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  1. Yesterday
  2. Welcome to “Wait, What?,” a recurring column in which we examine confusing or incoherent details in crime movies. I can’t drive. I mean, I can drive…technically… but I’m not legally allowed to. When I was 17, I passed my written driver’s exam, failed my road test, and never took either again. Not out of anything other than convenience, mind you… I lived in a city and public transit satisfied my needs and I didn’t feel a burning need to get my driver’s license again. The thing is, I’m still not exactly sure why I failed my road test. I was driving, and everything seemed to be fine, and then the instructor looked at me and went “Get out. Just get out.” No explanation, no elaboration, just… evacuation. I’m told most people fail their road tests their first time. Driving isn’t easy. It becomes easy (I’m told) the more you practice. But it isn’t really a thing anyone just knows how to do from the get-go. No one is born knowing how to drive. Which brings me to Halloween (1978), John Carpenter’s classic horror movie about a small-town psychopath who escapes from a mental institution to go on a killing rampage. Michael Myers (the psychopath in question) murdered his sister when he was six years old. After his crime was discovered, he was sent away. When Halloween begins, Michael has spent fifteen years at an institution called Smith’s Grove Sanitarum. When he escapes, he hops into a car and drives away. Which is… what? He can’t be driving a car for the first time, so well? He had to know how to drive. How did he learn to drive? Was he given a tutorial as a very young child? I do like that the film acknowledges this. Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) is informed that Michael can’t drive, but Loomis yells in response: “He was doing very well last night! Maybe someone around here gave him lessons!” Maybe someone did, indeed! This development is never really explained. But it is oddly empowering to me? If Michael Myers can find his feet operating a break pedal and gear shift, perhaps I can too? View the full article
  3. February’s international crime releases are as varied in setting as they are excellent in quality. Perhaps this column can distract us from the nation’s turmoil; or perhaps it’s a useful remembrance that there are places outside, places we either want to move to or at least feel comforted in the knowledge that everyone has issues, even people in Paris who get to solve crimes while philosophizing and wearing stylish coats. Thanks, as always, for reading fiction in translation—the world is vast, and the need to decolonize our reading lists and decenter our nationalist impulses are served well by reading (and traveling, and imagining) widely. (My dad told me when I get preachy I sound like Rod Serling, so please imagine this intro delivered between gritted teeth and with cigarette in hand). Eva Menasse, Darkenbloom Translated by Charlotte Collins (Scribe) In the sleepy town of Darkenbloom, located on the border between Austria and Hungary, a seemingly bucolic surface covers a dark history of unspeakable crimes. Those who suffered under the Nazis (at least, those who survived) live side-by-side with their former tormenters in a fragile detente. Their peace is shattered by the end of the cold war and the Pan-European Picnic, in which hundreds of East Germans on holiday in Hungary fled across the border, seeking asylum and unwittingly opening old wounds. Meanwhile, a mysterious visitor to the insular community is poking around in the past, a past much of the town would prefer not to recall. Stunning & shattering, Darkenbloom is also the rare historical novel to make full use of its setting. It’s also a disturbingly relevant piece of fiction, as we watch our friends and neighbors being taken away by governmental forces hell-bent on enforcing brutal and deeply damaging policies with no purpose beyond bigotry. Baalu Girma, Oromay Translated by David Degusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu (Soho) Baalu Girma worked as a journalist during the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea and wrote this novel just before he vanished, presumed murdered. In his magnum opus, translated into English for the first time, a cynical journalist helms a vast propaganda effort aimed at convincing Eritrea’s rebel forces to capitulate, while struggling to contain his growing disillusionment. Despite its heavy subject matter, Oromay is full of dark humor and heartfelt sentiment, and to read it is to gain a sense of the dynamism and liveliness of its author, making his fate all the more tragic to contemplate. Patrick Modiano, Ballerina Translated by Mark Polizzotti (Yale University Press) Yale University Press brings American readers another gift this year: a new translation of the Nobel-prize winning Modiano’s rich, evocative Ballerina, set in the world of dance (and oblique existential mysteries) in 1960s Paris. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief Miguel Ángel Hernández, Anoxia Translated by Adrian Nathan West (Other Press) A photographer mourning the sudden loss of her husband finds new purpose in photographing the dead for an eccentric patron determined to revive the art of Victorian death portraiture. Moody and multi-layered, this novel, like its photography subjects, has earned a long and eerie afterlife. Ricardo Silva Romero, Rio Muerto Translated by Victor Meadowcroft (World Editions) A murdered man’s ghost tells the story of his widow’s quest to confront the men who killed him in this new novel from renowned Colombian author Ricardo Silva Romero. –DM View the full article
  4. Lone wolf protagonists, like guns and knives, come in all shapes and sizes. They can be cops, like Jo Nesbo’s gruff, go-it-alone Oslo detective Harry Hole, or private eyes, like Mike Hammer, Mickey Spillane’s justice-at-all-costs private eye. On one page, you’ve got Stuart Kaminsky’s low-boil, part-time Sarasota process server Lew Fonesca, on another there is John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, a sun-loving, skirt-chasing boat dweller (“The Busted Flush”) with possibly the best job in mystery fiction: “salvage consultant.” Lawrence Block’s unlicensed private eye, Matt Scudder, did things his way, as does Lisa Gardner’s Frankie Elkin, an expert on finding missing persons who travels the country to ply her trade. These iconic crime fiction characters and more were on my mind as I created Mercury Carter, the protagonist of my new thriller, The Mailman. In bringing Carter to life, I strove to craft an agent who stands both outside of law enforcement and any other recognizable security structure. To do that, I gave Carter a career that as far as I know doesn’t exist in real life. He’s a freelance courier, a private mailman who delivers pretty much anything for a price—nothing illegal, though—with one overarching rule. Carter has never missed a delivery and will stop at nothing to keep that streak alive. Woe betide the bad actors who get in Carter’s way, regardless of how innocuous the delivery. (One year, Carter’s most popular item was French Bulldog puppies.) Despite the violence that Carter unleashes against anyone standing between him and his clients, and despite his background as a former federal agent, Carter doesn’t consider himself a do-gooder. He just wants to make his deliveries and go home. Full stop. The Mailman opens with Rachel Stanfield and Glenn Vaughn, wife-and-husband attorneys, held captive inside their suburban Indianapolis home by a gang of home invaders. The team, led by a scar-faced killer named Finn, is ready to torture the couple to death for information about a woman Rachel’s firm is in litigation with. What no one realizes, neither Rachel and her husband nor the band of brutes, is that outside the door at this very moment, Carter has arrived with a package for Rachel. “Delivery has to go to the name on the invoice,” Carter explains to Finn after Finn offers to sign for the package. When Finn presses, Carter stands his ground. “Rules are rules,” he says. Here are seven lone-wolf protagonists whose adventures helped inspire The Mailman. Lee Child’s Jack Reacher There’s a reason that ex-Army major Reacher is one of the greatest characters in modern crime fiction. Child created a brilliant conceit with the concept of a man with no address, no belongings other than a toothbrush and a money clip, and no interest in personal or professional attachments. Reacher travels randomly across the country on bus, rail, or via hitchhiking, minding his own business until circumstances require him to intervene and clear the field of malcontents. Finished, he’s back on the road again. (Books in the series that flash back to Reacher’s time in the military bolster his image as a man who charts his own course.) It’s tough to pick a favorite adventure, but for my money, 2015’s Make Me is the quintessential Reacher book. Disembarking in Mother’s Rest, a tiny Midwestern town whose name fascinates him, Reacher takes out a thieves den of miscreants before uncovering and stopping a truly shocking crime venture. Gregg Hurwitz’s Evan Smoak Smoak is better known as the Nowhere Man, a shadowy figure who’s available to help the neediest in the ultimate “pay it forward” system: he urges the latest recipient of his extraordinary and lethal skills to pass his number onto someone else in trouble. (1-855-2-NOWHERE in case you need it.) Smoak is a certified loner, content in what passes for his downtime to live in his fortified LA apartment—with multiple safe houses on stand-by—and sample his extensive collection of high-end vodka. But Smoak has a problem: he’s a refugee from a defunct government assassin program that recruited and trained orphans, and now someone from his past wants him eliminated. With that, Smoak faces the biggest challenge of his new, secret life: “Who better to hire to go after the Nowhere Man than a former Orphan?” Steve Hamilton’s Nick Mason Mason is serving a long sentence for robbery in an Indiana prison when, with no explanation, Darius Cole, an imprisoned crime boss who rules the penitentiary, makes him a deal. Freedom in exchange for 24-hour on-call servitude to carry out missions that Mason can’t, if he wants his family to survive, turn down. Mason questions the deal almost as soon as he takes it but understands he has little choice. Mason sums up his manacled existence by likening it to rules for survival in prison. “You exist from one moment to the next. You don’t look ahead. You don’t look back,” Mason observes in An Honorable Assassin, the third (2024) book in the outing. “You survive.” James Byrne’s Desmond Aloysius Limerick There’s pretty much nothing not to like about Byrne’s enormously entertaining Limerick (Dez to his friends), who first appeared in 2022’s The Gatekeeper. Starting with Dez’ military-grade combat and tech skills and moving onto a murky past that hints at mercenary action but who really knows; a tossed salad of various UK accents (“From England?” “Thereabouts.”); his moral compass; and above all his opinions on beer. Finding out who attacked a client is important, Dez notes in The Gatekeeper. “Just not important enough to drink a typical American beer. Nothing’s worth that.” As The Gatekeeper opens, Dez—“five-eight but built like a tank”—is relaxing in his 18th-floor LA hotel room after a night playing bass guitar at a club when he happens to look outside, spots a sniper on the opposite roof, and leaps into action without being sure whose day he’s about to save. You can only pray for the bad actors after this. Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins By the time we meet up with Easy Rawlins in Farewell, Amethystine (2024) the sixteenth outing of Walter Mosley’s storied Los Angeles investigator, it’s 1970 and Rawlins is a certified private detective with his own firm. But it took a lot of legwork and hard knocks to get there. In earlier Rawlins novels—the series began with a bang with Devil in a Blue Dress, set right after World War II—Easy is just a guy trying to mind his own business as he makes his way in the world. Yet people, often the police, keep coming to him with problems and soon enough, he’s embroiled in yet another engaging mystery. “I knew when he called me mister that the LAPD needed my services again,” Easy says at the beginning of 1992’s White Butterfly, one of my favorites in the series. “Every once in a while the law sent over one of their few black representatives to ask me to go into the places where they could never go.” Reed Farrel Coleman’s Nick Ryan Ryan may be a sworn New York City police officer but he’s beholden to no one but himself and a few trusted associates. The beauty, and fun, of this series—2023’s Sleepless City and 2024’s Blind to Midnight— is the long leash Ryan is given to investigate sensitive crimes. That, and Ryan’s ability—and willingness—to operate outside the bounds of NYPD rules and regs. When Ryan comes across a gang of fellow officers beating up a man who threatened to file a complaint against one of them, one of the officers tells Ryan it’s not his concern. Ryan’s reply: “When people tell me not to be concerned, it concerns me.” Although this is far from a typical police procedural, it’s also hard not to love the series’ tagline: “When you’re in trouble, you call 911. When cops are in trouble, they call Nick Ryan.” Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander There are bad-ass lone wolves who want to be left to their own devices, and then there’s Salander. A brilliant hacker with little formal education, a troubled past, and that iconic dragon tattoo on her left shoulder blade, Salander literally stands out in a crowded field of singular female protagonists: “She looked as though she had just emerged from a week-long orgy with a gang of hard rockers,” Larsson writes in the first of his Swedish-language trilogy, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and with Salander, that might be the case. Or as Mikael Blomquist, Salander’s sometimes investigative partner and occasional lover, observes, Salander “was an information junkie with a delinquent child’s take on morals and ethics.” She also brings a white-hot fury to investigations focusing on the abuse of women, unearthing dark personal and societal secrets along the way. “Do you like pain, creep?” Salander asks the psychotic villain in a climactic scene near the end of the first book. With Salander, it’s a question you don’t want her to pose. *** View the full article
  5. When I’ve completed a long book, like The Enigma Girl, I often wonder where the story came from, for the truth is that the book is always so very different to what was hazily in my mind at the outset. For a writer like Frederick Forsyth, this will seem bizarre, because, as he once told me during a photoshoot for a magazine, he plans every scene on index cards before he starts writing and knows exactly what happens right up to the denouement. I have almost no idea of the way things will unfold, which means there are lots of surprises and many unnecessary diversions along the way—one reason I had to reduce the book from 180,000 to around 135,000 words over the winter of ’23 to ‘24. Yet, there are advantages to my lack of method. Themes and subplots emerge as I allow myself to dive down rabbit holes during my rather haphazard research. These excursions are often a waste of time, but sometimes they become very important to the book. My obsession during the last days of lockdown with the Bronze Age archaeological sites of eastern England looked like a classic Porter dead end. But soon after returning from looking at the 3,000-year-old log boats near Peterborough and the Sea Henge in Norfolk – an ancient circle made of tree trunks that have been precisely dated to the spring of 2049 BC – I knew that the hero of The Enigma Girl, Slim Parsons, was lying low on an archaeological dig. And from her experience on that dig came important themes about loss and death. Likewise, a Polish theme began to develop after my first visit to the UK’s wartime codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park. One day early in 2022, I travelled the 40 miles from my home in the Cotswold to Milton Keynes, with a rough idea that the New Town planned in the Sixties might be an original setting for a story involving my young MI5 undercover specialist. I didn’t know until I reached Milton Keynes that it contained Bletchley Park, the site of the heroic British effort to crack the Enigma enciphering machine during World War II. After crisscrossing the town in dense fog and becoming intrigued by the thoroughly un-British grid of boulevards, I had time to spare and decided to visit the Bletchley Park museum. The story of the frantic work conducted in the huts that were hastily erected around an ugly Victorian mansion in the then village of Bletchley has become one of the key myths about Britain’s war against Germany. Miraculous feats were achieved at Bletchley, especially Alan Turing’s work on computing and the construction, by a man named Tommy Flowers, of the world’s first programmable electric computer – Colossus. But not until I wandered into the courtyard of the old stable block beside the mansion did I become aware of the vital role of Polish cipher experts in cracking Enigma. In an obscure part of the courtyard, there is memorial of an open book with the names Jerzy Rozycki, Henryk Zygalski, and Marian Rejewski carved into the stone. Research on my phone while I was standing in front of the memorial revealed that during the 1930s the trio used mathematics to reverse engineer the commercial version of the machine and developed a mechanical device to calculate the Enigma settings that changed the German cipher every day. They called it the Bomba, possibly after their favourite ice cream desert, or because the machine made the sound of a ticking bomb. Their work saved the British codebreakers, Alan Turing and the arrogant genius Dilly Knox, two years of hard slog, not to mention tens of thousands of lives. None of this had much to do with my book, which was to be set in the present day and was about the struggle between journalists bent on revealing the truth and the government and Big Money who want to bury it. But on that visit to Bletchley, I had the idea of a news website that was based in Milton Keynes and staffed by the descendants of people who worked at the Government codebreaking centre during the war – a gene pool of talent and brains that worries the authorities. As I walked back to my car, I knew that my tough but thoroughly human, bisexual spy, Slim Parsons, would have Polish ancestry and, moreover, that she came directly from a line of spies, some of them Jews whose families had assimilated into Polish middle classes during the nineteenth century. Those three Polish mathematicians were excluded from the work at Bletchley, but just after the invasion of Poland by Germany in September 1939, Major Maksymilian Ciężki, head of Polish Cipher Bureau’s German section, did the Allies a crucial service. He and a small company of men went behind enemy lines and reached the secret codebreaking facility at Pyry, where all the evidence of the Polish success with the Enigma machine was waiting to be seized by the Wehrmacht. If the Germans had discovered that he and his colleagues had broken Enigma, a crucial advantage would have been lost and the war would certainly have taken many different turns. The radio mast used to intercept German radio transmissions was blown up, all the secret papers and equipment burned, and the Enigma rotors and machines were spirited away by Ciężki. So, my unplanned visit to a deserted museum provided many fundamentals of the book and, when, later, I read about the raid on Pyry, I knew that this was precisely the sort of action Slim’s ancestors would have taken. I was discovering my hero in history that long preceded her existence, which is a strange way of building a backstory, yet it was how I came to know the forces that were responsible for her courage and sense of justice. The Polish theme wasn’t done with me. That winter, which seemed particularly cold and damp even for Britain, I hiked through the dismal countryside near where I live to an old prisoner of war camp that was hurriedly built at the same time as the sprawling network of huts at Bletchley Park. It was never used for German POWs but instead became the home of hundreds of displaced Polish soldiers and their families after the war. Just a few hundred yards from where I write now, there is a cemetery with a section reserved for the people who never returned to Poland and died at the camp. I find it rather moving that over fifty years after the closure of what became known as the Northwick Park Resettlement Camp, fresh flowers are still placed on the graves of the people who lived in the camp. I circled the camp, which is now a rundown business park, and came across another memorial, hidden from the track by a low stone wall and privet hedges. I had often passed the small enclosure but never ventured inside. How glad I am that I went in and crouched down to read a plaque dedicated to servicemen and their families who lived at the camp. “Their ordeal,” reads the inscription, “started with deportation to Siberia in 1940. After their release, the Polish Army was formed in 1942. Following retraining in the Middle East, they contributed greatly to the Allied Victory of World War II. In 1942 most of the civilians were separated from the soldiers in Persia and transferred to East African countries to be returned in Great Britain during 1948.” Those few lines contain one of the great forgotten stories of the war – a whole army and thousands of civilians seized and imprisoned by Stalin then let go when Germany attacked Russia in 1942. Thousands of Polish men and women walked across the Soviet Union then boarded ships to cross the Caspian Sea, only to begin another journey through present day Iran. Led by General Wladyslaw Anders, the soldiers became a ferocious fighting force. Some of them choose to stay in Palestine and fight for the nascent Israel, others joined the Allied forces in the Italian campaign and fought all the way up Italy, many being decorated for the bravery at Monte Cassino. And when this epic journey ended in the quiet English countryside in 1945, these extraordinarily brave and hardy Polish soldiers were forced to wait another three years to be reunited with those family members who had survived a Siberian ordeal of their own. The resilience of both men and women is astonishing. What relevance does this have to a thriller set in 2025 about a spy sent to infiltrate a troublesome website? Everything I have written here was used in the book. Apart from giving Slim what I believe to be a rich backstory, I was pleased to be able to write about the forgotten heroes who cracked the commercial version of Enigma, who saved the secret from the clutches of the Nazis, and who crossed Russia and the Middle East to fight for freedom again. I never know where I’m going to find material, which is both exciting and unnerving. I am constantly aware of the things I must be missing, whole stories which may be out there but are lost to me because I failed to follow my nose, or take a trip, or look behind a stone wall and some privet hedges on a rather dismal day in Gloucestershire. *** View the full article
  6. Last week
  7. From the Salem Witch Trials to the Satanic Panic of the 80s to the narratives spread by online conspiracy theorists today, group think has been around for centuries. I’m not sure what drives it—the need to feel a sense of superiority, the desire to be part of a larger and more powerful whole, the strange bonding that comes from sharing a common enemy. It could be all of those things, combined with the simple, sad fact that if enough people repeat a falsehood—no matter how outlandish—it feels like the truth. I tackle this topic in my new novel, We Are Watching—about a small family in New York’s dHudson Valley who are targeted and terrorized by a violent group of conspiracy theorists. Unbeknownst to bookseller Meg Russo, her daughter Lily and her reclusive musician father Nathan, this cult-like group has been watching them for years, and have developed an entire mythology about them, in which Meg, Lily and Nathan are dangerous and powerful Satanists who must be stopped before they bring about the end of the world. I know, it sounds outlandish. But it felt frighteningly plausible to me, considering the real-life incidents that inspired the book. Here are three that have haunted me for years… The McMartin Pre-School Trial I was in high school when the first allegations of “Satanic ritual abuse” were levied against Ray Buckey, his mother Peggy McMartin Buckey, and other staff members at the McMartin pre-school in Manhattan Beach California. By the time the family had been brought to trial and exonerated, I’d graduated from college. I can still remember the news stories—horrifying tales of sexual abuse and torture of hundreds of children, animal sacrifice and nightmarish ceremonies, most of these acts taking place within a network of tunnels located under the foundation of this family-run daycare. I believed all the stories. Everyone did. Only later did we learn that there were no tunnels under the school, and that the allegations against the teachers were without evidence and that many of the children had denied being abused at first, only to be coaxed into it by police. (Oh, and their testimonies also included depictions of teachers flying through the air on brooms and turning children into mice.) The McMartin family was ultimately exonerated, but only after irrevocable damage to their reputations, livelihoods and emotional well-being. For more: Try 1993’s The Abuse of Innocence: The McMartin Pre-School Trial by Paul and Shirley Eberle. If you’re looking for something more contextual, author Talia Levin includes a riveting depiction of the case in her 2024 page-turner Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America. Judas Priest’s “Subliminal Message” What would the Satanic Panic era be without talk of secret demonic messages burned into rock records? The furor surrounding “subliminal messaging” and “backward masking” reached new and dangerous heights in 1990, when the parents of James Vance sued the band Judas Priest, claiming that subliminal messaging in their song Better By You, Better Than Me had led to their son’s suicide attempt. (He had shot himself after making a drug and alcohol-fueled pact with his friend Raymond Belknap. Belknap had died. Vance suffered permanent disfigurement.) While the band was found innocent, the images of them taking the stand in this spurious case were jaw-dropping, particularly considering the troubled backgrounds of the two young men. “Why would a band tell their fans to kill themselves?” asked a baffled Rob Halford. Reasonable question. But at a time of heavy metal mass-hysteria, it appeared he was shouting into the wind. For more: Check out the excellent documentary Dream Deceivers: The Story Behind James Vance vs. Judas Priest Pizzagate It was a shockingly implausible story that started on internet message boards and was later accelerated by Alex Jones’ InfoWars. Before long, tens of thousands of people fully believed that Hilary Clinton and her campaign staff were running a Satanic child sex trafficking ring out of Comet Ping Pong and Pizza—a small, family-run restaurant in Washington, DC. While Clinton and her staff had the benefit of tight security details, Comet owner James Alefantis did not. Before long, Alefantis found himself subject to death threats and near-constant harassment, with things reaching a peak in 2016, when Pizzagate believer Edgar Welch stormed the pizzeria with a loaded AR-15 in an attempt to save the non-existent trafficked children from a non-existent secret room. Fortunately, Welch was arrested before anyone was hurt. And Alefantis, his staff and his business survived. That aside, he may never fully recover from the trauma he suffered at the hands of this angry—and largely unseen—mob. For More: Try the insightful documentary After Truth: How Ordinary People Are Radicalized by Fake News *** View the full article
  8. Novelist and television writer Lee Goldberg looks askance at luck in the publishing world. “You make your own luck,” he says. “I put myself in a position for ‘luck’ to happen. I learned about the business of writing by interviewing screenwriters and authors for articles I sold to newspapers and magazines to pay my college tuition. I hung out with other aspiring writers, some of whom who later became successful. And I befriended my journalism professor, who gave me my big break. I got the knowledge, and made the contacts, that allowed the ‘good luck,’ to happen.” Networking is always important to a career because it creates opportunities if you’re ready to take them, and Goldberg was certainly prepared when they arrived. The result has been a career as a bestselling crime author, television writer, and producer. He always wanted to write. He can’t remember when it wasn’t his passion. He used his mother’s old typewriters to punch out stories in grade school to circulate among his friends––that’s right, grade school. After a few years, he started his own newspaper, the Cochise Courier – named after the cul-de-sac where his family lived – and wrote stories about his neighborhood. He sold it for a nickel a copy. In high school and college, he edited the student newspapers. He also wrote a thinly disguised, very bad, series of novels based on Simon Templar and The Saint series. His first unpublished novel, The Perfect Sinner, may have been awful, he says, but he learned a lot from it. Lee Goldberg was barely a teen. These are experiences aspiring writers often undertake far beyond grade school. He was so young, he might have started writing in the womb had he had pen and paper at the time. For his entire life, he has lived his writing passion, and it has opened all size and shapes of doors for him. The difference between his passion then and now? “It hasn’t changed, but I think I dress a little better.” He loves to talk. Conversation is words and Lee Goldberg loves words, especially those that evoke humor. He’s downright funny, even when he repeats his best lines. In high school, while living in the San Francisco Bay area, he began earning money for college by interviewing celebrities for different publications. He was maybe sixteen at the time and did his interviews over the phone. Lee used his best anchorman voice, which he’d learned from his father – a local television news anchorman. None of the famous caught on they were talking to a kid. Years later, when he was studying journalism at UCLA, he was interviewing television producer Stephen J. Cannell (The Rockford Files, The A Team, The Greatest American Hero, and more), when he let it slip he was now in Los Angeles. Cannell, who had talked with him previously while Goldberg was living in San Francisco, invited Goldberg to the studio to meet in person. “Now, he’s going to discover I’m a kid,” Goldberg says. “I was terrified. I knew the moment I walked into his office, he was going to feel deceived. So, I asked him a tough financial question about his independent production company to prove I was a serious journalist. He was knocked on his ass by it, but he took me seriously and we were fine. I interviewed him many times after that.” Years later, after Goldberg and Cannell had become friends, Goldberg asked how he felt when the fledgling student walked into his office. “Oh, I felt sure I’d been conned,” Cannell told him. “I thought you were angling for a job.” Ironically, when Goldberg became an executive producer on Diagnosis Murder, he actually hired Cannell as an actor. Goldberg’s parents divorced when he was a teen and his mother, a local socialite, took a job writing a society column for the local East Bay Times newspaper, switching from going to parties to make a splash, to going to parties to make a salary. She met a guy one evening at a party and flew off to Santa Barbara with him, so she called her young son and asked if he could quietly write her next column from notes she’d left on her desk in the newsroom. He was familiar with her writing style, so he slipped into the newspaper late at night, read her notes, and filed her column for the next day. “No one could tell from the way I wrote it that it wasn’t her.” So, his mother started leaving town more often and counting on him to file her copy, he says, trailing off with a hint of exasperation. “I resented her for it, but it turns out she did me a big favor. She taught me how to write in someone else’s voice,” he says, which later helped him tremendously with his television writing and also his novels. His ability to interview adults, make a snap decision to defuse an age issue with Cannell, and to mimic his mother’s column writing style so perfectly that no one noticed, show a maturity beyond his years. Yet Goldberg maintains his boyish sense of humor even to this day (noting on his website, and in innumerable interviews, he sleeps in “Man From U.N.C.L.E.” pajamas). He attended UCLA and put himself through college freelancing for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, UPI, Newsweek and American Film magazine. His girlfriend at the time worked at Playgirl magazine and got him a job writing sexually explicit letters-to-the-editor at $25 a clip. During all this, he was also writing for UCLA’s college newspaper, The Daily Bruin. There, he befriended his journalism advisor, Lewis Perdue, who was also writing thrillers on the side. “Lew showed me his manuscripts and I gave him my opinion,” Goldberg says. “I really had no life experience at age 18, but I’d read lots of thrillers and had plenty of opinions.” But his words were true enough that Perdue listened to his ideas. When Perdue’s publisher asked him to write a men’s action series – the male equivalent of a Harlequin romance – Perdue turned him down. “He said, ‘no,’ but he knew someone who would do it. And he recommended me” “I needed to come up with a men’s action-adventure series, so I needed to educate myself. Writing is one of the few professional careers where you can be entirely self-taught – if you pay attention.” He went to the chair of the UCLA Communications Department and was granted class credit for his new sideline. He dug into the genre and turned it into a research paper for a grade, while also writing the book. “I wrote books in class, during lectures, and at night – whenever I could.” His first novel, .357 Vigilante, was published while he was still in college. It’s a story about a Brett Macklin, a young man whose father, a cop, is brutally murdered by a gang. Macklin seeks revenge, going after each gang member one by one. He says it has elements of Death Wish and covers all of the genre’s archetypes and tropes about an ordinary man thrust into an extraordinary adventure. “But I wanted it to be literature. I wanted to be the next John Irving or Larry McMurtry.” So, he made his protagonist impotent. “I thought this would give my character enormous depth,” he says, laughing about it today. His editor was not pleased. “Are you out of your mind?” the editor railed. “Not only is he having sex, he’s having amazing sex!” “I had no choice, I had to rewrite it, but I was furious.” So, Goldberg wrote some ridiculously, insanely athletic sex scenes and soon gets a call from his editor. Goldberg was sure he was about to get fired. But his editor said: “Not only were your sex scenes hot, they were real.” “I was relieved, but also horribly depressed,” Goldberg says. “Because if those were real sex scenes, I was the worst lover on the planet.” His debut novel exploded onto the bestseller list, partially due to timing. .357 Vigilante arrived the same week Bernhard Getz, the so-called Subway Vigilante, shot four black youths on a New York subway. New World Pictures quickly picked up the film rights and Goldberg was hired to write the script, and his screenwriting career was born. Goldberg had signed a four-book deal and finished three of them when his publisher, Pinnacle, went bankrupt. He never received a dime of royalties for .357 Vigilante, and it took him fifteen years to get his rights back. He’s since republished the book under a new title, Judgment. The writer, whose passion for his profession is off the scale, said his first publishing experience wasn’t all bad. “I had to learn to work with an editor,” and he learned a lot about book marketing. One marketing gimmick he used was his pen name, Ian Ludlow – after Ian Fleming and Robert Ludlum – so he would be on bookstore shelves next to Ludlum. And his timing is often impeccable. For example, his novel Dream Town was about Chilean burglary tourists breaking into L.A. homes that face open spaces like parks, hillside and golf courses. Shortly before the book was published, a gang tried to break into his home… while he was there. He caught it all on his security cameras and the event made national news. Maybe Goldberg needs to stage his crimes farther away from L.A., like maybe the Mojave Desert? His first published novel, he says, “was awful. I look at it now and I cringe. But I can see the writer I would become in there.” His many early novels, “were written when I was teenager. Of course, they suck compared to the New York Times bestsellers I’m writing now. I didn’t have the knowledge or the failures I’ve learned from… I came from Walnut Creek, California. I didn’t know anybody. You have to make your own luck.” Fortunately, he says, “I’m still getting royalties from books I wrote when I was eighteen.” Goldberg has lived his passion for more than forty years, and nothing says it better than that. ___________________________________ .357 Vigilante ___________________________________ I want to be a writer: From the womb. Experience: Student newspapers, celebrity interviews and features in numerous publications, mother’s gossip column. Began writing in grade school. Writing Time: Three months Agents Contacted: One. His professor’s agent. Time to Sell Novel: None. His professor signed on as guarantor with the publisher. If Goldberg failed to deliver, his professor would have written it. First Novel Agent: Mel Berger, William Morris Agency First Novel Editor: I don’t remember, it was years ago! First Novel Publisher: Pinnacle Inspiration: “I have no idea. I always wanted to be a writer and I’ve been a veracious reader.” Fletch, by Gregory Macdonald, was his wakeup call. “It was driven entirely by dialogue. I can do this, I thought. It was a revelation to me and made me believe I could be novelist or screenwriter.” Advice to Writers: Read. You can learn so much from good books and bad books. Go back and reread them and figure out how it moved you. The magic is all right there to be seen. Take the books you like apart and find out why they work. Do the same with books you don’t like. Website: LeeGoldberg.com Author Photo by Ron Scarpa Like this? Read the chapters on Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Tess Gerritsen, Steve Berry, David Morrell, Gayle Lynds, Scott Turow, Lawrence Block, Randy Wayne White, Walter Mosley, Tom Straw. Michael Koryta, Harlan Coben, Jenny Milchman, James Grady, David Corbett. Robert Dugoni, David Baldacci, Steven James, Laura Lippman, Karen Dionne, Jon Land, S.A. Cosby, Diana Gabaldon, Tosca Lee, D.P. Lyle, James Patterson, Jeneva Rose, Jeffery Deaver, Joseph Finder, Patricia Cornwell, Lisa Gardner, Mary Kubica, Hank Phillippi Ryan, I.S. Berry, Heather Graham, and John Gilstrap, J.D. Barker, and Kate White. View the full article
  9. We tired as hell. At this juncture of my life, I find deer more preferable company to people. I’m tired as hell from a long decade of caretaking and performative allyship and white men getting bonuses when I didn’t even get a cost-of-living adjustment. Like, yes, the deer are also shitting on my lawn, but at least they don’t expect me to clean up after them or save democracy. Calla, the eldest sister in my debut novel, Listen To Your Sister, is also tired as hell. She’s stretched thin as the new guardian for her troublemaking teenage brother, Jamie. Her middle brother, Dre, promised to help, but he’s not. Calla juggles work, getting food on the table, and the overwhelming anxiety of parenting alone. When Jamie’s antics spiral out of control, it’s on Calla to keep him safe in the aftermath and the siblings escape to a remote cabin in the woods. Here are five books featuring protagonists like Calla—exhausted Black women who should leave everyone to deal with their own bullshit and take a nap. Lakewood by Megan Giddings Reeling from the loss of her grandmother, Lena’s stress is palpable from the opening pages. The casseroles don’t even have time to cool before she’s weighed down by bills, college assignments, her shift at work, financial insecurity, and her mother’s home health care schedule. When she receives an invitation to participate in the Lakewood Project, a research study, she assumes it’s a scam. But the benefits are too good to pass up¾health insurance for her and her family, housing, and a stipend. In a different country, the promise of health insurance as an incentive would require a suspension of disbelief, but Lena’s mother isn’t well and they don’t live in a country that takes care of its people. The setup had me so pressed on Lena’s behalf. While We Were Burning, Sara Koffi After the death of her friend, the white and wealthy Elizabeth hires a young Black woman to be her personal assistant to help her get back on track. Brianna is competent, professional, and doing the absolute most to infiltrate Elizabeth’s affluent neighborhood. The interpersonal dynamics are messy and insidious. Someone in Harbor Town called the police on Brianna’s young son, which ultimately got him killed. And that someone really ought to pay for it. Not So Perfect Strangers, L.S. Stratton Tasha Jenkins has successfully escaped her abusive husband¾except she’s forced to return when her teenage son opts to stay with his father, trapping her further in a cycle of control and violence. A chance encounter with a white woman who also wants out of her marriage kicks off a modern Strangers On A Train narrative. The relationship between Tasha and her son is gut-wrenching to read, especially as he undermines her efforts to protect him. The Girl With All The Gifts, M.R. Carey To many, this may be Melanie’s story, but you’ll never convince me that Helen Justinaeu isn’t the goat. If escorting a white zombie child across an apocalyptic wasteland isn’t doing the most, then what is? As Helen comes to see the humanity in her feral young charge, she clashes with raiders, scientists, and military bros. I first read this at a time when Black people in zombie stories were still mostly appetizers, so Helen’s journey left a deep impact on me. Hell Hath No Fury Like A Woman Haunted, R.J. Joseph This eclectic and visceral short story collection features Black women in a myriad of situations. They’re everyday women marked by hope, grief, curiosity, and sacrifice as they hold their families, communities, and ancestors together. Sometimes they’re monsters, sometimes they’re victims, but they’re all thrilling. I was especially spellbound by “A Woman’s Work,” “Keep On Trucking,” “Conflict Resolution,” “Into the Nothingness,” and “I Get Mad, Too, Sometimes.” The reading experience is terrifying and permanent. These are stories that will stay with you for a long, long time. *** View the full article
  10. 2073, the new film from director Asif Kapadia, opens with a shot of a wildfire blazing through the trees of a hilltop. Its directionless destruction becomes hypnotic, especially as it melds with the images of recent memory: Los Angeles transforming into an inferno. The movie has a relationship with reality like few others, acting, with simultaneous force, as a dramatic depiction of a plausible reality that awaits the world in its titular year, and a gut wrenching, interpretive analysis of the reality that citizens of countries all over the world, from the United States to India, the United Kingdom to China, are living. It is difficult to describe 2073. Evidently, even Kapadia, whose previous work includes the Academy Award winning documentary on Amy Winehouse, Amy, also struggles to neatly define his current, genre-evading movie. When he invited a British journalist to an advanced screening, she asked, “What is it?” He replied, “I don’t know, but it is about everything that’s happening right now.” It is a work of essayistic art that occupies two worlds – documentary and cyberpunk cinema. After opening with a collage of environmental catastrophe – wildfires, blown out cities covered in dust, bodies of water cresting with garbage on the surface – it becomes clear that Kapadia has transported us into the future. San Francisco is the “capital of the Americas,” Chairman Ivanka Trump is celebrating “30 years in power,” and police brutality is a daily occurrence on the open streets. Speaking a foreign language is illegal, as is the promotion of democracy. The most priceless works of classical art, from Michelangelo’s statue of David to Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, decorate the hallways and conference rooms of corporate offices. Average citizens search through dumpsters and the aisles of abandoned markets for food, clothing, and other basic necessities. Our docent for the dystopia is Ghost, a young woman played by Samantha Morton. She has vowed to no longer speak, but we can hear her voice as she writes a record of her lost age and troubled times. Her mission is simple: To avoid detention at the hands of the police or the marauding street militias who persecute anyone suspected of dissent, while leaving a testimony that can act against the erasure of history and memory. Her grandmother also attempted to document and warn against the mutation of democratic societies into fascist oligarchies, but one day her grandmother disappeared without a trace, leaving behind nothing but grief. A series of “time capsules,” playing out in Ghost’s recollections, transport us back into her grandmother’s days – The days of the 1990s, the 2010s, and the 2020s; The days that we are currently experiencing and witnessing. It is those time capsules that serve as the documentary portions of 2073. Real journalists, activists, surveillance technology experts, and philosophers describe what is happening in our world, while archival footage plays of state-sponsored oppression, police assaults against people all over the world, ecological disaster, warfare, and the growing power of despots. The film sends a chill throughout the bones of the viewer with the realization that Ghost’s memories, captured by the archival footage, are all real world events. Kapadia has invented nothing of the present or recent past. Instead, with the help of expert testimony, he presents a plausible picture of where recent and ongoing developments and trends, if unabated and uncontested, could lead. History offers no guarantees, making the prediction game tough to win. The techno-authoritarian hellscape that Kapadia sketches is not inevitable, but as his film makes painfully clear, it is also not far fetched. No optimistic futurist could easily dismiss the warning of 2073. It is a warning that comes with greatest urgency and eloquence from Silkie Carlo, a British civil liberties advocate and technology expert, who is also a voice of one of the time capsules. “The totalitarian architecture is here,” she says over real footage of facial recognition tools, “You only need a change of government, and then it’s too late.” Carlo’s alarm sounds immediately after a summary of how the Chinese government oppresses and detains the Uyghur Muslims. Classifying every Uyghur Muslim as “normal,” “suspicious,” or “untrustworthy,” the Chinese government employs facial recognition technology and algorithmic, predictive formulas on the internet and social media to maintain the categories. Anyone who falls into the “suspicious” group is forcibly taken to a concentration camp for interrogation and reeducation. Those who are “untrustworthy” are rarely, if ever able to escape. There are currently over one million Uyghur Muslims in Chinese concentration camps. Fascist governments in India, Uganda, and Turkey have resorted to similar measures against those it deems inferior and/or unfit for participation in open society. The blueprint is waiting for eager hands to begin construction elsewhere, and 2073 amplifies the voice of historian Anne Applebaum during a time capsule to forecast potential darkness. Applebaum describes a “democratic recession” transpiring around the globe, the consequence of which is that 72 percent of the world now lives under authoritarian rule. The authoritarians have formed an alliance of convenience and cooperation against democracy’s forces of the West. Russia’s Putin, North Korea’s Kim John Un, China’s Xi Jinping, India’s Narendra Modi, and the Ayatollah of Iran, using subtle means of propaganda and overt methods of military aid, work hand in glove to strike blows against an international order of peace and human rights. Meanwhile, tech-oligarchs exert worldwide influence, partnering with autocratic regimes to enhance their own power, while reducing the agency of free people. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen use their billions, and perhaps even more importantly, the thunderous megaphone of their platforms to advance an agenda that goes well beyond greed. Musk and Andreessen have openly declared their hostility toward democratic governance, longing for, what a commentator in 2073, calls a “techno-monarchy.” A clip of Thiel speaking at a policy conference that plays in the middle of the film captures his worldview. “Think of the homeless as a feature to raise real estate prices,” the tech-billionaire tells his audience after explaining that in San Francisco the mere presence of homeless people in lower and middle class neighborhoods increases demand, and therefore cost, of housing in wealthy precincts. Peter Thiel’s protégé is none other than the current vice president of the United States, J.D. Vance. There are several references to Donald Trump in 2073, but he is not the focus. He is merely a member of a large cast of anti-democratic demagogues, despots, and plutocrats who understand, as Anne Applebaum tells viewers in a time capsule, that “Putin hacked the system” with his own power and influence overseas, and in the words of an executive of Cambridge Analytica, a big data political lobby, politics is now an enterprise of “no facts, all emotion.” These men control the systems of information. With the push of a button or pull of a lever, they can help to determine the outcome of elections, the future of social movements, and the news that their millions of consumers can access. Maria Essa, a 2073 time capsule journalist who became a free press icon after courageously opposing a former president of the Philippines’s violent and oppressive war against drug addicts, offers the rhetorical question: “Isn’t this a science fiction movie?” The dramatic, futuristic segments of 2073 answer with troubling affirmation. Ghost, our fictional guide into the second half of the 21st Century, describes the nightly curfew. Anyone who violates it is subject to rough, street justice. She recalls the days when libraries still existed, but were “secret places” for rebels, dissidents, and free thinkers meeting undercover. Her movements and home underneath a long closed shopping mall make it obvious that there is no escape from facial recognition technology and the techno-fascist clutch of modernity. A friend that she made, living off the grid, a former history professor who remained steadfast in her subversive politics, vanished one day without a trace. Ghost knows that she will never see her again. The only solace Ghost finds is in the bottom of a dumpster – a badly damaged, nearly burnt copy of Malcolm X’s autobiography. His words cannot inspire activism – any act of protest is too dangerous to even contemplate – but they can remind her of a time when the truth was able to live in the discourse and in the minds of those who would accept it. We hear her read the following passage, as it offers an assessment of the world she inhabited before the dystopian decline into the techno-monarchy: “I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation.” We also hear Ghost’s internal monologue recite Malcolm X’s conclusion, “The world goes on. It’s us that will end.” And she does meet her end. 2073 ends with a masked law enforcement officer manhandling Ghost, and placing her in a detention center where a robotic voice emanating from an electronic device hanging from the wall asks her a series of questions about her relationships, beliefs, and reading habits. “It was too late for me,” appears on the screen, “It is not too late for you.” The world in which Ghost lives, hides, and dies is the world that we are witnessing being born. In 2073, the complete transformation occurs after “The Event” – an unexplained cataclysm. It could be climate catastrophe, a world war, a global pandemic, anything, but the point is, anything that is easy to imagine. The world that takes form is one that prescient writers and filmmakers have predicted, all working under the subgenre of cyberpunk. Cyberpunk borrows from science fiction and crime noir to present a futuristic world of dystopian dimensions. Familiar to most people through the movie, Blade Runner, based on a novel of Philip K. Dick, a cyberpunk pioneer, the genre depicts profoundly unequal societies where human beings wrestle against dominant technology and the tyrants and moguls who engineer and control it. Jared Shurin offers an accurate and workable definition of the term in the introduction to his essential anthology, The Big Book of Cyberpunk: “Cyberpunk fiction is therefore an attempt, through literature, to make sense of the unprecedented scale and pace of contemporary technology, and also of the brutal and realistic acknowledgement that there may be no sense to it at all. As a working definition, cyberpunk is speculative fiction about the influence of technology on the scale, the pace, or the pattern of human affairs (emphasis his). Technology may accelerate, promote, delay, or even oppose these affairs, but humanity remains ultimately, unchangeably, human. It is the fiction of irrationality. Science fiction looks to the stars; cyberpunk stares into a mirror.” The image in the mirror cannot differ too radically from the present. Cyberpunk is not set in space or fantastical, faraway worlds, but instead a world that is a plausible iteration of our own. William Gibson, another cyberpunk founder, was prescient in his novels, particularly Neuromancer, about the influence of computers on human life, and the creation of the internet, just as lesser known authors of the genre can give insight into a near future, such as Isabel Fall, whose massively controversial story, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” explores gender, and George Effinger, who forecasted the isolation that social media would encourage. More recently, pop star Janelle Monáe created a cyberpunk audio-textual classic with her record, Dirty Computer, and the companion collection of short stories focusing on how technology could create a “neofascist” regime of homophobia and racism, due to its enablement of extreme and thorough classification, the likes of which are already operative in China. 2073 depicts a future that, like the best of cyberpunk, is not alien to our own conception of the present. It also demonstrates that, as Shurin would surely observe, humans are inalterably human. Those with power use whatever tools at their disposal to enhance and enshrine their authority against all potential enemies and dissidents. The tools certainly differ, but the methodology of tyranny is traceable to the ancient world. Those who occupy the bottom strata struggle to survive physically by subsisting on whatever nutrition and shelter they can find, but also psychically, by reading old, discarded books, and forming underground friendships. The words of Malcolm X ring true in 2073, just as they did at time of publication in 1965. There is quick, but brilliant allusion to the genius of the cyberpunk storytelling promise when a montage of Ghost’s memories slowly advances as she takes her final walk to the detention center. We see a quick scene of her looking frightened in the backseat of a vehicle. It is a scene, with the same actress, from the Steven Spielberg film, Minority Report. Also based on a Philip K. Dick novel, that revolves around predictive technology, available to law enforcement agencies, that allows for the arrest of a person before he commits a crime. Algorithms, invasive surveillance, the creation, to borrow another Shurin phrase, of “techno-capitalism on steroids” – it all might seem like the exclusive property of imaginative novels and films, but it is now becoming a reality that everyone, from candidates for the presidency to the average, unknown voter, must navigate. James Cameron, referring to his 1984 movie, The Terminator, recently told an interviewer, when asked about artificial intelligence, “I warned you guys in 1984, and you didn’t listen.” It appears that critics are again refusing to listen. 2073 is on the receiving end of various barbs – “pretentious,” “doomsday,” “cliched.” On its artistic and aesthetic merit, Kapadia’s movie is a clever and daring merger of two genres and mediums. Politically, it is as urgent and important as any film of the past ten years, offering, to name one example, a much more salient and global perspective on Donald Trump’s conquest of American politics than the typical partisan and parochial reaction. Other critics have lamented that it is a “barrage of despair” and that it is “overly pessimistic.” As Ghost’s final words make clear, the movie is only pessimistic if an apathetic public determines that its trajectory is inevitable. The next era does not have to resemble the world of 2073, but to act as if it can’t calls to mind the lyrics of a Bruce Springsteen song about civilizational decline and the delusions that could invite it. The music is joyous, and the chorus is infectious: “Don’t worry, darlin’ / Now, baby don’t you fret / We’re living in the future / And none of this has happened yet.” View the full article
  11. We have now gotten a bit more information about the new Rian Johnson film, the third installment in the Benoit Blanc series, after after Knives Out and Glass Onion. This third film, which is called Wake Up Dead Man, is projected to premiere sometime this year, has officially released a photo from the production. Behold! This past week, Johnson tweeted: The photograph in the tweet shows Benoit Blanc, with slightly longer hair than in the last adventure, standing in a Gothic church, while a man in priest’s clothes (Josh O’Connor), lolls against a pew. Here it is, on its own: Exciting! What does this mean? I have no idea… the plot remains reatively unknown, we do know that it finds Daniel Craig’s gentleman sleuth Benoit Blanc on a dangerous case. It seems to be set in the UK, and stars (in addition to Daniel Craig, of course), also includes Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, and Thomas Haden Church. Stay tuned for more of our Knives Out series coverage! View the full article
  12. If someone had predicted to me that during my sophomore year at Harvard I would be arrested on suspicion of premeditated murder, I would have called him a lunatic. But the lunatic would have been right. I was reminded of those days again recently when an old classmate sent me a copy of a blown-up photograph that he said is now displayed on the wall of the atrium at the JFK presidential library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That’s me in the middle, holding the McMillan Cup after we won the national intercollegiate sailing championship in June of 1938. As you look at it, Joe Kennedy, Jr., is standing to my left and Jack Kennedy to my right. Jack and I were sophomores; Joe was a senior. Some strange things happened to Jack and me that year. If they hadn’t turned out the way they did, history might look a lot different today. I’ve waited sixty-five years to tell the story. The reason will become evident by the end of this account. *** The future president preferred his own reading choices to what we were assigned in the first English course we took together, which started the following Monday. I had decided to major in English and Jack in government and history. He was taking two history courses, along with government, English, and fine arts, while I registered for two English classes, Music 1, economics, and a history course. The English class opened with the 17th century poets, and the first book we were assigned was John Milton’s Paradise Lost. We both hated it. “I don’t think I can survive this course,” said Jack in his clipped Boston accent when we were walking back across the old Yard between the John Harvard statue and Massachusetts Hall one day. We passed two Radcliffe girls lying on their stomachs in the grass, reading under one of the oak trees. Jack turned to look down at them before adding, “If Paradise Lost is considered one of the greatest works of English literature, I’ll take your Hardy Boys.” It came out Hoddy Boys. We quickly fell into the regular routine of course work, studying, and morning and afternoon sports practices. More than eighty men went out for the soccer team, and I knew it would be a serious challenge to make the starting eleven as a sophomore. It was October 7, 1937 around two weeks after classes began, when the incident took place that led to my meeting Maggie Halloran, one of the waitresses in the Winthrop House dining hall. A few days earlier, someone had pulled off a prank that attracted the notice of all four hundred men living at Winthrop. The practical joker had launched a big balloon filled with helium inside the enormous dining hall, and it was still hovering under the ceiling about forty feet above our heads. It wasn’t a regular balloon. The thing was about four feet long and somehow shaped into the form of a dirigible airship. Like an airship, it had a small wooden gondola dangling under it. The word Hindenburg had been stenciled in red paint along the length of the balloon. *** In May of that year, the real German dirigible Hindenburg had caught fire and exploded while trying to land at Lakehurst, New Jersey. No one was sure if it was an accident or sabotage. Thirty-six people died in the fire, and film footage of the raging inferno made all the newsreels. Now we had this replica of it flying over our heads, and the dining hall manager was scratching his head to figure out how it could be removed from under the ceiling. The second morning after its arrival, I awoke to find Bill Coleman grinning at me like a fox. Bill, Jack, and I, along with Torb MacDonald, were roommates. Bill was blonde and rugged looking, with a prominent nose; we called him Beak. “I’ve got the solution,” he said. “The solution to what?” I muttered. “Bringing down the Hindenburg.” In his right hand he was holding what looked like an ebony-handled dueling pistol from The Count of Monte Cristo. “This is the same model air gun William Powell used to shoot out the Christmas tree bulbs in The Thin Man. I ordered one as soon as I saw the movie, but I’ve never gotten around to using it.” I sat up, and he handed it to me. It only fired BBs but looked lethal. In response to Bill’s tapping on the wall, Jack came in with Torb, both in their bathrobes. When Bill told them his idea, Jack loved it. Grinning, he took the pistol, practiced aiming it, and said, “I’m in.” Torb thought it over and said he’d have to pass. Naturally cautious, he didn’t want to do anything that would affect his status on the football team. Since it was Bill’s idea, Jack and I agreed he would shoot first. Jack won a coin toss with me for the second spot if Beak missed. Twenty minutes later, the three of us entered the dining hall. Bill had concealed the air pistol inside his waistband under his sweater. At least two hundred men were having breakfast as we went to our regular table and sat down. One of the waitresses came over to pour coffee and orange juice. Looking up at the ceiling, I saw that the Hindenburg was positioned at a point that gave us an unimpeded chance for a clear shot. Still, it was at least forty feet away from our table. Jack said, “Let me introduce the festivities.” Standing up, he tapped his knife against our tin water pitcher enough times so that the room slowly quieted down. When there was almost complete silence, Jack called out, “Gentlemen, do not be alarmed at what is about to happen. We who are about to fire, salute you.” With that, he sat down, and Beak stood up. He removed the pistol from under his sweater, aimed it skyward with both hands, and fired. There was a pinging noise, and the BB hit the ceiling near the balloon with a thin snap. A collective sigh filled the hall, whereupon Jack said, “My turn.” Still sitting, he took the pistol and rested the barrel on my shoulder to steady it before aiming and firing. We heard a sharp crack as it hit the wooden gondola, making it swing back and forth beneath the balloon. A cry of disappointment rose from the men in the hall, and I heard a nearby female voice call out, “I thought you knew how to aim your bullets, Lacey!” The cry had come from the striking young Irish waitress who often served at our table. Jack always made a point of flirting with her, and it was obvious she enjoyed it. Her nickname for him was Lacey, for lace curtain Irish. He called her Shanty. Grinning, Jack handed the pistol to me. “Okay, Buffalo Bill,” he said, giving me a pat on the shoulder. “This could be embarrassing if you miss.” In the distance, I could see the dining hall manager striding across the hall, threading his way between the tables, an apoplectic glower on his face. It struck me that this was something that could get me into trouble, but when I glanced back at the Irish girl, she gave me a wink and a thumbs up. I slowly raised the pistol and fully extended my arm toward the balloon, trying to keep my hand steady as the Hindenburg filled the gun sights. I closed my eyes and pulled the trigger. A loud pop split the silence, and the Hindenburg began rapidly descending to the accompanying sound of rushing air. Cheering burst out as it landed on one of the serving stations and scattered the waitresses standing alongside. Putting the air pistol down on the table, I stood up and gave them all a bow, garnering even more enthusiastic applause. By then, the dining hall manager had reached us. He was furious. “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded, staring down at the pistol as if it were a bazooka. “Have you lost your mind?” Jack stepped between us to block his view and began patting me on the back as Bill moved in behind him to retrieve the pistol and slip it back under his sweater. “Give me your gun,” the manager demanded. But when he looked down, it was no longer there. “I don’t have a gun,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I’m late for class.” I was almost to the doors when the Irish waitress intercepted me. Like the other waitresses, she wore a black dress, black cotton stockings, and a black headband to keep her hair out of the food. She took my hand and held it. Looking up at me, she laughed and said, “That was wizard. My name’s Maggie Halloran.” The words came out with an Irish lilt. “I’m Jimmy Rousmaniere,” I said. She was about my age, maybe a year or two older, with blue-violet eyes and a cherubic face sprinkled with freckles. Her headband couldn’t contain the abundance of auburn hair that framed her face. Over her shoulder, I saw the manager glaring at her. The girl turned and saw him. “No rest for the wicked,” she said. As Maggie began walking back toward the serving station where the carcass of the Hindenburg had met its end, Jack stepped over to me and grinned. “Shanty’s very good, Jimmy. Mark my words.” Heading out into the courtyard, I hoped there wouldn’t be any serious repercussions for the prank. __________________________________ Excerpted from The Harvard Murders by Robert Mrazek. Copyright © 2025 by Robert J. Mrazek. Used with permission of the publisher, Compass Rose Publishing. All rights reserved. View the full article
  13. Up until two years ago, when I heard the word “spy,” I thought of hidden daggers, poison vials, fake identities, and, of course, James Bond and the entourage of Hollywood spy characters that have come in his wake. All of these elements of espionage are, admittedly, exciting. They bring with them the dangerous, edge-of-your seat romance and thrills that I’ve come to expect from pop-culture spy tropes. It wasn’t until I started doing research into World War II espionage for my historical fiction novel, The Librarians of Lisbon, that I realized how limiting (albeit fun) this stereotype of spies is. What often goes overlooked and underappreciated is the extraordinary talent of real-life spies, not as masters of weaponry or stealth, but as masters of words. Spies, by the very nature of their craft, must be tellers of tales. They have aliases, and these fabricated identities come with personalities, family backgrounds, long-lost loves, heartaches and triumphs. Not only does a spy working undercover have to commit to a new narrative with each new mission, they have to live the story they craft. Author Sonia Purnell said of World War II spy Virginia Hall, “She could be four different women in the space of one afternoon, with four different code names.” Hall posed as everything from a reporter to a dairy farmer to accomplish her missions. Aline Griffith, a beautiful former-model recruited by America’s OSS (Office of Strategic Services), posed as a socialite in Madrid in order to gather information on Nazi movements. Marie Christine Chilver (aka Agent Fifi) often posed as a journalist in bars and restaurants in Beaulieu, England, in order to “test” SOE (Special Operations Executive) trainees to see how much personal information they’d divulge to her (It did not bode well for the trainees when they confided too many secrets.). According to Elyse Graham, author of the fascinating Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, spies weren’t supposed to carry weapons at all. Carrying weapons was too risky, because if a spy was caught, a weapon was an instant incriminator. Words, on the other hand, might serve as a spy’s most valuable alibi. Not only did spies have to craft narratives about their identities, but if captured, they had to spin yarns about their motives and movements as quickly and convincingly as possible. This art of storytelling extended well beyond aliases. During World War II, scholars, academics, and librarians were recruited by America’s OSS and sent to Europe to gather information for the Allies, as well as to preserve and protect rare manuscripts and literary treasures in danger of being confiscated or destroyed by the Nazis (Read Kathy Peiss’s wonderful recounting of this in her book, Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe). It was no mistake on the American government’s part to turn to these brilliant minds for espionage work. Because of their attention to detail and their skills with careful reading and meticulous research, these men and women scoured phone directories, artillery manuals, and uncensored and underground newspapers looking for the tiniest kernels of information that might prove useful. These kernels, when brought together, might turn into a story in and of themselves—of troop movements, of names and activities of high-powered Gestapo, of horrific war-time truths about destruction, crimes against humanity, and tragic deaths. Adele Kibre, a scholar in medieval linguistics, proved indispensable to the OSS when, working as an agent in Stockholm, Sweden, she secured thousands of reels of microfiche documenting aerial raids and resistance activities, much of which was censored information by the Germans. She also obtained a copy of Industrie-Compass 1943, an extensive, secret directory of manufacturers and industries in Germany. Each of her acquisitions told a story about the war—each one helped the Allies piece the puzzle together of how Germany and the Axis powers were operating, and how the tide of the war might be turned. World War II Double Agent Garbo, considered to this day to be one of the most talented and successful spies in the history of Britain’s MI5, was arguably also one of MI5’s best storytellers. Born in Spain, Garbo, whose real name was Juan Pujol García, was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and held a deep-seated disdain for both communism and totalitarianism. He approached the British SOE to offer his services as a spy, but they turned him down repeatedly. Desperate to help the Allies, Garbo planned a drastic move. Relocating from Spain to Lisbon, he contacted a German handler, offering his services, and was recruited by Germany under the codename Alaric. It was at this point, hoping to prove his usefulness to the SOE, that Garbo began weaving an extraordinary web of lies to give him the credibility he needed to become a spy for Britain. With the help of his wife, Araceli, he crafted a fictitious network of twenty-seven spies, all of whom were supposedly reporting on the movements of British troops from within Britian itself. It was all a grand fabrication. Each of these spies had a distinct backstory and personality, all crafted from Garbo’s inventive mind. There was a seaman, a soldier, a courier, an aviator, and many more. They hailed from a variety of countries, including Venezuela, Britain, and India. Garbo’s network was called the spinnennetz, or the “spider’s web.” His storytelling was so convincing that he soon became one of Germany’s most trusted and valued spies. When one of the spinnennetz spies purportedly died, the Germans sent condolences to the fake spy’s widow, and then she soon became a member of Garbo’s spy network herself. What makes Garbo’s feat of deception all the more incredible is that, from early 1941 until April 1942, he crafted these stories in Lisbon, without ever having set foot on British soil. He relied solely on the travel guidebooks and maps he’d secured of Britain and his own imagination. The Germans never suspected a thing. Eventually, his success as a spy for Germany caught the attention of Britain, and at last, he was recruited by MI5 and brought to London to continue his espionage work. Once he arrived in England, his spinnennetz reached a whole new level of credibility. Now, with the help of information from MI5, Garbo’s fake spies were able to report, many times quite accurately, about British troop and artillery movements. Sometimes the facts were real but had been deemed non-essential by the British and safe enough to pass onto Germany. Other times, Garbo and MI5 made sure some truthful information arrived in Germany’s hands too late to be of any great service to them. Agent Garbo played a vital role in the success of Operation Fortitude and D-Day by spinning yet more stories. Operation Fortitude was, itself, one enormous lie, the purpose of which was to deceive Germany about the magnitude and location of D-Day. Garbo and his network told the Germans of a massive army forming along the coast of south-east Britain, commanded by General Patton himself, complete with tanks, landing crafts, and airplanes. He also led Germany to believe that the Allied invasion would take place in Calais, France, rather than in Normandy. It was all a ruse. The Allied army Gable told of was a “decoy,” made up of inflatables that looked deceptively real from the sky. But Germany fell for the trick, and in the days following the initial D-Day landing on June 6, 1942, thanks to one final message from Garbo, Hitler delayed sending reinforcements from Calais to Normandy. Because of this, the Allies were able to gain the upperhand, and eventually, go on to win the war in Europe. If Garbo had not been so adept at storytelling, what would the outcome of D-Day, or in fact, the war might have been? If Adele Kibre and her team hadn’t sent three thousand reels of microfilm to the United States from Sweden, what vital information about the war might have been left undiscovered? If Virginia Hall had not been such a skilled chameleon at re-writing her own script, how many more people might have lost their lives instead of being rescued by her adroit espionage work? Many spies, as I’ve come to understand through my recent research, are wielders of pen and paper more than cloaks and daggers. Yes, they operate in the shadows. Yes, they face incredible danger. But they do it all while spinning their own spider webs of stories, to ensure their continued survival and that of those they’re trying to protect. The tales they tell just might be their most powerful weapon of all. *** View the full article
  14. More than 100,000 people in the USA are on waiting lists for organ transplants. Each day 17 people die while waiting. Advances in organ procurement and allocation have expanded the donor pool. For example (focusing on heart transplants, since I’m a cardiologist) in early 2020, doctors started to perform transplants using hearts from donors who had sustained circulatory-arrest deaths, instead of brain death. Similar to donors after brain death, post circulatory arrest donors have sustained irreversible neurologic injury. But unlike brain dead donors, circulatory arrest donors don’t yet meet formal brain-death criteria. This change has significantly expanded the donor pool. Today, 30%-50% of all transplants are from circulatory arrest donors. Advances in organ care systems have greatly expanded the viability and the scope of organ transplants. Today we have the “Heart in a Box” technology. Before this technology, the donor’s heart would be on ice in a cooler to preserve it during transport, and doctors had only four hours to get the heart to the recipient, which limited the possibility to provide matching organs across extended distance. If no suitable donor was available in the limited area, the heart would go to waste. Today doctors can revive the donated heart and make it beat again inside the box by perfusing it with warm, oxygenated blood, preserving it for up to 12 hours. Despite the advances, the organ shortage is still a formidable problem. What complicates matters is the fact that for centuries ethical dilemmas have marred most medical advancements. From the sin of performing autopsies in the Middle ages, to the denigration of anesthesia, to the conviction that nothing could be introduced into human blood vessels, which forced a heroic doctor to perform the first heart catheterization on himself using a urinary catheter, many medical innovations endured an uphill battle. It shouldn’t surprise us that organ donation, which often requires the death of a donor, is also facing serious ethical dilemmas stifling life-saving progress and organ availability. The challenge starts with the request for consent to donate. Today, the responsibility to obtain consent from the donor’s family and to evaluate the suitability of potential donors belongs to the Organ Procurement Organization. A doctor with a patient in desperate need of an organ is not allowed to approach a donor or his family directly. I strongly believe that organ donations would increase if the doctor helped the donor’s family to develop a connection with the recipient. An even more controversial issue is that donation is viewed as a purely altruistic act, unburdened by external pressures and without any compensation to the donor or his family. Why should a donor or his family donate organs? From the goodness of their hearts (pun intended.) I’m a strong believer that we should compensate the donor’s family for organ donations. There are different ways to achieve this through hospital fund raising, private insurance, and private pay. What’s wrong with financial compensation, as long as proper patient-donor match and severity of illness remain priorities? After all, nowadays recipients do pay for sperm and egg donation. Why not for organs? Because of the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) passed by Congress in1984 to ensure an equitable allocation of donor organs and to (ironically) increase the number of organs available for transplantation. NOTA bans the sale of human organs for transplantation, with violations punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $50,000. A reason for the ban, is the past experience with the sale of blood, which led to problems with drug addicts selling blood-carrying diseases. But nowadays we have much better way to screen tissues and organs for infections. According to a prominent cardiothoracic surgeon I consulted, if half of the effort spent encouraging people to sign donor cards was spent to make organ donation safer, compensation to donors’ family would greatly increase organ availability. As it has happened in the past with other kind of prohibitions, the black market of organs is flourishing. Compensation for donation would help prevent illegal practices and unsafe transplant tourism. In my novel I weaved into the plot and concretized several of these important advances and the ethical dilemmas they cause. I highlight in action the emotional turmoil faced by families of donors, who are thrust into a position of making a swift and agonizing decision about their relative’s organs. This reflects the tension between honoring the donor’s wishes and the family’s grief, compounded by the time-sensitive nature of organs’ procurement. I delved into cybercrime linked to organ allocation systems, which can be exploited for profit, as concretized by the hospital hacking subplot and the misuse of donors’ data. I challenged the idea that donation should be purely altruistic, since compensation would alleviate illegal practices. A good novel doesn’t openly proselytize. The author’s ideas have to be concretized through the actions of the characters and the events of the plot, so the reader arrives at the writer’s original idea by his own conclusions, after reading the story and may develop a personal opinion about these ethical challenges. There are many more and greater challenges at the horizon for organ donation. Xeno-transplantation is in the process of becoming a reality. Today, gene-editing technology can create genetically-altered pigs which are bred and housed using infection-control measures and isolation in sterile environments, to provide organs, especially hearts. Many object that using pigs and nonhuman primates for xenotransplantation research, or to grow organs, violates established best practices for animal care and welfare. This ethical challenge thrusts us into the discussion about whether animals have rights which supersede humans’ right to preserve and prolong their own life by utilizing nature and non-rational species. I encourage other authors to concretize their views about these new ethical dilemmas through the actions of their characters and the plot’s events, to make people aware of the challenges patients and doctors face on a daily basis to promote life sustaining innovations. View the full article
  15. As someone who has spent their life in motorsports from the day I left school until I took the plunge and switched careers in 2019, I was constantly being asked when I would write a book about racing. A year ago, I finally decided to include a motor racing theme in book fifteen of my AJ Bailey Adventure series. The result? Polarized. Readers either loved the insight into the sport, or drearily trudged through, or simply skipped the racing parts. So, what had I done wrong? According to one reader: ‘I’d rather stare at a rusty bucket of bolts in the corner of my garage than watch auto racing.’ Okay, I don’t think I was ever going to hook this fellow with anything motor racing related, but I also received other notes and reviews about the level of detail I’d delved into. In both directions; critical and praising. The book, Lighthouse Point, was a passion project for me and a nod to my late father who’d spent his life in racing and shoved my backside in a go-kart when I was ten years old. My goal with the racing storyline, which was set in the glamourous and incredibly dangerous era of Grand Prix racing in 1970, was to put the reader in the driver’s seat and have them experience the tactile and exhilarating feel of being behind the wheel. For those interested in cars, excited to learn, or drawn into following the story of the fictional fledgling independent team I placed amongst the actual racers and storied names of the time, they loved the sensation of being immersed in the action. The balancing act of choosing a level of detail wasn’t new to me. The series is based around a female dive boat operator in the Cayman Islands who seems to always find herself mixed up in trouble of some kind. Most of the books are written in dual timeline, following a storyline in history which ultimately converges and resolves in AJ Bailey’s present day world. Scuba diving itself, even basic recreational diving, has technical details and knowledge which if ignored can seriously injure you or kill you. My series has become very popular in the diving community, so making sure these details are both correct, and not ignored, is critical. But a larger percentage of my readers have never put a regulator in their mouths, and never had to worry about nitrogen narcosis, rapidly expanding bubbles in their blood system, or no-decompression limits. Yup, how do you slide info like that into a story without generating a page-skipper instead of a page-turner? Tricky, right? Now write a lengthy series where these terms and situations will crop up repeatedly, but you can’t guarantee your new readers start with book one. Many will join the series in book sixteen then go back to the beginning if they enjoy the latest release. So, you can’t throw in a term like DCS (decompression sickness) and expect them to know what you’re talking about. The solution I’ve found after clumsily learning through the early novels, is to make sure a technical detail is critical to the story, or necessary for the situation, then find the briefest way possible to describe it. I’m not going to blather on about the intricacies of nitrogen narcosis – a drug-like euphoria caused by a large presence of nitrogen molecules in your system when diving deeper – when AJ is guiding her customers on a shallow reef. The next challenge is to drop the information into the narrative or conversation without sounding like a manual or textbook. Having AJ verbally warn another diver about the dangers before they get in the water is a useful trick. Now you’re setting the reader up to expect and feel the tension as the errant diver becomes disorientated in the wreck at 130 feet down. Timed right, the reader is yelling at the diver not to go farther inside the shipwreck. Or a shed full of chainsaws. Breaking up the information is also a useful technique. Similar to how I try to drip-feed my protagonist’s description over the early chapters. ‘AJ’s shoulder length blond and purple highlighted hair soon dried with the warm tropical air rushing over the bridge as she steered the dive boat towards shore.’ A little later in the chapter, I may have her slip on a long-sleeved sunshirt to protect her colourfully tattooed arms from the sun. The same system can work for technical details which will be important to the story later on. I might describe them filling the tanks with nitrox gas instead of air before leaving the dock, a mix with a higher percentage of oxygen. Now I can reference nitrox and have AJ tell someone: ‘We’re diving nitrox which will extend our ability to stay deeper without going into deco.’ I still have to tell the reader what ‘deco’ means, but at least I don’t have to also stack an info dump on nitrox at the same time. In diving there is specialised equipment involved which presents a similar challenge. Your regular readers already know what a BCD is, but the new prospective fan who grabbed your latest release may has no idea. ‘AJ donned her buoyancy control device, or BCD as they’re commonly called, the vest-like piece of equipment holding her tank.’ Everyone has seen a picture of a scuba diver wearing some sort of jacket with a tank on their back, so now they know it’s a BCD and we can move on to dropping into the turquoise gin-clear water of the Caribbean Sea. A short enough sentence that your regular readers aren’t shouting at their ereader about how they already know this, but enough information to keep from losing the newbie to your stories and scuba diving. A glossary has been a tool used by many in the past, but I prefer not to pause the story to have the reader go look something up. You can hyperlink in an ebook, but it’s still a break in the flow, especially when the information is required during an action sequence or tense moment. Keep it brief, break it up, and make sure it’s critical to the story or required for authenticity. Which leads into my final point. Get it right. Someone who knows what they’re talking about, whether it’s flying a plane, handling a firearm, or scuba diving to the depths, will call you out if your description is inaccurate. Almost every film ever made about motor racing is unwatchable for anyone who has competitively raced cars. They’re filled with technical flaws, often to the point of being ridiculous. No driver ever goes down the long straight at three-quarter throttle, waiting for their rival to pull alongside so they can ‘mash the gas’ to the floor to surge ahead again. Their foot was already on the stop from the first moment traction off the previous corner allowed until the latest braking point for the next corner. Get it right, or you’ll aggravate and lose knowledgeable readers. So, did I include too much nuance and fine detail in Lighthouse Point? Certainly, for some I did, but that was a decision I made going in. As I mentioned, it was a passion project, so I accepted the hits to tell a story and share a love of mine which had dominated my family’s life. I thought of my dad while I wrote every racing scene, and it was my gift to him. I’m proud of the book knowing he would have loved it. But I didn’t hit the ‘please everyone’ balance between detail, technical jargon, and story to make the masses happy. The next book released in the series is titled Spitfire Storm, where the historical timeline follows a female ATA pilot in WWII England. In this story it was easier for me to temper the technical detail as I’m not a pilot and relied heavily on research and advice to accurately portray the aerial scenes. Spitfire Storm has been the most popular release in the series so far, so in hindsight, the valuable lesson I learnt from Lighthouse Point helped me fine tune the balance for future books. *** View the full article
  16. I began writing about books for the New York Times in late 2023 and officially began my tenure as the horror fiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review in January on 2024. I love that gig with all my heart, but it often makes me miss something else I love with all my heart: crime fiction. Sure, I’m still reading crime (and noir, thrillers, mystery suspense, true crime, etc), but I’m not writing about what I read, and writing about what I read is what I’ve always done. Solution? Start a column to talk about crime fiction. The perfect place? CrimeReads, a place that has supported me from the start. Yeah, I’m happy to be here. Let’s talk about some new books. Johnny Careless by Kevin Wade (Celadon Books) Kevin Wade has had a great career as a screenwriter, television writer, and producer. All of that, however, came to a screeching halt when the writers’ and actors’ strikes hit in 2023. Locked in and with not much to do, Wade wrote a novel. Johnny Careless, Wade’s first novel, is a fun, fast-paced narrative written by a “debut” author who brings to the table decades of accumulated knowledge and a deep understanding of pacing, structure, and dialogue. Police Chief Jeep Mullane used to work as a cop in New York City, but after a very personal case broke him while also earning him a NYPD detective’s shield, Jeep opted to return home to Long Island’s North Shore to run a small new local police department. The North Shore is home, but while Jeep settles in relatively quickly, the things he ignored in the past and the big differences between hardworking people like himself, the son of a cop, and the wealthy families that populate the area start rubbing him the wrong way and making his work a little harder. When Jeep gets a call about the body of a drowned man who turns out to be one of his best childhood friends, Johnny Chambliss, his new role as the law in town clashes with his past. Johnny, nicknamed Johnny Careless by his coaches, grew up rich. Jeep didn’t. Back then, that meant feeling like an outsider and knowing Johnny and him would have different paths in life. Now, the difference means a lot more. As Jeep navigates his grief and tries to get to the bottom of Johnny’s death, he is also forced to deal with the wounds of his recent past, Johnny’s secretive family and overbearing father, Johnny’s own past, corrupt local politicians, and a gang of car thieves. This novel is always moving forward at breakneck speed. Short chapters–many of them carried mostly by dialogue–and Wade’s lean prose make this a quick read. There are two narratives at play here, and they both move well. The first, which occupies center stage and delivers the biggest emotional punches, is happening now as Jeep investigates his friend’s death. The second, which provides context and helps with character development, follows Jeep and Johnny back at the end of their high school days when they played lacrosse together. Unfortunately, the chapters from the past end up revealing too much and giving away all of the pieces of the puzzle. There are a few tropes here that might have worked better on television, including things like Latinx bad guys with tattooed tears and a cop talking about how good cops are and how rough the gig is. Despite those flaws, Johnny Carless is an impressive debut from a voice that sounds like a veteran because it comes from a veteran who knows how to tell a story. The Note by Alafair Burke (Knopf) Alafair Burke consistently delivers, so I went into The Note, her latest, with high expectation. Burke met all of them and then kept going, delivering what is arguably her best novel to date. May Hanover is one of those people who likes to follow the rules. To a fault. Most of it comes from growing up the daughter of a first-generation Chinese single mother who understood that education and discipline were the way to a better future and had very high expectations. But May isn’t perfect. A video of her yelling at someone on the subway went viral. It destroyed her life for a while. Now May is engaged, teaching law, and on her way to a couple of days with old friends in a rented house in the Hamptons. Lauren and Kelsey have experienced things like what happened to May–scandals also altered their lives forever–so their bond is deep despite their bumpy past. While out for drinks, the three friends have a bad experience with a parking spot that leads to a prank that goes horribly wrong and quickly becomes an investigation that threatens to expose the three friends to the world once again. The Note is a complex, shifting, and very timely procedural. Burke has always excelled at those, so this comes as no surprise. However, the intricate way in which Burke examines female friendship and the lingering impact of trauma after it has been amplified by social media make this a remarkable novel. Also, the plot is still delivering surprises in the last few pages, which is saying a lot. Burke is a master of suspense, which is great, but what is astonishing about her is that she somehow keeps getting better. None of This is True by Lisa Jewell (Atria) As someone who pays the bills writing a mix of horror and crime, I’m fully aware of the differences between those genres as well as of all the ways in which they share the same dark heart. The work of Lisa Jewell–murky, twisted–has always appealed to me because it brings in enough human darkness to be horror while remaining firmly entrenched in a crime. None of This is True, now out in paperback, is Jewell at the top of her game. Josie Fair is in a pub with her much older husband celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. At the same pub and doing the same thing–also for her forty-fifth birthday–is Alix Summer, a famous podcaster. When the two cross paths, the encounter is a funny “I found my birthday twin” story for Alix, but it has a much deeper meaning for Josie. When the two women run into each other again, Josie talks to Alix about an idea she had while listening to her podcast, which she has been obsessed with since meeting Alix at the pub on their birthday night. Josie wants to change her life, and Alix could tell her story. Alix agrees, but when she and Josie start working together, she realizes Josie might not be who she says she is. A story about lies that also delves deep into topics like pedophilia, alcoholism, and grooming, None of This is True is a dark spiral of tension that gets weirder and creepier as it goes. Josie’s unhealthy obsession with Alix and the way she wedges herself into the podcaster’s life is only the start, and everything leading up to is even worse. There is a lot to like in this novel, but besides the great dialogue, twists, and master class in tension, one of the most interesting elements of the narrative is the snippets of a true crime Netflix documentary that readers “see” by reading audio from the podcast as well as interviews done after with people who knew Josie and Alix. To say more would be to give away too much, so I’ll end it there. There are many reasons why Jewell sells so many books, and all of them are in full display here. View the full article
  17. Cornell Woolrich was a worker. He produced a large amount on the printed page in a relatively short window of time. He wrote, by my count, twenty-seven novels and countless short stories in various genres, which were later compiled in numerous collections. The books and stories were a natural source for the movies, as their plots neatly fit the mold of three-act screenwriting: conflict, deeper conflict, and resolution. There were forty-three (!) feature films made from his books and short stories, which ultimately made him a very wealthy man, an unusual outcome for a writer who toiled in the pulps. The most famous of the films mined from the Woolrich library is probably, and deservedly, Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), adapted from the Woolrich short story “It Had to Be Murder.” There were other very good ones: The Leopard Man (directed by Jacques Tourneur, 1943); The Chase (directed by Arthur Ripley, 1946); the underrated I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (directed by William Nigh, 1948); and The Window (directed by Ted Tetzlaff, 1949). Street of Chance (1942), a passable picture directed by Jack Hively and starring Burgess Meredith and noir mainstay Clair Trevor, was adapted from The Black Curtain, the book you hold in your hands. There were Woolrich-inspired films by Indian and Japanese directors, and one from Italian Giallo/horror/Eurocrime practitioner Umberto Lenzi (Seven Blood-Stained Orchids, 1972). Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed Martha (1974); Francois Truffaut directed The Bride Wore Black (1968) and Mississippi Mermaid (1969). For a Hitchcock acolyte, Truffaut made surprisingly dull suspense films, but it should be noted, if it’s to your taste, that The Bride Wore Black’s premise inspired Quentin Tarentino’s Kill Bill. My favorite Woolrich movie adaptation is Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944), a delirious high-water mark of film noir. What of the books? Woolrich started his writing career with Fitgerald-inspired, Jazz Age novels that were sold in numbers and well received. This sent him out to Hollywood for a shot at screenwriting. The Depression ended the market for Roaring Twenties lit and Woolrich turned to mystery/suspense fiction. He was prolific from 1940–1960, so prolific that he was compelled to publish under other names (my hardback edition of Phantom Lady, under Collier’s Front Page Mysteries imprint, carries the pseudonym William Irish on its spine). The Black Curtain was the second of Woolrich’s six novels with “Black” in the title, which is a tipoff to the darkness of the work. Can Woolrich be described as a noir novelist? He was among them, though I don’t think he (or anyone else) invented the form. Noir rose up simultaneously, perhaps unconsciously, amongst other arts. It’s there in German Expressionist films and design, it’s in Edward Hopper paintings, in jazz music (through association), in literature. Though Boris Ingster’s The Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) is usually credited as the first film noir, mainly because of its expressionistic nightmare sequence, I’d put Fritz Lang’s M (1931) in the running as well. The point being, there were no “firsts” in noir. The Black Curtain was published in 1941, before anyone knew what noir “was” (it took the French to put a label on it, years later). Yet, deliberate or not, Woolrich wrote in a style that was very precise in conveying anxiety, fear, claustrophobia, and the inevitability of fate, elements that were to become the emotional core of the genre and would be conveyed by film directors with visual style in a distinct blend of lighting and effects. In Woolrich’s later books, there is evidence that he was being influenced by the visual signposts of film noir (venetian blind shadows, etc.), but at this stage in his career, perhaps inadvertently, he was creating something new. Even as early as The Black Curtain, he equated fractured illumination with impending violence, as in the “blades of light” that divided a space or the way light “knifed” its way into a room. From The Black Curtain: Townsend stood there by the tree, watching her down the leafy alley. Now the disks of sunlight didn’t gently alternate down on her; they streaked in one continuous, blurred line like a striped tiger pelt, she was running so fast. At times in The Black Curtain, one can sense that Woolrich was writing in a fever, manifested in his staccato prose. The rhythm maintains the anxiety and works to great effect: The door seemed to explode with impacts. It made the light bulbs jitter in the ceiling. It made a pottery thing on table sing out with the vibration, carried to it along the floor and up the table legs. It was an earthquake of an attempted forcible entry. It was violence in its most ravening form. It was the night gone hydrophobic at their threshold. It was disaster. It was the end. Much has been made of Woolrich’s tortured life and how it spills onto the pages, like blood from a freshly opened wound, of his work. There are some facts backed up by interviews of his friends and editors: He was an odd-looking man, pale and small. He had one brief marriage that fell apart and thereafter lived in low-grade residences with his mother in New York City. He rarely left his apartments and was probably agoraphobic (fear of the marketplace, from the Greek). He suffered from thanatophobia (fear of death, from the Greek, just saying). He was an alcoholic. When his mother passed away, his life spiraled downward and his health rapidly declined. Towards the end, one of his legs was amputated due to gangrene left unattended. He died with nearly a million dollars in the bank (from the movie money, a fortune in 1968), which he willed to Columbia University for a scholarship fund for writing students in honor of his mother. Did any of these things make their way into his fiction? Probably, in the same way that a writer’s psyche always makes its way into the fiction. As for his rumored queer life and his infamous sailor suit, much as been made of it, and I’m not sure why. It’s never been proven, nor has it been confirmed that his marriage was never consummated. His private life was his, and for me it has no relevance to his work. I’m content to read the books and not overanalyze the man behind them. Woolrich’s output was, frankly, uneven. But when the author was creatively locked in, his books and short stories were terrific. The Black Curtain is a crackling good mystery/suspense novel. I’m pleased to own this new edition for my collection. I think you will be, too. George Pelecanos Silver Spring, MD May 2024 View the full article
  18. When I sat down to write a synopsis for my newest novel, Saint of the Narrows Street, I described it as “a kitchen-sink crime drama set across eighteen years in southern Brooklyn.” I’m not sure when I first heard the terms “kitchen-sink drama” and “kitchen-sink realism,” but I was attracted to that sort of storytelling before I had a name or label for it. Even as a kid, the sorts of stories that drew me in could be perceived as the constraint-ridden domain of plays, working-class tales set in cramped kitchens and living rooms and grimy bars where trapped characters, experiencing one sort of crisis or another, holed up away from the world. When I discovered that there was a whole genre devoted to stories like that, of course it appealed to me. Even better was the fact that the genre intersected with noir in interesting ways. Typically, like noir, when folks talk about kitchen-sink realism or kitchen-sink dramas, they’re talking about a very specific place and era—in this case, it’s a British movement that spanned the late 1950s and the 1960s. As with noir, the impact of the genre reverberates through the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first with many works that might be perceived as “neo kitchen-sink.” The classic school of kitchen-sink realism dealt with “the sordid aspects of domestic reality” and was rooted in a sort of social realism that was revolutionary and controversial at the time. The characters—often poor, struggling, and living in industrial areas—confronted taboo subjects (adultery, pre-marital sex, abortion, sexual orientation, and crime) that were previously off-limits in such frank ways in fiction and on stages and screens. Key features included the heavy accents these characters, often from Northern England, spoke in and the slang they employed. Robert Hamer’s film It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), based on a 1945 novel by Arthur La Bern and starring Googie Withers, Jack Warner, and John McCallum, is often thought of as a precursor of the genre. It was a film that had a big impact on me when I watched it and one that I’ve mentioned often as key influence on Saint of the Narrows Street. Even the tagline could double as a tagline for my book: “The secrets of a street you know.” It Always Rains on Sunday looks and feels like a film noir in many ways, but it’s much more a slice-of-life, working class drama, one where escaped convict Tommy Swann (McCallum) hides out in the home of his now-married ex-fiancée Rose (Withers). It’s a story rooted in desperation, yearning, and regret. 1956 is often used as the marker for the beginning of the kitchen-sink realism movement. That was the year that John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger premiered and, as writer Alan Sillitoe (also an exemplar of the kitchen-sink movement) put it, Osborne “didn’t contribute to British theatre, he set off a landmine and blew most of it up.” Look Back in Anger is set in a claustrophobic, one-room flat in the English Midlands and focuses on a disillusioned young man with working-class roots named Jimmy Porter and his upper-middle-class wife, Alison. The harsh realism of the play—its consideration of class especially—made it the preeminent example of kitchen-sink drama in theatre and helped spawn the “Angry Young Men” movement, a group of mostly working and middle-class playwrights, novelists, and filmmakers disillusioned with traditional British society. The film adaptation of Look Back in Anger, made in 1958 and released in 1959, starred Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, and Mary Ure and was directed by Tony Richardson—I encountered the film several years ago thanks to the Criterion Channel, which sent me deeper down this rabbit hole. Other classic examples within the genre include John Braine’s 1957 novel Room at the Top (adapted into a film in 1959 by Jack Clayton); Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play A Taste of Honey (adapted into a film by Richardson in 1961); Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (the novel came out in 1958, the film adaptation by Karel Reisz in 1960) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (the short story was published in 1959, Richardson’s film adaptation was released in 1962); David Storey’s 1960 novel This Sporting Life (adapted into a film in 1963 by Lindsay Anderson); Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar from 1959 and John Schlesinger’s 1963 adaptation of it; Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction (1963 novel, 1965 Ken Loach BBC TV adaptation, 1968 film adaptation by Peter Collinson) and Poor Cow (1967 novel, adapted into a film the same year by Loach); and Barry Hines’s 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave, adapted into a classic film by Loach in 1969 simply called Kes. Kes was likely my (unknowing) introduction to the genre—I watched the film almost twenty years ago after hearing Willy Vlautin recommend it and read the book soon after. This is, by no means, an exhaustive list of examples of kitchen-sink realism—these are simply the works I’ve engaged with that have had some major impact on me and on the creation of Saint of the Narrows Street. It’s important to note that the films listed also serve as examples of the British New Wave movement, inspired by the French New Wave, which portrayed the lives of the urban proletariat. The influence of the kitchen-sink school impacted my decision to keep the action of Saint of the Narrows Street largely focused to the cramped apartments and kitchens and dining rooms of its characters and to the dive bars they inhabit. I’ve always been interested in telling character and place-driven stories, and kitchen-sink realism has been a model for that. I love that you can often feel a place without seeing a ton of it—the place comes through the characters. And keeping things small creates tension and helps me break away from formulaic storytelling devices. In the 1960s and 1970s, television plays became the domain of kitchen-sink realism. Mike Leigh’s BBC slice-of-life dramas made a mark on me, in particular. I first encountered these early Leigh efforts about nine years ago, prompted in that direction by Louis C.K.’s Horace and Pete (itself a sort of kitchen-sink crime drama). It is difficult, at this point, to discuss C.K. for obvious reasons, and I’ve been able to largely disentangle myself from much of his output, but the influence of Horace and Pete looms large, especially as a gateway to Leigh’s BBC work. Though I’d seen and loved many of Leigh’s later films by that point, it was an interview with C.K. where I heard him discuss Abigail’s Party that sent me down this particular road. I tracked down DVDs of Leigh’s BBC work where I could. A couple of years ago, an excellent retrospective appeared on the Criterion Channel called “Mike Leigh at the BBC” (still available as of the writing of this piece), finally giving me access to everything I’d wanted to see, identifying Leigh as “the great humanist of British cinema,” and highlighting the way these small kitchen-sink dramas “sharpened his distinctive voice and famously improvisatory process,” rooted in strong and indelible characters. Leigh’s bittersweet humor, his empathy, and his critiques of class and social structures opened up new ways of seeing and thinking about the world of working-class southern Brooklyn in the 1980s and ’90s that I was writing about. Character-driven American films of the 1970s like The Last Picture Show and Five Easy Pieces that changed my life and perspective as a young viewer have a direct correlation to the influence of kitchen-sink realism, as does the work of one of my greatest artistic heroes, John Sayles (see Return of the Secaucus 7, for one example). I also see links to the work of Paddy Chayefsky and John Cassavetes, both lodestars for me. In attempting to portray the ugly realities of working-class lives and sympathizing with the poor and distressed, these creators helped give shape to my version of end-of-the century Brooklyn, as well. Since kitchen-sink realism is rooted in a kind of social realism, it’s also interesting to draw lines to key works by Émile Zola, François Mauriac, and Theodore Dreiser that inspired me and are cut from the same cloth. Mauriac’s Thérèse Desqueyroux was a huge influence, as were Zola’s Thérèse Raquin and Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (and George Stevens’s adaptation of it, A Place in the Sun, one of my ten favorite films), all of which center crimes or attempted crimes. The throughline between kitchen-sink realism and noir or noir-adjacent works is desperation. Noir is, after all, tragedy. Kitchen-sink dramas also home in on tragedies both small and profound. Violence—emotional, spiritual, and physical—hums steadily under the surface in works of kitchen-sink realism, which is why it dovetails so nicely with noir and with social realism to provide an examination of dysfunction within families and society. What happens when people—often already living on the ropes for a variety of reasons—reach the edge of sanity, have taken all they’re willing to take? The leap from boiling point to breaking point isn’t far. That’s what happens to Risa, the central character in my book, a good woman married to a bad man, who winds up paying in blood for a necessary decision made in the heat of the moment. I should say that, ultimately, my work borrows tenets from the kitchen-sink movement but pushes it forward in my own direction through a blend of melancholy noir melodrama, neighborhood mythology, and dark humor. Whether or not my work qualifies as kitchen-sink realism or not is a question for readers, but there’s no doubt it’s a major strain of DNA in Saint of the Narrows Street, providing me with so much inspiration for the characters and conflicts and textures of the world of the story. *** View the full article
  19. I spent many decades in journalism, most of that time for Newsday on Long Island. I covered criminal trials, town beats, and spent several years on the newspaper’s acclaimed Investigations Team. For most of those years working as a reporter, and later an editor, my goal was to find a crime with enough layers and details that would enable me to write a true-crime book. Like so many journalists, I found In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, to be a masterpiece of this genre. Could I find something that could even come close to this book? I found what I was looking for in the 1980s with the murder of Roy Radin, a Southampton, N.Y., businessman who went to Hollywood to produce a movie, got in with a group of cocaine dealers, and was brutally murdered. I covered the Los Angeles Police Department’s investigation into the crime, which led me to another murder in Okeechobee, Florida, and I later covered the trial of the defendants who had murdered Radin. This produced my first book Bad Company: Drugs, Hollywood and the Cotton Club Murder. At the criminal trial in Los Angeles, I met the Vanity Fair writer, Dominick Dunne. He graciously gave me a wonderful blurb for the book. The reporting of the book took me to Los Angeles; into the mansion of fabled movie producer Robert Evans; and to Florida, where one of the defendants in Radin’s murder was a suspect in the execution-style murder of her husband. I was very proud of the book, and hoped, with a lot of research, I could find another true-crime story that would help me continue with this genre. Nonfiction research is hard, and very time consuming. All that work had to be accomplished while I was working full time at Newsday. I wasn’t sure it was possible. Over the subsequent years, I managed to publish two more nonfiction books, neither in the true-crime genre. Then I found an actual murder to write about – but the idea was to take it, with all its gruesome details, and see if I could turn it into a work of fiction. In late September 1954, on the first night of the World Series between the New York Giants and the Cleveland Indians, a woman from Lindenhurst, a small village on the South Shore of Long Island, entered a dive joint called the Alcove. She was alone, and had walked from her nearby home. As a historical footnote, that first game in the Series featured “The Catch,” with Willy Mays running down a deep ball to the warning track and catching it. The next morning, her body was found in a field north of Lindenhurst. She had been brutally murdered and left to bleed to death by her attacker. Three decades later, in the mid-1980s, I was working the court beat for Newsday in Riverhead, Long Island. One day while waiting for court to begin, an elderly man named Rudolph Hoff was brought into the courtroom in handcuffs and, to everyone’s surprise who was sitting there, he was charged with the 1954 Lindenhurst murder. It was said to be the oldest cold case in New York State when the arrest was made. Fascinated, I covered the trial every day. On the most shocking day of testimony, Hoff’s ex-wife took the stand. She told a story on the night of the murder that left spectators in the courtroom speechless. She told the jury she was awakened that night by water running in the bathroom. She opened the bathroom door – and confronted her husband washing blood off his clothes and arms. He ordered her to take the bloody clothes to the basement and wash them. She did as she was told. Except for one thing: she took the bloody belt, put it in a jar, and buried it in the backyard. Thirty years later, a detective dug it up. Her testimony, and the physical proof, sent Hoff away to an upstate prison for life. He later died in prison. Before he was shipped upstate, I interviewed Hoff in prison. He, of course, said he was innocent. During the course of that interview, he went off on a tangent that, at the time, I didn’t follow. He kept talking about a man named Richard Hauptmann. He said Hauptmann had been framed for a murder he didn’t commit and executed by the State of New Jersey. Hoff compared himself to Hauptmann as being railroaded by prosecutors. He went on to say his mother was a close friend of Hauptmann’s widow. Research showed me that Hauptmann was the German immigrant convicted and executed for the kidnapping and murder of the toddler son of Charles Lindbergh, who was taken from the Lindbergh mansion in New Jersey in 1932 on a night when the house was fully occupied. Somehow, the kidnapper knew when the toddler was put to bed, and which room on the second floor was the nursery. I read a number of books about the case, many of which raised serious questions about the evidence against Hauptmann. Some writers said Hauptmann could not have committed the crime, and they went on to say the state framed Hauptmann in an effort to appease Lindbergh, an American hero. At some point, as I searched around for another book to write, the idea came to me that there was not enough material for a true-crime book on the Hoff case. There was enough for a long magazine article, which I wrote for Newsday. But a book? I didn’t see how I could pull that off. There were simply too many unanswered questions. Thus, the idea of fiction: take an actual case, one with many mysterious elements, and tell the story around the character of a fictional detective who had suffered greatly in World War II and came home from a prisoner of war camp in Asia to assume the job as police chief in Lindenhurst. With fiction, I could answer questions never answered in the trial: why was the case not solved in 1954; what was the background of the murderer; did the murderer and his victim know each other? Fiction explores truth in a different way. I wanted to see if I could do it, and, at the same time, fully develop the character of the small-town detective who suffers from war-related issues and doesn’t have the skill sets to solve a grisly murder. To help him, I created the character of Doc, an Austrian born physician who suffers from his own Holocaust-related horror. Could they work together to solve this crime – and take the investigation wherever it might lead? Thus was born The Ruins. After four decades in journalism and nonfiction, moving up to fiction was extraordinarily challenging. In journalism, you explain things; in fiction, explanations bog down the story flow. I had to – literally – change the way I saw stories unfold. I think it worked. My hope is to be able to continue with this detective with a sequel. Fiction has now become my way of telling a true story. *** View the full article
  20. What does it take for a woman to be monstrous? The protagonist of my latest novel, a literary horror called Old Soul, probably ticks a few of the boxes. She’s a predator, for a start. A woman-of-many-aliases who moves across centuries and continents, sacrificing people she meets in exchange for immortality. She doesn’t age and remains about forty years old. She’s determined to cling to life, even if others must pay in blood, and anyone who gets in her way ends up grievously injured or dead. Nothing else matters to her. Not family, which she abandoned long, long ago. Not human connections or belonging. In her brutal, stubborn will to survive for as long as possible, she’s solipsistic in the extreme. All her focus and drive have narrowed down to this one thing. Grit. Tenacity. Determination. There aren’t many female monsters in the horror genre, but the few there are seem to have these qualities in common. From Annie Wilkes in Misery, forcing captive novelist Paul Sheldon re-write his book for her, to Pearl in Ti West’s X Trilogy, savage and unhinged in the pursuit of stardom. When they don’t get their way, they violently lash out, and as much as I wince as the sledgehammer or pitchfork splatters blood, there’s an uneasy recognition, too. They exteriorize the parts of us we keep choked down inside—the screaming, life’s unfair, tantrum-throwing parts, suppressed in order to function in society. And in the colder, more calculating monstrous women, I catch queasy glimpses of myself as well. In Under The Skin’s Isserley, endlessly driving the highways of Scotland, picking up hitch hikers to be castrated and penned-up before being slaughtered for meat. In Audition’s Asami, waiting patiently by the telephone for days, planning and biding her time before enacting her exquisite torture against the ‘casting director.’ It impresses me, I admit. The bloody-minded resilience. The sheer ferocity of will by which they get things done. But a woman rarely gets away with her monstrousness for long, for another thing these antagonists have in common is they tend to be killed off in the final act. It’s a tidy, moral narrative closure. Her crimes are punished by death and the world now safe from her malignancy. Yet, despite this, Annie Wilkes and Carrie White et al live on powerfully and vividly in the audience’s memory as the surviving characters fade away. They were the stars of the show. They refused to be cast aside or marginalized. They grabbed the reigns of the central plot and steered. And so I created a monstrous woman to steer the central plot of Old Soul. Though I didn’t think at first I had much in common with her, this woman of such unequivocal evil, during the eight years of writing the book, I slowly came to recognise how much of myself I was channelling into her creation. How much my main character’s calling, which is her own solitary and predatory existence, was a dark and distorting mirror held up to my own calling: the solitary writing of books. Because determined— perhaps deludedly and ludicrously so—to write, not an ordinary novel, but a great novel, I prioritized writing above all things: family, friendships, nights out, weekends away, traveling abroad (unless for well-planned research trips). And when I did partake in some recreational activity it was with a secret (though perhaps not undetectable) reluctance. Dragging myself away from my writing desk for any length of time was a wrench. My life was centered around my resolve to finish the book. It’s shameful to admit to this turning away from other people, from life. I was thirty-six when I started Old Soul, and forty-four when I finished. At some point during the eight years of writing I probably crossed the point of no return regarding having children—my own biological children, that is. And though I’ve never particularly wanted to be a mother, there’s something alarming about deviating from the path that the vast majority of people take. Especially if not wanting to divert any time and resources away from the novel I was monomaniacally writing (the great novel) had anything to do with it. There’s a stigma around a woman who doesn’t have children. A perception of—what? Selfishness? Tragedy? Failure? Whatever it is, it’s persistent and pervasive and impossible not to internalize to some extent. Art monster is a contentious term and the suggested binary between great artist and decent human being, or great artist and mother, has been rightly disputed. But false binaries aside, I’ve always quite liked it. It captures the guilty tug-of-war between my own self-centered ambitions and the obligations and duty of care I owe to others. It captures how monstrous I sometimes feel in the choices I’ve made (though would a bona fide monster experience such pangs?). And how monstrous I feel in what can’t be chosen, such as aging. Is it any coincidence that I created a monstrous woman when I was entering my forties? Departing from beauty standards that are really only youth? It’s very gendered, this feeling of being deviant and wrong, and it fuelled Old Soul. My monstrous woman’s transgressions are a horrifying exaggeration of my own far lesser transgressions. But, unlike me, she’s not ashamed. There’s something I admire, even covet, about her certainty in her choices and lack of repentance for her sins. She wouldn’t feel bad about forgetting to reply to an email or a text, or any failure to be accommodating and people pleasing, or respond to some request with anything but amenable good cheer. She just rampages across the pages of the book I’ve written, obstinately refusing to die. Death is something that happens to other people, not her. Did she make the right choices in the end – breaking away from love and human connection to live on and on and on? Did I, in my partial turning away from other people, from life, to write novels? There’s an existential question at the heart of Old Soul, about what constitutes a meaningful life. I’m not sure it can ever be answered. But my central character was my way of exploring it, though it was never something I set out to do. A monstrous woman is not unproblematic. But in the horror genre, where most monsters are male and the female characters tormented victims or plucky, resourceful Final Girls, I’m glad that we have a few. As far as feminism’s concerned, it’s an odd thing to applaud. But perhaps it’s more about what a female monster represents: the explosive rejection of the societal pressures to be uncomplaining and compliant with all the emotional and domestic labour that women are expected to do. A fuck you to being well-liked and attractive, undemanding and self-sacrificing, and conforming to all the other limiting and inhibiting desirable traits. I don’t see a monstrous woman as aspirational in any way. Their toxic behavior and sociopathy aren’t to be emulated. But as much as I recoil when Baby Jane Hudson serves her sister that dead parakeet, or The Ring’s Sadako crawls out of the staticky TV screen towards her latest victim, I recognize that in their monstrousness they are very, very human, and admit a shiver of delight at their gleeful subversion of all we’re told women should be. *** View the full article
  21. For cleansing one’s mind and reconnecting with nature, there’s nothing like a calming walk in the pastoral splendor of the English countryside. Normally, it’s a safe and carefree experience—unless you’re in one of my Walk Through England mysteries. In that case, watch out! Danger can lurk behind every tree, around every bend, and even in the warm confines of a country pub. If you’re thinking of joining a group walk in England, here are some tips to ensure you won’t end up on a slab beneath the local medical examiner’s magnifying glass: Always check your boots. Walking boots are large and sturdy enough to hide an array of unpleasant surprises if you step into them without looking inside first. Why would you look into your boots, you ask? You won’t be asking again if you encounter a deadly adder ready to bite. (Adders’ venom is generally not fatal, but do you want to take that chance?) Other “surprises” can include poison-tipped tacks or vicious scorpions. (I hope I’m not giving would-be murderers any ideas!) Don’t stand near the edge of a cliff. This is good advice to heed pretty much all the time, even if there’s no murderer lurking nearby. A very popular English walk is along the “Seven Sisters” chalk cliffs in Sussex, particularly those that overlook the landmark lighthouse at Beachy Head. These cliffs soar more than 500 feet above the rocky shores below, so it’s no surprise that hundreds of people have lost their lives falling off the cliffs through the years, many of them suicides. Were some murders? It wouldn’t be surprising. If you do find your walking path getting uncomfortably close to the edge of a cliff, especially if you’re walking with someone who dislikes you, stay as far from the edge as possible, and make sure no one is walking behind you. If there’s a thick fog that blocks your vision, stop immediately! Don’t move again until it clears, either partially or fully, and when you can, move as far inland as possible. Watch what you drink. One of the pleasures of walking in the English countryside, as I’ve mentioned, is the local pub. Typically, it’s a warm, thatch-roofed building filled with cozy nooks, a roaring fire, one or two sleeping hounds, and a tempting line-up of ale taps along the bar featuring the best of locally-brewed spirits. But never let that freshly-drawn pint of beer out of your sight! Pubs can easily become boisterous, rowdy places with a lot of activity (including dart-throwing; the combination of deadly, sharp projectiles and inebriated throwers can be deadly). Pub chaos makes it easy for a murderer to slip something nasty into your drink without being seen, where it immediately dissolves among the bubbles and foam. The stairway can be treacherous. Britain’s castles are some of its most popular attractions. Who doesn’t relish seeing how famous kings and queens, whom today would be living in the utmost luxury, used to sleep in cold, stony cells, with no indoor plumbing, thermostat-controlled heating, or WiFi? And that’s not the half of it. Many castles have steep stone staircases and turret balconies, many without banisters and exposed to the elements. Refer back to my warning about avoiding paths near a cliffside: these are not locales you want to frequent if you’re a potential murder victim—especially if wet weather (a British staple) makes the stone surfaces slippery. Never wear red. Sometimes it’s perfectly acceptable to wear red. If you’re dressing as the devil on Halloween, for example, or you’re marching in a Communist parade. But on a walking trail? Not smart. England’s trails and footpaths frequently cross private land, which often includes farms. Where there are farms, there are cows, and where there are cows, there are usually horn-equipped bulls. Bulls get angered at the color red (ever see a matador’s cape at a bullfight?) and will charge without hesitation. If you’re entering a field or pasture in which there’s a bull, you are usually notified by a posted sign saying something like “Caution: Bull in Field”. That’s your cue to remove your red rain slicker and stash it in your backpack. (If one of your walking companions takes that occasion to mention how good you look in red, don’t think twice. Avoid that person like the plague.) Maybe you’re a-mazed. Another popular attraction in England are its garden mazes. These twisty corridors lined by tall hedges can be a diverting challenge (tip: always walk to the right—place your right hand on the hedge as you enter and keep it consistently touching throughout your journey). What makes garden mazes particularly challenging is that, unless you’re a star basketball player, you’re probably not tall enough to see the center of the maze (your goal). That also means you can’t be seen, as neither can that person sneaking up behind you with a stone, ready to cosh in your head. The solution? Either avoid garden mazes entirely, or walk with three or four others, preferably people you trust. There are other things you may encounter on a British trail, and all of them have the potential to be used in nefarious ways by a resourceful killer. Therefore, be careful when encountering kissing gates, cattle grids, wall and fence stiles, river and creek crossings, and even statues (large ones can be toppled over to crush you). The thing is, how can you tell if a killer is nearby? That leads me to my last tip: Know your walking partners. When on walking holidays, most of us go with close friends or family members. Presumably, we’d have an idea of whether they want to do us in long before we agree to take a long walk in the countryside with them. It’s not unusual, however, to join a walking group of complete strangers. In such cases, be sure your walk has been arranged by a reputable firm, and you are being led by a qualified guide. It is the guide’s job not only to lead you along the trail safely and securely, but to be on watch for any signs of trouble. In addition, get to know your fellow walkers. Walking together gives you plenty of time to get to know one another, and uncover any murderous intent. After reading this, you might now consider walking in the English countryside as appealing as walking through a minefield. That was not my intent! Most people make it through an English walk not only unscathed, but anxious to return and do it again. Even as I write this, I picture myself joyfully ambling along a trail, relishing the steady movement of my arms and legs, anticipating the view around the next bend… Wait. What was that sound behind me? *** View the full article
  22. Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * William Boyle, Saint of the Narrows Street (Soho) “Boyle structures the sprawling tale like a Greek tragedy, mining potent themes of legacy and class with such force and empathy that readers may come to think of him as the Balzac of Brooklyn. It’s a stunning achievement.” –Publishers Weekly Kate Alice Marshall, A Killing Cold (Flatiron) “Terrific―and terrifying. . . This delicious setup is promisingly sinister. . . Marshall’s chilling new novel pushes all the right buttons when it comes to inexorable suspense and psychological frights.” –Kirkus Ava Barry, Shoot the Moon (Pegasus) “Well-paced and features a psychologically complex cast of characters. Barry captures her protagonist’s history of trauma, loss, and addiction in ways that help this mystery ring true.” –Library Journal Stephen Spotswood, Dead in the Frame (Doubleday) “Spotswood’s newest title takes on another closed-door mystery to great effect. He balances the tension, the red herrings, and the clues well, and fans of the series will be in for a treat. Mystery readers in general would do well to place this series on their TBR lists to enjoy the twists and turns that make these titles a joy to read.” –Library Journal Virginia Feito, Victorian Psycho (Liveright) “A twisted, bloodthirsty governess celebrates Christmas with her new employers. Where ironic horror and horrific irony meet, this unbridled madhouse of a novel dazzles like a bloody jewel.” –Kirkus Reviews Cornell Woolrich, The Black Curtain (American Mystery Classics) “Tense in mood and exciting in event.” –New York Times Jonathan Kellerman, Open Season (Ballantine) “The story moves quickly and smoothly, with vivid descriptions . . . A treat for fans of crime fiction. Delaware and Sturgis are a durable duo.” –Kirkus Reviews Suzanne Nelson, The Librarians of Lisbon (Zando) “Based on real historical figures, this captivating novel will keep readers on the edge of their seats while it explores themes of bravery, friendship, and sacrifice.” –Booklist Joshua Moehling, A Long Time Gone (Poisoned Pen Press) “The third in Moehling’s Ben Packard series is far and away the best…It’s amazing how Moehling keeps all these narrative balls in the air, but even more amazing is how they eventually come together. For those who love classic mysteries, police procedurals, and family drama.” –First Clue Reviews Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, Mutual Trust (Bloomsbury) “Wolfgang-Smith explores tensions in the private lives of three queer misfits turned business titans in her stunning latest . . . Wolfgang-Smith’s sharp, sardonic narration brilliantly brings to life both the Gilded Age and her unforgettable protagonists. It’s a virtuosic performance.” –Publishers Weekly View the full article
  23. Hey, it’s a long winter for some of us! And so we start to dream of places like Fiji, that charmed South Pacific Isle, 1,300 miles from New Zealand, an archipelago of over 330 islands, about only a hundred are permanently inhabited. About three-quarters of the 920,000 Fijians live on the island of Viti Levu’s coasts, mostly in the capital city of Suva. Surely, it’s an idyll of peace and calm with no crime at all for us to write about? Turns out there’s some…. Nilima Rao’s A Disappearance in Fiji (2023) is set in 1914 . Sergeant Akal Singh would rather be anywhere than this tropical paradise – or, as he calls it, ‘this godforsaken island’. After a promising start to his police career in Hong Kong, Akal has been sent to the far-flung colony of Fiji as punishment for a humiliating professional mistake. Lonely and embarrassed, he dreams of solving a big case, thereby redeeming himself and gaining permission to leave. Otherwise, he fears he will be stuck in Fiji for ever. Then an indentured Indian woman goes missing from a sugarcane plantation and Fiji’s newspapers scream ‘kidnapping’ and Singh has his big case to crack. Nilima Rao is a Fijian Indian Australian and A Disappearance in Fiji is her first novel but there will apparently be more of Akal Singh in the future. A Shipwreck in Fiji is published in June 2025 – set in 1915 with a purported sighting of a German ship approaching Fiji as World War One comes to the South Pacific. Sergeant Akal Singh, based in Suva, is sent to visit the neighbouring island of Ovalau to investigate the sightings. B.M. Allsopp is the author of the five-book Fiji Islands Mysteries series. She’s an Australian who lived in the South Pacific islands for fourteen years, including four in Fiji where she worked at the University of the South Pacific in Suva. The series features DI Joe Horseman – a washed-up rugby hero (rugby is a BIG sport in Fiji BTW) and detective and Detective Sergeant Susie Singh (just to note that between 1879 and 1916, when Fiji was a British colony Indians were brought to Fiji as indentured laborers to work on Fiji’s sugar plantations). In the first book in the series Death on Paradise Island (2016) Horseman and Singh discover a young maid’s corpse snagged on the reef. In Death by Tradition (2018) an anti-mining activist is murdered at Tanoa in Fiji’s remote highlands where an ancient crime that still haunts the present. Next, in Death Beyond the Limit (2020) a corpse, or at least bits of one, are fished out of a shark’s gut. The question for Horseman and Singh is was the victim dead when the shark snacked on him? In Death Sentence (2021) there’s riots in Suva over the early release of a hated local killer. Horseman and Singh have the unenviable and unpopular job of protecting the man from the mob. And finally, in Death Off Camera (2023) death strikes the contestants in a reality TV game show being filmed in Fiji. All-in-all Allsopp Fiji Islands Mysteries series is a great way to get into the geography and society of Fiji, its capital Suva particularly, and some good crime writing too. Bang up to date is Lucy Clarke’s The Castaways (2021). Two sisters from London (Lori and Erin) are scheduled to fly to the remote island of Limaji in the Fijian archipelago. But things go awry quickly – next to the wreck of a plane, a stranger paces. Another sharpens a knife, scoring a list of the dead onto a palm tree. Others watch from the shadows of a campfire – all with untold stories, and closely-guarded secrets. The Castaways was recently filmed with UK TV star Sheridan Smith as a five-part thriller Paramount+. Joseph C Veramu is a Fijian writer and his 1994 novel Moving Through the Streets captures the colloquial street slang and attitudes of young working-class Suva brilliantly. The action is quick as the novel follows a group of teenagers in an urban environment rife with criminal temptation and opportunity. Veramu is a lecturer at the University of the South Pacific whose work has included studying young people’s lives in Solevu on Fiji’s Malolo Island. He comes originally from the relatively poor and tough area of Raiwaqa in Suva. And finally…. As usual something a bit different Sugar (2024) is an ethnographic novel written by two Australian-based researchers: political analyst Edward Narain and medical anthropologist Tarryn Phillips that draws on their respective research and lived experience. Narain is descended from Indian indentured labourers. Sugar follows the lives of three main characters in the lead up and aftermath of the cyclone: Hannah a naïve but well-intentioned Australian health volunteer, Rishika a jaded, Indo-Fijian, amateur historian, and Isikeli a troubled Fijian (iTaukei) teen caring for his diabetic grandmother. These three live very different lives, shaped by gender, class/caste and ethnic differences. Isikeli is one of the “coconut boys”, disenfranchised youth who collect and sell coconuts. By night, he is a petty criminal. Rishika’s husband was murdered as Cyclone Dorothy swept through the island causing chaos. Isikeli is accused of murder and the others must help him prove his innocence. A murder mystery on several levels but also a study of the damage the legacy of indentured labour and the sugar industry cultivated in Fiji still does – massively high rates of diabetes for a start, but also displacement, crime, inter-ethnic strife. The novel tells the stories of indentured labourers and the rise of the great industry of sugar propelled by vast profits and empire as the world’s sweet tooth demands more. Sugar is a book about crimes, about Fiji and about its people that is well worth reading if you know little of the country and what shaped its history and society. View the full article
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  25. Welcome to “Scene of the Crime,” a recurring column in which we examine single memorable scenes from crime movies. Scene: “The Coin Toss” Film: No Country for Old Men Of all the millions and millions and millions of individual scenes that all fit together to make the movies in the crime genre, perhaps my favorite—my single favorite—is the coin toss scene at the gas station in No Country for Old Men, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. It’s so elegantly, brilliantly blocked and designed, and with a mise-en-scene so impeccably loaded with symbolic detail, that, when I taught university English courses, I’d show it to students to teach them close reading. In this scene, we meet the film’s villain, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a sinister hitman who turns dangerous at the friendly chatter from a gas station clerk (Gene Jones). The clerk attempts to make conversation, asking about the weather where Chigurh came from. “I seen you was from Dallas,” he says, off-handedly, ringing him up. But Chigurh reacts defensively, darkly, terrifying the clerk. Then Chigurh launches into his usual routine, insisting that this man play him in a coin toss. Chigurh, a kind of angel of death, is a serial killer (recreationally, that is… in addition to being a professional hitman), who uses coin tosses to determine whom to kill. This way, he is a kind of vessel, a means for the universe’s ends. As Chigurh forces the clerk to play him in a coin toss, the scene builds to a terrifying climax. But the mise-en-scene surrounding the clerk also foreshadows this dark interaction; underscoring the film’s themes of, say, predestination or fate. The tire chains behind him hang like nooses, suggesting his unknowing proximity to death. Chigurh feels called to play the clerk in a coin toss after he learns that the man has “married into” the gas station he operates. Chigurh tells the man that he’s been at this gas station his whole life, and the man contradicts him, saying that he’s from another town, where he raised a family (in Temple, Texas… a sanctuary-sounding place, unlike the place he is now) and he and his wife inherited this gas station from her father and only moved here four years ago. “You married into it?” Chigurh balks. This is the turning point, a signal for him that he has no choice but to play this man in a game of head’s or tails; this man has bucked his station in life, manipulated his existence, somehow, and Chigurh must test him, to see if the universe wants to balance out his circumstances. Chigurh finishes eating the snack he has been munching on, and places the crumpled plastic wrapper on the counter. A close-up shot reveals how it writhes like an insect, once he lets go, an uncomfortable movement capturing the squirminess of this whole interaction. “What’s the most you ever lost in a coin toss?” Chigurh asks him, flipping the coin. “Call it,” he says exasperatedly. The clerk is confused about what exactly they’re betting on. “I didn’t put nuthin’ up,” he tells Chigurh. “Yes you did,” Chigurh tells him. “You’ve been putting it up your whole life.” The clerk calls heads, and [spoiler] he is correct. “Well done,” says Chigurh quickly, blandly. The clerk is stunned. The camera films Chigurh’s strange exit, but after he leaves, the camera captures a reverse-shot of the Clerk. This one’s a medium shot, not the close-ups of the previous few exchanges. Now, we can see that the register in front of the clerk reads .21 from the previous sale. “PAID OUT .21.” “21” is the lucky number in another game of chance, Blackjack. The fact that it has been on the register all along perhaps clarifies that the Clerk was destined to win this game, all along. View the full article
  26. One of the most popular ghosts in Jamaican folklore is the White Witch of Rose Hall. According to the lore, Annie Palmer, the aforementioned “White Witch,” is said to have been a cruel mistress on a plantation. The stories claim that she tormented her husbands and her male slaves and practiced some form of “dark magic.” Her reign of terror allegedly ended after one of her former slaves murdered her. But soon after her death, she began to make terrible, haunting appearances to all who visited the property. You can travel to Rose Hall in Montego Bay in hopes of running into Annie Palmer’s unsettling presence. But even if you don’t, other features of the house might still give you a fright. Some visitors report being shoved by invisible hands. Objects disappear and reappear. Footsteps echo through empty halls. Tour guides will probably tell you that these happenings are evidence of duppies—spirits. And at Rose Hall, they’re likely the ghosts of the enslaved, refusing to fade into history without their stories being told. In Honeysuckle and Bone, eighteen year old Jamaican American Carina travels to Jamaica to work as an au pair for a wealthy political family. She expects some culture shock, a smidgen of homesickness, and maybe a few sleepless nights. What she doesn’t expect is to be stalked by an increasingly aggressive duppy, and for reasons she can only speculate. While Carina faces a more personal haunting in modern-day Jamaica, she discovers what locals have known for centuries: some spirits refuse to rest until justice is served. As I wrote my debut novel Honeysuckle and Bone, I was curious about how Jamaican duppies differ from the ghosts we engage with in Western media—think the US, Canada, and Europe. Because there’s such a broad and rich folklore in Jamaica, in many cases, duppies and Western-type ghosts aren’t that different. Like more familiar-to-the-West ghosts, duppies can be helpful or threatening, or they might be completely disinterested in human affairs. But to me, the real difference comes from the way different cultures view and interact with these specters. Western media seems to walk the line of fearing ghosts while also being intrigued and even entertained by their presence. In Jamaica, the culture might lean more into respect and, at times, genuine fear. But to understand the duppy’s position in today’s Jamaica, we have to step back to where the myth around these spirits originated: African spirituality. Note that much of what is known about the history of the duppy comes from oral tradition, creating a wide variance in what is considered “true” and how the lore behind this creature evolved. This deep-dive into the mythology, then, is a combination of well-documented history and personal speculation. Most likely, the concept of the duppy came from African beliefs—likely Akan and/or Bantu—about humans possessing dual or multiple souls. In older Jamaican folklore, people were said to have two spirits. One was “good,” and at death, it ascended to a spiritual realm. The other was “bad,” and if proper rites were not held, that spirit could linger among the living and create chaos of all sorts. These beliefs traveled to North America during the slave trade, becoming part of the culture for many enslaved Africans. There’s some evidence in folklore studies that storytelling was a form of psychological resistance, helping enslaved individuals cope with their oppression. So it’s possible that during this time, the enslaved people of Jamaica developed the stories around their spiritual beliefs, which might have provided some comfort. While African slaves faced unimaginable horrors, perhaps their belief in the soul’s multiplicity evolved into the idea that after death, while one soul might leave and find peace, the other could become a duppy and persist to complete unfinished business or assert itself after an unjust death. One can then imagine that on Jamaica’s plantations, duppy stories had the potential to take on new power. Think of the popular tales that grew out of the centuries of subjugation. Instead of spirits merely taking human form, people spoke of duppies who looked like animals—like the myth of the dreaded Rollin’ (or Roaring) Calf, sporting fiery eyes and clinking metal chains. This creature offers a duppy figure who represents fear and retribution. The Calf is meant to be the twisted spirit of a person who was evil in life; in a world of daily mistreatment and abuse, then, why wouldn’t a being like this come to be? Consider also the legend of the three-foot horse and its rider, the whooping boy. Like the Rollin’ Calf, the three-foot horse (which has three legs) might be terrifying with its flaming gaze and deadly breath. But perhaps more horrifying is the holler of the whooping boy upon its back, who is said to have been the broken spirit of a young slave. Of course someone subjected to so much pain in life would become a menace after death. It’s plausible, then, that duppy stories developed as a way to imagine scenarios where cruel overseers and plantation owners actually had to acknowledge their crimes. Through that lens, duppy tales become more than ghost stories. They become a form of hope in a world where enslaved individuals were denied tangible justice. But duppies were not only seen as supernatural weapons against oppressors. People needed protection from the duppies of others. Duppy catchers often used African spiritual practices to protect the living from these restless, vengeful spirits. They developed rituals to trap or banish these ghosts, and they figured out where duppies were strongest, like in cotton trees or at crossroads. When emancipation eventually came, duppy beliefs didn’t fade. Instead, they evolved to serve new purposes. Today’s Jamaica still bears the marks of centuries of belief in the duppy—namely, protecting oneself from them or keeping them in the realm of the dead. Lines of salt are laid to keep spirits away. Certain practices, like not announcing when you’re leaving a dead yard, or making sure your shoes face a certain way when you return home from one, are still followed by many today. In isolation, these can read as anxious superstition, funny practices persisting into a modern world. But zoomed out, these could be links to a history of resistance and survival. The dead yard or nine-night ceremony is perhaps the most well-known and enduring practice, even if it feels somewhat removed from its multi-soul origins. Traditionally, for nine nights after a person’s death, family and friends gather to celebrate and remember the deceased in order to ensure the spirit doesn’t become a lingering duppy. Before, this practice involved more praying and singing; today, there might be more eating, drinking, and dancing. In both cases, telling stories and remembering the lost loved one is important. Even now, people try to guide souls safely to rest in their own plane. But sometimes, even a fond remembrance and a grand party aren’t enough to soothe a slighted spirit. Younger people today might smile at their parents and grandparents’ duppy precautions. But even for supposed non-believers, these spirits maintain a significant presence. Maybe there are more mansions than great halls now, but in Honeysuckle and Bone, Carina discovers that whether she’s on a colonial plantation or inside a gated mansion, some spirits refuse to be ignored. Pop culture continues to pay homage to the duppy and its associated traditions. Authors weave them into their stories. Reggae and dancehall artists reference duppies in their lyrics. (Give Bob Marley’s “Duppy Conqueror” a listen.) And, of course, old traditions evolve to address modern-day fears and anxieties, the injustices of the now like police brutality or poverty. After all, the need for amends didn’t end with emancipation. The desire for hope and justice exist today. Only the means of oppression have changed face. The power of the duppy lies in more than its ability to frighten or terrorize. Ghosts have long been used to express universal thoughts about guilt, retribution, and the heaviness of the past on the present. When truth has struggled to be heard, these vengeful duppies that were birthed from African beliefs suggest that what’s buried has a way of rising to the surface. Jamaica’s ghosts remind us that the past and its truth can never be silenced. Not forever. *** View the full article
  27. Pick up any novel by Thomas Perry (he’s published 32), and within the first 25 pages, you’ll be hooked—he’s that good. His latest, Pro Bono, is the story of Charles (Charlie) Warren, an attorney with a past. Warren is a one-man law firm whose specialty is helping clients recover stolen or embezzled financial assets. It’s a unique skill, one shaped by an event from his adolescence. The book begins with a prologue, set in August 2007, in which two convicts, on a bus back to jail after being part of a firefighting crew, come across a wrecked BMW that’s collided with a tree. One of the prisoners, Alvin Copes, is driving the bus and insists that they stop to see if they can render aid. His buddy, Andy Minkeagan, joins him at the wreck, where they discover both a dead body and financial documents the driver carried with him, documents they can use that could set them up for life—once they eventually get out of prison. They secrete the papers in the vent of a fan at a restaurant where they’ve stopped for lunch on the way back to incarceration. (It’s worth noting, particularly with the catastrophic fires recently in Los Angeles, how Perry captures the essence of such a conflagration: “They had been on the fire line in California for three weeks fighting the Prickleback Fire, a big one made worse by the weather, with temperatures in the hundred and five plus range and winds that would blow one way for a while and then reverse, like something turning back because there was something alive back behind it that it had forgotten to eat. Sometimes the something seemed to be you.”) The story then shifts to a few years after the death of Charlie’s father when he was eleven. His mother has remarried a man who calls himself “McKinley (Mack) Stone.” He claims to be an “investor,” but Charlie, who’s never liked or trusted him, is suspicious of this interloper and begins researching him online—and finds nothing. The marriage begins to falter, and his mother tells him that Stone’s investments haven’t been performing well, leading to a visible strain between the couple. Home from a college that Stone maneuvered him into attending, Charlie begins a discreet search of his mother’s and stepfather’s financial documents. Yup, financial chicanery is afoot! Asked how he approaches the beginning of a new novel (and here, specifically Pro Bono), Perry says, “My books usually begin within a day after I’ve sent the last one to my publisher. I start thinking about a character and start to write. I describe him and the things he’s doing, planning, or remembering right now. That information may never get into the book, at least in its original form, but it starts the engine. Pro Bono began in my mind with the two Nevada firefighting convicts finding the wreckage of con man McKinley Stone’s car with the deposit papers for the money he stole in the trunk. Right after that, we see what killed him—the rage of his victim’s teenage son, Charlie. Then we jump ahead to the present and see the teenage son seventeen years later as a young successful lawyer who has protected clients from people like the one who robbed his mother.” One of the many pleasures of Perry’s stand-alone novels is the depth of research he does prior to writing. In Forty Thieves (2016), the criminal element is a large group of diamond thieves from Eastern Europe. We learn how a large gang operates—it also presciently involves the now more common “smash and grab” style of theft. In The Boyfriend (2013), it’s the sadistic methodology of a roving serial killer who preys on escorts, and with The Burglar (2019), how to disable an alarm and break into all manner of buildings undetected—lots of juicy details. In his prior novel, Hero (2024), the ins and outs of being a high-end female bodyguard are explored in fascinating depth. So how does he find out all this stuff? For Pro Bono, says Perry, “since I’m not a lawyer, I needed to do a bit of searching for facts—the bar association code of conduct was useful. The fact that I was once taken in by a large and reputable investment company which guided me to invest in a municipal bond that turned out to be fraudulent and resulted in federal prison terms for several people was useful. “When my wife and I were setting up a trust for our kids, the legal firm’s conference room with the huge television screen, etc., became the conference room of one of the investment firms in Pro Bono. The peculiar behavior of the victims of Bernie Madoff’s embezzlement was enlightening. Very sophisticated people were willing to believe for years that their investments with him only went up, never went down. Did these victims look for outside verification or wonder how that could be? No. They looked at the first page of his monthly reports and saw that this month’s total was bigger than last month’s total.” He goes on to say, “I like to ground a book in genuine information. I enjoy doing research. It’s what a writer can do on those days when he wants to make progress, but doesn’t feel like doing any actual work. “Information for a book can come from anywhere. I’ve found that once you begin a story, details and things come to you. You’re curious about a disease you never heard of? Suddenly there are articles about it everywhere. Somebody you know had a boyfriend with that disease, and it was terrible. She’ll tell you every detail. Your wife’s cousin the doctor can explain the disease to you and the various treatments for it.” The advent of the Internet opened up Perry’s ability to do in-depth research. “For most of my career there was only a prototype Internet used by professors, so when I wanted to know something, I would buy a book about it. My wife, Jo Perry, who is also a writer, used to kid me when I came home with new books. ‘I see you found another book so you can write a bunch of exposition you’re going to cross out.’ We were in an ideal environment when we worked in universities. There were professional experts on every subject. I could call them or walk over to their offices and ask.” Moving at breakneck speed, Pro Bono includes many of Perry’s trademarks: vivid, believable characterizations, screeching car chases, discreet surveillance, gunshots, and a couple of smoothly lying liars. Charlie’s life is further complicated when Copes and Minkeagan show up with Stone’s stolen documents—they’ve traced him using his mother’s name—and expect to be well compensated. The development of this eventual uneasy alliance between the three is a most creative example of plotting … and orchestrated with skill and verve—everyone wants money! Los Angeles, too, is invariably a character in its own right in many of Perry’s books. He agrees: “You observed that many times Los Angeles is like a character in some of my books. It’s true that I’ve lived here for many years now. My wife Jo was born and raised here. I came to California in 1974 and met her while I was working at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She was a graduate student working on her doctoral dissertation and teaching English for the English Department and poetry writing for the College of Creative Studies, where I was working. “We married and moved to Los Angeles in 1980. During my lifetime, I’ve tended to go from small places to larger ones, which always brings on a kind of awakening. I was born and brought up in the prototype for the small town where Jane Whitefield was born in that series. It was a place with twelve thousand people. On my first day at Cornell University, I unpacked my suitcase and then walked to the student union, went down to the dining hall in the basement, bought a cup of coffee, and had a conversation with a student who was from Tibet. Moving to Los Angeles was a similar experience. It was not only a kind of doorway to the world, but a world in itself. It’s a place where things are happening every morning that will capture the imaginations of the rest of the world before noon. L.A. is not just a city, but a county with ten million people, and we’re all up to something. What could be better for a writer?” Perry’s plots, complex without resorting to one twist after another, are a marvel of creativity. So how does he begin? Is he a planner in advance? A “Let’s just see where this thing goes” writer? “I’ve known writers who outline everything,” says Perry. “What I do is try to keep the process open and free, and not feeling like a job. If you start with an outline or a rigid plan, what you have is the best idea for a book you’ve had that day. If you don’t outline, what you end up with is a selection of the best ideas you have over about a year of thought. The way I think about the process is that the reader is a friend. He/she is sort of like me. He/she likes stories. I say to the reader, ‘I’d like to tell you a story. All I can really guarantee is that you haven’t heard, seen, or read it before. But I’ve found it kind of interesting, and you might too.’ And then I tell him the story. I try to get his attention, and then not waste or squander it. As for the issue of how to handle the complexity that’s inevitable in realistic stories, you don’t have to show anybody your book until you have produced a draft that feels right. Nobody knows that it’s the tenth draft.” Perry’s novel The Old Man was the inspiration for the FX series starring Jeff Bridges. In their early days of novel writing, Perry and his wife worked in TV, writing for major network shows. They came to the small screen in a serendipitous way. “Our television career started when we were both working at the University of Southern California in early 1984. One day I got a call at my office from an executive at Universal Studios named Jim Korris. He had read The Butcher’s Boy and Metzger’s Dog. He asked if I’d be willing to try writing episodic television. I knew nothing about it, but Jo had at least read some scripts. She urged me to try it and said if I ran into trouble, she would help me. After some discussion, I went to a meeting with him, and he sent me to Richard Chapman, who was the executive producer of the CBS show Simon & Simon. He hired me to write a script. I did run into trouble, and Jo helped me. After that, we always worked as partners. “After a couple more scripts, we were enjoying it, improving, and making more money on weekends than we did during the week. When the university was preparing to be a site for the 1984 Olympics that summer, we were asked to vacate our offices, which overlooked an athletic field, so the police could use them for security. By then we both felt ready to move on, and so we agreed to vacate the offices, but decided we wouldn’t return. “We accepted a job as staff writers for Simon & Simon. When our bosses moved to Disney, they asked us to join them, so we did. We worked on Sidekicks and The Oldest Rookie while they lasted. Then we went back to Universal for Snoops. As that show was ending, we were awaiting our first child and wanted to concentrate on raising our kids, so I went back to writing novels, and we accepted assignments part-time. We wrote a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, three 21 Jump Street episodes, and back-up scripts for several shows that weren’t picked up. In all, we wrote television for 11 years. “It was a good experience for anyone writing fiction. When you write for the screen, you learn to recognize the moment when a scene should end. You learn to use criticism rather than resenting it. You become aware that events don’t just happen, they’re being seen by a camera from a certain angle, distance, a degree of clarity, and certain light conditions. What does it look like? Who is meant to be the one seeing it, and why?” As Pro Bono ultimately expands from a search for Vesper’s assets that dovetails with the scheme by Copes and Minkeagan to utilize the financial documents of Charlie’s mother, we see that the cliché “honor among thieves” can be true! The two mostly honest men prove to be a different kind of “asset” to Charlie and Vesper. How it all blends together is a classic meld by Perry of disparate people who share a common goal. Judging from his remark about starting a new book upon delivering a completed one, we can safely assume that Perry has already written at least one, if not two more. So much to look forward to, and let’s hope he has even more up his criminally literary sleeve! View the full article
  28. Do you enjoy mysteries with real historical figures as the amateur detective? I love learning about history while I’m tearing through the pages of a good mystery. It makes me feel virtuous and adds to the mystery as I speculate on which aspects are real or fictional. I always end up searching the internet or going to the library to learn more. When I had the chance to write a mystery series with Eleanor Roosevelt as the detective, I knew only that she was a former First Lady of the United States and an advocate for equality and human rights. As I jumped into research, I learned the real woman was all that and more. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote four volumes of her autobiography and My Day, a national syndicated newspaper column that ran six days a week and was published in 90 newspapers across the United States at its peak of popularity. While this provides much information about her life, weaving a fictional mystery around her real schedule proved a challenge. I knew I couldn’t be completely accurate, but I wanted the story to be credible—perhaps a murder could have happened, and Eleanor fit an investigation around her packed timetable. ER, as she was known to match her husband’s FDR, left the White House in 1945 after the death of her husband. Famously, as she was leaving, she said to Harry Truman, who had taken over the presidency, “Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.” I set my first book, Eleanor and the Cold War, in 1951, while ER was a delegate to the United Nations. President Truman offered her the position, to begin in 1946. Eleanor first considered declining. How could she be a delegate to organize the United Nations when she had no experience in international meetings? She accepted at last, in “fear and trembling.” Toting her luggage and typewriter case by herself since no one told her she could take a secretary, Eleanor boarded the Queen Elizabeth to sail across the Atlantic Ocean. Faced with incomprehensible State Department papers (in her autobiography, Eleanor wrote she would find it hard to reveal any Department of State secrets because she was seldom sure of the exact meaning of what was on the blue sheets) and discrimination against her gender, Eleanor stated that she walked on eggs. She was the only woman on the delegation and feared that if she failed to be useful, it would be considered that all women had failed. Eleanor Roosevelt’s days began before eight o’clock, when she met with advisors for breakfast, and ended after midnight with informal meetings with delegates in her room and work on her correspondence. Even though she felt inexperienced, she verbally sparred with Soviet-era politicians as her committee developed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Eleanor writes that she interrupted the Soviet delegate, Dr. Pavlov, in his attack on the United States to state, “Sir, I believe you are hitting below the belt.” There is no doubt she was a remarkable woman. But what makes Eleanor Roosevelt a great amateur detective? A good detective understands people and their complex motives. In her autobiography, Eleanor writes, “Very early, I became conscious of the fact that there were people around me who suffered in one way or another.” At six years of age, she helped her father serve Thanksgiving dinner at a newsboys’ club and learned that many of the “ragged little boys” had no homes. She developed compassion for people in all walks of life. Born in 1884, Eleanor lost her mother to diphtheria when she was 8 and her father to the disease of alcoholism when she was 10. Her mother, a beauty, called young Eleanor “Granny” because she was serious and plain, while Eleanor wanted to sink through the floor in shame. Eleanor blossomed when she was sent away to England to attend Allenswood school, and found her voice and confidence under the tutelage of Mlle. Souvestre. I believe her awkward beginning taught her empathy for individuals. This served her well as she toured through the U.S. during the Great Depression as FDR’s eyes and ears. For me, her empathy was an important aspect of Eleanor Roosevelt as a detective. I believe an amateur detective should possess a strong moral compass. Eleanor left DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) when that organization refused to let the famous contralto Marion Anderson, a Black woman, sing in their hall. In another instance, when Eleanor was told she must sit in the white section at a meeting, she deliberately placed her chair in the aisle between the two segregated sections. Eleanor championed human rights. I believed that she would also be driven to right injustices, which is the perfect motivation to investigate murder. The most surprising thing I learned about Eleanor Roosevelt was how she celebrated after the ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. What she did revealed her fascinating personality and, to me, showed she had the main quality that makes a great amateur sleuth. On Eleanor Roosevelt’s first day of United Nations meetings at the Palais des Nations chambers, she marveled at the entrance lobby—soaring ceilings over acres of polished marble floors. As she went in, she whispered to a State Department advisor, “I’d love to slide on those floors.” After the draft declaration was voted in, Eleanor walked out of the meeting room with a colleague and a Russian representative. She stopped where the hallway opened out to the entrance hall. Her colleague told her, “You can now take your slide.” And Eleanor slid across the marble. The image of Eleanor Roosevelt playfully and joyously taking a running slide across the marble floor fascinated me. I knew she would make the perfect detective: she possessed joie de vivre, curiosity, and a rebellious, honest heart that led her to break a few rules. *** View the full article
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