Crime Reads - Suspense, Thrillers, Crime, Gun!
CrimeReads is a culture website for people who believe suspense is the essence of storytelling, questions are as important as answers, and nothing beats the thrill of a good book. It's a single, trusted source where readers can find the best from the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. No joke,
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new nonfiction crime books. * The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock: An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense By Edward White (W.W. Norton & Co.) White’s study of Hitchcock is an endlessly engaging and insightful read, breaking down the Master of Suspense’s life into twelve aspects, each illuminated with clever analysis of the director’s work. From Hitchcock “the dandy” to Hitchcock “the voyeur” and Hitchcock “the man of God,” White offers up incisive commentary on the multitudes contained within the man’s larger-than-life persona, and the live mind behind some of the greatest movies ever made. For fans of classic movies a…
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Back when I was a football coach, I used to call other coaches and “talk shop.” I wanted to know how they ran their practices, which plays they called on third and long. I wanted to know everything. Now that I’m a writer, not much has changed. Anytime I get a chance to meet up with other authors, I always want to talk shop. “Shop Talk” is a column where I’ll chat with some of today’s leading crime writers about how they put the black on the white. We’ll cover everything from office setup to what a regular workday looks like, and all stops in between. For the first installment of “Shop Talk,” I sat down with William Boyle, author of the novels Gravesend, The Lonely Witne…
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Many a mystery novel featuring an amateur sleuth places a librarian in that role. With good reason—outside of law enforcement, no profession lends itself to the role of detective more readily. Librarianship requires a combination of temperament and education that produces a professional with a powerful curiosity and the skill set to satisfy it, no matter how obscure the fact we seek. Though often written off as unassuming, cardigan-wearing bookworms, our jobs require traits more often associated with our hard-boiled colleagues in the investigation business. We do good research. Go ahead—try us. But be warned: strolling up to the reference desk and prefacing your question…
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Chester Himes is one of the most prolific and underrated Black writers of the 20th century. Himes, who lived from 1909-1984, was the author of 17 novels and numerous short stories. But for crime fiction lovers, he is best known for his Harlem detective series featuring the African American detective team of Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. I was first introduced to the duo through the 1970 movie Cotton Comes To Harlem, which was based on the sixth novel in his series. While Himes published his first novel in 1945, he didn’t enter the hardboiled genre until he was recruited by a French publisher to write crime novels while living in France in the 1950s. The expat…
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We all know the power of fiction to do some good. It’s cover for forbidden facts. It can shine a spotlight on corruption. Ars gratia artis has it’s place, but not for me, not today. We’re living in a world of teenagers too young to drink or drive, sporting AR-15s. Of Putin and Xi assembling an all-star team of autocrats to take on the world. Fiction has a job to do. And one genre in particular is up to the task. “Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic,” Raymond Chandler begins his iconic essay on the crime writer’s craft, “The Simple Art of Murder.” The father of American noir goes on to rip apart the British cozy and most detective fiction as too improb…
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Young Man, It Starts Here Almost all the people I called my peers were second-generation township dwellers. When my father said he was going home, he embarked on an exhausting, bumpy drive to the rural south coast, past Umzumbe and beyond, to dusty villages where youths still greeted elders. I went there too from time to time. There was nothing lavish about the place. When I said I was going home, I meant Umlazi—a township. Both my maternal and paternal grandparents were of the last generation that lived in the same place for their whole lives. Times changed fast. Even I, bush mechanic that I was, vowed not to die in a township, let alone in my father’s house. My father …
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Even Sherlock Holmes, wrote the Monster, couldn’t beat us. In March of 1984 a kidnapping rocked Osaka. Masked men with guns dragged 42-year-old Katsuhisa Ezaki, president of the multimillion-dollar Ezaki Glico confectionery company, out of his bathtub. Here was a man whose name was a fixture in stores and vending machines across Japan (Glico candies are iconic; Pocky is just one of them)—the leader of a company that in the ruins of postwar Japan had been an engine of revitalization, selling everything from dairy products to meat curries, coming to represent health and vitality to so many millions of Japanese. Now his wife and daughter, and even his mother in the house ne…
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If a thrilling movie filmed in a foreign locale helps you escape for an hour or two from limitations on travel imposed by the pandemic, imagine what watching 25 episodes of an international thriller series might do to uplift your psyche and energize your creativity! I thought I’d test that theory, and over the last month have streamed 27 international thriller TV series in a variety of subgenres—espionage, political, romantic, and more—from continents across the globe. I do feel considerably less home-bound, and have drawn from what I learned about the wider world as I write my next book. Based on that experience, I’m delighted to share with you my Top 10 Streaming Inter…
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America’s Gilded Age was always rotten at the core. Glittering estates and palaces of commerce for the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies, the squalid tenement and factory floor for the masses. Two entire generations of workers had been sacrificed to that grinder to make the Rockefellers rich. But when the gleaming veneer cracked, the whole system fell apart, and the country lapsed into a stupor like it had never known. The Panic of 1893 was the worst depression the United States had yet endured. The railroads—the revolutionary technology of the age, and engine of overnight trade and communication—had been overvalued and overbuilt, growth fueled through acquisitions that hi…
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As the mother of daughters, I am well aware that sisters can be twisted. Sure, they can be loving, but there is often a darker side to this relationship … and what makes it so frightening is the speed with which the pendulum swings. One moment it’s all rainbows and unicorns, the next it’s hairpulling and eye-gouging (or is this just at my place?). As someone with brothers, this relationship has always been fascinating to me. How is it that two people can be so close, and yet so treacherous? This is something I wanted to explore in my new novel, The Good Sister, but clearly I’m not the only one who is interested in this subject. Here are a few of my favorite novels about…
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In conversation with Andy Warhol, another artist who spent a great deal of his career silently staring at bodies in intimate situations, Alfred Hitchcock claimed he had glimpsed pornographic films only once in his life, and that was after the age of sixty, and by way of happenstance. It occurred after a steak dinner during a publicity trip to Tokyo, he said, when he was led blithely “into this upper room and there they had a screen that showed these awful films,” the specifics of which he didn’t divulge. However, he daydreamed about including acts of sexual voyeurism in his films. The story of Adelaide and Edwin Bartlett, which Hitchcock frequently cited as his favorite t…
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I’ve heard musty advice about including the internet in books again and again: don’t do it. It’s always from a certain kind of writer and age has nothing to do with it; the kind of writer that imagines a purity of craft that I don’t believe exists, combined with a personality that romanticizes being a luddite because they have better, more elevated, things to accomplish. These folks have a lot to say to me because I write a ton about computers, games, and digital community. They warn that it will date my book (all books are dated). They exclaim, also, that it will create too many plot holes—how will the characters still have problems that they cannot solve if they have Yo…
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There are few places in the world that inspire awe and terror like the Alps. With peaks that top 4000 meters and immense crevasses cracking through granite, the Alps give a god-like vantage above the world one minute only to plunge one to its depths the next. This dizzying sensation was best expressed by the French essayist Chateaubriand when he wrote: High mountains suffocate me, and while the lack of oxygen is certainly a factor, it is just one of the elements that make the Alps the perfect setting for chilling crime, suspense, and horror fiction. One of my favorite novels set in the Alps is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818. Shelley perfectly captured th…
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Winter’s chill is thawing, and you know what that means: a fresh crop of true-crime podcasts. Tune into these nine new pods this spring. TW: Sexual assault Anatomy of Murder (audiochuck) What sets Anatomy of Murder apart from other true crime podcasts? It’s the real insider’s perspective offered by the show’s co-hosts—one that considers every single layer of a murder investigation. Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi and Scott Weinberger are the definition of true true crime insiders. Nicolazzi spent 21 years working as a New York City homicide prosecutor and currently hosts Investigation Discovery’s True Conviction. Scott Weinberger, an Emmy Award-winning investigative journalis…
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I’d forgotten how beautiful this drive is,” Marine said to her best friend, Sylvie. They were heading south on the highway between Aix and the coast, and Marine was craning her head so that she could better see the hills to her right. They were covered in garigue that was brighter than usual because it had rained so much that spring. “Oui, c’est vrai,” Sylvie mumbled in agreement, signaling to pass a slow-moving truck. “How are you feeling today?” “Oh, I’m fine,” Marine said, smiling. “It was really just those first three months, you know. I was constantly tired.” Sylvie shifted gears as they climbed the mountain. “Get ready for the view,” she said. Marine did as she …
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Professor Dr Dr (honoris causa) (mult.) Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld came from a distinguished family about whom little is known, other than they had existed, as von Igelfelds, for a very long time. The obscurity of their early history in no way detracted from the family’s distinction; in fact, if anything, it added to it. Anybody can find their way into the history books by doing something egregiously unpleasant: starting a local war, stealing the land and property of others, being particularly vindictive towards neighbours: all of these are well-understood routes to fame and can lead to immense distinction, titles and honorifics. Most people who today are dukes or earls ar…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Bryan Christy, In The Company of Killers (Putnam) “Christy makes his fiction debut with an exceptional adventure thriller… A riveting plot, complex characters, deep backstory, and an engrossing setting enhance this finely written novel about justice, personal responsibility, and saving the environment.” –Publishers Weekly Edward White, The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock (W.W. Norton & Co.) “White distinguishes his work with an inspired approach…. An absorbing, thoughtful, and balanced look at a master of his medium.” –Library Journal Mariah Fredericks, Death of a Showma…
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At the National Museum of American History, there is a small piece white fabric, roughly the shape of a trapezoid. It has three pearl buttons, decorative stitching along the edge, and a small faded brown spot. The spot is the blood of Abraham Lincoln. The piece of cloth a dress cuff worn by actress Laura Keene who was performing Our American Cousin the night he was assassinated. Written by British playwright Tom Taylor, the play was a satirical look at oafish, jingoistic Americans abroad. The play’s broad humor suited the President’s taste and he was an admirer of Keene. When the shot was fired, Keene, still in costume, shouted to panicked theater goers, “For God’s sake,…
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Each member of the gang had a job. Margaret Whittemore, soon to be known all over America as “Tiger Girl,” knew exactly what to do. And she played her role to the hilt. Early on the morning of January 11, 1926, Margaret Whittemore, not quite twenty-two years old, rose just before dawn. Daylight would reveal a sky as dull as a mollusk and gray as concrete on this early winter day, but at this hour, as the sky slowly brightened, the lights of the streets of Manhattan still twinkled outside the window. Most days Margaret and her husband, Richard Whittemore, rarely opened the curtains before noon, if at all. They stayed out late and awoke even later, often stumbling home at …
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My wife and I completed our family through adoption, so perhaps it was inevitable that my debut novel, Other People’s Children, tells the story of an adoption gone awry. Our son and our daughter both came home without much drama, but we weren’t spared the endless waiting, the razor’s-edge uncertainty, and the flood of love when we first met our children. Adoption is such an emotional and sometimes fraught experience for everyone involved—the birth parents, the adoptive parents, and as they grow up, the children. When things go well, when everyone cooperates in good faith, it just changes everyone’s life forever. When things go wrong, when circumstances slide toward the gr…
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Alan Parks didn’t set out to be a crime writer. But his beyond gritty depictions of 1970s Glasgow, seen through the eyes of rather bent copper, Harry McCoy, are at once searing and humane. The former music executive—a stint as creative director with London Records is only part of his previous background in the business, after many years in the capitol—returned home to Glasgow, (he actually grew up nearby, in Paisley) where he began a new career at 54. In the just released Bobby March Will Live Forever, Bobby, a by now past his shelf date rock star, has been found overdosed in a nondescript Glasgow hotel room…with a needle still stuck in his arm. Harry is called by the h…
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Hello, readers, and hello, April. We are starting to see glimmers of the big psychological thrillers of the summer, from such fan favorites as Megan Abbott, Paula Hawkins, and Robyn Harding. In the meantime, April has plenty to offer us. Let’s take a book into the nascent sun and try and get some vitamin D and some sense of normalcy. It’s going to happen, right? We’re going to be normal again, aren’t we? Caroline Kepnes, You Love Me (Random House) Long before Kepnes’s brilliantly sick series of books, she worked at Entertainment Weekly (also the former workplace of crime writer Julia Dahl, regular CrimeReads contributor Daneet Steffens, and me). Reading Kepnes is l…
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My fascination with the women of the Office of Strategic Services, the organization that was the precursor to the CIA in WWII, began with a Washington Post article I came across from June 2011, about two best friends in a retirement community in Virginia. Elizabeth McIntosh and Doris Bohrer lived on the same street in the Westminster at Lake Ridge Seniors Village in Prince William County. Upon meeting, they bonded over a highly unusual connection—both women had been spies overseas in WWII in the OSS, and later had long careers with the CIA. McIntosh had served in Asia, and, even at ninety-six, still struggled with the guilt over unwittingly handing off an explosive disgui…
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Imagine an idyllic, sunny Greek island surrounded by a deep blue-green Aegean sea, bordered in long sandy beaches, filled with vast fertile plains, sporting a backbone of rugged green mountains, and peppered everywhere with villages, towns and ruins running back to antiquity. All that, plus terrific locally raised food, warm and welcoming people, reasonable prices, and a history predating Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece. Question: Would you like to visit? Answer: Who wouldn’t? I think it’s safe to say that in response to observing that brief Q&A a famous Danish Prince would say, “There’s the rub.” Of course, dear Hamlet is right, because it is within the irresis…
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The man stood on the crumbling road. Green grass grew through its many fissures. Old, faded symbols with long-forgotten meanings stretched into the distance down its center and near its edges. To the man’s right, the boy rubbed his eyes, blond hair tousled and pillow-matted. He stood nearly as tall as the man, his father, though he had not yet seen twelve summers. To the left, the girl shielded her face against the rising sun, her curly red hair billowing in the breeze. Soon they would follow the road down the hill to the graveyard where, among monuments great and small, dew sparkled on the grass, though not for long; the air already felt warm. A scorching late June, port…
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An Anthology, Romantic Suspense, & More
Twice a Quinceañera Twice a Quinceañera by Yamile Saied Méndez is $2.99! This was mentioned on a previous Hide Your Wallet and I remember Sarah being excited for this on in a previous podcast. Did any of you grab this one when it released? Acclaimed author of the Reese Witherspoon YA Book Club Pick Furia, Yamile Saied Méndez makes her adult fiction debut with this sparkling, whimsical novel of an accomplished young woman who discovers what it really means to come into her own . . . One month short of her wedding day—and her thirtieth birthday—Nadia Palacio finds herself standing up to her infuriating, cheating fiancé for the first time in . . . well, ever. But that same courage doesn’t translate to breaking the news to her Argentinian family. She’s hyperventilating before facing them when she glimpses a magazine piece about a Latina woman celebrating herself—with a second quinceañera, aka Sweet 15! And that gives Nadia a brilliant idea . . . With a wedding venue already paid for, and family from all over the world with plane tickets, Nadia is determined to create her own happily-ever-after. Since the math adds up perfectly, she’ll celebrate her treintañera, her double quinces. As the first professional in her family, raising a glass to her achievements is the best plan she’s had in years. Until she discovers that the man in charge of the venue is none other than her college fling that became far more than a fling. And he looks even more delicious than a three-tiered cake . . . Full of exuberant heart, Twice a Quinceañera is a pure delight for every woman who needs to be her own biggest fan—and who dreams of a second chance at first love. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. The Arrangement The Arrangement is an anthology containing historical romance novellas from Sylvia Day, Minerva Spencer, and Kristin Vayden. It’s on sale for 99c! I’m unsure if the Day novella was previously published, but all the stores have a marriage of convenience theme. Some Goodreads reviews mention there being too much sexytimes. A trio of sizzling historical romances that prove passion is timeless . . . MISCHIEF AND THE MARQUESS by Sylvia Day Justin, the Marquess of Fontaine, and Lady Sophie Milton-Riley are completely ill-suited to one another. But they will have to prove it in order to end their mothers’ insistence that they should marry. Yet the more they attempt to demonstrate how wrong their union would be, the more surprisingly, irresistibly right things feel . . . THE DUKE’S TREASURE by Minerva Spencer Plain, prickly Josephine Loman has loved Beaumont Halliwell, the Fifth Duke of Wroxton, since the first time she saw him. But the most beautiful man she’s ever met had eyes only for Jo’s erstwhile friend, who betrayed Beau’s trust by marrying his brother. Beau hasn’t been home in years, but when his brother dies in an accident, he must marry to save the impoverished dukedom. And Jo is the overlooked heiress who will turn his world upside down . . . THE INCONVENIENT COUNTESS by Kristin Vayden As the eldest in a poverty-stricken family of daughters, Miss Diana Katherine Lambson’s only option is a marriage of convenience. Her only prospect is a rogue with a miserable reputation. Her only true desire: freedom. And that is exactly what Charles Brook, Earl of Barrington, is willing to offer, in return for the respectability their union will give him. He will even provide Diana with a contract. But does she dare entrust her future to a scoundrel? Does she dare not to? Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. A Rogue by Any Other Name RECOMMENDED: A Rogue by Any Other Name by Sarah MacLean is $1.99! This is book one in the Rules of Scoundrels series, all of which take place in and around a gaming hall. We had two A-grade guest reviews for this one. What a scoundrel wants, a scoundrel gets… A decade ago, the Marquess of Bourne was cast from society with nothing but his title. Now a partner in London’s most exclusive gaming hell, the cold, ruthless Bourne will do whatever it takes to regain his inheritance—including marrying perfect, proper Lady Penelope Marbury. A broken engagement and years of disappointing courtships have left Penelope with little interest in a quiet, comfortable marriage, and a longing for something more. How lucky that her new husband has access to such unexplored pleasures. Bourne may be a prince of London’s underworld, but he vows to keep Penelope untouched by its wickedness—a challenge indeed as the lady discovers her own desires, and her willingness to wager anything for them… even her heart. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Hidden Hidden by Rebecca Zanetti is $1.99! This is the first book in her Deep Ops romantic suspense series and I’m very curious about it. It has a 4-star rating on Goodreads, which is impressive. However, if you’ve tried Zanetti’s books in the past and have mixed feelings, readers definitely suggest trying the sample first. Hide. That’s all Pippa can do to escape the terror chasing her. But now that she’s off the grid in a safe house, she finds plenty of interesting things to watch through the window. Like her new neighbor, with his startling green eyes, killer smile, and sexy bad-boy tattoo . . . Run. Malcolm West is fleeing the hell he unleashed in his last assignment as an undercover cop. A backwoods bungalow sounds like the perfect place to start over. Until he discovers he’s been set up . . . Fight. Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to bring them together. No matter how much he resents that, and his own driving needs, Malcolm will have to dig deep and let loose the banished killer inside himself, or Pippa’s fears could come true faster than the flip of a bolt in a lock . . . Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. View the full article -
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Fairy Tale
“My mother couldn’t believe the Queen’s hats. My mother disliked birds and hats.” Queen Elizabeth II in New Zealand, 1953. Licensed under CC0 2.0. When the Queen of Tuvalu died, I remembered. My parents were pleased that at ten years old I liked Mark Twain. And then they discovered that, as with Cleo the Talking Dog five years earlier, I would not move on from The Prince and the Pauper. I wasn’t interested in any other non-school book. I’d seen the film of Twain’s novel and Errol Flynn had the right to sit in my presence every week when I reread my favorite parts. Tom Sawyer? Any luckily orphaned boy princes? No? Then no thanks. My mother had purchased from a door-to-door salesman in 1958 our 1957 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia. We never owned another set. My knowledge of the world came from our ever more out-of-date encyclopedia. My science is still very Sputnik-era. I let the twenty-four taped, dogged volumes go with much regret in 2009 after my parents died. As I was tiring of Twain’s lookalike boys and their protector, Miles Hendon, I found in the encyclopedia a black-and-white illustration of a painting of two princes in dark clothes. They had light long hair and looked scared. Princes were unlucky. I lived in Indianapolis, Indiana. I longed to be unlucky. The two brothers were in a place with a dark staircase called the Tower of London. And, yes, the L volume of our encyclopedia set had so much on London, headed by a drawing of really old London dominated by “S. Pauwls Church.” I studied the narrow houses packed around it. My father couldn’t tell me for sure what “eel ships” were, but they were the largest vessels on the river in the drawing. So that’s where my nursery rhyme jumble of “all fall down” came from. (When did I come across the drawing that had the Globe Theatre marked in it and London Bridge full of houses over the “Thames fluuius”? Much later, when Shakespeare’s history plays were still way over my head.) I looked up stuff in the encyclopedia and in volume E I learned the counties of England from a map. England was superimposed over the state of Alabama to show how small the realm was. I tried to learn the list of English kings and queens going back to Alfred, but names before the Tudors (“To doors,” like “to arms,” I said, before I learned “two doors”) were hard. I looked up whatever I hadn’t heard of before. Sometimes the encyclopedia let me down. Then in February of 1964 came The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and the British pop invasion. (Everything is on YouTube now, including an audio recording of the Beatles concert I went to at the Indiana State Fair cow barn in September of 1964. The screaming.) Fan magazines about The Beatles were supplemented by expensive and out-of-date copies of The Illustrated London News, which I begged my parents for on Sundays when they went downtown to the newspaper store across from the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on the Circle. I was twelve years old when I first heard the voice of Queen Elizabeth II. It was a Saturday morning in 1965 and instead of cartoons or Little Rascals films on television, there was a broadcast of a memorial being dedicated to the late President Kennedy at Runnymede. I learned then what the Magna Carta was. My mother mocked the Queen’s accent: “Efrika.” When had the Queen talked about Africa? In 1965, I got up real early to watch the funeral of Winston Churchill. “I Vow to Thee, My Country” brought me to tears. I’d never heard “My Country ’Tis of Thee” sung as “God Save the Queen.” To add to my illustrated histories of great European military battles, I wanted coffee-table publications about Churchill. It was just a hobby, a history buff–type project, but then my family became alarmed when I insisted to my older sister that she must have meant Wat Tyler, who led the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and marched on London. No, Watts. California. Los Angeles. Black people. Riots. What else had I missed or failed to take in? Around the dinner table, my mother and my sisters thought I was hilarious. Except black people had been killed during Watts, my father said, very serious. To fall in love with Great Expectations at the new “white” school was fine, but my parents were offended when a history teacher told them how astonished he’d been when he began to recite in class “They came three thousand miles and died…” and I finished the stanza. (We’d been to Concord, Massachusetts. I had a little replica of the Grave of British Soldiers with that verse on it.) My parents did not like it when white people were surprised that black people knew anything. Maybe my parents’ ambivalence about my out-of-nowhere Anglophilia began then. It was a joke, distasteful to them, but then I could beat white people at their own game with it. I’d never been into sports and my father had played football for Fisk until he was kicked out for calling his French teacher queer. Maybe it had been a little weird when I got caught experimenting on my feet with my mother’s nail polish at a school friend’s when he burst in to tell me that somebody had just shot Lee Harvey Oswald on television. I was put in the special squad for sissies and fat boys at the new “white” school. In those days of vinyl, I had a record of historic speeches that I still listened to a lot after school. “This is Windsor Castle, His Royal Highness, Prince Edward.” I didn’t understand what was the constitutional impossibility that had kept Edward VIII from speaking before this broadcast, but I responded to the dramatic flummery of his self-pity: “… and to discharge my duties as king as I [eye-ya] would wish to do … of the British race …” (Race?) Unlucky kings were another matter. A known closet case to myself, my Anglophilia blossomed into a private gay culture. I’d not heard of Oscar Wilde but in 1969 when I was sixteen and locking every door behind me, I had no need of him. I’d discovered the House of Stuart. Flame on. Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser and The First Churchills on PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre and the BBC documentary The Royal Family and the broadcast of the investiture of the Prince of Wales—one great vanilla mound of unlucky princes with Her Majesty the faultless berry on top. My mother said, Yuck. My mother and Queen Elizabeth were born in the same year. My mother couldn’t believe the Queen’s hats. My mother disliked birds and hats. She was always in favor of missing church, except on holidays. A bow and a bit of veil. Her imitation of the Queen’s voice was a high, squeezed little pipe. I said “liege man” and my mother said “liege man my foot.” I moved on to the Hanovers. The high school bookstore had stuff in it like Elizabeth Longford’s biography of Queen Victoria. My father put on his serious voice. He had avoided the army for as long as he could, because he and his friends at Morehouse had had no wish to fight for the British Empire or the French Empire, for that matter. My Anglo-American version of history went something like the House of Hapsburg with its weird chins degenerated and a son of the French House of Bourbon became King of Spain in 1700, provoking the thirteen-year War of the Spanish Succession. By the Treaty of Utrecht, Spain had lost the Netherlands and its possessions in Italy, but at the same time immigration from Spain to its colonies in Central America, Latin America, and South America was at its height. The populations there had already started dying, as soon as the Europeans brought diseases. I saw footnotes but did not read accounts from the Spanish conquests. Anyway, Spain kept going downhill in the Anglo version of its history and was a husk of an empire that fell apart in the nineteenth century. Before Pearl Harbor, lots of black people, Langston Hughes among them, had regarded Japan as the non-white empire that would counter European power in the Pacific. My father said he was not one of them. He got sent to Italy, a beautiful country, but the poverty he saw in Naples was worse than anything he’d come across in Georgia. The locals attacked black soldiers who they thought were after Italian women. Protestant conquest of the globe was different in my Anglo-American version, obeying as it did the imperatives of trade, capital, and progress. Trade. Yes, that commodity, human beings. There had been some debate among their captors as to whether or not slaves—as we said and as history books also said when I was in high school—should be baptized. Maybe the villain is conquest in the name of monotheism. Spain and France never had the large abolitionist movements of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and the United States. Most of the captured and imprisoned Africans were transported to lands controlled by Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking people, not to those lands squatted by England. My father tried again. These people do not care about us. But I knew from The British Overseas by C. E. Carrington that during the War of 1812 the slaves, as we said then, ran off to the British lines, because they would be free and sent to Nova Scotia. My father put on his don’t-hand-me-that face, but it was too late. I wanted buckles on my shoes and ruffles on my cuffs. I wrote “Sonnets Written in Dejection near Indianapolis.” Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, danced in Accra in 1961 with Queen Elizabeth, Head of the British Commonwealth, to a specially composed highlife tune, “Welcome, Your Majesty.” That was the year, 1961, that I took my first plane ride. My mother wore gloves and a hat. Life went on after the World Book Encyclopedia of 1957. The Queen‘s prince consort, happy as his Frankish ancestors, danced with Ghana’s Egyptian-born first lady. Black women were crowded around to check out the smooth moves of the dancers and one pretty spectacular diamond tiara. I’d seen a photograph and read the caption. Among the Zande, the Queen was given the name Naingitere. The name means “she who flies high in the sky with a white smoke.” The Queen owned a plane. Naingitere could be given only to a girl child with the characteristics of a ruler. Such were chosen by the deity to rule. I lied and said I was going to London with a school group. High school graduation present, 1971. My father had probably guessed that this was a solo flight, because he slipped some of his condoms—they came in little blue plastic containers of wet—into my shaving kit. I was unaware for a week and then paid it no mind for days that I’d brought my Afroed head of every obtuseness to a London that belonged not to the Queen’s men, but to Enoch Powell. Shit happened. Darryl Pinckney’s memoir, Come Back in September, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the fall. View the full article -
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Interview with Simon Crook (SILVERWEED ROAD)
Simon Crook has been a film journalist for over twenty years, visiting film sets and interviewing talent for Empire magazine. A new and exciting voice in domestic horror, he is perfectly placed to translate the recent successes of the genre from the silver screen to the written word – while adding something new and wholly his own. Social links: @sicrook on Twitter Welcome to the Hive, Simon. Firstly congratulations on your debut Silverweed Road. Can you tell us all about it, what can readers expect? Silverweed Road is a horror short story collection set on a cursed street in Kent. The pitch I originally sent HarperVoyager was ‘A New Horror Behind Every Door’, and that logline ended up on the book’s front cover. It’s a real Devil’s pick and mix – the ten horror stories range from were-foxes to predatory swimming pools, mutant cuttlefish to cursed rings, vengeful urns to demonic jackdaws, plus a darts player who makes a deal with the Devil himself. I guess what sets it apart from the standard anthology format is the way the stories link together: characters and events interweave, turning the street into this weird horror eco-system. Silverweed exists in its own little purgatory, itching between classic horror anthology and a splintered novel. What can readers expect? Horror. Weirdness. Madness. Laughter. Fear. Chills. And hopefully, an unsettling sense that anything can happen. I tend to see the horror genre as a booby-trapped playground. Of all the genres, it’s the most unpredictable. Definitely the most fun to write. Tell us a little something about your writing process – do you have a certain method? Do you find music helps? Give us a glimpse into your world! Oh, God. The idea of listening to music while I’m writing brings me out in hives. I’m blessed and cursed with the hearing of a bat. Play me a tune, and I can pretty much instantly play it on piano, so if music’s playing as I write, my brain will start analysing the bass line, the hi-hat or whether the guitar is panned right or left. If I do listen to anything, it’s white noise. But not any white noise. It has to be a 10-hour track on YouTube called Celestial. The monotonous blur sharpens the focus. Admittedly, it sounds like a ghost yawning, but it works for me. Other than that, it’s good old-fashioned graft. I’ve been a magazine journalist since I was 24, and deadlines have to be met, whether you feel like writing or not. I’ll drag my feet, like everyone else, but with procrastination comes guilt, and that drags you back to the desk. When I’m writing a feature, I’ll always outline, and it’s the same for fiction. Writing’s an act of discovery, but rather than grope around in the dark, I like to light the path ahead so at least I know where my story is going. Having said that, I’m a big fan of the William Gibson Method: if isn’t happening, have a nap. A brief nap does wonders for your subconscious: it seems to magically untangle any problems. Don’t just take it from me. Salvador Dali used to go to sleep on a chair, holding a spoon with a bucket by his feet. The moment he entered a woozy dream state, his hand would relax and the spoon would drop, hit the bucket, the clang would wake him up and he’d start painting. His weirdest, darkest, most surreal art were all created in that fuggy waking-dream state. So, yeah, naps. Naps and coffee. Lots of coffee. Speaking of worlds, what initially inspired you to write a collection of horror stories set on a cursed street in Britain? Were there any particular spooky experiences or favourite urban myths which you always planned to write about from the beginning? This goes right back to my childhood. Late at night, during Christmas, the BBC would air horror films in the late-night slot – either classic Hammer or an Amicus anthology. I was a mutinous little tyke back then, so I’d sneak out of bed and watch them while everyone else was asleep. It’s like a Proustian nightmare, I guess: I’ve never shaken off the sense that horror feels forbidden. Silverweed Road was inspired by those Amicus portmanteaus, and a genuine love of horror short stories. My Damascus moment was less about the stories than where to contain them. Once I realised a street had never been used as a horror anthology location, I knew I was onto something. Silverweed Road is a real street on a housing estate, by the way, close to where I grew up. All the roads are named after obscure plants with really peculiar folklore connotations: Yarrow Road, Speedwell Avenue, Valerian Way and, of course, Silverweed Road. That struck me as weirdly magical: this otherwise banal suburban estate with these vaguely occult street names. But then Kent is weird and ancient, especially the Medway Towns. Everywhere you turn, there’s a ghost story lurking. Seen at a certain angle, the Garden of England resembles a graveyard. Rochester’s Coopers Arms, where I used to drink, is home to a monk who was walled-up alive. Mote Park, where I used to play, is haunted by a girl in a white nightdress. And most notorious of all, less than a mile from Silverweed Road, is Bluebell Hill: the most haunted highway in Britain. There’s been over 50 sightings of its hitchhiking phantom – most often a bride, soaked in rain – who begs a lift only to vanish from the backseat. I was obsessed with that story as a kid. Ok, remind me never to visit these places! *shivers* It gets weirder though. At the bottom of Bluebell Hill is Kits Coty: a neolithic long barrow that predates Stone Henge and is said to be haunted by a trio of witches. All of those legends seeped into me as a child, and helped shape the curse that wrecks Silverweed Road. I love that idea: that wherever we walk, others have walked before, and their dark histories creep up from the pavements. If you had to be transported into one of your own stories, which would you choose and how do you think you would fare? Nice! So you’re basically asking me to imagine my own death?! Practically every story ends with a horrific fatality. Well you know, it is the spooky season after all, we had to get a touch macabre with our questions! I definitely wouldn’t want to end up like poor Cleo Marsh in ‘The Pool’, or Leo Harbinger in ‘Dust’. I’m obsessed with cuttlefish, so Erik Akoto’s experimental aquarium appeals… until I think about what happens to him. No, it would have to be ‘Darts With The Devil’. Darts is sorely underrepresented in literature – aside from Martin Amis’ London Fields, I can’t recall it ever appearing in fiction, and I love the sport. I used to be pretty handy with the arrows in my youth, but I’m a solid 26-er nowadays. So the idea of a darts player making a Faustian pact to hit any number he likes was basically wish-fulfilment. As long as I don’t the suffer fate, I’ll take Terry Slater’s demonic darting superpower. Can you tell us a bit more about your characters? Did you have a favourite character you particularly enjoyed writing? Or one you found the most difficult to craft? OK, so here’s the thing with short stories. Unlike novels, it’s the plot that drives the story, not the character. Clive Barker said it best. When he wrote Books Of Blood, he didn’t care what his protagonist had for breakfast. What mattered was the set-up, the horror, then the twist. It sounds counter-intuitive and arse-over-elbow, but you plot first, then throw in a character best (or least equipped) to deal with the horror. That’s where the fun starts. Augustus Fry, the antagonist in ‘Caught Red-Handed’, was a scream to write: a pompous, greedy antiques grifter who gets his comeuppance when he all but steals a cursed ring. He was basically late-stage capitalism made flesh, so I went full-scale Roald Dahl-villain with him. I find anger, especially masculine anger, both terrifying and perversely funny so a lot of Silverweed’s residents have lost control before the horror even starts (a classic example would be my irascible gardener, Victor Hagman, in ‘The Jackdaw’). Oh yes, Victor had some serious anger issues! I suppose Silverweed Road is a world without heroes: all of the characters are tragic, scarred or deeply flawed, so I still feel a pinch of guilt for putting my gentler residents – Shanta Kapoor in ‘Crash Flowers’, Cleo Marsh in ‘The Pool’ – through the mill. I’m equal opportunities when it comes to horror, but it’s very much by design the smartest characters in the book are all women. Who (or what) have been your most significant horror influences? Are there any creators who inspired you the most in Silverweed Road? I avoided reading any fiction while I was writing Silverweed Road – I didn’t want to risk inviting any influence. What I DID read in-between stories was poetry – specifically, Philip Larkin. Larkin has this supernatural talent for painting incredibly vivid images in very few words, and was a crucial reminder in the power of economy. Short stories are a very direct discipline, so if I ever felt I was getting verbose or too indulgent, I’d inhale some Larkin to snap me out of it. That said, there’s bound to be an element of subconscious influence on the stories. I’ve since realised ‘Caught Red-Handed’ was channelling MR James, and I adore Ramsay Campbell and Clive Barker, so their influence is probably lurking in there somewhere. How do you feel your experience as a film journalist, particularly in the horror cinema genre, has helped shape you as a writer? And I have to ask, who was the most interesting celebrity you have interviewed? (Was it Kermit the Frog?!) Ha! Oh, Kermit. I spent a day at the Tower Of London, where a Muppets film was being shot. I met Kermit in the Muppets storeroom, with all these spare body parts everywhere, like a Muppet Chainsaw Massacre. Kermit’s ‘helper’, the puppeteer Steve Whitmire, sat down with me in full view, Kermit on his lap with his black arm stick visible, and I thought, well that’s the magic gone. The moment Kermit spoke, Whitmire vanished, and somehow, I was talking to a frog. It was pure Muppet voodoo. We chatted about chicken visas, Kermit’s favourite road (the A40 [Editor: AGREED. The Welsh bits anyway]), the tuxedo he was wearing (“The size is Extra Spindly”). Kermit is real and I’ll take those 50 magical minutes to the grave. Everyone should have a go. There should be walk-in Kermit booths on the streets. Oh this is brilliant!! I’d love to meet Kermit! Whenever I visit a film set for Empire, I talk to everyone – from the carpenters to the costumers – because everyone has a story and everyone is interesting. Despite being a film journalist for 20 odd years, it still feels a bit vulgar and name-droppy talking about it, but I’ve been lucky enough to meet some incredible people while they’re working on set. Jeff Bridges sat sketching me while we chatted. I spent a day hanging out with Jack Black (very chilled and the opposite of his screen persona). Michael Caine is a walking anecdote machine. David Cronenberg is a big softie and one of the smartest people alive. Interviewing Mike Leigh is like going into battle and Ray Winstone made me laugh so hard I choked on one his toffees. This will disappoint the easily scandalised, but apart from Miss Piggy, I’ve never met anyone you’d class as ‘Difficult’. As for writing Silverweed Road – I live and breath horror cinema but I consciously avoided ‘borrowing’ film imagery. The book is, for my sins, the product of my own weird imagination. I guess the transformation scene in the were-fox story, ‘The Vanslow Fox’, was a warped homage to An American Werewolf In London, and the burning wallpaper in ‘Caught Red-Handed’ was inspired by the hotel corridor sequence in Barton Fink. Otherwise, that’s it. I’m a visual writer, so art played a far more important role. ‘The Pool’ was inspired by a Mark Rothko painting, and Goya’s Ghostly Vision inspired the grimoire in ‘The Mogon’. As for the jackdaws, that comes from real-life. One winter, every day for two months, a flock of jackdaws would fly directly over the house during twilight. It was an amazing spectacle – so many jackdaws, the sky would actually go dark. I’ve never forgotten it, and they ended up in the book. I guess I was plagiarising nature. We see such varying opinions from authors when it comes to the time of editing their books. How have you found the editing process? Enjoyable, stressful or satisfying? All of the above. There’s that old chestnut: ‘writing is rewriting’, but I think there’s more to it than that. You have to play the Man With Two Brains. When you’re writing, you’re inviting your subconscious to take control. Editing is more like the Ice Bucket Challenge: your brain splashes from its waking-dream state and your analytical side kicks in. Just knowing they’re two entirely different processes is part of the battle. And it is a battle: you’re basically at war with your past self, and it takes guts (and time) to admit where you’ve gone wrong. ‘Kill your babies’ is a brutal saying all writers are familiar with – most often, that will involve sacrificing a finely sculptured paragraph you’ve chipped at for months. If it slows down the pace, it’s probably self-indulgent and begging for a mercy killing. Editing wise, there was a fair bit of benevolent butchery involved. The original manuscript had 14 stories, but the deadline was looming, and it felt right to kill a few tales and focus on the survivors. The biggest change came with the final draft. I’d originally kicked off the anthology with an opening statement from Detective Chief Inspector Heath. My editor suggested we make the detective a regular character, either introducing each story or providing a footnote at the end, so I went for the latter. Editing isn’t always about the red pen: it’s about adding stuff too. It was a genius suggestion from my very smart editor, and despite the extra work, a scream to write. DCI Heath’s post-script really glued the story world together (most of his theories are wrong about the culprit behind each story, so it had the added bonus of making the reader feel smart). This one is just fun and is one of our favourite questions here on the Fantasy Hive: which fantastical creature would you ride into battle and why? Ha! OK… I’d ride on the back of Medusa, wielding a sledgehammer. She can turn the enemies to stone, and I can demolish them. And if that doesn’t pan out, there’s always Kermit The Frog as back-up. Kermit for the win!! Haha! Tell us about a horror book you love. What should our readers add to their Halloween TBR? Haunted house novels are a spooky season staple aren’t they? If you want something modern, I’d recommend Anne River Siddons’ The House Next Door in a heartbeat. And if you’re after something more gothic, try Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece The Haunting Of Hill House. I’ve genuinely lost count how many times I’ve read her novel. “God! Whose hand was I holding?” is, for my money, the scariest line in literature. Horror short stories are my wheelhouse, obviously, so the list of recommendations would fill the internet. In terms of Pleasure Shivers, you can’t beat MR James, but I’ll go for a story a little less celebrated: Marghanita Laski’s ‘The Tower’. I turned pale as milk the first time I read that. As for me, I’ll likely be re-reading Clive Barker’s Books Of Blood this Halloween. Six volumes. Thirty stories. All of them black gold. It’s the apex predator of horror anthologies. What’s next for you, Simon? Can you tell us a little something about your current work(s) in progress? Have you any upcoming projects which you can share? Oh, I’ve got a bunch of horror projects on the burn – and something Silverweed Road-related that could be quite fun. Are you planning anything fun to celebrate your new release? Do you have any upcoming virtual or in-person events our readers may be interested in? There are radio interviews and podcasts lined up, and some fun tie-in features for Time Out and The Guardian. And I’m really looking forward to an event with the brilliant CJ Tudor. It’s quite freakish: both of us have horror anthologies out on the same day, both of us have gnarly trees on the cover and, even spookier, both of us have a story called ‘Dust’ in our collections. CJ’s a legend, so chatting horror with her will be a giggle and an honour. It’s funny, really: in terms of horror, the publishing world has lagged about five years behind TV and cinema, where the genre’s still experiencing a second golden age. With brilliant writers like Paul Tremblay, CJ Tudor and Catriona Ward getting their due, I sense a dark tide rising, and a growing appetite for literary horror. Fingers and eyes crossed, the future is black. Finally, what is the one thing you hope readers take away from your writing? If just one Silverweed story results in a creepy Pleasure Shiver, then I’ve done my job. Thank you so much for joining us today! It’s been an absolute pleasure. Stay shivery. Silverweed Road is out today from HarperVoyager. You can find a copy HERE The post Interview with Simon Crook (SILVERWEED ROAD) appeared first on The Fantasy Hive. View the full article -
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I’ve Heard Such Mixed Things
It is a truth universally acknowledged, a reader in possession of a platform must be in want of an opinion. As news desks covering books have disappeared, book bloggers and bookstagrammers and booktokers have proliferated. As such, I hate to break it to you, but you’re going to see some really mean comments about your book. But chin up, because the reality is? There have always been people who hated your book. In a different generation, they just wouldn’t have had an easy way to let you know they hated it. And while that might not seem like much of a silver lining, then let this be: there are also people who love it and will talk about it so much you’ll wonder who, exactly, is paying them. So, this is the way of things now, for better or worse. But whether the social media reviews are good or bad, it’s the volume of them that can feel particularly relentless. Your publisher wants them to be relentless. Relentless is a good thing in this ecosystem of content attention. Yet for all the good it may ultimately do, we should at least acknowledge that it’s different. That authors today are dealing with something authors yesterday did not: the presumption of access. And its corollary: the feeling that your reader is now looking over your shoulder. So here are some things that help me navigate all that (when I remember to take my own advice): No book is universally beloved so stop trying to write one that is. Because of my day job, I get tagged in reviews of other writer’s audiobooks. Sometimes I’m tagged even when the author isn’t, because while the reviewer liked my performance, it’s a bad review of the book (and the good reviewers have learned not to tag the author in negative reviews – seriously, what HEROES). So let me tell you: books you may think are universally beloved? Aren’t. There is some corner of social media that hates them. One of my favorite moments in one of my favorite movies, The Big Sick, has Ray Romano’s character utterly baffled by internet opinions: “This is why I don’t want to go online, ‘cause it’s never good. You go online, they hated Forrest Gump. Frickin best movie ever.” Even if you, in your social media bubble, have seen only positive posts about these books, trust me, if you scroll through the comments, you will inevitably see that someone has written: “oh, I’m so glad you liked it! I’ve heard such mixed things.” Whaaaat? you will think. Where? The internet. That’s where. Universally beloved books don’t exist. No one has ever written one. You will never write one. So you don’t have to try to! Your opinion is just as valid as theirs. Roland Barthes argued that once a text is out in the world, the author, for all intents and purposes, is dead. That their opinion of the work they’ve created is no longer more valid than that of any reader. That’s a tough pill to swallow. After all, we are the final arbiters of right or wrong interpretations of our work. If a reader fundamentally misunderstands something about, say, our plot, then they are, objectively, wrong. But that doesn’t mean their opinion of the work is wrong. And in turn, that certainly doesn’t mean that our opinion of our work is wrong. In fact, I would argue – and I did – it’s the only thing that matters (see my previous post about only competing with yourself). Some people are just miserable. In my experience, most reviewers understand how to say something that reflects their personal, subjective experience. “This book wasn’t the right fit for me.” “I just didn’t connect with it”. The ones who are vitriolic and have zero self-awareness (“this book is trash!!” “worst book ever written!!!”) are not to be taken seriously, the same way we don’t take seriously those same people in the real world. They are misanthropic and tedious on Instagram, just as they are in life. Would you let this kind of person offer their unsolicited opinion about your wife, your kid, your job? Realize this is a them problem, not a you problem. Have boundaries around whose words you take to heart. If you can’t stick to your boundaries, then control your interaction. Goodreads is for readers, not authors. We all know that, right? So what are you doing on there? Can’t keep up with Facebook comments? You don’t actually have to. Overwhelmed by Instagram? Don’t let people tag you. Seriously. I know authors who have changed their settings to prevent people from tagging them. When they’re ready – if they ever are – to see what’s being said about their book, they will search for the hashtag. Or, a heretical proposal: you could delegate a friend to send you only the good posts. Now, some people will argue, well, if you’re going to read the good reviews you should also read the bad. Why? Please, explain that to me. The time for notes and critiques has passed. The book is done. Anything you may learn from bad reviews can only be applied to the next book and that’s like trying to divine from tea leaves what the weather will be tomorrow. Besides, if you’re anything like me, no one’s going to think there’s more wrong with your book than you already do. In my opinion, we all have to believe we’re writing for a reason. That all this work is worth it. So if you only want to read reviews that make you feel like it actually is worth it, then do that. Fill your boot, man. Whatever gets you back at the desk. For that reason, I love this post by Therese Walsh and I think about the phrase “protect the flame” at least once a week. You didn’t write the book for the people who don’t like it. Intellectually, we know this. But when we’re slogging our way through a draft, spending years on this thing, it’s not, uhhhh, fun when people don’t like it. Oh, it isn’t personal? Of course it’s personal! It’s my heart and my brain and my guts and my time on this earth poured onto those pages about which your review just said, “I mean… meh?” As a writer, actor, and artist in general, I long ago learned you can’t please everyone. How could you? No one book (or performance or song or painting) can be for everyone. When you aim for that, you get books that don’t take risks, that don’t say anything new, don’t challenge. And guess what happens then? There will still be people who don’t like it. Why? Because it’s derivative. They’ve seen it a million times before. The goal is not, nor should it be, to “write for everyone.” It should be, I think, to write for someone. And on that note… The final thing I’ll leave you with is that something social media does not celebrate is the magic of dumb-luck timing. So much energy goes into ARC reviews, then launch week, then the first month on-sale. But books continue to live and some of my favorite posts are the ones that happen 8 months, 14 months, 2 years after pub. When someone picked it up at a Little Free Library in a vacation town, or their cousin’s coworker’s sister gave it to them at a bachelorette weekend, or they saw another post where someone said, “I’ve heard such mixed things” and they thought, well, I’ll be the judge of that. I’m truly mystified by how books find readers at the right time. Your book can be just what someone needed. And the same person, had they read it last year, or right after they broke up with their boyfriend or, hell, right after they fell in love with their new boyfriend, wouldn’t have liked it. They weren’t ready for it then. What we like isn’t static. When we were kids, we didn’t like brussels sprouts. Now, we may crave them. Crisped up, with a little balsamic glaze and bacon? Freakin best vegetable ever. That’s who you’re writing for. Some future version of someone. You’re writing for an audience you can’t know, at a time you can’t predict. It’s some real message-in-a-bottle stuff. That’s what social media is like to me: making a wish, taking aim, and watching whose shore your book washes up on. Question: Have you had the experience of reading a book and not liking it, then picking it up again at a different time and it’s like a new book? About Julia WhelanJulia Whelan is a screenwriter, lifelong actor, and award-winning audiobook narrator of over 500 titles. Her performance of her own debut novel, the internationally best-selling My Oxford Year, garnered a Society of Voice Arts award. She is also a Grammy-nominated audiobook director, a former writing tutor, a half-decent amateur baker, and a certified tea sommelier. Her forthcoming book, Thank You for Listening--about a former actress turned successful audiobook narrator who has lost sight of her dreams and her journey of self-discovery, love, and acceptance when she agrees to narrate one last romance novel--releases in August, 2022. Web | Twitter | Instagram | More Posts [url={url}]View the full article[/url] -
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The Best Reviewed Crime Books of the Month
Deanna Raybourn, Killers of a Certain Age (Berkley Books) “… so inventive, the only ageist wisecracks it deserves are the ones its characters make about themselves … a singular suspense story thanks to its deftly fluctuating tone, which is by turns comical, violent and unexpectedly affecting … t’s impossible not to root for these dangerous dames and their refusal to let themselves be put on the ash heap — a phrase that, in this thriller, should be taken literally.” –Maureen Corrigan (Washington Post) Robert Harris, Act of Oblivion (Harper) “Fast-paced yet wonderfully detailed … Cleverly, the adventures and privations of Ned Whalley and his son-in-law, Will Goffe, are set in counterpoint to the trials of Will’s wife, Frances, as she hides in London with five young children, relying on the charity of her religious community as she faces plague, poverty and the great fire that will later destroy much of the city.” –Alida Becker (New York Times Book Review) Tracey Lien, All That’s Left Unsaid (William Morrow) “… suspenseful … Lien’s novel, by turns gripping and heartbreaking, makes room for forgiveness and understanding. Ky knows all about her people, and to know all is to forgive all.” –Arlene McKanic (Bookpage) Kate Atkinson, Shrines of Gaiety (Doubleday) “Shrines of Gaiety revolves around this grimy power struggle, and yet is—outwardly at least—Ms. Atkinson’s airiest creation to date. A feather-light confection of intersecting dramas that recalls the antic comedies of P.G. Wodehouse, the novel has it all: a runaway teenager, a sleuthing ex-librarian, a dogged Chief Inspector, even a stash of purloined jewels. There is the perfect balance throughout of sweetness and heartbreak … And, as always, there is the unmistakable zest of Ms. Atkinson’s dry wit … t is hard to think of another writer who can flit from darkness to levity, often in a single sentence, without lapsing into coyness or cynicism…Ms. Atkinson has perfected the comic wizardry that keeps us both airborne and immersed in her mosaic-like narratives … if such scenes border on farce—just as some of the novel’s dialogue veers toward archness—this only accentuates the underlying darkness. For here, once again, with nonchalant dexterity, Ms. Atkinson has depicted a world ripped apart by war and a city still emerging from the shroud of ‘muffled mourning.'” –Anna Mundow (Wall Street Journal) Richard Osman, The Bullet That Missed (Pamela Dorman Books) “Osman concocts a satisfyingly complex whodunit full of neat twists and wrong turns. But unlike most crime novelists, he ensures his book’s strength and momentum stem not from its plot or its thrills but rather its perfectly formed characters. Once again, the quartet of friends makes for delightful company … If there is fault to be found it is a recurring one throughout the series – namely that Osman’s two men have less to do than his two women, and as a result feel like extras around the main double-act. But what a double-act … What could have been twee and uninvolving is in fact heartwarming and enthralling. ‘They carried a kind of magic, the four of them,’ a policeman muses. That magic is still there in abundance.” –Malcolm Forbes (Washington Post) Barbie Latza Nadeau, The Godmother: Murder, Vengeance, and the Bloody Struggle of Mafia Women (Penguin Books) “Pupetta, who died last December at 86, may be the star but she is hardly the only engaging figure in this crisply written, dutifully researched book exploring the role of women in a sector of Italian society not noted for its embrace of a #MeToo ethos … [Nadeau’s] prose is straightforward, with welcome flashes of irony.” –Clyde Haberman (New York Times Book Review) Daniel Stashower, American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper (Minotaur) “The premise is a grind house fever dream … The reality of this case is far more mundane and messy, and far more fascinating … Both Ness and the Torso Killer are operating in Cleveland at the same time, but Stashower is admirably forthcoming about how these two threads barely intersect … Stashower demonstrates an ear for the vivid poetry of the era’s tabloid journalism as he resurfaces the outlandish writing that came out of the press’s attempt to cover the Torso Killer … American Demon is a winding, and sometimes confusing, jaunt.” –Patton Oswalt (New York Times Book Review) Virginia Hartman, The Marsh Queen (Gallery Books) “With its atmospheric swampland setting, Hartman’s debut brings to mind Delia Owens’ blockbuster Where the Crawdads Sing (2018), while the mystery itself is on par with Stacy Willingham’s A Flicker in the Dark (2022)…While the plot has many different threads to follow, the fast pace and short chapters keep the story moving for an enjoyable ride.” –Cari Dubiel (Booklist) Iain Reid, We Spread (Gallery/Scout) “.. another masterful example of high-concept psychological horror. Laid out in captivating, first-person prose … Through Reid’s spare, fragmented passages, the reader is immediately situated deep within Penny’s solitary world: hours, days, perhaps weeks pass in a heartbeat. We know only what she sees and experiences … Reid confronts that which is unavoidable for us all: ageing and death. His deft hand at plot and atmosphere calls to mind the films of David Lynch or the ‘strange tales’ of English author Robert Aickman. We Spread is a fast-paced, engrossing thriller that will hold you in its clutches from the opening right through to its stunning conclusion.” –Justin Avery (Readings-Aus) Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing (Vintage) “… a grim, disturbing novel of family drama and mental illness, yet a bizarrely funny glimpse into one woman’s mind … Hogarth rocks readers via Abby’s turmoil, her swings from devotion to fury, self-loathing to self-aggrandizement. Motherthing keeps readers as unstable as its narrator, struggling to manage the traumas and the waves of emotion … The result of these roiling thoughts and images is a darkly comic, kaleidoscopic novel of unhealthy fixations, love, murder, the gifts and wounds that family can inflict and one woman’s fight to save herself.” –Julia Kastner (Shelf Awareness) View the full article -
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The Complicated Life of Leo Marks
Sometimes you discover writers in the most roundabout ways. I must have seen Michael Powell’s 1960 film Peeping Tom two or three times before I knew anything about its screenwriter, the man responsible for its unusual story about a shy and sympathetic cameraman who is also a serial killer, his modus operandi being to film his victims while he stabs them. I’d never put together that the name listed as screenwriter in the film’s credits, Leo Marks, bore a similarity to the main character’s name, Mark Lewis. It wasn’t until I bought the Criterion edition of the film on DVD and watched the documentary extra on it called “A Very British Psycho” that I learned the rich story of the person who dreamed up Peeping Tom and how the film’s narrative derived quite logically from the life Marks had lived. Born in 1920, Marks grew up in London, and he spent a substantial portion of his childhood surrounded by old books. His father co-owned Marks & Co., an antiquarian bookshop on Charing Cross Road. This was the shop made famous decades later when Helen Hanff’s book 84 Charing Cross (1970) came out. From her apartment in New York, Hanff for years had corresponded with and bought books from the store’s chief buyer, a man named Frank Doel. By that time, Leo Marks had lived a few lives. He’d been a World War II cryptographer involved in espionage for the Allies, and he had moved on to his career as a playwright and screenwriter. “He’s weird, I tell you,” the person who introduced him to director Michael Powell, in the nineteen fifties, said. “You ought to see him. He lives double or triple lives, he’s difficult to get ahold of, and he’s full of mystery and conundrums.” And it had all started, Marks’ oddness, his peculiar obsessions, in that bookstore. On a Saturday morning when Marks was eight, his father took him to the bookshop to start getting him acquainted with the family business. His father taught him such essential things as the profit margin of rare books. The store was doing so well that it would be closed on Saturdays, and the education of the young Leo Marks proceeded once a week every Saturday. As a reward, Saturday afternoons after the sessions, his mother would take him up the street to a nearby movie theater, and from this routine, the association between books and film developed in Marx. But soon enough, something else was added to the formative mix. Edgar Allan Poe set him off. When Marks was eight-and-a-half, his father showed him a signed first edition of Poe’s “The Gold Bug” he had just acquired, explaining what it had cost to buy and at what price he would sell it. Marks opened the story out of curiosity, and he found himself reading a story about a code that needed to be broken to find a buried treasure. Marks had never known what codes were or how they functioned, but at that very moment, devouring the story, Marks became enamored of cryptography. He had no need that day for a trip to the movies. Eager to crack a code himself, he remembered his father telling him that every book in the store over five pounds had its cost written on it in code on the book’s back cover. This was to allow the staff leeway in how much discount to give to individual customers. His father had not explained the code’s workings to him, however, and so by himself, over the course of an afternoon, using as a basis that he knew the cost of “The Gold Bug” volume and could see the code price listed on the back, Marks cracked his father’s pricing code. He would do this as well later at the rare bookshop his grandfather owned and the one his cousins owned, all in London. The little boy had hit upon a passion. But not only for codes. As he would later write in Between Silk and Cyanide, the book about his life, “From that moment onwards, I had two ambitions: to know as much about codes as Edgar Allan Poe, and one day to become a writer, probably of horror-stories, possibly of films”. He was 21 years old, in 1942, when he got conscripted for World War Two. Marks applied and was accepted to a school for cryptographers. The newbies were slated to take an eight-week course, after which they would be graded and sent to Bletchley Park, the country house and estate that was the British headquarters for code breaking. Marks completed within a day a training exercise that was expected to take the aspiring code masters a week, but instead of being dispatched to Bletchley, as the rest of his class was, the powers that be earmarked him for “some potty outfit in Baker Street, an open house for misfits”. It was clear, despite his talents, that those in charge regarded him as a challenging man to teach and manage. The potty outfit was called SOE (Special Operations Executive). Here, too, he had a bumpy start. Informed that SOE’s primary function was dropping agents into Europe and that he would be tasked with keeping an eye on the security of the agents’ codes, the lieutenant briefing him handed him a code to break. This was to test his abilities. That it took Marks hours to make headway with it disappointed the lieutenant, who told Marks that prospective SOE cryptographers usually cracked it in twenty minutes. As it turned out, Marks had not been given the needed cipher key. The lieutenant had meant for him to do a simple speed decoding test, not to break the entire code, which SOE considered secure. But Marks, after several hours, had broken it, and he asked his superior, “You mean, sir – that SOE is actually using this code?” “We were,” his superior answered. “We have others now.” Marks rose fast within the SOE ranks. Agents then were using existing poems for their codes, or familiar quotations, language they could remember easily. Marks’ first job was to provide ciphers to the agents in the field, so that, by radio, they could send their information to London, and the writers often tapped for poem-codes included Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, and Poe. Sometimes agents used the Bible as their source. The problem, as Marks realized right away, was that some poems and quotes in use were so well-known that German agents knew them as well, even in English, and could guess the ciphers. Somehow, this susceptibility had never dawned on the SOE brass. Not one to quash his thoughts, Marks spoke up about the need to improve the quality and security of the coding, and his solution, which was something novel, was to have the agents memorize original poems, language created from scratch, and to use those poems as the basis for their codes. But who would come up with these poems? Who would compose these verses which would have to be coherent and rhythmical enough for agents doing work under great pressure to memorize? It was not as if SOE had reincarnations of Shakespeare, Keats, and Shelly on hand. Marks had never been a poetry writer himself, not even as a hobby, but he took the lead in this project, and from that point till the end of the war, he wrote hundreds of poems, contributions, as he put it, to the ditty-box. To one agent he gave these verses: They cannot know What makes you as you are Nor can they hear Those voices from afar Which whisper to you You are not alone. They cannot reach That inner core of you That long before of you The child inside Deep deep inside Which gives the man his pride What you are They can never be And what they are Will soon be history. After the war, one poem he wrote for an agent would become famous because of its use in a film. Carve her Name with Pride, from 1958, was about Violette Szabo, one of the many women SOE used as agents on the continent, behind enemy lines. To her he gave a poem that had occurred to him on Christmas Eve 1943, lines inspired by the recent death of his girlfriend in an airplane crash. At the SOE briefing room in London, before Szabo departed for her mission, Marks recited the poem for her, not mentioning its provenance and saying, when Violette asked, that he didn’t know who had written it. The life that I have Is all that I have And the life that I have Is yours The love that I have Of the life that I have Is yours and yours and yours. A sleep I shall have A rest I shall have Yet death will be but a pause For the peace of my years In the long green grass Will be yours and yours and yours On her second mission into Nazi-occupied France, the German army captured Szabo. She was tortured, sent to a concentration camp, and executed. Carve Her Name with Pride, starring Virginia McKenna and Paul Scofield, dramatized her experiences and made Marks’ poem famous. He’d given the film’s producer permission to use it on the condition that its author’s name not be revealed. As he writes, “Thousands of letters poured in asking who’d written it and the Rank Organization professed not to know…” Not until sometime after Peeping Tom came out did the press somehow get wind that he had written the poem, and the knowledge caused them much consternation. The press had loathed Peeping Tom, with critics lambasting it as vile and disgusting and worthy of being flushed down the toilet, and they had a hard time reconciling its scriptwriter with the man who had written such a moving ode for a heroic figure from the war. Throughout the film, Mark Lewis, cameraman-murderer, is trying to capture something ineffable. He is obsessed with photographing a specific thing only his victims can provide. What exactly that something is we don’t discover until near the film’s conclusion, but we do know from early in the story that what Mark is after relates to that most basic of human emotions – fear. This is the emotion his psychologist father studied when Mark was a child, using Mark as his guinea pig in fear-inducing experiments he devised. For Leo Marks as well, fear was a preoccupation. Having discovered its potency in fiction through Poe, he had then lived with it, immersed in it, during his years with SOE. Every time, he’d have a briefing with an agent about to be dispatched to occupied Europe, he’d know that the agent might be killed on the mission. At that briefing, he’d try to probe the agent and get inside the agent’s head so as to understand the person as fully as possible. He’d do this in part because he felt he owed it to the agent about to risk his or her life, but also for a practical reason. Earlier, before Marks started at SOE, agents at work sending back messages that had mistakes in their coding would be asked to repeat the message so it would no longer be indecipherable. Mistakes happened, naturally, due to the stress agents were under while conveying their messages to London. But for an agent to repeat a message took time and served to increase the chance of the agent being caught while transmitting. A number of agents had in fact been captured this way. Marks declared that this was an unnecessary risk and that there would be no such thing, henceforth, as an indecipherable message. An agent in the field would transmit a message once and then, wherever they were, be on the move. One transmission, perfectly done or not, and the staff at SOE headquarters would have to decipher it. Marks got his way on this proposal, and he put together a team of 450 women whose sole job was to crack the so-called indecipherables. One such message took 750,000 attempts to decode. But decode the garbled transmissions his team did, and a primary help in this labor was knowing how the agent’s mind worked. Understanding the person’s mental quirks, their interests and neuroses, their general thinking process, often gave a clue to what lay behind the agent’s coding errors. Cryptography mixed with applied psychology one might call this, where the stakes were life and death, and Marks barely slept for four years. It makes total sense that he would say, though the film has nothing to do with codes, that the idea for Peeping Tom was born in the briefing rooms, the fear-saturated environment, of SOE. But voyeurism, pleasure in looking? This is the activity that defines Mark Lewis, and the question is how did Leo Marks alight on this particular subject for his script. Again, he says it connects to his wartime experience. At SOE, dealing with secrets and codes and fear, managing people of every imaginable type, he had indeed developed a keen interest in human psychology. To both the men in his charge and the hundreds of women, as they toiled non-stop in their pressure-cooker offices, he had been something of a psychotherapist. He would come to draw a connection. If psychotherapy is the study of the secrets people keep from themselves, then codes is the study of secrets nations keep from one another. And as he explained, he “became convinced that all cryptographers are basically voyeurs, and I wanted to write the study of one particular voyeur”. Peeping Tom, to this day, is among best movies ever made about voyeurism. Its influence has been wide-ranging, cited of course by Martin Scorsese for its depiction of film-making as violating and aggressive, a precursor to slasher films. You see nods to it in many a Brian DePalma film, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, and a host of others. And just what was Leo Marks’ voyeur trying to capture with his camera while filming and filming, pointing his lens at women he kills? What did he hope to see while moving in for close-ups that would be the last thing his unsuspecting subjects ever experienced? He was, like Leo Marks and his cryptographer colleagues at SOE, trying to break a code. But the codes the cryptographers wrestled with were ultimately, after strenuous efforts, breakable. Not so for Mark Lewis, the sad and obsessed cameraman, who found that what he was trying to grasp is ungraspable, impossible. View the full article -
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Why Horror is Good for Your Mental Health
Over the course of the pandemic, we (the royal, anxious, self-isolated we) watched a lot of horror movies. More than usual. In fact, Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s chilling pandemic thriller from 2011 was one of the most streamed movies of 2020. This data generated a few headlines of course, because why on earth would we (the collectively sad and terrified we) want to micro-dose on fear in the middle of a waking nightmare? There’s a thing that people say—usually to themselves just before a rectal exam, but also sometimes to other people going through a tough time: the best way out is always through. Meaning, among other things, that life’s challenges can’t be avoided, only faced, endured, and mined for lessons (clench less next time). Perhaps, by binging horror fictions, we’ve actually been training—bolstering our brains against the mental anguish of the pandemic, prepping for whatever else the decade has in store. Consider the experience of watching a horror movie: you’re hyper-focused, present with the television, your mind hooked by a tight leash to the film’s threat. You’re stressed, sure, but as opposed to anxiety’s relentless spiral, this stress is directed. And there’s a cap to it. You’re not actually scared that Samara from The Ring is going to crawl all jittering pixels and pointy elbows out of your TV screen. Your sympathetic nervous system responds as though she is, activating the involuntary processes of the fight or flight response—increased heartrate, raised blood pressure—but in your heart of hearts you know she’s not. You know that you’re safe and sound in your living room. And that you haven’t had a landline in a decade. Enter the parasympathetic nervous system, which facilitates the rest and digest response—lowering blood pressure, decreasing heart rate, letting your body know that it’s okay—and what you have is a challenge faced, endured, and mined for lessons. This theory aligns with the outcomes of a recently published study, which asked over 300 participants about their entertainment preferences, and their emotional state during the pandemic. The study found that “voluntary use of horror entertainment may lead to less reliance on avoidance mechanisms in response to fear…by eliciting fear in a safe setting, horror fiction presents an opportunity for audiences to hone their emotion regulation skills…which have, in turn, been shown to be associated with increased psychological resilience.” In other words, as the legendary Wes Craven once put it, “horror films don’t create fear, they release it.” But I suspect there’s even more to it than that. The experience of anxiety and depression exist so far beyond language that only metaphor can begin to adequately describe it. Horror gives a face to the monsters which lurk in our own minds. The Babadook is grief. The Yellow Wallpaper is postpartum depression. To see these depicted on screen or in print, is to know, on some level, (a level which might sometimes be buried beneath an inky thick of hopelessness) that you’re not actually alone. Because another person experienced this awful thing too, and they lived to write about it. My new novel MOTHERTHING is just such a book—a story about depression, but also, a ghost. Abby Lamb has married the perfect man, Ralph, who is going to give her the perfect life—lots of love and a big family, in a clean, safe home. Exactly what she’s always wanted but never had. When Ralph’s mother, Laura, a cruel woman who Abby tried very hard to love, commits suicide, her ghost returns to terrorize them both: dragging Ralph down into his own suicidal depression, and threatening to destroy all of Abby’s hopes for a better life. With everything on the line, Abby must come up with a chilling plan to rescue Ralph from his tortured mind, and break Laura’s hold on the family for good. This idea germinated while living with a loved one in the throes of a severe depressive episode. It was a long, difficult process, caring for this body which had seemingly been emptied of its soul. In darker moments I worried, perhaps selfishly, how their illness might be affecting me. Other diseases of the body were easy enough to avoid, contaminated respiratory droplets for example, can be blocked by a fresh face mask. But depression is different. More insidious. So, like everyone who streamed Contagion in 2020, I became very interested in stories of folie a deux, shared madness, a psychiatric syndrome in which delusions are transmitted from one person to another. The most sensational examples of folie a deux are about couples who murder together. And though that’s not Abby and Ralph’s story, it made me wonder about the extent to which shared madness is a possibility in any close romantic relationship. Maybe even a necessity for close romantic relationships, particularly as we’ve defined romantic relationships for straight women: hopeless devotion, blurred boundaries, implicit trust, the expectation that you and your husband will fulfill one another’s every physical, emotional, and mental need. And so Abby—a lightning rod for all the bad intel passed down to women about marriage and relationships—was born. And over time, reading all those real-life horror stories about folie a deux was good for my mental health. By engaging with what terrified me, I felt somehow inoculated against it. By the time my loved one began to feel better, I had a first draft finished. And that old adage proved itself to be true once again: the best way out is always through. *** View the full article -
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The Myth and the Reality of Violence in the Old West
It was Halloween thirty-seven years ago and I was seated with my thumbs balled into my fists, a bit too shy to look into the camera. My mother, hurriedly trying to snap the picture so we could set off trick-or-treating before sundown, attempted to coax out a smile. But I had donned my cowboy hat and my gun belt for this occasion and wouldn’t be caught dead smiling in either of them. Even at five years old, I knew that cowboys never smiled for pictures. But then my mother made a joke and despite my best efforts, she captured my pearly whites. That portrait stands as the earliest record of my fascination with the Old West. I was raised in the East, and since I could remember, the West beckoned with an intoxicating promise of vast, mythical spaces where anything was possible. As I read deeper into the world, I began noticing that so many of the stories I enjoyed felt like different versions of the same story. It went something like this: A lone man rides into a lawless town where, outgunned and outnumbered, he battles bandits and dodges bullets until he has imposed law and order. When his work is done, he rides off alone into the sunset. The first time I read such a story, I was enthralled. The hero was clever, valorous, decisive, and all but silent—an attractive trait for a shy child. While the talkative characters always seemed to reveal themselves as dimwitted natterers, the cowboy hid his interior self beneath a mountain of brevity. The less he spoke, the more in command he appeared to be. Only later would I come to understand that his brevity was some kind of emotional disconnection, though even as a boy I felt something was lacking in him. I wondered if he was quiet because he was at peace, or because he had something to hide—something unspeakable. Violence has been tangled up in Western lore since its popular beginnings in the late 19th century. It finds perhaps its purest embodiment in the Outlaw. To me, these deeply flawed men blazing through life’s gray zones were a most gripping, morally ambiguous subject. They felt real even if they were as fictitious as the lone cowboy bringing order to the chaos of the frontier. These were men who fled civilized life for open plains and new beginnings; who made mistakes then spent the rest of the story trying not to be consumed by them. It was the Outlaw Myth that led me to crime fiction. Whether it was George V. Higgins or Elmore Leonard, so much of the genre seemed to pick up where the Western left off. I recognized many of the same tropes, which leads me now to wonder why Westerns are not considered crime fiction. Perhaps because, for there to be a crime, there must first be laws. There must be a system to push back against. Even when a crime was committed in civilized lands, the outlaw inevitably fled west, seeking anonymity in the Territories, far beyond the reach of judicial institutions. Perhaps this is one reason why our perception of crime and violence in the West is so askew. It’s common lore that the frontier was a violent cauldron of mayhem and murder, where quickdraws devoid of moral accordance ran wild. According to historical records, however, this is more or less pure fiction. Violence between individuals did occur, and for much the same reasons it occurs today, where roughly forty percent of convicted murderers have admitted to using alcohol before or during their crime. Though record keeping on the frontier was spotty at best, it’s safe to assume that alcohol played a part in the kind of gunfights that are emblematic of the genre. And though alcohol-induced violence was probably as prevalent in the Old West as it is today, our favorite books and movies would have us believe that every saloon and corral played host to daily gunfights. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Even on the frontier, civil order tended to prevail over violent chaos. Private organizations imposed authority on those lands beyond the government’s grasp. Cattlemen’s associations, mining camps, and wagon trains upheld social norms of civility and moralism and meted out punishment when those norms were betrayed. But that doesn’t mean the American West was a peaceful place. Though there were pockets where powerful authorities maintained order, beyond those boundaries (and sometimes within them) blood was spilled by the barrel, innocents were slaughtered en masse, and no lone cowboy riding into town could do anything about it. Probably he wouldn’t have cared to, either. Because the actual source of violence in the latter half of the 19th century came not from gunslinging brigands but from the systematic extermination of the Plains Indians. Prior to the Civil War, the American government sought a policy of trade with the indigenous populations of the West. After the war, however, militias were replaced by standing armies and conquest rather than negotiation became the desired means of acquiring land. As economist Adam Smith noted, “[i]n a militia, the character of the labourer, artificer, or tradesman, predominates over that of the soldier: in a standing army, that of the soldier predominates over every other character.” The U.S. Army cut a bloody swath through Indian Territory that white settlers and railroad corporations were able to follow. “Trade” was replaced by “raid” and the so-called Indian Wars that followed marked one of the bloodiest periods in American history. Though some $800 million was paid by the U.S. government to Native American tribes, that money was just as quickly siphoned back into white hands through policies of graft, predation, subjugation, and murder. Finally, in 1871, Congress no longer tried to mask its policy of “raid” over “trade” and voted not to ratify any more Indian treaties. No longer would they seek peaceful relations with indigenous peoples who occupied land deemed valuable by the government or the railroad corporations they were in bed with. As a result, an era of violence more horrific than most popular Western narratives would care to admit left the Territories drenched in blood. In my book, The Loving Wrath of Eldon Quint, the history of systemic genocide and the resulting trauma visited upon those caught up in it—both indigenous people and white settlers occupying their land—serves as a formative backdrop for the main characters. And this is what separates the book from traditional Western dramas about good men vanquishing evil and imposing law and order to keep the peace. Though my novel is set in 1883, the Dakota War of 1862 is a pivotal event that echoes throughout the story. During this mostly forgotten war, traditional roles of good and evil were not so easy to assign—at the level of the individual, at least. At an institutional level, the source of evil was the U.S. government’s policies toward Native Americans, full stop. The same can be said of its European predecessors. From 1492 to 1900, policies of conquest sparked systematic genocide which in the Americas resulted in the murder of roughly 12 million indigenous peoples (a conservative estimate). By 1862, the rage these policies produced in the eastern Dakota people resulted in a gruesome slaughter that cost the lives of hundreds of innocents. For decades, the Dakota had been bamboozled by the U.S. government into ceding more and more of their ancestral lands in exchange for cash annuities and useless provisions such as beads or rugs. Eventually, tribes were corralled onto barren reservations and forced to adopt their oppressor’s way of life. However, when their crops failed thanks to the poor quality of the soil, they became dependent on the government for their survival. At the time of war, government policies had turned the proud Dakota people into welfare recipients. But as winter approached, a white Indian Agent who administered provisions to the Dakota tribes decided to withhold their food, claiming that he could not release what they needed to survive because they did not have the money to pay for it. This was nonsense. The reason the Dakota had no money was that the U.S. government was late with their annuity payment. As you might imagine, Dakota blood boiled. Still, the majority of the tribes sought a peaceful solution. But then a handful of young braves took some eggs from a white settler and when confronted, they killed him. That spark ignited a war that all but destroyed the Dakota people. The white settlers that lived next to them also suffered, though it may seem easy to cast off their deaths as less valuable. After all, they were living on stolen land. Yet many of those settlers were lured from across the pond by agents of power looking for cannon fodder to pave a clear path to the Pacific Ocean. In the end, the dead on both sides were victims of a ruthless colonizing force. The Indian Wars ended in 1924 with the defeat of a different indigenous tribe. The Apaches had been fighting for their land for 200 years. But in the end, it wasn’t violence that broke their spirit, it was capitalism. Government officials gave cattle to each of the medicine men who led the Apache tribes. Previously, medicine men led only by example, never by decree. In the parlance of our times, they were a horizontal, decentralized organization. But with the ‘gift’ of cattle, power shifted from symbolic to material and now the medicine men could reward or punish their tribe members by giving or withholding cows. The Apache had been, for lack of a better term, Westernized. In the 132 years since the Bureau of the Census announced the frontier officially closed, the West has remained an elemental mythic space. But its primal lore is not chiseled in stone. Whether by oppression, forced assimilation, bribery, or bloodshed, the policies of the U.S. government, and those who enacted them, destroyed the indigenous people of this nation—and that is the real crime of the Old West. If our hope is for a more robust understanding of history, we must seek out the true villains in every story and update our myths accordingly. *** View the full article -
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Seasonal Oreos and Books
It’s time in the northern hemisphere! You know, when the days get shorter, the temperature at night drops to a level that annihilates all the bugs that want to bite me, and…. The SEASONAL FLAVORS have ARRIVED! Let’s start with the one that’s in my house: That’s right, PUMPKIN. SPICE. OREOS. Please note: any and all disparagement of pumpkin spice is not necessary. Please also note: I did NOT get to try one of these, but I am told by my younger child, who pursues all the seasonal flavors of Oreo with gleeful determination, that they are “really good.” When asked how to describe them, the reply was, Turn pumpkin pie filling into icing, and slap it between two crispy snickerdoodles. So, let’s say that you’ve found a package at your local purveyor of seasonal cookies. You need a book to go with your cookies! What books do we pair with this flavor? Shana, Amanda, and I are here to help! A | BN | K | AB A | BN | K | AB A | BN | K | AB Sarah: For pumpkin spice Oreos, I’d pair a fine stack of four with The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna. It’s cozy, sweet, and a little spicy, and very good indeed. Shana: Pumpkin pie is one of my favorites and I wait all year for pumpkin season (even though canned pumpkin means pies could be made year round). So I’d pair these with The Duke Who Didn’t by Courtney Milan. The couple in this book has waited a long time to get together, perhaps unnecessarily. Pumpkin spice has a reputation for being basic, but it’s actually complex. The relationship catalyst in Milan’s book is the launch of a British sauce recipe, and the story made me rethink my dismissal of British sauces and chutneys as boring and simplified. The book made me really hungry, just like reading about these Oreos! Amanda: I’m not super big on pumpkin pie (however pumpkin spiced coffee drinks are another story – love those!). I think of something a little witchy as pumpkin reminds me of the transition from the end of October into November as we start the Thanksgiving prep, but of course, with a focus on gathering and family time. My vote for this one goes to The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston. … Next up, a flavor that isn’t necessarily seasonal but I find more easily in the fall: Carrot Cake Oreos! Amanda says these are delicious. They’re less sweet than the other two, I think. Amanda: Whenever Sarah sends me mail, there’s always a little snack included. I think we were Twitch streaming and she was talking about the abomination that are Carrot Cake Oreos and I jokingly said to send them over. Next thing I know, I have a ziploc baggie with oreos inside arriving on my doorstep. It felt like some illicit drug deal. There’s definitely some spice to them, but what I remember most is the cream-cheese style filling. Less sweeter than the original creme filling. I think this would be a great option for someone who finds a regular Oreo to be too sweet. So: what book do we pair with this one, y’all? A | BN | K | AB A | BN | K A | BN | K | AB Sarah: I’d pair this book with The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes by Cat Sebastian. This book is cunning, fun, diverting, and there are some elements that I did not expect but really appreciated. I think the carrot cake Oreos are a little unexpected, too. Shana: These would make me want cake, so I’d pair them with Fake It Till You Bake It by Jamie Wesley. There’s a cupcakery owning hero, and some strong enemies to lovers flavor. Amanda: I’m not going to go with a romance with for this. Instead, I want to suggest a kooky whodunnit – Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson. It’s unassuming on the surface, but is a fun, new sci-fi take on a locked-room mystery with some wholesome characters. … And finally, our most elusive seasonal flavor. My younger child loves these, and we haven’t found them in a while. They’re more than a limited edition. They’re rare. He describes them as “Heaven.” “God’s gift to earth.” Specifically: “Apple cider donut Oreos are like cinnamon cookies dunked in the flavor of apple cider, then y’know. Icing Texture.” They are his absolute faves, and we haven’t scored a package yet this year. Fingers crossed! I have no knowledge of what these taste like. If they arrive in the house, they disappear very quickly. But what books can we pair with this elusive, deeply enjoyable flavor? A A | BN A | BN | K | AB Sarah: That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon by Kimberly Lemming. This was such a rare find: funny, immersive fantasy with a fantastic heroine in a familiar fantasy plot. Plus, the heroine’s name is Cinnamon, and she loves cheese enough to yell about it in the first few pages. Like I said, a rare find. Shana: Oooh, these sound good! I would pair them with Greener Pastures by Aurora Rey. One of the heroines runs an apple orchard and makes hard cider. She has a serious sweet tooth too. Amanda: Anything with apples, I have to suggest Bittersweet by Sarina Bowen. New England. Orchards. Come on! Anything with apple cider flavors definitely makes me think of fall in my area. My partner and I are going to attempt an apple cider donut tour of New England and I’m very excited. What about you? Do you have a seasonal favorite in the flavor department, or do you too seek the experience of the apple cider donut Oreo? What book would you pair with a stack of cookies? View the full article -
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So Shall You Reap
On a Saturday in early November, Guido Brunetti, reluctant to go outside, was at home, trying to decide which of his books to remove from the shelves in Paola’s study. Years ago, some months before the birth of their daughter, he had renounced claim to what had been his study so that their second child could have her own bedroom. Paola had offered his books sanctuary on four shelves. At the time, Brunetti had suspected this would not suffice, and eventually it had not: the time had come for The Cull. He was faced with the decision of what to eliminate from the shelves. The first shelf held books he knew he would read again; the second, at eye level, held books he wanted to read for the first time; the third, books he’d not finished but believed he would; and the bottom shelf held books he had known, sometimes even as he was buying them, that he would never read. He decided to begin with the books at the bottom. He knelt on one knee and studied the spines. Halfway along, he saw the familiar face of Proust, and the face of Proust, and the face of Proust. Slipping his hands into the space before the first book and after the last, he said aloud, ‘Now,’ and extracted them in one block. He stood and carried them over to Paola’s desk, tilted his hands, and set them down in a wobbly pile, then patted them into order. He stepped back and counted the faces of Proust: seven. He went to the kitchen and returned with one of the paper bags the city distributed to hold paper for collection. He opened it and lowered the Prousts carefully inside, then returned to the shelf, carrying the bag. He set it beside him, knelt again, and glanced more carefully at the remaining books, making a series of visceral judgements, adding the books to the bag without bothering to give them the opportunity to plead for their lives from the temporary safety of Paola’s desk. Moby Dick; The Man of Feeling; I Promessi Sposi, which he’d been forced to read as a student in liceo and had hated. It had survived this long because, until now, he’d lacked the courage to believe a ‘classic’ could be such a bore, but into the bag it went. He came to four volumes of D’Annunzio’s plays and poetry and knew instantly that they were for the bag: was it because he was a bad writer or a bad person? To settle it, he opened one of the books of poetry at random and read the first line of the first poem his eye fell upon. ‘Voglio un amore doloroso, lento …’ Brunetti’s hand, still holding the book, fell to his side. ‘You want a love that’s painful and slow, do you?’ he asked the deceased poet. ‘How about fast and painless?’ He bent and picked up the sixteen centimetres of D’Annunzio and tucked them in beside Manzoni. ‘If ever a marriage was made in heaven,’ he said, looking down into the bag, content with his decision. The used bookstore at Campo Santa Maria Nova would gladly have them all. Brunetti studied the empty spaces on the shelf, wondering how he could fill them. Before an answer came, his phone rang. He started to give his name, but a voice he recognized as Vianello’s spoke over his, asking, ‘Guido, can you meet me at Piazzale Roma?’ ‘It’s Saturday, Lorenzo,’ he told his friend and colleague. ‘And it’s raining and it’s cold.’ ‘And it’s important,’ Vianello added. ‘Tell me.’ Pausing only long enough to give a heavy sigh, Vianello said, ‘I had a call from Fazio.’ It took Brunetti a moment to recognize the name, a sergeant on the Treviso force and someone with whom both he and Vianello had worked. ‘Alvise’s been arrested.’ ‘Alvise?’ Brunetti asked, unable to disguise his astonishment. Then, to be sure, he repeated, voice lower but no less shocked, ‘Alvise?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Where?’ ‘There. Treviso.’ What in God’s name, Brunetti wondered, would Alvise be doing in Treviso? Indeed, what would anyone be doing there, especially on a day like this? ‘What was he doing there?’ ‘He was at the protest.’ Brunetti paused a moment and searched his memory for any protest threatened for that weekend. Not the train drivers, not the remaining No-Vax, not the workers at Marghera – who seemed in a perpetual state of protest – and not medical professionals, who had protested two weeks before. ‘Which one?’ ‘Gay pride,’ Vianello said with absolute dispassion. ‘Gay pride?’ Raising his voice, Brunetti repeated, ‘Alvise? We don’t have anything to do with patrolling Treviso,’ he reminded the Ispettore. ‘He wasn’t on patrol.’ ‘Then what was he doing there?’ ‘That’s why we’re going to Treviso. To find out.’ ‘What happened?’ Over the line came the sound of a vaporetto changing into reverse to slow for a station stop. A voice – not Vianello’s – came over the line: ‘Ca’ Rezzonico.’ Brunetti was already walking towards the door, where he’d left his raincoat and umbrella that morning after coming come home from having a coffee and picking up the newspapers. Switching his phone to his left hand, he felt in the pocket of his raincoat for his house keys. ‘All right. I’ll meet you in front of the taxis,’ he said. Then, before Vianello could disappear, Brunetti asked, ‘What was he arrested for?’ ‘Resisting arrest.’ Brunetti could find no words. ‘And violence to a public official,’ Vianello added. Brunetti had no trouble making the translation from police vocabulary to reality. ‘Violence? Alvise?’ ‘Fazio wasn’t sure what happened. He called me when they brought Alvise into the Questura. He asked me to come. And bring you,’ Vianello said. ‘All right. I’m leaving now.’ Brunetti broke the connection. Despite the rain and cold, Brunetti chose to walk: the vaporetti would be overheated and crowded in weather like this. The thought of the feral mug of warm, damp air in the passenger cabin only confirmed the wisdom of his choice. As he made his way towards Piazzale Roma, he considered what Vianello had told him. Alvise? Alvise had been on the force for as long as Brunetti, but in that time, while Brunetti had increased in rank, Alvise – slow, polite, inept, thoughtless, well liked although generally considered a fool – had remained a simple officer. Even with all of his contradictory qualities, Alvise had still become the mascot, one could even say the beloved mascot, of most of the Questura. He had never fired his gun and had never had the sudden realization of who was responsible for a crime, but he had more than once put himself in danger to help a fellow officer. His hair had thinned a bit, the sides growing white; his face had aged, and he’d put on some weight. He never talked about himself, was interested in his colleagues, remembered the names of their spouses and children, was loyal and did his best. And now he’d been arrested in Treviso at the gay pride parade and had, it seemed, struck another officer. Brunetti tried to recall ever having encountered Alvise beyond the Questura or his position as a policeman and found it impossible. Alvise, perhaps by virtue of his not being taken seriously by his colleagues, did not register fully with them as a person. Brunetti stopped involuntarily at the realization that he might not recognize Alvise if he saw him out of uniform. He turned his head and stared into a shop window for a moment, trying to recall what Alvise looked like: the best he could come up with was a roundish face, no moustache or beard, hair still mostly brown, eyes that contracted when he smiled, and a general inability to remain entirely still when standing. Beyond that, Alvise was pretty much a cartoon figure of a man in uniform, his hat always seeming one size too big for his head. Brunetti muttered, ‘It’s like he doesn’t really exist,’ which led him to wonder how many of the other officers didn’t really exist for him, and that led him to wonder if all of them had managed to separate their private lives from their professional lives. He turned from the shoes in the window and resumed walking, having calculated the time Vianello’s boat would arrive. He tried to recall incidents in which his colleague had been involved, and in all of them Alvise had managed to cause confusion: he’d gone to the wrong address to make an arrest, had left a briefcase full of witness statements on a bus. But he had also disarmed a man who was threatening his wife with a kitchen knife and had once prevented a fight in a restaurant when a client, seemingly displeased with his dinner, had thrown a plate of pasta at the waiter and turned over the table where he sat. Somehow, Alvise, at the next table, managed to calm the man down, spoke with him for a few minutes, then suggested that he apologize to the waiter and help him put the table upright again. The man’s mother, Alvise had told the owner, was in the hospital and not expected to live: the pasta had been so much like hers that it had broken him. The man’s apology was both tearful and sincere. The next day, the story had filtered into the Questura. Alvise had said no more than that it had been a waste of very good pasta. He saw Vianello, wearing corduroy slacks and a thick parka, waiting at the head of the line of taxis, and joined him. When he saw Brunetti, the Ispettore leaned forward and opened the back door of the cab, then went round and got in on the other side. Before Brunetti could say anything, the Ispettore gave the address of the Questura in Treviso and sat back. ‘Well?’ Brunetti asked. Vianello leaned forward and slid the glass panel between them and the driver closed. He turned to Brunetti and, keeping his voice low, said, ‘The parade was the usual thing: about two hundred people, holding signs and chanting slogans. Fazio said there was a lot of good feeling, even with the rain.’ ‘Where’d they begin?’ Brunetti asked. ‘In front of COIN. They had permission to go along Via Lazzari. There was supposed to be singing and maybe a few speeches, but they hadn’t figured on the rain, so things got confused, and it was after eleven by the time they left COIN.’ ‘So?’ Brunetti asked. Being late when you had two hundred people seemed hard to avoid. ‘That’s when some people began giving them trouble,’ Vianello went on. ‘What?’ Brunetti asked. In this rain? On a Saturday morning? ‘Fazio was there. He said there were about twenty of them. The usual: fat men with biblical texts printed on signs. No women. Name-calling, telling them they were damned.’ ‘They sound as crazy as the anti-abortion people.’ ‘Don’t forget the No-Vax,’ Vianello said. Brunetti nodded and sighed, remembering one particularly unpleasant demonstration in front of the hospital. ‘What happened?’ ‘Fazio was detailed to go along. In uniform. He said that one of the anti-marchers …’ Vianello paused to consider that word, shook his head, and went on, ‘… came running at the people in the parade, holding his sign stuck out in front of him horizontally, and deliberately ploughed into them. Three or four were knocked down.’ ‘Hurt?’ ‘Not really. Surprised more than anything.’ ‘What happened?’ ‘Fazio said the guy started waving his sign around, swinging it at people. So he ran towards him, but before he could get there, one of the people from the parade grabbed the sign, pulled it away from him and slammed it on the ground a couple of times. Broke it into pieces.’ ‘What did the other man do?’ ‘Fazio said he started screaming at the guy who’d taken his sign – the usual: “fucking faggots”, “you’re all sinners”. But then Fazio had a radio call from his lieutenant, and when that finished, he looked around and saw that one of his men was putting handcuffs on the guy who’d trashed the sign.’ ‘Are you going to tell me this was Alvise?’ Brunetti asked, unable to keep the surprise from his voice. Vianello nodded. ‘Did anyone see what happened?’ ‘Fazio managed to get the names and addresses of a few people who were there, but – you know how it is – no one saw anything.’ Brunetti knew how it was. Unless they filmed it on their phones and could boast about that, few people were willing to say they had witnessed a crime, reluctant to be caught up in the slow-grinding maw of the justice system. The car slowed, and Brunetti glanced out of the window of the cab. They were in front of the Questura of Treviso. Vianello paid and got out of the taxi; Brunetti followed him and, as he had the first time he was there, stood and gawked at the multistorey building and again tried to count the floors. As ever, he failed, defeated by the architect, who had granted more than one horizontal window to each floor. Brunetti gave up and followed Vianello into the building. As the Ispettore led him down corridors, no one asked them who they were or why they were there. Brunetti had no idea if this was lack of security or whether the two of them somehow looked like policemen and were thus left alone. Or perhaps, as many criminals had told him, it made no difference where you tried to go: so long as you looked like you knew where you were going, no one would interfere with you. He followed Vianello into the elevator, got out with him on the second floor, and stayed close behind him as the Ispettore turned right and then left, ending in front of an office with the name ‘Danieli’ on the door. Vianello knocked, a male voice said something, and they went in. A short, thick man sat behind a desk. His hair was equally short and thick, dark, and cut close to his head. He was wearing a grey suit with a white shirt and a red and blue striped tie. He looked up and got to his feet: his eyes were a very pale blue and tilted faintly upwards at the outer corners. ‘Ah, gentlemen, I’m glad you could come. I was told he’d called you.’ He turned his attention to Brunetti, somehow scenting that he was of superior rank, and said, ‘Danieli.’ Brunetti gave him their names and Vianello’s rank. Instead of offering his hand to the men, Danieli waved it towards the chairs in front of his desk and waited until they were seated before he sat down again. Brunetti was searching his memory for the name, which he had recognized, although he couldn’t remember why. ‘You’re here about your man,’ Danieli said, making it a statement and not a question, aimed at either one of them. ‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, ‘Alvise.’ Then, summoning his first name, added, ‘Dario.’ A file lay open on Danieli’s desk; he glanced at it before asking, ‘How long has he been on the force in Venice?’ Brunetti turned to Vianello, who said, ‘Decades.’ ‘What’s your assessment of him?’ Danieli asked, using the plural so either could answer. Brunetti said, ‘He’s reliable, honest, deals well with people.’ Danieli looked at Vianello, who said, ‘He’s one of the most popular men on the force, has never had any disciplinary problems, and more than once has managed to defuse potentially violent situations.’ Brunetti nodded in agreement. ‘Has his homosexuality ever caused any difficulty?’ Stunned, Brunetti leaned back in his chair, almost as if the word had given him a shove. He folded his hands and studied the map of Treviso on the far wall. Alvise? Finally he said, ‘Not that I can think of, no.’ That was certainly true. Then, hoping to divert the course of this conversation from wherever the other man was trying to direct it, he added, ‘I like to think those times are over.’ ‘What times?’ Danieli asked politely. ‘The times we all lived through,’ Brunetti said, ‘when our gay friends had to lie and pretend, and – some of them – get married, even have families.’ He shrugged, glanced at Vianello and then back to the other man, and asked, ‘For what?’ ‘To keep their jobs, chiefly, I suppose,’ Danieli answered. ‘And what used to be called their respectability.’ Vianello interrupted here and asked, ‘Excuse me, Signore, could you tell me why you asked about that?’ Danieli closed the file – which Brunetti noticed contained no more than a single page – and said, ‘I’ve heard conflicting stories about what happened. Someone who was there said that your officer resisted my officer when he put the handcuffs on him.’ Before Vianello could say anything, Danieli continued, ‘Another person said that my officer was deliberately, and unnecessarily, rough in treating yours.’ ‘What has Officer Alvise said?’ Brunetti asked. Danieli tapped at the cover of the file with his forefinger. ‘So far, he hasn’t had the chance to say anything to anyone.’ ‘Meaning that he’s sitting by himself in a cell, waiting for us to come and get him out?’ Brunetti enquired. Danieli, as Brunetti had intended, smiled at the question. ‘Yes, something like that. He was put there when he was brought in. One of the men on the squad at the protest recognized him as being on the force in Venice.’ ‘I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘So I asked Fazio to call someone on the Venice force he knew – and trusted – and tell him that we had one of their men here and we’d like someone to come out and help us find a way to settle this.’ ‘Settle it among friends?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Of course,’ Danieli answered without hesitation. ‘The last thing any of us needs is the Gazzettino banging on about police brutality.’ He looked past them, as though there were a projection of the first page of the Gazzettino flashing on the wall behind them. ‘You’d think this was the Bronx, the way they go crazy anytime someone claims to have been injured while they were being detained.’ Brunetti noted that word, ‘detained’ rather than ‘arrested’. ‘It happens, doesn’t it?’ Vianello asked. ‘Rarely,’ Danieli answered in a flat voice. He glanced back and forth between them. ‘I think you’d have to admit that.’ Brunetti nodded, followed by Vianello, who said, ‘It’s probably because Venice is such a small place – tiny gene pool – so it’s always possible we’ll be detaining the cousin of someone we know or our son’s mathematics teacher.’ Brunetti liked it that Vianello had repeated the word: ‘detaining’. ‘Notoriously violent, mathematics teachers,’ Brunetti said to inject a lighter tone. Danieli gave a small laugh and said, ‘So, shall we try to settle this like colleagues?’ Brunetti, noting that ‘friends’ had been demoted to ‘colleagues’, paused a moment before asking, ‘Can we speak to Alvise first?’ Danieli made no attempt to hide his surprise, but answered calmly. ‘Certainly. I’ll have him sent up.’ He reached for the phone on his desk and punched in two numbers. While he waited for someone to answer, he waved his hand around the room and said, ‘You can talk to him here.’ Before they could protest his generosity, he held up a hand and spoke into the phone. ‘Gianluca, could you bring that man who was detained this morning up to my office? He’s in one of the holding rooms on the ground floor. Two men are here to talk to him.’ He paused a moment, then answered, ‘Yes, at the protest march.’ The other man said something; Danieli thanked him and hung up. Looking up at them, he said, ‘Shouldn’t be long.’ This was the moment, Brunetti knew, when the three of them should engage one another in talk about sports or any one of the conversational methods men used to fill up time. But they all lacked the will or simply had nothing to say. Four minutes passed, which is a long time for people who are waiting for something to happen. There was a crisp knock at the door. Danieli called out, ‘Avanti,’ and the door opened. A uniformed policeman entered and made a semi-salute towards Danieli, then stood aside to allow the man behind him to enter. Alvise, hands at his sides, took a few steps into the room. Seeing Vianello, some of the tension disappeared from his face, only to return when he saw that Brunetti was there with him. He brought his feet together and snapped out a salute in Brunetti’s direction, but did not speak. It was Alvise, good old Alvise, dressed in jeans and a thick dark blue sweater that zipped up the front, a dark blue windbreaker over it, the sort worn on a boat or on a rainy day. Out of uniform, he looked less like the Alvise they knew; smaller, somehow, but more clearly seen. Making him seem even less like himself was the dark red bruise that was gathering on his left cheek and the large bloodied bandage on his forehead that covered most, but not all, of what looked like a graze wound, as though his face had been dragged along a rough surface. Without thinking, Brunetti stood and pulled another chair over towards them. ‘Have a seat, Alvise,’ he said. Perhaps uncertain how to behave in the company of men who outranked him, Alvise did nothing but salute and stand rigid to attention. Vianello slipped into Veneziano and said, ‘Good God, Alvise, what happened to you?’ Still rigid, fingers apparently stuck to his forehead, Alvise took the opportunity to answer in dialect, and finally said, ‘I fell down the stairs.’ From SO SHALL YOU REAP, the upcoming novel from Donna Leon, to be published in March 2023. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press. Copyright © 2023 by Donna Leon. View the full article -
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Links: Interviews, Bookstores, & More
Welcome back to Wednesday Links! How are you all? I had an okay weekend! My lovely partner brightened up a rough day I was having by getting me a fluffy blanket for their apartment (I’m a chronic nester) and finally…a toaster! Imagine my shock when they presented me toast for the first time and they had air fried it. Now no shame to air fryers, but that can be toast made from a toaster. I probably eat toast as a meal or snack several times a week. Regardless, the gesture was super sweet and also made me consider what kitchen gadgets I couldn’t live without and which ones my partner uses the most. What would you say is your most used kitchen gadget or appliance? … Earlier this year, our reviewer Tara reviewed Jonathan Van Ness in front of a live audience. How freakin’ cool?! Now, Tara has uploaded the audio for our listening pleasure! … Queen Charlotte of Bridgerton is getting her own spin-off series and People has some first look images and details. Are you excited? … This one comes from Ellen. Thanks, Ellen! Relevant to our latest Cover Snark, Ellen passed along a YouTube channel where a woman parodies a “fantasy heroine,” including the very interesting armor designs women in fantasy often get. … Lastly, Romancelandia has another bookstore! If you’re in the San Diego area, please stop by the Meet Cute Romance Bookshop. We’re obsessed with their mural wall! … Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way! View the full article -
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A Couple Freebies, Fantasy, & More
Grave Reservations Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest is $1.99! This is book one in a mystery series with paranormal elements. It also gives me Stephanie Plum vibes. I love Priest’s horror novels, so I’m curious about this one. A psychic travel agent and a Seattle PD detective solve a murder in this quirky mystery in the vein of Lisa Lutz’s The Spellman Files and Charlaine Harris’s Aurora Teagarden series. Meet Leda Foley: devoted friend, struggling travel agent, and inconsistent psychic. When Leda, sole proprietor of Foley’s Flights of Fancy, impulsively re-books Seattle PD detective Grady Merritt’s flight, her life changes in ways she couldn’t have predicted. After watching his original plane blow up from the safety of the airport, Grady realizes that Leda’s special abilities could help him with a cold case he just can’t crack. Despite her scattershot premonitions, she agrees for a secret reason: her fiancé’s murder remains unsolved. Leda’s psychic abilities couldn’t help the case several years before, but she’s been honing her skills and drawing a crowd at her favorite bar’s open-mic nights, where she performs Klairvoyant Karaoke—singing whatever song comes to mind when she holds people’s personal effects. Now joined by a rag-tag group of bar patrons and pals alike, Leda and Grady set out to catch a killer—and learn how the two cases that haunt them have more in common than they ever suspected. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Daughter of the Blood Daughter of the Blood by Anne Bishop is 99c! This is the first book in The Black Jewels series and was recommended in our Inner Goth Rec League. Ellen notes that this series deserves all of the content warnings. I know for many readers this was a formative series for their fantasy reading. What are your thoguhts? The Dark Kingdom is preparing itself for the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy–the arrival of a new Queen, a Witch who will wield more power than even the High Lord of Hell himself. But this new ruler is young, and very susceptible to influence and corruption; whoever controls her controls the Darkness. And now, three sworn enemies begin a ruthless game of politics and intrigue, magic and betrayal, and the destiny of an entire world is at stake. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. The Work of Art The Work of Art by Mimi Matthews is FREE! This is book one in The Somerset Stories series. Matthews has been well-reviewed on the site and is often recommended in the comments, though I haven’t heard much about this older title. An Uncommon Beauty… Hidden away in rural Devonshire, Phyllida Satterthwaite has always been considered more odd than beautiful. But in London, her oddity has made her a sensation. Far worse, it’s caught the eye of the sinister Duke of Moreland — a notorious art collector obsessed with acquiring one-of-a-kind treasures. To escape the duke’s clutches, she’s going to need a little help. An Unlikely Hero… Captain Arthur Heywood’s days of heroism are long past. Grievously injured in the Peninsular War, he can no longer walk unaided, let alone shoot a pistol. What use can he possibly be to a damsel in distress? He has nothing left to offer except his good name. Can a marriage of convenience save Philly from the vengeful duke? Or will life with Arthur put her — and her heart — in more danger than ever? Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. The Hostage Bargain The Hostage Bargain by Annika Martin is FREE! This has been mentioned in the comments of at least 3 Rec Leagues: More Action Adventure Romance, No Bleak Moment, and Heists. My evil banker boss had the whole town under his thumb, but nobody more than me. I was miserable. Trapped. Until the three hot AF outlaws came to town. They robbed my boss’s bank like it was child’s play. They took me hostage. They blew that town in a blaze of fury. Seriously OMG. I’d never been in a car chase before—I’d never even been more than a few miles away from our farm. It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me, and I was all in. Then I learned about their wicked ideas for the four of us—outrageous and shocking desires that mean I’ll never have to choose between them. Yes, please! But now my beautiful badasses are becoming obsessed with me. They’ll do anything to protect me. And the more I discover how wounded and lost they are, the more I realize how much they need me. Being wanted by three protective men is the best thing ever. Too bad they’re wanted by every law enforcement agency ever. How will our fledgling family survive this? Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. View the full article -
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Deep Emotion, Plain Speech: Camus’s The Plague
Mur de la Peste, Lagnes. Photograph by Marianne Casamance, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The Plague was not an easy book to write. Camus was ill when he began it, then trapped by the borders keeping him in Nazi-occupied France. Aside from these difficulties, there was the pressure of authentically speaking up about the violence of World War II without falling into the nationalist heroics he deplored. Like with most problems in art, the solution was to address it directly: in one of the most revelatory sections of the novel, the character Tarrou blurs the line between fancy rhetoric and violence. “I’ve heard so much reasoning that almost turned my head,” he says, “and which had turned enough other heads to make them consent to killing, and I understood that all human sorrow came from not keeping language clear.” All human sorrow! The boldness of this claim hints at how much Camus believed in words. The Plague is full of people who struggle to clarify their language and strain to make it more precise: Grand, Rambert, Paneloux, and even Rieux all try—and often fail—to express their deepest feelings through words. But in writing, Camus manages to develop a style that encapsulates feeling within the sentence structures themselves—a kind of syntax that captures deep emotion in plain speech. For example, the first time Rambert tries to get out of the city, the smugglers who might help him escape don’t show up, and he despairs at the thought of having to retrace his steps: At that moment, in the night spanned by fugitive ambulances, he realized, as he would come to tell Doctor Rieux, that this whole time he had somehow forgotten his wife by putting all his energies into searching for a gap in the walls that separated him from her. Camus raises the emotional register of the language slightly here, but the words are quite plain, and most of the work is done by the structure of the sentence itself. Though the opening of the sentence promises immediacy, it is full of delays and distractions—the ambulances, the presence of the doctor, all the intervening time. The three prepositional phrases that front-load the sentence create the syntactic equivalent of the delayed gratification Rambert is experiencing, and the end of the sentence enacts the separation itself, forming a word wall between him and his love, which in the French is even more difficult to surmount: les murs qui le séparaient d’elle. The sentence ends with him and her, and only séparaient, the word for ongoing separation, divides them. This stylistic strategy has provoked a bizarre paradox. Critics have called and continue to call Camus’s prose in The Plague “rigorously and studiously unbeautiful,” stoic, flat, or even blank. Yet readers react to the prose with emotion—they find it powerful and sometimes tender. Restraint is a tricky concept, a tangle of literary and emotional implications. It has been weaponized by conservative critics to argue for a kind of “appropriateness,” to disavow the urgent necessity of radical self-expression. Restraint has also been mistaken for a kind of stiff-upper-lip style, a way of pushing feelings down out of patriotism so that horrific events like wars remain veiled from the public eye. Then there is restraint as a kind of humility before the unknown, the restraint of contemplating forces beyond a human scale. Late in life, Jacques Derrida, who also grew up in Algiers, linked restraint to the hush of faith: “Scruple, hesitation, indecision, reticence (hence modesty <pudeur>, respect, restraint before that which should remain sacred, holy, or safe: unscathed, immune).” Camus’s character Tarrou, who wants to be a secular saint, isn’t so far from Derrida’s idea. For Tarrou, clarity in language prevents loss of life, and restraint is a kind of earthly religion, a path of “clear speech and action.” As a secular person and as someone who felt compelled to bear witness, Camus had to develop an idea of restraint that was compatible with confronting harsh truths. But he was also troubled by the rarity of restraint in the aftermath of World War II—a lack of clemency, a quickness to defer to the binaries of good and evil, us and them. These forms of Manichean thought proved that simplicity in language could also lead to extremism. In 1948, the same year The Plague came out in an English translation, Camus published Letters to a German Friend, in which he explicitly addresses the problems with these binaries. “When expressed forcefully,” he writes, “truth wins out over falsehood … we are fighting for fine distinctions, but the kind of distinctions that are as important as man himself. We are fighting for the distinction between sacrifice and mysticism, between energy and violence, between strength and cruelty, for that even finer distinction between the true and the false.” Unlike falsehoods, truth, for Camus, requires a certain delicacy of expression, the fine distinction between clarity and simplicity. The syntax of this passage parodies the structure of binary thinking, but the words themselves counteract simple opposition. In fact, each pair is designed to provoke questions: where does sacrifice bleed into mysticism? How could there be a fine distinction between the true and the false? To get at some sense of reality, Camus uses syntax that is clear but not reductive. In Letters to a German Friend and in his lecture “The Human Crisis,” he hopes for a community of individuals who could disarm hatreds and stereotypes, but he knew that such a world could only be possible if humans acknowledged their capacity to carry the venom of extremist thinking and to turn people’s heads with its rhetoric. Plenty of venom, conscious or unconscious, can emerge through the flourishes of style. As W. G. Sebald points out, writers who attempt to bear witness to horrific events can fall prey to their own technique. His book On the Natural History of Destruction explores the few texts that attempt to describe the firebombing of Germany during World War II and the civilian casualties that resulted. In one essay, Sebald quotes the writer Arno Schmidt for his excesses of metaphor, which lead Schmidt to describe the smoke after an air raid as a woman: “a fat-lady cloud stood up above the warehouse, puffed out her round belly and belched a pastry head high into the air.” The depiction of this woman-cloud is both sexist and not particularly moving; it’s possible for a reader to forget the loss of life this cloud signifies. Sebald writes: “The author certainly intended to conjure up a striking image of the eddying whirlpool of destruction with his exaggerated language, but I for one, reading a passage like the following, do not visualize the supposed subject: life at the terrible moment of its disintegration … I do not see what is being described; all I see is the author, eager and persistent, intent on his linguistic fretwork.” In Schmidt’s eagerness to convey the intensity of destruction, he robs it of all its power, and the style serves as a screen between author and reader so that the horror of what’s being represented is blunted into a kind of literary fancy. By contrast, The Plague uses few instances of figurative language and, at the sentence level, rarely extends a metaphor. This aspect of the book has, at times, confused its readers, not to mention its translators. For the translator Stuart Gilbert, who lived through World War II and translated the book in the immediate postwar period, the novel’s plainer moments seem to provoke anxiety, and he meddles with them to make them closer to heroic postwar rhetoric. Where Camus writes “they must begin again” (il fallait recommencer), Gilbert adds a mythological flourish: “they must set their shoulders to the wheel again.” These inner workings of restraint are counterintuitive: often the less drastically the writer expresses an emotion, the more forcefully a reader can feel it. Naming a feeling or conjuring it through elaborate flourishes can be deflating and reductive. It’s Camus’s lack of stylistic padding that makes his work harrowing. In a moment of the novel that has been read by critics as Camus’s acknowledgment of the Nazi death camps, he writes, “And since a dead man carries no weight unless you’ve seen him dead, a hundred million corpses strewn across history are nothing but smoke in the imagination” (une fumée dans l’imagination). Robin Buss, who translated the novel in 2001, blinks here, using “a mist drifting through the imagination.” By turning smoke into drifting mists of memory, Buss represents the veil humans place between themselves and the dead, rather than what’s left of the bodies. Instead of obfuscating, Camus’s original metaphor tricks us into looking at what we don’t want to see. Confronted with the horror of death and ruin, Sebald identifies “the moral imperative for at least one writer to describe what happened in Hamburg on that night in July.” When Sebald praises the writer Hans Erich Nossack, it’s for his directness: “The narrative tone here is that of the messenger in classical tragedy,” Sebald writes. As Alice Kaplan points out in her essay on the narrator of The Plague, Dr. Rieux has some of this directness. He is a messenger, the counterpoint to Camus’s narrator in The Stranger. Where Rieux is a “we,” Meursault is a hollow “I”; he lacks a sense of community. The endings of the two novels represent two forms of immersion in the world, or perhaps two ways in which the world absorbs human emotion. Where Meursault is a loner, someone who decides to open himself “to the tender indifference of the world,” Rieux is a community member whose task is “to write simply” what the indifference of the world has thrown at him. Of course, Camus was also trying to create an allegory, and in that sense, Rieux’s task was always simpler than Camus’s. Yet in this pandemic year, The Plague has been tested as a direct chronicle of illness, and it has held its own. We have all, to some extent, become residents within its chapters. Many of the novel’s details feel more realistic than your average allegorical gesture—the mastic trees, the skies, the characters’ understandable hypochondria, the heartlessness of bureaucracy. In the midst of all this, as I translated the novel, I had to restrain myself from transferring my experience of plague onto the page. It would’ve been so easy to use the words in the news; to choose vaccine instead of serum; to put my own frustrations in Rambert’s mouth, or worse, Rieux’s; to make the prefect of Oran, who downplays the threat of the epidemic, sound a little too much like Trump. I felt this mirroring all year as I translated the novel in quarantine, as if the events of the world might become legible, rising through the ink shadow of the page. Perhaps The Plague holds up so well as a chronicle of real illness because, more than some of his contemporaries, Camus had an intense and highly specific relationship with the natural world. Though he was criticized by Roland Barthes and Jean-Paul Sartre for representing the Nazi occupation through a biological phenomenon, there is a certain humility to this choice—a certain refusal to put human intervention on a pedestal. “There are two sorts of efficacity,” Camus writes in The Rebel: “that of typhoons and that of sap.” As Sebald proves, there is a great deal of restraint in natural history, in trying to describe the world plainly and precisely but without oversimplification. This use of description presents another paradox of restraint: that the world itself is dramatic enough. If you look at it closely, its images can express intensity without much embellishment. Channeling emotion through observation can be another way to express a feeling without naming it. I’m reminded of, in The Plague, the first rat Dr. Rieux observes on his landing, and the way it makes him think of his wife’s illness. By describing how the animal collapses and coughs up blood, he accesses both the pain of his wife’s symptoms and the fact that they are ever-present in his mind. In this way, what the doctor notices lets us understand the true danger of his wife’s condition without having to say it directly. Restraint is sometimes the act of watching what disturbs another’s eye. The craft of observation, of image making, is closely related to poetry. The Plague combines Camus’s stylistic facility with fiction, philosophical essay, and the dialogue of a play, but there was another, less obvious genre that also influenced him: the lyric essay, which is the writing closest to a kind of poetry about the natural world. In Ellen Conroy Kennedy’s brilliant translation, Camus’s essay “Nuptials at Tipasa” opens like this: In the spring, Tipasa is inhabited by gods and the gods speak in the sun and the scent of absinthe leaves, in the silver armor of the sea, in the raw blue sky, the flower-covered ruins, and the great bubbles of light among the heaps of stone. At certain hours of the day the countryside is black with sunlight. The eyes try in vain to perceive anything but drops of light and colors trembling on the lashes. The thick scent of aromatic plants tears at the throat and suffocates in the vast heat. Today, this would be called a prose poem—it’s Camus’s early voice at its wildest. And yet, there is a kind of restraint here, too, in delaying the self to foreground the landscape. Here, the “I” is withheld until the end of the paragraph. He begins with the lyric voice as an eye rather than an “I,” a lens through which a reader is guided to observe the world. The intensity of this language serves to plunge us into the scene, to make us feel the granular detail of the sunlight, the rocks, and the smell of the foliage. By immersing himself in the world, by placing suffocation in the heat and the scent of absinthe rather than in his own lungs, Camus withholds his actual situation: his struggles with tuberculosis, which made him confront his own mortality. There is a sincere urgency in this beauty—you can only be so arrogant when you know you’re going to die, when your body is already fighting for survival. These essays prove that restraint isn’t the same thing as moderation—restraint can’t exist without deep feeling on the part of the writer, without intensity to harness. Camus’s early pieces read like the manifestos of someone trying to merge with a landscape as a way out of himself. This kind of “style incarnate” is, for Camus, what gives the written word power. To return to The Rebel: “Through style, the creative effort reconstructs the world, and always with the same slight distortion that is the mark of both art and protest … Art is an impossible demand given expression and form.” Remember what I’ve seen. Feel something of what I feel. More than any other literary experience, translating Camus has taught me that restraint isn’t for the writer; it’s for the reader. By holding back the dazzle for a moment, a writer can let someone look directly through the page, at the part of the world that hurts. Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her recent translations include Albert Camus’s The Plague, Louis Guilloux’s Blood Dark, and Geraldine Schwarz’s Those Who Forget. Her first solo-authored book, The Age of Loneliness, will be published by Graywolf in 2024. She lives in Buffalo, New York. This is an excerpt from States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic by Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in October 2022. View the full article -
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Walking Middle-Earth: The Barrow-downs
Everard Took returns with a new set of walks, starting with a visit to the Barrow-downs and Prancing Pony. Our stuffy guide once more reveals his love of the landscapes of Middle-earth, but he is also preoccupied by a suspicious loss… Kai Greenwood (@LostDunedan) A long, circular route starting at the village of Bree and taking in the ancient ruins on the old downs. Distance: 13 miles Difficulty: Moderate, long distance and some small hills to climb Dangers: Fog can descend quickly. The wights are gone however, (although the author bears no responsibility etc etc). It is the dawning of the Fourth Age. Four hobbits set out on a quest beyond all imagining, and succeeded against the odds in destroying the one ring. Sauron is defeated, and King Elessar has taken his rightful place on the throne of Gondor. The orcs are gone, fear is gone, and peace and prosperity is promised for all Middle-earth! Truly we live in a blessed Fourth Age! Which is all very well, but it isn’t going to help me find my missing notebook. Now, I swear I had it stowed safely in my backpack whilst going on this latest series of walks, yet when I went to check some old notes, it was gone. Most perplexing, (and I suspect foul play), but please keep an eye open for it. Thank you, kind readers. Anyway, welcome back to this new series of walks around Middle-earth in which I will be venturing far(ish) and wide(ish). This trail begins in Bree, at the Prancing Pony Inn (1). Stroll through the town and out of the south gate, pass over the causeway and follow the lane between the fields. You will soon see a footpath that cuts west across common land to meet the ancient North Road, the Greenway, with its cobbles overgrown with grasses and dandelions. It is not these cobbles that we have come to see, but other stones far more dramatic. In the west rise the Barrow-downs, topped with tombs and menhirs from the ancient Kingdom of Cardolan. What was once a peaceful resting place of men became for years a fearful, shunned land, infested by cold-hearted wraiths known as Barrow Wights. Few who entered these downs returned, and those who did were said to be changed, carrying a shard of terror in their souls for ever more. These days though, it’s a lovely place for a stroll. Follow the well-worn path between Skull Mound and Goby Ridge (as the hobbits of Bree have named them). This track, trodden by the curious, leads directly to the Great Barrow (2). The tomb is open, and though all burial goods have been removed, the wight that Frodo encountered here is also gone, so pay your respects to the Last Prince of Cardolan and then amble northwest to the Sunken Circle (3). Now, I am not one to cast aspersions, but how Frodo et al got so lost at this point in their journey is beyond me. The gateway to the downs, a clear gap between two steep-sided hills, is due north of this place, and even in a fog it isn’t difficult to find. If you want to find a pea in your porridge, just poke your finger in, as my Isobel used to say! Still, all was well in the end for Master Frodo, so no harm done. What Frodo should have known is that moss, growing on the side of the standing stone, shows us the direction we need to go! Follow the moss (or your compass) northwards to pass over the ruined Cardolan boundary ditch (4) and onwards to the East Road (5). Ah, the East Road! There is something comforting about setting a hairy foot on this ancient route. It runs for miles beyond the northern reaches of the Old Forest, past Buckland, over the Brandywine… to home. How many hobbits have walked this road? How many ponies, and dwarves, and men? More importantly, how many barrels of Prancing Pony Ale have made the journey to ease hobbit thirsts in Bucklebury and Bywater and Brockenborings? A de-sobering thought. The Shire is a long way off though, too far for today. Turn instead to the east where the lights of Bree will be visible between the poplars that line the road. Brightest amongst them are those of the Prancing Pony Inn. Many a weary traveller has looked with relief upon this view after the slog through the wilds. I can imagine the pleasure the lights must give them, the promise of a warm bed and a dry roof and a full tummy. There’ll be no peaceful night’s sleep for me though. Not until I find my bloody notebook. Yours, Everard Took Read more at www.kaigreenwood.com Twitter: @LostDunedan Text and Maps © Kai Greenwood 2022 The post Walking Middle-Earth: The Barrow-downs appeared first on The Fantasy Hive. View the full article
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