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My father grew up in a small lumber mill town in Idaho called Potlatch, where the panhandle meets the pan. In 1953, Potlatch High School won the state championship in Track & Field. How’s that for a school with a graduating class of seven? How’s that for a school whose Track and Field team consisted of one person? My father! (Not at the time. Later. Dad didn’t even know Mom yet.) He won every event except the relay and that was only because the rules stipulated that a relay must consist of a minimum of three participants — or, in Dad’s case, 42.857143 % of his entire graduating class! My grandparents boasted a lot about that accomplishment, but my father did not. When I asked him why, he said it was because real sports meant being part of a team. I have always been terrible at team sports – unlike my father, I never knew what I was doing, what my teammates were doing, what they were going to do, or what they expected me to do. In high school I wrestled (sucked on offense, but hard to pin) and distance swimming. For me, the difference between writing for TV and writing books comes down to the difference between me and my father. Not in a Freudian sense — which applies to every writer in every discipline — but in the pursuit of my writing-as-sports-analogy as applicable to my early writing career when I had to choose between putting the bulk of my writing efforts into scripts or books. My natural inclination (long distance swimmer) suggested books, but … my wife, Brigitte, and I had a baby on the way and, in theory, script writing promised to generate income faster. So, I asked Dad what internal judo move he’d utilized on his team-player mentality that allowed him to triumph in a string of solo efforts to heroically win State. Dad said, “Ah, it’s all athletics. Just throw your body at it as hard as you can.” I translated that into the following advice: It’s all writing. Just throw your (fingers? eyeballs? head?) at (the blank page) as hard as you can. All writers face the blank page. That’s what makes us heroes. But where book-writers face that blank page in a vertiginous endless-void-like silence, scriptwriters face it engulfed by a deafening sonic tsunami of clamor. To me that clamor sounds like a pack of hyenas at dinner. A movie-writer friend describes a subsonic groan; another a banshee shriek; another his mother banging on his bedroom door and asking what he’s doing in there. Even before typing “Fade In” script writers hear that noise, and no matter the individual manifestation, like, we know the source: pre-existing demands by a Host of Others. These “Others” are not the amorphous and elusive “audience” that all writers — book and script alike — hope to reach. That audience can be muted in the same way that — depending upon our belief system — we scrape through the day in denial that gods, aliens, God, or whoever is running the computer simulation in which we all live is watching our every move. Scriptwriters face additional Others. Other Others. Flesh-and-blood human beings with faces — producers, directors, actors, etc. Not just indivduals but groups. Nay! Teams of people who, in the best-case scenario will partner up with the script writer to produce the script in its final form. Book-writers have only ourselves to please because the book is its own final form. Scripts are not their own final form. It is only the foundation upon which its final form can be realized: a moving picture. To become a moving picture, scripts require allies, colleagues, compatriots, partners, patrons, comrades, collaborators, co-conspirators, and friends. All of whom will turn on us like hyenas (which is why I hear hyenas) if we don’t deliver what they want, need, and desire. Which is why scriptwriters appear waving a script, saying, “Hey, everybody! What do you think of this?” Looking for affirmation. Book-writers appear, waving books, saying “Hey, everybody! Look what I did!” Presenting the book as an affirmation. To get the Host of Others on board, a script is required to prioritize story above all else. Starting with the person/studio/production company that is paying for the script and expects profits in return. Books can prioritize story if they want — but books have the option to dwell and ruminate, to stop and smell the roses, without causing a ruckus. When scripts ruminate and poeticize, story steps back, crosses its arms, and awaits its cue to take center stage. Meanwhile, the audience checks their phones, or leaves, and the writer is labeled “self-indulgent” or — rarely, but it happens — a “genius”. In a script, it’s easy-peasy in a script to show a character thinking. The scriptwriter simply types: The character thinks — but it’s nearly impossible to show what they’re thinking. We can help by typing: The character thinks about that distant afternoon when their father took them to discover ice. At which point the actor — quite rightly — protests, “How the hell am I supposed to convey that? Shiver? All that shows is that I’m chilly.” The camera can always luxuriate on an expressive face with eyes that reflect the universe. Just not for too long. What counts as “too long” has nothing to do with the writing and everything to do with whose face we’re luxuriating upon. Scripts face outward. All the internal longings and thoughts must be dramatized. Books can look both outward but also inward — telling us in poetic prose all about those longings in ways that get readers to highlight the lines and dog-ear the page. Scripts are about doing. Books are about being. Ask a script writer, “What is your script about?” and we should be able to do so in a sentence or two. Ask a book writer the same question and we usually start with, “Well, it’s about a quite a few things, actually…” Scripts tend to be centered around somebody who wants a tangible something. A thing or an event. Motivated by an internal, universal longing which must be made clear through dramatization. Because not everything in a book requires dramatization, a book can afford to, as an old professor of mine once said, “Dance around the shithouse.” A book doesn’t have to dance, but it can. Which sounds easier until the writer recognizes that, at every step, there are so many options for getting where we want to go. It’s easier to go wrong in a book and there’s nobody but the writer to take the blame. When a moving picture goes wrong, the script writer has lots of people to help fix it — and even more to take the blame. We can blame studio execs: “It would have been great if the script hadn’t been dumbed down for the audience!” We can blame directors: “It would have been great if you’d moved the camera more (or less) gotten some close-ups (or beauty shots).” We can blame editors: “It would have been great if the right image had been on the screen at the right time.” We can blame composers: “It would have been great if the score was sad during the sad times and exciting during the exciting times.” We can blame actors: “It would have been great if it hadn’t been for all that improvisation!” We can blame cinematographers: “It would have been great if you’d been able to see it!” We can blame Locations: “It would have been great if the mansion scene hadn’t been shot in a shed.” We can blame Sound: see cinematographers but substitute “hear” for “see”. We sound terrible but please, remember, when the project is a success, all those same people will take credit — a waste of time because only the director will be successful. Book writers have no one else to blame. At least not for the content. We are reduced to blaming — or praising — marketing. And the narrator of the audiobook. In any case, all a writer can do is learn from my father: Throw yourself at it. Give it your all. Leave the boasting to your parents and offspring. *** View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Michael Bennett, Return to Blood (Atlantic Monthly Press) “Bennett highlights Hana’s struggle to reconcile the pull of her Māori roots against her inner cop, a struggle that serves as a compelling backdrop for this twisty, well-crafted mystery.” –Booklist Swan Huntley, I Want You More (Zibby) “Deliciously disquieting…strikes a delicate tonal balance between seductive and serious…Readers who have ever wondered, ‘Do I want to be her or be with her?’ will feel a chill up their spines.” –Publishers Weekly Fiona McPhillips, When We Were Silent (Flatiron) “Auspicious debut alert: Fiona McPhillips’ When We Were Silent is the strongest first novel I have read in ages.” –BookPage Jaclyn Goldis, The Main Character (Atria/Emily Bestler) “Delicious tension and drama. Grab your suitcase and board the Orient Express for a trip you won’t soon forget.” –Kirkus Reviews L.M. Chilton, Swiped (Gallery/Scout) “Chilton shines a blackly humorous light on male misbehavior and love in the age of the internet—plus the timeless and ridiculous societal pressure of finding “the one.” Bound to become a classic of the singles scene.” –Kirkus Reviews Stuart Turton, The Last Murder at the End of the World (Sourcebooks) “Don’t go in the water” takes on new meaning in Turton’s brainy thriller.” –Kirkus Reviews Ruth Ware, One Perfect Couple (Gallery/Scout Press) “Ware once again delivers the literary goods, with a cheeky sense of wit (including a “blink and you’ll miss it” nod to one of her own books), a propulsive sense of pacing, and a fiendishly clever conclusion.” –Library Journal Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time (Avid Reader) “[Bradley’s] utterly winning book is a result of violating not so much the laws of physics as the boundaries of genre. Imagine if The Time Traveler’s Wife had an affair with A Gentleman in Moscow. . . You’d need a nuclear-powered flux capacitor to generate more charisma than Gore. . . His banter with the narrator crackles off the page . . . Readers, I envy you: There’s a smart, witty novel in your future.” –Ron Charles, The Washington Post Hart Hanson, The Seminarian (Blackstone) “A study in contrasts, this book is by turns bloody, gritty, and violent, heartwarming, thought-provoking, and laugh-out-loud funny. An unusual, inventive, unforgettable read that will appeal to mystery aficionados looking for something different.” –Booklist Graham Moore, The Wealth of Shadows (Random House) “Based on astonishing true events, The Wealth of Shadows is both a gripping, cinematic story of wartime subterfuge, and a powerful reminder of how even the most unlikely people can become resistance fighters during times of crisis.” –Flynn Berry View the full article

The first time I went to Adelaide the first thing everybody told me about the city was its specifically non-criminal antecedents. Adelaide, I was repeatedly told, is the major Australian city not originally established as a penal colony by the British. Today Adelaide is a jewel of Victoriana and art-deco architecture, enjoys a close proximity to serious wine making country, and is home to a slew of fantastic arts and literary festivals. But it does have a rather interesting crime history too – particularly true crime. In 1948, a well-dressed, seemingly undamaged, male corpse was discovered on a beach in Adelaide with a half-smoked cigarette left by his side. It became known as the Tamam Shud Case, after a tiny piece of rolled-up paper with these words printed on it was found sewn into the dead man’s pocket – words from Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Suicide or a particularly clever murder? And if so, who was killed, who was the murderer, and what was the motive? It’s Adelaide’s longest running unsolved case. Kerry Greenwood’s Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery (2012) reinvestigates the case. Now those in the know will realise that Greenwood is also the author of the bestselling Miss Phryne Fisher books (and the hit TV show). And so her interest in the Tamam Shud case had tipped over into fiction – Tamam Shud (2021) – with a returning Phryne Fisher (who is usually Melbourne-based) in 1948 (rather than her usual Jazz Age persona) returning to Australia having served with the French Resistance during the Second World War. She stumbles upon the Tamam Shud man on Somerton Beach. The Adelaide police are baffled, and Phryne recognises the Tamam Shud clue as a coded message. Then there is the Beaumont Children mystery, three kids that disappeared from Glenelg beach, near Adelaide in January 1966. The three siblings had left their Adelaide home on Australia Day and set off for the beach. By the end of the day, none of the children had returned home and the case remains unsolved. Suspects, physics, baffled cops, and obviously distraught parents ensued. But all to no avail. There are a number of books on the case, the most famous and well-known probably being Alan Whiticker’s Searching for the Beaumont Children: Australia’s Most Famous Unsolved Mystery (2011). And even now, nearly 60 years after the children’s disappearance, new evidence, ideas and books keep appearing, most recently author Stuart Mullins and former South Australian police detective Bill Hayes’s Unmasking the Killer of the Missing Beaumont Children (2023). There’s also a good novel loosely based on the case by Stephen Orr, Time’s Long Ruin (2011). And a final true crime linked to Adelaide – the infamous Snowtown murders. In 1999, several bodies were discovered in barrels inside at bank vault in the South Australian town of Snowtown, up the coast from Adelaide. The Snowtown murders were Australia’s most horrific and sustained serial killing. Again the case has led to a number of books (and a very good 2012 movie by Justin Kurzel). Former police reporter, Jeremy Pudney, covered the case and wrote The Bodies in Barrels Murders (2005). Pudney investigates those who were caught and jailed (after a prolonged investigation), but asks why they committed the horrific crimes they did and just why South Australia has a reputation for producing the country’s highest number of serial killers? A question, incidentally, also posed by Stephen Orr (see above) in his book, The Cruel City: Is Adelaide the murder capital of Australia? (2011) that looks at some of the city’s most infamous crimes and asks why Adelaide? Enough true crime. Let’s look at some crime fiction set in Adelaide and South Australia. Best selling Australian author Jane Harper found success with The Dry (2016) featuring her character Federal Police Agent Aaron Falk. He reappeared in Force of Nature (2017) and then, though perhaps Harper is better known for setting her novels in the remote Australian Outback, heads into South Australian wine country in book three of the Aaron Falk series, Exiles (2023). A mother disappears from a busy festival on a warm spring night. Her baby lies alone in the pram, her mother’s possessions surrounding her, waiting for a return which never comes. A year later Aaron Falk begins his investigation of the disappearance. Garry (yes with two ‘r’s) Dicher is a household name to Australian crime writing fans and a South Australian. Among his many books and various series are the Constable Paul Hirschhausen novels. The series starts with Bitter Wash Road (2013) – published as Hell to Pay in the USA – featuring Hirschhausen, a whistleblowing cop forced out of the Adelaide force and posted to a remote one-cop station in the Flinders Ranges, the South Australian wheatbelt. Thrill killers on the loose prove quite a challenge, but it’s not as simple as that. Meanwhile Hirschhausen has his own problems – he’s called a “dog” (serious Australian insult) by his fellow officers as he receives pistol cartridges in his mailbox. Paul Hirschhausen returns in Peace (2019). It’s Christmas and he walks in on a a strange and vicious attack that sickens the community while Sydney Police are asking his help looking into a family living. on a long forgotten back road. There’s more Hirschhausen in Consolation (2021) and Day’s End (2023), both set in rural South Australia. Gill D Anderson was born in Edinburgh and immigrated to Adelaide where she set her novel Hidden From View (2019) featuring Police Sergeant Lynn Gough investigating domestic abuse cases. Something Anderson knows about given her background in social work background and the field of Child Protection. And finally, as ever something a bit different and highly recommended. This time a Young Adult novel – Adelaide foothills resident Vikki Wakefield’s All I Ever Wanted, which won the 2012 Adelaide Festival Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction. Mim knows what she wants, and where she wants to go. Anywhere but home-in a dead suburb and with a mother who won’t get off the couch. Her two older brothers are in prison, so now Mim has to retrieve a lost package for her mother. Does this make her a drug runner? She’s set herself rules to live by, but she’s starting to break them. All I Ever Wanted is both a thriller and a gritty romance and though it’s a grim world Mim inhabits her character is uplifting. A great Young Adult find from South Australia. Despite the true crimes we’ve noted above, Adelaide is a great city – the sun shines bright, and the wines are great. But like everywhere this slice of South Australian paradise also has its dark side and that’s where Crime and the City inevitably goes! View the full article

“Aunt Betsy, what do we do with these boxes? They’re filled with paper,” my nephew shouted across the large playroom. In preparation for the estate sale, we were cleaning out my mother’s office, something that hadn’t been done in 32 years. We’d sorted through medical files, personal diaries, books, magazines, photographs and even empty wine crates. The only paper that we’d found to date was in boxes that contained unused stationery—engraved with her name and address. I looked at the boxes. They were the same vanilla-colored glossy cardboard that held letter-size stationery. “Bring it here so I can look at it.” I opened the first box. The top sheet was typewritten with the words Dune House by Eunice Mays Boyd. I thumbed through the perfectly clean manuscript set in San Francisco. The second page read, “Dedicated to Marilyn Reed Roberts”. My mother. It was finished sometime between 1948 and 1950 when she was married to my father. The second box was much lighter. I opened it. Slay Bells, a Christmas murder mystery also set in San Francisco. The third box looked more worn and held, One Paw Was Red. I flipped the pages in this last box and saw a familiar name, F. Millard Smythe. I understood, it was the fourth mystery set in Alaska. Her three published mysteries took place in Alaska, featuring a small, unassuming grocer and amateur sleuth. Eunice won awards and received accolades for her Alaska cozy mysteries Murder Breaks Trail, Doom in the Midnight Sun, and Murder Wears Mukluks. In my hands, I held the fourth book in this series. The last of the Alaska mysteries. Eunice Mays Boyd was my godmother and I called her Nana. I knew she had written a book set in Europe which she began when she retired from the University of California; I’d read that manuscript when I was twenty years old and in college. The plot was clever with numerous twists and red herrings—a classic Christie-style “whodunit”. I read the manuscript, typed on yellow draft paper with penciled-in corrections, in one sitting. Her last five years were filled with travel to Europe and this mystery was set in France with a bus tour traveling from the Roman ruins of Nîmes to the medieval walled city of Carcassonne. She died soon after I read the book. When her house was cleared, my mother rescued that manuscript and gave it to me. The 250 pages were held together on a brown pressboard clipboard. For forty-five years I kept that manuscript in its clipboard. When my time became more flexible, I thought it would be fun to see some of the sites she described in A Vacation to Kill For. In 2014, I spent five days in Carcassonne where I re-read the book, walked the places she described, and confirmed her descriptions. At the end of the trip, I wondered what might be involved to publish this murder mystery. That was as far as I got…a thought. But that all changed when I discovered the other three unpublished murder mysteries. I read them. I knew the timeframe for Dune House. Slay Bells, also set in San Francisco was near the Stonestown shopping center, where we lived between 1957 and 1963. One Paw Was Red had to have been written after Murder Wears Mukluks (1945) and before Dune House between 1945 and 1947. Eunice had lived in Fairbanks, Alaska for twelve years. She began to write as a way to pass the long winter nights and dark winter days. She wrote about the Alaska she knew—the Alaska of the 1930’s and early 1940’s just before the United States entered World War II, when she divorced and returned to her family’s home in Berkeley, California. Murder Breaks Trail (1943) was followed by Doom in the Midnight Sun (1944) then Murder Wears Mukluks. Nana regularly participated in the Berkeley Writers Circle. I remember her going to meetings on Saturdays then coming home enthused with ideas and new, clever ways to murder. She read two to three cozy mysteries a week and prided herself on identifying the killer well in advance of the denouement. With her bed-ridden mother, Mabel Ainsworth Mays, we watched Perry Mason and I would engage in the conversation and try to find the guilty party—Nana always won! One day, when I came to her home for a routine bi-monthly weekend, she gave me a Nancy Drew mystery. I finished it that night and the next morning she pulled three small leather bound books out of the bookcase. Her books. She said the publisher, Farrer Rinehart, had given her these special copies. Next, she brought out a hardback book with a red and white cover—The Marble Forest (1950). She proudly opened the book to the first page filled with signatures. “Nana, what’s this? Why are there so many signatures,” I asked. “A group of us decided to write a mystery together. Each of us wrote at least one chapter. We were all members of the San Francisco chapter of Mystery Writers of America. Twelve of us participated and I wrote the third chapter, which is why I am third in sequence.” I counted the autographs, “But there are only eleven autographs.” I looked at the book’s cover and saw the author was Theo Durrant. “Okay, but who’s the author?” “All of us but one. Virginia Rath (The Dark Cavalier) died in 1950 before we got copies of the book and couldn’t sign. Her health was failing so we decided to use letters from the healthy eleven, so…Theo Durrant has eleven letters. The name was created by using one letter from each of our names. I am the “E”, Anthony Boucher is the “H”. Look.” It wasn’t obvious. Then she scribbled on a piece of paper how the name was derived: Terry Adler (On Murder’s Skirts) AntHony Boucher (The Case of the Seven of Calvary) Eunice Mays Boyd (Murder Breaks Trail) Lenore Glen Offord (Murder on Russian Hill) Dana Lyon (The House on Telegraph Hill) Cary LUcas (Unfinished Business) Richard Shattuck (The Wedding Guest Sat on a Stone) William WoRley (My Dead Wife) Allen Hymson (San Francisco writer) Florence OsterN Faulkner (Wedding for Three) Darwin Teilhet (Death Flies High) I opened the book to the blurb which began, “How long could a four-year old girl live buried in a casket?” It scared me so I closed the book but never forgot the opening. The Marble Forest (1953) became the basis for the move Macabre (1955) starring Jim Bacchus. When I was older, we watched it on television with my godmother. Although proud of her accomplishment, she pointed out all the places the film either cut corners or didn’t follow the book. The result—we saw the movie at least two more times with and without commentary. Later I discovered that three of the authors used pseudonyms. Anthony Boucher (or William White) was a well-known local author, writer and critic. The other pseudonyms belonged to women who wrote under men’s names (Allen Hymson = Alma Hymson, Richard Shattuck = Dora Richard Shattuck). These writers were born in the first decade of the twentieth century and were avid readers during the Golden Age of Mystery Writing dominated by the British authors Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. The SF Bay Area writers were all in their forties, had honed their skills and created clever whodunnits in local venues. They were part of the Golden Age of American Cozy Mystery Writers. In all those years, after the success of The Marble Forest/Macabre, she wrote but seemingly stopped in the early 1960’s. She never mentioned her unpublished manuscripts. It wasn’t until she retired that she put fingers to keys. *** What to do? I now had a critical mass of manuscripts. I felt an obligation to honor Eunice’s memory and to let others enjoy her skillful, intelligent writing. Thus began my journey. First step was to convert the typed pages into a Word document—Done. The next step was a manual edit. Then, a local editor suggested, why not get the rights to her published books and ensure I had the literary rights. I thought I had these rights, but couldn’t find a copy of her will so a literary lawyer pointed out that possession didn’t count for nine-tenths of anything. Fortunately, I grew up knowing members of my godmother’s extended family. Even though Nana had no children, her niece, Nancy, and family visited the Berkeley home frequently. Nancy was also friends with my mother and they kept in contact through the years. Well, up to a point. Nancy died decades ago and I’d lost touch with her children after Eunice’s death in 1971. Enter LinkedIn. I found her grandnephew and sent him a note. We connected online. He suggested I get in touch with his brother who was the keeper of their family’s pioneer history. I did. With their help, I was able to identify her surviving heirs: their sister and Eunice’s nephew, Harry. Back to the internet. I spent hours figuring out which Harry Mays it was, deduced the email, then bingo, found the phone number. I dialed it and miraculously a woman answered the landline. “Hi, I’m Eunice Mays Boyd’s goddaughter. My mother was Mal Matys. I knew Harry’s parents George and Harriett and I was the little girl at the house on Forest Avenue.” “I remember Mal well,” she replied. We chatted for a while and she told me Harry wasn’t very well. She put Harry on the phone and I told him about the books and my desire to publish them. “So, would you like me to sign a release?” “Yes!” I replied. The lawyer wrote a release and I sent it immediately to Harry with two copies and a self-addressed stamped envelope. Ten days later I had his signature. Two weeks later the grandnephews and grandniece gave their permission and six weeks later Harry was dead. Whew—just in the nick of time. I had what I needed to publish the new books, and, decided to republish her “classic” works. My task escalated from four books to seven. But…I needed the rights to republish her Alaska mysteries. The internet came to the rescue with a copy of the standard Farrar & Rinehart contract from 1943 which required giving them 90-day notice. Notification—done. I was good to go. Next step…find a publisher. I contacted two publishers who reviewed books submitted directly by authors. Otto Penzler at Mysterious Press wrote back immediately saying that he remembered reading Murder Wears Mukluks and found it delightful. He would be happy to republish her Alaska mysteries and maybe One Paw Was Red. Remarkably, the next day I received a reply from Level Best Books wanting to learn more. Verena Rose was intrigued because Eunice had written during the Golden Age. After reading Dune House, Level Best agreed to publish all seven books. Dune House and Slay Bells were published in December, 2021 and A Vacation to Kill For was published in 2023. Murder Breaks Trail will be republished in 2024 followed by Doom in the Midnight Sun. Murder Wears Mukluks and One Paw Was Red are in the future queue. It was a great way to pass time during the Pandemic lockdowns. My journey has refreshed many memories and reconnected me with Eunice’s family. It also introduced me to the world of writing and publishing. At the time, the Level Best team ran Malice Domestic. I decided to attend and had no idea of what to expect. I was overwhelmed by the availability of free mysteries, the ease of meeting and talking with accomplished writers. Maureen Jennings (Murdock Mysteries) even suggested that F. Millard Smyth’s series could become a television series set in 1940s Alaska. I was asked to participate as a last minute replacement on a panel to talk about what makes a good cozy—some internet research and Nana’s books helped me survive the experience. It was fun to meet other Level Best authors and be part of a group. I am proud to have undertaken this journey. It has been hard work, but I’ve learned. It is an adventure to enter into an entirely new discipline. Nana inspired me to write my own books. My medical thriller The Goldilocks Genome (May 21, 2024 publication date) and HEPATITIS Beach, a non-fiction coming-of-age adventure about my doctoral fieldwork experience studying hepatitis B virus in Melanesia. The lessons I’ve gleaned for my own literary estate include the importance of filing a copy of all book-related contracts with one’s lawyer and specifically gifting one’s literary rights. I am grateful for the experience of bringing Eunice’s “lost” murder mysteries to life and for the time I spent with her. A time capsule is a gift too precious to ignore. *** View the full article

It’s that time of year again. There’s a new Guy Ritchie film in theaters. Last year, I went to the movies and experienced the soul-warming balm of the nearly-incoherent heist movie Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, and this year, I wanted to experience that again. So, I took myself to see Ritchie’s new film, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which seemed like it would be a heist story set during World War II. When the movie began, a title card flashed that said the film was based on true events, and I was like, right, it’s based on the factual event of World War II. But I wasn’t open-minded enough. Turns out, the film is specifically based on a real-life and very cockamamie WWII mission called “Operation Postmaster” that was only declassified in 2016. Upon learning that, I wondered for a moment why Ritchie had not called the film “Operation Postmaster,” but then I remembered that his movie last year was called “Operation Fortune,” and it’s a known fact that you can’t have two operations so close together. Speaking of which… I was surprised to hear about the existence of “Operation Postmaster” because of that very rule! The British are already known for an absolutely bananas, top-secret WWII mission to turn the tide of the war: Operation Mincemeat. I have read the book Operation Mincemeat, seen the movie Operation Mincemeat, and seen the West End stage musical Operation Mincemeat, and I thought that this was the only absolutely insane, t0tally confidential war operation that the British had pulled off. But no, turns out there’s another one, too. And that’s the one this movie is about. Clearly, the educational merits of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare are manifold. I was surprised to learn anything from this movie because, truthfully, I’ve never learned anything from a mid-career Guy Ritchie movie besides the fact that I really like a movie in which bad guys carrying guns have slower reaction times than the good guy who is carrying just one knife. I like a movie about a heist team made up of several hulking, wisecracking men and a single cool woman! I like a movie where something goes wrong with the plan that a crew has meticulously worked out to the very last detail and now they have to improvise a whole new plan and it works anyway. I want a large body count provided by the same stuntmen over and over and you can actually tell, you’re like “oh that’s the guy who got nailed with the fishhook in the opening” or whatever. I like a movie where people are so British, they can barely speak English. I like a movie with a cast that includes Cary Elwes. I like all this, and Guy Ritchie has never not given it all to me. What is The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare about? It almost doesn’t matter! But I’ll explain anyway. Henry Cavill plays G.H. “Gus” March-Phillips, a military officer of some kind who’s currently serving jail time because he doesn’t play by the rules. This is great news. I also love a movie in which no one follows the rules. If someone follows the rules, I will walk out. Anyway, Winston Churchill (Rory Kinnear, only I didn’t realize that he was supposed to be Winston Churchill for like 2/3rds of the movie because he doesn’t look or sound like Winston Churchill and why would you cast Rory Kinnear as Winston Churchill?) and Cary Elwes, who plays a military commander they call “M,” want March-Phillips to lead a secret, unofficial, unsanctioned, and illegal renegade mission. It’s very cool. He has to take a crew down to the Atlantic-side African island of Fernando Po, where the Nazis are keeping a giant ship that they use to store all their equipment to maintain the U-boats which patrol the Atlantic Ocean. The plethora of U-boats has been preventing American ships from bringing aid to Britain and the Allies. So, if March-Phillips blows up that ship, the Brits will basically stymie the Nazi control over the Atlantic. Sounds like a plan! March-Phillips says he’s down to help, but he needs a badass crew. He has a few guys in mind: an Irish firearms virtuoso who hates the Nazis (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), an explosives weirdo (Henry Golding), a Swedish one-man-killing-machine (Alan Ritchson), and his best friend, Geoffrey Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer), I guess because they’re best friends. So, the British government is like, hm okay, we’ll let you include these guys as long as you add to your team 1.) this really cool agent (Babs Olusanmokun) who has set up a contact in Fernando Po already, and 2.) a very sexy woman (Eiza Gonzalez) who knows how to do everything and who will have a million costume changes despite traveling with only one small valise. March-Phillips is like, you drive a hard bargain, but you’ve got a deal. So then, yeah, they all go to Fernando Po and pull off the mission. Eventually, March-Phillips recruits another cool guy, Kambili “Billy” Kalu (Danny Sapani), who has his own crew of cool guys, and they all join in together. There are snags that require some fancy-footwork, and a Nazi or two that Eiza Gonzalez has to seduce, but they all overcome all these obstacles. Honestly, it doesn’t even seem that hard. And that’s it, that’s the whole movie. There is no complicated multi-act structure. There are no sophisticated themes. There is absolutely no character development. And that’s fine! Who needs character development? This is a movie about several tough men and a very cool woman who go on a journey to kill Nazis and sabotage their large-scale plans for World Domination. I fail to see how anyone could develop character beyond that, anyway! And sure, sometimes the action scenes are a little confusing, like it’s hard to know where the characters are, exactly, in relation to each other. But you know what, that’s also fine! They know! The characters know. When I watch a Guy Ritchie movie, I’m not going to backseat drive. I know we’re going to get where we’re supposed to go and I don’t care if it doesn’t make sense. Everyone involved appears to be having a bloody great time, and so am I. The only thing that would have made this movie more enjoyable is if I were also eating an entire family-size bag of Doritos. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a chipper extravaganza of nonsense black-ops, a jolly-diverting entrant in the canon of “Nazi killing” movies. It’s like if The Dirty Dozen weren’t gritty or unhinged. Actually, it is a great movie for people who wanted to watch Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds but were worried that it might be too shocking and bloody. And, you know what? I learned stuff from this movie. One thing I’ll say seriously is that we as a country are not taught enough about the Nazi occupation of Africa and this movie reminded me to go do more research on that topic. But, and I’m returning to being unserious now, perhaps the thing I learned the most from The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is that the guys who ran MI5 or whatever during the 1940s probably had the same psychological profile as Guy Ritchie—a flair for dramatic narrative and a devil-may-care attitude about the finer points of execution. It all checks out. Overall, I had a great time. I do have a few questions, though. I’ve laid them out as follows. There are a million scenes of people being obsessed with their gold cigarette lighters. British brigadiers, scrappy agents, Nazi scum… they’re all yanking out and flicking open their cigarette lighters, even when no one is lighting anything. Why is that? Literally, though, why did they cast Rory Kinnear as Winston Churchill? Actually, let me rephrase this. Why did they cast Rory Kinnear, a man who doesn’t look a thing like Winston Churchill, as Winston Churchill and not Darkest Hour-the hell out of him, prosthetics-wise? He’s clearly wearing some makeup, but it is not enough and therefore doesn’t work. Why would they not lean into the physical “Winston Churchill”-ness of the character of Winston Churchill? Aren’t there like six hundred Winston Churchill-looking actors just walking around London? Why wasn’t one of them captured and brought to set? Honestly, “Rory Kinnear” is an even weirder cast because (while he’s a talented actor and deserves widespread recognition), he’s not famous enough for this to be some fun, forgivable stunt casting. You know who they should have cast, if they wanted to do stunt casting for Winston Churchill? Mike Myers. I think that would have been great. At one point in the film, Eiza Gonzalez wears this denim outfit that appears to be a tight-fitting romper, but is revealed to be a set of separates; a tiny, midriff-bearing jacket and high-waisted pants. Is this outfit historically accurate? I’m not being an asshole; I really want to know. Because it’s really cool. When does it come out on DVD? View the full article

“I gave her my ugliness.” This is what I said to my editor when we first spoke about El, the protagonist of my debut novel Man’s Best Friend. El’s issues—her selfishness, her unavailability—were very much my issues in my early twenties. I was the friend who dodged phone calls, the employee who might not make it in on Monday, the girlfriend of questionable loyalty. In my attempt to be no one to anyone, to outrun the potential for abandonment, I hurt the people in my life, myself most of all. El is much more destructive than I was: my own misadventures were hardly pulse-pounding. I walked so El could run, deep into her darkness. She was never written to be aspirational. Novels about destructive women have always been my favorites. In the lead up to the release of Man’s Best Friend, I’ve been thinking about fiction in this tradition, and wondering why it is that problematic female protagonists inspire such love/hate reactions from readers, why I fall so firmly on the love side. I had my theories, but I decided to start by looking at the science. Women are, surprise surprise, the safer sex. “Few… have examined gender as a potential moderator of the emotional dysregulation associated with violence,” one study points out, though it asserts that men are more likely to exhibit violent behavior than women. Another study confirms that women “more rarely and/or less intensely” behave in a self-destructive manner than men i.e. are less likely to binge drink or drive recklessly. What these studies could not answer for me is why women cause less harm, on average, than men. It’s a question of nature or nurture: are women less destructive because of some genetic predisposition, or because we’re coached into compliance? [A]re women less destructive because of some genetic predisposition, or because we’re coached into compliance? When I read novels that center destructive women I feel a pulse beneath the words, a dark song of repressed despair that resonates in my body. If women ruminate on the harmful and the selfish, if the darkness is within us, can we really chalk it up to evolution that it’s less likely to express itself outwardly? Much more convincing to me is the idea that, within the confines of the patriarchy, women behave in accordance with cultural expectation because it’s the only way to be acceptable, likeable, loveable. This goes doubly for women of color, who are saddled not only with the burden of patriarchy but of white supremacy, too. As Raven Leilani has said, “Unlikeablility is a very different thing to navigate for Black women… What we call unlikeability in white women, I think Black women feel, but have to suppress in order to survive.” Yes, there are many excellent novels by women of color with unlikeable or destructive female protagonists, Leilani’s Luster among them, but I doubt anyone would argue that women of color author and successfully publish such novels more than white women do. All this to say, it’s my belief that oppressive social constructs are deeply entangled with women’s decreased potentiality for destruction, self-centered or otherwise, and thus the destructive woman on the page (particularly if she isn’t white) feels transgressive—and, for some readers, unsettling and unwelcome. On Goodreads or Bookstagram, critiques of harmful female protagonists aren’t often fleshed out. You’ll see something like: insufferable whiny DNF’d at 15% or I’m all for a complicated MC but this?? Sometimes, though, the takes are sweeping, full of observations about how “unhinged” characters are all well and good, but this character felt unhinged for unhinged’s sake. Don’t even get me started on the readers who rate American Psycho five stars but need their destructive women to have some spelled out tragic #MeToo or capital T trauma backstory to justify their wrongdoing. And then there are those readers like myself, who love a destructive female protagonist. It would be nice if this were a reflection of progressive values, but really it’s just my taste, informed, I suppose, by my own life experience. It’s taken a lot of time and effort to cultivate compassion for my past self, the twenty-two year old whose abandonment issues and untreated alcoholism made her a not so great roommate, daughter, friend. When I see pieces of my self-destructive past glimmering like shards of glass through someone else’s prose, I feel a certain comfort, a gratitude that I’m not in that broken place anymore. And even when I don’t identify, even when I confront a violent and irredeemable protagonist who I don’t love but love to hate, I am riveted by the author’s transgressive act in portraying such a woman. I present to you now a list of excellent novels about destructive women. These authors use the page to liberate woman from the constraints of culture, allowing her to be what is not allowed or not anticipated, and in doing so don’t condone harm but expand our understanding of the human condition. Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier One of my favorite reads in recent years, this novel tells the story of Jane, a pregnant 18-year old pizza joint employee who becomes obsessed with a female customer. Jane neglects every caring person in her life as well as her unborn child (she drinks throughout her pregnancy), instead focusing her attention and empathy on the customer. The sophistication of Frazier’s narration is especially impressive; she has a gift for demystifying Jane for the reader while allowing Jane to remain eighteen, barely adult, a mystery to herself. Wideacre by Philippa Gregory Back in the mid-2000s everyone read The Other Boleyn Girl in anticipation of the Natalie Portman/Scarlett Johanssen feature adaptation, but Wideacre is Gregory’s debut novel. The protagonist is a squire’s daughter, Beatrice Lacey, and she is queen of the Faustian bargain. I won’t spoil all the twists and turns, but be forewarned: nothing taboo is off the table in this novel. Beatrice graduates from one heinous act to the next, all to keep hold of her beloved land, the locus of her identity. The Pisces by Melissa Broder Lucy, a PhD student reeling from a break-up, moves to Venice Beach for the summer and, while coming to terms with her love addiction, becomes infatuated with a merman. The vulnerability of this protagonist is so acute it will no doubt inspire skin-crawling discomfort for those who haven’t become acquainted with their shadow selves. I love this book: you might, too, if descriptions of U.T.I.s after hotel bathroom anal sex are your thing. My Men by Victoria Kielland (translated by Damion Searls) The torrent of stunning prose in this novel is almost as violent as the protagonist, Belle, herself. Belle Gunness was a real-life American (Norwegian-born) serial killer. In Kielland’s telling, Belle’s darkness incubated for a long time before she graduated to murder. When Belle’s behavior does escalate, Kielland draws us into Belle’s confusion: “The face the mirror, which image should she believe in?” Kielland paints her protagonist with such a human brush that the ending, where we learn the unspeakable horror Belle is responsible for, gives the reader a taste of serious whiplash. I dare anyone with a little life experience not to relate to this passage: “[I]t really hurt to love, it was like being skinned alive, and yet everyone took every chance they could get, every time. Full-grown adults, it was absolutely insane.” I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel In the immortal words of David Fincher, “I like characters who don’t change, who don’t learn from their mistakes.” In her debut, Patel’s first person (unnamed) narrator shares one damning insight after another about the age of social media, white privilege and sexual power dynamics, but while she confesses her personal missteps in full, all her powers of insight don’t save her, in the end, from the kind of delusional thinking that got her into trouble in the first place. Many readers have been and will continue to be hooked by the premise of I’m A Fan—a young woman, infatuated with a married man, online stalks his more prized mistress—but the book is so much more than a pulpy premise. For me, Patel achieves the thing all storytellers aim for, creating the universal within the specific, mirroring back to her reader the prison we create for ourselves when, as creatures of capitalism, we harm ourselves and others in pursuit of a life that only looks Good and Right. The Guest by Emma Cline The guest of The Guest is Alex, a twenty-two year old sex worker who has conned her way into a relationship with Simon, an older guy, and the owner of a sumptuous Hamptons summer home. But after a dinner party faux pas Alex is exiled from Eden, and for the rest of the novel she’s in survival mode, counting the days until she can see Simon again, using anyone and everyone in her path so she can remain in the Hamptons, away from New York City and Dom, a dangerous man she’s stolen from. Each of Alex’s victims is such a desperate character (an uptight house manager is a secret cokehead; a rich young woman, a literal member of the club, has no friends) that Cline distracts us, for most of the narrative, from Alex’s psychological desperation. The reader is put in the same position as Alex herself, who’s held her emotions at a distance for a long time. Cline doesn’t use Alex’s hidden fragility to excuse her bad behavior, nor does she force Alex into an ethical makeover after some dark night of the soul: redemption is not necessary because Alex is no hero. Boy Parts by Eliza Clark Irina, the protagonist of Boy Parts, initially comes across like a version of Lisbeth Salander, a sharp, incisive and hard to know bisexual woman with obscure taste. She’s revealed, however, to be someone Lisbeth might target, a sexual sadist harboring a deep dark secret. Clark assigns Irina problems that haunt many women, including an eating disorder and more than one experience of sexual assault. Irina grapples for control behind the camera, photographing men, the would-be predators, just as she seeks control around her appetite, planning to vomit whenever she consumes something apart from bagged salad. Readers who struggle with the problematic female protagonist will no doubt stumble (among other things) over Irina’s poor treatment of her closest friend, but it’s this relationship that really allowed me to fall in love with this book. This is not simply, as some have suggested, a “female” American Psycho: it read to me like a story about one woman’s profound struggle with attachment—attachment to love, attachment to success, attachment to reality. Luster by Raven Leilani Some might take issue with Edie’s inclusion in the destructive female protagonist tradition, because Edie is not all that hard to love, ultimately. This is a main character who does graduate to a more mature perspective in the end (literally as well as figuratively—her painting improves over the course of the novel). That said, Edie’s behavior in the early chapters of Luster is problematic and frustrating, and in my view firmly cements her in the transgressive canon. A Black woman in her early twenties, Edie is fired from her publishing job for inappropriate sexual behavior. She’s been involved with so many colleagues, men and women, she’s not even sure who brought her behavior to the attention of HR. Edie compares herself unfavorably to another Black female colleague: “She plays the game well… She is Black and dogged and inoffensive… I’d like to think the reason I’m not more dogged is because I know better, but sometimes I look at her and I wonder if the problem isn’t her but me. Maybe the problem is that I’m weak and overly sensitive. Maybe the problem is that I am an office slut.” Leilani’s choice to have Edie address us in the first person present makes the narration inherently unreliable, so we don’t know, after this admission of Edie’s, how much we should forgive and how much we should judge. Should we be understanding that Edie is not more dogged? Should we think she’s weak? Both, I think. Most of the novel is the story of Edie’s entanglement with Eric, an older, alcoholic white man, and how she comes to move in with Eric and his wife, Rebecca, and their adoptive daughter Akila. Edie’s sexual relationship with Eric is fine by Rebecca until it is not, at which point Edie carries on with Eric anyway, for a time. More interesting than this, however, is the fact that Edie allows, even encourages, Eric to hurt her, hit her. At a certain point, Eric leaves Edie a remorseful, drunk voicemail saying something about how he knows she’s a human being. It’s not terribly relevant whether Eric knows this or not—the only relevant question is whether Edie knows who she is, what she deserves. Will I continue in this pattern of destruction, or won’t I? These are the worthy stakes of this novel. *** View the full article

July 5, 1915 Police headquarters, Centre Street, Manhattan The bombs came in all kinds of packages. Often they arrived in tin cans, emptied of the olive oil or soap or preserves the cans had originally been manufactured to contain, now wedged tight with sticks of dynamite. Sometimes they were wrapped with an outer band of iron slugs, designed to maximize the destruction, conveyed to their target location in a satchel or suitcase, “accidentally” left behind in the courthouse, or the train station, or the cathedral. Many of those devices were time bombs running on clockwork mechanisms. The more inventive ones utilized a kind of hourglass device, releasing sulfuric acid into a piece of cork, the timing determined by chemistry, not mechanics: how long the acid took to eat its way through the cork, until it began dripping onto the blasting cap below. Many were swaddled in old newspaper pages. One of the most notorious bombing campaigns sent the devices through the mail, dressed up in department- store wrapping. And sometimes the bomb was just a naked stick of dynamite, with a fuse simple enough to be lit with the strike of a match, ready to be flung into an unsuspecting crowd. Many bombs were delivered anonymously. But others were accompanied by missives sent to a local paper, or left on a doorstep: threats, intimations of further violence, delusional rants, and more than a few manifestos. The smaller bombs— the ones detonated by a storefront, a few notches up from fireworks— were the mobster version of an “account overdue” mailing: the big stick of the extortion business. A few came from clinically insane individuals without a cause, propelled toward the terrible violence of dynamite by their own private demons. But most of the explosions that made the national news during those years were expressions, implicit or explicit, of a political worldview. The political bombers were a diverse bunch: socialist agitators, Russian Nihilists, Irish republicans, German saboteurs. But of all the bomb throwers of the period, no group was more closely associated with the infernal machines—as the press came to call the bombs—than the anarchists. The forty-year period during which anarchism rose to prominence as one of the most important political worldviews in Europe and the United States—roughly from 1880 to 1920— happened to correspond precisely with the single most devastating stretch of political bombings in the history of the West. Indeed, the whole modern practice of terrorism— advancing a political agenda through acts of spectacular violence, often targeting civilians— began with the anarchists. What was anarchism, really? Start with the word itself. Today the word anarchy almost exclusively carries negative connotations of chaos and disorder. But when the political movement first emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century, the word’s meaning was much more closely grounded in its etymological roots: an-, meaning no, and -archos, the Latin word for “ruler.” The anarchists believed that a world without rulers was possible. At times, they convinced themselves that such a society was inevitable; imminent, even. The anarchists maintained that there was something fundamentally corrosive about organizing society around large, top- down organizations. Human beings, its advocates explained, oftentimes at gunpoint, had evolved in smaller, more egalitarian units, and some of the most exemplary communities of recent life—the guild-based free cities of Renaissance Europe, the farming communes of Asia, watchmaking collectives in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland—had followed a comparable template, at a slightly larger scale. These leaderless societies were the natural order of things, the default state for Homo sapiens. Taking humans out of those human-scale communities and thrusting them into vast militaries or industrial factories, building a society based on competitive struggle and authority from above, betrayed some of our deepest instincts. At its finest moments, anarchism was a scientific argument as much as it was a political one. It had deep ties to the new science that Darwin had introduced, only it emphasized a side of natural selection that is often neglected in popular accounts: the way in which evolution selects for cooperative behavior between organisms, what Peter Kropotkin—anarchism’s most elegant advocate—called “mutual aid.” As a theory of social organization, anarchism was equally opposed to the hierarchies of capitalism and the hierarchies of what we would now call Big Government. For this reason, it lacks an intuitive address on the conventional left-right map of contemporary politics, which partly explains why the movement can seem perplexing to us today. Whatever you might say about Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and Peter Kropotkin—the three main anarchists in this book—they should never be mistaken for free-market libertarians. They wanted to smash the corporate regime as much as they wanted to smash the state. But the other confusion about the movement lies in the language itself. The main reason that the word anarchy now carries the implicit connotation of troublesome disorder is because a century ago, a wave of anarchists insisted on blowing things up, again and again and again, in the name of the movement. That sense of unruly chaos that the word anarchy triggers in our mind today is the aftershock of all those explosions, part of the debris field they left behind. For the anarchists, it was arguably one of the most disastrous branding strategies in political history. They turned a word against their cause. Why exactly were the anarchists so intent on blowing things up? That is, by definition, a technological and scientific question as much as it is a question about radical ideologies: How did anarchism and dynamite—born in the same decade but otherwise unrelated—come to be so closely intertwined? Dynamite gave small bands of humans command of more energy per person than they had ever dreamed of having before. Dynamite, quite literally, gave them power. The anarchists happened to be the first political movement to embrace that new power. But why were they compelled to make that choice? Could they have made a more persuasive case through less destructive means? To even begin to answer those questions, we need to understand where the anarchist’s appetite for political violence originally came from, its complex symbiosis with the everyday violence that industrialization had unleashed into the world. For every death at the hand of a bomb-wielding anarchist, a hundred or more would die from factory accidents. We also need to understand what that appetite for violence—enabled by the energy density of the dynamite-based explosion—helped bring into the world. When the anarchists began dreaming of a society unfettered by institutional authority, there were no forensic detectives, no biometric databases of identity, no anti-terror agencies. Where official police forces did exist, they were usually in bed with urban crime syndicates and political machines; national and international investigatory bodies like Interpol or the FBI or the CIA were decades from being created. But in the end it turned out to be those institutions that triumphed over the stateless dream of the anarchists. In many key respects these techniques and organizations were prodded into being by the emerging threat of the infernal machines, like an immune response to an invading virus. The innovation of dynamite-driven political terrorism created a counterreaction from the forces of top-down authority, one of those stretches of history where some of the most powerful institutions in the world are shaped by the activities of marginal groups, working outside the dominant channels of power. In this case, though, the legacy of the anarchist movement ultimately possessed a kind of tragic irony: the dream of smashing the state helping to give birth to a regime of state surveillance that would become nearly ubiquitous by the middle of the twentieth century. In the summer of 1915, the site in the United States that best represented that new regime was the Identification Bureau of the New York Police Department, created originally by a cerebral detective, Joseph Faurot, and eventually overseen by Commissioner Arthur Woods, a well-born Bostonian turned social reformer. The bureau was on the ground floor of the NYPD headquarters in Lower Manhattan, lined with file cabinets containing tens of thousands of photographs and fingerprints, organized by intricate classification schemes. In a predigital era, the Identification Bureau was the closest thing imaginable to the U.S. government’s plan for “Total Information Awareness” that would become so controversial in the months after 9/11. The Identification Bureau had an equally revolutionary idea at its core, one that had first developed in Paris and London at the end of the nineteenth century before Faurot and Woods brought it state-side: the idea that crime and sedition were fundamentally problems that could be solved with data. The way to combat individuals or groups who were intent on disrupting society was not to overwhelm them with physical force. Such naked expressions of power only inflamed the passions of the radicals. It was better to contain dissent through more subtle means: file cabinets filled with information, undercover operations, a web of invisible oversight stretching across the country and, increasingly, across the world. This book, then, is the story of two ideas, ideas that first took root in Europe before arriving on American soil at the end of the nineteenth century, where they locked into an existential struggle that lasted three decades. One idea was the radical vision of a society with no rules—and a new tactic of dynamite-driven terrorism deployed to advance that vision. The other idea—crime fighting as an information science—took longer to take shape, and for a good stretch of the early twentieth century, it seemed like it was losing its struggle against the anarchists. But it won out in the end. How did that come to happen? And could the story have played out differently? The history of the struggle between those two ideas involves a global cast of some of the most fascinating characters of the age: most of all Berkman, Goldman, Kropotkin, Woods, and Faurot. But doing justice to that story demands that we take a wider view of the historical timeline: venturing back to the original invention of dynamite itself and its first deployments as a political weapon in czarist Russia, the growth of anarchism as a political worldview in the late 1800s, the pioneering innovations of forensic science in Paris that evolved in part to counter that growth—all the way up to a terrifying, but now mostly forgotten, stretch of New York City’s history in the early twentieth century, when the metropolis experienced thousands of bombings over the course of just two decades. If you had to select the one point on that timeline that marked the apex of the struggle between anarchism and the surveillance state, the point where you might get even odds as to how it was all going to turn out, you could make a good case for the night of July 5, 1915. Despite the late hour, the Identification Bureau was bustling with activity. A bomb had detonated two days earlier in the U.S. Capitol building; the financier J. P. Morgan, Jr., had been at-tacked at his home in suburban Long Island the following morning; and the detectives had just discovered that the suspect in both crimes had recently purchased two hundred sticks of dynamite in New York, only six of which had been accounted for. For weeks Joseph Faurot had been receiving death threats in the mail from anarchist groups, reminding the detective of the fast approaching one- year anniversary of one of the most devastating explosions in the city’s history, a blast that destroyed an entire apartment building on the East Side, the work of anarchists plotting an attack on an-other titan of industry. That damage had been wrought with only a few sticks of dynamite. The trove of explosives currently missing threatened to make the previous year’s blast look like a bottle rocket by comparison. But the clash between the anarchists and the NYPD was not only visible in the frenetic activity inside the Identification Bureau itself. To see it in its full scope, you needed to leave the file cabinets and the fingerprint studios behind, walk out the plate glass doors into the hall, venture down a set of fire stairs into the darkened hallways of the basement. There you would have seen a cheap suit-case, leaning against a doorway. Below the muffled hum of activity in the Identification Bureau directly above, if you listened very in-tently, you might just have heard the quiet metronome of a ticking clock. ___________________________________ Excerpted from the book THE INFERNAL MACHINE by Steven Johnson. Copyright © 2024 by Steven Johnson. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. View the full article

The incredibly successful suspense author Harlan Coben once told me—with a chuckle—that he thought conducting research for a book was just another form of procrastination. Guilty as charged on some occasions, but in most instances the research I’ve done for all nineteen of my mysteries and psychological thrillers has been extremely beneficial to the process. First and foremost, it helps me get my facts straight. Readers can be forgiving—to a point. They assume that as an author you might need to take some poetic license to move the plot along, but they also want to know that details you provide about everything from locales to characters’ jobs to crime scenes make sense. But that’s not the only reason I do it. When I’m digging, I often come across information that inspires a great plot development, or even a killer plot twist. Much of the research I do these days is online, but I also visit locations I’m writing about and talk to lots of experts, mostly on the phone, but sometimes in person if they can spare the time. I’ve not only interviewed plenty of cops, forensic experts, criminal profilers, lawyers, doctors, EMT workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, and real estate agents but also the occasional acting coach, magician, electrocution expert, and dog whisperer. When I’m researching, I’m mostly concentrating on what details can be used for background and what can come out of characters’ mouths, but later, away from my computer, I often realize that something I came across was just plain fascinating to have learned. I’ve even ended up using a few nuggets of wisdom in my own life. Here are some of the most intriguing, weird, and/or quirky things I’ve discovered along the way. 1) DNA evidence has become an important tool in solving homicides, but here’s a point that’s been driven home for me during the dozens of interviews I’ve done with former death scene investigator Barbara Butcher, author of What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator: Many homicides are solved today not because of DNA but thanks to CCTV footage and/or cell phone data. 2) I’ve never featured a body language expert as a character in any of my books (hmm, maybe I should, though), but I’ve interviewed a few because I’ve found their research helpful when describing how characters move and gesture during conversations. Something I learned while writing The Fiancée: One way to convey power through body language isn’t with a particular gesture or facial expression but with stillness. When you move your head and arms too much (something acting teachers call “becoming entangled”), your body leaks energy and you come across as nervous and unsure. 3) Speaking of energy leaks, one supposed indication of a poltergeist, beyond the commonly cited “bumps in the night,” are unexplained cold spots. Because, according to one so-called expert, spirits draw heat and energy from a room. I don’t believe in ghosts, but cold spots now make me nervous. 4) In Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Detective Scottie Ferguson suffers from acrophobia, an extreme fear of heights, which I’m sure you’ve heard of or might even experience yourself. And you’re probably also aware that some people have a fear of snakes, or spiders or flying. But in researching phobias for my next book, I learned that there are hundreds of them, including, koumpounophobia (fear of buttons), lachanophobia (fear of vegetables), octophobia (fear of the letter eight) and philemaphobia (fear of kissing). 5) The protagonist in my 2020 novel, Have You Seen Me, is a personal finance writer, so for background I interviewed financial expert Jean Chatzky, CEO of HerMoney. During one of our conversations, she told me about a field of study I’d never heard of called behavioral finance, which examines why smart people do stupid things with their money. Chatzky says that the reason for a lot of stupid money behavior is that we’re wired for instant gratification, which can be hard to override. One coping strategy, she says, is to “trick yourself by setting up artificial roadblocks, such as unsubscribing from shopping emails, taking your credit card number out of the automatic one-click ordering, and using cash, which is psychologically harder to part with.” 6) If you’ve ever gone to the ER with a relative or friend who needed stitches, you were probably told to take a seat rather than stand by the person’s side. You might have protested initially, especially if the patient was your child, perhaps promising the doctor or P.A. that you wouldn’t be in the way and guaranteeing them that the sight of blood didn’t bother you. But what I learned from Paul Paganelli, M.D., a retired ER chief I’ve interviewed for almost every book, is that it’s not unusual for someone who swears he or she isn’t squeamish to actually pass out while watching stitches being done. Until the “take a seat” rule became commonplace, parents would frequently hit the ground, sometimes sustaining serious, life-altering head injuries. 7) According to some estimates, between twenty-five and fifty percent of people have experienced at least one episode of a distressing condition called sleep paralysis, which occurs most frequently as someone is either falling asleep or waking up. It involves a feeling of being conscious but at the same time unable to move or speak. For some it can include a feeling of extreme pressure on the body or a sense of being choked. Some have even reported having a sense of a witch-like creature perched on their chest. That’s why this phenomenon is referred to in someplaces, including Canada, as “old hag syndrome.” 8) In my 2022 novel, The Second Husband, the protagonist is a trend forecaster, and I interviewed several for background. Trend forecasters do research and surveys, but some of them also like to follow what trend forecaster Jane Buckingham calls “the rule of three:” If something catches your attention once, it’s chance; if you see it twice, it’s coincidence or a curiosity; but if you see it three times, it could very well signal a trend worth paying attention to. 9) I never stop having my eyes opened by Barbara Butcher, who during her years with the NYC Medical Examiner’s office investigated over five thousand death scenes. Here’s another insight from her, an observation about death scenes that I try to remember for real life: “What we need to know is around us for the taking as long as we are truly taking it in. The biggest mistake a death scene investigator can make is going in with a pre-conceived idea. Take your hands off your ears and put them over your mouth. Learn to listen, see, smell, and absorb everything around you without speaking your thoughts first.” 10) The protagonist in my current psychological thriller, The Last Time She Saw Him, is a career coach named Kiki Reed, and though I’ve written several books on career success myself, I touched base with several career coaches while writing the book. One expert, Eliot Kaplan, former VP in charge of talent acquisition at Hearst Magazines, told me that one of the biggest complaints interviewers have about job candidates is that they don’t seem enthusiastic enough (which is probably a result of nerves or trying too hard to seem professional and buttoned up). “Don’t be afraid to show how much you want a job,” he told me. In fact, he suggested, it doesn’t hurt to sit a little bit on the edge of your chair. I have Kiki suggest this to one of her clients. 11) A couple of books ago, I was writing a scene where the protagonist sat down with an attorney after she sensed she’d fallen under suspicion with the police for a homicide. To better write the scene, I asked acclaimed white collar defense attorney Susan Brune how she would advise my character. One piece of wisdom she says she offers defendants early on is: “research yourself, just as the police will be doing.” That way a client becomes aware in advance of what will be turned up. This would mean not only Googling yourself, but reviewing your online search history, phone logs, texts, emails, calendar, credit card statements, and E-Zpass history. Even if we aren’t under suspicion, it’s probably not a bad idea to occasionally check out the information that’s available about ourselves. 12) You’ve probably read or heard the wonderful Maya Angelou quote, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” Forensic psychiatrist Karen Rosenbaum says that’s good advice, but so is a common misquote of the comment: “When people tell you who they are, believe them.” People, she explained to me, have blind spots when it comes to their own personality and motives and sometimes don’t realize that others may be put off by the truth of who they are. “They might blurt out things that are at the core of who they are,” she adds, “without realizing the impact it may have on the listener or audience. Like a governor who brags about shooting her dog.” 13) Here’s another other piece of information I learned researching and have tried to use in my own life. It came from a detective supervisor in a police department’s mental evaluation unit, whose job was to respond to people having mental breakdowns or threatening suicide: “In a crisis, we often have a little more time to react than we realize,” she told me. She said that in her career it had made all the difference to count to ten before acting in a crisis, using that time to think through the best strategy before responding, rather than just letting her adrenalin guide her actions. *** View the full article

At Night Court one Christmas, John Larroquette gave me a sofa pillow embroidered with: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Larroquette, who makes the work of acting comedy and drama look effortless, gave it to me knowing it also crystalized the struggle of a writer. The real battle isn’t writing comedy or drama. It’s mixing the two. In crime and thriller novels, it’s murder. But not impossible. There’s simply a high degree of difficulty. Yet, when it works, it’s freaking magical. I’m talking about you, Mick Herron. Your Slow Horses series crackles with mystery and tension. But what elevates it is the humor. Reviewers call it dark comedy. I call it human comedy because it comes out of characters responding like real people to real situations. Sometimes with fright, horror, violence, or tears. Other times, with a wisecrack or an insult. Or, when one of them is Jackson Lamb, the world-weary den father of MI5’s dumpster, with a loud, prolonged, public passing of gas. Reading Herron, you let out shock laughter in the backwash of tragedy. His novels are a must-study for a tone balance that’s pitch perfect. Why? I worked on Nurse Jackie, a dark comedy TV series. That meant we wore the twin masks of drama and comedy. Like I said, a high degree of difficulty. So, beginning each year, I made a speech to the writers’ room that, to pull off this feat, comedy and drama need to be good roommates. It’s that simple and that complex. Let’s stick with books. Let’s celebrate the alchemists—authors who forged tense mysteries and thrillers where humor also thrives. Like Janet Evanovich, right from the gate, in 1 for the Money. Elmore Leonard, who mined humor with hapless strivers in Swag, Get Shorty, and more. Then there’s Carl Hiaasen and the recently departed Tim Dorsey, both making Florida seem like a fun place to take a beating. Rachel Howzell Hall brings the funny amid tragedy through her LA homicide detective, Elouise Norton. Can’t leave off Robert Crais, Joe R. Lansdale, or Gregory McDonald. And then there’s the master, Donald E. Westlake, who consistently staged a Cirque du Soleil balancing act in The Ax, The Hook, and his intimidatingly sublime Dortmunder series. These top-flight authors took me to school. I’ve not only studied how they crafted a story, I’ve marveled at the ways they threaded the needle between laughter and slaughter. They helped me find my hybrid voice in my first novel, The Trigger Episode, and all seven of my Nikki Heat series, writing as Richard Castle. I’m still learning from them. What have I learned? If you’re looking for rules, I’m not your guy. In his essay, “Ten Rules of Writing,” Elmore Leonard’s first rule was never open a book with weather. My first Nikki Heat novel was entitled Heat Wave, and guess what I opened with? Yup. Elmore Leonard, you were a god to me but, sorry, Dutch, that book went to number six on the New York Times list. Then there’s “Mario Puzo’s Godfatherly Rules for Writing a Bestselling Novel.” First rule: “Never write in the first person.” Huh. My latest spy thriller, The Accidental Joe, had difficulty getting traction at first, a euphemism for WTF?! At the risk of finding a horse’s head in my bed, I undertook a page-one rewrite, changing to…the first person. The process was scary, but the upshot was a fresher book with a singular voice, some healthy swagger, and a fat dollop of organic humor. It sold immediately. So, let’s not talk rules; let’s talk considerations. First off, why use humor? You may have your own reasons. One of mine is to use it with protagonists who are new to a world so I can have them draw on sarcasm, irony, and wisecracks to expose truth and react to norms without going all earnest. Not a fan of earnest. What about jokes? Consider that a no. It’s a mystery or thriller, not open-mic night at the Chuckle Hut. The minute you start writing in joke forms (A hitman walks into a bar…) do some hard thinking. The best comedy comes from character, attitude, and point of view, not one liners. Save the banana peels. As above, slapstick and pratfalls are red flags. Just like joke-jokes, extreme physical comedy smacks of contrivance and tone breakage. Be honest. Does your humor play real? Put yourself in the situation. Whatever action is going on around you, would you really say or do this? Really? Are you trying to wear two masks at once? Humor works if it’s well placed. Sometimes the perfect lighthearted dialogue collides with darker action or slows the pace. Remember that thing about comedy and drama being good roommates? Be careful not to shoehorn in humor where it becomes a distraction or an obstacle. A life-death chase or your climax is not the time to bring out the laugh track. I try to spot it where the readers can catch their breath after I’ve just taken it away. Character will make humor work for you. The key is to make it organic. If it’s something only this one person could say or do and only in this moment, your chances are good. Be consistent. Establish your tone and stick with it. The sudden appearance or disappearance of humor is as jarring as a POV swap. Finally, trust your gut. If the funny is funny but feels “off,” don’t force it. Basic as it sounds, humor works when it works. If it’s not right, don’t deny your feelings. Adjust or cut. If in doubt, walk away and grab one of those above books. You may come back inspired. Or at least have a good laugh. *** View the full article

Chicago has produced more than a few successful African-American writers, in both the literary and sales sense, including Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Willard Motley and Sam Greenlee. Inspired greatly by Richard Wright, whose classic texts Native Son and Black Boy helped create a literary path for many Black boys with a pen and a headful of ideas, novelist Ronald L. Fair isn’t as well known as his textual contemporaries, but he was another wonderful writer who emerged from that hard city. Fighting every step of the way as he embarked on the revolutionary road of creating literature on his own terms, he had a bigger mission in mind than just fame and fortune. “I doubted that I would ever make any money as a writer of this kind of fiction, but that didn’t matter because I would be telling it like it is,” Fair wrote in an essay published in the April, 1965 issue of Negro Digest. “No more polite lies. No more biting of the tongue or twisting of truths. Richard Wright’s death would mean something, because I would keep him in mind and swing away.” According to “Bearing Witness in Black Chicago” by Maryemma Graham (1990), “Fair began writing in high school in order to provide an outlet for his own developing and inquiring mind. Like Red Top, a character in the novella ‘World of Nothing,’ writing was a mental and spiritual exercise. But the path that led to a literary career was interrupted by three years in the Navy and two years at a Chicago business college. Then Fair spent ten years as a court reporter for the city of Chicago.” Fair’s 1963 debut was the slim Many Thousand Gone: An American Fable. A dark satire in more ways than one (it was reissued last year from the Library of America), the book depicts a fictional Mississippi town called Jacobs County that neglects to tell their local “colored folks” that slavery is over. After a few of the slaves, most notably Jacobs County elders Granny Jacobs and Preacher Harris (the only Black person in town who could read) discover that there exists a free world beyond their plantations, they became fixated on getting their families to the Negro Promised Land they believe Chicago to be. When a copy of the Black-owned/Chicago based Ebony magazine is mailed to the town, word gets out that there was a place where they could live as nicely as white people and keep a few dollars in their pockets. When Fair decided to satirize slavery it could have gone all wrong, but, as Negro World (owned by Ebony’s parent company Johnson Publications) observed in 1965: “It is a measure of Mr. Fair’s artistry that the pain and fury behind the laughter is always finely felt.” Yet, while the golden streets of Chicago and other northern wonderlands (Pittsburgh, Detroit, New York) served as the perfect strivers’ fantasy, the reality of those harsh, cold cities was quite different than expected: shabby tenements, and later housing projects, replaced the plantations and the laws of justice still weren’t balanced. Fair, whose own parents made the sojourn from Mississippi, was born and raised in Chicago and knew very well the levels of race inequality that were prevalent in housing, schooling, banking, salaries paid and the policing of Black communities. These heavy subjects are tackled in Fair’s powerful and naturalistic second novel Hog Butcher (1966). This told the story of a college-bound Chi-Town high school basketball champion headed for college named Nathaniel Hamilton, whom everyone calls Cornbread. A neighborhood hero, Cornbread is gunned down by a white policeman who mistook him for a thief as he ran home in the rain holding a bottle of orange soda. The policeman, half an interracial duo of blue boys, thought Cornbread was the burglar they had been pursuing minutes before, but his deadly mistake causes the community and “the system” to explode. A small riot breaks out minutes after Cornbread is slain and the mayor’s sends in a task force of, “twelve officers, all over six feet, cruising slowly down the block on motorcycles. They were so big the motorcycles looked like children’s toys under them,” to occupy the neighborhood like a military force.” With the only witness to their senseless crime being a ten-year old kid, Wilford Robinson, who along with his buddy Earl, idolized every cool Cornbread made on the battlegrounds of the basketball courts, the goal of everyone including civic leaders, the welfare agency and violent cops, one who beats-up Wilford’s mother, is to make the boy be quiet. As the state builds their web of lies, the truth becomes the scariest enemy. Negro Digest editor Hoyt W. Fuller wrote in the October, 1966 issue of that publication, “Hog Butcher is…a sharp portrayal of a diseased city. That the picture might fit any American city is merely coincidental.” Author Richard Guzman, editor of Black Writing from Chicago: In the World, Not of It?, wrote a 2015 essay on Fair and Hog Butcher, “Though some have commented on the novel’s humor and, in particular, on the energy and courage of the two adolescent protagonists through whom some of the action is seen, the novel is a sobering exploration of social class … and, of course, police violence.” In The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches (2005) author Bernard W. Bell wrote that Fair borrowed the term “hog butcher” from Carl Sandburg’s 1914 poem “Chicago” (‘Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders…’), but also believed that “the white Chicago system is the hog butcher that cuts out the souls of blacks.” Maryemma Graham notes, “Hog Butcher, considered by most critics to be (Fair’s) best, drew heavily upon his intimate knowledge of Chicago’s legal system. Fair sets up the oppositional forces in Hog Butcher on several levels… Fair is quite detailed in his descriptions about how the police department and the court systems work with regard to black people and the black community, obviously drawing upon his years of experience as a courtroom reporter. This necessarily leads to a focus on the social dynamics of the black urban experience, a fact which invited some very negative reviews from Fair’s critics.” “Hog Butcher was different from any novel I had ever read,” novelist Cecil Brown wrote in a 2020 essay. Brown, who considered Fair one of his literary heroes, met him in 1966. “His prose was exciting and infectious; you could not begin reading one sentence without reading the next sentence. But the most important thing was it was about police brutality. The story was set right in Chicago where we were having riots.” When Hog Butcher was reissued in 2014 from Northwestern University Press, Brown wrote the forward, In 1975, during the height of the Blaxploitation movement that was going down in American movies, Hog Butcher was adapted by screenwriter Leonard Lamensdorf and director Joe Mandrake. Released under the title Cornbread, Earl and Me, the picture was an American International Picture release that starred thirteen-year-old Laurence Fishburne in his film debut as Wilford. There was also NBA star Keith Wilkes as Cornbread, Rosalind Cash as Wilford’s mother and Bernie Casey playing the other policeman. Soul-jazz unit The Blackbyrds did the soundtrack. Though not as brilliant as the funky scores composed by Isaac Hayes or Curtis Mayfield, leader Donald Byrd created a serviceable soundtrack. While filming the adaption, considered a classic in some quarters, told the story from Wilford’s point of view, Fair used the third-person omniscient that showed readers how Cornbread’s murder affected each side from the Black cop and the frightened grocery store owner to the uncaring Deputy Coroner and the knight in shining armor lawyer Benjamin Blackwell, who was working for Cornbread’s family. In Cecil Brown’s forward to the 2014 edition, he wrote, “Mr. Fair presented a new style of writing in Hog Butcher. The story is told not in a traditional narrative mode, but in an impressionistic style that relies heavily on interior monologue. The style enables Fair to move into and out of the minds of different characters and back and forth between past and present. Along with Richard Wright’s first novel, Lawd Today! (published posthumously in 1963), Hog Butcher can be seen as a milestone in the use of interior monologue to portray the consciousness of African American characters.” Although Fair never claimed that Hog Butcher was based on a specific case, almost sixty years after its initial publication the novel serves as a reminder that American police brutality in the Black community wasn’t something that began in the age of cell phone cameras, police dashcam footage and surveillance monitors. Four years before the film version was released, Fair was encouraged by writer Chester Himes to flee the racism of Chicago in 1971; he lived in various European countries before finally settling in Finland in 1972. Since Hog Butcher was reissued in 2014, more writers and critics have embraced the book, including a chapter I wrote for Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980 and an essay by writer Kathleen Rooney, who stated in 2022, “I would like to nominate Fair’s novel to appear alongside To Kill a Mockingbird on syllabi everywhere because instead of exceptionalism and white saviors, Fair’s story depicts—with a cast of lovable, hateable, believable characters from the young man who gets murdered to the cops who murder him—how power’s highest aim is always to preserve itself and how collective action is the best hope anyone can have against systemic injustice.” Though his work is important, Fair didn’t think America appreciated Black writers. “Being a Black writer was a dead end,” Fair told Cecil Brown in 2010. Eight years later, in February, 2018, Fair died from a a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 86. According to his widow Hannele, though he stopped publishing, Ronald L. Fair never stopped writing. “I have many of his unpublished manuscripts with me that deserve to be published,” she wrote Cecil Brown in 2018. Hopefully one day those works will be shared with the world. View the full article

El Nino-induced flooding of biblical proportions has inundated my home this year, which can mean only one possible thing: TIME TO READ SOME GOTHIC FICTION! It’s giving damp. It’s giving mold. It’s giving drip-drip-drip on the window pane. And the weather event causing me personal misery is also a perfect in-road to highlighting one of the greatest years yet in the Great Gothic Fiction revival. It could have been a great moment for fungal fiction, but we already covered that trend in Lit Hub with this fantastic list for lovers (and haters) of The Last of Us. Carmella Lowkis, Spitting Gold (Atria) All is not what it seems in this lush and twist-filled tale. Two spiritualist sisters, famed in their teen years for their convincing seances, must come together for one last con. Spitting Gold is carefully plotted, fully characterized, and incredibly satisfying. Let the ectoplasm flow! L.S. Stratton, Do What Godmother Says (Union Square, June 11) L.S. Stratton’s new gothic thriller is divided between the Harlem Renaissance past and a writer in D.C.’s present. In the past, a young painter is taken under the wing of a mysterious socialite; her new hopes for the security to pursue artistic freedom are quickly dashed as she learns how controlling her new patron can be. In the present, a journalist comes into possession of a valuable painting, only to find herself beset by collectors who seem ready to engage in unscrupulous methods in order to get their hands on the piece of art. Do What Godmother Says is both a prescient critique of artistic appropriation and a darn good mystery—in short, an immensely satisfying read. Donyae Coles, Midnight Rooms (Amistad, July 2) Never. Eat. What. The. Fairies. Give. You. Especially if it’s as disgusting as what’s consumed at the wedding feast in this atmospheric gothic (complete with strong folk horror elements). Donyae Coles’ plucky heroine is surprised to receive a later-in-life proposal from a mysterious gentleman. Their connection is genuine, but his family is off-putting, his manor house is crumbling, and for some reason, he keeps getting her drunk on honey wine while feeding her bloody meat and little cakes. What does he want, and what will she have to sacrifice to give it to him? Clare Pollard, The Modern Fairies (Avid Reader Press, July 23) While debatably gothic, this novel set in 17th century ancien regime France is most certainly suited to the damp—after all, it was an era long before dehumidifiers (of which I now possess four). The Modern Fairies features the great historical salons of Paris, in which literary luminaries mingled with the demimonde and mixed witty repartee with inventive storytelling. Pollard’s characters are reinventing their nation’s traditional stories and creating the modern fairy tale, even as the details of their lives show the the rot of French society before the Revolution. John Fram, No Road Home (Atria, July 23) A wealthy preacher’s compound is the setting for this gothic parable from the author of The Bright Lands. The narrator of No Road Home, newly wedded to the beautiful scion of a megachurch pastor, is visiting his wife’s family for the first time when a storm closes them off from the rest of the world just as their patriarch is found dead. Even before the disturbing demise, Fram’s hero is already having second thoughts about the marriage: her relatives keep making snide remarks about his gender nonconforming son, it turns out his wife only married him to unlock her own inheritance, every family member appears to be keeping secrets, and someone’s been painting threatening messages warning of vengeance to come. Oh, and there’s also a ghost and some very disturbing paintings… Del Sandeen, This Cursed House (Berkley, October 8) Jemma Barker is broke and newly single when a strange offer comes in: a lucrative position has opened up with a wealthy family on their Louisiana plantation, and Jemma needs to get out of Chicago, fast. It’s 1962 and the world is changing, but for the family on the plantation, things appear to be frozen in time, as the family is still stuck in the colorism that allows them to feel superior to the darker-skinned Jemma. Sandeen’s heroine soon learns that the family has summoned her for a very particular purpose: they are cursed, and they believe her to be the only one who can save them from future calamity. View the full article

I was never a fan of science fiction. I have a vivid imagination but with the exception of the original Star Trek, there’s something about stories set on different planets, or filled with aliens or with robot point-of-views that disconnects me from the story in a way in which I can’t recover. But I’ve discovered in the past few years that much like my coffee, I do enjoy science fiction in very specific ways. My latest novel An Intrigue Of Witches is a treasure hunt founded in a historical mystery with coded messages and puzzles to be solved. It combines my favorite genres: mystery, adventure, fantasy and science fiction. My favorite time travel tropes are ones grounded in reality, set in the near future and fueled by hard science – meaning the scifi elements have to be scientifically accurate and logical. I enjoy reading science fiction that is believable and almost doable with our contemporary understanding of science and level of technical advancement. But I also need my scifi to have a lot of heart. Poignancy. Be character-driven and based in family connections and interpersonal relationships. I suppose I need some sort of anchoring, if I’m to explore science fiction in a way that makes sense to me. I have probably watched more scifi TV and film than I have read books in the genre, but the few I have read share the same four elements: a government or military context—because let’s face it, if time travel is a thing, it’s highly probable that the military and or government will seek to control the technology. Secondly, based on the frequency in which we are advancing in technology, it will happen sooner than later. Thirdly, the scifi elements are based on technology that is already existing in the real world. And lastly, include a well-developed main character, who themselves are navigating significant relationships with their family and friends throughout the story. To that end, here are my three recommendations for time travel books suited to readers who don’t usually read science fiction. Version Control by Dexter Palmer This novel almost appears to not to be about time travel. Like it’s not a dark, looming shadow over the characters in the story. The main character, Rebecca is living her life, dealing with the minutiae of being an adult, while her husband, a scientist is hard at work on a device that is like a time machine but definitely not a mechanism for travel through time. The most important events are happening off the page, but they are impacting the lives of the characters in the most incalculable of ways. It’s a very nuanced, indirect look at time travel, and how it could impact lives. Here and Now and Then, by Michael Chen This story is about a regular Joe that readers can relate to. The main character, Kin Stewart lives in our world. He is a husband and father, works in IT and struggles to maintain a positive relationship with his daughter. The twist? Kin is a government time traveler from the future who was stranded in the past when one of his devices malfunctioned. With no way to return to 2142, he creates a life for himself in his past and our today. What could go wrong? A lot. Especially when a team member finally returns to bring him back to his world and a family he doesn’t remember. At its heart, this is a family drama, a story about hard choices and the impact time travel can have on every day people. The Rise And Fall Of Dodo by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland The main character in this book, Melisande Stokes, is an expert in linguistics and languages at Harvard. Her life is irretrievably changed when she randomly bumps into a military intelligence operator who asks her to translate some very old documents that may prove a long history of magic in the world, abruptly cut off in the mid-1800s. This mishmash of history, fantasy, science fiction, time travel and witches provides an intriguing look at how the government might try to fix history if they had access to both magic and time travel. *** View the full article

The Lavender Hill Mob, which was made in 1951, is a film of endless charm and joy. It is a caper, which is (in my opinion) the best genre. And it was made by Ealing Studios, an English production company that was formally established in 1929, though on a site that had been home to different filmmaking companies since 1902. From 1929 through the end of World War II, the studio was known for making both comedy films and war documentaries, but in 1947, it discovered a kind of narrative and stylistic niche, really sensibility, that would lead to the creation of its masterpieces and cemented it as a cornerstone of British cinema. The film that was made in 1947 was a comic, vaguely crimey adventure called Hue and Cry, a story about kids who find themselves on a great adventure in bombed-out postwar London. But the films that followed, especially three that came out in 1949—Alexander Mackendrick’s Whiskey Galore!, Henry Cornelius’s Passage to Pimlico, and Robert Hamer’s Kind Hears and Coronets—helped shape the tone of this niche, even further. Ealing Studios chiefly produced films that were invested in exploring Britishness; rather, exploring facets of British identity through exaggerations of associated themes, such as class, war trauma, and emotional repression. The Lavender Hill Mob is about that last thing. Directed by Charles Crichton, written by T.E.B. “Tibby” Clarke, one of Ealing’s best and most prolific writers (who won the Academy Award for his screenplay), it is the story of, in the words of scholar Terry Williams, “the repressed fantastic.” It is about two men, neighbors in the small Battersea London neighborhood of Lavender Hill, who become unlikely collaborators, compatriots, and friends by giving into their desires and pursuing a life of crime. Our hero is a mild-mannered bank transfer agent played by Alec Guinness (known best by younger generations for playing Obi Wan in the original Star Wars), and a frustrated artist played by Stanley Holloway (best known as playing Alfred Dolittle in My Fair Lady), who team up to commit an extraordinary heist. The Lavender Hill Mob is about finding an alternative to one’s own life and living that instead. Guinness (who would star in several Ealing films—the aforementioned Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Man in the White Suit, from 1952, and The Ladykillers from 1955) is our antihero Henry Holland. He has dutifully worked for the bank for two decades, facilitating the transfer of gold bullion from foundry to bank, every week. Holloway is Alfred Pendlebury, who dreams of being a sculptor but has to settle for carving stone in his off-hours; his day job is making lead souvenir statues. But it’s not long before Holland realizes that, if one wanted to smuggle stolen gold out of the country, all they’d have to do is melt and smelt it into figurines and ship them abroad. Holland knows that, even if he gets promoted, he’ll never ever make enough money to live a good life. Pendlebury knows he’ll never make it as an artist. So, the realization of an easy smuggling opportunity gives them both a new raison d’être. But they’re going to need help, so they pretend to be tough-guys and enlist the help of two criminals (Alfie Bass and Sidney James), forming a bank robbing gang for the ages. Both men are seeking, in different degrees of awareness, a reprieve from the repressive grind of their lives, of their world. Williams calls their desire “freedom from British stagnation and creative frustration.” He cites an example, a scene in which Holloway’s character does a mock interpretation of Richard the Third while making a bust, quoting , “Of all words of tongue and pen… The saddest are these… It might have been me… “Slave. I have set up my life as a cast.” This exemplifies how his anxieties about a lost and ignominious future are tired up in a visage of Britishness. It makes sense then, that a symbol of their long-elusive freedom winds up manifesting as the opposite of being British, which is to say, as looking quite French. This is to say, they plan that, after they manage to rob the gold from the bank (which is no simple feat, on its own), they’ll melt it into miniature Eiffel Tower figurines and load them on a boat to France. In doing so, they give themselves their first vacation, a rip-roaring sightseeing opportunity up and down France (horizontally as well as vertically… you’ll see what I mean). Holland and Pendlebury quickly become dear friends—thick as, shall we say, thieves. They embrace passionately several times. They laugh hysterically as they chase a mark down the Eiffel Tower staircase. They even rename themselves, with Pendlebury choosing the nickname “Al” and Holland choosing, of all things, “Dutch.” The surprise of this moniker suggests that perhaps Holland has had more dreams, fantasies, alter-egos inside him than his staid career path might suggest. Indeed, The Lavender Hill Mob is about finding an alternative to one’s own life and living that instead. It is also a love story; of loving oneself, one’s friends, and also one’s own life. There are many magical tidbits sprinkled through, including a tiny appearances of a young, pre-fame Audrey Hepburn, and a young, pre-fame Robert Shaw. And, doubly exciting for you Lucasfilm fans, the cinematography was done by Douglas Slocumbe, who was the director of photography on all three original Indiana Jones films. But there is great magic not just in these little funny details. The Lavender Hill Mob is in a way about finding the underside of magic in everything—work, friendship, even, of all things, crime. View the full article

Film and television have given us a number of unforgettable serial killers to haunt our nightmares. Sometimes, their origins and crimes are inspired by the stories of real criminals in our world. Other times, offenses and offenders are conjured up entirely from nightmare ether, tales of bogeymen creeping in the shadows. Often, these fictional murderers start out as human and became monsters. In other cases, they were never human to begin with. They were created in darkness and remain within it, horrifying us with their dark imaginations and shocking deeds. Here are some of my favorite serial killers from the big and little screens, with their complicated histories and compelling characters. Norman Bates – Psycho (1960) Based in large part on serial killer Ed Gein, Norman Bates haunts the hidden Bates Motel. In this trap of a place, he murders a young embezzler on the run. The disappearance of a private eye investigating the embezzlement leads to Bates being captured, where it’s revealed that Bates has been living too far in his dead mother’s shadow…and in her head. Aside from killing his mother and stepfather, he kills women who he finds attractive. In the case of the PI, Bates murdered him to cover up his previous grisly crimes. Bates is a deeply disturbed man who visits his dysfunction on hapless people who fall into his trap. Hannibal Lecter – The Silence of the Lambs (1991) We meet Hannibal Lecter behind bars in his most famous film depiction, learning that the elegant serial killer developed a taste for having his victims over for dinner and turning them into leftovers. His series of horrific crimes is probed by fledgling FBI agent Clarice Starling as she chases another killer. Lecter’s escape into the world leaves the audience cold with fear, wondering who will be on his menu next. Lecter’s victims are people who have committed the cardinal sin of being rude, with a smattering of instrumental killings to aid his escape. Dracula – Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) Perhaps the greatest serial killer of all time, Dracula sets sail to England. He kills as a means to survive, yes, but we have to think that he also enjoys it. This version of Dracula is partially a seductive gentleman who hides the ancient monster that lies beneath his genteel smile. Once can’t help how many hundreds of people he’s drained over the centuries. Maybe thousands? He’s a supernatural monster, and has been for centuries. Like the human killers on this list, he started out as human, though, twisted by the loss of love. Victor Tooms – The X-Files (1993, 1994) Appearing in two episodes of the X-Files, Victor Tooms is a mutant who has the creepy ability to squeeze into small spaces. He’s been around since the late nineteenth century, having ducked out of society occasionally to hibernate. He particularly enjoys liver, and often goes to great lengths to hide bodies. He seems to be an opportunistic killer, squishing himself into air ducts and pipes like a snake. When Mulder and Scully confront him, he’s potentially got dozens of kills under his belt and looking forward to more. The Joker – The Dark Knight (2008) Batman’s classic foe is imagined as a criminal mastermind, creating plots within plots to try and antagonize his nemesis. The Joker seems to kill for the thrills, yes, but many deaths are collateral damage to draw out Batman. His fascination for Batman is largely unexplained. But as Batman’s loyal butler observes: “Some people just want to watch the world burn.” In that sense, he is primarily an agent of pure chaos with no efforts made to conceal his murders. Rose the Hat – Dr. Sleep (2019) Always wearing her magic black hat, Rose leads a coven of psychic vampires who devour the “steam,” or life force, from magically-gifted children. In this sequel to The Shining, we learn that Rose’s people have lived a long, long time, devouring the innocent. Victims are carefully chosen, those who “shine.” But Rose may have met her match in the now-adult Danny Torrance and his young friend, Abra. One can’t hazard a guess about how many kills these ancient foes have amassed over the centuries, but the total might exceed Dracula’s. Patrick Bateman – American Psycho (2000) Bateman is a true psychopath, and one that the viewer loves to hate. He’s a Wall Street businessman who delights in killing as a power trip, choosing victims that he has social, financial, and physical power over. His grip on reality is tenuous, and we’re never certain which crimes he’s actually committed and which are all in his head. One thing’s certain, though…he blends in perfectly with his monstrous contemporaries by the end of the film. Dexter Morgan – Dexter (2006-2013) In contrast to Bateman, Dexter is the sort of serial killer one can sometimes root for. He starts off as a controlled killer, killing only people who have committed terrible wrongs—people like other serial killers who have evaded law enforcement. In his day job as a blood spatter analyst, he’s got a unique forensic viewpoint on how to get away with murder. And his father, a cop, taught him well. But Dexter’s moral code flags, and his personal life makes him vulnerable. By the end of the show, we’re left wondering what kind of monster he truly is. The Corinthian – Sandman (2022) The Corinthian is a rogue nightmare who doesn’t follow the rules. First created by Dream, he slipped into the waking world as an unauthorized entity, murdering young men and inspiring the murder of many others by humans who called themselves the Collectors. The Corinthian became a cult figure, an underground celebrity, until he’s ultimately confronted by Dream. The Corinthian was never human to begin with. Lacking eyes himself, he’s particularly fond of plucking out the eyes of his victims. He sees in the dark, and sees the awful impulses humanity has toward one another. These serial killers run the gamut from human to supernatural and everything in between. Each has a different take on the story of a monster, from ancient entities to ordinary people with axes to grind. In the world of fiction, a monster can be anyone. And that’s the scariest thing to contemplate in the real world. *** View the full article

There’s nothing I love more than sitting down with a queer mystery or thriller—obviously, as a writer of the genres myself! The twists, the turns, the “oh my god!” moments, there’s nothing like it. Add the riches of queer history, the complexity of queer identity, and the double-lives queer people often have to live and you’ve got a recipe for a killer thriller. Across YA and Adult, queer mystery and thriller are catching steam, throwing out convention and leaving us gasping at that final twist. Below are some of my favorites in both age categories, from the Dorian Gray inspired to the wilds of 1800’s smuggling rings. I hope you’ll pick up a few if you haven’t read them yet! SHE’S TOO PRETTY TO BURN by Wendy Heard: queer thriller inspired by Dorian Gray, has everything a Dorian Gray fan-girl like me could ask for. Entrenched in the rebel art scene, Heard’s morally gray and complex characters are as twisty as the plot itself. Arson, murder, and stalking abound in this rollercoaster of a book as Mick finds herself drawn into Veronica and Nico’s world. LAVENDER HOUSE by Lev C. Rosen: I’m a long-time fan of Rosen’s work in YA, but the Evander Mills series—of which LAVENDER HOUSE is the first—hooked me even deeper. Set in the 1950’s with a bit of a Knives Out-esque flavor, we explore the lives—and deaths—of the Lamontaine Estate, family and staff and the secrets that are keeping them safe—but also letting a killer get away with murder. AND DON’T LOOK BACK by Rebecca Barrow: Barrow is a must-buy for me. AND DON’T LOOK BACK dives into the life of Harlow and her complicated relationship with her mother. They’ve spent their entire life running—and when Harlow is forced to confront the past when an accident kills her mother, leaving behind a mysterious safety deposit box with clues to a life Harlow’s mother never told her about. This is what I would call a gut punch of a book. A thrill-ride that leaves you emotional, unsettled and hungry for more. A LINE IN THE DARK by Malinda Lo: While Lo is better known for her brilliant queer historicals, her earlier sci-fi and thrillers are a must for queer genre fans. A LINE IN THE DARK explores the complexity and intensity of female friendship and the lines between friend and crush. COME OUT COME OUT by Natalie C. Parker: I admit to being a bit of a tease for putting a book not out until August on this list, but I would be remiss to not include it. Mixing queer horror and mystery, Parker delves into heartbreak, family complexities, romance and a presence in the woods that does not intend to let our main characters go—or remember the truth. Parker is Queen of atmosphere and spookiness—she had me screaming by the end of chapter one! THE BEST BAD THINGS by Katrina Carrasco: Set in the 1800’s, this tale of a former Pinkerton detective Alma who is tasked with hunting down stolen opium by the mysterious Delphine, head of a smuggling ring and her new boss. Disguised as a man, Alma infiltrates a crime organization and wins their trust…but if they find out she’s a double-agent, all will be lost and she’ll be six feet in the ground. An evocative, atmospheric and propulsive read! *** View the full article

Jack Sterry sat astride the crossroads of history; at the right time and right place, he tried to shape the course of events by his actions. Sterry was part of an extraordinary group of men. Often referred to as Jessie Scouts, they were named after the wife of Major General John Charles Frémont, an explorer and a politician who was a US Senator from California and the first presidential candidate for the Republican Party in 1856. At the start of the Civil War, Frémont was a general officer in command of the Department of the West. Known as “the Pathfinder” for his pioneering missions that explored and mapped the West while fending off hostile Native Americans, Frémont organized the specialized group of operators at the beginning of the war in St. Louis and employed them in Missouri, which was embroiled in guerrilla fighting. His wife, Jessie Ann Benton Frémont, was the daughter of a US senator. The flaxen-haired beauty grew up at her father’s side, rubbing elbows with politicians and sharing his political views, including becoming an outspoken advocate against slavery. Brilliant, powerful, charismatic, and a tremendous advocate for her husband, one admiring journalist of the time dubbed Jessie not only a “historic woman but the greatest woman in America.” In many circles, it was known Jessie “was the better man of the two.” Reportedly, she first advised her husband’s Scouts to wear their enemies’ uniforms. “Jessie, who had been with her husband until lately, frequently saw these men and became very popular with them. Hence their present attachment to her. They swear by her and wear her initials on their coats, inserted in a very modest but coarse style.” In addition to embroidering her initials, they also adopted Jessie as their namesake. When John Charles Frémont moved east in the spring of 1862 to take command of the Mountain Department, located in southwest Virginia and what would become West Virginia, he brought men who understood rugged terrain and an enemy skilled in guerrilla fighting. The taming of the American West and conflict with Native Americans, including the adaptation of some of their fighting tactics, would have a profound impact on the foundations of American special operations and unconventional warfare. One contemporary stated that the Pathfinder “proceeded to follow his notion derived from experience in the Western frontier. He knew that the safety and efficiency of his army in a wild, wooded, and rugged region depended on the accuracy with which he received information of the plans and movements of the enemy. He at once called around him a set of Western frontiersmen, who had served all through the campaign in Missouri. Some had been in the border wars of Kansas; some served long years on the Plains, hunting the buffalo and the Indian; men accustomed to every form of hardship, thoroughly skilled, not only in the use of the rifle, but drilled in all cunning ways and devices to discover the intentions, position, and strength of a foe. The best of these men were selected and placed in a small organization called the Jessie Scouts.” One of the Jessie Scouts’ mentors, and an original member, was “Old Clayton, who had come with General Frémont from the West.” Old Clayton developed his survival skills while exploring the American West with Frémont and contending with hostile Native Americans. As chief scout and trainer of raw recruits, “he conceived a great fancy for ‘the boys’ and gave them a deal of advice and instruction.” Commonly known in camp as Clarence Clayton, but also Chatfield Hardaway, Old Clayton could not only give advice to colleagues but also serve up tactical acumen to their opponents. One such incident occurred in the fall of 1862. When scouting in a Confederate uniform in advance of a large Union cavalry force, he saw a lighted house on the side of the road. When he approached the dwelling, a Confederate picket challenged him. Clayton coolly responded that he was a friend. When Clayton bantered with the picket, the soldier revealed he was with a Confederate cavalry unit. Suddenly, nine men, including a Rebel officer, darted out of the house onto their saddles and confronted Clayton with their cocked revolvers. The Confederate officer demanded to know his identity. The wily scout informed the Confederate officer that he was a scout of Captain Duval’s Confederate Cavalry, and they were riding to reinforce a certain Confederate cavalry colonel. The Jessie Scout was told that the very officer he was going to reinforce was standing before him. “Captain Duval will be overjoyed to meet [you],” Clayton convincingly responded. According to a contemporary account, “At that moment the cavalry came down the road, and while the Colonel and his men were covering the scout,” Clayton called for the captain to come over and calmly introduced him to the Confederate colonel. The Union captain and his men surrounded the Southerners and “very coolly asked them for their arms.” Old Clayton then “apologized for practicing the ruse to save his life.” The Rebel colonel reportedly then “asked for a knothole to crawl into, remarking that he had been sold too cheap.” Members of the US Army, civilians, and later even a turncoat former Confederate cavalry trooper, the Scouts morphed into the enemy, taking on their uniforms, accents, and mannerisms: “He seems a Tennessean, a Georgian, an Irishman, a German—anything indeed but what he really is,” recalled one contemporary. To pass off as Confederates, the Jessie Scouts developed false backgrounds for men they impersonated and learned convincing cover stories to pass themselves off as the enemy. They began wearing white scarves knotted around their necks in a particular way in order to identify each other behind the lines. Jessie Scouts also developed a stilted coded conversation to identify friend from foe. Scout One: “Good morning.” Scout Two: “These are perilous times.” Scout One: “Yes, but we are looking for better.” Scout Two: “To what shall we look?” Scout One: “To the red and white cord.” They developed the exchange deliberately so that it could not be guessed. By the summer of 1862, the group numbered roughly two dozen men, including three Scouts recently captured and executed by Confederate troops. Considered spies for wearing the enemy’s uniform, they faced death if they fell into enemy hands. Their first commander, Captain Charles Carpenter, was initially a fitting leader for this handpicked group: “He was by no means a figure to be passed by. Fancy a poacher who is half brigand and wholly daredevil, and you catch a glimpse of his air. His high-topped velvet boots are drawn up over his wide velvet trousers. No vest is worn, and the expanse of a broad chest affords a fine field for the once snowy shirt-bosom of Parisian pretensions and fine material.” Dark haired, blue eyed, five feet six, and “sinewy and ready for a fight, fun, or frolic, [Carpenter] mingled his dash and boldness with remarkable prudence and caution.” Armed with a Colt and a breechloading rifle for distance shooting, Carpenter bragged he was a crack shot at more than a quarter of a mile. Trappings and appearance aside, at his core, Carpenter ardently hated slavery and told one reporter a tall tale that he was a member of John Brown’s party that attacked the Harpers Ferry arsenal in 1859 “by crawling through a long culvert, or covered drain, which led from the famous engine-house to the river. The Captain does not love the slave lords,” the journalist wrote after interviewing Carpenter. When not adorned in velvet and gold chains, daredevil and gloryhound Carpenter had sneaked into Confederate Fort Donelson in Tennessee in early February 1862 wearing a Confederate uniform, masquerading as an enemy officer: “I went into Fort Henry two days before the attack on it and brought General Grant an accurate account of the position and number of the Rebel forces and defenses,” he later recalled to a journalist. “I have General Grant’s letter certifying to that. Also, I went into Fort Donelson, while our troops lay at Fort Henry. I went in there in Confederate uniform; and I have General McClernand’s letter to show that I brought him information that proved to be accurate. On my way out a cavalry force passed me, while I lay by the roadside; and its commander told one of his men to leave a fine flag, which he feared would be torn on the way. The flag was stuck into the road, that a returning rebel picket might carry it in. But I got it, wrapped it around my body, and rode into Fort Henry with it.” Carpenter’s information gleaned while posing as a Confederate no doubt had a role in the battle for Fort Donelson waged between February 11 and 16, 1862. The capture of the fort opened the Cumberland River as a route of invasion into the South. Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant forced General Simon Bolivar Buckner to accept terms of unconditional surrender, earning Grant the immortal nickname “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. A master of disguise, Carpenter once wore a woman’s dress to execute a clandestine mission: “Once [I] Rode down to the Rebel pickets at Wilson Creek, dressed as a woman to deliver a letter . . . and this trip was made because ‘the General’ wanted to know precisely the position of part of the Rebel lines.” Not so lucky, other members of Carpenter’s command were sometimes captured by Union forces. One Jessie Scout was initially arrested for being an enemy spy, “James Alexander, who was arrested in the uniform of a [Confederate] Captain of Cavalry, was released yesterday. Finding him to be one of the Jessie Scouts, as he reported.” Ingenuity was a hallmark of the Scouts, who often had to perilously improvise on the job. They were selected for their aplomb, audacity, valor, and intelligence, “special faculties born in some few men,” wrote one contemporary author. ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Unvanquished © 2024 by Patrick K. O’Donnell. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved. Featured image: Captain William J. Lawton, one of the Jessie Scouts View the full article

If the world is flat like the Internet says, then this is the edge. The mountains on either side of the Cajon Pass are crumbled and cracked ruins slumping under a starless sky. It looks like where the earth runs out, the place before no place. Not that Luke really believes the earth is flat. But just now it seems like one of those online ideas – like the one about how the government and corporations are run by lizards only playing at being people – that’s true enough to make a point. Luke is nineteen, tall in a way nobody ever seems to notice, everything about him drawn thin like he’s been stretched on a rack. His hair is getting long, odd bits sticking out all over. He’s got the eyes of someone outnumbered, even when he is alone – maybe then most of all. He’s driven for sixteen hours now, that long slow fall from Colorado to California, stopping only to piss or buy food. He drives slumped forward so that he steers with his forearms resting on the wheel, so tired that ghost rabbits dance at the corners of his eyes. His stomach burns, his gut flora roiling in open rebellion. He figures they’ve earned the right. He’s been firebombing them all day with energy drinks and bags of flamin’ hot extruded whatever. Or maybe it’s something else that’s riled them. Something that’s been bubbling in him since he passed into California for the first time in twelve years. Something thick and black that tastes like root beer. He is coming home. His head snaps up, a trance breaking. How long had it been since he’d thought about the road? Weird how the body can drive without you, how there is a stranger in your brain that keeps you from drifting across the center line while you are somewhere else. He cracks the window to let the cold air slap him awake. In his memories of this place – the ones he lets himself have – the Inland Empire is a place of unending heat. He forgot how cold the nights can be, how sometimes the desert holds no ghost of the heat that rules it during the day. The music he’s streaming feels wrong now. Skittering mumble rap he got into at school, echoing weirdness that sounded right in his cave of an apartment in Colorado Springs. Here on the edge of the world it sounds tinny and bad. He pokes at his phone to shut it off. He drives in silence. His teeth harvest the skin off his lips in thin strands. His hands drum against the wheel. He jabs the radio button. A blast of static. He jabs again, his radio scanning to find a station. A man bellows – Low cost insurance even if you have a DUI – an air-horn choir behind him. It is demonic as fuck. But better than the silence. Luke’s phone tells him the turn-off is coming. He checks behind him to switch lanes, catches a rear-view glimpse of the back seat crammed with everything he owns. His clothes piled in a hamper, his skateboard. The box with his single pot and his single pan, the plastic spoon and spatula. His box of books, his Algebra 101 textbook poking out of the top. Looking at the math book fills him with hot shame. Maybe that’s why he brought it, gave it this place of honor in the rear-view mirror. To remind him how he wound up here, the only place he has left to run to, the last place in the world he belongs. The exit to Devore looms ahead. The pulse in his neck thumps turn-back turn-back turn-back. Turn back where? To his apartment in Colorado Springs that he fled owing two months’ rent? To his mother’s people who had passed him around like a serving dish from the time he was seven until exactly the day of his eighteenth birthday? Again he has that feeling like he’s standing with his toes poking over the edge of this flat earth. He thinks on something he read in a novel in Intro to World Lit, before he quit going to class altogether. About how when you peek over the side of a cliff and get that swooshing feeling in your belly, that it isn’t a fear of falling. In fact, the book said, it is the opposite. Vertigo is the fight in your mind between the part that wants to save you and the part that wants to fall. The exit lanes slopes down from the highway. He takes it down into the dark. __________________________________ Excerpt continues after cover reveal. The Last King of California (Mulholland Books, November 2024) __________________________________ His only memories of this place are a child’s, so that it feels both familiar and strange at the same time. Like the rooms in a dream. Luke’s wheels spit gravel as he leaves the paved road and heads up into the hills. Rock walls dotted with grease-wood and mummified monkeyflowers rise up on either side. He looks down at his phone. Here in the crevices there is no signal. Something inside tells him when to turn. He drives in submarine dark for three football fields before he sees the lights. Home. At least it was once. The sheet-metal gate that dead-ends the gravel road is pulled shut. Past the gate, up the hill, Luke can see the house with its broad front porch. He remembers a swinging loveseat. Now there’s only a row of fold-out camping chairs, the kind that look woven out of seat belts. A couple of big trucks sit in the gravel in front of the house. Lights burn behind the curtains of the front windows. Behind the house the box canyon stretches, and in the half-moon light he can see shadows of junkers and brush piles, and something new, something like a second house against the far back wall of the canyon. Luke knows there’s no nerves in the meat of the brain, so this feeling of a thumb pressed deep into the center of his head is just bullshit. But he feels it anyway – the pressure that is almost always there, juicing his adrenal gland. You cannot smell adrenaline, but Luke’s sure it smells like root beer. Luke stops his car and climbs out to lift the hitch and open the gate. He’s too tired to lift his feet clear. They shush through the gravel as he walks to the latch. ‘Hey now,’ a voice says in the dark. Luke freezes, his hand inches from the latch. He has this feeling like being dunked in cold water. This scuzzy kid comes out of the dark. The kid, old enough to drive but not much more, is a head-and-a-half shorter than Luke, but stocky. His dark hair hangs greasy down to his shoulders; he has a sad teenage mustache. He wears a heavy metal T-shirt under a jean jacket with the sleeves hacked off. He carries something long in his hands. The pit bull that runs ahead of him is the color of a bad day. Her ears are combat-clipped into tiny triangles and her muzzle carries old scars, but when she pokes her head between the wide slats of the gate her tongue lolls out of a friendly idiot grin. The kid follows behind. When he steps into the slashes of headlight Luke sees the thing in his hands is a rifle. ‘You’re in the wrong place.’ No shit, Luke almost says. ‘I’m Luke.’ He tries to say it strong and clear, but it gets caught up in his throat and comes out a rasp. ‘You’re what now?’ The kid is not pointing the rifle at Luke, but he holds it at the ready. Luke can’t meet the kid’s eyes so he studies his shirt, the words ‘POWER TRIP’ written in electric letters, a skeleton king underneath the logo. ‘I’m Luke,’ he says again, better this time. ‘They know I’m coming. Del’s my uncle.’ The kid spits into the dark. ‘You’re Luke Crosswhite?’ Luke almost reaches for his wallet, like he’s going to show this kid ID to prove it. He catches himself, thinks about how lame that would be. He nods instead and mumbles some sort of yes. The kid works his jaw like he’s thinking of spitting again but can’t wrangle the sputum to pull it off. ‘Kathy said you was en route. I thought it was like next week is all. You’re a college kid, right?’ ‘I was.’ He doesn’t say, Before I blew it all up. The kid scratches himself under the chin with the barrel of the rifle, as if thinking on casual suicide. He looks Luke over, like he’s trying to make sense of how this skinny kid with scared eyes could be the seed of Big Bobby Crosswhite. ‘You even know what goes on down here?’ he asks. ‘Yeah.’ The kid laughs like the hell you do. ‘So you’re coming to join the Combine then?’ the kid asks, but Luke’s pretty sure he’s fucking with him, that even in the dark this kid must be able to see from the sweat on Luke’s forehead and the pulse of his neck that Luke has no place in his family’s business, no matter who his dad is. ‘I just need a place to crash, get my head above water, you know?’ The kid blows across the rifle’s muzzle, drawing out a low sad tone. ‘Well, they got a place laid out for you. Hell, it’s your dad’s land anyway, right?’ Luke can almost see the thoughts splash across the kid’s face next as he has them one by one: But your dad’s not here – ten years left on his sentence at least – oh shit oh shit— ‘Oh shit,’ the kid says. ‘You were there. At Arrowhead.’ Luke’s face must do something. The kid whistles low like goddamn. Luke worries he’s going to want to talk about it, maybe ask questions that Luke can’t handle. But instead the kid moves forward and reaches for the gate latch. ‘I’m Sam,’ he says. The pit bull goes through the gap in the gate as soon as it’s wide enough to fit her. She hits Luke with her body, that way dogs do like they love you so much they want to mix their atoms together with yours. Luke kneels down to take her hungry affection and give some back. Sam comes through the gate behind her. ‘That’s Manson. She’s a stone killer. Only thing is she doesn’t know it.’ Luke rises, looks towards the light spilling from the house. In the windows, shapes from inside project against the closed curtains. Men standing close to the light so their shadows fill the windows, making them giants, the way they’d always seemed to Luke back when he had lived here and the house was often filled with the huge roaring men of the Devore Combine. ‘Del and them’s talking with this dude Pinkle from out in the desert,’ Sam says, talking low, his eyes gleaming like he’s sharing juicy gossip. ‘Some shit went down out in Hangtree, I think. I think maybe somebody got got.’ A dark thrill runs through Luke at those words, and he thinks about asking more, to find out what really goes on down here. But a wave of panic washes through him at the thought, and he studies the gravel until the moment passes. ‘It’s black hearts only, so they got me on lookout.’ Sam touches his shirt over his heart. ‘I’m due mine soon, for real.’ Black hearts kick up memories of black-ink hearts tattooed over real ones, men laughing and lifting Luke into the air, the taste of ice and root beer. Luke swallows the memories before they swallow him first. He thinks, Please don’t let it happen here. ‘So, should I wait?’ Luke asks. ‘I’ve been driving since dawn, mountain time. I just want to crash.’ ‘Don’t think you’re meant to stay in the big house. Kathy fixed up the trailer out back for you.’ Sam nods to the shape back against the canyon wall. Luke wants to say But my bedroom is there, but he knows it would come out weird and childish. Something about this feels right anyway, that he wouldn’t be let inside. He just nods again. ‘I’ll let them know what’s up when the meeting’s done,’ Sam says. ‘There’s room to park right next to the trailer.’ ‘Thanks.’ The kid touches his shirt over his heart again. ‘Blood is love.’ Somebody says Hey Bobby what’s up Bobby blood is love Bobby in Luke’s head. He’s worried that if he stays out here much longer he’s going to say something strange. So he mumbles some sort of seeya and climbs back into his car. Luke drives up onto the property. As he passes he looks behind him to the back of the house, at the back right corner, the window of his childhood bedroom where he thought he’d be sleeping tonight. The window is dark. He drives through the skeletons of old cars, junk, shadowy and unidentifiable on either side of the gravel. He parks next to the trailer that is his home now. It is covered in brown siding, lifted off the ground with cinderblocks, spear grass growing tall around it. He kills the engine. The dash lights glow for a while. Then they go out. He sits in the darkness and tries to make sense of his insides. Other folk seem to know right away what it is that they’re feeling, have words for it and everything. Luke hardly ever knows how to name the things that swim so huge inside him. He doesn’t know if he is smart or dumb, happy or sad. He doesn’t know what he’s doing or where he is going. All he knows for sure is that he does not belong here. That he is his father’s child but not his son. He watches in the rear-view as Sam pushes shut the gate. It’s like he can hear it shut from here. But of course he can’t. He lets himself into the trailer, bringing in just his backpack and a half-drunk bottle of water. He doesn’t turn on the lights. In the dim he sees the hotplate kitchen, the bathroom with its toilet and shower in the same stall, before falling onto the bed. Sleep comes fast for once. He wakes to the sound of meat and bone colliding. __________________________________ Excerpted from the book THE LAST KING OF CALIFORNIA by Jordan Harper. Copyright © 2024 by Jordan Harper. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved. View the full article

In the summer of 1995, I was living in a country at war. Where I kept my billet, in the westernmost province of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the worst atrocities had been committed two years before my arrival. Nevertheless, it was amid the blast craters and bullet holes of Mostar, a demolished city that now lay under a psycho-terror siege of random mortar launches and sporadic sniper shots, that I began to recognize “the problem of evil” as an obstacle to religious faith. The tales of horror I heard in Mostar were moral quicksand. I kept my head above the horror by floating the surface of it in a cracked shell of professionalism, refusing either to believe or disbelieve the story of those Catholic nuns who claimed to have been captured by a unit of so-called četniks, gang-raped until each was pregnant, then given a choice between abortion, suicide, and bearing a Serb bastard. For me, it was enough to dip my toes in the citywide seep of sadness that lingered after the very public deaths of a young Muslim mother and her two children, blown apart by a direct missile strike as they attempted to flee down the Neretva River in a rubber raft. I could deflect everything except the expressions of the orphans on street corners. Seven and eight years old, they stood smoking cigarettes and flipping off passersby with a stony insolence that you couldn’t have wiped off their faces with an assault rifle. Looking into their agate eyes, I knew it was too late for us all. Picking a path through the gigantic pile of scorched rubble that had once been Mostar’s city center, a place where two years earlier Catholic and Muslim survivors of the Serbian bombardment had fought each other with artillery at close range, I asked myself, as so many had before me, “How can a God who is all-knowing, allpowerful, and all-good abide such depravity?” And what about justice? Maybe God wasn’t who I thought he was. Maybe God wasn’t, period. It didn’t help my sleep that the most impressive people I met that summer made a point of telling me that the Devil, at least, was real. The first to speak these words was Mirjana Soldo, a religious visionary in Medjugorje, the Bosnian Croat “peace center” twelve miles from Mostar. There, a rapturous cult of devotion had formed around apparitions of the Virgin Mary that were already the most controversial and closely observed purported supernatural phenomena to appear on earth in at least a half century. As Mirjana urged me to recognize the Devil as an actual being who was determined to steal my soul, her pale blue eyes seemed to darken, and her expression became a discomfiting combination of pity and reproach. My sense was that she felt obliged to give me a warning she knew I wouldn’t heed. Rita Klaus was more successful in suspending my disbelief. A large, handsome, white-haired woman from Pittsburgh, Klaus was famous for her spontaneous healing from an advanced case of multiple sclerosis, the most celebrated and thoroughly documented of the many medical miracles associated with Medjugorje. Klaus had seemed to appear out of nowhere one afternoon in the village’s parish office. She sat down across from me, leaned over the table, laid a hand on mine, and introduced herself with these words: “Satan exists.” I felt as if I had been shot with some drug that causes a temporary paralysis. Klaus seemed to wait until the effect was complete before continuing: “The evil inside you comes from temptation. You have to make a decision, either for the good or for the bad. So the evil is inside us, as you believe, but it’s also out there, and believe me, it is very real and very pervasive.” Klaus then told me the story of a diabolic attack on her family that had begun when one of her daughters began to experiment with a Ouija board. The part that disturbed me most at the time, and that would haunt me later, involved a series of attacks on Klaus and her family by something that took the form of a large black dog with red eyes. “I don’t want to scare you, but I think you need to hear my story,” Klaus told me at one point. The emphasis she put on the word “need” troubled me. The person I admired more than anyone I met in Medjugorje was a Franciscan priest named Slavko Barbarić, spiritual adviser to Mirjana and the other visionaries. Shortly after my meeting with Rita Klaus, Father Slavko attempted to breach my skepticism with a phenomenological report. Slavko was, among other things, an intellectual whose multiple PhDs included one in psychology. He lowered my guard by admitting straight out his own reluctance to believe in supernatural evil, then described the series of events that had changed his mind. One experience that made a deep impression involved his participation in the exorcism of a woman who was able to distinguish consecrated hosts from those that had not been consecrated. He and the other priests participating in the exorcism each had left the room on multiple occasions, Slavko recalled, only to return a few minutes later with either a wafer that had been consecrated or one that had not yet been blessed. The woman who lay on the bed never reacted once when they came into the room with an unconsecrated host, Slavko told me, but went into paroxysms of writhing and cursing whenever a consecrated host came near her. “What in her could possibly have known the difference?” Slavko asked. In reply, I simply shook my head. I was to witness an exorcism myself only a few days later. I’ve attempted to deconstruct that experience many times in the years since, mainly in the hope that I would be able to put it out of my mind. Those I’ve spoken to about it always make reference to the “altered state” I was in at the time. I don’t deny this. That night and the days leading up to it were almost unbearable in their intensity. The Youth Festival Mass in which the exorcism occurred was the most fervid and enthralling religious service I’ve ever experienced. The thousand or so young adults who made their way to Medjugorje from all over the world had braved warnings from the United Nations and the European Union that the situation was especially unstable at the moment and that travel to the former Yugoslavia was “strongly discouraged.” The Croats were mobilizing for a final push against the Serbs, and the climax of the war was upon us. A sense that the armies of light were rallying against the forces of darkness imbued that evening’s mass from the moment it began. Father Slavko was as I’d never seen him before, ferocious in his ardor, swinging an enormous gilded monstrance and the consecrated host within like a holy weapon as he stormed through the crowd. Each time Slavko turned the monstrance in a new direction, repeating the words “Body of Christ,” I heard an eruption of bone-chilling noises from out of the crowd, shrieks of agony and gasps of terror, animal howls and loud, throaty curses. There were several raspy barks of “Fuck you!” The choir on the stage behind Slavko only sang louder, faces aglow with the conviction of imminent victory. As Slavko approached, his expression frightened me; the gaunt priest’s reliably warm gaze was replaced by a piercing glare. He pointed the monstrance directly at me and in a booming voice shouted, “Jesus!” It was as close as I’ve ever come to keeling over in a dead faint. The roars of rage and cries of pain seemed to be swelling around me. A young woman standing perhaps twenty feet to my left began to produce a noise unlike any I’d ever heard, a cough so dry and deep that it sounded as if she was trying to bring up a lung. It went on and on, like an echo that did not fade but rather amplified. She bent over, then shuddered uncontrollably, a white foam issuing from her mouth in a copious stream. She dropped to the ground, kicking and writhing, and began to scream obscenities. I heard “Fuck you, Jesus,” in very clear English, but also curses—or what I assumed were curses—in a variety of languages I did not recognize. The girl’s voice became impossibly deep and guttural, and the white lather continued to pour from her mouth. A crowd of people gathered around, reciting the exorcism prayer of Pope Leo XIII. At one point, the girl on the ground seemed to go still and silent, but then her screams started up again, louder than ever, gruesomely desperate. At the moment of what I could sense as a climax, she arched her back into a position that not even a world-class gymnast could have held, impossibly extended, with her weight resting entirely on her heels and the crown of her head, and let forth a hoarse, croaking expulsion of breath that must have emptied her lungs utterly. It was the smell, though, that shocked me, a ghastly stench that was like the exponential product of rotted flesh. In that moment I became utterly convinced that something was leaving her, that what I had just witnessed was not emotional or psychological or imaginary but real, whatever that meant. I remember very little of what happened next, just blurred images of the girl being helped to her feet and led away, of Slavko finishing the mass, of the shining faces of the choir as they sang. I have no idea how I made it back to the Pansion Maja, into my room, and out onto the tiny balcony where I awoke at dawn, sprawled on the concrete floor, shivering with cold and happy in a way that was completely unfamiliar. Two days later I was in Rome, on my way home. It was mid-August, and to escape the suffocating heat I sought the cooling mists of the Fountain of the Four Rivers on the Piazza Navona. I was leaning against the back of a bench when I noticed an elegantly dressed man walking through a sea of tourists, T-shirt vendors, and street performers that seemed to part before him. He wore a beautifully cut blue blazer with cream linen trousers, a bright yellow cravat, and sharp-toed loafers polished to a high gloss. “Quite the gent,” I thought, then drew a quick breath when I saw the man’s face. His aquiline features were formed into the strangest expression I’d ever seen, a sort of malevolent drollery that did not entirely mask the suffocating rage beneath it. Though all by himself, the man began to speak in a loud voice as he drew near me, in a language that was not Italian. Heart pounding, I glanced at the tourists nearby, baffled by their lack of a reaction. Not one of them seemed to have noticed this jarring oddity moving among them. It was as if, somehow, the silver-haired man and I had been isolated from the scene surrounding us. Suddenly, he let loose with a mad cackle and turned his head slightly to fix me with one eye. In that moment, I felt absolutely certain he wasn’t human. I knew it. An unearthly calm came over me almost immediately. Why I can’t say, but I reached inside my shirt to grasp the scapular medal I had taken to wearing that summer, stared back at him, and whispered, “You can’t touch me.” He responded with an obscene leer. I understood exactly what he said then: “I’ll catch you later.” After returning home, I spoke to no one about the . . . creature I had encountered on the Piazza Navona. In time, the indelibility of that summer began to fade. Within a couple of years, the only thing I understood better than before was how much of memory is conviction. And by then, the practical advantages all seemed to be on the side of doubt. To claim that I had encountered a diabolical entity on the Piazza Navona made me sound either crazy or foolish—even to myself. It wasn’t good for business. I was aided immeasurably in my will to forget by the television broadcast of a “live exorcism” on a network news magazine. The contrived staging and cornball theatrics of this TV event served only to highlight the abject need for an audience that drove not only the show’s producers but also the grandiose exorcist and his dim-witted subject. There wasn’t enough self-awareness in the thing to raise it even to the level of farce. I thought, “What if my own state of mind is the main difference between what I witnessed in Bosnia and what I’m seeing now?” Even to allow this as a possibility undermined my recollection of that night in Medjugorje. And because my numinous moments from the summer of 1995 were never repeated, it became easier and easier to tell myself that the extraordinary stresses and sympathies I experienced in Bosnia had induced bizarre perceptions of what were probably half-imagined shadows of a truth beyond my understanding. Or some such shit. While I didn’t really believe this new version of my story, I didn’t really believe the story I had come home with, either. It soon seemed both possible and preferable to shroud my memories in a haze of ambiguity. My four-year-old son chased me out of that cloud. Gabriel got into bed next to me one morning, then whispered in my ear that something terrifying had happened to him during the night. A big black dog with red eyes, he said, came into his room and bit his baby blanket, the silk-banded square of blue flannel he had slept with since birth. My little boy was shaking as he spoke these words. When I hugged him close and tried to tell him that sometimes our dreams seem so real to us that we think they actually happened, he went quiet for a few moments, then told me plaintively that it wasn’t a dream, that he knew it wasn’t a dream, that it was real. When I tried again to talk about how affected a child can be by the things he imagines seeing in the night, Gabe became angry and demanded to know why I was trying to make him think he didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. “The dog was real, even if it wasn’t a real dog,” he told me. I let it go then, though the subject continued to come up from time to time, always when my son raised it. He seemed to have a need to talk about it. I tried several other times to suggest that what he had experienced was a very vivid, powerful dream, but this inevitably infuriated him. When he was five, he saw a psychologist who told him about the night terrors that younger children often experience, and how these take place in a zone between waking and sleeping. Gabe seemed to find some comfort in this notion, but within the year he again brought up the black dog that had bit his baby blanket when he was four and insisted once more that what had happened was real, not a dream or even a night terror. I was ready for him this time, and answered with the suggestion that I might have told his mom a story I heard from a woman I met in Bosnia about a black dog with red eyes that had terrorized her family. He might have overheard this story when he was very young, I went on, and later somehow half-dreamed and half-imagined a similar experience. “So now you think I’m crazy?” he asked. No, no, no, I assured him: all our heads are full not only of thoughts we know about, what we call the conscious mind, but also of thoughts we don’t know about, what we call the unconscious mind, and when those two mix, we can have experiences that seem completely real to us but not to anyone else. “So you’re saying that it wasn’t really real,” my son accused. I didn’t know what I was saying and shook my head in confused frustration. “It happened,” Gabe told me. “I know it happened.” He gave me a measuring look that I’d never seen from him before. I knew it was a big moment for us both. “You believe me, don’t you, Dad?” my son asked finally. I stared into his eyes for some time before answering, “I believe you.” That was the last time we ever talked about it. It was also, for me I think, the beginning of this book. ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Devil’s Best Trick by Randall Sullivan. Copyright © 2024. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved. View the full article

At seventeen thousand feet and halfway from India to China, pilot Joseph Dechene had lost both his aircraft’s engines to ice. His lumbering cargo plane was now a glider. With white, ice-laden clouds pressed tight against the glass of its windows, the cockpit was like the inside of a bathysphere, a contraption of glass and metal churning in an abyss. The violence of the winds aloft had blown the plane so far off course that the pilots and radio operator had no idea where they were, knowing only that the peaks of high mountains were somewhere close below. Shining a light through the cockpit window, they could see ice building on the wings, but as they did, a lurch of turbulence, the worst the experienced senior pilot had ever encountered, heaved the plane upward “like an express train,” as he reported. “We came busting out the top of the thunderhead at 20,000 feet with twenty-four tons of airplane and no engine.” Above the clouds, he got the engines running again and so, eventually, safely concluded another trip over the Hump. “The Hump” was the name that U.S. airmen had given to one the most perilous aviation missions of WW2: flying transport planes overloaded with gasoline, materiel and other supplies from India to China in the little known China-Burma-India (CBI) theater. The Japanese capture of Burma (now Myanmar) in April 1942, had closed the Burma Road, the last effective land route into China, whose ports were already in Japanese hands. President Roosevelt had pledged that no “matter what . . . ways will be found to deliver airplanes and munitions of war to the armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek,” and with the closure of the Burma Road the only remaining way was by air. Unfortunately for the U.S. airmen tasked to the fly the untested transport aircraft, the route from northeast India to Kunming, China passed through a unique convergence of deadly weather systems—and over the foothills of the Himalayas. As the expected accidents piled up, airmen spoke darkly of “the aluminum trail” of wreckage that lay scattered across mountainsides and deep jungle beneath their path. “Below us was jungle,” recalled pilot Don Downie of his departures from his air base in Assam, India. “Personally I would sweat out this part of the trip even more than over the actual mountains. At least if you hit a hill, you had no struggle to get out.” By ‘getting out’ he meant surviving a crash or bail-out in the jungle and having to try to walk out. The first such bail-out had occurred on November 18, 1942, on a return flight from Yunnan-yi, an air field 130 miles west of Kunming, to Assam. “The airplane ran into a very severe storm,” recalled radio-operator Matt Campanella. “[I]t was completely engulfed with fog plus heavy icing conditions” and the plane was soon lost. “The pilot, his face ashen bluish-gray from lack of oxygen and strain, ordered the co-pilot and myself to bail out.” As the plane lurched and slipped, losing altitude, the two men hurriedly put on their parachutes. They were at about 16,000 feet. Campanella grabbed his .45, a flashlight, and a unit of “K” rations and canteen, while the co-pilot, Lt. Cecil Williams, radioed that by order of the pilot, they were bailing-out. At the rear of the plane, the men fumbled with the doors, fighting to get one open, then stood in the gaping space. White-out conditions completely obscured whatever lay below, whether mountain peaks or the jungle. “I asked, “Who’s going first? The Lt. answered, “We’ll jump together.” We interlocked arms. The Lt. looked back at me and asked, “All set?” “Set, I replied.” As the men jumped, Campanella was instantly knocked out, perhaps by striking the door or even the tail of the plane, briefly gained consciousness, then blacked out again. He came to his senses on top of a tree some seventy-five feet above the ground with no memory of having opened his parachute. From the darkness, Lt. Williams was calling to him and the men realized they were in the same tree. As Campanella unbuckled his ‘chute, he fell to the ground, where his landing was cushioned by underbrush and vines. Lt. Williams climbed down, a painfully slow process in the darkness, taking hours. By midnight both men were on the ground together, unharmed. Over the next twelve days the airmen wandered in the forest. By the fourth day they had exhausted their rations. Coming upon a stream, they followed its course until it became a river bounded by towering cliffs, and they swam across. Both men had lost their shoes and were now barefoot and hobbled along on makeshift crutches until, one day, as Campanella reported, “we fell to our knees and prayed God that this day we might see people and civilization of some sort.” That afternoon two native men appeared in the forest, and after an exchange of sign languages led the lost Americans to their village, a tiny compound composed of four bamboo huts inhabited by some forty souls. “They appeared to be of a mixed Chinese-Indian type,” Campanella reported. “They seemed to speak a Hindustani dialect.” Hospitably received and generously fed, the airmen recovered. On their third day in the village, runners bearing notes written by the airmen were dispatched to they knew not where; and on the eighth day the soundof a low-flying plane was heard overhead. Shortly after the pilot walked in to report he had made a precarious landing in a small buffalo pasture just beyond the village, but for the return flight it would necessary to clear a longer runway for take-off. The plane, a little PT-17 biplane used as a trainer, was so tiny it could not carry both men on one trip. Safely back at their air base the rescued men learned that the village runner had brought their message to Fort Hertz, a remote British outpost in the far north of Burma that—by air—was only some sixty-five miles away from where they had fallen from the sky. The men also learned that it was now December 10, and that they had been lost for 23 days and their names inscribed on the memorial list posted on their squadron bulletin board. By the end of the war the U.S. Air Forces’ Air Transport Command had ferried an estimated 700,000 tons over the Hump. Officially, 594 transport planes were lost in the airlift, a figure that is almost certainly incomplete given the less than rigorous record-keeping: for one thing, very few reports were filed for aircraft lost before June 1943. Estimates of crew killed or missing range from 1,659 to 3861, and an astonishing 1,200 are estimated to have survived bail-outs over the mountains and jungle. The aims of the deadly air mission had been twofold: to support Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces combat the Japanese and so prevent the “collapse” of China, and to ensure Roosevelt’s dream of a warm alliance between the U.S. and—as it was presumed—Nationalist China after the war. At war’s end many airmen questioned these objectives. Pilot James Segel probably spoke for many when he pointed out that even if China had collapsed and gone over to the Japanese, “China alone was a major headache to control, as there were many regional warlords with private armies, who were experienced in fighting guerilla wars. They could keep the Japanese military very busy.” His conclusion was that “[o]nce started, the CBI campaign was taken for granted as an essential military operation.” Today modern advances have left the aviation epic behind. Military transports now carry payloads of 85 tons, against the Hump’s ‘giant’ C-54 aircraft’s typical six-ton payload, while the payload of the Soviet Antonov An-225 Mriya is an astounding 253 tons. All the elemental features that made the Hump route so formidable are indeed unchanged—the monsoon and winds from Asia still slam against the Himalayas—but aircraft today simply fly above them. ___________________________________ From SKIES OF THUNDER by CAROLINE ALEXANDER, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2024 by Caroline Alexander View the full article

Latin American crime rates are triple the world average and centuries of art can be found throughout the region, often unprotected or with minimal security. Crimes related to high value art and antiquities often involve cunning schemes and intriguing news reports. The abundance of pre-Columbian sites potentially well-stocked with artifacts make them a rich target for looters. In the novel Five Days in Bogotá, fictional looters offer Ally an abundance of artifacts from sites in Northern Colombia. The absence or lack effective on-site security allows easy plundering. Governments and anthropologists are discovering sites with digital tools like drones with Lidar. Dealers in illegal artifacts also use these tools to explore remote areas with difficult access. Networks of looters and their sponsors have created a criminal web where artifacts disappear into private hands for resell to collectors or legitimate buyers like museums who can authenticate these objects but not their provenance. I visited a collector in Lima whose collection covered the walls and ceilings of his home and spread to a walk-in vault installed in a back building. The collection included colonial paintings from the 1600-1700s, a solid silver altar from a Catholic church, a necklace made of twenty real-sized gold peanuts from the Tombs of Sipan discovered in 1988 and much more. The collector claimed it was legal to pay site looters if the objects did not leave Peru. This astonishing accumulation had to involve more than a Peruvian who loved his country’s cultural history. Colonial-era objects are vulnerable for similar reasons. Isolated churches and monasteries abandoned or little used for centuries become easy targets. In 2000, the San Diego Museum of Art purchased Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (1728) from a Mexican dealer for $45,000. When museum curators discovered a listing identifying the painting that had been cut from its frame and stolen from a remote church in the state of Hidalgo, they returned it to the Mexican government for an investigation. Approximately 600,000 works in Mexico alone have been registered which allows experts to determine ownership, but just as many or more are not listed for Mexico alone. Imagine the art treasure trove in Latin America. The forgery market in Latin America began in Mexico in the 1800s when pre-Columbian objects were purchased by American and European museums anxious to have encyclopedic collections from exotic places including the Americas. Acquisition specialists had little scholarly research to authenticate objects. Today many fakes can be found in important museum collections. They are more easily spotted when compared to works that came directly from legitimate archeological digs. Looters will take broken pieces of little value and form new parts to fake a highly valued object. Scientific tools like chemical and soil tests, carbon dating, and radiography as described in my novel Attribution have made it much more difficult to create fakes. Contemporary Latin American art forgeries abound as auction values increase. Forgers have an additional challenge when living artists can identify their own work. In 1993 Christie’s auction house withdrew a Fernando Botero painting offered at $500,000 because it was discovered to be a fake. It was particularly embarrassing because Christie’s put the fake work on the cover of their sale catalogue and the owner of the real painting protested. Botero confirmed the auction painting was a fake. At that time, the artist received queries about three to four paintings per month; he declared all were fakes! Botero died in 2023 and experts will need to authenticate works without his help. Auction catalogues contain warnings for the buyer to beware. Buyers must have their own experts for authentication, but most works are not available for thorough inspection pre-sale. The big houses do provide authenticity warranties, but the small print includes clauses about accepted attributions and expert opinions. In a world where many experts can’t agree, how can the average collector be certain of what they are buying? In Latin America’s high crime environment, sophisticated crime organizations pump up art auction sale prices to launder money. Little known artists can quickly fetch top dollar bids, sometimes in the millions. The centuries-old tradition of anonymous buyers and sellers facilitates these schemes. European countries have worked hard to implement regulations for dealers to know their buyers and report cash transactions. The U.S. recently instituted similar regulations. With over $60 billion in annual international art sales, it will be difficult to enforce especially because dealers and gallerists are ill-equipped to comply. At an art fair, a collector presented me with a briefcase full of cash to purchase an expensive French painting. U.S. banks require a mountain of paperwork for any cash deposit over $10,000. The collector declined other payment options like a wire transfer from his account to mine or another bank instrument, a tip-off the transaction was shady. I passed on the deal. Bank failures, wild inflation, and governments trying to stabilize their national currency, converting cash into hard assets like gold, jewelry, and art is common among the wealthy in Latin America. I attended a luncheon in Mexico City where a fellow guest admired the golden chandelier. Our host corrected him. The chandelier was pure gold, he laughed, and a crate was ready to ship it wherever the owners needed to flee. Worth approximately $60 million U.S. dollars, it’s not likely any customs officer would guess its value. Free zone warehouses (FTZ) in Europe, Asia and the U.S. have museum-level climate controls and security protections. Used as a strategy to avoid capital gains taxes and duties, art works can be bought, sold, and traded without ever leaving the FTZ. Illicit transactions are converted into multiple legal transactions complete with provenance and appraisal paperwork. These warehouses, said to be the largest unseen museums in the world, contain an estimated 1.2 million artworks. Compare that to the Louvre with 380,000 works for a sense of the scope of the problem. Latin American art crimes share similarities with other regions of the world, but the volume of stolen or forged material, illicit cash and corrupt or non-existent enforcement agencies amplify the attraction as a setting for crime fiction. A news story, perhaps true or not, about Escobar’s men freezing without firewood in a mountain hideout burning piles of cash to stay warm, says it all. *** View the full article

I love ghost stories. It’s not just the surface-level horror of the supernatural that appeals to me, but the deeper themes they can be used to explore. They are, at their heart, always about something returning: lost love, buried griefs and traumas, societal shames, injustices. A ghost—like a good tale—will only linger on for a reason. My debut novel Spitting Gold is also a story about the many things that haunt us. Set in 1860s Paris, it follows two sisters who are con artist spirit mediums, exploiting other people’s belief in spirits for their own gain. But, as my characters soon discover, we can’t always pick and choose which parts of the past will come back to speak to us. In researching Spitting Gold, I’ve become a connoisseur of the ghost story. Here are eight novels that have stuck with me in particular, from classics of the genre to more recent additions that deserve a place on your shelves. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson Brought together by the occult scholar Dr. Montague, a group of strangers meet to investigate the reported supernatural phenomena in the remote Hill House. While they expect the poltergeist activity that greets them, they aren’t so prepared for the menacing sentience of the building itself. Hill House doesn’t want them to leave. And for Eleanor—a lonely young woman who has never felt welcome anywhere—there’s something seductive about this. Shirley Jackson’s iconic paranormal thriller may be the blueprint for the haunted house genre, but the reading experience still feels as fresh and surprising as ever. The prose is exquisitely tense; the setting is perfectly unsettling. Just like Eleanor, you will never want to leave. Dark Matter by Michelle Paver I can’t get enough of the uncanny, barren suspense of a polar horror story, and Dark Matter is the best example of this that I’ve read yet. Just ahead of the outbreak of the Second World War, an Arctic expedition sets out from London for the uninhabited bay of Gruhuken. Working-class wireless operator Jack feels a particular pressure to prove his worth to his new Oxford-educated colleagues—not to mention to impress the handsome Gus. So when someone needs to volunteer to remain behind, solo, through the winter, Jack is the one to raise his hand. But as the polar night closes in, he starts to wonder if he really is alone on Gruhuken, or if someone else walks out there in the dark. Beloved by Toni Morrison Set in 1870s Ohio, Beloved is the story of mother Sethe and daughter Denver, whose home is haunted by the infant girl that Sethe lost in the process of escaping slavery. The family attempt to drive the spirit away, but the horrors of the past can’t be exorcized so easily, and soon a mysterious young woman arrives on their doorstep. She identifies herself only as ‘Beloved’—the single word that Sethe could afford to have inscribed on her dead child’s tombstone. Beloved stands out for me as a ghost story that so successfully unpacks the legacies of grief, trauma and interrupted love, both for the novel’s characters and on a larger societal level, making it a powerful and unforgettable read. Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth If you’re as obsessed with urban legends about cursed film sets and theatrical productions as I am, then Plain Bad Heroines is the book for you. This eerie doorstopper takes place between two connected time periods: in 1902, two students at a New England girls’ boarding school are found dead in the orchard following a freak yellowjacket attack. In the present day, the girls’ lesbian love story and grisly young deaths are being adapted for a Hollywood film, shot on-location where the school still stands. As both narratives unfold, they join into one delicious gothic drama studded with a host of brilliantly complicated female characters. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders Lincoln in the Bardo is a literary treat told through the mingled voices of a graveyard of spirits, on the evening that President Lincoln’s son Willie is laid to rest. The cemetery’s inhabitants have never been able to accept their own deceased states, but as Willie’s soul falls into danger, his new neighbors will have to come to terms with reality if they want to help save him. This book is charmingly weird, massively entertaining and it packs a real emotional punch – I haven’t ever managed to get through it without crying. This is the book to pick up if you want a paranormal tale that’s more life-affirming than horrifying. Cold Earth by Sarah Moss Six archaeologists are excavating the remains of a Norse burial ground in Greenland when they learn that the outside world has been hit by a devastating pandemic. Safe in their isolation but entirely cut off from families and friends, tensions in the group run high, particularly when visions of past violence start to creep into their dreams. Cold Earth’s narrative style takes the form of a collection of letters written—and presumably never sent—by these six characters. The result is the literary equivalent of a found-footage horror in the style of The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity, lending a spine-chilling dramatic irony as the reader makes connections between the subjective accounts that the characters aren’t yet able to see. The Between by Tananarive Due When Hilton’s wife is elected as the only African American judge in 1990s Dade County, Florida, the family become the targets of racist hate mail. At the same time, Hilton is afflicted by new nightmares, some so vivid that it’s hard to tell them apart from waking life. One childhood half-memory recurs in particular: the day he should have drowned. Are these disturbing visions just the product of extreme stress, or is something trying to warn him of impending peril? The Between is an enigmatic, shifting novel with a narrator slowly losing his grip on reality. The horror of this story is its uncertainty as psychic foreboding converges with the very real threat of racially-motivated violence. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters Last on this list is the ghost story that managed to scare me the most—possibly because I made the mistake of reading it late at night in a spooky old English countryside house. This is an atmospheric historical novel set in the crumbling Hundreds Hall, whose resident Ayres family have fallen on hard times in post-war Britain. When the newly-qualified physician Dr. Faraday is called to the hall to examine a patient, he becomes tangled up in the Ayres’ lives, and in the strange occurrences that they attribute to a presence they call ‘the little stranger’. Sarah Waters knows how to craft a perfectly-paced story, and the slow-burn, nerve-wracking tension in this novel of social change is no exception. *** View the full article

Mothers, it’s all your fault. But you knew that, right? Whether you: –Let your little boy wander away in a crowded shopping area, never to be seen again –Let your toddler or tween daughter get taken from your own house –Encouraged your adult daughter to travel abroad and into the arms of dangerous strangers. What were you thinking? Welcome to a specific subgenre of psychological suspense novel, the one that explores parents’ fears—let’s be honest, mothers’ fears—about what might happen to our children. Whether they are stolen from us or go missing in other ways, including metaphorical ones, these novels are about more than just mothers’ inclinations to blame ourselves. They are also about control and losing control, grief, the challenge of accepting unavoidable change, motherly intuition, and whether we can ever truly know anyone—even that beautiful person who was, for a time, the center of our universe. I wasn’t thinking about any of that five years ago, when I read my first Lisa Jewell novel, Then She Was Gone, about a mother grappling with all she’d never know about the presumed death of her missing 15-year-old daughter, Ellie Mack. I was sitting on a rocky island beach at the time, alone with a paperback that was both poignant and disturbing. My daughter was in college, several thousand miles away. I missed her dearly, and that yearning must have allowed Jewell’s quiet, character-rich novel to speak to me in a particular way. That summer day was when I decided in earnest to jump genres, from leisurely paced historical fiction to a more urgent kind of psychological suspense. When I first started drafting The Deepest Lake, set in Guatemala, about a mother named Rose who travels to Lake Atitlan to seek answers in the wake of her daughter’s death, I depicted the mother-daughter relationship as close and conflict-free. In that draft, Rose had trouble piecing together the details of 23-year-old Jules’s final hours. The lake’s depth made it impossible to find and retrieve a body for examination, and people who’d spent time with Jules weren’t talking. But Rose didn’t question her fundamental understanding of her daughter. Revisions brought me to a new and less comfortable place, informed by personal experience. Certainly, I feel close to my own daughter, an energetic world-traveler like Jules. But did I know every cliff she scaled, every person she kissed, every rule she broke? Of course not. Like Rose, I had to admit the difficulty of decoding texts and the impossibility of knowing how to read a young adult’s moods and motivations—especially when that child has been out of sight for many months. As a writer, and as a mother, I had to dig deeper to bring my murkiest anxieties into the novel. It isn’t pleasant to picture one’s child suffering from depression, engaging in risky behaviors, falling under the sway of a despicable person, or simply becoming an independent and less knowable adult. But becoming a suspense writer requires imagining those kinds of possibilities, from real dangers to more common forms of emotional loss. At the same time, I still come back to the idea that a mother’s love is powerful, as is a mother’s intuition. We may not know our children perfectly, but we know when something isn’t right. That knowing impels us—and characters like us—to act. Only a thriller’s final pages will tell us whether that love-fueled action has come too late. But first, I read more books. Here are a handful of emotional page-turners that convinced me the missing-child trope is both powerful and capacious, with room for further writerly exploration and interpretation. All the Dangerous Things, by Stacey Willingham In Stacey Willingham’s All the Dangerous Things, life comes to a halt when Isabelle Drake’s toddler-aged son Mason is taken from his crib in the middle of the night. In the year that follows, our narrator’s marriage implodes and Isabelle becomes an obsessive amateur sleuth, devoting herself to understanding what happened to her baby. Lecturing on the true crime circuit and submitting to interviews by a podcaster—anything to find the truth—only worsen Isabelle’s anxiety and exhaustion. You know how readers often say that a well-described place becomes “a character” in a novel? Here, insomnia itself is a character—a tricky foe familiar to any person who has suffered extreme sleep deprivation. Little Secrets, by Jennifer Hillier The trail has gone even colder in another young-missing-child quest, Little Secrets by Jennifer Hillier. A year and a half after her five-year-old son is grabbed from Pike’s Place Market by a man in a Santa suit, successful salon owner Marin hires a private investigator, whose digging leads not to the child but to other unsavory revelations, starting with the fact that Marin’s husband is having an affair with an art student named Kenzie. Numerous other secrets and twists follow. Unlike many novels of this kind, Hillier packs in surprises without depending on unreliable narration. The storyline jets beyond doubtful grief into red-hot anger, as Hillier’s Marin uses her rage to get to the bottom of things. If you enjoy flawed characters and a dual POV structure that complicates readers’ sympathies, this one’s for you. Good as Gone, by Amy Gentry What’s more disturbing than a missing child? The idea that you might not recognize your own missing child years later, when she returns to you. That’s the high-wire premise behind Amy Gentry’s Good as Gone, in which returned teenager Julie seems curiously unfamiliar to her mother Anna. Structurally, this thriller is complex, with alternating chapters that tell us the mom story alongside the slowly unspooled backstory of a teen on the run, struggling to survive. Far more than just a novel about abduction, Good as Gone considers topics from sexual violence to identity and how we are shaped by experience. Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared In Lisa Jewell’s The Night She Disappeared, we arrive at the story of a teen old enough to be a mother herself. Tallulah, 19, has gone on a date, leaving her baby in the care of her mother, Kim. Then Tallulah disappears. Kim has a hard time believing Tallulah would take off without her child, but then again, young adults are unpredictable. Having thoroughly enjoyed my fill of mother-and-child stories in which the very young victim is unquestionably innocent, I’ve found myself increasingly drawn to novels like these precisely because the missing teen or young adult plays a more active and ambiguous role. Our grown or nearly-grown children sneak out, take risks, befriend the wrong people. They fail to answer emails and texts. They try on new identities. They make dangerous mistakes. On top of that, everything we think we know about our older children relies on the interpretation of spotty memories. How serious was that crisis she had as a freshman in college? What was that argument we had last summer? A certain tone, a look, a silence—these are the clues which only a parent, not a P.I., can decipher. View the full article

A look at the week’s best new releases in crime fiction, nonfiction, mystery, and thrillers. * Emma Rosenblum, Very Bad Company (Flatiron) “[Rosenblum] is fantastic at showing the subtle corruption of wealth and how those who have it justify both the having and the wanting more. A fun, decadent ride.” –Kirkus Harlan Coben, Think Twice (Grand Central) “Harlan Coben is one of our greatest living thriller writer.” –Bookpage Carmella Lowkis, Spitting Gold (Atria/Emily Bestler) “Lowkis’ twisty debut plays with the conventions of the gothic novel in a tale that pits two ambitious sisters against each other… A deliciously convoluted tale of layered deceptions.” –Kirkus Reviews Ashley Weaver, Locked in Pursuit (Minotaur) “With many well-deployed historical mystery tropes on offer, including a juicy love triangle and a host of elegant gowns, it’s an enjoyable, fast-paced lark. Fans of Susan Elia MacNeal and Rhys Bowen will have fun.” –Publishers Weekly Elka Ray, A Friend Indeed (Blackstone) “Readers who raced through books by Liane Moriarty, Celeste Ng, and Eleanor Barker-White will appreciate Ray’s compelling, well-paced, and plot-driven mystery. With twists and turns until the final pages, A Friend Indeed dives into the complexity of female friendships, shifting loyalties, and the allure of the unknown.” –Booklist Kate Weston, You May Now Kill the Bride (Random House) “I laughed, I gasped, and said ‘I do’ to this chilling romp sparkling with humor, Prosecco, and murder.” –Julia Seales Nicola Solvinic, The Hunter’s Daughter (Berkley) “This atmospheric and haunting mystery will keep the reader guessing to the very last page. A must-read for lovers of serial-killer thrillers and mysteries with a darker edge.” —Booklist Steven Johnson, The Infernal Machine (Crown) “Johnson’s vivid, eye-opening history chronicles epic labor-movement battles, terrorist bombings failed and tragic, backlash against immigrants, love affairs, undercover operations, courtroom dramas, and prison life in a fast-paced narrative rich in cinematic moments and resonance.” –Booklist Craig Whitlock, Fat Leonard (Simon and Schuster) “A vigorous investigation into the life of a con artist and swindler who had half the leadership of the U.S. Navy in his pocket….Maddening and astonishing in its revelations of a crime spree that cost taxpayers untold millions.” –Kirkus Reviews View the full article

At 23, I decided I wanted to work with offenders. I’d always been fascinated by people who did bad things, maybe because I was a little bad myself. I’m the second youngest in a gigantic family, so there’s a touch of catholic guilt talking, but no, I was naughty as a child and young adult. I rejected boredom. I confronted bullies, I broke rules. I never did anything really bad, but I believed I might be capable, and was interested in people who did. I wondered: ‘Why did they do that?’ and ‘How can we make sure they don’t do it again?’ I was working as an administrative officer in a hostel in London at 23. I loved it. The staff were friendly, and so were the 50 ex-offenders who lived there. I interviewed some of them, published a small booklet with the stories they told me. One was set in Manchester during the second world war. He was out at the shops when a bomb hit his workplace. The story was called: ‘How cigarettes saved my life.” There were stories everywhere in that hostel; every one of the men had lived difficult, dramatic lives. The hostel in London was a happy place. It was well managed. It was caring. And it wasn’t a halfway house. It was a permanent home to the residents. When I fell in love with a Scots-Italian, I applied for a job as ‘project worker’ in a hostel in Edinburgh, and arrived in the gothic, fairy-tale city on a glorious summer’s day. The interview – and the job – was in a beautiful Georgian townhouse right in the middle of the New Town. I didn’t notice much about the inside of the building. I was too excited about my new life. Somehow, the interview went well. Afterwards, I skipped all the way to Princes Street and up The Mound to the Royal Mile. In the afternoon sun, I lay on the grass in The Meadows. By evening, I was writing bad poems on cobble-stoned streets in old town cafes. I had found myself. Social work was my job. Edinburgh was my city. Writing was my hobby. Three months later, I found myself sitting at a rickety desk in a dingy office, trying to finish the short story I started years earlier. It was dark. It was only 4pm. The inside of the beautiful Georgian townhouse stank of urine, cigarette smoke, sweat, and sperm. I was completely alone, thankfully. The residents were all out getting drunk. They would return, sooner or later, and all hell would break loose. Edinburgh was not the same place that it was in September. And I had no idea how to write a short story. Suddenly, my colleague, let’s call him Jim, walked in with his Christmas shopping and his smile. “Don’t cry”, he said. I didn’t realize I was. “Don’t let them get to you,” said Jim. “They just need us to help them untie their knots.” He was talking about the five residents living in the hostel. All of them had prolific and serious criminal histories. They were considered ‘very high risk’. They had stringent conditions on their parole licenses, like a condition to live in this halfway house for one year, with idiots like me—as well as qualified social workers—watching your every move. Since starting the job, I’d been threatened and manipulated by sex offenders, undermined by the boss, and followed home by a man with a baseball bat. I’d had taken to chain smoking and trembling. This was nothing like the hostel in London. This was more like a prison, and I was the only guard. This terrifying job was the inspiration for my latest book, Halfway House, in which the naive and selfish Lou O’Dowd finds herself living with the five worst men in Scotland. After qualifying as a social worker (specialising in criminal justice), I got a job in the Gorbals Social Work office. The Gorbals was famous at the time – for poverty, deprivation, addiction problems and gangland crime. My family and friends in Australia were so worried for me. They’d read a book about life in The Gorbals during the depression (‘No Mean City’) and they hadn’t heard anything good about the place since. “Where? The Gorbals. No. Not The Gorbals. (When an area in prefaced by ‘The’ in Glasgow, it means you probably shouldn’t go there). Right enough, The Gorbals was ravaged by poverty. Its 70s high-rise buildings were in disrepair, and—to my horror during home visits to the 14th floor—swayed in the wind. But the people were the friendliest I’d ever met in my life. I ended up playing in the Gorbals netball team. (We smoked at half time. We also won.) I left the Gorbals office when ‘something very exciting happened’ with my writing. I’d written a screenplay for fun and it turned out to be okay. I was going to be a screenwriter. I had a glorious going away party. I had a night out that ended with a fabulous amount of remorse. I had a big cake. My boss gave an amazing speech. Obviously, nothing happened with the screenplay. That terrible hope, gets me every time. I returned to the Gorbals office two years later; embarrassed, terrified, and excited. I was glad to be back. And my colleagues were kind. In Glasgow, people much prefer a failure. My next job was in HMP Barlinnie, or ‘the big hoose’ as it’s called here. It’s a Victorian prison with five intimidating stone Halls, all in a row. It’s being replaced right now and will not be missed. The stairs were worn and the two-storey building stank and the cells were tiny. Every day, I felt for the prisoners. It was dehumanizing in jail. After three years, something very exciting happened again. I had written a book. I was going to be a novelist. The Barlinnie Social Work team gave me a small going away party and a small cake. My boss didn’t give a speech. I managed to be a full-time writer for four years before I needed to get back to it again. (Not only money reasons, but also sanity. I like being in a team). I returned to a frantic office in Paisley. My job involved supervising probation and parole cases, writing sentencing and background reports for the court, visiting prisons, doing home visits, undertaking risk assessments with the police. I really got to know the people I was supervising; their families too. And I loved being aware of the types of crimes that were coming into the system, and the harmful behaviours that were not yet illegal. While I was in Paisley, I wrote Viral (about revenge pornography) and The Cry (about coercive control) – and these crimes have since been made illegal in the UK. I would have stayed at Paisley, if something very exciting hadn’t happened with my writing. My novel, The Cry, was being adapted into a BBC/Netflix drama. And so I resigned. I don’t remember getting a cake. That was six years ago, which means that this has been my longest period as a full-time writer to date. And I am getting the itch again. I want to listen to people’s stories. I want to try and support them. I’m sick of thinking about myself. I’m craving my dark and hilarious colleagues. I have, in fact, been thinking about applying for a job as group worker. It’s with men who’ve been convicted of intimate partner violence. It is so tempting. It’s what I’m interested in. I’d say two-thirds of my books are about domestic violence and toxic relationships. The job specification is on my desk. The application is open on my laptop I’ve confirmed with my old boss that she’ll give me a reference. But wouldn’t you know it? My screenwriting agent just emailed… Something very exciting has happened. *** View the full article

If – like me – you love a comedy murder mystery or thriller, but have been judged by someone for it, I’m here to tell you that it’s ok because of science. That’s right, there is actually science behind your enjoyment of silly murders. One of the things that we humans find funny is incongruity (again this is according to science, not me, and I’d like to stress this is almost the only bit of science I know). We recognise two things as being wildly different and that the act of putting them together seems ridiculous. Thus, laughter ensues. Obviously, it’s more complex than this but a) I’m not that smart and b) there’s a word count here. The main thing is that the reason we find it funny is not because we’re bad people, it’s because the two things – comedy and murder – are so wildly different it prompts this response in us. Also, if you’re anything like me you make light of things that you’re afraid of. I am afraid of death; so I laugh in the face of it…on the page. So if you also love a comedy thriller, here are my top five, current favourites. After all, they do say laughter is the best medicine. Just maybe some of the characters are a little beyond the help of said medicine… How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie This darkly funny novel following antihero Grace Bernard as she enacts revenge on her terrible family had me hooked from the description. It’s witty and sarcastic, completely unique, and above all else it left me cackling. Unlikeable female characters get a bad rap but no matter what she does you root for Grace Bernard. I read this book years ago and it remains a favourite to this day. Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Sutanto Protagonist Meddy Chan is set up on a blind date by her meddling aunties. When the date doesn’t exactly go to plan, and she ends up accidentally killing him, her and her aunties set about trying to hide the dead body. This book has everything, unexpected killers, laugh out loud moments and even a bit of romance! I love everything Jesse Sutanto writes and to be honest I struggled to pick only one of her books to include on this list. Bunny by Mona Awad This book has it all, drama, horror, and satire. Set on a University Campus, outsider Samantha Heather Mackey is drawn into a clique of unbearably twee rich girls called the Bunnies. Bunny is twisty, hilarious and terrifying in equal measure. The characters are so well drawn that you can’t help but stay stuck down the rabbit hole until you’ve finished it. How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin Frances was told she’d be murdered by a fortune teller in 1965. For sixty years she tried to stay safe while none of her friends or family believed her. Until one day, when the murderer succeeds. Enter her Great-Niece Annie from London, who finds herself caught up in Frances’s posthumous act of revenge against her sceptical friends and family. With a country estate full of clues to unpick, whoever solves Frances’s murder gets to inherit her millions. Village murder mysteries are my favourite thing, and this one’s engrossing, clever and twisty as well as being packed with humour. A Most Agreeable Murder by Julia Seales An eligible bachelor dropping dead at a ball? Check. A cast of brilliant characters trapped in a mansion with a killer? Check. A hilarious main character who’s trying to put her ‘unladylike’ obsession with true crime behind her? Check. The perfect package for a cosy, funny, mystery in my opinion! A cross between Jane Austen and Knives Out/Glass Onion, this has some incredible one-liners and is utterly ridiculous in the best of ways. An absolute treat of a book. *** View the full article