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

It’s no secret I love historical mysteries. I spent my childhood reading Nancy Drew, The Famous Five and Secret Seven, progressing to Agatha Christie in my teenage and adult years. I rejoiced when the genre moved away from bumbling women who solved mysteries purely by luck to strong, interesting and diverse characters solving crimes through pluck, grit and intelligence in a variety of settings, with a motley crew of supporting characters. In the real world during these time periods, women would have been confined to strictly domestic roles, but in the realm of historical fiction, they emerge as powerful figures, breaking free from patriarchal constraints and asserting their agency in male-dominated spaces. While the upper class and titled gentry still reign supreme (pun intended) within the historical mystery genre, there are plenty of unique and interesting settings and characters to keep the most mystery addicted reader engaged. In my new release, The Mayfair Dagger, Albertine is unusual in that she was raised by a scientifically minded father who prided himself on educating Albertine and her brother as equals, however upon his death, due to the inheritance laws of the time, she finds her utterly untrustworthy cousin named as her ‘guardian’. So, she does what any self respecting woman would do – she steals a dogcart and travels to London with her friend-cum-maid and sets herself up as a lady detective hoping to earn her own money, and gaining control over her life, with hilarious results (none of them money making results, much to her chagrin). Female detectives in historical mysteries highlight the resilience, intelligence, and resourcefulness of women in the face of adversity. These strong and unique women serve as inspiring role models for readers, as they often fight against wider social injustices and help shape readers’ understanding of historical events and women’s roles throughout history, as well as supporting readers to develop empathy and understanding for people from different backgrounds. Take Sherry Thomas’ Lady Sherlock series – Charlotte Holmes ruins herself (scandalous!) to remove herself from the oppressive upper class society she lives in. Pretending to be a man ensures she can earn money as a detective and is able to dedicate herself to solving the most puzzling of crimes. The greatest riddle for her though, is emotion. Described by Thomas as “on the very high-functioning end of the autism spectrum” we have front row seats to Charlotte’s internal dialogue as she struggles to understand her friends and family, and show love in a manner that is understood and received by the ‘Neurotypicals’ in her life. And who isn’t a sucker for the ol’ dressed as a man going adventuring trope?! Laura Joh Rowland’s Victorian Mystery series, beginning with The Ripper’s Shadow, is another outstanding example. Set in Victorian England, this series follows Sarah Bain, a photographer of risqué images of, ahem, ladies of the night, she hunts for Jack the Ripper with a diverse bunch of friends including a street urchin, a gay aristocrat, a Jewish butcher and his wife. Where does one find friends like this, one asks oneself? I’d sign up immediately! The Harlem Renaissance Mystery Series by Nekesa Afia follows Louise Lloyd, a Black journalist in the 1920s Harlem, as she becomes embroiled in murder investigations while navigating the vibrant cultural scene of the Harlem Renaissance. Think shimmery gowns, dancing, bootleg alcohol and a serial killer hunting young girls…ok, ok, you got me. Nekesa Afia’s own promotional copy beats anything I could write: “if you want a jazz age murder mystery starring a tiny, tired lesbian, look no further than DEAD DEAD GIRLS.” The recently published The Mayor of Maxwell Street by Avery Cunningham is a delicious addition to the historical mystery genre. Wealthy (albeit newly minted, but one can’t have it all) debutante Nelly Sawyer works secretly undercover as an investigative journalist, who becomes embroiled in a hunt for, you guessed it, the missing mayor. Cunningham does a magnificent job at placing us in 1920’s Prohibition-era Chicago, and the cast of characters include a speakeasy manager, not one but two love interests for Nelly and ALL the fashion. Sujata Massey writes historical mysteries set in Asia, with her most recent – The Mistress of Bhatia House – gives us India in 1922. Featuring an amateur detective in the form of Bombay’s only female solicitor, Perveen Mistry, grapples with class divisions, sexism, and complex family dynamics. Massey shows beautifully what a complicated country India was at that time, colonised by the British as it was and does an excellent job of defining the social issues in an entertaining and intriguing way. These characters, among many others, represent the diverse and dynamic portrayal of women in historical mysteries, where strong, dynamic protagonists challenge convention and shape the genre. From Victorian England to 1920s Harlem and beyond, these characters defy societal norms, navigate complex social landscapes, and pursue justice with unwavering determination. Through their stories, readers gain insight into the resilience, intelligence, and resourcefulness of women throughout history, while also confronting important social issues and expanding their understanding of the world. As we immerse ourselves in the rich tapestry of historical mysteries, we celebrate the diversity of women’s experiences and the enduring legacy of their courage and strength. Now, pour me a gin darling, I’ve got some books to read! *** View the full article

I love writers who mix genres. It’s like an athlete who plays sports and somehow, improbably, manages to be good at all of them. C.J. Tudor’s novels cross boundaries between mystery, horror, and thriller, managing to bring out the best in each of them while creating something wholly new. Her newest novel, The Gathering, delves into the aftermath of a grisly murder that may have been committed by an isolated community of vampires in rural Alaska. As one online review put it, “You never know what you’re going to find in a book from C.J. Tudor—other than a great read!” Recently we sat down to talk about another genre-crosser, Michael Marshall Smith’s 1996 novel Spares. Why did you choose Spares by Michael Marshall Smith? Well, it’s one of my favorite books. I love Michael Marshall Smith. He’s one of my top favorite authors, along with Stephen King. I picked up Only Forward first, and I absolutely loved it. It was completely different from anything I’d read before in the way it mashed up genres. It was crazy and inventive, and I fell in love with his writing. After that I was waiting for another book of his to come out, and then I saw Spares in an airport book shop. I loved it right away. It’s sci-fi, it’s noir, it’s a mystery. But I love most about it is the way Smith writes about the human condition. It’s very poignant and darkly funny at the same time. The novel is set in a futuristic world, and the main character is a guy called Jack Randall, a washed-up cop and former soldier. Early on in the book, you find out that in this world, if you’re very rich, you can have a clone made of yourself. Then if anything bad happens to you, you can get a spare body part from this clone, essentially. The clones are kept in these places called farms, but it’s quite a horrific environment. They’re not educated or even taught to talk or walk. They’re living meat. Jack Randall becomes a caretaker at one of these farms, which are basically automated and run by robots, but he’s there to make sure everything runs smoothly. He sees guys come in the middle of the night, and they’ll take a clone away that will later come back minus a body part, and he decides he wants to help. He starts to teach the clones some things, but of course the more human they become, the more they realize what’s happening to them. Eventually he goes on the run with some of the clones, and then the book takes a turn and becomes more of a noirish thriller. The clones are kidnapped and he has to chase them down, and then he ends up in this place called the Gap where there’s a war being fought. It sounds kind of crazy, but he takes all these elements and makes them come together. It just works for me, because I love authors who take risks with genres. You can read it as a thriller, or sci fi, or a sort of social commentary. It’s just a great book. I’ve definitely never read anything like it. I wanted to ask you more about the narrator. When we first meet him, he’s addicted to a designer drug and kind of a mess, but later he redeems himself. Why is he an especially good guide to this world? I think as readers, we quite like reading about flawed characters. We’re all familiar with this character of a cop who has a bit of a drink or a drug problem and a tragic past, but it works so well in this novel. Jack is a fairly unsympathetic character to start with. He doesn’t want to help the spares; he wants to be left alone to stagnate in his self-pity. Then they kind of bring him back to humanity, so to speak. His voice is very darkly comic, and the dialogue is great—Smith is really good at writing black humor. So I think we kind of warm to this character as things go on, even though he does some bad stuff. That’s a great point. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that Jack fits into that ex-cop archetype, even though he’s in this really strange world. Exactly. All writers use tropes, but it’s all about how you play with it. You could give half a dozen writers the same setup and the same characters, but they’ll each take them in a completely different direction. That’s what’s so interesting about writing fiction. I’d never heard of this novel before you chose it, but the concept immediately reminded me of a book I love, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Then when I was Googling the book, I found a Reddit thread that said it had a lot in common with Michael Bay’s film The Island. Do you think Spares could have been an influence on either of those works, or are writers just naturally intrigued by these questions about the ethical uses of scientific discovery? (Spares was published in 1996; The Island and the novel Never Let Me Go came out in the same year, 2005.) I can’t say much about the novel’s influence, but I think it’s funny that you’ll often find that books that come out within a few years of each other will have similar subjects. Cloning was talked about quite a bit in the Nineties, so it was definitely in the air, but again, writers will approach it in different ways. It makes sense that writers wondering where cloning might go would arrive at the idea of human clones. Where there’s science and innovation, there will often be a dark side. We’ve talked a little about the mixing of genres and why that’s appealing to you. At the same time, the publishing world often wants writers to pick a genre and stick with it. Is it hard to market a book that mixes genres? I think it’s getting easier. It’s nice to be able to put the book in a certain place, but I think that increasingly, people are mixing things up a bit. My books can be defined as horror or crime or thriller, because what matters to me is telling a great story. I read all kinds of genres, and I think it was Michael Marshall Smith who made me realize that you didn’t have to restrict yourself in terms of genres. You didn’t have to confine yourself to writing a particular type of fiction. And that has been one of the biggest inspirations and biggest influences on my writing. That’s really great. Do you think UK audiences are more friendly to mixing genres? I think we’ve seen quite a few successful books come out in the UK lately that have been doing that. The current number one hardback here is The Last Murder at the End of the World by my friend Stuart Turton, which has done quite well in the US as well, and he really mashes things up. His first novel was described as an Agatha Christie mystery mixed with Quantum Leap, with time travel and body swapping. The new one is an apocalyptic murder mystery among the last one hundred or so people left in the world. It’s so fun, because the great thing about murder mysteries is you can set them anywhere. You can make them historical, you can set them in the future. Certainly in the UK, readers are really up for that. And I think in general, readers’ tastes are wider than we sometimes give them credit for. In my opinion, horror and crime work especially well together. Some people call The Silence of the Lambs a crime novel or thriller, but of course it’s quite horrific, whereas I’ve read lots of books classed as horror or supernatural that are much more psychological. There’s a lot of crossover. We’ve talked a lot about the mixing of genres, but is there anything else you’ve taken from this novel that you might use in your own work? Well, I’ve never written sci fi, but I love futuristic stuff, and I have some ideas for stories in a futuristic setting. Every book for me has to be different. I’m always like, what can I do this new and exciting to me? Smith does that, and his books have been such a big inspiration for me. Without his books, and Stephen King’s, I probably wouldn’t have started writing what I write. View the full article

Perched on a stool at the end of the bar of the Elks Club lodge 656, Gary Webb answered his black Nokia flip phone like a celebrity fielding live calls at a telethon fundraiser. After so many decades as a farmer, political agitator, activist, competitive fisherman, football coach, school board member, and historical preservationist, Webb, 69, was a well-established connector, the hub at the center of a giant wheel of people. That was part of why he’d finish one call, clap the phone closed, and it’d start ringing again. The other part was my fault, since before I’d made that reporting trip out to Missouri in August of 2013, I’d told him I’d like to meet anyone he thought I should talk to about the murder. He was, after all, the person who’d introduced me to the case—in a sense, it was only because of him I’d gotten involved at all. Broad in the shoulders with a snug short-sleeved button-down of checkered reds, Webb wore white New Balance sneakers with thick rubber soles flecked in mud, clean white gym socks bunched at his ankles, and pleated, baggy khaki shorts. The bartender came over with my beer and Webb sipped from his Styrofoam cup while he worked the phone. As we left, I thanked him for his offer to arrange interviews. “At your disposal,” he said, climbing into the driver’s side of his Chevy red pickup. “Now let’s go get it.” Like so many of the other 10,000 residents who lived around Chillicothe, a farming town in northwest Missouri, Webb was a native to the area. And like most everyone else in Chillicothe over the past three decades, he had developed rather strong feelings about the murder investigation and subsequent courtroom battles that followed that one horrible night in November, 1990, when Cathy Robertson, a mother of five, had been shot and killed in her home. The town was thrown into turmoil by the shooting, Webb said, suffering the deep fear and surreal shock of a mother slain while she slept down the hallway from her small children. But that fear would soon give way to intense disagreement between two opposing camps, divided on the guilt or innocence of a young Chillicothe man. A teenager at the time of the shooting, Mark Woodworth would eventually be tried and convicted for the killing. “A raw deal,” Webb said. “But there were sides even before there had been sides to take,” he explained. It would take me several years to fully appreciate what Webb had meant that day. We kept the truck windows down while Webb sped around Livingston County’s long, solitary gravel roads, plumes of dust rising behind us, in search of those associates of his who he thought would be better to approach about the sensitive topic in person. On the porch of a general store, then in a kitchen fragrant with a roast in the oven, then outside a farmstead drinking sweet tea, I encountered what would become the running theme while I was in Missouri — everyone had a different interpretation of the case. My own sense of the case would change, too, as I acquainted myself more fully with the police investigation, the legal files, and the full range of grievances. Both advocates for Mark’s innocence and those convinced of his guilt laid out disparate criticisms and accusations of wrongdoing, cleaved together by a contradictory explanation for the same circumstances. What was unusual about these allegations however was that it wasn’t always one side speaking ill of the other. In fact, I’d often hear ambivalence towards the opposing faction on the grounds that those other folks, as far as it went, were incidental victims themselves, unaware that their belief in the innocence or guilt of this young man was not a conclusion of their own but the result of deceptions from the defense team or the state prosecutors, or the court system, or the squad of law enforcement agents that hadn’t been forthcoming with the whole damning truth. Still, others, either by what they said or in simply telling me the story of their own lives, echoed Webb’s idea—that the division around Woodworth’s guilt or innocence didn’t really begin with the case itself, or fall exclusively within the jurisdiction of this community. Rather, the night of the shooting and subsequent legal action were but two dots on the crowded timeline of recent historical events that had upended life for the farming families of not only Missouri but across the Middle West. These were, in their own way, examples of larger malignant forces that had preyed, pushed, and ultimately undermined small farming towns trying to earn their daily bread. Singular as the violence of the murder had been, and as disruptive as the criminal trials would become, they were but pieces of the decade’s legacy—the long, grinding, bankrupting bad times known as the 1980s farming crisis. To be sure, much of this wasn’t so clear to me by the time I left Webb and everyone else I’d met on that initial trip through Missouri and Illinois. I came back home jumbled and disorganized, my notes in total disarray. It seemed like too much material and yet, as I began to sift through it all, I suspected that I had missed something. There were sources or documents I didn’t have but which would explain how these stacks of papers were all related. I’d spend another year fumbling in the dark until I squared up to the possibility I wasn’t going to find a coherent story to tell. I finally packed it up and put it all away. After three years, I’d decided it was time to give up the ghost for good and clear out my apartment’s closet—the only closet, shared by my patient, accommodating girlfriend—crowded with the several boxes of files that I had shipped to myself from Missouri. Looking through everything one last time, I came across a reminder of what had sent me down this path in the first place: a DVD of a little-seen documentary featuring Gary Webb and his long quest to make hand fishing legal throughout the United States. It was Webb I’d originally wanted to write about — this pivotal figure in the niche community of so-called noodlers, third and fourth generation men and women who’d been taught the tactics from their parents and grandparents in Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and other states where Webb had traveled as a grass roots advocate. All across the South and Midwest, Webb defended this homespun technique of dangling one’s fingers underwater to catch, knuckles over lip, the chomping 80 pound catfish protecting their underwater nest eggs from the intrusive digits. I had approached Webb, the co-founder of the group Noodlers Anonymous, in the early summer of 2013. With the memory of the 2009 Great Recession still lingering and the opioid epidemic ravaging rural communities in earnest, I first rang his flip phone because I was curious to know if the years of widespread social unraveling—the sky rocketing unemployment, the drug overdoses, the weariness amid so many deaths of despair—had bestowed his tradition with something particularly valuable. Webb’s answer was both yes and no—the sport proved to be a reliable release valve during the dark times, and made for a cheap meal at the jubilant fish fries that followed the successful evasion of fish and game wardens on the prowl. But Webb’s interest seemed unchanged by this long recent spell of upheaval. He was animated principally by the prospect of defeating an ambiguous them, which was comprised of the affluent boat fisherman and politically connected hunters who’d lobbied the game wardens and agriculture department officials to keep noodling off limits. It was only a glimmer of a breakthrough, but thinking of Webb while I stood over the boxes that I was getting ready to throw out, I caught sight of something I hadn’t noticed in the divide of the two sides around the murder case. Webb’s desire to make handfishing legal was as true as it was felt, just as the people of Chillicothe had chosen their sides with moral conviction. Their opponents, however, weren’t necessarily each other. They had their own version of Webb’s them—the judges, state officials, and attorneys with power and ulterior motives that had quite fairly earned their derision. These had been after all the primary figures who either allowed or participated in the corruption, political malfeasance, and manipulation that had ravaged the town for almost a decade during the 1980s crisis. Indeed, both sides had amongst them residents with brutal memories of lean years and plenty of frustration and resentment stored up, and for very good reasons. But fighting against these figures and the large, systemic forces unravelling American farming communities like their own could feel overwhelming, if not impossible. In picking a side in Mark’s case, I realized, some had found a durable vessel into which they could now pour their anger. Looking at the files pulled from my closet for the first time in several years, I saw the Livingston County residents in a different light, enough to get a rough sense of what now might be possible to say about them. After another year of reporting and more weeks back in Missouri, I filled eight new banker boxes with legal documents, police files, archival material, and personal records from those involved in the case. This second tranche included new reporting on the Chillicothe Sheriff’s office’s ongoing investigation into the murder, as well as material related to the protracted civil lawsuits that began in 2014, after the previous year’s controversial Missouri Supreme Court decision, and would only end, bitterly, in 2023. Though the division around the murder remains alive in Chillicothe to this day—as does the sheriff’s ongoing investigation into the case—I believed I had enough already for the book now being published. If Gary Webb were still here to read it, I hope he might agree this was the right story to go chasing after in the backcountry of Livingston County. *** View the full article

In the two years that have passed since I did my first round-up of Australian crime and mystery dramas, our “Golden Age” of Antipodean streaming options has only grown more gilded. To date, at least two dozen more top-tier Aussie (and Kiwi) series have made their way to North American streaming services, including cringe rom-com Colin from Accounts (Paramount+), cringe apocalypse comedy Class of ‘07 (Prime Video), and cringe probate law comedy Fisk (Netflix). Also, the Cringe Comedy King of them all: Taskmaster, both Australia and NZ editions. But of course it hasn’t just been cringe comedies the Antipodeans have been sending north these past two years! They’ve also — as you’ll see with the inclusion of Deadloch and Far North below below — sent us some prime examples of cringe crime drama(dies), too. Okay but for real, all (cringe) jokes aside, the volume of exceptional Australian and Kiwi crime and mystery dramas that have popped up across every North American streaming service since the last CrimeReads list was published underscores just how rich the mystery tradition is on the other side of the equator. Not only is the storytelling strong across the board, but that storytelling is supported by stunning cinematography and remarkable casts. This last is particularly exciting, as several of the series — like Black Snow, which drew from the local South Sea Islander community it shot in to cast its core characters — feature whole slates of new faces. All of which is to say, what follows here is just a snapshot of the great Antipodean crime TV that’s currently streaming for North American audiences. Some of it is funny; much of it is challenging. All of it is solid. A note about our organizing strategy: While the last list dropped in alphabetical order, this one is chronological by the story’s primary setting, starting in 1855 and running all the way up to 2023. The Artful Dodger (Hulu / Disney+) The Artful Dodger | Official Trailer | Hulu The Artful Dodger feels like the result of a dare: A period piece that’s also a medical drama that’s also a heist show that’s also a raucous indictment of Victorian classism that’s also a star-crossed romance that’s also a spinoff of a Charles Dickens novel. Sure! In slightly more detail (though I’m not sure it will make this show’s whole deal any clearer), The Artful Dodger tells the story of Jack Dawkins, AKA Oliver Twist’s infamous Artful Dodger, who has escaped the cells of Newgate and absconded to Australia, where he’s come away from his time aboard a navy ship something of a surgical savant. When the series opens, it’s 1855, and Dawkins (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) is employing those surgical skills as entertainment for the toffs in the theater of Port Victory, where by way of compensation he’s given room and board and not a scrap of salary more. With no surgical unionist movement in sight, Dawkins is obliged to spend his off-time hustling at the local poker tables to turn his meager theater tips into something a bit more substantive. Five minutes into the pilot, he’s in hock to the local poker boss (Tim Minchin) for more money than he’s seen in his lifetime; ten minutes in, his old London gang boss Fagin (David Thewlis) has washed ashore, obsequious and scheming in equal measure. It won’t be a surprise that this unfortunate combination spirals into Dawkins having to shrug on his old Dodger persona to pull off a number of increasingly daring crimes. What might be, though, is that in between his pre-ether surgeries and post-London heists, Dawkins also manages to get romantically entangled with the Governor’s eldest daughter, Lady Belle Fox (Maia Mitchell), whose sense of justice and mind for medicine is more than a match for his own. As weird an “adaptation” as this show is, Dawkins’ wild Australian tale is so compelling that it doesn’t matter that Oliver Twist himself is left behind in England, two oceans and a lifetime away — romantic, class-conscious, and squelchingly visceral, The Artful Dodger is banger. Boy Swallows Universe (Netflix) Boy Swallows Universe | Official Trailer | Netflix Based on Trent Dalton’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, the limited series Boy Swallows Universe is another exercise in Australian TV going just absolutely full tilt in layering together genres and narrative modes that really have no right to work en masse, but still somehow do. In this case, those layers are 1) violent drug-running crime thriller, 2) wrenching family melodrama, 3) gonzo journalism joint, and 4) guileless (often animated!) coming-of-age story, all of which come together to tell the tale of future crime reporter Eli Bell (Felix Cameron / Zac Burgess) and his artistic, selectively mute brother Gus (Lee Tiger Halley) as they barely survive their tumultuous pre-teen and teen years in 1980s Brisbane. In early episodes of the series, the boys and their mom, Frances (Phoebe Tonkin), are living with their retired drug dealer stepdad, Lyle (Travis Fimmel), a firecracker of a father figure who really wants to do right by them all — and especially Frances, who’s a recovered addict — but who finds himself falling back into old drug dealing patterns long before the first episode is out. By the end of the series, adult(ish) Eli and his crime reporter colleague/crush, Caitlyn (Sophie Wilde), are traipsing the darkest hollows of Brisbane on the hunt for the story behind the psychopathic drug lord who’s haunted the Bell family for years. And in between, the Bell family laughs and loves and goofs off and hugs, and Gus beatifically pens smoky messages from the future with his finger in midair, and draws charmingly innocent illustrations about the Bell family’s fortunes that keep coming true. It’s a weird mix, tonally! But back here in the States, Tarell Alvin McCraney pulled a similar trick with his exceptional OWN (now MAX) series David Makes Man, which featured a similarly charming and emotionally full-up central teen boy character facing similarly harrowing domestic circumstances. So clearly this kind of tonal tension is something audiences are ready to bear! Still, as charming as Eli is at every age — and as hopeful a note as the series really does end on — I do want to stress that this series is not for the faint of heart. The first episode features a graphic animal (lab rat) cruelty, and the final set piece takes place in a blood-spattered mad scientist’s lair that would give the best Fright Fest you can think of a run for its money. (Lyle, spoiler alert, fares very poorly in this regard.) But if you can swallow your bile for those parts of Eli’s story, Boy Swallows Universe is worth a look. Mystery Road: Origin (Acorn TV) Acorn TV Original | Mystery Road: Origin | Official Trailer Prequel stories can be hit or miss, but the 1999-set Mystery Road: Origin, which tells the story of Mystery Road’s Detective Jay Swan back in the days when he had only just earned his badge, connects so squarely, the ball sails past the horizon. Starring Mark Coles Smith in the role originated by Aaron Pedersen, Origin posts up with Jay as he returns to his tiny, dusty hometown of Jardine, a fictional gold mining town in Western Australia that is divided along generational lines of race and wealth — that is to say, a place where the white vs. Indigenous tension that has long defined Swan’s character can stretch taut. Profiled as a criminal his first night in town, Jay finds his homecoming fairly brittle. And that’s before he reconnects with his alcoholic rodeo champ father (Kelton Pell), his vagabond brother Sputty (Clarence Ryan), his take-no-shit first love Mary (Tuuli Narkle), or his wealthy white mine-owning childhood pals Geraldine (Caroline Brazier) and Patrick (Daniel Henshall), who on the one hand really do seem to love and support Jay as an individual, but who also live in a house where the “art” on their mantle is a wooden tree adorned with slavery-era neck chains. (“Well, people pay good money for real history,” Geraldine bristles when Jay says something mildly critical of it, “so.”) The mystery that follows Jay’s homecoming is classic Mystery Road — thorny in social implications, spare in dialogue, and, thanks to Tyson Perkins’ blistering cinematography, often astonishing simply to look at. For longtime fans, some key personal details from Jay’s history feel retconned, but not so egregiously that it should pull you out of the story. Because what does remain the same is Jay’s laconic doggedness in pursuit of justice, and the series’ commitment to laying bare Australia’s colonial sins. May we get another season soon. Black Snow (Sundance Now) A Sundance Now Original | Black Snow | Official Trailer [HD] Another entry on this list featuring Travis Fimmel in a lead role, Black Snow follows cold case Detective James Cormack as he travels to a small town in North Queensland in to investigate the unsolved murder of Isabel Baker (Talijah Blackman-Corowa), a popular high school senior from a South Sea Islander community who, alongside a real Breakfast Club hodge-podge of fellow detention kids, had put together a time capsule for the graduating class of 1994 that, when it’s finally unearthed twenty-five years later, turns out to contain a bloody clue to what happened to her the night she was killed. Much like fellow “sunshine noir” series Mystery Road did before it, the story Black Snow proceeds to tell is one of deep-seated racism, colonial violence, and patriarchal oppression. Only here, that story sits within the context of industrial sugar cane operations and the immiserating labor, health, and social conditions that surround them. What happened to Isabel in 1994 — and, not incidentally, a handful of trafficked young Pacific Islander workers — is directly tied not just to the historic sins of Australia’s colonial past, but also to the very much still living sins of its modern day economic and cultural engines. Cormack, of course, eventually solves Isabel’s case (the genre formula at work!), but it’s hard to call the emotional fallout of the conclusion “satisfying.” That said, the newcomer performances at the heart of Isabel’s story — not just Blackman-Corowa as Isabel, but also Molly Fatnowna as the young version of her little sister, Hazel, and Eden Cassady as grown-up Hazel’s daughter, Kalana — are gripping, as is Fimmel’s uncompromising intensity in Cormack’s drive to give other families the peace he can’t secure for himself. That’s right — Cormack is also embroiled in a personal cold case, his being the decades-old disappearance of his younger brother from their abusive childhood home. And while a few dominoes from that story fall here in Black Snow’s first season, there are plenty of questions still left to unravel in Season 2, now filming in Queensland. Safe Home (Hulu) Safe Home | Official Trailer | Hulu Possibly the most harrowing entry on this list (and that’s saying a lot, given the two Fimmel joints blurbed above), the modern day family violence thriller Safe Home is also at least blessedly brief. Starring Aisha Dee as Phoebe Rook, a trained journalist and communications professional who is, when we meet her, in the process of moving on from a PR gig at a fancy progressive law firm to become the first ever communications officer for an overworked family violence legal clinic, Safe Home aims to give its audience an unflinching look at the utter banality of family* violence. (*As the clinic’s staff didactically exposits in the first episode, the choice of “family” as a qualifier here is a critical and intentional one, as “domestic” carries with it the albatross weight of having been too easily dismissed by law enforcement and media for too long. “Okay, so, family, got it,” says Phoebe in Episode 1, lesson received.) Across its four hour-long episode, the series follows both Phoebe’s work at the underfunded clinic and the specific stories of abused women from all walks of life, a spectrum which includes a seemingly comfortable white grandma whose life on a horse farm looks idyllic to her small-town neighbors; an immigrant whose limited English gives her husband and in-laws total control over her life; and a young queer retail employee whose co-worker boyfriend indulges not just in physical abuse, but also revenge porn. More to the point, the spectrum also includes someone within Phoebe’s immediate social circle — someone whose abuse, we are teased when the first episode opens, Phoebe is so long blind to, that it ends up resulting in their murder. The mystery of who’s been murdered (and who by) drives the framing tension of Safe Home, and the answer, when it’s revealed, is conclusively distressing. But what the series is even more interested in is the everyday tension that pervades so many family violence victims’ everyday lives, and which those of us lucky enough not to have (yet) been touched by it directly can’t even sense. That’s a story that doesn’t have an ending. Deadloch (Prime Video) Deadloch | Red Band Trailer | Prime Video If not the funniest series on this specific list, the Tasmania-set Deadloch is by far the most replete with full-frontal male nudity. Well, it’s likely the leader of full-frontal female nudity, too — but once you get to the punchline at the end of the investigation, it’ll be clear that it’s the male nudity that matters. But let’s back up. Deadloch is a Broadchurch-esque “odd couple” detective series that is both a send-up of the overly serious small-town-serial-killer genre and one of the best examples of that niche to date. It stars Kate Box as Deadloch Sr. Sergeant Dulcie Collins, a buttoned-up, ex-detective lesbian with a free-spirited big animal vet wife, and Madeleine Sami as Detective Eddie Redcliffe, a hot hetero mess of a detective sent over from mainland Australia to “assist” on the serial killer situation suddenly sweeping the hyper-progressive burg. It also effectively (and affectionately) takes the absolute piss out of overly earnest progressive “wokeness,” while simultaneously illustrating the very real threat of men’s rights activists and self-styled “male allies” alike. For anyone who bristles at rhetorical incompetence, Eddie’s investigation-destroying brashness for the first half of the season can be a hurdle too high, but for those willing to stick that one rough spot out, the relationship that she and Dulcie eventually build — and the confidence that their leadership inspires in their young forensically minded colleague, Abby Matsuda (Nina Oyama) — is one of the best that new 2023 detective dramas had to offer. And given where the first season ends, that relationship is only just beginning… Far North (AMC Plus) Far North – 2023 – Three (NZ) Series Trailer The sole Kiwi offering on this particular list, Far North stars Temuera Morrison (Boba Fett himself!), Robyn Malcolm, Villa Junior Lemanu, Maaka Pohatu, John-Paul Foliaki, Albert Mateni, Fay Tofilau, and Mosa Alipate Latailakepa on the Aotearoa side of things, and Xiao Hu, Xana Tang, Fei Li, Dennis Zhang, Nikita Tu-Bryant and Louise Jiang on the Chinese side. Partly based on a true story — “partly” here meaning, “whole exchanges lifted in their entirety from the 2016 court transcripts” — Far North follows, in parallel, 1) the comically inept exploits of an Australian-Tongan “smuggling” “gang” looking to turn Big Time with an incoming shipment of Chinese meth, 2) the less comedic exploits of the all-female crew of forced-labor Chinese smugglers failing to bring that shipment in, and 3) a retired Māori mechanic (Morrison) and his aqua aerobics-instructor wife (Malcolm). With a cast this sprawling, cultural references this specific, and criminal acts this inept, Far North aims for (and occasionally hits) the Snatch register. Where it falls short of that mark is in its momentum — it takes a long time to get going, and loses narrative steam every time the focus shifts back to the immiserated Chinese smuggling crew. When it does get going, though, it’s a ride! Stick with this one; truth is stranger than fiction. View the full article

This is part two of our annual roundtable discussion ahead of the Edgar Awards, in which we discuss major issues (and minor peeves) in crime writing. Thanks so much to all the nominees who contributed to the discussion! __________________________________ What do you think is the most important issue facing crime writers today? __________________________________ Jess Lourey (nominated for Best Paperback Original – The Taken Ones): Inclusivity in our genre, in my opinion, is the most important issue facing crime writers today. Thanks to the hard work of Crime Writers of Color, Sisters in Crime, and others, our field is more diverse than it’s ever been, but there’s still important stories that aren’t being told, or aren’t reaching the audience they deserve. This issue affects all crime writers because all our boats rise together. Susan Isaacs (nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – Bad, Bad Seymour Brown): Not getting distracted. A crime writer has to create the world they want, and then populate it with characters who feel alive. Of course there’s the crime. It has to be depicted in such a compelling way that the reader can’t resist sticking with the investigation from start to finish. But even with a room of one’s own, it’s tough for a crime writer to stay focused. We all know that the Internet is both blessing and curse. Dare to look up a synonym for fire online (because all that comes to mind in that moment is conflagration, which would suck). And when your conscious mind next checks in on your progress, it discovers you’ve been listening to a podcast by the members of the Nissequogue, Long Island volunteer fire department. I’ve gotten so tripped up by rabbit holes when researching the forensic science available to solve crimes that I’ve wasted words, passion, and time coercing my narrator to natter on about trace evidence analysis of explosives. Paragraphs. Pages. All because I felt like a pro after an hour of skimming erudite papers and watching a YouTube video. And after I reread and rewrote it? One sentence remained. It’s not only websites that distract us. It’s politics on social media (watchable on any cellphone) that stimulates us to the point where we believe we’re pundits and must expound. Or the need to display our alleged “real lives,” except even when we’re working, we document our doings for the world: our messy desk, pics of Fluff the cat watching us work. If your goal is to invent a world, you have to live in it, not observe your creation from the outside. Even entering that world of your characters has become more challenging because of how we’re hooked by some enthralling narrative that seizes our inner lives: from video games to instantly downloadable books to streaming adaptations of… other authors’ crime writing. It’s a fight to leave a compelling story for one that’s unfinished. James Lee Burke (nominated for Best Novel – Flags on the Bayou): I think what we call crime stories today, at least the good ones, replaced the books about the Depression Era. Steinbeck and Dos Passos come to mind. The big crime to them was injustice. That’s what I try to show in my work. I.S. Berry (nominated for Best First Novel – The Peacock and the Sparrow): Freedom of speech (and I think this applies to all writers, crime or other). Increasingly, I think people seek to silence voices and subjects to which they object—whether through overt bans or, more insidiously, through pressure, marginalization, or personal attacks against authors. Uncivil discourse surrounding books is growing. Authors should be able to write honestly, authentically, and in an unvarnished and unorthodox way. Books are like frogs in our ecosystem, a bellwether for the health of our society. Sean McCluskey (nominated for the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award – “The Soiled Dove of Shallow Hollow,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine): The devaluing of writing into content, something that can be squirted out by an algorithm. As artificial intelligence improves, will it be capable of cranking out something that can hold a reader’s interest? Surprise them, delight them, make them glad they picked it up? I like to think that’ll remain the province of the human mind. Mary Winters (nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – Murder in Postscript): One important issue facing crime writers today is pay. According to a 2023 survey from The Authors Guild, full-time “mystery, thriller, and suspense authors had a book income median of $10,000, with their combined median book and author-related income totaling $15,010.” Like so many other artists, writers are not compensated as they should be. It’s a privilege to write, and a blessing for so many, but it should also be a viable profession that provides benefits and a livable wage. Scott Von Doviak (nominated for Best Paperback Original – Lowdown Road): I’m guessing many of the nominees will mention AI, and rightly so, as it’s probably the biggest issue facing writers of all kinds at the moment. So I’ll leave that one to someone smarter and better informed than me. Another big one is the increasing scarcity of outlets for our work and the promotion of same. A publisher like Polis folding is a massive loss to the crime writing community, and with Twitter a shadow of its former self, it’s even harder to hawk our wares. (I know TikTok works for some, but come on, I went to high school in the ‘80s.) “Everything’s important, everything’s on the table, and everything’s fair game.” –Tracy Clark Katherine Hall Page (2024 Grand Master): This is a hard one. Staying relevant without tripping over current cliches or losing one’s own style to catch the next Girl-On-A-Train trend are important issues we face. The Importance of Being Honest sums it up. However, the most crucial issue is simply the ongoing state of the publishing world. It’s a landscape that has changed at warp speed since my first book was published in 1989 by SMP, a family publishing house. The absorption of it and similar houses into what are now essentially five publishers with the former houses now imprints makes it more difficult for crime writers to stay published and get published. The days of the slush pile and over the transom discoveries unagented are long gone. To an extent, this means small independent presses and self-publishing, which is good news, boding well for diversity on many levels. It’s possible to become a published crime writer, but it’s more daunting than ever and acknowledging it, trying to change it is the challenge we face. And then there’s AI… Ken Jaworowski (nominated for Best First Novel – Small Town Sins): I think readers are starving for good books, and I believe that there are more terrific writers out there than ever. Yet with the decline of newspaper book reviews for general audiences, it can be tough to introduce titles to the public. Social media can help, of course. But I’d love to find a way to make it easier to alert the casual reader to new works. Tracy Clark (nominated for Best Paperback Original – Hide): I don’t think there is a “most important” issue. Every issue out there is important. We’re writing about society and its ills. We’re writing about the human condition. Everything’s important, everything’s on the table, and everything’s fair game. William Kent Krueger (nominated for Best Novel – The River We Remember): At the heart of so many stories in our genre is the idea that, in the end, justice prevails. But as a reality, the goal of justice for all seems more distant than ever. If crime fiction is a reflection of society, and I believe it is, for me the greatest challenge is to offer stories of hope in a world where hope seems more and more to be slipping away. __________________________________ What is the future of crime writing, in your opinion? __________________________________ Mary Winters: The future of crime writing is bright. Writers continue to diversify the genre, bringing their unique experiences to the field. The changing landscape makes me feel hopeful for new authors and books. AF Carter (nominated for Best Paperback Original – Boomtown): Let me put this another way. What is the future of commercial fiction? Fewer people read today, compared, for instance, to the time, not all that long ago, when every little store contained a revolving wire rack holding mass market paperbacks. The decline was inevitable, probably, given the ever-diversifying entertainment options out there. The good news is that storytelling is as natural to human beings as breath and heartbeat. Storytelling will continue on in some form. The bigger question is whether or not human beings will produce the stories. Software like Sudowrite already exist, and while they cannot yet produce a readable novel, AI is still in its infancy. My sense is that novelists themselves will be eliminated as computer-written novels become viable. After all, why pay an advance and royalties when the work can be produced by a salaried editor in a few weeks? No sub-rights to share with authors, either. Jennifer J. Chow (nominated for the Lilian Jackson Braun Memorial Award – Hot Pot Murder): The future of crime writing is bright. People will always be curious, and I believe crime fiction plays on that desire to unveil secrets, explore mysteries, and to, ultimately, understand one another better. Katherine Hall Page: When I think about the future of crime writing I look to the past and P.D. James’ response to a question asking about the appeal of crime fiction: “These novels are always popular in ages of great anxiety. It’s a very reassuring form. It affirms the hope that we live in a rational and beneficent universe.” Writers like Dashiell Hammett, Agatha Christie, and Mickey Spillane offered distraction from the Great Depression, World Wars, and political upheaval. The appeal continues—all too relevant— in the present. The future promises even greater anxieties, and we will need crime writing all the more. The traditional mystery with redemptive goodness triumphing over evil; Noir presenting chaotic warnings; and true crime with vicarious escape—we’ll take our picks! Sean McCluskey: Hopefully, me! But failing that, shorter, more serialized works written by people instead of programming. I anticipate more diversity, with stories of cultures, places, and people that aren’t traditionally heard from. And I think there’ll be a continued drift away from traditional mystery stories (focus on who committed the crime and how) into thriller territory (emphasis on why they did it). All of this will happen, I believe, alongside the continued expansion of self-publishing. Samantha Jayne Allen (nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – Hard Rain): Hopefully, more diversity—of characters and their creators, of structures and the types of stories being told. Not underestimating longtime fans of our genre, who I think desire to read what’s yet unfamiliar in addition to old favorites. As you mentioned, the mixing of genres is becoming more popular, and as crime fiction becomes a larger umbrella, conversely, I think, readers might also burrow into their own niches a bit. Kind of like streaming now, there could be something written specifically for every taste, overall more choices. William Kent Krueger: No end in sight, as far as I can tell. There are wonderful new voices coming onto the scene every year. Lots of reasons to celebrate. __________________________________ If you could get rid of any trope in the genre, what would it be, and why? __________________________________ Tracy Clark: The hard-drinking PI with a whiskey bottle in his bottom drawer can go, as far as I’m concerned. Seen it. Done it. Time to move on. Rob Osler (nominated for Best Short Story – “Miss Direction,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine): I would relax the constraining expectation that a cozy should entail a cottage business, take place in a small town, involve a pet, and completely avoid contentious social issues. Note that I said relax, not eliminate. Readers benefit by having broad choices; there’s room for both traditional and progressive works. A more inclusive cozy world only invigorates the subgenre. Sean McCluskey: It’s been decried by many people more eloquent than I am, but I’d be happy to see the end of the ‘woman as victim to motivate/justify a man’s righteous revenge’ bit. Whatever shock value it once had is long gone, and there are so many more interesting ways to kick off a good vengeance spree. Ken Jaworowski: The long-winded, implausible denouement, when at the end of a story, a Snidely-Whiplash type character pulls a gun and announces to the hero: ‘I am the killer! Don’t you remember, back at the very beginning, when I said…etc. etc. etc.” That is often the sign of lazy writing, and when it happens, my eyes seem to roll into the back of my head. William Kent Krueger: Although I try to steer clear of them, I have nothing against tropes, in general. In some ways, they meet readers’ expectations of the genre. But if you put a gun to my head (a cliché, which is, I suppose, another form of trope) and I had to choose one it would be the scene at the end of a mystery when our detective hero explains all the clues that point to the killer, a whole set of circumstances that only someone with the brain of an astrophysicist would have been able to make sense of. Lina Chern (nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – Play the Fool): I wouldn’t get rid of any tropes. I like tropes! All stories rely on certain basic conventions of storytelling—like agreements between readers and writers regarding what makes a story work—and I often find that the line between acceptable familiarity and “trope” or “cliché” is thin and subjective. To me, good writing is all in the execution, and some of my biggest thrills as a reader come when a writer executes a done-to-death trope in a way that makes it new and fresh. Scott Von Doviak: I’m not sure this counts as a trope, but my biggest pet peeve in crime fiction is the word “upmarket.” When I was on the agent search, this buzzword was everywhere—“we’re looking for upmarket crime fiction”—and I’m still not sure exactly what they mean. To me it suggests respectability and tastefulness—something you can read on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard without being embarrassed. Certainly there’s an audience for that, but is it the only audience? “Keep crime fiction disreputable,” that’s my campaign slogan. Call my stuff pulp, you won’t hurt my feelings. __________________________________ What are your thoughts about cross-genre writing? __________________________________ Scott Von Doviak: The more the merrier, although I’m not sure agents and publishers agree. I’ve met with resistance just from mashing up subgenres that fall under the crime fiction umbrella. One rejection that stuck with me (not in a good way) was from an agent who felt a particular manuscript was too hardboiled to be a whodunnit and too cozy to be a thriller. “You have to pick a shelf,” as if most bookstores actually have different shelves for each of these things, when mostly they’re shoved together under “Mystery/Crime.” Personally, I doubt most readers need things so neatly categorized, but maybe that’s why I never went into marketing. Carol Goodman (nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – The Bones of the Story): I’ve always loved cross-genre fiction and think that it only strengthens and invigorates the field. Mystery is a wide, capacious tent generous enough, despite a little bickering, to shelter the hardboiled and the cozy; the contemporary and the historical, the realist and the fantastic. I’ve particularly enjoyed Stephen King’s horror-inflected forays into the detective novel, Zakiya Dalila Harris’s potent mix of horror, suspense, and social satire; Anthony Horowitz’s injection of golden age tropes into contemporary who-dunits; and Simone St. James’s haunted thrillers. A.F. Carter: Consumers have a right to be entertained by whatever entertains them. As for authors? If you don’t put fannies in the seats, you won’t be writing long. It works or it doesn’t. Jennifer J. Chow: Creativity should be allowed to flow, and I think extending boundaries is a way to stretch artistic muscles. William Kent Krueger: One of the things I love most about the crime genre is that it can embrace any interest that a reader or writer might have. If you love history, there are historical mysteries. If you’ve got a profound sense of humor, there are funny mysteries. Love philosophy? It’s easy to find mysteries that delve into all kinds of philosophical conundrums. So, why not throw a vampire or werewolf into the mix? There’s a reason crime novels are called popular fiction. They offer something to appeal to everyone. As both a writer and a reader, I appreciate the egalitarian nature of our genre. I.S. Berry: I love cross-genre work! More than ever, I think traditional category descriptions are too limiting and don’t do writing justice. When you look back, so many great books could fit into multiple genres. Is John Fowle’s The Collector a thriller or literature? Before I was published, I didn’t even know what all the labels meant. One reviewer called my book “equal parts noir, thriller, and literature”—and I’m delighted with that description! Sean McCluskey: I love anything that sparks creativity in writers, and inspires readers who love particular genres but don’t have experience with others to try new things. And I think one of the best things about crime is that it just goes great with anything, like chocolate and/or peanut butter. Also Scotch. April Henry (nominated for Best Young Adult – Girl Forgotten): I think crime fiction has always cross-pollinated with other genres, and has long had room for humor, or romance, or settings like outer space or historical times. Mysteries can be solved by cats or have a supernatural element. More recently, I’m seeing a mix of horror and crime fiction. I love it all. Patricia Johns (nominated for the Lilian Jackson Braun Memorial Award – Murder of an Amish Bridegroom): As a romance writer who has moved into crime fiction, I love this! Romance looks at the human experience of falling in love, and crime fiction looks at the human experience of death, and pushes the envelope further to include murder. It’s the same source of passionate emotions driving people to find a partner to care for, or on the other end of the spectrum, to lash out and kill someone. Those deep boiling emotions drive us, and I believe that being able to write compelling romance really does help to write compelling murder, too! Sometimes I joke that in romance I get to marry them off, and in crime fiction I get to kill them off. But there is something very satisfying about exploring both the bright side and the dark side of the human experience. Claire Swinarski (nominated for Best Juvenile – What Happened to Rachel Riley?): I think the melding of genres is a great way to get people interested in mysteries who otherwise might not be. My favorite books don’t fit neatly in one category; they’re a blend of romance and mystery and literary fiction and drama. There are no rules anymore–it’s a great time to be a writer because there’s so much creative play and experimentation! Jennifer Cody Epstein (nominated for Best Novel – The Madwomen of Paris): I tend to think that crossovers of any sort can strengthen, enrich, and add dimension to writing, in much the same way that open dialogue can enrich and enhance conversation and understanding. It’s something I’ve always been interested in; in fact, my first novel centered on an early 20th-century artist who drew criticism as well as acclaim for blending Chinese and Western painting techniques. And as a writer I’ve always been intrigued by the way elements like truth and fiction, past and present, and prose and poetry can speak to one another within my novels. The Madwomen of Paris was very much an experiment along those lines, combining a variety of different genres—historical, mystery, Brontëan Gothic, true crime—in a way that I hoped would speak to modern-day questions like sexual assault and medical exploitation. Jess Lourey: Mystery writer Matthew Clemens once said, “There are only two genres: good books and bad books. Everything else is marketing.” The more we feel free to cross into what’s been historically considered another genre to write the best story we can, the better the books will be. Personally, I love reading crime fiction threaded with romance, or horror, or in a fantastical setting and hope to see more of it. __________________________________ Do crime writers have a responsibility to engage with social criticism? __________________________________ William Kent Krueger: A responsibility? I don’t believe so. But many of us do choose to use our work as vehicles for pointing out the iniquities or injustices in our society. And I believe that our stories have the profound possibility of making readers aware of and sensitive to social problems in a way that straight forward reportage cannot. A good story goes for the heart, not the head. And it’s only in the heart where a story finds a lasting home. Tracy Clark: Crime writers are pretty attuned to the world around them. The world is their landscape. Crime fiction is nothing more than society in microcosm. Good v. evil. Humanity/inhumanity. It’s just a big old morality play with good guys and bad guys battling it out. Crime fiction doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Writers need to see the world as it is, and then figure out what they think about it. Sarah Stewart Taylor (nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – A Stolen Child): This is such a complex subject. One part of my author brain says that when you sit down at your desk for the day, your primary responsibility has to be to the writing, to the story. Good writing, by every definition that I subscribe to, is informed by what is true, by the actual experiences and feelings of people like the ones you’re writing about. Characters need to feel wholly and messily human. They can’t be symbols or mouthpieces. But I think that crime writers do have a unique responsibility to look unflinchingly at systemic injustice and inequality. Writing about crime can confer a narrative advantage; crime stories provoke a visceral response that draws readers in and gives our genre its appeal and staying power. Along with that advantage, I think we have a responsibility to re-examine who we cast as heroes and villains in the stories we tell and to be clear-eyed about the inequities in our justice system, about poverty and racism and homophobia and misogyny. I just do. Carol Goodman: I think that’s each writer’s choice, but it’s hard to imagine how not to comment on society while writing crime fiction. Whenever we write about crime, we’re writing about social ills, taboos, and marginalized people. I am continuously inspired and provoked by what’s happening in our world and I use writing to process the chaos. I want my readers to recognize the world they live in and to perhaps see it anew when they put the book down. Jennifer J. Chow: Writers absorb their surroundings, so real-world issues will organically appear in our work when we craft authentic characters. I believe crime writers have a unique position in opening up dialogue about social issues because we often explore underlying primal human emotions that can lead to merriment…or murder. Linda Castillo (nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – An Evil Heart): A fiction writer has one job and that is to entertain the reader. Do some readers read crime fiction with an eye toward real-world issues or social criticism? Perhaps. But I think it’s more likely that readers read fiction to escape and enjoy a fictional world that will entertain and delight. Give your readers what they want. Stay true to your story. Stay true to your characters. And you will stay true to your readers. Yvonne Woon (nominated for Best Young Adult – My Flawless Life): I write novels for young adults, so I’m biased, as I believe that writing for young, malleable minds comes with many layers of responsibility. When we have the attention of developing minds, we have to be mindful of what our stories are telling them. This especially goes for stories about crime, which are, in essence, about what’s right and what’s wrong, and how and why people do bad things. What complicates crime writing is that our idea of what’s right vs. wrong is constantly changing – many behaviors that are unacceptable today were socially accepted just ten or twenty years ago, and if you look historically, the difference is even more pronounced. Many actions that are now considered crimes weren’t treated as such just a handful of decades ago (domestic violence, sexual assault, and police brutality, to name a few). So while I don’t think crime writers have a duty to directly address real-world issues, I do think it’s impossible to write a story that feels true and urgent without thinking about the story existing within the moral context of the world today. Rob Osler: All authors are interested in writing authentic characters. Unless the story features a recluse, the protagonist exists in society—and no society is perfect. Whether the story’s hero is gay or straight, a POC or white, rural or urban, poor or wealthy, identity and social status shape a character’s world and struggles. It’s hard to keep it real and completely avoid social issues. That said, genre then influences how deeply a reader might expect an author to delve into such matters. If the story is a political thriller, social issues would seem unavoidable, but with a cozy, a lighter touch would be expected. A.F. Carter: I’m going to stick out my neck and say no. The first duty of an entertainer is to entertain, and it’s quite possible to please a large audience without touching up controversial issues. There’s also the well-worn mandate: show, don’t tell. I want my own books to reflect social issues and they do, but I wouldn’t impose social relevance on others, nor is social relevance especially prominent in my own reading. I would add this, however, for beginning writers. The novel you begin tomorrow, will see the better part of two years before it’s published. Today’s hot topic may well be yesterday’s news two years down the line. Better to allow your characters to embody the issues without resorting to windy polemics. Sean McCluskey: As a federal employee, I obviously eschew any responsibility whatsoever! But I think a writer’s greatest duty is to tell a compelling story, whether it speaks to contemporary issues or not. A writer’s message, like a writer’s unique voice, will come through naturally. I think the crime fiction writer need to be aware of the criticism that address the genre (gratuitous violence, sexual assault as a plot device, etc.) without limiting their work out of fear that they’ll offend. I.S. Berry: Writers should absolutely tackle real-world issues. People are looking to make sense of our world, and I think artists of all stripes have a unique ability to help them do that. Especially in this time of TikTok, clickbait, and social media, I think writers can provide a more thoughtful, nuanced, deeper lens on issues. That said, there are a lot of current topics that seem to flicker through the literary ethos, and I’m wary of becoming too wedded to these: as a writer, I search for what’s timeless; I want my book to retain its resonance and engage readers twenty years from now. View the full article

Death of an Author is a rare example of a novel by E. C. R. Lorac (the principal pen name of Carol Rivett) that does not feature her popular and long-serving series detective Inspector Macdonald. The story is so entertaining, however, that we don’t miss him, especially given that Lorac introduces an appealing and capable pair of substitute investigators in Chief Inspector Warner of the CID and Inspector Bond. The novel, originally published in 1935, boasts an unorthodox and well-crafted plot, but is particularly strong in its depiction of the literary world of the mid-1930s. This is a subject which evidently fascinated Lorac, and she returned to it more than once in subsequent novels, including These Names Make Clues, which has been republished as a British Library Crime Classic. Here, the opening scenes are especially pleasing and one can almost taste the relish with which she wrote them. The story opens with an encounter between Andrew Marriott, a publisher, and his star author Michael Ashe, whose successes have made him a celebrity. They have a wonderful exchange in which Ashe threatens to write a crime novel, only for Marriott to respond: “Crime stories are a legitimate branch of fiction, but they’re mere ephemerals—selling like hot cakes today, and gone tomorrow.” This view was widely held at the time, not least by many of those who wrote detective fiction. Among Lorac’s contemporaries, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis (whose mysteries were published under the name Nicholas Blake) and the broadcaster and priest Ronald Knox, undoubtedly regarded their whodunits as ephemeral, although Day-Lewis soon came to appreciate—and exploit—the literary potential of the genre. Even Agatha Christie gave spoilers about the solutions to four of her early mysteries in Cards on the Table, an Hercule Poirot novel of 1936, which suggests that she thought they had passed their sell-by date. Today, such modesty seems wholly misplaced. Everything I’ve learned while researching Lorac over the years leads me to the conclusion that she had a stout belief in the value of her work, although no doubt she would have been not only thrilled but also amazed by the sales figures (and positive reviews) her books have achieved as a result of appearing in the Crime Classics series. The conversation between Marriott and Ashe turns to a novel written by another of Marriott’s authors. The book in question is The Charterhouse Case by Vivian Lestrange. As Ashe says, Lestrange has “achieved the impossible—or at least, the improbable—by writing a crime story that is in the rank of first rate novels. His writing, his characterisation, and his situations all disarm criticism.” Lestrange, it seems, is a recluse who refuses to have his photograph taken for publicity purposes and about whom nothing is known. Marriott and Ashe debate whether a book of such quality could really be the work of a newcomer and also the extent to which the authenticity of the prison life background of the story is such that it must be based on real life experience rather than simply meticulous research. Marriott concedes that: “to do them justice, some of the ‘thriller merchants’ take an infinite amount of trouble to get their facts vetted. The standard is going up steadily…” Ashe persuades his publisher to arrange a dinner party at which he can meet the mysterious Lestrange. But a shock is in store. We are told that Lestrange is actually a young woman. Marriott regards her as “the coolest creature I ever met in my life!” What follows is interesting and relevant to the storyline, and it also gives us an intriguing insight into Lorac’s attitude towards the treatment of female writers by reviewers and the publishing industry generally. On first meeting the young woman, Marriott said, “I have been flattering myself for years that I could tell a man’s writing from a woman’s…” Her response is blunt: “I get so sick of that theory. The minute a reviewer learns from some gossip that so and so is a woman, he promptly writes ‘there is a touch of femininity about the writings of X.Y.Z. Her descriptions are above criticism, but her dialogue betrays her sex.’ It’s all my eye and Betty Martin!” When Ashe—accompanied by Marriott and his colleague Bailley—meets the young woman, he is thunderstruck. She is scathing: “What but male conceit formulated that judgment of yours that no woman could have written a book which you admired? Is your estimate of all women the same?” She also makes a forceful case for equal treatment: “You envisage women still as the sheltered, emotional playthings of men. The woman of today is beginning to see through the fraud… We are still handicapped by the habit of thought of centuries, still too prone to acknowledge the unique splendour of the gifted male—but your ‘weaker vessel’ theory—I deride it!” Three months after that dinner party, however, a woman walks into Hampstead Police Station to announce that she is afraid that something has happened to Vivian Lestrange. The author is missing from home and so is the housekeeper. The elaborate mystery which gradually unfolds tests the detective skills of Warner and Bond, but they rise to the challenge. To say much more without giving too many spoilers is almost impossible, but although this has until now been a vanishingly rare book, most people lucky enough to read it in modern times have been greatly impressed. Warner (who hates the idea of hanging and favours abolition: hardly a conventional view for policemen of his era) and Bond are a likeable duo. One minor mystery is why Lorac abandoned them after this novel. Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that this was the last novel of hers published by Sampson Low. She moved to the more prestigious Collins Crime Club imprint, and it may well be that, since Macdonald was already a well-established series character, the publishers were keen for the author to make the most of him. Edith Caroline Rivett (1894–1958), generally known as Carol Rivett, published her first detective novel in 1931. There can be little doubt—as the discussion in this book makes clear—that she adopted the ambiguous writing name of E. C. R. Lorac because of a suspicion of prejudice against female authors. She was so successful in hiding her identity that, many years later, the crime novelist and critic Harry Keating wrote of his astonishment at discovering, eventually, that she was a woman. She wasn’t alone in fearing prejudice. In The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators, I’ve discussed other female authors who masqueraded as men, notably Elizabeth Mackintosh (who was better known as Josephine Tey but whose first detective novel appeared under the name Gordon Daviot) and Lucy Malleson (who wrote most of her mysteries under the name Anthony Gilbert). Even Agatha Christie toyed, briefly, with the idea of adopting a masculine pseudonym. By 1936, however, Carol Rivett was confident enough to create a new literary identity using her own first name, and so was born Carol Carnac. One of the Carnac titles, Crossed Skis, has been reprinted as a British Library Crime Classic. How it must have amused her to put these words in Warner’s mouth: “If I petitioned Parliament, do you think I could get an enactment that no man writes under any name but his own, and his finger-prints be registered on the title page?” When Bond points out that some writers produce different kinds of work under a host of different names, Warner groans: “Hardened offenders…recidivists, I call ’em.” Late in life Carol Rivett used a further pen name, Mary Le Bourne, when writing Two-Way Murder. That book, however, did not find its way into print for more than sixty years prior to first publication in the Crime Classics series under the E. C. R. Lorac pen name. That is yet another good example of the strange and unpredictable nature of the author’s life, a subject right at the heart of this lively novel. _______________ From Martin Edwards’ introduction to E.C.R. Lorac’s DEATH OF AN AUTHOR. Copyright ©2024 by Edwards. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, POISONED PEN PRESS. All rights reserved. View the full article

From ancient times, India has had a rich tradition of magic, active and thriving even today. Lord Indra, Hindu God of the heavens, who wields the power to control thunder and lightning, is also believed to be the world’s first master magician. His biggest magical creation is the Indrajala, or maya, the web of illusion in which our lives are embedded. The Atharva Veda, one of India’s oldest and most influential sacred texts, is rich with descriptions of magical rituals, incantations, charms and spells. Seals from the Indus Valley site in Harappa, dating to the Bronze Age, show evidence of shamans wearing horns. In colonial India, jadoo, magic, was intertwined with street theatre and animal acts – performed on the humblest of streets, and the grandest of stages. In his 1863 book Mumbaiche Varnan (The Story of Bombay) writer Govind Narayan provides a fascinating eyewitness account of the city’s streets, filled with snake charmers, rope dancers, magicians, conjurers, tumblers, monkey and bear handlers, and acrobats performing somersaults on horses. Videshi or foreign visitors were fascinated by what they saw, bringing Indian jadoo tricks to world wide attention. Especially popular were the famous Indian rope trick (featuring a rope which, thrown into the air, immediately became rigid like a ladder – after which the magician’s assistant, usually a small boy, climbed up the rope and disappeared into thin air) and the mango seed trick (where the magician planted a mango seed in a pot, watered it, covered the pot with a cloth – and whisked it away to reveal a small tree, laden with fruit). As John Zubrzycki describes in his book Jadoowallahs, Jugglers and Jinns, Western magicians developed a love and hate relationship with the Indian world of jadoo. Alfred Silvester, a British magician who moved to the USA in the mid-19th century, called himself the ‘Fakir of Oolu’, dressing up in flowing robes, turban on his head, to perform his signature trick, of floating in mid-air, apparently unsupported. In a strange turn of events that speaks to the increasingly globalized world of the 19th century, Silvester and his family then embarked on a round-the-world trip in 1878, taking his bowdlerized version of Indian magic back to India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and then to Africa, where they performed to packed houses in Mauritius and the African Cape. Magicians like Howard Thurston and Harry Houdini, perhaps the best known American magicians of their times, further exploited the obsession of the west with the oriental, battling each other for their share of the spotlight. They travelled to India to learn local jadoo, and then took it back to the USA, adapting what they had learnt and using it as a centrepiece in their acts. Often, it was a direct, even brazen theft of ideas. Harry Houdini capitalized on the American audience’s fascination with the exotic Orient, dressing up as a flute-playing Indian fakir in blackface and white robes at the Chicago World Fair in 1893. Thurston paid Indian street magicians to perform in his hotel room, keenly watching them, dissecting how they did it, and then building on it for the stage. At the same time, he openly sneered at the street fakirs whose ideas he stole. Writing about Indian magic tricks in an April 1927 issue of Popular Mechanics, he dismissed their work as of ‘crude construction,’ ‘far inferior’ to the work of American magicians like himself. Silvester, Thurston, Houdini and dozens of other American, British and Australian magicians sought to assert the superiority of Western modernity and rational science over what they termed Oriental superstition – while at the same time amassing vast collections of books on Indian traditions of spiritualism, witchcraft and tantric magic, eagerly studying them to pick up hints that they could use to devise new routines. Of course this was only in keeping with established colonial traditions of appropriating the knowledge of the colonized, using it to their own benefit while simultaneously deriding its foundations – in fact performing another, highly perfected sleight of hand. At the same time, Indian magicians began to become increasingly connected to the global world of magic, through exposure to journals and magazines, and international societies of magic. By the late 19th and early 20th century, it was becoming increasingly common to find Indian magicians in England and the USA, wearing coats and top hats. Perhaps the oldest of Indian magicians to visit Europe was the south Indian juggler Ramo Samee, who performed in Europe from 1810-1844, also doing a tour of the USA. Sadly, Ramo Samee died in poverty, but over a century later, Bengali magician PC Sorcar found far greater success, calling himself not just India’s, but the World’s Greatest Magician. Sorcar is still remembered for a very famous BBC program he did in 1956, where he sawed a woman assistant in half. He intentionally made it seem that the trick failed, leading to a ghastly accident. The audience panicked, and the BBC had to issue a clarification in the newspapers to let people know that his assistant was fine – it was just a trick, and a very successful one at that. This performance catapulted Sorcar to international fame. A Nest of Vipers, my latest book – the third in The Bangalore Detectives Club series – is set in 1923, in colonial India. The book begins at the time of the visit of Edward, Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII, one of the shortest reigning monarchs in British history) to several parts of India. Edward expected to be greeted by cheering crowds – instead, he was met by rioting crowds, violence on the streets, and increasingly strident calls for the British to depart from India. I seek to explore how the world of jadoo interfaced with the growing calls for Indian nationalism during this period, by creating a fictional master magician Das. A nationalist at heart, Das refuses to use the term magic – he calls himself a jadoogar, proudly claiming his heritage. At the opening of the book, Das disappears in front of large crowds while performing a magical act – and does not reappear, as he was supposed to. His son turns to Kaveri, begging her to help him. Is Das alive or dead? Was his disappearance planned and staged – or has he been abducted, perhaps even killed? When Mrs. Kaveri Murthy, now firmly established as Bangalore’s leading woman detective, begins to investigate – she discovers a world of smoke and mirrors. Nothing is as it seems, and every lead she finds seems connected to the Prince’s upcoming visit to Bangalore. In this, Kaveri’s deadliest case yet, the character of Das was inspired by PC Sircar. Sircar passed away in 1971, the year before I was born. Yet I often watched his performances, routinely telecast on Indian television when I was a child. Despite the bad quality of the recording, and the limitations of the black and white television set on which we viewed his magic acts, he was mesmerizing. I also vividly remember his beautiful assistant, who acted as a live prop. Did she have magical abilities of her own? We, the viewers, never found out. By including a note about Das’s wife’s death, which takes place a few years before the opening of the book, I also examine the roles that women magicians were allowed to engage in at the time – apart from being sawn in two at the end of each performance and then put back together again. 1920s colonial India is a fascinating period to write about, but also deeply disturbing. My parents were born in colonial India, and many of my older relatives took part in the freedom struggle. I use the medium of the book to explore my own discomfort with the manner in which Indian traditions and local knowledge systems were being exoticized and exploited for commercial benefit by western magicians – while mocking and deriding their ideas. Sadly, intellectual theft continues to be common today, with indigenous communities often at the receiving end of exploitation. The world of mystery fiction, especially historical mystery, offers rich possibilities to examine the antecedents of many of these issues. I have enjoyed delving into the world of Indian jadoo, and I hope my readers do as well! *** View the full article

They fanned out across the slope, taking their time to survey the terrain. The wind was no longer so ferocious, but it was still cold and gusty. Back home, the experts referred to this as a natural ‘terrace’, but it was far from flat – a thirty-degree slope with steep cliffs at the bottom, the terrain a mixture of scree-covered rock and patches of snow. Just one slip could send you tumbling down the mountain, to be smashed to pieces on the glaciers below. They were at 27,000 feet on the North Face of Everest, the lower edge of the ‘death zone’. Five American climbers and mountain guides: average age thirty-two, two previous summiters, all eager and willing. At Base Camp, 10,000 feet below – near the tip of the Rongbuk glacier – other members of their team were attempting to follow the action through a powerful telescope. It was 1 May 1999, day one of their search for Everest’s Holy Grail: a camera that had gone missing seventy-five years earlier when George Mallory made his final, fateful attempt on Everest. No one expected to find anything straight away – it was all about assessing the lie of the land, getting used to the oxygen sets and radios, figuring out how to work together as a team for a mission that was expected to take a week. And then, fifteen minutes in, Jake Norton, the youngest climber on the team, spotted something: a blue oxygen cylinder, much bigger and heavier than their own, possibly a remnant of a Chinese camp set up in 1975. If it was, they were in the right area, so they carried on going, spreading out until eventually they were so far apart they needed their radios to communicate. Each of the climbers had been given a small, spiral-bound notepad with instructions on how and where to look, but the search zone was vast – the size of about twelve American football fields – so they followed their hunches and intuition. If a body had fallen from a ridge high above, where would it have landed? Were there any obvious funnels or collection points? Then at 11.00 a.m., about half an hour in, Conrad Anker spotted the first corpse, a twisted set of badly dislocated limbs wrapped in a washed-out purple suit. One arm stuck out rigidly, almost as if it were waving. Getting closer, he realized that the ravens had been there first, pecking off much of the skin from the dead climber’s face. It was a gruesome sight, but it wasn’t what he was looking for, the corpse clearly too recent. ‘What are you doing way out there?’ one of his teammates crackled over the radio. ‘We need to be more systematic.’ Anker ignored him and carried on going westwards. This was sacred ground, the North Face of Everest – mountaineering’s most elevated and celebrated peak. All around were features named by previous expeditions; it was a privilege just to be here, heading for the Great Couloir that Edward Norton had attempted in 1924 and Reinhold Messner had conquered in 1980. Then Anker saw a second body, this time in a blue-grey suit; again it was a confusion of broken limbs, the torso facing downhill. But like the first, the clothing was too modern for the expedition they were interested in. So Anker moved on, keeping a wary eye on the line of cliffs below until he stopped to take off his crampons. They weren’t much help on steep downward-facing slabs covered in unstable scree. A few minutes later, he spotted a piece of fabric fluttering in the wind and began climbing upwards to investigate. Blue and yellow, it too was probably modern but he needed to get closer to check. And then he noticed it: a patch of white. Not snow, not rock; something that didn’t quite fit. He moved closer and was stopped in his tracks. It was the powerful shoulders of a climber, his arms stretched upwards as if to arrest a fall, his partly clothed body seemingly fused into Everest itself. Moments later, Conrad Anker took out his radio and called his teammates, but it was another twenty minutes before they all assembled, staring down at the mummified but clearly defined body. No one could quite take it in. On the first day of their search, Anker had discovered something totally remarkable, the solution to a mystery which had gripped the climbing world for the last seventy-five years. He’d found the remains of one of the great heroes of twentieth-century exploration: George Herbert Leigh Mallory. In the now almost a century since he disappeared into the clouds with his young partner Andrew Irvine, George Mallory has become a legendary figure. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay may have been the first men to reach the summit of Everest, but their expedition has never quite roused the same devotion in Europe and America. Mallory has inspired biographies, epic poems, documentaries, works of fiction as well as works of fact, and countless magazine articles and other commentaries. His answer to the question ‘Why climb Everest?’ – ‘Because it’s there’ – is probably the most famous quotation in the history of exploration, on a par with Henry Morton Stanley’s ‘Dr Livingstone I presume’ and Neil Armstrong’s ‘A small step for Man’. Everything about Mallory, from his looks to his skill with words to his athletic abilities, made him the ideal, quintessentially English hero. Even his name seemed to imply his destiny: George the dragon-slayer; Mallory an imperfect echo of Thomas Malory, the great chronicler of Arthurian legends. It’s no wonder that his friend Geoffrey Winthrop Young dubbed him ‘Galahad’, after the legendary knight. In general, most biographers and commentators have been very positive about him: he’s portrayed as a Romantic hero, the incarnation of adventure, an idealist and a visionary. The only real exception to this hagiographic tendency comes in Walt Unsworth’s monumental history, Everest, in which he described Mallory as someone ‘who had greatness thrust upon him. The pity of it was that he had so little actual talent.’ I suspect that Unsworth was being deliberately provocative, but a century after Mallory’s disappearance how should we assess him? Was he the ‘greatest antagonist that Everest has had – or is likely to have’, as Edward Norton dubbed him in the official account of the 1924 expedition, or was he ‘a very good stout-hearted baby’, as Tom Longstaff, his teammate on a previous Everest expedition, memorably described him in a private letter? Is there any fresh evidence that might help answer this question? The unexpected truth is that over the last decades a surprising amount of new material has become available – Mallory’s letters to his penfriend Marjorie Holmes, John Noel’s private archive, George Finch’s papers, an enormous number of documents from the Mount Everest Foundation archive that have now been scanned and digitized – that enables Mallory’s story to be told more fully. The picture that emerges is complex and nuanced: a fascinating individual, loved by his friends and family; idealistic, chaotic, narcissistic, generous, impulsive, indecisive, driven by the demons of risk and ambition, and continually reassessed and reappropriated by successive generations of climbers and adventurers of all kinds. This book is not an attempt to tell the complete story of Mallory’s life. Rather, the aim is to do two things: first, to look in detail at the events of 1923 and 1924 and understand the forces that drove Mallory and the third British Everest expedition, and second, to separate the man from the mythology that grew up after his disappearance and which continues to evolve, especially after his body was discovered in 1999. It begins though, not on the slopes of the world’s highest mountain, but on a small spit of rock by the seaside… ___________________________________ Excerpted from Fallen: George Mallory and the Tragic 1924 Everest Expedition, by Mick Conefrey. Copyright 2024. Published by Pegasus books. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. View the full article

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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