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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sex Was Everywhere” Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere: in Lisa’s sixth-grade locker with her breath mints and roll-on deodorant; in Dr. Perlman’s walk—slow and tight-calved; in Mr. Robinson’s guitar, playing Cat Steven’s “Wild World” each afternoon before the bell; in Mrs. Taylor’s wavy, knee-length red hair, smelling of Wella Balsam and cigarettes. Sex was in the heat that gathered under the ceiling of the gym—when you climbed the rope to the very top, you came down smelling of it. Sex was baked into the raviolis Gina’s mom pinched shut around spoonfuls of meat while Gina snuck thick slices of last night’s chocolate cake for you to share upstairs as you admired her confirmation dress, all white eyelet and pearls. Sex was in John O’Connor’s towheaded curls, limp on his damp scalp as he leaned in to marvel at the hugeness of your thighs. There were strong urges in contradictory directions: Gina’s older half brothers, so shaggy and sideburned that you asked to take your plate up to Gina’s room so you wouldn’t have to face them over dinner. Then you spied on them from the top of the stairs, blood pounding in your throat with every swallow. And Sam in your class, who you wanted to press against the wall and kiss, and whom you kicked instead, so hard he turned on you and screamed “what’s wrong with you?” See Eros (life force) and Thanatos (death drive) in later psychoanalytic theory. It was a land where everything was safe until it wasn’t: Ted Bundy, arm in a sling, waiting for you by every car. It was a land where you walked two blocks from school to the Luncheonette for a dollar twenty-five hot dog special, followed by a school-wide assembly introducing the Safe House program—“look for the orange Safe HouSe card in the front window if you need to ring the bell,” too late for little Maria-of-the-transparent-skin who’d returned to school with bruised cheeks and bloody veins in the whites of her eyes. And Mr. McMann was suddenly no longer the boys’ swim team coach because he was a “bachelor.” And Maggie told her mother something that made her mother fire the babysitter and then every week Maggie talked to a doctor named Leda while her mother waited in the car outside. Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere, and there were body parts. Gina leaned into the window of a lost driver’s car to answer his question and his purple penis was propped against the steering wheel. Lisa’s father slept naked, and when you slept over, you saw his long white buttocks as he left the bathroom in the middle of the night (like quivering poached pears). One day, Teo, a distant older cousin from Israel, appeared and told your little brother (who told you) he liked to lick salt off girls’ breasts. The gardener’s son, rumored to be a rapist, worked shirtless in the backyard doing things to the flowers; his back rolled and glistened like a buttered croissant. There was food. There was a seven-ounce smoked gouda devoured during General Hospital, followed by graham cracker sandwiches filled with Betty Crocker cream cheese frosting during Edge of Night. There were stomachaches, and there were fantasies of Baryshnikov and David Cassidy. Insert here a feminist history of gorging and female sexual repression from the primordial to the postmodern. Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere, and there was fever. It was the year of the chickenpox and then the extended family cruise on the Statendam: mothers in halter tops and Bermuda shorts sitting outside in the sun, silver reflectors under their chins, when you fell asleep on your stomach by the pool and your back crisped so that nothing—not Noxzema, not vinegar, not leaning forward for a week—nothing brought relief and you glowed heat and untouchability. And your sister sleepwalked onto the ship’s deck (she could have walked right off the boat into the moony ocean), and then went back to the bunk across from yours and snored with her mouth wide open beneath the ledge with the pennies she must have swallowed since they were gone the next morning. The rest of the week, your cousins calling, “Hey Drea, got change for a nickel?” Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere, and there were words whose meanings you pretended to know— ménage à trois and fellatio. And there were jokes whose punch lines you pretended to understand—Why does Dr. Pepper come in a bottle? Because his wife died. It was a land of intimations. There were Annie and Esme who cleaned the house on Tuesdays and Thursdays (lived together, had no boyfriends). There was the piano tuner who was a man one time and a woman the next (Peter to Peterpa). There was Harold and Maude. Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere, and there were rumors: Mrs. Donoghue (divorced) and Mr. O’Hara (single) team-teaching, winking over your head. There was Lisa at the end-of-school dance, arms around Timmy’s neck. Why had you never seen him before tonight? And how had he gotten so tall without your noticing? There was the rock star whose stomach was pumped because of all the semen he’d swallowed, and Peter’s sister’s best friend who got pregnant from a toilet seat after her best friend got pregnant from her boyfriend’s pee. There were live gerbils and dill pickles in all the wrong places, and there was the spider that laid eggs in some girl’s cheek so when she scratched what she thought was a mosquito bite, hundreds of baby spiders crawled over her face. Banisters were for straddling. The stuffed unicorn was for rubbing between your legs and then throwing in the trash when its horn smelled. Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere, and there was fear. There was the drainage hole in the stone wall that opened into nothing but air over the quicksand inlet at the end of the dead-end block. And there was your neighbor Jimmy—square-chinned, squint-eyed, and broody—who you dreamed of kissing before he tripped on his stairs with his fishing rod in hand and the end of the rod went through his eye and into his brain. You stayed up all night praying he would live, that if God let him live, you’d be kinder to your siblings and less fresh to your parents, and he did live, but he was never the same. It wasn’t just the cane and the stiff leg he had to grab by the thigh and swing around the side when he walked. His face was crooked and he was moved to the special ed class, and when your parents invited his family over for dinner and your father asked him what piece of chicken he preferred (“I’m a leg man because the leg never gets old, are you a breast man, Jimmy? Come on, you’re a breast man, right?”) he just sat there with a half-grin on his face, and you wondered if your prayers for him to live were not specific enough. Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere, and there was competition. There was Steven on his bike on your way home from school who you were supposed to ask to the square dance on Gina’s behalf, but who you managed to get to ask you first. There were tie-dyed shirts cut into strips at the bottom onto which you threaded wooden beads that clacked and clapped as you walked so Timmy would turn away from Lisa when you entered the room. There were dances you danced at the talent show so the boys could see your hips and poems you wrote for class so the boys could hear your voice. There were boys too skinny and boys too dull, boys not smart enough and boys not mean enough. Boys whose chairs you pulled out when they were about to sit down and boys you made sure you were cast opposite in plays. Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere, and there were placebos—hooker costumes on Halloween, sleeping bags in the wayback of the station wagon. Catwoman and hot pants. Chest hair peeking out of collars and wrap skirts that flew open in the wind. Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere, and there was a whole rich life of love. There were afternoons on the front lawn loving back walkovers and back handsprings, and there was running barefoot to meet the Good Humor truck at the end of the street (pretending the ice cream was for your little sister) and cutting your foot on a piece of glass and Lucy from up the street with her choker made of hemp, smelling like bubble gum and sixteen-year-old-girl sweat, lovingly carrying you back home. It was a land of tube tops and velour and somewhere in the future were your very own children waiting to be slung over your shoulder like the most adorable purse straps. There were swans’ nests in the reeds across the inlet at the end of the block. Potato bugs and daddy longlegs. Black-eyed Susans at the garden wall and, after two weeks in Vermont, a gigantic sunflower— dad-tall, plate wide—nodding its weird love. Not everybody’s father was as handsome as yours. Lisa and Gina liked to come over and watch him play the guitar, admiring how his hands moved up and down the fretboard. This section left intentionally blank. Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere, and there were dreams—hiding that you could fly until you couldn’t take it anymore, then flapping your arms hard and taking off over roofs, naked and slick; dropped overboard from a boat and sinking to the bottom before realizing if you sucked hard, you could breathe underwater, slowly, thickly. You were movie stars and murderers in the making. Some of you had big plans. Others went along. Two of you designed a restaurant that served only breakfast and dessert. Afterward, you made and sold painted dough pins in the shape of meaningful and repeatable objects— hearts, moons, roller skates. You were entrepreneurs and chauvinists and other French-sounding things. Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere—and there was death. There was the boy on his bike on his way to school caught under the 18-wheeler who you offered a minute of silence to during first period, though the principal wouldn’t say his name over the loudspeaker, and you couldn’t picture how it had happened and you couldn’t stop picturing how you almost could picture the truck on your bike, on your leg, on your chest. There was the Billig boy diving into the shallow end of the pool. There was the girl who walked onto the neighbor’s frozen pool and fell in and couldn’t get out and no one heard her or held her or saw her as she died, blue and alone. There was Jonathan Livingston Seagull all summer long, on the boat in swells—you were limitless, your body your own idea—with your parents saying, “when are you going to get your head out of your book and live a little?” __________________________________ From HALF-LIVES. Used with the permission of the publisher, AUTUMN HOUSE PRESS. Copyright © 2024 by LYNN SCHMEIDLER. All rights reserved. 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Whether authors will admit it or not, some of us use personal experiences as inspiration for our writing. In the case of my latest psychological thriller The Alone Time, I drew inspiration from a plane crash that I survived when I was a child. The influence of my experience can be identified in the first few chapters of the book, while the rest of the story and its characters are all highly fictionalized. Yet, writing this book while drawing on my real-life memories led me to wonder just how many other authors do the same thing. Was I overstepping in mining this moment for creative purposes? Has anyone else also felt the pressure to leave reality as subject matter alone? I learned that I am far from the first author to have existential questions regarding a writer’s duty to their work versus a duty to their loved ones. Author of Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer had an interesting take on life’s matrixed path: “My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met.” This resonated with me when I first read this quote years ago, and then again as I was writing The Alone Time. Although I’ve had a few individuals insist that I never write about them—and I never have—, I find it strange to think I could write my own thoughts and feelings without bordering or overlapping the moments I’ve shared with others. Safran Foer is right in that we can’t separate our stories from others’, not entirely. Another great quote regarding our communal experience is from Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk: “Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.” This likewise hints at how inseparable our paths are from the people we encounter. I always feel this most acutely when I go to write a dedication page for a new book; how can I single out one person when so many contributed to a new story in overt and inadvertent ways? (Alas, I suck it up and make a choice.) Knowing all this—let’s say, being in agreement on the above, Eudora Welty’s words in On Writing hit hard: “Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself, that a character becomes in its own right another human being on the page.” Welty could have been narrating my life as I wrote The Alone Time when she said this, as it sums up my perspective here. It’s from the personal trauma of the plane crash I survived that the catalyst for my story was born. It was through imbuing my characters with reactions that I saw or had myself during the actual crash, the weeks that followed, or during the moments just before the crash, that I gave my characters their foundations. This basis in reality led me to explore my characters’ subsequent worlds as alternate realities, in a way, to what could have been mine. Finally, I think that if we are taking on the complicated task of writing from our own experiences, then it should be done with rigid respect to the story. Jesmyn Ward, author of Salvage the Bones, said, “I realised that if I was going to assume the responsibility of writing about my home, I needed narrative ruthlessness. I couldn’t dull the edges and fall in love with my characters and spare them. Life does not spare us.” To my mind, and to Ward’s point, it’s not enough to take inspiration from an author’s personal life—we must mine the darkest parts of this existence to bring depth and believability to the page, even at the cost of presenting real places or real events in less than favorable filters. Bearing this responsibility in mind, I highly doubt that I could ever recreate an actual location or person with my words. We as humans are too complex, layered, and contradictory to fully be transferred to my laptop. And, to be clear, I believe that people who are writer-adjacent deserve their privacy; the individuals who were involved in my plane crash could not have predicted that I would one day write a story stemming from the pivotal event (—and as a child, neither could I), which is why the plot of The Alone Time is the work of my imagination. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t think we shouldn’t try, occasionally, to build on hurts or shocks that we know well for the sake of the story. *** View the full article

After the publication of Nedra Tyre’s first book, a collection of dramatic monologues based upon her career as a social services caseworker entitled Red Wine First, the native Georgian author joined a writing group in Atlanta, one of whose members, Atlanta Constitution columnist Celestine Sibley, would, over the next forty-odd years, devote occasional columns to her colleague in the pages of the Constitution. After Nedra’s death in 1990 Celestine recalled that in their writing group, ironically named the Plot Club (“We had no plots and it was no club”), Nedra as a successfully published author “heard us read [our work] and encouraged and advised us.” To her contemporaries Nedra strikingly possessed a demurely genteel and innocent appearance, being, according to Celestine, a blue-eyed, “tiny, pixie-like creature who wore her red hair in a ponytail and dressed like Alice in Wonderland in full-skirted childlike frocks and Mary Jane slippers.” She looked about twelve, Celestine added, although at the time they first met she was thirty-four years old, and she spoke with a “soft, high voice, and she was shy!” As any mystery fan will tell you, appearances can deceive. As a social worker, Nedra knew all about the facts of life (and death). “Social work can be emotionally exhausting,” she explained in a 1954 newspaper interview about her crime fiction. “But as background for murder, it was just what I needed.” Upon its publication in 1947, Red Wine First was condemned by nationally syndicated newspaper columnist James Farber as an unladylike and indeed “unpardonable tome” besmirched by “gutter language” (i.e., the actual language of Nedra’s clients).[1] The book’s author could be direct in person as well. She once implored another member of the Plot Club—genteel crime writer Genevieve Holden, whose first mystery novel followed Nedra’s own debut effort into print by a year in 1953—when she was giving a halting reading from her latest thriller: “Go on, Gen, get to the incest!” The other ladies in the room–including Celestine Sibley, who at her death in 1999 was described as “the last voice of the white-glove, tea-and-apple-blossom set that had not a sharp edge on it”–promptly dissolved into laughter. This ladylike yet every so often unexpectedly earthy southern crime writer was born on October 6, 1912 to Henry Tyre and his wife Frances “Fannie” Hull in Offerman, Georgia, then (and still today) a tiny town of under five hundred souls located in rural Pierce County in the far southeastern corner of the state, not all that far distant from the Okefenokee Swamp and the Georgia-Florida border. The 1910 United States Census records Henry and Frances Tyre as newlyweds living in Offerman, where Henry served as the little burg’s chief of police. Henry died eight years later—possibly a victim of the Spanish Flu pandemic–and two years after his death the 1920 US Census records that Frances, employed as a primary schoolteacher, was living with her seven-year-old daughter, Nedra, in the city of Marietta, Georgia, today part of the sprawling metropolitan Atlanta area. By 1930 mother and daughter had moved to Atlanta proper, where they resided together in rooms at a series of boarding houses and Frances found permanent employment as a stenographer with Anchor Hocking Glass Company. After graduating from high school, Nedra took a job as a Dictaphone operator for Devoe and Raynolds Paint Company, during which time she also began attending classes at the Georgia Tech Evening School of Commerce (later Georgia State University), whence she graduated with a B. S. degree in 1936. She received an M. A. in English from Emory University a couple of years later (in recognition of her thesis on “dear Mrs. Gaskell,” as she later preciously put it) and attended classes at the Richmond School of Social Work (now the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Social Work), before finally taking employment as a caseworker with the Fulton County Department of Public Welfare in 1939, just a few weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War. In her 2019 Crimereads article on Nedra Tyre, “Nedra Tyre: A Sweet Southern Lady’s Guide to Murder,” Sarah Weinman characterizes Nedra as the quintessential southern lady crime writer, one who while wearing white gloves—and Nedra did wear white gloves–could delicately drive a stiletto, or perhaps a hatpin, into your back in the most genteel manner. While Weinman certainly makes a good point, Nedra’s southern lady looks and demeanor were perhaps to some extent performative, belying and denying a life which appears to have consisted as much of hard knocks and tough cookies as it did of tea and apple blossoms. As we have seen, Nedra’s father, a (very) small-town police chief, died when Nedra was only five or six years old, prompting her mother, who never remarried and seems to have been remarkably bereft of family relations, to move to the big city (Atlanta had a population of over 200,000 in 1920), where, in order to make ends meet, she became a stenographer with the country’s premier manufacturer of cheap, mass produced “Depression Glass.” Nedra herself had to take a secretarial job at a paint factory, all the while dutifully attending night school classes. In 1928 the genteel English author Virginia Woolf famously pronounced: “A woman must have money and a room of her own to write fiction.” For her part, Nedra–who did not have Woolf’s luxury of a private income and often found the importunities of life constantly pressing down hard upon her wearied soul–poignantly advised her friend Celestine Sibley, who herself wanted to write a novel: “Fifteen minutes a day, Celestine, that’s all it takes—Fifteen minutes a day.” It is obvious that Nedra held great empathy, born partially of her own personal travails, for the struggling souls on relief whom she daily encountered while working with relief cases in a poverty-stricken region still struggling with grim anguish to pull itself out of the depths of the Great Depression. Nedra’s experience of eight years in three states in this field filled to the brim her impressive debut book, Red Wine First, a work which intoxicated reviewers across the country, some of whom compared the author, in terms of her depiction of the South’s downtrodden plain people, to Erskine Caldwell, Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner. James Agree, who wrote the text to the seminal photo book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), might have been mentioned as well. Montgomery Advertiser reviewer Ray Gould deemed Nedra’s Wine “an experience never to be forgotten. It is shockingly frank…lewd, ribald, and sometimes it delves into subjects too delicate to discuss, but, above all, it is honest….brutal…startling…powerful stuff.” For his part future Pulitzer Prize winning Atlanta Constitution columnist Ralph Emerson McGill, who first introduced Nedra and Celestine Sibley to each other, rhapsodized the author, a “small, red-headed, intense young lady from Atlanta,” as having an ear so fine-tuned for “language and conversation” that in her book “you seem to be listening to [human speech].” Doubtless Nedra’s experience as a Dictaphone operator at the paint company came mightily into play here as well. Nedra’s career as a writer seemed off to a smashing start, but it was five years before there appeared another book by her, the mystery novel Mouse in Eternity (1952). Fifteen minutes a day may get a novel done, but it will not get it done rapidly. While it may have taken a while for Mouse to appear in print, however, the end result was roundly huzzahed by crime fiction critics. Heading the list was noted New York Times reviewer Anthony Boucher, who lauded Nedra as a “highly talented writer who has joined the small group which is trying to relate the detective story to human reality.” The Saturday Review’s “Sergeant Cuff” (aka noted bibliophile John T. Winterich) chimed in more succinctly: “Watch this gal.” Two more crime novels came with surprising celerity from Nedra’s hand over the next couple of years, Death of an Intruder (1953) and Journey to Nowhere (1954), and these works were also applauded by critics. Celestine Sibley’s own favorite among Nedra Tyre’s crime novels, Death of an Intruder “combines the cumulative helpless horror of a compulsive dream with surroundings that scrupulously avoid any trappings of the horrendous,” observed the novel’s notice in the Oakland Tribune, neatly capturing the dichotomous appeal—what might be termed cozy cruelty–of mid-century domestic suspense, of which Intruder is an outstanding example. Under the title “Dispossessed,” Intruder was filmed in 1955 as an episode in NBC’s Matinee Theatre anthology series, which Nedra herself failed to watch when it aired. Mystery writer and reviewer Frances Crane deemed Journey to Nowhere, which closely followed Intruder, “as chilling [a novel] as any I have ever read,” and approvingly concluded, after mentioning Mouse and Intruder: “Nedra Tyre has done another A-1 job.” Anthony Boucher concurred with Frances Crane, assuring his readers: “[Y]ou’ll remember the terrors, and the economy and insight with which they’re depicted.” Director Fritz Lang personally optioned Journey for a film adaptation, which was to be scripted by frequent Hitchcock collaborator Charles Bennett and star, Lang hoped, rising young actress Anne Baxter; but sadly the project fizzled, resulting in Nedra missing what turned out to be her only shot at a lucrative big screen adaptation of one of her novels. Only three mysteries followed Nedra’s initial trio, appearing very sporadically indeed over the next sixteen years: Hall of Death (1960), Everyone Suspect (1964) and Twice So Fair (1971). On the other hand, beginning in 1955 with the prize-winning “Murder at the Poe Shrine,” Nedra would publish twenty-six short stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, her last tales there appearing in 1987, just a few years before her passing at the age of seventy-seven in 1990. Between 1962 and 1978, Nedra also placed another ten pieces of short fiction, including the once much-anthologized “Killed by Kindness,” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, as well as another half-dozen stories in additional periodicals, making a total of at least forty-two works over three decades. Short fiction, after all, was easier to write when one could spare but fifteen minutes a day. Nedra’s beloved mother Frances–who had been gravely injured, breaking both of her ankles, when, returning home from work one day in 1946, she had inadvertently stepped off a street car into a pothole–had died in Atlanta on March 10, 1951 at the age of sixty-four, leaving her unmarried daughter, approaching forty years of age, at a loose end in life. Nedra, who had devoted the last five years of her mother’s earthly existence to her constant care, had Frances laid to rest in Atlanta’s Westview Cemetery under a modest headstone with her mother’s initials and the words “Quiet Consummation,” drawn from Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline: “Quiet consummation have; and renowned by thy grave!” Frances Tyre’s death helps explains Nedra’s profusion of fiction writing at this time. The next year the author left Atlanta boarding houses behind her and bought a house in Richmond, Virginia, where she taught English and sociology at the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University). She remained domiciled in Virginia for the rest of her life, gradually losing contact with her Atlanta friends like Celestine Sibley, to whom we owe so much of what we know about Nedra–though she returned to Georgia in 1957 to teach a class on detective fiction at Georgia Tech. By 1961 Nedra had taken a position with the Christian Children’s Fund (today ChildFund), headquartered in Richmond, in which capacity she helped find foster parents for children orphaned by the myriad martial conflicts of the tragically war-torn middle century. In 1961 Nedra, whom Celestine Sibley more than once characterized as a desperately publicity-shy individual, consented to sit for an interview with Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist and author Louise Withers Ellyson, which the newspaper carried under the byline “Richmond Author Plots Crime in Her Spare Time.” Nedra’s interviewer described the author as a bustling, “tiny blonde” who “each evening and Sunday…tries to get to her typewriter to work on her latest mystery novel.” Nedra declined to discuss her current writing project (she had just published the well-received Hall of Death the year before), but she spoke in some detail of her views on the art of mystery writing, which she took quite seriously, being herself an ardent reader of mystery fiction. In contrast with Agatha Christie, she noted, “I don’t plot in the grand manner…I start with a clash of personality and build from there. Sometimes I find it easier to begin in the middle, to write what is uppermost in my mind at the time. The act of violence and the setting are clear before I start, the rest develops as I go along….It is not hard to create people capable of crime; I see so much hostility [in my social work] that it is not too difficult to imagine anyone committing murder.” She allowed that often “I don’t even attempt to hide who did it, but it is not from lack of application. I rewrite, polish and revise everything. But I have so little time!” (Fifteen minutes a day, Celestine….) While Nedra’s novels won praise from critics, the remuneration which she received for all her labor could not have been great. Over two decades she managed to publish only six crime novels, which were far from bestsellers; and only two of them, evidently, ever appeared in paperback editions in the US: Mouse in Eternity, under the dreadfully basic title Death Is a Lover, in a Mercury Mystery digest edition; and Hall of Death, under the title Reformatory Girls, in a titillating Ace edition obviously aimed at attracting the market for salacious juvenile delinquency fiction. Moreover, Nedra’s short stories were published in mystery magazines which paid only $150 per story. Patricia Highsmith, who also published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, viewed this forum disdainfully as strictly a last resort. Fortunately Nedra enjoyed her salaried work, which also gave the author her greatest contact with other people, a social intimacy which she mostly lacked in her private life. Chronically short of money, Nedra is said nevertheless to have given generously to those in need and rigorously scrimped and saved in order to take trips to England (for all of five days) and Mexico, which she justified to herself as research for her writing. She also was known to take additional odd jobs, like clerking at bookstores and envelope stuffing for political campaigns (the latter of which features in her novel Twice So Fair). When Celestine Sibley questioned Nedra about not having a telephone at her home, believing that the intensely private author had deliberately and eccentrically eschewed the instrument, Nedra bluntly informed her that, to the contrary, “It’s not what I like–it’s what I can afford. And I can’t afford a telephone.” Whatever the reason, however, the result was the same: Nedra remained “incommunicado until she was ready to reach out to her friends.” Only at that point would there come, in Nedra’s own meticulous cursive script, a “pretty, funny, enchanting little handwritten missive,” like a rainbow out of the clouds. Eventually Nedra’s charming notes stopped coming, and Celestine lost touch with her old friend. Finally in 1990 the unhappy news arrived in Atlanta that Nedra, who was then seventy-seven years old, had passed away on the eleventh of July at a Richmond nursing home. The previous year she had, like her mother, suffered a “bone-breaking fall,” and after that mishap she was no longer able to live on her own, as she had for the nearly four decades since her mother’s demise. Nedra’s official cause of death was given as cardiopulmonary arrest, but a Virginia friend sadly informed Celestine: “She was tired and ready to die.” At Nedra’s request no funeral service was held, but her ashes were returned to Atlanta and scattered over her mother’s grave. “My funeral service was when my mother died,” she told her friend, who related this melancholy observation to Celestine. “I want no other.” * In her 1961 newspaper interview in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Nedra Tyre told Louise Ellyson: “I do not draw [my characters] from life but altogether from imagination.” Nedra would not have been the first author to have deceived an inquisitive interviewer (and, possibly, herself). In my eyes an examination of her crime novels Death of an Intruder (1953) and Twice So Fair (1971) removes any doubt that the author derived her primary inspiration for these two novels from her own frequently beleaguered life. Like Kind Lady, the classic 1935 suspense film starring Basil Rathbone in full villainous form that was based upon Horace Walpole’s short story “The Silver Mask” (both of which works are referenced in Nedra’s novel), Death of an Intruder is a sort of genteel home invasion story, but here there is a feminine despoiler at work. The novel, subtitled A Tale of Horror in Three Parts, is a major (albeit largely forgotten) example of the “psycho-biddy” subgenre of suspense fiction, where, in its most classic form, two isolated middle-aged or elderly women find themselves claustrophobically locked in a battle of wills, seemingly unto the death, for control over a house and/or estate. Other notable examples of this subgenre which followed Death of an Intruder into print are Shelley Smith’s The Party at No. 5 (1954), Henry Farrell’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1960), Ursula Curtiss’ The Forbidden Garden (1962) and Elizabeth Fenwick’s Goodbye, Aunt Elva (1968). With the notorious1962 film version of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, directed and produced by Robert Aldrich and starring deglammed fiftysomething Golden Age Hollywood icons Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, the whole psycho-biddy horror film subgenre was launched as well. Aldrich would go on to produce a film version of The Forbidden Garden, starring Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon, under the title What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969), and he had planned as well a film version of Goodbye Aunt Elva, under the working title What Ever Happened to Dear Elva?, although this project never achieved fruition. The subgenre largely petered out in the 1970s. Critics have condemned the term “psycho-biddy” for carrying misogynistic and ageist connotations and, at the least, it seems a frivolous term as applied to Nedra Tyre’s brilliant little novel, which in any event preceded the formal recognition of the subgenre. While Tyre herself with her tale’s subtitle termed it a horror story, what she obviously had in mind was classic supernatural literature and Gothic fiction. Gothics have been called, tongue in cheek, stories about women who get houses, but this adage indeed sums up the plot of Death of an Intruder. Miss Martha Elizabeth Allison, “a spinster in her middle years,” finds, after the lingering death of the long-ailing aunt whom for decades she had diligently nursed, the home of her dreams, purchases it and contentedly settles in with her old dog Dora, only to have her blessed haven somehow invaded by an improbable intruder: another middle-aged, single working woman named, symbolically, Miss Withers, an odiously banal and blandly overbearing individual who simply will not voluntarily depart the premises. And try as Miss Allison gently might, she seemingly cannot oust Miss Withers from her demesne. Over the course of a hag-ridden year with her unwanted housemate, Miss Allison concludes that murder is the only solution to her increasingly desperate dilemma. Presumably Nedra Tyre wrote Death of an Intruder in 1952, when, having entered her fortieth year, she settled into her own house in Richmond after the death of her invalid mother back at their tiny longtime lodgings in Atlanta. Nedra lavished loving attention on her new house, her first real home, meticulously decorating the walls with carefully selected art prints and canvases, which, she told Louise Ellyson, helped to inspire her writing. (Miss Allyson’s love of modern art, particularly Henri Matisse’s Blue Window, plays a central role in Intruder.) It seems impossible to me not to see this novel as anything but an expression of the solitary author’s own personal nightmare fantasy: What if some horrid person “invaded” my wonderful little house? In terms of the way a house becomes an object of mortal battle, as it were, I am reminded of P. D. James’ splendidly nasty little short story “A Very Desirable Residence” (1976), although there the protagonist is male. Nedra’s crime novel, reminiscent of Georges Simenon’s série noire tales, is itself quite short and she maintains complete control of its tight, compelling plot, from its memorable opening scene of two ladies at table to its ironic conclusion, which of course must not be disclosed. Nedra prudently smudges details here and there, but in its general outlines Miss Allison’s life story darkly mirrors her own. Miss Allison, we learn, “had lived a protected girlhood, an only child encircled by the protection of her parents,” but then her mother, “a gentle, gracious and serene person, had died, after a long illness, when Miss Allison was fourteen”; and her father had followed his wife to the grave “after two bedridden years.” Miss Allison had “left her home town and had gone to live with her only relative, an aunt of her mother’s. In the comparatively large and bustling city of Kingborough where her aunt lived Miss Allison had taken a business course and at twenty-one she had started her long employment with Mr. Smithson.” Compared to the current awful situation with Miss Withers, her previous life had not been such a poor thing, she reflects: Her aunt would say: think ahead to that time when I am dead, think what you want your life to be; but Miss Allison had been too busy with the day and the moment; life had been sad but it had been good; she had savored it, though she had lived on its perimeter; though most would have shuddered to have borne the burden of her monotonous job and the chronic invalidism in her family, she had not found it glorious but on the whole she had found it pleasant. Anyone who has read the first part of this introduction can see the similarities between Nedra and her fictional creation. Like Nedra, Miss Allison is a fervent believer in the strict code of the lady: “She was so gentle, so proper, so completely a lady in its true sense,” Nedra observes of Miss Allison, who wears gloves too. After Miss Allison’s code falters in the face of Miss Withers’ monstrously determined dullness, she develops, like Nedra, an abiding passion for ingenious tales of murder, both fictional and true. In these murder tales she begins to glimpse a solution to the problem of Miss Withers. “It was surprising and sad that one so gentle and ladylike as she,” Miss Allyson reflects, “had been forced to the point where she could ask herself with deadly intent and complete composure: How can I get rid of Miss Withers and at the same time save my own neck?” How, indeed? See for yourself what fate befalls the intruder. Like the anguished Miss Allyson, Rosalind Wells, the protagonist of Nedra’s 1971 crime novel Twice So Fair, remains a remarkably isolated character throughout the tale which unfolds to us through her eyes. When her university professor husband and one of his pretty coed students are discovered dead from asphyxiation in the student’s studio apartment, Rosalind is not only tortured by grief, but plagued with tortuous questions. Were the dead man and woman having an affair? Were they victims of accidental death, suicide or murder? And what is the strange story behind the mysterious young man who keeps appearing at her door? Although she interacts with other characters in the novel, particularly the enigmatic young man named Carl, there is a striking interiority to Twice so Fair, as Rosalind wanders dejectedly around her house, now tragically emptied of her loved one, and tries to think through the weird mysteries enveloping her. I cannot help but feel that with this novel the author was casting back two decades, recovering and re-experiencing her feelings of desolation and loss after the death of her mother Frances in 1951. This passage about what are termed, with unintended irony, “sympathy calls,” ritualistically paid after an unfortunate family bereavement, has the elegant precision of unhappy personal experience: No callers appeared during the dinner hour, and then they surged again. Now as earlier some stood at the front door as if to enter a house of bereavement might engulf them in death itself, invite death into their own lives; others stood in the hall iterating and reiterating Matthew’s talents as a professor and as a critic; still others settled rather overlong in the living room and assented when she offered them cake and other refreshments. Dr. Thompson, of the Philosophy Department, happily consumed three wedges of pecan pie, and Rosalind thrust the rest of the pie upon him to take to his bachelor apartment. He had left cuddling the pie against his plump stomach as if he had been a young guest at a children’s party and had won the prize for pinning the donkey’s tail. “Done in Miss Tyre’s expert style,” perceptively commented crime writer and critic Lenore Glen Offord of Twice So Fair, “this is as understated and moving as a dim nightmare.” Both Twice so Fair and Death of an Intruder have that that quality of a dreadful dream from which one cannot awaken and free oneself. Discovering just how Rosalind and Miss Allison escape from their respective solitary waking nightmares makes compelling reading indeed. Social Work May Kill You: Nedra Tyre’s Mouse in Eternity and Hall of Death “[A]s background for murder, [social work] was just what I needed.” So divulged native Georgian crime writer Nedra Tyre to a newspaper interviewer in 1954, upon the publication of her third full-length mystery–her third such in three years. Among Nedra’s half-dozen essays in the genre, both her much praised debut crime novel, Mouse in Eternity (1952), and her exceptionally grim fourth effort, Hall of Death (1960), draw, most effectively, on her professional background as a social worker in the American South. Partially orphaned as a young child by the untimely death in 1918 of her young father, Henry Tyre, chief of police of the small town of Offernan, Georgia, Tyre moved with her mother Frances, a schoolteacher by training, to the state capitol, Atlanta, where both mother and daughter resided at a succession of unsatisfactory boarding houses and found life-sustaining employment in the secretarial field. Often attending evening classes, Nedra in the Thirties received BS and BA degrees from Atlanta universities and attended the Richmond School of Social Work in Virginia. In 1939, just a few weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War, Nedra at the age of thirty fatefully accepted a position as a caseworker with the Fulton County Department of Public Welfare. It is obvious from her writing that Nedra held great empathy, born partially of her own personal travails, for the struggling souls on relief whom she daily encountered while working with relief cases in a poverty-stricken region still struggling with grim anguish to pull itself out of the depths of the Great Depression. Her experience of eight years in this field in three states (Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee) filled to the brim her impressive debut book, Red Wine First, a pungent collection of earthy regional dramatic monologues which intoxicated reviewers across the country, some of whom compared the author, in terms of her depiction of the South’s downtrodden plain people, to Erskine Caldwell, Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner. James Agree, who wrote the text to the seminal photo book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), might have been mentioned as well. Nedra published Red Wine First in 1947, not long after her beloved mother was gravely injured in a street accident when returning home from work one day in 1946; and during the next five years until Frances’ death at the age of sixty-four, Nedra, in addition to carrying out her professional duties, cared for her invalid, ailing parent. After Frances’ death, Nedra, then nearing forty years of age, left both Atlanta boarding house life and case working behind her for good and bought a little house filled with reproduction fine art in Richmond, Virginia, where she taught English and sociology at the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University). There she also rapidly published a trio of crime novels, in the most productive years of her writing life. In 1928 genteel English author Virginia Woolf famously pronounced: “A woman must have money and a room of her own to write fiction.” Finally Nedra had these, as well as a precious bit of time in which she could actually write. * Into her oddly titled first crime novel, Mouse in Eternity, Nedra retrospectively poured her dozen years’ experience in social work. Set a decade earlier in 1942, the novel suggests that, while within her diminutive body the author was filled with a great reservoir of sympathy for the region’s poor and downtrodden, the “weak and the weary” (to quote from a Pink Floyd song), she abominated the grueling grind of her job and the cruelly callous indifference of her bureaucratic overseers. In Mouse–the novel derives its strange title from a poem that speculates “one may either be/A cat that nibbles a moment/Or a mouse in eternity”–soulless bureaucracy is symbolized by the odious, pedantic ogress symbolically named Mrs. Jennifer Patch, who is roundly despised by all the caseworkers in her office–and by everyone else who encounters her. The novel is narrated by caseworker Jane Wallace, a confirmed detective fiction freak (like the author) whose best friend and crime fiend alike is one of her cases, an elderly decayed gentleman invalid by the name of Mr. Lawrence, who lives alone with “his devoted friend” Andrew. Their talk about crime fiction is one of the highlights of the novel. (We learn that Jane’s favorite mystery short story and novel are, respectively, “The Hands of Mr. Ottermole” and The Nine Tailors, while Mr. Lawrence’s are “The Two Bottles of Relish” and The Moonstone; the two respectfully disagree on the merits of Sherlock Holms, with Mr. Lawrence pro and Jane con.) It is Mr. Lawrence, in classic armchair fashion, who will eventually solve the murder of Mrs. Patch (speak of the devil), but only after Jane herself has almost been done to death by a desperate murderer, by means of an acutely described sleeping pill overdose: I was sinking deep inside nothingness, being welcomed wherever I was going softly, with the gentleness of tender fingers on a tired, aching head. Death was entering, as a lover, kind, generous, soothing me, caressing me, foundling me. Life was the enemy, calling me back to its stupid, unendurable tasks, trying to cajole me into resistance, trying to tear me from the sweet peace and inaction of death, Life with its harshness had nothing to offer so good as death’s soft calm. Mouse in Eternity earned roars of approval from critics, including such leading names in the field as Anthony Boucher, who lauded Nedra as a “highly talented writer who has joined the small group which is trying to relate the detective story to human reality”; Dorothy B. Hughes, who praised Mouse as one of the best crime novels of the year; and Doris Miles Disney, who allowed herself to be quoted in a back cover rave: “It is the authentic background and the way people…are developed that makes the story so unusual. It is certainly not run-of-the-mill mystery fare. I shouldn’t think anything Miss Tyre wrote would be.” I agree with Doris Disney that the authentic regional and professional background of Mouse is the story’s greatest strength. (A review of this novel which I published about a decade ago I now believe egregiously underestimated its virtues.) Some readers may be reminded, as I was, of the feminine dress shop milieu in English detective novelist Christianna Brand’s Death in High Heels (1941). However, the most intriguing characters, aside from Jane herself (surely to a great extent a self-portrait by the author) are that odd male couple Mr. Lawrence and Andrew. Only later in the novel is it made clear that the younger man, Andrew, is black (the only character of color in the novel I recollect). Throughout the tale Andrew is portrayed with uncommon respect and dignity for the period, but, even more than that, just what exactly is the relationship between the two men? It does not seem merely that of master and servant. I suspect that the two men are same-sex partners, in the accepted modern sense of the term, presented with all the care and discretion required at a time when publishers deemed positive representations of such relationships unseemly and unacceptable. It is a quietly remarkable portrait. * In its depiction of the drudgeries and draining nature of social work, Mouse in Eternity can seem dispiriting at times, but the novel is spiritually sustained by Jane Lawrence’s steadfast love for certain of her co-workers and her gay (?) male friends. The book is, in fact, a veritable ramble in the park compared to Nedra’s bleakest realistic crime novel, Hall of Death. Nedra clearly found real life inspiration for Hall of Death in the nasty 1950s scandals at the Georgia Training School for Girls in Adamsville, Georgia, now a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Atlanta. (The Georgia Training School of course was segregated.) Like Mouse in Eternity, Hall of Death derives its title from a poem which Nedra suggestively quotes as an epigraph, Matthew Arnold’s Requiescat: Her cabin’d ample Spirit/It flutter’d, and fail’d for breath/Tonight it doth inherit/The vasty Hall of Death. The dark novel is set primarily–and unnervingly claustrophobically–at the Training School for Girls in the city of some unnamed, obviously southern and rather socially backward, state. However, as Nedra’s old Georgia friend Celestine Sibley, a beloved longtime columnist at the Atlanta Constitution, noted when reviewing Tyre’s novel in 1960, the connection of her pal’s fictional school–more a prison, really–to the Georgia school for delinquent girls is obvious. A half-dozen years earlier Celestine Sibley herself had written a series of articles about the problems at the Georgia school, contrasting it rather unfavorably with Florida’s Industrial School for Girls at Ocala. Sibley condemned Georgia’s school for its “inhuman treatment of students” (including shaving their heads as punishment), not to mention “recurrent runaways, old and inadequate facilities and unsuitable or untrained staff.” Sibley thought it telling that at the Florida School the entrance sign cheerily read “WELCOME!” while at the Georgia school the sign read forbiddingly “Enter on Business Only.” At the Florida school, walls gleamed with fresh paint, while at the Georgia school walls were scrawled with profanity. At the Florida school, “shining window panes [were] framed with crisp curtains and potted plants,” while at the Georgia school “shattered window panes” had been replaced with “boards and iron bolts.” In Hall of Death, Nedra excels at portraying this grim atmosphere of pervading gloom. “If you’ve ever been in a penal or reform institution of any kind,” Celestine Sibley assured her readers, “….You’ll smell the tired old plumbing, hear the rats in the walls, taste the sponge cake and canned fruit.” What the girls at the school are forced to endure, Sibley noted, is not wanton cruelty, but the banality of bland societal indifference–“a terrible bleakness engendered by the fact that the state, which held them as wards, was really indifferent to them. They were cared for by the ‘Manual of Operation’ put out by the State Department of Welfare and there was nothing in the manual that mentioned love or healing damaged spirits or restoring confidence. So the girls themselves and the nine women staff members are grimly suitable figures for Miss Tyre’s drama of hatred and murder.” The narrator and protagonist of the story, Miss Michael (I do not believe we ever learn her first name), is the idealistic new assistant to the stolid, by-the-book school superintendent, Miss Spinks. At one point the latter woman bluntly tells her new assistant (who also teaches English and grammar at the school): “Miss Michael, please don’t philosophize. Just try to protect yourself.” So Miss Michael keeps speculations like these to herself: No one ever seemed to look directly into a girl’s eyes. I suppose there was too much agony and defiance in them. To establish contact with angry, hostile persons the easy way is to appeal to their anger and hostility, to claim their emotions and hatred as your own. The way to love and kindness is infinitely more difficult. Reflecting her bleakly resigned commitment to blanket punitive incarceration, Miss Spinks lectures Miss Michael with fatalistic finality: We’re carrying out instructions and it’s not for us to question them. I’d like to have an adequate staff. I’d like to have comfortable buildings. But we have to make out with these barns. You’ll get along much better, Miss Michael, if you don’t criticize. We haven’t a rehabilitation program. The girls are here to be punished. They don’t want to change themselves and there’s nothing we can do to change them. In spite of Spinks, Miss Michael tries to reach the girls somehow. She makes connections of a sort with two of them in particular: an angel named Lucy and a devil named Johnny. With interesting results, to say the least. For readers interesting in learning about a certain horrible place in terrible time, Hall of Death delivers the deadly goods. In its own way it is as memorable a female institution mystery novel as Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night or Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes, though it will never be as generally popular, I would imagine, on account of its pervasive gloominess. (Many people like their murder fiction to be gay, as it were.) Nedra Tyre herself loved British novels of manners, including manners mysteries, but in this particular book her tone is altogether more earnest and her outlook frequently pitch dark. Yet there is also a very nice little mystery tucked away in the text of this book, which, after all, includes two suicides, a couple of murders and another attempted one. It is fairly clued, with some fine strategies of deception. In other words, in contrast with some other of Nedra’s crime novels, Hall of Death is a genuine detective story. Like Celestine Sibley, Anthony Boucher, a great admirer of the author, highly praised the book, as did others newspaper reviewers. “Told with a perception and sensitivity that few mystery novels can match,” declared the Miami Herald of Hall of Death, “it is a story of chilling violence.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch concurred, proclaiming of Hall: “A chilling story of terror and despair written with discernment and compassion.” Both novels suggest that social work may kill both body and spirit. [1] Celestine Sibley later related that Loretto Chappell, head of the children’s division of Georgia’s State Welfare Department, felt compelled to resign her office after being summoned before a legislative committee in 1951 and accused of being a Communist or Communist sympathizer. It seems that the head of the committee, one Bush Mims, had espied subversive literature in the welfare department’s library, including a copy of Red Wine First. History repeats itself! View the full article

The notion of “Identity” can be regarded in multiple ways: Identity (noun): the condition or fact of being a specific person or thing; the ways that people’s self-concepts are based on their membership in social groups; the characteristics and qualities of a person, considered collectively and regarded as essential to that person’s self-awareness. This discussion explores ways in which each of these concepts can be central to crime fiction and how, as an author, I have explored each of them. * In mysteries and thrillers, it’s often customary to follow a plot to find out “Whodunnit?”, that is to uncover the identity of the perpetrator of an illegal act. Some crimes suggest the offender knew the victim. In this case, friends, lovers, exes, co-workers, and acquaintances may be scrutinized to determine motive and opportunity: Had they recently broken up? Were they arguing? Did someone harbor a long-held grudge against the victim? Were they spotted together just before the crime? Other offenses may appear to have occurred at random, and the breadth of possible suspects is wider. Did anyone near the incident see anything unusual? Hear something? Was anything left at the crime scene to provide a lead? In either case, the detective or protagonist looks for clues—often left unintentionally, sometimes deliberately—and uses these scraps of information to lead them to the culprit. The perpetrator dropped cigarette butts, left heel prints from size 10 boots in the dirt outside the crime scene. Witnesses saw a Chevy van with New Jersey plates careening away at the time of the incident. It’s the detective’s skill in recognizing, pinpointing, and determining the significance of such clues that brings the quest to a successful resolution, and the identity of the perpetrator is revealed. But often the pieces don’t come together smoothly, and the investigation involves misidentification of suspects. In my 2009 novel, The Labrys Reunion, a group of women gather to mourn the murder of one of their daughters. Frustrated by the perceived indifference of the police, they follow clues that seem to suggest a suspect. With no training, only a fervent thirst for justice, they take it upon themselves to detain this potential perpetrator and, overcome with a lust for vengeance, almost become executioners of what turns out to be an innocent man. “Whodunnits” primarily concentrate on the first definition of identity provided above, to name and apprehend the guilty party. It’s somewhat rarer to concentrate on the psychological profile of the perpetrator, although in some novels, readers may learn a lot about this in the search for clues. The reader is also sifting for for evidence right alongside the investigator, and making determinations about whether we draw the same conclusions or have our own ideas about who the offender might be. This engagement of the reader, drawing on our own skills of assessment and discernment to weigh and discard possible scenarios, makes crime novels such an exciting read. * Beginning in the late 19th century, mysteries began to introduce detectives of diverse identities—female, Asian American, Native American. Often, these characters were drawn from the imaginations of writers who were white and male and could therefore present inauthentic or stereotypical representations, such as in Earl Derr Biggers’ characterization of the detective, Charlie Chan. While women writers and writers of color were publishing detective fiction during this period, they often chosen protagonists who were white and male, perhaps due to commercial considerations. Although José F. Godoy is considered the first Latin American writer to write a mystery novel (Who Did It? The Last New York Mystery,1883), and Todd Downing of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma was one of the first commercially published mystery writers of Native American descent, both Godoy and Downing chose to feature white protagonists. The exception seems to be African American writers who, as early as 1901, featured Black detectives in their work. Perhaps due to the dearth of opportunities to publish in white publications, they understood their audience to be Black readers. In both Pauline Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter (1901-02) and John Bruce’s The Black Sleuth (1908-09), the authors incorporate black vernacular, the music of black speech, as well as detectives whose black identity is essential to the solving of the murders. These novels also function as social critiques of pre-and post-Civil War racism, and pave the way for writers of diverse backgrounds to use the mystery genre as a vehicle for heightening awareness of the issues confronting their communities. From the mid-20th century to the present, female, Latino, Native American, Asian-American, and LGBTQ as well as African American writers explore their identities and communities through crime fiction. Leading with protagonists who represent those communities, stories reveal the social identities of and demonstrate how the protagonists are up against straight, white, male-dominated structures. Often these protagonists are called upon to prove themselves to a mainstream culture that questions their abilities. The protagonists in my novels are always lesbian and the stories illuminate aspects of that community. In my 2011 novel, Stealing Angel, the protagonist kidnaps the daughter she has co-parented when she learns that someone close to her ex has been physically abusing the seven-year-old child. She leaves the familiarity of her community and heads for a spiritual commune in the southern Baja. There she is an outsider, because she’s a lesbian, is not a member of that insular community, and its members disapprove of her choice to abscond with the child. She must win the trust of the community to gain their help. * In the psychological thriller, we may find more emphasis on the identity of the protagonist, who must resolve internal issues in order to survive the threat to them. In my most recent novel, Season of Eclipse, the protagonist loses her sense of self when she is forced to relinquish her identity and construct another. Marielle Wing is a successful author who unexpectedly witnesses a large-scale, public crime. As someone who may have seen the perpetrators, she is forced to enter the Witness Security Program and thus, give up her identity. Relocated to a new part of the country and assigned a new name and birthdate, she must then construct a new self-concept and story. This won’t be the first time she undergoes a change of name and visual appearance as she struggles to stay out of the clutches of those who are looking for her. This brings to the forefront the question of Who am I? once the trappings of our lives are stripped away. While not all of us solve crimes or go undercover, nearly everyone at one time or another must revise our self-image—whether as a result of marriage or divorce, parenthood, job change or job loss, or coming out. This aspect of identity turns out to be one with which most readers can readily identify. *** View the full article

The Harlem Detectives arrived like a thunderbolt. Like a meteor screaming across the sky. I had seen detectives before, but nothing compared to this. Or so I felt when I was introduced to Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. They make their appearance at the start of chapter 8 of A Rage in Harlem, the 1957 novel that started Chester Himes’ Harlem Cycle, conducting their unique brand of “crowd control” at the legendary Savoy Ballroom: “Grave Digger stood on the right side of the front end of the line, at the entrance to the Savoy. Coffin Ed stood on the left side of the line, at the rear end. Grave Digger had his pistol aimed south, in a straight line down the sidewalk. On the other side, Coffin Ed had his pistol aimed north, in a straight line. There was space enough between the two imaginary lines for two persons to stand side by side. Whenever anyone moved out of line, Grave Digger would shout, “Straighten up!” and Coffin Ed would echo, “Count off!” If the offender didn’t straighten up the line immediately, one of the detectives would shoot into the air. The couples in the queue would close together as though pressed between two concrete walls. Folks in Harlem believed that Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson would shoot a man stone dead for not standing straight in a line.” In 1957, in Chester Himes’ New York City, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones are the only two black detectives in the NYPD. Their beat is Harlem. From 110th Street at the northern end of Central Park uptown to 155th Street. From the Hudson River crosstown to the East River. Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are “just possibly the two toughest men alive,” according to Stephen F. Milliken’s critical appraisal of the Harlem Cycle. In his finely tuned biography of Himes, novelist James Sallis describes the two detectives as “larger-than-life” figures who possess “something of the power and authority of myth.” I consider Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson to be the hardest of all the hard boiled heroes. They would crack Mike Hammer’s skull like a walnut without blinking an eye. If Freddy Otash visited Harlem, they would have used him up like a box of Kleenex. Here is how Himes’ describes them: Grave Digger and Coffin Ed weren’t crooked detectives, but they were tough. They had to be tough to work in Harlem. Colored folks didn’t respect colored cops. But they respected big shiny pistols and sudden death. It was said in Harlem that Coffin Ed’s pistol would kill a rock and that Grave Digger’s would bury it. They took their tribute, like all real cops, from the established underworld catering to the essential needs of the people—gamekeepers, madams, street-walkers, numbers writers, numbers bankers. But they were rough on purse snatchers, muggers, burglars, con men, and all strangers working any racket. And they didn’t like rough stuff from anybody else but themselves. “Keep it cool,” they warned. “Don’t make graves.” I was introduced to Chester Himes and The Harlem Detectives by Charlie Donelan, a Central Massachusetts impresario and perennial PHD candidate at Clark University in Worcester. This was sometime in the late 1970s, around the time that Jimmy Carter was engaged in mortal combat with a fierce swamp rabbit (Sylvilagus Aquaticus) in the backwoods of Georgia. Donelan had his own connection to the Peach State. He claimed to have grown up in Waycross, Georgia where he drank rum and Dr. Pepper with Gram Parsons. He lived in a shack above the Clark campus, on one of the Seven Hills of Worcester, with the Allman Brothers Band on constant rotation, blasting from a massive pair of JBL speakers. Charlie was allegedly working on his dissertation on James Fenimore Cooper, but most nights he was holding court at the pool tables in the back of Moynihan’s Pub on Main Street. I don’t know if Donelan ever finished his dissertation – I think he got hung up somewhere between Chingachgook and Natty Bumpo. But I do know that when the good Professor handed me his worn copy of A Rage in Harlem one night before last call at Moynihan’s I considered it a mandatory reading assignment. In the opening chapters of A Rage in Harlem, Himes introduces his cast of Harlem eccentrics. “Stack of Dollars,” who runs the biggest standing craps game in Harlem. Undertaker “H. Exodus Clay,” the owner of Harlem’s busiest funeral parlor on Lenox Avenue who thanked his future clients every year at the Annual Undertaker’s Ball. “Sister Gabriel,” a Sister of Mercy who frequented both the craps game and the funeral parlor. For a price, Sister Gabriel would pray for your soul or bless your dice. For another price, Sister Gabriel was a stool pigeon for Grave Digger and Coffin Ed and their eyes and ears on the streets of Harlem. After making their unforgettable appearance at the start of Chapter 8, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger play supporting roles for much of the novel. The main action revolves around stolen money, missing gold, and swift, merciless death. But, by the end of the novel Grave Digger and his “blind rage” take center stage and animate the plot. \Grave Digger becomes a one-man police force to avenge his partner Coffin Ed, who is lying in a hospital bed, fighting to survive the mortal damage caused to his face and his eyes by the acid thrown at him by a crew of hard-boiled hustlers. Before Grave Digger heads out alone into the Harlem night to face down the crew, he tells the white Lieutenant in command of the Harlem Precinct and all of the other white police officers in the station house that he won’t need any backup: The lieutenant frowned. It was irregular, and he didn’t like any irregularities on his shift. But hoodlums had thrown acid in a cop’s eyes. And this was the cop’s partner. “Take somebody with you,” he said. “Take O’Malley.” “I don’t want anybody with me,” Grave Digger said. “I got Ed’s pistol with me, and that’s enough.” The economy and precision of Himes’ writing are diamond sharp. Everyone in that Precinct House and everyone in Harlem who had ever “heard the chimes at midnight” – all the hustlers and the pimps, all the brothel madams and the bookies – knew the score. They all knew that Grave Digger would be coming for the men who put Coffin Ed in the hospital. I knew it too. When I finished A Rage in Harlem I was hooked. I spent the better part of three years tracking down the rest of the Harlem Cycle. But no booksellers near me carried Chester Himes books. There was no market in Central Massachusetts for Himes, a Black expatriate with shadowy ties to the CPUSA, an ex-convict forced into exile from his home. I would come across a novel in the Harlem Cycle here and there over the years – in Cambridge, in New Haven, in Amherst – any town with a decent bookstore and a yen for civil rights. I read them all – Cotton Comes to Harlem, Blind Man With a Pistol, The Crazy Kill – eventually reading my way through the whole series just about the time Ronald Reagan was taking office. Then the Himes’ books practically vanished from the stacks, amidst rumors that Himes was on Caspar Weinberger’s secret “enemies list” and that the big booksellers best not traffic in the works of alleged “enemies of the state.” I don’t know if there is any truth to those rumors. But I do know that enemies are in the eye of the beholder and that Himes’s books hold a place of honor in my library. On the top shelf. So, in 2006, when Cap Weinberger finally shuffled off his mortal coil, I commemorated the occasion by screening a Chester Himes double feature: 1991’s A Rage in Harlem, an entertaining film which I don’t think has aged especially well, and 1970’s Cotton Comes to Harlem, a magical film which has aged like a fine claret. With Cap Weinberger dead and gone, few people think about Chester Himes these days, and fewer still read his crime novels. But maybe the worm has turned for Himes. And maybe Chester Himes and The Harlem Detectives are finally going to get a meaningful measure of the acclaim they deserve. If so, then we have to thank the Everyman Library’s 2024 publication of The Essential Harlem Detectives. The collection selects – curates really – four of the eight volumes of Himes’ Harlem Cycle: A Rage in Harlem (1957), The Real Cool Killers (1959), The Crazy Kill (1959), and Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965). It is a beautiful book. The edition meets the highest production standards, with acid-free paper, full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. This edition also includes an introduction, a select bibliography, and a detailed chronology of the Chester Himes life and times. The introduction by crime fiction superstar S.A. Cosby is a heartfelt fan letter to Chester Himes and The Harlem Detectives. Crosby says this: “Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson are not private eyes. They are police detectives and carry with them all the psychological and sociological caveats that come with that occupation in the Black community. And yet Himes is able to garner sympathy and adulation for these two men who, within the world of Himes’s Harlem, try their best to mete out justice equally under an inherently unjust system. They use abhorrent techniques to get information from abhorrent people. They never make the mistake of thinking they are the good guys. To quote another fictional policeman, Rust Cohle, they are “the bad men that keep other bad men from the door.” And this: “If Chandler is considered the poet of crime fiction and Hammett its great journalist, then Himes is the songwriter of the downtrodden. His stories sing with a fire and light that comes from a simmering sense of loss. A loss of respect, of humanity, of honor.” I could not agree with S.A. Cosby more. The sheer exuberance of the four novels in the Essential Harlem Detectives is intoxicating. Each of the novels is essential to The Harlem Detectives arc, from their “origin story” in A Rage in Harlem through Cotton Comes to Harlem where they confront the insidious perfidy of Reverend Deke and his breathtaking affinity scams, and make more work for undertaker H. Exodus Clay. The novels are chock full of predators, hustlers, scam artists, thieves and felons. They are all on the make, all on the lookout for the squares and the straights, for the “marks” that they can take. In the rollicking world created by Chester Himes, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are the only real law north of 110th Street. That law is swift and sometimes brutal and it’s not always fair. But every night Coffin Ed and Grave Digger go out into the mean streets of Chester Himes’ brilliant imagination. And every morning when the sun rises over the East River the only thing that stands between the straight and crooked, between the predator and the prey, are the shadows cast by The Harlem Detectives. Welcome back Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. Welcome home Chester Himes. *** Bruce K. Riordan is a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles. All of the views expressed in this review are entirely his own and do not reflect the views of his employer, the federal government or anyone else living or dead. View the full article

I love feminism, and I love serial killer novel, but for many years I could never find enough novels featuring feminist female killers. (Aside from Sweetpea by CJ Skuse, the evergreen classic series of this genre.) So I decided to write one. My novel Bad Men is the story of heiress Saffy Huntley-Oliver, whose hobby is killing bad men—murderers, rapists, sex pests, abusers. She’s on a one-woman crusade to take down the patriarchy. The problem is, that it’s hard to have a love life as a straight woman when you’re busy murdering men. So Saffy sets out to get a boyfriend, leaving way too many severed heads in her wake. Years ago, when I first tried to pitch Bad Men to my agent, she didn’t think there was a market for it. But then My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite happened. And then, How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie. Right now, there’s a wealth of female killer novels to choose from, written by feminist authors. Many novels, like mine, explore the vital real-life question of a female response to male violence, but others addressing female friendship, female aspiration, and gender-based systems of power, among other issues such as class, race and climate change. What a wonderful time to be alive! Here are a few of my choices. The Best Way to Bury Your Husband by Alexia Casale Calls to domestic abuse hotlines rose 65% during the Covid19 lockdowns, and this book takes this very grim statistic and turns it into a buddy novel about female solidarity and friendship. Sally, after years of coercive control, brains her husband with a skillet. While searching for the best way to dispose of his corpse, she encounters three other neighborhood women who are looking to do the exact same thing. Even though the murders are tongue in cheek, and I learned some new uses for cat litter, this book doesn’t gloss over the realities of domestic violence. Wahala by Nikki May In Nigeria, ‘Wahala’ means ‘trouble’, and that’s what friends Ronke, Boo and Simi get when they welcome glamorous and rich Isobel into their group. Issues about friendship and culture take the star places in this novel but there’s murder, too, all set in the Anglo-Nigerian community of London. Unlike the killer protagonists of the other novels on this list, Ronke is totally sympathetic—a food-loving dentist on the lookout for love—and the violence in the book is an expression of the toxic unspoken jealousy that can simmer beneath some female friendships. How to Kill Men and Get Away With It by Katy Brent Katy’s book is probably the most similar to my own on this list—they’re both about rich, glamorous female serial killers who target terrible men as a hobby—so if you enjoy one, you’re bound to like the other. Protagonist Kitty is an influencer who enjoys killing rapists, and as heiress to a meat-packing empire, she’s got a perfect way of disposing of the bodies. The problem is, once you start killing, when do you stop? Set in the socialite party-girl world of London, with lots of fashion, glamour and aspirational settings, this is breezy and bloodthirsty and very funny. She’s A Killer by Kirsten McDougall In near-future New Zealand, a rapidly worsening climate crisis has brought an influx of rich ‘wealthugees’, hogging resources and building gated communities to keep out the less fortunate. Alice, an unhappy office worker who hates everything and everyone except for her imaginary friend, finds herself entangled with a group of violent activists, including Erika, a teenage assassin with perfect eye makeup. This is compulsively readable and deeply weird, while at the same time being a chillingly plausible glimpse into a world made more desperate by climate change. The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff Everyone in Geeta’s small Indian village believes that she killed her husband. Geeta didn’t kill him, but she doesn’t mind the reputation—it means they leave her alone, and she’s rid of an abusive man. But when other women in the village start approaching her for help getting rid of their own terrible husbands, Geeta’s quiet life is over. But she styles herself after Phoolan Devi, the legendary Bandit Queen, who smashed the caste system and fought against her abusers. A spirited, funny, touching book that, like most of these killer novels, is really about female community. As a reader, I enjoy the violence in the above books because it’s fictional. Even when the books address social issues, no real people have been harmed in their pages. But what about my more guilty obsession with true crime—which I also used as a plot point in Bad Men? So as a bonus book, here’s one nonfiction account: Savage Appetites by Rachel Monroe This book is true crime rather than a novel, but it speaks to some of the ways that real-life women are drawn to violence—in one case, to the extent of planning a mass murder. Monroe examines the female attraction to true crime, by giving accounts of individual women who have, in some way, inserted themselves into crimes that they did not commit. It’s different from many classic true crime accounts because it looks at how the crime has affected people who are neither victims or perpetrators, but uninvolved spectators. From meticulous crime scene dioramas to true crime conferences to murder houses to fans of school shooters—Monroe asks how much of our obsession with crime is innocent pleasure, and how much is complicit in further harming victims. *** View the full article

Some time back, I saw a meme on social media about being a “good-enough” friend to help someone hide a dead body. It got me thinking: who would I help? My oldest childhood friends sprung to mind. If they killed someone and couldn’t—who knows why?—call the cops, there’d have to be a valid reason. What though? My answers to that spun into a novel about old friends, twisted secrets, and loyalty stretched to its limits. Authors write books about questions that intrigue us. How far would I go for my best friends? What’s inspired this fierce loyalty? How are we shaped by our oldest friendships? My early childhood was nomadic—a dozen schools before junior high. My dad was a gold exploration geologist and we often lived in wild places, with no other kids for hundreds of miles. When we moved to Victoria BC—on Canada’s gorgeous Vancouver Island—my folks promised we’d stay put until I finished high school. Once I made friends, I stuck to them like glitter glue. Approaching four decades on and living continents apart, if my childhood besties called in hysterics in the night, I’d hop on a plane, no questions asked. I’d also stop at Walmart to buy shovels. As Marlene Dietrich famously said: “It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.” I don’t think I’m alone in my deep loyalty for my oldest friends. We share a special—almost sibling-like bond—with friends made when we’re young. They’re our generation. Those early experiences shape us. In my novel, the two best friends have grown up to lead very different lives. Jo’s a struggling single mom, while Dana is fabulously wealthy. When Dana’s rich and domineering husband winds up murdered, Jo helps her dispose of his body. I wanted to test their relationship in every way possible. Would their childhood ties hold or would the stress of a coverup—plus their socioeconomic disparity—drive a corpse-sized wedge between them? To explain their grown-up relationship, I throw in scenes from their teenage past. I’ve long been fascinated by teen girl power dynamics and teen girl aggression, both overt and not. In 1997, in my seemingly idyllic hometown, a 14-year-old girl named Reena Virk was attacked by seven girls and one boy, all aged 16 or less. They burned her with a cigarette, punched and kicked her repeatedly, and dragged her unconscious body into a waterway, where she drowned. The media and public exploded with moral panic over teen girl violence. The boy, 16, and one of the girls, aged 15, were tried as adults and found guilty of second-degree murder. The boy, who showed remorse, got out of jail in 2010, while the allegedly unrepentant girl has been on day parole since 2017. The other six girls were convicted of assault in youth court, with punishments ranging from 60-day conditional sentences to one year of incarceration. Reena Virk’s parents channeled their unimaginable grief into a program to educate local kids about bullying and violence. In a final bitter twist of fate, Reena’s mom choked to death in a local café 21 years after her daughter’s murder. While I’d already moved overseas when this horrific crime happened, it made me think—a lot. I went to a public high school in a “good”—ie middle class—Victoria neighborhood, not that far from where Reena was murdered. The only physical fights I witnessed in my teens were between girls. At one grad-class campout, a girl attacked a classmate and broke her arm and ribs. This drunken brawl, reportedly over a boy they both liked, could easily have turned deadly. In contrast, I never saw any boys so much as argue. Was this undercurrent of female rage unique to my town and era? Given that Reena was twelve years my junior, it seemed the trend kept going. I wasn’t the only kid in my year intrigued by female friendships and their dark side. My high school bestie—to whom I dedicated A Friend Indeed, grew up to be a prominent sociologist who specializes in teen girl relationships and bullying. Obviously, we’re using very different tools to explore girls’ and women’s realities. But we’re asking similar questions about female relationships, anger, social pressures, and power. While A Friend Indeed is adult Suspense—and contemporary, Jo and Dana’s choices, behaviors, and relationship stem from their teenage past. I hope you’ll join them as they try to outpace their dubious choices. Most of all, I hope you have friends for whom you’d go far indeed—and vice versa. And yes, don’t worry: my husband and those of my oldest BFFs remain alive and well. *** View the full article

I should really have titled this column “The Best International Crime Fiction of May Plus One From April and One From Last Year”: mistakes were made in my reading preparations, and when you read two-thirds of a book that came out last year thinking it was out this month, you feel compelled to recommend it. Thanks, as always, to my loyal readers, and our search engine overlords. Also, thank you translators! This column was initially conceived to showcase the intricate art of those who distill meaning from words, and the following titles are all testaments to their superlative skill. Layla Martinez, Woodworm Translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott (Two Lines Press) This book is so creepy!!! In a visceral exploration of the absurdities of male control, a woman and her grandmother are trapped in a house of horrors, built by a husband who cursed his female relatives to be bound to the abode, only to be trapped there himself, along with numerous other spirits. It’s all pretty bearable if you don’t let the ghosts think you’re getting too vulnerable—just don’t look under the bed, and if something grabs your ankle, squash it ever so firmly. Grotesque brilliance, all the way through. Beatrice Salvioni, The Cursed Friend translated by Elena Pala (HarperVia) For some reason this one is comped only to Elena Ferrante, despite the fact that the FIRST SENTENCE IS ABOUT A DEAD BODY, so somebody needs to clear this up for me: does Ferrante Fever imply…murder?!? Or would this better be described as “Ferrante with a murder”? Anyway, The Cursed Friend is about two adolescent girls in 1930s Italy, who, on the first page, kill a fascist. He deserves it. Do I even need to say that? He’s a fascist. And the girls are badasses, but doomed badasses, because it’s 1930s Italy. Johana Gustawsson, Yule Island Translated by David Warriner (Orenda) Johana Gustawsson is a perennial favorite, and her latest chilling noir has the queen of Scandinavian detective fiction at the top of her game. In Yule Island, a bloody murder on a remote island is the catalyst for all kinds of chaos in the insular world of wealthy Swedish art collectors. Hehe insular in two ways…I’m writing this blurb very late at night, okay? Lina Wolf, The Devil’s Grip Translated by Saskia Vogel (Other Press) Lina Wolf is as cutting in her observations as she is knowing in her study of human behavior. The Devil’s Grip recounts the sordid tale of a toxic relationship in Italy between a traveler in Florence and her ugly-hot paramour (who I imagine looks exactly like Harvey Keitel). Despite an intense initial infatuation, things go downhill rather quickly, and soon enough, there are demons involved. Shumona Sinha, Down with the Poor! Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan (Deep Vellum Publishing) This is the one from last year, but it’s so good, y’all, and also I read the whole thing before I realized it came out last year. In this dark comedy of misplaced loyalties and imperialist corruption, a woman recounts her woeful, furious story to a police officer after being arrested for attacking a migrant man on the subway. She, too, is an immigrant, employed as a translator in an office where she must listen to the desperate pleas of those who know they are about to be rejected for asylum, and her hatred of the newly arrived masses ebbs and flows with her willingness to forgo solidarity in favor of identifying with the power structure. A timely and terrifying read. View the full article