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In 1919, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. claimed, in his decision in Schenck v. United States, that the First Amendment right was not allowable if it hindered larger national strategic operations, but his particular phrasing of this verdict is notable for its idiosyncratic turn of phrase: he claimed that the right to free speech does not excuse “falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing panic.” This is a highly curious reference to make in a case entirely unrelated to panic (or fire) of any kind. Indeed, this case referred to Joseph Schenck’s being tried for printing and disseminating materials encouraging men to boycott the current wartime draft. The verdict was that Schenck’s arrest in fact upheld the Espionage Act of 1917, which principally sought to prevent non-authorized individuals from interfering with larger military-related situations or ventures. During this period, theater fires were frequent occurrences, and had been for quite some time. Moreover, due to overcrowding and packed audiences, poor safety practices, and rudimentary electrical equipment, the risks were vastly greater in the nineteenth-century, than in previous eras. At its simplest, Holmes’s locution confirms theater fires as common cultural knowledge. Holmes’s phrasing also equates unconstitutional behavior with unmitigated danger, thereby frightening possible dissenters. More importantly, however, in this respect, is that he specifically equates inappropriately free speech with deliberately and falsely drumming up panic. To Holmes, the theater fires connote confusion: public hysteria which principally results from authority or authoritative-seeming presence muddling together what is real, and what is not. Theater fires were a national fascination, a spectacle of their own. There were sensationalistic accounts published about real-life and recent theater fires, which emphasized gruesome details in order to sell copies. For example, less than a year after the deadly Iroquois Theater fire, a writer named Marshall Everett compiled an account of the fire, entitled The Great Chicago Theater Disaster, which featured the following subheadings: “Presenting a Vivid Picture, both by Pen and Camera, of One of the Greatest Fire Horrors of Modern Times,” “Embracing a Flash-Light Sketch of the Holocaust, Detailed Narratives by Participants in the Horror, Heroic Work of Rescuers, Reports of Building Experts as to the Responsibility for the Wholesale Slaughter of Women and Children, Memorable Fires of the Past, etc., etc.,” and “Profusely Illustrated with Views of the Scene of Death Before, During and After the Fire.” Then again, there were well-meaning reports that co-opted this sensational, inflammatory rhetoric to muckrake, announcing disasters with gripping phrases, to call attention to public safety lapses. In February 1875 (thirty years before Chicago’s deadly Iroquois Theater Fire), the Chicago Times ran an enormous front-page spread about a local theater fire, with shocking subheads entitled “Burned Alive,” Hundreds of Charred and Distorted Corpses,” and horrifying details about both patrons’ struggles to escape, and their gruesome deaths. The article proved to be a fake – but it was much more than a hoax. It was a cautionary tale, printed by the newspaper in hopes of raising awareness about poor fire safety measures in public places, particularly entertainment venues, which packed audiences in, night after night. The article’s rhetoric matches the bombastic vernacular surrounding such extremely frequent, real-life disasters, as well as directly engages with the increased concern about the promotion and implementation of fire safety policies and technologies. In this era of journalism, many incidents, from quotidian events gone awry to large-scale horrors, were represented in the news with exaggerated, shocking headlines and gory details. The overblown and graphic headings and subheadings of many such articles, argues Paulette D. Kilmer, do much more than rhetorically inflate the tragedies at hand to capture the attention of readers (although they certainly do this); the goal of some news outlets, especially The New York Times, was to scare its readers through the inclusion of horrifying and memorable details, by drawing attention to, and representing the disaster that can result from poorly constructed structures, corrupt institutions, dangerous products, or simply, everyday ignorance, mismanagement, irresponsibility and carelessness. To Justice Holmes, “shouting fire in a crowded theater,” as his words have come to be phrased idiomatically, refers to the moment that panic overtakes the crowd, overruns the show. A cry like this dissolves the boundaries and the authority of the theater space, leaving the people subject to their own whims, wits, wills, and feelings. Holmes notes that the governing principles of the theater are abandoned as soon as someone( anyone) announces a disaster loudly enough, just as the promulgation of anti-draft materials by an invested interloper might destabilize domestic war preparation plans, by displacing the rules in favor of the clashing feelings of an un-unified or disinterested mass. View the full article

Like a lot of writers, I’m always dreaming up hypothetical “what-if” scenarios—and sometimes I’ll run these situations past my wife, Julie, to ask how she would respond. For example, I once asked what she’d do if I was on a plane that vanished at sea—like Tom Hanks in Cast Away. I asked how long she’d wait for my return before giving me up for dead and remarrying. (She promised to wait longer than Helen Hunt, but I think she was just humoring me.) On another occasion, I asked how she’d react if our son committed a crime. Specifically, I wanted to know if she would turn him over to the police. She answered with a shrug. “Depends on the crime. What did he do?” “Something really horrible. Like murder.” She thought for a moment. “How many murders?” I couldn’t believe it! How many? She insisted the number mattered. She felt that if it was just one murder, then our son might have a reasonable explanation. “But what if he didn’t? What if he was flat-out guilty?” I kept pushing, but her answer didn’t change. She said it would be really hard to turn him over to the police, that she couldn’t imagine turning him over to the police. And I understood her point of view. I’m not sure I could turn him in, either. The conversation got me thinking about parents and the lengths we’ll go to protect our children (and also our willingness to overlook bad behavior that’s happening right under our noses). The real world offers plenty of case studies. One of the main characters in Michael Finkel’s fabulous nonfiction book The Art Thief is a mother who turns a blind eye to the nearly $2 billion worth of stolen artwork on display in her attic (her son claims that he purchased all of the sculptures and paintings at yard sales). And then of course there’s Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency titan recently convinced of fleecing his customers for billions of dollars. A judge sentenced him to twenty-five years in prison, but all through the trial, Bankman-Fried’s parents maintained their son’s innocence. They’re law professors at Stanford, so I imagine they understand the specifics of the case better than the average person. But I’m not sure they can view their son’s case with the same clarity as an impartial judge and jury. All these ideas and questions factor significantly into my new thriller The Last One at the Wedding. The story opens with a phone call: Frank hasn’t spoken to his estranged daughter Maggie in three years, but she rings out of the blue to announce she’s getting married, and better still, she wants her father to attend the wedding. Frank is overjoyed: Here at last is a chance to make amends with Maggie and start anew. But in the days leading up to the wedding ceremony, Frank makes an alarming discovery about Maggie’s fiancé, Aidan Gardner. It turns out that Aidan’s previous girlfriend vanished under mysterious circumstances–and there are rumors Aidan may have been involved. Naturally, Aidan’s parents insist their son was innocent, that he’d never hurt anyone. They claim their son is incapable of violence. But Frank has spotted additional red flags about his future son-in-law, and he begins an investigation. “So it’s a psychological thriller at a wedding,” one of my writer friends suggested. “But the narrator’s a dad? That’s unusual.” Up until that conversation, I hadn’t realized I was writing anything out of the ordinary. A talking octopus is an unusual narrator. Or a private investigator with Tourette’s syndrome—sure, that’s an unusual narrator. But a Dad? What’s so strange about a Dad? Then I went home and browsed the psychological thrillers on my bookshelves, and I understood my friend’s point. The overwhelming majority of psychological thrillers told in the first person are narrated by women (usually young, single women, to allow for the occasional romantic subplot). Any time fathers do appear in these novels, they’re usually (1) deceitful sociopaths tormenting their wives and children, or (2) completely clueless. This surprised me, because elsewhere in crime fiction, there’s no shortage of Dads fixing problems, solving mysteries, and taking down bad guys. The wonderful Joe Pickett novels by C.J. Box follow a Wyoming game warden who’s completely devoted to his wife and daughters (when he’s not stalking criminals and wildlife around Yellowstone). And S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears offers a terrific variation on the usual “action dad” formula; his story concerns the grieving fathers of a murdered gay couple who go on a bloody quest to avenge their sons. But in the quieter realm of the psychological thriller, Dad protagonists are scarcer than unicorns. My favorite example comes from a book that happens to be one of my favorites: Defending Jacob by William Landay. It’s the story of a district attorney who learns that his eighth grade son has been charged with murder—so yes, I guess you could argue that the novel is technically a legal thriller. But its most compelling scenes take place in domestic settings—in a middle school, in a suburban teenage bedrooms, and around the kitchen table. It’s a wonderful story of fathers and sons and families, artfully written and full of surprises, and probably the novel that inspired The Last One at the Wedding more than any other. But surely there must be other examples of psychological thrillers with great Dad narrators, right? If you think I’ve missed a good one, please drop the title and author in the comments. I need something new to read! *** –Featured image: Winslow Homer, Dad’s Coming!, 1873 View the full article

We all like to think of a writer’s literary career as a clean straight line climbing in a gradual upward trajectory until boom, it takes a sudden turn into that steep rise to the top of the bestsellerdom. Reality for most authors—even the most successful—is more often quite different, more like a roller coaster with a variety of ups and downs, and unexpected twists and turns. Best-selling author Robert Dugoni—Bob to everyone who’s ever met him—had a roller coaster beginning. It started out like most rollercoasters on an upward trajectory. Well sort of. His first book, The Cyanide Canary, a nonfiction account of corporate abuse, won critical acclaim but not readers. The Washington Post called it one of the best books of the year, but his publisher, Simon & Schuster, did little promotion. He switched to Hachette’s imprint, Grand Central Publishing, for his first legal thriller, The Jury Master, about attorney David Sloan. It landed on the New York Times bestseller list with more than 100,000 readers. “They marketed the hell out of it,” Dugoni says. He’d reached the pinnacle of his rollercoaster. Unfortunately for Dugoni that left only one direction to go. For his next David Sloan legal thriller, Dugoni switched publishing houses. He readily admits he took the money over a publishing house that wanted to build his career and almost immediately realized his mistake. In two years, he was out on the street. He wondered what might have happened had he stayed with Hachette. But not for long. Dugoni kept moving and wrote, My Sister’s Grave, a police procedural with Seattle Violent Crimes Detective, Tracy Crosswhite. His agent received a call from Thomas & Mercer, the crime fiction imprint of Amazon Publishing, based in Seattle. They wanted the novel and their hometown boy. His first encounter with Thomas & Mercer was in a large downtown Seattle conference room. There sat staff from editorial, marketing, sales, and digital production, all ready to go. They filled the room and promised their full support. And boy, did they deliver. Dugoni discovered Amazon’s marketing prowess, and his book sales soared. Today, My Sister’s Grave has sold more than two million copies. That first in a series remains his biggest seller followed by his popular literary novel, The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell. One reason My Sister’s Grave remains popular, is Thomas & Mercer’s insistence they continue to promote it. Their goal is to introduce new readers at the beginning of his series so they will read all of the Tracy Crosswhite books. The marketing strategy works. Bob still receives monthly royalty checks from a novel he wrote a decade ago—and the second, third and fourth in the series and so on. Like a small number of successful writers who revisit the bestseller list repeatedly, Bob has made it. Yet, he’s not on everyone’s bestseller list. There are many reasons he shouldn’t be as popular as he is today. The most obvious is readers can’t find his books on any shelf in Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and most independent bookstores because his publisher is an Amazon imprint. Most bookstore owners would rather wallow in pig slop than touch a print copy of an Amazon book, despite knowing they would make money on the sale of their competitor’s products. It’s the principle of the thing to them, even if it makes no financial sense. And you’re not likely to find him on The New York Times bestseller list anytime soon either. His new publisher was astounded Bob made the list three weeks in a row with their first novel together, My Sister’s Grave. So, he called the Times editors to thank them for the recognition. The Times editors expressed surprise. They hadn’t realized Dugoni had moved from Simon & Schuster. The next day My Sister’s Gave disappeared from the bestseller list. Despite millions in book sales since then, Dugoni has never again appeared on the list. For Dugoni, it doesn’t come down to whether you appear in print or e-books or appear online or in physical bookstores. Dugoni wants readers, and he’s found more than twelve million of them. Writing started for him as a child in the seventh grade. He was assigned a class speech on slavery and chose the point of view of an abolitionist. He spoke before his classmates explaining how demoralizing and abhorrent slavery was. But when he finished, everyone in the class just stared at him, including his teacher, Sister Kathleen. He was anxious. Was it really that bad? He suddenly felt embarrassed. Then Sister Kathleen pulled him from the classroom with no explanation and told him to stand in the hallway. Now he was really in trouble. She disappeared into the classroom next door while he wondered what went wrong. Finally, she returned. She told young Bobby, she wanted him to give his speech to the other seventh grade class. “I loved the moment,” Dugoni says. “I realized I could move people with words. That is the moment I decided I wanted to be a writer.” Today he has progressed through several standalones and series and currently maintains two. He earned his literary chops on his two biggest standalone novels, The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell and his Vietnam era novel The World Played Chess. For the foreseeable future, Dugoni has set a path for himself of writing just two crimes series––his Tracy Crosswhite detective novels, and a new legal thriller series he introduced in 2023 with a young Irish American protagonist named Keera Duggan. His first in the new series, Her Deadly Game, was popular enough his publisher urged him to continue. The second in the series, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, is set for release on October 22nd. He has introduced a female protagonist into a genre dominated by men. In fact, both of his current crime series star female protagonists. “Gracie Doyle (his editor and associate publisher) came to me and said, ‘Would you like to do a legal thriller?’ because they really like the way I write courtroom scenes. I said, ‘yes but I’d like it to be like a police procedural and have the family dynamic in there.” “I wanted to do an Irish family. I think it’s an absolutely fabulous country. I’m half Irish and I’ve been to Ireland multiple times now. I find the people are incredibly generous and wonderful. But I also had a grandfather who was a professional and very successful, but also an alcoholic, and it very much scarred my mother and her family members. I saw what happened firsthand and I thought it was something I could write about with some honesty.” His current writing schedule calls for a new novel every nine months alternating between Detective Tracy Crosswhite and attorney Keera Duggan. His next Crosswhite novel launches in early 2025. To understand just how prolific he’s been, look back six months and forward six months. This spring he published, A Killing on the Hill, a standalone noir murder and corruption novel during the Great Depression base on old newspaper clippings his wife’s grandfather kept from one of his legal cases about a 1930s crime. Of all places, he found them in his own attic among some of his wife, Cristina’s, family treasures. Then his new Keera Duggan legal thriller comes out in October, and then a co-authored novel about World War II, Hold Strong, based on a true story, debuts in December. And finally, the next installment of his Tracy Crosswhite series appears around February 2025. Four novels in less than a year. How does a writer work at such a pace? “Four books a year? I go to work every day. This is not a hobby for me. It’s a job. Not to say I don’t love it. I do.” Still, he plans to slow his pace to one book every nine months for the foreseeable future. He will be writing one Tracy Crosswhite detective novel and one Keera Duggan legal thriller—alternating a new book in each series every eighteen months. Dugoni writes five days a week, leaving weekends for family. He often plays golf two or three times a week since he suffered a stroke after a fiftieth birthday party for Cristina. He was taken to the hospital where they found since birth, he’d had a heart valve that didn’t close properly––something he’d never known. A blood clot had passed through his heart to his brain. Fortunately for him, a leading specialist was at the nearby University of Washington Hospital to treat him. Dugoni began playing golf about five years ago to reduce stress and help with anxiety. “I think it comes from my mom’s upbringing in an alcoholic household…I was never impacted by it until 2016 when I had the stroke. After I had a stroke, I had a couple of panic attacks. I reached a point where I needed to acknowledge it. I needed to realize it was nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed of. That it was part of who I was. That it was something many people dealt with, and it shouldn’t be hidden. So, I sort of embraced it. I’ve managed it and taken care of it now.” Anxiety, he says, “is an unwanted passenger in my car, but I’ve learned how to not allow it to drive. And I’ve learned how to not allow it sit in the passenger seat. It’s got to sit in the rear seat. So, I know it’s there, but I don’t acknowledge it. It doesn’t tell me how to drive. I think that’s the best way to define it.” Today, he speaks openly about his anxiety at various writing conferences and many attendees later come up to him after his talk to tell their stories. “My 50s were not a fun time in my life.” He had a heart patch implanted, suffered from anxiety and had hip surgery. “I told people when I turned 60, I was actually relieved.” Yet, he says, “Everybody’s dealing with something. Nobody goes through life unscathed. In the whole scheme of things, I’ve been pretty lucky.” In his new Keera Duggan novel, he uses his experience to build his story. Instead of introducing the stereotypical protagonist with a drinking problem, he makes her part of a scarred family that deals with the family’s alcoholic patriarch and legal rainmaker. At the beginning of his first Keera Duggan novel, Her Deadly Game, the father goes to a bar on a lunch break in the middle of a trial and doesn’t return. Keera, who has been watching the case, immediately jumps in for the client. This is the first time readers experience her courtroom prowess—and Dugoni’s. His courtroom scenes are unsurpassed in the genre for their legal sleight-of-hand maneuvering and drama. In fact, anyone considering law school who wants to become a litigator, should read both of Dugoni’s Keera Duggan novels. In the first, you must read the father’s courtroom scene where he subtly eviscerates the prosecutor in such a civil manner. In Beyond Reasonable Doubt, which comes out in October, read the scene where Keera turns her case inside-out. If those don’t make you want to become the next Perry Mason—excuse me, Keera Duggan—nothing will. “In court she’s tough as nails. And out of court, she’s really complex,” Dugoni says. “Trial lawyers come off as fearless and I’ve observed enough trial lawyers to know that’s not true. It’s a facade they put on in the courtroom…. Outside of court, they have the same problems as everybody else.” And Keera Duggan’s no exception. After two legal thrillers in two years, Dugoni’s now in the planning stages for a third. “I’ve been toying with the idea,” he says. “What usually happens is I come up with an idea. It gets really complicated—overly complicated—and then I realize the answer is just keep it simple. Don’t try to come up with such an extravagant plot, because the book is more about the characters than it is about the plot. So, I’m trying to see if I can work something into this idea and I just haven’t been able to do it…I don’t know how much more I’ll deal with that before I just dive in and get started.” He acknowledges his writing style can make getting started on his next book awkward. “I often struggle to come up with something that is some sort of kick ass idea. I’m just not that kind of writer. I’m more of a panster. I don’t know what story I have until I get into it and I’m writing it and seeing where the characters are going. But it doesn’t change the fact writers want some kind of security when we’re writing and that we should have an idea where the story’s going. But you also have to trust your instincts and say, ‘you know, I’m just going to wait on this. I’m just going to let this happen and see where it goes.’ And I’ve had multiple books now and that’s been successful for me, so you’d think I’d be willing to be trustful and just go with it. But it’s hard. It’s a hard thing to do.” Writing for him, he says, “is like a Monet painting. It’s just swatches of color until you get to the point where you’re taking that fine paint brush and you’re putting in just a little flick. And it looks like just a little flick until you stand thirty feet from it and realize it’s an umbrella. You know that kind of thing.” Dugoni works closely with his agent and editors from the very beginning of the process. Today, before he starts a novel he has a conversation with agent, Meg Ruley, who gives him suggestions. He then works on a first draft and sends that to Gracie Doyle at Thomas & Mercer. “I write a first draft and get to a point I’m not finished, but I feel comfortable sending it to them so if there’s a glaring problem, I don’t spend nine months working on a book and they then say we can’t publish this.” After Gracie does her magic, he sends it to his developmental editor, Charlotte Herscher. “I’m a very big proponent of allowing people to do their jobs,” he says. And he prides himself on listening. The first page of Herscher’s editing memo tells him how wonderful he is. The next four pages rip his manuscript apart. He then revisits his work with diligence until he’s satisfied he’s resolved his editors’ issues. “I’m a little OCD. That’s both a blessing and a curse.” What were we saying about being productive? “To be honest, I’ve never missed a deadline.” Deadlines, he says, are important and a lot of first-time novelists don’t understand that. “I think a lot of writers who make it start off with another career and they have all the time in the world to write their first novel. Then they sign a contract,” he says and are facing a deadline. Writers, he says, “can get too wrapped up in our head. That can be a product of people who become hopeless. They stop asking for help and they stay in their head trying to solve the problem. That’s what we writers do.” That may be too simplistic a description, he acknowledges, but it sounds spot on. He encourages aspiring writers not to quit. “Just keep the faith. Keep putting one foot forward. The minute it starts to become a drag, step away. You’re no longer enjoying it. But if you really truly love it, you just keep doing it.” “This is a really hard business. The key there is business. You can’t treat it as a hobby. You’ve got to treat it as a business. You’ve got to go to work every day, and you’ve got to be prepared when opportunity knocks.” And opportunity knocked for Dugon, who has nothing to prove, but who still loves his daily routine. “The future is the fun part of this whole job. You never know what’s going to happen. I never thought I’d write a story about World War II (Hold Strong). I helped to bring the characters to life and get the story over the goal line.” He never thought he’d write about Vietnam (The World Played Chess). “As I wrote this story…my son wanted to know about Vietnam. No one talks about it. Veterans have said it’s the most raw account they’ve read.” While he loves writing, it is not sacrosanct in his life. It merely wins the silver. His family and friends win the gold. And while his body of work at age 63 is broad and popular, he still has a lot more he wants to say. No doubt, a standalone—maybe another literary novel—will slip in among his two series if his golf game doesn’t get in the way. With a nice size body of work, you’d think he’d want to be remembered for his best literary effort, but that’s not the case. “You hope it’s for the right thing…But there are few people in life who are truly remembered. It’s fun to go down to Palm Springs and hear young people say, ‘Who’s Frank Sinatra? Who’s Bob Hope?’ I don’t think it’s realistic for me to say I want to leave a legacy. At the same time. I want to leave a legacy for my wife and kids, but more so, I want them to love their husband and dad. That’s what I think is important to me, that my kids can look back on me and my life and say he was a good dad. He was a good man. He really gave us a leg up.” View the full article

“Books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones,” said Petrarch. For me, that goes double for any novel set in the Middle Ages, those liminal centuries when ancient magic mixed with new religion, when love and war, feast and famine, walked hand in hand. This contradictory and chaotic period provides fertile ground for tales of crime. Before toxicology reports or formal forensic analysis, and in the midst of omnipresent superstition, medieval detectives crack the case with the power of their own original logic. The stakes are always high; those in power kill quickly and with immunity, church law criminalizes autopsy, and individuals deemed “too clever” may find themselves accused of witchcraft. Despite all this, the medieval detective is not grim and stoic: the so-called Dark Ages were also full of love and laughter. We see this in the bawdy writings of Chaucer and Boccaccio, in the Limbourg brothers’ delicate illumination of the month of August, where peasants swim as nobles in absolutely fabulous hats trot by on their tasseled ponies. Thus, when faced with Death, our detective greets him with an excellent joke. In my novel The Stone Witch of Florence, Ginevra di Gasparo is recalled from years of lonely exile to catch a relic thief. Her sole qualification: a magical coral amulet that renders her immune to plague. When everyone else is dropping dead, she’s the only one who might live long enough to see the thing through. As Ginevra muddles her way through the investigation, she must face the tragedy and comedy of her time head on. “Death comes for everyone,” the gravedigger tells her. “Mocking it is the only way to remove its sting.” The Stone Witch joins a rich tradition of medieval crime novels. Here are a few of my favorites: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco 1327, Northern Italy This is THE medieval mystery. It is thrilling and intricate and if you haven’t read it yet, I heartily encourage you to jump on the bandwagon. Brother William of Baskerville and his assistant, Adso of Melk, are called to a fraught theological meeting at a remote Benedictine Abbey. But upon arrival, the Abbot asks William to investigate a monk’s death. Soon, another brother is drowned in a vat of pig’s blood. The murders continue, and William must seek the killer in the monastery’s mysterious library. Version 1.0.0 Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin First of a series 1171, Cambridge, England This fascinating and grotesque tale follows a female doctor as she battles bigots and her own shortcomings to track down a serial killer. Adelia Aguilar is a doctor to the dead, trained at the famed medical university in Salerno. She’s called to Cambridge (she’s not sure by who, exactly), to investigate the disturbing deaths of village children. The local population is quick to blame their Jewish neighbors, and not everyone is pleased with Adelia’s presence. She must uncover the real killer to save the lives of Cambridge’s Jews and her own. A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters First of The Cadfael Chronicles. 1137, Shrewsbury, England Written in 1977, A Morbid Taste for Bones is the earliest book on this list, and is a source of inspiration for many writers of this genre. Brother Cadfael had his adventures as a crusader, and now is content to spend his retirement as a monk tending the abbey’s gardens. His quiet days are interrupted when he’s sent to Wales to acquire the relics of Saint Winifred. In Wales, not all the locals are willing to part with the relics, and the disagreement escalates to murder-by-mysterious-arrow. Some think the victim was struck down by St. Winifred herself, but Brother Cadfael has other ideas. The Alewives by Elizabeth R. Anderson 1353, Colmar, Alsatia We all like to be cozy sometimes, there’s no shame in it. The Alewives is a clever and not-too-dark medieval mystery that centers on friendship without falling into cringey, saccharine territory. Three women living on the poorest, grossest, street in Colmar need to put food on the table, so they join together to start a brewery (even though none of them actually know how to brew beer). When several neighbors end up dead in suspicious circumstances, the town sheriff is quick to dismiss these deaths of poor women as accidents. But the alewives know better, and for their own safety decide to take the investigation into their own hands. Nicked by MT Anderson 1087, Bari, Italy Nicked is a fantastic and original heist novel, based on the true story of the theft of the relics of St. Nicholas (yes, that St. Nick). St. Nicholas comes to the compulsively honest Brother Nicephorus in a dream and encourages him to help the poor. The monk’s superiors interpret the dream differently, and hire Tyun, a professional relic “liberator” to snatch St. Nick’s relics for their own city of Bari. Nicephorus is sent along with Tyun to recover the bones, but quickly becomes suspicious of the mercenary’s motives. Is he in the pay of Bari, or their rival, Venice? And also…is Tyun flirting with him? The Lover by Lauri Silver First of the Sufi Mysteries Quartet 907, Baghdad The setting alone makes The Lover worth a read, the mystery delicately unfolding inside a layered and richly described medieval Baghdad. Zaytuna, the reclusive daughter of a Sufi mystic, just wants to be left alone. But when a young girl stumbles into her home, seeking comfort after another child’s murder, Zaytuna feels called to seek justice for the ones at the very bottom of a strict social hierarchy. The Queen’s Man by Sharon Kay Penman First of the Justin de Quincy Mysteries 1193, England A fast-paced whodunnit set against the drama of Eleanore of Aquitaine’s court. Justin de Quincy, bastard son of a bishop, has just been thrown out of his home. Aimless and dejected, he encounters a dying man who thrusts a bloodied letter into his hands. The letter is for the Queen, and contains information about Eleanore’s missing son, Richard Lionheart. Now, Justin must deliver the letter, solve the messenger’s murder, and claim a place for himself in the Queen’s hostile court. *** View the full article

I am not the only writer I know who watched a lot of television during the pandemic. Too much television. My husband and I parked ourselves on the couch and watched Tiger King (oh come on, you know you did too!), every episode of New Girl (still funny, even the second time), and countless British mystery shows, all of which began to blend together into a seamless, cozy, pacifying blur. I didn’t mind this. I was so lucky: no one in my family was ill, no one died. We live on a boarding school campus in Massachusetts, so even though the school sent everyone home and moved its academics online for March, April, and May of 2020, we were quite happily stuck in our campus bubble. We spent lots of time hosting “driveway parties” and playing an invented, socially distant lawn game called Bean Bolf. I bought giant bags of flour and my college roommate sent me a sourdough starter in the mail. I sewed masks, which were apparently completely useless, and my kids built bike jumps in the woods. It felt a little like my childhood in the 80s, with some Zoom sprinkled in. Our sufferings were small—infinitesimal—compared to the greater world. And yet, I missed them. Yes, the teenagers. My writing desk looks out on a large quad, surrounded by four dormitories. On normal days, the quad is filled with kids doing what kids do: laughing, racing each other on scooters, flirting, chasing each other around, tripping because they are trying to walk and watch a show on their phones at the same time. During Covid, though, the quad was mostly empty, except for an occasional faculty child on a solo bike ride, our silly Bean Bolf games, and, once, a bear, who lumbered slowly through the empty quad, amazed at his good luck. I didn’t realize how much I relied on the small daily dramas of the students for inspiration until they were gone. A few months of watching the same stale television night after night—and writing very little, despite the massive windows of time I had to do so—made me notice that something was changing about the way I was consuming the stories I was watching. I didn’t really care whether the priest in the tiny, weirdly crime-prone English village would find the killer; I didn’t even try to figure it out myself. Because my daily life was lacking in intrigue, no fictional intrigue appealed. The stakes in the real world were much too high; the stakes in the fictional world were way, way too low. You would think that I would just turn off the television and feed my creative soul with something new and perhaps more stimulating, but it was Covid, so we just plugged along, the same thing every night. In the fall of 2020, my school was lucky enough to be able to open in-person for our students, which was a logistical nightmare but an emotional boon for the young people in our care. Slowly, they returned to campus, and although I was much busier, I could feel my creative energy and curiosity return. I decided to try my hand at writing something like a mystery, and The Undercurrent, a novel about a new mother who becomes obsessed with story of a missing girl, arrived very quickly, as if it had been waiting for me to turn off the television and write. A friend of mine, the very excellent writer Kate Hope Day, alerted me to a quotation by Benjamin Percy, in his craft book, Thrill Me: “…a good story is a turnstile of mysteries.” This idea makes sense to me: the reader must desire, need, to pass through one turnstile—one scene, one chapter—to get to the next. The joy of reading centers around this sensation, and the joy of writing is in creating stories that make the reader want to lean on that turnstile and turn the pages of your book. But more importantly, the desire to move through that turnstile is the core of living. When the world seemed to stop in 2020, it was hard to remember to push on it and keep going. Now that the pandemic is limping its way into history and the election looms, it’s clear that we can’t stay on our couches and watch the world go by. It goes too fast, and it requires our loving, total participation. The students at my school have returned to their business of living. I sit at my desk and watch them run out the door to catch their breakfast before classes begin and return at the end of a long day, sweaty and exhausted. They are sometimes joyful, sometimes angry, sometimes lonely, sometimes kind, sometimes cruel. It is all so ordinary. What could be a greater mystery? *** View the full article

I had never met the two stern-looking young women sitting across from me in the train car, but I knew who they were. Both were wearing in vintage dresses, pressed and perfect, their hair waved and smooth in the style of the 30’s. The train, too, seemed to be old; the seats were wooden, and the car jostled terribly, causing a constant swaying and jerking motion that was relentless. “You,” one of the women said, pointing her finger harshly at me, “did not do us justice.” In agreement, her companion slowly shook her head. “It’s not that simple,” I tried to say, but the woman with the pointed finger narrowed her eyes in anger. “You could have helped us,” she said sharply. “And you did nothing.” “That’s not true,” I started to argue. “I do want to help you.” “You let her off the hook,” the other woman, who had been silent up until now, said. “And she killed us.” “She got away with it all over again,” the first woman said. “And we still can’t do anything about it. We thought you would fix that.” I was humiliated. I felt an icy sheet of shame frost over me, as if I had been caught doing something horrible. These two women, Anne LeRoi, the bolder one, and her quieter companion, Sammy Samuelson, were murdered on the night of October 16, 1931. They were killed by their best friend, Winnie Ruth Judd, known as Ruth, each with a precise gunshot to the head. Both women were stuffed into trunks, Anne whole, Sammy dismembered, and loaded into the baggage compartment of a train travelling across the dry, brittle desert between Phoenix and Los Angeles. Their bodies were discovered as blood leaked onto the platform of the Los Angeles Union Station, alerting porters that something awful was inside each trunk. I didn’t wake up as much as I shot into in the darkness of my bedroom, feeling that Anne and Sammy had been right there. That dream followed me for days. It still bothers me. In 2015, I went into the Arizona State Archives to research the case convinced that Ruth acted in self-defense, which was the lore that had followed the case around since 1931. She mourned for her dead friends for the rest of her life, referring to the crime as “my tragedy.” In Arizona, Ruth was held up as the patron saint of injustice, convicted of a crime and sentenced to hang for a misunderstood accident. Ruth was breathtaking, and not just in the beholder’s eyes. She was a great beauty with kind eyes, a lovely smile and was always perfectly coiffed. On the day she surrendered—after five days on the run with barely any food, water and a bullet lodged in her hand that was turning gangrenous—she emerged in a fur coat, flawless finger-waved hair and a veil of sadness, a police officer flanking each arm. The coat was stolen, but everything else about her was perfect. Not a hair out of place or a tint of lipstick. She looked miraculous and ethereal, like a saint. The photo looked like a movie still. Killers don’t look like that, I remember thinking as I studied the photos. They are messy and cold, with twisted mouths and steel eyes. Aileen Wuornos. Griselda Blancos. Lizzie Borden. Genene Jones. They look hard, pinched, swollen, unperfect. Ruth didn’t fit the model, the manner, the background. She was a minister’s daughter, a doctor’s wife. I knew it had to be self-defense. Within fifteen minutes of the files being delivered to my table in the Arizona State Archives, I knew that everything I had hoped about her innocence was wrong. Not only was I off the mark, I wasn’t even on the right map. The autopsy report of the victims revealed stippling on both of the victims’ temples, which indicates a muzzle-on-skin shot. It’s a powder burn. The entrance and exit wounds were almost parallel. Not the signs of a struggle, but the signs of an intentional shot, held with a steady and deliberate hand. Planned. Premediated. First-degree. Over the next decade, I dug up everything I could about Ruth; letters, newspaper clippings, interviews, oral histories. I talked to other reporters who had studied the case, and one of them gave me the archival research of Sunny Worrel, a research librarian who spent her life devoted to uncovering every aspect; she was also the great-niece of Sammy Samuleson, the victim who had been dismembered. It was a treasure trove of cited, sourced information, some of which I had never seen. Like any great story, the layers began to peel away to reveal a naïve woman who held a streak of wildness in her that she didn’t know how to harness. She wanted to love deeply, experience beauty, become a mother—all of which were beyond her grasp as she tried to reach for them over and over again, taking care and fixing the messes of her drug-addicted older husband. She was kind, I was relieved to discover. She did help people. She was a good friend. And then, in 1931, separated from her husband and stuck in Phoenix, she saw a last chance to touch everything that had escaped her in life. A furious romance that became her sole focus. A time of happiness, even solace, a slice of what she finally dreamed of—stability, a home, calm. But then a threat emerged in the form of her dear friend, an interference that could destroy everything. The more I discovered about Ruth, the more I understood her, and how that awful night in October came to unfurl. And then I realized the most terrifying thing of all; I identified with her, a murderess who had taken the life of two people she loved most in the world. The acts on the October night were savage, evil and psychotic. But I came to understand her, and I wrestle with that, because she took the lives of two vibrant young women unnecessarily. As I veered deeper and deeper in Ruth’s head, I sympathized with her, and to be honest, it was not hard, despite the fact that she was unequivocally a murderer. She took that step, made that decision. Alcohol, luminol and cocaine use did not help the situation, and Ruth found herself getting sucked in a whirlpool that was taking her down deeper every day. In researching and writing The Murderess, I’ve learned the truth is not a two-sided coin. It’s multi-faceted, and the truth depends on who you talk to. Who you like the most. Who you find yourself trusting. There are so many theories about the murders even today that people discussing them get into arguments. I knew that if I was going to write a solid book, I really had to ground myself in Ruth’s head and I had to stay there while writing the section that comes from her perspective. She lost focus on rationale as deep-rooted anxiety swept away common sense and reality. It was a terrible, anxious place and I hated it. It was the greatest challenge of my writing career. It brought be back to times in my own life when I was in a bad place, and emotions and reactions I thought had long ago healed burst open again. Found myself in a frantic, uneasy, frenetic state relaying Ruth’s perspective. I didn’t sleep much, and when I did, had stress-induced nightmares that culminated into sitting with Sammy and Anne on a train. I had to understand not only how Ruth committed murder, but also how I could do it, too. I used to think that I could never commit such an act, but we are all fooling ourselves if we believe we have such a strong hold on circumstance and what constitutes a strong state of mind. People sometimes crack. Nice people. Kind people. The truth—no matter how many sided a coin it is—is that none of us can guarantee that given wrong place, wrong time, wrong set of circumstances—that we aren’t capable of horrible things. Truly horrible things well beyond the possibility of what we understand in ourselves. There is still so much that I don’t know about the Ruth Judd case because everyone involved with it has now passed, and the truth has evaporated with them. Ruth’s death sentence was commuted to life in the state hospital, then known as the insane asylum. But the remainder of her life was fruitful; she cared for the children that were incarcerated with their mothers who were not able to care for them. She escaped the state hospital numerous times, the last for five years as she was a companion and caregiver to two separate elderly women before her recapture in 1969. In the early seventies, she was pardoned and lived a peaceful and uneventful life until her death at the age of 98, surrounded by people who loved her and respected her. I’ve talked to them. They adored her, calling her the most kind and generous woman they’d ever known. But there are still two young women on a train in the 1930’s who look at me sternly and with awful disappointment. Sympathizing with their murderer does not sit well with them, and I understand that. Explaining to two victims that their killer had “some shit going on” can’t make anything better or change what happened. Their lives were over. They could have lived until 98, too, surrounded by friends and family who cared deeply for them. Ruth took that from them, but I don’t think she really got away with it. She lived, but she was haunted for seventy more years about what had happened, disguising it as self-defense because she couldn’t believe she was capable of such horror, that events brought her right up to the edge that none of us think is possible or believable. It’s the stuff of nightmares, whether you’re a ghost sitting on a train, or a woman who cannot believe her own capacity. I finished the book a year ago, and I was relieved to go back to my own life. The truth can be terrible, and it doesn’t always absolve or resolve. It just is, even if decades bury it and parts of it become unearthed, revealing lines that were crossed and mistakes made. I live day by day knowing now that good people sometimes do bad things, and although I’m not happy about that revelation, it is a hoovering reminder that horror and devastation is only as far away as circumstance allows. And that goes for all of us. *** View the full article

Imagine you’re an ambitious doctor in 1820’s Edinburgh. You don’t know anything about germs or anesthesia, but you have a medicine chest of calomel, blue pills, mercury and arsenic. You lance and bleed and carry a bag with all kinds of scalpels, forceps and syringes. Unlike the men you apprenticed to—army doctors, because you couldn’t afford university—you also carry a hollow wooden tube, a controversial innovation called a stethoscope. Many of your colleagues still listen to patients’ hearts putting their ears right on their chests, but this makes some women uncomfortable. A stethoscope gives better sound and protects their modesty. You can amputate a leg in under five minutes, but unfortunately, that’s not enough to make a name for yourself. Unlike some of your teachers, you have an astonishing knowledge of human and animal anatomy. In the last few decades, dissection has become a thing. You’ve taken apart dozens of dead bodies: men, women, children, pregnant women (these bodies are particularly expensive), rabbits, dogs, birds, even a platypus. You’re so good at dissection, one of these animals, carried across oceans and seas, was presented to you to disassemble in a public theatre. Other doctors are jealous. Most of your income is made cutting apart dead things and selling tickets. But dead things, astonishingly, are in short supply, and unless you have them, you can’t sell tickets. This was the quandary of Dr. Robert Knox, of 4 Newington Place, Edinburgh. Like most of his colleagues, he counted on resurrection men, nighttime marauders with prybars and spades, to supply him with bodies stolen from local kirkyards. Edinburgh was (and is) a leading centre for medical study. In Knox’s lifetime, numerous private anatomy schools offered classes and specialist lectures as well as the university. Knox himself taught hundreds of students each year and was known for the excellence of his lectures as well as his reliable supply of specimens for study. But everyone knew it was impossible to come by so many honestly. On October 31, 1828, Knox’s suppliers, the infamous William Burke and William Hare, murdered their last victim, Margaret Docherty. In exchange for immunity from prosecution, Hare confessed that he and Hare killed sixteen people and sold their bodies to Knox over a ten-month span. Burke was hanged and publicly dissected, but Knox was never called to testify. The medical fraternity, rightly concerned for their reputation, closed ranks to shield Knox, though Robert Christison, a physician and leader in the emerging field of forensic science, said that he considered Knox “deficient in principle and in heart.” He certainly was. Though Knox may not have suffocated any of the sixteen known victims, their murders would not have happened without his greed, ambition, and appalling lack of compunction. But Robert Knox and the so-called Burke and Hare murders are not the only medical murderers worth mentioning. Cases of ‘Angels’ and mercy killers such as Charles Cullen show how vulnerable we truly are to ‘good’ nurses and doctors. For example: Dr. Harold Shipman, a UK physician, killed 218 patients (confirmed) but may have murdered as many as 250. All were female and elderly, and he was convicted of killing only 15. Elizabeth Wettlaufer, a Canadian nurse, killed 8 long term care residents. 132 patients of Dr. John Bodkin Adams, an Irish GP practicing in Britain, died in comas between 1946 and 1956. Though charged with murder, Adams was never convicted. He was struck off the medical register in 1957 but reinstated in 1961. These cases, and the personalities of Knox, Wettlaufer, and Adams—their astonishing immunity to detection and prosecution—are the inspiration of my new novel, The Specimen, a story I hope readers find as haunting as the truths that inspired it. Because we trust the women in the white coats and the men holding the stethoscopes. Or at least we tend to. But maybe, sometimes, we shouldn’t. *** View the full article

“What’s a cult?” It’s everybody’s favorite question when it comes to religion and true crime. I guess because it seems so unanswerable. Except that it’s very answerable. It’s just a boring answer. A cult is an unsuccessful religion. One too young and not big enough to absorb crime and controversy when it happens. One that hasn’t grown too big to fail. That failure can take the form of everything from criminal acts to public embarrassment to the death of a leader—all things bigger organizations can withstand with little issue. I researched scores of not-yet-religions to get down to the thirty featured in my book Cult Following. That winnowing was necessary for practical reasons, but also because after a certain horizon, the stories of most cults get redundant. You see one UFO cult, you’ve seen them all. This doomsday cult is pretty much that doomsday cult. Self-help cults always seem to help themselves the same way. Still, even among the most unique cults that I could find, the ones featured in the book, they all seem to share basic commonalities…that will not at all help you avoid them. 1. The rules of the organization do not apply to its leader. This red flag is appropriate for any organization—a political system, a corporation, a sports team. Sure, we know that the rich, famous, powerful, and talented can get away with far more than most, but we should all at least pretend that the rules apply to them and have some kind of limit for their shenanigans. But with cult leaders, there is often no pretense that their actions are bound by a common law, and their ability to act unencumbered by any rules is limitless. David Koresh of the Branch Davidians took all the wives as his own while enforcing chastity on everyone else. Pyotr Kuznetzov, who founded the Russian cult Heavenly Jerusalem, convinced his followers to seal themselves into a cave, but begged off doing it himself because he claimed a different destiny. 2. The leader sees themself as preternaturally unique and gifted. Like most leaders, cult leaders have something that makes them stick out from the pack. It could be charisma, drive, passion, knowledge—but those are relatively common human traits. Cult leaders fetishize and aggrandize themselves far beyond mere characteristics. The leader of NXIVM was often described as a child prodigy, the world record holder for highest IQ, and the most ethical man in the world. And the number of cult leaders who fancied themselves the reincarnation of Christ is so great they could all get together and form their own cult. 3. The organization is isolated geographically or socially. It’s the classic fishbowl tactic. Cult leaders, to maintain doctrinal purity and control of their followers, need to keep members separate from the world. Dissenting opinions, outside perspectives, and objective analyses are all dangers to extravagant ideologies and the manipulation of the vulnerable. Often, that isolation is a geographic strategy. That’s why communes are so popular for cults. The People’s Temple in Guyana. The Ant Hill Kids in the mountains of Quebec. Sometimes, it can be a social or psychological isolation, like with the Sullivanians, who managed to run a cult of white collar, active members of society in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. 4. The organization acts according to urgent predictions of an impending world-changing event. Nothing forces action like urgency. Politicians use it all the time to explain why they should be elected. Budget crises. Immigration crises. Climate crises. Crime crises. Cult leaders use the same tactic, but go bigger. They often prophesy the end of the world via natural apocalypse, alien invasion, or worldwide war. And then they’re audacious enough to establish a near-term date. Because that makes it even more urgent—the Millerites, Heaven’s Gate, the Planetary Activation Organization. When it doesn’t happen, sometimes the cult disbands or loses followers. But not always. Cognitive dissonance often keeps members of the cult going. In fact, the concept of cognitive dissonance was formulated by researchers who embedded themselves in a UFO cult called the Seekers to see what would happen when the aliens didn’t arrive. 5. The organization impoverishes members by fundraising intensely from their pockets and estates. Poverty traps. Riches flow to the top. It’s that simple and has nothing to do with cults. But it happens in almost every cult. Bhagwan Rajneesh, who founded the Rajneesh Movement, owned close to 100 Rolls Royces. Hogen Fukunaga, who established Ho No Hana Sanpogyo in 1987, wore $5,000 suits. Dwight York, who established the Nuwaubian Nation and built an Egyptian-inspired commune in Georgia, told his son, “I don’t believe in any of this shit. If I had to dress up like a nun, if I had to be a Jew, I’d do it for this type of money.” 6. The organization expounds ideas that are an unoriginal mishmash of the teachings of other organizations. Nobody has any original ideas. Most cult ideologies are predictable mashups of the tenants of religion or self-help programs or spiritualism. Even the advanced extraterrestrial entities proffered by UFO cults always seem to offer trite messages of peace and evolution of the sort most science fiction novelists wouldn’t even use as placeholders in their first drafts. This commonality is the most fascinating since it would be the best test of whether a cult harbors the ultimate truth of existence. Its deity or extraterrestrial overlords should be able to provide new, reality-shattering information that nobody could even guess at. A real revelation, in other words. 7. The organization has a boring name. I don’t know why this is. Maybe marketers are less susceptible to joining cults. But cults generally are either named after their leader—such as the Koreshan Unity or Raëlism—or have a vaguely Christian/New Age-sounding names: Home of Truth, Children of God, Superior Universal Alignment, Remnant Fellowship Church, Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments. It’s gotta at least look good on a T-shirt. If you see any or all of these seven red flags in a group, it’s probably a cult. And if they can survive the inevitable outcome of those flags and grow, they’ll graduate to religion. Whatever the case, these flags won’t stop you from joining a cult. That’s because there is no more human act than joining a cult. It’s not weird. Unless you just categorize the entire human species as weird. Which is a valid assertion. I mean, likeminded people searching for something join together under an impressive leader. That’s all we do in life, whether it’s in our families, our jobs, our societies. Cults are an extremely human enterprise. And that’s the most terrifying thing about them. *** View the full article

You’ve probably heard of the “write what you know” theory, or the “know what you write” rebuttal, which has probably lead to a precipitous rise in both memoirs and cursory internet research. But a lesser-known strategy is the handy “write about what you did when you were drunk,” which steers me—apparently by way of my own incipient desire to examine (alas) what I write—to the sketchy and often-maligned history of the pedal pub. Or the Party Pedaler. Or the Pub Cycle, the Trolley Tavern, Party Bike, Beer Bike, Bar Bike… Or as the Van Laar brothers, Zwier and Henk, christened it back in 1997 when they invented this monstrosity to promote their Netherlands bar during a parade, the “Fietscafe,” which Google is telling me translates as “Bike Café.” It seems like these crazy contraptions peaked about 6 or 7 years ago, or at least that’s when the majority of the news reports are from regarding noise complaints, tipsy skirmishes, or just general hand-wringing about imposing some sort of regulations to (literally) curb all that “Whoo-hooo-hooing” up and down the quiet neighborhood streets of our mid-sized US cities. This is also right around the time when adult entertainment and drinking activities seemed to be evolving into something a little more physical: trivia competitions morphing into Escape Rooms, chess boards suddenly being used as Axe Throwing targets, darts boards traded in for Fight Clubs. Incidents seem to have tapered off though, which probably speaks to how effectively these Rube Goldberg wagons (highlight on “rube”) will eventually exhaust any revelers who saddled up to pedal away their troubles. I mean, if someone else does the steering, how long can you really drink and ride a bike? Or pat your head and rub your stomach? The science is still out! For those who somehow have missed the trend, the typical Pedal Pub consists of a dozen or so passengers, plus a “driver,” who is in charge of steering and braking and, presumably, obeying traffic laws (2 years ago in Atlanta, a pedal pub driver got drunk right along with the pedalers and flipped their steed at the bottom of a fairly steep incline, resulting in serious injuries all around). Ten of the seats are usually designated for pedaling, plus a handful of non-pedaling seats over the rear wheel (most pedal pubs warn you that any hills with a 5% gradient or higher “may require everyone to get off and push,” which seems like a much more effective bonding method, to be honest). The “Pittsburgh Party Pedaler,” however, is an even more impressive feat of engineering, boasting a whopping 16 pedaling passengers and spots for 3 more non-participants, as well as one seat smack-dab in the middle for the “VIP” to soak up the maximum amount of attention. But what most people discover once these machines are in motion is that everyone is a VIP, and anyone on board will quickly be afflicted with from what has more recently been diagnosed as Main Character Syndrome. As many people soon realized, once you take the party outside and on the road, it’s very easy for these mobile revelers to act like the rest of the world is focused on them, and, to be fair, they probably should be. It’s a crazy sight, all that gleeful exertion. In the movie The Wolf of Wall Street, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill, desperate to get their expired quaaludes to kick in, hop on some exercise bikes and start pedaling in a frenzy to get the chemicals cruising quicker through their bloodstreams. Apparently, something very similar happens on a pedal pub. I’m no doctor, but I’m guessing all the conspicuous vomiting that always seems to accompany such outings (according to the Reddit threads which tirelessly chronicle such misadventures) likely has something to do with this combination of booze and labor. But who knows, maybe this is actually a win/win, as any carefully timed expulsion of beer could increase your velocity and get you up those biggest hills. So maybe it turns out that the oft-cited Foucauldian surveillance falls apart when the subject is just a bunch of intoxicated aerobicizers who no one actually wants to see, but who really really need to be seen? For anyone out there wondering if the public ever turned the tables on this invasion, they actually turned the spigots on them instead. At first glance, it seemed to be a victimless crime: take the infamous 2015 Minneapolis pedal pub ambush, when five bicyclists wearing what has been reported as “Mad Max-style outfits” went after a pedal pub populated by off-duty Burnsville cops (oops!) armed with an array of squirt guns and water balloons. And this was two Mad Maxes ago, before they started to tone down the leather and feathers in favor of bodypaint and gasmasks (but with the sideways cellphone footage of the battle, it’s hard to see if there are any football pads or feather mohawks under those cops’ knees). The drunken cops pinned them to the ground until more sober reinforcements arrived, and the colorful attackers were arrested and charged. I’m not sure what their ultimate punishment was (you look it up, I’m still pedaling), but the (post) apocalyptic meltdowns captured on film seem to confirm what we always suspected about some cops: they are supremely delicate flowers who will not be disrespected on a giant community bicycle! Strike that, maybe they’re not really flowers, because a squirt gun would probably be a flower’s best friend. After just one splash of water, those particular police officers burst into rage, then (probably) a gentle shower of coins. But seriously, I could have told them that if it’s one thing a cop cannot abide, it’s a squirt gun. When I was a kid, my brother and I would ride around on our ridiculous one-person bikes with our 1980’s, extremely-realistic pump-action squirt guns to hose down passing cars. Thankfully, someone called the police on us, who came knocking on our door during dinner to confiscate our alarming-looking toys. I’ll never forget the all-business officer who had us stand in the yard as he squirted our driveway, then reported solemnly into his shoulder: “I have discharged the weapon into the asphalt and determined it is a replica.” Sure, my brother and I may have learned an important lesson that day, but one unintended consequence was a reoccurring fantasy where a special unit of police officers crashed through door after door, tackling our Christmas tree and gathering up our toys to determine whether they were real or not. “Stand down, men. Strawberry Shortcake is not really cake. I repeat not really cake.” Side note: after diving down the rabbit hole of that whole incident, I’m not saying I cracked the case or anything, but in retrospect it kinda feels like entrapment. A Facebook page titled “I Hate the Pedal Pub” organized the Minneapolis balloon and squirt gun ambush, so the pubs with the pedals certainly knew it was coming. Now I can’t prove they stacked the bike with off-duty cops to roll around town, beers and feet chugging away, finger crossed they’d get attacked, because who’s to say that’s not where they went every night when their shifts ended anyway, but you have to wonder. Anyway, hearing about these fiascos, I finally had to experience one for myself. Friends and family were game, and I was as surprised as a cop experiencing a “Mad Max-style ambush” to discover that it was a blast! No pun intended. Eventually, I had to try them all. Axe-throwing, escape rooms, table-top bowling, until… The final boss was the “party bus” in Louisville, Kentucky, which was actually a modified 1973 American LaFrance Pumper fire engine with a hot tub in the back, ideally suited for putting the party on display. Both the Nashville Party Bus and the (now defunct) Louisville Pool Party Express featured surprisingly roomy tubs to slosh around in while you got sloshed, bubbling away in a sun-soaked cauldron until the whole party was properly stewed. Now we were cooking with meat. We cruised around Louisville in this contraption for what felt like hours. I didn’t get as drunk as my fellow passengers, sticking to Monster Energy drinks throughout, which was somehow worse. And I don’t know if I grew out of it during that last party bus cruise or what, but sometime around the third mile whooping it up in the rolling hot tub I began to wonder what would happen if that truck never pulled over? This led pretty directly to my novel Shallow Ends, which I hope treats the whole craze more fairly than I did here (it doesn’t). In the novel, the characters experience the ultimate recreation; a rolling party that never ends. Hopefully, this sounds as terrifying to you as it did to me. But I am pretty confident I’ve gotten all of these misadventures and misdemeanors out of my system now (remind me to tell you how our group set a record on the Pittsburgh Escape Room, only to have it stripped away when the cameras caught me “cheating” by forcing open one of their doors without solving the puzzle to earn the key. Talk about entrapment!). I guess I’ll never recapture the magic, or to paraphrase Chris Cornell, “the water’s always greener, where the Monster Energies are peeing”? But who knows. Even though the 13 party-goers who climb about the party bus in my novel are certainly forever changed, I, myself, am incapable of learning anything this late in life. So really, I can’t wait to jump on some kind of manual motorized mayhem again. I mean, how can you hate anything that makes you have to work so hard to have fun? *** View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Anne Rasche, The Stone Witch of Florence (Park Row 0“The Stone Witch of Florence sparkles with suspense and the magical power of women. An engaging and entrancing debut.” –Laurie Lico Albanese Sarah Sawyer, The Undercurrent (Zibby) “A gripping and emotional domestic suspense novel that explores the complex trials and tribulations of motherhood from three female perspectives . . . The taut prose and complex narrative structure illustrate the three women’s loyalties, sacrifices, longings, and ambitions, illustrating how they are forced to make difficult choices and embrace their womanhood.” –Booklist Danielle Trussoni, The Puzzle Box (Random House) “[An] astounding sequel . . . This clever and satisfying novel cements Mike Brink as an action hero for the ages.” –Publishers Weekly AF Carter, Johnny-Boy (Mysterious Press) “Brutal yet satisfying . . . thriller fans with strong stomachs will have a blast.” –Publishers Weekly Chuck Palahniuk, Shock Induction (Simon and Schuster) “Readers’ choice whether this is a coded message, a spiked cocktail, or just a secret love letter to art.” –Kirkus Reviews Jason Rekulak, The Last One at the Wedding (Flatiron) “Part conspiracy thriller, part family drama, The Last One at the Wedding kept my heart racing and my mind reeling from its first page to its devastating conclusion.” –Riley Sager Max Hastings, Operation Biting (Harper) “’Reads like a thriller’ is often said about good nonfiction accounts of war adventures–but in this case it’s true.” –Daily Mail S.E. Redfearn, Two Good Men (Blackstone) “A brisk and gritty thriller with a strong psychological undercurrent.” –Kirkus Reviews Lawrence Robbins, The President’s Lawyer (Atria) “Robbins’ expertise as a high-profile trial litigator is on full display in this tautly constructed novel that exposes the slippery confluence of evidentiary facts and emotional trauma.” –Booklist Laurie Notaro, The Murderess (Little A) “As complex as it is deftly crafted―this is a pulse-pounding, page-turning, heartbreaking account of the misunderstood woman behind a sensational news story that gripped a nation. A haunting novel that never lets the reader go.” –Kirkus Reviews View the full article

So, we’ve all read The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, right? Maybe it was an assigned reading in high school or college, or a voluntary read to see what the fuss was all about. Perhaps you were drawn to the theme of youthful alienation and the rejection of the phoniness of the adult world. I know I was. In college, I read Salinger’s short stories as well, understanding them to lesser and greater degrees. But what I totally missed in all of Salinger’s works was the inextricable link to his personal experience of the Second World War. Several decades ago, a rereading of The Catcher in the Rye left me cold, even slightly irritated at what I perceived as Holden Caulfield’s self-centered view of the world. But I totally missed the point once again. He was consumed with grief over the death of his younger brother Allie. Death and grief, two horrible outcomes of combat in the Second World War. Salinger knew them well. As a sergeant in the 4th Infantry Division, he landed in the second wave at Utah Beach on D-Day and fought through several major battles and into Germany. Holden Caulfield was there, too, in the form of seven typewritten chapters Salinger carried ashore in Normandy in his rucksack. Salinger served with the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps, attached to the 12th Regiment of the 4th Division. The duties of the CIC included protecting personnel from threats posed by enemy agents, investigating breaches of security, and interrogating enemy prisoners near the front lines. Salinger’s proficiency in French and German was constantly employed as his unit fought in the weeks and months following D-Day. The 12th Regiment landed with 3,100 soldiers on June 6th. By the end of that month, only 600 were left standing. Death and grief. * Salinger’s unit was also involved in the hunt for Nazi collaborators among the French. His CIC partner and best friend throughout the war, John Keenan, reported that in one city they had just picked up a collaborator when a crowd heard of the arrest and jumped them. They grabbed the prisoner and beat the man to death in front of them. Salinger and Keenan were helpless observers. Even before D-Day, Salinger was witness to a horrific tragedy in the cold waters of the English Channel. While practicing invasion landings off the Devon coast near Slapton Sands, ships carrying men from his division were attacked by German torpedo boats. Over seven hundred men died, more deaths than at any single beach on D-Day. The disaster had to be covered up, and the job fell to Salinger and the other CIC men. Their role was to ensure that the anguished survivors told no one about the death of their brothers-in-arms. Death and grief suppressed. It was not long after this event that Salinger wrote “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” In this story, Sergeant X has just been discharged from an army hospital, clearly suffering from combat fatigue. He can’t concentrate, his writing is illegible, and his hands shake so much he can’t roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter. His face jumps with nervous tics, and he occasionally feels his mind “dislodge itself and teeter, like insecure luggage on an overhead rack.” Sergeant X receives a package from Esmé, a young girl he met before going into combat. She’s sent him a letter and a shockproof watch that belonged to her father. Her letter concludes with this postscript: P.S. I am taking the liberty of enclosing my wristwatch which you may keep in your possession for the duration of the conflict. I did not observe whether you were wearing one during our brief association, but this one is extremely water-proof and shockproof as well as having many other virtues among which one can tell at what velocity one is walking if one wishes. I am quite certain that you will use it to greater advantage in these difficult days than I ever can and that you will accept it as a lucky talisman. Charles, whom I am teaching to read and write and whom I am finding an extremely intelligent novice, wishes to add a few words. Please write as soon as you have the time and inclination. HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO LOVE AND KISSES CHARLES It was a long time before X could set the note aside, let alone lift Esmé’s father’s wristwatch out of the box. When he did finally lift it out, he saw that its crystal had been broken in transit. He wondered if the watch was otherwise undamaged, but he hadn’t the courage to wind it and find out. He just sat with it in his hand for another long period. Then, suddenly, almost ecstatically, he felt sleepy. A shockproof watch, shattered in transit, which Sergeant X holds as he considers the depth of the damage. But the childlike greeting from Charles calls to him, and he feels sleepy. Sleep, which possesses curative powers for soldiers suffering from combat fatigue. “And I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.” -Franny and Zooey Salinger’s unit was one of the first to march into liberated Paris, where he engaged in prisoner interrogations. In my novel The Phantom Patrol, the 19th in the Billy Boyle WWII Mystery Series, I make use of this historical circumstance to bring CIC Agent Salinger into the narrative. As he investigates the murder of a fellow CIC agent, Salinger is drawn into Billy Boyle’s assignment to track down a murderous gang of art thieves. But my fictional tale treats Salinger gently compared to what the war threw at him. After the battle for France, his division was chewed up in The Hürtgen Forest, a densely forested area on the Belgian-German border, thick with pillboxes and heavily defended villages. Casualties were heavy. Knowing what Salinger went through there, as I reread the following lines from Chapter 16 of The Catcher in the Rye, I had a dawning understanding of what he was getting at. Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. All the little kids playing some game, going over that cliff. Things only got worse as the war dragged on. Salinger was at the Battle of the Bulge in the freezing cold, then on into Germany as the spring of 1945 rolled around. Writing to a friend, he said: I dig my fox-holes down to a cowardly depth. Am scared stiff constantly and can’t remember ever having been a civilian. Salinger wrote whenever he could. One soldier stated that during a bombardment, Salinger crawled under a table and continued to type on his portable typewriter. In April 1945, he helped liberate the Kaufering concentration camp, a sub-camp of Dachau in southern Germany. The SS had tried to exterminate the surviving prisoners by burning them alive in a locked building. He later told his daughter: You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live. After the surrender of Germany, Salinger had himself admitted to a German hospital for combat fatigue. He apparently wished to avoid the stigma of an official nervous breakdown diagnosis and chose a private hospital instead of a US Army facility. After his release, he stayed on with the army and joined in the hunt for Nazi war criminals. For me, no other short story encapsulates Salinger’s reaction to the war more fully than “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” First published by The New Yorker in 1948, it features Seymour Glass, who appears in other stories. Seymour is on vacation with his wife, Muriel, in Miami and has just been discharged from an army hospital for an assumed psychiatric disorder. His wife’s mother is very concerned with his erratic behavior, but Muriel insists all is well. While everyone else is putting the war behind them and enjoying peace with their prosperity, Seymour is alienated and alone. After a day at the beach, Seymour shoots himself in his hotel room while his wife naps. In one of his rare interviews, Salinger said the character “was not Seymour at all but… myself.” Finally, I have come to understand Salinger’s writing. It was not about adolescent angst and melodrama. It was about the wounds of war and the pain of remembering. At the end of Catcher, Holden Caulfield has the final word, hinting both at the repression of grief and, at the same time, the possibility of healing. “Don’t tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” Missing everybody. All his buddies, all the dead soldiers, all the victims, all the kids in that field of rye. *** View the full article

You’ve reached the end of the Reacher universe, at least until the next book comes out. There are no more small towns left to explore. The villains have all been defeated, and Jack’s toothbrush is safely stowed away. What do you read next if you need a fix from the land of well-crafted thrillers? Something that’s a page-turner but thoughtful, populated by great plots and multidimensional characters who are easy to root for. Here are six crime thrillers that promise to scratch the itch created by Lee Child’s iconic character. The Drowning Woman by Robyn Harding While the story is simple and the characters few, the cliffhangers and plot twists are plentiful in this un-put-downable novel about friendship and betrayal. The setup is straightforward, a homeless person who’s recently lost her business and sense of self saves a battered woman from suicide. The two women become friends but nothing is as it seems, especially when a murder occurs. If this book was a TV show, you’d binge it over the weekend. The Drifter by Nick Petrie The first book in Petrie’s long running series introduces Peter Ashe, a veteran of America’s endless Middle Eastern war machine, and, depending how you look at it, a spiritual descendant of Reacher. Battling a monumental case of PTSD, Ashe lives as a loner, drifting from place to place as foreshadowed by the title. That is until a friend from his time in uniform commits suicide and Ashe finds himself pulled into a dark world he thought he’d left behind. Blacktop Wasteland by S. A. Cosby Considered an instant classic upon its release, Cosby’s novel about a former getaway driver who just wants to be a good husband and not be part of his old life, hits all the right notes, especially in its portrayal of rural Virginia and the people who live there. This novel has it all—great stakes, well-developed characters, and an edge-of-your-seat plot, everything backed up by Cosby’s excellent writing. Every Dead Thing by John Connolly Speaking of excellent writing, no one quite compares to master stylist Connolly when it comes to developing a sense of place intertwined with complex characters. (Notable exception: James Lee Burke.) In Every Dead Thing we first meet Charlie Parker, a disgraced NYC cop turned private detective who is haunted by the brutal murder of his wife and child. This is the first in a long-running series that is part procedural, part supernatural, and a hundred percent compulsively readable. Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke This book earned numerous accolades—the Edgar and Anthony Awards, New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and too many “Best Book” lists to mention. It’s easy to understand why. Darren Mathews, the deeply conflicted Texas Ranger who serves as Locke’s protagonist, catches a case that pits him against his superiors, a town full of racists, and his own ethics. The Deep Blue Good-by by John D. MacDonald Can we call Travis McGee, the hero of this novel, Jack Reacher’s literary godfather? Lee Child has certainly intimated that without the Travis McGee books, there would be no Reacher. We’ll have to overlook MacDonald’s antiquated views on gender and concentrate on his main character, a beach bum who can fix most problems with his fists or his brains. Sound familiar? *** View the full article

It’s autumn in New York, which means that I am inevitably, thinking about school. I haven’t taken classes in years, and I haven’t taught in years, but I attended one formal school or another in one capacity or another for every year of my life, from pre-school through the end of my PhD last year, pausing only for one year to go teach at a school instead. Since I was three, this is the first autumn I have not prepared for a class or a course or a colloquium, have not set foot on a campus or in a classroom or an administrative office. It’s strange. I don’t miss it, but I have been thinking about it a lot. I had wondered if I would feel, this semester, as if I were skipping school. And I don’t, I’m surprised to say. The sensation of completing my degree and playing hooky from it are totally distinct. For one thing, I feel happier than I know I would if I cut class. I’d be worrying the whole time, and I’m not now. Whenever I think about this, I remember my favorite “school-skipping” scene in cinema, from François Truffaut’s 1959 film The 400 Blows (Les 400 Coups in French). You’ve probably scene it, but just in case… it’s Truffaut’s semi-autobiographical film about a young boy’s lonely and bleak adolescence in late 50s Paris, and a meditation on the oppression of youth in both public and private spheres of everyday life. The film concludes that while it is necessary for our hero Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud) to escape a nuclear family structure that has deteriorated into an unloving, vaguely abusive situation, true freedom cannot be experienced by physically abandoning society altogether; although society is oppressive, it still allows for intellectual and emotional releases such as through fun and art (and, of course, through the institution and craft of cinema). This message is articulated in one scene in which Antoine and his friend René skip school and wander around Paris, seeing a movie in a theater, playing pinball at an arcade, and riding a carnival centrifuge. This isn’t the only scene in which Antoine will run away from school. In the film’s famous conclusion, Antoine runs away from the reform school he has been forced to attend. In a long tracking shot, he runs from the school, through the woods, all the way to the beach, at the edge of the shoreline. When he arrives by the water, the camera freezes on a close-up of his face. In this shot, his face is a cypher, blank and endlessly interpretable, a real-life Kuleshov experiment. Antoine is totally bondless and alone in nature, as he was on the day he skipped school in Paris. But here, the effect is different. He is almost forced into stillness by this abandonment of the public and private worlds. This freeze frame serves a valuable contrast to the happy, public school-skipping scene—in which the camera both spins on its own axis and stands still to capture the spinning of the centrifuge ride. Antoine spins uncontrollably in the centrifuge and laughs as a result (one of only several scenes in the movie where he laughs or even smiles), and the hyperkinetics captured by the mobile camera indicate that the public sphere provides physical stimulation that leads to emotional betterment. Furthermore, the alternating point-of-view shots in this scene reinforce that happiness is not a solitary emotion—the riders are enjoying the experience as much as the onlookers (a group which, meta-cinematically, includes the film’s audience). When Antoine and René go to the cinema and visit the park, they do not encounter any authoritative figures. In fact, the only adults caught on camera are fellow passengers on the centrifuge ride—and, giddily standing side by side with Antoine (the only youths), they are quite literally on the same level, looked down at in a mass by the undiscriminating camera above them. Moreover, not only is the public space bearable when children are not put down by adults, but it is also bearable when children are treated the same as adults (or even allowed to be adults, themselves)—earlier, when Antoine and René cross the street, the cars and trucks at their crosswalk stop. The boys, behaving maturely, function seamlessly with everyone else. However, while it is important for children to be acknowledged as equal to adults on many levels, it is also important to enjoy childhood. In the ride, when the floor of the rotor disappears, the camera tilts down Antoine’s body, from his suddenly grinning face to his airborne feet, emphasizing the phenomenon he is experiencing. Then, pressed up against the wall of the mechanism, caught in a medium shot, Antoine bends his body into all sorts of (often horizontal positions). He looks as if he is flying; in a kind of Peter Pan moment, Antoine is free because he possesses childlike sensibilities instead of adult concerns or inhibitions. When the rotor is whirring in a long shot a few moments later, it is nearly impossible to tell the figures apart—everyone is a blur, except Antoine, who has previously stretched himself out laterally. His behavior on the rotor is the most immature, but none of the adults attempt to suppress it; another passenger even attempts to wiggle the same way, himself. Therefore, freedom is found in the public sphere when adults understand or emulate it for its enthusiasm. The flying motions of the characters also add notes of surrealism—as of the public sphere’s yielding such a carefree moment is magical or beyond reality. The twirling of the rotor (with its whizzing, clicking sound—which is audible because the detached, merry music playing when Antoine and René have their jaunt stops suddenly, as if a projector is being turned on) is also reminiscent of film reels turning… and makes Truffaut’s larger point about the rejection of oppression in domestic and social spaces one about the redemptive power of cinema. Antoine and René begin this fun day with a movie, and, later in the film, Antoine’s parents take him to the cinema, in the only scene where all three enjoy each other’s company. Therefore, cinema has the power not only to provide a worthwhile escape, but also to confront situations by reducing interpersonal tension—temporarily repairing the fractures of a crumbling private life. The private sphere should be filled with happiness, but it is not so in Antoine’s home. Thus, in The 400 Blows, the only way to ensure happiness is to escape the constraints that exist both in society and at home, and to pursue a life of enjoyment, fun, and art. View the full article

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Dreams are one of those things professors and editors and more seasoned writers all tell you not to write about. It’s a day-one “don’t,” right up there with adverbs and any speaker tag other than “said.” It’s willfully unrealistic to write characters who don’t dream, but dreams in fiction often function as a clumsy storytelling shortcut. Consider the “false start,” when a character wakes up from a dream the reader didn’t know they were having on page two or three, flustered by the subconscious irruption of whatever past trauma drives the story. We dislike this trope because it’s lazy, low-hanging narrative fruit. All literary creatures are hypersensitive to symbolism, forever fighting the Freudian impulse to assign meaning to things that are intrinsically meaningless—like the color of the curtains or what the weather is doing on the other side of that window. Real-life dreams resist interpretation; even the scientists who study them can’t say where they come from or what physiological purpose they serve. So why are they irresistible to young writers trying to make their work mean something? I’ve grappled with severe insomnia my whole life. Long nights of no sleep were how and when and why I learned to write. I couldn’t dream the way most people did, so I dreamed up whole novels instead. Most of my fiction is still written in a weird, dreamlike state. My first novella, Graveyard Shift, which unfolds over one sleepless night, pushed me to think more deeply about the role this dream state plays in my writing. On the rare nights I do sleep enough to dream, characters from whatever novel I’m working on often appear in starring roles. Writing is the last thing I do before bed, so they’re closer to the surface of my subconscious than the real humans I interact with each day. One nocturnal encounter stands out: I crouch under an overturned boat in a dry lakebed, knee to knee with the troubled main character of my novel. We dig in the sand between us with small plastic shovels, slowly uncovering a bottomless burial ground for single, mismatched children’s shoes. The book had nothing to do with shoes, children, or boats, but for some reason my troubled brain manifested a version of the famously unsettling six-word story “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” I still think about it six years later. Asking myself why that was, I realized that what makes a dream a bad plot device is also what makes it an excellent writing prompt. We’re wired to look for meaning in everything, and we will—like Jane Eyre’s action—make it when we cannot find it. The books that stick with me as long as that dream are books with blank spaces begging to be filled in. A story that refuses to hand us all the answers demands we do some interpretative work of our own and precludes a passive reading experience. We rarely recall the beginning or end of a dream—how you got under that boat or what happened when you crawled out—so the details we can grasp in the moment take on an outsize significance. We make whole tapestries of meaning from a few evocative details. A novel done well does this, too: it offers detail, concrete and specific as lost shoes in the sand, but lets us connect the emotional dots and draw our own conclusions. No need for ham-fisted symbolism or fictive psychoanalysis. Usually, you don’t notice you’re in a dream while it’s happening—so seamlessly immersed that you can lose yourself there for a while, and not notice how time is passing. That’s the same feeling I’m always chasing in fiction: nuance and mystery inseparably intertwined. Not a clinician, but a weaver of dreams. _____________________________________________ Graveyard Shift by M. L. Rio is available now via Flatiron Books. View the full article

When we think of fall, the imagery of pumpkins, the changing color of the leaves, and cozy sweater weather always seem to be at the top of most people’s minds. For myself, fall always brings to mind the “Back to School” commercials on television, lists of new school uniform requirements, and covering my textbooks with brown paper grocery bags to protect them for the year. I looked forward to school each fall – seeing my friends and discussing our respective summers, being curious about any new students, and, of course, that first Scholastic book fair. Since I am a member of the last generation to grow up without the internet, books provided much of my escape as a young child. But, while school and academia provided comfort and stability, I had friends and classmates who dreaded the school structure. What is it about school-setting stories that make us as readers sink into the world so much faster? Is it our nostalgia for a time when life seemed much more straightforward than our lives as working adults? We’ve seen it across the tales of boy wizards, lightning thieves, and even young women writing love letters. As a dark fantasy/horror author and fan, there’s something about school being a nightmare that just sings to my penchant for the spooky season of fall. So, just in time for the switch to the fall season, my second novel and companion book, The Girl, comes out on October 1, 2024. The Demon, both in the title and main character, takes our leading new adult to the Bay Area and the world’s number one public institution for education – UC Berkeley. The Demon explores the mortal realm as a freshman in college. She should be thrilled – she has received a body, and things went according to plan…she just cannot remember what or why the plan existed. On top of navigating legal adulthood in the US, she faces the consequences of her former master – Death, and the three other generals she once served alongside. Toxic friendships, relationships, power dynamics, and heartbreak all come to a head as the Demon faces the tried-and-true proverb – be careful what you wish, as you just might get it. In that spirit of Dark Academia, I want to acknowledge five of my favorites from the genre just in time for the Back to School season: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo – What is it about the secret societies of the Ivy League schools that are so interesting? Is it our own hunger for conspiracy theories when dealing with the institutions that have produced several of the United States’ most notorious leaders? Follow Galaxy “Alex” Stern as she navigates her first year at Yale University as the occult apprentice of a missing mentor trying to handle school and the varying power dynamics of the illegal occult use of the secret societies. This is the first book in a two-part Bardugo series that will make you snuggle in your college sweatshirt tighter. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Macguire – With the major motion picture coming this November 2024, why not look at the novel on which (no pun intended) the Broadway musical is based. In the land of OZ, a young Elphaba has green skin, sharp teeth, and a fear of water, with a broken home before meeting the young social-climbing Galina at Shiz University. Soon, Elphaba and Galina, the unlikely frenemies, discover that Oz has a lot of political strife, and Elphaba desperately wants to help fix it. The Wizard of Oz, however, is not only not what he claims to be but does not share Elphaba’s dream. Wicked thrills with its reexamination of this lore and characters while questioning what it means to be evil. The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani – With a title like this, how could it not be on this list? The novel and series follow two female best friends, Sophie and Agatha, who attend the school with the same title. Both girls hail from the quintessential fairy tale village of Galvadon, which for the past 200 years has had two children kidnapped once a year. The usual qualifications for the two kidnappees are one must be “hideous and peculiar” and the other “well-behaved and majestic.” The “School Master” responsible for the kidnappings does so to funnel the leads of many of the world’s fairy tales into the school for training. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros – When you combine dragons, chronic illness, and a school filled with intrigue and believable friends-to-lovers romance, you get the viral hit from Rebecca Yarros. In the fictional land of Navarre, Violet Sorrengail enters the famed Basgiath War College with contradictory goals from her parents. She’ll first have to survive the entry process into the school, the deadly famed Conscription day, of which only a small percentage survive to reach graduation. Physical and emotional challenges amongst the political intrigue only heighten the stakes for Violet and the kingdom as news of violent acts along the borders comes to a head. Version 1.0.0 Epoca: The Tree of Ecrof by Kobe Bryant (creator) and Ivy Claire (writer) – Follow Princess Pretia and street urchin Rovi as they discover their land is threatened by a terrible evil. While this story takes place in an elite sports academy, there’s still danger and magic, known as grana, as the story traverses the kids for their first year. As each of them tries to navigate learning everything they can to be at the top of the freshman class, Petia and Rovi soon suspect there is something far more sinister happening at the school. While they may mistrust each other initially, they may have no choice but to work together to keep their families and secrets safe. This is also the first book in a two-part series. *** View the full article

Every October 5th, millions of people around the world mix up a martini, throw on a bowtie, or practice some deplorable puns in a Scottish accent, all while spinning some John Barry records. For diehard fans of precisely made drinks and glamorous action adventure, Global James Bond Day is celebrated every year on October 5th, because in 1962, that’s the day the very first Eon Productions James Bond film, Dr. No, hit theaters. But, while Dr. No was the first “official” James Bond movie in 1962, the phenomenon of Bond was already nearly a decade old by that point. The beginning of Agent 007’s career didn’t start with films but with books. While the James Bond films are immortal and popular in the extreme, the true beginning of Bond wasn’t October 5th, but arguably, April 13, 1953, the moment the publisher Johnathan Cape released Ian Fleming’s first 007 novel, Casino Royale into the world. After that moment, Ian Fleming wrote, on average, one book every year, until his death in 1964, just after the release of the film version of Goldfinger. But, just as Fleming’s death didn’t prevent the film franchise from continuing into a bewitching global phenomenon, James Bond books didn’t stop with his death, either. For many mystery and thriller lovers, James Bond novels — written by Fleming or not — are sometimes written off the way armchair music critics dismiss Ringo Starr’s drumming; competent but nothing special. And yet, nothing could be further from the truth. The literary world of James Bond is richer and more complex than any of the twenty-five official films. To prove it, here are 007 books in the James Bond canon, that are all way better than any of the films. Moonraker (1954) by Ian Fleming When a rocket-obsessed mogul promises to protect Britain with a nuclear missile deterrent called “Moonraker,” Bond’s boss, M gets worried because he happens to know that this 1950s tech bro, Hugo Drax, cheats at cards. Soon Bond is dispatched to the idyllic seaside county of Kent, where Drax is actually building his rockets. This novel pairs Bond with undercover police officer Gala Brand, a Bond heroine who has never been adapted into any of the films. Bond’s affection for brilliant and competent Brand is one half of what makes this novel tick, the other half is discovering Drax’s true intentions with his rocket. In 1954, The Spectator review read, “It’s all utterly disgraceful and highly enjoyable.” This novel also has an ending line that gives Hemingway a run for his money. Carte Blanche (2011) by Jeffery Deaver An utter reboot of James Bond for the modern age, but no, it’s not Daniel Craig. Written by thriller-king Jeffery Deaver, Carte Blanche, this potboiler puts a harder edge on Bond with one crucial limitation: While undercover in this novel, 007 almost never breaks the law. While ostensibly on a mission to determine if a waste disposal company — Green Way International — is really a cover for terrorist operations, James Bond is utterly reborn as a new, 21st-century character. The title “Carte Blanche” refers to a whiskey drink Bond concocts during the story, but this idea also serves as a clever counterpoint to the reality of his actual life; the more freedom Bond has, the more isolated he becomes. But, the best bits in the book are almost certainly the subplot, one in which Bond is trying to figure out who killed his parents, and whether or not one of them was actually a spy just like him. A Spy Like Me (2024) by Kim Sherwood In 2023, with her novel Double or Nothing, Kim Sherwood gave the world a new crop of Double O agents. Set in the present day, Sherwood’s current series barely features James Bond at all, except in a few flashbacks. And, while Double or Nothing set-up this new universe of MI-6 — in which Moneypenny is in charge of the agents and not M — the second book in the series, A Spy Like Me, is probably the best proof of why Sherwood was given this provocative assignment by the Fleming estate to begin with. Switching between the points of view of three agents, 003 Johanna Hardwood, 004 Joseph Dryden, and 000 Conrad Harthrop-Vane, A Spy Like Me is written in an incendiary present-tense clip, which forces you to think in cinematic terms. But, the literary roots of Sherwood’s universe run deep; this book not only features the return of Japanese spymaster Tiger Tanaka but also James Bond’s father-in-law, Marc-Ange Draco. Does Bond finally appear in this novel? That would be telling. Forever and a Day by Anthony Horowitz After the success of his Goldfinger sequel, Trigger Mortis, Anthony Horowitz decided to create a historically accurate origin story for Fleming’s original James Bond. Using techniques similar to his Sherlock Holmes novels, Horowitz mines Fleming’s original text to determine just how and when a slightly younger 007 took on his very first mission. There’s a lot of hanging around on boats and extremely exquisite meals in this novel, not to mention an utterly despicable villain who you can’t wait for Bond to best. On top of all of this, Horowitz gives us a foil for Bond in the form of a well-connected, mysterious woman named Sixteen. Like many Bond books, the romance novel aspect of this story is nearly as good as the mystery. Solo (2013) by William Boyd The celebrated novelist of such brilliant (and widely different books) as Trio or Any Human Heart, delivers a tender, and smart Bond novel in his one and only 007 novel, Solo. Like Horowitz, Boyd’s novel attempts to fill in the Bond literary chronology, using the Fleming books as the true canon. But, here, Boyd puts Bond in 1969, much later in his career and his life than any of the original novels depicted. The mission also sends Bond to West Africa for most of the book. Boyd himself lived in Nigeria as a young child, making much of the flavor of Solo utterly personal. The story also has a smart amount of metafiction, as we’re invited to wonder if the literary Bond can possibly stay relevant in the impending 1970s. Boyd doesn’t bother to think of Bond as a film character from the 1960s, but instead, as a man who served in WWII, and became a spy in the 1950s. This movement through time matters and Boyd’s mastery of place and history are both top-notch. Colonel Sun (1968) by Kingsley Amis A close friend of Ian Fleming, legendary author Kingsley Amis wrote the very first Bond continuation novel under the nom de plume “Robert Markham.” Amis attempted to emulate Fleming’s fast-paced, sometimes clipped style, but couldn’t help adding in his own ideas. Decades before the films The World is Not Enough and Skyfall would find Bond trying to protect M from kidnapping (or worse) the essential plot of Colonel Sun is all about Bond going on a rescue mission to find his boss. The tagline, “This time, it’s personal,” isn’t mentioned on the jacket copy for the original book, but it very well could have been. The states in this book reflect some of Fleming’s best Bond musings, beginning with a revealing golf game between Bond and longtime office buddy Bill Tanner, in which Bond utterly reveals he’s having second thoughts about the job. This kind of thing — in which Bond considers quitting the secret service gig — is more common in the original novels than you might think. But with this book, Amis incorporates that angst into the story in a legitimate and huge way. Thunderball by Ian Fleming If you’ve never read a Bond novel, nearly every one of Ian Fleming’s original novels has something in there that will pleasantly surprise you. And for those who think Fleming couldn’t write or was somehow a privileged hack, Thunderball will convince you otherwise. This is the novel where Bond quips “I’m the world’s authority on giving up smoking. I do it constantly.” There’s sarcasm in this one but of an especially crisp variety. The plot, like the movie, is about Bond trying to locate some stolen nuclear weapons, which leads to a lot of swimming and boating in the Bahamas. But, what makes the novel so fascinating is an obsession with personal health. The book begins when M decides Bond has a horrible lifestyle, and sends him to a mandatory dayspa called Shrublands to detox. Bond’s boredom with this place is captured by the immortal non-description of his temporary digs, which Fleming renders with more weird, menacing humor: “It was a room-shaped room with furniture-shaped furniture and dainty curtains.” Fleming could write beautiful passages, but with this line in Thunderball, he lets the readers in on his secret: If you’re bored with your own room-shaped room, Bond is too. The difference is simple: Bond’s trip to the gym will lead to an intricate mystery, but the setting feels grounded. This, beyond anything that is true of great Bond books, remains the trick: The normal and the commonplace become tickets to adventure, which the reader feels is just around the corner. If only we were looking in the right place. View the full article

The yakuza have always been pretty good at reading the room, or as they say in Japan, “reading the air”. When Japan finally decided to slam the door on their more traditional lines of work back in 2011 with a wave of laws that made it tricky to extort, traffic, or gamble without drawing a whole lot of heat, the yakuza did what all good businessmen do: they pivoted. And where did they go? Cambodia. Because, really, where better to set up shop than a place where the police are underpaid, corruption is practically a cultural pastime, and you can still buy off the local muscle with a well-timed “donation”? It started with the basics—human trafficking, prostitution, the usual suspects. But it didn’t take long for the yakuza to level up their game. They saw Cambodia as more than just a place to smuggle and hustle. No, this tropical paradise had the infrastructure for something far more lucrative—cyber scams. The kind where you convince old ladies back in Japan that they owe money on imaginary phone bills, using a labyrinth of smartphones and anonymous bank accounts to move the money around faster than the Cambodian cops could look up from their lunch. It was a gold mine, one built on desperation, and the real stroke of genius? Using their own people as the foot soldiers. The yakuza, a term broadly used to cover the 24 designated organized crime groups legally operating in Japan, have seen their numbers plummet in the last decade. While there were 80,000 yakuza in 2011, the number of active members is now below 24,000, according to the National Police Agency. Laws enacted nationwide in 2011 have put a serious dent in their business. In recent years, the Japanese yakuza have expanded their criminal portfolios in Cambodia to include sophisticated fraud operations, particularly in cybercrime. These syndicates run scams involving online fraud, including phishing and investment schemes, often targeting victims in Japan or other wealthy countries. One particularly insidious practice involves holding individuals—usually fellow Japanese or other East Asian nationals—captive. These individuals are lured into Cambodia with promises of legitimate work, only to find themselves trapped in compounds where they are forced to participate in scam operations. The victims of these operations are coerced into working long hours under the threat of violence, essentially becoming prisoners of the syndicates. The Sihanoukville Scams: A Case Study A grim illustration of this trend came to light in early 2023 when Cambodian authorities cracked down on a transnational scam operation in Sihanoukville, arresting and deporting 19 Japanese nationals suspected of running phone scams that targeted Japanese citizens. These men were detained in poor conditions, with some claiming they were lured by promises of lucrative work but were instead trapped in grueling environments. Forced to work under threat of violence, with limited freedom and harsh treatment, these individuals were little more than slaves in a digital-age crime syndicate. According to NHK (the BBC of Japan) and other sources, Sihanoukville, a coastal city known for its beaches and casinos, has recently gained a reputation as a hotspot for organized crime. In the case of the Japanese yakuza, the suspects were allegedly operating out of a beachside hotel. Police raids revealed an entire operation centered around sophisticated fraud schemes, in which the Japanese nationals were forced to place scam calls to elderly victims back in Japan. The scams involved impersonating government officials or lawyers, convincing their victims to transfer large sums of money to resolve fictitious legal disputes or tax issues. In this particular case, the yakuza backed network was uncovered after a Tokyo woman in her 60s reported losing around ¥250,000 ($1800) to the scam. She was tricked into believing she had unpaid bills from NTT Docomo, one of Japan’s biggest mobile phone providers. This wasn’t a one-off. It’s estimated the group was involved in over 75 similar cases. As you’d expect, the police didn’t take too kindly to it. Many of the perpetrators, were also victims in a sense. Forced to take part in the scam, they didn’t exactly have the freedom to stroll out and catch a tuk-tuk to the beach. One of them, desperate, sent an SOS email to the Japanese embassy in Cambodia, pleading for help. That message cracked the whole thing wide open. The Japanese Embassy then provided key intelligence to Cambodian authorities, leading to the raid. When police stormed the hotel, they found rooms filled with smartphones, detailed manuals on how to execute the scams, and long lists of Japanese victims. The operation was meticulously organized, with each participant assigned a specific role, from making initial contact with potential victims to closing the fraudulent deals. Sihanoukville’s transformation from a sleepy beach town to a crime haven has partly been driven by the influx of Chinese tourists and investors, who have fueled a booming casino industry. This environment—where gambling, drugs, and human trafficking intersect—provides fertile ground for organized crime to thrive. The yakuza in Japan exist in a legal gray zone; they are regulated but not banned. Their members have business cards, and their offices are well-known. You can easily visit the brick-and-mortar headquarters of the of the Inagawa-kai or the Sumiyoshi-kai in Tokyo. They are listed on the National Police Agency web page. What happens after you knock on the door, is your problem. But being regulated and watched makes it hard to do business. Yakuza members in Japan found it extremely difficult to have a bank account, a mobile phone, or even check into a hotel. When operating in Japan becomes nearly impossible, it’s not surprising that Japanese yakuza are increasingly moving their operations overseas. From Cambodia With Love It should surprise no one that the Sihanoukville incident wasn’t an isolated case. In November of 2023, 25 Japanese nationals were arrested by the Saitama Prefectural Police for their involvement in an elaborate scam operation also based out of Cambodia. The group is accused of preying on the elderly by making fraudulent phone calls from Cambodia, leading to an estimate of at least 230,000,000 yen ($1.6 million) in damages across at least eight prefectures in Japan. In a statement that speaks to the psychological toll of their criminal activities, some of the suspects reportedly expressed relief at being caught, because they were working against their will. The suspects, aged between 20 and 42, were arrested after being deported from Cambodia, where they had been detained in September of 2023. The group allegedly orchestrated several scams, including one in which they convinced a woman in her seventies, residing in Hokkaido, to part with ¥450,000 under the false pretense of resolving a fictitious dispute over nursing home admission. These individuals, it is believed, served as the “callers,” placing deceitful calls to their Japanese victims from their base in Cambodia. The group had set up shop in an eight-story apartment building in Cambodia, reserving an entire floor as a dedicated calling center. When the authorities raided the premises, they discovered over 100 smartphones and computers, along with lists containing the phone numbers of elderly individuals, records of victims’ personal details, and other materials that pointed to an organized effort to manage the scam meticulously. Adding another layer of intrigue to the operation, it was revealed that the scam-related paperwork was printed on water-soluble paper, presumably to enable the rapid destruction of evidence if necessary. The police are now delving deeper into the group’s operations, attempting to untangle the command structure and determine the identities of those who masterminded the scheme. The conditions under which these individuals were operating in Cambodia are slowly coming to light. Statements from some of the suspects paint a bleak picture: long hours of work from 9 AM to 7 PM with only an hour’s break, limited freedom of movement, and substandard living conditions. This case underscores the growing trend of Japanese scam operations relocating abroad, particularly to countries like Cambodia, where law enforcement can be more easily circumvented. The reasons behind this shift are multifaceted, including Japan’s increasingly stringent crackdown on domestic fraud rings and the relatively lax oversight in countries like Cambodia or the Philippines. How did they get there? But what are a bunch of Japanese criminals doing in Cambodia anyway? Well, if you follow the breadcrumbs, it leads you back to Japan’s underworld—the yakuza. According to an investigator in the Saitama Prefectural Police, at least one key figure in this scam ring had ties to a designated organized crime syndicate in Kyushu, specifically an affiliate of the notorious Kudo-kai. Other members included former gangsters in the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s third largest organized crime group. Japan’s yakuza started planting their roots in Cambodia around 2010, after new laws in Japan made their traditional business models less sustainable. Cambodia, a land where bribery and corruption run rampant, was the perfect escape. There is one former yakuza in the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest organized crime group, who told me of personally witnessing senior yakuza figures wining and dining Cambodian officials in 2017, doing what they do best—using cash to buy off the muscle, be it the police or the military. They are adept at using the promise of “candy or the whip” to get what they want. And it’s not just the foot soldiers setting up shop. Some of the most powerful retired yakuza bosses have been known to relocate there, too. Leading the way was, notorious Tadamasa Goto, once a major player in the Yamaguchi-gumi, also found his way to Phnom Penh in 2010, where he set up a criminal empire. (Note: Details of why this happened are covered in Tokyo Noir (Scribe Publications). The US Department Of Treasury took notice of his newfound career as a Cambodia-based mafia boss and put Goto on a black-list. In December 2015, the U.S. The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Goto for his involvement in transnational criminal activities. Despite his expulsion from the gang in 2008 and subsequent relocation to Cambodia, Goto was accused of continuing to launder money and support yakuza global operations. This action froze Goto’s assets held in the U.S. and prohibits U.S. citizens from engaging in any financial dealings with him. It was part of a broader effort by the U.S. to target transnational criminal organizations under an executive order signed by President Obama in 2011, reinforcing the international pressure on organized crime groups operating across borders​. This move by OFAC served as a clear signal that U.S. authorities were closely monitoring global organized crime networks and their supporters, no matter where they operated. It also should have been a warning. That was almost ten years ago. The seeds of crime bear bitter fruit, indeed. The Role of Cambodian Corruption At the heart of this problem is Cambodia’s systemic corruption. Law enforcement in the country is weak, with many officers underpaid and overworked. As a result, criminal syndicates like the yakuza can operate with near impunity. In some cases, Cambodian officials are directly involved in the criminal operations, taking bribes to turn a blind eye or actively assisting in the cover-up of illicit activities. This environment allows the yakuza to expand their operations, diversify their criminal portfolios, and continue preying on vulnerable populations, both in Japan and in Cambodia. The problems in Cambodia are so deeply rooted that even the U.S. has taken notice. This September (2024) The U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Ly Yong Phat, a powerful Cambodian tycoon. These sanctions are part of a broader effort to target human rights abuses, specifically related to human trafficking and forced labor tied to the online scam industry in Cambodia. Ly Yong Phat’s O’Smach Resort has been implicated in these operations, with victims reporting being lured with false job offers and then forced to participate in online fraud schemes, such as cryptocurrency scams, once their phones and passports were confiscated. The State Department has also expressed deep concern over the rising prevalence of cyber scamming and human trafficking in Cambodia. In its 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report, the department highlighted how Cambodian government officials have been complicit in these operations, often protecting or profiting from the scam compounds. The State Department emphasized that Cambodia’s scam centers, like those operated by Ly Yong Phat, are responsible for systematic human rights violations, and that the U.S. remains committed to disrupting these operations and holding responsible parties accountable through sanctions and other measures. As Cambodia becomes a new frontier for organized crime, the lines between human trafficking, fraud, and drug smuggling blur. The yakuza, long known for their structured and hierarchical operations, have evolved into a more opportunistic organization, capitalizing on the weaknesses of countries like Cambodia to build transnational networks. And they know the right people to bribe. For Japan, this presents a serious challenge, as its citizens are increasingly caught in the crossfire of these criminal activities, both as victims and as unwilling participants. Combating this transnational threat will require not only stronger domestic policies but also international cooperation, particularly in countries like Cambodia, where the yakuza have found fertile ground to grow their operations. Cambodia’s transformation into a hub for organized crime is a reflection of how globalized the yakuza and other syndicates have become. By the way, if you’re thinking of taking a holiday in Cambodia, or considering a lucrative job offer to work there, think again. It’s the Wild West of Southeast Asia right now and unless you’re a gunslinger, it’s not the place to hang your hat. If you’re a ruthless yakuza with a yen for big profits, it may be your Shangri-La. *** Sources: 元暴力団トップ、タダマサ・ゴトのカンボジアでのビジネス” (Yomiuri Shimbun, 2003). カンボジアで日本人拘束、詐欺組織に関与か” (Asahi Shimbun, 2023). US State Department Treasury Sanctions Cambodian Tycoon and Businesses Linked to Human Trafficking and Forced Labor in Furtherance of Cyber and Virtual Currency Scams S. Department of the Treasury OFAC Sanctions Prominent Japanese Yakuza Member US Sanctions Yakuza Boss Living in Cambodia View the full article

Welcome to my latest labor of love: a list of true crime in translation, because as far as I can tell, no one else has bothered before. There isn’t much translated nonfiction, full stop—the following list has been assembled from the past 6 years, when I first started tracking the phenomenon. Much of the list is by anthropologists and historians, rather than journalists; it may seem a bit pithy, but I think journalists tend towards fulfilling the prejudices of their audiences, while anthropologists want to understand. These are almost all deep dives into history, ranging from the 1340s to the 1980s, and they all reckon with the long shadows of trauma and the ways in which crime is the story of humanity and society, a rupture that contains the whole world. (Also, weirdly, almost all of these books are from Catholic countries. Not sure entirely what that means! Perhaps the Protestant work ethic breaks down when it comes to acknowledging suffering instead of success.) Amedeo Feniello, Naples 1343 : The Unexpected Origins of the Mafia Translated by Antony Shugaar (Other Press, November 12) Apparently, we can blame the rise of the Mafia on the diffused empire structures of the high Middle Ages, as weak rulers and a long period of social crisis allowed the most powerful families of Napoli to begin their long journey into organized crime. The central incident that inspired the book involves a group of powerful nobles and citizens of Naples who, during a harsh year of famine, hijacked a grain ship bound for elsewhere in the peninsula, and faced both ineffectual resistance and prompt censorship for their act of rebellion. Amadeo Feniello is an erudite historian who doesn’t let his deep knowledge of his subject matter get in the way of a good anecdote. My favorite detail in this book? People dumped so many murder victims in Medieval Italy that the city fathers had to put covers on the wells. Don’t kill where you drink, folks! Lucio Urtubia, To Rob a Bank Is an Honor Translated by Paul Sharkey (AK Press, December 3) Lucio Urtubia’s memoir reads like the story of a fairy tale trickster, which makes it all the more impressive that the story is real. Bank robber and anarchist Urtubia cheerfully bilked CitiBank for millions in the 1970s—and got away scot-free. Like, he didn’t even go to prison. And he’s so charming, and devilishly handsome (in my mind, anyway). Why don’t we have bank robbers like this in the US anymore? I want a politically aware Bonnie and Clyde!!!! Cezary Lazarewicz, Did This Hand Kill? Translated by Sean Bye (Open Letter) Cezary Lazarewicz takes a deep dive into a bizarre crime that captivated interwar Poland. When a teenage girl is found murdered, suspicion quickly falls on the governess having an affair with her father. The real story of what happened, and and the eventual fate of the accused murderess, remain lingering questions, but the infamy of the crime, and the media circus surrounding, are never in doubt. As a quick side note, it’s intriguing how many books on this list are about female murderers when so few exist. Selva Almada, Dead Girls: A Chronicle of Femicide Translated by Annie McDermott (Charco Press) Dead Girls is the product of years of research by the author into the cases of three murdered women, each the victim of what we now call femicide—killed for being women, killed as women, and blamed as women for their own deaths. Almada is a writer of literary fiction, as well as various nonfiction endeavors, and the haunting poetry of this rageful project will linger with the reader for quite some time. Javier Cercas, The Impost0r Translated by Frank Wynne (Knopf) This one came out way back in 2018, when CrimeReads first launched, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Cercas’ fascinating investigation looks at the fraudulent past of a pretend hero unmasked by an obscure historian; the titular impostor had claimed for decades to have been imprisoned in a concentration camp for his efforts to support the Spanish Republicans, earning widespread admiration from the people of Spain, when in fact he had collaborated with the fascists and never spent time in any prison camp. Cercas uses this story to pose difficult questions about identity, celebrity, and the ongoing exploitation of historical suffering. Alia Trabucco Zerán, When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold Translated by Sophie Hughes (Coffee House Press) Alia Trabucco Zeran has one of my favorite books out this year as her fiction debut, Clean, but I first came to her writing through this intricate examination of societal reactions to prominent crimes by women, initially titled Las Homicidas and translated to “When Women Kill”. Each of the four killers profiled in the book came to prominence as part of national debates on the changing roles of women; each had to be re-positioned as non-threatening to social order at large—aberrations as objects of fascination, not fear. I really can’t recommend this haunting meditation on crime in society enough. Also, when I was reading When Women Kill at my favorite coffee shop (shoutout to Barrett’s!), my barista asked me about it, I told her that I was reading about Chilean murderesses, and she gave me a high five, which was awesome. When Women Kill is translated by the ever-capable Sophie Hughes, who also translates the work of Fernanda Melchor, another personal favorite. Remigiusz Ryzinski, Foucault in Warsaw Translated by Sean Gasper Bye Foucault wrote much of A History of Madness while residing in Warsaw as an envoy of the French arts; he also spent his time in the city exploring Warsaw’s gay underground, and eventually, found himself the victim of a honeytrap and deported back to France. In Remigiusz Ryzinski’s enthralling anthropological project, the author traces Foucault’s time in Warsaw and the history of gay life behind the Iron Curtain through a careful examination of Soviet surveillance files and a candid set of interviews with the remnants of socialism’s queer subculture. Foucault had a personal relationship with the Polish nation that lasted long after his expulsion, culminating in a trip to support the Solidarity movement while he was already dying of HIV. Ryzinski makes clear the connection between Foucault’s study of madness and the ways in which the 20th century ostracized same-sex attraction—sanity needs its foil of madness, just as the straight world needs queer people. Every norm needs an other, to punish and to define itself against. And every bookshelf needs this book. Stefan Hertmans, The Ascent Translated by David McKay (Pantheon Books) This book is such a fascinating project of autofiction. Stefan Hertmans had already sold his former home in Ghent when he read a memoir by a former occupant that shocked him: before he’d lived there, a Flemish nationalist turned SS officer had called the place home. Hertmans uses this jarring revelation as an excuse to explore the home’s long history and reconsider the meaning of sanctuary. Mona Chollet, In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial Translated by Sophie R. Lewis (St. Martin’s Press) Mona Challet uses this work to explore not only the history of witch burnings and what they meant for the persecution of difficult women, but how those same trends of ostracization and punishment are played out today. There’s also an intro from Carmen Maria Machado, which really clinches this one as a must-read. Javier Sinay, The Murders of Moisés Ville: The Rise and Fall of the Jerusalem of South America Translated by Robert Croll (Restless Books) The Argentine investigative journalist Javier Sinay, in his new book, The Murders of Moisés Ville, brings his professional craft to bear on an intensely personal story: of the Jewish settlement of Argentina’s agricultural lands, and of the atrocities the new immigrants suffered there. For Sinay, the story begins with the discovery of a 1947 article written by his great-grandfather, addressing the murder of twenty-two settlers. The reader is then taken along for the investigation as Sinay discovers his great-grandfather’s central place in the era’s Yiddish-speaking community of Argentina. Sinay is soon learning Yiddish himself to better relay the stories of people who fled czarist Russia in search of a new life in the “Jerusalem of South America,” only to find new dangers and oppressors waiting for them. Starvation, land inequality, and bands of violent gauchos were just some of what the community faced, and their stories were passed down through family lore and through the country’s Yiddish press. Sinay’s new book is at once a compelling piece of journalism born of archival research and interviewing, and also a meditation on cultural legacies and inter-generational trauma. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief View the full article

Our memories make us who we are. In his novella Story of Your Life (basis for the film Arrival), science fiction writer Ted Chiang describes memories forming in the narrator’s mind “like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesmal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness.” It’s a wonderful metaphor because it captures the fragility of a self based on memories: ashes are just fragments, easily scattered or blown away. When we feel nostalgic, we crave the immediacy of the “flame.” We want to re-experience our past in all its vivid detail, not just that ashy memory residue. In my novel The Midnight Club, four college friends—now middle-aged—discover a solution to that problem: a “memory drug.” Just one sip of a creepy, pine-scented homebrew, they’re promised, and they can relive a moment from their past in all its original detail and immediacy. A little nostalgia trip can’t hurt, can it? But one of the friends is determined to use the drug to solve a mystery with potential real-world consequences. She wants to know what really happened the night their fifth friend drowned—an incident she witnessed but was drinking heavily enough to black out. My characters soon grow dependent on the memory drug, haunted by past regrets even when they aren’t under its influence. “How could you leave the past undisturbed when it was hiding parts of you from yourself?” one asks. Then they find themselves asking a much more dangerous question: If you can relive the past as if it were the present, what’s stopping you from changing it? My fascination with this theme grew from my own tendency to dwell on memories, especially early ones—my family likes to call me “the Memory” because I have detailed (though far from flawless!) recollections of so many childhood incidents. Over the many years I worked on my book, I drew inspiration from neurologist Oliver Sacks, fellow memory obsessive Marcel Proust, and many stories with similar themes. Here are six compelling fictions about the power of memory and the dangers of manipulating our own memories—or other people’s. Story of Your Life (in the collection Stories of Your Life and Others) by Ted Chiang If we could see our past, present, and future simultaneously, how would that change our experience of the world? Would we become godlike? Would we try to rebel against our fate? In Chiang’s hands, an extraterrestrial first-contact story becomes a powerful and provocative answer to that question. Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones One of the first books I ever read (and loved) about memory manipulation was this 1984 fantasy in which a young woman begins to suspect that her childhood memories hide another set of buried ones, in which she discovered a supernatural underworld and ran afoul of the Queen of the Fairies. Like William Wordsworth—famous as a poet of memory—Jones understood that the whole world tends to feel more tantalizingly magical to children than it does to adults. Confessions of a Memory Eater by Pagan Kennedy In this 2006 novel, a memory drug offers a washed-up academic an escape from midlife crisis into golden moments of his past. While former zine publisher Kennedy is technically (just barely) a boomer, this book shows she had her finger on the pulse of Generation X’s “retrophilia,” as I call it in The Midnight Club. The Candy House by Jennifer Egan Egan’s sequel to Pulitzer Prize winner A Visit From the Goon Squad asks: What if a tech giant developed software that allowed you to download your own memory and “Own Your Unconscious”? This brilliant novel is less about personal than collective memory. Egan suggests that the internet has become a memory extender and an archive of experience for all of us, luring us into its inescapable web just as the witch’s candy house lured Hansel and Gretel. MEM by Bethany C. Morrow In tales of memory manipulation, the flip side of being able to relive a good memory is being able to remove a bad one. But there’s always a price. In this novel, set in an alternate 1920s Montreal, Morrow envisions a procedure that allows the wealthy to transform their unwanted memories into static doppelgängers of themselves—Mems—who are doomed to remain trapped in that one moment forever. The protagonist is a Mem who manages to develop her own memories and consciousness, reminding the reader of everything we lose by censoring the past. Recursion by Blake Crouch With memory manipulation comes the disturbing possibility of developing false memories that can’t be distinguished from true ones. In Crouch’s clever speculative thriller, which recalls the trippiness of vintage Philip K. Dick, a time travel device leads to a mass outbreak of “False Memory Syndrome” that menaces the human race. In the Woods by Tana French While French writes superb procedural mysteries rather than science fiction, the lure and unreliability of memory are potent themes running through her work. The narrator of her debut novel is a detective with a terrifying gap in his childhood memories: the day he and two friends went missing. He was the only one to return, with no recollection of what had happened. As the detective insinuates himself into a murder case in the same wooded area where his friends vanished, we discover how a preoccupation with unlocking the past can make it impossible to live in the present. This is a good cautionary tale for any memory obsessive! *** View the full article

When we read about a crime in the newspaper, we can usually guess the offender’s motive. Murder is often committed in a fit of rage, while robbery is driven by greed. But some crimes leave us scratching our heads in puzzlement. That was my reaction upon learning that customs officials in my home country of New Zealand had arrested a man for attempting to board an aeroplane with forty-four live geckos concealed in his underwear. I couldn’t fathom how anyone could hide so many animals in his pants, let alone why he would want to. What could he possibly plan to do with forty-four geckos? As a writer, curiosity is one of my greatest assets. If a newspaper headline grabs my attention, chances are others will also be intrigued. So, I did some research. I spoke with New Zealand’s leading herpetologists — reptile experts — and gradually uncovered the fascinating truth about the little-known world of animal smuggling. New Zealand, an isolated archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, is home to a unique array of flora and fauna. A hundred bird species live or breed only on these islands, including the majestic southern royal albatross and the iconic kiwi. Less well known but equally precious are New Zealand’s lizards. Some of their names hint at their beauty: the jewelled gecko, the rainbow skink, the goldstripe gecko. Unfortunately, these creatures’ good looks have caught the eye of exotic pet collectors worldwide. The lizards’ endangered status only makes them more desirable to those seeking something rare, and they command high prices on the international black market. Mr Gecko Pants’ actions didn’t seem so mysterious anymore. As crime writers know, some people will do anything for money. In the course of my research, I came across the harlequin gecko and fell in love. Sporting a coral-pink pelt adorned with green diamond patterns, this little lizard looks as though it was dreamed up by a French fashion designer during a particularly wild party. The harlequin gecko is found only in a remote corner of Rakiura, an island in New Zealand’s deep south. Most of Rakiura is a national park, unspoiled by roads, so a smuggler on the hunt for geckos would need to hire a helicopter—unless he owned a yacht, like the villain who had begun to haunt my imagination… When I discovered the harlequin gecko, I was in the midst of writing my second thriller, No One Will Know. My heroine, Eve, is a vulnerable young woman—friendless, penniless, and pregnant. Lured to a remote Australian island with promises of a better life, she becomes the target of an organized crime network. My villain is a yachtsman who spends most of his time at sea. I could see the story so clearly, apart from one detail: What kind of crime was my evil sailor mired in? Who were his victims before Eve came along? And that’s when my little harlequin gecko skittered into the picture. A yacht would be the perfect way to smuggle animals. Few novels explore the arcane world of wildlife smuggling, which is surprising given its impact in recent years. In the past decade, over a thousand gamekeepers have been murdered in Africa, animals such as the white rhino have been driven to the brink of extinction, and trafficking has been implicated in triggering the coronavirus pandemic. Yet the smuggling persists. In Russia, endangered New Zealand geckos are being kept by so-called animal lover Ekaterina Valeyeva. Her first husband was killed by his own pet snake, and her second husband languishes in a Brazilian prison after attempting to board a plane with nearly three hundred live animals (packed in his suitcase, not his pants). Despite these events, YouTube videos of Valeyeva handling her captive endangered geckos continue to grow in popularity. Thousands of followers praise her apparent concern for the animals. It’s hard to think of another serious crime that someone could openly film, confident that viewers won’t realise anything is awry. I hope my novel sheds light on this shadowy world—while providing readers with a heart-stopping adventure.\ *** View the full article

Everyone knows Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It’s the story of a respectable, wealthy doctor who transforms into a murderous alter-ego and commits terrible crimes around London. Stevenson’s life offers many possible inspirations. Born into a family of devoutly Presbyterian lighthouse designers, his young adult life saw a movement away from the conservative, Calvinist tenets of his upbringing, towards an extremely bohemian lifestyle. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a fascinating, subversive text about the urges, desires, and darknesses of ordinary people throughout London. As Vladimir Nabokov wrote in his essay on the novel, Mr. Hyde isn’t simply the “evil” version of the “good” Dr. Jekyll, but the part of him that is evil. Jekyll himself is a composite of his good and bad parts, and this way, the story isn’t so much about “good” versus “evil,” but how people are made up of countless, unknowable qualities that all balance each other out. Stevenson’s interest in the different components of the human psyche certainly parallels currents of Victorian science, from phrenology (the now-defunct Victorian “science” that sought to explain how physiognomy relates to mental capacity) to alienism (the progenitor of “psychology”), that sought to understand “deviance” and difference in the human mind and speculate as to its causes. But these matters were not abstract questions, for Stevenson. He encountered some of these issues rather directly, and most likely became inspired for the themes of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, when his own acquaintance, Eugène Chantrelle, suddenly murdered his own wife. Chantrelle was a Frenchman who came to Edinburgh, Scotland, where Stevenson lived, to teach French at the exclusive Newington Academy. In 1866, when he was 32, Chantrelle began a relationship with one of his students, the 15-year-old Elizabeth Dyer. They were married in 1868, with Elizabeth giving birth to their child two months after the wedding. Stevenson met Chantrelle at the home of Victor Richon, his former French teacher. According to an article in The Spectator from 1906, looking back on the case, From the first the marriage was most unhappy ; the husband was repeatedly and ostentatiously unfaithful to his child-wife. He ‘beat her, kicked her, caned her, cursed her.’ More than once she had to invoke the protection of the law, and she was only restrained from petitioning for a divorce by dread of the scandal and exposure. Chantrelle sank into habitual intoxication. His classes fell off, and pecuniary difficulties were added to the wife’s other miseries. Things came to a head in December of 1877. According to The Spectator, On New Year’s Eve, 1877, Madame Chantrelle was in the usual good health which she bad enjoyed in spite of her wretched life. Her husband’s behaviour had been less brutal since the birth of the youngest child. The family dined happily together at their house in George Street, and a bottle of champagne was opened in honour of the festive season. On New Year’s Day she was unwell, but from purely natural causes. She had no appetite, suffered from sickness, and retired early to bed. … The next morning [the servant, Mary] Byrne came down shortly before seven, and while she was tidying up the kitchen she beard moans proceeding from her mistress’s bedroom upstairs. Hastily entering, for the door was about a foot open, she found Madame lying in bed with the bed-clothes partially off her, unconscious, “awfully pale-looking, her eyelids closed,” and now and again “moaning very heavily.” The girl roused her master, and between them they tried, though without success, to awaken the sleeper. At last, after considerable delay, Chantrelle went off to summon Mr. Carmichael, a general practitioner in the neighbourhood, who arrived at 8.30, to find Madame Chantrelle “profoundly and completely unconscious.” Chantrelle had taken out a £1000 life insurance policy against his wife’s accidental death the year before. When the maid and the doctor arrived, there was a strong smell of gas in the room. But when Elizabeth passed away shortly thereafter, and her body was autopsied, the examiner determined that she had died of narcotic poisoning, not from a gas leak. But, knowing the reputation of the Chantrelle household as one of abuse, Littlejohn did his duedilligence. The article continues, The relations between Chantrelle and his wife were sufficiently notorious in Edinburgh, and immediately on quitting the house in George Street, Dr. Littlejohn, who was surgeon to the Police Office, had sent to request the gas company to inspect the premises. One of the gasfitters noticed in the architrave of the window in Madame Chantrelle’s bed- room a place from which a gas-bracket had been removed, and on opening the shutter he discovered a pipe loose between the architrave and the wall. On inspection the pipe was found to be broken, and from the hole the gas, when turned on at the meter, escaped freely;’ a piece of piping about two inches long was on the ledge at the foot of the shutter, and had evidently been wrenched off by bending backwards and forwards. … Both’ on the nightgown of the deceased and on the sheets of the bed were certain stains caused apparently by vomited matter. These were cut out and submitted to examination, but not until the police had discovered, locked up in one of the-rooms; enough drugs to stock a surgery, including various preparations of chloral and extracts of opium, both fluid’ and solid. And so, on January 5th, 1879, at Elizabeth’s funeral, Eugene was arrested for her murder. He pleaded not guilty. The trial, which lasted four days, found him guilty, and sentenced him to death by hanging. According to Historian Jeremy Hodges, Stevenson attended the trial. While he was known in some circles to behave monstrously to his wife, he was also known as a loving father. The article notes, “The only redeeming feature in her husband’s conduct was his uniform kindness to the children, two little boys ten and eight years old at the time of Madame Chantrelle’s death, and a baby born a few months before that event.” Certainly, this inkling of duality would have intrigued Stevenson. Hodges has found, in Stevenson’s notes, a rumination on Chantrelle: “I should say, looking back from the unfair superior ground of subsequent knowledge that Chantrelle bore upon his brow the most open marks of criminality; or rather, I should say so if I had not met another man who was his exact counterpart in looks, and who was yet, by all that I could learn of him, a model of kindness and good conduct.” In other words, as Jekyll says in his final letter, in the novel, “man is not truly one, but truly two.” View the full article

I grew up reading horror. Okay, as a kid “horror” was pretty much Scooby-Doo and some children’s ghost stories, but I still devoured everything I could find, and as soon as I got my adult library card at thirteen, I headed straight for the horror section. My favorite trope is the haunted house. It doesn’t matter how many renditions of it I read, I’ll always grab a new one, because I know that author will put their own spin on it. My first horror novel, Hemlock Island, was not a haunted house story. I felt as if I needed to save that for book two. When I sat down to write I’ll Be Waiting, I pulled on all those stories I loved, and I later realized the ones that most influenced it were the haunted-house stories by women, which made sense for my tale of a young widow’s search for her husband’s ghost. Below are seven haunted house novels by women, some of which influenced me, and some of which I read later. The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson Is any list of haunted-house horror complete without this one? For me, it’s been the gold standard since I read it in high school. A researcher of psychic phenomenon invites people who’ve had supernatural experiences to join him in a supposedly haunted house, conducting experiments. This is an absolute master class in creating terror while never actually showing anything terrifying. Mexican Gothic – Silvia Moreno-Garcia A 1950s Mexico City socialite is summoned by her desperate recently-married cousin. She goes to help and discovers a house full of secrets and lies. I devoured this one, with twists and turns that left me guessing to the end. Dead Silence – S.A. Barnes Does a haunted spaceship count? Imagine if the Titanic had been lost in space instead of the ocean. That’s the premise here, where the characters accidentally come across a massive luxury ship that was lost decades ago on her maiden voyage. Starling House – Alix E. Harrow A young woman is desperate to pay for the private school that’ll break her gifted little brother out of their family’s cycle of poverty. She takes a cleaning job at the local “creepy old house that seems abandoned” and is actually home to a reclusive young man. Do you think you know where this is going? You almost certainly don’t, and that’s the joy of this one. Silence for the Dead – Simone St. James St. James almost exclusively writes ghost stories, and that might seem limiting, but every book is a fresh take on the genre. This one is set in 1919, at an English hospital that houses mental casualties of the Great War. What happens when you put soldiers in fragile mental states in a house with a mysterious dark past? Nothing good. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Can I call this a haunted-house story? Sure, I can. There might not be any ghosts, but it is indeed about a very haunted house and the very haunted people who live in it. The unnamed narrator marries a wealthy widower, only to discover that his wife might be dead, but her memory does not rest in peace. The Hacienda – Isabel Cañas This one was marketed as Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca, which meant I had to pick it up. Set after the Mexican War of Independence, a young woman in desperate need of stability agrees to marry a widower . . . whose first wife died under mysterious circumstances. Yep, you can see where the Rebecca comparison comes in, but this is a very different take on concept, and this time, we get actual supernatural content. Bonus Title: The Spite House – Johnny Compton This is supposed to be a list of haunted house stories by women, but I’m going to sneak in this one extra recommendation. A man with two daughters agrees to move into a “spite house”—an extremely narrow house built to irritate neighbors. This particular one has a dark history, but he needs the money and he believes the house might contain answers to his own past. *** View the full article

ALACHUA, FLORIDA APRIL 1, 2015 “This is our guy,” the FBI SWAT team commander said, indicating me to the hundred officers dressed in camo fatigues before him. “He’s one of us. Don’t shoot him.” We were assembled at 4:00 a.m. in the Alachua Police Department parking lot, the early-morning darkness broken only by the pole-mounted floodlights shining down upon us. A large oak tree spread shadows over the scene that seemed to swallow pockets of the troops assembled, shifting with the whims of the wind. A natural earth berm blocked any view of the group by cars cruising past on State Road 441. The SWAT commander turned my way. “Show us how you naturally hold your hands.” I let them dangle by my sides. “Okay, cross your hands, left over right, just over your belt.” I put my hands in the low-compressed position, as instructed. “That’s the signal for the takedown. We’ll move in once we see it and brace for the assault,” the commander said. When I’d arrived at 3:30 a.m., he’d told me they had almost deployed the FBI’s elite HRT, the Hostage and Rescue Team, to take down Charles Newcomb, given his proven propensity toward violence. Newcomb was a former patrol cop and prison guard currently working as a recovery agent, or repossession specialist, fancy terms for a repo man. He was stout and very muscular, with a wide build and piercing blue eyes. He claimed he had killed four people, supposedly in the line of duty, when he was a cop in Tennessee. Most recently, he had helped orchestrate the murder by the Ku Klux Klan of a former inmate who had run afoul of prison guards who were members of the klavern in which Newcomb served as Exulted Cyclops, effectively the chapter’s mayor. “What stopped you?” I asked the SWAT commander. “We decided to use you instead,” he told me, with a slight smile. Five hours after the meeting’s conclusion, at 9:00 am, I was sitting in my Kia Sportage almost directly across the street from the police station in a Home Depot parking lot. I was there to meet Charles Newcomb on the pretext that the national leadership of the KKK wanted me to build a bomb, and we needed to purchase the ingredients. As Grand Knighthawk for all Klan chapters throughout Florida and Georgia, and with my background as an army sniper, such a task was well within my purview, and Newcomb had no reason to suspect I was telling him anything but the truth. “Subject is leaving his home,” a voice from the surveillance plane flying twenty thousand feet over Newcomb’s neighborhood announced though my earpiece. “Stand by.” That plane was outfitted with cameras that could read a license plate from four miles in the sky. It would now be trailing Newcomb in his pickup truck the whole way to our planned meeting. “Subject is turning onto Highway 20 West,” the same voice reported. At this point, FBI agents were already stationed inside the Home Depot, preparing to lock the site down for safety. Once Newcomb approached the parking lot, no one would be permitted to leave the store or enter the lot on the chance that Newcomb would resist arrest and it went to guns. I had infiltrated this particular chapter of the Ku Klux Klan two years ago as a confidential human source for the FBI in an operation being run alongside the Joint Terrorism Task Force. This was the second time I had infiltrated a klavern, and the first time, which had ended six years before, had almost cost me my life. The best I could hope for today was to walk away alive. “Subject turning onto State Road 441,” the voice in my earpiece crackled. “Stand by.” Charles Newcomb wasn’t the only target of this operation. I had provided firm evidence on four Klan members, including the designated leader for both Florida and Georgia, Jamie Ward, and two members of the law enforcement community, Thomas Driver and David Moran. The charge lodged against Newcomb, Driver, and Moran was conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. For Ward, it was a federal firearms charge. The four-pronged plan was to arrest all of them simultaneously, so none of the four could provide advance warning to the others. As I sat in my car waiting for Charles Newcomb to arrive, I knew a group of SWAT team members culled from both the FBI and numerous local police departments were closing in on the Florida State Prison commonly known as Raiford, located in Lake Butler thirty minutes from my position, where two of the targets, Thomas Driver and David Moran, worked as guards. Their plan was to execute the arrests there during a shift change, when Driver would be coming out and Moran would be coming in, the perfect moment to snatch them up without gunplay. Another team would be converging in full force on Jamie Ward’s house, while the largest detachment of all was already deployed unseen in the Home Depot parking lot, since Newcomb was considered to be the most dangerous of the bunch “Subject still proceeding north on State Road 441,” the voice in my ear reported from the sky. “Approaching parking lot.” “Secure the building,” the voice of the FBI SWAT team commander followed. “Secure the building.” I checked my watch. It was 9:25 a.m. Newcomb should be here any minute. “Subject has turned onto surface road,” the crackling voice reported. “Approaching target site.” I used those final moments to settle myself. I took a deep breath and then slipped into the 4-7-8 breathing ratio I had learned in my training to become an army sniper. It was the regimen I’d practiced before taking a shot in the field, an experience comparable to the one I was facing now. As I breathed, I focused on my wife and two children. Do everything by the numbers and I’d be home with them soon. Do anything that deviated from my norm and aroused suspicion in Newcomb and I might not be coming home at all. “Subject is entering parking lot. Repeat, subject’s truck is entering site parking lot. Begin lockdown now.” In that moment, the surface road accessing the Home Depot would be shut down in both directions to prevent any potential customers from entering the parking lot. With gunplay considered a very realistic, if not likely, possibility, the FBI needed to minimize risk to civilians at all costs. I recognized Newcomb’s truck pulling in, then making a long, lazy circle of the lot to make sure there were no surprises waiting—though in this case all the surprises were tucked out of sight, namely in staging vehicles and around the side of the building. A few moments later, Newcomb pulled his pickup truck alongside my Sportage. I climbed out in the same moment he did. “Kigy, Brother,” he greeted. “KIGY” is the acronym for Klansman I greet you. “Kigy, Brother,” I said back. We shook hands and half hugged, with me ready to act in the event Newcomb felt the wire I was wearing. I noticed he was wearing latex patches on the tips of his fingers to avoid leaving fingerprints on any of the bomb-making materials we were supposedly there to buy. After we separated, I watched Newcomb casually remove his firearm and tuck it under his driver’s seat. I still had to assume he had a backup weapon on his person and act with that distinct possibility in mind. That wasn’t just protocol, it was common sense. We started toward the Home Depot entrance a hundred and fifty feet away. The FBI step van was parked half that distance away, the juncture where the takedown of Newcomb would take place. “This is a big assignment, Brother Joe,” he said, when we were almost there. “I’m up for it, sir. I’m prepared to serve the brotherhood with the calling I was taught.” He smiled. “Just so long as it doesn’t take you away from us.” Halfway to the entrance, just short of the step van, I put my hands in the low-compressed position I’d demonstrated at the staging session hours before, the signal we were a go. An instant later, a loud explosion rocked the air, coming from a spot well to our left, just beyond the outskirts of the parking lot, where a natural land depression utilized for drainage sat. “What the hell was that, Charles?” I said, feigning shock. The distraction achieved its desired effect of making Newcomb swing round in the direction I was already facing. “There’s a cloud of smoke coming up,” he noted, pointing toward the heavy black smoke rising from the depression. Our attention was still firmly rooted in that direction when we heard, “LET ME SEE YOUR HANDS!” I raised my hands in the air, while Newcomb left his by his side. We turned together, and I found myself facing an M4 assault rifle six inches from my face, the finger of the FBI SWAT team member in full body armor starting to curl over the trigger. ___________________________________ Excerpted from White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us, by Joe Moore. Copyright 2024. Published by Harper Books. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. View the full article

There’s always been something about a story that’s set in a desolate and beautiful place, where the wind moans just right and the paint peels and there’s a sickly sweet scent that carries so much memory that it goes straight to your metaphorical head. At least that’s been true for me as a reader, and then later as a writer. I can’t say I remember the first time I became aware that there was a name for what’s created when these elements come together in this perfectly unsettling balance, but I imagine I heard it in a classroom, probably from a teacher with a glint in his or her eye, introducing the topic as a guilty pleasure, a secret indulgence, the kind of stories that might finally make glassy-eyed students lean in for once. Probably, just like Byron dared Shelley over 200 years ago on that claustrophobic summer holiday that birthed a genre, my teacher said, Now, let’s write a ghost story. And I find that my work is haunted by that challenge. Gothic. What does it mean? The word has a shape to it that begs to be said aloud, just to feel it, soft, round, and suddenly spikey. See, there. The romance of it. The risk. The innate thrill and terror of what it is to be a creator. To live, knowing you must die. To love, knowing you must grieve. The absolute contradictions of being human, or not. It’s irresistible and maybe that’s why it was inevitable that I would nestle up to it as a storyteller whose work dwells so deeply in a complicated regional setting and wrestles with my conscience over long, bitter histories. But I can’t say it was intentional. Only that it was natural to find myself so comfortable with a form of literature that exists in a boundless hinterland. And after three published novels, I’m still trying to explain it to myself and define it for my readers. I make academic lists. I try to keep it simple. What will a reader find in a work of gothic fiction, then drill down further to American Gothic, and drawing closer to my own writing, Southern Gothic? Be on the watch for the presence of transgressive and irrational thoughts, impulses and desires, dark humor, grotesque characters and an overwhelming sense of alienation. On some level, all of these will be found. But trying to define gothic fiction can be difficult if you’re relying solely (rather than soulfully) on academic lists. Go ahead and try. See if it doesn’t end in an argument, always passionate, even if you’re only arguing with yourself, because it’s gothic, for heaven’s sakes. So, let’s talk spirits. Ghosts? Oh, yes, but not always of the horror variety. Although, they might be. Take Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights with Heathcliff and Cathy, where even death can’t separate the lovers. Sure, it’s a bit of melodrama. In reality, people don’t actually unearth graves in their grief? Except when they do. Or the haunting might be more in line with Jess Kidd’s Himself, where the deceased maraud and murmur among the living like relatives that visit too late and too long. And what about monsters? Literally, no. Well, except when they are very real. Especially the ones we create, as in Toni Morrison’s Beloved or the sisters in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. And speaking of castles, a gothic tale might be set against a classic haunted English manor as in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, but it might just as likely be set on a coastal island in the Southern United States, as in Emily Carpenter’s The Weight of Lies. Does it make you uncomfortable, all this ambiguity? Now you’re getting it. And if I’m being honest, I’m not even sure that any of us really wants a resolution. Don’t we revel in being lost along the foggy roads, in the dark woods and winding mazes, eternally climbing stairways to nowhere, existing simultaneously in some kind of heaven and hell, as in Lauren Groff’s Florida? We don’t want the explanations to be black and white. We prefer the gray, where anything is possible, even forgiveness for the unthinkable. Even love where there is loss. Even life when death is a constant companion, as in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. We don’t want the answer, we want the angst of the question, the coming of the inevitable consequence. We want the raven’s maddening tapping at the chamber door and the terrible, lurking loneliness of Sarah Perry’s Melmoth. What then, if gothic fiction may best be defined not by examples or expectations, but intimately, intuitively, for how it makes us feel—like we’re almost home, for better or worse? And because we suspect what’s waiting there. Ranging and roving through my reading and writing life, again, I come back to the simplest of lines from Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream. The meaning brings a sense of bleak terror even as it reads like a line from a lullaby. And I find the best explanation for the gothic that I know: we are, all of us, finite creators who fear what we’ve wrought. Perhaps this is what it comes down to, why I’ll always write a haunted tale: when we set out to write a ghost story, when we try to define what that means, we aren’t attempting to do something exceptional, only human. For if we stop trying to break a gothic story down into its pieces and instead, appreciate the concept as a whole, we might find the proof in all the contradictions—that all stories are ghost stories. *** View the full article

Hot girl summer is over; get ready for bog witch fall. Actually, get ready for bog witch decade. From Copenhagen Fashion Week to the 2024 Met Gala, from the cover art for Hozier’s Unreal Unearth to Kasey Musgraves’ Deeper Well, imagery redolent of wet earth, green moss, brackish water, and tannin-dyed corpses has seeped into the mainstream and shows no signs of receding. If you’re extremely online, you’re probably not surprised: bogs (and their ecological cousin, swamps) have been beloved of social media users for several years now. Images of boggy landscapes appear widely on Tumblr image blogs dedicated to “goblincore,” “swampcore,” and even “cottagecore” aesthetics, not to mention the Tumblrs wholly dedicated to “bogcore” images. On Twitter, bogs, bog bodies, and bog witches have been the subjects of so many viral tweets (and the inspiration for so many display names) that bog love is virtually a community in-joke. For the uninitiated, bogs may seem an unlikely object of fascination, evoking images of scummy water, muddy boots, and clouds of insects. But wetland-heads and archeologists alike will tell you that bogs can be ethereal, even spiritual spaces—with a rich, complicated cultural history that is still evolving. Like all wetlands, bogs are marginal ecosystems, toeing the line between land and water. But unlike other wetlands, bogs have no water-source besides rain, which means they are less watery than swamps or marshes. Often, it’s possible to walk right through a bog without even knowing you’re in one—only to take a wrong step and sink knee-deep into mire. Because of a natural process called ecological succession, bogs also tend to become less watery over time. A bog’s life cycle begins when a glacial lake is colonized by sphagnum moss, which forms a carpet on the water’s surface and slowly fills the depths with decayed moss, called peat. Over time, this peat becomes an acidic soil that most plants can’t tolerate, but certain species—pitcher plants; sundew; other ecological weirdos that get outcompeted elsewhere—absolutely love. As these plants begin to take over, the soil becomes thicker and more hospitable to shrubs and grasses. Eventually, a glacial lake becomes a mushy meadow. That meadow eventually becomes a forest. So your bog is not your grandmother’s bog, and your grandmother’s bog was not her grandmother’s bog. Cranberry Glades, a boreal peat bog in West Virginia. Taken by the author in the spring of 2022 The “in-betweenness” of bogs marks them as liminal spaces, “liminal” being a term coined by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in 1908 to describe moments of transition during which a person is neither child nor adult (adolescence) neither unborn nor born (birth), and neither alive nor dead (dying). Like liminal moments, liminal spaces can feel uncanny or unnerving because our brains have trouble fitting them into familiar categories. But they can also feel charged with spiritual energy or magic. van Gennep theorized that societies use rituals to help structure and control their experiences with liminal moments. Historically, some of these rituals have been held in liminal places—in fact, studies of the mummified “bog bodies” unearthed in countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Ireland reveal that Bronze Age civilizations frequently used bogs for burial of the dead. Although archeologists still debate whether bog bodies were executed criminals or ritual sacrifices to a boggy god (or both), most agree that bogs held a sacred significance to the peoples who buried their dead in the peat. For many Bronze Age people, bogs may have been considered a place where the boundaries break down between the ordinary physical world and the invisible world of spirits— an appropriate site for the transition from life to death. And because bogs preserve things buried in them, due to their oxygen-poor environment, burial in a bog is—almost—like achieving a kind of immortality, similar to mummification. Bog bodies are dead but not gone, their distinct facial features and even facial expressions still preserved thousands of years after death. Ancient beliefs about bogs survive in European folklore about ghostly will-o-the-wisps and shape-shifting puca, who are both said to live in wetland areas, but they are also reflected by the “creepiness” that we traditionally associate with bog landscapes even now. Although a real-life bog on a sunny day is a perfectly friendly-looking landscape, we tend to imagine bogs as places of eternal night and mist. Think Wuthering Heights’ haunted Yorkshire moors, Lord of the Rings’ Dead Marshes, or The Bog of Eternal Stench in the 1984 Bowie/Muppets film Labyrinth. When the professional reactionary Jordan Peterson told The New York Times that “it makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp,” he was unreflectively trading on this traditional image of a wetland as a liminal place inhabited by liminal creatures – in this case, witches. People accused of witchcraft have historically been women who live outside the structures of wife and motherhood, often poor women who live on the literal margins of their community. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas writes, witchcraft “is the anti-social psychic power with which persons in relatively unstructured areas of society are credited, the accusation being a means of exerting control… Witchcraft, then, is found in non-structure. Witches are social equivalents of beetles and spiders who live in the cracks of the walls.” Witches are also social equivalents of bogs. As spaces that are both symbolically and literally messy, bogs violate the symbolic and literal sense of order that has traditionally dictated femme-presenting people’s lives. Women accused of witchcraft tend to be folks who have done the same. Traditionally, both witches and bogs have been objects of fear, disgust, and avoidance. But for these very reasons, women and gender-non-conforming folks have recently embraced bogs and the figure of the bog-witch as symbols of defiance, non-conformity, and subversion. Like the ecosystem where she lives, the bog witch rejects beauty standards and social expectations, refusing to do what society expects of her. “I hate this whole ‘women can be sexy at fifty!’ narrative. At what age will society stop demanding I try to be hot and just let me turn into an old swamp witch, as nature intended?” asks @SmallJenna in one widely shared tweet. “Sorry if I’m not your cup of tea. I’m not even my own cup of tea. I’m barely a cup and I don’t like tea. I’m more like a rusty bucket of haunted bog water,” writes @TragicAllyHere in another. the bog-witch revels in slime and muck in her hut, probably sans children and definitely sans husband. As a fantasy of escape from society’s rigid hierarchies and structures, bogcore may be seen as a subversive alternative to cottagecore, another Tumblr-born aesthetic that hit the mainstream in the early 2020s. Bogcore and cottagecore aesthetics both represent a desire to reconnect with nature and return to an older, more “natural” way of existing. But while the sourdough-baking cottagecore tradwife maintains an immaculately clean household for the benefit of her children and husband, the bog-witch revels in slime and muck in her hut, probably sans children and definitely sans husband. Cottagecore aesthetics also idealize a cultivated, organized, and essentially non-threatening version of nature—think vegetable gardens and fields of flowers—whereas bogcore aesthetics embrace the strange, challenging, and not obviously useful beauty of wetland ecosystems. Unlike a field or a forest, a bog naturally offers few harvestable resources. Because of its nutrient-poor soil and watery texture, a bog is also an unfit space for cultivating those resources. You can’t typically farm on a bog; you shouldn’t build a house (or a cottage) on it. Yet draining wetlands to dry them out— to make them “useful”—has yielded disastrous consequences for both human settlement and the environment, leading to increases in flooding, pollution, agricultural run-off, and the release of planet-heating carbon dioxide. Left to their own devices, bogs store incredible quantities of carbon. They also provide needed buffer zones between land and water. But “left alone” is key. There is no way for human intervention to improve a bog or make it more productive than it already is. By embracing both the messiness and the uselessness of wetland ecosystems, bogcore resists the capitalist and anthropocentric values that typically define human relationships with nature. Acknowledging that bogs are not for us, bogcore aesthetics – and the figure of the bog-witch – let us fantasize about being close to these ecosystems, even a part of them. Appropriately, the ultimate bogcore fantasy – articulated in innumerable tweets, Tumblr posts, and Instagram memes—is simply dissolving into moss, the trials and tribulations of being human shed like an unwanted skin. “The girlboss is dead,” tweeted Daisy Alioto in 2022, “long live the girl moss (lying on the floor of the forest and being reabsorbed back to nature).” Alioto’s tweet went stratospherically viral, resulting in a line of “Moss Girl” t-shirts and baseball caps that Twitter users are still wearing. If we were all girlmosses instead of girlbosses, we might be happier—the Earth would certainly be. Whether the rise of bogcore will have any concrete effect on the future of our wetlands remains to be seen. As with any online phenomenon, it can be difficult to tell half-ironic enjoyment from genuine care. But when I drove to the Tannersville Cranberry Bog Preserve on a cold fall night for a guided moonlit bog walk, I was pleasantly surprised to find a full house, about twenty people bundled up in winter coats who had all paid $12 for the privilege of experiencing a bog after dark. As we touched lacy pieces of sphagnum moss and listened to owl calls, the guides explained the fragility and resilience of the ecosystem surrounding us: the plants that would survive nowhere else but here, the animals that migrate through and the ones that stay all year, the multi-millennia history beneath the boardwalk where we laid our feet. There is no record of human sacrifice or Bronze Age ritual at the Tannersville Cranberry Bog, no associated folklore about witches or hauntings. It is only a place. But it felt magical to gather there just the same. *** View the full article