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Most of the generation of authors that produced the Golden Age of detective fiction–that brief era when the puzzle plot purportedly reigned supreme in mysteries–had departed not only from the field but from life itself when, over a half-century ago in the Spring of 1972, British crime writer and critic Julian Symons published Bloody Murder, his landmark study of mystery, detective and crime writing (there is a difference among them to be sure) and the first popular survey of the misdeeds and mayhem genre since Howard Haycraft published Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, three decades earlier in 1941. (Revised editions of Bloody Murder followed in 1985 and 1992.) What made Bloody Murder significant in a way that Haycraft’s book, notable as it was, had never been, is indicated by Symon’ subtitle, From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. As one of the contemporary reviewers of Bloody Murder put it: [Symons] accepts that fiction’s criminal records are primarily entertainments but contends that inside this limit there is a point at which escapist and serious writing converge. He defines this as the crime novel. Here, puzzles take second place to characterisation: the concern is not with murder but its consequences and it is not simply man who is indicted but society itself….Not everyone will accept the thesis—the [detective fiction] diehards will insist that the puzzle is all—but few will be able to resist the cause. In writing Bloody Murder, Julian Symons desired, like an earnest virologist, to isolate and quarantine from the crime novel the frivolous but infectiously entertaining detective story, which in his view had for too long hampered, if not prevented, the genre from being taken, and taking itself, seriously. Symons wanted both practitioners and public alike to appreciate that “[i]n the highest reaches of the crime novel, it is possible to create works of [literary] art”—if admittedly ones “of a slightly flawed kind,” on account of their intrinsic dependence on “sensationalism,” which went back to the crime novel’s bloodstained roots in the days of the Victorian sensation novel of Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood and others. In the dark hearts of even superior crime novelists like himself, Symons avowed, there still was something “that demands the puzzle element in a book, or at least the element of uncertainty and suspense, as a diabetic demands insulin.” He did not say, as the consciously highbrow mystery-hating critic Edmund Wilson doubtlessly would have, “as a drug addict needs a fix,” although it actually would have been a more accurate expression of the point which Symons was making: that there was something slightly seamy in all forms of fictional mystery mongering—intellectual slumming, as it were. Nevertheless, Symons wanted it understood that the crime novel was a loftier mystery form than detective fiction, concerning itself with more than mere puzzles. 1972 seemed a propitious year indeed for finally putting the “detective story” back in its proper place as lesser entertainment and apotheosizing the serious novel of crime. (Note that Symons does not dignify the tale of detection with the word “novel.). The generation which had produced so many prime specimens of the detective novel—I will use the word novel—was passing rapidly from the world’s mortal scene. The review of Bloody Murder quoted above, which appeared in the pages of The Guardian on April 6, 1972, came from the hand of Matthew Coady, successor in the “Criminal Records” crime fiction review column to Anthony Berkeley (under his pen name Francis Iles), who had died just a little over a year earlier, on March 9, 1971. Along with Agatha Christie, who would pass away on January 12, 1976, Berkeley had been all that remained on earth of the original founders of the Detection Club. The Club had been formed in London over four decades earlier, in 1930, as a social organization for eminent practitioners of the fine art of clued murder, with the goal, in part, of distinguishing themselves from the purveyors of cheap thrills, or the shocker-schlockers, if you will, such as Edgar Wallace, “Sapper” and Sax Rohmer, inheritors of the lowly Victorian penny dreadful tradition. Then pushing eighty years of age, Anthony Berkeley had steadfastly remained in the reviewing saddle throughout most of 1970. On October 15 he submitted his final column, which included a review of one of Agatha Christie’s last and least novels, a muddled political thriller, or something, entitled Passenger to Frankfurt, which, bad as it was, became an international bestseller anyway, the seemingly immortal Queen of Crime being critically bulletproof. About the lamentable Frankfurt Berkeley had little on point to say (What could one in kindness say?), aside from an unintentionally amusing and characteristically cranky bit of carping about a vintage crime thriller device: “Of all the idiotic conventions attached to the thriller the silliest is the idea that a car whizzing around a corner at high speed can be aimed at an intended victim who has, quite unseen, stepped off the pavement into the roadway at exactly the right moment. Mrs. Agatha Christie uses this twice in Passenger to Frankfurt.” One can almost hear that final triumphant Harrumph! from the curmudgeonly reviewer. Agatha Christie happily enjoyed a brief Indian summer the next year with her goodish, if by no means great, Miss Marple detective novel Nemesis, but she then published two more mysteries, Elephants Can Remember (1972) and Postern of Fate (1973), which were remarkable only as confirming indicators of the author’s rapidly diminishing powers. (Of Christie, Symons wrote with uncharacteristic indulgence in the first edition of Bloody Murder, when the Queen of Crime was still alive and active as a writer: “she is alone among Golden Age writers in remaining as readable as ever and her capacity sometimes still to bring off a staggering conjuring trick.”). In 1972, ailing Anglophile American mystery writer John Dickson Carr published his final mystery novel, The Hungry Goblin, which evidently is deemed so poor that is has never been reprinted in the last half-century. Anthony Berkeley himself had not published a mystery novel in over three decades, having contented himself with reviewing them under his Francis Iles pseudonym. While there were still a few old-timers around plying the clued murder trade with appreciable zest, like Ngaio Marsh, Michael Innes, Gladys Mitchell and Rex Stout their ranks were sadly diminished, like those of Great War veterans at an Armistice Day commemoration. Even Edmund Crispin, for a few brief years after the war the wunderkind of detective fiction but now an alcoholic slowly dying by degrees, struggled, zombie-like, for over a decade to complete a final, muddled mystery before his tragic, demise in 1978 at the age of fifty-six. Julian Symons was well aware of all the death and dreary decline going on around him. He began writing the first edition of Bloody Murder in 1970 at the relatively youthful age of fifty-eight, after having retired from a decade-long stint as the crime fiction reviewer for the Sunday Times. (His replacement had been his philosophical opposite Edmund Crispin.) In his critical magnum opus, which he completed the following year, Symons predicted this dire fate for the future of the “detective story”: “A declining market. Some detective stories will continue to be written, but as the old masters and mistresses fade away, fewer and fewer of them will be pleasing to lovers of the Golden Age.” Symons omitted from his 1972 study any mention of rising British murder mistresses P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Moyes, Catherine Aird and Anne Morice, all of whom wrote mysteries in the classic puzzler vein and were more than acceptable to “lovers of the Golden Age.” The Seventies would see continued success for all five of these authors–particularly James and Rendell, both of whom, much to their irritation, the press dubbed successors to Agatha Christie–and additional notable practitioners of detective fiction joined the murder muster during the decade, like masters Peter Lovesey and Reginald Hill, both of whom actually had published their first detective novels in 1970, and masters Colin Dexter, Robert Barnard and Simon Brett, who came along but a few years later. By 1992 Symons, now himself an octogenarian just a couple of years away from his own demise, was still doggedly insisting that the market for the detective story “has declined,” although face-savingly he added, albeit somewhat confusingly, that “few old-fashioned [emphasis added] detective stories are written.” By old-fashioned did he mean books with country houses, floorplans, men-about-town, flippant flappers, stately butlers, terrified maids, bodies in libraries and other such impedimenta? Writers like P. D. James and Ruth Rendell hardly had need of such devices to create classic detective fiction. Yet “A Postscript for the Nineties,” the valedictory chapter of the third edition of Bloody Murder, was filled with the author’s grim forebodings for crime writing’s future. In it, Symons lamented the sadistic violence of Elmore Leonard’s “strip-cartoon” neo-noir tales like L. A. Confidential (1990) and Thomas Harris’ gruesome serial killer novel The Silence of the Lambs (1989) (“the literary equivalent of a video-nasty”), as well as the startling, disturbing rise of…the criminal cozy. Seemingly contradicting his prior claim in the same volume that the detective story market had declined, Symons acknowledged, with a certain sense of rue, that the previous reports (mostly his) of the death of detective fiction had in fact been grossly exaggerated, especially in his native country, as evidenced by the success of what he called the cozy mystery, which he conflated with puzzle-oriented detective fiction: In Britain the cosy crime story still flourishes, as it does nowhere else in the world. We are a long way away from the fairy-tale crime world of Agatha Christie, but a large percentage of the mystery stories in Britain are deliberately flippant about crimes and their outcome….it would seem that the British crime story has always been marked by its lighthearted approach, from the easy jokiness of [E. C. Bentley’s] Philip Trent through the elaborate fancifulness of Michael Innes and Edward [sic!] Crispin to the show businesses mysteries of Simon Brett. A similar refusal to be serious about anything except the detective and the puzzle can be found on the distaff side in a line running from Patricia Wentworth through Margery Allingham and Christianna Brand to half a dozen current exponents of crime as light comedy. This is a product for which there is still a steady demand, as the recent foundation in the United States of a club for the preservation of the Cosy Crime Story shows [this a patronizing refence to the founding of Malice Domestic in 1989]. Symons attempted to distinguish James, Rendell, Lovesey and Hill, long leading lights in what might be termed the Silver Age of detective fiction, from their Golden Age forbears, praising their more “serious” crime novels, like James’ A Taste for Death (1986), where the author takes time to visit a housing project and the murderer is revealed two-thirds of the way through the novel. But the truth is these authors wrote plenteous traditional, puzzle-oriented detective fiction, just like their forbears from the Golden Age did (embroidered, to be sure, with sound characterization and social observation). Today of the aforementioned quartet only Peter Lovesey, now himself an octogenarian, is alive and active, yet younger writers have carried on with the writing of detective fiction in the classic vein, which has now achieved a popular and critical cachet that it has not enjoyed since the Golden Age itself. New reprints of Golden Age mysteries, many by authors long out-of-print and forgotten, appear every month. It becomes more obvious with each passing year that Julian Symons grievously underestimated the public’s passion for “mere puzzles.” It becomes more obvious with each passing year that Julian Symons grievously underestimated the public’s passion for “mere puzzles.” The blunt dismissiveness which Julian Symons in Bloody Murder directs toward many prominent writers of vintage detective fiction might startle those unfamiliar with his writing (and perhaps some of those who think they are familiar with it.) His animadversion against those detective writers, like Freeman Wills Crofts, John Street and Henry Wade, whom he notoriously termed “Humdrum,” is well-known and I have written about this at length in my 2012 book Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery, so I will not go into that again here. Here I want to look at Symons’ disparagement of other Golden Age greats, beginning with one of the towering figures of the era, Dorothy L. Sayers, whom, in the first edition of Bloody Murder, Symons repeatedly disrespects, as I am sure Sayers herself would have seen it, by omitting the “L.” from her name. (The “L.” is restored in the third edition.) Admittedly Symons likes such Golden Age stalwarts as Agatha Christie—though he declares condescendingly that she was not a good writer from a literary standpoint and that her fictive world was a “fairyland”—John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, Anthony Berkeley (primarily on account of his Francis Iles crime novels) and even S. S. Van Dine, creator of the extraordinarily obnoxious amateur sleuth Philo Vance. When it comes to Dorothy L. Sayers, however, he is coruscating in his assessment: There can be no doubt that by any reasonable standards applied to writing, as distinct from plotting, she is pompous and boring. Every book contains enormous amounts of padding, in the form of conversations which, although they may have a distinct connection with the plot, are spread over a dozen pages where the point could be covered in as many lines. This might be forgivable if what was said had some intrinsic interest, but these dialogues are carried on between stereotyped figures…who have nothing at all to say, but only a veiled clue to communicate….[Lord Peter Wimsey] is a caricature of an English aristocrat conceived with an immensely snobbish, loving seriousness….[His knowledge is] asserted rather than demonstrated, and when demonstration is attempted it is sometimes wrong….Add to this the casual anti-Semitism…and you have a portrait of what might be thought an unattractive character. It should be added that many women readers adore him….[Sayers’ later novels] show, with the exception of the lively Murder Must Advertise, an increasing pretentiousness, a dismal sentimentality, and a slackening of the close plotting that had been her chief virtue. Gaudy Night is essentially a “woman’s novel” full of the most tedious pseudo-serious chat between characters that goes on for page after page. Rather more gently—the Sayers stuff is so sharp-edged as to seem personal—Margery Allingham is faulted for not retiring Campion to the home for superannuated aristocratic sleuths (her books “would have been better still without the presence of the detective who belonged to an earlier time and a different tradition”), while Ngaio Marsh is taken to task for seeking “refuge from [the depiction of] real emotional problems in the official investigation and interrogation of suspects,” with Symons adding chidingly that “one is bound to regret that she did not take her fine talent more seriously.” Repeatedly he stresses his belief that the presence of a series sleuth was a ball-and-chain around the narratives of Allingham and Marsh, shackling their artistic development as crime writers. Christianna Brand and Elizabeth Ferrars, younger writers who were both born in 1907 and first published crime novels near the end of the Golden Age, Symons classifies cursorily in the third edition of Bloody Murder as being among the better writers of what he terms the women’s crime novel. Brand, in his view, “often wrote too hastily for her own good,” while Ferrars (who was still alive at the time) “has never completely fulfilled her talent.” Symons is forthrightly critical of Josephine Tey, long boosted by her many devout fans, including American critic and Symons contemporary Anthony Boucher, as an original and rare talent in crime fiction and what might be termed the Fifth Crime Queen (Christie, Sayers, Allinhgam, Marsh, and sometimes Tey). He dismisses examples of her crime writing as essentially belonging to the between-the-wars era and “really rather dull.” Coming off no better are Ellis Peters, author of the beloved Brother Cadfael mysteries (“I have tried three books without getting to the end of one”); Gladys Mitchell, creator of one of the genre’s most memorable women sleuths, Dame Beatrice Adela LeStrange Bradley (“an average Humdrum….tediously fanciful….impenetrable”); and once hugely popular American mystery writers Mary Roberts Rinehart (“crime stories which have the air of being written specifically for maiden aunts”) and Mignon Eberhart, the latter of whom barely rates from the critic a sniffy mention. In his view Eberhart, along with American mystery writer Elizabeth Daly and Britishers Anthony Gilbert (Lucy Beatrice Malleson, an early member of the Detection Club still alive when Bloody Murder was published), and Georgette Heyer, simply number among the “dozens” of “epigones” of Christie, Sayers, Allingham, Marsh, Rinehart, et al, and hence did not merit serious critical consideration. For a nanosecond Patricia Wentworth, creator of the Miss Silver mysteries, pops up in the text as numbering, along with the aforementioned Margery Allingham and Christianna Brand, among the writers who refused “to be serious about anything except the detective and the puzzle”—a charge I find baffling in all three cases. How refreshing it was for me, as a lover of vintage detective fiction, to turn back from the Symons of the pious and preachy Bloody Murder decades, the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, to some of the critics’ earlier crime fiction columns from the 1940s and 1950s—what might be termed his lighthearted, pre-dogma days. There I spied find him lustily singing an altogether more praiseful tune about some of these very same detective writers he in varying degrees disparaged in Bloody Murder, as well as others who were entirely omitted from the pages of his critical tome. It seems that Julian Symons—like Raymond Chandler, another famous critic of Golden Age detective fiction (see Chandler’s notorious essay “The Simple Art of Murder” and an earlier Crimereads article by me)—was of a mind rather more divided on the matter of mystery writing than he willingly acknowledged. *** One of the biggest shocks from Julian Symons’ “Life, People—And Books” column in the Manchester Evening News is a 1947 piece concerning Dorothy L. Sayers and the ardent devotion which Symons professes to have for her criminal handiwork. “A few weeks ago, Miss Dorothy Sayers, when asked if she was working on a new detective story, replied that she was not,” Symons, then just thirty-five, reported. “She added that she did not even read new detective stories nowadays, because our present-day mysteries were so markedly inferior to those of a few years ago. In common with many other readers I regard Miss Sayers’ defection with dismay. I hope she is really deceiving us, and is quietly hatching out a new story with a brand-new detective.” Were Symons’ tears real human ones, or rather those of the false sort reputedly shed by the crocodile? Were Symons’ tears real human ones, or rather those of the false sort reputedly shed by the crocodile? Perhaps his expressed hope that Sayers write a new story with a brand-new detective really amounted to a wish that she would finally rid the world of Lord Peter Wimsey. Yet Symons claimed to regard her defection from detection with dismay. Symons even agreed with Sayers than detective fiction in 1947 was worse than that from a decade earlier, although he praised Christie, Carr and, more surprisingly, Ngaio Marsh, “who gives us every year a piece of social satire with a mystery neatly embedded in it.” No complaints from Symons here about the “long and tedious post-murder examinations of suspects” in Marsh’s mysteries, as there would be in Bloody Murder. Incredibly, in a 1949 column Symons laments the loss of the “superman detective,” observing: “The detective as a heroic or remarkable figure has almost vanished from the detective story—and a certain liveliness has gone with him.” Fortunately for lovers of Super Sleuths there was “Mrs. Agatha Christie,” who “may fairly be called the queen of detective story writers now that Miss Dorothy Sayers has abdicated the throne; and it may be fitting that, like Miss Sayers, she should have created one of the few memorable modern detectives—the little Belgian Hercule Poirot….It is very noticeable that the best of Miss Christie’s stories are those in which Poirot appears.” So, did Symons actually like Lord Peter Wimsey at this time, then? And if the presence of series detectives marred the work of Allingham and Marsh, why did it not do so with Christie and Sayers? It seems that back in the late Forties, Symons really liked those series detective puzzles and he was forthright in declaring his admiration for them, even at the expense of the old Victorian masters of mystery whom he would later celebrate in Bloody Murder. “There are few more ingenious detective writers than Ellery Queen and Carter Dickson [John Dickson Carr],” Symons admiringly observed in 1949, sounding like a twenty-first century miracle problem fanboy with a blog. “It is no exaggeration to say that in the way they set and explain their puzzles these writers can knock Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle (or any other old-fashioned detective writer) into a cocked hat.” By 1955, Symons, still conducting his crime column for the Manchester Evening News, divulged, in a review of Ngaio Marsh’s latest mystery Scales of Justice, that he asked for “something more from the modern detective story than a puzzle.” Yet it seems that, at that time anyway, Marsh amply fulfilled Symons’ need: The classical formula for the detective story is well known. Introduce your suspects in some rural scene. Let them include the local vicar, doctor and solicitor. Kill off the most unpleasant of them, and then proceed to long, long interrogations by the police and amateur detectives….Ngaio Marsh uses this old formula brilliantly….There are interrogations galore, conducted by that gentlemanly professional Chief Detective-Inspector Roderick Alleyn. How is it that Miss Marsh managed to make all this so wonderfully entertaining? The prime reason is that like all good modern crime writers she is also a lively novelist. There is something individual about her characters. The interrogation of suspects, as she manages it, reveals a genuine clash of wits….Yet—and this is a rare thing—she can provide the puzzle, too. The solution…is highly ingenious. This is one of Miss Marsh’s two or three best books. It is assured of a place on the top shelf of crime fiction. By the time of Bloody Murder, however, this “top shelf” Marsh had been, it seems, carelessly discarded into the bargain bin. Yet in 1955 Inspector Alleyn and his endless inquisitions had not served as an obstacle to Symons’ reading enjoyment–indeed, far from it. What seems to have changed is something within Symons himself. A quarter of a century later, Symons selected, to represent Ngaio Marsh for the 1980 Collins Crime Club Jubilee Reprint series which he edited, not Scales of Justice but rather Spinsters in Jeopardy, an improbable thriller that no one else I know of has ever praised as remotely close to being one of Marsh’s best books. Citing “the problems facing the writer [like Marsh and, presumably, himself] who wants to create characters, yet knows the need to present and organize a puzzle,” Symons declared that happily “Marsh has sometimes escaped from these problems by writing another kind of book, the simple, pure, enjoyable thriller in which the puzzle is a secondary element. Spinsters in Jeopardy is such a story.” In the same column in which he reviewed Marsh’s Scales of Justice, Symons assessed the detective novel Watson’s Choice by Gladys Mitchell. You remember Gladys Mitchell: the author dismissed as “tediously fanciful” in Bloody Murder. Back in 1955 Symons gratefully deemed the author “an old reliable if ever there was one” and her latest book, based on an “ingenious idea,” “well worked out” with “several good touches” (though “rather lacking in liveliness”). Admittedly this is a mixed review, but it is far from the curt dismissal which Mitchell receives in Bloody Murder, where Symons acted as if he could barely recall the poor woman (another longtime colleague of his in the Detection Club). At least Gladys Mitchell merited a paragraph’s worth of notice in Bloody Murder (the third edition, anyway; in the first she is merely mentioned in passing). Other authors whom Symons once professed actually to enjoy receive only the slightest of passing, patronizing nods in his survey. Take Elizabeth Daly, for example. In Bloody Murder she is written off simply as one of the “Golden Age writers whose work was once highly popular.” However, in 1954 Symons reviewed her final detective novel, The Book of the Crime, in the Manchester Evening News, pronouncing it “a typical example of her craft, and very enjoyable it is too.” What was Daly’s craft, precisely? “[R]ather cozily horrific stories with a strong feminine appeal.” This cozy feminine appeal evidently had become lost on Symons by 1972. Then there is the strange case of Mary Fitt, who in the Forties and Fifties had at least three mystery books which Symons highly praised in the Manchester Evening News: the early Forties novels Death and Mary Dazill and Requiem for Robert, reprinted as Penguin paperbacks (and recently reprinted in the present day by Moonstone Press with introductions by me, I should disclose), and the short story collection The Man Who Shot Birds. Both novels Symons lavishly lauded as crime novels of character and atmosphere, although he does not use the term explicitly. The short story collection he raved as a model puzzler: “The detective short story is a most difficult form—much more difficult than the full-length novel, as anyone who has tried to write both [like Symons] will know—and Miss Fitt handles it very skillfully….the mysteries themselves are highly ingenious, with false clues laid and misleading suggestions made most cunningly in limited space.” By 1972, however, Symons seemingly had forgotten that the talented Miss Fitt had ever existed, obviously much preferring to write rapturously about the talented Mr. Ripley and his sociopathic ilk. So far I have detailed only women writers whom Symons left by the wayside or seriously downgraded. One male writer who suffered the same treatment, however, was versatile queer mainstream author Rupert Croft-Cooke, who under his pseudonym Leo Bruce was during the Fifties and Sixties one of the finest exponents of the classic series detective story, which Symons insisted in Bloody Murder was rapidly wasting. In 1948 Penguin reprinted Bruce’s classic debut Sergeant Beef detective novel Case for Three Detectives, which simultaneously was an ingenious locked room puzzler and an affectionate parody of Great Detectives Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot and Father Brown. Symons’ praise for this superb detective tale, which may have influenced his own poor attempt at satirizing Philo Vance in The Immaterial Murder Case, was high indeed: I read “Case for Three Detectives” more than ten years ago and thought highly of it then. I have refreshed my memory and can confirm that this is one of the most slyly amusing tales of detection that has yet been written. Lord Simon Plimsoll, Monsieur Amer Picon and Monsignor Smith are three amateur detectives who bear a wicked resemblance to the famous creations of Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie and the late G. K. Chesterton. Their investigation of the mysterious death of Mary Thurston and the account of the ingenious theories which are destroyed by solid, stolid sergeant Beef is very good fun. Yet not a whisper of Bruce—a personal favorite of my own, I should divulge—is heard in Bloody Murder! Seemingly “one of the most slyly amusing tales of detection that has yet been written” had been utterly forgotten by Symons. *** Why all these later revisions and omissions on Symons’ part? Was the critic simply an insincere, cynical flatterer in those Manchester Evening News pieces, vigorously puffing books for which he actually cared little or nothing? Certainly, there are always imperatives for reviewers to give good notices to the books they review. Such notices make publishers happy, not to mention readers, who are forever on the hunt for new books to read and understandably do not like just to be told how dreadful everything is. And making both publishers and readers happy makes the reviewers’ employers happy too, which is no small consideration. All too often one has, after all, to sing for one’s supper. Additionally, most reviewers naturally dislike offending others. A review I once posted at my blog The Passing Tramp, which criticized Julian Symons’ own first essay in crime fiction, that weak little number The Immaterial Murder Case (1945), provoked a onetime internet friend of mine of over a decade’s standing, a former blogger of fine distinction and discriminating taste who is also something of a Symons fanboy (there are two of them I definitely know of), to accuse me, in rather off-color language, of wanting to “make Julian Symons my bitch,” which rather took me aback. (I can assure you I have no desire to make anyone “my bitch.”) In Symons’ case, he himself was inducted into the Detection Club in 1950 and became a member of the Crime Writers Association when it was founded in 1953, meaning that he informally socialized with many of the very writers he was reviewing. Yet throughout his life Symons seems to me to have been a man remarkably forthcoming, if not to say overbearing, with his opinions and not especially concerned about hurting the tender feelings of either his author colleagues or their fans. Get tougher skins, was his attitude, it is just honest criticism. Or as he explicitly put it: “The good should be praised, the eccentric tolerated, the bad excoriated….What could be more reasonable? Yet after such knowledge, what forgiveness? The approach did not make universally loved.” By the Sixties, Symons’ critical views had begun their tectonic shift. By the Sixties, Symons’ critical views had begun their tectonic shift. He was coming around to the “fact” which he pronounced in his introduction to Criminal Practices, a collection of his essays on crime writing published in 1994, the year of his death, that “in the fifties the crime story was still comparatively in its infancy. In terms of characterization, attention to forensic detail and police procedure, and truth to the lives and language of the many millions of people below the upper and middle classes, the best British crime stories were immensely inferior to those written now.” Back in the Sixties an incensed Margery Allingham took Symons’ mixed notices of her novels in the Sunday Times so personally that she implored the Times to keep her books out of his nitpicking hands. In 1964 she wrote defiantly of hoping with her next book, The Mind Readers (1965), her final book published during her lifetime, to “bust out of the AWFUL Gollancz/Symons/MWA [disparagingly referencing not merely Symons but the publisher Victor Gollancz and the Mystery Writers of America] stale blood and fumbling sex blanket bath and have FUN again”–which probably would only have confirmed Symons’ reservations about her writing had he been aware of this. Over two decades later, Symons, somewhat bemusedly observing what he termed the late Eighties “Allingham revival”—a series adapting her mysteries had been launched in the United Kingdom and her books reprinted in paperback—speculated thar this event was, in part, “a very minor accompaniment to the Thatcherite counter-revolution,” though he also credited the author’s exuberant romanticism, love for the “baroque and odd,” sharp eye for detail and “her surprising capacity to order and dovetail” her fanciful material into “plausible plots” (a very fair assessment of Allingham, in my view). While Allingham was complaining about the negativity of Symons reviews back in the Sixties, however, the hugely prolific and popular British crime writer John Creasey, founder of the Crime Writers Association, was pugnaciously putting Allingham’s distraught words into action by proposing nothing less than expelling Symons from the CWA. The critic recalled mordantly in a 1989 article on Creasey that the ban was stay in effect “until such time as I started to write constructive, helpful reviews.” Lamented Symons of his former friend: “That different levels of writing existed was something that John did not understand, and that his books should stay unreviewed, or be reviewed caustically, really upset him.” Before the board of the CWA, according to Symons, Creasey indignantly “read out a long account of my critical misdeeds—and received no support [for his motion].” As Symons tells it, he and Creasey had still not really reconciled at the latter man’s death in 1973, a year after the publication of Bloody Murder, which probably had not helped the cause of reconciliation with such observations of Creasey’s work by Symons as “the writing of the books is never equal to their often clever conceptions, and his people think and behave with a schoolboyish naivete.” (In the Criminal Practices introduction five years later, by the by, Symons states that Creasey’s CWA expulsion motion was “decisively defeated”—not quite the same thing as its having received “no support,” but I digress.) Across the pond, in the New York Times in 1977, not long after the death of esteemed American mystery writer Rex Stout, creator of Great Detective Nero Wolfe, the ever-iconoclastic Symons, perhaps slightly bloodied but still bowed, in a review of Stout’s recently published biography boldly waved a virtual red flag in front of the faces of the author’s many fans, writing: At the risk of outraging an accepted American myth, it must be said that [Stout biographer Joseph] McAleer absurdly inflates the [Nero Wolfe] stories’ merit….Stout was simply not in the same stylistic league with Hammett, Chandler or Ross Macdonald. His prose is energetic and efficient, nothing more. His plots lack the metronomic precision of Ellery Queen’s….The truth is Stout wrote too much too easily, and that like all crime writers dependent on repeated introduction of the same characters—including Doyle and Simenon—his work was subject to the law of diminishing returns….[The admittedly memorable Wolfe] operates in the context of books that are consistently entertaining, but for the most part just as consistently forgettable. Letters of protest poured in from Stout’s American mythmakers, who questioned whether Symons really must have been said any of this. Methodically Symons responded, at one point complaining with a rather surprising sensitivity, given his years of bluntly questioning the talents and tastes, respectively, of other mystery writers and countrywide mystery readerships, that one of the letter writers, the late Richard Reis, Chairman of the English Department at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, had been “gratuitously insulting” to him. (Of Symons’ motivations in writing the hit piece Reis had speculated acidly: “As a far less successful mystery writer than Stout, he splenetically attacks a biographer, when his real target is the biographer’s subject.”) How appalled Symons would have been, then, to have known that at this time the widely admired English suspense writer Mary Stewart (another name which does not appear in Bloody Murder) in a letter to Jospeh McAleer wrote with utter, withering contempt of the man: You also know that Rex Stout is an incomparably better writer than the pathetic and jealous Symons (or any of the grubby merchants he admires), and that this is the motivation of the review….I have met [Symons]; he is a boor, and a second-rate writer, and has no sense of style—I mean, he would not know good English if he saw it. The biggest compliment Julian Symons can pay to any book is to dislike it. Contrary to Richard Reis and Mary Stewart, I do not doubt that in both his early book reviews and his later ones Symons was expressing his genuinely held beliefs at the time, not concerning himself with how painful they were for some. What, then, produced the changes in his beliefs? I think that Symons’ views gradually hardened into inflexible dogma, producing in Bloody Murder a crusading book in which he was determined, finally, to put puzzle-oriented detective fiction in its lesser literary (or non-literary) place for once and all as the sort of freak he now deemed it: a changeling which had mischievously replaced the crime novel in its cradle back in the Twenties and Thirties and continued ever since to receive nostalgic genuflection from fond fans. Additionally, I think Symons genuinely had gotten bored with detective fiction, having had to read so many pedestrian examples of it in his capacity as the Sunday Times mystery reviewer for over a decade. (Dorothy L. Sayers had only been able to stick it out in that job for a couple of years). In the third edition of Bloody Murder Symons recalls that “I gave up [reviewing mystery fiction at the Sunday Times] chiefly because I knew I was becoming stale, so that my reaction on seeing a parcel of new books was not the appropriate slight quickening of the pulse marking the hope of a masterpiece. I opened it rather with the expectation that the contents would fulfill my belief that almost all crime writers publish too much.” Or, as he put it near the end of his life in 1994, in his introduction to Criminal Practices: I wrote the column for more than a decade, received the whole flood of crime stories that came into the paper…and so read thousands of books in the genre during that period. But ‘read’ needs inverted commas, for many of the books that piled up on my desk were ill-written, poorly-crafted rubbish…. Until I was threatened by burial under this mass of rubbish, I had not realized the full weight of it. The fact is that ninety percent of crime stories, mystery stories, thrillers, are written by people with no feeling for language, place or character. Once I understood that, there followed a desire [on my part] to make distinctions…to abandon the alkaline flatness of most writing about crime stories in favor of something sharper, sometimes even picric. Ironically Bloody Murder—that lauded, landmark study of mystery, detective and crime fiction—was written by a man nearing his seventh decade who had lost his youthful enthusiasm for detective fiction and become to a great degree jaded with the very genre to which he had devoted his book, after over a decade of having hoped every two weeks, rather unreasonably it seems to me, for glittering masterpieces to cross his desk, rather than solid examples of able craftsmanship. (How many masterpieces does mainstream fiction produce on a biweekly basis?) While he was able to summon up something of his bygone juvenile passion for Christie, Queen, Carr and even, in a true testament to the power of adolescent nostalgia, S. S. Van Dine and Philo Vance—what he really now desperately wanted was for murder fiction to bloody mean something, for tales of violent death to say something meaningful to him about human life. “Bloody Murder…makes discriminations between thoroughbreds and hacks,” the ailing Symons declared in a cri de cœur near the end of the ‘92 edition, published not long before his death. “It was part of my hope and intention that the book would, through such discriminations, raise the status of the best crime stories so that they would be considered seriously as imaginative fictions.” The books by “serious” crime writers like Patricia Highsmith, Dashiell Hammett, Eric Ambler, he still found rewarding reading, as ever he had earlier in his life, but so many other makers of mystery seem largely to have lost whatever luster they had previously held for him. As he reiterated in the third edition of Bloody Murder for readers who perhaps should have paid more attention to him two decades earlier: “although this book is in general a history of the crime story, it also reflects personal preferences.” The book also reflected, as I hope I have shown, Julian Symons’ profound personal boredom in his middle and later years with the great dead mass of the mystery genre, which, as he must have seen it, was sinking helplessly into the mire of mediocrity by the law of its own weight (to borrow from the Book of Revelation). Perhaps Bloody Murder could more tellingly have been titled Bloody Bored. View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death (Harper) “An absolutely engrossing tale…written with the abundance of whimsy and dark humor that seems to permeate nearly everything that Horowitz creates. Kudos to anyone who can figure this one out!” –Booklist Sara Paretsky, Pay Dirt (William Morrow) “Paretsky’s phenomenal gifts for significant and riveting stories, lacerating dialogue, rich psychology, and barbed humor reach tornadic force.” –Booklist Alyssa Cole, One of Us Knows (William Morrow) “Cole mixes a spooky, isolated setting with a hint of the gothic and a storyline that isn’t afraid to tackle tough social issues and creates a book that is both entertaining and insightful.” –Library Journal Nick Medina, Indian Burial Ground (Berkley) “Nick Medina blends myth and reality, supernatural danger and ordinary human menace into a story that will pull your heartstrings even as it shreds your nerves. Like the alligators lurking in its pages, Indian Burial Ground will swallow you whole.” –Ana Reyes David Baldacci, A Calamity of Souls (Grand Central) “A Calamity of Souls by David Baldacci is the immovable object of history slamming into the irresistible force of truth. An examination of a fractured place and time where the mores of the past were confronted by the implacable ferocious tenacity of justice. A tour de force.” –S.A. Cosby Karen Jennings, Crooked Seeds (Hogarth) “Bleak and provocative . . . leaves readers with much to ponder about South Africa’s painful history . . . There are no easy answers in Jennings’s knotty narrative.” –Publishers Weekly Megan Campisi, The Widow Spy (Atria) “Campisi follows up Sin Eater with a gripping and richly imagined mystery…With piercing prose and a nimble balance of emotion and suspense, Campisi expertly melds the best of historical mystery with top-shelf literary fiction. Amy Stewart and Sarah Waters fans, take note: this is a must-read.” –Publishers Weekly K.T. Nguyen, You Know What You Did (Dutton) “The descriptions of Annie’s OCD…and her struggles to control it are particularly visceral…[An] exploration of generational trauma and mental illness…There is healing to be had in the journey and the ending.” –Kirkus Reviews V. Castro, Immortal Pleasures (Del Rey) “History comes to undead life in this bloody tale of vampiric vengeance….An engrossing tale of monstrous life—human and otherwise.” –Kirkus Reviews Josh Young and Manfred Westphal, The Fixer: Moguls, Mobsters, Movie Stars, and Marilyn (Grand Central) “A fast-paced, fascinating tell-all that’s a previously untold account of the seamy side of Hollywood, politics, and mob activity.” Library Journal View the full article

The prisoner hauled before a Brooklyn judge in 1928 did not look the part of one of the most notorious criminals in history. He squinted at the world through round-framed spectacles. When he removed his broad-brimmed hat, the sudden exposure of the baldness beneath added years to his appearance. “A pudgy little man, with only a vague collar of chestnut hair,” was the assessment of James Kilgalen of the International News Service, one of the journalists in the courtroom that day. “He seemed old and tired.” Other newsmen were more charitable in their descriptions. One called him “a meek lamb.” Another thought he could pass for a retired stockbroker. Yet another found him “still alert of mind and fast in repartee.” “He’s one of the smartest men I’ve ever met,” noted one of the detectives who had hunted him down and arrested him for passing a worthless check. “Might have been a judge, or a doctor,” and he could have “gone far” if he had not been “too lazy to use his mind in the right direction.” The man was sixty-eight, born the year before the outbreak of the Civil War. He had been arrested more than a dozen times and had spent years in New York’s infamous Sing Sing prison. John McCarthy – also known as George C. Parker and William McCloundy – launched his swindling career by selling shares in the Brooklyn Bridge. (Brooklyn Times Union, July 8, 1928) His name? That depends. Some knew him as William McCloundy, others as Mr. Roberts or Mr. Taylor. When he was posing as the captain of an ocean liner, he went by George C. Parker. He had brazenly signed the name “I.O.U. O’Brien” on checks and gotten away with the ruse. Police officers who remembered the day he walked out of a prison where he was serving time, posing as the man in charge, nicknamed him “The Warden.” Lately he had been calling himself Albert Murch. The New York police considered him “an aristocrat of crookdom.” In the press, he was crowned the “dean of confidence men” and “the biggest of the big-time” swindlers. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle hailed his signature fraud as “the epic of the confidence world.” His real name appears to have been John McCarthy. And he was the con man who sold the Brooklyn Bridge. * * * It was hailed as the Eighth Wonder of the World. The Brooklyn Bridge was “the greatest work wrought by the hand of man” in the nineteenth century, Brooklyn’s Daily Eagle proclaimed on the day it officially opened in May 1883, a “monument to human ingenuity, mechanical genius and engineering skill.” It was then the longest suspension bridge in the world, spanning the East River to connect Manhattan Island to Brooklyn. The span and roadway approaches stretched for more than a mile. The soaring, Gothic-arched stone towers were, for a time, the tallest structures in the Western Hemisphere. It took more than a dozen years to build, at a cost of $16 million – the equivalent of about $425 million today. It was simply, the New York Tribune asserted, “the greatest Bridge the world ever saw.” The vaudeville comedians who delighted in bashing the city at the eastern end of the bridge, however, remained unconvinced. “All that trouble,” one wisecracked, “just to get to Brooklyn.” The bridge was also a magnet for crime. Allegations of fraud, graft, and political corruption dogged the massive project during the construction phase. Once it opened, thousands of people crossed on foot every day and crammed the walkways for weekend strolls, offering tempting targets for pickpockets. “The bridge is likely to be a favorite field for the operations of … the light fingered fraternity,” noted one press report. The warning came too late for James Cruikshank, a Long Island man who inspected the bridge soon after it opened and was relieved of his gold watch. The bridge had its own police force and, in 1885 alone, officers made 228 arrests for offenses ranging from drunkenness and assault to theft and swindling. Even one of the boys hawking newspapers to passersby near the bridge tried to get a piece of the action. One tearfully told a potential customer he needed to sell his stack of papers or his parents would beat him when he got home, then absent-mindedly switched sob stories and claimed he was an orphan. A vintage postcard showing pedestrians crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, which opened in 1883. (Author Collection) The bridge itself was a money-making machine. For many years tolls were collected from everyone who crossed – ten cents for a horse-drawn wagon, three cents for pedestrians and cyclists – and the pennies added up. Annual revenues topped a half-million dollars by the end of 1884. Despite the bridge’s grandeur and financial prospects, the editor of a Milwaukee paper was unimpressed and offered some pointed advice to his readers. “If anybody comes around here selling stock in that bridge,” he warned, “don’t any of you invest a dollar.” Sometime in 1885, with the bridge a commercial success, McCloundy/Parker/O’Brien/McCarthy/Murch – let’s call him McCarthy – hit upon the idea of selling New York’s newest landmark, or a stake in it, at least. The twenty-five-year-old swindler, in the words of journalist James Kilgalen, was suave, “a ‘slick’ talker, and a dapper dresser” who found it easy “to strike up acquaintance with gullible strangers.” McCarthy prided himself on ignoring rubes and preying on bigger fish. He seemed to relish the challenge of duping well-heeled victims who should have known better. It was “the clever ones that fall,” he once told New York detective Charles Kane. ___________________________________ This article first appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. ___________________________________ McCarthy was “a smooth, high pressure salesman invariably giving his customers a good ‘bargain,’” Kane recalled. To sell his bridge investment scheme, the detective explained, he touted “the very fine return” to be made from toll revenues “in view of the large amount of traffic involved.” His first target was a visitor from Indiana, who was hooked by the sales pitch and agreed to McCarthy’s terms: $1,000 cash and $4,000 more to be paid in quarterly instalments. The day he handed over the initial $1,000, of course, was the last time he saw McCarthy. How many times McCarthy pulled the swindle is unknown. Kilgalen, writing in 1928, claimed he sold the bridge “over and over” and the Brooklyn Times Union reported that his bridge frauds alone netted $50,000. And it’s not clear that he first sold the bridge in 1885 – the scam does not appear to have attracted press coverage at the time, and some later accounts claim he pioneered the fraud in 1895 or 1901. If the latter date is correct, he may have stolen the idea from Edward Brasso, who was reportedly doing a brisk business of selling the bridge to Italian newcomers as early as 1900. McCarthy soon moved on to a new but similar scam, selling lots in New York’s City Hall Park to unwary New Englanders for $25,000. His first conviction for grand larceny, in 1901, earned him two and a half years in Sing Sing. Soon after his release he was convicted of forgery and imprisoned for four more years. He was sent back to Sing Sing in 1911 for theft and passing a worthless check. Convictions for forgery in 1917 and theft in 1923 put him once again behind bars. After being caught trying to loosen a stone in the wall of his cell, he devised an easier way to escape: he got his hands on the warden’s hat and coat, confidently exchanged greetings with guards as he passed, and walked out of the prison. He was soon recaptured and the caper added six months to his sentence. New York police estimated McCarthy reaped as much as a million dollars during his swindling career. His victims, they believed, included prominent people who refused to report their losses, fearing they would be subjected to public ridicule. And it was easier to separate fools from their money “in the good old days,” he lamented as detectives questioned him about his criminal record, “before the police became so systematic.” He seemed unable to pass up a chance to make a quick buck at someone else’s expense. As he awaited his court appearance in 1928, one of his suspected victims was brought to the police station to see if he could identify McCarthy. The man, who had been swindled out of $10,000, did not recognize him and, as he left, the incorrigible and ever-optimistic con man sensed an opportunity. “Let me have your card,” he said. “We may be able to do business some time.” * * * McCarthy’s final scam was modest. The bogus check he tried to cash in 1928 was for a measly $150. But when the police picked him up in New Jersey for that offense, he was on the verge of a big payday. He was about to sell ten building lots in Asbury Park to a realtor for $17,000. McCarthy, of course, did not own the lots. His timing could not have been worse. Under a state law introduced in 1926, repeat offenders convicted of a fourth felony received an automatic sentence of life in prison. McCarthy’s criminal record put him well over the threshold and he was dispatched to his alma mater, Sing Sing, in November 1928. “It looks like a sad Christmas,” noted one news report. “for the last of the old time crooks.” He died in prison eight years later. McCarthy was sixty-eight in 1928 when his arrest on a minor fraud charge put him in prison for the rest of his life. (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 23, 1928) The Detroit Free Press thought there was a lesson in McCarthy’s audacious fraud. “Crooks are sent into the world to teach those who want to get rich quick that there is no royal road to riches,” the paper editorialized. “They will go on selling Brooklyn bridges as long as people can be induced to buy them, which looks as if it might be until the end of time.” McCarthy’s swindle has become the ultimate con, synonymous with gullibility and blind trust. The catchphrase, “if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you” has been around almost as long as the bridge has been standing. When New Yorkers celebrated the bridge’s one hundredth birthday in 1983 with parades and fireworks, the structure went on sale for real. Bits of wooden walkway and slivers of cable salvaged during repair work were sold as souvenirs, and ten dollars bought a certificate purporting to be the deed to the bridge, signed by Sid E. Slicker. On the eve of the celebrations, New York cab driver Lou Henderson told a journalist the iconic bridge ranked with the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building as a landmark tourists wanted to see. “Brooklyn Bridge is still the most, the greatest,” he said. “One of these days I’m gonna get lucky and find a buyer.” View the full article

I can’t write crime. That’s the troubling discovery I made while drafting my second novel Sing, I. As a discipline of the crime genre for decades, particularly detective fiction and more recently true crime, I initially found my inability to write crime deeply frustrating and surprising. I knew from the outset that Sing, I would begin with a store holdup and the robber would continue to commit local crimes and evade capture. As I wrote on, I fully expected Ester, my main character and one of two victims of the store holdup, to become increasingly embroiled in the hunt for the repeat offender—along the lines of a heart-trembling psychological thriller. But Sing, I’s story and characters refused to bend to my will and instead insisted on veering full-throttle to the domestic. This is where I risk admitting to the uncanny sense that I’m not always in charge when writing. It’s like I’m sometimes the sock and storytelling is the moving hand. A more grounded interpretation is that when I stop forcing, the best story flows. Thus, through an ultimately copacetic weaving of my and my characters’ choices, Sing, I defied the crime genre and remained within my wheelhouse of family-centered fiction. And as it turned out, surrendering my hopes of writing a great crime novel wasn’t Sing, I’s most painstaking demand on me. While writing always comes with challenges, and too often the practice can be a sadistic master, that end point of a finished, organic manuscript came at a price I never anticipated. Sing, I plunged me into a reckoning with my long-held devotion to the crime genre and forced me to face how trauma, my own and others, complicates that affinity. We writers inflict suffering. It’s how we test and reveal and change our characters. There’s no story without torment. Before Sing, I, I felt little to no hesitancy in putting my characters through mounting obstacles and pain. It’s what this job requires and I undertook the task with the necessary care and unflinching aplomb. But Sing, I as a would-be crime novel required me to go further than ever before in how I beset my characters and I found that there were punitive places I could not enter. As the characters in Sing, I built from splinters to fully-formed, from idea to real, the more I resisted subjecting them to the typical tropes of the crime genre. In particular, I found myself balking at depicting violence, especially against my women characters, and at giving their assailant a voice. So much so, I started questioning my entire longtime appetite for crime books, podcasts, and TV and film. All of which overwhelmingly center offenses against girls and women that are sexual, gruesome, and fatal in nature. Misogynistic, heinous crimes that mirror those inflicted in real life, daily, globally, relentlessly. Did I really want to add to a canon that portrays that horrific reality? In wrestling with that, I returned in time. I first tuned in to crime as a teen, addicted to the lighter fare offered by the ilk of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. I couldn’t get enough of their gripping plots and brilliant sleuthing, the mystery and suspense. I loved trying to figure out whodunit before it was revealed on the page or screen and delighted when my best guesses were almost always foiled. It was wonderfully reassuring that the novels’ shrewd detectives would unfailingly solve the complex case. Somewhat unconsciously at the time, I liked that these suspenseful mysteries were never of a sexual nature and weren’t always murders. When they were homicides, the men and women victims were glimpsed as mere corpses and rarely if ever fully realized characters. That meant I didn’t need to feel anything for the deceased, they were more prop than real, and instead I could immerse myself in the wholly satisfying task of unravelling clues, eliminating suspects, catching the killer, and seeing justice served. In this way, crime fiction delivered what my own life hadn’t. The adult family friend who had sexually abused me from age 5 to 13 got away with his crimes and would never stand accused and convicted. As a young adult, my crime reading and watching tastes graduated to such favorites as Patricia Highsmith, Ken Follett, and P.D. James. I later went through a James Patterson phase and The Firm was my gateway to John Grisham. The early 2000s brought me to grisly offerings from Dan Brown and Dennis Lehane that didn’t hold back on our potential for depravity, particularly men’s. Later in the decade, Stieg Larsson’s books were among the more memorable fixes for my thriller habit. In most of the crime I read and watched as an adult, I was increasingly struck by how far the pendulum had swung toward the violent and graphic—storylines rife with sensationalized plots, grotesque crimes, romanticized psychopaths, and objectified women victims. This sharply shifted my teen perspective on corpses as props. Where once this ploy served to showcase the story’s whodunit elements and minimize triggering readers and viewers, the modern motif of women’s often desecrated dead bodies as set design reflects an atrocious reality: Women are considered less than and too often are deemed dispensable if not outright culpable in their brutal ends. But while I became more selective and less tolerant in the crime I consumed, I remained an avid fan. I felt sure I would take these sensibilities into the crafting of Sing, I and deliver a crime novel that contained the best of the genre and refused to delve into the gratuitous, exploitative, and dehumanizing. Further, I was fat on endless inspiration thanks to the ongoing burgeoning growth of women crime writers and felt eager to add my silenced voice to theirs—full of a sense of kinship with women bursting with provocative stories to tell and seizing their time. I wanted to be among the ranks of those crime writers who wield their power to reclaim and reframe women’s experiences on their own terms. These authors are taking back control and turning the abhorrent into art, into meaning, into condemnation, into a revolution. No longer will girls and women allow ourselves to be gaslit, trivialized, appropriated, and dismissed. No longer will we minimize our experiences and trauma for the comfort and convenience of others, least of all our tormentors and patriarchy as a whole. But despite my trying to avail myself of this higher calling in the early drafts of Sing, I, I continued to fail in my efforts to write crime. Somewhere in this angst, I confronted the obvious if difficult. Perhaps my being a victim of childhood abuse and partner abuse in young adulthood prevented me from engaging with the crime genre as a writer. Like maybe I could consume it but I couldn’t go in-depth and create it. Cue my delve into considerations of control. In no news to anyone, trauma victims find comfort in structure and wrangling chaos into order. So, I already knew that part of the crime genre’s hold over me was in how it placed me in a controlled environment. There, I could allow unwanted feelings like fear and shame and ickiness to resurface in an interaction where I was essentially safe and could pull myself out of at any time. More often than not, I find these situations less triggering and more recalibrating. Each time I reexperienced the unwanted awfulness that certain scenes on the page and screen evoked, my inner disturbances invariably lessened rather than ratcheted. This, alongside the satisfying sense of a case solved and justice served that I touched on above, largely soothed me. There’s also something ironically reassuring and sanity-saving in seeing the terribleness of the world reflected back to us through pop culture when too many power systems for their own gains seek to deny women the validity of what we see, hear, feel, think, and experience. Given all this, I concluded that my PTSD hadn’t hindered my ability to write crime. When I returned to the spark that started Sing, I, I hit on exactly what had—beyond, that is, my willful characters. When I was ten years old, I was the first to arrive at the scene of a store holdup right as three thieves exited, guffawing and hauling large black plastic bags lumpy with cartons of cigarettes and bottles of alcohol. The injured salesclerk remained behind the wooden counter, looking as violated and asunder as the plundered shelves and littered, liquored floor. His assailants had stabbed him in the head with a broken bottle and he stood struggling for breath, his face a thick half-mask of blood. His lone clear eye, it was a light gone out. To this day, that holdup haunts me. I fully intended to at least put it to good use in Sing, I as a crime novel. That’s where Sing, I, like the fictional detectives I favor, turned out to be way smarter than me. Sing, I wound up focusing on the traumatic impact and ripple effects of crimes that are all-too-often considered minor. It became a raison d’etre to center victims and show the devastation caused to them by supposedly lesser crimes and trespasses. In a world where people have become ever more desensitized and uncaring, Sing, I testifies to how traumatic ostensibly insignificant crimes can be. I worry about and am frightened by people’s increasing inhumanity and that’s where I perhaps most see my guiding hand in Sing, I. The novel is an appeal to our dwindling empathy levels and growing lack of sympathy for human suffering. Just as several of Sing, I’s characters find their way to embracing their true selves, I’ve come to celebrate the fact that Sing, I is not a crime novel as I’d first hoped. It is its own story entirely. *** View the full article

Spring is here, summer is coming, and June is Pride Month. What does this mean? Lots of great new queer mysteries and thrillers to read on the beach or at the park on a lazy Sunday. This season, many beloved characters return: Katrina Carrasco’s queer 19th-century outlaw Alma Rosales, John Copenhaver’s 1950s crime-solving (and—committing) lesbian duo Judy Nightingale and Philippa Watson, Dharma Kelleher’s goth tattoo artist and vigilante Avery Byrne, and Robyn Gigl’s passionate trans defense attorney, Erin McCabe. New characters and scenarios also abound: Leslie Karst and Jack Ori begin a new series set in beautiful Hawaii and on an ominous college campus, respectively. Anne Laughlin returns with a standalone thriller about a sober living home, and David Pederson offers a motley cast of suspects in mid-century Michigan. Craig Willse debuts a steamy, Highsmith-esque thriller, and Paul David Gould takes us to Moscow in the 1990s in his first novel. Queer Crime Writers* represents a vibrant part of the crime fiction world; as well, the diversity of subgenres being written by LGBTQ+ authors continues to impress and entertain with their range. So, this spring, return to some old friends you’ve been missing or get to know a few new ones; you won’t be disappointed. *Queer Crime Writers is an organization that advocates for LGBTQIA+ crime fiction authors and creates community for them. April 2024 Molten Death, by Leslie Karst (4/2) Author of the Sally Solari Mysteries and Justice is Served, Karst begins a new series with Molten Death: An Orchid Isle Mystery. Retired caterer Valerie Corbin and her wife vacation on the Big Island while Valerie is grieving the recent death of her brother. They visit an active lava flow with their friend, Isaac. Valerie ventures off alone and then witnesses what she believes is a body in the molten lava. By the time she alerts the others, the body has disappeared, and law enforcement finds no evidence of it. Unable to let go of what she saw, she investigates on her own. Valerie seeks justice for the unknown victim against the backdrop of the gorgeous setting of Hawaii, including parts the tourists don’t often see. Karst uses this amateur sleuth’s adventure to dive into the Hawaiian culture and the complex politics of Hawaiian tourism. Rough Trade, by Katrina Carrasco (4/9) This follow-up to the critically acclaimed The Best Bad Things continues the story of a gang of opium smugglers in the rough-and-tumble world of the late 19th-century Pacific Northwest. Outlaw and genderfluid Alma Rosales, also known as Jack, is making a fortune moving opium with their smuggling crew. Trouble starts when two dead men with connections to the opium trade bring the attention of the police. Alma moves quickly to keep the heat off their operation but is distracted by the appearance of Bess Spencer, their ex-lover and old partner at the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Furthering the tension, a crew member’s new lover starts asking questions. Is he an undercover agent? Alma must decide how far they’ll go to protect their people. Carrasco reimagines queer communities as she considers the pleasures and costs of satisfying desire. Providence, by Craig Willse (4/28) Debut author Craig Willse’s Providence is a thriller in the vein of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. The shine has come off English professor Mark Lausson’s career in higher education, but things change when handsome, self-possessed sophomore Tyler Cunningham enters his classroom; the young man shows him another, more exciting way of living, and they begin a steamy affair. At first, the rush of sex and secrets is thrilling, but as Lausson gets further in over his head, Tyler’s true nature starts to surface. As he demands more and more, Lausson discovers that his paramour can’t be trusted. Willse explores how feelings of isolation and longing can warp our perceptions of ourselves, others, and moral boundaries. May 2024 A Plague of Grackles, by Dharma Kelleher (5/7) In book three of Kelleher’s Avery Byrne Goth Vigilante series, Avery takes justice into her hands when malevolent forces target a fellow transgender woman in a swatting attack. A tattoo artist by day, Byrne moonlights as a vigilante and links the swatting to a string of vicious assaults on members of the trans community. Unsurprisingly, the police refuse to take action, so Avery, passionate about protecting her community, teams up with her girlfriend, Roz, to get to the bottom of the conspiracy in a fast-paced, blood-soaked whirlwind that shakes them to their cores. As the story unfolds, Avery pushes her limits and faces past trauma to stand up for what’s right. Kelleher uses the vehicle of a gritty thriller to communicate important truths about trans lives today. Clean Kill, by Anne Laughlin (5/14) The four-time Goldie award winner Anne Laughlin returns with her seventh suspenseful stand-alone queer crime thriller. Clean Kill’s former Chicago homicide detective, Nicky Sullivan, has taken a job managing a sober living facility, Olive Street House, a home to ten newly recovered alcoholics. When a resident is murdered, Nicky sets out to catch the killer. Soon, more female residents with similar profiles are murdered, each with a connection to Nicky. Working with her former detective partner and his beautiful new sidekick, Joanne Parker, she searches for a serial killer with a vendetta against newly relapsed women. Soon, Nicky becomes a prime suspect of the police and a prime target of the killer. With themes of redemption, recovery, and courage, Clean Kill will appeal to fans of Sarah Paretsky and Sue Grafton. Puzzles Can Be Deadly, by David Pederson (5/14) An author of a number of historical series, including the seven-book Heath Barrington series set in 1940s Milwaukee and the three-book Mason Adler series set in post-WWII Phoenix, Pederson now takes us to 1950s Ann Arbor. His new mid-century sleuths, Skip Valentine and Henry Finch, encounter a cast of eccentric characters on their trip to visit Henry’s uncle: a bizarre old woman who worships the memory of her lost son, a nun with hidden secrets, a spinster housekeeper with a secret, an angry young man with a troubled past, and a neighbor who claims to talk to dead people at séances. When a vicious murder occurs, they find they have a bunch of rather unusual suspects. June 2024 Hall of Mirrors, by John Copenhaver (6/4) Following up Lambda Award-winning The Savage Kind, the second book in the trilogy, Hall of Mirrors, opens in 1954. Lionel Kane watches as his Washington, DC apartment erupts in flames while his lover and writing partner, Roger Raymond, is inside. Police declare the fire a suicide, but Lionel refuses to believe it, even though distraught Roger had recently been fired from his job at the State Department, a victim of the anti-gay crusade, the Lavender Scare. Judy Nightingale and Philippa Watson, lesbian amateur sleuths from the first novel, have been tracking Adrian Bogdan, a spy and vicious serial killer protected by powerful forces in the government. Has the pursuit of their archvillain brought a murderer to Roger and Lionel’s door? Or are they involved in Roger’s death? This layered book explores the homophobic political paranoia of mid-century America. Last Dance at the Discotheque for Deviants, by Paul David Gould (6/4) Having spent years in the former Soviet Union earning a degree in journalism, Gould uses that experience to write his Last Dance at the Discotheque for Deviants. Set in post-Soviet 1993 Moscow, where new liberties have been introduced, like the freedom to travel abroad, to make money, and to explore the new gay underground, the story focuses on twenty-one-year-old Kostya, who comes out of the closet to find love and pursue his dream of working in the theater. However, betrayals and tragedy beset him, his family, and the boys he loves. In this debut thriller, Gould explores the deeply human experience of living in a country and culture undergoing startling change. When the world you know crumbles, the question becomes: what will take its place? Open Secrets, by Jack Ori (6/7) Five years after escaping from a vicious pedophile, non-binary college student CJ Jennings hopes to change hearts and minds with a campus podcast. When a frightened child reaches out for help, the freshman responds, making a grim discovery. The victim, a bright and promising researcher, was entangled in so many secrets and scandals that more than one person wanted her dead. As CJ navigates a dangerous maze of lies, manipulations, and coverups, they find themselves up against the university: an institution willing to protect its reputation at all costs. CJ must find the truth before the dirty administration stops them and casts the blame elsewhere. Fans of dark academia will find this first book in the Cedarwood Campus Mysteries particularly appealing. Nothing But the Truth, by Robyn Gigl (6/25) In this fourth installment of Gigl’s popular award-winning Erin McCabe series, Erin, a transgendered attorney, and her partner, Duane Swisher, take on a racially charged, headline-making case. Their client, a gay white cop, is accused of killing a black investigative reporter. The evidence says he did it, but Erin believes him when he says he was set up by a nefarious group of state troopers known as the Lords of Discipline. Now, the Lords have a bigger mission—to silence anyone who can expose their existence and name its members, people like the murdered man who was writing an expose on the group. As it becomes clear corruption runs deep in the local government, Erin and Duane are in a battle against powerful forces to protect their client from becoming their next victim. View the full article

Throughout the shooting of The Exorcist and into postproduction and publicity, a half-dozen crew members would insist that Linda Blair had emerged from the experience unscathed, but barely a year after the film wrapped, she was burning rubber in the Hollywood fast lane and, before the end of the decade, she would become a teenage alcoholic, bizarrely mirroring one of the dismal TV movies she starred in after establishing Regan MacNeil as an offbeat cultural touchstone. Her brief but lurid interval in the spotlight culminated with a notorious drug bust in 1977. “The Exorcist, for me, lasted a lifetime,” Blair told A&E. Like Jason Miller, accosted in the streets by disturbed strangers looking for salvation, Blair suffered from her newfound fame. Wherever she went for a few years post-Exorcist, she drew attention for more than her celebrity status. “I scared thousands of people,” she told Fangoria, “and they would look at me—they would see me in a supermarket, in a clothing store—and their reaction was unbelievable. I freaked people out.” While Blair may have inadvertently terrorized gullible shoppers, what she suffered far exceeded the average jump scare. Just as America produced thousands of lost souls convinced that they were in the grip of Satan after viewing The Exorcist, so, too, did it mass-produce ticket buyers delusional enough to believe that Linda Blair was truly some sort of diabolical entity. “The whole devil thing never hit me,” she told Fangoria. “But because it was about the supernatural, demonology, et cetera, the types of people that were attracted to the film were pretty intense people. And I attracted a lot of weird people around me.” Unable to differentiate between fact and fiction, those weird people not only flinched when they saw Blair in person, but some of them also sent death threats to her. When she was only fifteen, Blair had a security detail shadowing her. Then, a few years after the height of Exorcist-mania, stalkers began harassing her. “When I was eighteen, it kind of happened again and the FBI was in on it, because the man called the police and said he was going to kill me. So I lived in a hideout from that and then the drug bust came on top of it, for something I really did not do. Because of that, the paper nicely enough published my address, so the guy had my address. I’d come home at night and be so horrified. It’s just so unbelievable.” In 1974, the gossip pages also reported that Blair was dating twenty-five-year-old Australian rock singer Rick Springfield. A few months after they were first spotted as an item, Blair and Springfield began living together in Los Angeles. At the time, Blair was fifteen, not yet old enough to meet the minimum for the age of consent, but her mother had returned to Connecticut in 1974, leaving Blair under the watch of her older sister, Deborah. “When I lived with my friend in Hollywood, mother was a little upset at first because I was only fifteen,” Blair told the New York Daily News. “But then she said there was no use trying to stand in the way of love. I didn’t feel precocious about living with a man at that age. It was great. I never dated much in school. You know, I didn’t have boyfriends in the traditional sense. When I did date, it was in groups. So when I came to California, I went straight from living at home to living with a man.” In an episode of Intimate Portrait on the Lifetime network, the narrative voice-over bizarrely refers to the Springfield-Blair pairing as a May-December romance when it was clearly something else. In fact, it was illegal. Springfield put his own time-capsule spin on it for an episode of Biography on A&E. “Now, probably I would have been burned at the stake, you know. But back then, it was just, ‘Oooh, that’s kind of weird,’ you know. But to us, it was very, very natural.” *** If her role as a demon-possessed child was not enough to distinguish Blair from the run-of-the-mill teen, her subsequent appearances gave her an even darker allure. The mid-1970s saw Blair develop enough negative connotations to make her a strange symbol of the prurient American id, and she achieved this unique distinction mostly in middle-class living rooms across the country. The made-for-television movie had become a family tradition since See How They Run premiered in 1964, often bringing hot-button sociological issues to the masses, with a campy, moralistic, slapdash quality that would differentiate it, negatively, of course, from Hollywood releases. Early on, however, made-for-television productions had higher ambitions. The first film shot specifically for television had been The Killers, directed by action auteur Don Siegel and starring Lee Marvin, Ronald Reagan, Angie Dickinson, and John Cassavetes, but its high-octane violence sent executives scurrying despite the all-star cast and crew. Instead of airing on NBC as scheduled, The Killers received an unexpected theatrical run. A decade later, Linda Blair starred in Born Innocent, a teen delinquency melodrama so coarse it lit up switchboards at NBC and launched sensitive newspaper columnists into overdrive. In her first screen appearance since The Exorcist (other than a guest spot on a game show), Blair plays Christine Parker, a serial runaway who winds up, at fourteen, sentenced to a juvenile detention center after her dysfunctional parents sign her over to the state. In the notorious centerpiece of the film, made doubly uncomfortable because of its duration, Christine is held down by her cellmates and raped with a plunger handle. Subsequent outrage from viewers forced NBC to issue defensive statements as to the sociological value of the film; even so, it excised the scene completely for future airings. Although Blair is sexualized throughout, with a pair of strip searches, two shower scenes, and the gruesome rape, Born Innocent, despite its undeniable salaciousness and a certain amount of implausibility, is remarkably effective. As the rare prime-time downer, Born Innocent also stood out from The Wonderful World of Disney, Happy Days, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Good Times, and The Waltons the same way Charles Manson might have stood out at a debutante ball. The documentary look solidifies the nightmare quality of Born Innocent, and the climax, which includes a scorched-earth riot and a closing scene of the now-hardened Blair joining her rapists and walking off into the distance just before the credits roll, feels almost revolutionary. No happy ending? No redemption? No mawkish speeches of the kind William Peter Blatty cherished? Nearly fifty years later, Born Innocent looks like some sort of terrible accident, one that completely blindsided a country watching the first season of Little House on the Prairie by the millions. Born Innocent seemed to say, to hell with the so-called “Family Hour.” A ratings bonanza for NBC, Born Innocent set the template for Blair as a teen martyr to whom not just bad things happen—but very, very bad things. After a small role in the disaster spectacular Airport 1975, Blair returned to the airwaves with Sarah T.—Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic (directed by Richard Donner just before his breakthrough with The Omen), another grim problem film with a title that effectively functions as a spoiler. Unlike Born Innocent, Sarah T. is less objective and far more preachy; nonetheless, Blair spends a significant amount of on-screen time suffering, and, in keeping with her sexualization, at one point, her character offers to trade her body for a bottle of liquor. When Blair headlined another made-for-television extravaganza a year later (this time for ABC), she became a national concern. As an illiterate farm girl kidnapped by an escaped mental patient (played by Martin Sheen) in Sweet Hostage, Blair, now sixteen, seemed less typecast than the subject of some sort of cultural experiment. At the Buffalo News, Jeff Simon seemed genuinely disturbed by the Linda Blair phenomenon. “How is it possible that a teenage actress can be making a busy career out of being violated, abused, and victimized, most often in kinky circumstances?” he asked. Other media observers and critics also began hand-wringing. “Linda Blair has become a professional victim,” wrote Bill Carter of the Baltimore Sun. The Philadelphia Inquirer referred to her as an “exhibitionist,” and the Los Angeles Times imagined that Blair was probably asking herself, “Who do you have to know to get OUT of this business?” In 1977, when shooting began for what became known as Exorcist II: The Heretic, however, Blair had serious life-imitating-art problems to confront. By then, her eyebrow-raising relationship with Rick Springfield was over, but Blair had adopted certain hedonistic aspects of the rock ’n’ roll outlook. This included, among other indulgences, liquor. In no time, Blair became a real-life Sarah T., struggling with alcoholism and depression. She explained the extent of her dependency to Lifetime: “For me to drink whatever I could find—vodka, a quart or a bottle, whatever, I don’t know, I can’t remember—but it was enough for me to know that I could get to bed and that I would pass out.” Although Blair would deny it, to the extent of making statements that suggested reaction formation, drugs were also a problem. In fact, her insatiable appetite for drugs scared off her latest boyfriend, Glenn Hughes, ex-bass player for English proto-metal band Deep Purple and singer/multi-instrumentalist for hard-rock road warriors Trapeze, back in America for a reunion tour. Despite having lived out the excesses of the rock era in the early 1970s and having once told NME, “I spent a million dollars on cocaine,” Hughes could not keep pace with Blair. “Like me, Linda was very addicted to cocaine,” he told Classic Rock magazine in 2011. “I was going completely off the rails, and I’d found the perfect mate to stumble along with. We shacked up in LA together. It’s incredible to tell you this, but I broke up with her because she was doing so much blow, it was getting too intense for me to be around. We’d be driving down Sunset Boulevard, she’d have an ounce of cocaine in a bag on her lap, and she’d be doing bumps through a straw. I’m thinking: ‘Any minute now they’re going to catch us; whoever they are.’ I couldn’t deal with it. A few weeks after we broke up she got busted.” On December 20, 1977, Linda Blair made global headlines when she was arrested on drug charges and linked to a nationwide cocaine ring. An army of DEA agents and local law enforcement descended on her small Cape Cod house in Wilton, Connecticut, to serve a fugitive warrant from Jacksonville, Florida. While there, officers discovered amphetamine (aka speed) on the premises, another setback for Blair, who now had a possession charge tacked onto a rap sheet that would soon include conspiracy to buy or sell cocaine. Blair was whisked to the Court of Common Pleas in Stamford for arraignment, where she posted bail of $2,500, with a continuance date scheduled for January 18. In the meantime, Duval County (Florida) requested her extradition to Jacksonville, where the fugitive warrant had originated. In October 1977, Blair had traveled to Florida to attend the funeral of Ronnie Van Zant, lead singer of Lynyrd Skynyrd, who had died in an airplane crash. As part of the rock circuit (she had dated, among other musicians, Tommy Bolin of Deep Purple, Jim Dandy of Black Oak Arkansas, and Glenn Hughes of Trapeze and had even graced the cover of a recent issue of Circus magazine devoted to “Women in Rock”), Blair roamed through a netherworld of barbiturates, crank, coke, morphine, and quaaludes, with heroin still an occasional risk (Tim Buckley had overdosed in 1975 and Bolin in 1976, and the loss of Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison was still fresh). “At the funeral, someone suggested we do some cocaine,” Blair told the San Francisco Examiner. “I felt horrible, and dope was not on my mind. But a senator’s daughter convinced me, and we bought some coke from a couple who were also breeding basenji dogs.” Unfortunately for Blair, it turned out the dog breeders were also part of a sprawling drug ring. “All I wanted to do was buy a dog,” she would later claim. Instead, Blair purchased cocaine at least twice from George Edward Mangum, described by the press as a cocaine wholesaler from Jacksonville, Florida. While Blair fought extradition to Florida, her case in Connecticut proceeded. On April 17, 1978, the state dropped charges when Blair agreed to enroll in a rehab program. She exited court laughing that day, but four months later she was busted again, this time carrying two joints in her purse at Calgary International Airport. To save her already precarious career, Blair made public statements about drug use that were, on the surface, nothing short of preposterous. “Some people may not understand, but I really don’t like them,” she wrote in the Bridgeport Telegram. “When any of my friends get involved with drugs I get upset.” If so, then her rock roll lifestyle, where nearly everyone she knew snorted, swallowed, or shot up, must have left her perpetually distressed. And the Jacksonville bust was no exception: while Blair would continue to maintain her innocence about drug use in general, her recent ex-boyfriend Teddy Hartlett and her bodyguard Steve Schiano were also part of the dragnet, charged with conspiracy to buy or sell cocaine. (Both would eventually plead guilty to lesser charges.) After Connecticut and Florida both dropped state charges against Blair, a federal grand jury returned a sealed indictment in Jacksonville in March 1979. When testimony revealed that Blair had twice purchased cocaine in small amounts (each time one-quarter of an ounce), it was clear that what she was interested in was personal use. Because Blair was already implicated, prosecutors might have viewed her as someone who could shine a spotlight on the drug scourge, which would only get exponentially worse in the 1980s and 1990s. Most likely, the charges against Blair were trumped-up: although it was established that she used drugs and had purchased cocaine from Mangum, the conspiracy angle suggested prosecutorial overreach. In the late 1970s, half the entertainment industry in America snorted cocaine. It was one of several adult fads produced by the “Me Decade,” along with porno chic films, wife swapping, and primal scream therapy. “The whole town of Hollywood is coked out of its head,” Robert Blake once said. Eventually, after numerous court appearances, Blair would plead guilty to conspiracy to possess cocaine, a federal misdemeanor, and a significant downgrade from the original charge of intent to distribute. In June 1979, U.S. District Judge Howell W. Melton sentenced her to three years of probation and ordered her to perform community outreach. Blair was also fined $5,000. At around the same time as her legal ordeal began, Blair saw Exorcist II: The Heretic bomb in theaters, damaging her hopes of a future beyond sensationalized TV appearances. Directed by John Boorman, who had distinguished himself with the modernist noir Point Blank and the harrowing blockbuster Deliverance, Exorcist II was one of the great follies in Hollywood. Its initial reception from opening weekend viewers (which included uproarious laughter and debris hurled at the screen) so disturbed Warner Bros. that Boorman raced back to Hollywood to reedit the film and shoot new scenes in hopes of salvaging the international box office. Nothing, however, could be done to improve such absurdity. After her plea deal, Blair returned to the screen in Roller Boogie, produced by Brooklyn huckster Irwin Yablans to exploit the twin fads of disco and roller skating. A minor hit, Roller Boogie was the last time Blair would star in anything even remotely resembling a mainstream release until 1990 when she spoofed her role as Regan MacNeil for the Carolco film Repossessed. Her projects were notable for alternating between pure exploitation and sheer ineptitude, with a few films shelved before achieving delayed release and others so fringe that they were ignored when they opened. Savage Island, for example, was a grind-house cheapie that almost defies description: It is three different films cobbled together to produce one seventy-nine-minute adventure in sleazoid trash. After cutting and pasting parts of two existing Italian torture fests (Escape from Hell and Orinoco: Prison of Sex, both from 1980), the producers asked Blair to appear, with a machine gun, for a prologue and a bloody ending that totaled one reel of screen time. “A job is a job,” Blair told the Los Angeles Times, reflecting a pragmatic worldview that jibed with her general indifference toward acting. By the mid-1980s, the arrival of VHS created the direct-to-video market, which fed the insatiable hunger for fringe trash. And Linda Blair would eventually star in several B vehicles throughout the decade. Often, she would appear nude in them, producers exploiting the on-screen notoriety she had developed as a teen in the 1970s. Blair was naked in fairly graphic scenes in Chained Heat, Red Heat, and Savage Streets, while partial nudity figures in both Night Patrol and Bedroom Eyes II. In a 1987 interview with Fangoria, Blair, still only twenty-eight, looked back with acrimony—not professional detachment—over some of her roles. “I personally hate Chained Heat,” she said, about the outré women-in-prison quickie co-starring Sybil Danning. “I’ve never even watched the whole thing. It made good money, but it was a piece of trash. To this day the problem with my career is that this film keeps playing and producers don’t want to hire me because of it. Chained Heat has actually ruined my career. Plus, it was not the movie I signed to do. I signed to do a totally different movie that was made and it’s a really big problem in my life. Wow, was I unprotected.” In an interview with Deep Red magazine, Blair expanded on her charges of exploitation. “The script they gave me for Chained Heat was nothing like the script that we ended shooting. The movie became a T&A film. I cried more than you’ll ever know, but there was nothing I could do. I had already been paid. managers weren’t there to support me. It was awful; it was a case of either take my top off in the shower or get sued. I can’t tell you that this is a great business. People can be really mean.” Still, Blair was a survivor. She spent the next two decades or so as what might be uncharitably called a D-list celebrity, starring in direct-to-video foolishness, making guest appearances on countless television shows, popping up, somehow, in a pair of Australian cheapies, becoming a regular on the Hollywood Squares, and then, finally, enjoying a steady gig as the host of Scariest Places on Earth, a ghost-hunting show that aired on cable for several years. But there has never been anything uncharitable about Blair, whose philanthropic pursuits (ranging from environmental causes to rescuing dogs) are a far cry from her early post-Exorcist life when she faced the strange results of a strange celebrity profile: “How would you like it,” she once asked, “if every day, everywhere you go, someone would ask: Spin your head or throw up?” ___________________ From THE DEVIL INSIDE: THE DARK LEGACY OF THE EXORCIST by Carlos Acevedo. Copyright ©2023 by Carlos Acevedo. Reprinted by permission of the Hamilcar Publications. View the full article

Three years ago, when I ranked 100 Sherlock Holmes performances in an article for this very website, I had thought that I had landed upon the most challenging project I’d ever undertake at CrimeReads. Watching countless film and TV adaptations, attempting to ascribe value to various interpretations of the character, attempting to force a logical ranking out of them all… for weeks, I wrung my hands over it, and, when it was over, I washed my hands of it—and the notion of putting together any similar list ever again. And yet here we are. Here we are again. The list which you are about to read is a ranking of the 85 film and TV performances of Sherlock Holmes’s esteemed colleague, Dr. Watson, and if I may say so… this list was much, much harder. No disrespect to the good detective, but this is the hardest ranking I’ve ever done. Why? Because the adaptation history of Dr. Watson is even more fraught, even more frenzied and clueless and madcap than the legacy of Sherlock Holmes. The thing about Holmes is, there are a few qualities of his that everyone agrees on: his deductive abilities, his slightly taciturn nature, his soft spot for Watson. There is no such coherence to the Watson canon! Well, except for a long trend in which he’s represented as a blithering idiot. But that only adds incoherence to the character, a man who evidently was smart enough to get a medical degree and become an army surgeon and yet is so spectacularly dumb that he is confused by the simplest observations and amazed by the simplest observations. It’s maddening. Why did I put together this list? Why did I subject myself to all these Watsons? What’s wrong with me!? Hold on, I need to calm down. All right, I’m back. I have a lot of thoughts about Watson, but this isn’t the place for all of them. If anyone’s interested, you can find them in a long polemic, elsewhere on this website. For now, we should stick to procedure. Here are the rules, or the attempt I made at coming up with rules. First of all, why are there only 85 Watsons when there are 100 Sherlocks? Well, a lot of the shorter films and TV shows on the Sherlock list don’t include Watson. Shockingly. And some that do, show him so fleetingly, like Mr. Holmes (2015), that it’s not worth trying to discuss them. Second, how do you rank a character like Watson? Are the good portrayals the ones that are closest to the source text, or the ones that give the man a little of his dignity back? Or perhaps the gameness and commitment to the performance? For the first time, I don’t really know. It’s some combination of the two. But you do get a bunch of points if you’re a Watson who can find a pulse on a victim, or go five minutes without announcing “by Jove!” A note about media. This list is a ranking of performances that I, and everyone else, can access. This rules out theater and radio portrayals, and any of the many lost silent Sherlock Holmes films. I’m sorry. (As always, my thanks to the Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia for its treasure trove of information about countless adaptations.) Well, without further ado, let’s get this over with. As one foolish Watson or two might say… tally ho. 81. Seth MacFarlane, Family Guy, “V is for Murder” (2018) Seth MacFarlane voices Brian the dog in Family Guy, and Brian acts as Dr. Watson to Stewie’s Sherlock in one episode. Briana doesn’t really do anything other than be his usual self, so there isn’t really a “Watson” to rank, here. 80. John C. Reilly, Holmes & Watson (2018) The thing about this irredeemably silly movie is that John C. Reilly is not bad at playing Watson. The character is written as a joke, and not a very good one. Though I did laugh at the pompous way he says “cocaine” when offering it to a sick patient. John C. Reilly is a very good actor and I’d love to see him play Watson in a movie that doesn’t appear to have been written in ten minutes. 79. Dudley Moore, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978) British comedy duo Peter Cook and Dudley Moore play Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in this weird spoof of The Hound of the Baskervilles. I love Dudley Moore and I think what he does with Watson (taking the character’s associated cluelessness to astronomical heights) is a good idea, but the film on the whole isn’t funny enough to make his effort worthwhile. 78. Heinz Rühmann, Der Mann, Der Sherlock Holmes War (1937) Heinz Rühmann’s Watson is very interesting. He lurks in the background of interrogations and clue-findings, staring with a pair of giant eyes. He’s basically a lizard. If at one point, he whipped out his tongue to catch a fly, I wouldn’t be shocked. 77. Campbell Singer, The Man Who Disappeared (1951) I’m sorry to say that Campbell Singer is rather misplaced as Watson. Singer’s got the vibe, casting-wise, of a butler in a slamming-doors-comedy… a character who is supposed to bounce into a room at the worst moments. But I think we need something different from a Watson. 76. Richard Peel, Murder by Death (1976) Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson aren’t in Murder by Death, but they were going to be! All that remains of their appearances is one deleted scene from the film. Richard Peel’s Watson has a hardcore “I SAY” kind of personality, evidently inspired by Nigel Bruce. 75. Chris Emmett, 3-2-1, “Sherlock Holmes” (1983) Watson, in case you’re wondering, is the guy with the high-pitched voice and the tumbler in his hand. He says things to Sherlock Holmes, but Holmes thinks that his dog is talking instead. I’m so confused. 3-2-1 was a game show. I don’t know why a game show has a Sherlock Holmes sketch smack-dab in the middle of it. Everyone involved seems a bit drunk, if you ask me. 74. Anthony O’Donnell, O Xangô de Baker Street (2001) This movie is technically about how Holmes and Watson come to Brazil to solve horrific Jack-the-Ripper-style murders, but it’s actually about how the local cuisine doesn’t agree with Holmes, and how Dr. Watson wears dorky sandals and accidentally gets high. That’s all I have to say. 73. Mikhail Vashukov, Sherlock Holmes (2009) Mikhail Vashukov plays Dr. Watson in this inane Russian Sherlock Holmes stage musical (which was filmed, so it goes on this list.) He gets points for that little jog and how he lifts up his bowler hat with he sings his name. 72. Margaret Colin, The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1987) In 11941, Rex Stout wrote an essay called “Was Watson a Woman?” In the original stories? No. In many adaptations? Yes. One of many films with a Lady Watson is The Return of Sherlock Holmes, a 1987 TV movie. In this film, Margaret Colin plays Jane Watson, John Watson’s great-granddaughter. Also in this film, Sherlock Holmes has been cryogenically frozen for eighty years, and Jane Watson unfreezes him. Regrettably, Jane doesn’t have much of a personality, except that she’s into Sherlock and she’s American. 71. Himesh Patel, Enola Holmes 2 (2022) Himesh Patel appears in a post-credits scene of Enola Holmes 2 as Dr. Watson. I like Himesh, and his presence as Watson (though brief), is warm and affable. I find Henry Cavill extremely annoying as Holmes, but a good Watson might help to reset his whole deal. We’ll see, I guess. I assume there’s a third film coming out at some point. Until I know more, I’m sticking Himesh up here. 70. Gerard Horan, Science Fiction: “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Link” (1992) Gerard Horan’s Watson is mostly there to announce plot developments and explain crucial details in this short, educationally-inspired TV episode. His droopy, fulsome mustache is endlessly entertaining, however. 69. Hubert Rees, The Baker Street Boys (1983) I’m not sure who decided that Watson was a bowler hat guy, but wow, that sartorial choice matches Sherlock’s deerstalker in ubiquity. I knew that Watson was Watson because I first saw that hat on the head of a man I could only subsequently conclude was Hubert Rees. Rees looks like what I picture when I close my eyes and imagine “Doctor Watson”—youngish, blondish, mustachioed—so he gets points for that. The script doesn’t give him much to do, but he definitely captures an essence. 68. Igor Ugolnikov, Oba-Na! Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (1994) This goofy Russian adaptation is about how Holmes and Watson want to get super drunk together on New Year’s Eve but can’t, because they keep being interrupted by well-wishers and other visitors. I am 90% this is the whole plot? As I said when I listed this thing on the Sherlock Holmes list, there are no subtitles. 67. Zhongquan Xu, Sherlock Holmes in China (1994) Sherlock Holmes in China, also known as Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Heroine, is a fascinating, complicated film in which Holmes (who is white) and Watson (who is Chinese) travel to Qing Dynasty China and get mixed up in a mystery. Zhongquan Xu’s Watson seems almost exclusively played as comic relief, and appears sometimes to be Holmes’s servant more than his friend. 66. Adam Ungvar, Sherlock Holmes Nevében (2011) Adam Ungvar plays a dorky, loyal Watson in this Hungarian film which imagines Holmes and Watson as kids and actually reads a lot like Stephen King’s It. 65. Ernst Romanov, The Blue Carbuncle (1980) Ernst Romanov’s dopey, jumpy Watson might be the best part of this strange, poorly-lit Soviet Holmes comedy. 64. Richard Woods, Sherlock Holmes (1981) This film is actually a recording of a 1981 theatrical production of William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes play which starred Frank Langella. Watson’s given VERY little to do in that play, besides be a dolt, and Richard Woods does his best to oblige. BUT! He’s also given a big responsibility with a lot of narration. So, he’s put to work. He pitches in. 63. Phil Hartman, “Sherlock Holmes Surprise Party,” Saturday Night Live This skit features Jeremy Irons as Sherlock and Phil Hartman, one of the funniest men to ever live, as Watson. He’s adorable as a Watson who’s just trying to throw Holmes a nice birthday party, but he doesn’t get to do too much. I’m sorry, Phil! 62. Kenneth Walsh, The Hound of the Baskervilles (2000), etc. Kenneth Walsh gives us a very standard, neutral Watson, in this Matt Frewer series. He’s a little older, startles a bit easily, is clearly along for the ride… doesn’t really add much. 61. Alexei Sayle, Episode #1.6 of The All New Alexei Sayle Show (1994) Evidently, the point of this very cute sketch is to make fun of the common representation of Watson as an easily-astounded buffoon, and Alexei Sayle delivers. His Watson has his mind blown when Holmes notices things like how it’s getting dark outside, or does something as simple as turn on the lamp. A perfect satire. Well done, Alexi, old chap! 60. Donald Houston, A Study in Terror (1965) Case in point, Alexi! The only “terror” in this movie is how completely inept Watson is. He sits on pipes, grows astounded whenever Holmes says the most general thing. You want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him out of whatever this is! 59. Václav Voska, Sherlock Holmes’ Desire (1972) This incomprehensible, 97-minute Czech movie about “how Sherlock Holmes wants to be a professional violin player but is very bad at it” features an all-time goofy Watson. Par for the course. 58. Royce Pierreson, The Irregulars (2021) Royce Pierreson’s commanding Watson is a not-so-great guy in this topsy-turvy spin on the Holmes stories. He hires a bunch of children to solve dangerous crimes involving ghosts, so his partner Holmes can take the credit. 57. Patrick Monckton, “My Dear Watson,” Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1989) This episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (technically, at this xpoint, it had already gone by The New Alfred Hitchcock Presents and then had the “New” dropped), is a little story about Sherlock Holmes. When I watched this episode for my Sherlock Holmes ranking, it was available online. Now, that no longer seems to be the case, so, unless I wanted to wander onto some very… unpolished streaming sites, I had to rely on my memory. It’s too important to leave off the list, because this episode is all ABOUT Watson! He’s kidnapped and Holmes has to find him, which… aww. Anyway, the other thing about this take on the character is, it’s about how he’s a GOOD doctor. Lestrade has gone mad from constantly being outshone by Holmes, and Watson (with some of that cool psychoanalysis training that was becoming pretty hip in the Victorian zeitgeist?) brings him from the brink of insanity. Monckton’s Watson is good-natured, and a good doctor! 56. Jenny O’Hara, The Return of the World’s Greatest Detective (1976) The Return of the World’s Greatest Detective is a movie about how a guy named Sherman Holmes gets hit on the head and thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes. By this logic, if I get hit on the head, I will think I’m Olivia Rodrigo. Larry Hagman plays our misremembering sleuth and Jenny O’Hara plays his psychologist, Dr. Joan Watson (yeah that’s right… decades before Elementary), who, you know, becomes his Watson in sleuthing, too. She’s very cute and bubbly, which works well. 55. David Mitchell, “Holmes and Watson,” That Mitchell and Webb Look (2010) British comedy duo David Mitchell and Robert Webb have played Holmes and Watson a few times. I enjoy when comedy duos take on the Holmes and Watson parts. And no duo does that better than Mitchell and Webb. In this sketch, which cracks me up, they both play two actors who are competitive with another and wind up building tension as they switch roles from Holmes to Watson on different nights of the same production. Mitchell is a solid Watson, but Webb is a good one in a later sketch. That’s a few slots below. 54. Gianni Bonagura, L’ultimo dei Baskerville (1968), etc. In this late 60s, black-and-white adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Gianni Bonagura brings a new vibe to the proceedings as a Watson who just stands around. It’s very Italian. 53. William Rushton, “Elementary, my Dear Watson,” Comedy Playhouse (1973) William Rushton’s voluminously-bearded Watson is the sidekick to John Cleese’s Sherlock Holmes in this comic standalone episode of the series Comedy Playhouse. He absolutely loves that his friendship with Holmes allows him to “neglect” his practice and jaunt about with Holmes on “harebrained” adventures while still living “very comfortably.” He’s a blunter Watson than we usually encounter, but he makes a good point. 52. Robert Webb, “Old Holmes,” That Mitchell and Webb Look (2010) This sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look is a strange, heartbreaking representation of an elderly Holmes, with dementia and no longer in possession of his faculties. David Mitchell’s senile Holmes captures the sad irony of the deterioration of the greatest mind of the age… but Robert Webb’s loving and lucid Watson, underscores just how sad this really is. He looks at his friend with both admiration and heartbreak. Yes, technically, this is a piece of sketch comedy. I don’t really know how. 51. Jessie James Grelle, Case File nº221 (2019) This Japanese anime show is about a house in Kabuki-chō, Tokyo’s red light district, that is home to several unusual individuals, including the detective Sherlock Holmes. Dr. Watson, who works at the university hospital, stumbles on the group after looking into a murder (committed by Jack the Ripper). This is a hyper-knowledgeable, slightly stiff, stylish Watson is a take on the character we don’t see too often. 50. Terence Rigby, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982) If Terence Rigby’s Dr. Watson had any more of an English accent, he would be completely unintelligible. I, personally, enjoy a spot of gluey English elocution, but must admit that it doesn’t make this Watson sound entirely “with it.” 49. Earle Cross, Sherlock Holmes and the Baskerville Curse (1983) This Hanna-Barbera-looking Sherlock Holmes cartoon (is it for kids? they shoot the dog! they kill the dog!) features a Watson who is equal parts “stout, off-balance sidekick” and “intrepid detective in his own right.” Earle Cross provides exactly the voice you’d think this character would have. 48. Mr. Moyse, Sherlock Holmes (1912), etc. In this French silent film series, there really isn’t much for Watson, played by a tall, baldish actor named Mr. Moyse, to do. He mostly stands near Holmes and looks at stuff, accompanies him everywhere. For the modern viewer, the vibe of this relationship might be “what if a guy who looked like Prince William followed you everywhere?” 47. Fritz Odemar, Der Hund von Baskerville (1937) Fritz Odemar stands out as a chain-smoking Watson in this German adaptation. All of the characters are basically chain-smokers, too, but he chain-smokes the most. I mean, look at the Hound, itself; it looks like it just can’t kick its ten-pack-a-day habit. 46. Lewis Arquette, Sherlock Hound (1984) Lewis Arquette is the voice of Watson in this cartoon series in which Holmes, Watson, and company are all anthropomorphic dogs. He is a portly Scottie dog, often panting, sometimes bewildered. 45. Burt Blackwell, The Interior Motive (1976) Burt Blackwell played Watson to Leonard Nimoy’s Holmes in this short TV movie. All you really need to know about him is that he looks like this, and Holmes calls him “Old Fish.” 44. Bernard Fox, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1972) Hey, the Fox and The Hound, as it were. Get it? Bernard Fox’s richly mustachioed Watson is a little ditzy but also a little petty? He’d love to get the better of Holmes one of these days. In a friendly way, of course. This is amusing. 43. Val Bettin, The Great Mouse Detective (1986) Val Bettin is the voice of Watson in this Disney film in which Holmes, Watson, and company are all anthropomorphic mice, rats, and lizards. Technically, his name is Dr. David Q. Dawson, and he is a mouse of stout heart and a fair amount of pluck. One of the loyalist, most cheerful Watsons of all time. 42. Bill Paterson, Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars (2008) Watson, though earnest and well-meaning, is ultimately less help than a bunch of street children in this movie about how Holmes is wrongly arrested for murder. 41. Thorley Walters, Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962) Thorley Walters’s Watson is a bit cotton-headed, but it’s in a way that’s very faithful to the texts: he absolutely cannot tell when his dear friend Holmes is in disguise. He’s completely fooled. Like, Christopher Lee’s Holmes is great, but the man is a million feet tall! That’s kind of a giveaway. 40. Athole Stewart, The Speckled Band (1931) Athole Stewart plays opposite Raymond Massey as a tall but generally unhelpful Watson, who truly does nothing of importance throughout the entire film. 39. Jason Liebrecht, The Empire of Corpses (2015) This anime amalgam of Sherlock Holmes and other works of 19th century literature offers a surprisingly young and handsome 2-D Watson, and you know what? Good for him! 38. Edward Fielding, Sherlock Holmes (1916) This silent film is an adaptation of William Gillette’s 1899 Sherlock Holmes play is mostly about Sherlock Holmes. Watson is Holmes’s “confidante” who “sometimes” accompanies the detective on adventures. Part comic relief, part lip-service to the books, the Watson in the play does very little. Watson in the silent film, played by Edward Fielding, does even littler, I’m afraid. There’s barely any Watson to rank! 37. Nigel Bruce, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), etc. Look, I love and respect Nigel Bruce. He was an extremely talented comic actor, and a prolific and versatile voice actor. His Watson is an icon—often imitated, never truly repeated. But even when his Watson is at his most adorable, you can’t deny that Bruce is doing Dr. Watson pretty dirty. My God. It’s as if he asked himself, “what if Dr. Watson were the stupidest person to ever exist?” and then doubled down on that. Sometimes Watson’s ineptitude is flat-out painful; several times in my life, I had to fast-forward through a few of his antics. Let’s get on with the mystery, we don’t need the posh English equivalent of all four Beverly Hillbillies to stall us now. If he weren’t so iconic, he’d be further back on this list. Alas. 36. John Scott-Paget, The Hound of London (1993) How did John Scott-Paget feel, playing Dr. Watson to Patrick Macnee’s Sherlock Holmes, when Macnee had played Watson so many times in his career? That’d be like playing Michael Corleone in front of Al Pacino. 35. Warburton Gamble, A Study in Scarlet (1933) “Warburton Gamble” is a name that many people in my life would accuse me of making up. In fact, I had to check a few times that I didn’t make it up. But I didn’t! He is real! It’s his stage name; he was born Evelyn Charles Warburton Gamble, but I’ll take it. He plays Watson in this b-movie mystery thriller starring Reginald Owen as Holmes. (Owen also played Watson in a film the year before and therefore has his own entry on this list.) Gamble’s Watson seems to take things in a little slowly, but this doesn’t mean he’s not bright. He just appears to be thinking “huh,” almost constantly, about everything. 34. George Seroff, Der Hund von Baskerville (1929) I’m going to quote the late BSI member Russell Merritt’s essay (from the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s retrospective on this really wonderful film), because he assesses Watson perfectly. “[Carlyle Blackwell] He plays off George Seroff’s bashful Watson, in arguably the first Holmes film to make the Holmes-Watson friendship a central part of the story. True, Seroff turns Watson into an adoring naïf, but Seroff gives personality to a character who up to now had been notoriously colorless or missing altogether in Holmes silents.” 33. Roger Morlidge, Sherlock (2002) Roger Morlidge’s Watson has the stylings of a heist movie sidekick. He’s versed in the lingo and the protocol just as well as (if not better than) the protagonist, but he’s the one who hangs back to do the research. If the setting was moved to the year 2000, this guy would be wearing Vans and eating a hero while hacking into a mainframe in two minutes. Love it. 32. Donald Pickering, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (1979-1980) This cute, low-budget Sherlock Holmes show features a pleasant, competent Dr. Watson, who serves as the series’ narrator. He and Holmes are real roommates; they have a gentle banter, regard each other (relatively) as equals. In one episode, after they plan to travel to Dover, Holmes says “you pack, and I’ll arrange the tickets!” Now, if that isn’t teamwork… 31. Paul Edwin Roth, Sherlock Holmes (1967-1968) Paul Edwin Roth plays, in this late 60s German adaptation, a Dr. Watson who is surprisingly calm under pressure, and dexterous enough to lazily point a revolver at someone with his right hand and smoke a pipe with his left. 30. Takanori Iwata, Sherlock: Untold Stories (2019) The Japan series Sherlock: Untold Stories is one of the sexiest… I mean… most interesting Sherlock Holmes adaptations. Dean Fujioka’s sexy, bad-boy Sherlock? Takanori Iwata’s sexy, motorcycle-riding Watson? A+. The Watson character is named Junichi Wakamiya, and he’s a psychiatrist who winds up teaming with Sherlock to solve mysteries. Also, he’s extremely hot. Maybe I said this earlier. I can’t remember, due to the hotness. 29. John Hillerman, Hands of a Murderer (1990) This Sherlock Holmes adaptation can be a bit slow, and its occasionally sleepy tone is very much not hindered by John Hillerman’s sonorous baritone. Putting that aside, this Dr. Watson is actually fairly badass. He’ll smoke anyone who endangers Sherlock. You love to see it! 28. Richard Johnson, The Crucifer of Blood (1991) The Crucifer of Blood isn’t a great movie, but I really like Richard Johnson’s fatigued, frustrated, knowledgeable Watson. He’s also got very exciting eyebrows. 27. Roland Young, Sherlock Holmes (1922) I find the plot of this Sherlock Holmes silent to be rather trying (it’s all about how Holmes wishes he were married), but I kind of love Roland Young’s Watson. His body language and facial expressions help characterize him as an earnest friend and good listener. He also looks a fair amount like the actor Harris Dickinson, to the point where I’ve been thinking that I’d be very interested to see Harris play Watson. 26. José Luis García-Pérez, Holmes & Watson: Madrid Days (2012) José Luis García-Pérez’s Watson, in this Spanish-language Sherlock Holmes movie about Jack the Ripper terrorizing London, has a fantastic look. He’s young, suave, smart. Vibes-wise, he’s one of our Best Watsons. 25. Melville Cooper, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” Your Show Time (1949) Melville Cooper’s Watson isn’t the brightest bulb, but the great thing about him is that he’s happy to joke about his dimness with Alan Napier’s Holmes. A solid guy, doesn’t take himself too seriously. If you’re going to do a dopey or daffy Watson, this is the way to do it, I say. 24. Patrick Macnee, Sherlock Holmes in New York (1972) Patrick Macnee was a pro at playing Watson. He played him here, in Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady in 1991, and in its sequel, Incident at Victoria Falls, in 1992. He also played Sherlock Holmes, but this isn’t a Sherlock Holmes list so I’m not going to get into those. Macnee offers a majorly different school of Watsonian performance than Nigel Bruce. It’s like the Stanislavski Method vs. Strasberg’s. (Except not at all.) Nigel Bruce’s Watson is excitable and idiotic. Patrick Macnee’s Watson is excitable and of normal intelligence. 23. Arthur M. Cullin, The Sign of Four (1923) Arthur M. Cullin stepped in to play Watson in The Sign of Four, one of the 46 sum-odd films made by Maurice Elvey out of the Holmes stories, replacing relative-lookalike Hubert Willis, whose performance is described more below. Cullin is a good Watson, though he seems to be doing his best Willis impression? 22. Hubert Willis, The Yellow Face, (1921) etc. Hubert Willis plays Watson in Maurice Elvey’s series of faithful mystery films made during the silent era, adapting the collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and further stories, co-starring Ellie Norwood as Sherlock Holmes. (Willis is the one smoking, in the photo.) Norwood and Willis played these roles in 44 shorts and one long film together. I love Willis’s engaging, dauntless Watson, almost as much as I love Norwood’s incredibly subtle and sophisticated Holmes. 21. Nigel Stock, Sherlock Holmes (1964-1965) I’m not about to say that if you’ve seen one Nigel’s Watson, you’ve seen them all. But if I did say that, would I be so wrong? Nigel Stock’s Watson, which he played alongside Douglas Wilmer and Peter Cushing’s Holmeses, isn’t nearly the imbecile that Nigel Bruce is, but he’s not exactly the brightest bulb in the chandelier that is this time-consuming list, either. 20. Joanne Woodward, They Might Be Giants (1971) Joanne Woodward’s Mildred Watson is an absolute delight to watch. First of all, Woodward is such a good actress that she’s a delight to watch all the time. But she’s great as a cranky, overworked, caring Watson to George C. Scott’s Sherlock Holmes (well, he’s a guy who thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes). 19. Reginald Owen, Sherlock Holmes (1932) I don’t love Clive Brook’s Sherlock Holmes, but I have a soft spot for Reginald Owen’s Watson, probably, in part, because I have a soft spot for Reginald Owen. (He’s Admiral Boom from Mary Poppins, remember?) Reginald Owen wins the award for Loudest Watson out of them all; he yells everything he says, regardless of what it is he’s saying or where’s saying it. I really appreciate that because I do the same thing, but I also like it because it’s great to see a Watson so full of vim and verge. 18. LeVar Burton, “Elementary, Dear Data,” Star Trek: The Next Generation (1988) In this, the best episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Data the android (Brent Spiner) and Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge (literacy champion LeVar Burton) end up inside a VR-style game where they play as Holmes and Watson, solving a brand-new mystery. It’s perfect. They’re perfect. The lack of a spin-0ff series is a tragedy. 17. Ben Kingsley, Without a Clue (1988) What to do with Without a Clue? I really don’t have a clue. In this decidedly Pro-Watson film, the good doctor (Ben Kingsley) is the real detective genius but needs a public face for his enterprise, and so hires a drunken actor named Reginald Kincaid (Caine) to play the made-up detective “Sherlock Holmes.” I am a Watson truther, so I do appreciate this take, even if it makes all the characters rather unrecognizable. 16. Alan Cox, Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) Alan Cox gives us the NERDY Watson we’ve all been waiting for! Every overconfident genius protagonist needs a neurotic little geek behind the scenes, and Young Sherlock Holmes lifts the curtain for us! Why aren’t there more bookish, pointdexter-ish Watsons in the world? 15. André Morell, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) André Morell’s calm, square-jawed Watson is the relative intellectual equal of Peter Cushing’s Sherlock Holmes in this pulpy Terence Fisher adaptation. He’s got impressive deductive faculties of his own and a wry air. He and Holmes exchange quite a few inside glances when they’re interviewing someone, suggesting that they’re operating on the same wavelength. 14. Colin Blakely, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) Colin Blakely’s Watson is a concerned, slightly goofy but dependable friend to Robert Stephens’s Sherlock Holmes. AND, essentially, his Watson is a writer, which isn’t an angle we get too often!! Actually, the film on the whole is one of my favorite Holmes takes because it is so much about Watson’s editorial input, stressing how Watson co-creates a Holmsian image for the public. 13. Ian Hart, The Hound of the Baskervilles (2002) Ian Hart, who reprised the role as Watson in the Rupert Everett film Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking, starred as Watson first in this really good adaptation of Hound that I guess no one but me saw, against Richard Roxburgh’s Holmes. I like the seriousness of his, and Roxburgh’s, performances. And Hart brings an almost dark gravitas to Watson that we don’t often see. I feel like we also don’t usually get a Watson with this color hair, either. Just an observation. 12. Shihori Kanjiya, Miss Sherlock (2018) I love Shihori Kanjiya in Miss Sherlock, a modern, female, Japanese reboot. She plays Dr. Wato Tachibana (who, with her honorific title, is called “Wato-san,” which is amazing) returns to Tokyo from medical volunteer work in Syria to witness the strange murder of her mentor, a traumatic event which leads her to meet a strange consulting detective, a mysterious, elegant woman who goes by the name “Sherlock” and who has tremendous powers of observation (Yûko Takeuchi). They wind up collaborating on the case, and ultimately living together. But this isn’t the chummy partnership of Holmes-and-Watson you’ve come to know; more than simply being motivated to solve crimes by boredom, this Sherlock is motivated solely by her own pleasure. She’s even a little mean to Wato (Shihori Kanjiya), who, on the other hand, is shy, sympathetic, and sensitive—dealing with her own demons, PTSD that has begun to rage since her return to Japan. Their friendship becomes more like a sisterhood—fraught, frustrated, turbulent, triumphant. 11. Vitaly Solomin, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (1980-1987) This impeccable Russian adaptation of the Holmes stories features a wonderful performance from Vitaly Solomin as a thoughtful, caring Watson. His naturally furrowed brow makes him look like he’s constantly in deep thought, which is what this Watson pool needs more of. 10. Martin Freeman, Sherlock (2010-2017) I like Martin Freeman’s Watson better than I like Benedict Cumberbatch’s (occasionally nasty) Holmes in the BBC Sherlock series. As with Miss Sherlock, I think the production is wise to focus on the psychological impact of his wartime service. Personality-wise, he’s an all-in, best-friend type with an adrenaline-junkie side to him. 9. Robert Duvall, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, (1976) Robert Duvall can do anything, and he’s charming (and surprisingly excellent at being British) in The Seven Per-Cent Solution. Part comic relief, part caring friend, part short king, he’s the secret weapon of an already wonderful film. 8. Lucy Liu, Elementary (2012-2019) Lucy Liu’s Dr. Joan Watson is a wonderful example of the great ways a character can be interpreted to fit a new adaptation. Liu plays an ex-surgeon looking for a new career, becoming a sobriety companion and randomly being assigned to Jonny Lee Miller’s Sherlock Holmes. But his energetic, erratic brilliance, and her calm, thoughtful approaches turn out to be an excellent match, and they become best friends and start solving cases together. Watson is a canny New Yorker, loves the Godfather and shoes, and Holmes decides he’s going to teach her his methods, which is interesting; thus Liu’s Watson doesn’t merely comment on or observe Holmes’s methods or stand as proof of the singularity of her brilliance, she becomes an experiment in the accessibility and transferability of his methods. 7. James Mason, Murder by Decree (1979) I love James Mason’s elegant, gentle Watson in this film, in which he is a voice of equal reason to Christopher Plummer’s Sherlock. His slightly sentimental nature even becomes comic relief, like when Sherlock squashes the single green pea that Watson has been trying to stab with a fork. He gets very put-out at the demise of the pea. It’s so cute. Another actor would have played this Watson as a clueless buffoon or fall-guy, but Mason keeps his Watson genuine without making him too simple. 6. Ian Fleming, Sherlock Holmes’ Fatal Hour, (1931), etc. Not that Ian Fleming, this Ian Fleming. He played Watson against Arthur Wontner’s Holmes and boy did he hold his own; before Nigel Bruce’s dumb Watson, Fleming was a Watson who kept Holmes in check while also being extremely curious himself. 5. Donald Churchill, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1983) etc. Donald Churchill’s Dr. Watson and Ian Richardson’s Sherlock Holmes are BEST FRIENDS FOREVER and they’re a joy to watch. A JOY. They get the sillies together, and if that‘s not friendship… 4. Jude Law, Sherlock Holmes (2009), etc. I really do not enjoy Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as Sherlock Holmes… but I love Jude Law’s performance as Watson. It’s emotional and yet elevated. He chides Holmes, despairs of him, worries about him. It’s actually kind of adorable? 3. Howard Marion-Crawford, Sherlock Holmes (1954-1955) I love Howard Marion-Crawford’s Dr. Watson. His is a worthy companion to Ronald Howard’s Holmes. Theirs is a relationship of mutual respect. He is genuinely interested in Holmes’s work, rather than simply, perpetually being bewildered by it, and Howard’s frequent glances and small smiles to Watson while they’re working suggests their genuine interest in collaboration. 2. Edward Hardwicke, The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1986-1988), etc. Hardwicke is the second Watson to play alongside Jeremy Brett’s Holmes in the long-running series; Watson got Darrened when the prior actor, David Burke, left to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. The Two Watson Discontinuity Problem is actually the only issue I have with this series, which is pretty perfect, otherwise. Hardwicke’s Watson is rather impeccable. He is the consummate sidekick: game, clever on his own, a bit amused by Holmes’s antics. He is his professional equal and proud friend, holding his own next to Holmes like no other. 1. David Burke, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984-1985), etc. It’s not easy to pick Number One in general, let alone on a list of Watsons, let alone between Burke and Hardwicke!!! It’s in fact quite hard. But I find myself giving the edge to David Burke, the first of Jeremy Brett’s Watsons? Is that even fair, after he was in it for only one season and Hardwicke did all the rest? Is it because he looks so much like the Watson I picture when I close my eyes, or is it because he brings a slight air of light comedy to a partnership, and I always need my duos to feel a teensy bit like vaudeville acts? I don’t know. It’s hard. On another day, I might switch them. View the full article

“I’m a firm believer that things happen when the time is right,” says USA Today bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan. She should know. Her time to write psychological suspense didn’t arrive until she was 55 years old. Ryan was in America’s early 1970s class of female broadcast pioneers along with Jane Pauley, Jessica Savitch, and Leslie Stahl. Long before she ever considered writing thrillers, she’d won the hearts of her viewers along with numerous Emmys for her investigative reporting on WHDH-TV in Indianapolis, and in Atlanta and Boston. Then one day in 2004, a spam email popped up on her computer screen at Channel 7 News, and by mistake, she opened it. The subject line said, “a new re-financing deal for you.” But the text seemed to be dialogue from a Shakespearean-era play. “Why would someone send a spam email that millions receive, and few would open containing a Shakespearian line? My brain whispered to me: maybe it’s a secret message.” And that brain began to crank into overdrive and conjured an idea for a novel. “At home that night I told my husband, and he was carefully skeptical. He said, ‘Sweetheart, do you know how to write a novel?’” “How hard can it be?” she replied. “I’ve read a million of them.” “I’ve since learned better, of course,” Ryan says. “I was the picture of naivete at that time. I somehow had infinite confidence that I could write a successful novel. Had I known how hard it is, I would have been much more daunted.” And after being in the public eye as a television reporter for many years, “I thought it would be easy to find an agent.” She contacted two in the Boston area. One loved her writing and hated the plot. The other loved her plot and hated her writing. “I was completely flummoxed. I can’t begin to tell you how thoroughly I didn’t know about what I was doing…but still, I had the audacious confidence I could write a book. My own possibly ridiculous obsession was the only thing that carried me through.” One of her initial problems was her first draft manuscript. Printed out, it was 723 pages long—a five- or six-inch stack of paper. “I edited it relentlessly. Took out everything that was repetitive, derivative, unoriginal, overwritten. I was ruthless in editing, something I learned in television. And I eventually discovered the book it was supposed to be.” But not until it took up all of her spare time—she wrote nights and weekend and vacations. “My very supportive husband ate a lot of carryout salmon, I will admit…There was no easy road. There were a lot of tears and frustrations. Although after all those years as a reporter, I did have some training in writing and storytelling, I still needed to find my rhythm and my voice.” And was it difficult switching to writing fiction after a long career as a journalist? “That was my only true fear. I wondered if I could make stuff up! After years of using only the facts and the dialogue that other people actually used, I wondered if I could sit at my desk in my office looking out the bay window at the sugar maple tree, and somehow create an entirely new world.” And what was that world? Her first effort was Prime Time, a psychological thriller about a middle-aged female television reporter feeling the pressure of aging in a young, beautiful-face profession. She stumbles upon (what else?) a spam email promoting a refinance opportunity and citing Shakespeare. She submitted her revised manuscript to about twenty agents and four showed interest. Among those was Kristin Nelson, who became her agent. Nelson then submitted Ryan’s manuscript to various publishers. Editor Ann Leslie Tuttle with Harlequin at first rejected it, but a few days later called Nelson and told her she couldn’t get the story out of her head. “She said she loved it, and she loved the character, but it was too ‘light’—too cute and too funny.” But Tuttle told Nelson the plot was so memorable that she wondered if Ryan could rewrite the whole thing with a more serious tone, avoiding the chick lit genre. Ryan did—rewriting and revising the entire novel with the same plot and character but with a ‘bigger’ style. It took her about a month of non-stop editing. “She wanted it to feel like a big women’s’ fiction mystery,” Ryan says. “I can do that, I told her.” She got her first two-book deal for her efforts. “Ann Leslie was trying to allow me to write the book she envisioned I was capable of writing…I wouldn’t be the place I am today had Ann Leslie not seen a hidden talent that she felt she could encourage and nurture so that I could write the best book possible.” Tuttle was right. Prime Time went on to win the Agatha Award for Best First Novel from the Malice Domestic Convention. She’s been stacking up literary awards to go with all of those Emmys on her shelf ever since, now with five Agathas, five Anthonys, and the coveted Mary Higgins Clark Award. Ryan describes her writing style as a complete pantser. “Just as in TV news, I’m going out in search of the story. If I knew the end of my investigations, they wouldn’t be news, right? So, in fiction, I’m comfortable allowing myself to discover what happens along the way.” And what about her news stories? Today, after 43 years in TV, she picks and chooses them, and is only on the air from time to time. Her passion is now writing novels, although it’s obvious when you talk to her the investigative urge is still very much a part of her. When she was about twelve, she read Nancy Drew books and later Agatha Christie. She and her sister would ride their ponies in rural Indiana to the local library, load up their saddle bags with books, and read for hours in the hayloft of the barn behind her house. “At first, I thought maybe I should be a mystery writer, and write about detectives. Then I thought, no, I should be the detective!” And she did become an investigative reporter, uncovering crime and corruption, and always trying to solve the riddle. She studied Shakespeare in college and says she is still in awe of his story telling ability. Which is another reason the strange spam email caught her eye. What was Shakespearean dialogue doing in that message? And it was on her first day of college where Harriet Ann Sablosky picked up the moniker Hank. A classmate said she didn’t look like a Harriet and called her Hank. It stuck. So, what is the biggest surprise of this second phase of her writing career? “The publishing world is so different from TV world. As a television reporter, only one person can win and break the big story…but in the fiction writing world everyone can win, because one good book leads to another good book. So that’s been a new experience for me—how encouraging and supportive and enthusiastic my colleagues are. The community, the knowledge we’re all in this together, has really carried me through this second half of my life and career.” “Things happen by luck and timing, and the right person at the right time seeing the right novel. That is so unpredictable, right? So, you have to keep putting one foot in front of the other –step by step and word by word—and you simply have to persevere.” And she has. ___________________________________ Prime Time ___________________________________ Start to Finish: 18 months I want to be a writer: Age 12 Decided to write a novel: Age 55 Experience: Television Investigative Reporter Agents Contacted: About 20 Agent Rejections: About 16 (an 80% loss ratio) First Novel Agent: Kristin Nelson, Kristin Nelson Agency First Novel Editor: Ann Leslie Tuttle First Novel Publisher: Harlequin Inspiration: Agatha Christie, Tom Wolfe, Edith Wharton, Mark Helprin Website: HankPhillippiRyan.com Advice to Writers: The only thing you can control in the world of publishing is to write the best book you can. Stop comparing yourself to other writers. Stop worrying you’re not going do well enough. Concentrate on being the best writer you can be. It takes luck, timing, and an open mind to be ready for the next wonderful thing to happen. Like this? Read the chapters on Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Tess Gerritsen, Steve Berry, David Morrell, Gayle Lynds, Scott Turow, Lawrence Block, Randy Wayne White, Walter Mosley, Tom Straw. Michael Koryta, Harlan Coben, Jenny Milchman, James Grady, David Corbett. Robert Dugoni, David Baldacci, Steven James, Laura Lippman, Karen Dionne, Jon Land, S.A. Cosby, Diana Gabaldon, Tosca Lee, D.P. Lyle, James Patterson, Jeneva Rose, Jeffery Deaver, Joseph Finder, Patricia Cornwell, Lisa Gardner, and Mary Kubica. View the full article

“What a rotten writer of detective stories Life is!” By the time he wrote these words, Nathan Leopold, Jr. was middle-aged and balding. But in the American consciousness, he was forever immortalized as the sullen teenager he had been in the sweltering Chicago summer of 1924, infamously linked—in name and in deed—with his partner in crime, Richard Loeb. Leopold and Loeb were nineteen and eighteen respectively when they committed the “crime of the century.” On May 21, the two boys, driving a blue Willys-Knight rented under a pseudonym, picked up fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks as he walked home from school. They had planned carefully for months, orchestrating what they thought would be the perfect crime. They would kidnap a young boy and get a ransom payment from his father, but to be certain they couldn’t be identified as the abductors, they would kill the boy, too. The victim was chosen at random. Bobby happened to be walking alone that day, just a few blocks from home. Loeb knew the Franks family was wealthy—certainly Mr. Franks would pay the $10,000 ransom demand. Once Bobby was in the car, either Leopold or Loeb bludgeoned him with the blunt end of a chisel (each pointed a finger at the other during their otherwise corroboratory confessions, although evidence suggests it was Loeb who attacked, while Leopold drove) before gagging the young boy with a cloth in the back seat of the vehicle, where he suffocated to death. With the body in the car, Leopold and Loeb stopped to pick up two hotdogs and two bottles of root beer. After nightfall, the pair stripped off the boy’s clothes, poured acid on his face and genitals in an effort to conceal his identity, and left Bobby Franks’ body hidden in a remote spot Leopold knew of from bird-watching trips. Unbeknownst to either of them, Leopold’s eyeglasses slipped from his jacket pocket, landing near the body. Loeb phoned the Franks household to inform the boy’s mother that her son had been kidnapped and a ransom note would soon follow. The letter arrived the next morning, but shortly thereafter, their plan was foiled when the body was discovered alongside a pair of eyeglasses which the Franks family confirmed did not belong to Bobby. A unique hinge on the frames allowed the police to match them to Nathan Leopold, whose alibi quickly crumbled. At four o’clock in the morning on May 31, 1924 both Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold confessed separately to the murder of Bobby Franks. “The Franks murder mystery has been solved,” State’s Attorney Robert Crowe announced to a dozen reporters who had waited overnight for a break in the case. Leopold and Loeb instantly became household names, as the case garnered national media attention. Who was no longer the mystery in the Franks murder case. The question then, and still today, was why? In the ten days between the murder and the confessions, there had been much speculation about the murder of Bobby Franks. The body had been found naked, so it was widely assumed that the crime had been sexually motivated. The day the boys confessed, the Chicago Tribune published a censored version of a letter Leopold had written to Loeb after a fight, which insinuated that their relationship had been sexual. The coverage of the case captured the spirit of the Roaring Twenties with all its talk of sex, money, and violence. The famed Clarence Darrow, who the following year would serve as the defense in the Scopes Monkey Trial, pleaded the boys guilty to avoid a jury trial, which he believed would result in a death sentence. Using testimony from forensic psychiatrists (which was not yet standard practice in the courtroom) Darrow did not argue that Leopold and Loeb were insane, but that certain mental “abnormalities” were mitigating factors in their guilt. The judge ultimately ruled that the boys were too young to be executed and sentenced each to life in prison for the murder and an additional ninety-nine years for the kidnapping of Bobby Franks. The nation watched as the courtroom drama unfolded. A litany of explanations for the crime covered front pages of newspapers across the country, spinning into a web of competing and often contradictory narratives and laying bare the cultural anxieties that plagued Americans in 1924. It was a lack of parental supervision, some claimed, as more and more women left the home and entered the workforce. Or perhaps it was the extravagant wealth of both the Leopold and Loeb families, or alcohol, or “overeducation.” Leopold and Loeb were indeed both well-educated—at the time of the crime, both had already completed their undergraduate studies. At fifteen, Loeb was the youngest graduate of the University of Michigan. Leopold was a respected amateur ornithologist studying law at the University of Chicago, with plans to attend Harvard in the fall. As the dominant narrative of the pair took shape in the press, reporters zeroed in on Leopold’s fascination with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. In Leopold’s eyes, Loeb embodied the Nietzschean concept of the Übermensch, or superman, which, according to Leopold, meant that he was “exempted from the ordinary laws which govern ordinary men.” This complemented Loeb’s long-held desire to become a master criminal who would commit the “perfect crime”—a fantasy borne from his love for crime fiction and detective stories. In their report for the defense, the psychiatrists wrote that Loeb experienced an “abnormal mixing of phantasy with real life.” But if Richard Loeb had trouble distinguishing reality from crime fiction, then so did the rest of America—then and now. if Richard Loeb had trouble distinguishing reality from crime fiction, then so did the rest of America—then and now. The lines between truth and legend in the Leopold and Loeb case were blurred from the very start. In the days following the confession, the press latched onto one quote that ostensibly addressed the motive. “It was just an experiment,” the June 2 edition of the Chicago Tribune quoted Leopold as stating, “It is as easy for us to justify that experiment as it is to justify an entomologist in impaling a beetle on a pin.” This was damning evidence of the two cold-blooded killers’ callousness. But in his autobiography, Life Plus 99 Years (1958), Leopold maintained what he had also claimed in 1924—that his words had been misconstrued by the reporters. “What I said was, ‘I suppose you can justify this as easily as an entomologist can justify sticking a bug on a pin. Or a bacteriologist putting a microbe under his microscope.’” He wasn’t the scientist, and he wasn’t experimenting. Under a barrage of questioning from the reporters, he was their specimen. “I was being sarcastic,” he wrote, “I was telling them that they were showing me, a human being—and a human being in a tough spot—no more consideration than a scientist showed an insect or a microbe.” Reporters were eager to portray Leopold and Loeb as self-aware, evil thrill-killers who didn’t just fail to comprehend the value of human life, but actively rejected that value. It’s a tempting portrait; Leopold was, by all accounts, a smug and haughty teenager. But this narrative is so seductive in part because it is so reductive. Leopold’s motive, as he recalled it in his autobiography, was far more banal. “My motive,” he wrote, “so far as I can be said to have had one, was to please Dick. Just that—incredible as it sounds. I thought so much of the guy that I was willing to do anything—even commit murder—if he wanted it bad enough.” “How,” Leopold asked, “Can anyone hope to enumerate the components in human motivation in real life? Isn’t it only in fiction that jealousy, or revenge, or hatred, or greed is found, simple and unadulterated, as the wellspring of human action?” In contrast to the fictional motivations that drive the tidy narrative arcs of detective stories, real life motives are messy and often deeply unsatisfying—the kind that would be totally unconvincing in a work of fiction. Real motives—like real people—often don’t make sense. But clear-cut motives, however manufactured, can help us to make sense of otherwise senseless acts of violence, like the murder of Bobby Franks. If, rather than foolish, immature teenagers, the perpetrators were conscious evil-doers who saw themselves as unconstrained by the moral standards of ordinary humans, then any punishment was justified. Scholar Mark Seltzer has described the true crime genre as “crime fact that looks like crime fiction.” As such, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) is often credited as the first modern true crime text. The book purports to depict, as its subtitle suggests, “a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences.” Capote himself claimed that he had invented a new literary genre—the nonfiction novel, “a narrative form that employed all the techniques of fictional art but was nevertheless immaculately factual.” Later that year in a piece for Esquire, Phillip K. Tompkins noted numerous inaccuracies in In Cold Blood, including significant discrepancies between dialogue and transcript records and a concluding scene that was entirely fabricated. Capote had molded the real people he wrote about into literary characters, grafting the true story of murder onto the prescriptive narrative structure of detective novels. Fiction has thus, paradoxically, become baked into modern true crime. In Cold Blood undoubtedly played an important role in shaping the genre, but Capote’s work—despite his assertions that he had conceived of a new literary form—built heavily on conventions developed by earlier writers, including Meyer Levin’s 1956 novel Compulsion. A former classmate of Leopold and Loeb, Levin was a budding journalist in 1924 and a strong advocate for Leopold’s parole in the 1950s. Compulsion was his heavily researched interpretation of the case, which he referred to in the foreword as a “contemporary historical novel or a documentary novel.” Capote scathingly critiqued Compulsion as “a fictional novel suggested by fact, but in no way bound to it.” Unlike Capote, Levin never claimed that it was. Levin changed the names of the characters and noted explicitly that “some scenes are … total interpolations, and some of my personages have no correspondence to persons in the case in question.” Capote tends to get a lot of credit for shaping the modern true-crime genre, but the case of Leopold and Loeb has made considerable contributions to the genre as well—and not just in the form of the many pop culture depictions of the case, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) to the twenty-first century musical rendition, Thrill Me: The Leopold and Loeb Story (2003). Beyond this preponderance of portrayals of the case, representations of Leopold and Loeb also helped to popularize the generic convention of adopting fictional techniques to tell a true story—or at least, one that purports to be. [R]epresentations of Leopold and Loeb also helped to popularize the generic convention of adopting fictional techniques to tell a true story… The preface of Simon Baatz’s For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder that Shocked Chicago (2008), the most popular book on the case, begins with the words “This is a true story.” The book’s opening scene in the Franks household depicts the family sitting down for dinner, awaiting the arrival of Bobby, who will never come home. As Erik Rebain, author of Arrested Adolescence: The Secret Life of Nathan Leopold, has pointed out, “From a narrative standpoint it makes perfect sense to start the book with this scene … yet this dinner scene is completely fictional.” Though Baatz is a historian, these fabricated scenes appear throughout the book, and in so doing contribute to, rather than circumvent, the mythologizing of Leopold and Loeb. A more recent retelling of the case, Nothing But the Night: Leopold and Loeb and the Truth behind the Murder that Shocked 1920’s America (2018) by Greg King and Penny Wilson attempts a revisionist approach. King and Wilson refute the accepted narrative of Richard Loeb as the instigator and turn it on its head, presenting Leopold— on the basis of very little evidence—as a volatile and dominant serial killer in the making. The authors are careful to hedge, making it clear that much of their analysis is speculative, but the book’s subtitle implies more than mere conjecture. In crime fiction, when the audience knows the identity of the killer from the start, this sort of plot twist works well (think Psycho). But real cases rarely lend themselves well to such tropes. A century after their crime, the story of Nathan Leopold’s and Richard Loeb’s crime has assumed the status of American folklore. The story, with its larger than life characters and salacious details, has many of the features that make for compelling true crime narratives, in part because our understanding of violent crime is so often heavily mediated through crime fiction. The many representations of Leopold and Loeb demonstrate the pitfalls of narrativizing violent crime in ways that mirror fiction; flattening real people into a cast of familiar character archetypes collapses the complex realities of violent crime in favor of a digestible narrative. View the full article

Here is a short list of things that are easy: –Brunch. –Turning on the television for your children instead of reading to them. –Looking at your phone and checking some vacuous app some deem crucial. –Sleeping in. –Eating too much. –Making love. And so on and so on. The “easy” list is extensive and if done in excess becomes boring. As the saying goes: everything in moderation. Here is a slightly longer list of things that are not easy: –Going to brunch and pretending to enjoy yourself. –Turning off the television and convincing your children that reading is better. –Not looking at your phone for an hour (try it, prove me wrong). –Awaking early to be productive. –Eating less red meat. –Making love. –And, of course, with a bullet, writing well. I’m not an essayist, so forgive me if this essay isn’t that good. I’m trying to enter into this subject lightly. The subject of conveying menace in literature. Sustaining the malevolent. Delving into the places one does not like to find themselves within. With an amount of irreverence however, and hopefully levity, I can come to some kind of conclusion. Or at least a palatable commencement. When I was writing Stag my mother-in-law was dying. I loved her very much as everyone in her world did. She was the kind of woman most women want to be. My wife and I and our very young sons went to Colorado for Christmas that year. And during that Christmas we watched her deteriorate and when my wife told me she was going to stay with our newborn son, to be with her mother in those final terrible days, I said of course. The day Tor (he was three at the time) and I left, mom staggered from her chair, looked at my wife, her only daughter, and in a tone so clairvoyant it was almost incoherent, said: That’s the last time I am ever going to see them. For the next month and a half Tor and I went through life together. It was January in northwest Washington. It was dark and it was cold and it was wet. We spent most of our free time skiing. But to get to the mountains you have to travel a stretch of road where people lived in squalor amongst the vines and moss and tin shacks with woodsmoke leeching from bent stovepipes. It’s a stretch of road that terrified me and still does. Having Tor in my custody, being the one to keep him from harm, I’d dwell on the macabre at night after I’d put him to bed. We’d pass those ruinous little places tucked into the woods and I’d think about the fear a little boy might feel being left there and the horror a father would comprehend having left him behind, and all the evil things that often befall the truly innocent. Stag has nothing to do with that dynamic though. Nothing to do with a father and a son. But it was a vivid emotion that prevailed within me till the book’s conclusion, and every morning when I sat down to write and I had to reenter that morbid place where there seemed nothing left of hope, where evil reincarnate was allowed to move freely, haunting what it will, it brought me pause. I have never felt such consternation while working on a book. It’s a novel I’m still fearful to read aloud. Which is all to say, in anything I write, I’m examining my fears in an attempt to bring about some levity. Not to the work itself, but my own life. To make everything that scares me easier to face. It’s not cathartic, exactly. It might not even be healthy. But to obsess over a story and the characters and the prose and the struggle, getting the dialogue and the lighting and the smells and the sounds, takes a generous amount of empathy. And that, I think, is healthy. I envy the brunch crowd sometimes. I too like to laugh. But sometimes you have to climb deeper to avoid the darkest places. Sometimes that void beyond reach or reason glows brighter than one might think. *** View the full article

Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. That’s the easy way to remember what happened to Henry VIII’s six wives, and even though four of them died natural deaths, he’s most known for executing two of them—both for treason and adultery, although only one was guilty. By the time he was searching for a fourth wife, eligible royal women throughout Europe were making excuses as to why marriage to the king was out of the question. Christina of Denmark allegedly made the comment that she would need two heads, one for disposal by the king of England. It was this minefield I stepped into when deciding to write a modern retelling, with sixth wife Kate Parker (Catherine Parr) at its center. Why would a woman marry a man who’d had five previous wives? Catherine Parr—and all of the others, save for the first, Catherine of Aragon—hadn’t had any choice; Henry VIII was king and you didn’t say no when he wanted to marry you. But Kate Parker, in today’s world? She would be in a different position altogether. And then, of course, there was a headless body—or two. Being a crime novelist, I was on steadier ground with this. I’ve written about murder, which was commonplace in Tudor England. Executions weren’t only for inconvenient wives; Henry VIII also had men who’d held high positions in his government beheaded, like Thomas More, who served as Lord High Chancellor, and Thomas Cromwell, who was his right-hand man for years. Moore’s crime was not denouncing Henry’s first marriage to Catherine of Aragon and acknowledging Anne Boleyn as queen. Cromwell made the mistake of convincing Henry that marrying Anne of Cleves would solidify a necessary alliance with Germany, which turned out to be wrong—and it didn’t help that it was hate at first sight for Henry and Anne. If the people closest to him weren’t safe from the axe, it’s not a surprise that he also killed those he considered heretics like Elizabeth Barton and Anne Askew, as well as anyone who refused to take the oath of supremacy or who rose up in rebellion. The Tudor court was a dangerous place, full of political machinations. Families elbowing their way to power and using whatever means they could to achieve it. Executions, including beheadings, hangings, drawing and quartering—it was all incredibly gruesome. A greedy, tyrannical king with a colossal ego who couldn’t possibly believe that a daughter would be able to rule—ironic, since his daughters proved to be more than up to the task. It all sounds like a season of Succession. Tudor England has held a fascination that’s resonated for more than 500 years. Books, movies, TV shows, and even a Broadway show feed the public’s curiosity—regardless of historical accuracy. We dive into the pages of Philippa Gregory, Alison Weir, and Hilary Mantel. Richard Burton and Genevieve Bujold brought Henry and Anne Boleyn to life in Anne of a Thousand Days. Scarlett Johannsen is The Other Boleyn Girl. Jonathan Rhys Myers is a dashing Henry VIII in The Tudors—a far cry from the obese, gout-ridden king he became. All the wives have a pop concert-style sing-off on stage in the musical SIX. And while the king is at the center of the stories, the Tudor women are the ones who continue to intrigue us the most. Six wives. Two daughters. A nine-day queen. A Scottish queen. I wasn’t writing historical fiction, but I could work with and manipulate the history to bring these women into the present. Catherine of Aragon was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and while Henry was off fighting the French, Catherine served as regent, directing an army against Scotland and was victorious. Her tenacity and warrior instincts would serve her well during the years Henry was seeking a divorce. If it weren’t for Anne Boleyn, we wouldn’t have seen the Reformation and the Church of England wouldn’t exist. Catherine Parr took it even further by befriending known “heretics” and writing religious reflections. She was the first woman to publish in English under her own name. Anne of Cleves was the real survivor; she never married again, but lived as an independent woman with a generous income and several homes, including Hever Castle. It wasn’t difficult to tease out modernity, to reimagine these strong women who managed to make their own marks during a time when their sex was considered inferior—despite being the wives of a king who had no qualms about killing. Ironically, by remembering them, by telling their stories over centuries, they’ve all survived. *** View the full article

In my teenaged years, when I traveled to my parents’ native Greece for the summers, I brought with me an entire duffel bag full of books. In high school, and taking myself seriously (too seriously) as a future novelist, I packed this second bag with entire bodies of work by authors I felt were Important. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner: I knew these were the writers of the Great American Novels, and so I stuffed their paperbacks into my bag. As a first-generation Greek/American, I didn’t exactly know what the literary canon was in English, the language I learned second while speaking Greek at home. I found my reading list through a combination of hearsay, high-school syllabi, and the serendipitous selections my father had made from his subscription to the Book of the Month Club. And so, among the Importants in my summer reading, I also included John Dos Passos and William Saroyan—whom I admire, but who are not often mentioned in the same breath as the others. One year I packed something by Thurber, a hardback copy of The Years With Ross about the famous editor of the New Yorker, which my father had selected from the Club brochure. I pored over Thurber’s tales of life at the magazine with dedication and reverence. Because of that Club and my father’s surely mistaken impressions of its title, I knew that Joyce’s Ulysses was Important. But it would be many years of trying before I could pull it off our bookshelf in the States and understand it. I never brought that book with me to Greece. Since our time with family in Greece lasted the entire summer, I usually finished all the books I had brought with me before our return to the States. I could read in Greek, so I could have simply gone to any one of the local bookstores and purchased a Great Greek Novel. Instead, I went—year after year—to another one of my father’s literary collections: detective and crime paperbacks in English. On the landing of my grandmother’s house in Athens was a small storage closet. Just to the left of the door was a two-shelf bookcase full of paperbacks my father had bought from Pantelides book store, purveyor of foreign-language literature in downtown Athens, and sadly now closed after decades in operation. In the way that we remember clearest the beloved spaces that are lost to us, I could reconstruct that closet for you now inch by inch. (My parents had the house torn down to make way for a new building—a common practice in Greece, but a loss I still mourn.) The closet was narrow and long, and held rolled-up rugs that were taken up each spring and re-laid again in autumn, an old sewing machine, an armoire, and an icon with a perpetually-lit votive. The jumble of these things held its own charm for me. It was a tiny Narnia, a place of strange disorder in my grandmother’s otherwise proper home. On the shelves of that bookcase were my father’s paperbacks by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, Eric Ambler, Agatha Christie, Leslie Charteris, with a Glenway Westcott thrown in too. The Westcott had earned its place by virtue of its title: Apartment in Athens. Many of these volumes were Pocket Books, with the message on the back that you could send the copy to “a boy in the armed forces” anywhere in the U.S. for only 4 cents. My father had written his name inside most of them. Lazaros Lazaridis, written in a tidy English cursive. The adult handwriting of his that I came to know was spiky and alive, not the careful lettering with which he claimed his teenaged purchases. Every summer, I began my reading with what I believed to be the canonical works of American literature and finished up with mysteries and crime novels and thrillers. I loved those books. I loved the DeSotos and Duesenbergs and Pierce-Arrows that Simon Templar drove—the very names of the cars singing of glamor. I loved the adventure and urgency of crimes that needed to be solved. I loved the way that I had to slip inside the closet’s space, a space that was somehow extra to the daily living we did in my grandmother’s house. I never saw anyone else go in there all summer except me. It wouldn’t surprise me to know that, but for my visits, the door only opened when the rugs had to go in or come out. I loved that these books had been—were—my father’s and that he had bought them when he had been roughly my age. And that he had bought a few of them before the war, before the German Occupation, and the famine of 1941. My father’s many stories of his experience during the war were tales of daring exploits, like the time he snuck into a German airbase and removed the chain from the steering mechanism of a Stuka, or the time he hid a camera inside his coat to photograph the German tanks as they first entered Athens. When I read his thrillers and espionage books decades after these reckless adventures, I could slide into that other era, into the daring and the danger, and I could imagine that I, too, lived in a time when what I did and saw carried enormous significance. The paperbacks on that two-shelf bookcase shaped my tastes as a reader, I think, more than the suitcase full of Great American Novels I lugged with me over the years. I have a Ph.D. in English Literature, and I taught the subject for ten years to college students, so I have spent my fair share of reading time with the “fine” literature of the English language. But what I most enjoy is a novel that puts its fine-ness in service of a mystery, or a spy story, or a crime. Tana French, Mick Herron, Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie books: these are the novels I hold to my heart when I have finished them. McEwan, too, whose plotlines are sometimes faulted for being almost grand guignol with obsessions and violence and danger lurking and then breaking through. I find works like this comforting, and it is surely because as I turn their pages I am transported to the wonders of that closet in my grandmother’s house. The way a duck imprints on its first living creature, I feel as though I imprinted on my father’s books. I hunger for language that works artistic marvels, but only if it’s making me desperate to see what happens next. I have a recurring dream in which the architecture of a home that is supposed to be my home (but looks nothing like it) suddenly reveals itself to be more, bigger, wider than I knew it to be. My dream self will open a door to discover an entire wing, or a staircase to another story. I used to find these dreams troubling, even disappointing, as I woke to what now felt like a diminished reality. But I’ve come to see them for the creative reassurance I think they are. Through the door or up the stairs or down the new hallway is the extra space, the place full of surprise and wonderment. It’s the closet where the extra books are kept, with their hard-boiled detectives and their glamorous cars and their danger. *** View the full article

One night in 1970, Rena Pederson, a young wire-service reporter organizing news bulletins printed by the Dallas office’s teletype machines, came across a dispatch about an audacious crime. The so-called King of Diamonds was at it again, absconding from a local mansion with jewels worth an estimated $60,000. “That,” Pederson recalls, “was ten times what I made a year at UPI.” The clever crook, it seemed, had been active for years, stealing from dozens of homes owned by Texas tycoons whose new money came from oil wells and retail empires. Pederson would spend the next several decades amassing an impressive journalistic resume, but even as she climbed The Dallas Morning News’ masthead and published several books, she didn’t forget the never-caught thief. In the mid-2010s, Pederson realized she finally had time to write about the “king,” as the press dubbed him six decades ago. The product of interviews with more than 200 people and countless hours spent digging through newspaper archives, her new book—The King of Diamonds: The Search for the Elusive Texas Jewel Thief—is informative and entertaining, a game effort to solve a batch of sensational crimes that coincided with Dallas’ midcentury economic boom and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Speaking from her home in Austin, Pederson discussed the thief’s intriguing crime spree, which, she calculates, netted jewels that would be worth $6 million today. By 1970, how long had the thief been active? I would say that the thefts were going on for at least a decade by then. Once I checked the records, I realized that they probably started in the mid-50s. Who was the thief stealing from? It was a very special time in Dallas, I guess you would say. Oil money brought incredible riches pouring into what was basically a very rural, poor state. Dallas was full of Gatsbys, because that’s where the bankers were, and they would take a risk on a well for a share of the profit. Dallas was essentially a small city, with rich people who were like sparklers on the cake. That aspect of the book makes it a portrait of Dallas becoming the place we know today. Did you realize from the start that you writing a sort of history of the city in the 20th century? At first, I didn’t. I thought, well, this guy was so good, he had to be a pro, and he probably ended up in some other jurisdiction. But the more I got into it—and the more the police got into it—I realized it was someone living in Dallas, because it went on for so long in a very contained space. It had to have been somebody who knew these rich people, because the thief was so intimately familiar with their houses. You had to look at the culture, because the culture created this moment, this perfect storm of money and glamour. The people whose homes were robbed belonged to swanky golf clubs and night spots. And you think that more than 20 had some sort of link to the Dallas Opera? When you have people who are newly rich, they want respectability, they want a place in society. So what they did was join the opera. They dressed up to go to the opera because that’s what rich people in New York and Boston did. How exactly did the thief work? Usually, a burglar will come when people are out of town and there are no lights on, and papers are piled up in the yard. That’s the thing that was confounding to the police—he would come into people’s homes while they were in their beds, walk by their beds, sometimes hide in their closets. That was my favorite detail from the book, that he seems to have wanted people to be at home, because if they were, their jewels would be there too. Correct, and the burglaries were happening in a finite area, two-and-a-quarter square miles. When the police made a spreadsheet, they realized that most of the crimes occurred between October and March. Well, that happens to be social season in Dallas, when people have their jewels at home—you don’t want to be running back and forth to the safe at the bank. If the jewelry-owners wanted to be seen looking fancy at the opera, the thief also seems to have had something to prove. He only went after the best jewelry. He only took women’s jewelry. He would leave thousands of thousands of dollars in jewels if they weren’t the best. Some men, just to prove how much money they had, wore these big gold Rolex watches with diamonds. He wasn’t interested in those. And none of these items ever turned up for sale anywhere? No, and that added another layer to the investigation. The only people who might be able to get the jewels out of town, to Europe or wherever, would be organized crime. You think you might’ve figured out the identity of the thief. I won’t spoil the ending here, but I was wondering if you can talk about narrowing down your suspects. I found that as it went on, and as their neighbors were being hit, people suspected their neighbors, they suspected someone dancing next to them who looked like they were wearing expensive jewels that they couldn’t afford. Everybody’s suspected everyone else, so that gave me more suspects. I had to pare it down, and what I did is, if somebody’s name came up at least 10 times, then I would look more intensely and in more detail at them. I ended up with about five lead suspects, and I could have made a good case for any one of them. And that’s one reason it took longer than expected to finish the book, because I wasn’t investigating just one burglary—there were over 60 that I could document, and I suspect there were at least 100. Some people didn’t report them, because they didn’t want their neighbors to know that they had been burgled or how much jewelry they had. Though the crimes happened decades ago, you were able to interview a lot of people who lived through this, including cops and reporters. I’m so glad I started when I did. I would say at least a third of the people I interviewed have died since then. I feel so fortunate that I got to them in time to get their oral histories. Some people were eager to talk about it because it felt like it had just happened yesterday. It was still very real to them. As you say in the book, you can’t talk about Dallas in the 1960s without discussing JFK. How did that affect the pace of the crimes and the investigation into them? Dallas police were pulled away from the case, of course, to deal with the catastrophe that the Kennedy assassination was. They pulled one officer to reinvestigate what had gone wrong in the protection of Lee Harvey Oswald, and how Jack Ruby (who shot Oswald on live TV) got into the police station. But two weeks after the assassination, jewels were taken from an architect’s home that was only a couple blocks from the police station. So the King of Diamonds wasn’t in shock. He wasn’t mourning. He was doing what he did—he wanted things, so he took them. View the full article

A better world is a near future story told through the perspective of a doctor, mother, and wife, who moves with her family to a protected company town where she thinks they’ll all be safe. She soon discovers that this town is hiding secrets about how it was founded, and upon whose backs that safety is won. It was great fun to write, inspired by Atwood, Jackson, and Levin. It looks ahead while nodding to those fun stories from the 1970s that were both more mainstream and more jaundiced, because of the era that made them popular. The nascent idea for A Better World was founded on an unwelcome repetitive thought I developed as a new mom and it was that thought that informs my novel’s inciting incident. As the youngest in my family, I’d had little exposure to infants (or babies, toddlers, or children, for that matter). Though my mom and I were close, she suffered from a lot of health problems and wasn’t able to bestow advice. My husband and I had bought a house in Crown Heights, Brooklyn where I had no local friends. I remember going to a nearby store called Nairobi Knapsack for a meet-up with expectant mothers. I was the only person who showed up. I had no idea what I was doing when I brought my daughter home from the hospital. Truly. No idea. I don’t think every parent has this, but until my kids were around three years old, I clocked every item in a room, every subway ride and music class and library, for its potential to rise up like a house alive, and commit harm. My daughters might pull the hot coffee from the table and burn themselves. They might trip and fall into a hard corner. That kitchen shears needed, not just to be put away, but locked in a drawer. I remember the heat going out one winter night. I was afraid my daughter would be too cold. I slept in her room without a blanket, so I’d be her coal mine canary. Even at the time, I knew this was nuts. I was nuts. But parenthood can do that to you. As soon as my kids reached the age of reason, that overdrive protection instinct subsided. They were fine. They knew not to eat poison, dump their heads in half-filled buckets of mop water, pull coffee off tables and douse themselves with it. I calmed down. My entire immune system relaxed. Once it was over, I was able to address a deeper fear I’d had during that time more clearly. During those early years, I’d had a persistent worry that someone might break into the house during the night and hurt them. I never told people about this worry. It was too weird—too incriminating. It reeked of post partum depression, of madness, of the possibility that I was unfit. My husband traveled a lot. I was often home alone at night. It was at these times that the worry apparated like an unwanted guest: what if someone cut the glass so I didn’t wake? What if they did it so surreptitiously that they left no trace? … What if I not only had to discover the awful evidence, but was blamed? Before writing this piece, I asked some friends if they’d ever experienced this fear. They looked at me like I was nuts. So I’m willing to believe I’m alone. But it’s a big world. Probably, I’m not. Immune systems are good at fighting enemies that mean harm to the human body. I’ve got an especially overactive one. I’m the most allergic person I know. For instance, right now I’m recovering from poison oak, for which I’m taking antihistamines, steroids, and this cream that soothes the inflammation for like, five seconds and then it’s itchy again. My system has always been good at fighting bacteria and viruses, but once it gets excited, it likes to keep going. With no more enemies left to fight, it turns on itself. I think of this fear I had, as a kind of protection instinct gone rogue. In other words, if the enemy wasn’t visible—if it wasn’t hot coffee or heavy furniture, maybe it was something unseen, like an intruder. And if it wasn’t an intruder… maybe it was me? Yes, I would think, while lying in bed at night. What would happen if I woke up in the morning, and my children had been harmed, but there was no evidence of break-in? Would it be like that guy who got blamed for killing his wife, only she’d been attacked by an owl (This really happened! A guy went to jail for killing his wife and subsequent evidence proved an owl did it!)? …Or would it be something even more sinister? What if it wasn’t an intruder at all? What if it was me? But this was impossible! I’d never do that! …But what if I had multiple personality disorder and didn’t know it? What if I was Sybil!?!?! Did you read that book? Sybil was so crazy! I’d go down the rabbit hole: was reality even real? What if a different me existed in a different reality, and she punched through into this world and took my place, only she was super awful?? To be fair, I didn’t think these thoughts very often. Just sometimes, late at night, wheels spinning, because my formerly active life had suddenly become an island. It’s also just a hazard of the job: my mind is always asking: What if? The worry speaks to the enormous responsibility of parenthood, which some people are ready for, and others, not so much (oops!). It also speaks to the world we now inhabit, which seems so fraught and untrustworthy. Half the news is apparently fake, but which half? History isn’t history but narrative. Everyone is angry. Psychotic drug dealers are lacing drugs with fentanyl and selling them to middle schoolers (What the hell? Why would they do that?). It turns out that if any of us dig deep enough, we’ll discover that we’re not good people after all. We’re bad guys. But we should probably keep that secret. Because if we’re outed on social media, we won’t be met with any kindness or generosity; only righteous rage like a house, a world, on fire. About a third of the way through A Better World, I get to the plot point where a mom is accused of endangering her children. My main character, a compassionate woman, investigates what this mom did and why she did it, exposing all kinds of secrets along the way. Much of the original idea for the book – a mom is accused of harming her own kids late one night – metamorphosed into a larger theme about rogue emotions, particularly fear. My main character has chosen to live in a protected town with high walls and now has to get along with the kinds of people who build walls. But the thing about people like that, in absence of obvious enemies, their fear has no place to go. They begin to attack one another. *** View the full article

Most of us have experienced a bad neighbor or two in our lifetimes. From dorm life to 20-something apartment life, I remember a lot of neighbors with loud music, pot wafting through the halls, wild parties, and some squeaky bed frames I’d like to forget, but those were simply slight annoyances compared to the bad neighbors in these spine tingling thrillers. In my new novel, The Vacancy in Room 10, I had loads of fun creating sinister neighbors keeping dangerous secrets. So if you’re also a fan of scary neighbors you won’t want to miss these. From gaslighting, kidnapping, betrayal of all kinds, and even murder, this list of thrillers is guaranteed to give you the chills and keep you up all night. City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita In a small Alaskan town every resident lives in a single, highrise building. The setting is already incredibly unique and haunting, but when body parts wash up ashore, a chain of events are set into motion that will change the life of Cara Kennedy, an Anchorage detective, who is sent to look into the case. This book is written by an Academy Award nominated screenwriter, and you will be able to see why when you read it because the setting really gets into your bones and it feels cinematic and gritty yet somehow unrelatable and eerie all at the same time. This thought-provoking, clever, and devastating story is one you’ll be telling your friends about and thinking about long after you’ve read the last page. Quiet in Her Bones by Nalini Singh What could be more delicious than a thriller set in a cul-de-sac full of secrets and gossip and danger? A woman disappears along with a mountain of cash, but that was ten years ago and it was written off as a trophy wife getting out from under her wealthy husband. Now, her bones are found in the forest surrounding the neighborhood and when her son, Aarav, decides to stop at nothing to find out what happened to her, he unearths secrets and horrors that the well-to-do residents have gone to great lengths to keep hidden. I love a neighborhood drama. What sets this one apart is the Hindu culture as a backdrop and the male protagonist which seems a rarity in these sorts of thrillers, but it made for a really unique perspective and I was here for it. The author expertly sets up red herrings and page-turning, pulse-pounding moments. Aarav comes off as a bit unhinged and you don’t know if you can trust all that he says because of the memory problems he’s suffering, but all of this combined, sets the stage for a really different and outstanding thriller. The Woman in the Window by AJ Finn A reclusive woman spends her days in her New York apartments, drinking wine, hiding from life, and spying on her neighbors when she witnesses what she thinks is a murder, but nobody seems to believe her. The lines between real and imaginary blur as the deeper she digs, the more of her own secrets surface. I listened to this one on audio, and it was a few years ago, but for the simple fact that I remember where I was when the shocking twist came, I have to add it to the list. I was pulling into my garage and I stopped the car with a screech and yelled “no way” out loud. I don’t recall audibly emoting over a book before, so it was powerful enough to make me remember how much I loved it, even though I have probably read two hundred thrillers since that moment. The Woman in the Window is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and deserves a spot on everyone’s thriller shelf. Perfectly Nice Neighbors by Kia Abdullah When Salma Khatun moves into a new, upscale development, she is excited and hopeful, but when a neighbor is caught ripping out an anti-racism sign she put up, battle lines are drawn and a slew of misunderstandings, prejudice, and self reflection on both sides which is well handled by the author and forces the reader to really weigh all sides of the difficult topic. This is a story that you could, sadly, see ripped from the headlines on the nightly news. Two neighbors grappling with racial tension that escalates that meets a tragic end. The author explores the human condition and creates unforgettable, multi-layered characters, with unique voices, and hard topics. Stranger In The Lake by Kimberly Belle Charlotte has escaped her troubled past and impoverished childhood and now lives her dream life, in her dream house, with a loving husband and seemingly no problems…except that everyone talks. Did she get pregnant to trap him, did the trailer park girl marry him for his money? That all seems like petty gossip when a body washes up by the dock behind their house and she’s faced with real, life altering problems. Does she really know the man she married? Can she trust his friends who are all suspect and seem to be hiding secrets themselves? Is she in danger? This story was immediately gripping and atmospheric. Belle breathes fresh life into a familiar storyline and creates a truly page-turning and spellbinding mystery. The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena Something will always go wrong when the baby is left sleeping and the parents go next door to party, thinking the baby monitor will alert them if anything is wrong. It’s a chilling start to a story you already know can only snowball into trauma and chaos from there. And that’s how Lapena starts this rollercoaster of a book, which doesn’t slow down until the shocking end. When the baby is snatched, and the police get involved, just about everyone is a suspect, and nothing is quite as it seems. Parents Anne and Marco are beside themselves and desperately search for answers to find their infant daughter. Everyone is pointing the finger at someone else…and there is more than enough blame to go around. Can you trust your spouse, your in-laws, your friends, your neighbors…or nobody? The lies, betrayals, and cover-ups in this one will have your head spinning in the best way. *** View the full article

On August 10th, 2023 I was given a small metal chip to celebrate a year of sobriety. It was the first full year of sobriety I’d experienced since 1977. I’d gotten high for the first when I was ten, courtesy of a lung-busting hit off a device called The Neutron Bong. Despite that name, it was not Cheech and Chong who served up the opportunity. An older cousin and my big brother were the ones who turned the matching keys that armed the aforesaid nuclear bong. In this situation, both “older” and “big” are relative terms. My cousin was in high school and my brother was only two-and-a-half years older than myself. While some months shy of his thirteenth birthday, my brother was already an experienced stoner, and our cousin was working on his teenage Master degree in all things pot related. Indeed, we were parked near his secret weed patch off a twisting country road when I joined their club. I don’t recall that it was a club I was looking to join. Neither do I remember being bullied or in anyway peer pressured. I knew my cousin and brother were getting high, and I was offered the chance to join in. I wanted to by cool, I suppose. A desire that would earn me no end of trouble and self-humiliation over the next thirty-odd years before it began to taper off. Though truth be told, the appetite to be cool still afflicts me. A toxic addiction that I can admit to, but for which there seems to be no twelve-step program. I imagined back then that getting high would make me cooler, but I can’t know what my cousin and my brother were thinking when they instructed me in the art of bong-hitting. At their ages, I don’t expect that they were thinking much at all. In a few years I’d be at a friend’s house blowing weed smoke directly into his dog’s muzzle so we could watch the poor animal get high. We thought that was hilarious. My cousin and my brother may have been of a similar mind regarding my first high. What is most clear in my memories of getting stoned for the first time is that it worked. It was an unequivocal success. I got baked out of my skull, laughed uncontrollably, and felt wonderful. For years to come I’d hear people tell stories about the first time they tried pot. How they didn’t really get high or got too high and felt nauseous or paranoid or had some other bummer experience that effectively turned them off. Not so me. What a lucky boy. I would get high no more than perhaps another twenty times in the next year or two. It’s tough to score in 6th grade, but the the pace would pick up by 8th. I’d be fourteen before I got drunk for the first time. From there, the constancy of my drinking and use would ramp up more or less gradually and constantly until 2022. What was most firmly established from that first high onward was a pattern that would come to dictate how I lived my life. The pattern of using drugs and alcohol to feel better about myself. Using drugs and booze to feel cooler dovetailed with using them to feel more at ease in social situations. This in turn mated with using them to feel better about my life as a whole. Eventually, I’d be using them to feel better about simply existing in the world. Until the last ten or so years of my life, in which I used alcohol to help make me feel better about having to be alive at all. During the forty-five years that I drank and drugged, I was what is sometimes called a “high functioning” alcoholic. This is understood to mean that I managed the basic mechanics of my life without booze and dope utterly derailing me. There were aimless years, but over time I built a career, writing several novels and TV shows, while also, more importantly, partnering in a healthy marriage and forging a strong relationship with our daughter. But my ability to maintain a career was in many ways a byproduct of my drinking. As much as I wanted to write, what I wanted more was to get to my free hours at the end of the day when I could drink with the peace of mind that I’d gotten my work done. Drinking without that peace of mind was a special kind of torture. This is why I find it challenging to embrace the concept of “high functioning.” Despite appearances, I was malfunctioning all over the place. When I bottomed out, it was very much with an external whimper, but internally I was blown to smithereens. None of my drinking had been done in secret. Friends and loved ones had seen me reeling drunk when I was younger, but that had been typical of our crowd. We’d all partied hard, and most all of us still drank, but we’d been mellowed by time and experience. No one knew how I structured my days, how my entire inner life, my approach to work, marriage, and parenting, revolved around getting to the evening hours when I could drink. When I could file off the edges of the world and of myself. When I’d stop feeling at the verge of tears, stop having to fight the physical urge to crawl under furniture and hide, stop hearing the constant inner refrains of self-loathing, stop the cataloging of resentments; when I could stop my daily battle with being myself in a horrible world and be cushioned for a few hours by the blur of alcohol. Despair is deeply entangled with alcoholism and addiction. The most common despair I hear spoken of by fellow alcoholics is the one I experienced; the despair of being hopeless. Suffering from alcoholism means living under a pall that puts hope and optimism out of reach. A shockingly toxic atmosphere breathed second by second every day of your life. Now, with eighteen months of sobriety, I am beginning to scratch the surface of the wall that stands between me and a full understanding of why I drank and drugged for those forty-five years. Most days I manage to make another scratch mark in that wall, but it is never less than terrifying, never less than painful, even when the results are truly wonderful. The most painful day of that scratching came when I fully realized that I am renewing my life in a way that my brother was never able to. He died at thirty-two, still struggling with his multiple addictions. How I felt when I stopped drinking is very likely how he felt when he died. It is impossible for me to know if I have spared myself from that fate, but at least I know now that it is possible. My magical time travel wish is that I could go back twenty-seven years to the last day I was with my brother, and instead of getting drunk and high with him I would ask him if he would get sober with me. One of the tools I have for understanding my alcoholism is my writing. Both the act of it and the works I’ve produced in the twenty-something years of my career. All my books, including my newest, were written while I was drinking and/or using. My characters are a catalogue of bar-tending alcoholics, teen stoner delinquents, addict vampires, doping cops, and emotionally crippled adult-children. Looking back over those works is helping me to see myself with a sometimes horrifying and sometimes hilarious degree of increased clarity. Similarly, my current writing is a form of personal revelation. I am learning, at this very moment, what it is to be a sober writer. For example, I have never before had as many sober days behind me when writing a piece of this length. These are quite literally the most sober words I have ever written. These two words right here are my most sober words: I hope. *** View the full article

In the late 1960s, the screenwriter Jack Whittingham, who had collaborated on the writing of Thunderball, started to write a screenplay based on the life of Ian Fleming. Whittingham’s daughter Sylvan says: ‘He had Fleming as a Reuters correspondent travelling on that train across Russia. Fleming was sitting in a compartment, and this alter ego like a ghost came out of him, and this whole adventure took place. That was how Dad played it – that Fleming had this other life that was Bond.’ The project was aborted, yet it reveals something of Whittingham’s perception of Bond that he saw his origins in Ian’s first important foreign assignment. During his fortnight in Moscow, Ian confronted a system that crystallised in his twenty-four-year-old mind the kind of enemy Bond would take on in the 1950s and 60s. Ian had been forewarned from reading Leo Perutz that ‘Russia is ruled by an army of executioners’ with the Lubyanka as ‘the headquarters of death’. He understood the truth behind these remarks as he sat for six days in the packed Moscow courtroom and observed from a few feet away ‘the implacable working of the soulless machinery of Soviet Justice’. In July 1956, after delivering From Russia, with Love, Ian told his editor how it was based on what he had witnessed personally, ‘a picture of rather drab grimness, which is what Russia is like’, and a portrait of state intimidation on a scale that he could never have imagined in Carmelite Street. During his time in Moscow, Ian formed a hostile picture of the Soviet state that, twenty years later in the context of the Cold War, the rest of the world was ready to gobble up. A system built on fear, routine arrests, the terrorising of innocent men and women in a show trial dominated by a pitiless Stalinist prosecutor, who, in his appetite to break and dehumanise the accused, compared them to ‘stinking carrion’ and ‘mad dogs’. *** At 9.45 a.m. on 8 April 1933, Ian’s ornate Victorian-style carriage pulled into Belorussky station. On the platform on this cool morning in late spring was Robin Kinkead. The twenty-seven-year-old Stanford graduate had booked them both into the National and he brought Ian up to speed on their drive to the hotel. The streets they raced through were in grey contrast to Kinkead’s rented Lincoln. The unpainted and weather-stained houses reminded Ian of the Gorbals neighbourhood in Glasgow. He agreed with one of the British journalists whom he met for lunch at the National, Arthur Cummings, that Moscow was ‘as depressing as a pauper’s funeral’, with long queues outside the bakeries ‘as if the unemployed of half a dozen industrial towns in the north of England had been dumped here and ordered to keep moving’. The faces of the people had the pinched, dead look that came from the malnutrition that had already claimed an estimated five million lives and was provoking tales of cannibalism out in the grain belts. There was nothing in the shops, only busts of Stalin and what Kinkead told Ian were perpetual signs: ‘No Lamps’, ‘No Bulbs’, ‘No Shoes’, ‘No Dresses’, ‘No Cigarettes’, ‘No Vodka’. The National was situated near the Trades Union Hall, which the Soviet government had chosen as the venue for the trial. Several seasoned hands were among those journalists downing sixteen-rouble Martinis at the hotel’s American bar. In addition to Cummings, political editor of the News Chronicle, there was Walter Duranty, the one-legged Pulitzer winner from the New York Times who had denied the famine; A. T. Cholerton of the Daily Telegraph; Linton Wells of the International News Service; and Kinkead’s secretary-interpreter, Zachariah Mikhailov, ‘a dapper little man of fifty odd’ with a cane and a grey hat, who had a temporary job with Reuters’ rival agency, Central News of London. Ian was the baby of the pack, the least experienced, yet here he was covering a trial that Cummings told him might prove to be ‘the most spectacular event of its kind in recent years – if not since the trial of Dreyfus’. The Times did not have a man in Moscow, nor the Manchester Guardian (Malcolm Muggeridge had left a few days before, ‘in a frenzy of frustration’). This meant that a large part of the world was relying on its Russian news from one young man of twenty-four. The pressure on Ian to come first with the story was exhilarating. He was back on the athletics track. Twelve years later, when Ian became responsible for news from Russia for the Sunday Times, he privileged ‘the man from headquarters’ over the local bureau chief. ‘The clear eye and perspective of the special correspondent from London can translate the foreign scene in sharper, simpler colours than the man-on-the-spot who by long residence and experience has become part of that scene.’ The ‘so-called “trial”’, as The Times, relying on Ian’s cables, put it, opened at noon on Wednesday 12 April in a building with Greek-style columns that had once been a gentleman’s club like White’s. Ian had done a recce on Rickatson-Hatt’s advice. He set the scene in a paragraph cabled the night before that The Times reprinted. ‘As the famous clock in the Kremlin Tower strikes twelve, the six Metropolitan-Vickers English employees will enter a room which has been daubed with blue in the Trades Union Hall and thronged with silent multitudes in order to hear an impassive Russian voice read for 4 or 5 hours the massive indictment which may mean death or exile.’ Militia patrolled the streets outside to prevent crowds. Two soldiers with bayonets inspected Ian’s press pass. A short flight of red-carpeted steps led him into a high-ceilinged chamber ‘hung with crystal chandeliers, expensive damask and all the trappings of Czarist days’. The massive electric chandeliers lit up the platform with the prosecutor’s small scarlet-draped table and the boxed-in, low wooden dock with chairs for the seventeen prisoners. The place had a queer, fusty, charnel smell, thought Arthur Cummings, squeezed in beside Ian on the press bench. Next to Ian sat his translator. Ian was fortunate to rely on Aleksei Brobinsky, son of a former count, with a big nose and curly hair, who had learned his English from an Irish governess. Cummings, by contrast, had ‘a most perfidious police-woman as interpreter who whispered in his ear what she thought best.’ Bullard wrote in his diary: ‘England is humming with sympathy for the imprisoned engineers.’ In London, two hours behind Moscow, the morning had begun with the BBC offering prayers for the six British prisoners. Ian watched five of them enter in single file – the technicians who had been released on bail. Minutes later, the sixth and last, a club-footed engineer called William MacDonald, limped to his seat in the front row. His fingers twitched over the dark goatee beard he had grown in the Lubyanka, where he had been in solitary confinement for four weeks. MacDonald’s deposition formed the bulk of the Soviet Government’s case against the British company. MacDonald was joined in the dock by eleven of the Russians accused, including Anna Kutuzova, Thornton’s secretary and his whispered mistress. Peter Fleming, passing through Moscow two years earlier, had reported to his brother on the ‘startling and universal ugliness of the women’. Yet the abiding memory of Hilary Bray, who had grown up in Russia, ‘was of girls with bright smiling eyes looking at him out of enormous furs’. According to Alaric Jacob, Ian picked up a Jewish woman from Odessa, ‘and then discovered that she was supposed to be keeping tabs on him’. Rickatson-Hatt formed the idea that ‘he got preferential treatment by flirting with the secretary of the chief interpreter.’ If so, the evidence has not survived. The only Russian woman Ian wrote about was Anna Kutuzova. She sat directly opposite him for six days, attractive, lively, strong-minded. In her impossible predicament can be glimpsed the first outline of Tatiana in From Russia, with Love. She took her place between MacDonald and Thornton and gazed around at the columned walls, the elaborate cornices, with what Cummings described as a look of birdlike intelligence. ‘She wore a dainty black costume with a broad and spotless white collar, and elegant shoes and stockings and her glossy hair was beautifully waved.’ Kutuzova was the prosecution’s star witness. Andrei Vyshinsky, the thickset state prosecutor, emerged briskly through a low curtained doorway. Pince-nez, blond moustache, tight-lipped, fifty years old, wearing a blue suit and tie. In 1908, he shared a cell with Stalin, and in 1917 he ordered the arrest of Lenin. His catchphrase: ‘Give me the man and I will find the crime.’ After the Second World War, Vyshinsky would gain fame as a prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials and then as Russia’s Foreign Minister. In April 1933, his name was synonymous with Stalin’s show trials. A clerk in a droning voice read out into a microphone the seventy-seven pages of charges. Ian reported two bombshells on the opening day. The first occurred at 3 p.m. when MacDonald was asked if he pleaded guilty. A sensation was caused by his haggard reply. ‘Yes, I do.’ The audience gasped. ‘To all the charges?’ These included disabling motors by chucking bolts and stones into them, and paying Russian employees to gather military information for British Intelligence. MacDonald muttered, ‘Yes.’ Vyshinsky rubbed his hands. The court was adjourned. Ian dashed out to write his report in the press room on the floor below. It needed to be submitted to one of the three Soviet censors in a room upstairs and signed and red-stamped before Ian could take it to the central telegraph office two blocks away. He picked up on the general feeling that MacDonald’s confession had been ‘extracted by OGPU methods’, and was ‘not entirely unexpected: he had been in prison longer than the others’. Even so, Bullard wrote in his diary, ‘MacD’s “confession” was a terrible blow, not merely to the British government but to all of us who believe that British engineers of that type would not commit sabotage . . . it was saddening to think that any pressure could make a man perjure himself so grossly.’ The case was ‘pure fake’. ‘I wish to repudiate this document entirely.’ The second bombshell occurred in the evening session when Leslie Thornton retracted his confession. In a clear voice, he added, ‘I always built and never destroyed.’ When the judge asked him why then he had signed the deposition, he fumbled angrily with his copy of the indictment: ‘Because I was nervous. I lost my courage.’ ‘When did your courage return?’ Thornton replied firmly. On 4 April at 6 p.m., the hour he was released from prison. Duranty was a veteran reporter of these trials. ‘This created the greatest sensation the writer has ever seen in a Soviet courtroom.’ The second day exceeded the first for unexpected drama. The court opened at 10 a.m. when Ian witnessed a further ‘astonishing development’. Having pleaded guilty the afternoon before, William MacDonald rose stiffly to his feet and said in a loud voice that he was changing his plea. ‘I am not really guilty of these crimes. I declare this emphatically.’ Ian wrote: ‘Standing upright despite a lame left leg, MacDonald denounced in cold and calculated tones the statements contained both in the indictment and the written statement.’ His depositions against himself, against Thornton, ‘were a tissue of lies, signed “under the pressure of circumstances” on the premises of the OGPU’. This ‘sudden turning of the tables’ produced ‘the profoundest sensation . . . in the midst of which the microphones “broke down”.’ The court was adjourned and MacDonald escorted away by uniformed OGPU guards. When he reappeared for the evening session, pinched and hollow-eyed, Ian was shocked by his ‘remarkably changed demeanour’. Instead of defiantly maintaining his innocence, MacDonald spoke in a low, almost inaudible voice and admitted to further charges, answering ‘yes’ to every question put to him about wrecking activities. What could have happened to him in the interval? Ian listened to the press room speculation. Torture was one theory, hypnotism another – the OGPU had possibly resorted to drugs prepared by Tibetans from herbs and administered in the prisoners’ food to place them in the psychic power of their gaolers. The view of the British embassy in Moscow, wrote Bullard, ‘was that MacDonald made his “confession” to save the families of various Russian friends.’ Ian reported that Anna Kutuzova had been broken like this, ‘by the usual threats in regard to her relatives’. But the censors would never have let him cable the actual details: how she had been kidnapped for twenty-four hours and come home battered; how the OGPU had sat her down back-to- back with Thornton; how the chief interrogator had then said to Thornton, ‘If you deny what she asserts we will believe you, but citizeness Kutuzova will be shot for perjury.’ Thornton had crumpled. After that, the trial followed a predictable course. Thornton’s statement that there was not a word of truth in his deposition was supported by his boss, Allan Monkhouse, who was then forced to listen to Anna Kutuzova repeating to Thornton, her lover, after an initial hesitation, ‘mechanically, in an unnatural voice, as if by heart’, how she remembered Thornton explaining to her that ‘if a piece of metal were thrown into a turbine, a turbine would fly into bits through the ceiling.’ In her weary sing-song tone, she made the claim, which sounded improbable even to the many Russians in the hall, that her lover had plotted in her presence. She said the Moscow embassy had provided 50,000 roubles to hire wreckers. One after another, the Russian prisoners in the dock stood up to testify in the same nervous manner: yes, they had received bribes to throw iron into the machinery, also a fur coat, and in two instances, a bottle of eau de cologne and a pair of trousers. To all this, the state prosecutor listened with grim detachment, playing noughts and crosses with a stubby pencil, and sipping from glasses of hot tea. Vyshinsky’s winding-up took place over two days, lasted six and a half hours, and resembled, in its exorbitant length, bombastic tone and trumpeting of his world-beating system, not merely the tirades of Sam Slater, Uncle Phil and Eve putting young master Ian in his place, but the speech of virtually every James Bond villain. Ian wrote in You Only Live Twice: ‘It was pleasant, reassuring to the executioner, to deliver his apologia – purge the sin he was about to commit.’ ___________________________________ Excerpted from Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, by Nicholas Shakespeare. Copyright 2024. Published by Harper. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. View the full article

Some books take longer than others. In my case, I first heard about Dr. Paul Volkman – a med-school classmate of my dad who was charged with a massive prescription drug-dealing scheme that led to the deaths of numerous patients – in 2009, about a month before my 24th birthday. I knew instantly that there was a story to tell there, but…well, it took a while to tell it. Fifteen years, to be exact. My book about Volkman, Prescription for Pain: How a Once-Promising Doctor Became the “Pill Mill Killer,“ comes out next month, just a few days before I turn 39. A lot has happened in the years that I worked on this project. I spent 18 months as the news editor of my local alt-weekly paper before it closed in 2014. I taught writing and literature courses at a handful of different colleges. I took detours to write about mental health, Walt Whitman, and Joni Mitchell, among other subjects. And I sued the federal government under the Freedom of Information Act. I also consumed a lot of true crime. Some of what I watched, read, and listened to was highly-celebrated fare. These are the stories that many people have heard of – and for good reason. Season 1 of Serial. OJ: Made in America. The Paradise Lost trilogy. The Executioner’s Song. Columbine. Know My Name. Other stories never became household names or inspired SNL skits. But they are worthy of celebration just the same. And, today, as my long-awaited publication day approaches, I wanted to give these storytellers some of the praise they deserve. The following stories all made a tremendous impact on me. Each one expanded my idea of what true crime could do. Each one avoided the worst impulses of the genre: sensationalism, glibness, dehumanization. Each one takes the raw facts of awful events and turns them into something more. “The Color of Blood” (published in the New Yorker), by Calvin Trillin On an August night in 2006, a teenager was shot and killed on a cul-de-sac in Long Island. The victim, 17-year-old Daniel Cicciaro, was white. The man who shot him, 53-year-old John White, was black. Trillin’s story about the incident is packed with explosive American subjects: race, class, guns, the justice system, the American Dream. And yet he navigates this material with a dancer’s grace and control. The story is a marvel of concise, lyrical storytelling, and a reminder that Trilling – whose crime reportage is collected in the book Killings – is a master of the form. Happy Valley directed by Amir-Bar Lev Bar-Lev’s 2014 documentary isn’t a straightforward account of Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky’s serial sexual abuse. It’s something far more interesting: a portrait of how the football-worshiping community around the crimes wrestled with them, and the complicity of revered-to-the-point-of-sainthood head football coach, Joe Paterno. Over the course of the film, public murals featuring Sandusky and Paterno are re-painted. A statue of Paterno is removed. Students watch tearfully as the NCAA announces sanctions against the football program. At one point, a lawyer for Sandusky’s victims says that, for people in the region, convicting Sandusky was the easy part. “The tougher stuff is the self-examination,” he says. The themes of this film – sports, power, institutions, and group psychology – resonate far beyond one Pennsylvania town. “The Final, Terrible Voyage of the Nautilus” (published in WIRED), by May Jeong. How do you write about the gruesome murder of a friend? May Jeong offers an answer in this dazzling piece on Kim Wall, the 30-year old freelance journalist who was killed while interviewing a Danish inventor during a trip in his self-made submarine in 2017. (The inventor, Peter Madsen, was later convicted of her murder and sentenced to life in prison.) Jeong’s article isn’t just a riveting crime narrative. It’s also an exploration of grief, a tribute to a friend, and a meditation on what it means to practice journalism as a woman. At one point, Jeong describes how her editor made her promise that she wouldn’t put herself in harm’s way. “But much of reporting is just that—routinely putting yourself in uncomfortable positions,” she writes. “In the four months I spent on this story, I did things that in other circumstances might have seemed foolish. I went on long drives at night with sources. I met strangers on their doorsteps and entered their homes. In stepping onto that submarine, Kim was doing what any reporter onto a good story would have done.” Tower, directed by Keith Maitland Long before Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and Columbine, there was the University of Texas, where, on a sweltering August day in 1966, a gunman shot indiscriminately from the school’s clock tower, killing 15 and wounding 31 others. Keith Maitland’s 2016 film depicts those events with various methods: archival video and audio footage, photographs, animation, contemporary documentary footage, and scripted scenes with actors that were then rotoscoped. It’s an experimental film that never feels hokey or disrespectful. And perhaps its boldest choice is an unwavering focus on the day’s victims and heroes – civilians and law enforcement, alike – instead of the crime’s perpetrator. Every time I re-watch the film, I’m amazed by its emotional power. I Will Find You: A Reporter Investigates the Life of the Man Who Raped Her, by Joanna Connors In 2008, the Cleveland Plain Dealer published a five-part series by reporter Joanna Connors. “​​Almost every six minutes, a woman reports being raped in the United States,” read an Editor’s Note at the start of the series. “We’ll never know for certain how many women were raped in 1984, but one of them was Plain Dealer reporter Joanna Connors, who was then our theater critic. She was attacked on a deserted stage at Eldred Theater, on the campus of Case Western Reserve University.” Connors’ 2016 book, which expands on that newspaper series, is a searing chronicle of her ordeal, told with a poet’s pen and a reporter’s precision. Of her experiences at the hospital after the crime, she writes, “In the silent, chilled room, naked under the gown, I feel like a forgotten corpse, awaiting my own autopsy.” Later, when describing the criminal justice process, she observes, “‘My’ rape case isn’t mine at all – it’s the state’s…The prosecutor works for the people of Ohio. I am just a witness.” The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B. Tyson Tyson’s book is perhaps the best-known work on this list. It was a New York Times bestseller, a Washington Post notable book for 2017, and longlist-finalist for a National Book Award. But at a time when presidential candidates still proclaim, “We’ve never been a racist country,” no audience is too big for this account of one of the nation’s most notorious hate crimes. A masterful work of research and storytelling, The Blood of Emmett Till is also a rebuke to historical revisionism. “The bloody and unjust arc of our history will not bend upward if we merely pretend that history did not happen here,” Tyson writes. “We cannot transcend our past without confronting it.” *** View the full article

I’ve always loved reading books set in mysterious houses. A great mystery is filled with ambiance, and some of my favorite novels are ones where the setting sets the tone for the book. When I was writing my new novel The House on Biscayne Bay, I wanted to honor the rich tradition of suspenseful novels set at enigmatic estates while also exploring the fascinating history and architecture of South Florida. In designing Marbrisa, a home filled with secrets and a deadly history, I thought about what I loved most about these novels and the places that define them. These houses create the perfect setting to transport the reader to a time and place where anything feels possible as the reader finds themself walking down eerie hallways, navigating treacherous mazes, and wondering what hidden dangers—and secrets—lurk behind every corner. If you’re like me and you love reading about mysterious homes, I’ve created a list of some of my favorite novels featuring grand estates that are filled with secrets. Whether you’re in the mood to travel to a contemporary gothic estate in the Scottish Highlands or a haunted mansion in Mexico, these larger-than-life houses will immerse you in their atmospheric settings. The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware Heatherbrae House in the Scottish Highlands is the setting of Ruth Ware’s The Turn of the Key. When Rowan Caine accepts a position as a live-in nanny at the grand estate, she thinks she’s found the perfect place to work. But her idyllic job soon becomes a nightmare that ultimately ends in death. Brimming with tension and forcing the reader to question everything right alongside Rowan, The Turn of the Key is a twisty and chilling delight. Home Before Dark by Riley Sager In Home Before Dark, Baneberry Hall is a home with a dark history and legacy that rivals that of The Amityville Horror. When Maggie Holt returns to the Victorian mansion where she lived as a child with her parents, her goal is to renovate the estate so that she can sell it. But as secrets from the past come back with a vengeance, Maggie is thrust into the ultimate fight for survival. Riley Sager’s thrilling novel is a page-turner that will keep readers guessing until the very end. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Set in 1950s Mexico, Mexican Gothic is a gripping gothic thriller. In High Place, Silvia Moreno-Garcia has created a terrifying mansion where the impossible becomes possible. Alongside the heroine Noemí, readers are thrust into the dangerous machinations of a secretive family where you no longer know who you can trust. As High Place comes alive, Noemí must navigate an insidious threat determined to consume her. The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell An abandoned mansion in a trendy neighborhood in London is the setting for Lisa Jewell’s page-turning thriller about the rise and fall of an enigmatic family. Jewell invites readers to 16 Cheyne Walk where they’re instantly immersed in the lives of the home’s inhabitants—and their mysterious guests. Told in alternating timelines, The Family Upstairs is a domestic thriller and family saga ripe with twists and turns that will leave readers guessing until the very end. When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole A rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood filled with historic brownstones is the setting for Alyssa Cole’s taut thriller When No One is Watching, pitched as Rear Window meets Get Out. As Cole’s heroine Sydney Green begins exploring the history of her neighborhood and the impact that racism and greed are having on its residents, she’s plunged into a sinister reality that threatens her life and that of those around her. Readers will be gripped as the novel races toward its stunning conclusion. The Last Mrs. Summers by Rhys Bowen Rhys Bowen has a knack for immersing her readers in the fascinating life of her effervescent heroine Lady Georgiana as she traverses 1930s Europe solving mysteries. In The Last Mrs. Summers Georgie’s adventures take her to Trewoma Hall, a gothic estate in Cornwall. When a member of the household is murdered, Georgie must put her legendary sleuthing talents to the test as she uncovers the secrets of Trewoma Hall. The Missing Years by Lexie Elliott When Alicia Calder inherits half of a manor house in the Scottish Highlands, she’s transported back in time to face her childhood secrets. Her father disappeared twenty-seven years ago, and alongside the half-sister who is practically a stranger to her, Alicia is forced to confront both the house’s past and her own. There’s something treacherous about the home and the surrounding grounds, and this atmospheric thriller will keep readers guessing until the end. The Stranger Upstairs by Lisa Matlin Sarah Slade buys Black Wood House, a Victorian home with a deadly past, with the intent to renovate the home and post about it on her blog. But as soon as she starts the renovations, it seems like the house is fighting back as mysterious and threatening events begin to take over Sarah’s life threatening all she holds dear. This twisty, unpredictable novel will have you questioning everything you think you know about Black Wood House. The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas In The Hacienda, a young woman named Beatriz travels to Hacienda San Isidro hoping to find sanctuary from her troubles following the Mexican War of Independence. But a dangerous presence is haunting the remote hacienda and Beatriz must rely on the assistance of a priest to help her survive. This gothic, page-turning read will keep you up late at night as it brings the supernatural to life. *** View the full article

Crumpets and platitudes!

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Sarah Langan, A Better World (Atria) “An apocalyptic thriller that becomes more terrifying with every turn of the page.” –Booklist Megan Miranda, Daughter of Mine (S&S/MarySue Ricci) “Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation… Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.” –Kirkus Reviews CJ Tudor, The Gathering (Ballantine) “Vampires, or ‘vampyrs,’ roam the earth—and provoke heated political debate—in this wildly imaginative supernatural thriller from Tudor . . . This frostbitten procedural is a bloody good time.” –Publishers Weekly Seraphina Nova Glass, The Vacancy in Room 10 (Graydon House) “Weaves an interesting plot that keeps readers intrigued until the end. Recommended for fans of murder mysteries.” –Booklist Dane Bahr, Stag (Counterpoint) “Once you’re in the novel’s grip, it’s difficult to break free. A predator thriller with a difference, by a rising star in the field.” –Kirkus Reviews Lindy Ryan, Bless Your Heart (Minotaur) “Ryan melds mystery, horror, and family drama in her sharp solo debut… This has bite.” –Publishers Weekly Robert Dugoni, A Killing on the Hill (Thomas & Mercer) “Dugoni scores a decisive win with this tale of greed, lust, and bloodshed: it’s chock-full of expertly drawn characters and plenty of historical lore, and its note-perfect noir atmosphere could accommodate James Cagney. Here’s hoping this gets the series treatment.” –Publishers Weekly Rena Pederson, The King of Diamonds (Pegasus) “With a novelist’s gift for description and a detective’s keen eye for evidence, Pederson considers suspects ranging from gigolos to interior designers and jewelers. It’s a pleasure to watch her cross them off her list one by one until she resurrects a convincing theory that the case’s original investigators were unable to pursue. This is a must-read for any true crime buff.” –Publishers Weekly Nicholas Shakespeare, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man (Harper) “Monumental . . . . Mr. Shakespeare is so adept . . . at distilling complex history and conjuring cinematic images.” –Wall Street Journal James Patterson and Matt Eversmann, The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians 9Little Brown) “A celebration of the world of books. … and the deep satisfaction of creating a vibrant community for readers. A compendium of warm recollections.” –Kirkus Reviews View the full article

McKenna Jordan is the owner of Murder By The Book in Houston, Texas, and a consultant for Minotaur Books at Macmillan Publishers. ___________________________________ Bookselling is this weird world where it’s kind of like rainbows and unicorns and magic, but it’s also a business. My job is to discover new authors. To find amazing new voices and to put those books into as many hands as I can. Customers know about the number one New York Times bestsellers. What they don’t know about is the brand-new historical mystery set in India that they’re going to absolutely love because of the charming characters. So those are the books that I seek out as the proprietor of Murder By The Book, one of the oldest and largest mystery specialty bookstores in the country. I read Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train six months before it comes out and just keep nagging the publicist, “This book is amazing. We want to order hundreds of copies. You have to bring her over for a tour.” We hand-sell 600 or 800 copies of The Girl on the Train before it becomes The Girl on the Train. It’s so fun to be able to do that and make a difference very, very early on in an author’s career. I love doing this. I love reading a great book and recommending something that people haven’t heard of before, getting to have interesting conversations with customers. And once they’ve read and loved it, they come back. They’re so happy that you found something new for them. I first came to the store as a customer, a college kid finishing up an English literature degree and shopping on weekends for cheap finds in the used-book section. Every time I come in, I ask if there are any openings on staff. The answer is always the same. No, because no one ever leaves. ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians: Their Stories Are Better Than the Bestsellers, by James Patterson and Matt Eversmann. ___________________________________ Finally, they change up the Saturday schedule. Four hours a week become available. I’m hired. My first day of work is January 11, 2003. That same day, an abandoned Rottweiler puppy finds its way to the store. Soon the whole staff is out back watching a manager named David coax the frightened dog to eat a few bites of his sandwich. I’m at the register all alone, answering customers’ questions by myself on my first day. I learn right away that working at this store is going to take some hustle. By the summer, I’m covering people’s vacations and basically working full-time. David and I become fast friends. He takes the puppy home and names him Travis. We go out after work for drinks—cosmos for me, margaritas on the rocks with salt for David—and talk about our days at the store. And books. Always books. Though it takes a few years for us to notice and then do something about it, David and I fall in love. We marry in 2008 at Dryburgh Abbey in Scotland. The Houston Chronicle does a great piece on us, “A Storybook Marriage.” The original owner of Murder By The Book, who started the store in 1980, is making her retirement plans. She’s always wanted to leave the store to David but sees that he doesn’t have any kind of business sense. And that I do. In January 2009, I purchase the store from her. I’m twenty-six. David and I are married, and happy here together at Murder By The Book. He has his own publishing company, Busted Flush, and I have the store. That kind of team effort seems like a good plan. Then David dies unexpectedly on September 13, 2010. He’s thirty-eight. Life takes us in some weird directions, right? David was a force of nature, and very well loved by all the authors and customers. Six hundred people attend his memorial service. People fly in from all over the country, all over the world. Lee Child flies in from the UK. People in the crime fiction community are very supportive. “Read a book in his honor,” the publisher of Mystery Scene magazine suggests. In 2011, Bouchercon, the annual World Mystery Convention, establishes the David Thompson Memorial Special Service Award for basically being a good guy or woman in the field of mystery. I have to very quickly figure out, Okay, here we are. I’ve got staff that depend on me. Everything has to go on. It’s my store and I need to make it work. Let me figure it out. My staff is wonderful, but it’s not easy. It takes a really long time before the store finds its way. Still, I remain its sole owner. I’m just now over forty. So the store’s been a big part of my life for more than twenty years. We’re in a new era. We’re constantly trying to hand-sell books to people who want more great books. We keep databases of everything that our customers buy. We hustle. We’re a New York Times reporting bookstore. That matters to publishers. In short, we sell a lot of books. But we also develop relationships with people. We know the names of our customers, their children, and what’s happening in their lives. And in among those conversations, we recommend books that we know they’re going to love. It is definitely a community. We have a well-run, well-oiled machine for author events, from the presale signing to how we do the line afterward. And we try very hard to make sure we sell a lot of books, make sure that the experience is good all around, both for our customers and for the authors. The crowd is happy and the author signs a lot of books and sells a lot of books, consistently some of the highest figures on tour. Authors want to come back, and they’ll tell their publicists. We push for a long time to get one particular author to the store. “Can we get James Patterson? Can we get James Patterson?” And finally we get to host James Patterson. As you would imagine, we have a huge turnout, with people lined up for a good while. It was all very smooth and organized. He was a delight. Everyone was happy. So that was an amazing night. Book signings so often are. When people come in to meet their favorite author, we stress to them, “If you want to keep seeing authors come through here, support us so that we can stay around and keep doing this. Come to the store, have a good time—and buy the book.” The best is when customers leave with a stack of books, saying, “This is the most wonderful talk I’ve ever heard and thank you so much for hosting it.” ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians: Their Stories Are Better Than the Bestsellers, by James Patterson and Matt Eversmann. Copyright 2024. Published by Little Brown and Co. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. View the full article

When I first started writing Bless Your Heart and the Evans women, it was a goodbye letter, not the start of a new series. I’d recently lost my grandmother to a brief but brutal sickness, and not long before that, my great-grandmother in one of those sudden-but-expected sorts of ways. With my mother battling a chronic illness and my once-strong matriarchal family scattered to the wind, I found myself in an existential free-fall: I’d grown up on the wings of these strong, capable, passionate women, and suddenly they were all gone. Craving one more adventure with those grandmothers I’d loved so much, I decided to bring them back. Unfortunately, my powers of necromancy are tragically limited, and so I did the next best thing a horror girl like me could do, and took to the page to write a story about four generations of women who did their best to keep their town’s dead—and their own family secrets—buried. Coming up with the idea for a horror story baked through with blood-drenched humor, monster-fighting grannies, and a trip back through the millennial heyday of the late-nineties? That part was easy. But figuring out how to build a world big enough to home a fictional small-town that blended mystery and monsters with Southern charm and girl power, and to then invite everyone in town to help tell the tale? Different story. Enter that old adage: “Write what you know.” I’ve never really liked those four limiting little words, though I remain a fan of Ursula K. Le Guin’s take on them. She said, “As for ‘Write what you know,’ I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it’s my duty to testify about them. I got my knowledge of them, as I got whatever knowledge I have of the hearts and minds of human beings, through imagination working on observation. Like any other novelist. All this rule needs is a good definition of ‘know.’” While alien societies are one of many things that I don’t know anything about, I do know a thing or two about surrounding myself with women who’d fight to the teeth for one another, blood or not, about growing up in a once-upon-a-boomtown in the late-nineties rural South, and about finding myself in that family, in that town, at that time. And so, bless my heart, I started by writing what I knew. Not that it was easy, mind you. Several elements made introducing the Evanses’ world difficult: a multi-POV cast, a mythology rooted in really old and unkempt folklore, and tragic, centuries-old events in both my real hometown’s history as well as those that made worldwide headlines in 1999. Add a mystery, and writing a Big Story in a Small Town became a Tall Order. I knew I wanted to make each of the four Evans women a Big character with her own POV. A good ensemble can be so satisfying and dynamic, giving readers multiple characters to connect with and layers of rich story texture—but it’s hard to get right. Each Evans woman needed her voice, her own quirks, and each needed to have a clear role in the family’s legacy. Beyond the main characters, everyone in the world needed to be fully realized. In a series, those secondary and tertiary characters have a habit of finding their way into major plot lines sooner or later. I’m a sucker for Small Stuff, and I wanted to infuse the Evans women with glimpses of my real family. Luckily, I had a lot of memories to build out Ducey, Lenore, Grace, and Luna. My great-grandmother was never without a dog-eared Harlequin novel and a pocket full of butterscotch candies; my clock-collecting nana could often be found wandering her own home, forever winding; and my terribly clumsy mother, well, our “Grace” really does have that silver scar on her wrist. With the littlest Evans an amalgamation of my closest childhood friends in our teenage glory days, Luna became a Frankengirl of her own. I tucked into my arsenal of favorite characters from literature and film, studied what I loved most about them, and let them inspire the world too: Olympia Dukakis’s brilliant portrayal of Chinquapin Parish’s Clairee Belcher (Steel Magnolias) mixed with the canonical horsepower of Bram Stoker’s Mina Harker (Dracula) helped bring Mina Jean Murphy back from the dead; Edgar Allan Poe’s “Lenore” gave Lenore Evans her name while a character study of Toni Collette’s filmography informed her personality; and, because I’m a professor and enjoy poking fun at fellow pedagogues, Washington Irving’s willowy Ichabod Crane (“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”) coupled with British comedian Noel Fielding’s affable weirdness made me giggle every time I wrote a scene with this town’s newest student, Crane Campbell. With the characters in place, I needed a world to put them in, and there’s no hometown I know better to write about than my own. Though I’ve left the familial nest, like many Southern families, the rest of us Evanses have lived in Southeast Texas ever since my great-great-whatever-grandparents came to America. Along with long genealogies, small rural towns on the Texas-Louisiana border are a gumbo of people and ideas. I wrote about as much of it as I knew, and then some. Some of the book’s settings are based on real locations, while others blend inspiration and imagination. My grandfather, like Bless Your Heart’s Edwin Boone, once worked at the Fair Store. When I was in high school, my mom and I lived in a garage apartment, but not over a laundromat. We went to the same high school too, but it wasn’t called Forest Park when I went there like it was when she did. And you can’t write a book in Southeast Texas without mentioning Blue Bell Ice Cream, and my favorite discontinued flavor, Fruit Special. All those Small details added up to build a Big small-town—and I “knew” every one. In addition to the place, there’s also the timing to consider, and what a year was 1999! The music! The movies! The eyeliner! 1999 saw the birth of the Chanel Vamp urban legends, the apocalyptic fears of Y2K. If you were alive in 1999, you lived through those small moments, just like you remember the many big bleak events that ended the nineties grungy crime streak. The Columbine High School massacre. The Clinton impeachment trials. Shakespeare in Love won the Academy Award, but the rest of the world was gunfire and natural disaster. And so was my tiny little sliver of real life. Social mores of late-nineties Texas were social mores of late-nineties Texas, and I was a weird goth kid with all the scars to prove it. A friend committed suicide after coming out of the closet that year, another got killed by a drunk driver. Bi-polar meds were shoved down rebellious teenage throats. I spent an entire day in the principal’s office because all of us who wore Hot Topic clothing found death threats in our lockers. The KKK still carried a known presence. Billboards lined a ten-mile stretch of highway, bullet-pointing the details of a local cold case of a murdered woman. And as much as I know late-nineties Southeast Texas, I know monsters. Enter the strigoi. When I’m asked about my love of monsters, a favorite story to tell is the one about how I dusted a copy of Interview with the Vampire off a flea market bookstore as a kid and fell in love. But it’s never been the romance, the fangs, or even the glitz, glamour, and sometimes even glitter of these fanged heartthrobs that’s called to me—it’s the history, and it’s the sadness, and it’s the othering. It’s all well and good to sleep away the day in cozy coffins and skulk around in capes at night, but doing it year after year, decade after decade, century after century, watching everything you know and love perish and rot, only to become a solitary predator in the darkness of your own never-ending monstrousness? Yikes. Blood drinking aside, that’s some horror, right there. Being in academia has taught me the merits of good research, which served me well both in researching the real history of my actual hometown to tangle it all up with that of the Evanses’ family lore, and in digging into undead myths of the past. Before Dracula, before Carmilla, other types of blood drinkers gorged themselves in folklore—roaming, mindless, restless things, like strigoi. A primitive predecessor to the more modern vampire, strigoi, like those the Evans women face, are risen dead. Most rise from improper burials, but some rise from trauma or contagion and others for no good reason at all, other than hunger. In these old myths, the restless strigoi is less a fanged charmer than it is a ghoul eager to sink its teeth into whatever part of its victim it can. And if there’s anything undead I love more than vampires, it might be zombies. In the end, all those things I knew, both Big and Small, became Bless Your Heart. I’ve had a heck of a last adventure with my grandmothers, and now, I hope readers will make some good old-fashioned guts and glory memories with the Evans Women. So, my advice: follow Ursula’s lead. Write what you know—especially if you know monsters. *** View the full article

Nothing keeps me flipping pages late into the night like a twisty who-done-it mystery or a fast-paced thriller, but my absolute favorite genre mash up is when those elements are mixed with a little bit of magic. There’s something about the addition of magical elements that adds a new layer of tension, intrigue and excitement to the pages. Perhaps that’s why I not only read, but write, speculative thrillers. The Darkness Rises, my latest speculative thriller releasing April 9, follows Whitney, a high school student who sees dark clouds hovering over people when they are in danger. She’s always tried to save people when she sees the warnings ghosting over their heads. But after she saves a boy from her school who goes on to do something horrible, she’s wracked with guilt and not sure if it’s her place to interfere. Then she receives an ominous note in her locker and realizes someone knows her secret about her role in last year’s tragedy. They want revenge, and as the threats escalate, she has to figure out who’s behind the messages before it’s too late. In The Darkness Rises, the magical component of the dark clouds adds an ominous element to the danger surrounding Whitney because it clues the reader into the moments of imminent peril while also providing an additional motivation for Whitney’s stalker. Do they want revenge because she saved the boy from her school, because of her power, or both? If you’re like me and you enjoy your crime with a speculative twist, here’s a list of five fantastic reads that are guaranteed to scratch that itch. And don’t forget to check out The Darkness Rises on April 9! Dark and Shallow Lies by Ginny Meyers Sain Seventeen-year-old Grey spends her summers in the small and secret-laden town of La Cachette, Louisiana, which also happens to be the self-proclaimed Psychic Capital of the world. After the disappearance of her best friend, Grey sets out to find out the truth behind what happened. But she soon begins to realize that everyone in town has something to hide, and with a murderer on the loose Gray has to be careful who she trusts, or else she could end up becoming another of her towns buried secrets. This speculative who-done-it is wrought with page turning tension and set in a wonderfully atmospheric Louisiana small town that almost reads like another character in the book. When by Victoria Laurie High School Junior Maddie Flynn can see the day when someone will die in the form of mysterious digits that hover over their foreheads. Her mother forces her to use her ability to make monkey, and when Maddie’s ability identifies the death date of one client’s young son and he goes missing on the exact same day, law enforcement takes notice. More and more young people disappear only to be found murdered days later, and Maddie quicky finds herself at the center of a police investigation as both a suspect and a potential target. With a twist you won’t see coming, this is a must read for fans of magical crime. The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson For those interested in the story of Jack the Ripper, The Name of the Star is a unique spin on one of the most notorious murderers. Louisiana-native Rory Deveaux arrives in London to start a new life at boarding school just as a series of brutal murders mimicking the horrific Jack the Ripper killing spree of more than a century ago has broken out across the city. The police are left with few leads and no witnesses. Except one. Rory spotted the man believed to be the prime suspect. But she is the only one who saw him—the only one who can see him. And now Rory has become his next target…unless she can tap her previously unknown abilities to turn the tables. The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma Told from multiple perspectives, the story follows Violet, an eighteen-year-old dancer, and Amber, a girl stuck inside the walls of the Aurora Hills Juvenile Detention Center. Connecting the two together is Orianna who holds the key to unlocking the mystery of what really happened to each of the two girls and the horrible fate befell the other inmates at Aurora Hills. With a twist you have to read to believe, this supernatural tale keeps you guessing as it weaves together a story of guilt, innocence and what happens when the two become intertwined. How to Survive Your Murder By Danielle Valentine Alice Lawrence is the sole witness in her sister’s murder trial. On the first day in court, as Alice prepares to give her testimony, she is knocked out by a Sidney Prescott look-alike in the courthouse bathroom. When she wakes up, it is Halloween night a year earlier, the same day Claire was murdered. Alice has until midnight to save her sister and find the real killer before he claims another victim. This is a wonderfully creepy take on the Groundhog’s Day concept with subtle speculative elements that finally take shape when the truth is revealed. *** View the full article

The thing about the new Ripley limited series, which premiered on Netflix this week, is that its leading actor, Andrew Scott, is incredibly good. He’s incredibly good in it, and he’s incredibly good in everything. I might even say that he’s the best actor working today. We don’t really need another adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley, since we already have Anthony Minghella’s masterpiece from 1999 and René Clément’s Purple Noon from 1960 (not to mention Wim Wenders’s superb 1977 film The American Friend, an adaptation of Ripley’s Game, and two other films, a 2002 Ripley’s Game and a 2005 Ripley Under Ground). All of these have brought us generally excellent Ripleys in the forms of Matt Damon, Alain Delon, Dennis Hopper, John Malkovich, and Barry Pepper, which is to say that, if the new Netflix series hadn’t cast Andrew Scott, I might not have felt such a desperate need to watch. Developed, written, and directed by Steven Zaillian, Ripley unfolds as a noir, in punchy, digital black-and-white. In the first shot of Andrew Scott’s face, his dark eyes look black and cold, like pools of crude oil. In Ripley, Scott has managed to evacuate almost all humanity and feeling from his body; he embodies the sharp contrast of a body which appears to be human but lacks a human’s soul. That’s the thing about Scott, who many of us discovered from his turn as the taunting psychopath Moriarty in the BBC Sherlock series, then discovered again as a young priest in crisis, fighting romantic attraction to a woman in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag; not only is he an actor with intense charisma, but he is also uniquely able to command a wide gamut of emotions. Whenever I watch him, I think of those sliding adjustment scales in photo editing software—how one drag of a toggle to the right or left can take the same image and drain it or fill it up with warmth—and I like to imagine, visually, the settings he’s using for that particular performance. In Ripley, that imaginary cursor lies at its farthest axis. This mode of characterization makes for a compelling antihero, but also feels rather like an intervention in the Ripley canon. Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley is nothing if not emotional; it stars Matt Damon as a young, giddy and thoroughly disturbed interloper who falls in love with a beautiful man and a beautiful lifestyle, and then does whatever he can to preserve whatever he can have of it. It is as heartbreaking as it’s terrifying, a study in explosive pathos and even, maybe, how the pursuit of community only results in greater loneliness. But the novel, written in 1955 by Patricia Highsmith, offers us a slicker, slimier sociopath. We’ve seen an unfeeling Ripley before, but not in a while, and not as well as the one Andrew Scott offers to us, which is an awkward but conniving lizard-man. The series begins in New York, in the 1960s, where Tom Ripley works daily as a small-time con man; running a faux collection agency designed to defraud ordinary folks of small amounts. He’s tracked down by a private detective (Bokeem Woodbine) hired by the shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf (Kenneth Lonergan), who has heard that he knows his wayward son Dickie (Johnny Flynn). Dickie has been on a permanent vacation in Italy for years, spending money, lying on the beach, and “working” as a “painter,” and his father thinks it’s high time he returns to face his responsibilities. He sends Tom, all expenses paid, to Italy to retrieve him. But, of course, when Ripley arrives there and gets a taste of Dickie’s lifestyle, he decides to stay indefinitely, at whatever cost. It’s not exactly that he loves the coastal Italian village that Dickie lives in, or feels any particular fondness for the quirky Italian denizens; if anything, he seems more annoyed and inconvenienced by everything around him. He’d almost seem motivationless in his clear evil if it weren’t for the ways his darting eyes catch objects he likes, things he wants. Maybe Ripley doesn’t think Dickie deserves such objects. Maybe Dickie is one of those objects. Dickie is a little put-off by Tom’s weird vibe—over-serious, graceless, a bit gauche—but Dickie’s American writer companion, his sort-of-girlfriend Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning), is both suspicious and disapproving of the new addition to their group. And Ripley is jealous of Freddy Miles (Eliot Sumner), a wealthy friend of Dickie’s who starts to crash their outings. The more people enter the picture, the more tense things become. If you know anything about the character, you know that Ripley will become a serial killer, slowly and systematically getting rid of anyone who stands in his way as he climbs towards the things he desires. Ripley is extremely paranoid, another of the extant themes from Highsmith’s novel, but rather than that being some indication of repressed morality or a cosmic punishment for his sins, it feels more like simply another facet of his chemical makeup, one that always prioritizes his own interests. Just because he’s aware of his own criminality doesn’t mean he has any regrets or hesitations. At all. I like the cinematography and overall production style of Ripley. For a story that spends so much time on aesthetics, from Dickie’s art hobby to the natural, rugged beauty of the locations, it’s striking that it’s all in such crisp black, white, and gray. But it makes sense; it’s a reduced, focused, gelid lens. It’s how Ripley sees the world. The sharpness of the contrast around material objects emphasizes the things that are important to him, while the azure waves and empyrean skies of Southern Italy melt into uninteresting grayscale. More than that, though, the show plays great attention to the right kinds of details, particularly “systems.” For example, there’s a difference between the pristine machinations of the post-office, the place where Ripley feels at home scheming, and the chipping, endless stairs of Italy, where Ripley must get his bearings to mount his gambit. Watching him do all this isn’t so much thrilling as it is riveting; there’s no emotional reason to connect to the character, which in some ways almost makes him more watchable. He’s something of a riddle, rather than a surrogate; he’s a living black hole, an unknowable entity, mesmeric for his impersonal capacity for dismantling and swallowing the world around him. View the full article