bad at groups and good at books. That said, I’ve been a fan of Sherlock ever since listening to Mind’s Eye audio cassettes of his stories on camping trips as a kid. For years, I taught a course in Mystery Literature, and the Arthur Conan Doyle weeks sometimes felt like an exercise in adulation. Plus, I love people. I love readers. I love mysteries. Groups: not so much. My family and I had recently moved to Anacortes, Washington and were excited about the change, but hardly knew a soul. We were grateful to be surrounded by salt water and cedars, and the town was small but didn’t feel small, maybe because of its vibrant library and pair of dreamy bookstores. Libby, my wife, was happy with her new librarian position at the region’s community college and our teens had braced themselves for change— But moving is never easy, and moving mid-life left us a little bruised. Walking away from a tenured teaching job in order to write induced all manner of midnight panic, as did hearing our kids’ tales of finding no one to sit with at lunch. Although we felt lucky to have found a place to live, our modest new house had cost twice as much as the one we’d left, and needed a ton of work. Our tiny bathroom felt like it was sprouting teenagers. Then came Libby’s breast cancer diagnosis, thankfully caught early, but not early enough to avoid surgery and months of radiation. And, along with the rest of the planet: Covid. Maybe this minor dogpile had primed me for joining the group. Or maybe it was because the first time I’d climbed the steps to the room above the pizza parlor, I was welcomed by a bright batch of humanity: The Dogs in the Nighttime. * There’s nothing fancy about the generic room where we meet, but the old brick building used to house a mortuary—coffins once parked where the pizza now bakes—which seems morbidly fitting. Out the windows, rain falls and seagulls eye our pizza crusts. The Dogs in the Nighttime was formed in 2011 by Texas-born, marathon-running mystery writer, Kathleen Kaska. Worldwide, there may be hundreds of such groups, many with allusive names that are as clever as cozy titles: The Stormy Petrels, The Giant Rats of Sumatra, Mrs. Hudson’s Lodgers. They range from the scholarly and ceremonial to book clubs that meet in bars and libraries. Some of the stauncher groups read the canon in order of publication, in order to trace the development of characters and gauge Conan Doyle’s evolution as a writer. The pinnacle of these is also the oldest: the Baker Street Irregulars, founded in 1934. The few B.S.I. members I’ve met are dapper, affable, and astounding in their knowledge. They’d kill us on trivia night. B.S.I. membership is invite-only, but no one needs an invite to be a Dog. This is not to say that we don’t take the stories seriously, but we also read pastiches—Sherlock spin-offs—as well as the occasional Poe story. And we host an original radio play at the library, complete with whimsical sound effects and baffling British accents. We pride ourselves in being a motley bunch. In addition to several mystery writers, members include chemists, film buffs, medical professionals, Sherlockian scholars, and avid readers. Among us are several married couples, a pair of sisters who are never far from a cruise ship, a bright-eyed Scotswoman, and a retired detective named Holmes with a dog named Watson (really). Besides being fans of a good story, we gather for different, overlapping reasons: to take a journey into Victorian England. To experience justice in an unjust world. For the interplay of art and logic. And for Sherlock’s ferocious curiosity, a trait we mimic each time that we gather. The fact that his knowledge runs more deep than wide—more esoteric than encyclopedic—seems like an accurate reflection of our collective brain. None of us are geniuses, but together, we cover a lot of ground. For me, the appeal has always been the darker side of the stories: the spooky settings, the moody prose, and the sense that in Sherlock’s cocaine habit and opium dens, we glimpse the spectrum of humanity: a person who knows pain, yet finds solace in his pursuit of knowledge and art. Like many literary detectives who have followed him, he’s waded through “deep waters” and come out the other side to serve a higher purpose. It’s probably good that politics are verboten in our meetings, a norm that’s not always easy to follow. The proverbial gramophone has skipped a few times, and some of our feet could be heard dragging up the steps in the wake of the recent election—but for the most part, we embrace civility. We generally agree that there’s something amusing, and sometimes sexist, in the way Conan Doyle describes the damsels of these stories. And we can discuss Watson’s enthusiastic embrace of the Crown, while also pointing out his blind spots, such as the lasting scars of colonialism. At times, we dig so deeply into these stories that it feels like we are in a Richard Osman novel, trying to solve something that is just beyond our grasp. One member observed that when she sees us drilling down into the text, she is reminded of “Holmes, prone on the grass with a magnifying glass.” The way we discuss him sometimes, you’d think he was a family member who’d just left the room, pipe smoke lingering. * Reading can be full of contradictions. It is typically a solitary act, ideal for the non-joiners among us. Yet through reading, we can also learn to empathize and grow closer to each other. There is a similar irony in the fact that we gather to focus on Sherlock, of all characters. He is sometimes diagnosed by today’s standards as having Autism Spectrum Disorder, being Bi-polar or, in the Benedict Cumberbatch interpretation, “a high-functioning sociopath.” In any case, he struggles to be tolerant of mortals such as Watson—and, by extension, us. In his own way, though, even Sherlock was a joiner. His association with the Baker Street Irregulars—a group of street boys whom he occasionally calls upon—adds color to a number of stories. And through his brother, Mycroft, he was affiliated with the Diogenes Club, a group of “unsociable” men in London who, “some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows.” Unless they were in a special room, its members sat in silence, forbidden to speak or take notice of each other—yet they gathered all the same. Sherlock even says that the club has “a very soothing atmosphere.” Further proof that, whether it comes naturally or not, we can all find our place. “For a long time he remained there…” (Illustration of the Sherlock Holmes short story, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” which appeared in The Strand Magazine in October, 1891.) Works Cited “A Study in Pink.” Sherlock, season 1, episode 1, BBC, 2010. Conan Doyle, Arthur. “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter.” The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1893, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/834/834-h/834-h.htm. —. “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1661/1661-h/1661-h.htm#chap08. View the full article

When I pitched The Impossible Thing to my publisher, his eyes glazed over. Embarrassed, I changed the subject. I already knew it was a weird one: The true story of thirty miraculous red eggs that were all taken from the same guillemot, sold to the highest bidder for a small fortune, and then somehow disappeared, never to be seen again. I thought it was a crime novel where the victim was a bird, and a wonderful mystery. Apparently I was wrong. I tried to forget about it, but that sad little seabird that never raised a chick haunted me. Over the next few years I’d try to explain the story to people, but it was never received with enthusiasm. Finally my brave publicist asked one critical question: ‘B,’ she said hesitantly, ‘Does the bird talk?’ ‘What?!’ I said, aghast. ‘NO!’ ‘In that case,’ she said. ‘I LOVE it!’ And I realised where I’d been going wrong. Anthropomorphism. When it comes to fear of ridicule, it’s right up there with Bigfoot. Enlightened and relieved, I wrote the book. But I still think about that question all the time… No, my bird doesn’t talk, but if I’d felt it would serve the book, I would not have demurred. And I do give her emotions. Limited bird-emotions, admittedly, but I believe animals have feelings, that they communicate more efficiently than we do, and that we do them a disservice when these things are discounted. I have given animals bit-parts in most of my novels, and it confuses me that more people don’t. We live alongside animals, spend billions on their care, talk to them, enact laws to protect them, worship them as gods, dress them like babies. Adult fiction has occasionally veered towards rocky anthropomorphic shores, but it’s only when the motives attributed to the animal are antagonistic or satirical that such fiction becomes ‘respectable’. Moby Dick must be allowed his vengeance, and Napoleon his revolution. Other mainstream books, such as Watership Down, that dare to imagine animals talking to each other, are regarded as mere fantasies. Conversely, children’s stories are crammed with animals displaying every possible emotion, and our own lives are shaped by these formative tales. We all cried when Bambi’s mother was killed, we rooted for Babe the sheep-pig, and we cheered when Dumbo spread his ears and flew. But we are conditioned to mock the very idea that a cow might cry for her stolen calf. When does it change? And why? When does treating animals as thinking, emotional beings suddenly become a wholly crazy notion, like Santa Claus or the tooth fairy? And how does it serve us to shed our belief in the connectedness of all living things and to regard animals as unfeeling and mute? Is it a convenience that shields us from how badly we misuse them? If we didn’t mock anthropomorphism so ruthlessly, could we really eat Bambi? Hook Dory? Murder Eeyore for his skin? So childlike compassion is derided and we fold under peer pressure. Ironically our language – bacon, steak, hamburger – distances us from the animals that are the source of these meals. Our denial runs deep. Who knows, if only we called it ‘long pig’, could we more easily overcome our aversion to cannibalism? Why not? We already pick and choose those marked for exploitation and consumption because we have been convinced they are ‘less than’… Is the power of speech the only thing that stops us? The saddest thing about this ridicule is that the very thing we’re being made to feel embarrassed by – and the only thing we lose by it – is the one thing that anthropomorphism teaches every child. Empathy. And where is the benefit to society in reducing our collective empathy? I am grateful to report that, overwhelmingly, the readers of The Impossible Thing have been moved by the book – instinctively grasping the sorrow of the bird, the horror of the sport of egg collecting, and the shame of man. Maybe it’s only our lingering memories of talking bees and bears and butterflies that keeps us from treating animals – and each other – even more badly than we already do. Anthropomorphism? I’m all for it. *** View the full article

In Scots, there are separate words for fine driving snow (snaw-pouther) and small flakes (spitters)—plus about 400 other snow-related terms. Alas, English isn’t nearly so rich. And yet there is something about the winter landscape that begs to be written about. The crackle of ice underfoot. The calls of crows that mass at sunset. A setting so bleak and yet full of beauty practically begs for mystery. If it’s not clear by now, I’m a sucker for setting. Not just any setting, but settings that loom, that breathe. Settings so alive that they feel like another character in the story. And winter makes a particularly good one for a mystery. Cold is an implied threat just outside the door that cranks up the tension. Amassing snow builds claustrophobia. Winter brings a closeness to the elements that reminds us we’re only one bad decision away from an unfortunate end. When the power goes out, the consequences are real. Here are ten wintry mysteries that will have you reaching for a blanket: The Snowman (Jo Nesbø) – Harry Hole is one of my favorite detectives—clever, flawed, and seemingly always on the brink of being fired. Most of the series takes place in Norway, so you can expect lots of snow, but in book 7 the winter grows teeth. Hole chases a twisted killer who leaves behind snowmen as his signature. The use of this classic symbol of childhood makes for an especially twisted read. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Olga Tocarczuk) – This novel is set in a Polish village on the Czech border that’s mostly uninhabited in the winter, except for a handful of eccentric characters. But, as bodies start turning up, Janina (part time astrologist, part time poetry translator) and her neighbors become determined to figure out what’s going on. Don’t go into this one expecting a traditional murder mystery—it’s much harder to classify—just go with it. Murder in the Crooked House (Soji Shimada) – The Crooked House (otherwise known as the Ice Floe Mansion) sits on a snowbound cliff overlooking icy seas at the remote northern tip of Japan. The house is a disorienting maze of sloping floors, built by the wealthy, eccentric owner to purposely destabilize his guests. He also collects lifesize dolls and sleeps in a tower room accessed by drawbridge, of course. When he invites a group of colleagues for Christmas, one of them ends up dead in seemingly impossible circumstances. A locked room mystery worth reading for the setting alone. Nightwatching (Tracy Sierra) – What’s more claustrophobic than crouching in a hidden compartment of your 300-year-old house while a killer stalks the halls? Doing it while a blizzard rages outside. Sierra uses setting to great effect in this thriller that was so scary it took me two tries to read it (but so good I absolutely had to finish). Disappearing Earth (Julia Phillips) – This novel is set in the peninsular Russian province of Kamchatka, which is so remote—bordered by ocean and a frozen desert—that no major roads connect it to the rest of Russia. It begins on an August day (though this far north, the leaves are already turning) when two young sisters go missing. As the weather grows colder, so does fear about what happened to the missing girls. This is winter like only Kamchatka can produce with snow banks that “propped up the buildings” and cold so deep one character muses “her marrow must have frozen blue.” Murder on the Orient Express (Agatha Christie) – The quintessential locked room mystery. On the snowbound Orient Express railcar, world-famous detective Hercule Poirot is faced with a murder committed by one of the train’s passengers, whose locked bedroom seems to be the only possible place from which the crime could have been committed. The Coldest Case (Tessa Wegert) – Two influencers decide to spend the winter on a tiny, remote island in New York’s Thousand Islands, cut off from the mainland by miles of ice and snow. What could possibly go wrong? Part of Wegert’s Shana Merchant series, this novel also stands alone. Smilla’s Sense of Snow (Peter Hoeg) – The novel opens with flakes of snow “like feathers” falling on a child’s coffin. Smilla Jaspersen is a world-class expert on ice and snow as well as a surly and irritable narrator, who doesn’t love anyone except her 6-year-old neighbor. When the young boy falls from the roof of their apartment building, a supposed accident, Smilla sets off across wintry Copenhagen to find out what really happened. Part murder mystery, part character study, and unpredictable to the last page. Wolf Winter (Cecilia Ekbäck) – Swedish Lapland, 1717. Maija and her family arrive from their native Finland, hoping for a fresh start in this harsh and beautiful wilderness. When Maija’s daughter discovers the mutilated body of another settler, the death is dismissed as a wolf attack. But Maija knows the wound is too precise to be the result of an animal. As the “wolf winter,” the harshest winter in memory, descends upon the remote settlement, darkness falls, snow gathers, and secrets are laid bare. Perfect for fans of historical mysteries and gorgeously written landscapes—“bouquets of butterflies” dance on the wind and patches of snow glow “hollow blue” even in summer. Version 1.0.0 The Dark (Emma Haughton) – Locked room mystery, but make it Antarctica. After a personal trauma, Dr. Kate North decides to take a post overwintering as the doctor at an Antarctic research station. 24 hour darkness surrounded by fields of ice and snow so vast it’s “uncannily like an ocean”—with no escape until spring. With that level of tension it’s almost inevitable that someone would wind up dead. *** View the full article

Breathless (1983) is a textbook-perfect example of how to create a great remake. It offers many of the same narrative pleasures which helped make Jean-Luc Godard’s first film of the same name a highly influential cinematic phenomenon. But at the same time, writer-director James McBride and his collaborators behind and in front of the camera find numerous ways to make their version of this film feel vibrant and alive in ways that are completely original to it. From a storytelling standpoint, these two versions of Breathless are nearly identical. Both films center on a young car thief (Jean-Paul Belmondo in the original, Richard Gere in the remake) who set off for a major city (Paris, Los Angeles) to win back an old girlfriend (Jean Seberg, Valérie Kaprisky). Both protagonists accidentally kill a cop before they get there. Upon arriving in their metropolis of choice, both protagonists find that their intelligent, yet dispassionate, ex-girlfriends don’t want to get involved with them again until they convince them to give their relationship another shot. The protagonists also deal with police manhunts for them, have pop cultural fixations which reveal a key part about their character, and even try to make a business deal at a junkyard. Even the endings hinge upon the same plot point, which is a betrayal committed by someone the protagonist loves. You might think that the fidelity of McBride’s version of Breathless to the original would be a weakness. Instead, it preserves all the delights of its original story, which came from a treatment by Francois Truffaut (who was inspired by an article he had read) and Claude Chabrol (who was uncredited and also served as a “technical advisor”). It perfectly depicts the mixture of life as a low-level criminal (the protagonists never do anything grander than steal a car), exciting chase scenes, and playful romance which helped make the first version of Breathless so exciting and interesting on a narrative level. Breathless (83) feels like a cover of a great song done in a different genre: the lyrics may be the same, but the style with which the artists are telling it makes it feel distinctive from the first version. Godard’s Breathless, with its 16mm black and white cinemaphotography by Raoul Coutard (a future legend who at that point in his career had only worked on four films) and handheld camerawork which makes you feel like you are in Paris experiencing the film’s events yourself, feels like a documentary. This was a comparison noted by Godard himself, who referred to it as “a documentary about Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg,” as well as celebrated documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, who noted in an interview that Godard’s method in this film was “definitely [taken] from, the existing documentary films of the time” and were driven by the same creative impulses. Its sense of realism and immersiveness makes it feels like it could play as the second half of a double bill with Primary (1960), a highly influential documentary which Pennebaker said that Godard had seen and admired. You could never mistake Breathless (83) for a documentary. It has a subtle, yet persistent love of artifice which gives it a distinctive visual identity from Godard’s version. This is apparent from the first shot, in which red neon light bathes protagonist Jesse Lujack (Gere) as he stands on a street corner in the Las Vegas Strip. While the light owes something to real locations, its effect is to make the world around Jesse feel a little more heightened and colorful. The color palette which McBride and his cinematographer, Richard H. Kline (who had received two Academy Award nominations after he had worked on dozens of films, none which were shot in black and white) emphasizes bright primary colors, most of which are red or blue. They make the world surrounding Jesse look like a children’s book, which goes well with the innocent quality Gere gives to him. Even shots of real locations have a small touch of surrealness to them, like the one in which Jesse stands outside at night against a backdrop of lights from a faraway city in the San Fernando Valley, which makes him seem like he is standing in front of a wall of stars as shiny and distant as the future he conjures for Monica where they will be happy together in Mexico. McBride goes on to make the world around his protagonist seem a little unreal in other ways. There’s his use of rear projection photography (a technique commonly used in American studio films from the 1950s involving pre-recorded footage being projected onto a screen behind actors) when Jesse drives around with Monica in Los Angeles, which makes their interactions feel even more real and vivid more because the background behind them feels so artificial. Or the way the camera spins around Jesse and Monica as they make out in a stolen car, their emotions dictating its movement like how dancers would dictate where a camera would be in an American musical. Everything about this film’s visual style makes you feel like you are not watching a documentary about the facts of a couple’s relationship, but a maximalist poem about what it feels like to be young and in love while living a life of crime. In addition to creating a different technical style for his version of Breathless, McBride and his collaborators in front of the camera offer different takes on the original film’s most iconic characters. In the first version the protagonist was named Michel, and he seemed to embody the idea of French cool. With his jaunty hat and ever-present cigarette, Michel sauntered through the world as if nothing could faze him, despite his numerous complaints. If Michel is cool, then Jesse is hot. He has a zest for life which his grey gallic counterpart lacks. McBride establishes this in an early scene where Jesse drives to Los Angeles. In the original, Michel had calmly talked to himself (aside from breaking the fourth wall to tell certain audience members to “get stuffed”) and blandly sang “la la la” to jazz on his way to Paris before a cop pulled him off to the side of a road. But in the remake, Jesse excitedly delivers a monologue about how he is going to win back an architecture student named Monica (Kaprisky). He then happily blares Jerry Lee Lewis’s song “Breathless,” singing along with the lyrics word-for-word and tapping his hands on the wheel to provide accompaniment to the music, which is already furiously frantic. This scene establishes that Jesse is a warmer and more childlike version of Michel. He’s more conventionally likeable, even if we might relate to Monica’s line that he is “like one of those rides at Disneyland – you make me dizzy.” If Michel felt like the cool older brother who wouldn’t want you anywhere near him because he was busy brooding over a love affair gone wrong, then Jesse is the younger brother who won’t leave you alone because he wants to distract you from seeing the wounds he is trying so desperately to hide. McBride also makes Jesse distinctive from Michel in terms of their different pop cultural fixations and how they relate to them. In Godard’s Breathless, his protagonist admires Humphrey Bogart. This is established when Michel sees a poster of him in Paris. He says “Bogie,” a nickname that implies familiarity even as Michel says it with reverence, perhaps the way a contemporary young woman would call Taylor Swift “Taylor.” Bogart, who had died three years before this film’s release, is clearly someone whom Michel admires, even though we never learn why. The sight of the picture even causes Michel to rub his thumb over his mouth, something which Bogart used to do in his films. It’s a brief yet memorable moment which establishes that Michel, despite his self-centeredness and arrogance, is vulnerable enough to feel the need to live up to the example of an older hero as well as being as much of a fan of American pop culture as his creators. In contrast to Michel, whose idol is someone who was a real person, Jesse’s pop cultural hero is the fictional superhero known as The Silver Surfer. In his comic book series of the same name, The Silver Surfer is an alien who has been endowed with great power and a surfboard-like craft which he uses to live a nomadic lifestyle throughout the universe, saving people and longing to return to his lost love Shalla-Bal. The passionate emotions of these comics and the gloriously celestial style of their pop artwork make them a perfect pop cultural fixation for Jesse. While Michel’s worship of Bogart is only depicted directly only once, and with some ambiguity as to why he would idolize him, Jesse’s admiration of The Silver Surfer is a recurring narrative motif throughout Breathless. It is one that begins as soon as the second shot of him, which features him holding and reading out loud from a Silver Surfer comic. There go on to be several shots in the rest of the film in which artwork from that issue (created by comics veterans John Buscema and Chris Stone), fills the screen, the score by Academy Award-winner Jack Nitzsche (for Best Original Song from An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), which also starred Richard Gere) rapturously accentuating its beauty. In addition, Michel’s love for Bogart was something that he kept to himself, while Jesse has a conversation with Monica about the Silver Surfer. It is clear from his description of that character – that he’s “looking for love” and is “trapped” – that he relates to him. It’s a more direct and extensive act of paying tribute that feels perfectly at home in an American movie, as opposed to a colder French New Wave film like its source material. But that’s fitting when you consider McBride’s goal in making this movie. It might be surprising, considering both the artistic pedigree of the original version and McBride’s background in directing more experimental movies like David Holzman’s Diary (1967) and Glen and Randa (1971), to hear that his original desire to remake it was driven at least in part by commercial consideration. McBride said in an interview that someone in LA told him to find a piece of intellectual property to adapt because he felt it would be the only way for him to make a film. He chose Breathless (which he had loved) in part because it was a “known quantity.” That is a reason that would be familiar to modern studio executives who try to get the most out of their vast library of films by remaking them or setting new movies in the worlds of their well-regarded classics, as well as to the directors who create them. But McBride made Breathless (83) work so well, like any good remake, because he was willing to update it for a different context. He noted that he “decided to make it more like a Hollywood movie,” which he did in part by taking the story and ““set[ting] it in an entirely different world.” He ultimately approached the task of updating one of the most famous films in world cinema history not as a commercial artist trying to wring some extra money out of a beloved masterpiece, but as a translator who sought to make it feel new and alive in a brand-new way by making it something that Godard arguably loved more than anything else: an American crime movie. Breathless (83) performed decently at the American box office (McBride also notes it was a big hit in France), but it also received mixed reviews in America. Its legacy has grown over the years, however. Film writer Travis Woods has noted that it “essentially created a new filmmaking vocabulary, prefiguring the pop-addled, video-stored filmographies of artists like Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Michel Gondry.” One of those filmmakers he mentioned, Tarantino, is such a big fan of McBride’s Breathless that he has a poster of it permanently hanging in the New Beverly, a movie theater he owns in Los Angeles. But, even more than that, Breathless (83) deserves to be remembered as one of the great remakes. It proves that, with a paradoxical mixture of fidelity and freshness, an artist can enable people to enjoy the pleasures of a well-worn classic while still finding new ways to make a familiar story feel exciting and original. Let us hope that future filmmakers as well as those working today study it as a guide for how to create their own fresh versions of older films that will be artistically original while preserving what made audience fall in love with them in the first place, and that more than a few of them will be so exciting they will leave us…breathless. View the full article

A resort vacation? Thousands. A novel making fun of one? Less than 30 bucks! And the look on your rich cousin’s face when she realizes you don’t give a shit about her tan and plan to ask her leading questions about labor conditions instead of letting her show you pictures? Priceless. (This is a hypothetical cousin I’m making up here, in case any of my actual family is reading). Why bother lamenting a lack of travel to new territories when you can stand firm in the knowledge of your own moral high ground? Americans are all badly dressed assholes abroad anyway, like, who shells out for an international plane ticket but won’t bother investing in long pants (that’s aimed at all the Germans, too – why are you all always wearing shorts?) Anyhoo, with the conclusion of the third season of White Lotus, it’s the perfect time to read some books about rich people dying in the tropics! Even though the New York Times already ran a similar list, THIS list distinguishes itself by embracing all-new titles out this year (and one classic noir that was shockingly snubbed by the Times). Cleyvis Natera, The Grand Paloma Resort (Ballantine, August 12) Cleyvis Natera blew me away with her debut Neruda in the Park and her sophomore novel is truly the perfect follow-up from White Lotus. Set in a ritzy Dominican resort ostensibly located in a historic community of freedmen from the United States, The Grand Paloma follows staff and guests undergoing a variety of crises as a deadly hurricane approaches, and as characters steadily realize their moral compromises are no longer enough to hold off the twinned destruction of late-stage capitalism and its accompanying environmental collapse. I have feelings about the ending. Mainly I liked it a lot, was completely surprised by it, and need to talk to folks about the book so you all need to read it, finish it, then talk to me about it in like 6 months. Okay? Jo Morey, Lime Juice Money (Harper, August 12) In this thrilling, atmospheric debut, a woman trapped in a dangerous relationship finds herself isolated in the Belizean jungle and caught up in a complex orchid smuggling effort linked to decades-old family sins. The title comes from a recurring phrase in the book: “champagne dreams with lime juice money”, eventually discovered to be lyrics to a song played during a significant, and long-forgotten, memory. That contrast—dreams vs. reality—forms the central axis of each character’s development, negotiated well by some and disastrously by others. Krysten Ritter, Retreat (Harper, March 25) Krysten Ritter writes the kind of books she likes to read—thrilling, complex takes on compromised heroines facing terrifying obstacles. In Retreat, a con artist heads to an insular community off the coast of Mexico to hide out and take stock. Upon arrival, she finds her host missing, and her identity easy to assume, but Ritter’s heroine soon encounters more danger under her new name than she ever faced before. Andrea Bartz, The Last Ferry Out (Ballantine) Andrea Bartz is at the top of her game in this moody thriller set on a remote Mexican island full of secretive vacationers. Bartz’s narrator isn’t on vacation, though—she’s there to find out more about her fiancee’s last days, and learn if there’s a wider story behind her partner’s shocking death from food allergens. Trisha Sakhlecha, The Inheritance (Pamela Dorman) At last, a psychological thriller that mentions the Highland Clearances! Trisha Sakhlecha’s propulsive debut reads a bit like Succession, if it was a locked room mystery set on a terrifyingly remote island. When a wealthy Indian family reunites to celebrate their patriarch’s retirement, the younger generation plans to spend their vacation squabbling over finances, but a shocking tragedy soon threatens to dismantle their empire entirely. Barry Gifford, Port Tropique (Black Lizard) While many have recommended The Mosquito Coast or Alex Garland’s The Beach as proper backlist fair for the White Lotus enthusiast, I find Barry Gifford’s Port Tropique to be even more of a match for the slow-burn show. The introduction to the 1986 edition, which is the one I found on my family’s bookshelf, describes Port Tropique as Heart of Darkness if it was written by Borges, and I can confirm: this novel is dark, stylish, and deeply condemning. View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Austin Kelley, The Fact Checker (Atlantic Monthly) “In his sort-of-mystery debut, with understated humor and zippy prose, former New Yorker fact-checker Kelley is a fluid and funny writer, divertingly digressing on the nature of fact-checking and filling out a backstory for the narrating fact-checker, who, both well-informed and hilariously unaware, is as charmingly pedantic as a character could be.” –Annie Bostrom, Booklist Bailey Seybolt, Coram House (Atria) “Seybolt blends true crime and fiction in this absorbing debut. Seybolt skillfully blends points of view. Part Gothic novel (with creepy Coram House playing a role) and part investigative reporting procedural, this will both disturb and fascinate readers.” –Booklist Abbi Waxman, One Death at a Time (Berkley) “Full of the witty banter and laugh-out-loud scenarios readers have come to expect from Waxman, this raucous romp around Tinseltown with an odd couple of sleuths will delight readers.” –Library Journal Jeneva Rose, The Perfect Divorce (Blackstone) “Rose has a lot of fun with her characters’ attempts to implicate each other in the book’s overlapping criminal investigations and maintains wicked tension from the opening pages…A ride worth taking.” –Publishers Weekly Matthew Sullivan, Midnight in Soap Lake (Hanover Square) “Midnight in Soap Lake hooked me from page one. This twisty, smart thriller is brimming with complex characters, a page-turning plot and big questions of science, nature, marriage and murder. Matthew Sullivan expertly blends fact, fable and the evocative setting of Soap Lake in rural Washington state to create a spellbinding novel—I adored it.” –Tara Conklin Jonathan Coe, The Proof of My Innocence (Europa Editions) “A smart yarn with biting humor, ingenious clues, and a satisfying twist.” –Booklist Abigail Dean, The Death of Us (Viking) “This wonderful novel is a page-turner par excellence, written with unobtrusive brilliance, [and] full of sharply observed lines…. Dean has taken a case that closely resembles California’s Golden State Killer and combined it with the story of Isabel and Edward, a couple whose love is put under a breaking strain by an almost unimaginable tragedy…. The Death of Us lives up to the hype. Read it for story, always appreciating the no-showing-off clarity of its prose.” —Stephen King Lindy Ryan, Another Fine Mess (Minotaur) “Sometimes the dead can ruin your life. Lindy Ryan’s Another Fine Mess is a rich and captivating story about family legacy, history, lore, and of course murder. Delightfully alluring and richly suspenseful.” –Cynthia Pelayo C.S. Harris, Who Will Remember (Berkley) “Harris does her usual superior job of combining a page-turning fair-play plot with plausible period detail. Both series fans and newcomers will be captivated.” –Publishers Weekly Michael Amos Cody, Streets of Nashville (Madville Publishing) “Cody’s Streets of Nashville is a lyrical love letter to the musicians who built the city as well as a powerful exploration of friendship and brutality. With his authentic, empathetic voice, Cody is a welcome addition to Southern crime fiction. I look forward to more Ezra MacRae stories to come!” –Heather Levy View the full article

When I first trial-ballooned the idea of writing a fantasy murder mystery to a few other writer friends, the concept was met with a little skepticism: Could be really tough! Murder mysteries need people to know exactly how the world works. With fantasy, you can do anything, so it’s hard to build a mystery out of that. I knew instantly that this wasn’t so. Fantasy magic works only when the audience knows exactly what it can and can’t do: that’s a core thesis of worldbuilding. But more to the point, I knew that a fantasy murder mystery had been done before – and had been so successfully that it had become a cornerstone of entertainment culture. The first four Harry Potter books always focus on a series of mysterious crimes taking place within a tightly contained environment, with some of the crimes producing bodies (though not dead ones, just magically paralyzed ones). The mysteries always follow very tight, specific beats: there are clues built up during the start of school, and then more are carefully released at very predictable events after, like sports games, holiday parties, Christmas breaks, and exams. There are suspects, revelations, theories, and often a smaller set of crimes that the detectives confuse for the larger threat. All of it builds to a grand confrontation where the secret villain is revealed to have been present the whole time. Sound familiar? It should! Because this is more or less the bones of a classic drawing room murder mystery. For example, in At Bertram’s Hotel, Miss Marple takes a two-week holiday in a inn where the staff and the guests prove to be more than they seem – much like the teachers and students of Harry Potter. A contained environment, a series of odd incidents, a crime: it’s all there. The reasons fantasy murder mysteries work is because the two story types are oddly symbiotic creatures, with each one having demands in the exact places where the other genre doesn’t. For example, murder mysteries are one of the few genre types that has a specific plot requirement. Just like how a romance must feature the protagonist getting together with someone at the end – a romance writer will quickly tell you this has to happen, otherwise it’s not a romance – a murder mystery must end in revelation, the classic “whodunnit?” Besides this, murder mysteries are completely free to be inventive, and can take place anywhere and feature nearly anyone. Fantasy stories, however, have no specific plot requirement. There is no default fantasy plot. There’s the vague expectation of a big battle here or there, and a few old tropes about the country farm boy being revealed to be the chosen one and then something something grand quest, but fantasy moved beyond the basic Joseph Campbell archetypes a great while ago. What readers really desire of fantasy is a sense of place: to be introduced to a setting and characters that are both familiar and strange, existing in a world with its own histories, restrictions, opportunities – and grudges. In other words, often the same sort of stuff you have to build into a murder mystery. The two complement each other tremendously, really: for while fantasy often examines class, power, and ideological struggle, murder mysteries do precisely that as well. The costumes are just a little more ostentatious. Perhaps the one place where murder mysteries and fantasy diverge is a sense of the scale of threat. Fantasy readers like big places, big powers— and big destruction. It’s not just that the armies have to be big, but entire kingdoms, realms, and cities must also potentially be destroyed, or at least damaged during the proceeds of the plot. Murder mysteries are much smaller in scope: a great wrong has been done, true, but it is usually only one death. We are then driven to unwind this tangle of human impulse and desire in order to determine the culprit, which can be dangerous… but is unlikely to result in the fiery holocaust of an entire continent. As such, it is perhaps surprising that the world of The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption both focus so steadfastly on these very human and small-scale conflicts—while the true, enormous, civilizational threat occurs in the distance. For each wet season, the seas to the east of the Empire churn, and giant leviathans emerge and try to breach the sea walls to go wandering and raging, leaving death in their wake. Each year, all the arts, genius, and resources of the Empire must be mustered to keep them back—often with great loss of life. The detective Ana Dolabra, and her assistant—our protagonist—Dinios Kol, however, do not battle these leviathans. They do not wield immense weapons and go lightly dancing up the limbs of these great beasts to strike at their hearts in a tremendously cinematic sequence. Rather, Ana and Din are tasked with the maintenance law and order in this land that lives with such anxieties floating over it every year. It seems a curious choice, I suppose, to take a world of such huge stakes and instead focus on the small things—yet fans of murder mysteries may quickly recall another mystery story that does this as well. In Anthony Horowitz’s World War II television show Foyle’s War, Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle dearly wishes he could join the front lines and defend England from threat of invasion, but is instead forced to remain a humble Hastings police officer, and pursue petty crime. Yet in an era of so much struggle, there really is almost no such thing as petty crime: each instance of profiteering, black market trade, and murder often come with profound consequences that could endanger nearly any aspect of England’s defenses. Often these crimes get mixed up with military operations, and plots of conspiracy or treachery, leading Foyle into messy moral thickets that make him doubt how his nation is prosecuting this war for their very existence. Yet he strives on, performing this act of service that seems small, but portends a grander conflict. Because what Foyle is really battling is not a handful of murderers, but a battle for the soul of his nation. A civilization that lives under so much threat is liable to unravel, leading to corruption, suspicion—and collapse. To prevent this, and to keep an England worth defending, the morally upright, stiff-necked Foyle chases after criminals both large and small, and keeps the peace during an era of war. In this manner, the stories of The Shadow of the Leviathan and Foyle’s War have much in common. Both ask the questions—how can we keep this up, and retain our civilization? How can we ask our people to follow the law when they are so exposed to lawless violence? How can we maintain our humanity while living under this constant stress? This is where the meat of the story lies: not in magical mass destruction, but in what we do to each other when we feel the rules are getting fuzzy, and what steps we have to take to reassert the law—and why. As Ana and Din travel the grand and holy Empire, and see how all the human frictions and resentments imperil their yearly fight in so many ways, they’re forced to wrestle with these questions again and again. I hope it makes for a grand entertainment, while also giving those of us living in this particular reality a little food for thought. *** View the full article

Jonathan Ames was born in 1964 and raised in New Jersey by a traveling-salesman father and a schoolteacher mother. He was educated at Princeton and at Columbia, where his writing teachers included Joyce Carol Oates and Paul Auster. His senior thesis became his first published novel, which bore a blurb from Philip Roth. (“Mr. Ames’s antisocial young hero comes through as a cross between Jean Genet and Holden Caulfield.”) By 2019, he had written ten books, had a one-man New York stage show (Oedipussy), appeared several times on the David Letterman show, was a frequent participant in The Moth storytelling showcase, wrote and produced two television series (Bored to Death, Blunt Talk) and boxed several times in public billed as “The Herring Wonder.” Most recently, he is the author of three detective novels featuring L.A. private investigator Happy Doll (A Man Named Doll, The Wheel of Doll, Karma Doll). Mr. Ames speaks carefully and gently in a deeply compelling nasal voice which he describes as “affected.” What drew you to writing crime fiction? I had been a Chandler lover, and a Hammett lover – and then, later, Ross Macdonald – starting in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. Finally, in 2007, I wrote my first mystery story: “Bored to Death.” I later published it in McSweeney’s. That short story became the basis for my TV show. For the next 10 years, basically, I was involved in TV and hardly writing prose at all. But inbetween my two TV series, I went back to write another piece of crime fiction, You Were Never Really Here, which became a movie. When TV sort of ran its course for me, I started writing the Doll novels, in 2019. I’ve managed to write three of them in the last five years. I wish I could write more quickly. Do you see yourself writing Doll books indefinitely? I would like to. I love these long series. When I was making Bored to Death, I got introduced to Richard Stark [the hardboiled pseudonym of Donald Westlake]; and I just devoured those 24 Parker novels. Then what Ross Macdonald did: 18 Lew Archer novels, right? And the short stories, and the fragments. And then of course there’s Michael Connelly. I sort of discovered Connelly after I started writing the Doll books, believe it or not. Also what he’s done, with his intersecting universes – oh my God! I just think it’s brilliant. How does Happy Doll, patterned on those classic private eye figures, differ from them? Good question. He’s not necessarily consciously different. It’s a little bit like trying to describe the sound of my own voice, which, when I’ve heard it, is like: “Oh God, who is that guy?” Just ‘cause probably of my affected tone, but – I think he’s different, like, for example: Jack Reacher, he’s like an indomitable machine, and he almost never really screws up. Or – Lew Archer? Doll’s like a mix, of Lew Archer and [Philip] Marlowe. He has sort of Marlowe’s humor, a little bit. Or — a slightly goofball take on the world. And – they were much more confident men, Marlowe and Archer. They had a clarity of purpose. They knew who they were. I mean, sometimes Archer has self-doubts, or he would think about his divorce, or he would be a little melancholic about how he had screwed up his love life – but – he had real clarity of purpose, in regard to right and wrong. Whereas Doll – I think ultimately what makes him different is that there’s just a lot of Introspection, and confusion. And he’s a little bit nuttier; he’s more of a screwup. Though both Marlowe and Archer, whom Doll mimics, invariably get hit on the back of the head, step into a room and get knocked out. So I play with that trope, of them walking into spots where they get hit from behind. Does that make sense to you? Does that sound right to you? So, sort of an Everyman private eye – who’s also a student of Buddhism. Yeah, that’s increasingly, obviously, become a theme of the last two books. He’s been trying to apply Buddhist philosophy; he’s not necessarily a Buddhist; he wouldn’t call himself a Buddhist. He’d really need to have a group, what the Buddhists call a songa. He would need a teacher. He’s kind of like self-taught, just from books, which mirrors my own sort of interest and application of Buddhist philosophies to my life, the last few years. Though I hope that I make it clear in the books – that he might be getting a lot of this stuff wrong. Though the Buddha would say, “It’s up to you, to figure out how to apply these things.” So I hope that if anyone reads the books, and it makes them a little bit interested in Buddhism, that they’re not turned off by Doll not being an expert practitioner. He has to set it aside in order to start hitting bad guys. Yeah, the violence. He does come across, in Karma Doll, a Buddhist parable saying that the Buddha, in another life, or in another form, struck down a pirate, to keep the pirate from committing further negative deeds that would cause the pirate bad karma, as well as to protect the people that the pirate was going to hurt. So Buddhists will defend themselves, if need be, if push comes to shove. But for the most part, they want – to quote the New Testament – to turn swords into ploughshares: to transform violence into compassion. Compassion was certainly one of Lew Archer’s strong suits. I’ve been rereading Ross Macdonald. My one peeve is, sometimes his clients are so annoying. Which I know is part of it: The first noble truth of Buddhism is, “Life is characterized by suffering.’” I just picked up The Chill. I have all of them, because it helps me to try to write my stuff. And, oh, this annoying husband! I don’t want to deal with him. I mean, I love being with Archer, but – his clients sometimes annoy me too much. Also, sometimes I like him to be – I like it when he battles tough guys, like in that really great one, one of my favorites, when he goes to see that mother in Santa Monica . The Way Some People Die? The young woman who’s the nurse? Galley Lawrence. Galatea. For some reason, that’s one of my favorites. He goes up against tough guys in that one I think. I like when he goes up against tough guys; just my thing. ‘Cause I like to see him best them. There’s a short story, set in Palm Springs? In which he takes a terrible beating. I love Archer. Doll has a dog, with whom he enjoys an unusually strong bond. Yeah. A lot of people talk about that. I have a dog, so – The Buddhism, and the dog – these are reflections of my inner life. And it’s funny: I saw a quote from [Donald]) Westlake, when he was talking about [Richard Stark’s criminal protagonist] Parker. And Westlake is like my big hero. Though I tend to prefer Stark to Westlake. He said about Parker: “I didn’t give him a dog; I didn’t give him anything to make him more likeable, or loveable.’” And I was, “Oh – he’s –” I felt like in a way, from beyond, he was calling me out for giving this guy a dog! But I didn’t do it to make him more loveable; it’s just a reflection of my love for my dog. It’s a unique relationship; it’s way beyond Asta and Nick Charles Yeah, I guess Asta would probably be the closest, in The Thin Man. But Nick Charles – he seems to tolerate Asta. You know what I mean? Asta seems to be more Nora’s dog, perhaps; and he always has to walk it, or – Hammett was so big, although he only wrote about, what, four or five books? You can see, obviously, how influenced Chandler was by Hammett. And then Ross Macdonald sort of picked up the baton from both of them. One thing I try to do, as Ross Macdonald does, is, I try to write about nature. The beauty of L.A., or the sea. He’ll have these passages about the water, and the color of the water. His eye for nature, and also, even in the ‘50s and ‘60s, his sadness, about the smog, and how things are getting wrecked. And oil spills. Oh yeah, and then his great fire novel: [The] Underground Man, I think. I also try to have environmental themes in the Doll books. In the first book, there’s kind of post-fires, and – all these butterflies, ‘cause a few years ago, there was that Monarch butterfly migration. The second book, there were maybe fewer references to nature. Then the third book, there’s an atmosphere of storm, which we’re about to have here again. And the fourth book: my plan, and I had started it before the fires, was to have a fire novel, kind of like Ross Macdonald, ‘cause I love his – kind of dark, but his descriptions in Underground Man of fires on the ridge, advancing like an army. Umm. I can’t believe – I mean, I can, but – the Archer novels, the plotting is so intense. Two things – I love how he’s always running all over the place. He’s driving here, he’s Driving there; he’s in San Franciso, he’s hopping on a plane, he’s gone to Mexico. I just reread the Mexico one: The Zebra-Striped Hearse. That was a great one. I was going to try to do that also, like in The Underground Man: he’s zigzagging here, he’s zigzagging there; he’s almost getting the kid, but then – he’s out of his grasp. Because, for the reader – it kind of keeps you always in tension. And you know when I reread them, because I’ve forgotten so much, I don’t totally remember who the killer is. You suspect so many people. He wrote them so you couldn’t know in advance; he would write them so he wouldn’t know, or choose, who the guilty one was until late in the text. He made it so that almost any of the characters might be the murderer. So, I kind of try to learn from all these guys. It’s like listening to music. What about their stories compels me as a reader? And then: how can I recreate that effect? There’s a noticeably gruesome aspect to your books, don’t you think? One young woman’s legs are amputated. A man receives a kidney transplant. Someone receives a complete facelift. Yeah. That’s true. I know; Doll’s sort of like a cartoon figure, in that sense, but hopefully, believable enough that someone could persevere through these things: the blows to the head, the illnesses, the physical suffering some have. One of the writers who blurbed the first book said , “This is a book about being in the human body, and the horror of the body.’” I don’t want to overly disturb the reader, but – yeah, I guess there’s a gruesomeness to the books. There is death and mayhem. In the second book, the woman – she’s had her legs amputated, because she’s homeless, and she’s a junkie, and keeps having frostbite and gets gangrene. And it is a real issue for homeless populations in colder areas, to have a lot of amputations, because they get these terrible infections, and frostbite, and gangrene, and use intravenous drugs. But Doll feels great tenderness towards this character; it’s his ex-lover who’s lost her legs. You’re at work on the fourth Doll book now? I’m a little bit on a pause, at the moment. What with everything going on in the world. When you write novels you’re sort of a year behind, and it’s like: holy cow! If I write a new Doll novel, I mean, we might be living in a total authoritarian state by the fall; I mean we’re very close to it now. And so – will Doll be navigating that world? Even if he’s in his own mysteries, you’re still set in the now. Separate from that, I’m just so overwhelmed – as so many people are – with anxiety and dread. It’s hard to ignore the news. Part of the problem is, we carry around these phones, which are like Times Square ticker-tape machines. I guess it’s sort of like: with food, you have to be careful with what you put in your mouth. We have to be careful not to poison our minds, too much. View the full article