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Once again, the Edgar Awards are upon us, and once again, I’ve had the privilege of asking dozens of great writers to contribute to our annual roundtable discussion on the state of the genre. This year’s roundtable, like in previous years, is divided into two parts: the first, running today, is focused on craft advice and the writing life, while the second, running tomorrow, will address issues in the genre and the future of crime writing. Thanks so much to the more than 30 nominees who sent in thoughtful, fascinating, and often hilarious responses. The award ceremony is this Wednesday night, and you’ll be able to follow along on social media as winners are announced or take a look at CrimeReads first thing on Thursday morning. __________________________________ What is your advice for writers who are just starting out? And what’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever gotten? __________________________________ William Kent Krueger (nominated for Best Novel – The River We Remember): First piece of advice: Write every day, and write because you love it, not because you hope you’ll get rich and famous from the effort. Second piece of advice: Marry someone with a good job. The best piece of advice given to me when I was about to become a published author was to get to know the booksellers. If the booksellers like you and appreciate your work, they’ll sell you like crazy and spread the word. I found this to be true. Susan Isaacs (nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – Bad, Bad Seymour Brown): Writing may be an art. It is certainly a craft. But also it’s a job. You have to put in regular hours and go to work whether you feel like it or not. You already may be working one job and even have another as parent or caregiver, so how can you possibly do it? By figuring out a schedule that’s doable, albeit hard. Three nights a week for three hours, or even two. Every Saturday or Sunday. Whatever. Yes, it will take longer, but it will get done if you stick to your schedule. You have to work and not get sidetracked reading How to Write Fiction That’s Fabulous and Will Make You Megabucks during your writing hours. That time is for writing your own book. The best piece of writing advice I’ve ever gotten, I gave to myself. One day I was musing on how interesting it was that speaking aloud converted swarming thoughts into coherent ideas: like with talk therapy, or the Catholic sacrament of confession. So I turned to some dialogue that didn’t feel natural the way I’d written it. I spoke it out loud, which actually was beyond hard. I was embarrassed, even though there was no one in the house but me and the dog, and the latter was not at all judgmental. The technique worked for me. I have also used talking to interrogate a character: “Why are you doing that?” I ask aloud. Not rude, not amiable. Just a matter-of-fact question. Answered that way too. Okay, your character may hesitate or mutter I don’t know. Be patient, then ask again. Listen, this is as awkward for them as it is for you. But trust me, they’ll talk. April Henry (nominated for Best Young Adult – Girl Forgotten): When you start out, there is almost always a lot of rejection. But the only person who can say you can’t do something is you, when you give up. When I was a teenager who loved to write, I decided that there was no way someone like me, a poor girl from a logging town, could be a writer. But that decision meant I never would be a writer, because I stopped writing. I finally came to my senses in my early 30s. The best piece of writing advice I’ve ever gotten is: “You can always edit crap. You can’t edit nothing.” Tracy Clark (nominated for Best Paperback Original – Hide): Learn the craft. You have to know the rules to break the rules. Take your writing seriously. Commit to it. Once you have the foundation set, then you can really let yourself fly. Go for it! Yvonne Woon (nominated for Best Young Adult – My Flawless Life): Be fueled by rejection. It isn’t enough to grow a thick skin, you have to convert rejection into motivation. So much of my writing when I first started out was not good, and plenty of people told me so (via workshop critiques, magazine rejections, fellowship rejections, acquisition rejections, negative reviews). Though they were painful to receive, they were also helpful, and in most cases, right. At the time, I’d read somewhere about writers taping their rejections to the wall, so that’s what I did, too, and every day I looked at those rejections and said, “I’ll show you what I can do,” and tried to get better. In terms of craft, I’ve received a lot of incredible advice, but the ones I use the most are: -Your character has to want something in every scene. -End each scene with the start of a new action. -So much of writing is endurance and practice. No work can get done until you put your butt in the chair. Robert Morgan (nominated for Best Critical/Biographical – Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe): My advice to young writers is one word: persistence. I’ve taught writing for fifty years, and many of those who seemed more talented have not gone on to become writers, while some who appeared less gifted at first have succeeded. Everyone has some writing ability, but it’s those with fire in the belly, relentless, who reach the goal. This is true of all the arts, whether country music, acting, or film directing. The best advice ever given to me about novel writing came from my friend Alison Lurie: if you have living characters, find a passive gear and let them take over. Rob Osler (nominated for Best Short Story – “Miss Direction,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine): Imagine a clock that measures time in months, not minutes or hours, and reset your expectations accordingly. Jennifer J. Chow (nominated for the Lillian Jackson Braun Memorial Award – Hot Pot Murder): I’d find community even while pre-published. The writing journey can be bumpy, and it’s essential to have support along the way. The best piece of advice I’ve ever received? Compare yourself with yourself. Think about your personal goals from several years ago to better perceive your current achievements. Samantha Jayne Allen (nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – Hard Rain): Life is long and you never know what might change. And also, life is short, so be present knowing that the writing and the joy you experience in the act of creation are kind of the whole point. The best advice I’ve ever gotten was from my former professor, Tom Grimes, whose feedback on a workshop submission once was just two words: “keep going.” Finishing my novel’s first draft and worrying about the rest later was the message, but I think “keep going” applies to the writing life generally, to the importance of having faith in yourself. Lina Chern (nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – Play the Fool): This advice is not just for new writers, but for any writers, and especially for myself, because I forget: Have fun. Writing, while often difficult and frustrating, should be fun. Very few of us will get rich and famous doing it, so if you’re not having fun, why do it at all? We all go through periods where, for whatever reason, the writing doesn’t come easily. Work out a set of tools for those times, that make you reconnect with the fun. The tools will vary writer to writer. For me, it often works to step back from whatever stage of the process I’m mired in and doodle some longhand notes about the story —almost like a journal. Often, that’s enough to make me excited again about what I’m trying to do, or show me a new way to do it. Other tools could be taking a walk, or changing your work location, or leaving a particularly difficult passage alone and working on a different one. Find whatever works for you, and do it until the fun comes back. It always does! Sarah Stewart Taylor (nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – A Stolen Child): The longer I write, the less I feel equipped to give advice! There is no one right way to accomplish the nearly impossible task of writing and revising a novel—90,000 words or more containing a whole universe of people and places and things! Just think of it!—and finding the process that works for you takes time and a lot of trial and error. I’m skeptical of anyone who claims to have a surefire “Ten Steps to Finishing your Novel” formula, but I do love talking to other writers about their approaches. Hearing that a friend uses index cards to keep track of scenes or that a writer I admire doesn’t allow herself to edit anything until her first draft is done helps me see my own process in a different way. So here’s a piece of advice: be in community with other writers in order to learn. And, also, writer friends will save your soul and your sanity. No one else truly understands what it’s like. Make some writer friends! I also feel passionately that writers must be readers. Really study the novels you love, figure out why they work and why they work for you. The best piece of advice I ever got was from my amazing editor, Kelley Ragland. Years ago she told me that the only parts of this whole thing the writer really has control over are whether they write another book and the quality of that book. It’s such good advice. If you want to write for a long time, you always have to put the work in progress first and use it as the lodestar as all the other parts of the business swirl around you. “Imagine a clock that measures time in months, not minutes or hours, and reset your expectations accordingly.” –Rob Osler Mary Winters (nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – Murder in Postscript): It isn’t a piece of writing advice, per se, but guidance a history professor gave me long ago. He said don’t be afraid of something because it’s hard. I’ve found it to be true with writing. Whether it’s a short story that touches a memory or a novel that includes a complicated plot or daunting research, I’ve gained the most satisfaction from projects that require the most from me. I.S. Berry (nominated for Best First Novel – The Peacock and the Sparrow): Pick a story you love, that you can live with through the ups and downs (of which there’ll be many). A story’s like a relationship: some days, you can’t stand it, you’ll fight with it, so pick a partner you’ll still love in the morning. Find your readers. Don’t set a goal of selling as many books as humanly possible (though, of course, that’s always nice); try to get your book into the hands of readers who will love it, with whom it will resonate. It’s a rare book that appeals to everyone, and when you find the readership that clicks, you’ve hit the jackpot. Jennifer Cody Epstein (nominated for Best Novel – The Madwomen of Paris): I know a lot of writers swear by routine—”write every day!” “Hit that daily word count!” Those are certainly great habits to form. But in practice they aren’t always attainable, and for me they can actually increase the psychic burden of producing (which is already pretty damn heavy) by making me feel “behind” in a project before I’ve even started working on it. My advice is instead to take a longer view. Allow yourself to try and fail to write sometimes, and to recognize that chopping out 500 words can be more valuable than writing 1000. Recognize that sometimes mulling and stewing and brainstorming and scrawling notes and spewing seemingly nonsensical voice-memos is also a valuable, even essential, part of the long-term process of The Work. And in terms of writing advice, one of my MFA mentors told me that nothing you cut from a piece should ever be seen as wasted words. Your work will always be stronger for having written that bit, reconsidered it, and taken it out. Also, don’t feel compelled to delete anything forever—you can murder your darlings, sure. But you can also keep them in a file for inspiration and repurposing later on. That’s always felt strangely comforting to me as a writer. Claire Swinarski (nominated for Best Juvenile – What Happened to Rachel Riley?): Quantity, quantity, quantity. New writers need to write a lot in order to really find their voice and break out of just trying to copy what other writers before them have done. The only way to improve your writing is to practice consistently and learn what works for you and what doesn’t. The best piece of writing advice I’ve ever gotten is to focus on really small assignments. Sitting down and thinking “today, I’m going to write a book” is ridiculously intimidating. Reframing it as “today, I’m going to describe this character’s kitchen” or “today, I’m going to tackle this specific conversation between these two characters” is so much more doable, and totally transformed my writing process. Ritu Mukerji (nominated for Best First Novel – Murder by Degrees): My advice to new writers: read the depth and breadth of this wonderful genre. There is such creativity and diversity in narrative, plot, character. It is the best education. And the best writing advice I received was to write at the same time every day, so that your mind would become conditioned to working at a specific time, no matter what. The consistency created creative momentum. Linda Castillo (nominated for Best Short Story – “Hallowed Ground”): It’s almost a cliché to tell a writer who is starting out to not give up, but that is always my best advice. Writing is hard. While writing a novel is a long and arduous journey, the writing business is even more difficult. When times are tough, when the writing isn’t going well and everyone and their dog is rejecting you, it is our love for our story that gets us to our laptop every day. Writing is our escape. It is our refuge. Sometimes it is our revenge—and that’s okay as long as you get it done. The best piece of advice I ever received is this: When the writing is going poorly or you are stuck, allow yourself to write badly. Get the words on paper even if they suck. You can always edit later. Anastasia Hastings (nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – Of Manners and Murder): It’s a tough business, and you have to be tough, too. Getting published can take a very long time and usually, the road to publication is lined with rejection. Keep trying, keep plugging away. Don’t give up. Sean McCluskey (nominated for the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award – “The Soiled Dove of Shallow Hollow,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine): Obviously, write. It’s easy to wander down the rabbit hole of taking courses, reading how-to books, and watching author interviews, and that all feels like you’re doing something productive. In reasonable doses, it is productive. But none of it’s a substitute for writing and rewriting. Speaking of rewriting, I think that’s where the important work gets done. I compare writing a first draft to cutting down a tree–just get the damn thing on the ground! But then you have to saw it into planks, carve them into pieces, and assemble the wood into the furniture you want. Then sanding, varnishing, polishing, and more woodworking metaphors than I have the knowledge to deliver. As for the mechanics of storytelling, I was once told to keep asking or implying questions with your writing, and promising your reader that they’ll get the answers if they just keep reading. That teacher told me every word, every line, every paragraph, and every page has only one job: make the reader want to read the next one. Because if they stop caring about what happens next, they put the book down and it never, ever does. Ken Jaworowski (nominated for Best First Novel – Small Town Sins): When I wrote for the theater, I’d sometimes sit among the audience to make sure my script was engaging them. Yet when I’d write an (ultimately unpublished) novel, I’d sometimes turn self-indulgent and forget all about my audience. Then one day I read a quote from Scott Smith, the author of “A Simple Plan.” He said: “I was fearful of boring the reader, so whenever it became a question of exploring some moral dimension or driving the plot on, I went with the latter.” That made everything click. Whether I was writing for the theater, or for a novel reader, or for anyone, the end result should always be the same: Never forget that you and your audience are a team. Patricia Johns (nominated for the Lillian Jackson Braun Memorial Award – Murder of an Amish Bridegroom): Don’t give up! That is my best advice I can give to anyone. If you keep writing, keep submitting and keep trying, you will eventually find a way. Too many writers give up because it’s hard, and rejection hurts. But if you keep trying, you’ll become a stronger writer, too. So keep at it, and never look at the odds. __________________________________ What is your favorite method for writing? __________________________________ Jennifer Cody Epstein: OMG—computer. Hands down! I’m a relentless re-editor (and also can’t even read my own handwriting), so it just makes the most sense. Scott Von Doviak (nominated for Best Paperback Original – Lowdown Road): I’m a pen and pad guy all the way. It seems like most of my friends in the field have a routine of getting up at five in the morning, pouring a cup of coffee, and putting on some ambient music or just opting for dead silence as they sit at the laptop and get to work. And that’s great if it works for them! But I’m a Happy Hour writer. Give me a dive bar, a great jukebox, a cold beer, and life happening around me. That’s where my first drafts come together. I can fix the mistakes at the laptop later, but I thrive on that initial burst of energy. Tracy Clark: Laptop. Laptop. Laptop. I’ve got to feel the keys under my fingers. Pens and pencils are way too quiet. April Henry: I write in Scrivener on a Mac, but the key part of my writing is that I write on a LifeSpan treadmill desk. I bought it 10 years ago and it is one of my favorite purchases ever. My posture is better, I feel I think more clearly, and after I got it, I lost weight without even trying. Claire Swinarski: I’m a classic Microsoft Word girl, but I am fairly consistent with writing in order. I don’t like to skip around throughout the timeline while writing. I’ve found it helps me understand where things are slow-moving or lacking—if I’m dreading writing a scene because it feels boring, it’s almost certainly going to read boring, so how can I eliminate it? I typically know the main events throughout a book before starting, but I don’t really dive into a book until I have the perfect first chapter crafted. “The story began in my head, traveled through my heart, down my arm and hand, and flowed from the pen onto the page.”–William Kent Krueger William Kent Krueger: I wrote my first nine novels longhand. It was part of the magic. The story began in my head, traveled through my heart, down my arm and hand, and flowed from the pen onto the page. But writing longhand requires that, at some point, you must transcribe the work into a word processing system of some kind, which takes time. I was behind deadline on my tenth novel, and I thought if I could write directly to my computer and skip the transcribing step, maybe I could turn the manuscript in on time. Giving up the magic of longhand was a scary proposition. But it worked. Now I write on a laptop. Yvonne Woon: I start every project by plotting and brain dumping ideas into a notebook. I only plot in long hand and am particular about my notebooks. They can’t be fancy or expensive or I’ll feel I have to “save them” for better thoughts. Can’t be too big or I can’t carry them around with me. I like medium-sized, clearance-section notebooks at Target that are meant for teenagers. In those notebooks I map out my characters and form a “blob plot” of a book, which usually has 5-6 events that I want to book to cover and gives me a loose understanding of what the book will look like. Then I figure out what has to happen in chapters 1-3. Once I have a general idea, I move to my laptop and start writing. My computer situation is very basic. Microsoft word. Kitchen table, sometimes the bed. I can write basically anywhere as long as I have earplugs. Samantha Jayne Allen: Ideally, on my laptop, at my desk, with a journal beside me for handwritten notes and stray thoughts. Since having my daughter, who’s now two, I’ve had to be more flexible—I’ve written whole chapters in the notes app on my phone while holding her during her nap. I think not being so tied to a certain way of getting the words down has been good for me. It’s refreshing to change up your method sometimes, like the equivalent of going for a walk or cleaning the kitchen when you’re stuck with a plot problem. Ritu Mukerji: I am a perennial fan of Google docs for writing the manuscript, certainly for anything longer than a page or two. But given that I spend a lot of time thinking about the 19th century, I often resort to pen and notebook, especially when I feel stuck. Writing longhand is a great way to work through knotty problems. Robert Morgan: I usually write first drafts in a spiral notebook, in my odd combination of printing and long-hand. There is a kind of intimacy with the page and the physical world while putting down words with a pen, slow and deliberate. Writing is a kind of acting, and that physicality is useful to me. For the second draft I go to the laptop, revising as I proceed. For additions I follow the same process. Katherine Hall Page (2024 Grand Master): I wrote the first book, The Body in the Belfry (1989) on an Underwood typewriter and graduated to an IBM Selectric for the next two before acquiring a Mac. I still use Apples, but throughout I’ve also stuck to pad-and-pencil—more specifically, Clairefontaine graph paper (to keep my writing legible) notebooks. I start by listing the cast of characters, new and old, with reminders of age, distinguishing features, then as I write I make a timeline, list each chapter’s first and last lines, brief notes on what happens in each chapter as I write, and notes on the research, the fun part. So distracting a rabbit hole, it’s hard to get back to actual writing my own book. Since there are original recipes at the end of each book, drafts of these go in the notebooks as well. At the start of each day, I rewrite what I have written the day before. At the end of a chapter, I print it out and rewrite using a pencil, transfer the changes to the computer and keep going until eventually the book is finished. I write a synopsis at the start to go over with my editor, but this skeleton of the book often changes. I always know who gets it and who did it. Ken Jaworowski: You can write anywhere, anytime, and I do. Sometimes I’ll sit at my laptop and write for an hour. Then I’ll go to the post office and think of a fresh idea, so I’ll use the recording app on my cell phone to speak into. Later, at the library, I’ll recall something I wanted to add to a chapter, and I’ll email myself. Even if you think of a single good line of dialogue while eating at a fast-food restaurant, that’s writing, and that’s a little victory. Lina Chern: I have specific methods of writing for specific parts of my writing process. When I’m brainstorming or trying to tell myself the story or just generally trying to make something out of nothing, I have to write longhand. Something about the sensation of pen-to-paper, and the overall slower speed allows me to disappear into the story and tap into that subconscious space where the good stuff lives. This part of the process is where the biggest and most satisfying surprises come, and the part I often return to when I’m stuck or need a jolt of fun to keep myself motivated. Revisions I do digitally, because during that part of the process my brain wants to work more quickly and consciously. I.S. Berry: I type everything on the computer. Haven’t done longhand since before the internet. But I print everything when I edit. Maybe because I grew up without computers, words just read differently to me on a physical page than a screen. Sentences have a different cadence, and I catch errors and syntax problems in hard copy that I wouldn’t catch digitally. Carol Goodman (nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – The Bones of the Story): I write my first drafts long-hand in composition notebooks and then type up, chapter by chapter, on my laptop, editing as I go along. Writing by hand lets me feel freer and more experimental in the first draft because I know I’ll be cleaning things up later. It also keeps me away from the internet while I’m writing. Sean McCluskey: I can’t imagine writing longhand. When it came to teaching penmanship, the nuns certainly failed me (though I don’t doubt they did their damnedest). For me it’s all laptop, all day. Although, oddly, it’s rarely on my lap. __________________________________ What is the key to crafting compelling characters? __________________________________ I.S. Berry: Complexity. For characters to be full-bodied, I think they need to be morally murky, or at least variegated; to make decisions and take actions that aren’t obvious, that make readers think. When I write, I create a backstory for each character—even if it never shows up on the page—to make them more three-dimensional and inform the character’s decisions. Sean McCluskey: I try to stop worrying about whether the character is likable, or even relatable, and focus on whether or not they’re interesting. Is this someone I want to watch doing things, good or bad? Do I want to spend time in this character’s head, even if it’s an ugly and scary place? ” The key, I think, is to go small, not big. Go inner, not outer. You want to build your book people from the inside out.” –Tracy Clark Tracy Clark: The key, I think, is to go small, not big. Go inner, not outer. You want to build your book people from the inside out. You’re tapping into emotions and inner thoughts. You’re grabbing onto a character’s flaws and struggles, their hurdles and challenges. You give them weight and a pebble in their shoe and then put them into a situation and see how they’ll handle it. Series give you more room to explore a character’s arc. You follow your characters’ drama from book to book to see how they change and adapt … or don’t. Samantha Jayne Allen: One way to do this is to make your characters feel real: give them a rich inner life, a lived-in voice. But most of all, a compelling character is a character that wants or needs something. To solve the case, get paid, avenge their best friend’s murder, etc. The reader should understand the character’s desires or even share them—the reader is then rooting for them to get what they want (or that they don’t!) and is thus invested in the story’s outcome. I think with a series you simply have more room to play, and for loose ends, whereas in a standalone the arc is somewhat completed at the end of the novel. A lot of series novels have multiple arcs for their main characters: one for each book, another that is overarching and that is possibly not resolved for many books, and at which point the series might end. William Kent Krueger: A good story isn’t so much about what happens, but more about who it happens to. I believe compelling characters are those that feel most real to us, those who are deeply flawed, as we all are. It seems to me that characters who, despite their flaws, struggle to follow some moral compass tend to have a greater hold on our hearts, to stay with us longer. Of course, in a series, there’s so much more space to explore all the niches of a protagonist’s psyche, so much more time for a character to grow. On the other hand, a dynamic character in a standalone can, like a branding iron, leave a deep and abiding impression on a reader. One and done can be a tremendously effective approach. AF Carter (nominated for Best Paperback Original – Boomtown): I really don’t `craft’ my characters. I begin with a rather vague impression of their various attributes, including gender, job, marital status, children, education etc. Then, ever the optimist, I start clicking away at my keyboard and hope for the best. I can be more specific with regard to the second question, about series vs. standalones. Once past the first volume of a series, there’s no winging it. Recurring characters are already defined and editors have long memories. You have to go with the ones who brung ya. This commonly leads to a complication as the volumes add up. You can’t assume the reader of any particular book, has read the others. Thus, you’re more or less required to deliver some backstory for each recurring character and that can slow the pace, sometimes drastically. I deal with this in the Delia Mariola series I’m currently writing, by creating a pair of “vice-protagonists”. These are characters who get a lot of space, though not so much as Delia. At the end of the novel, they move on. Perhaps they leave town to begin again somewhere else, or are arrested, or even killed. Fresh characters offer fresh perspectives, and keep the author (and, hopefully, the reader) involved. You don’t know what they’re going to do next, because you’ve never encountered them before. Again, this is as important to this author as it might be to readers. Ritu Mukerji: I think a series is the perfect vehicle for character development–I always thought of Murder by Degrees as the start of a series. For my main character, Dr. Lydia Weston, I created an extensive backstory. I included little details: what did she like to wear, eat, read. And then the larger theme of how her past experiences and childhood shaped her. As I wrote the book, it helped me anticipate how she would behave in certain situations. Equally important is the villains–thinking through their character and motivation is so vital to understand what would drive them to commit a horrific crime. Anastasia Hastings: Lots more latitude in a series, lots more time to have a character grow and change. Stand alone? You’ve got maybe 100,000 to make a character come alive for readers. In a series that might go on for 10 or 12 or more books, there are many more words to work with. What is the key? So many answers to that one! If I had to choose one, I’d say voice, that special something in the writing that reveals character. It’s all about word choice, the cadence of their dialogue, the way their internal monologue is written. When it’s done well, characters fly off the page! Rob Osler: With a short story nominated and as a writer of a novel series, I’ll come at this from a short story versus long perspective. In a short story, there’s practically no time for a protagonist’s personal growth. It’s all a writer can do to create a compelling character, set up the crime, introduce the suspects and resolve the mystery within a short word count. However, at the other end of the spectrum, with a series, the author has a long runway for character evolution. Whatever personal improvement and enlightenment the hero achieves in a particular book can’t be 100 percent. Instead, the character is on a long journey toward self-betterment and understanding throughout many installments. Sarah Stewart Taylor: When I taught creative writing, I would have my students do an exercise where they had to pick one of their close friends and write about the first time they met them. What were the writer’s first impressions of the friend? What was their initial dynamic with the friend? Then I would have them write a couple of scenes set in subsequent years showing how their impressions changed as they got to know the person better. Were their initial impressions correct? What did they learn that deepened their understanding of their friend? Showing that kind of evolution in perception and in the dynamic between two people is one of my favorite things about characterization. There is such pleasure in developing that evolution over the course of multiple series installments. A character can be one thing in one book and something else entirely in another. Standalones can show significant character development and satisfying arcs as well, of course, but I love the way a series can represent all the eras and stages in a human life. It’s so satisfying to me. Linda Castillo: A writer must possess intimate knowledge of his character. He must know his character’s deepest, darkest fears, his opinions—flawed or imperfect or not—and he must understand what drives his character forward. The human psyche is infinite, which gives a writer much fodder. Use it. When writing a long running series, character growth is a key element. It’s vital to maintain that growth to keep the series fresh. Each book in a series contains a character arc and for a long running series that arc is expansive. One last personal note: I love writing imperfect characters. They are interesting and unpredictable and can be such fun. That said, there are certain lines that should not be crossed. Know what those lines are because they could edge a highly-flawed sympathetic character into irredeemable territory. __________________________________ How do you balance between educating and entertaining when it comes to nonfiction? __________________________________ Robert Morgan: This is one of the most difficult questions to answer about writing literary biography. A good biography requires a lot of research, but if the biography relies mostly on facts and interpretations others have already made familiar, the work will be neither educational nor entertaining. The narrative must have fresh facts and new interpretations. Lyton Strachey once observed that ignorance could be an important asset to a historian. An author who knows everything already will not understand what a reader needs to know to appreciate the unfolding story. A good biography will communicate the excitement of discovery and new understanding, and readers will be entertained. If the biographer feels no thrill of insight and interpretation, the reader will not either. Steven Powell (nominated for Best Critical/Biographical – Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy): Entertaining is rather easy in James Ellroy’s case: his life is so dramatic! Applying the facts to the narrative of Ellroy’s life in a clear and concise manner does the work for you. There’s no need to sensationalize. In fact, a few of Ellroy’s claims seemed questionable, and scrutinizing them with all the available evidence makes for fascinating reading. Additionally, when you have a charismatic, larger-than-life subject such as James Ellroy it’s gripping to hear the testimony of the people who have known him. I spoke to over eighty friends, colleagues and partners of Ellroy and it was important to me to include their voices, as they gave a portrait of Ellroy very different to the Demon Dog persona he has worked so hard to cultivate. __________________________________ What is a moment that sticks out in your research journey? Was there a particularly odd factoid or archive you’d like to highlight? __________________________________ Steven Powell: I discovered the identity of Jean Ellroy’s first husband, which even James Ellroy didn’t know. James only knew of him as ‘the Spalding Man’ and thought he was the heir to the Spalding Sporting Goods fortune. He was, in fact, Easton Ewing Spaulding, a real estate heir. Ellroy had misspelled his name by a single letter and, consequently, was never able to track him down. Solving this mystery helped me to earn Ellroy’s trust and persuaded him to cooperate on the biography. I also think, in the long-term, that the more mysteries we can solve about Jean Ellroy’s life the closer we will get to solving her murder. Robert Morgan: When I was examining the Poe material at the Enoch Pratt Memorial Library in Baltimore I got to hold letters written by Elmira Royster Shelton, Poe’s first and last fiancee, to his aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, just before and after Poe’s death in 1849. Looking at the fine handwriting, the sophisticated phrasing, the kindness, I understood, as I had not before, the depth of the bond between Edgar and Elmira, her importance as muse and inspiration for “The Raven.” Another discovery, as I re-read “The Gold-Bug,” was that Poe had placed the landscape and flora around Charlottesville, Virginia, on the swampy coast of South Carolina, combining two places in the South he knew well. More significant was my discovery that Poe was a poet of the natural world as well as of horror and crime. In “The Domain of Arnheim” and several other stories he celebrates the splendor and mystery of forests and streams, adding to the astonishing range of his achievement. Even more important, I found that Dr. Snodgrass’s account of finding Poe near death in a tavern in Baltimore was part of his temperance lectures. Snodgrass used Poe’s death as a warning against the evils of alcohol. Poe had taken a pledge to never drink again, and others who saw Poe in those last days made no mentions of alcohol. Poe more likely died of tuberculosis of the brain. One clue to Snodgrass’s bias was his statement that Poe was wearing cheap clothes when found. Though dirty, Poe’s coat and pants were made of alpaca and cashmere. View the full article

Write what you know, they say. A tall order if you’re writing about a serial killer. Most serial killers don’t take the time to sit down and write crime fiction—harder to plot a crime than simply do it, I would think, particularly once you’ve figured it out and are on a roll—but there’s a thought: a serial killer who writes crime novels. Otherwise, you do your research for that part of it. There are writers who have a great idea, a plot, a construct with a shocking twist, and set it in a generic landscape anywhere. But for me, the most satisfying crime fiction are stories that spring from a particular place and the people who live there; a place and manners the author knows well; stories that could not happen anywhere else. What I know, in recent years, is the life of a single parent in small town Maine. Being a parent is the sum of all my fears now: that something could happen to my child. Particularly as that child enters the teen years, if he or she has trouble in school and out of school, and you don’t always know where he or she is. And in Maine: Stephen King country; a beautiful rural state of forests and bogs and a rocky coast, full of dark promise. Here are some novels whose crimes and mysteries grow out of place and manners: Jane Harper; The Dry, etc; Tana French; In the Woods, etc Both of theses authors are excellent, well known, and in similar ways have staked out their turf. Jane Harper’s novels are set in Australia, beginning with The Dry, three of them featuring her detective Aaron Falk, others are stand-alone mysteries. Usually involving cold cases—not always murders, sometimes deaths resulting from tragic relationships—Harper’s slow-burn but cinematically rendered stories unwrap layers of Australian communities, family secrets, broken friendships that are defined by landscapes both beautiful and harsh. Tana French’s stories are set in Ireland. Like Harper, she has a series of novels, The Dublin Murder Squad, beginning with her debut, In The Woods, that feature returning detective characters, with revolving points of view, and stand-alone novels with new characters. Like Harper, her stories are slow-burners: an inciting incident draws the reader in, and the long, deliberate development of her plots is sustained by the convincing details of place, characters, and the quality of French’s writing. Louise Welsh; The Cutting Room Less well known, more striking in location and character, is Scottish writer Louise Welsh’s debut novel The Cutting Room. Her protagonist is the grim, saturnine auctioneer, Rilke, who finds snuff porn photographs among the property of a dead man, and sets out to learn the story behind the photos. The photos are almost a MacGuffin for Welsh to take us through Rilke’s world of vividly described alcoholic auctioneers and gay sex hookups in a dismal, gothic Glasgow. Welsh’s writing, characters, and setting of place transcend genre writing into literary fiction. She has authored six crime novels, including most recently a sequel to The Cutting Room, The Second Cut, where we meet Rilke, still alive, 20 years on. Georges Simenon; , Maigret; Dirty Snow, and the romans durs The fantastically prolific—over 400 novels—Belgian writer Georges Simenon was most famous for his French police detective Jules Maigret, for whom he wrote 75 novels and 28 short stories—almost double the appearances of Hercule Poirot. Maigret’s world is smoggy, tobacco-filled early to mid-20th century Paris. But Simenon’s greater literary reputation is based on what he called his romans durs—‘hard novels’— “psychological thrillers exploring the darkest corners of the human mind, prostitution, police corruption… the hope of escape represented by railway stations… events which Simenon had experienced and were fictionalized to a criminal or psychological extreme.” Booker Prize-winner John Banville, who writes crime fiction under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, praised Simenon’s novels for their psychological insights and vivid evocation of time and place. W. Somerset Maugham; The Letter While not known as a crime writer, during most of his lifetime Maugham was the most famous author in the world. His commercial success so undermined the critical reception of his work that he himself described his position in the literary world as being “in the very first row of the second-raters.” Depending on who’s counting, between 60 and 90 of his novels, plays, and short stories have been adapted to film and TV. One of the most famous of these is his short story, The Letter, the barely fictionalized account of the 1911 murder of a British planter in Malaya by his lover, the wife of another British plantation owner. Its strength is not the nature of the killing but the shame and duplicity and the world of its characters. The Letter became a play, and was filmed twice, best in 1940, starring Bette Davis. The real life murder is also the subject of a 2023 novel, The House of Doors, by Tan Twan Eng, featuring Somerset Maugham as a character. I found it a tepid dilution of Maugham’s original short story, lacking the perfectly drawn time, place, and characters that Maugham knew best. Edward St Aubyn; The Patrick Melrose books The five short ‘Patrick Melrose’ novels—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk, At Last—by British novelist Edward St Aubyn, are not crime books per se. They are accounts of the emotional and pedophiliac abuse received by St Aubyn’s thinly veiled autobiographical character Patrick Melrose during his childhood at the hands of his parents, dysfunctional British aristocrats, and Patrick’s later adult life. The first book describes Patrick’s rape as a child by his own father at the family’s beautiful chateau in the south of France. Subsequent books deal with Patrick’s life as a drug addict, his father’s funeral, his own attempts at marriage. They are as dark as human familial relations can be, and frequently hysterically funny. St Aubyn is a great prose stylist. His humor is a way to deal with unspeakable abuse and horror. He’s not laughing at his protagonist, with the glee sometimes shown by Stephen King and other authors toward their miscreant creations, St Aubyn is using humor with compassion, as a way to assimilate, for protagonist and reader, the unspeakable. It’s a writing lesson for the ages. HBO made a successful adaptation of the five books, called Patrick Melrose, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. My point here is, again, place and manners. The Melrose books are a trip, a literary benchmark of human misbehavior; guaranteed—trigger warning—to offend every sensibility. *** View the full article

There was no good reason for Bob Ramsey, a veteran St. Louis defense attorney, to take on Mark Woodworth as a client. At first glance, Woodworth couldn’t appear more guilty. He’d already been convicted, not once but twice, of the same murder—once in 1995, and then again in 1999 after a retrial, when the judge, throwing the book at him, had sent Woodworth back to Missouri state prison with four life sentences. The evidence against Mark looked damning. The victim had been Mark’s neighbor Cathy Robertson, a forty-one-year-old mother of five. At the crime scene, investigators had found Mark’s fingerprint on a box of bullets, the same type of bullets police suspected the shooter had used. Moreover, police had confiscated a Ruger pistol from Mark’s father and passed it along to a ballistics examiner. The examiner fired a test bullet from the Ruger, looked at the bullet under a microscope, and then matched it to a remnant of one of the six bullets used in the shooting. Mark, who was sixteen at the time of the murder but was certified as an adult by the state of Missouri at trial, had target-practiced with a nearly identical Ruger pistol weeks before Cathy was killed. Neither did it help his cause that the Robertsons lived across the street from the Woodworths and that Mark slept alone in a bedroom in the basement, next to a door he could sneak out of without anyone knowing he was gone. During a polygraph, Mark responded to the suggestion that he’d been the killer and could now face the death penalty by telling the detective matter-of-factly, “We all have to die sometime.” At his first trial, when Mark was brought up to the witness stand to proclaim his innocence, he had not been a convincing advocate for his own cause. He did not passionately reject the prosecutor’s suggestion that he had been the gunman. Quite the opposite, in fact; he wasn’t showing much emotion at all. Pale, short, thin, with a spread of acne on his cheeks and narrow, dark brown eyes that tended to gaze off into the distance, Mark had the type of sullen disposition that, as the Missouri state prosecutors suggested in their closing remarks, was not unlike all the American teenage boys with brains soaked by action movies and bloody video games who kept making the nightly news for brutal acts of senseless violence in the 1990s. In both trials, jurors learned Mark had almost no social existence to speak of. He was hardly interested in girls, didn’t go to parties, and had but one friend. Academics never being his strong suit, he’d dropped out of high school and spent much of his time by himself on his family’s farm. To put it simply, Mark fit the profile of what had become a prominent if menacing figure in the national imagination—a loner with a gun looking to make a name for himself. For a small-town jury, there was perhaps nothing more emblematic of the ongoing American crisis of violence than the young American male with a dead stare and something toxic boiling in his blood. In the cities, the bloodshed had become a bleak if almost rudimentary occurrence. But now the violence crept into their rural outpost, knocking on their door. By the time Mark was back in his prison uniform at the Crossroads Correctional Center after his failed appeal, the Woodworths had already churned through four lawyers. Now that Mark was facing four life sentences, they had little hope of finding a decent attorney willing to keep fighting. It was during this period of despair that Dale Whiteside, a friend and state representative born and raised in Chillicothe, the small northwestern Missouri town where the Woodworths and Robertsons lived, told Mark’s parents about an unusual lawyer named Bob Ramsey. A middle-aged attorney who had bounced around law firms in St. Louis, Ramsey had a habit of taking on down-and-out clients. This wasn’t great for his bottom line, but something about their plight would speak to Ramsey’s sense of injustice; he’d spent years toiling on these special projects, trying to prove to himself and the courts that his client had gotten a raw deal. Whiteside had come to know Ramsey through a shared hatred of domestic abuse. One of Whiteside’s pet issues in his capacity as a representative was working to free Missouri women who’d been imprisoned after killing their abusive husbands or boyfriends. With frustrating frequency, judges in Missouri rejected the argument that women who’d spent months or years being punched, kicked, slapped, or otherwise physically tormented by their abusive significant others were acting in self-defense when they killed the men who hurt them. Ramsey had taken on a few of these women as clients, one of whom he hoped to free by winning her clemency from the governor. As determined as he was persistent, even when the chances of a successful outcome were slim, he’d set off on a three-day walk along a 130-mile route from St. Louis to the capitol building in Jefferson City to drum up publicity for his client. Though his cross-state pilgrimage was a bust, the effort convinced Whiteside of Ramsey’s extraordinary commitment to his clients. It was then that Whiteside called Ramsey to ask if he would represent the son of a family from his hometown of Chillicothe, a young man who Whiteside believed had been set up as the killer. Whiteside, however, struggled to instill the same belief about Woodworth’s innocence in Ramsey, who was more than a little dubious. The Woodworths were good people in need of someone who could help them, Whiteside told Ramsey, all but begging him to just give the case a look. At least meet with Mark in prison before you say no, Whiteside pleaded. This wasn’t a good time for Ramsey to take on more long-shot cases. He and his wife, a trauma nurse, were raising two teenage children in their modest suburban home outside St. Louis, and expensive college tuitions were on the horizon. But Ramsey agreed to give Mark a chance. * As he sat across from Mark under the sterile fluorescents of the Crossroads Correctional visiting room, with guards watching closely, it had taken Ramsey all of about ten minutes to intuit that Mark was not a killer. The possibility then that Mark was an innocent young man spending his life in prison ignited a deep sense of injustice in Ramsey. “How could you know that?” I asked Ramsey. We were in his office in a small brick building along a strip of fast-food restaurants and office parks that sprawled east from St. Louis over the border into Illinois. “You haven’t met him yet?” Ramsey asked. I hadn’t. It was August 2013, and after landing in St. Louis, I’d picked up my rental from Hertz and stopped by Ramsey’s place before making the four-hour drive west. I’d heard about the case from a source on an unrelated assignment earlier in the year and couldn’t stop thinking about it. Despite the rap on Mark as an outcast turned stone- cold gunman, he didn’t have any history of violence, and as the local who tipped me off to the case explained, those who’d known Mark had considered him a quiet, even gentle, kid—at least until the shooting took place. He was the son and grandson of farmers on both his mother’s and father’s sides, and as the eldest of seven children he stood to lead his siblings in eventually taking over the family farm. In news coverage of the case, Woodworth supporters said that all the boy ever wanted to do was be a farmer like his father. So what exactly happened to Mark, then, to make him turn away from the path that had been laid out for him, eschewing the traditions and livelihood that were his inheritance? And what was it that had Ramsey so convinced that Mark was innocent? How could he maintain such a high level of confidence when two juries unanimously voted the other way? “Well, when you do meet him, I think you’ll know what I mean,” Ramsey told me. What I wanted to know from Ramsey, though, was how he’d come to take on this case at all. The idea that Mark didn’t seem violent, I said, didn’t necessarily matter in light of the two juries who felt otherwise. What was it that convinced him this was a client who was worth the trouble? Ramsey took a second to think it over. At sixty-five, he was tall and well nourished, with a round belly and broad shoulders. His neatly trimmed goatee was the same gray as his dense head of hair. He wore silver wire-rimmed glasses. He hadn’t been in this particular office all that long; it was just another workspace he’d taken up since leaving his previous firm after butting heads with the owner over how he ran the practice. Grabbing this desk in the office of an old friend, Ramsey had brought along his diplomas and a landscape print of a golf course, which now hung on the walls slightly askew. All the flat surfaces were covered with piles of court documents and legal pads flipped to pages filled with dense cursive scribbles. Bankers boxes around the edge of the room were stuffed with papers so thickly annotated with sticky notes they resembled planters of exotic yellow flowers. Ramsey had been grinding away on the Woodworth case for well over a decade, and it had become a full-blown obsession. “Well, the funny thing about that is, it wasn’t any single thing,” he said. “Every part of this case smelled like a skunk from the beginning.” He recalled that, after he met Mark, the family put him in touch with a group of a dozen or so locals in Chillicothe who’d formed the Concerned Citizens for Justice for Mark Woodworth. While the Robertsons and many in Chillicothe took Mark’s life sentences as proof of a functional justice system, a small but zealous contingent felt otherwise. They’d held fundraisers over the years, accumulating enough money to offer a $153,000 reward for information that would lead to the “arrest and conviction of the persons responsible for the death of Catherine Robertson,” as one of their bake-sale posters put it. It was strange that the neighbors in such a small community, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, would so adamantly disagree about who had killed one of their own. When Ramsey went to the courthouse and asked the clerk to pull the grand jury transcript file, the clerk had given him a folder with almost nothing in it. There were just a few pages containing the opening remarks that the judge, Ken Lewis, had made at Mark’s hearing—a long, stinging monologue chastising the county prosecutor, who, for reasons unspecified, had recused himself from the case. Judge Lewis told the grand jury how grateful he was that the Missouri attorney general, the state’s highest-ranking law enforcement official, had gone to the trouble to travel up north from the capital to this small farming outpost to see about Mark’s day in court. What he was doing in Chillicothe, and why this little speech was preserved in the court files, remained a mystery. Standing with me outside his office building in the bright, warm August sun, Ramsey smoked a cigarette and lamented that, ever since a pair of back surgeries, he couldn’t keep up his daily training in aikido, the Japanese martial art. He’d traveled all over the country for aikido retreats and studied the philosophy underlying the practice with an intensity he otherwise reserved for trial preparation. Over the years, Ramsey has implemented some of the aikido principles into his legal practice. “Calmness in action,” he said. “You try to do this without escalating the conflict, without inflicting unnecessary pain on your attacker. It’s based on the old samurai code of a spirit of love and protection of all living things. “It’s all there, downstairs,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette. “The case squad binders, all of it. You’re free to look at whatever I have.” We went into the lower level of the office, where a conference table was flanked by shelves of bankers boxes jammed with papers from the Woodworth case. It wasn’t possible to guess how many individual pages were in the files. It was many thousands, and a daunting portion of it wasn’t labeled. Ramsey was Mark’s fifth attorney, and he had inherited documents from everyone who had worked on the case before him; then he spent a decade adding his own massive haul of collected materials. Somewhere, I thought I might find the point of origin, of where this case really began—and then perhaps I’d get a sense of what the police had found, and as Ramsey suggested, what they had missed. “It’ll take a while,” Ramsey said, stacking a pile of folders in front of me before he headed upstairs to take a phone call. “But I bet you’re gonna find what you’re looking for.” ___________________________________ From The Shooter at Midnight: Murder, Corruption, and a Farming Town Divided by Sean Patrick Cooper, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. © 2024 by Sean Patrick Cooper. View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Kellye Garrett, Missing White Woman (Mulholland) “Juicy but shrewd, Missing White Woman is arguably a thriller for the TikTok age, its issues contemporary yet timeless. Kellye Garrett uses her staccato sentences to build pressure … [and] handles questions with depth and verve in this exciting new book.” –Elle Peter Nichols, Granite Harbor (Celadon Books) “Well-written, character-driven portrait of small-town New England meets Silence of the Lambs.” –Kirkus Reviews Catherine Mack, Every Time I Go On Vacation Someone Dies (Minotaur) “[A] fizzy series debut . . . Mack, a pseudonym for the veteran Canadian author Catherine McKenzie, gleefully pokes fun at genre tropes while evoking Eleanor’s zany world . . . hilarious.” –The New York Times Jeneva Rose, Home Is Where The Bodies Are (Blackstone) “Rose demonstrates a formidable command of character…Fans will enjoy the ride.” –Publishers Weekly Niklas Natt och Dag, Order of the Furies (Atria) “A brutal, satisfying end to a superior series.” –Publishers Weekly Jean-Luc Bannalec, Death of a Master Chef (Minotaur) “An intriguing and tasty mystery with surprising twists in a beautiful, charming setting that will appeal to Louise Penny fans.” –First Clue Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Oracle (Tor Nightfire) “Told in the style of an international thriller and featuring a huge cast of well-developed characters, the novel is a deep dive into how the tendrils of the past can reach out and force humanity to heed a warning.” –Library Journal Lee Geum-yi (trans. An Seonjae), Can’t I Go Instead (Forge) “Compelling and inspiring, this story speaks of resilience and determination to make the best out of the situation one has been dealt.” –Booklist Sean Patrick Cooper, The Shooter at Midnight (Penguin) “An arresting work of true crime. . . Cooper’s suspenseful narrative nimbly interweaves procedural beats and a vivid portrait of rural America in crisis.” –Publishers Weekly Jason Bell, Cracking the Nazi Code (Pegasus) “The investigative work the author has done has produced a biography suited to the best of the current-day spy novels. Well-written and interesting and deserves to be devoured.” –New York Journal of Books View the full article

They moved Route 36 in the years after the killings. Now the road runs straight where it used to dogleg through Newton County, an hour’s drive southeast of Atlanta, and most travelers don’t see that it was ever otherwise. Orphaned stretches of the old highway linger here and there, most of them dwindled to rough trails—hardwoods and high weeds pressing their flanks, yearling pines braving their unpaved crowns, thick weaves of vine plunging their remote twists into midday dusk. Leave anything for long in the Georgia heat and rain and, sure as the sunrise, nature will reclaim it. It does not take long. You have to look hard for one piece of the original roadbed, where it veers from modern blacktop into jungle at the county’s southern tip. Its passage into the trees has knitted shut, season by season, over a lifetime of disuse. A sign once warned off the curious; when it fell away, the opening had shrunk so small, so easily missed by passing traffic, that hanging a new one must have seemed a waste of effort. The revelations tore at America’s faith in its own virtue. They undermined its sense of modernity, challenged its grasp of history—resurrected sins thought dead and gone. The road beyond is an abstraction, a shallow groove carpeted in pine needles. But if you dare push through the tangle into the gloom, and follow the ghost of old Route 36 on its curving path among the trees, you soon reach the South River—and what’s left of the span that bore the abandoned highway to the far bank. Mann’s Bridge squats on rusting pylons a few feet over the drink, its wood-plank floor stripped away, its box-truss skeleton venturing only halfway across the water. Its bones are pitted, flaking, and brittle with age. It receives few visitors, this fossil of horse-drawn days. Barely visible from the modern concrete bridge a thousand feet downstream, it’s paid little mind by anyone. Yet here, unknown to most folks in Newton County and unmentioned by those aware of it, an event of powerful repercussion occurred. One winter’s Saturday night in 1921, an automobile chugged up the old highway to stop in the span’s middle, and one of its occupants dropped to the water below. Then, as now, the South River was shallow at the bridge, its bottom only eight to ten feet down. But when a man is bound by wire, with a hundred-pound sack of rocks chained to his neck, water need not run deep to do its work. Dark with tannins, clouded by mud, it swallowed him up. A minute later, it was back to running smooth and slow. On the same night a mile from here, where old Route 36 crossed another river, two different men, likewise trussed with wire and chain, were thrown off Allen’s Bridge, now all but vanished. In the space of a few nights, three more men were pitched off a third bridge five miles to the northeast. Many others died in the surrounding countryside, all of them Black and all at the hands of what seemed an unlikely killer. His arrest and trial would spawn front-page headlines from coast to coast about the virtual prison he ran on a plantation one county over, and about what lay behind the farm’s prosperity and the murders, both—a form of slavery that had survived in the South for generations after Appomattox. Each day’s paper brought new details of the slaughter, new glimpses of the brutal months and years the victims endured before meeting their ends. The revelations tore at America’s faith in its own virtue. They undermined its sense of modernity, challenged its grasp of history—resurrected sins thought dead and gone, put to rest by the Thirteenth Amendment. Provoked wonder: How could such things happen here, in the Empire State of the South? How could they happen now, amid the inventive dazzle of the twentieth century? How could they happen at all? A century on, you might ask the same questions. The whole business remains incredible, the more so because it has so faded from memory. No roadside marker calls it to mind out on the new Route 36. No town square monument honors the dead. Nothing commemorates the drama that brought a pernicious but largely unseen form of indentured servitude to widespread attention—and, by dragging it into the light, perhaps helped to hasten its decline. Neither do we have tangible reminders that Georgia’s governor at the time, a man vilified for his role in an earlier murder case, earned some measure of redemption through his response to these killings. Nor that, while doing so, he allied with two African American activists who rank among the twentieth century’s ablest generals in the long and continuing battle for racial justice. About the only memorial to those clamorous days is here, in an out-of-the-way corner of a sparsely populated county in central Georgia, at the end of an abandoned dirt road, at the decrepit remains of Mann’s Bridge. It seems too tranquil a setting for the lessons it offers. That the past lurks close. That we haven’t learned as much as we think we have. That maybe we never do. Crickets and birdsong fill the air. Fish leap. The bridge’s old metal bakes hot in the sun. The river swirls like syrup around its legs. * A January weekday at the U.S. Post Office and Courthouse in downtown Atlanta—today the home of the Eleventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, but in 1921, a busy warren of federal offices. Two special agents of the United States Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner of today’s FBI, were working at their desks on the third floor when up walked a Black man named Gus Chapman. Thirty-nine years old and worn for his age, Chapman told the agents that he had been living in Atlanta the previous spring when he was picked up on a loitering charge. Fined five dollars, unable to pay it, he was facing hard labor on the chain gang when a young farmer approached him in the jail. Come home with me, he said, and you can work out your fine there. You’ll be happy you did. It’ll be like a home to you. And so Chapman accompanied Hulon Williams home to Jasper County, in the cotton country forty miles southeast of the city, and to a sprawling plantation owned by Williams’s father. He quickly saw that “Mr. Hulon” had oversold its charms. Chapman received no pay. He was forced at the end of a gun barrel to work from dawn to well past dark. He was forbidden to leave the premises under threat of death. He was locked up at night in a bunkhouse crowded with other prisoners, and whipped for any infraction, real or imagined. The Bureau agents recognized the conditions he described. Gus Chapman had been held in peonage. That word has fallen out of use, and today is unknown to many Americans, if not most. But throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, peonage claimed lives by the thousands and ruined untold others. It tore men from their wives and children, stole sons from their mothers, and helped fuel the Great Migration of southern Blacks to the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest in the years on either side of World War I. Chapman was typical of its victims. In one of its many forms, a man, usually Black, would be arrested for a trifling or trumped-up offense. Vagrancy—that is, having no job, or at least no ready proof of one—was a favorite, as was loitering. Conviction was pretty much automatic, and almost always carried a fine and fees beyond his means. A third party would then step forward to pay the fine in return for the prisoner’s labor until his debt was repaid. If, before he settled his account, he was prevented from leaving, that prisoner was a peon, trapped in what amounted to debt slavery. Ginned-up bills for his food and housing might be added to his fine, effectively turning a short jail term into a life sentence. His working and living conditions were often hellish. And if he tried to run, he’d be hunted down like an animal. Chapman knew that firsthand. The previous July, after three months on the farm, he had slipped away by night and struck off to the east. Roughly a dozen straight-line miles across forest and cottonfield, he found himself cornered. The farm’s owner, John Sims Williams—“Mr. Johnny” to his field hands—dragged him home and threatened to kill him. Chapman pleaded for his life until Williams softened. He decided instead to beat the prisoner with his fists, treat him to a savage whipping, then order him to chop firewood in the rain until the sun went down. Though Congress had outlawed peonage in 1867, it had endured in the hardscrabble back blocks of the rural South. The memory of that beating, and Mr. Johnny’s assurance that if he ran off again he’d be killed like a snake, dissuaded Chapman from another flight for more than four months—until, on or about December 1, 1920, he again snuck off the Williams place in the dark. This time he made it to Atlanta. He’d been in hiding since. Others had not been so lucky. Chapman told the agents that he knew of peons killed at the Williams place, and that he had witnessed one of their deaths. A prisoner nicknamed Blackstrap had run away the previous spring and was recaptured after several days on the lam. Back at the plantation, he was draped over a gasoline barrel, his hands and feet held by other field workers, and whipped by Mr. Hulon with such fury that he begged for the torture to stop, begged for the pain to end; cried and begged even as Mr. Hulon handed a revolver to another farmhand and ordered him to shoot. These Williams people were dangerous, Chapman told the agents. He lived in fear they would track him down in Atlanta. If they found him and took him back to Jasper County, it would be to kill him. It so happened that Gus Chapman was not the only peon to steal away from the Williams plantation and seek out Special Agents Adelbert J. Wismer and George W. Brown. A second man had been bailed out of jail by Mr. Hulon in February 1920 and had been held against his will until his escape the following September. He evaded capture, ghosting into neighboring Newton County and reaching its seat, Covington, before turning west to Atlanta. The record is vague on whether James Strickland spoke to Wismer and Brown before or after Chapman, but their visits came within weeks of each other, and the accounts they gave the agents dovetailed in their particulars. In exchange for the $5.25 fine that Mr. Hulon paid the jailers, Strickland worked from daybreak to night, without pay and under guard; Mr. Johnny, Mr. Hulon, and Hulon’s brothers, LeRoy and Marvin, carried pistols, as did two trusted Black hands who served as the plantation’s field bosses. Strickland was locked up at night with other men “bought” from the jails in Atlanta, Macon, and Monticello, the Jasper County seat. Like Chapman, he described seeing a fellow peon murdered. Strickland had not been on the farm long when a worker named Iron Jaw—who also went by Long John, and whom still others knew as Smart John—took off running. The Williamses hunted him down, brought him back, and whipped him. Three of the Williams boys took turns getting their licks in. On a Saturday morning not long after, the peons were building a hog enclosure, and Iron Jaw was dispatched to retrieve a coil of wire for the fence. He was unable to carry it, or was making a mess of rolling the wire—the exact nature of his offense wasn’t clear, but whatever the case, Mr. LeRoy decided he had earned another whipping. LeRoy was well into giving it to him when Iron Jaw asked him to stop. When Mr. LeRoy did not, Iron Jaw told him he would rather die than be treated so. Mr. LeRoy asked him: You want me to kill you, sure enough? Yes, came the reply. Mr. LeRoy shot him in the arm, then asked: You really want me to kill you? Iron Jaw nodded. Mr. LeRoy shot him dead. He turned to Strickland, standing a few feet away, and asked: Do you want some of this? The gun, he meant. No, Strickland recalled saying. I don’t want none of it. Wismer and Brown took it all down. Though Congress had outlawed peonage in 1867, it had endured in the hardscrabble back blocks of the rural South, and it was among the agents’ duties to investigate reports of its presence. It wasn’t the sort of work they savored. Victims were often too terrorized to say much, white juries tended to side with white defendants, and even if the government won a conviction, the penalties faced by the accused were meager. Still, the Bureau had other business in that part of the state, so on February 18, 1921, the agents drove to Jasper County. From their office they wove through a booming city of electric lights and elevators, grand movie and vaudeville houses, and office towers reaching higher than songbirds flew. They drove boulevards clogged with Model Ts, streetcars, and slow-rolling drays, past smoking factories and the tenements of the poor. Atlanta, the capital of the New South: a city of smarts and bustle and cosmopolitan style to match most any in the East. Out through its suburbs of fine homes they passed. Soon the houses fell away, and the cotton rose, and they were in the country. It was another Georgia out there. It was another century. __________________________________ Excerpted from Hell Put to Shame: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America’s Second Slavery by Earl Swift. Copyright © 2024 by Earl Swift. From Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission. View the full article

“People should be interested in books, not their authors.”—Agatha Christie A couple of years ago, on the sun-drenched Amalfi Coast when it was climate-change hot outside, I had a thought (Okay, I had many thoughts, but mostly—why did I think it was a good idea to go to Italy in July?). My husband and I were halfway through a ten-day tour and our conversation was wandering, as it tends to do when we’ve spent that much uninterrupted time together, into random topics. I talk a lot—maybe that’s why I’m a writer?—and my thoughts sometimes skip like stones across a flat pond. In between Coke Zero’s and Aperol Spritzes (By the time the trip was over I was half Coke Zero and half Aperol Spritz), my thoughts turned to Agatha Christie. And more specifically, why anyone would ever invite Miss Marple anywhere? Had no one noticed that every time she went on vacation, someone died? Oh! Now there was a book title! I stopped talking for an hour or so, my mind pulled inward, spinning through the various possibilities of what story I could tell with a title like Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies. Because I knew I had something, I just wasn’t sure what. After a couple of hours of internal monologue (Did you know that a huge percentage of people have no internal monologue? I am all internal monologue.) where I’m sure my husband thought I was having some kind of stroke that rendered me silent, I settled on a story about a writer surrounded by literary rivals and her all-too-real protagonist whom she wanted dead. It would be set in Italy, of course, and as the I in the title suggests, it would be written in very close first-person with fourth-wall breaking and footnotes. Once I got home and started writing it, the book came more easily than anything I’ve written before, even though it was quite different from the thrillers I’ve been writing for years, or the rom-com I wrote before that. I didn’t stop then to wonder then why that was, but I think I’ve found the root of it. I grew up in a house full of books. But not just any books—detective fiction lined our floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, tattered paperbacks that had been reread so many times the spines were starting to give. Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, and Sue Grafton were my companions from age 12 after I graduated from L.M. Montgomery and Flowers in the Attic (It was the 70s. No, my parents did not monitor what I was reading.). Looking back there was a common thread that ran through my parents’ choices—many of these books featured a detective who was also a writer. Maybe it was because my father had writing aspirations (he eventually wrote a mystery and published it with a small press), or maybe it wasn’t as deliberate as that. I never asked. But it’s a fairly specific trait. One, that, after a quick Google search I learned has been present since the very first modern detective story—Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Does this mean I haven’t read Poe? I’ll never tell.). In that short story, Poe established a template that would be followed by some of the most famous detective fiction authors in history—a narrator who acts as an assistant to a mercurial and brilliant detective as they solve baffling cases. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who read and admired Poe, adopted this format when he invented Holmes and Watson and gave them their first adventure in A Study in Scarlet in 1886. The Holmes novels are “case studies” written by Dr. Watson, a twist on the format influenced by Holmes’ medical career where case studies were used in teaching surgical techniques. Agatha Christie, too, was almost certainly influenced by Doyle’s choice of an author who is both part of the story but not the principal detective when she wrote The Mysterious Affair at Styles, where we meet Hercule Poirot through the eyes of his friend, Hastings (Hastings and Dr. Watson have many similarities in their personalities and backgrounds according to this Wikipedia article!). While Hastings doesn’t appear in all of Poirot’s novels, he helped introduce us to Poirot and set the tone for that series. Agatha was a fan of Doyle’s early novels and—fun fact!—he participated in the search for her when she went missing in 1926. Rex Stout used a similar device in Fer-de-lance, his first detective fiction novel (published in 1934) which introduced Nero Wolfe and his trusty guy Friday Archie Goodwin. I’m not the first person to point out that Stout followed a familiar path trod by Doyle in his creation—a quirky detective and his trusted assistant; they even both live in the same house. I’m sure there are many other examples, but I’m an author, not an academic. Besides, if I didn’t read them, could they have influenced my literary path? Yes, yes, I know they could have. Like Miranda Priestly points out in The Devil Wears Prada (the movie), that teal sweater you buy at the Gap had its birth on a runway in Paris whether you follow fashion or not. Put another way, and to (mis)quote someone (Shakespeare? I thought it was Shakespeare but I can’t find it on the interwebs), there are seven basic plots and one of them surely involves a writer stuck in their own murder mystery. I’m sure Sue Grafton would agree. In her alphabet series, which started in 1982 with A is for Alibi, she changed it up by introducing a female detective (Kinsey Milhone) and doing away with the sidekick—Kinsey narrates her own stories thank you very much, which she frames as case reports. Sound familiar? Interestingly, Grafton wrote screenplay adaptations of Christie’s A Caribbean Mystery (a Miss Marple story) and Sparkling Cyanide (a Colonel Race story), and was apparently groomed—in a good way!—by her father to write detective fiction. More recently, the writer as protagonist in mysteries has taken a different turn into an emerging genre of funny mysteries. Two of my favorite examples are Benjamin Stevenson’s Ernest Cunningham series (Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone) and the Finlay Donovan series by Elle Cosimano. Besides the fact that I am fairly certain that Benjamin Stevenson and I somehow share a brain though we’ve never met, both of these series involve a writer who is thrust into a murder mystery and are told in the first person. Finlay even has a sidekick—the enigmatic Vero who is part nanny and part partner-in-detecting-crime. So we know we do it. But that also begs the question—why? Is it a lack of imagination? I’d defend myself in that case. I’ve written many books and the main character is a writer in four. Okay, that’s still a big percentage. But no one would ever accuse Poe or Doyle or Christie of lacking in imagination. So the question remains. I have a theory because of course I do. And it’s this—writing is puzzle solving. Even if you’re in charge of the mystery in your book (and all books have mysteries regardless of genre, that’s why we read them, to find out) you still need to be able to put the pieces together and follow a trail of clues and see into the heart of people so their motivations are understandable. In short, writers are detectives. Who better, then, to narrate a murder mystery? *** View the full article

My cat has nothing in common with Maisie Dobbs. Let me back up. Picture the scene: it’s December 2021. My first nephew had just been born, and because of the pandemic, I couldn’t meet him in person or help my sister the way she’d helped me after my sons were born. I was feeling helpless, sad, and vulnerable as Christmas approached. So I did what any logical person would do. I went on PetFinder. Hear me out, though—we’d recently adopted a chihuahua, and my intention was to find contact information so that we could make a holiday donation to the organization that had rescued him. Instead, I saw a description of a cat who needed a home. I showed it to my husband, who raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Izzy wants a sister!” I informed him. He eyed the black cat we’d had for twelve years as she napped serenely on my favorite chair. “Izzy definitely does not want a sister.” And, okay, maybe he had a point. After all, with a mere hiss and a swat, Izzy had easily asserted her dominance first over our two beagles (may they rest in peace) and then over the chihuahua. All three dogs were terrified of her. Fast forward a week and I had convinced him; instead of a donation in honor of our dog, we made plans to adopt our second cat. Fast forward another week and our new kitty arrived on a transport van from Tennessee. I named her after my favorite fictional detective, Maisie Dobbs. Her entry into our household caused chaos. While her namesake is courageous, intelligent, and empathetic, Maisie the cat turned out to be none of these things. She’s flighty, nervous, and enjoys clawing my favorite chair—the same one Izzy loves to nap on. As my husband predicted, Izzy was less than thrilled about the arrival of her new sister. Much hissing and swatting ensued. Unlike the dogs, though, this new cat refused to submit entirely to Izzy’s dominance. Eventually, the prickly queen and the neurotic newcomer learned to co-exist. Now, they’ll curl up next to each other on my lap as I sit in my favorite chair, now decorated with festive stripes thanks to Maisie’s claws. Many fictional detectives are like Izzy used to be: happy to fly solo. After all, the trope of the lone investigator is appealing. Harry Bosch, one of my all-time favorites, embodies it. Even as I fret about Harry’s unhealthy work-life balance, I still find his all-consuming passion for justice inspiring—and very fun to read about. However, there’s an alternative to the “man on a mission” in crime fiction: the detective duo. And, boy, can it be fun to go along for the ride as a pair of detectives works together to solve murders. The first one that comes to my mind is Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. By pairing his ruthlessly intelligent investigator with a kinder, more sensitive partner, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created one of the most famous foils in all of literature—and gave readers a relatable character who could translate Holmes’s lightning-fast deductions for us, filling in the blanks that the brilliant detective would’ve been far too impatient to stop and explain himself. Duos’ dynamics vary. Sometimes—like my cats—they are thrown together by fate (or, ahem, by me) against their will. Other times, the partnership evolves naturally because the partners’ skills and attitudes complement each other. And sometimes, the only way for two people to overcome a shared trauma is to work together to solve a murder. In my debut historical mystery DEATH IN THE DETAILS, my main character, Maple, is an amateur sleuth who feels compelled to investigate a mysterious death in her small town. My decision to give her a partner was partly a practical one; she needed inside information, and Kenny—the sheriff’s deputy—could provide it. However, I also enjoyed forcing my prickly and somewhat jaded heroine into partnership with an idealistic young officer. Throughout the story, Maple helps Kenny see beyond his rose-colored glasses and he helps her reclaim some faith in humanity’s potential for good. So, in honor of Holmes and Watson, Maple and Kenny, and (to a lesser extent) my two cats, here are three types of detective duos found in historical mysteries. Agreeable Allies MAISIE DOBBS by Jacqueline Winspear (London, 1929) Maisie Dobbs and Billy Beale encounter each other in the first chapter of the first book in the series, when he arrives to help hang a sign outside the detective agency she just started… but it isn’t the first time they’ve met. Billy recognizes Maisie immediately as the nurse who saved his life in a casualty clearing station in France. Their shared history—they’ve both returned from the war with both physical and emotional wounds—and mutual respect grows into a strong friendship and partnership. Throughout the series, the former nurse and the former soldier become each other’s sounding boards, looking out for each other as they work increasingly dangerous cases and support each other through personal tragedies. Feisty Frenemies A CURIOUS BEGINNING by Deanna Raybourn (England, 1887) Veronica Speedwell and Mr. Stoker get on each other’s nerves immediately in this lively romp of a story. In Stoker’s defense, he has no idea why his beloved mentor shows up at his door unannounced with Veronica in tow and instructs him to protect her with his life. Veronica is also in the dark, but when the mentor is murdered and they fear Veronica is the next target, these two strangers must go on the run together. Both characters are passionate, strong-willed, and stubborn; as a reader, it’s great fun to watch them provoke each other and bicker enthusiastically as they hunt for a murderer and try to stay alive themselves. Bonding over Emotional Baggage A DEADLY ENDEAVOR by Jenny Adams (Philadelphia, 1921) On the surface, Edie and Gil have very little in common. She hails from one of Philly’s oldest and richest families, and he’s from the wrong side of the tracks. However, when their mutual connection to murdered girls throws them together, they find themselves hunting a serial killer. Gil’s living with shell shock from his wartime experience and mourning his wife’s death; Edie struggles with depression, the effects of a long illness, and the betrayal of someone close to her. Though their individual traumas are different, they turn out to share the same deepest fear: they don’t want to be cowards. Luckily (?), they have plenty of opportunities in this story to face their own demons—and also some very dangerous criminals. *** I find murder mysteries oddly comforting. When I open one, I know something bad has happened, but I also know I can trust the detective(s) to put everything right—or, as right as it can be put in the aftermath of brutal death. Veronica Speedwell sums up the detectives’ mission this way: “‘Murder is an act of chaos. It lies with us to bring order and method to the solution of the deed.’” Sometimes, we readers crave a lone wolf to restore order. But sometimes what we really need is connection. And sometimes—even if they may not always want to admit it—that’s what our fictional detectives need, too. View the full article

This is a transcript of a talk that was given, by Dr. Olivia Rutigliano, at New York University Law School’s Poe Room Event, on May 19th, 2023. Briefly, from 1845-1846, Edgar Allan Poe lived in a building on the site where NYU Law’s Furman Hall now stands. The Poe Room Event is a twice-annual event, open to the public, that invites scholars and artists to put together a presentation honoring Poe’s legacy. This speech contains spoilers for the stories “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” and “The Purloined Letter.” * The subject of today’s talk takes us to Paris, in the 1840s. A gruesome double-murder has taken place one night in a home along the Rue Morgue, a street in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris. The victims are two women, Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter, Mademoiselle Camille L’Espanaye. The body of the younger woman is found stuffed inside a chimney. She has marks on her neck from strangulation. Her mother’s body lies in the backyard, with numerous bones broken. Her face is badly mutilated, and a tuft of reddish hair is stuck in her fist. She has such a deep gash in her throat that when the police lift her body to carry it away, her head falls off. The residents of the street had been awoken at night by screams—about “eight or ten” neighbors and two gendarmes had, together, forced themselves inside to see if everyone in the home was all right. Running up the stairs, they still hear noises from somewhere above, but by the time they reach the fourth floor, everything has gone silent. The police determine that the murder took place there—on the fourth floor of the house, which has been thoroughly ransacked and where strange pieces of evidence remain: tufts of gray human hair on the fireplace, gold coins all over the floor, and a straight razor, which is by now caked in blood, lying on a chair. A safe is open. And complicating things is that the room is locked. The concerned neighbors and constables had needed to break down the door. The police speak to many witnesses, who explain that they heard several voices coming from the house. One voice was male and was speaking French (which they know because they heard the cry of “mon dieu”), but no one can agree on the language that the other speaker has used. The police are entirely stumped. But there is one man who is not. And his name is Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin. This is the premise of the mystery at the center of a short story called “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” It was published in Graham’s Magazine in 1841, written by the American author Edgar Allan Poe. And it is thought to be the first true, the first pure, the first modern detective story in history. Which makes Dupin the first modern detective. Dupin is a chevalier—which means he has been given the Légion d’honneur, a knighthood, at some point in the past. He is a young man, from a once wealthy family that has since ceased to be so. He is presented to us by the story’s unnamed narrator, an Englishman. And they meet in the most appropriate of settings: searching for a book. They meet in an “obscure library in the Rue Montmartre.” The narrator says that “the accident of our both being in search of the same very rare and very remarkable volume, brought us into closer communion. We saw each other again and again.” Our narrator says of him, “This young gentleman was of an excellent, indeed of an illustrious family, but, by a variety of untoward events, had been reduced to such poverty that the energy of his character succumbed beneath it, and he ceased to bestir himself in the world, or to care for the retrieval of his fortunes. By courtesy of his creditors, there remained in his possession a small remnant of his patrimony; and, upon the income arising from this, he managed, by means of a rigorous economy, to procure the necessaries of life, without troubling himself about its superfluities. Books, indeed, were his sole luxuries, and in Paris these are easily obtained.” The two strike up a friendship, and since the Englishman does not have permanent lodgings for his stay, they agree to live together. Dupin moves into the narrator’s home, which is “a time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted through superstitions into which we did not inquire, and tottering to its fall in a retired and desolate portion of the Faubourg St. Germain.” They live in a home full of books, decorated “in a style which suited the rather fantastic gloom of our common temper.” And it is there where Dupin and his friend open a newspaper, the Gazette des Tribunaux, one morning to learn about the ghastly horrors that took place in a home across the river, a home on a street called the Rue Morgue. The article, simply called “Extraordinary Murders,” chronicles the gruesome scene. For days, the papers will overflow with coverage into this mysterious, grisly circumstance—relaying interviews with twelve people who knew the deceased or lived nearby. No one can agree on the language being spoken in the room. And everyone confirms that no person had entered the house all night. The police arrest a young clerk named Adolphe Le Bon but have not explained why. And after reading everything—the testimonies, the descriptions— Dupin asks his friend what he has made of all of this. Dupin’s friend doesn’t believe that it’s possible to figure out the identity of the killer from any of the evidence. Dupin begs to differ. Friends with the prefect of police, he grants them both entry to the crime scene. The scene is the same as they have read in the papers. And Dupin walks around, narrating what he is seeing. He explains to his friend that what they are doing is unprecedented “in investigations such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much asked ‘what has occurred,’ as ‘what has occurred that has never occurred before.’ Dupin does not see a mass of conflicting details, but a collection of details that all point to the same thing, in their conflict. The interviewed neighbors are people from all over Europe, and they all think they are hearing languages that others, speakers of those languages, think are other languages.” “Now, how strangely unusual must that voice have really been, about which such testimony as this could have been elicited!—in whose tones, even, denizens of the five great divisions of Europe could recognize nothing familiar!” This is because, with the exception of the Frenchman’s “mon dieu,” “…no words—no sounds resembling words—were by any witness mentioned as distinguishable,” he says. Dupin also divines that the murderer must have escaped via the windows—the back windows. It is the only explanation as to how all the doors could have been locked, and the home not entered from the street. Dupin and his friend stand there, trying to figure out the entity that might have been able to climb up and down the side of a building, make humanlike sounds without saying words, and be strong enough to do serious damage to two women. The mother has had her head nearly severed by the grip of a straight razor, while the daughter has thumbprints and fingernail gashes on her throat. Dupin’s friend thinks it must be a madman. But Dupin realizes that it is not a man at all. The handprint on the daughter’s neck is too wide. The hair in the mother’s fist is too coarse. The killer, Dupin divines, is an orangutan—an orangutan who must have been captured in the wild and brought to Paris in captivity, only to escape. Dupin puts an ad in the paper, claiming that he has found an ape. Someone answers the ad—a sailor. This is the Frenchman whose voice could be heard along with the unintelligible grunts of the ape—who had chased his escaped, and unfairly treated pet, as he fled away from the sailor, into another house. The man tells Dupin that the orangutan had attacked the two women he randomly encountered there in his frenzy, before escaping out the window again. Because Dupin has found the sailor who can recount the tale, he is able to convince the police to release the wrongfully imprisoned man. * Dupin was such a success that would appear again in two more stories, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” published from 1842 to 1943, and “The Purloined Letter” in 1844. Readers were enchanted by his unique deductive abilities. His narrator begs him, “Tell me, for Heaven’s sake, the method—if method there is—by which you have been enabled to fathom my soul in this matter. Dupin practices a heightened method of analysis referred to as “ratiocination”—a purely intellectual method of observing things in great detail and being able to imagine how those things would have interacted. Some who do not understand it find it to be a little supernatural. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the narrator tries to put a pin in exactly what the process is. Here is some of his legwork: “The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis… As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension præternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.” “The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse.” Basically, he explains, “the extent of information obtained; lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation.” Poe would later refer to all three Dupin stories as his “tales of ratiocination.” Dupin is not a policeman, and he is not a private detective. He is a true amateur. But his gifts, and his insistence on using them to solve the puzzles that arise in life, cement his tale as literature’s first modern detective story. As literary critic A. E. Murch writes, the detective story is one in which the “primary interest lies in the methodical discovery, by rational means, of the exact circumstances of a mysterious event or series of events.” Critic Peter Thoms elaborates on this, defining the detective story as “chronicling a search for explanation and solution,” adding, “such fiction typically unfolds as a kind of puzzle or game, a place of play and pleasure for both detective and reader.” The well-heeled Dupin is an armchair detective who solves puzzles because he can and because he likes to. He sees things that no one else can see, draws conclusions that for many others are too far outside of the box. If Poe had not solidified the conventions that we recognize as marking the modern detective story, others likely would have done the same not long after. Literature was on its way to this discover; certainly, there had been a long lineage of characters who operated similarly, tracking down stolen objects and cracking impossible puzzles, and, like Dupin, doing so as private citizens, rather then as agents of the state. In 1747, Voltaire wrote a philosophical novella exploring the theme of problem-solving, Zadig ou la Destinée, featuring a wise young man in Babylonia whose knowledge gets him in trouble but often ultimately saves him. In William Godwin’s 1794 novel Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, a scathing indictment on the so-called justice system’s ability to ruin lives, state-sanctioned investigators are disavowed in favor of non-traditional problem-solvers. In 1819, the German novelist E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote Das Fräulein von Scuderi, in which a nosy woman named Mlle. de Scuderi (who might be considered a predecessor of Miss Marple) finds a stolen string of pearls. And no nineteenth-century detective lineage would be complete without Eugène-François Vidocq, a criminal-turned-criminologist who lived from 1775-1857 and who founded and ran France’s first national police, the Sûreté nationale, as well as France’s first private detection agency. His life inspired countless (swashbuckling) adaptations, including an American adaptation published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1828, entitled “Unpublished passages in the Life of Vidocq, the French Minister of Police,” which Poe very well might have read. Interestingly there’s a character in that story named “Dupin.” Ahem. Poe had been experimenting with the conventions of detective fiction, himself. Many of his horror stories had also relied on the kind of third-act reveal, a twist—but one that is not figured out. Poe seemed to discover that the difference between a detective story and a horror story was the inclusion of a character who could make sense of the mysterious events going on. Horror stories are mysteries without someone to explain them. I submit that in his stories leading up to the Dupin tales, Poe had been experimenting with “bad” or “failed” detectives, in this way. In 1839, he wrote the short story “William Wilson,” which features a man driven mad by the perception of his own doppelgänger, who does not realize until he fatally stabs him, that his doppelgänger was his own reflection—himself. In 1840, he wrote “The Man of the Crowd,” a story about a man who believes that there is a man walking around London who is able to change his appearance subtly to blend in with the different groups he encounters. The narrator believes that something about this ability is ambiguously criminal and he pursues that man until he cannot do it anymore, unable to figure out what it is that the man wants or has done. Thus, until his stories about a detective searching for clues, many of Poe’s stories come to act as clues in the mystery of an author searching for his detective. It is almost impossible to overstate the significance of Poe’s discovery—not only for his career, but also for history. Detective fiction is commonly regarded as decidedly non-academic. But academia would be nowhere without Poe or Dupin. The famed Columbia drama professor Brander Matthews wrote, “The true detective story as Poe conceived it is not in the mystery itself, but rather in the successive steps whereby the analytic observer is enabled to solve the problem that might be dismissed as beyond human elucidation.” It was not long—only about a century—before scholars began to become to drawn to Poe. Indeed, Dupin’s greatest impact might lay outside of mystery novels, and inside the broader, later field of literary criticism. Dupin’s ability to read extraordinary meaning into clues makes him rather the first semiotician (or scholar devoted to figuring out the relationship between language and meaning), elucidating the relationship between signs, signifiers, and ‘signifieds’ more than a century before Ferdinand de Saussure published his work on the subject in 1966—particularly because Dupin finds his clues through linguistics rather than physical objects. (For more on Poe and semiotics and much more, I recommend the edited collection The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading.) A reminder that, in “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” he deduces the whole solution because of two words allegedly spoken during the crime; “Upon these two words [‘mon Dieu!’]…I have mainly built my hopes of a full solution of the riddle.” Poe knew that he was onto something, with Dupin. So he wrote a sequel. By that “The Murder of Marie Roget” begins, Dupin is a minor celebrity. The story of how he solved the Murders in the Rue Morgue has catapulted him to fame. But domestic life has gone on as normal… as usual, Dupin regales his narrator friend with his ratiocination, all the time—often seeming to predict what his friend is thinking and finishing his sentences. His friend has remained astounded at the way Dupin has been able to solve the Rue Morgue murders but does not imagine that his friend’s parlor trick will ever be used in such a serious manner ever again. Until a year later. That’s when Dupin reads in the paper that the body of a beautiful young woman, a perfume saleswoman who had previously gone missing, has been found floating in the Seine. Dupin’s friend gets a detailed account of the police investigation from the prefecture and brings it home. Together, they read everything they can about it. ““I need scarcely tell you,” said Dupin, as he finished the perusal of my notes, “that this is a far more intricate case than that of the Rue Morgue; from which it differs in one important respect. This is an ordinary, although an atrocious instance of crime. There is nothing peculiarly outré about it. You will observe that, for this reason, the mystery has been considered easy, when, for this reason, it should have been considered difficult, of solution. And yet, despite its ordinariness and therefore its complexity, Dupin can solve the whole thing without leaving his home. From what he has read, he can recreate the entire affair in his mind—and names the murderer. Poe thought this was an even more interesting story than his previous detective tale—partially because he had based it on a real tragedy, the murder of a beautiful young woman, a tobacco store employee, named Mary Cecilia Rogers in 1941. Her body was found in the Hudson. Poe believed that, in fictionalizing her story, he was getting at the heart of the mystery, not unlike his detective. He attempted to sell it to magazines claiming that he had solved the mystery of Mary’s death, via his story. The impertinence of that claim aside, Poe believed that there was much more to represent, regarding an amateur detective, an armchair detective’s ability to think through a crime to the point of solving it. His final Dupin story, “The Purloined Letter,” is the epitome of this interest. By this time, Dupin is so well known that the police prefect asks for his help. The queen has had a letter stolen from her bedroom by a sneaky associate of hers, who has now been using it to blackmail her. The police have searched that man’s rooms but have found nothing. They are desperate. The prefect returns a while later, promising Dupin 50,000 francs if he can help them locate the letter. Dupin asks the prefect to write the check right there, and he does. At that moment, Dupin produces the letter, himself. Dupin’s friend is astounded—how had he found it? Dupin explains that he had divined that the blackmailer had anticipated that the police would search high and low for the note, and so hid it in plain sight. Dupin had visited the blackmailer and searched for a letter in an obvious place. He found it—noticing that it was disguised by having been folded inside out and re-sealed it with a new seal. He returns the next day, and, in time with a distraction he has arranged, switches out the letter for an imitation he has made himself. That year, in 1844, Poe wrote to a friend that “The Purloined Letter” was the best of his three tales of ratiocination. And he was right. The scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbit suggests that its superiority lies in its complete move away from the sensational towards the intellectual. Indeed, let’s observe the progress of the Dupin stories. The first one, a true “sensation” story, was designed to shock as much as amaze. The second combines the sensation of the first (the surprising, gruesome discovery of the corpse of a beautiful woman) with tremendous mental gymnastics. And finally, “The Purloined Letter” is purely an intellectual exercise—the epitome of the detective story as a puzzle, a riddle, a game. It is because of this final story, more than the others, that Dupin changed the course of mystery fiction. There were several mediocre film adaptations of the first two stories, but that’s not what I mean. Not only did he create the gentleman sleuth archetype which would become so ubiquitous in mystery fiction’s Golden Age during the first half of the twentieth century, but he also provided a model for the detective story to be, first and foremost, more concerned with the puzzle of the mystery, than the material concerns of the associated crime or death. Most obviously, though, Dupin provided a template for what the intellectual sleuth would look like—a template that was borrowed, time and time again. Dupin is a brilliant man whose roommate chronicles his incredible feats of crime-solving, most of which he does not need to leave his home to complete. Years later, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, “Each [of Poe’s detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed… Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?” Indeed, Doyle construed his detective Sherlock Holmes as an intellectual descendant of Holmes, having Watson (who also participates in a lineage offered by the Dupin stories, but of Dupin’s supportive narrator/chronicler and friend) cite Dupin upon first witnessing Holmes’s deductive genius.’‘You remind me of Edgar Allen Poe’s Dupin,’” he tells Sherlock Holmes in their inaugural novella, A Study in Scarlet, in 1887. ‘“I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories.”’ And yet Holmes is snide about this bit of praise: “No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin. Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.” Except, of course, that he was. Holmes doesn’t know it, but he, himself, wouldn’t have existed without Dupin. Virtually none of the detectives in the stories we know today would have existed without him. Thank you. View the full article

A look at the month’s best new releases in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers, via Bookmarks. * Don Winslow, City in Ruins (William Morrow) “Winslow has written a near-perfect saga: He’s created great characters who grow and develop while remaining true to their essence, and a sweeping story that morphs and expands over time, with the stakes escalating until they reach nosebleed heights at the end.” –Alma Katsu (Washington Post) Karen Jennings, Crooked Seeds (Hogarth) “It’s been years since I read a book that strained the Likability Principle so viscerally … This novel couldn’t be any more overwhelming if it came in a scratch ’n’ sniff edition … The real artistry of Crooked Seeds lies in Jennings’s ability to make this story feel so propulsive … Urgent.” –Ron Charles (Washington Post) Dervla McTiernan, What Happened to Nina? (William Morrow) “Painfully gripping … Despite its title, the central question posed by this disturbing, enthralling book is less concerned with what happened to Nina (you’ll find out soon enough), but how the parents — all broken, terrified and desperate in their own ways — respond to the exigencies of the moment. The last scene will make your blood run cold.” –Sarah Lyall (New York Times Book Review) Nicholas Shakespeare, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man (Harper) “A monumental edifice of a book that at first glance seems somewhat daunting … Entire eras materialize in artful sketches while the portrait of Fleming acquires texture and shade with each trial and triumph.” –Anna Mundow (Wall Street Journal) Rena Peterson, The King of Diamonds (Pegasus) “As much a sociological study of upper-crust Dallas society as a true crime story, enlivened by [Pederson’s] sprightly writing style … King of Diamonds is an enjoyable read, in large measure because of Pederson’s extensive, high-quality research, obtaining compelling info from and about her subjects.” –Curt Schleier (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) View the full article

My theory is that everyone has one of these stories. Perhaps it was a place you grew up in where random objects would vanish – you swore you put your keys on the sideboard and now there’s just a blank space where they were. Maybe your girlfriend lived in a house that produced unexplainable sounds – ‘no, there’s no one upstairs, it just sounds like someone is walking up there sometimes.’ Or perhaps it was a tiny but powerful thing – you walked into the ruin of an old church on a fiercely sunny day only to feel a chill settle over your bones. You’re not supposed to be here. This place is bad. For me, stories about hauntings have two key ingredients. The first is one often shared with crime and thriller novels: the past encroaching on the present. Usually, someone in the past has done something unforgivable and not experienced any consequences, and it has ramifications in the present. In your classic crime or thriller novel, a detective, amateur sleuth or unreliable narrator will be the agent looking to uncover what happened, and ultimately bring those consequences to bear. In a novel about a haunting, it’s usually a ghost who fulfils this role. Or a whole team of ghosts. The second ingredient is location, location, location. Hauntings are often about places, and it was this idea that was the seed of The Hungry Dark. We’re familiar with haunted houses, haunted hotels – haunted graveyards, naturally – but what if the Bad Place was a wild place, a place of nature? The idea of the Bad Place is one that has intrigued and excited me since I picked up my first Stephen King book (Needful Things, I was ten) and I personally find that the greatest scary books really understand this idea. Here are my five favourite books about Hauntings (which are really books about Bad Places, and Terrible People): The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson It is probably illegal to have a list about hauntings without including the grandmother of the modern horror novel. Shirley Jackson was the undisputed queen of the unsettling undercurrent, and by the time Eleanor arrives at Hill House with all her mental baggage, we already know that something is terribly wrong, and that the house is going to draw it out of her like a poison. Except it won’t be a healing experience. The Haunting of Hill House also contains probably the greatest opening lines in a novel ever: ‘No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.’ Please read that and tell me you are not terrified of Hill House. I still wake up in a sweat sometimes with the words ‘Hill House, not sane’ bouncing around my head. Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel Now you could say that I am throwing out my thesis in my second example, because surely Hilary Mantel’s wonderful book about a genuine psychic haunted by the ghosts of her past is not about place at all, but about Alison herself, a woman slowly run ragged by the diabolical men, long dead, who made her childhood a living hell. I would argue that it is still very much about place. In Beyond Black, the very landscape of England feels haunted as Alison flits between pubs and working men’s clubs, plying her trade. Here, you feel, you can’t walk down the road without being accosted by some dreadful little spirit. And the idea of England being thick with spirits and strangeness is present in Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall trilogy too. I think Mantel understood the nature of haunting better than any of us. The Shining by Stephen King The Overlook hotel might be the ultimate Bad Place novel. You know the story already: Jack Torrance agrees to be the winter caretaker at an isolated hotel, bringing his wife and young son with him. Only there are dark forces at work in the Overlook, and they want Jack to stay forever, and ever, and ever… Stephen King is probably the master of the Bad Place novel, and I’ve no doubt that my love for them comes from an early exposure to his work. From Castle Rock, the chaotic New England town that draws weirdness to it like a magnet, to Derry, home to a psychotic child-eating cosmic clown, King delights in creating locations that bring out the very worst in people. Dark Matter by Michelle Paver In the 1930s, a young working-class man called Jack signs up for an expedition to the arctic region of Svalberd and through a series of unfortunate events finds himself manning an outpost there alone, through the unending darkness of an arctic winter. And of course, he isn’t quite alone, after all… If you’re afraid of the dark and you feel like scaring yourself silly, Dark Matter is the novel for you. Here, the intensely logical Jack tells himself there is nothing to fear – the darkness never hurt anyone, right? – but he hasn’t contended with the bloody history of the bay of Gruhuken, and the fact that some Bad Places never forget. Cold and claustrophobic and genuinely haunting. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters The Little Stranger feels like your classic haunted house story, one that could perhaps rub shoulders with M. R. James or Charles Dickens (when Dickens was in a spooky mood). A country doctor befriends the well-to-do family at Hundreds Hall, a rambling country house long since past it’s best, and is on hand when strange happenings start to make the place unliveable. It feels like a classic haunting, but being Sarah Waters, it’s much more complicated than that. Under the surface the tensions of class, sexuality and trauma pull at the narrator until tragedy strikes, and the reader is left wondering: what exactly was the malevolent force at Hundreds Hall? *** View the full article

Would the real Australia please stand up? Are you a tropical paradise of blue skies and golden beaches, the Great Barrier Reef, koalas and kangaroos? Or are you the perilous continent of venomous snakes and enormous spiders, dense bushland and parched desert where travellers venture and never return? It’s clear which scenario thriller and crime writers are drawn to. Australia has long been mythologised as a dangerous exotic land, the landscape presenting the ideal setting for an eerie thriller not unlike that of Nordic noir. In reality, how frightening is it to live here? On TikTok there’s an avalanche of clips showing gigantic Australian spiders; there’s a frisson of excitement in the thousands of comments generated. While the spiders aren’t actually that large (the angles exaggerated for horrific effect), it’s a fact that we’re home to the world’s most venomous, the Sydney funnel-web. I’ve seen plenty of Huntsman and Redback spiders at home, and simply give them a wide berth. Most of the world’s most venomous snakes live in Australia (85%), although the only snake I ever encountered was during a visit to Canada. Australia is one of the most shark-infested countries in the world too (behind the US). The yearly worldwide shark attack summary (yes there is such a thing), says there were 15 “unprovoked incidents” in 2023. And let’s not forget the temperature. In summer, temperatures can soar to around 40°C (104°F). The highest temperature ever recorded was 50.7 °C (123.3 °F), in 1960 in Oodnadatta, South Australia – where my father in law was born. Is it any wonder that the Australian population clings to the cooler coastline? About 87 percent of the population lives within 50 kilometres (31 mi) off the coast. We’re like people hovering near a doorway for a quick escape. Roads are closed and towns cut off when we’re ravaged by bushfire or flood. This sometimes means arduous detours (in the thousands of kilometres) for food and other deliveries; major routes such as the Nullarbor Highway can be shut, and travellers forced to hole up in roadhouses for days. Australians are well versed in the rules of outback driving. If you break down; never abandon your car. Always pack plenty of water. Share your travel plan with others, so if you don’t turn up on time, they know to raise the alarm. You can’t rely on a cell phone in the outback – not to call for help, or to help you navigate. Most of Australia’s land mass has no mobile coverage at all. Like the population, it hugs the coast. But it’s important not to demonise this beautiful country, its flora and fauna. Every living thing plays a part in the ecosystem, and in this climate crisis the last thing we need is an extermination attitude. It’s also important to reflect that Australia was colonised, the indigenous did not cede this land, and there have been successive waves of immigration. To what extent did the colonisers and bewildered immigrants contribute to the lore of a frightening Australia? My own parents arrived here as children – my mother from Finland, my father from The Netherlands. Even though I was born here (in the world’s most isolated capital city, Perth), I’ve always felt apart. I wonder how my parents influenced that; English is their second language, they had to adjust to the climate, the culture, the distance from everything they knew. I inherited a sense of being an alien here, observing but not participating. But perhaps that’s part of being a writer… I’ve had my fair share of roadtrips – another popular setting in Oz literature, and in fact the inspiration for The Rush, my outback thriller. Like many teens, I left home to study at a capital city university. Whenever I wanted to visit family or friends, I faced a four-hour roadtrip north. I passed through many tiny country towns, but for the most part, the scenery was fields of crops or plains of orange sand. Eventually, I returned home and worked for a federal politician and there were more roadtrips. Our electorate took up an incredible 92% of South Australia. That’s 904,881 square kilometres (349,377 sq mi). Still later, I worked for the South Australian Tourism Commission. As a website editor and writer, I travelled over the state, absorbing its beauty and trying to translate that to the online page. (It’s an irony not lost on me, that many readers of The Rush have declared they’re “never” coming to South Australia or never camping in the outback. I believe it’s said with tongue-in-cheek, but to think of all the effort I put into attracting tourists, and now it’s coming unstuck…) With all of this seeping into our psyches, is it any wonder Australian writers have produced haunting thrillers that leverage the landscape? Like Jane Harper’s The Lost Man, set on a vast cattle property in Queensland, and where in the opening scene a man has died of exposure and dehydration. There’s Shelter by Catherine Jinks, No Country for Girls by Emma Styles, and Out of Breath by Anna Snoekstra – all exploring Australia’s secluded pockets, remote from help or technology, high on risk. The film world has mined similar territory, with movies such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (an eerie school excursion into the bush, where two students and a teacher disappear); Mad Max (on dystopian outback roads); The Reef (young people terrorised by a Great White Shark); and another Ozploitation example in The Boar (a family stalked in the outback by…you guessed it). The Rush draws on many of this island’s dangers and myths, as well as my own decades of remote driving and unsettling experiences. It follows four young people on a roadtrip from Australia’s south to north; Adelaide to Darwin. Rather than the quintessential outback experience of heat and sunny skies, they encounter unseasonal rain and flooded roads. My characters quickly learn that the world is very different beyond their suburban cocoon. And I hope, rather than deterring people, that such stories can captivate and actually attract tourists. That’s what occurred – believe or not – after the worldwide success of Wolf Creek, the 2005 horror film about three abducted backpackers. If you do make your way down here, come say g’day. *** View the full article

Recently, Paul Giamatti received an Oscar nomination for his performance in The Holdovers—Alexander Payne’s period film about three loners stuck at a boys’ boarding school during holiday break. He was previously nominated for a supporting role in Cinderella Man in 2005. Many, including myself, are still enraged that he was not nominated for his expressive and powerful performance in Sideways, Payne’s 2004 dark comedy about two friends who go on a trip to wine country and wind up reckoning with their lives and choices. But allow me to suggest that Giamatti, an actor of boundless talent and irrepressible commitment, should have received his first Oscar nomination in 2002, for a performance in a Nickelodeon Studios kids’ movie called Big Fat Liar. Half of the people reading this will automatically agree. You know what I mean. You will remember. The other half of you won’t know what I’m talking about at all. To this half of you, I ask… nay, I beg: hear me out. HEAR me out. “Big Fat Liar. B.F.L. Bfl, as it’s come to be known.” The film is a cornerstone in the cinematic repertoire of persons who subliminally know the back half of the phrase that begins “call me, beep me,” who remember the Rachel McAdams-Ryan Gosling kiss at the MTV Movie Awards, who can recall seeing purple and green Heinz EZ Squirt bottles in the supermarket. In other words, the youngest millennials and the eldest zoomers. What’s it about? Everything. It’s the kind of splashy, kid-friendly studio fare that they don’t make anymore: a hilarious, grandiose adventure about two wiseass kids, and it’s also (like many movies aimed at kids from that era), a tribute to great movies from the 20th century. Frankie Muniz (2002, baby!) is a fourteen-year-old kid named Jason Shepherd. He lives in a nice Michigan suburb, skateboards to school, hangs out with his best friend Kaylee (Amanda Bynes). But he also complicates his blissful existence by lying constantly, using his silver-tongued gift of gab to slide around the rules, get himself out of undesirable situations, and ultimately… wind up in big, big trouble. Our story, which was directed by Shawn Levy, begins when Jason fibs to get out of handing in a school paper but gets caught in the lie. He’s given a very, very brief extension of a few hours from his teacher (Sandra Oh), and is hit with a stroke of genius. He begins to pen (furiously, due to the time-limit) a short story about a compulsive liar and the trouble it gets him in, which he calls “Big Fat Liar.” He names the main character after his dog. It’s all very ad-hoc. And it’s full of intriguing framing language like, “Kenny Trooper was the world’s biggest liar… they say a little lie can grow bigger and bigger… one man will pay the price.” If it sounds to you like the tagline to a movie or the VO in a trailer, then you’re thinking right. Let’s keep going. So! As Jason is biking to the meeting place to hand it in, he is hit by a car! Yes! Well, actually, it’s a limo. And the passenger of this limo, a Hollywood producer named Marty Wolf (Giamatti), agrees, very, very unhappily, to give him a ride the rest of the way. As Jason and Marty chat for a bit in the backseat, his backpack spills and the story falls out without him knowing. After Jason leaves, Marty picks it up and gives it a quick read, growing visibly intrigued (you can tell by the slow arching of Giamatti’s eyebrow). And Jason shows up to meet his teacher without it, frantically telling a wild story about getting hit by a limo driving a Hollywood producer who accidentally took his paper. No one believes him, he fails his class, and he is sentenced to summer school. It’s only when he’s at the movies with his friend Kaylee (Bynes) does he see a teaser trailer for a movie with the same plot and title as his paper, causing him to realize that Wolf had stolen his story and has begun adapting it into a big feature, next summer’s hotly-anticipated blockbuster. Yet, still no one will believe Jason about what happened, so he convinces Kaylee to run away to Los Angeles with him for a long weekend while his parents are out of town, planning on corner Wolf at his studio and get him to admit that he plagiarized his next big feature film. Only, Big Fat Liar is poised to be Marty’s biggest hit in a long, long time, and he doesn’t plan on letting go of it easily. Big Fat Liar is probably the first time my generation even saw Paul Giamatti. Maybe some of us did see him in small roles beforehand; we might have seen him as the bellman in My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), or watched as he played the orangutan Limbo in Planet of the Apes (2001), unrecognizable in pounds of makeup. There was always one or two kids in my elementary school classes who bragged about being allowed to watch Saving Private Ryan (1998) so maybe some of them caught him in that movie, too. But it’s not only appealing to kids—rather, the kids we were in 2002. In the twenty-plus years since, my own father has always been compelled to stop flipping through channels every time he sees Big Fat Liar playing. He watches it through to the end, every time, and his loud belly laughs echo through the house. Critics will say that movies like American Splendor (2002) and Sideways (2004) made him the star he is now. But Big Fat Liar proved, early on, that he could do anything. Giamatti seems to have thrown his whole heart into this one, playing the obnoxious, perfidious, sneaky, general all-around jerk Wolf with a level of manic energy heretofore unseen in man. He is… incredible. He is far more committed to his role than anyone in this genre of movie need be and, as a result, he makes the whole thing gel. He’s never so vile that he’s unwatchable; in fact, the deeper Giamatti burrows into his unpleasantness, the more compelling he becomes. The intensity of performance is not merely funny, but it is a coherent exaggeration of the sinister Hollywood producer archetype we’ve seen a thousand times before. Giamatti told GQ in an interview in December 2023 that he enjoyed the chance to do the “crazy physical stuff” that the role of Marty Wolf required. “I’ve always been physically comfortable doing stuff like that in front of people. I mean, there’s obviously an exhibitionist element to actors… he just was letting me do so much ridiculous stuff and I enjoy being big like that. It’s really fun, you know? You don’t get the opportunity so much to just go over the top like that. And [the director, Shawn Levy] knew I could.” Levy was a college friend of Giamatti’s and apparently hounded him to take the part. Honestly, has anyone been a better judge of ability than Shawn Levy in this moment? I say nay. Marty’s personality develops across two acts: his normal state of unprincipled megalomania, unhinged unpleasantness, and petty tyranny at his production company offices and on sets, and a state of frantic, tantruming, vengefulness as Jason turns the tables and begins to ruin his life, in the form of a series of vengeful pranks by Jason, Kaylee, and the small army they have gathered from the pool of his employees and colleagues. Throughout, though, he is a magnetic antagonist, a showstopping villain, combining vocal mayhem and madcap physicality. A perfect example is the film’s perhaps most memorable scene, when the obnoxious Marty wakes up one morning in his ostentatious Los Angeles mansion and dances his way to his pool, grooving along to his favorite song “Hungry Like the Wolf.” He doesn’t realize, though, that Jason and Kaylee have dumped out bottles of blue dye in his pool, poured orange hair dye in his shampoo, and dabbed wet superglue inside his phone earpiece. In the course of a single two-minute scene, we see the extremes of Marty’s existence: a narcissistic tyrant at the height of his power and an angry bully who realizes someone’s getting the better of him. But of course, this is only gets him ready to fight back harder. And boy, does he fight back. Marty and Jason find themselves locked in an epic battle that takes them across the Universal Studios lot. Their story already borrows from different genres (especially heists and westerns), but it also literally takes place on and across the different sets there, from famous movie landmarks like the Bates home from Psycho, to the flash flood set on the studio tour. In developing as a behind-the-scenes look at a major motion picture studio, Big Fat Liar becomes a heady mash-up of Hollywood tales; more than simply a be movie about “movies,” it’s movie about the stories we tell about the movies. Movies and stories and lies are all different versions of the same thing. It’s clear that the liar Marty doesn’t love movies, or, storytelling on the whole. He has a knack for fiction, but he’s in this game for the moolah. Maybe he wasn’t, always. But he is now. We meet Jason, on the other hand, before he parlays his life of lies into something truly disingenuous, like Marty has. And we watch Jason at this pivotal turning point in his emotional journey, realizing that he can transform his ability to tell stories from a strategy for copping-out into a productive creative form. Rather than stay a humble liar, he becomes a writer. Anyway, Big Fat Liar is a film burrowed deep in the annals of millennial cinema, but it deserves a Renaissance of its own—for Giamatti’s inspired performance, yes, but also for the whole damn thing. As Marty Wolf yells to a crowd of potential supporters and financiers during one BS-loaded speech, ““God Bless All of You, God Bless America, and God Bless Big Fat Liar.” Except the difference between me and Marty is that I mean it. And that’s the truth. View the full article

For three months after its launch in May 2023, I.S. Berry’s spy novel was flying under the radar, as most debut novels do. Then a rave review from The New Yorker set off a firestorm of other favorable notices that resulted in numerous publications and National Public Radio naming it one of the best novels of year. In a world where thousands of great books go unnoticed annually, I.S. Berry (her pen name) was the lucky one who was discovered for her talent and story by a publishing and media world that too often looks inward for more of the same, by the same, for its next round of similar enlightenment. Berry’s novel, The Peacock and the Sparrow was also nominated for best debut novel by the Mystery Writers of America, the International Thriller Writers, and Deadly Pleasures quarterly magazine, yet it was still not a bestseller. But at Bouchercon, the massive mystery/crime fiction convention held in San Diego in 2023, Berry’s novel sold out quickly. Her publisher, Atria (a Simon & Schuster imprint), noticed. Publishing is so arbitrary at times that publishing experts are often caught off guard. But what you can expect once they realize they have a winner, they go all in. Expect a major marketing push for the paperback release of The Peacock and the Sparrow. A book that reeks of bestseller status, it just may find its way to the top soon. The Peacock and the Sparrow has been described as nuanced, realistic, and filled with twists and turns as it races to its conclusion. It’s based on the real-world dynamics of the Arab Spring. Berry knows of what she writes because she lived the life of a spy. And yet it wasn’t until her life as a case officer for the CIA had come to an end that she finally came up with the idea for the novel. “It’s not a typical thriller novel. It doesn’t fit in a category,” she says. “It’s literary, and as much a human, character-driven story as a traditional espionage story. I also wanted to portray the unvarnished, dark, gritty side of spying, which most spy novels don’t…My book doesn’t glorify the agency at all…I tried to make Bahrain a character. I think it’s full-bodied and immersive in the time and place. I tried to make every detail authentic. Every detail in there is real, from the cocktails at Trader Vic’s to the way spies conduct dead drops to the expat villas.” For a long time, she didn’t live the routine life of a spy. She didn’t schmooze potential contacts at embassy parties or get many chances to take them out for drinks at lunchtime. Instead, she became a counter-terrorism case officer during the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a case officer, her mission was to recruit sources, but she was stationed in the green zone in Baghdad, protected from her potential sources by walls and surrounded by the U.S. military. And she admits she was traumatized by the daily shelling and mortar fire that landed near her inside and outside the massive compound on a near-daily basis. She often relied on walk-ins (to the zone) to become her latest assets but would sometimes venture into the red zone in an armored vehicle to pick up sources. Not exactly the romantic life for a young, single case officer. There was nothing glamorous about it and she captures that feeling in The Peacock and the Sparrow. Berry was assigned to track down Al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, who was responsible for numerous suicide bombings and beheadings of Americans and other hostages. He was killed by U.S. bombs dropped on a safe house in 2006, several months after Berry left Iraq. The exact circumstances of his death are still murky, Berry says. She doesn’t know the particulars and if she did, she couldn’t talk about it. It is this uncertainty, which is pervasive in the spy game, that makes The Peacock and the Sparrow so compelling. One source helped her track down an alleged terrorist target believed to be involved in a Baghdad attack. He was detained but never confessed. Today, she can’t say for sure if he’s guilty. She still wonders if they got the wrong guy. “It is something that has haunted me,” she says. “It’s still a weight on me.” It is yet another example of the ambiguity of the spy game. “The truth is elusive. You never know and you have to make peace with the unanswered questions.” Berry was beguiled by foreign affairs while studying abroad at the London School of Economics. “I thought I’d be a civil rights lawyer, but I fell in love with the great beyond and wanted to explore.” After graduation, she shoved everything she owned into a suitcase and moved to Prague where she lived in a small flat above the famed Roxy night club while making a sparse living at an online English-speaking newspaper. “I wanted to experience the world.” It was there that she made her first attempt at a novel, but she readily admits that at that time, she had no experience and nothing to say. She then she moved to Cambridge, England and worked for the U.S Department of Defense as a Balkans intelligence analyst. Having lived in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, she was already well-versed in transitional countries and “I loved intelligence. I loved being in the thick of foreign affairs.” While on one of her frequent trips to Bosnia, someone told her the CIA needed more women case officers (spies) and suggested she apply. She did. It took so long that she attended law school at the University of Virginia while waiting for the CIA to examine her application and run their background check. She focused on national security and international law. After graduation, she joined and later headed to the Middle East. Years later after leaving the CIA, Berry returned to the U.S., got married, and practiced national security law until her son was born in 2010. She moved to Bahrain in early 2012 where her husband worked as a civilian for the Department of Defense as the Arab Spring was bubbling to the fore. Most Americans focused their attention on the events in Egypt, but Bahrain was a hotbed of protest against its autocratic government. It was also the battleground for a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Berry was entranced by the politics. “It was so fascinating. We were living in it,” she says. Following their two-year stint, her family moved back to Virginia, but the ghosts of espionage were still imbedded in her soul. Her son was now in preschool, so she had some free time and decided to again try writing a novel. This time, she had extensive exposure to the world and had lots to say. One of her struggles has been dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after first coming home from Iraq. “Your brain learns to live with this fear, trauma, and uncertainty…I really don’t know of anyone (who’s experienced war) who doesn’t deal with PTSD…We’re just not programed as humans to deal with it.” She used her own time in war and everything else she experienced as a spy to mold her novel. Particularly the unanswered questions. She wanted to leave the reader feeling haunted, wondering what was unseen and what the story was behind the story to convey a visceral sense of espionage. “Initially, I didn’t have a firm idea of what I wanted to write,” she says. She started with what she calls, “a spy-flavored thriller, but not a spy novel. I looked back and the espionage scenes had an authenticity that the rest of the book didn’t.” She began rewriting. It took five years. Three years in, she said, “For a moment, I hated the story. I think every writer reaches that point. But I worked through it because fundamentally I believed in my book. You just have those moments of doubt.” Later, she notes, “I didn’t realize until the end how much of my own experience was in there.” Critics have spoken of the realism in her writing. “One review I saw described my book as ‘equal parts literature, noir, and thriller.’” Her novel focuses on Shane Collins, a world-weary CIA spy, who is stationed in Bahrain off the coast of Saudi Arabia for his final tour. He’s ready to call it quits when he starts to uncover Iranian support for the insurgency against the monarchy. Then he meets and falls for Almaisa, a beautiful and enigmatic artist. This enabled him to experience a part of Bahrain most expats never do. When a trusted informant becomes embroiled in a murder, Collins finds himself caught in the crosswinds of a revolution. Drawing on all his skills as a spymaster, he sets out to learn the truth behind the Arab Spring, win Almaisa’s love, and uncover where Bahrain’s secrets end, and America’s begin. Berry was now learning to become a writer. “I’d always wanted to write a novel. I didn’t think it was a practical profession.” It was a lonely task she couldn’t fully share with others, not even her husband. Because she is former CIA, every manuscript she writes about spies has to be preapproved by the agency before she can share it with anyone. For that reason, she hadn’t gotten to know any writers to ask for help about the publishing business. So, ever the novice, she read what she could and queried about 15 agents. The response was immediate. Several expressed interest. “I didn’t understand how audacious that was at the time. I think if I had known I would have been a lot more intimidated and not as bold. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know.” She chose David McCormick because he represented a wide range of authors, and her book, as he pointed out, wasn’t a “genre” book. “He really loved my manuscript and seemed to really believe in me…Along the way there are people who really believe in you and that’s what I felt with him.” Especially, she says, because “my book is kind of a slow burn, not a shoot ‘em up novel.” “When my agent was pitching to publishers, I suggested he submit to Peter Borland, who had edited Joseph Kanon, bestselling author of The Berlin Exchange. Peter ended up being the one. And my first blurb ended up coming from Kanon.” When her book launched on May 30, 2023, she faced what most debut novelists endure. Silence. “I was so new to this I wasn’t part of the writers’ community. I thought it would get reviewed more. I had no reviews at first. It felt a little bit like shouting in an empty room.” Publishers Weekly did give it a starred review, but others like Kirkus ignored it. “That was eye opening for me. And then I hustled to get events. I joined social media and got involved in the author community. I was blown away by how supportive other authors were.” Her colleagues at the CIA embraced her as well. “Since my book was published, I’ve met with a lot of former case officers and even spoken to the CIA’s creative writing group, ‘Invisible Ink.’” It was the first time she’d set foot in the CIA’s Langley headquarters in 15 years. “There are a fair number inside that world who want to write books,” she says. But her watershed moment came after The New Yorker stumbled upon her book and later named it a best book of the year. That attracted other reviewers, even NPR. “Having the cache of The New Yorker really helped,” she says. Since then, she has gotten a hoard of invitations from book clubs, including men’s book clubs. For a writer who had to wait so long to become part of the authors and readers community, it appears the neighborhood has finally opened its arms to her. “Spying was definitely not like this,” she says. ___________________________________ The Peacock and the Sparrow ___________________________________ Start to Finish: 3 years to write, 2 years edit, CIA approval a few months Decided to write a novel: First attempt in Prague, years later after her CIA and Bahrain tours. Experience: CIA Case officer (spy who recruits human sources for information) Agents Contacted: About 15 agents Agent Rejections: 10-11 First Novel Agent: David McCormick First Novel Editor: Peter Borland First Novel Publisher: Atria (Simon and Schuster) Inspiration: The texture of the world. What lies beneath the scenes. Secrets intrigue me. Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Website: https://isberry.net Advice to Writers: Don’t be afraid to find a distinctive voice. Pick a story you love because writing is like a long-term relationship. There are moments you will hate your story. Read everything to find out what speaks to you and what doesn’t. Like this? Read the chapters on Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Tess Gerritsen, Steve Berry, David Morrell, Gayle Lynds, Scott Turow, Lawrence Block, Randy Wayne White, Walter Mosley, Tom Straw. Michael Koryta, Harlan Coben, Jenny Milchman, James Grady, David Corbett. Robert Dugoni, David Baldacci, Steven James, Laura Lippman, Karen Dionne, Jon Land, S.A. Cosby, Diana Gabaldon, Tosca Lee, D.P. Lyle, James Patterson, Jeneva Rose, Jeffery Deaver, Joseph Finder, Patricia Cornwell, Lisa Gardner, Mary Kubica, and Hank Phillippi Ryan. View the full article

During my career as an investigative reporter – and as the wife of an expert in the field of computer-assisted investigative reporting – I have experienced situations that could be distressing if you didn’t realize this is all great material for writing mysteries! The first occurred early in my career when I was assigned to write a feature on a man who was a “shoo-in” as a candidate for the U.S. Senate. We will call him Mr. M. He was a familiar figure in the city and state – a young, handsome multi-millionaire respected not only for his business acumen but because he was ballyhooed as “the most eligible bachelor” in town. I was tickled to be covering such a neat guy. Our first interview went well though I did note that he wore lifts in his shoes. Guess he wanted to be taller? That night I was at a dinner party where I mentioned to a woman friend that I was working on an article about Mr. M. “Really,” she said with an odd expression, “I know him. I used to babysit for him. I suggest you check with this reporter in my hometown for background on Mr. M.” So I called the newspaper in that city, connected with an award-winning investigative reporter and when I told him whom I was profiling and why (i.e. “he’s also the most eligible bachelor in town….”) – the reporter paused, then said, “That’s interesting because he has a wife and three children down here.” Our newspaper broke that story. Mr. M lost the election. No U.S. Senate. One week later, he called me at my office shouting, “I’m suing you for defamation.” “Try,” I said, “and I’ll sue you for libel.” Of course, I had no idea if I could or not. A few weeks later, I was in a small private plane, sitting near the pilot, as I was being flown to a political conference I had to cover when the pilot said he had seen my stories on Mr. M. “Something you should know,” said the pilot, “is that Mr. M. keeps his private plane next to mine and I know he does not have it inspected as he should. That plane is going to crash one of these days….” Sure enough, a couple months later Mr. M and five other people died when his plane crashed during a flight to Las Vegas. Lesson learned: Never trust a person who wears lifts. And learn to spot those people who think they can get away with anything. Until they can’t. Great Material. * My next experience occurred ten years later. My second husband, B, also an investigative reporter, was testing the use of database technology – this was in the early eighties before the Internet was so easy to use – and he had decided to explore what was behind a series of small mentions of accidental deaths in our area. We lived near a large East Coast city, which was surrounded by small towns, each of which had their own police force. B had been keeping track of different death notices that had appeared as “agate” in the major city’s newspaper. “Agate” referred to a brief graph in tiny type stating the date, sex and cause of a victim’s death. B also knew that the different police departments did not, generally, communicate with one another. Again, this was before our major, amazing national databases in use today. On his own, B reached out to the police departments for more details and then he got started building his own database. I will never forget it as I found him in our den, in the dark, on a hot summer night, inputting the following details: Each of nine (!) victims was female, black and between eighteen and thirty years of age Each victim was known to the police as having worked as an “escort” or prostitute Each victim’s body had been found near an electrical transformer Each victim’s cause of death had been listed as “undetermined” but when an autopsy was finally done, each one had been strangled And so it was that hot summer night that B and I looked at each other in amazement: this was the work of a serial killer! Likely an employee of the local electric company. What was needed next was to find someone who might have known all the women. And with that information, the various police departments chose to work together. They soon discovered an engineer at the electric company who moonlighted as a “pastor” focused on saving women’s souls. It didn’t take long to determine he had known each of the murdered women. He got life in prison. B, meanwhile, went on to become an expert in the field of computer-assisted reporting. Lesson learned by me: Keep an eye on the details such as locations, odd coincidences and don’t make early assumptions based on race, education or sex. Look for the obscure, the unexpected – and take notes! That’s when you’ll discover Great Material. ** Even when you are not working as a reporter, challenging events can occur: happy, sad or perfectly awful. Again, you can choose how to deal with such moments. The following happened shortly after B and I had moved to a new suburb out east and I had just enrolled my son in the nearby middle school. It was early on a snowy January morning and I was driving him to his first day of school. A neighbor had told me of a shortcut to the school so I was driving a road that ran alongside the high school playing fields when we passed a small sedan that had crashed into a telephone pole. No one was around but that didn’t worry me – I grew up in Wisconsin where drunk drivers often abused telephone poles. I kept going. After dropping my son off, I returned the same way only to see police officers and men in trench coats gathered around the wrecked sedan. Once home, I called B at the newspaper and told him, “There might be an accident…” at such and such a location. An hour later, he called back quite upset saying, “that was a murder scene. I wish you had told me!” (Translation: he could have broken the story and gotten a raise.) Turns out there was a dead woman in the car. Had I stopped on my way to the school, I would have found her naked, wearing only panties in the below-zero weather. When the police, two men, first arrived, they reported “an accident.” But minutes later, when they were joined by a female officer, she took one look at the victim and said, “This is no accident. No woman, drunk or depressed, goes driving in weather like this wearing only panties! This is murder.” At first, the woman’s husband, an OB-GYN at the local hospital, tried to say she had been drinking, they had fought and she had driven off angry. Not true. And this is where the story gets kind of awful. They’d had a fight, all right, and he beat her to death with a statue of the Virgin Mary, dumped her body out their bedroom window onto the driveway — only to realize he better do something to hide his actions. When the autopsy report showed she had died of blunt trauma to the head, he was arrested and convicted of homicide. But that’s not the end of the story. Years later, I was in Wisconsin and giving a library talk about “things you cannot make up” when a woman in the audience raised her hand. “I was on that jury,” she said. “And you won’t believe what happened next. The husband got out on appeal, applied to a hospital in another city and was hired as the head of their OB-GYN unit. They never checked his credentials. They hired a murderer!” Lesson learned: Some stories you can’t make up. Again, Great Material. *** Finally, on a lighter note, B covered one investigation where he had to interview a forensic pathologist. The source turned out to be a hefty woman wearing scrubs who invited him into her autopsy room. They weren’t alone. Along with the deceased, she had two massive Great Danes she allowed to roam freely. Lesson utilized: That experience prompted me to conjure up the coroner in my series who is a retired bartender, appointed to his position by his brother-in-law, the Mayor of Loon Lake, and who shows up for official duties “overserved.” Like I said, you can’t make this stuff up. How to find your Great Material? When writing mysteries don’t hesitate to draw from real life: the unexpected, the amusing, or the horrifying. It is all Great Material. **** View the full article

Leo Tolstoy, author of my favorite novel, War and Peace, said that the purpose of art is to teach us to love life, an observation that has pleased me since I first read it. But on reflection, I think it fair to say there are other things that art can do in relation to life; it can change the way we see life; it can teach us to endure or perhaps enable us to escape life. For a time, anyway. In a world beset by unprecedented horrors, where the survival of the planet itself seems to hang by a fraying thread, art can sometimes grant us respite—time, as it were, to catch our breath. Art can take us out of ourselves, plunging us, however briefly, into alternative worlds, worlds of beauty and make believe, worlds that allow us a pause from day to day anxiety and panic, a “timeout” in which to… surrender to enchantment, to collect ourselves so as to return refreshed and perhaps inspired to resume the ongoing battle with reality. The art that can accomplish this may not necessarily or always be great art. It might be. It might be Mozart or Shakespeare, which for me is akin to getting a transfusion. But it could also be the less exalted variety, like, for example, the satisfaction of curling up with a good mystery story at bedtime. Detective stories, are, as many will allow, a source of great comfort, which is strange if you think about it. After all, detective stories promise death and bloody destruction, serial killers, and mayhem, severed body parts with corpses splayed at unnatural angles, the skulls fractured by blunt instruments wielded a person or persons unknown. How can this stuff be comforting? Because detective literature for all its protestations of thrills, gore and procedural authenticity, frequently delivers the exact opposite of what it promises. Unlike life in which dreadful things happen for no reason, where children are struck by lightning or pedestrians by drunk drivers, in detective stories, as the gumshoe sooner or later observes, “it all adds up.” In detective literature, unlike life, nothing happens without a reason. So yes, we love detective stories because they help us escape real life. It is a superficial escape, to be sure. It isn’t a total transfusion like Mozart, (who has unfortunately been elevated to a form of castor oil—“listen to your Mozart, it will make you smarter!”) Detective stories by contrast are what some people call guilty pleasures. And let’s admit frankly that some pleasures are all the keener because they’re guilty. We feel we should be spending our time on more “worthwhile” things, but we cannot resist the siren call of, “Come, Watson, the game’s afoot!” Artists lose all proprietary authority over our creations when they’re finished. We cannot be objective judges of our creations. Like Moses, we don’t get to cross the Jordan and look back to see the trail we’ve blazed. Like messages stuffed in bottles, our work is essentially thrown out into the wide world, hoping for the best. Each person who extracts the message within will make of the contents what they will. So, what follows must be counted idle speculation. I write Sherlock Holmes stories for the same reason I read them, to divert my attention from the terrifying issues that plague the rest of my waking hours—Ukraine, Gaza, drought, famine, wildfires, limits on voting rights, Fox News and anti-vaxxers. But for a few hours, when I read or write Sherlock Holmes stories, I am transported to what appears to be a simpler world, where a creature of superhuman intelligence, nobility, compassion and yes, frailty, can make sense of it all. Was the Victorian world in fact simpler than this one? We’ve no way of knowing, but like an audience willing itself to believe that the magic trick is really magic, we are conniving accomplices to our own beguilement. I’ve now written five Sherlock Holmes novels. The sixth, Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell, will be published August 27 and I am working on a seventh. I didn’t plan on writing more than one and I don’t write them unless I have an idea that seems right for Holmes. Ideas of any kind do not come easily or plentifully to me. As an example, twenty six years passed between the time I wrote The Canary Trainer and when I wrote The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols. The idea has to be good enough so that it teases my brain and won’t let go. When I should be doing other things, grownup things—like earning a living—instead I am lying awake and riffing on what has begun taking shape in my head. I self-censor easily. If I can poke holes in my idea, it becomes natural if not inevitable that l lose interest and drop it. My novels fall into the category now pejoratively labeled “pastiche,” which I confess I find irritating. All art is a history of cut and paste. Are James Bond movies with different Bonds also pastiches? Star Treks with different Spocks? As Michael Chabon has observed, all fiction is fan fiction. What are the Odyssey and Aeneid but fanboy spinoffs? There is something to be said for pouring new wine into old bottles. Don’t we sometimes get off listening to covers of The Beatles? Just to see what someone else does with their songs? Isn’t it cool to hear Sinead O’Conner’s riff on “Nothing Compares to You?” To listen to Tiffany’s version of “I Think We’re Alone Now”? The words of the Catholic mass are pretty standardized, but who would argue that Mozart’s “Requiem,” Bach’s “B Minor Mass,” Verdi’s “Requiem” or Haydn’s “Mass in Time of War” are “pastiches”? The music makes them different. Seeing what can be done with Holmes and Watson while adhering to the rough outlines set forth by Doyle, seems to me as legitimate a challenge as setting new music for the text of the “Dies irae.” No one confuses Mozart with Verdi. Most of my ideas reach me indirectly; they begin as someone else’s; in however incoherent form, I trip over them. Or someone primes my thought pump. “What about Holmes and…?” and I’m off and running. Sherlock Holmes meets Sigmund Freud; Holmes in London’s theatre world; Holmes encounters the Phantom of the Opera; Holmes and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Lately, Holmes in Egypt. This last notion was no more than those three words. It was all I needed. I find that taking Holmes out of his element (England, and specifically London), making him in effect, a fish out of (Thames) water, allows my creative juices to flow. I am not interested in limiting myself to Doyle’s vocabulary or never allowing Holmes an action that he hasn’t performed earlier someplace. Mere variations along those lines strike me as inevitably a species of taxidermy. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but in my opinion in order for Holmes to come to life he must change. But he must always change in character. It is a fine and arguably abstract line that I am drawing and while I’ve no doubt there are Doyle imitators who successfully adhere more literally—and literarily – to Doyle than I do, I am not certain the results are more lifelike. Of course, I’ve not read many other Holmes novels and stories, for two reasons: firstly because there are now so many that if I attempted to canvas the competition I’d never have time to read anything else. Secondly, I shy away from other Holmes books, not because I suspect they might be dreadful but because I am just insecure enough to fear they might be better—much better—than my own attempts. I’ve read some that are and the result is a kind of brain freeze wherein I become creatively inhibited. Or worse, I start to imitate other Doyle imitators. Writing Holmes, of necessity, involves an enormous amount of research. Whether it’s a novel or a screenplay, entering a different narrative milieu is like starting medical or law school. You write down everything because you’ve no way of judging at the start what will prove pyrite or gold. You go for long walks, notebook in hand. You think about possibilities as you fall asleep and as you wake. You try things in different combinations. Somehow the result must seem inevitable, one event leading to inexorably to the next. Besides our dynamic duo, who are the characters? What are Holmes and Watson doing in Egypt? In Russia? What is the mystery? (Hint: a body always helps). How much description can the reader (used to moving pictures in all venues) tolerate? How much modern and how much ancient history do you—and the reader—need to know in order to follow the story? How much information is too much? Research is like painting stage scenery. All you need is what you want the audience to see, not what’s hidden in the wings, fascinating though it may be. It’s like fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube. But it is more than that. For all the research, the hesitations, the false starts and frustrating stops, it cannot be denied that writing a detective story provides—for this author, at least—many of the same pleasures as reading one. It is, in short, a great escape of its own. And, to mix a metaphor, it can only be hoped that my great escape proves contagious, that what I stuff into my bottle will entertain and divert those who chance upon it. __________________________________ Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram From Hell by Nicholas Meyer is published by The Mysterious Press and will release on August 27th, 2024. It is available for pre-order here. 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I grew up in the former USSR surrounded by books on shelves built by my grandfather. The books came in multiple numbered tomes – grey, brick red, pale green – and bore the names of the authors in gold lettering that glistened under the light of the lamp. Chekhov. Pushkin. Akhmatova. One collection – Tolstoy – numbered in 14 emerald-colored volumes. There were foreign ones too: the Brontës, Hemingway, London. It would be a while until I learned that such collections were a status symbol for the Soviet middle class and that they were very hard to come by. Back then, long before I became a debut author in the U.S., they were simply a backdrop – weighty and venerated. Before I dared open one – in fact, before I even learned to read or write – I entertained myself by making up nonsensical rhymes. I loved that words could be used to build worlds. To make magic. But the words I heard adults around me use weren’t magical. They were strange, complicated, dry: synthesis, psychotechnical, methodology. My parents worked as psychologists and all their friends – and my potential role models – were psychologists too. Even Santa Claus, who came to our apartment one year, turned out to be my dad’s colleague who, after ho-ho-hoing, took off his white beard to drink vodka in the kitchen and talk shop with my dad. While I secretly wanted to grow up into someone who made magic with words, when adults leaned over to ask what I wanted to be, I dutifully said, a psychologist. Saying a writer – putting myself in the vicinity of the gods on our bookshelves – felt sacrilegious. After living in Ukraine, we moved to Moscow where, in third grade, a tall, assertive teacher with a booming voice walked into my Reading class. He announced that instead of Reading, where we’d been suffering through short, deadwood passages of Soviet-era textbooks, he had come to teach us Literature. Literature! I still remember how that sophisticated word – and the dignity with which he said it – cast a magic spell on my mind. I thought of the gold-lettered books back home. As the teacher teleported me from the boring textbooks toward the transcendent poetry of Pasternak, I knew I wanted to be part of this World of Literature. Within a couple of years, I was composing my own Russian poetry. On a long winter bus ride to school, I wrote a poem about Pushkin, which won an award in a school competition. When assigned to write a fairytale based on a real historical event, I wrote an animal-populated version of the 1991 putsch, a coup attempt that resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I stopped saying I’d become a psychologist and began to believe that I was on a path toward a literary future. I allowed myself to dream that I would become a novelist, with a gold-lettered tome of my own. Then, in the summer before seventh grade, my mother dropped a bombshell: we were immigrating to the U.S. At 13, I found myself walking into an ESL class in a public middle school in San Francisco. No one there would care for a girl writing in Russian. My main purpose in life became mastering English and fitting into the strange and fraught new world of American teenhood. I’d studied English back in Moscow, but the proper British version in my old classes included no Californian slang or cultural references. Plus, there was the accent. I’ll never forget how the whole class giggled when my “can’t” came out like “cunt”. I learned the pledge of allegiance and the concept, drilled into me daily, that this was the best country on earth, that I was lucky to be here, and that to be American meant abandoning the past and reinventing yourself in this land of opportunity. I was, in the words of Emma Lazarus, “the wretched refuse” of my ancient homeland “yearning to breathe free.” What I heard behind the American welcome was: my homeland was lesser than, my language was unnecessary, and my past irrelevant. All those gold-lettered books that traveled with us to San Francisco were a shrine to my past. They would never be a gateway to my future. In high school, I took Psychology where I confirmed that I had no talent or interest in following in my parents’ footsteps. By the time I got to college, I’d decided to major in Comparative Literature. I might not have the language chops or cultural knowledge to become an American novelist, I reasoned, but at least I could immerse myself in the writing of others. My classes focused on international literature and, unsurprisingly, were much smaller than the those in the English department. I read Doctor Zhivago, learned about Futurism, where we studied Marinetti and Mayakovsky, and did an independent study project on Akhmatova’s connection to Italian literature. I was finally making use of the books my mom dragged across the ocean, though I also felt college years were an indulgence. No one would pay me to do any of this in the real world. Even if I were to write a novel, the very concept of “The Great American Novel” excluded me, I felt. Though by then I’d become a U.S. citizen, who was I to say anything about my adapted homeland? It didn’t help that I kept wondering what would have happened to me had I never immigrated. In that alternate universe, unencumbered by foreignness, was I becoming a young novelist? At 19, I landed a summer internship at a Russian-language newspaper headquartered in the Empire State Building. As I rode the elevator – up, up, up – for a moment I felt there was value in my native language after all and maybe, even in America, I could carve out some niche and become a real working writer. My first assignment was to interview a Soviet émigré artist who made sculptural paintings using found objects. He was in his 40s and lived in a crowded studio apartment on the Upper East Side. Though his life didn’t seem glamorous, I admired that he was able to find himself as an artist in this new country and was jealous that his craft was free of language. As I was about to leave, he asked me what I wanted to be. When I told him, he said, “To be a writer, you first need to live a little.” Instead of seeing through his condescension and sexism, I accepted that I hadn’t lived enough real life stuff to say anything substantial. By my age, Hemingway had been injured in World War I. Chekhov had assumed full support of his bankrupted parents. Jack London had gone to Japan as a sailor, had ridden trains as a hobo, and was jailed for vagrancy in London. In comparison, my immigrant life was pretty conventional. I didn’t have the confidence to appreciate what I had already lived through: growing up in Russia during the brutal violence of the 1990s, coming to America, being separated from my father, losing my first love to a car accident, and having grandparents who’d survived the Ukrainian famine, World War II, and Stalin’s repressions. The artist confirmed what I had already internalized as an immigrant: the stories from my culture didn’t matter. For the next decade, I didn’t write fiction or poetry. Not a single creative word, in any language. I was convinced that I had to live a little, whatever that meant, and that I had nothing meaningful to offer to American readers except occasional articles about things happening in this country. It took ten years and a divorce that sent me to Moscow where I marched in the biggest wave of anti-Putin protests for me to see that maybe I had some things to say that could bridge my upbringing in Ukraine, Russia and America. The protests were followed by arrests and, soon, by an armed conflict between my two homelands. At the time, in 2014, the conflict was centered in my family’s hometown in Ukraine. The world didn’t yet know that soon it would grow into the biggest land war since WWII. But I knew I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to stop being afraid that I hadn’t lived enough and that no one in the U.S. would care to read a story that happens in another place, another time, to other people. It took me almost three decades to go from ESL class to seeing value in my history and culture. I only wish I could tell my younger self not to wait, but to write while life happened. To practice the craft. To record the experience of living in an insecure, confused, immigrant body. And meanwhile, not to let those old, gold-lettered books gather too much dust. *** View the full article

Given how much I love reading and writing about dysfunctional families, it’s no wonder I would soon turn my attention to evil mothers! While my new book, Darling Girls, is about the relationship between three women who grew up in foster care together and call each other sisters, once you meet their foster mother Miss Fairchild, you’ll understand what I mean. Here are some of my favourite thrillers that feature evil mothers, all of which definitely provided inspiration for Darling Girls… Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent This incredibly twisty book is an absolute page-turner! Strange Sally Diamond is told from two perspectives. We have Sally Diamond, now orphaned in her forties and grappling with her less-than-average upbringing as she tries to function in ‘normal society’ in the small Irish town where she lives. Then we have another narrator, living in New Zealand, who’s also grappling with their strange childhood and telling the story of the past. Do their stories intertwine? What do evil mothers have to do with it? You’ll need to read to find out… None of This is True by Lisa Jewell Where I live in Australia, it seems like everyone is talking about None of This is True by Lisa Jewell… and for good reason. The story follows two mothers who meet in a restaurant bathroom and both realise it’s their 45th birthday. The protagonist, Alix Summers, is a popular podcaster, and Josie Fair sees an opportunity to tell her own story. Alix agrees to interview Josie, and quickly we realise we have no idea what’s true. I can’t really talk about the evil mothers storyline without spoilers, so you’ll have to trust me! Mommie Dearest by Christina Crawford Originally published in 1978, Mommie Dearest was one of the first harrowing memoirs of child abuse that gained global attention. It also shed light on the behind-the-scenes life of Hollywood actor Joan Crawford who was an alcoholic and abuser of her adopted daughter, Christine. I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy While we’re on the subject of true stories, how could I skip over I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy? Not exactly an evil mother in the true crime sense, but the title says a lot about the toxic and abusive relationship that child actor Jennette experienced at the hands of her mother for many years. White Oleander by Janet Fitch White Oleander technically isn’t a thriller, but the mother character, Ingrid, has always stayed with me. She’s a gorgeous, talented poet locked away for committing murder, and a master manipulator to her daughter who’s being shipped from foster home to foster home in her absence. It’s also beautifully written (Oprah reads the audiobook, if that tickles your fancy!). Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews One of the most evil mothers in crime fiction history, I would argue, is the mother in Flowers in the Attic, a book (series of books) that has haunted me since I first read it many years ago. I remember this being a book my friends passed around at school…it really had us in its grasp! Let’s just say the mother stores her children in the attic with unwanted furniture. Need I say more? *** Version 1.0.0 View the full article

If you follow the news at all—on TV, newspapers, social media—you are aware of crimes perpetrated both at home and in faraway places. You might read them, feel a pang of grief for the victim or a flare of rage at the villain. But our fast-moving media often gives us only a glimpse of the crime itself and then the news cycle is on to the next crime. Most of the time, the aftereffects of crime aren’t acknowledged. It’s not because those reporting the news are bad people. There’s just so much crime and only so many minutes in the day. Part of it may also be our own viewing habits. In these days of instant connection with a single click, I think our attention spans have become shorter. We read a news story and then we’re on to the next. But every crime has aftereffects. Some are more widespread than others. I call these “ripples.” A pebble tossed into a pond makes a small ripple. A larger rock makes a bigger ripple. But there’s always a reaction. It can be psychological, physical, or financial. It can affect only the victim or it can touch their family and friends. The news rarely focuses on these aftereffects, but for me—both as a writer and as someone who’s been touched by these ripples—it can be life changing. Acknowledging these life-changing ripples gives depth to the characters of a story. And in real life, it can help survivors deal with their trauma. In a basic example, a father is murdered in a random shooting on his way home from work. His family and community mourn. There will be a funeral and speeches. There might be flowers or teddy bears left at the scene. But when the speeches are over, when the flowers have died and the teddy bears cleared away, the victim’s family is left to pick up the pieces. The victim was the primary breadwinner for the family. Now there is no income. If the family was at the poverty line prior to the murder, they might not even be able to afford a funeral. A family who’d been getting by paycheck to paycheck might find themselves homeless. Even a middle-class family might have to sell their home and move somewhere smaller and probably a lot less nice. In either case, the surviving spouse must find a way to pay the bills amidst her grief. The kids will need to depend on free lunches and other charity at school and the other kids can be cruel about such things. If there were any savings or college funds, they’ll be used for daily expenses. The children will no longer be able to go to college, their entire future compromised. An entire family can be bankrupted. Those financial ripples go on to cause other trauma—shame, fear, hunger. No one steps up to pay for this family. The cops aren’t responsible. The city isn’t responsible. The only one responsible is the person who committed the murder and, statistically, if they are caught, they’re unlikely to be sentenced in a way as to bring peace to the family. The family suffers for years for the actions of a single murderer. There are other kinds of ripples, of course. Here’s a more detailed example: A psychologist is nearly killed by a client while trying to keep the client from hurting/killing everyone in their place of work. The client is angry because his court-ordered therapy required him to be on time for the therapy sessions. He’s missed several and his probation has been revoked. He’s going to jail and he’s filled with rage. If he’s going down, he’s going to take everyone with him. He sets the practice’s building on fire in an attempt to smoke out the therapists and other clients there for treatment. He’s waiting in the lobby for the occupants to exit—armed and ready to cause real pain. Occupants and therapists are huddled behind doors barricaded with desks and chairs so that the client can’t get in to hurt them. Smoke is spreading. They are terrified. Only two people have not been able to retreat behind closed doors—the owner of the practice and one of his therapists. The owner confronts the rage-filled client, but the owner is a man of small stature and the angry client is over six feet tall and muscular—and armed with knives. This isn’t going to end well. Luckily the other therapist hasn’t been seen. He’s standing in the shadows, frantically trying to think of what he should do. He’s got martial arts experience and wrestled in high school but that was nearly twenty years before. Luckily his skills come back to him. He attacks the much-larger client, taking him down, pinning him to the floor—and somehow he holds the man down while the fire department arrives to put out the fire. The firefighters then hold the client down until the police arrive. Crisis averted. For the moment. The client is arrested. You’d think he’d go to jail for a long time, considering he’s committed arson and attempted murder. But he’s sentenced to only thirty days in jail. Thirty days. And, as he’s dragged away from the courtroom, he turns to the therapist who’d wrestled him to the floor and threatens the man and his family. Ripples ensue. The therapist is traumatized but doesn’t realize it yet. It hasn’t quite sunk in and won’t for years. He’s just getting through each day. His first action is to quit his job, because it’s not the first time his life has been threatened by a client. It’s the third. He’s got a wife and two young daughters and he’s afraid the next time he won’t be so lucky. He’s just a dissertation away from his doctorate, but he walks away from that too. He can’t bear to think about the field of therapy now. Every client is a potential threat. His career as a therapist is over. He was a good therapist. He helped a lot of people. But now, the world is missing one good therapist and anyone who might have come to him cannot. The remaining therapists will have to take on more clients. These therapists will now have to work harder, longer. Clients have lost an ally in their recovery. All because one rage-filled client got violent when faced with the consequences of his own actions. The therapist’s wife is also affected. Besides the fear that never quite subsides—she’d come so close to losing the love of her life—she is now the sole breadwinner because the trauma runs far deeper than either husband or wife are aware. PTSD is an insidious condition, affecting everyone a little differently. For the therapist, it’s going to be several years before he’s ready to tackle a structured job in public. With people who might be threats. When he’s able to, he thrives once again, but there’s always the knowledge that an attack can come from anywhere at any time. He’s always vigilant. Continuous vigilance is physically and mentally exhausting. All because one rage-filled client got violent when faced with the consequences of his own actions. The therapist and his wife are afraid of the rage-filled client’s threats, that after his thirty days in jail, the man will follow through and come after the therapist, his wife, and his two young daughters. They sell everything and move. Start all over again in an uncertain economy. More ripples. The family moves several more times, trying to find that new start. Their children’s lives are disrupted and their home not as stable as it once was. There are financial ripples. Money is very tight. One of their children is sick, but knows that Mom and Dad are stressed, so she doesn’t say anything. The child gets worse and worse until she finally admits how sick she is. The parents now feel guilt on top of everything else. The therapist becomes a teacher and tells his students not to become therapists. It’s too dangerous. (Which is true, in his experience.) The world may lose other good therapists before they can even begin their journey. On the other hand, those people will be a lot safer in other jobs. All because one rage-filled client got violent when faced with the consequences of his own actions. The other clients in the building that day faced their own trauma over the years. They’d come to a place of healing, only to have their sense of safety ripped away. One hopes that they found help elsewhere or they probably would have continued to suffer, dragging their families along with them. The therapists who huddled behind those barricaded doors will always wonder if the new client in their office is the next one who’ll become violent and hurt someone—maybe the therapist. They are always vigilant, which, again, is exhausting. So many lives were affected that day—and no one was even physically harmed. So many lives were affected that day—and no one was even physically harmed. The therapist who took the client down walked away with only bruises that disappeared over the next few days. It was the psychological bruises that took years to heal. If the second example sounds personal, it’s because it is. It happened to my family. My husband was the brave therapist who saved lives that day. I was the wife who didn’t want to let him out of my sight. My daughters were the children whose lives were uprooted. All because one rage-filled client got violent when faced with the consequences of his own actions. Ripples happen. I hope the next time you read a story about crime that you think about the victims, about how their lives will go on. Because while the loss of life or the crime itself is horrific, the aftereffects—the ripples—can continue for a lifetime. *** View the full article

The beetles could help her disappear, but not in the same way the others had. She would do it for a better life. This was why, even though someone had trashed her van, even though her cell phone was now one big useless glitch and even though her mother was probably sick with worry, Chenoa Cloud had hiked for days to reach this ravine in the dark. If the beetles were nocturnal, so was she. The November wind whirred into the chasm and up the sleeves of her jacket like a threat, carrying with it loamy soil laced with the scent of decay. Chenoa tried to clear her head, to think instead of the waist-high switchgrass that had been gentle company as she walked across Oklahoma’s eroded plains, but the memories of missing friends were too intrusive. The moment her mind went quiet or she felt hopeful or—and this was especially annoying—she was alone in the dark, they were there with her too. The ones who left and never came back, or who couldn’t come back. How many girls had she known who’d never been heard from again? Rez girls gone. Families that searched. Or didn’t. Fleeting news coverage. Then gone again. A shiver trailed across Chenoa’s scalp as she took careful steps through the lonely cut that ran the edge of the reservation. Forget the switchgrass. Think of the beetles. She trailed her hand along the ragged sandstone wall flanking the narrow trail and knew she must be close. The smell of death, that harbinger of the American Burying Beetle colony, grew stronger. Maybe she would come upon them, feeding on a carcass right in front of her. Or maybe they would be tucked into a cave, an expanse suddenly opening under her fingertips in the dark. The image of a black and red beetle on a screen at the front of a lecture hall flashed in her mind. Any graduate student who could find and document an endangered species or, better yet, a species long-feared extinct, would be awarded grant money and a Smithsonian job at the end of the rainbow. It was the moment that had changed the angle of her future. That’s when she’d realized she had a secret, hard and smooth as a seed, its electric shock singing through her body. In an instant, she knew why the American Burying Beetle looked so familiar, and she knew exactly how to win. She was going home. Excerpt continues after cover reveal. Every weekend since, Chenoa had driven her Volkswagen from campus to the rez—a risky endeavor for the unreliable van—to conduct a search that started to feel pointless. Until she found a single crumbling carapace in this, the last place on Saliquaw Nation land that she knew to look. The crimson markings on the dried-out shell were enough to drive her onward. No matter the weather, no matter the hell she’d catch from her mother, no matter what she was afraid to find. Chenoa stumbled to the floor of the ravine, the sound of gnarled branches creaking overhead, her visibility doused by the inky night. A pungent odor filled her nose, her mouth, like fetid, fermenting fruit and something fleshier, rotten, underneath. Here was the source of the smell at last: A raccoon, its ribs picked clean, its tail still thick with fur. Chenoa moved carefully, using her headlamp to illuminate the decay from every angle, and found her future: a pair of American Burying Beetles in a clash of antennae and pincers, the victor to gain a mate. To gain it all. A place in the world where it could survive, even on this land that made people fight for all they had. A thrill began to work its way up from her belly. It spread through her chest and into her throat, which she exposed to the hidden moon, grateful. She’d found them. They were her ticket out. The American Burying Beetle would be a triumph for the reservation, thanks to the recent passage of a Recovering America’s Wildlife Act that would dedicate annually nearly $100 million in federal funds directly to tribal nations for on-the-ground conservation projects. Or it would spell disaster, bring the reservation’s development plans to a screeching halt with punitive fines for habitat damage. Either way, nothing would stop her from proving its existence. It was her way out. Rez life isn’t for everyone, Chenoa whispered over the battling beetles. The night sounds closed in. Chenoa began to recite their names. The girls, gone. Kimberley. Tayen. Loxie. Aileen. She needed to tame her thoughts, put memories into a manageable order, ignore the warning that chirred inside her like an organ. Chenoa stood, feeling the tingle of blood rushing into her thighs. Her headlamp made her blind to anything outside its range of light. If she heard the sound, it only registered as a feeling. The snap of an instinct breaking open inside of her. There was someone else. Out here, in the ravine. Where only she should have been. Where she should have been alone. “Hey, hey, it’s okay.” A man, hands outstretched in front of him, fingers wide. “Sorry, didn’t mean to spook you. I just…” He was close now, talking fast, and Chenoa was standing, rooted. Her mind was trying to make sense of it, of someone out here, with her. In the dark. Then he lunged. __________________________________ From MASK OF THE DEER WOMAN. Used with the permission of the publisher, BERKLEY. Copyright © 2025 by LAURIE L. DOVE. View the full article

The Bond Girl. The phrase itself is a source of celebration and contention. Few other thriller writers before Ian Fleming placed such emphasis on creating rounded female protagonists with their own backgrounds, motives and agency. Few other action films attract such attention with the question of who will play the next female lead. At the same time, the word “girl” rather than “woman” suggests a childlike, even subservient helplessness. Bond would never be described as a “boy” rather than a “man”. A possessive apostrophe seems to hover nearby in invisible ink: Bond’s Girl – defining these women by their relationship to a man. Such duality reflects both the sexist reputation of James Bond and the often-overlooked legacy of women in the world of 007. As a lifelong Bond fan and feminist myself, I am often asked how both can be true at the same time. There is the sexist image of Bond – recently, a clip went viral showing Sir Sean Connery as James Bond in Goldfinger slapping Dink on her bikinied bottom with a dismissive, ‘Man talk.’ It’s not hard to find moments of sexism across the novels and films. However, to dismiss Bond on these terms would be not only to deprive ourselves of something rare in culture – a character who lives beyond the page or screen in popular imagination, an elite rank shared with the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Peter Pan – but also to deprive ourselves of the opportunity to examine the culture that produced such a character. On top of that, we’d miss out on Fleming’s inimitable style. I first read a Bond book when I was twelve or thirteen, and have been transfixed since then by his uncanny imagery, vivid and journalistic eye, taut suspense next to exquisitely flowing sentences, wit and wisdom. The literary and cinematic Bond of the fifties and sixties represents both post-war feminism and the backlash against it. Taken as a whole, we might say the James Bond films are a series of lasting images. Yes, one of those images is James Bond dismissing a woman with the words ‘Man talk.’ Yet another is Connery warning Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore that Goldfinger ‘kills little girls like you.’ Honor Blackman’s arch reply: ‘Little boys, too.’ What an icon. I’ve always felt the role of women in Bond deserves more credit. Ian Fleming writes women who are independent, capable, courageous, witty, intelligent, vulnerable, dangerous, haunted. They are often orphaned or exiled; pursuing careers that defy expectation, whether as a journalist or a Special Branch agent; or attempting to survive and escape abusive men, whether as a mistress or a smuggler in a diamond chain. Take these moments across three books where Bond meets ‘The Bond Girl’ and adds up his impressions: “She might sleep with men, obviously did, but it would be on her terms and not theirs.” – On Domino in Thunderball (1961) “She was beautiful in a devil-may-care way, as if she kept her looks for herself and didn’t mind what men thought of them, and there was an ironic tilt to the finely drawn eyebrows above the wide, level, rather scornful grey eyes that seemed to say, ‘Sure. Come and try. But brother, you’d better be tops.’” – On Tiffany Case in Diamonds are Forever (1956) “The whole picture seemed to say, ‘Now then, you handsome bastard, don’t think you can “little woman” me. You’ve got me into this mess and, by God, you’re going to get me out! You may be attractive, but I’ve got my life to run, and I know where I’m going.’” – On Tilly Masterton in Goldfinger (1959) I’ve got my life to run, and I know where I’m going. There is a strength here that might surprise people. There is also a depth to these characters that might surprise. Take, for example, The Spy Who Loved Me, which bears zero resemblance to the Sir Roger Moore film of the same name. This is one of my favourites, the only Bond novel Fleming wrote in first person, told from the perspective of protagonist Vivienne Michel. Part One, titled ‘Me’, details with empathy Vivienne’s struggles as a single, professional woman in sixties London, smashing against the glass ceiling and going through an abortion alone. I first read this as a teenager –Vivienne’s experience aged seventeen facing sexual pressure from her boyfriend to ‘be a sport’ rang true then, and still rings true for women now. Or take Thunderball, where we are treated to one of Fleming’s greatest introspective passages, as Domino tells the story of her life through the lens of a fantasy she constructed growing up inspired by the illustration on a packet of Players cigarettes. This depth of character creates a convincing and distinctive female gaze, which Fleming turns on Bond. Gala Brand is an undercover Special Branch agent. One of my favourite characters, she never made it to film. Here’s Brand assessing Bond after meeting him for the first time in Moonraker (1955): “Commander Bond. James Bond. Clearly a conceited young man like so many of them in the Secret Service. … He could probably shoot all right and talk foreign languages and do a lot of tricks that might be useful abroad. But what good could he do down here without any beautiful spies to make love to.” Gala Brand is primarily concerned that Bond will ‘blow her cover by doing something stupid.’ I love that Fleming gives us such a driven, cool-headed female agent in 1955, a time when post-war advertising was urging women to leave work and get back to the kitchen. And here are Vivienne’s thoughts on Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) after she answers the motel door, desperately hoping for someone to help her against the gangsters who have taken her captive: “At first glance I inwardly groaned – God, it’s another of them! He stood there so quiet and controlled and somehow with the same quality of deadliness as the others. And he wore that uniform that the films make one associate with gangsters – a dark blue, belted raincoat and a soft black hat pulled rather far down. He was good-looking in a dark, rather cruel way and a scar showed whitely down his left cheek. I quickly put my hand up to hide my nakedness. Then he smiled and suddenly I thought I might be all right.” This is a rare opportunity to see Bond through someone else’s eyes, and not as the hero of the story, but as a passing battleship in the night. We’re so used to judging Bond by his own self-perception that it’s a shock to the system that these ‘years of treachery and ruthlessness and fear’ have left him with the ‘same quality of deadliness’ as the villains. That Fleming does this through the eyes of Vivienne underlines the significance of his female characters. The Bond of the novels experiences a character arc perhaps not seen in the films until Daniel Craig’s tenure, one that’s in many ways defined by his relationships with women. Bond’s journey begins with his love for Vesper Lynd, a British operative forced to become a double agent under duress. Her seeming betrayal and suicide leaves Bond with a ‘cold heart’. But his relationships aren’t actually all that cold, only fleeting. After a passionate journey on a train with Jill Masterton, there are no ‘regrets’ for either character: “Had they committed a sin? If so, which one? A sin against chastity?” This is the Bond of 1960s Free Love. (Or it would have been if Goldfinger hadn’t murdered Jill by painting her gold.) Bond cares for the women he connects with even if he knows it won’t last. He tells Domino that he loves her before she leaves to risk everything in a bid for revenge against Emilio Largo. He leaves Vivienne a note urging her to contact the Secret Service if ‘you ever want me or need any help’. There is something about the phrase If you ever want me that I find desperately lonely. Towards the end of his arc, Bond meets Tracy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and his heart thaws. Bond realises, “I’ll never find another girl like this one. She’s got everything I’ve ever looked for in a woman. She’s beautiful, in bed and out. She’s adventurous, brave, resourceful. She’s exciting always.” After grieving for Vesper and avoiding lasting relationships, Bond realises he is ‘fed up of all these untidy, casual affairs that leave me with a bad conscience. I wouldn’t mind having children.’ He and Tracy are ‘two of a pair, really. Why not make it for always?’ But their happiness is not without a shadow for long. Blofeld murders Tracy hours after the wedding, freezing Bond’s development, stopping his watch as he cradles her dead body in the crashed car and yet tells the patrolman: ‘we’ve got all the time in the world.’ In Fleming’s final novel, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), Bond ends the series with the realisation that while he might find happiness with Mary Goodnight, his former assistant and now Number Two at Station J, he can never commit to a lasting relationship, never commit to peace, never commit to stability in the same room with the same view. Many of the women in Bond’s world, from books to films, have achieved iconic status: Vesper, Tracy, Honey Ryder, Pussy Galore, Octopussy, Dr Holly Goodhead. (The names alone call for a whole other essay.) I grew up as Pierce Brosnan’s Bond hit the screen – I fell in love with a hero who was attracted to accomplished women who weren’t fools and didn’t suffer them either. Natalya Simonova, a computer programmer to whom the mission is just as personal as it is to Bond. Wai Lin, a secret agent played by Michelle Yeoh in a role that catapulted her to Hollywood stardom. Elektra King, the only female arch-villain of the franchise. And, of course, Dame Judi Dench cast as M, a defining moment in cultural history because it became so much more than just a moment. The world of Bond remains evergreen because it evolves and is capable of self-reflection. Judi Dench’s M begins by calling Bond a ‘sexist, misogynist dinosaur’ and a ‘relic of the Cold War.’ From here, M and Bond go on to form the most meaningful and lasting relationship of all, until she dies in his arms in Skyfall (2012), telling him that he is the one thing she got right. Reader, I cried in the cinema. And that’s only the women in front of the camera. Behind the camera, the first two James Bond films were co-written by the real-life Johanna Harwood. Dana Broccoli and Jacqueline Saltzman were both true creative partners to producers Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. Barbara Broccoli has now helmed the films for decades alongside her stepbrother Michael G. Wilson. Eileen Sullivan was the wardrobe mistress for the first five Bond films. Daniel Craig, whose style has grabbed headlines and shaped men’s fashion, has benefited from a run of incredible costume designers: Lindy Hemming, Louise Frogley, Jany Temine and Suttirat Larlarb. Debbie McWilliams has been casting Bond films for over forty years. Phoebe Waller-Bridge co-wrote No Time to Die (2021). The list goes on and on. Women have also played crucial roles in the evolution of the novels, from artist Pat Marriott’s striking covers for the first editions of Diamonds are Forever and Dr. No, to Fay Dalton’s celebrated illustrations for the Folio Society, which I display proudly beside my desk. Samantha Weinberg put Moneypenny centre stage in her series The Moneypenny Diaries. The Fleming family continue to shepherd the books. Ian Fleming’s nieces, Kate Grimond and Lucy Fleming, have been deeply involved in the family business since the 1970s. Literature is in their blood. As part-owners of the company and spokespeople for the Estate, Kate and Lucy’s shared passion has ensured that Ian Fleming Publications is still flourishing over 114 years since Ian was born. Today, the next generation of Flemings – Kate’s daughter Jessie Grimond, working with Diggory Laycock and Fergus Fleming – are honouring their legacy whilst looking to the years ahead. The company has benefited from talented editors, including Kate Jones, Zoë Aquilina, Sarah Fairbairn, Josephine Lane, and my initial editor on the Double O series, the luminous Phoebe Taylor. Corinne Turner first became involved with Ian Fleming Publications Limited in 1988, and has led Ian Fleming Publications as Managing Director since 1999. Corinne has been an inspiring and guiding light for me, endlessly encouraging, classy and cool – so much so that 003 drives Corinne’s car. Just as the history of the Secret Service itself is the story of women and men – something Ian Fleming personally experienced as a Commander in the Intelligence Office during World War Two with close female colleagues – so is the story of James Bond. Maryam d’Abo, who starred opposite Timothy Dalton in The Living Daylights, writes that ‘being a Bond Girl was… about being independent enough to stand alongside James Bond and all his history.’ The women of Bond stand in their own history, creating a legacy that will last forever. I feel humbled to step forward and stand alongside them. Bibliography GoldenEye. Directed by Martin Campbell. United Artists, 1995. Film. d’Abo, Maryam and Cork, John. Bond Girls are Forever: The Women of James Bond. London: Boxtree, 2003. Goldfinger. Directed by Guy Hamilton. United Artists, 1964. Film. Fleming, Ian. From Russia with Love. London: The Folio Society, 2016. Fleming, Ian. Moonraker. London: The Folio Society, 2017. Fleming, Ian. Goldfinger. London: The Folio Society, 2018. Fleming, Ian. Diamonds are Forever. London: The Folio Society, 2018. Fleming, Ian. Thunderball. London: The Folio Society, 2019. Fleming, Ian. The Spy Who Loved Me. London: The Folio Society, 2020. Fleming, Ian. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. London: The Folio Society, 2020. Fleming, Ian. The Man with the Golden Gun. London: The Folio Society, 2021. Skyfall. Directed by Sam Mendes. United Artists, 2012. Film. View the full article

Statically speaking, when someone hurts a woman, her intimate partner, whether current or former, is the most likely culprit. We don’t protect teenage girls from this reality, either. They’re exposed to its foundations during one of the most emotionally vulnerable periods of their life: middle school and high school. Experiencing first love and first heartbreak might be considered canon events when it comes to growing up, but so is experiencing the first time the person you like pressures you into doing something you’re not ready to do; the first time you reject an advance; the first time you are punished for rejecting an advance, whether that is socially, emotionally, or physically. Dating is a large part the social currency in high school, because high school is a microcosm of our patriarchal society. The male gaze has currency because we’ve decided it has currency. Who you date—and if you date—means something. Being the only girl without a date at a school dance/the only girl without a boyfriend/the only girl who isn’t ‘experienced’, etc., can cost you social currency. And suddenly a girl might find herself feeling pressured to say yes to a boy who she innately doesn’t want to be with just to fit in. There’s the flipside of this coin, too: being seen as a boy who can’t ‘get’ a girl (as if a girl is something to ‘get,’ like a prize) can be equally as mortifying and even emasculating. It doesn’t help that over the last few years, we’ve seen a rise in the backlash to the #MeToo movement. Men like Andrew Tate gained a following by targeting impressionable young men to groom. At the heart of their messaging is entitlement: that men are entitled to women and their entitlement trumps all. It all sounds very Handmaid’s Tale but it is certainly not fringe and it is certainly not new, though perhaps it is bolder. This kind of entitlement seeps its way into teenage relationships through pressure and manipulation. If you really love me, you’ll do this. I really love you, and that’s why I’m doing this for you. To you. I love you. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Romance can break your heart figuratively or literally, though when it becomes the latter, it morphs into something other than romance. It becomes violence. Falling in love can be wonderfully thrilling or deceptively dangerous. It’s difficult to believe the person we’re baring our heart and soul to and swapping bodily fluids with could harbor nefarious intentions, especially as a young person, when we’re often less wordly and less jaded, and when emotions are just a lot more intense. Is every kiss a deception? Is every date a brush with danger? A teenager might be more prone to ignoring red flags with a controlling boyfriend simply because they have less experience with recognizing them. They might continue a relationship, hoping the red flags will disappear or improve as the relationship progress. Love can blind us. It can make us ignore the feeling that’s telling us to run. And that is precisely why it makes for a compelling plot device in a young adult thriller. A suspicious love interest might be able to pull the wool over the eyes of even the sleuthiest of main characters, if their heart is invested enough. A recent YA thriller that does this especially well is Alexa Donne’s Edgar-nominated Pretty Dead Queens, and one that subverts the trope in highly bingeable fashion is Megan Lally’s That’s Not My Name. Even Angeline Boulley’s knockout of a debut Firekeeper’s Daughter uses a romantic subplot to cast suspicion on characters not being what they seem, at first glance, which is a theme that continues all the way to the heart stopping conclusion. I came of age when stranger danger was preached loud and hard. Be wary of strangers, of men in white vans who will lure you with the promise of a puppy or candy. The reality is that the people who are most likely to hurt us are the ones who already have access to us. They can be our family friends. Our teachers. Our boyfriends. They know the ways in which we’re vulnerable; they know our routines; they have our trust, and they can use all of this against us. It’s a bit of a shock, the first time you feel that self-preservation instinct kick in around someone you should be able to trust. I write for teens, and while books are a form of escape and entertainment, they can also act as a mirror. They can be a warning and a safe place to explore dark and disturbing themes and ideas in a way that’s still appropriate (because, spoiler: teens are often dealing with things that adults might find dark or disturbing, but that doesn’t make them any less real). In my debut YA thriller, The One That Got Away with Murder, romance is not only a subplot but it’s truly at the crux of two cold cases. When my main character Lauren moves to a new town, she’s eager to leave the traumatic end to her last relationship behind her. As much as she tries to downplay it, she’s still in a vulnerable state. The first person she meets is Robbie Crestmont, an enigmatic boy who she begins a no-strings-attached relationship with. She feels a closeness to him, and because they’re intimate, some part of her already trusts him. After all, she trusts him with her body. However, upon learning of her new flame, Lauren’s soccer teammates warn her to stay away from Robbie: he was the last person to see his ex-girlfriend Victoria alive before her body was found floating in a lake. But Lauren can’t reconcile this piece of information with the boy who she is beginning to fall for. Those emotions wield significant power. This leads her to ignore some of her own instincts for self-preservation, even after she finds out Robbie’s brother Trevor was also the last one to see his girlfriend Jess alive. Two brothers, with a dead girlfriend each? What are the chances? Statistically, they’re not low. When Lauren finds disturbing evidence that could prove her teammates were right all along, suddenly her biggest problem goes from trying to survive being the new girl to trying to survive, period. It is always the boyfriend. It is, at least, in my novel. The question is: which one is it? *** View the full article

The phrase “people often ask me” sounds like a setup here, but it’s true that people often ask me why it is I’ve chosen to write about small-town Texas. And every time, the question sort of takes me aback—not because it’s an unusual one, but because the setting of my books feels inherent to me, the first thing that comes when I sit down to write; it doesn’t feel like much of a choice. The straightforward answer is that I’m writing what I know: I grew up in small towns and rural areas. I enjoy wide-open spaces and have a need to spend time there in my mind. There’s also an intrinsic relationship between crime fiction and small-town settings—small-town mysteries their own subgenre, really—that I gravitate toward as a reader, and I couldn’t resist not tossing my own hat in the ring. The melancholy of a crime novel is a natural counterpart to the ache, to the yearning felt by someone who’s ever lived for long in a quiet place. A place where the matinee is at seven p.m. and all the restaurants close shortly after, where the only thing left to do is stir trouble or cook up some drama. And then, there’s the self-possession, the nostalgia that the ones who get away feel—I’m a romantic, a leaver myself, but as a crime writer, I know better than to be so rosy-eyed. Small towns, like any place, are as full of contradictions as they are rooted in tradition, as changing as they are stagnant. I love a book that looks inward and tells me a true story—a story about how in all that quiet, you might find an answer to who we are and where we’re headed. And so, without further ado, here’s a list of titles that use crime as the vehicle and small towns as the fuel, all in service of a well-told story: Tornado Weather by Deborah E. Kennedy A beautifully written, sharply observed novel told in alternating viewpoints of the residents of Colliersville, Indiana, Tornado Weather’s plot centers around the disappearance of a five-year-old girl who is last seen at the bus stop near her home during a tornado watch. But the real small-town mystery here is actually how the people in a community—in much of America, really—are both disparate and interlocked. Using the kaleidoscopic framework of many different voices, Kennedy examines the forces that both connect and divide the town’s residents: race, class, the feeling of being trapped (by poverty or sheer inertia), gossip, and perhaps even more powerfully, what’s left unsaid and unknown. Bootlegger’s Daughter by Margaret Maron The Deborah Knott series is a favorite of mine, both for Maron’s smart, wry protagonist and her detailed portraiture of small-town North Carolina. This, the first in the series, follows attorney Deborah, whose family has lived in the community for generations, as she runs for district judge. If elected, she’ll be the first woman to hold the position, and if her Republican opponent wins, he’ll be the first Black man—one of the many intrigues of this series is its chronicling of local politics and a community poised for change (the books were written and are set in the early nineties). Meanwhile, an unsolved murder case comes to Deborah from a family friend, and this investigation dovetails with the campaign and her shifting sense of identity in unexpected and satisfying ways. The titular bootlegger’s daughter, Deborah learns that the past—hers, and that of her community—is never so far away. Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke Lyrical and tense, the second entry in what Locke has announced with be a trilogy featuring Texas Ranger Darren Mathews opens with a scene that haunts my memory years after I’ve read it: a young boy is on a boat, winding through the ancient cypress on swampy, labyrinth-like Caddo Lake when the boat’s motor dies right as night falls. Later, to investigate the boy’s disappearance—the boy is be the son of a white supremacist he arrested in the previous book—Darren must set up camp in a small town where the main drag is a tourism shrine to antebellum Texas, and where racial prejudices seem to match that era. In addition to being a fast-paced procedural, the book asks deeper questions about who really who owns a place and who gets to tell its story; as layer upon layer peels back, Locke grounds the reader in Darren’s search for purpose, for justice, and identity as a Black lawman in our ever-tumultuous present. Bone on Bone by Julia Keller Another brilliant series, the Bell Elkins mysteries are, like many of the genre, concerned with crime and punishment, but what sets them apart is the overarching theme of retribution in all its forms and what it really means to hold ourselves and our institutions accountable. A native of the small town of Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, Bone on Bone opens with former prosecutor Bell returning home after a prison stint. She has it in mind to begin work on a long-term project holding big pharma responsible for the ravaging of her community by opioids, but soon narrows her focus, hired to look into a drug-related homicide by the thinly-stretched local law enforcement. The grip the opioid epidemic has on this town is tight, and it’s hard for anyone—the law, the family of those lost to overdoses or the addicted themselves—to imagine a way forward. Keller doesn’t pull any punches, but the book is not overly grim in its portrayal of the region; the deep, thoughtful characterizations of the community members who haven’t lost all faith—Bell, also a disabled former deputy and the new county prosecutor—show that in the pursuit of truth, in loving a place even when it’s complicated, you might work through some of your own demons and find glimmers of hope for a better future along the way. The Searcher by Tana French The previous titles on this list are of native residents going on a journey of the heart, or of prodigal sons and daughters returning, but this is the other classically satisfying plot: a stranger coming to town. When it was announced that Tana French had written a western, I don’t know that I’ve ever been as excited for a book’s release—and of course, The Searcher did not only meet all my high expectations but exceeded them. In this Shane-esque suspense, former Chicago PD officer Cal Hooper has moved to the West of Ireland searching for the quiet idyll of life in a small village, and naturally, things turn out to be not what they seem. Beyond her deep characterizations and mesmerizing prose, part of what is so satisfying about a Tana French novel is both her reliance on and ability to totally upend genre conventions; here, as in tales of the old west, there’s a slipperiness of the moral code, Cal having had to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong when no one was looking, and as the story progresses, he must operate outside the law where the local police have failed. The plot kicks into high gear when Cal reluctantly agrees to help a local boy find his missing brother. Cal gets much more than he bargained for in this initiation to the small town’s secrets, its cruelties and its dangers. “Disaster Stamps of Pluto” by Louise Erdrich I first encountered this story in a short fiction anthology I’d been assigned to read in college, an excerpt from the novel The Plague of Doves, and all these years after reading the opening line, “The dead of Pluto now outnumber the living,” I’m still moved by this beautiful, austere tale. An octogenarian in rural North Dakota, a retired physician who writes the historical society newsletter, is feeling the weight of time and loneliness while staring down the twilight of her life. After years of setting every snippet of the town record straight, there is still a bit of history that needs to be recoded—a truth so unsettling she’s hesitated to bear witness to it for all these years. A truth she’s yet to face about the night she was an infant and her entire family was murdered, and the manner with which she discovered the true killer. Disaster stamps are literal postage in the story—collectible pieces of mail that have survived earthquakes and wars—but they’re also the morbid, darkest relics of ourselves and our collective past that we both cling to and push away. The story asks, in a town that’s dying, what will remain of our time here, and examines the urgency with which the living feel called to preserve it. *** View the full article

It was an introvert’s paradise. Two weeks after Fidel Castro forced Fulgencio Batista from power in 1959, Justin Gleichauf found himself as the one and only employee of the new CIA operation in Miami. Part of the Domestic Contacts Division of the Directorate of Intelligence, the CIA field office (meaning Gleichauf) was tasked with monitoring and reporting on developments in Cuba. Gleichauf missed the fighting in the Second World War because he was too underweight for combat action (he was the water boy in college at Notre Dame because he was so skinny). Instead, he served as a technical advisor in the Office of Price Administration and on the Board of Economic Warfare. In. 1950, he joined the CIA, and was assigned to an office that debriefed American professors and businessmen who had just returned from trips to Europe. During the Hungarian revolution in 1956, Gleichauf directed the interrogations of Hungarian rebels who came to the US after fighting Soviet troops. When he first got to Miami, the first wave of exiles had already arrived, and he set out to learn what government agency was doing what with the new Miami residents. According to Gleichauf, thirteen different federal agencies were working the problem, including the INS; Border Patrol; Customs; the Coast Guard; the State Department; the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW); FBI; and Army, Navy, and Air Force intelligence (along with a myriad of local law enforcement agencies). And now the CIA. At this time, the US government still hadn’t decided what it was going to do about the new regime in Cuba. The US intelligence community had very little information about what was happening there, so Gleichauf collected as much open-source intelligence as he could, like newspapers, magazines, and any other printed material that might have relevant information. This open-source sweep also included Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, and Verde Olivo, which gave some insight into the Cuban military. To attract new contacts, he listed his CIA phone number in the telephone book and handed out business cards with his home number. The results were mixed. For every solid lead, Gleichauf explained, there was “a motley collection of weirdos,” and opportunists who were looking for a way to earn some money from the US government. There were also “lots of would-be Mata Haris, eager to do anything for the cause,” and American mercenaries, who thought Cuba would be a quick and easy way to get glory and riches. Gleichauf consistently tried to warn them off, with limited success. There were also Castro sympathizers in Miami: A brick was thrown through the windshield of my car parked outside the house, and my wife received a number of threatening calls along the lines of “. . . [x-date] will be a day that you and your family will never forget . . .” I received a barrage of late-night phone calls, with the caller remaining silent while I answered. I memorized Spanish insults, which I directed at Fidel via the open line. The calls eventually dwindled. With so many exiles entering Miami at that time, the CIA finally realized Gleichauf could not do this all by himself, so it beefed up his office’s staffing. To four. The new additions were one air force and two army intelligence officers. Thankfully, they all spoke Spanish. In the meantime, the government had finally figured out how it was going to react to Fidel Castro: he had to go. The CIA was working on multiple different operational plans against the new Cuban government. One of these involved air-dropping supplies to resistance forces still in Cuba. In late September 1960, the CIA made its first airdrop of supplies to rebels in Oriente Province (enough for one hundred soldiers). The operation, however, did not go as intended. Instead of supplying rebel forces fighting Castro, the airdrop landed seven miles from where it was expected—right into the hands of the Cuban revolutionary militia the arms were meant to be used against. And this wouldn’t be the last time something like this went awry. Richard Bissell, the CIA Deputy Director of Plans, lamented, “We never got to first base in Cuba in building an underground organization. . . . We only had one [supply drop] where we were reasonably sure that the people the supplies were intended for actually got them.” Then there was the story you might already have heard of—the CIA’s use of the mob against Castro. The Mafia was motivated. Before Fidel Castro came to power, Havana had been “the empress city of organized crime,” and a “free port for the mob.” Havana was the main tourist destination in the 1950s, and people came there from all over for the gorgeous weather, the beaches, the gambling, and the bordellos. Even tourists from Miami headed south for activities forbidden at home. Batista was a supporter of this world, at least for the right price (he received serious kickbacks for his protection). Now he was gone, replaced by a regime that was taking it all away. The Mafia could not find a way to control Fidel Castro, which meant he had to go. It was nothing personal, just business. In August 1960, Bissell approached the CIA’s Office of Security to see if they had any assets that “may assist in a sensitive mission requiring gangster-type action. The mission target was Fidel Castro.” The CIA had used a man named Robert Maheu in the past for some of their shadier operations. A former special agent in the FBI, Maheu left the Bureau and opened a private investigation office in Washington, DC, in 1956. He was what was known as a “cut-out,” a middleman, or someone that allowed the Agency to maintain distance from these kinds of things. According to CIA documents, “over the years he [had] been intimately involved in providing support for some of the Agency’s more sensitive operations.” He had contacts in the underworld and would be the person who insulated the CIA from any direct contact with the mob. Maheu reached out to Johnny Roselli, whom he had met on more than one occasion in Las Vegas. Roselli would eventually link Maheu (and the CIA) with Momo Salvatore “Sam” Giancana and Santo Trafficante Jr., two men, incidentally, on the list of the attorney general’s ten most-wanted. Trafficante was the head of the Mafia’s Cuban operations, and Giancana was the chief of the Chicago branch of the Mafia and considered the successor to Al Capone. Together, Roselli and Giancana had controlled a massive Mafia empire, reportedly larger than the organization run by the five families of the New York Cosa Nostra—combined. Maheu had been authorized to offer the mobsters $150,000 for the job, but they declined. They would do it for free. Why? Well, for one, they stood to make far more money if Castro was removed from power, and they could restart their gambling interests in Cuba. Also, they likely assumed helping the US government in such a way could pay off later if they found themselves in, say, legal trouble. In September 1960, Maheu met up with Johnny and Sam at the Boom Boom Room at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. The men discussed a variety of options for taking out Castro. The CIA was originally thinking along the lines of a “typical, gangland-style killing in which Castro would be gunned down,” but Giancana said absolutely no to the use of firearms. He argued that no one could be recruited to do this kind of job, “because the chance of survival and escape would be negligible.” Instead, the mobsters suggested the use of a poison pill. Giancana said he knew a guy, whom he identified only as “Joe” (it was Trafficante), who would serve as a courier to Cuba and could make arrangements there to get the pill into Castro’s drink. The individual who could get close to Castro in Cuba was Juan Orta, who was described as a “disaffected Cuban official with access to Castro and presumably of a sort that would enable him to surreptitiously poison Castro.” According to Roselli and Giancana, Orta had once received kickbacks from gambling profits, and now that that was gone, “he needed the money.” Orta was, at that time, the office chief and director general of the office of the prime minister, Fidel Castro. After Maheu reported back to the Agency, the chief of the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD) was asked to develop a pill that “had the elements of rapid solubility, high lethal content, and little or no traceability.” The poison itself had to be “stable, soluble, safe to handle, undetectable, not immediately acting, and with a firmly predictable end result.” Botulin toxin met all those requirements and could be made into a pill. Six of these were produced and tested. And they didn’t work. When they were dropped in water, they didn’t even disintegrate, let alone dissolve completely, with “little to no traceability.” The TSD tried again, and successfully made a new batch that “met the requirement for solubility.” But would they kill someone? No. Guinea pigs were acquired for the test, but when the TSD tested the pills on the poor animals, they were found to be “ineffective.” Well, that didn’t work. Perhaps we should scrap this idea and move on to plan B? No. Roselli was given the useless pills and passed them along to Trafficante, who said they had then been delivered to Orta in Cuba. A 1966 CIA document states that, after several weeks of aborted attempts, Orta “apparently got cold feet and asked out of the assignment.” But by 1967, the CIA knew the real story: Orta had lost his position in the prime minister’s office in January 1961, while planning for the operation was still in full swing in Washington and Miami. Did Roselli, Giancana, and Trafficante know this? According to the CIA, yes. So why did they say they could deliver when clearly they knew they couldn’t? Only the three of them truly know, but one could surmise that they hoped to curry favor with the government by showing they’d tried. ___________________________________ Excerpted from Covert City: The Cold War and the Making of Miami by Vince Houghton and Eric Driggs. Copyright © 2024. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. 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“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows …” / Insert sinister laugh here. The Shadow, a proto-Batman who, unlike the Caped Crusader, was more than willing to gun down the bad guys, began as a character on a 1930 radio show and then backtracked into his own pulp magazine the following year. The shadowy crimefighter is probably the best-known pulp hero, but those cheap magazines delivered hundreds of heroes and villains into the hands of eager readers for much of the first half of the 20th century. Heroes like the Shadow and Doc Savage and the Avenger are remembered today – if they’re remembered at all – for their reincarnations in paperbacks and comic books beginning in the 1960s. But other mainstays of pulp fiction – to coin a phrase – included cowboys, detectives, secret agents, scientists, barbarians and even private investigators, many of them among the most-beloved characters in genre literature. Pulp magazines, also known as “the pulps,” were born out of publishers’ determination to make as much money as possible, so they were printed on the cheapest pulpwood paper. The writers of the pulps churned out hundreds of novels and stories for a few bucks apiece. Two hundred separate pulp titles were regularly published in the Depression years, according to “An Informal History of the Pulp Magazine,” Ron Goulart’s indispensable 1972 history of the pulps. In “The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps,” the hefty 2007 collection of pulp fiction, editor Otto Penzler raised that ante, saying that more than 500 titles a month were published. The pulps took the country by storm, filling the era between dime novels and comic books and, later, paperbacks. But because they were printed on the most disposable of paper and written and illustrated as cheaply as possible for New York publishing houses, they were, in their paper form, short-lived by design. When they were gone, they were gone. But the pulps, somehow, live on. Unlikable father of the pulps It’s not the sometimes-turgid prose or outlandish plots that keep pulps alive, at least in some segments of the population, today. No, it’s the characters. And some of the most memorable characters were those who created and produced the pulps. “Nobody liked Frank A. Munsey,” Goulart wrote in his guide to pulps, regarding the man considered the father of the format. Munsey, who died in 1925, was a money man, not a creative type. He bought up magazines and newspapers and tried to capture the public tastes of the day. Goulart notes that Munsey ruthlessly canceled his newspapers and magazines when they failed to generate enough revenue. Munsey printed his magazines on cheap wood-pulp paper and shipped them out with the ends untrimmed, solidifying the image of pulps. He founded Argosy magazine in 1888, publishing adult fiction following Argosy’s run as a children’s magazine, and it was one of his most lasting successes, publishing until 1978, more than a half-century after his death. Probably because of his desire to generate the largest-circulation magazines possible at the lowest cost, Munsey joined other publishers specializing in printing fiction. Writers, who were paid pennies or fractions of pennies per word, earned $10 or a little more for a novel-length story for Munsey or other publishers, could churn out fiction at an astonishing pace: Walter B. Gibson, ghostwriter and friend of magicians like Harry Houdini, wrote 112 book-length shadow stories between 1931 and 1936. When the Shadow magazine shut down in 1949, Gibson had written 280 novels about the character, Goulart wrote. Argosy sold a half a million copies a month in the early 1890s, Goulart wrote. In the first dozen successful years of Munsey’s publications, Munsey’s and Argosy, the publisher made a net profit of nine million dollars. Murderous cats and deep-sea corpses The characters in the pulps were introduced to readers by the covers of the pulps. Those lurid covers were, not surprisingly, the strongest selling point of pulps from Munsey and other publishers. The covers were a riot of color, with cowboys and detectives wielding weapons and damsels threatened by murderous creeps. All-Story Detective, which didn’t debut until 1949, really seemed to specialize in putting women in danger. The covers of the earliest issues are a parade of women reacting with open-mouthed terror to knives being thrown at them or thrust at them or guns pointed at them. Black Book Detective, first published in 1933, ran for 20 years. Square-jawed men and menaced women, often blondes in red dresses, were featured on the covers, while a masked crimefighter known as the Black Bat hovered in the background beginning in 1939 – the same year Batman debuted in Detective Comics, a straight comic book for DC. The titles of the featured stories in the pulps were insanely creative – or just insane. “The Cat Mews Murder” headlined the pulp titled Speed Mystery. “Hot Lead Hurricane” led off an issue of Red Seal Western. “Murder Can’t Be Drowned” – illustrated by a great cover of a deep-sea diver discovering an underwater skeleton with a knife stuck in its ribs – would have made Dime Detective Magazine a sure purchase for adventure lovers. Since the paper, stories and that vivid art of the pulps were so cheap, many of the issues were huge: Munsey’s Argosy reached nearly 200 pages in a typical issue. For a dime, those thick pulps were seen as a great buy. “I grew up reading pulps,” author Harlan Ellison wrote in an introduction to a section about villains in “The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps.” “I was born in ’34, and unlike most of the Jessica Simpson-admiring twerps of contemporary upbringing, for whom nostalgia is what they had for breakfast, I actually remember what a hoot it was to plunk myself into the Ouroboros root-nest of the ancient oak tree in the front yard of our little house at 89 Harmon Drive, Painesville, Ohio, with the latest issue of Black Book Detective Magazine or the Shadow. Ah me, those wood-chip-scented, cream-colored pulp pages dropping their dandruff onto the lap of my knickers …” After railing on for a few hundred words about how 21st-century entertainment was lacking compared to that of decades before, Ellison allows that when read today, “The (pulp) fictions may creak a bit in the joints, some of the writing may be too prolix for modern tastes (don’t forget, they were writing for a ½ cent to a penny per word in those halcyon days of post-Depression America) and we have been exposed to an electronically-linked world for so long now, that some of the attitudes and expressions in these fables may seem giggle-worthy, but this is a muscular writing that sustained us through some very tough times, and their preserved quality of sheer entertainment value is considerable. So be kind.” Jellyfish and dames at breakneck speed The Black Mask pulp alone has a tremendous legacy of great crime writers, Penzler noted in the “Black Lizard” pulp compendium. “Every significant writer of the pulp era worked for Black Mask, including Paul Cain, Horace McCoy, Frederick L. Nebel, Raoul Whitfield, Erle Stanley Gardner, Charles G. Booth, Roger Torrey, Norbert Davis, George Harmon Coxe and, of course, the greatest of them all, Raymond Chandler,” Penzler wrote. In a 1932 edition of Black Mask, in the story “Honest Money,” Gardner introduced an attorney, Ken Corning, a character that would be perfected when Gardner later created lawyer Perry Mason. Gardner didn’t stint on the vivid writing as he described a would-be client that came to Corning’s office, which was so new the attorney’s name had just been painted on the door. “He looked as though his clothes had been filled with apple jelly…He quivered and jiggled like a jellyfish on a board. Fat encased him in layers, an unsubstantial, soft fat that seemed to be hanging to his bones with a grip that was not temporary. “His voice was thin and falsetto. “’I want to see the lawyer,” he shrilled. And how about this, in Dime Detective in January 1938, from Raymond Chandler, set in a California cocktail lounge where Philip Marlowe has just settled on a barstool. “The kid behind the bar was in his early 20s and looked as if he had never had a drink in his life…Marlowe looked around the room and observed a miserable-looking souse. “You sure cut the clouds off them, buddy, I will say that for you,” Marlowe told the bartender. “We just opened up,” the kid said. … “I ought to call a taxi and send him home. He’s doing his next week’s drinking too soon. “A night like this,” I said. “Let him alone.” In the “Black Lizard” book, the great Laura Lippman introduces a section of stories about women in pulps and acknowledges that “the pulps of the early-twentieth century will never be mistaken for proto-feminist documents.” She cites the then-recent incident of an astronaut who, wearing a diaper and armed with a knife, gloves and garbage bags, drove 800 miles to “confront a romantic rival.” The astronaut was a woman, Lippman notes, and so was her potential victim, who spoiled the scheme. “All I know is that I prefer the company of the dames within these pages, who parade before us in impeccable suits, filmy negligees, torn evening dresses and … a voluminous purple kimono worn over a corset. But not a diaper, never a diaper, thank God. Even the most venal among them have more class than that.” In his “Informal History,” Goulart notes, “Nobody noticed it at the time, but the pulp magazine was one of the casualties of the second world war. The mystery men chuckling in their capes and the bronze geniuses leaping out of penthouses didn’t fit very well in the world as it was after Hitler and Hiroshima.” Goulart notes that paperbacks, comic books and later, television, provided different shapes of romantic and adventurous escape. The pulp writers, great and not-so-great, left behind some memorable writing, but as Penzler noted, “The writers mainly had the goal of entertaining readers when these stories were produced. … stories written at breakneck speed and designed to be read the same way.” View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Victoria Houston, At the Edge of the Woods (Crooked Lane) “A rollicking comedy of errors combines mystery and romance.” –Kirkus Reviews Ava January, The Mayfair Dagger (Crooked Lane) “For fans of romantic suspense and cozies looking for intrigue in their next read.” –Booklist Samantha Jayne Allen, Next of Kin (Minotaur) “Atmospheric….Allen conjures a suitably noirish mood from the opening pages, and renders even her secondary characters in three dimensions. With regional intrigue and plenty of satisfying sleuthing, this series merits a long run.” –Publisher’s Weekly Sasha Vasilyuk, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury) “A Ukrainian soldier survives World War II to face a lifetime of secrets . . . Chapters set during the war alternate with chapters set much later; to begin with, Yefim, as an old man, has just died, and among his papers, his wife has found a letter to the KGB that seems to indicate that much of what he has told his family about his wartime experiences was untrue. Vasilyuk, a journalist as well as a debut novelist, sets out to comb through all this with patience, subtlety, and finesse.” –Kirkus Reviews Anne Hillerman, Lost Birds (Harper) “Heartwarming, gently humorous, occasionally dark, this slice-of-life book offers another entertaining read from a gifted author.” –Booklist Elly Griffiths, The Last Word (Mariner) “Griffiths expertly blends a well-wrought procedural with distinctive characters, academic politics, and romance. Fans old and new will be rewarded.” –Publishers Weekly Kim Sherwood, A Spy Like Me (William Morrow) “Sherwood delivers all the hallmarks of a Bond novel, including a complex plot replete with double-crossing and exotic settings, plenty of Easter eggs for Ian Fleming fans, crackling prose… and a jaw-dropping conclusion. Readers will be on tenterhooks until the final installment.” –Publishers Weekly Douglas Preston, Extinction (Forge) “A thriller as breathlessly riveting as you would expect from a genre master like Douglas Preston, but much more too: it’s meaty and thought-provoking, and tells us a lot about our distant past—and our immediate future. Spectacular!” –Lee Child Sally Hepworth, Darling Girls (St. Martin’s) “As in The Soulmate, compelling themes of trust, betrayal, and brittle façades circle the sisters’ relationships, raising the stakes of the investigation painfully high. Hepworth’s fans will be primed for her newest unnerving thriller.” –Booklist Vince Houghton and Eric Driggs, Covert City: The Cold War and the Making of Miami (PublicAffairs) “Lucid and entertaining, this adventuresome account covers well-trod ground with panache.” –Publishers Weekly View the full article