Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

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

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

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

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

In 1927 Alice Dorothy Ormond Campbell—a thirty-nine-year-old native of Atlanta, Georgia who for the last fifteen years had lived successively in New York, Paris and London, never once returning to the so-called Empire City of the South—published her first novel, an unstoppable crime thriller called Juggernaut, selling the serialization rights to the Chicago Tribune for $4000 ($60,000 today), a tremendous sum for a brand new author. On its publication in January 1928, both the book and its author caught the keen eye of Bessie S. Stafford, society page editor of the Atlanta Constitution, a genteel southern lady who seemingly, like the Bourbons of France, had forgotten nothing. Back when Alice Ormond, as she was then known, lived in Atlanta, Miss Bessie breathlessly informed her readers, she had been “an ethereal blonde-like type of beauty, extremely popular, and always thought she was in love with somebody. She took high honors in school; and her gentleness of manner and breeding bespoke an aristocratic lineage. She grew to a charming womanhood—” Let us stop Miss Bessie right there (we will be seeing her again later), because as you may cynically have guessed, there is rather more to the story of the once prominent and still intriguing vintage Anglo-American crime novelist Alice Campbell—the mystery genre’s other “AC,” who published nineteen crime novels between 1928 and 1950—than her vaunted ethereal beauty and good breeding (though, to be sure, there is something to that as well). So allow me to plunge boldly forward with the fascinating tale of Atlanta’s great Golden Age crime writer, who as an American expatriate in England, like her younger contemporary John Dickson Carr, went on to achieve fame and fortune as an atmospheric writer of crime and mystery and become one of the early members of the Detection Club. Although Alice Campbell’s lineage may not have been “aristocratic,” this word almost invariably being misapplied in an American context, it was to no small degree distinguished. Alice was born in Atlanta on November 29, 1887, the youngest of the four surviving children of prominent Atlantans James Ormond IV and Florence Root. Both of Alice’s grandfathers, James Ormond III of Florida and Sidney Dwight Root of Massachusetts, had been wealthy Atlanta merchants who settled in the city in the years leading up to the American Civil War. James Ormond III’s grandfather, James Ormond I, was a Scottish sea captain who in 1804, after many adventures, seafaring and otherwise, established “Damietta,” a two thousand acre cotton and indigo plantation in the east-central section of what was then Spanish Florida. The first James Ormond was murdered by a runaway slave in 1817, but a few years later his son and daughter-in-law, Isabella Christie, returned to Damietta and reestablished the plantation. (Isabella’s presence in Alice Campbell’s family tree means that theoretically she could be related to Agatha Christie’s first husband Archie, whose paternal grandfather, incidentally, was named Campbell Christie.) James Ormond II died at Damietta in 1829 and was entombed on its grounds, his survivors removing to Charleston, South Carolina. Today thirteen-acre James Ormond Tomb Park is all that remains of the once sprawling plantation, which was destroyed by Native Americans during the Second Seminole War—although the city of Ormond Beach, Florida named in honor of the family, stands as well as a grander tribute. James Ormond III returned to Florida to fight, for the good of the family name, during the Second Seminole War, serving as an officer in the so-called Mosquito Roarers, a Florida militia. At the war’s conclusion he married a daughter of Benjamin Chaires, the builder of Verdura, said to have been antebellum Florida’s most opulent plantation. James Ormond III himself rose to wealth and prominence after he removed to Atlanta, among many enterprises founding the Atlanta Paper Mill, of which his son, Alice’s father James Ormond IV, later served as superintendent. In 1873 James IV wed Florence Root, with whom he fathered two sons and two daughters who grew to adulthood, including Alice, the pampered baby of the Ormond brood. Florence was one of the children of Sidney Dwight Root, a native of Massachusetts who settled in Georgia in the 1840s, later moving to Atlanta and becoming a co-partner in Beach, Root & Company, the most lucrative business firm in antebellum Atlanta. During the Civil War, the firm set up an office in Liverpool, England and with its merchant vessels successfully ran the Union naval blockade of the South. Root himself traveled in person to England and France, where he promoted the desperate idea of emancipating slaves in return for their military service in the Confederate Army, in the hope of drawing English recognition of the Confederate States of America. There he meant such pro-Southern sympathizers as the Marquis of Bath at his country seat, Longleat (the home of the family of Golden Age mystery writer Molly Thynne), Lord Derby and “an intense Confederate Englishman by the name of Campbell”—no ancestral relation, evidently, to Alice’s future husband. Alice’s uncles John Wellborn and Walter Clark Root were noted American architects. When John Wellborn Root died at the age of forty-one in 1891, when Alice was but three years old, he and his partner Daniel Burnham, designers of the Rookery, then considered the finest office building in the United States, had been in the preliminary stages of planning the Chicago World’s Fair (aka the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893). Walter C. Root, fated to be known as the “other Root brother,” rose to prominence in Kansas City, Missouri and remained active there until his death in 1925, less than three years before Alice published Juggernaut. In contrast with her two uprooted uncles, Alice’s pair of prominent brothers, Sidney James and Walter Emanuel Ormond—who respectively were fourteen and twelve years older than she—remained in Atlanta. Sidney James Root served as a drama critic and political writer for the Atlanta Constitution and in the latter capacity covered the infamous Leo Frank murder trial in 1913, which transfixed the American nation and haunts it still today. Leo Frank, a Jewish superintendent of an Atlanta pencil factory on trial for the murder of Mary Phagan, a pretty, thirteen-year-old white employee, was convicted, sentenced to death and—after his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the governor in 1915—hanged at the age of thirty-one by a lynch mob which included the immediately previous governor of the state. Outside of the South the whole affair was widely deemed a monstrous miscarriage of justice. Outside of the South the whole affair was widely deemed a monstrous miscarriage of justice. Today it is generally believed that Mary Phagan was murdered by factory sweeper Jim Conley, who was the state’s star witness against Leo Frank at the trial. At the time of Sidney Root’s own untimely death the next year at the age of forty-two, he was at the apex of his career, serving as personal secretary to Atlanta Mayor James G. Woodward, who in 1915 had pugnaciously rationalized Frank’s lynching before a non-southern audience by asserting that three-quarters of the state of Georgia thought the man was guilty and “when it comes to a [southern white] woman’s honor, there is no limit that we [southern white men] will not go to protect it.” Alice, who was married and living in England at this time, did not return to Atlanta for her unmarried brother’s funeral. Alice’s other brother, Walter Emanuel Ormond, an Atlanta attorney and justice of the peace, suffered an even more untimely death than his brother when, in 1906 at the age of thirty, he fell overboard to his death from the steamer Kansas City, en route from Savannah to New York, somewhere near Cape Hatteras, off the cost of North Carolina. Earlier in the evening, after considerable drinking one surmises, Walter in his capacity as a JP had performed a mock marriage ceremony, demanding as a fee the bracelet worn by the “bride,” which he placed around his own left wrist. Later, restless and hot on that sweltering July night in his upper deck state room, which he reportedly shared with an “intimate” male friend, Walter, clad in his pajamas, stalked out and went to sleep in a steamer chair on the deck. The Atlanta Constitution speculated, more euphemistically than I am putting it, that Walter while vomiting over the deck rail lost his balance and toppled headlong into the ocean, where he drowned. The paper expressed the hope, which came to naught, that Walter’s body would be identified by the woman’s bracelet encircling his wrist. At the time of his demise Walter was unmarried and lived with his mother and sister. Alice’s sister Mary Florence, a decade older than she, had wed six years earlier to insurance executive Hinton Hopkins, a son of the first president of the Georgia Institute of Technology, aka Georgia Tech. Like Alice, Mary was deemed a “beauty of the fairest and daintiest type of blonde.” Both Alice and her sister managed to dodge the Reaper’s scythe that repeatedly struck down their menfolk in the prime of their lives. Alice was raised by her mother after Florence and James Ormond divorced some time prior to Mary’s marriage in 1900, before Alice was even a teenager, although Florence, evidently seeking to avoid the ignominy that inevitably attended a divorcee in the Victorian era, no matter the circumstances of the divorce, listed herself as a widow in city directories. James seems to have become a nonperson to his family afterward, not even receiving mention in his daughter Mary’s marriage notices in the Atlanta Constitution, despite the fact that he was still alive and residing in the city, living with a sister and brother-in-law, with apparently no occupation, though he was only in his fifties. At her wedding Mary was given away not by an adoring father, but by her surviving maternal uncle from St. Louis, Walter C. Root. Had James as a husband been alcoholic, adulterous, even abusive? Evidently the dirty laundry of an unamicable parting between representatives of the socially prominent Ormonds and Roots was not something which the Constitution felt inclined to air before its readers. Alice precociously published her first piece of fiction, a fairy story titled “Ambitious Allen and Pretty Annette,” in the Atlanta Constitution in 1897, when she was nine years old. Four years later, Alice, herself pretty like Annette and ambitious like Allen, was in the final stage of completing a two-volume novel. By 1905 she was an honored graduate of Atlanta’s Girls’ High School and a nationally published poet, having appeared in an anthology along with another talented teen, native Pennsylvanian Miriam Allen deFord, a future Edgar Award winning true crime writer. By this time Alice attended the Church of Our Father, Atlanta’s only Unitarian house of worship, and served as corresponding secretary of the Southern Associate Alliance, a branch of the National Alliance of Unitarian and Other Liberal Christian Women. Two years later, nineteen-year-old Alice, having found Atlanta too narrow a canvas for her large-scale literary and social ambitions, had relocated to New York, safely chaperoned by Florence. Together mother and daughter took up residence at Manhattan’s Yorston Hotel, overlooking Central Park, which had been started by three native Atlantan sisters to cater to fellow Atlantans who had moved, like Alice, to New York to launch business or artistic careers. There Alice became friends with writers Inez Haynes Irwin, a prominent feminist, and Jacques Futrelle, the creator of “The Thinking Machine” detective who was soon to go down with the ship on RMS Titanic, and scored her first published short story in Ladies Home Journal in 1911. Simultaneously she threw herself pell-mell into the causes of women’s suffrage and equal pay for equal work, topics which in 1912 she returned to Atlanta to discourse upon before an audience of assembled natives. Feminism was not just a cause of eccentric, elderly spinsters, she explained, but young women, married women and married women’s supportive husbands too. The same year she herself became engaged in New York to marry Burnet C. Tuthill, a music student at Columbia University and son of architect William Tuthill (the designer of New York’s famed Carnegie Hall and an acquaintance of Alice’s uncles) who later founded the Memphis Symphony Orchestra. However, the couple soon broke off their engagement and in February 1913 Alice went off to Paris with her mother to further her cultural education. Three months later in Paris, on May 22, 1913, twenty-five-year-old Alice—who as a girl in Atlanta, it will be recalled, “always thought she was in love with somebody”—married James Lawrence Campbell, a twenty-four-year-old theatrical agent of good looks and good family from the American state of Virginia. Jamie, as he was familiarly known, had arrived in Paris a couple of years earlier, after a failed stint in New York City as an actor. “A Virginia ham is all right in its place,” joked a friend of Jamie’s struts upon the stage. A photo of him from probably about fifteen years later calls to my mind something of an amalgam of actors Michael York and Joel Gray from the film Cabaret. In Paris he served, more successfully, as an agent for prominent New York play brokers Arch and Edgar Selwyn. The Atlanta Constitution carried the happy announcement of the comely young couple’s nuptials on page eight, the front page of the newspaper being devoted, naturally, to the state’s latest crime outrages, notably the Leo Frank case—Atlanta police had just arrested and dragged off to prison the Franks’ hysterical, “high yellow” cook, Minola McKnight, in an effort to extract incriminating evidence against her employer—as well as a narrowly averted lynching of a couple of county black men accused of murdering a white woman. Florence’s duty to her daughter done, the devoted mother returned to Atlanta, where Mary still resided, and passed away there five years later at the age of sixty-four, possibly a victim of the Spanish Flu pandemic then wracking the world. The tablet over Florence’s grave memorializes as well her dear lost son Walter, “drowned at sea.” James Ormond had predeceased his ex-wife in 1911, expiring at his sister’s home in Atlanta after having suffered a paralytic stroke on a visit two years earlier to Ormond Beach, the cite of his forbears’ faded glory. Sidney Ormond of course died five years later. Obviously one reason Alice so long put off returning to Atlanta was that she had so little left to return to there and yet so much still to prove. ******* After the wedding Alice Ormond Campbell, as she now was known, remained in Paris with her husband Jamie until hostilities between France and Germany loomed direfully the next year. At this point the couple prudently relocated to England, along with their newborn son, James Lawrence Campbell, Jr. After the war the Campbells, living in London, bought an attractive house on Albion Road, in the district of St. John’s Wood, Westminster, where they established a literary and theatrical salon. There Alice oversaw the raising of the couple’s two sons, Lawrence and Robert, and their single daughter, Florence Ormond, while Jamie spent much of his time abroad, brokering play productions in Paris, New York and other cities. Like Alice, Jamie harbored dreams of personal literary accomplishment; and in 1927 he published, in the United Kingdom and United States, a novel entitled Face Value, which for a brief time became that much-prized thing by publishers, a “scandalous” novel that gets Talked About. The story of a gentle orphan boy named Serge, the son an emigre Russian prostitute, who grows up in a Parisian “disorderly house,” as reviews often blushingly put it, Face Value divided critics, impressing many of them with is refreshing frankness while merely scandalizing others. While provincial Dayton, Ohio reviewer Varley P. Young, for example, groused of the novel that “[f]rom the first paragraph until the last, the reader is never allowed to forget the sordid background of the story” and sneered that other reviewers would pronounce it “an important’ book” merely because “it dispels the illusions of mankind and brings to surface the sewage of life,” as perceptive an audience as the great American novelist Willa Cather was captivated by it, writing a friend, playwright Zoe Akins: “Zoe, I’m going to send you a book which has interested me a lot. I don’t usually like books about houses of prostitution, or comparisons of English and French manners, and this book is made of those two things; but I like it. The man really has something to say. It’s called ‘Face Value.’ Please read it carefully—it’s good somehow. I don’t know why.” Read it people did, and Face Value ended up on American bestseller lists. Jamie went on to publish two more novels, The Miracle at Peille (1929), likewise set in France, and Success and Plenty (1930), set in England, but neither work received anything like the attention Face Value had, making Jamie, as a novelist at least, a one-hit wonder. The success of his first novel led to the author being invited out to Hollywood to work as a scriptwriter, and his name appears on credits to a trio of films in 1927-28, including French Dressing, a “gay” divorce comedy set among sexually scatterbrained Americans in Paris. One wonders whether in Hollywood Jamie ever came across future crime writer Cornell Woolrich, who was scripting there too at the time. Meanwhile Alice remained in England with the children, enjoying her own literary splash in warm waters with her debut thriller Juggernaut, which concerned the murderous machinations of an inexorably ruthless French Riviera society doctor, opposed by a valiant young nurse. The novel racked up rave reviews and sales in the UK and US, in the latter country spurred on by its nationwide newspaper serialization, which promised readers ….the open door to adventure! Juggernaut by Alice Campbell will sweep you out of the humdrum of everyday life into the gay, swift-moving Arabian-nights existence of the Riviera! London’s Daily Mail declared that the irresistible Juggernaut “should rank among the ‘best sellers’ of the year”; and, sure enough, Juggernaut’s English publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, boasted, several months after the novel’s English publication in July 1928, that Hodder already had run through six printings in an attempt to satisfy customer demand for ructions on the Riviera, something English thriller writer E. Phillips Oppenheim had made a fortune supplying the public for over three decades. In 1936 Juggernaut was adapted in England as a film vehicle for horror great Boris Karloff, making it the only Alice Campbell novel filmed to date. The film was remade in England under the title The Temptress in 1949. Contrasting with Jamie’s sober-sided novels, Alice’s Water Weed (1929) and Spiderweb (1930) (Murder in Paris in the US), the immediate successors to her debut shocker, held up well to their predecessor’s performance. Alice, now in her forties, finally saw her career as a writer triumphantly launched. She chose this moment to return for a fortnight to Atlanta, ostensibly to visit her sister at her $30,000 (about $465,000 today) colonial home on Fairview Road, but doubtlessly in part to parade through her hometown as a conquering, albeit commercial, literary hero. And who was there to welcome Alice in the pages of the Constitution but Bessie S. Stafford, who pronounced Alice’s hair still looked like spun gold while her eyes remarkably had turned an even deeper shade of blue. To Miss Bessie, Alice imparted enchanting tales of salon chats with such personages as George Bernard Shaw, Lady Cynthia Asquith, H. G. Wells and (his lover) Rebecca West, the latter of whom a simpatico Alice met and conversed with frequently. Admitting that her political sympathies in England “inclined toward the conservatives,” Alice yet urged “the absolute necessity of having two strong parties.” English women, she had been pleased to see, evinced more informed interest in politics than their American sisters. Alice, Bessie declared, doted on her children: sixteen-year-old Lawrence, a student at prestigious Westminster School; fourteen-year-old Ormond, her only daughter, a blonde like her mother who liked poetry and attended Francis Holland School for Girls; and twelve-year-old Robert, enraptured with electrical engineering and “enrolled in a modern coeducational boarding school.” Yet their mother diligently devoted every afternoon to her writing, shutting her study door behind her “as a sign that she is not to be interrupted.” This commitment to her craft enabled Alice to produce an additional sixteen crime novels between 1932 and 1950, beginning with The Click of the Gate and ending with The Corpse Had Red Hair. Although nearly half of Alice’s crime novels were standalones, in contravention of convention at this time, when series sleuths were so popular, with The Click of the Gate the author introduced one of her main recurring characters, intrepid Paris journalist Tommy Rostetter, who appears in three additional novels: Desire to Kill (1934), Flying Blind (1938) and The Bloodstained Toy (1948). In the two latter novels, Tommy appears with Alice’s other major recurring character, dauntless Inspector Headcorn of Scotland Yard, who also pursues murderers and other malefactors in Death Framed in Silver (1937), They Hunted a Fox (1940), No Murder of Mine (1941) and The Cockroach Sings (1946) (With Bated Breath in the US). Additional recurring characters in Alice’s books are Geoffrey Macadam and Catherine West, who appear in Spiderweb and No Light Came On (1942), and Colin Ladbrooke, who appears in Death Framed in Silver, A Door Closed Softly (1939) and They Hunted a Fox. In the latter two books Colin with his romantic interest Alison Young and in the first and third book with Inspector Headcorn, who also as mentioned appears in Flying Blind and The Bloodstained Toy with Tommy Rosstetter, making Headcorn the connecting link in this universe of sleuths, although the inspector does not appear with Geoffrey Macadam and Catherine West. It is all a rather complicated state of criminal affairs; and this lack of a consistent and enduring central sleuth character in Alice’s crime fiction may help explain why her work faded in the Fifties, after the author retired from writing. Be that as it may, Alice Campbell is a figure of significance in the history of crime fiction. In a 1946 review of The Cockroach Sings in the London Observer, crime fiction critic Maurice Richardson, in the course of explaining why “[w]e can always do with Mrs. Alice Campbell,” asserted that “[s]he belongs to the atmospheric school, of which one of the outstanding exponents was the late Ethel Lina White,” the author of The Wheel Spins (1936), famously filmed in 1938, under the title The Lady Vanishes, by director Alfred Hitchcock. This “atmospheric school,” as Richardson termed it, had more students in the demonstrative United States than in the decorous United Kingdom, to be sure, the United States being the home of such hugely popular suspense writers as Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mignon Eberhart, to name but a couple of the most prominent examples. Like the novels of the American Eber-Rinehart school and English authors Ethel Lina White and Marie Belloc Lowndes, the latter the author of the acknowledged landmark 1911 thriller The Lodger, Alice Campbell’s books are not pure puzzle detective tales, but rather broader mysteries which put a premium on the storytelling imperatives of atmosphere and suspense. “She could not be unexciting if she tried,” raved the Times Literary Supplement of Alice, stressing the author’s remoteness from the so-called “Humdrum” school of detective fiction headed by British authors Freeman Wills Crofts, John Street and J. J. Connington. However, as Maurice Richardson, a great fan of Alice’s crime writing, put it, “she generally binds her homework together with a reasonable plot,” so the “Humdrum” fans out there need not be put off by what American detective novelist S. S. Van Dine, creator of Philo Vance, dogmatically dismissed as “literary dallying.” In her novels Alice Campbell offered people bone-rattling good reads, which explains its popularity in the past and its revival today. Lines from a review of her 1941 crime novel No Murder of Mine by “H.V.A.” in the Hartford Courant suggests the general nature of her work’s appeal: “The excitement and mystery of this Class A shocker start on page 1 and continue right to the end of the book. You won’t put it down, once you’ve begun it. And if you like romance mixed with your thrills, you’ll find it here.” The protagonist of No Murder of Mine is Rowan Wilde, “an attractive young American girl studying in England.” Frequently in her books Alice, like the great Anglo-American author Henry James, pits ingenuous but goodhearted Americans, male or female, up against dangerously sophisticated Europeans, drawing on autobiographical details from her and Jamie’s own lives. Many of her crime novels, which often are lengthier than the norm for the period, recall, in terms of their length and content, the Victorian sensation novel, which seemingly had been in its dying throes when the author was a precocious child; yet, in their emphasis on morbid psychology and their sexual frankness, they also anticipate the modern crime novel. One can discern this tendency most dramatically, perhaps, in the engrossing Water Weed, concerning a sexual affair between a middle-aged Englishwoman and a young American man that has dreadful consequences, and Desire to Kill, about murder among a clique of decadent bohemians in Paris. In both of these mysteries the exploration of aberrant sexuality is striking. Indeed, in its depiction of sexual psychosis Water Weed bears rather more resemblance to, say, the crime novels of Patricia Highsmith than it does to the cozy mysteries of Patricia Wentworth. One might well term it Alice Campbell’s Deep Water, recalling Highsmith’s third crime novel. In this context it should be noted that in 1935 Alice Campbell authored a sexual problem play, Two Share a Dwelling, which the New York Times described as a “grim, vivid, psychological treatment of dual personality.” Although it ran for only twenty-two performances during October 8-26 at the West End’s celebrated St. James’ Theatre, the play had done well on its provincial tour and it received a standing ovation from the audience on opening night at the West End, primarily on account of the compelling performance of the half-Jewish German stage actress Grete Mosheim, who had fled Germany two years earlier and was making her English stage debut in the play’s lead role of a schizophrenic, sexually compulsive woman with two polar personalities: Lilia, “a shrinking, sensitive creature with a disturbing suggestion of mental fragility,” and Bess, “a brazen harlot.” Mosheim was described as young and “blondely beautiful,” bringing to mind the author herself. At its Glasgow tryout, the play was greeted with unqualified praise, one critic declaring that the writing was “so psychologically sound it would satisfy Freud”; and no fewer than “nine curtain calls greeted the cast and author.” Unfortunately London critics were put off by the play’s sexual subject, which put Alice in an impossible position with them. One reviewer scathingly observed that “Miss Alice Campbell…has chosen to give her audience a study in pathology as a pleasant method of spending the evening….it is always a distressing sight to see a struggle between good and evil….one leaves the theatre rather wishing that playwrights would leave medical books on their shelves.” Another sniffed that “it is to be hoped that the fashion of plumbing the depths of Freudian theory for dramatic fare will not spread. It is so much more easy to be interested in the doings of the sane.” The play died a quick death in London and its author went back, for another fifteen years, to “plumbing the depths” in her crime fiction. What impelled Alice and Jamie Campbell so avidly to explore human sexuality in their work? Doubtless their writing reflected the temper of modern times, but it also likely was driven by personal imperatives. The child of an unhappy marriage who at a young age had been deprived of a father figure, Alice appears to have wanted to use her crime fiction to explore the human devastation wrought by disordered lives. For his part globetrotting, cosmopolitan Jamie Campbell came, seemingly paradoxically, from a genteel old southern family from the piedmont region of Virginia and a country town, Bedford, of fewer than three thousand souls. His father, James Lawrence Campbell, Sr., was a respected lawyer, mayor, state senator and circuit judge who died in 1914, the year after Jamie’s marriage. Yet Jamie’s mother, Lillian (Bowyer) Campbell, had passed away nearly two decades earlier at the age of thirty-four, likely from the effects of a difficult childbirth, leaving his father with the responsibility for raising the couple’s four young surviving children: Thomas, eight, Jamie, six, George, four, and Lillian, one. A pair of the judge’s spinster sisters attempted daintily to step into the breach left by Lillian’s untimely demise, but at least one of the Campbell children, daughter Lillian, went decidedly wayward, in 1913 eloping at the age of eighteen with her beau, Thomas Berry, a son of a local banker and tobacco planter. For some months Judge Campbell had endeavored to put an end to his young daughter’s love affair, and a few weeks before the elopement he had personally hauled Lillian to the State Normal and Industrial School for Women, about one hundred miles to the north of Bedford in the Shenandoah Valley town of Harrisonburg, and proceeded to enroll her there, where she was to stay pending completion of arrangements to pack her off to Paris, where her brother Jamie, who himself would marry Alice in three months, was now located. This setup makes the Normal School sound more like a girls’ reformatory or prison than a hallowed institution of learning, and Lillian, a spirited girl, was having none of it. Around four in the morning on Valentine’s Day, February 14, Lillian lowered herself from her dormitory window on a rope made from bedsheets, met her lover and fled with him to the train station, where they boarded for Washington, D. C. and wed, before seemingly vanishing into thin air. This youthful outburst of esprit d’amour made for wryly amused national newspaper headlines, such as “Maid Outwits City Judge, Her Father,” but unfortunately Lillian and Thomas Berry did not live happily ever after together. The couple moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Lillian rapidly gave birth to four daughters and Thomas worked as an advertising salesman. By 1930 the man and wife had divorced and Thomas had left for Gulfport, Mississippi, where he remarried. Left with the care of four daughters, Lillian found employment in Milwaukee as a public librarian. She died in 1941 at the age of forty-six, but surviving photographs of her show a smiling woman, lovingly surrounded by her daughters. Jamie’s brother Thomas Bowyer Campbell also very much chose his own path in life. An Episcopalian minister, former China missionary and prominent member of the Anglo-Catholic Group in the Episcopal Church, Thomas made national headlines by converting to Catholicism in 1931 and becoming a Catholic priest. He had been living in England for the last three years, officiating at Anglican ceremonies at Oxford, and like his brother Jamie and sister-in-law Alice at this time, he was bitten by the literary bug. He published a quartet of novels: Black Sadie (1928), a tale of black life in Virginia and Harlem, Old Miss (1929), a story set in antebellum Virginia that he based on the life of his great-grandmother, Far Trouble (1931), a thriller set in China, and White Nigger (1932), a miscegenation novel that he had submitted to publishers under the less attention-grabbing title Sweet Chariot in 1930. (To his credit he admitted his embarrassment with the title under which the book was published.) Evidence suggests that discord had entered the lives of Alice and Jamie at least as early as the 1930s, when the couple had reached middle age and their children had entered adulthood. After the First World War, when Alice and Jamie produced their trio of children, it appears that they spent a great deal of time apart, and it is not hard to imagine that Jamie, at least, carried on sexual liaisons with others. Alice’s life, on the other hand, seems to have settled down considerably from those heady early days in Paris and London. In 1939, as the Second World War loomed, Alice resided in rural southwestern England with her daughter Ormond at a cottage—the inspiration for her murder setting in No Murder of Mine, one guesses—near the bucolic town of Beaminster, Dorset, known for its medieval Anglican church and its charming reference in a poem by English dialect poet William Barnes: Sweet Be’mi’ster, that bist a-bound By green and woody hills all round, Wi’hedges, reachen up between A thousand vields o’ zummer green. Alice’s elder son Lawrence, living unemployed in New York City at this time, would enlist in the US Army when the country entered the war a couple of years later, serving as a master sergeant throughout the conflict. In December 1939, twenty-three-year-old Ormond, who herself preferred going by the name Chita, her father’s pet name for her, wed the prominent antiques dealer, interior decorator, home restorer and racehorse owner Ernest Thornton-Smith, who at the age of fifty-eight was fully thirty-five years older than she. Thornton-Smith and his similarly occupied brother, Walter, appear to have been modestly born “Smith,” sons of civil servant Samuel Tomas Smith, but under the posher moniker “Thornton-Smith,” they both made fortunes catering to the tastes of England’s rich and privileged. Suggestive of estrangement from her husband, Ormond in 1967 would officially change her name by deed poll from Florence Ormond Thornton-Smith to Chita Florence Ormond Campbell. Antiques play a significant role in Alice’s No Light Came On (1942) and Travelling Butcher (1944), a wartime novel which Kate Jackson at her Cross Examining Crime blog deemed “a thrilling read.” The author’s most comprehensive wartime novel was Ringed with Fire (1943), which native Englishman S. Morgan-Powell, the dean of Canadian drama critics, in the Montreal Star pronounced one of the “best spy stories the war has produced,” adding: “Ringed with Fire” begins with mystery and exudes mystery from every chapter. Its clues are most ingeniously developed, and keep the reader guessing in all directions. For once there is a mystery which will, I think, mislead the most adroit and experienced of amateur sleuths. Some time ago there used to be a practice of sealing up the final section of mystery stores with the object of stirring up curiosity and developing the detective instinct among readers. If you sealed up the last forty-two pages of “Ringed with Fire” and then offered a prize of $250 to the person who guessed the mystery correctly, I think that money would be as safe as if you put it in victory bonds. A few years later, on the back of the dust jacket to the American edition of Alice’s The Cockroach Sings (1946), which Random House, her new American publisher, less queasily titled With Bated Breath, readers learned a little about what the author had been up to during the late war and its recent aftermath: “I got used to oil lamps….and also to riding nine miles in a crowded bus once a week to do the shopping [at Bridport?]—if there was anything to buy. We thought it rather a lark then, but as a matter of fact we are still suffering from all sorts of shortages and restrictions.” Jamie Campbell, on the other hand, spent the war years in Santa Barbara, California. It is unclear whether he and Alice ever lived together again. Alice remained domiciled for the remainder of her life in Dorset, although she returned to London in 1946, when she was inducted into the Detection Club. Six years earlier, in May 1940, English crime writer Anthony Gilbert, author of the popular Anthony Crook mysteries, had urged Alice’s nomination upon Dorothy L. Sayers, writing: “She would be an excellent member, would attend [meetings] and bring guests, is a professional writer who lives by her pen and is a charming woman and one of my best friends.” For her part, Sayers agreed that Alice “seems a charming person and should be a most excellent member.” Anticipating possible objection from Anthony Berkeley, something of a curmudgeon when it came to admitting any new members, Sayers strategized: “If Anthony Berkeley is opposed he is in Devon so we can do an end-run [around him].” Unfortunately, when it came to a vote of the membership committee, another obstacle loomed up in the form of Milward Kennedy, who apparently objected to Alice’s election. Although the nominee was supported by the more orthodox puzzlers Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode, her membership did not finally materialize until after the war. Milward Kennedy’s view of Alice Campbell notwithstanding, Dorothy L. Sayers, back when she had reviewed crime fiction for the Sunday Times, had lauded Alice’s Desire to Kill, singling out “the soundness of the characterisation and the lively vigour of the writing,” which lifted the narrative out of “sheer melodrama.” Sayers pointed out that while the murderer is effectively revealed long before the end of the tale, there was genuine detection concerning the matter of alibis. Interestingly, around the time Anthony Gilbert was proposing Alice for membership in the Detection Club, there appeared a new Alice Campbell mystery, They Hunted a Fox, which is more of a formal murder puzzle than many other Campbell works, and set in nothing less than that sanctum sanctorum of Golden Age British detective novels, a country house party. A number of Alice’s mysteries from this period, which in England were all published by the Collins Crime Club, are shorter and more in the style and form of the true Golden Age detective novel. Alice Campbell’s induction into the Detection Club may have been a moment of personal triumph for the author, but it was also something of a last hurrah. Alice Campbell’s induction into the Detection Club may have been a moment of personal triumph for the author, but it was also something of a last hurrah. After 1946 she published only three more crime novels, including the entertaining Tommy Rostetter-Inspector Headcorn sleuth mashup The Bloodstained Toy, before retiring in 1950. Now white-haired and grandmotherly in appearance, she lived out the remaining five years of her life quietly at a cottage near the small city of Bridport, Dorset, expiring “suddenly” on November 27, 1955, two days before her sixty-eighth birthday. Her brief death notice in the Daily Telegraph refers to her only as the “very dear mother of Lawrence, Chita and Robert.” Alice’s sister Mary had passed away in Atlanta in 1951, while Jamie Campbell predeceased his wife by just under a year, dying by his own hand in 1954 at the age of sixty-five. Earlier in the year he had enjoyed a personal triumph when his play The Praying Mantis, billed as a “naughty comedy by James Lawrence Campbell,” scored hits at the Q Theatre in London and at the Dolphin Theatre in Brighton. In the latter venue, the play to great plaudits starred, in the role of the eponymous man-eater, a wickedly sultry, twenty-year-old Joan Collins, who would make an international sensation the next year in the film Land of the Pharaohs. In spite of this success Jamie near the end of the year checked into the Hotel Splendid in Cannes and imbibed poison, expiring around six in the morning on December 1. The American consulate sent copies of the report on Jamie’s death to Chita in Maida Vale, London and to Jamie’s brother Colonel George Campbell in Washington, D. C., though not to Alice. Jamie’s list of personal effects included hand grip—very old and worn, suitcase—very old and worn, navy blue pin stripe suit (old) and Westclox clock (broken). It is true that you cannot take it with you, but certainly Jamie appears to have had little with him to take. This was far from the Riviera romance that the publishers of Juggernaut had long ago promised. Perhaps the “humdrum of everyday life” had been too much with him. As was the case with Jamie, Alice Campbell and her work fell into obscurity after her death, with not a single one of her novels having been reprinted in English for more than seven decades. Happily the ongoing revival of vintage English and American mystery fiction from the twentieth century is rectifying such cases of criminal neglect. It may well be true that it “is impossible not to be thrilled by Edgar Wallace,” as the great thriller writer’s publishers pronounced, but let us not forget that, as Maurice Richardson put it: “We can always do with Mrs. Alice Campbell.” Mystery fans will now have nineteen of them from which to choose—a veritable embarrassment of felonious riches, all from the hand of the other AC. View the full article

In 2018, I was asked to speak at a local university known for its diverse, working-class student body. I identify as queer, southern, and working class, so I said yes. And as a non-academic, not-especially renowned author, I felt like a beautiful unicorn. They were gonna pay me to talk about myself? I could not say no to that. After the speech, members of the department took me out to dinner, which was a lovely gesture, if a bit anxiety-inducing for someone who really just wanted to go home to her wife, cat and TV shows. A professor who taught Southern Fiction was also in attendance. On the way to the restaurant, amid the white noise of rain patter and windshield wipers, I asked him which authors he taught in his courses. He rambled off the usual suspects–you know The List. The List of the same old white guys everyone mentions. I won’t name them here. “And Flannery,” he said. “What about Jesmyn Ward?” I asked. He hadn’t heard of her. I’ll repeat: he taught Southern Fiction. He hadn’t heard of her. As they drank wine, ate slowly when the food finally arrived, and continued to discuss “inside academia” topics, the more appalled I became that The Professor hadn’t heard of Jesmyn Ward. She’s one of the most celebrated contemporary writers of fiction and non-fiction. She’s a two-time National Book Award winner and MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship recipient. Her writing often appears on the list of reading luminaries, such as Barack Obama’s famed Summer Reading List. Jesmyn Ward is 1) not dead, 2) not white, and 3) not a dude. Perhaps that’s why he hadn’t heard of her? Of course, Jesmyn Ward does not need me to speak for her. I’m aware that writing an essay that frames the absence of her name in many southern literary lists reeks of white savior behavior. But she’s a great example of an affliction that so many white southern readers and writers have, which I call “And Flannery.” You notice this mostly from cishet white men who share their influences in articles or in viral lists on Twitter and the like, but many white women also fall under the spell. When asked who influenced them or which southern writers these folks like to read, there’s a litany of mostly cishet white guys—not all dead, I’ll add. And at the end, almost like an Ann Flanders reminder of etiquette, they add the one woman they can think of. It’s almost always Flannery O’Connor. Every time I read such lists, I think: O Brother, Where Art Thou Contemporary Southern Women Writers?(1) In fairness, the search algorithm does not favor authors who are not yet well known. If you conduct a simple search of Southern Fiction, you will get the usual suspects. If you conduct a more advanced search of Southern Fiction in a specific state, you will get a little more than the usual suspects, but they’re usually dead. But I work in technology, understand how to perfect a boolean search, and have diversity at the top of my mind when creating lists. As Mimi Thi Nguyen says: “I care, therefore I critique. If I don’t push, the car doesn’t go, right?” So consider this my gentle push to my pale southern brethren to do the same when promoting, recommending, and participating in all things Southern Fiction. Also in fairness, I get it. I do. Like many literature students, I was blown away when I first read Flannery O’Connor. There’s a recording of her reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find” that’s deeply comforting to me because her voice reminds me so much of my Grandma Sue, with her high nasal drone. Like Flannery O’Connor, my Grandma Sue was also a woman who stood out, figuratively and literally (she towered over all her classmates in her Missouri Bootheel one-room schoolhouse). At 15, she stole her abusive father’s wad of cash from his overalls while he was sleeping and ran away to St. Louis, lying about her age to get a job and then saving up enough money to help her best friend Charla escape the rice fields too. People loved her—or hated her—because she swore at people and objects and never took no shit off of nobody—qualities that are typically assigned to men. Typically. But only if you buy into the idea that southern women are the sweet, sassy gals(2) you see in most pop culture offerings. As if southern women can only exist at one end of a spectrum: pure trailer trash or southern belle. Most of the southern women in my life have veered somewhere in between. They were far from window watchers, clinging to the hope of a husband’s eventual homecoming. They were holding it all together despite the generational trauma of lives bent and twisted by bad luck and bad decisions, their own and others’. They struggled to raise themselves—and often, their families—up out of the confines of their circumstances, some less successful than others. But I guess that all depends on your definition of success. Much of southern fiction fetishizes masculinity.(3) But it wasn’t my Grandpa who worked with his hands. It was my grandmas, those fierce rivals, working at the Maybelline factory in Little Rock. Getting mad and writing notes at the back of the Bible about how much they love and want a man, but how damned hard that man makes it. Having to bury the man who not only strayed but then had a heart attack on his 50th birthday in a “whorehouse” in Memphis (allegedly). They were “Unlikeable Women.” Hell, I’d be unlikeable too if I’d had to put up with my grandfathers’ shit. But that’s what makes southern fiction by women so compelling to me. I’m less interested in the revenge and Tough Guy narratives than those about the women who have been at the center of the so-called Tough Guy’s nonsense. I guess that’s why I get so annoyed when I read southern women characters in fiction. They’re always a little too sweet or a little too trashy. When written by men, the Traditional Southern Woman usually exists to activate the male character(s), like many other women characters in pop culture. She’s tragic and/or “fridged.”(4) She’s a set piece, waiting for the man to come home from saving the world or a hard day at work. She appears in the beginning and end of the film, in the middle as a photographic reminder. Maybe, if she’s lucky, she’ll appear in a montage somewhere in the “fun and games” portion of the story.(5) Or she’s a Smurfette, the guy’s girl.(6) Or perhaps she’s a “tough” or a “strong female character” who sounds and behaves eerily like a dude.(7) When such characters are done well, the praise heaped on these male authors is often above and beyond while ignoring the fact that there are many, many southern women out there who can also write southern women pretty darn well. But our fiction often goes unnoticed, or it’s not considered as “serious” or “tough” as those from the male perspective. But some of the best writers about the impact of “tragic masculinity”(8) are women writers. To be a woman is to be at the mercy of a system built largely by and for cishet white men. In such a system, crime often becomes a matter of black and white, good and bad. Literally. Crime from a feminine perspective requires one to expand their notions of what constitutes a crime and what constitutes southern fiction. In my experience, I’d call poverty a crime, including those umbrella topics of food insecurity and housing instability and systemic racism and wage theft and the prison industrial complex and I could go on because I’m a history and sociology nerd (perhaps the use of footnotes gave it away). The scope and wreckage of these crimes encompass whole family systems and generations. If women write more “domestic” fiction, it’s because domestic violence affects so many lives. My most recent novel, Real Bad Things, is partially inspired by the emotional violence (and sometimes physical toward my mother) one particular stepfather inflicted on our family for almost five years. So many of these topics don’t see the light despite their author’s work because the lists inevitably veer dead and white. And as wonderful as those authors are, they can inform but cannot speak to the current climate of the South. I also have a hard time reading Flannery O’Connor’s work because of her racism.(9)(10)(11) No, of course Jesmyn Ward doesn’t need me to come to her aid! She’s a great example to shine a light on because she’s one of our most celebrated living authors. I assume she’s doing just fine. But what about the other southern women writers out there who are trying to get seen and heard? What about the young girls who only learn about women from the lens of a privileged white male perspective? Or the perspective of a dead white woman? Where do they learn about the rest of us out here? I absolutely hated reading Nathaniel Hawthorne in high school—and his whole ilk (sorry to my New England friends and counterparts). I’d been reading VC Andrews and Stephen King and Danielle Steel. Why would I, a working class girl from rural Arkansas, want to read about old New England? To “dig deeper” and to “appreciate art,” allegedly. I expressed how much I hated reading old dead guys to Mrs. Brown, my English teacher. I was one of those students. Finally, perhaps out of Mrs. Brown’s frustration with me, she gave me I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as an assignment. Maya Angelou exists on hallowed literary ground, so high that people either forget or don’t know that she was once a poor Black girl raised in Stamps, Arkansas. It feels weird sometimes to tell people that I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was hugely influential to me because I saw myself in that book. Clearly we are not the same. But what I learned from that lesson, to Mrs. Brown’s absolute and exhausted (probably) delight, is one that has resonated with me far more than anything the “greats” had to share: If a girl like Maya Angelou could get out of Arkansas, well so could I. The absence of that resonance for so many southern women is what makes me sigh every time I read these lists of great southern writers. And to those who would say, but that’s who inspired me, I would counter that it’s because we were all fed a feast of dead white guys, especially if you grew up in the South. But Faulkner and Flannery are not going to pop onto your Twitter thread to thank you. So why not give that attention and money to a working woman writer, one who could absolutely use that attention—especially if you are in a position of power or influence, such as a professor or a well-known cishet white male author or a festival and conference organizer? If you’re looking for a little inspiration, have a look at just a handful of living women authors working across a variety of genres who were born and/or raised in the South: (12)(13) Alabama: Yaa Gyasi, Angela Jackson-Brown, Ashley M. Jones, Imani Perry, Gin Phillips Arkansas: M Shelly Conner, PhD, Casie Dodd, Amy E. Elkins, Ayana Gray, Penni Jones, Laurie Marshall Delaware: Jo Ann Balingit, Cristina Henríquez, Sarah McBride Florida: Tina McElroy Ansa, Ellen Byron, Jaquira Díaz, Gale Massey, Dantiel W. Moniz, Steph Post, Raquel V. Reyes, Deb Rogers, Lori Roy, Aisha Saeed Georgia: Regina N. Bradley, PhD., Tananarive Due, Jessica Handler, Tayari Jones, Shanna Miles, Wanda M. Morris, ZZ Packer, Laura Piper Lee, Carolyn Prusa, Shay Youngblood Kentucky: Leesa Cross Smith, Deesha Philyaw, Joy Priest, Shawna Kay Rodenberg, Savannah Sipple, Jacinda Townsend, Kayla Rae Whitaker, Crystal Wilkinson Louisiana: Destiny O. Birdsong, Sarah M. Broom, Tiana Clark, Ladee Hubbard, Erin Entrada Kelly, Bernice L. McFadden, Alys Murray, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, Faye Snowden, EM Tran Maryland: Casey Cep, Lauren Doyle Owens, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Robin Kinzer, Stephanie Parent, Julie Smith Mississippi: Exodus Oktavia Brownlow, Mary Miller, Leah Nicole, JM Redmann, Natasha Trethewey, Tiffany Quay Tyson, Jesmyn Ward North Carolina: Kianna Alexander, Katherine Faw, Leah Hampton, Devi S. Laskar, Meagan Lucas, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Cassie Manns Murray, Toni Newman, Julia Ridley Smith, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle Oklahoma: Rilla Askew, Chloe Flanagan, Joy Harjo, Heather Levy, Vanessa Lillie, Jamie Mason, Teresa Miller, Shauna Osborn, Dea Poirer South Carolina: Dorothy Allison, Nikki Finney, Savannah J. Frierson, Signe Pike, Ciona Rouse, Eden Royce, Dori Sanders, Dorothy St. James, Synithia Williams Tennessee: Amy Cipolla Barnes, Monica Brashears, Tiana Clark, Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne, Anjali Enjeti, Amy Greene, Nichole Perkins, Mary Laura Philpott, Meredith Russo, Erica Wright Texas: Amina Akhtar, Isa Arsén, Cynthia Bond, May Cobb, Meg Gardiner, Amy Gentry, Katie Gutierrez, Attica Locke, Tembi Locke, Ire’ne Lara Silva, Rosalyn Story, Elizabeth Wetmore Virginia: Yasmin Angoe, Rebecca Elswick, Kelli Jo Ford, Nicole Glover, Ashleigh Bell Pedersen, Leslie Pietrzyk, Deanna Raybourn, Lee Smith, Kristin Wright Washington, DC (14): Camille Acker, Sandra Beasley, Elle Cosimano, Camonghne Felix, Chantal James, Jamila Minnicks West Virginia: Neema Avashia, Marie Manilla, Mesha Maren, Ann Pancake, SG Redling, Rita Mae Reese When I put out a call on Twitter for recommendations of writers I may not be aware of, there was an outpouring of love and support. What’s wonderful too is that there were so many genres and personalities represented. I’d love to see that energy carry forward, especially for the more marginalized among our southern fiction family. And the more everyone lifts up our voices, the more able we are to break the search algorithm that only shows us what so many men, even those with the best of intentions, have shown us and taught us for years. And if you MUST include a dead woman in your writer list because that’s the vibe you’re going for, well, Maya Angelou, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Doris Betts, Kate Chopin, Carson McCullers, bell hooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Fannie Flagg, and Eudora Welty, among others, are right there. (15) ___________________________________ (1) Trans women are women. (2) https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SouthernBelle (3) https://lsupress.org/books/detail/queer-chivalry/ (4) https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge (5) https://www.flyingwrestler.com/2017/12/fun-games-section/ (6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smurfette_principle (7) https://writerunboxed.com/2017/09/02/authentic-characters-vs-gender-swaps/ (8) Hat tip to SA Cosby, who is the first person I know who used this phrase. (9) https://www.patheos.com/blogs/suspendedinherjar/2020/09/oconnor-not-been-canceled/ (10) https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/confront-facts-oconnor (11) https://lithub.com/on-flannery-oconnors-chronic-illness-and-chronic-racism/ (12) It’s bafflingly hard to define the Southern United States in 2022. There are many variations, so I’ve gone with the US Census Bureau’s definition. Don’t holler at me; holler at them. (13) Of course, this is only a partial listing of southern women creating incredible work because I could not fit them all. Sorry if I missed your faves. It’s only due to space constraints. And apologies for any errors. (14) Not technically a state, but the citizens deserve full representation in Congress. (15) No, I did not include Harper Lee. If folks don’t list Flannery, Harper Lee is next up to bat. *** View the full article

The twist has become the cornerstone of the psychological thriller, aiming to keep readers on the edge of their seats, turning the pages furiously as the story turns and writhes, and reveals come thick and fast. My debut novel, HER PERFECT TWIN, is—perhaps unsurprisingly —about identical twins; a trope that has been used extensively in thrillers. So, I knew I needed to break the mold and deliver a series of twists that would take the reader on a deliciously dark journey they weren’t initially expecting. To achieve this, I utilized an arsenal of tools (including a trusty whiteboard and stack of post-it notes) to assist in the meticulous plotting required. But I also took advantage of the greatest resource for writers: other authors’ novels. I love to devour thrillers: keeping one eye on the story and the other desperately trying to figure everything out (and how the writer achieves such alchemy). But, despite my best efforts, there are some incredible novels I couldn’t guess; a testament to just how talented their writers are. Personally, there are two main types of twists that will leave me reeling (in a good way, obviously): those that spin the story off in a way I did not expect, and those that reveal a vital clue which turns everything I thought I knew on its head. I’ve used both in HER PERFECT TWIN to tell the story of Megan who kills her identical twin and then tries to cover it up by living both their lives. Think I’ve just given away one of those twists? Not at all, that only takes us to chapter two! The real fun comes as she tries to get away with it. But what if we throw lock-down and a narcissistic husband into the mix? You’ll just have to read it to find out. Below you’ll find my own favorite psychological thrillers. Those novels I read in a day because I couldn’t bear to put them down, and that I want to read over and over again because they demonstrate the absolute best this genre has to offer. Before I Go To Sleep by SJ Watson Every morning Christine wakes up in a life she doesn’t remember and her husband, Ben, must fill in the gaps since her accident two decades ago. But Christine has been keeping a journal and she’s starting to ask questions. SJ Watson’s debut took the literary world by storm when it was released in 2011 and with very good reason. The prose is delicious, the pacing perfect, and the twist is masterfully delivered. This is an absolute must-read for all fans of the genre. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn Nick Dunne’s wife disappears on the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary; physical evidence and the testimony of friends implicates him. But he claims he’s innocent. So, what really happened to Amy? Most psychological thriller fans will have read Gone Girl (it’s now sold over 20 million copies worldwide) and with good reason. Often cited as the book that defined the genre; Gone Girl is both twisty and twisted, superbly plotted, and peppered with gloriously sharp-witted observations of modern relationships. My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing The protagonist and his titular “Lovely Wife,” Millicent, find themselves stuck in a rut after fifteen years of marriage. They choose a rather unconventional method of spicing things up: getting away with murder. But not everything is quite as simple as it seems… I adored Samantha Downing’s debut novel: it’s dark and wicked and extremely fun! I thought I knew what I was letting myself in for when I first picked this up, but it twisted and turned in ways I never expected. I also credit this novel with proving to me that you can write a story where you root for a murderer, thus giving me the confidence to write Her Perfect Twin! My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite Korede will do anything for her little sister; including getting rid of a body and scrubbing down a murder scene, especially as Ayoola claims she was acting in self-defense. But this wasn’t the first time; it was the third and Korede worries it’s becoming a habit. When Ayoola starts dating Korede’s secret crush, she must decide if she should sacrifice her sister for the man she loves, or risk him ending up with a knife in his back. Oyinkan Braithwaite’s darkly satirical debut thriller blends a heady mix of clever plot twists with one of my favorite protagonists of all time. Korede’s voice is completely unique and her predicament oddly relatable. My Sister, the Serial Killer is an absolute must-read for all thriller fans. The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides Criminal psychotherapist, Theo, has waited years to work with the so-called “Silent Patient,” Alicia. She hasn’t spoken a word since she shot her husband in the face in an entirely unexplained attack. But Theo’s attempts to get her to talk begin to turn into an obsession that threatens to consume him. The Silent Patient is an entirely rewarding reading experience even without the twist; the prose is gorgeous, the characters fully realized and highly fascinating, the plot pacy and entertaining. But—for me at least—it is the execution of the twist that elevates this to sit on my list of all-time favorite novels. As soon as I finished my first read of the book, I was compelled to start again from the beginning to figure out exactly how Alex Michaelides had pulled it off! Blood Orange by Harriet Tyce Alison’s life is seemingly on track: she has a loving husband, a young daughter, and she’s just been given her first murder to defend. But beneath the surface things are far from perfect: Alison drinks too much, she’s having an affair, and her new client wants to plead guilty for a murder Alison doesn’t think she committed. Harriet Tyce spins a tale of deceit and deception in this dark thriller that fuses the legal with the psychological. The twists are perfectly executed within the fast-paced plot, and Alison is a brilliant example of the ‘unlikeable narrator’ who you will both hate and root for in equal measure. Rock Paper Scissors by Alice Feeney Adam and Amelia head to a remote location in the Scottish Highlands to celebrate their anniversary. But it soon becomes clear that one of them is lying and things take a dark turn. It’s extremely difficult to talk about Rock Paper Scissors without giving away spoilers, but I will say the twist knocked me sideways in its skillful execution and marks Alice Feeney out as one of the best writers in this genre. The Guest List by Lucy Foley On a remote island off the Irish coast, guests of Jules and Will’s wedding gather for what they think will be the celebration of the year. But a storm traps them all on the island. And one of them won’t be leaving alive. Lucy Foley blends the contemporary thriller with the classic whodunnit in this phenomenally clever novel. Everyone has secrets, everyone has a motive, and nothing is quite what it seems. The characters and plot are engrossing, and the setting is wondrously atmospheric. This is one of those read-in-one-sitting books. The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz Failed novelist turned creative writing teacher, Jake, helps himself to the plot of one of his students after their death. The book is a phenomenal success, catapulting Jake’s career into the stratosphere. But what if someone knows he’s a thief? The Plot contains a ‘book within a book’ device that adds a layer of further intrigue and Jean Hanff Korelitz’s writing is impeccable, full of wry observations of the publishing world and the writer’s psyche. The twists are surprising and wholly satisfying as the truths are revealed. I Know What You’ve Done by Dorothy Koomson Just before Priscilla collapses on neighbor Rae’s doorstep, she thrusts a book into her hands. Inside are the secrets of every resident of their seemingly innocuous suburban street in a well-to-do part of the UK city of Brighton. Rae knows she should give the book to the police, but then she spots her husband’s name written inside and she cannot help herself from reading further. I Know What You’ve Done is an absolute page-turner of a thriller as the lives of the Acacia Avenue residents are peeled back layer by layer. Dorothy Koomson pulls the reader into the narrative, using a clever blend of flashback, diary entries and present-day action to spin this twisted tale of deceit. 56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard 56 days ago, Oliver and Ciara met, and they started dating. 35 days ago, they moved in together, planning to ride out the impending COVID lockdown. Today, detectives arrive at Oliver’s appointment to find a decomposing body. Catherine Ryan Howard used lockdown to wonderful effect in 56 Days, eliciting the sense of uncertainty and claustrophobia from early 2020 while weaving a wickedly brilliant plot. The twists and turns come rapidly as the story unfolds, and I was kept guessing right to the end. Wrong Place, Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister Jen watches in horror as her teenage son kills a stranger in the street outside the family home. But the next morning, Jen wakes to find Todd is asleep in his room; the murder hasn’t yet happened. Every day she discovers she has jumped backwards again as she searches the past for the reason why her son committed such an act. Can she find the truth? And can she prevent the murder from ever happening? Gillian McAllister’s newest novel is an absolute triumph. Not only does the author deploy her trademark twist after twist in a story full of compelling characters, but she also plays around with the narrative form and the very structure of time itself. I read this as I recovered from COVID, wondering if its brilliance was part of an elaborate fever dream. On a second (and more lucid!) reading, I can confirm that it is both ambitiously genius and a simply great story. A Kiss After Dying by Ashok Banker Hannah might appear to be quiet and shy, but she has a role to play. For years she has tracked the people who tore her family apart and now she’s ready to unleash her plan for revenge. But how well does she really know her opponent? This super smart and slick revenge thriller is brilliantly plotted and I loved the kiss-ass female protagonist. But my favorite thing about this was the mid-point twist that threw everything I thought I knew into disarray in the most perfect way. Ashok Banker is a twisted genius, and their debut thriller is definitely worth picking up. *** View the full article

The Regency era is often viewed by present-day readers as a romantic time of fancy silks and satins, filled with glittering balls in Mayfair mansions and country house parties at grand estates. But there is a grittier side to the era. Historians consider it to be the birth of the modern world, with radical new ideas coming to life and fomenting fundamental changes in every aspect of society. This is especially true in science and technology, as innovations in chemistry, medicine and engineering—to name just a few of the disciplines—were turning the old world upside down. In my Wrexford & Sloane mystery series, I use scientific innovation as the core catalyst for each book’s mystery, and my research down various “rabbit holes” has led me to some really fascinating discoveries. The new technology was a positive force in so many ways and changed countless lives for the better, but in digging deeper into the history firearms for my newest book, which releases this month, I was surprised to learn that a number of our most frightening modern weapons had their beginnings in the Regency! It actually shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The Napoleonic Wars were raging for much of the Regency era, as Britain fought a titanic struggle with France to be the dominant world power. And the bloody conflict proved to be a catalyst for deadly new weaponry. Here are just a few examples . . . Inspired by the gunpower rockets used by the Indian sultanates against the East India Company during the Anglo-Mysore Wars, Sir William Congreve first invented a military rocket for the British in 1804. Working in the research laboratories of the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, he soon had his missiles capable of traveling over 3,000 yards. Made of iron and ranging in size from massive 300 pounders to light field rockets that could easily be moved around the battlefields, the Congreve rocket proved an effective weapon, especially for long range bombardment of fortifications where precise accuracy wasn’t crucial. (However, the Duke of Wellington hated them because they scared the cavalry horses!) Congreve rockets also become a popular weapon for the Royal Navy and were used in the War of 1812 to bombard Fort McHenry in Baltimore—thus “the rocket’s red glare” in the American national anthem! These days, we have sophisticated intercontinental ballistic missiles, but rocket technology really got off the ground during the Regency. Another explosive invention was created by Henry Shrapnel. In 1804, using Shrapnel’s concept of a “spherical shell” filled with metal fragments, the British military began using a type of projectile that threw off a rain of deadly fragments when it burst, thus paving the ways for the modern cluster munitions. An American comes into play when talking about submarine warfare. The inventor Robert Fulton, who launched the first-ever commercial steamboat, also developed Nautilus, a design for a submarine which he tried to sell to Napoleon to use against the British Royal Navy. In a trial run, he and a small crew descended to a depth of 25 feet and stayed submerged for an hour. However, when Napoleon asked for a demonstration, Fulton was in the middle of reworking the prototype because of leaks, and Napoleon decided the American was a charlatan. (He was know to dislike sea warfare in general.) The British quickly expressed interest in the submarine and Fulton headed to London. But the Battle of Trafalgar gave Britain command of the seas, so they decided they didn’t need the new technology and let the project sink into oblivion. Today, of course, submarines are an integral part of any military arsenal, put in motion by Fulton’s creative imagination. Moving to rifles, I’ll take a slight step back into the Georgian era to talk about the precursor to assault rifles like the AK-74. Muskets—which fired one shot and then had to be reloaded in a process that required several steps—were the standard military firearm of the era. However, I discovered that during the American Revolution, the British army had an experimental rifle brigade armed with the Ferguson rifle, a breech-loading weapon invented by Colonel Patrick Ferguson, who received a patent for it in 1776. The rifle could fire 6-8 shots per minute, compared with a musket, which required a skilled soldier to fire 3-4 shots per minute. That was quite an advantage in firepower! However, the Ferguson rifles tended break down in the heat of battle. And as all the parts were handmade (technology had not yet advanced to being able to mass produce identical parts) it took too long to repair them, so the project was put on hold. The rapid-fire multi-shot pistol was also a Regency-era innovation. Invented by Elisha Collier, an American living in London, the Collier pistol ( upon which I have based my current mystery) was patented in 1818, and is said to have inspired Samuel Colt to create his famous “six-shooter.” It was a flintlock revolver, and became popular with officers posted to India. The cylinder had to be manually rotated, but still it was, in effect, the basic inspiration for James Bond’s famous Walther PPK. And then there was Humphry Davy, the brilliant chemist and head of the Royal Institution, Britain’s leading scientific organization. A charismatic lecturer, Davy was the darling of London Society and aristocratic gentlemen and ladies flocked to hear his scientific lectures. In addition to inventing the safety lamp, which saved the lives of countless miners, Davy also was involved in a mysterious laboratory accident that injured one of his eyes in 1811. There is credible evidence that he was working on a secret project for the British military that involved concocting a powerful chemical explosive. He apparently backed off from the project, and it took until later in the century for other chemist named Alfred Nobel to invent dynamite and gelignite. But it seems likely that Davy deserves credit for the first experiments in chemical explosives for use in warfare. *** View the full article

In the bedroom that Ralph grew up in, there’s a galaxy of glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. There are chips of paint where he’d replaced posters of superheroes with posters of bands and beautiful women, all gone now, rolled up and bun­dled together and leaning in one of the house’s many closets and crannies. When we first moved in, we talked about peeling up the stars, softening the corners with vinegar, scraping them up with the edge of an old credit card. We use something similar at the Northern Star Seniors’ Complex, where I work, to free medical tape from the natural cling of formless flesh, a special tool that only works half as well as a credit card would. We staff com­monly complain about all the special tools we don’t need but have to use, mock the imaginary men in suits testing things on overripe peaches and unfloured dough, and maybe they’ve got lots of money in their pockets, but we know that they’re morons who have no idea what they’re talking about. Ralph and I also talked a lot about when we’d be mov­ing out: right away, as soon as possible, the minute she’s well again. Because even though he’d been strong when we’d moved in, strong enough to move in—equipped with resources he’d downloaded from a website called the Borderline Parent, and a swear-on-your-life promise from me that I could handle this temporary uprooting—being near her stirred rotten, danger­ous things inside him. And this house too, where her health and happiness had been his sole responsibility, where she’d only showed affection when he was sad, only gave attention to his tragedies; it soon began to feel again as though that were all that mattered. But Ralph was quick and good about consulting his cop­ing materials, practicing his mindfulness, deep breathing, and calming visualizations, reminding himself that he was a whole and separate person from her with a whole and separate life, and that he could love her and support her without turning to dust. And now she’s dead. And the house, though ours, feels as rotten and dangerous as the things she triggered in Ralph. Crumbling tendons of tightly wound wires in the walls, some living, most dead. Sodden cupboards and feathery centipedes and malignant fissures in the foundation. Never loyal, never good, built to indenture servitude to a monstrous brick idol, poorly ventilated, belching effluent into the water supply, weak­ening resistance with flats of free gin. Ralph is still asleep: even breathing, steady as a metronome, not even a flinch as I slide, limb by limb from the bed. I pull my copy of Secrets of a Famous Chef from his beaten old bookshelf. My favorite and only cookbook. It’s from the year 1930, and everyone you see who’s covered in wrinkles and hunched over walkers and lipping bits of soup from a spoon ate stuff from that book and I want us both to be old like that. I ease the door shut behind me and stand in the hallway, arms crossed over the book against my chest, confronted by Ralph’s mother’s closed bedroom door. She could still be sleep­ing in there. The way she could sleep all day long, emerging in the dead of night, her existence evidenced only by blooming ashtrays and vanishing produce and misplaced remote con­trols, the mischief of a miserable ghost. I consider opening her bedroom door, a signal to the house that a new era is upon it, but I hate the idea of her empty room being the first thing Ralph sees this morning so instead I tiptoe down the stairs, avoid the creaks, drop my cookbook off in the kitchen, then head all the way to the basement. I dig a retractable knife from a toolbox Laura kept in the laundry room, kneel next to the bloodiest section of basement carpet, and begin to slice, layer after layer, inhaling the carpet’s death rattle spew of dust and hair and skin cells, until finally I feel the scrape of concrete vibrate up through my arm and into my teeth. Then the next side, then the next side, until that dark­est, most destroyed square of carpet is free. Sweating, I yank it up with both hands, roll it, lean it against the wall. I’ll take it upstairs with me, take it right outside to the garbage. Now there’s a gaping hole in the floor, a little pond of exposed concrete, which could maybe be nice if we pulled up the whole carpet and polished it, glazed, so it’s natural and shiny. Modern is what our Realtor will call it, fingers crossed. But for now I’ll just reorganize the furniture, drag Ralph’s mother’s old cordu­roy couch overtop to hide it. * I still need coffee and food and to brush my teeth but instead I fall onto the couch, head back, eyes closed, stroke its softness like a pet. Corduroy couches must have been a big deal back when our moms were buying furniture because my mother had a couch just like this one. I called her Couchy. She was pushed up against a set of windows in our old den that looked out into the backyard. It was winter when we moved into that place, and whoever we rented it from had a set of patio furniture back there all covered in ice and snow. Sugarcoated. A sugarcoated table. Two lines scraped into the sugar snow from a sugarcoated chair on its side, dragged and slammed to the ground. What happened was Mom’s latest boyfriend had got so angry with her he didn’t know what to do but scream and slam a chair over onto its side. He must not have been good with his words. None of them ever were, not my dad either, I’m sure. Grown men with no way to communicate anger but scream­ing and punching walls and capsizing chairs and it would have made you feel the slightest bit bad for them if you didn’t also hate their guts. I guess that’s what rage is: the point where your words fail the power of your emotions. Maybe there can be happiness rage and sadness rage. I am in love rage with Ralph and sometimes it hurts so bad I could knock a patio chair over like that sloppy, gaping fuckhole, that rotten fucking fuck-ass boy­friend did. I remember it was nearly an ice storm out there, everything peaceful and tinkling like a lullaby, as though the furniture were actually nice, not used a thousand times over by decades of poor shitbags like us who’d rented this cold, dripping one-story where even the roaches, quite rightly, had no respect for humans. Wandering unafraid onto the counters, squeezing and selecting butter smears and toast leavings like produce at the grocery store, nodding neighborly to one another as they pass. I’d lift my feet, bullied, watching from the corduroy couch, stroking it like a pet, Good girl, good girl, good little Couchy. Cheek against her corduroy skin, eyes closed, dreamy dark, so soft it seemed I could slice through her velvet ridges, scatter gently into another universe. When a lab monkey doesn’t have a mother, a cigarette-smoking man in a white coat and horn-rimmed glasses will give the monkey a rolled-up pair of socks and the socks become their mother. Or, more accurately, the monkey needs a mother so badly that it can project enough mother things onto the socks that they do the trick. Become a Motherthing. The socks become a Motherthing, scribbles the cigarette-smoking lab coat man, who tastes his pen and continues writing: They can hug it and stroke it and put their cheek against it and it calms them down, really calms them down. The way a mother would. A real remarkable effect. The baby monkey’s heart rate decreases, blood pressure lowers, all the magic medicine a mother is. So that’s what I do. The same instinct as that little mon­key. Find the soft couch, stroke the soft couch, nuzzle it, let it absorb my whispers, absorb my tears, dilute my squishy rhyth­mic sadness. Does the couch resent having to do all this mothering when there’s a perfectly good mother storming around the five small rooms of this sugarcoated, roach-infested rental, gathering armfuls of clothes, tossing them one by one out the front door hissing, spit-spraying fury: Why her? Why her? Why her and not me, what more could I have possibly done? I mean it you sloppy, gaping fuckhole, you rotten fucking fuck ass, you tell me what I should have done, what I could have done to keep you faithful, you goddamn lowlife, you goddamn scumbag. Let you into my life, into my daughter’s life, and this is what you do. Useful to her this way. Her child for God’s sake: sweet, uncorrupted crea­ture he was turning into collateral damage. Maybe the couch does resent having to do this mothering, but it doesn’t let on, because it’s a better Motherthing than this real mother could ever be. The boyfriend, he’s yelling back: Aw, fuck you, man, aw, fuck you. Aw, come on, man, don’t, don’t do that, I said I was fucking sorry, all right? And you know I told you, I told you I wasn’t look­ing for anything serious, all right? I told you that. Couchy Motherthing warms, opens, fills my ears with her calmest, brownest warmth. Tries to be the rolled-up socks for me, more mother than couch, because this woman storming from room to room in her peach T-shirt and ripped jeans and overprocessed blondness rubbed to cotton at the temples, she really isn’t perfectly good. She’s able-bodied. She’s not techni­cally or traditionally sick. But there’s nothing perfect or good about her. Yeah, right, then you’re here every night, I’m making you dinner and covering your phone bill, your drinks at Chuck’s, and you’re fucking me like it’s serious, asking me—you know what you asked me—you know what you asked me to do and I guess she did it for you, didn’t she? I guess she was “open-minded.” Leeching off me like I don’t have a kid I’ve gotta take care of. Why don’t you come in, why don’t you tell her what you did, huh? Tell her who you really are. Abby? Abby, come over here, okay, sweetie? Randy or Ralph or Reggie, he’s got something he needs to tell you, come here, right now. Long nails, clawing the air, tap-tap-tapping against her thumb. Come on, come over here, tap-tap-tap, massive eyes, red rimmed, bulging and delicate like blisters, mascara packed, collected in the corners, foam lapping lakeshore. She looks so much like a person hurt beyond belief, with her rubbed-to-fuzz hair and her screaming and her blistered eyes. Nothing else matters but her pain, the biggest, loudest thing in the world, unimaginable, a way that people only ever expect to feel maybe once in their life, if ever at all, and maybe never even really recover from. She gets this way all the time. Ripped to shreds when a relationship ends. Is this real? Could this possibly be real? Can real grief even happen this many times to a single human body? The fuckhole boyfriend outside is freezing cold because the ground is coated in snow, not sugar, and icy air is blasting inside the house and his words are wrought with shivers, ((Come)) ((on)) ((Dani)) ((come)) ((on)) ((don’t)) ((bring)) ((her)) ((into)) ((this)) ((maaaaaan)), just stroke the couch, stroke Mama, eyes closed, breathing the couch in: cold salt, grease, cells, dust, heart rate slowing and slowing and slowing till hopefully it stops. ((At)) ((least)) ((give)) ((me)) ((my)) ((goddamn)) ((coat)) ((Dani)). ((Can)) ((you)) ((toss)) ((me)) ((my)) ((goddamn)) ((coat)) ((please)). Chattering man, turning blue, waiting for his coat, needing his coat, freezing to death. Shhhhhhh. The real mother, not Couchy Motherthing, not the rolled-up socks, but the real mother, she would have loved to see this man die. She would, that’s the thing. It’s not a joke, it’s not an exaggeration, she would have loved for him to drop dead on the lawn and watch the sugar coat him, preserve him hid­den till summer. Tell the police that he deserved it because he’d broken a heart that’d already been through more than any human heart should ever have to go through. She’d tell the cops about all the men who’d hurt her; what they’d done and how they’d left her: chest rotted through, flesh fallen from ribs left bare and perfect as a temple, a decomposing monument to her epic loneliness. But what about your daughter? they’d ask. Well, all alone except for Abby of course. Ralph’s mother’s couch isn’t Couchy though. No Couchy Motherthing, that’s for sure. Ralph’s mother’s couch is just Ralph’s mother’s couch and I don’t get any kind of good feel­ing from it the way that I used to get from Couchy, so I stop stroking it. Grind my eyes into their sockets with four straight­ened fingers like a mortar and pestle so they become a fine dust, which I shake down my cheeks, and everything’s a little brighter now. __________________ From MOTHERTHING by Ainslie Hogarth. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Ainslie Hogarth. View the full article

Meriam-Webster recently added over 300 new words to the dictionary. Reviewing the list, I found that I was already aware of most of them—I guess that’s the point. As Meriam-Webster explains on their site, “The dictionary chronicles how the language grows and changes, which means new words and definitions must continually be added. When many people use a word in the same way, over a long enough period of time, that word becomes eligible for inclusion.” Here are some of the newly added words. I knew some of them from being on social media (“virtue signaling”), watching the television show Parks and Recreation (“Galentine’s Day”), and having Gen Z kids (“yeet” and “sus”)—though “dawn chorus” was new to me: laggy : having a delayed or slow response (as to a user's input) : marked or affected by lag virtue signaling : the act or practice of conspicuously displaying one's awareness of and attentiveness to political issues, matters of social and racial justice, etc., especially instead of taking effective action greenwash verb 1 : to make (something, such as a product, policy, or practice) appear to be more environmentally friendly or less environmentally damaging than it really is 2 : to mislead (someone) by means of greenwashing greenwash noun : something (such as a claim or action) that is intended to make a product, policy, activity, etc. appear to be more environmentally friendly or less environmentally damaging than it really is dawn chorus : the singing of wild birds that closely precedes and follows sunrise especially in spring and summer yeet interjection, slang — used to express surprise, approval, or excited enthusiasm yeet verb : to throw especially with force and without regard for the thing being thrown sus slang : SUSPICIOUS, SUSPECT janky informal : of very poor quality : JUNKY; also : not functioning properly or adequately : FAULTY lewk slang : a fashion look that is distinctive to the wearer and that is noticeable and memorable to others Galentine’s Day : a holiday observed on February 13th as a time to celebrate friendships especially among women level up : to advance or improve (oneself, someone else, or something) in or as if in a game FWIW abbreviation for what it’s worth ICYMI abbreviation in case you missed it What do you think? --Marcia Peterson(C) Copyright wow-womenonwriting.com Visit WOW! Women On Writing for lively interviews and how-tos. Check out WOW!'s Classroom and learn something new. Enter the Quarterly Writing Contests. Open Now![url={url}]View the full article[/url]

It’s time for another edition of Stuff We Like! Brianna saved my office rug in our last edition of Stuff We Like, and this time around, I’m introducing Katie, our new feline resident! Plus we have products that have solved little annoying problems – which always makes me supremely happy. Want to see? Just click that image above or click right here, and come shop with us! And if you’d like to browse some more, we have a complete Stuff We Like archive, including past Gift Guides and other posts of our favorite items. View the full article

To Have and to Hoax RECOMMENDED: To Have and to Hoax by Martha Waters is $1.99! Aarya read this one and gave it a B: Despite all these points, I adored To Have and to Hoax. It made me giggle constantly during a week when I had little to smile about. I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone; if the antics sound juvenile and infuriating, then you won’t like the story. But if you’re in the mood to escape into a Regency romp and swoon over a married couple falling in love again, I recommend To Have and to Hoax as your escape of choice. In this fresh and hilarious historical rom-com, an estranged husband and wife in Regency England feign accidents and illness in an attempt to gain attention—and maybe just win each other back in the process. Five years ago, Lady Violet Grey and Lord James Audley met, fell in love, and got married. Four years ago, they had a fight to end all fights, and have barely spoken since. Their once-passionate love match has been reduced to one of cold, detached politeness. But when Violet receives a letter that James has been thrown from his horse and rendered unconscious at their country estate, she races to be by his side—only to discover him alive and well at a tavern, and completely unaware of her concern. She’s outraged. He’s confused. And the distance between them has never been more apparent. Wanting to teach her estranged husband a lesson, Violet decides to feign an illness of her own. James quickly sees through it, but he decides to play along in an ever-escalating game of manipulation, featuring actors masquerading as doctors, threats of Swiss sanitariums, faux mistresses—and a lot of flirtation between a husband and wife who might not hate each other as much as they thought. Will the two be able to overcome four years of hurt or will they continue to deny the spark between them? With charm, wit, and heart in spades, To Have and to Hoax is a fresh and eminently entertaining romantic comedy—perfect for fans of Jasmine Guillory and Julia Quinn. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. To Steal a Heart To Steal a Heart by K.C. Bateman is $2.99! This is the first in a new series by Bateman (who also writes historical romances under Kate Bateman). I’ve enjoyed most of Bateman’s romances. How about you? A master spy and a beautiful thief find love and intrigue in each other’s arms. . . Forced to do the bidding of a corrupt government minister, Marianne de Bonnard agrees to plant incriminating evidence in the offices of France’s most notorious spymaster. Under cover of night, the tightrope-walking thief puts her skills to good use—until her aerial stunt is foiled when her target appears in the window and, with consummate poise, helps Marianne off the wire and into his lair. The tremors that run through her body are not just from fear; there’s an unwanted frisson of desire there, too. But is it because of her elegant, wickedly handsome host . . . or his proposition? Nicolas Valette has had plans for his graceful trespasser since he witnessed her unique skills at the Cirque Olympique. Sinuous as a cat, Marianne is perfect for his next mission, but she refuses his generous offer for fear of disobeying her family’s tormenter. When their mutual enemy auctions off her virginity to the highest bidder, Nicolas leaps at the chance to purchase her cooperation. Keeping her will be like trying to tame a wild animal, but what’s life without a little risk? Besides, Nicolas and Marianne both want the same thing: revenge—and, perhaps, something else that’s equally delicious. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley is $1.99! This is book one in the Flavia de Luce series, which I remember this being pretty popular for a while. This gives me Nancy Drew vibes. Fans of Louise Fitzhugh’s iconic Harriet the Spy will welcome 11-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce, the heroine of Canadian journalist Bradley’s rollicking debut. In an early 1950s English village, Flavia is preoccupied with retaliating against her lofty older sisters when a rude, redheaded stranger arrives to confront her eccentric father, a philatelic devotee. Equally adept at quoting 18th-century works, listening at keyholes and picking locks, Flavia learns that her father, Colonel de Luce, may be involved in the suicide of his long-ago schoolmaster and the theft of a priceless stamp. The sudden expiration of the stranger in a cucumber bed, wacky village characters with ties to the schoolmaster, and a sharp inspector with doubts about the colonel and his enterprising young detective daughter mean complications for Flavia and enormous fun for the reader. Tantalizing hints about a gardener with a shady past and the mysterious death of Flavia’s adventurous mother promise further intrigues ahead. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. The Paris Seamstress The Paris Seamstress by Natasha Lester is $2.99! Sarah reviewed this one and gave it a D+, mentioning that whoa there’s a lot of trauma. Did any of you read this one? How much will a young Parisian seamstress sacrifice to make her mark in the male-dominated world of 1940s New York fashion? From the bestselling author of A KISS FROM MR FITZGERALD and HER MOTHER’S SECRET. 1940. Parisian seamstress Estella Bissette is forced to flee France as the Germans advance. She is bound for Manhattan with a few francs, one suitcase, her sewing machine and a dream: to have her own atelier. 2015. Australian curator Fabienne Bissette journeys to the annual Met Gala for an exhibition of her beloved grandmother’s work – one of the world’s leading designers of ready-to-wear. But as Fabienne learns more about her grandmother’s past, she uncovers a story of tragedy, heartbreak and secrets – and the sacrifices made for love. Crossing generations, society’s boundaries and international turmoil, THE PARIS SEAMSTRESS is the beguiling, transporting story of the special relationship between a grandmother and her granddaughter as they attempt to heal the heartache of the past. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. View the full article

Danielle Orchard, Lint, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin Gallery. The women in Danielle Orchard’s paintings are usually undressed, or only partially clothed. They might be smoking a cigarette in the bath, or staring at themselves in a mirror, or eating from a bowl of popcorn in bed. Orchard’s settings are often mundane—a bedroom, a boudoir, a kitchen—but these environments are striking in their angularity and irregular perspectives, the paintings’ compositions at once calling to mind the art historical tradition of the female nude and unsettling it. Her painting Lint graces the cover of the Fall issue of the Review and depicts a woman in stockings and no knickers. We talked about Balthus, working with life models, outsize objects, how she made Lint, and the notable absence of pubic hair from the painting. INTERVIEWER When did you start gravitating toward the female nude? ORCHARD The painting program I was in at Indiana University was fairly traditional and very observation-based, and the nude was a learning tool and a formal device: a way to develop the ability to depict volume and line. When I arrived at Hunter College in New York for graduate school, I didn’t want to abandon the nude, but I started to wonder, Who are these women? What is this uncanniness to their nudity? And who am I, as a painter, in this setting? I realized that the nudes I was painting were amalgams of my own experiences, but they were also deeply familiar images from art history. I was identifying with these characters and thinking about how their bodies might mirror my own, or how I might be unintentionally mirroring them. And so I started building a visual language with the female nude at the center. INTERVIEWER Do you have particular influences, or anti-influences, in painting female bodies? ORCHARD Everyone on my bookshelf is an artist I truly love and look to for inspiration—and whom I steal from directly. I think a lot about Picasso, naturally, but I’m also really into Balthus. The construction of his paintings—the eeriness and the function of light—were important to me when I was learning how to paint. Back then, the content of his paintings was never questioned by me or by my professors. INTERVIEWER How did you come to question it? ORCHARD When I got to New York, I saw a Balthus painting in person for the first time—Thérèse Dreaming at the Met. The professors of mine who’d come out of a feminist tradition often said it was incredibly fucked up in terms of its depiction of this sexualized adolescent, and would ask me to question my relationship to it. And I did question it—but I also sometimes felt like asking, Why? It’s such a great painting! I ended up making a couple versions of a painting inspired by Thérèse Dreaming. In Balthus’s original, there’s a cat lapping milk and it’s a pretty erotic little euphemism. I thought it would be funny to make Thérèse into a cat lady: an adult woman, a spinster, surrounded by cats. Danielle Orchard, Lessons, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin Gallery. INTERVIEWER How do you see your work in relation to the art historical tradition of nudes? ORCHARD Of course, once you learn about the subjugation some women have experienced at the hands of certain male artists who were depicting them, you can’t help sympathizing with their experiences as models. With this newer body of work, I’ve been trying to complicate things—to make my paintings at once more humorous and more specific to a feminine experience. The cover for The Paris Review is a good example. The idea of the painting was to show the discomfort of wearing tights. If you’ve spent a day walking around in tights, you’ll know that tights are always a bit less sexy than you’d intended. They have this formal function, which is to create clean lines on the body, but the internal experience is quite different. The seam is always off-center. INTERVIEWER How did that painting come to you? ORCHARD I had started to include pieces of clothing in my paintings—clothing that I felt was somehow more revealing than nudity itself. The transparency of tights interested me and posed a new painting problem, one I hadn’t taken on before. INTERVIEWER Why tights and no knickers? ORCHARD I thought it would make her appear even more uncomfortable. It would heighten the sensuality, but also, anyone who has ever worn tights would just be thinking about how gross that would feel. I was interested in these little gestures—nods in the direction of a woman’s true experience—which are often lost on a male viewership. In my experience, male viewers tend to see the painting in sexualized terms, while the humor is almost always picked up on by female viewers. INTERVIEWER And why no pubic hair? ORCHARD To make it a little bit more garish. And also just to continue the line—to underscore the linearity of the image. I’ve done other versions where she has a huge bush, but this image seems to me to suggest something about this character—maybe how meticulous she is, or that she wants to be seen as manicured. And then, of course, she’s having this wardrobe malfunction. INTERVIEWER Tell me a little bit about the process of making this painting—the materials you used and the iterations of the work. ORCHARD I worked hard to find this perfect temperature of brown for the tights. I tried so many different ways of layering, to different effects. A lot of them turned out pretty beautifully in studies, but then I couldn’t translate them onto a larger canvas. I couldn’t get it to feel quite right. This painting was probably the last one I did in preparation for a larger painting in the show that’s up right now at Perrotin in Paris. The brown was actually just an underpainting—some sort of residue from my palette table. I was about to scrape it off and then I realized that it was precisely the temperature I had been after. I’ve been trying to reproduce it, trying every brown I have in the studio, and it’s never coming back. INTERVIEWER The colors in this painting are darker than in some of the works of yours I’ve seen. Why is that? ORCHARD I had been trying to land on a color that felt like wearing stockings. At the same time, I realized afterward, I’d been looking at a lot of work by Georges de La Tour, who painted these dark, very calm religious paintings that are very angular and strange, in earthy colors. They have a lot of chiaroscuro, and what’s illuminated are the expressions of the women. INTERVIEWER How long did it take to paint this one? ORCHARD It took ten minutes to make that painting. Although that’s not exactly true, because of the time spent rehearsing on other canvases. I think about this all the time: how with runners, for instance, a single sprint is the accumulation of all the effort that went in before the actual race. Danielle Orchard, Skinny Pop, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin Gallery. INTERVIEWER Do you work with life models now, or from memory? ORCHARD After Hunter College, I couldn’t afford models, so I started pulling from old sketches and from my memory and imagination. The anatomical irregularities I’m interested in often come from misremembering anatomy—from having a foundation but then getting it wrong. I like it when the misremembering seems informed by the experience of physically inhabiting a female body. I’ve noticed that if I’ve done push-ups that week, say, then the women in the paintings will get a little bulkier. INTERVIEWER You often paint groups of women together. A few times you’ve called them “characters.” Are they separate individuals, or are they you—or amalgams of the two? ORCHARD They’re certainly amalgams, but together they also function almost like an organism—a fungus or something like that. It’s like when you’re around a lot of other women and this incredibly dynamic experience of viewership takes place, where you’re looking at one another with empathy, certainly, but also with some critical edge, and you’re also thinking about yourself and how you’re being perceived. Sometimes I include the same woman at different points in time in the same painting, as if she’s moved. There’s one painting I’m thinking of, a yellow bathroom scene that’s up right now in Paris, that has three figures in it, each at one step in the process you go through when you’re getting ready for an event: washing the hair, shaving the legs, putting on the makeup. A linear narrative stretched out visually. Danielle Orchard, Yellow Bathroom, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin Gallery. INTERVIEWER There are certain ordinary things—nail polish and beer and pencils—that often recur in your paintings and seem to play a kind of outsize role. Where do these objects come from? ORCHARD I think of them as outsize as well. I’m interested in the most generic version of all of these things. A phone is always a rotary phone, for instance, and a wineglass has almost emoji-level recognition and immediacy. I’ve noticed recently that these objects do often relate to a painterly impulse. The makeup and the nail polish are cognates to materials in the studio, and they’re symbols for navigating the ambivalence around how women are constantly reconstructing ourselves—like, almost every morning. Or I am, anyway. Danielle Orchard, Cheating at Solitaire, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin Gallery. Sophie Haigney is the web editor at The Paris Review. View the full article

“All Marriages possess their own tongue. It is a lexicon discovered in that space between clipped sentences. Its poetry can be heard in the rustle of blankets as you shift to curl around the other in silent apology. In this way, I spoke to my wife. I let the slow drag of my thumb along her jaw say what I could not.” The Last Tale of the Flower Bride is the debut adult novel by Roshani Chokshi and is my first foray into her work, to say that I was impressed would be an understatement, I was utterly blown away. This is a tale of horror and beauty, of broken promises and cracked dreams, of loss and loneliness, it is an addictive tale which vividly captures the dangers of fantasy and reality. Our story begins with a fairytale romance as our first protagonist, known only as Bridegroom, meets and falls head over heels in love with a mysterious heiress—Indigo Maxwell-Casteñada. Their attraction is impulsive, heady, and in no time at all the Bridegroom and Indigo marry, and promise to live happily ever after…on one condition. Our Bridegroom must never look into Indigo’s past, he must never delve into her secrets. For a spell, the Bridegroom is content to spend his days devoted to wife and delighted to be in her presence. They expand and build upon the Casteñada hotel empire together, visiting countries all over the world, spending nights in castles sharing wine, food and telling fairy tales of old. Yet when Indigo receives a call informing her that her estranged aunt is dying, the pair must travel to Indigo’s childhood home, the House of Dreams. Within the walls of this house is where our Bridegroom wavers, where the temptation to pry into Indigo’s life becomes too great, for the House knows her secrets and the House wants to reveal. You see Indigo was not the only one who inhabited the House of Dreams, another presence was also felt, that of Azure, Indigo’s childhood friend who mysteriously vanished. As the narrative unfolds our Bridegroom becomes entangled in a web of fantasy and reality, where either one could destroy him. In essence The Last Tale of the Flower Bride centres on obsession and complex relationships where dependency, possessiveness and insecurities dwell within each character. When Indigo and our Bridegroom first meet their chemistry is instant, intoxicating, full of passion and lust. We spend many chapters watching their marriage flourish over the years, and it is as beautiful as it is deeply intense, but as the whirlwind dies-down we see a sourness creep in, a darkness. It begins to show that Indigo has a very controlling air about her, forever watchful of her bridegroom, an incessant need to know where he is and what he’s been doing. The Bridegroom is passive, treading carefully around his wife, fearful to upset their serenity, though in secret he searches to uncover Indigo’s past, but he also searches to uncover the truth of his own, for over the years the memory of his brother has haunted him, a brother who he was told never existed. I loved the way Chokshi built up the unsettling atmosphere throughout the beginning, the way she weaves romance with subtle dominance, and the foreboding sense that all was about to unravel. I also found it interesting that our Bridegroom’s name is hidden, almost as though his identity is insignificant, as though his name held no power, but then this is also not his story alone, it is more the story of Indigo and Azure. As the chapters then alternate between the present timeline with the bridegroom, and Azure’s POV which centres on her and Indigo’s childhood, we switch to a coming of age narrative, which I have to say is one of my absolute favourites. Azure’s life prior to meeting Indigo was one of poverty, broken parental relationships and a step-father with lingering eyes. Resentment, loneliness and fear builds, and it is easy to see why Azure becomes so enchanted by Indigo and the House of Dreams. The House becomes a place of luxury, safety and comfort to Azure, it speaks to her in a language of sounds and feelings. Indigo and Azure’s days together are filled with silk dresses and tea, spells and sacrifices, of believing in faeries and magic and the ethereal. They are whimsical, endearing and their story was filled with such a comforting sense of nostalgia as Chokshi perfectly captures the moment where children believe in magic and possibilities with their very soul. These two young girls became inseparable. Where did Azure begin and Indigo end? “The magic was nothing so tangible as a crystal glass or an uttered incantation. It lay in how the House decanted the light, the aristocratic lines of the shadows cast on the floor. The magic was the spark in her brown eyes, rendering them an animal shade of amber. The magic was this: the supple sorcery of Indigo’s words, such that your own hand became a blade you eagerly welcomed.” In the grounds of The House of Dreams, Azure and Indigo share a place they call the Otherworld, a place they believed would take them away from the mundane and transport them into the magical. Yet as both girls grow older, Indigo clings to this idea like a lifeline, whilst Azure begins to notice the world outside. Throughout the book Chokshi illustrates that Indigo has a manipulative side to her, on appearances everyone is drawn in by her beauty, her aurora, yet as more of herself is revealed the more we see a darkness within, a certain kind of cruelty, which progressively heightens. Chokshi superbly executes the transition from innocence of childhood to something more sinister. I also loved the way Chokshi freckled the narrative with fairytales throughout, some of which were familiar to me and some new, but they were effectively used to punctuate the narrative that was unfolding, often foretelling the upcoming dangers. Princesses, maidens, old crones, and monsters, the motif of starlings and apple blossoms, ‘once upon a time’ and ‘happily ever afters’ were all present in this novel, but they were wrapped up in disguises and deceit. Chokshi plays with the concept of fairytales in the most darkly delicious ways, representing their beauty, their whimsy, their ideals and even their gruesome horror. I could not help but see comparisons to Alix E Harrow’s works, and damn did I love that. The Last Tale of the Flower Bride reads like a spellbinding gothic fairytale, enveloped in dreamy poetic prose and enigmatic characters. This is a book you’ll want to devour and savour, a book you won’t be able to put down until the final act leaves you in awe. “We are two blues, the neat seam of dusk and dawn. We share a sky, if not a soul, and yet we are cut of the same shades.” ARC provided by Kate at Hodder and Stoughton Books. Thank you for the copy! All quotes used are taken from an ARC and are subject to change upon publication. The Last Tale of the Flower Bride is due to be released 16th February 2023 but you can pre-order your copy HERE The post THE LAST TALE OF THE FLOWER BRIDE by Roshani Chokshi (BOOK REVIEW) appeared first on The Fantasy Hive. View the full article

Therese here to introduce a heartfelt community post regarding a friend and guest of Writer Unboxed who needs our help now. It begins with a personal plea on her behalf, authored by her husband, continues with actionable steps you can take to help, authored by former WU contributor Allison Larkin, and finishes with a infographic that you can use and share to help other authors in general. Thanks for reading, and for sharing, WU community! Your support is very much appreciated. Click the photo group above to be taken to a social media page filled with downloadable pictures you can share over Instagram or other social media sites! Tuesday is a special day in the world of traditional publishing, because it’s the day that a whole lot of books are released into the world for the first time. These books represent a mammoth effort for those authors, as we who write story understand, as well as the publishing house that releases that book. Every book has an ideal plan — a unique collaboration involving the author, the publicist and marketing team, and important peripheral groups, from stores to clubs, that sign on early as a book’s champion. But ideals rarely go off without a hitch, because reality brings chaos and chaos can be catastrophic. Especially when the author herself can no longer participate in a book’s release. Such is the case this month–today–with longtime friend, supporter, and guest of Writer Unboxed, author Ann Mah. Ann’s story in her husband’s words: My wife, Ann Mah, always fights hard against what writers call dull thud day — that day when their new books hit stores and sites with little fanfare, an anticlimax. She pushes for her own books, of course, but also for books by authors like her who must do so much on their own to promote their work. Ann’s new novel, “Jacqueline in Paris,” comes out September 27. Because of a serious sudden illness, she can’t make the case for it, not online or in person. It is a great book. I would be deeply grateful if you faithful unboxed writers could help me spread the word. “Jacqueline in Paris” tells the story of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis’ junior year abroad in Paris in 1949-50 — a year she described as the happiest in her life. Ann immerses us in Jackie’s feelings and thinking as she encounters France’s postwar awakenings and reckonings. Her experiences unfold against the backdrop of Paris, which Ann depicts vividly and from the viewpoint of an attuned resident — the scents of fir trees and coal smoke on the street before Christmas; the dusty Roman amphitheater tucked behind a bus stop. Ann also captures the intellectual and geopolitical ferment that made life in Paris and other European capitals so intense in the immediate postwar period. The book grew from a travel story Ann wrote for The New York Times about Jackie’s time in Paris as a student — but she knew there was more to explore. Ann researched the novel with the energy and rigor of a historian, going horseback riding in the Bois de Boulogne as Jackie did, enjoying tea with Jackie’s 90-something host sister, visiting Dachau as Jackie did. The result is a book that is as transporting as it is absorbing. Writing “Jacqueline in Paris” struck a personal chord for Ann. Like Jackie, Ann took chances and moved far from home at a young age (in Ann’s case, to Boston and then New York from Orange County, California), defying family expectations. Like Jackie, Ann felt her time living in Paris transformed her, made her bolder and more confident. The sexism Jackie faced resonates even 70-plus years later and animates Ann’s (and my own) efforts to make a positive difference in our work. Ann also wound up marrying a public servant (me), although our style is more home-a-lot than Camelot. Ann loathes self-promotion, like so many writers I’ve met during my lifetime, so I am unsure how successful she would be getting the word out about “Jacqueline in Paris.” My hope is that the quality and integrity of this work will generate the high level of interest it merits. But I love Ann too much to leave it to chance. I hope you will help me defeat the dull thud and create a shooting star instead. – Chris Klein, Ann Mah’s husband Thank you, Chris, for sharing Ann’s story with us, and for helping us to help Ann! Today’s post continues with our good friend and former WU contributor, author Allison Larkin, who shares Six Ways to Support Ann Mah’s New Book! Authors support authors. That’s what we do. You all know this because that’s the power of Writer Unboxed. Ann Mah is always a gracious supporter of other authors and creatives. She tweets, posts, retweets, and champions the books, articles, and recipes she loves in her thoughtful newsletter. Ann is such a bright light, so we want to come together now to support our friend on the launch of her new novel, Jacqueline in Paris. We know that sometimes the hardest part of helping is figuring out what to do. So we’ve brainstormed and crowdsourced to come up with a list of Ann Action Items for you! Pick one or two, or check off all of them! We want Ann’s launch day and the days beyond to feel like an overwhelming lovefest. And we want you to be a part of that. Thank you so much for being a writer who is part of this community and the greater community of creative people. Thank you for making this launch day special for Ann and her family. Get the book. Jacqueline in Paris is available today everywhere books are sold! Grab an extra copy for a friend! Get your holiday shopping done early! If you can’t buy the book, request a copy from your local library (also, make sure to check it out). Leave a 5-Star Review. Give Ann’s new novel your heartfelt five stars on Goodreads, BookBub, and bookseller sites. If you’re still waiting to give it a read, you can add it on Goodreads! Make it a Book Club Pick. Choose Jacqueline in Paris for your book club! Or start a book club and make it your inaugural pick! If you’re an author who visits book clubs, mention the book as a suggestion for future selections. Spread the Word. Share your support of Ann and excitement for her beautiful new book on social media, in your newsletter, or even just tell friends and family who love to read! Ask your friends and followers to share and help spread the word too! Your social media message can be simple. Here are a few examples (feel free to use them directly!): Congratulations to @AnnMahNet on the release of Jacqueline in Paris! Kirkus gave it a starred review, calling it “A delightful and surprisingly insightful novel.” Learn more here: https://tinyurl.com/bdde8k4y Can’t wait to read @AnnMahNet’s new novel, Jacqueline in Paris, the poignant coming-of-age story of Jacqueline Bouvier’s year abroad before the world knew her as Jackie Kennedy. https://tinyurl.com/bdde8k4y Write a Shelf-Talker. Ask your local bookstore if you can write a short recommendation they can include on their bookshelf to help draw readers to the book! Include what you love best about Jacqueline in Paris: Ann’s rich descriptions of Paris and Grenoble, insight into Jacqueline Bouvier’s inner life before she became one of America’s most famous First Ladies, or the magical coming of age mixture of heartbreak and adventure? Attend a Book Event. On Wednesday, September 28th, at 8 PM Eastern, two exceptionally brilliant, kind authors who have also written Jackie Kennedy novels will be doing a virtual event to celebrate Ann and her new book. Steven Rowley (The Editor) and Louis Bayard (Jackie & Me) will partner with East City Bookshop to discuss Jacqueline in Paris. This is certain to be a unique and fascinating conversation. The event is free, but please register to attend! It helps support all three authors and the store supporting this event if you order your copies (or extra copies) from the store! You can also invite your friends! Here’s a sample tweet or post, and a photo you can add to accompany it: Looking forward to this virtual event (9/28 8 pm ET) with Jackie Kennedy experts @MrStevenRowley & @LouiseBayard in conversation with @eastcitybooks to discuss @AnnMahNet’s new novel, Jacqueline in Paris! Free registration here: https://tinyurl.com/4edbkfs9 Many thanks to Allie for both this post and for her fantastic “How to Support an Author” infographic below, which can be used to help any author with a new book release! “Right click” to save and share the image. How else might we help to spread the word about Ann Mah’s Jacqueline in Paris? How have you helped authors and writers who’ve needed a hand in the past? What are some of the most inventive promotional ideas you’ve seen or tried yourself? If you’d like to be entered into the running for a copy of Ann’s Jaqueline in Paris, please indicate interest in comments! If you’ve helped to spread the word about Jacqueline in Paris over social media, please include that in your comment for an extra chance at winning a copy of her book. We’ll choose a winner or two at the end of this week. Thank you, WU Community! About Writer Unboxed began as a collaboration between Therese Walsh and Kathleen Bolton in 2006. Since then the site has grown to include ~50 regular contributors--including bestselling authors and industry leaders--and frequent guests. In 2014, the first Writer Unboxed UnConference (part UNtraditional conference, part intensive craft event, part networking affair) was held in Salem, MA. Learn more about our 2019 event, ESCAPE TO WuNDERLAND, on Eventbrite. In 2016, the Writer Unboxed team published a book with Writer's Digest. AUTHOR IN PROGRESS: A No-Holds-Barred Guide to What It Really Takes to Get Published has been well-received by readers who seek help in overcoming the hurdles faced at every step of the novel-writing process--from setting goals, researching, and drafting to giving and receiving critiques, polishing prose, and seeking publication. James Scott Bell has said of the guide, "Nourishment for the writer's soul and motivation for the writer's heart." You can follow Writer Unboxed on Twitter, and join our thriving Facebook community. Twitter | Facebook | More Posts [url={url}]View the full article[/url]

Rudyard Kipling brought sex to the movies. The author of “Gunga Din,” “The Man Who Would Be King” and “The Jungle Book” didn’t intend to do it, but he certainly bears some responsibility for the morass of cinematic depravity in which we so happily wallow today. However inadvertent his contribution, he helped create the screen’s first seductress, a woman as “wicked as fresh red paint.” Her career was brief and almost all of her films have been lost, but in her day, she was one of the world’s most popular stars. It happened this way. At 32, Kipling had published several volumes of stories and poems and was enjoying wide-ranging popular and critical success. After traveling around the world and living in America for several years, he had settled in England. The artist Philip Burne-Jones was his cousin and close childhood friend. Little Phil was the son of the eminent Victorian pre-Raphaelite painter, Sir Edward Burne-Jones. In the London of 1897, the younger Burne-Jones was a well-to-do young man about town. A rising if somewhat dilettantish artist, he was struggling to get out of his father’s shadow. He would never measure up to Big Ed in that regard, but Phil was enough of a stud muffin to be seen with Mrs. Patrick Campbell on his arm, and that was really something. Mrs. Pat, as she was called, was one of the most famous stage actresses of her day. A favorite of George Bernard Shaw, the diva was notorious for her temperamental behavior and richly varied social life. (Mr. Campbell was not an issue.) Her rough equivalent might be a young Liz Taylor, respected for her acting abilities and gossiped about at delicious length. Little Phil fell hard for Mrs. Pat and plied her with jewels, flowers, carriages. Alas, those weren’t enough. Some suspected that Mrs. Pat had merely used the lad to get close to Big Ed, but whatever the reason, after toying with his affections for a time, she tossed him aside for one of her co-stars. Phil did not take it well. He uncorked his anger, resentment, and bruised ego and poured them onto canvas in a painting he called “The Vampire.” It depicts a handsome young man stretched out supine on a chaise in his bedroom. His clothes are open, revealing his chest. If contemporary accounts are to be believed, the guy in the picture looks like Phil but taller, slimmer and with more hair. Looming above, a beautiful long-haired woman gazes down on him. With a cool cruel expression on her face, she is, unmistakably, Mrs. Campbell. When the painting made its debut at the New Gallery, it became an immediate scandalous sensation. Everyone knew who the figures were and what was rumored to have happened between them. To fan the flames, Little Phil inveigled his cousin Rudyard to write a poem to accompany the painting. Kipling agreed and cranked out his own “The Vampire” in six verses. It begins: A fool there was and he made his prayer (Even as you and I!) To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair (We called her the woman who did not care) But the fool he called her his lady fair— (Even as you and I!) Straightaway, Little Phil commissioned a limited run of signed first editions of his cousin’s work. (They sold. The painting did not.) Both poem and picture were both extremely popular in England and later in America. Beyond the immediate reference to such a famous woman, the painting touched something in the audience. It was an obvious variation on the sexual themes and undercurrents of Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula” which had been published that same year. Both are built around seductive figures creeping into bedrooms late at night. The scandal over the painting died away but Kipling’s poem remained popular and in 1909, Porter Emerson Browne expanded the basic idea into a stage play and quickie novel with the title taken from the first line, “A Fool There Was.” The plot is a fairly standard Victorian melodrama about drunkenness, infidelity and the destruction of a happy family. Browne added the element of the predatory seductress from Burne-Jones and Kipling. Though the New York Times dismissed the piece as “claptrap,” audiences flocked to see it and the play was a major hit. Four years later, independent producer and theater chain owner William Fox was trying to step up from simple one-reel films to more complex (and profitable) feature-length stories. (His studio would eventually become the Fox in 20th Century Fox.) His first major acquisition was Browne’s play. He reasoned correctly that it would be a good vehicle for a new kind of star, a darker antidote to Mary Pickford’s “America’s Sweetheart,” and he got some good advice from the play’s producer, Richard Hilliard. He told Fox to lock his leading lady into a long term contract before he shot the first frame of film. Over the years, Hilliard said, he’d replaced his actress six times because the role was so good that it made each young woman extremely popular and “difficult.” Theodosia Goodman was exactly the kind of woman William Fox was looking for. She’d moved to New York from Cincinnati in 1905 with dreams of becoming a stage actress. The movie business was in its infancy then and she wanted nothing to do with it. But after several years of minimal success on Broadway and in Yiddish theater, she took a more accommodating view of the new art form and looked for any work she could find in the studios across the river in Ft. Lee, New Jersey. That’s where Fox studio director Frank Powell spotted her in 1914. By then, she was staring grimly at 30 and knew that she was overweight. The waif look was in that year, and even at her most svelte, Theodosia was a large woman. But Powell saw something. Maybe it was the long lush dark hair or her expressive eyes. Whatever it was, Powell hired her but made sure that she stayed in the background on his film, “The Stain.” He didn’t want anyone else to spot her. Not then. William Fox then signed her to a five-year contract at $100 a week, and announced with great fanfare that he was searching for an unknown actress to star in his upcoming production of “A Fool There Was.” Filming began in the fall of 1914 on location in St. Augustine, Florida, and ended in New York. It was ready for release in January, 1915. Reviews were generally positive, particularly for leading lady Theda Bara. Theodosia Goodman from Cincinnati simply wasn’t sufficiently alluring and mysterious for the movies’ first bad girl… Yes, Fox and his imaginative p.r. flacks Johnny Goldfrap and Al Selig decided that Theodosia Goodman from Cincinnati simply wasn’t sufficiently alluring and mysterious for the movies’ first bad girl, and so they created Theda Bara. This exotic creature, born in the shadow of the Sphinx, was the daughter of a French artist and his Arabian mistress. The name actually came from a diminutive of Theodosia and a variation on a family name Barranger. It was only later that someone realized the name was also an anagram for “Death Arab” and added that little detail to the increasingly fanciful Theda mythos. And Goldfrap, Selig and company were tireless in their elaboration of that mythos with press conferences featuring incense, dim atmospheric lighting and crystal balls, all promoting “the Wickedest Woman in the World.” That’s what Terry Ramsaye was referring to with the “red paint” metaphor for Theda in his history of silent movies, “A Million and One Nights.” Just a few days before the premiere of “A Fool There Was,” they held their famous introductory press conference with a few reporters to “introduce” their new star. It took place in a heavily curtained Chicago hotel room, thick with incense. Theodosia was decked out in furs and veils and played Theda to the hilt. After it was over, Goldfrap and Selig told one reporter, a young unknown Louella Parsons, to hang around. She was on hand to see Theodosia rip off the costume, throw open the drapes and gasp “Gimme air,” just as the boys had planned. At the very moment they were creating Theda the Sex Goddess, they were revealing their own charade. It worked. Doubtless a few people actually bought the Theda malarkey but most, if they paid any attention at all, simply enjoyed the silliness of the whole business. And what of the film itself? By the time it was released, Kipling had won the Nobel Prize for Literature and so his poem was often recited aloud by an actor before a screening, thereby adding a degree of respectability to an unashamed exploitative potboiler. It tells the story of a sexy young woman who seduces and casts aside a series of lovers. The Vampire, as she is called, sets her eye on upright John Schuyler (Edward Jose). The happy husband and father of an angelic little girl has just been given a special European assignment by the President, and is about to leave by himself. The Vampire books passage on his ship, the Gigantic, and straightaway goads her current lover into suicide after she famously says to him, “Kiss me, my fool!” (It became an instant catchphrase and punch line.) Moments later, she meets Schuyler and nails him with a smoky glance. Cut to her boudoir in Italy where a dissipated Schuyler opens a letter from his wife asking why he hasn’t written. His face is lined, his complexion is sallow, his hair is white, his hands tremble. The Vamp has him under her spell. What is her power? On screen, it’s mostly the eyes. They’re surrounded by mascara that appears to have been applied with a putty knife. The rest of her face is pale zombie white. The primitive lighting and makeup techniques of the day demanded such harsh overstatement. With that extreme appearance, Ms. Goodman was able to level an intense stare at the camera and her co-stars. She also wore a series of fairly revealing outfits. In one scene, she’s in constant danger of falling out of her negligee as she packs her trunk. Beyond that, she’s an energetic, animated full-bodied woman who acts on her sexual desires. Such a character had not been seen before and audiences were stunned. Women everywhere wanted to share her power. Humorist S.J. Perleman spoke for most men when he summed up his reaction to film. “For a month afterward, I gave myself up to fantasies in which I lay with my head pillowed in the seductress’ lap.” Despite the imprimatur of Nobel, the film was roundly condemned by responsible civic and religious organizations, and it was cut severely by many state censors. Everybody else loved it, and the film became a certified boffo box office smash. The public relations ploy worked better than anyone could have predicted. Theda Bara was immediately identified as “the vamp.” It had been her nickname on the movie set, and the use of the word to describe a seductive woman entered the language. Fox immediately set to work on more vampish vehicles for its new star, and the studio cranked them out as fast as it could. Theda Bara starred in no less than 60 features over the next four years. That’s not a misprint—60 pictures in four years. True, many of them were little more than an hour long, but she worked at a crushing pace, and some of the productions were lavish. Judging by the photographs and publicity stills that survive, her 1917 “Cleopatra” was a visual marvel with huge sets and outré costumes that beggar description. We’re unlikely ever to know because all known prints were burned, along with most of her films, in a fire at the Fox studio. (Lon Chaney’s “London After Midnight” and “Cleopatra” are the two holy grails of lost films.) Theda made a few pictures in which she played the “good girl,” but those weren’t what her public wanted to see and they fared poorly. The vamp wasn’t playing so well, either. By 1919, Theda had grown tired of the character and retired from filmmaking. She decided to take another run at the stage and in 1920 she opened on Broadway in “The Blue Flame.” If the reviews are to be believed, it was a terrible play and she was terrible in it. But once again, audiences disagreed and the production made Theda a wealthy woman. When it was finished, she embarked on a vaudeville tour and that made her even wealthier. A year later, she married one of her favorite directors, Englishman Charles Brabin. She retired then, though he continued to work regularly, and they divided their time between Hollywood and New York. In contrast to her public relations portrayal of the Wickedest Woman in the World, the real Theodosia/Theda was a quiet, bookish woman with a smart sense of humor. Her private life was notably restrained—no problems with drugs or alcohol, no outlandish spending. At the height of her fame, she lived in a relatively modest Upper West Side apartment and made sure that her family was financially secure. As her biographer Eve Golden notes, that lack of scandal or controversy in her private life is at least part of the reason that Theda Bara has been forgotten today. Many moviegoers may recognize the vamp caricature with its dark eyes, but they may not associate it with Theda Bara. She talked of returning to the movies later in life, but few stars were able to make the transition from silent to sound and her heart wasn’t in it. But she did maintain her contacts in the entertainment business and that led to a fitting postscript. In the early 1930s, Mrs. Patrick Campbell was attempting to revive her fading stage career by offering her services to the American movies. Every bit as demanding and contrary as she had ever been, she had a tough time of it. Her biggest role was as the pawn shop owner Peter Lorre kills in “Crime and Punishment.” But when Theda learned that Mrs. Pat was in the country, she offered her a place to stay. She also publicly pooh-poohed all the stories that were being told about how “difficult” Mrs. Pat was and went out of her way to praise the older woman’s abilities. No one knows if they ever talked about “The Vampire” who connected their careers but it’s hard to believe they didn’t. *** View the full article