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“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

In the immortal words of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “And now for something completely different…” For Abir Mukherjee – the author of the award-winning, immensely popular procedural series that takes place in post-World War One Calcutta featuring Captain Sam Wyndham, a former detective from Scotland Yard with a taste for opiates, and Surendranath Banerjee, an Oxbridge-educated sergeant and first Indian member of the city’s police department’s criminal investigation department – this means a change of venue to North America, a change of century to the 21st, and a change of genre to a thriller. But, while these elements may be different, what drives Mukherjee’s fiction remains consistent: a desire to stretch his writer’s chops and a desire to “write something punchy, up to the minute, and dealing with the issues that we face today.” Nancie Clare In your recent interview with Publisher’s Weekly, you described yourself as a “wee boy from Hamilton.” And the funny thing is, I was discussing your books with Denise Mina and she used exactly the same words, “Oh, he’s just a wee boy from Hamilton!” Abir Mukherjee Denise Mina is my hero. I think she is amazing. And I say this because whenever I say nice things about her, she gets embarrassed and that’s half the fun. In my opinion, she’s the best writer of crime fiction in the world. Nancie Clare I’m right there with you. Abir Mukherjee Yeah. Have you read The Second Murderer, her take on Raymond Chandler? Nancie Clare Yes! I did an interview with her for Crimereads.com about it. Abir Mukherjee This is sacrilegious, but I think she’s done Philip Marlowe better than Chandler! Quite often you read books written in the style of other authors, and very quickly it degenerates into their own style. What she’s managed to pull off there is Raymond Chandler for the 21st century. The way she’s managed to capture his voice and inject her own thoughts and humor is just amazing. It is just a tour de force, that book. Nancie Clare Let’s talk about Hunted. You’re a successful author with a much-loved series set in Colonial India in the early part of the 20th century. How did it feel moving not just to the 21st century, but to North America? Abir Mukherjee It was great, to be honest with you. It was refreshing. I’ve spoken to a number of other authors about this: I think when you’re five, six books into a series, it’s very hard to keep things fresh. I wanted to do something different. I hope—I believe—in each of my books, I pushed myself a wee bit further. I think by the third book in the series, Smoke and Ashes, I had got the basics of writing down to a level that I was comfortable with. I mean, I can’t read the first book. It makes me cringe! With the fourth one, Death in the East, I experimented with two timelines. With The Shadows of Men, the fifth one, it was two narrators. But again, everything was first person. And I was getting to that stage where I was thinking, well, yes, I’m going to write a lot more of these, but I want to challenge myself. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Nancie, the world seems to be going to hell in a handcar over the last couple of years or last decade. Nancie Clare Umm, yes. I live in America, remember. Abir Mukherjee Yes, you do. And well, I mean, anything you can do, we can do worse. We are confident. Nancie Clare I’m not so sure about that, but please don’t try! Abir Mukherjee Well, yes, it’s a fair point. All of my writing comes from a position of anger. I write about things that are worrying me or are upsetting me but make them allegorical. When you’re writing stuff set a hundred years ago, it must be allegory. And sometimes, well, I don’t want to write allegory. I want to write something punchy, up to the minute, and dealing with the issues that we face today. It just felt right to me. And as for why America: you sneeze, and we catch a cold. America’s issues, America’s decisions affect the world. America has always been a fascinating place to me. I’ve always loved this sort of strange amalgam of different things, these idiosyncrasies, these things that are almost contradictory. I mentioned in the book that I’ve never been anywhere where people are so polite and so nice and tell you to have a nice day. And at the same time, if you look like me they’ll probably shoot you if you park in the wrong driveway. That sort of dual identity of being really, really nice, but being really, really scared of things they don’t understand is something I don’t understand. And I wanted to explore that. I wanted to explore this issue of hope because [the world] still looks to America. The American dream is one thing that I wanted to look at because it is a great ideal, but does it hold anymore? It doesn’t really hold for blue-collar Americans. And yet that American dream is still so powerful that people line up to enter the country, whether it’s people with visas from India or people from South or Central America trying to cross the southern border. People from around the world still believe in the American dream in a way that I think Americans don’t. That really fascinated me. I wanted to look at what happens when the certainties of your past, the things that you’ve grown up with, when those certainties no longer hold. What does that do to people? And I think a lot of the anger, a lot of the issues that we are dealing with, with populism—not just in America, but in the West—is about people who are brought up with intrinsic promises that have been cast aside. What does that do to people? And I really wanted to explore those ideas while killing people, obviously, which is very important in crime fiction. Nancie Clare: Right? Because of course it is a thriller. I have a craft question: The Wyndham-Banerjee books are procedurals, and Hunted is very much a thriller. Was it a difficult transition? Abir Mukherjee: Absolutely. I think the reason there’s been two-and-a-half, three years between my last book and this one is down to getting a handle on what makes a thriller. I had two or three attempts to get that element right, because thrillers are a different game completely from writing a procedural or a historical crime novel like the Wyndham-Banerjee series. And I’m an accountant by training, so thrills don’t come naturally to me. It was a battle. You know what really helped? I read The Accomplice by Steve Cavanagh. And it was amazing. Every chapter or two it felt like you were being hit in the face with a frying pan. It was that dialing it up to eleven. That’s what I took away from it. Like, my first reaction might be: that’s pushing it too far, that’s going too far, that’s not acceptable. Whereas I learned from Steve that readers give writers license if they take readers along for the ride. If we buy into the characters in the story, we will go along with the tension. In Hunted, at the beginning, there is a chapter where a bomb goes off in this mall, and one of the characters, FBI Special Agent Shreya Mistry, is investigating. In the first draft she investigated, and she walked back out. After having read Steve’s books, I thought, why doesn’t the mall fall on her head? And that’s what I did. I collapsed the mall on top of her. That was pushing it up to eleven. And having done that throughout the book, it made such a difference. It was about giving myself the confidence to be a bit braver and just dial things up. And when I got that mindset, everything seemed to work better. Much of that goes down to Steve, and I’ve told him as much several times, he’s probably sick of me telling everybody that I learned how to write a thriller after reading his books. But there you are. Nancie Clare In this thriller you have a story that jumps from the UK to British Columbia and then to the west coast of the United States, south to Portland, Oregon and Los Angeles, and then back across the United States by cars, buses, and airplanes told from the point of view of three characters and the whole story takes place in a week and a day. I guess this is another craft question: Did you have to plot this on a board with sticky notes or cards? Abir Mukherjee The short answer to that is yes, I had huge sheets of A-3 paper [approximately 11.75” X 16.5”] and I plotted it out on those. I have to say though, it changed a lot. It was always going to be that chase across America because as I say, one of the things I wanted to do in this book was look at America and take the temperature of America, especially those parts that are in the middle—the people that essentially decide elections now. That’s where I wanted to write about. It was a big, big job to plan. But to be honest with you, it was the other part of that question, the three different narrators [that was really challenging]. There are seven characters, and the story is told from the points of view of three of them. It was that process which proved much trickier to get right. I mean, a plot is a plot. You can plot it out, it’s there. That’s your structure. You can stick to it to make that into a novel. To make this into a story, it’s all about the characters. The first time I wrote it, I had six points of view, which was ridiculous looking back and it didn’t work. So, I changed it to three characters, and that took time; each of those characters took a rewrite in itself. The story is told from the point of view of British Bangladeshi Sajid Khan, a Muslim, who’s looking for his daughter in the US; FBI Special Agent Sherya Mistry, a woman of South Asian descent who’s Hindu; and Greg Flynn, a white American military veteran in his twenties. And each are very different characters. And getting the voices, getting inside their heads was an exercise in itself. The easiest one for me was Sajid, because his is probably closest to my experience. The next one I think was Greg. Greg, I could understand and make him real. The toughest one was Sherya, the Indian American FBI agent. That was probably the hardest character to get right and make authentic. I just hope I’ve done a good enough job. I mean that’s for you and for the readers to say, but that to me was the real challenge in this novel. Writing a thriller and also getting those three characters right. Nancie Clare Well, I can say that you did get them right as far as I’m concerned. Abir Mukherjee [Laughs] You’ve got to say that, Nancie, don’t you? Nancie Clare [Laughs} Yeah, I do! In Hunted, the idea of conspiracy and its partner, manipulation, are key elements. Are conspiracies orchestrated? Are they organic? Or is some diabolical person or organization adopting a conspiracy and using it in a nefarious way? Can you talk about how a conspiracy acts in the manipulation of the characters in Hunted? Abir Mukherjee I think conspiracy and domestic manipulation are big threats in Hunted. I think a lot of the time these things start off with idiots in chat rooms. But very quickly those conspiracies can be weaponized. And once the conspiracy gets rolling is where I think a lot of these external actors can and do get involved. Western countries— democracies—are particularly susceptible because we have open societies and we have left too many people behind. There are enemies of democracy, enemies of a certain way of life who will try to take advantage of our openness. When it comes to the nature of conspiracy itself, I don’t tend to believe in them. I tend to believe in the idiocy of people more than I do in the old grand overarching plan. I also don’t believe in the smartness of people. I think people get things wrong and conflated and it’s magnified by different idiots along the chain, but then other people can manipulate that. We see that in domestic politics. I mean the whole Q-Anon thing started off on 4-Chan, and just snowballed to take in a lot of people around America. And that to me is the worrying thing. It’s less how things start; it’s how they’re manipulated and who manipulates them. That to me is the bigger risk in terms of this book. Yes, there is a conspiracy, but one thing I am not sure about is if there are any bad guys in this book. Nancie Clare Yeah, I think there are bad guys in your book. Abir Mukherjee If you look at, of course they’re doing bad things, but in their heads they are the noble people. And I think this is often the case with conspiracies, right? The people that are subject to the conspiracy feel they’re doing the right thing. And that’s really interesting to me. It’s the people who call themselves patriots that I’m most scared of. The ones who wrap themselves in the flag or claim to have some sort of monopoly on patriotism, not just in America, but across the world. Here in Britain we’re seeing it. We are having politicians saying, “I want my country back.” I wonder when somebody says “wanting their country back” that it’s a coded message that people who look like me have robbed them of their birthright, which is nothing of the sort. It’s not the people arriving on dinghies who are robbing these people of their birthright. It’s the people that run countries. It’s the global elite. It’s the people who can move a factory from Ohio to Beijing to save one cent on a widget and destroy a community in the process. It’s the ones that control everything that have taken the country, not the poor. And that to me is fascinating. We’ve punched down, we always punch down because it’s easier to understand and it’s easier to manipulate. And that’s one of the biggest things that make me angry. Why is it that we always attack the wrong target? The people that are coming here for a better life, whether they’re coming with degrees or they’re coming with the skills of their own hands, they’re not the threat. They’re not the ones that have destroyed your communities. They’re not the ones that addicted your population to opiates. And yet these are the people that are the easy target. It’s easy to point at the alien and say, “you are responsible for why my life has gone to shit.” And yet it’s not. It’s the people who dress better than us and fly above our heads that are the ones causing the problems. Sorry, I’ve gone off on a rant! Nancie Clare That actually leads to my next question. In Shadows of Men, which is the most recent book in your series, your story is about mightier powers manipulating the little guy. I see similar themes of manipulation and getting disadvantaged people to do the dirty work in Hunted. Abir Mukherjee Don’t you see that today? Subconsciously, I keep coming back to this because it is the thing that is probably my greatest fear right now. It’s the manipulation of the powerless by the powerful just so that the powerful can maintain their own position and it’s getting worse. Nancie Clare You and I are talking the week before Easter. I love Easter eggs in books and all dedicated fans of crime fiction love to find them. I think I found one: Luca Vesta? Abir Mukherjee I have two. Luca Vesta and Mike Craven, who is Mike Raven in the book. Nancie Clare Didn’t catch that one. Thank you. Nancie Clare I understand that you’re writing another Wyndham-Banerjee book. Do you think that your series and other series by such writers as Vaseem Khan, Sujata Massey, Nev March and Harini Nagendra, among others, have opened a window into the British Raj in India? The idea of colonialism? Abir Mukherjee I hope it has. I mean, look, the issue about colonialism, and let’s take the British time in India until we came along, the story was really only told from the point of view of the colonizer, even when that was the most benign perspective in say, The Far Pavilions. What I’m trying to do is redress that balance. What I won’t do is write from only one side. I don’t think balance means writing purely from an Indian point of view. I mean, I can understand Indian sensibilities, but I’m not a hundred percent Indian in the same way that my Britishness is different from most other people’s Britishness. I sit in the middle, and I can give you a different perspective. I think anyone who is a minority of whatever type will live their life to a degree in stereo. They will see one point of view because that’s the society they live in, but they will have another insight into things from the particular group that they’re part of. I started writing out of anger. I wrote my first Wyndham-Banerjee novel because we have this vision in Britain that the empire was a force for good, and we think it was benign when in so many ways it wasn’t. And all we’re trying to do is provide a bit of perspective. I’m never going to say that one side was all good and one side was all bad. I think with my rants, I do apologize. Nancie Clare Please don’t apologize! Your “rants,”—your word, not mine—are brilliant. But is there any other thing you want to say about Hunted? Your hopes for the book, in addition, of course, to being an entertaining and crackerjack read? Abir Mukherjee Two things: I started writing this before the attack on the U.S. Capitol. All of this is plausible. And some of the reviews have already said that it is chillingly plausible: The other thing that I would love people to take away from this, especially white American readers, is that maybe a slightly different view or an insight into non-white people, non-white Asians. Especially to somebody like Sajid who is a poor Muslim man—a representative of 99.9% of Muslim men in Britain or America—and just a struggling everyman. It’s his color and his religion that make him different. But how is he any different from a blue-collar worker in America who’s just looking after his family and trying to make ends meet? And that’s at heart of the book; very little separates us. We all want the same thing, but we demonize people because we don’t know them. View the full article

One autumn afternoon in the German town of Zwickau, a woman splashed ten liters of gasoline around her apartment, then set it on fire. She had been dreading this day for years, hoping it wouldn’t come to this. But on November 4, 2011, it did, and she needed to act quickly to save her two cats from the flames. Their names were Lilly and Heidi. One was black with white spots on its paws, while the other had gray and black stripes. She scooped them up, put them in their carriers, and walked downstairs to the street. Version 1.0.0 A passing neighbor recognized the woman by her “strikingly long, dark hair.” Everyone seemed to fixate on this feature, perhaps because nothing else about her seemed distinct. She was five foot five, the average height of women in Germany. She was neither heavyset nor slim. Her face was wide, flat, expressionless, with thin lips and hazel eyes. Later, when her face became famous across Germany, there was one trait that nobody seemed to use to describe her. Which was strange because it was the only one that mattered: The woman was white. Four years later, at the trial that would captivate the country, the white woman would claim that she waited to set the fire until the two men renovating the building’s attic left for a break, so they wouldn’t be hurt. That she had tried to warn the older lady who lived downstairs— who looked after Lilly and Heidi when she was away— buzzing and knocking hard on her door, to tell her to run from the flames. Her lawyer would tell a courtroom packed with judges, prosecutors, lawyers, journalists, neo-​Nazis, and police that she’d taken great care to save lives the day she set the fire. The lives of other white Germans, and her two precious cats. She wouldn’t have needed to set the fire if only the fifteenth bank robbery had gone as well as the fourteen before it. For over a decade, her two best friends, and sometimes lovers, had been robbing banks at gunpoint in towns across Germany. On their previous heist, the two men— who shared the same first name— had walked in carrying two pistols, a revolver, and a hand grenade, one wearing a vampire mask and the other a ski mask. They walked out with 15,000 euros in cash, making their getaway as they always did— on bicycles. Over the years, they’d stolen hundreds of thousands of deutsche marks and euros, worth nearly a million dollars today. For their fifteenth heist they drove two hours from Zwickau to Eisenach, the birthplace of composer Johann Sebastian Bach and where Martin Luther translated the New Testament from Latin and Greek into German. On November 4, 2011, at 9:15 a.m., they walked in wearing sweatpants and sneakers, one in a gorilla mask, the other in a mask from the movie Scream. They pistol-​whipped the bank manager, leaving a wound on his head. They pedaled away with 72,000 euros in a bag. At 9:30 a.m., police issued an alert for officers to be on the lookout for two men on bicycles. Twenty minutes later, a witness told officers he’d seen two men ride bikes into a hardware store parking lot a half mile from the bank. They were in a hurry. They loaded their bikes into a white camper van and drove off. Hours passed without any sign of the culprits, and police theorized they might attempt to drive deeper into Saxony, the eastern German state where other recent bank robberies had taken place. Officers fanned out to patrol the roads leading west toward the city of Chemnitz. But at four minutes past noon, police spotted a white camper van parked on the side of the road a few miles north of the bank. Two officers got out of their vehicle and approached it. Just then, they heard a gunshot, then another. The officers took cover behind a nearby car and a dumpster. Another shot rang out. Then the van went up in flames. The cops radioed firefighters, who rushed to the scene and quickly extinguished the blaze. Carefully, they opened the side door and looked in. Lying on the floor were the bodies of the two bank robbers, each with a bullet through the head. After setting the van on fire, one of them had shot the other, then turned the gun on himself in a sensational murder suicide. Searching through the carnage, a police officer inspected the guns. On the vehicle’s right-​hand seat was a Pleter 91 submachine gun and a Czech-​made semiautomatic pistol. A black handgun was lying on a small end table between the two seats. But what caught the officer’s eye were the two shiny, brass-​colored bullet cartridges. They looked just like the casings of his own, government-​issued bullets. Could the bank robbers be police? Investigators had learned little from the series of bank heists across eastern Germany in the preceding years. Two months earlier, police in the town of Gotha described the suspects as “both about 20 years old, slender figures, approx. 180–185 cm, masked, dark brown hair, darker skin tone, German language without an accent.” That last phrase— German-speaking, without an accent— seemed intended to distinguish the men from immigrants or foreigners. The robbers were German, or at least they sounded the part. But the second to last phrase— “ darker skin tone”— seemed to differentiate them from the typical German, by implying they were not white. But the Gotha police got it wrong. That much was evident as officers looked inside the van at the bodies of two men, some of their white skin charred by the fire. When news reports began circulating that two bank robbers had killed themselves in a blaze of fire and gunshots, only one person in all of Germany knew who they were: the white woman with the long dark hair and two cats. Knew that they weren’t just two money-​driven men with a death wish. Knew that while robbing banks had been a talent of theirs, it was only a means to a more sinister end: murdering immigrants, to keep Germany white. They weren’t merely bank robbers, the woman knew— they were serial killers, terrorists. She knew this because she was one, too. * * * The three friends were not predestined to become killers. It was the culmination of their decade-​long indoctrination into Germany’s far-​right world. They didn’t radicalize alone, but as part of a white supremacist community. Its ringleader was a government informant who used taxpayer money to turn disillusioned young Germans into violent political operatives. Some tried to warn the world about what they were up to. One leftist punk began photographing far-​right rallies and documenting the white supremacists who attended, unaware that some of them would grow up to be terrorists or that she would one day be called upon to expose them. Before the murders began, a police officer had tried to arrest the trio for their other, foreboding crimes. But he was sidelined by a law enforcement system that cared less about protecting the public than protecting its own. Growing up in eastern Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, far-right youth called themselves National Socialists— Nazis. Like the original Nazis half a century before them, they blamed minorities for their ills. They despised Jews and didn’t consider them to be part of the white race. They derided Blacks. But above all they fixated on immigrants: workingclass men and women and their children, from Turkey, Vietnam, and Greece. Children like Gamze Kubaşık, whose family emigrated from Turkey to Dortmund, where they opened a corner store. Children like Semiya Simşek, whose parents came from Turkey and sold flowers at stands across Bavaria. But to the white woman with long dark hair, and to her two white friends, these immigrants posed an existential threat to the white nation they wanted Germany to be. And so they killed them, or killed their next of kin. One year before the Islamist terror attacks of September 11, 2001, three German terrorists set out to rid their nation of immigrants. Over many years, and in many cities, they shot immigrants where they worked and bombed the neighborhoods where they lived. Shot them in their corner stores, kebab stands, a hardware store. Bombed them in a grocery store, a bar, a barbershop. German authorities didn’t catch on to what they were doing. Blinded by their own prejudice, they couldn’t bring themselves to believe that sixty years after the Holocaust, some white Germans could still be radicalized to the point of carrying out racist mass murder. And so each time an immigrant was killed, officers would lie to the victim’s family, fabricating evidence to feed officers’ fantasies that immigrant crime syndicates were to blame. While police ignored evidence that the killings were being carried out by white Germans, men of Turkish and Greek background continued to be murdered one by one. Thirteen years passed before the trio’s crime spree finally ended. The country’s reckoning Munich courtroom, the city’s largest, renovated just in time to hold Germany’s trial of the century. Each day, former far-​right skinheads and former leftist punks filed into the courtroom as witnesses, defendants, lawyers, spectators. Each day, for five years. The truth trickled out slowly. The spy in the cybercafe. Taxpayer funds given to far-​right extremists. The intelligence agents who shredded documents in a frenzy. The trial would force Germany to grapple with what drove an ordinary German woman and her ordinary German friends to carry out a serial assassination of innocent people— people selected for the country from which they came, the accent in their voice, the color of their skin. A nation that liked to think it had atoned for its racist past would be forced to admit that violent prejudice was a thing of the present. That sixty years after Hitler’s Nazis led Jews and other minorities to their deaths during the Holocaust, German police were so blinded by bias that they couldn’t recognize the racist violence unfolding around them. The case would compel Germans to acknowledge that terrorism isn’t always Islamist or foreign. More often, it’s homegrown and white. And that in an age of unparalleled mass migration, the targets of white terrorism are increasingly immigrants. This is true not just in Germany, but in Western democracies around the globe. Since 9/11, more people in the United States have been murdered by far-​right extremists than by any other kind, including Islamist ones. And it’s getting worse: The year President Donald Trump took office, American white supremacists murdered twice as many people as the year before. Trump’s anti-​immigrant, antidemocratic rhetoric inspired white terrorists across the globe. In Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, minutes before a white man shot up a mosque during Friday prayers, he circulated a manifesto that called for the “removal” of nonwhite immigrants from Europe and praised Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” He wasn’t the first white man to find common purpose in terrorizing immigrants and racial minorities, Muslims, and Jews. And he wouldn’t be the last. Another white terrorist found it at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, slaughtering nine Black worshippers in 2015. Two years later, another found it in a mosque in Quebec City, Canada, where he opened fire just after an imam led the congregation in prayer, killing six people and injuring five. One month after that, another one found it in Olathe, Kansas, where he yelled at two Indian engineers, calling them “terrorists” and “illegal immigrants,” and screamed at them to “get out of my country,” before shooting and killing them. A few months after that, another found it on a train in Portland, Oregon, shouting racist and anti-​Muslim slurs at two Black teenagers before stabbing three people, killing two. Yet another white terrorist found it at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, killing eleven Jewish people and injuring six. Another found it as he hunted Mexicans in the aisles of a Walmart in El Paso, killing twenty-​three. Another one found it in the Asian American spas and massage parlors of Atlanta, where he killed six Asian American women and injured two others. One month later, another found it at a FedEx in Indianapolis that employed Indian Americans, killing four Sikhs and four others. Another one found it in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, where he entered a grocery store and slaughtered eleven people, almost all of them Black. Another found it in a store in Jacksonville, Florida, where, on the sixtieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in August 2023, he ordered white people to leave before killing three Black shoppers in a suicide attack. To stop this carnage, we need to acknowledge who the terrorists really are. Just as in Germany, most terrorists who strike in the United States are homegrown and white. Today, some Germans want to confront their domestic extremists. But many wish to look away. It’s a sentiment shared around the world. No one wants to believe that their neighbors, friends, and fellow citizens may be radicalizing around them, or that white terror is on the rise. They’d like to think it doesn’t happen often, or that it couldn’t happen here. Germany’s failure to recognize its first white terrorist spree of the twenty-​first century— much less stop it— is a chilling warning for other nations that are failing to fight extremists at home. Having briefly earned a reputation as a haven for the world’s refugees, Germany is now struggling to protect them from violence by native-​born whites. “There are those in the east and the west who want to see Germany as an open society”— one that embraces immigrants, said Heike Kleffner, a German journalist who investigates the far right. But there are other Germans who would like to make Germany white. “This rift is played out in families, in small towns, big cities, villages. It’s a battle about defining this country.” This upheaval is transforming Germany’s politics and calling into question what being German even means. Similar debates are engulfing nations around the world. When three white Germans began their anti-​immigrant spree, white terrorism was already a global phenomenon, though few yet knew it by that name. To understand what white terror is, who is spreading it, and how to stop it, we must look to Germany’s east, where three friends from a small town set off to murder immigrants— and the government that was supposed to stop them chose to look away. ___________________________________ Excerpted from Look Away: a true Story of Murder, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants, by Jacob Kushner. Published by Grand Central Publishing. Copyright 2024. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. View the full article

Authors tend to be solitary creatures, so the idea of collaborating with one another is a rather odd event. That said, when Clive Cussler called me up some years back and asked if I’d like to work on his Oregon Files series of adventure novels, I said yes even before we discussed salary. Clive liked to say, tongue firmly in cheek, that he made the money while I did the work. But nothing could be further from the truth. Writing and editing are two entirely different disciplines. I know a legendary editor in New York whose only attempt at writing a novel churned out one of the worst books I’ve ever read. And most authors can barely edit themselves, let alone someone else. That said, Clive wore both hats with ease. I read the first books in the series to familiarize myself with characters and plotlines and then handed in an outline with a few sample chapters for our first book, Dark Watch. Clive then invited me to his Arizona home to discuss my work. I’ll never forget what transpired. He told me that he liked what I’d come up with, but the smuggling of nuclear waste as a plot device had been done to death. He told me to come up with something else—and promptly left for a nap, giving me a one-hour deadline. Fortunately, I work well in a state of panic. I worked in a human trafficking angle, and we were off and running. Our system, and the system he employed with all of the other co-authors, was this: once the outline was agreed upon, I would write a third of the book and wait for his feedback. Clive had a great attention to detail and as a writer of complex plots understood that a minor tweak in the beginning of the story had repercussions throughout that had to be considered. He did not ask for structural changes to the plot without giving it a lot of thought, and for that I was always grateful. That isn’t to say he didn’t put his stamp on each page. He knew when I was overwriting a scene, or becoming too enamored of my research, or telling rather than showing, or falling into any of the other traps that befall an author. He loved his fans and took the time to make sure each of the books that bore his name also had his style of writing— his signature adventure plots loaded with intrigue as exciting as we could make it. After writing seven books this way, no matter how smooth the collaboration had been, I grew restless and went back to writing solo novels. It was nice to answer to no one for a change—but like being in the Mafia, I couldn’t really escape. Clive invited me to helm the Isaac Bell series and I turned him down flat. For a day. Then I got the brilliant idea of introducing Isaac Bell into the Raise the Titanic storyline—retconning is the term for it, meaning retroactive continuity of a pre-existing narrative. I pitched the idea of turning a Cussler book on its head with a prelude set in the modern world and the rest in the past. Clive was actually angry that he hadn’t thought of that himself. Working on that book, which was published as The Titanic Secret, was like our first effort all over again. Very soon we were onto another Bell adventure, this time set in Panama at the time of the canal construction. We again upended the Cussler formula and gave the book Agatha Christy-type twists. It was two thirds complete when Clive died rather suddenly. I soon learned that his son, Dirk, would be taking over Clive’s role. I was sure life would be just like before. Oops…. Dirk didn’t like how I’d structured this story and felt that, with Clive not around, deviating from his classic formula wasn’t such a great idea. After cursing Dirk for several days, I reluctantly agreed, and for the first time in my professional career had to rewrite one of my books. To his credit, Dirk understood the ordeal he’d asked me to endure and worked with me closely to minimize how much I’d have to redo. In the end, we put out arguably my best Isaac Bell novel. Since then, collaborating with Dirk has been just about as easy as it had been with Clive. I’m not sure how other co-authorships work, but I know for myself that keeping my association with the Cussler name is as simple as remembering to write the best Cussleresque novels that I can. And so, here we are now with The Heist. *** View the full article

To step into a campus novel, like stepping onto a college campus, is to enter a miniature world. It’s a place with a particular geography, made of dorm rooms and classrooms, student centers and dining halls. Time is both fixed and in motion: for students, it’s always moving toward an endpoint, while for professors, time passes, but their students remain young. As a setting for fiction, the campus offers a natural structure and urgency: the arc of the semester, seasons of the academic year. Its insularity can make things seem outsized, dramatic, whether the arcane traditions or the eccentricities of roommates or the absurd inner workings of academia itself. Lately, though, the college campus no longer exists in such a bubble. The anxieties of the real world—politics, social media, the climate crisis, uncertainty about the future—are pressing in. These concerns weigh heavily on the minds of the thoughtful undergraduates in my classes, and were on my own mind while working on Reunion, a novel about three old friends who return to their college campus many years later. The eight novels here include campuses past and present, six colleges and two boarding schools, classics in the genre and recent additions that interrogate the modern college experience or reflect on the past with a knowing eye. Kiley Reid, Come and Get It In the opening scene, Agatha Paul, visiting professor at the University of Arkansas, interviews three students about weddings. The conversation quickly unfolds in other directions, yielding admissions about race and class that are casually startling. Agatha’s research deepens—aided by diligent, hardworking RA Millie, who shares a wall with three clashing roommates—and the result is an unputdownable story as well as an incisive, addictive chronicle of consumer culture and what is taken, bought, and given away. Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year It’s the late nineties, the era of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and Isabel Rosen’s senior year at Wilder College. A student from a working-class family, Isabel has always felt like something of an outsider on her rarefied New England campus. In her final semester, after a sexual assault by a classmate, Isabel is drawn into a consuming, complicated affair with a professor. My Last Innocent Year is not only a beautiful, spot-on depiction of being a young woman in college during a specific moment, but a wise exploration of how such a moment can shape a life. Antonia Angress, Sirens & Muses At the prestigious Wrynn College of Art, four lives are dramatically entwined: scholarship student Louisa, her seductive roommate Karina, visiting professor Robert Berger, and classmate Preston Utley, an Internet agitator. The first half of the novel delves into passions and rivalries in the bubble of art school, then cleverly pivots to life after graduation, the fallout from the 2011 recession and the pressures and anxieties of the art world in New York. It’s a mesmerizing story about art, class, sexuality, ambition—and the writing is exquisite. Sara Novic, True Biz At the River Valley School for the Deaf, new student Charlie is struggling to acclimate to life on campus; unlike most of her classmates, she’s never learned ASL. Headmistress February, a CODA (child of deaf adults), is navigating stresses in her marriage and uncertainties about the school’s future. Austin, a model student, is thrown when his sister is born hearing. The immersive True Biz—“real-talk” in ASL—doesn’t feel like it was written to instruct the reader about the Deaf community, but leaves you feeling enlightened just the same. Sonora Jha. The Laughter It’s uncomfortable to occupy the perspective of Oliver Harding—a tenured white male professor who fetishizes his new colleague, Pakistani law professor Ruhaba Khan—but that’s the point. Harding is puzzled by the changes on the campus (including the call for greater diversity) and in the world, where tensions are rising around the 2016 election and #MeToo. His fixation with Rubaba deepens when her teenage nephew, Adil, arrives to live with her. This shrewd look at modern academia (and modern America) is also a tense page-turner. And the ending is haunting. Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members This blistering academic satire is composed as a series of letters by Jason Fitger, a writing and literature professor at a meh Midwestern college, contending with drastic budget cuts to the English department and his once-promising writing career. He’s routinely called upon to compose letters for students, colleagues, committees—the very relentlessness of these letters a jab at academic culture—to say nothing of their content, which is scathingly funny and wincingly true. (Schumacher’s sequels, The Shakespeare Experiment and The English Experience, are hilarious/painful too.) Donna Tartt, A Secret History Is any list of campus novels complete without Donna Tartt’s iconic A Secret History? This Gothic mystery, set at an elite Vermont college, occupies a singular place in the canon of dark academia. From the prologue, we learn that Richard, while in college, was involved in a murder. His recounting of what happened—beginning with his fixation on a group of fellow students cultishly devoted to their Classics professor—is both a queasy thriller and a chilling exploration of privilege and class. Julia Jonas, Vladimir In this twisty, juicy, darkly funny take on Lolita, the unnamed narrator is a 50-something English professor/writer at a liberal arts college in upstate New York. Her husband (also an English professor/writer) is facing allegations over past relationships with students. Though they happened years ago (and his wife was aware) campus life has changed; students are angry and empowered. On-campus tensions and marital resentments shift into higher gear when a new professor, young experimental novelist Vladimir Valinski, and his wife, a troubled memoirist, arrive in town. Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You The past is not a place that film professor Bodie Kane is keen to revisit, until she accepts a teaching invitation at her alma mater, a New Hampshire boarding school. Back at Granby, teaching a course on podcasting, she confronts not only conflicting versions of her teenage self but the mysterious circumstances around the murder of her roommate, Thalia Keith. This campus novel is both an entertaining whodunit and a no-pulled-punches reckoning with the past. *** View the full article

Ya gotta love this guy!

On Cumberland Island, Georgia, between the twisted oaks of the maritime forest and the broad, white dunes of the ocean-facing coast, I met a feral horse. He—a stallion straight from the cover of Black Beauty, if a little scragglier—had positioned himself on the narrow causeway that crossed a freshwater pond, and, by his snorting and head tossing and the way he ripped at the earth with his hooves, it was clear that he did not intend to let me cross. The horse moved towards me in a kind of stiff march. My friends scattered. I turned away at an angle (would he charge if I showed my back?) and walked into the woods beside the trail. I tried not to look at the horse. I shed my red jacket (were pissed-off feral stallions like Spanish bulls?). In the scrawny pines, I felt better. I was off the trail, but the stallion was nowhere in sight. I conferred with my friends. I took out my map. We could meet the trail at a different point, but we would have to, eventually, cross the causeway if we wanted to see the dunes. Over my shoulder, there was a crackling of leaves, the sound of wood breaking. “Behind you!” my friend (actually) said. It was the stallion, only yards away. He had followed me into the woods (why hadn’t I heard him sooner?). Again, I cut my eyes from the horse and walked away, deeper into the pines. I tried to stay calm. I imagined the hard crescents of the stallion’s hooves cutting into my back, but they never came. *** While this was (so far) my most hostile encounter with the feral horses of Cumberland Island—the descendants of a population imported from Globe, Arizona by the Carnegies in the 1920s—it was one of many. During my time researching the island’s horses and landscape, tourists would sometimes ask me on the ferry from St. Mary’s, “What are the chances we’ll see a wild horse?” Though the 200-odd feral horses can be viewed reliably on the grounds of the ruined mansion, picking over the few fallow fields of the island, or walking the sand trails in small, somber trains—typically a skinny mare and her foals—there are no “wild” horses on Cumberland Island. Only feral domestic stock left to eke out what living they can on the island, where browse is scarce, freshwater is limited, and their lifespan is less than half of what it might be. (For those interested, recent journalism on the horses’ situation can be found here.) It was my fascination with the horses of Cumberland, with the words “wild” and “feral” and the way they move in our imaginations, and—yes—with the natural beauty and diversity of life on Georgia’s largest barrier island that led me to write my first novel, the coming-of-age thriller, Bomb Island. On my fictionalized version of Cumberland Island, called Bomb Island for the unexploded atomic bomb sunk off its coast, it’s not horses, but the white tiger, Sugar, that stalks people from the cover of the saw palms. First, I wanted to write Jaws, then an artists’ romance, then climate fiction. As it often goes, all of these ideas mixed and folded and accordioned into the novel as it came to be, but it occurs to me now, years later, that the deepest root of the book might be found at the base of that causeway, with that irate dude-horse tearing up the ground, looking like a living specter of comeuppance for his and his forebears’ stranding. Like the characters in Bomb Island, I grew up feeling at home in the woods, hiking and hunting; this was one of many times that I was humbled by the natural world. Like the other authors on this list, I found conflict, catharsis, even pleasure in the risk of the wild. Here are five books that will transport you to wild worlds this summer, from which you may never return: Water Music: A Cape Cod Story, Marcia Peck (2023) Lily Grainger and her family find a new home on the edge of the continent, where she grapples with fragmented family dynamics and new friendships. Set against Massachusetts’ scenic coastline, the novel explores identity, belonging, and redemption. Through Lily’s journey of self-discovery, Peck captures the beauty and complexity of Cape Cod, weaving a tale of love, forgiveness, and the small ways that we hold each other together. Swamplandia, Karen Russel (2011) A haunting, coming-of-age story that centers the Bigtree family’s alligator-wrestling theme park, located on a mangrove island off the coast of Florida. The novel follows the Bigtree children on their quest to save their home and sister—a journey that will take them to the brink of the underworld. Magical realism animates an exploration of family grief and resilience amidst lush, otherworldly landscapes and eccentric characters. Teenager, Bud Smith (2022) In an intimate reflection on adolescence, Teenager follows two lovers as they escape their small New Jersey town for a road trip across the country. Smith navigates the complexities of life in violent transition in prose that is sharp and feeling, rendering a vision of America is raw and unflinching, as likely to kill you as it is to make you whole. The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides (1993) A chilling suburban drama narrated by a group of boys fascinated by the mysterious deaths of their neighbors, the Lisbon sisters. The Virgin Suicides makes space for itself as a contemporary classic that takes on the difficult territory of abuse, oppression, loss of innocence, and intrigue in a novel that renders profound tragedy with dark humor. Alongside Eugenides’ young characters, readers are compelled to immerse themselves in a mystery hidden in plain sight. Empire of Light, Michael Bible (2018) A hypnotic novel set in the American South that follows the rambling of the hapless Alvis Maloney. In small-town North Carolina, Maloney finds new friends and trouble in a surreal exploration of companionship, belonging, and redemption. Like his teacher, Barry Hannah, Bible’s prose is cutting, bizarre, even feverish. Empire of Light evokes and updates the Southern Gothic tradition in a modern narrative rife with melancholic beauty, wanderlust, and yearning. *** View the full article

The 8:04 is coming down the tracks. Board at your own risk. This is the warning on the cover reveal for my new thriller The Man on the Train. Ever since the original damsel in distress was tied to the railroad tracks and early audiences purportedly fled in terror at the sight of the locomotive roaring into the station in an 1895 silent short by the Lumière brothers, filmmakers and novelists have explored the thrilling possibilities of this singular form of travel. What makes trains so irresistible to suspense auteurs? Because of their confined, claustrophobic interiors that force strangers into intimate proximity with few places to hide and no means of escape? The fact that they’re constantly in motion, hurtling through time and space across borders and treacherous terrain where neither the passengers nor the audience can get off? We hear it before we see it, a shrill, piercing sound that sets our adrenaline pumping, especially when it starts out as a human shriek and morphs into a train whistle in The 39 Steps, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 tale of international intrigue. Then suddenly there it is, lumbering into sight. Which means you’ll have to move with lightning speed if you’re the villain preparing to push your unwitting victim onto the tracks. Or it can be a deceptively ordinary arrival, as the Metro North pulls into the Scarsdale station where my married protagonist Guy Kingship waits with his fellow commuters for the doors to open. Then it’s every man and woman for themselves as they race aboard to snag that coveted aisle or window seat. But Guy’s everyday train ride into Manhattan becomes a journey with an unexpected stop in the past he has buried deep when a beautiful woman takes the empty seat next to him. Speaking of seats on trains, in Hitchcock’s 1941 paranoid thriller Suspicion, based on the novel Before the Fact, the heroine (portrayed by Joan Fontaine) is happily ensconced in her first-class compartment when handsome stranger Cary Grant enters and arouses her suspicions by presenting a third-class ticket to the conductor. The Master of Suspense’s love affair with locomotives included 1941’s Shadow of a Doubt, which opens at a train station with Teresa Wright’s character eagerly awaiting the arrival of her favorite uncle and namesake Charlie, portrayed by Joseph Cotten. The action climaxes with the story’s antagonist plunging to his death into the path of an oncoming train. In the 1945 film Spellbound, it’s the layout of the tracks that evokes a plot-advancing flashback in amnesiac Gregory Peck while train-bound with psychoanalyst Ingrid Bergman. Our first glimpse of the thief played by Tippi Hedren (and that infamous yellow pocketbook) in 1964’s Marnie is from the back as she walks briskly across the platform to await her train. Cary Grant meets another beautiful woman on a train in the 1959 cross-country thriller North by Northwest, which leaves the after-story to the viewer’s imagination as it concludes with Grant and Eva Marie Saint on a sleeper train about to enter a tunnel. The Lady Vanishes, adapted from the aptly titled novel The Wheel Spins, was Hitch’s only film with the action set almost entirely on a train. This 1938 spy classic, shot on a ninety-foot set in a London film studio, brilliantly captures the sense of confinement ideal for attempting to conceal sinister doings (including a scene in a baggage car) in the story of an elderly woman who disappears aboard a European express where everyone denies having seen her. With a screenplay co-written by Raymond Chandler and based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel, the seminal 1951 Strangers on a Train delivers first-class chills. Although little of the film’s action actually takes place on a train, who can forget the fateful in-transit encounter between Farley Granger’s Guy Haines and Robert Walker’s Bruno Antony, the charming psychopath who suggests they swap murders? Nowhere is premeditated evil more on display than during the train sequence in Billy Wilder’s 1944 film noir Double Indemnity, as Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray carry out an ingenious plan for disposing of the body of Stanwyck’s dead husband. What about the trains that bear witness to crimes real or imagined? The recovering alcoholic heroine in Paula Hawkins’s 2015 The Girl on the Train sees something shocking taking place in the backyard of a house she passes on her daily commute to London. Another Lady on the Train was portrayed by musical star Deanne Durbin in the 1945 film about a San Francisco debutante on a New York-bound train who looks up from her book just in time to watch a murder being committed in a nearby building. In Agatha Christie’s 1957 mystery 4:50 from Paddington, Mrs. McGillicuddy is en route to visit her friend Jane Marple when her train passes another train speeding along in the same direction, where a man appears to be strangling his intended victim. Unreliable narrators or eyewitnesses to brutal acts of violence? Trains run by timetable, and this strict adherence to schedules heightens suspense and the feeling of impending danger. The action can turn into a furious race against the clock, which happens in the climactic moments of The Man on the Train when Guy Kingship’s attorney wife Linda rushes to prevent a murder with only minutes to spare. Transcontinental journeys add a sense of the exotic and the unknown. Christie’s 1934 masterpiece Murder on the Orient Express, written during the UK’s Golden Age of Steam Travel and made into two feature films, is the quintessential train tale because all the action takes place on the fabled luxury liner as it wends its way from Istanbul to Paris. In a setting where physical movement is limited, you can’t commit murder and flee the scene unless you want to risk your life jumping off a speeding locomotive. Even if you happen to be seen, your appearance arouses little suspicion because you are not out of place. You are who and where you’re supposed to be: an anonymous passenger on a train. But nothing and no one is what they seem as the Queen of Crime subverts expectations and the train becomes a repository for the characters’ vengeful secrets and a place of sudden, violent death. Now it’s up to Hercule Poirot, confronted with the most challenging case of his career, to use his little grey cells to deduce the killer’s identity. Here are a few more films that feature some form of train in the title: The Sleeping Car Murders, a 1965 Costas Gravas noir film about a woman found strangled in her berth based on Sebastien Japrisot’s novel 10:30 from Marseilles reminiscent of Murder on the Orient Express; the eponymous 1929 film The Flying Scotsman, believed to be the most iconic train in British railway history; Boxcar Bertha (1972), Martin Scorcese’s second feature film; The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, the 1974 film about a subway train taken hostage; Bong joon-ho’s 2013 film Snowpiercer, based on the 1982 graphic novel about earth’s surviving humans living on an enormous train that circumnavigates their glacial planet. The list goes on. Maybe now you’re starting to get an idea of why trains make such pitch-perfect suspense and mystery settings. As Federico Fellini said: “Our duty as storytellers is to bring people to the station. There each person will chose his or her own train.” All aboard! *** View the full article

Los Angeles is the quintessential city of mystery, and I firmly believe that my decision to live here ultimately led me to write crime fiction. But that journey took decades. I wasn’t one of the starry-eyed optimists who thought of LA as the promised land. When I moved from New York City to Los Angeles 30 years ago, I did so with trepidation. Actually, that’s putting a good face on my true feelings. Though I was originally a transplant from the Midwest to the Big Apple, I’d become one of those New Yorkers with a decidedly jaundiced view of the West Coast. And as a costume designer who made her living in theater, my attitude toward the movie business was equally disdainful. At the time, I thought that making the jump from stage to film was tantamount to “selling out.” But the practical side of my nature told me it would be wise to take a closer look at the more lucrative business of film, and if I was going to do that, I wanted to do it where they invented the industry. In hindsight, I admit that a big part of my prejudice regarding the move stemmed from my fear of the unknown. Plus, I was still quite young, idealistic, and in many ways, naive. Despite my doubts, I moved to Los Angeles in October of 1990, rented a tiny apartment in Silverlake, and bought a used car. And I was lucky enough to land a job in movies within 2 weeks of landing in LA, which sealed the deal for me. I became a reluctant Angeleno and for the next 27 years, I made my living in the film industry. During those years, my relationship with my adopted city went through many phases. I was still living in that little apartment in Silverlake when riots blew up the city that still felt new to me in 1992. I’d been working over on the Sony Studios lot that day, and when the violence erupted, the studio closed early in the afternoon. As I made the 15-mile trip across town via Venice Boulevard, I drove past burning strip malls and cars full of young men who brandished baseball bats at unlucky motorists like me who were just hoping to get home. And I’m very grateful that I did make it safely to my apartment where I holed up for the next 3 days, feeling frightened and heartbroken for the entire city. That’s a piece LA’s history I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life, and though I hope we’ll never see that kind of violence again, the problems that sparked the riots have never been fully rooted out. I’ve come to understand that Los Angeles will always have a dark side. It’s inevitable in a city so vast, so populous, and so complex — a sociological stew that makes LA unique. I cherish that diversity, even though I recognize that simmering conflict is a residual element of our blended society. For this diehard LA convert, the benefits of mixing all those rich cultural influences far outweigh any negative issues created by their synergy. Over time, that realization has gradually transformed my relationship with my adopted city. Los Angeles has been such an important part of my life experience and my development as both a human being and an artist that the city and I now belong together in a way I could never have imagined when I moved here. I’ve had the great good fortune to make wonderful life-long friends and enjoyed a long, lucrative career working on the costumes for movies like Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and X-Men Days of Future Past. And when I felt it was time to make yet another major life transition, changing my vocation from working in film to writing mystery fiction, I knew the kaleidoscopic nature of Los Angeles would be my touchstone because my heart will always be at home here. But LA is not only the location for my books; I think of the city as a living, breathing character in my stories. They couldn’t be written about anyplace else in the world. In part that’s because the books are set behind the scenes in the movie business. The film industry and the city of Los Angeles were born together; it’s arguable each made the other’s existence viable — not twins but rather symbiotic partners that supported and cross-pollinated one another until both grew into the giant entities they’ve become. Now you don’t think of one without the other; they’re inseparable in the popular zeitgeist, their combined magic luring dreamers from all over the world. And though it’s certainly possible to be inspired by the sheer scope and magnificence of Los Angeles as a symbol of glamour and excitement — many artists, writers, and filmmakers have ingeniously used those qualities to great effect in their work — I prefer more intimate glimpses into the many hearts and faces that make up this beautiful, troubling, complicated city. Because that immense sprawl, the unending carpet of lights that’s often used as visual shorthand for LA is just a superficial image. It has nothing to do with the true identity of the city, which is actually a patchwork of many different communities. Some are incorporated as separate municipalities, yet they march shoulder to shoulder from the foothills of the San Gabriel Valley to the Pacific Ocean with boundaries that exist only on paper. East LA, El Sereno, Downtown Los Angeles (which also encompasses Little Tokyo and Chinatown), Echo Park, Silverlake, Koreatown, Hollywood, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Culver City, Venice, and Santa Monica, each community with a distinct personality, some of which have blended over time, settling into various stages of overlapping influences with one another. That’s part of the real magic of Los Angeles — the schizy, unpredictable interplay between those different faces of the city is a continuous source of drama, the heart of any good story and definitely any good mystery. Anyway, that’s how it seems to me. I’m humbled to realize after all these years that my adopted city and my adopted profession are two of the greatest sources of inspiration for my writing. I’ve always been an avid reader. From childhood I dreamed of being a writer, and I’ve written for my own creative satisfaction throughout my life. But it wasn’t until I’d been in LA and working on movies for a number of years that I became a real fan of mystery fiction. And that happened almost by accident. I discovered that one of the few ways I could disengage my brain from the workday of a busy film was to read a good murder mystery at bedtime. Eventually (after reading several hundred in that genre) I started to imagine writing murder mystery stories of my own. So it was the combination of the years I’ve spent living in LA and learning to appreciate all the nuances of the city together with the variety of (sometimes jaw-dropping) experiences I’ve had working on movies that finally led me to write crime fiction. Turns out, a big movie in production is the perfect setting for a murder mystery because a movie company is its own unique community — a microcosm of the larger society that spawned it — but with its own set of relationships and always plenty of drama happening behind the scenes. Final Cut, the first book in my Hollywood Mystery series featuring movie key costumer Joey Jessop as the main character, was inspired by situations I encountered on one film in particular that I won’t name here. I didn’t stumble over the body of a fellow crew member on the set as Joey did, but many of the other incidents that appear in the book parallel actual events. Star Struck, Hollywood Mystery Book #2 was based in part on my experiences within the film world, but the incident that triggers the mystery, a fatal traffic accident near the movie set where Joey and her colleagues are working, was inspired by a startling event I witnessed in downtown Los Angeles. I watched in horror as a wild-eyed girl dashed barefoot through traffic across one of the wide north-south avenues. Fortunately, that girl made it to the opposite side of the street without being injured. But I’ll never forget her death-defying sprint or the panic I felt until she leaped safely onto the sidewalk without breaking stride. No one appeared to be chasing her, and I’ve always wondered what made her run. It’s a mystery that’s stayed with me, a seed of an idea that grew into a story. For me, that kind of capriciousness is a treasure that makes Los Angeles a Pandora’s box of imagination, a source of both great misfortune and hope — an endless well of creative inspiration for nearly any story about any sort of person who might be living or traveling through this iconic crossroads of the world. *** View the full article

Genre fiction is my jam, so I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes my favorite books tick. Growing up, I read a lot of macho thrillers: spies and submarines, combatants and operatives. These battles were mostly fought by well-trained experts. It’s fun to learn to pilot a submarine or stop a terrorist plot in Times Square. But the recent wave of heroine-centric thrillers is exciting in a whole new way. Many of these new titles are shelved as “domestic suspense,” aka “ordinary woman with a big, scary problem.” In these books, the heroine has to save herself. And she’s usually unprepared for the challenge ahead. On the one hand, there aren’t any Bourne-like superpowers to admire. But on the flip side, these novels ask a different question—what if it’s you in the hot seat? How fast can a nice girl from the suburbs find her dark side if the situation calls for extraordinary measures? It turns out that watching an amateur get up to speed is just as exciting as looking over the shoulder of a trained professional. There’s so much more at stake. That’s the zeitgeist I gave to The Five Year Lie. When her dead boyfriend suddenly sends her a confounding text, single mom Ariel Cafferty has a deep dark problem. The more questions she asks, the scarier it gets. Before I even wrote the prologue, I was inspired by these other domestic thrillers by female authors: The Last Flight by Julie Clark This inventive story actually has two heroines trying to save themselves via a fateful ticket swap—and identity swap—at the airport. Their stories unfold via two competing timelines and through absolutely flawless writing. I couldn’t put it down. With My Little Eye by Joshilyn Jackson The heroine of this thriller is an actress who’s being stalked by a shadowy figure who seems to know her awfully well. The police don’t seem to be doing much about it, which leaves her fighting for her own safety, and questioning every interaction with the men in her life. The writing is exquisite, and you’ll keep turning the pages, trying to figure out which of Meribel’s male acquaintances can be trusted. And which one can’t… On a Quiet Street by Seraphina Nova Glass The medley of women at the center of this drama are so well drawn that you’ll be hooked from chapter one. One woman believes her husband is cheating on her. And her neighbor, who’s trying and failing to recover from her own tragedy, offers up her services as an amateur sleuth. What could go wrong? A lot, as it turns out. This book’s power is in the way you’re rooting for everyone, even when you’re not sure they deserve it. And you won’t see the ending coming. The First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston This is one of those rare story concepts where you don’t quite know what’s going on, but you don’t mind all that much. The protagonist, Evie Porter, tells you right off the bat that she’s a con artist, willfully enmeshing her life with a certain Ryan Summer on orders from her shadowy boss. But things get wild all too soon, and you’ll be turning pages at warp speed to see if Evie can make it out of this mess alive. Girl Forgotten by Karin Slaughter This pick is cheating a little because Andrea Oliver, the heroine, is a US Marshall. But it’s literally her first day on the job! This setup proves to be brilliant and often hilarious. Thrown into the deep end of a big case, Andrea has to set aside her inexperience as well as her imposter syndrome to find the killer before he finds her. *** View the full article

Each month, I attempt to perform the Herculean endeavor of rounding up all the best psychological thrillers coming out, and each month, I must admit to myself the true impossibility of the task in the face of so many good titles. May, however, has been particularly challenging, in that there are just So. Many. Good. Thrillers. My apologies to all those that I was compelled to leave off the list below, for the simple reason of not being allowed to read, like, all the time. I still have to sleep, okay? And also, of course…do my job. Anyway, enjoy this selection of delicious scandal and disturbing insights! Ruth Ware, One Perfect Couple (Gallery/Scout) Love Island meets And Then There Were None in Ruth Ware’s latest psychological thriller as five couples in an island-based reality TV show find themselves cut off from the mainland during a ferocious storm as a killer picks them off, one by one. Ruth Ware is the new reigning queen of crime, so it makes perfect sense for her to take on a classic Christie set-up. Emma Rosenblum, Very Bad Company (Flatiron) I saw a tweet recently about how one of the most underrated possibilities for thrillers is the corporate retreat gone horribly, hilariously awry. Emma Rosenblum, author of last year’s fabulously scandalous Bad Summer People, has returned with an equally sordid and sardonic take on forced corporate fun, following a group of tech elites as their soused vacation, and house-of-cards company, quickly unravel. Andromeda Romano-Lax, The Deepest Lake (Soho) Andromeda Romano-Lax takes readers to a memoir-writing workshop as pricey as it is remote in her latest novel, a searing meditation on narcissism and motherhood. One attendee has a secret goal: discover the truth behind her daughter’s disappearance, soon after starting work as a general assistant to the workshop’s charismatic conductor. I didn’t have Grand Guignol Mother’s Day on my bingo card for 2024, but here we are. Fiona McPhillips, When We Were Silent (Flatiron) Fiona McPhillips breathes new urgency into the private school thriller with this tale of justice delayed. In When We Were Silent, Louise Manson enrolls at an elite Dublin academy with a singular goal: expose the swim coach as a sexual predator. Decades later, she must confront her past traumas when another of the school’s coaches goes on trial for abuse. McPhillips infuses her story with deep sensitivity and righteous fury, for a compelling and thought-provoking read. Omar Tyree, Control (Dafina) A frustrated psychologist puts an intricate plan in motion in this insightful new thriller: her talented but neurotic clients and their toxic personalities seem tailor-made to complement each other, and she’s ready to intervene in the name of helping them move forward (and giving herself a break). Unfortunately, the alchemy that results is rather than more deadly than she intended. Omar Tyree is based in Atlanta and the setting shines via character archetypes, with most characters based in the city’s thriving entertainment industry. L.M. Chilton, Swiped (Gallery) Another send-off of modern dating, this time with an extra-fun twist! Chilton’s unlucky-in-love heroine finds herself under suspicion of murder after the shocking demise of multiple men with whom she’s matched. Who is the culprit killing off all these (admittedly mediocre) dating prospects? And why are they so determined to pin the blame on her? Julie Mae Cohen, Bad Men (The Overlook Press) What a delightfully weird book. Bad Men continues the “sympathetic feminist serial killer” trend that I noted last year, and adds the hope for a happily ever after to the mix. When serial-killing socialite Saffy Huntley-Oliver meets her perfect man, she’s ready to engineer whatever machinations are necessary to draw him in as a potential mate, but she’s going to have to figure out the balance between her new lover and her old hobbies. Don’t worry, the dog doesn’t die. Some people do, of course. But no dogs! Elle Marr, The Alone Time (Thomas and Mercer) Elle Marr’s consistently chilling and insightful psychological thrillers have been growing in repute for some time, so I’m glad I finally dived into her latest and found it to be just as good as I’d hoped. Violet and Fiona are two sisters who survived a horrific plane crash in childhood and spent months defying death in the wilderness. They’ve always said their parents died instantly in the crash, and they’ve always been suspected of hiding some details. When a new documentary crew starts digging, the grown-up sisters must confront their own traumas and hope to keep the real story hidden. This book also confirms my plan to NEVER go into the sky in a tiny, tiny plane piloted by a cranky relative. View the full article

A look at the week’s best new releases in crime fiction, nonfiction, mystery, and thrillers. * Abir Mukherjee, Hunted (Mulholland) “A pretty much flawless thriller, Hunted works on every level imaginable. Terrific characters are subtly and mercilessly pushed along by a plot as propulsive as it is constantly surprising.” –Lee Child John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness (Atria/Emily Bestler) “Connolly is a first-rate storyteller, and the Parker novels have always been excellent, but there’s something different about this one. The darkness that permeates the series feels darker here, as though Connolly is conjuring up an evil we’ve not seen before. This one will leave readers breathless and shaken—which is, after all, just what the author’s fans expect.” – Booklist Mailan Doquang, Blood Rubies (Mysterious Press) “An intricate plan in a far-off city to snatch some priceless gems. What could possibly go wrong?…A crisp caper whose detailed setting is its biggest attraction.” –Kirkus Reviews Marjorie McCown, Star Struck (Crooked Lane) “Sorry, Sherlock. Detective work has nothing on the perils of costume design.” –Kirkus Reviews Andromeda Romano-Lax, The Deepest Lake (Soho) “All who enjoy writer-focused thrillers will be enthralled by Romano-Lax’s morally and intellectually intricate tale, while her fans will marvel at her versatility as she shifts from complexly imagined literary fiction like Annie and the Wolves (2021), to this psychologically and culturally spiky work of suspense.” –Booklist Sarina Bowen, The Five Year Lie (Harper Paperbacks) “Bowen . . . takes a confident step into the thriller genre with this engaging debut, which combines a fast pace and an intriguing plot with pointed commentary on the way useful technology can easily create a dangerous privacy nightmare. . . . An engaging and fast-paced thriller about the abuse of technology.” Debbie Babitt, The Man on the Train (Scarlet) “A mysterious woman on the train, a disappearing husband, and secrets from the past come together in this pulse-quickening ride. Babitt masterfully creates a narrative that explores the fragility of trust and poses the question of how well we really know those closest to us. THE MAN ON THE TRAIN will keep readers guessing until the final, shocking reveal.” –Liv Constantine Elise Juska, Reunion (Harper) “A pitch-perfect depiction of New England campus culture, COVID-era child-rearing and how the complexities of adulthood accumulate.” –People Emiko Jean, The Return of Ellie Black (Simon and Schuster) “Like Jessica Knoll, whose crime novels also revolve around missing girls, Jean focuses less on sensationalizing predators and more on the tragedy of a ‘frenzy of missing girls. They do not give answers. They do not speak of what has come to pass. They whisper: Find us. Please.’ Jean has written an impressive crime novel here…. An unexpected ending and a cadre of heroic female characters make Jean a crime writer to watch.” –Kirkus Reviews Jacob Kushner, Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants (Grand Central) “This fascinating book tells two stories: first, how a gang of East German thugs turned neo-Nazi ‘bomb tinkerers’ grew into a network of domestic terrorists, and second, how German authorities let them get away with murder. Jacob Kushner tells the story with cautious condemnation and intimate detail.” –Michael Scott Moore View the full article

An honorable serial killer. A hacker turned vigilante. A gentleman thief. Mysteries and thrillers are full of morally ambiguous antiheroes who challenge us to confront truths about human nature and undermine strict definitions of good and evil. From Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov to S. A. Cosby’s Beauregard, these compelling but deeply flawed characters operate outside the law, while also adhering to their own moral codes. One person’s hero is another person’s villain. Morally ambiguous characters capture this complexity, reminding us that the world is neither black nor white, but a slippery combination of both. A morally gray antihero anchors my debut, Blood Rubies, an international thriller set in the thrumming cities of New York and Bangkok. The book follows Rune Sarasin, a half American, half Thai jewel thief thrust into the unwanted role of savior after her latest heist goes sideways and her boyfriend’s sister vanishes from a Bangkok slum. I knew from the outset that I wanted my protagonist to straddle different worlds, not just racially and culturally, but also morally. Rune is an outsider in every sense of the word. Her white mother, her American upbringing, and her shaky grasp of the Thai language make her as alien in Bangkok as her Asian half makes her in the US. Rune is rebellious, self-serving, and blunt to the point of rudeness. These traits, along with her criminality, would seem to place her squarely in the villain camp. But Rune is more than the sum of her flaws and questionable actions, she’s also protective, fiercely loyal, and selfless in her efforts to save her loved ones. This combination of the good and the bad, of the admirable and the abhorrent, is precisely what makes Rune relatable. The sense that the Runes of the world are just like us, except more extreme, helps account for their enduring appeal. Morally ambiguous characters allow us to give up on the idea of moral purity without abandoning our sense of self as moral beings. Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter Morgan, bloodstain pattern analyst by day, serial killer by night, is a prime example. Dexter kills without legal authority or due process—and with immense pleasure! Thanks to his adoptive father, however, Dexter channels his homicidal impulses in a “positive” way by only killing violent criminals he believes escaped justice. Dexter’s strong moral code serves as a counterpoint to his decidedly immoral actions, compelling us to consider the ethics of vigilantism and the blurred lines between right and wrong. The same can be said of Lisbeth Salander, Stieg Larsson’s justice-seeking hacker who hunts down and violently punishes men who abuse women. Both Lindsay and Larsson foster empathy for their characters by highlighting their altruistic motives and the traumatic experiences fueling their misdeeds. Dexter was just a toddler when a drug dealer killed his mother and locked him in a crate with her dismembered body, while Lisbeth suffered repeated abuse at the hands of her father, her psychiatrist, and her court-appointed guardian. Empathizing with characters whose values don’t square with our moral precepts sends an important message: you don’t have to be a paragon of virtue to deserve understanding and forgiveness. If vigilantes are redeemable, then, surely, we are, too. As a writer and lover of thrillers, the allure of morally ambiguous characters lies in their potential for heightened suspense. Heroes behave in predictably heroic ways, exhibiting courage in the face of danger and selflessly putting the greater good ahead of their personal interests. Conversely, villains use manipulation, deceit, intimidation, violence, and other nefarious tactics to pursue their desires regardless of the harm it might bring to others. Although heroes and villains occupy opposite ends of the morality spectrum, they share several key traits, including a keen intelligence, determination, imagination, and, most important in this context, constancy. I never wonder if Jack Reacher will back down from a fight, or if Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles will wash their hands of a difficult case, despite being fully fleshed out by their authors. Their heroic attributes override whatever character flaws they might have. Similarly, I know that the Sandman will kill, that Adora Crellin will abuse her daughters, and that, if it weren’t for the creepy mask, Hannibal Lector would eat my face. Morally gray characters take away this certainty, building suspense into stories by keeping us guessing about what they’ll do next. Unrestrained by the moral code of conventional heroes, antiheroes zig when we expect them to zag, adding uncertainty to scenarios that might otherwise unfold in predictable ways. As a longtime fan of Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin stories, thieves are by far my favorite literary antiheroes and the direct inspiration for Rune. A witty, dapper, and charming master of disguise, Lupin navigates the world according to his own moral compass, only stealing from the rich, redistributing wealth to the poor, and always being a gentleman of his word. Contemporary authors have also fueled my love for contradictory characters. A recent standout is Grace Li, whose New York Times bestseller, Portrait of a Thief, tells the story of five young Chinese Americans hired to steal back looted art from world-class museums. Li’s characters are not just motivated by a $50 million reward, but also by a deep desire to combat the legacy of colonialism and to right historical wrongs. Similarly, Beauregard “Bug” Montage in Cosby’s award-winning Blacktop Wasteland resumes his life of crime both to save his family from financial ruin and for the thrill of being the best getaway driver on the East Coast. The popularity of Li’s and Cosby’s books, both of which are being adapted for the screen, speaks to the continued appeal of the antihero archetype. Love to hate them? Hate to love them? When it comes to antiheroes, you’re sure to do both. *** View the full article

I don’t usually include personal anecdotes in film reviews, lest they detract from the critical discussion at hand, but I’d just like to open this review by saying that I brought my 87-year-old Croatian grandmother with me to my advance screening of The Fall Guy in IMAX, and after we got her situated in her ADA seat and watched the trailers and the movie itself started rolling, revealing a medley of impressive stunts, she leaned over and said, in a very matter-of-fact way, “this is an action movie.” The Fall Guy has a lot going on, but the most important thing about it (indeed, the thing about itself that it most wants you to know) is that it is an action movie and that action movies are made not merely with actors and directors, but entire teams of stunt performers who risk their lives and limbs for movie magic, and do so for comparatively minuscule credit. The film is directed by David Leitch, who, prior to his career directing many memorable blockbuster action movies, including John Wick, Hobbs & Shaw, Deadpool 2, and Bullet Train, was a stunt performer and coordinator, himself. Most action movies have the feel of being driven by narrative, with stuntwork bolstering and buttressing and filling out the story. The Fall Guy, which was written by Drew Pearce and Glen A. Larson (based on the 80s TV series of the same name), feels like the opposite kind of affair: one in which the narrative exists to connect stunt setpiece to stunt setpiece to stunt setpiece. This isn’t to say that the narrative of The Fall Guy isn’t enjoyable or doesn’t make sense (because it is, and it does), but to underscore that The Fall Guy is, first and foremost, a passionate, high-octane, two-hour love letter to movie stunts and the people who make them. And more! So much more. Here’s some of the more. Our story follows Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling, locked and loaded and endearing as ever), a stuntman of many talents who falls off the map after an on-set accident results in a grievous injury. But he finds himself back in the game when he’s given the chance to help out on his ex-girlfriend Jody’s new sci-fi film, Metalstorm, a sandy, outer-space spectacle billed as “High Noon at the edge of the galaxy.” Jody (Emily Blunt) is still mad that Colt broke contact during his convalescence and resulting depression; he is still carrying a burning torch for her, upset that he didn’t do more to hold on to her during their relationship, so he is determined to be there for her, professionally, as she directs her first feature film. But he’s not simply going to help out with stunts; the film’s producer Gail (Hannah Waddingham) has called Colt to set because the film’s star, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), has apparently gone missing. No one on set knows this yet; they’re filming the action stuff and Tom doesn’t do his own stunts, so he’s not supposed to be around anyway. Gail promises Colt that he’ll be saving Jody’s movie if he finds Tom, and all Colt wants is a chance to make things up to Jody, so he agrees. But he gets more than he bargained for when mysterious, armed bruisers start coming after him, leading to a series of dazzling, jaw-dropping chase, fight, and stunt sequences—sequences which only get more and more fun as Colt starts assembling a team of helpers, including Metalstorm’s stunt director Dan Tucker (Winston Duke), Tom’s plucky assistant Alma (Stephanie Hsu), and a well-trained, French-speaking attack dog named Jean-Claude (played, seemingly, by a dog named Jean-Claude and his puppet stunt double). Meanwhile, Jody is happy to have Colt back in her life; his supportive energy provides her the inspiration to fix the film’s difficult third act. She doesn’t know that, by night, he’s taking punches and getting the stuffing kicked out of him to try to save her movie; but he’s committed to her and her work all the way, and she values this. That’s the thing about The Fall Guy; it becomes more than a movie about the undersung, hidden stunt-makers; it becomes a movie about movie-makers, writ-large. The film balances its face-value, hyper-kinetic, thoroughly cinematic diegetic action bits with other sequences that are solely, reflexively devoted to the behind-the-scenes ecosystem of film shoots. The film offers multiple peeks behind the curtain, so to speak, of making a movie like this; not only do we see the stunt performers with their cables on and watch the giant puffy landing mats get unrolled, but we also watch Jody literally direct her movie. We watch her design the shots and operate the camera, we go inside the editing room with Jody and the editor, looking through takes, we meet the writers, visual effects artists, DPs, ADs, and PAs who make the film possible. Thus, even though The Fall Guy technically gives us a single action hero (and a single romantic couple) to root for, it also effectively conveys a sense of ensemble achievement. We go with the crew to an after-work karaoke outing. We see crew members proudly wear their souvenir production jackets. The Fall Guy is about being on a team and loving that team. Movies like this (smart, funny blockbusters with wide theatrical releases) don’t get made like they used to, but they should. Much like the Mission: Impossible franchise’s commitment to impressive practical effects and denunciation of creepy human-replacing, AI technologies, The Fall Guy has a lot to say about how films are (and should be) personal. Not only do movies mean things to the characters in the film, but movies are also (the film argues) at their best when they are made by people, people who put in the hard work to make something as entertaining as possible. After the fallout from Tom’s disappearance starts hitting Jody’s set, she is given the out of leaving the shoot early to go rest on a beach, letting the producer call the rest of the shots, and letting the VFX crew take care of the rest of the stunts, and she balks at the very idea. Right on! The Fall Guy is a valuable exhibit in the case for bringing back fun movies—bringing them to theaters, and to fruition, more generally. And it’s great to watch a movie where you can sense star power. These days, we don’t have a lot of compelling movie stars holding down the fort of commercial film, but Ryan Gosling is a good choice for a movie like this. He, fresh off Barbie, is just as delightful a romantic comedy lead as he is a convincing action heavy. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, has natural comic timing, and can unleash a very good scream. The Fall Guy is good at balancing different kinds of “funny,” from recurring gags to witty banter to quality throwaway jokes. I laughed very hard, at one point, when Colt is mistaken as an intruder by Tom’s girlfriend (Teresa Palmer) while he is in Tom’s house, investigating his disappearance. “I’m on Metalstorm too,” he tells her, trying to get her to lower her weapon. “Liar!” she screams. “We’re on Metalstorm ONE.” Gosling yells back at her, with palpable frustration, “I MEANT ‘ALSO!'” I should also add that Gosling and Blunt have charming chemistry, building a movie-inspired, movie-adjacent love story that works on its own, too. I genuinely wanted them to be able to work things out. I have few slight issues with some aspects, but I don’t want to spoil anything in listing them. I will say that, when the villain of the movie appears, we don’t get to feel their threat as powerfully or ride that actor’s charisma as much as we should. It’s always a little bit of a letdown when the heroes are so lovable and the villains turn out not to match them in intensity. But this is a quibble. The whole thing is a rollicking good time, pure cinema. “I love when I get to call a movie ‘pure cinema,'” I said, as I left the theater, pausing to ask my grandmother, “Did you like it?” She responded, “it was entertainment!” View the full article

From the time gold was discovered here in 1871, Alaska has been a magnet for a certain type of risk-taker. Daredevil fortune seekers came, seduced by the area’s seemingly infinite riches – miners, traders, trappers, and crab fishermen all answering Alaska’s siren song. Throughout Alaska’s recorded history, yet another kind of risk-taker has gravitated to The Last Frontier. Lured by the vastness of the terrain, its Wild West lawlessness, its endless winter nights, or all of the above – serial killers have left their mark. I set my debut mystery/thriller Cold To The Touch in this locale because of its unique, stark beauty and its ability to harbor the darkest and most sinister of predators. Edward Krause, Alaska’s first known serial killer, is said to be responsible for the deaths of at least ten men between 1912 and 1915, killing them for their real estate holdings and bank balances. His true identity was Edward Klompke, a U.S. Army deserter. He was sentenced to hang but escaped two days before his execution. He met his end when a homesteader shot and killed him for a $1000 reward. Klutuk, “The Mad Trapper of Bristol Bay,” was a Yupi’k trapper named for a small tributary of the Nushagak River in Western Alaska. Between 1919 and 1931, he stalked trappers and prospectors in the wilderness between Cook Inlet and the Kuskokwim River. Fiercely territorial, he supposedly killed twenty or more men he perceived as infringing on his domain. After an exhaustive manhunt that covered several thousand square miles, a U.S. Marshal found remains he claimed to be Klutuk in a cabin near the Mulchatna River. Harvey Carignan killed 58-year-old Laura Showalter in the Territory of Alaska in 1949, while stationed in the U.S. Army in Anchorage. Although Showalter was his only Alaska victim, Carignan also killed two young women in Washington – one who answered a “help wanted” ad he posted for his gas station – and two women in Minnesota. He died in prison in Minnesota. Thomas Richard Bunday was serving at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks when he murdered five girls and young women between 1979 and 1981. With no physical evidence to hold him in Alaska, Bunday was able to transfer to Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas. He finally confessed in 1988, but killed himself before Alaskan detectives could apprehend him. Joshua Alan Wade claimed to have killed his first victim on an Anchorage bike trail when he was fourteen. He went on to kill four more people, including his neighbor, a nurse practitioner. After forcing her to give up her ATM and PIN, he shot her in the head and burned her body. He is serving a life sentence in a federal prison in Indiana. James Dale Ritchie started killing in 2016, when he shot a homeless woman and a male acquaintance. Twenty-six days later he shot a young man, presumably for his bicycle, which he rode away from the scene. A month later, he killed a homeless man and a young environmental activist out on a late-night bike ride. Ritchie himself was killed during a gunfight with Anchorage police. Robert Christian Hansen was the most notorious of the Alaskan serial killers, called the “Butcher Baker” because he owned a bakery a short distance from Merrill Field, where he kept his plane. From 1971 to 1983, he abducted, raped and murdered at least seventeen Alaskan girls and women, many of whom were exotic dancers or sex workers. Some he flew out to a remote location in his Piper Super Cub and hunted them in the wilderness with a semi-automatic rifle. When Hansen was apprehended, investigators found an aeronautical chart with thirty-seven “x” marks on it, leading officials to believe that he was responsible for far more deaths than he claimed. Hansen was only formally charged with the murders of four victims – of these, only “Eklutna Annie” has not yet been identified. He died of natural causes in 2014 while serving a life sentence. Long-haul trucker John Joseph Fautenberry confessed to killing six people across five states, including Jefferson Diffee, a miner at the Greens Creek silver mine near Juneau. After pleading guilty to killing Diffee and given a 99-year prison term in Alaska, he was extradited to Ohio. Here he was sentenced to death for previously killing and robbing Joseph Daron, Jr., a Good Samaritan who had stopped to offer him a ride. Fautenberry was executed there by lethal injection in 2009. Although Israel Keyes is believed to have committed multiple murders from 2001 to 2012, he has identified only three by name: William and Lorraine Currier of Essex, Vermont, and Samantha Koenig, a barista in Anchorage. In 2007, after living for six years on the Makah Reservation, Keyes left Washington state for Alaska where he started a contracting business. It was during one of his many trips to the Lower 48 that he meticulously stalked William and Lorraine Currier. Two years prior to the killing of the Curriers, Keyes had buried near their home a five-gallon drum of guns, ammunition, a silencer, zip ties, and duct tape. Using the contents of this “murder kit”, he tortured and murdered the Curriers, a middle-aged couple he had never met before, and left them to rot in an abandoned farmhouse. The Curriers’ remains were never found. Eighteen-year-old Samantha Koenig was a barista at Common Grounds coffee stand when Keyes abducted her at gunpoint on February 1, 2012. He took her to a shed just a few feet from his home where he sexually assaulted and killed her. Then he left on a two-week cruise in the Gulf of Mexico. When he returned, he applied makeup to Koenig’s face, sewed her eyes open with fishing line and photographed her with a four-day old issue of the Anchorage Daily News to make it appear she was still alive. He posted a ransom note demanding $30,000 in a local park, after which he dismembered Koenig’s body and disposed of it in Matanuska Lake, north of Anchorage. Officials tracked the use of the dead woman’s ATM card as Keyes moved across the southwestern United States. He was finally arrested in Texas and extradited to Alaska. He died by suicide on December 2, 2012. Keyes was born in Utah to a Mormon family. Fautenberry was from Connecticut, Bunday from Tennessee, Hansen from Iowa. For these killers, Alaska was as far as they could go – literally and figuratively. Alaska encompasses 365 million acres – only 160,000 of which have been settled by humans. Only 1580 sworn law enforcement officers safeguard this landmass, twice the size of Texas (2024 World Population Review). Maybe these killers believed their unthinkable crimes would be undiscovered or unpunished in this sparsely policed wilderness. Victims are lost here as well, never to be found, like so many of Hansen’s and Keyes’ casualties. Bodies decompose, undisturbed, in pristine lakes or are scattered by animals, strewn into the darkness of the long Alaska nights. *** View the full article

One of the most creative avenues for genre exploration today is found in young adult fiction. The following new and upcoming releases are distinguished by nimble use of tropes, deep love of references, intricate plotting, and a passion for justice. They are also, and I cannot emphasize this enough, incredibly entertaining. God speed, ye readers. Tyffany Neuhauser, Not Dead Enough (Viking, January 23) This novel uses the undead as a perfect metaphor for PTSD—the main character is literally haunted by her abusive ex-boyfriend, a duplicitous soul whose harmful ways were invisible to all other observers, and a brutal confrontation with this zombified incarnation of trauma is necessitated in order to move on. Sami Ellis, Dead Girls Walking (Amulet Books, March 26) Sapphic romance and serial killers at summer camp! Sami Ellis seems to have included every trope I have on my checklist, and they all work together seamlessly for an irrepressibly entertaining horror experience. Ream Shukairy, Six Truths and a Lie (Little Brown, March 12) Shukairy’s haunting noir of justice delayed and denied is an essential read for our times. Six Muslim teenagers are targeted by police after a Muslim student gathering on a beach is interrupted by mysterious explosions. Shukairy divides the narrative between these disparate narrators, with slow reveals leading to maximum emotional impact. The novel’s scenes of protest are especially evocative given recent events in which student voices have been violently repressed. Freddie Kölsch, Now, Conjurers (Union Square, June 4) New voice Freddie Kolsch has written a queer horror novel for the ages, in which a charismatic quarterback’s failed quest for absolution is the catalyst for an epic confrontation between his coven and his killer. Not to be a pest, but you must read this book. No excuses. Now you must be wondering, why does every sentence in this blurb begin with an “n”? No cheating—you’ll have to pick up the book to find out yourself. Tess Sharpe, The Girl in Question (Little Brown, May 14) In this intricately plotted nesting doll of a thriller, the sequel to her novel The Girls I’ve Been, a camping trip meant for solace instead goes horribly awry. Nora, Sharpe’s “girl in question,” was raised by a con artist mother and broke free from her family only through turning snitch against her violent stepdad. Now, he’s out of jail, she’s in the wilderness with her closest friends, and someone’s on their trail. Sharpe has been a personal favorite for some time, and this latest novel should continue her journey into becoming a household name. Joelle Wellington, The Blonde Dies First (S&S, July 30) I loved Joelle Wellington’s debut thriller with its epic party gone terribly wrong, and she continues to wreak gleeful havoc with traditional tropes in her new thriller. This one features an epic summer party interrupted by a demon hell-bent on picking off guests. Gigi Griffis, We Are the Beasts (Delacorte, December 10) Gigi Griffis breathes new life and intrigue into the historical tale of the Beast of Gévaudan, the mythical monster blamed for a rural murder spree in Ancien Regime France, as two teen girls take advantage of the chaos to fake the deaths of their nearest and dearest and thus save them from more human terrors. Griffis has an eye for historical detail and a deft hand when it comes to plotting. View the full article

Not coincidentally, I quit my great love, horror movies, right around the time I became a mom. Perhaps it’s because new terrors haunted me: SIDS and school shootings, poison in Halloween candy, toxins in the water, plastic in our bloodstream, creepy lingerers in Golden Gate Park, a planet on fire, a child poisoned, a child with no future, a child lost forever. That was enough horror for me at that point in my life. Or maybe it’s because becoming a mom brought to my attention how many horror movies make moms into monsters. Moms are the ugly reason behind Jason and Norman Bates and Carrie. They’re the evil antagonists in Ma (2019), Mama (2013), and Mother’s Day (1980/2010). It’s easy to demonize mothers, to make them the villains, the origin stories behind killers, the lost souls who hit their breaking point, turn their torment on others. And sure they have power, but isn’t it convenient, always blaming mom? Horror movies put a microscopic lens on our troubles, reflecting them back at us with heightened paranoia and terror. But some things aren’t all that exaggerated for the screen. In the horror world, as in ours, if you’re not a perfect mom, what are you? You must be a monster. As a new mother, I didn’t need the reminder, thank you. So, I gave up on horror for a time, turning my back on monsters. I told myself, hilariously, You’ll never be one of them. But in the horror that was lockdown, we were all on the verge of monsterdom. I was a single mom alone with my kids, a classic horror setup, very cabin in the woods even if we lived in the city. It was sweet, the way my kids wanted to sleep with me, but we were together all day. And at night? We were a pile of bodies, me in the middle, our limbs indistinguishable, breathing in each other’s hot exhales. One night, unable to sleep, feeling very much confined, I slipped out of bed and felt an old, familiar urge, so I turned on the TV, found the first horror movie that didn’t look terrible, The Babadook (2014). In one of the opening scenes, a single mom, Amelia, is in bed with her young son, Samuel. He’s got a leg thrown over her body, a hand at her neck; he grinds his teeth audibly. She escapes to the edge of the bed, lying there uncomfortable and sleepless. I understood her immediately. As a single mom, I have room for kids in my bed, but having room doesn’t mean I always have space. During an especially grabby hug, Amelia shouts at her son, “Don’t do that!” Too much, too close, the heat of a small human body that can shift from warm to oppressive in an instant. My first taste of monsterdom came years earlier, well before lockdown, when my neurodivergent preschooler would struggle at school. In The Babadook Samuel faces similar troubles. A couple of stuffy administrators tell Amelia: “The boy has significant behavioral problems,” to which Amelia replies: “Please stop calling him the boy.” Raising a child on the spectrum, I have sat across from many teachers and administrators with similar attitudes: You’re on your own. I’d have to walk out of that office, past the parents who appeared smug at the periphery of my rage. Were they really smug, or was my vision distorted by my monstrosity? I’d spend hours pondering this question, whether I was imagining that smugness—a horror movie in the making. Parenting shouldn’t be a solitary act, but when your child misbehaves publicly, there’s no one more judgmental than other parents. It’s easy to turn inward, to make your world smaller, to tread in shrinking circles, and isolation is one of the key ingredients to horror. For a time, I gave in, not accepting my monstrosity so much as reveling in it. I gave myself weird haircuts and wore monster-sized clothing and stopped smiling so much, and as a result people stopped smiling back at me. I’d hear about family parties to which my kids and I didn’t receive invitations and think, Fine, I can be a monster in private. Later in The Babadook, Samuel is uninvited to his cousin’s birthday party, a particular slight with an exquisite sting. He can’t go back to school, so Amelia and Samuel are alone in the house, listless until a mysterious book about a monster arrives. After reading it, Samuel warns Amelia not to let the monster in. But she does—she can’t help it—and the monster possesses her. After lockdown, I no longer had the ability to perform perfect, even if I wanted to. I’d spent too much time alone, embracing my monsterdom, to play pretend. So, when we all reemerged, I started talking about my fears openly, my frustrations, my pain, cracking jokes at my own expense and laughing too loudly, identifying the moms who laughed with me and making them my friends. Maybe it was lockdown, or perhaps it was just age, experience after experience settling on me, dust matter that I couldn’t wash away, but it occurred to me that I was neither perfect nor a monster; I was just a mom who was doing her best, and why wasn’t that enough? Now I’ve let my great love, horror movies, back into my life, though I still yearn for more movies that show the complexity of motherhood. More than that, I want a world that asks for less of mothers and offers more. But in the meantime, my neurodivergent child has become a teen, and she’s doing great. Great by a standard we’ve set, her and I. Other parents might think differently but that’s not my concern. I’m no longer shaken by their opinions about my kids or my parenting. The monster inside me sleeps, for now. But she’s there, always, if I need to call upon her. *** View the full article

April 2024 It is springtime in Paris. I am in Paris. I know now that this, what I am experiencing, is the perfect combination of a time and a place, a season and a city. It rains a lot, but only a little. The sun is chilly but the wind is warm. At lunchtime, I walk to the Place Dauphine, a shady courtyard on the west side of the Île de la Cité, the island in the Siene that bears up Notre Dame, listening to the hurried French of elderly couples. In the evenings, I stroll through the Latin Quarter, weaving around clusters of American students on study-abroad. I’m staying with a friend in an apartment in the 20th arrondissement, near Père Lachaise, the old cemetery. In a few days, I’ll be by myself in a hotel in the 16th, in Trocadero, across the river from the Eiffel Tower. I’m fond of the Metro, and the bus, but I’ll spend most of my time in Paris walking from neighborhood to neighborhood. I like to climb the hills, wander through the streets, feel the contours and furrows of the city in the soles of my feet. 29 Rue de Courcelles. Paris 8. I don’t walk near there, but it’s on my list of places to visit, if I can find the time. I don’t really spend much time in the 8th, partially because it’s crowded. I grew up in New York City, and it’s symptomatic of this geographic upbringing to develop a sort of psychosomatic skin allergy to throngs. I tend to shiver a lot in crowds. So, I avoid the Champs-Élysées and the Arc du Triomphe, shimmy north whenever I hit the Place de la Concorde. I never make it to Rue de Courcelles, even though I want to. Or I think I want to. In a way, I know that spot in Paris rather well already; it’s the setting for a favorite film, Louis Malle’s Ascenseur Pour L’Échafaud (1958). The film was re-titled Frantic for select audiences but is better known now with the title Elevator to the Gallows. It is a crisp, bleak, dreary film noir, black and white and morose, but also heartbreaking and gutting. I saw Elevator to the Gallows in college, homework for a course titled “Paris in Film,” a class whose enrollees, I imagine, expected a rosier overall patina in the assigned films. Instead, we watched Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), Alain Corneau’s Serie Noire (1979), Leos Carax’s Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, Michael Haneke’s Code Inconnu (2000). The happiest film we watched was Agnes Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962). I think about this course, and Elevator to the Gallows, as I walk around Paris. I don’t want to, but I can’t help it. Perhaps there’s a simple reason (one character traverses the city on foot in most of her scenes). Perhaps I’m remembering it because it was the first time I was exposed to Paris as a city, rather than as a dream. The film tells the story of Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), a cool-headed businessmen who plans and executes the perfect murder. After pretending to leave for the day and then climbing back up into the building (on the outside), he sneaks back in, and kills his boss, Simon Carala (Jean Wall). See, Julien and Simon’s wife, Florence (Jeanne Moreau), are in love and they want Simon out of the way. But then, after Julien kills Simon, he gets trapped in an elevator on his way out of the building. Once planning to rendezvous with the newly widowed Florence, Julien now must spend the majority of the film desperately trying to free himself. After waiting a long while, Florence assumes she has been stood up by her lover and falls into a depressed stupor. She wanders through the city as a score from Miles Davis cries, non-diegetically, around her. But that’s not all. A young working-class couple, Veronique (Yori Bertin) and Louis (Georges Poujouly), steal Julien’s expensive car, which lies abandoned on the street. Because he leaves his identification in the car, the kids also steal his identity, spiriting away to a nearby motel and checking in under Julien’s name. There, they commit a terrible crime that ultimately leads the police back to the entrapped Julien, still frozen in his escape from the original murder. In Elevator to the Gallows, Malle illustrates that, regardless of one’s initial (physical and financial) place in society, personal misery is rampant and leads to selfishness, which in turn leads to cruelty. Moreover, the film says, it is impossible for anyone to truly escape who they are—a theme Malle particularly emphasizes by trapping his transgressors in torturous solitude across the isobaric regions of the city. The film takes place within three different spaces (three neighborhoods, three sets), but all of these characters are united by the single crime perpetrated by Julien against his innocent boss. Julien’s action, therefore, begins a chain-reaction of anguish that ripples through various degrees of people who know him, but also through various degrees of the city. Moreover, as the individuals least involved, Veronique and Louis attempt to get farther and farther away from Julien, by moving to the peripheries of Paris; their desperation to abandon their former lives grows stronger until they, in turn, commit a crime to do so—a crime that is on par with the murder Julien had committed in Paris. Therefore, Paris is symbolically a uniting force—a haunting being capable of reaching out to its exiting parts and drawing them back in, forcing them to reconcile with their both their past selves and the origin of their circumstance. Film noir is about solitude, bleakness… reaching for someone and failing to hold on, solving a mystery and finding out that the answer means nothing. It is often about the relationship between a solitary figure and a single, large impersonal environment. Usually a city. Sometimes, even Paris. In noir, despite traversing a place from end to end, it is often impossible to extricate oneself from certain troubles and futile to attempt to move to a better place; ultimately, attempting either thing can only contribute to more destruction in an otherwise depraved world. Though they are equally just as lost, the young lovers Veronique and Louis are separated from the couple Florence and Julien by miles of pavement. However, Veronique and Louis are able to suffer together, while Florence and Julien are not. They are both in the center of Paris—but frustrated Julien is stuck in a fancy office building, while disheartened Florence wanders the Champs-Élysées. They both do not know where the other is, even though they are close; they are divided only by vertical structures, as opposed to horizontal planes. However, even before they are separated by Julien’s detainment, Paris separates them; in fact, they are never in a scene together. The film opens on a phone conversation between the lovers, and there are numerous crosscuts between close-up shots of their faces as they clutch the phone receivers and murmur adorations to one another. The intrusiveness of this shot removes the concept of “setting,” so the lovers aren’t positioned in the physical city of Paris so much as in their own, un-geographical, all-consuming world. However, when they hang up, the camera pulls back, and captures Julien setting down the receiver on a desk while zooming out to reveal that he has been standing in a high office in a building in the financial center of Paris. Only after their phone conversation ends, do the burdens of physical spaces (as opposed to emotional ones)—namely the realistic city of Paris—become relevant to the characters, and the story. This crosscutting technique, featuring shots of the lovers from different angles, also creates the illusion that they are looking at one another, or are at least near one another, when they are, in fact, vastly separated by the same Parisian structures that will divide them when they are detached from one another. However, when they are truly separated, they are still united by similar editing—scenes of Julien’s escape attempts from the elevator are often followed by shots of the miserable Florence, dolefully wandering around the streets of Paris; they are united with one another in and out of contact. In addition, though Florence has the ability to walk wherever she wants, she is just as trapped as Julien, who cannot extricate himself from his metal prison. She does not know what to do or where to go, as she does not know where her lover is or what has happened to her husband, so the wide streets of the Rue des Champs-Élysées serve as a contrast to her worried and despondent psyche. Though she is mobile, and he is not, they are equally held captive by Paris for what they have conspired to do. They are further cornered by the city when their ability to see structures diminishes. As Florence walks through Paris, night begins to fall, and soon, she is barely lit among the shadows. The severe use of chiaroscuro by cinematographer Henri Decaë turns her into a ghostly figure, almost glowing and gliding. Similarly, Julien, stuck in a metal box after hours in an office building, is shrouded in darkness as well, and uses a lit cigarette lighter to provide a little illumination. This same chiaroscuro unites them in darkness, but also melts the barriers presented by Paris and presents a tragic, romantic view of their relationship—they are two halves (quite literally, because their dark clothing and the scant lighting only illuminates half their bodies) searching space for completion in one another. Here, the lighting not only gets darker, but the camera also captures more close-ups of her troubled face, and she begins to walk into buildings (such as a café, and the police station); the highly characteristic Paris begins to disappear from behind her, and soon, she is merely a miserable figure wandering in a city. Similarly, in the dark of his elevator, it is impossible to tell that Julien is in Paris, or, rather, that he is anywhere near Florence. Therefore, although Paris is an impenetrable urban obstacle course for the lovers during the day, it is an unrecognizable purgatory by night. Malle stresses Paris as a presiding force that spatially manipulates transgressors and traps them for their crimes until their actions are brought to light. He uses the genre’s preoccupation with solitary location to illuminate the pessimistic themes of the fruitlessness of mobility to better states, and the destruction caused by those who dare to challenge the order of life, blowing up and scaling down Paris to show the chain reaction of cruelty brought on by human selfishness, explaining that any amount of freedom within a physical space does not represent freedom from a physical space. Anyway, I think about this as I walk home from the Eiffel Tower, as it glitters behind me in the dark. View the full article