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I was fifteen when I was introduced to my first serial killer. It was 1991 and I was sneaking into the cinema to watch The Silence of the Lambs. I was already obsessed with all things FBI, having binged on cult classic, Twin Peaks, but it wasn’t until I was watching Harris’s terrifyingly charismatic Hannibal Lecter do his dance with Agent Starling that I started to understand such ‘monsters’ existed in real life, and there were real people dedicated to hunting them down. That movie sparked in me a curiosity into the dark side of human nature, and I spent my teens gorging on true crime and thrillers. I was born in the UK in 1975 and grew up with the gruesome headlines and media circus that surrounds (thankfully rare) serial murderers. I have faint memories of Peter Sutcliffe, the “Yorkshire Ripper,” and the responding Reclaim the Night movement, begun by women when police advised them to stay indoors after dark. I recall the fear and shock around the case of Harold Shipman, known as “Dr Death,” who killed his own patients, and the horrifying crimes of Fred and Rose West in their “House of Horrors.” When I wrote my first contemporary thriller, The Fields, I had to study the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. A key element of the BAU’s remit is delving into the minds of serial killers, but it wasn’t until I started writing the second in the series that I came to use this research. Original Sins sees my protagonist, Riley Fisher, move from a sheriff’s office in small-town Iowa to become a rookie special agent in Des Moines. The oldest in her class at Quantico, Riley has to contend with self-doubt as she starts again at the bottom, with no idea who to trust in the murky politics of her new job. A serial attacker, last active in the nineties, is believed to have returned. Dubbed The Sin Eater, due to the religious nature of his crimes, he is once again hunting women. With the city gripped by fear, the state’s first female governor receives a vicious death threat. Tasked with protecting the governor, while battling a media hungry for headlines, angry families desperate for justice, and her own demons – Riley must determine if the two cases are linked. I’ve read serial killer books, both novels and non-fiction, that revel in the horror – where victims are reduced to blank canvases on which the murderer gets to write their bloody story. But I’m more interested in diving deeper, to find the human experience behind these crimes – the things that turn people into killers, the experience of victims, and society’s reaction to the murders. Here are six books I feel elevate the subject and offer more than just a ‘serial killer thriller:’ THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, Thomas Harris Harris’s central hook remains incredibly effective – that it takes a serial killer to catch one. It explores rookie agent, Clarice Starling’s past and her driving ambition, that first pits her against then draws her into an increasingly complex and symbiotic relationship with the warped but brilliant Hannibal Lecter. There’s an element of complicity in the story. Lecter is an alluring character. We like him. We find ourselves rooting for him. Harris spent time at Quantico to fully understand the psychology of what he was writing about, and his research shows. That we see the female victims and the horrors written on their bodies through the eyes of Starling, affords us a deeper experience. For me, the novel remains a classic of the genre. PERFUME, Patrick Süskind Set in 18th century France, the story follows orphan Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born with an extraordinary sense of smell. This lends itself to his chosen profession as a perfumer, but leads him into darkness when he becomes obsessed with a young woman’s scent and sets out to capture it. I read this in my teens and still remember Süskind’s use of the senses to evoke a time and place, but also to enrich our understanding of the killer, the environment in which he is created, and the victims he preys upon. I’LL BE GONE IN THE DARK, Michelle McNamara This is the haunting, harrowing account of one woman’s search for the notorious Golden State Killer. I read it in one sitting. McNamara’s dedication to seeking the truth, and justice for the victims, is a deeply human story, revealing as much about her, and the society she grew up in, as the case itself. It’s made even more powerful and poignant by the fact McNamara died before the book was finished (it was completed by others close to her), just two years before the killer, a former police officer, was finally captured, after decades at large. THESE WOMEN, Ivy Pochoda A gritty, ambitious novel – bleak, but electrifying, following the intersecting stories of women who live on the margins in the seedier side of Los Angeles. The plot revolves around a spate of murders of young women in the area, most of whom are sex workers, and how they are dismissed and overlooked. The setting is grimly, but compellingly realised. I love how Pochoda’s LA is itself a character. It’s an interesting look at how victims and killer can each exist in plain sight and be – for very different reasons – ignored by those around them. NOTES ON AN EXECUTION, Danya Kukafka This was one of my favorite novels of recent years. It opens with a serial killer on death row, then spirals out to explore the stories of the women whose lives he touched and altered. Technically, it shouldn’t really work as it dips and dives in and out of different lives, spanning years and generations, but somehow the scattered nature of the storytelling adds both urgency and depth. The writing is stunning, at times beautifully lyrical, at times simply devastating. THE FIVE, Hallie Rubenhold Rubenhold takes a grim tale we think we know – that of Jack the Ripper – and inverts it, so the story becomes about his female victims and the lives they led in late nineteenth-century London. Instead of the all-too-common focus on the shadowy Ripper and his grisly crimes, it’s the women – through Rubenhold’s deft and thoughtful skill as a historian – who come blazing into full color, as we explore their lives, loves, hopes and misfortunes, and the tragic circumstances and societal constraints that led each of them into a place where they were vulnerable to danger. A timely and necessary read that makes us question our obsession with killers over victims. *** View the full article

Mickey Cohen walked under the drooping fronds of a large palm tree toward the Clover Club at 8477 Sunset Boulevard with a shotgun tucked under his coat. The place was owned by restaurateur Eddie Nealis, and its management catered to film studio executives and Hollywood’s top stars. The Clover Club was located along a sparse stretch of the road, just beyond Los Angeles’s city limits. From the street, the place looked uninviting and fortress-­like. Inside, however, the Clover Club was outfitted with hidden gambling rooms where celebrities could bet against the house. Producers like David O. Selznick lost vast amounts of money on a weekly basis. The club also had one-­way mirrors to signal card dealers of impending raids so the gaming tables could be flipped over at a moment’s notice. Cohen led a small group of gangsters through the back door and into a large gambling den where they all showed their weapons and demanded that the patrons put their money and jewelry on the tables. “I had the stick [shotgun] on everybody. Everyone else had pistols,” Cohen recalled. He had targeted the nightclub under orders from Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel because Nealis had refused to hand over his profits to the Syndicate. During the stickup, Cohen noticed a beautiful young blonde standing nervously next to big-band trumpeter Harry James. Cohen did not see the musician as a threat, so he shifted his steely gaze to the other well-­dressed men in the room. The heist was over in a few short minutes, and Cohen then fled with the other members of his gang. Despite the brazen robbery ordered by Siegel and carried out by Cohen, Nealis refused to give up control of the Clover Club. Cohen was dispatched once again, this time to kill the club’s security man, a notorious Irish gangster named Jimmy Fox. Cohen shot him up but failed to kill him. Still, the message had been sent, and Nealis relinquished club control to Siegel and fled to Mexico. Cohen thought back to the night of the original raid, as he could not get the image of the beautiful blonde who had placed her diamond necklace into his fedora out of his mind. “Who was that gorgeous woman we just heisted?” Cohen asked. “That was Betty Grable,” one of the henchmen replied. At twenty-­two years old, Grable was pure Hollywood gold. She worked out of the 20th Century Fox lot and would later become known more for her pinup shots than for her screen performances. Cohen did not know it, but Betty Grable could have been his biggest score at the Clover Club, as her legs would soon be insured for $1 million in a publicity stunt orchestrated by 20th Century Fox. The cross-­pollination between Hollywood glamor and gangsterism was becoming more commonplace in Los Angeles. Movies like Little Caesar and The Public Enemy starring James Cagney put millions of dollars in the studio coffers while also depicting hardened criminals as big-­screen antiheroes. Screenwriters lifted their ideas from the gruesome headlines in newspapers from cities like Chicago and New York, but there was very little organization involving the crimes happening on a daily basis in LA. While Mexican youth gangs calling themselves palomillas, or flocks of doves, operated with limited success in Boyle Heights, the Italian Mafia had depended on a sleepy-­eyed killer from Corleone, Sicily, to seize control of all vice operations being run out of Los Angeles. His name was Jack Ignatius Dragna. A former soldier in the Italian army, Dragna had taken over the rackets in LA after the previous mob boss, Giuseppe “Joe Iron Man” Ardizzone disappeared and was declared dead. Dragna operated a 538-­acre vineyard in the nearby hills and ran a floating casino ship called Monfalcone. Born in a Mafia stronghold before the turn of the century, Dragna had Sicilian blood, but he lacked the brains to expand the mob’s operations in Los Angeles. His LA outfit was known as “the Mickey Mouse Mob.” The Syndicate, which operated mainly out of New York and was made up of notorious mobsters like Al Capone, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and others, sent one of their own to the West Coast to get Dragna in line or get rid of him altogether. Bugsy Siegel was their handpicked emissary. Siegel was even more dangerous than Dragna, and his handsome movie star looks made him a natural fit for Hollywood. Siegel was already an underworld legend by the time he reached Los Angeles. He was born in 1906 in a dreary, overcrowded tenement on Cannon Street in New York’s Lower East Side. The boy grew fast and was taller and stronger than most of the other kids in his Jewish neighborhood. By the time he was twelve years old, Benny, as he was then known, put his muscles to work extorting protection money from pushcart peddlers and threatening to poison carriage horses if their drivers did not pay up. Siegel’s fearsome reputation spread quickly through the Lower East Side, where terrified merchants began referring to the preteen in hushed tones as a vilde chaye, Yiddish for “wild animal.” At sixteen, Siegel partnered with a slightly built Jewish immigrant from Grodno, Russia, named Meyer Lansky. They formed a small gang and fought constantly with their Irish and Italian rivals. Siegel was skilled with his fists and quick to pull a weapon on his foes. “He was young, but very brave. He liked guns,” Lansky recalled years later.3 “His big problem was that he was always ready to rush in and shoot. No one reacted faster than Benny.” When he would get angry, the handsome Siegel would go “bug-­eyed” and unleash a torrent of bullets on his enemies, earning him the nickname “Bugsy,” which no one ever dared to call him to his face. When the FBI began to track him years later, the Bureau called Siegel “insane along certain lines.” Jack Dragna may have been worried about Siegel’s arrival in Los Angeles, but Mickey Cohen did not seem to care. Cohen had been ordered to report to Siegel and serve as his number two for the Syndicate’s plot to strong-­arm Dragna. “Jack [Dragna] wasn’t pulling [in] the counties or [getting] the political picture together,” Cohen later explained. “There wasn’t even a casino open [on land]. There was no combination, everyone was acting independently. The organization had to pour money on Dragna at all times. So Benny come[s] out here to get things moving good.” But Cohen was in no rush to work for his fellow Jewish mobster from New York. If I get in touch with Benny too quickly, he’ll lock me up in his gang right away, Cohen thought to himself. I won’t be able to plan any scores. I have to get a hold of some money, and I have some things to do. Operating independently and with a flair for the dramatic, Cohen targeted an LA gambling joint called the Continental Press, where bets were made on horse races over a wire service that telegraphed and reported race results. The gambling parlor had thirty-­five telephones for incoming and outgoing bets. Twenty-­five men worked the phones inside, while two armed sheriffs stood guard at the door. Cohen knocked casually on the front door. As it opened, he pushed his way in with a shotgun. “You cocksucker,” he told one of the sheriffs. “You just move and you’re gone!” Next, Cohen eyed a man who claimed that he had only come in to place a bet. The guy was carrying a large satchel. Cohen pointed his shotgun at the bagman. “You want it in the head, quick? Or slow in the belly?” he asked. The bagman handed over the satchel, which contained $22,000 in cash. Cohen had no idea that Siegel, Lansky, and the Syndicate all had a stake in the Continental Press by way of another “made man,” a Mafia lieutenant named Johnny Rosselli. Siegel sent out word that he wanted to meet Cohen the next afternoon. Cohen strolled into the locker room at the Hollywood YMCA, where Siegel was getting ready to work out. Cohen brought a friend as backup. Siegel stared right through Cohen’s companion and told him to take a walk. Now, Cohen was all alone with Siegel. Siegel immediately dropped the menacing posture and began to laugh out loud. “I heard you were a fucking nut, but how crazy can you be?” he asked Cohen. “You were supposed to call me right away, weren’t ya?” “Yeah, I didn’t think it was that important. I wanted to see my family. I’ve been busy.” Siegel shook his head. “Yeah, I know you’ve been goddamned busy!” He demanded that Cohen kick back the money he had stolen from the mob. Cohen refused to back down. “Let me tell you something right now. When I go on a score, I put up my life and liberty. I wouldn’t kick back to my own mother!” Cohen turned on his heel and walked out of the locker room. Siegel could have chased after him with his pistol out and bullets flying, but the gangster played it cool. There was a lot to like about Mickey Cohen. Instead of an armed showdown, Siegel called another meeting, this time at his lawyer’s office. Jerry Giesler was the most powerful defense attorney in Los Angeles and a well-­known “fixer” to the stars. Giesler (pronounced geese-­ler) had earned another nickname in Hollywood, “the magnificent mouthpiece.” But unlike his clients, including Siegel, Giesler was not flashy or charismatic. Born and raised in the small town of Wilton Junction, Iowa, the attorney was balding, weak chinned, and quiet. He spoke in a reedy voice, dressed sedately in conservative gray suits, and wore horn-­rimmed glasses. But if a bad-boy actor, corrupt studio head, or conniving actress found themselves in trouble with the law, they would almost immediately call their publicist with the frantic plea “Get me Giesler!” The lawyer was in high demand. In the past few years, he had been involved in two of Hollywood’s biggest criminal cases. In 1929, movie producer and theater operator Alexander Pantages was arrested and charged with raping a seventeen-­year-­old aspiring actress named Eunice Pringle. Pantages owned nearly one hundred vaudevillian theater palaces across the United States and Canada and was a business rival of future presidential patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy. Pringle claimed that Pantages had attacked her in a side office at one of his theaters in downtown Los Angeles, located at Seventh and Hill Streets. Pringle had gone to the meeting to talk with Pantages about steps to further her career. She ran out of the theater minutes later, half-­naked and delirious. Pantages was convicted of the crime, but Giesler got the conviction overturned on appeal. Following that trial, he was hired by Hollywood director and music man Busby Berkeley after he plowed his car into another vehicle while driving drunk along LA’s Roosevelt Highway, killing two people. Despite evidence from witnesses who said Berkeley reeked of alcohol at the time of the crash, Giesler won an acquittal after two hung juries. Giesler loved to defend both the famous and the infamous, and there was no bigger mob star in Hollywood at that moment than Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. At their meeting with Mickey Cohen, Giesler helped to negotiate the return of a stickpin that Cohen had swiped from a thug during the Continental Press heist. “It’s his family heirloom, it’s the thing the guy cannot replace,” Siegel explained to Cohen. “You’re not gonna get nothing for it anyway.” Nodding at both Siegel and Giesler, Cohen gave in. “All right, don’t worry. I’ll get it back for ya.” Giesler and Cohen formed an unwritten pact at the meeting—­one that would not be broken until years later when both men got involved with Lana Turner. ___________________________________ Excerpted from A Murder in Hollywood by Casey Sherman. © 2024 by Casey Sherman. Used with permission of the publisher, Sourcebooks, LLC. All rights reserved. View the full article

Aya de Leon interviews Breanne McIvor about her debut novel, The God of Good Looks, which has recently been nominated for an NAACP Image Award. The God of Good Looks features a rivals-to-lovers romance between two beauty influencers against the backdrop of shenanigans and high-jinks in the Trinidadian fashion industry. McIvor’s lush descriptions are informed by her background as a professionally trained makeup artist. Aya de Leon: Although The God of Good Looks is positioned as a literary novel, and the writing has all the lovely craft a reader desires in literary fiction, I also see it as part of the conversation in crime fiction. Do you see the book in connection with the crime fiction genre? Breanne McIvor: I love crime fiction and I love the idea of The God of Good Looks being in conversation with that genre. Of course, I would never class this book as classic crime fiction. But crime is the backdrop to my characters’ lives; murder, robberies, gang and gun warfare, white collar crime, and government corruption have all wormed their way into the national consciousness. In some ways, this is a book about how to build a life in a such a country. There are times when Bianca literally can’t leave her house because she hears gunshots in the street and Obadiah’s home life has been shaped by the threat of thievery and stray bullets. Initially, Obadiah sees his job in the beauty industry as being totally unrelated to Trinidad’s ever-increasing crime rate. And it may seem like he has a point. Makeup and murder are two entirely separate issues. But in a society where crime stalks everyone, Obadiah ultimately has to ask whether he can or should ignore the menace. AL: Yes. It’s character-driven, and also an integral part of the setting. In previous interviews, you’ve talked about how you were pressured to take the elements of crime out of the story to appease a white tourist gaze on the Caribbean. Can you say more about the reality of crime in Trinidad and why you insisted on authenticity? BM: Trinidad and Tobago has the sixth highest crime rate in the world and living under a near constant threat of crime, especially violent crime, leaves an indelible impact on you. Something as simple as a strange car idling outside your house would be a reason to lock all the doors, take a picture of the license plate, and peer out the curtains to make sure you’re not about to be robbed. I lived in Trinidad until I was eighteen and it wasn’t until I went to university in England that I realized how much of my life was centered around trying to make myself a hard target for criminals. It took me a while to get used to houses without burglar proofed windows or to feel safe walking on the streets after dark. Although I’m writing fiction, I want to represent my country as I live it. I’ve spent enough time making police reports and recovering from various crimes myself to know that it would be impossible for Bianca and Obadiah to remain untouched by crime. I wanted Trinbagonians reading to see the truth of our country reflected in this book and I wanted international audiences to know Trinidad as a real place and not as a perfectly packaged tourist brochure with all the undesirable bits edited out. I hope that this novel can be part of a conversation about the scourge of crime while leaving space for readers to think about why some people feel as if crime is their only path to a better life. AL: Well said. Crime is the path of upward mobility for those who don’t have access via the traditional pathway, education. My third novel, The Accidental Mistress is also about a Trinidadian makeup artist who is a product of class mobility through education. It’s also a crime and a romance novel about respectability politics and the failed promise of the American dream. My character goes to a US college prep school and then to Harvard. For people of color in general and people in former British colonies in particular, education and upward mobility have been offered for generations as our path to salvation. Yet for Bianca, her UK education was a bridge to nowhere. In the book, it positions her isolation after her mother’s death as the biggest obstacle to her building a successful life after college. But I felt the novel hinting at a broader critique of the system? Can you comment on that? BM: I think you phrased it perfectly: education is often touted as a path towards upward mobility and respectability; in Trinidad, a foreign degree is often seen as better or more prestigious than a local one. However, Bianca’s affair with Eric erases any respectability her educational background may have given her. She’s fired from her magazine job, not because she’s not good at it, but because being associated with her is social poison. Meanwhile, Eric keeps his much more prestigious job as the Minister of Planning and Sustainable Development. Ultimately, power or proximity to power is more important than qualifications or abilities and it seems as if Eric is too high and mighty to experience any negative repercussions. I think my implicit critique is the people who really understand this dynamic are often people from the upper classes. People like Eric are raised in a robust network of powerful families and often have a gilded path to success. I wanted to ask how people on the fringes of society can succeed in a system where connections are often your most valuable asset. Both Obadiah and Bianca realize that they don’t live in a meritocracy. Obadiah is a phenomenal makeup artist and Bianca is a talented editor with all the right qualifications, but those things aren’t enough to guarantee their career success. Part of their journeys is discovering how they can work together—and use any advantages they might have—to realize their dreams. AL: I loved that thread of the novel. And how Bianca had to develop new dreams after her foreign education trajectory to success was derailed. Like Bianca, you grew up in Trinidad and were educated in England, then returned. Beyond the logistical, are there particular parts of Bianca’s emotional arc that are autobiographical? BM: I think that, like Bianca, I’m on a journey towards loving myself. Neither Bianca nor I had lives that went the ways we hoped after moving back home; although, my experiences were vastly different from Bianca’s (thankfully!). We both went through periods of embracing unhealthy coping mechanisms but I’m doing a lot better now and I think that, by the end of the book, Bianca is too! AL: Yes, and clearly writing is one of Bianca’s passions that develops through the book. I was really curious about her freelance writing and editing life in Trinidad. Are there any magazines in Trinidad like your fictional magazine, either the version of the publication from the beginning of the book or the version from the end? BM: Yes! The God of Good Looks is set before Covid and, at that time, many local businesses used physical magazines as a way of reaching customers and communicating that they were elite publications. Some of those magazines were clever, insightful reads and some seemed more slapped together, like Extempo is before Bianca becomes editor. I’ve written for and edited local magazines and those experiences helped me in the creation of Extempo. Post-Covid, a lot of that magazine culture has moved online, and many magazines are no longer in print, but for a long time they were flagship publications that helped a lot of businesses. AL: And this is part of what I find so special about this book. I was raised on the story of the twenty-something girl in the city figuring out life and love with her first job at a magazine. These are typically New York stories, and I was thrilled to see a Caribbean take on it. Did you set out to write one of these novels, or did you just look back later and realize that it had all the elements? In the novel, Obadiah explains why he adopted his God of Good Looks persona by saying: “When I first started in this business as a stupid sixteen-year-old, I’d said shit like “all women are beautiful”. I’d practiced the barely there brand of beauty makeup that I still secretly prefer. It got me nowhere. Eventually, I realized people wanted a little less Jesus Christ and a little more Miranda Priestly.” I was definitely influenced by The Devil Wears Prada – a classic take on the story you described – and it looks like Obadiah was too. I love the twenty-something female character with the dumpster fire life who’s working at a magazine, struggling with romance, and figuring out her identity. Bridget Jones’s Diary was another influence on my work. Funnily enough, I hadn’t read the book or seen the movie while working on my earliest drafts. However, after my agent compared The God of Good Looks to Bridget Jones, I read it in a single sitting. I was blown away by the ways my novel was so similar to a book I’d never read. Looking back, I grew up in a Bridget Jones inflected world; so, the aspects of the book that permeated popular culture were part of my consciousness. In later drafts, I was more deliberately influenced by Bridget. For example, each month has a funny and meaningful title in Bridget Jones, like ‘FEBRUARY Valentine’s Day Massacre’ and I was inspired to divide my own book into six sections with titles that are (hopefully) funny and meaningful too. So, I was aware that I was writing my novel in the wonderful literary tradition you described. At the same time, I loved being able to locate my story firmly in Trinidad instead of New York or London. The glitz and glamor of a big city lends itself to certain plotlines. However, setting my book in Trinidad allowed me to excavate modern realities of my country. There’s a Toni Morrison quote that’s become something of a cliché in literary circles: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” I’d never read a book set in the Caribbean beauty industry, so I wrote it. When some early readers were surprised that a makeup artist as good as Obadiah could even exist in the Caribbean, that made me more eager to show a new face of my country to international audiences. AL: Yes, I loved how the book was an expansion of that literary tradition, but also really disrupted it. When you set those stories in New York or London, the focus can be narrowly on the magazine and the relationships. When the setting is the heart of empire, the entire global political and economic context that makes that industry and life possible is invisible. But you can’t tell that story in the Caribbean without colliding with larger issues of colonization and how the colonial structure has created hierarchies that pit different groups of people against each other. I loved how you use POV to look at class and gender, and differences in privilege. The primary narrator is a woman who was raised upper middle class and the secondary narrator is a man who was raised in poverty. How did you intend to have gender and class intersect in the novel? BM: For hundreds of years the Caribbean was a plantation society, and the plantation continues to echo through our present, especially influencing our attitudes about race and class. Both Bianca and Obadiah come from families who have experienced some degree of racial and class discrimination; however, Bianca’s family’s wealth meant that she was able to transcend that discrimination to a degree. Conversely, Obadiah is born into generational poverty and still feels the brunt of socially acceptable bigotry. So, in this regard, Bianca is clearly the one who has more privilege. However, the thing that makes Bianca most vulnerable to Minister Eric Hugo and then most susceptible to slut shaming is her gender. Of course, people of all genders can experience this kind of trauma, but there is still a socially conservative tendency in the Caribbean and elsewhere to place the responsibility for sexual purity squarely on the shoulders of women. So, Bianca is blamed by the public for her affair with Eric, although he’s older, more powerful, and he’s the one who’s married. Obadiah has never had to navigate this gendered aspect of respectability politics and so he’s incredibly dismissive not only of Bianca’s relationship with Eric but of his own sister’s relationship with a more powerful, older man. At the start of the novel, both Obadiah and Bianca are mired in their own realities, focused on the reasons that they’ve been ostracized from society. But as they get to know one another, they’re forced to confront attitudes they’ve casually held for years and interrogate privileges that they weren’t even aware they had. The ghost of the plantation may bestow some privileges on us in the Caribbean, because of our gender, our class, or our color, but those only hold for as long as we’re willing to conform to society’s unspoken rules. So, Bianca’s respectability flies out the window once she has an affair with a married government minister. As the novel progresses, both Bianca and Obadiah realize that they have to let go of limiting, culturally entrenched ideas to really allow people to exist in all their complexity. AL: Thinking about the book in conversation with crime fiction, I think about how adultery was a crime in the UK until the Matrimonial Causes Act in 1857, during which time Trinidad was a British colony. So the sexual politics in the book also have criminal roots. I also think about the MeToo movement and how Eric abuses his power in his relationship with Bianca. So, in some ways, this could be considered a crime novel that is told primarily from the POV of the victim. Bianca has clearly been victimized by sexual double standards and is a casualty of respectability politics. What were some of the dots you were wanting to connect around gender and crime? BM: I’ve had five knee surgeries and I was recently limping due to some issues with my knee. I was in a professional context, and someone made a joke about my limp; the punchline was that my boyfriend must have gotten fed up of all my talking and beaten me up. Almost everyone laughed. I think that story is a microcosm of how certain sections of Trinidadian society normalize gender-based violence and treat crimes against women as a joke. It’s the same with sexual double standards. Bianca’s affair with Eric Hugo could have been a catalyst for hard discussions. Instead, Bianca too becomes a punchline of jokes after the affair is made public. As a society, we sometimes undermine the legitimacy of sexual double standards or crimes against women by resorting to humor. The wider implication of this is that often, when a woman is a victim, she’s not sure if she will be taken seriously or if there is even an avenue for her to make a complaint. When Bianca is working as a model, a sleazy photographer runs his finger along her bare legs without her consent. Bianca contemplates continuing to work with him because she knows that there is no avenue for recourse and, if she were to make it an issue, she would be branded as ‘the problem’. As long as swathes of our population continue to have a casual or even mocking attitude to gender inequalities, we’ll be perpetuating a system where women are not empowered to protect their bodily autonomy or to question why their respectability is contingent on following unspoken patriarchal guidelines. AL: Yes! All of that. Also, in terms of gender, one of the most powerful aspects of the novel for me was how Bianca’s perspective on most of the men in her life changes so drastically over the course of the novel. I don’t want to spoil too much, but some of those shifts were as powerful as a twist in a crime novel. Did you start out with that in mind, or did it just unfold with the story? BM: I always knew that I wanted this to be a novel of emotional breakthrough and catharsis. So, I knew that Bianca would have to re-see and re-evaluate several of her relationships with men as the book progressed. However, how that happened changed dramatically as I drafted and re-drafted the novel. I recently read a beautiful Mary Oliver poem that said: This pretty little beast, a poem has a mind of its own. Sometimes I want it to crave apples but it wants read meat. And I think that perfectly captures how sometimes the needs of a work or the needs of your characters transform what it is you thought you were writing. I thought I knew exactly how Bianca’s character arc would pan out, but my final draft was very different from my initial outline. AL: Finally, in terms of gender, I was surprised by the fatphobia in the novel. I think my idealized version of the Caribbean is that women’s bodies are more accepted than in the US/UK. And yet we see Bianca severely restricting her eating as a model. I found myself wondering: is this about cultural influences from the US? The fashion industry worldwide? Shifts in how classism affects narratives of ideal bodies? (In previous generations, big bodies reflected resources to have abundant food. Today, slim bodies can be expensive to maintain). Can you comment on fatphobia, both in Trinidad in general and in the story in particular? BM: “Yuh getting fat!” is a common greeting in Trinidad and it’s never said in a positive way. My friends and I have often vented to one another about how socially accepted it is for other people to make detailed and often critical comments on our bodies. The Caribbean doesn’t have a homogeneous attitude towards beauty but the Trinidad I grew up in was hardly ever body positive and while I have encountered pockets of radical self-love, those are in the extreme minority. Certainly, in the world of local fashion, thin remains very much in. There’s a scene in the novel where Bianca is told that she has to weigh below 125 if she ever wants to make it as a model; that’s based on a real-life experience when I was told exactly the same thing. I wasn’t even modelling at the time; I was shopping for clothes and a stranger who worked in the fashion industry took it upon himself to tell me first that I could be a model and then that I would need to lose weight to succeed in a job that I’d never expressed any interest in. I think local fatphobia can partially be a product of influences from more dominant cultures, like the US, as well as the worldwide fashion industry. But it’s not a recent phenomenon locally. Many Trinidadian women I know have been pressured to be thin by their parents and grandparents, who have all internalized the idea that beauty has a weight limit. Of course, the version of thinness has changed over time—for example, the heroin chic look of the nineties gave way to the trend that favored big booties on slim bodies—but the ideal woman has been flat-stomached for ages. I knew that if I was writing about beauty and fashion in Trinidad, I wanted to depict the complexity of that world. So, I wanted to show makeup as an essential component of Trinidad’s Carnival creativity and the ways that fashion can help us to be the most authentic versions of ourselves. However, I also wanted to show the commodification of beauty in a patriarchal society and the ways that harmful beauty standards erode an individual’s sense of self-worth. I put a lot of thought into how I would write Bianca’s food restrictions. I was purposefully minimal with the details because I didn’t want this book to potentially be used as a how-to for disordered eating. However, I wanted to examine the effects on a person when they are bombarded with messages that they are most physically attractive and most worthy of love when their body is forced to conform to very narrow beauty standards. I wanted to ask what it would take for someone to eventually question the traditional beauty narrative and how hard it would be to really let go of such a socially ingrained ideal. Since the book has come out readers have been in touch—both from the Caribbean and the wider world—with stories of the ways their relationship with their bodies and with beauty is fraught and complicated. I’m both happy that Bianca’s beauty journey resonated with readers and sorry that so many of us still have to embark on these lifelong quests just so we can love ourselves as we are. AL: The climax was so suspenseful! You really nailed the pacing and the plotting, and it unfolded almost like a thriller. I started out writing heists, and now I’m writing spy fiction. I read and watched so many different thriller stories for inspiration. Do you read heist or spy fiction? Do you watch that genre of film or TV? BM: Thank you so much! I love a good thriller, including heists and spy fiction. I actually just finished reading Anthony Horowitz’s James Bond novel With a Mind to Kill. If you want a lesson in how to write a tight plot, read a thriller. The best thrillers build to a crescendo and you feel like you physically cannot put the book down because you have to know what happens and when you get to the ending, your heart is pounding because you suspect that the villain is going to get his comeuppance, but you’re not sure how the hero is going to pull it off. Obviously, The God of Good Looks isn’t a thriller, but I wanted the denouement to have a similar quality. I do also love a heist or spy movie or series, for much the same reason I love the books. Recently, any films or series I watch has had some escapist element—a psychologist could probably read a lot into that—but I do love getting lost in the tropes of spy movies like nations waging shadow warfare, double agents, high speed chases and, of course, the highly trained and incredibly lethal spy. AL: I have written in the past about Dominican author Cleyvis Natera’s work in this literary/crime borderland. Are there other Caribbean novelists writing in the hybrid crime/literary genre that you would like to tell us about? BM: First of all, I am such a fan of Cleyvis and I highly recommend her brilliant Neruda on the Park! For me, the don of Caribbean crime fiction is Jacob Ross. I adored The Bone Readers, which combines a police procedural with a young man’s attempt to discover which renegade policeman killed his mother. The novel is deeply rooted in Caribbean life and culture, with writing that is chef’s kiss good and a protagonist that you’ll be rooting for all the way through. The Bone Readers is the first in a four-part crime series and I’m eagerly awaiting the next installment. Marlon James’s Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings combines crime and literary writing in the most exquisite multi-generational epic. The story is told from the viewpoints of multiple characters from the ghost of a murdered politician to gang kingpins, CIA agents, drug dealers, and would-be assassins. It’s a sprawling novel knotted together by the force of these characters. At the heart of the book is the attempted assassination of Bob Marley and the rising tide of violence in Jamaica in the seventies and eighties. AL: Fantastic. So here’s my final question: this is your debut novel, what’s up next for you? BM: I’m working on something that could potentially be my next novel. My first drafts are always extraordinarily awful, sometimes I cringe when I re-read the writing! But I’m compelled to keep going; I’m so excited to see where these new characters will take me. View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Sarah Ochs, The Resort (Sourcebooks) “An escapist up-all-night thriller that holds you under and doesn’t let you surface for air.” –Lucy Clarke Brandy Schillace, The Framed Women of Ardemore House (Hanover Square) “Twisty, engaging, and thoroughly unexpected, The Framed Women of Ardemore House is a must-read for any mystery lover. Featuring a unique cast of characters and a village full of dirty little secrets, this book delivers a fresh take on the English cozy.” –Deanna Raybourn Kit Frick, The Split (Atria/Emily Bestler) “A knotty Sliding Doors–esque thriller about two sisters who share a dark secret. . . Frick keeps readers deliriously off-balance, tossing out just enough breadcrumbs to make the truth seem obvious only in hindsight. The format gives new life to the unreliable narrator trope. This is an exhilarating puzzle.” –Publishers Weekly Iris Yamashita, Village in the Dark (Berkley) “[A] compelling story, perfect for readers of crime novels set in isolated areas or those that feature strong, independent characters.” –Library Journal Jack Clark, Nobody’s Angel (Hard Case Crime) “My favorite fiction novel this year was written by a taxi driver who used to hand it out to his passengers. It’s a terrific story and character study…Kudos to Hard Case Crime for publishing Mr. Clark’s book.” –Quentin Tarantino Tom Baragwanath, Paper Cage (Knopf) “Baragwanath’s debut is both social novel and thriller, spinning the tensions between the white and Māori populations, the chokehold of street gangs, and the toll of drug addiction on young families into a suspenseful crime drama. . . . Just the kind of dark, disturbing, gritty, and unusual treat thriller lovers are looking for.” —Kirkus Reviews Gwenda Bond, The Frame-Up (Del Rey) “A clever art heist, a smoldering old flame, an irresistible found family tied together through magic . . . Gwenda Bond’s The Frame-Up is a twisty, riveting, and fantastically original story.” –Elle Cosimano Casey Sherman, A Murder in Hollywood (Sourcebooks) “A well-researched and new take on one of Hollywood’s most notorious mysteries. True-crime fans and celebrity mavens will enjoy.” –Library Journal Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes (FSG) “A scintillating and kaleidoscopic vision of opium’s role in the past several centuries of global history . . . Exquisitely written and packed with astonishing insight, this is a must-read.” –Publishers Weekly Ronald Drabkin, Beverly Hills Spy (William Morrow) “A beguiling tale of espionage and double-dealing in the years leading up to World War II. . . . Drabkin’s expertly narrated yarn, based on a trove of recently declassified documents, is constantly surprising, and it’s just the thing for thriller fans who enjoy kindred fictions of the Alan Furst variety. Strap in for a narrative that demands a suspension of disbelief—and richly rewards it.” –Kirkus Reviews View the full article

This isn’t exactly the hottest take you’ll come across today…but crime is bad. Even experiencing a minor crime is pretty terrible. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it! No wait, I said that wrong. That sucks. Sorry. Let me start over. So much of crime fiction can be a grim wasteland of humorless men hellbent on spilling blood, and we should… Okay, I just reread that sentence, and that actually sounds like a kickass movie, probably starring someone like Jon Bernthal, and now I want to see it. What I’m trying to say is that, although crime and violence are often horrific, and writers have a duty to convey that seriousness, there’s an importance to letting the occasional light moment shine. I’m always impressed with the writers who manage to do that well, and there are few better than Carl Hiaasen. In Skinny Dip, one of my favorite Hiaasen novels, the protagonist Chaz Perrone is a shady marine biologist who is helping a business destroy the Everglades. When he suspects his wife of realizing his plans, he pushes her off a cruise ship. But she ends up being saved by a handsome stranger and decides, with the help of that stranger, to derail Chaz’s plans. Much of what defines a classic comic crime novel is here. The destruction of the Everglades ties Hiaasen’s novel to the great traditions of crime fiction, ground that has been walked by Chandler and Hammett and more, which is the lone wolf or underdog against larger societal structures, often the political or financial establishment (or both). And there’s dark humor in Chaz throwing his wife overboard. Not that spousal murder is comic gold, but, look – there are far grimmer ways he could have killed his wife. That humor and tone is continued and enhanced with Chaz as a bumbling criminal, one of the more successful tropes in crime fiction, particularly comic crime fiction. We know Chaz is dangerous because he tried to kill his wife, so the danger is there and true and, if he gets his act together, his wife is in real peril. But there’s going to be humor, along with the potential of romance, both which keep the darker elements of the novel at a distance. Kellye Garrett’s celebrated debut novel, Hollywood Homicide, is one of my favorite blends of comedy and crime. Her protagonist, Dayna Anderson is a down-on-her-luck, out-of-work actress who, as the story opens, is interviewing for a job at a restaurant whose slogan is “Ask Us About Our Large Jugs.” The very first two lines of the novel are: He stared at my resume like it was an SAT question. One of the hard ones where you just bubbled in C and kept it moving. The comment about tough questions on the SAT, which answers you skip, lets us know that Dayna’s not some borderline genius, but she’s aware of that. And she can laugh about it. That self-awareness is hugely important, because it also tells us that Dayna is going to tread the line between self-deprecation and mockery, which immediately defines our expectations of humor. Another great moment, that reflects the immediacy of introducing humor and how it can expertly establish character, happens when Dayna describes Joey, the man with whom she’s interviewing. She notes that he probably doesn’t have “a centimeter of hair anywhere on his body.” And, immediately, she makes a mental note to “ask him about his waxer.” In addition to comedy, this gives us quick insight into Dayna, about what she sees as important. She’s a little on the shallow side (maybe more than a little), sarcastic, and interested in looking good. But that’s presented comically, so it’s not off-putting to the reader. That’s an incredibly difficult tightrope to walk, one Garrett nimbly skips across. Those first examples are from a comic novel and cozy, both which lend themselves to humor. But Lou Berney used comedy to wonderful effect in this year’s fantastic Dark Ride. Berney’s latest thriller opens with an ambitionless stoner who, while paying a traffic ticket, sees two small children with cigarette burns dotting their bodies, and the sight relentlessly haunts him until he’s driven to help. Which, no, doesn’t sound funny, but that’s part of what makes Berney—like Garrett and Hiaasen—one of today’s best, most compelling writers. Berney’s protagonist, Hardly, is warm-hearted and likeable and deceptively complex, but he’s also aware (and, initially, welcoming) of the stagnation in his life. This is brilliantly reflected in the reactions of the people he draws to his cause. Like the young goth attendant at Driver Verification, when Hardly tells her he’s decided to help those children: “You?” she says. “You are going to investigate and look for evidence? That is the most delightfully hilarious thing I’ve heard in ages.” I’m not offended. Believe me, I’m just as dubious about my qualifications as she is. Like Garrett, Berney employs sarcasm for his humor, but note the difference in how they apply sarcasm, compared to the mean-spiritedness that type of humor often implies. There’s a warmth in it, a self-effacement that lessens the vitriol. As a writer and reader, I’m drawn to that warmth. I employ and seek it because, when writing and reading about crime, we’re often (as much as the victims are) looking for answers. Without it, the palate of colors doesn’t seem quite as vibrant. As one of my favorite musicians said, when talking about how trauma informed his early work, “I didn’t yet know that the easiest colors to paint with are the darker colors.” As someone naturally drawn to dark colors (for real, all my tattoos are black and gray), I’ve found moments of humor utterly necessary in my work. When creating the character of Lucky Wilson, a hitman who is one of the protagonists of When She Left, I realized the conflict in him was the pull to his family and the allegiance to his work. And I decided to lean into that, and gave him a love for all things Christmas. That added layers to Lucky and the novel I hadn’t yet realized. And it made the harder, evil elements of the novel somewhat easier to write. We need the warmth. There has to be somewhere for readers to turn when it’s cold. *** View the full article

Imagine yourself stepping back in time a hundred years, traveling to London. North of the Thames, the wealth lived amid the beautiful gardens, fancy department stores, and night clubs. South of the winding waterway that divides London in two, the neighborhoods weren’t so posh. Lambeth, Southwark, and the Elephant & Castle neighborhoods brought shuttered munitions factories leftover from the first world war. Brothels abounded. Trash blew down the unwashed streets, and grungy hovels and falling down apartment buildings populated nearly every block. Tenants were migratory, running out on their rent because they simply couldn’t afford it. Poverty had reached new heights, and the air crackled with a new kind of energy leftover from the war—an overflow of loss, anger, and the swift degradation of the social classes. There also weren’t enough police. It was a perfect setting for criminal activity. Enter Diamond Annie, one of the most renown female thieves in UK history and leader of the Forty Elephants, an all-female gang. It’s 1925, height of the roaring twenties, and Diamond Annie trains her girls not only on the best shoplifting practices and other cons, but on how to use a blade. She wouldn’t dream of leaving home without her blackjack razor in case any unexpected scrapes with the police, or a scoundrel, arises. Thanks to Diamond Annie, the Forty Elephants are the strongest, most clever female shoplifting ring London has ever seen. These are real women, a real gang, with a real need to survive. I was completely captivated by the history of this all-female crime syndicate, and the fascinating ways they duped the street police at the Met (Metropolitan Police). I began a little preliminary research after discovering them in an article about London, and the next thing I knew, I found myself in the feverish throes of writing my new novel, Queens of London. The Forty Elephants (also known as the Forty Thieves in earlier decades) can be traced as far back as the Victorian era, a time when women wore voluminous skirts and overcoats, and in the case of the all-girl gang, special pantaloons sewn with large pockets. The many layers and pockets made it easy to snatch a slip of silk or a strand of pearls and stash them in their undergarments. But these brazen women went beyond the easy trinkets and were said to have lifted entire gowns, or bolts of fabric when the situation called for it. They were a brazen, bawdy bunch that also seduced men while looting their wallets, or falsified documents to obtain work, where they quickly emptied the till or made off with the silver. Like any organized crime, the Forty Elephants had something of a system in place, but it wasn’t until Alice Diamond, aka Diamond Annie, came into power and orchestrated more intricate and demanding cons that the gang flourished. She was excellent at reading people and used her skills to not only keep her girls “in check,” but to dupe shopkeepers and the police alike. Diamond Annie made for an intriguing main character. Part ruffian, part domineering mother hen, she also happened to believe her winnings served one major purpose: to indulge in the luxuries her class couldn’t afford. The Forty Elephants may have lived in the seedier neighborhoods of London, but they dressed to the nines in flapper attire, flaunted baubles and furs, and frequented the famed clubs in 1925 SoHo. In Queens of London, Diamond Annie goes beyond the indulgences of the luxuries that she covets. She’s on the make, looking for a home base for her girls and ultimately, to expand her dark empire from the west end department stores to other cities in southern England. A story like this wouldn’t be complete without portraying the other side of the law. One of the first female police in Britain emerges at the same time, fresh from the battlefields of WWI where she acted as a nurse. Lilian Wyles began her stint in law enforcement in a volunteer patrol and swiftly became one of the “real” and best policewomen at Scotland yard. In fact, down the road, she earned a promotion as one of the very first female chief inspectors. Things weren’t easy for policewomen in 1925 Britain. The already-small troop of women was being whittled away by the government and those who didn’t believe women had a place in law enforcement. It was in these circumstances that Lilian Wyles must prove her worth—and bag a worthy criminal to gain respect. In Queens of London, Diamond Annie and Lilian’s worlds collide in the midst of a major heist. And in the meantime, they cross paths with a half-Indian orphan on the run who is grappling with her identity and where her next meal will come from, as well as a beautiful, underestimated shop clerk. Fact and fiction mingle in an atmospheric, rollicking, and sometimes-tender tale that I hope will capture the imaginations—and the hearts—of readers as much as it did mine. *** View the full article

Mary Shelley did not grow up with a mother; she grew up with a dead mother. Her mother, the eighteenth-century writer Mary Wollstonecraft, had died giving birth to her in August 1797. Her father, the writer William Godwin, was so brokenhearted that he found it hard to be around young Mary. As a child, she spent much of her time at her mother’s gravestone in Saint Pancras’s Churchyard in Camden. Muriel Spark has written about how Mary would go there alone to read, to think. Reportedly, she learned how to write her own name by tracing her mother’s tombstone. She would read her mother’s books furiously, studying them under the grave. As Sandra Gilbert wrote, Mary’s “only real ‘mother’” as a girl “was a tombstone.” It was the closest she could get to her brilliant, late mother. It was also a place where she could escape her new family. When she was four, her father remarried, and Mary spent her childhood trying to avoid her stepmother, the obnoxious Mary Jane Clairmont, and dodging her clingy stepsister Claire. The Wollstonecraft gravesite was the only place where she felt like herself. And, as such, it was the place she brought the handsome poet Percy Shelley when she wanted to tell him that she had fallen in love with him. Lisa Frankenstein, the new film written by Diablo Cody and directed by Zelda Williams, takes its inspiration from many different kinds of cult classics: murderous 80s high school flicks, Cody’s ahead-of-its-time high-school horror movie Jennifer’s Body, the Universal Studios monster movies of the 1930s and 40s, the ur–text of Frankenstein-derived sex comedies The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and of course, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, itself. But it also draws from the life of Mary Shelley herself, a young woman who grew up feeling incomplete, afraid that her very existence was the thing that killed her incredible mother, a young girl who felt alone and looked for love, of many different kinds, in a cemetery. In such a cemetery is where Lisa Frankenstein begins. Our heroine, Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton) spends her free time in an overgrown cemetery in the woods near her new house; in the wake of her mother’s tragic death, her father has remarried and moved the family to a new town. Lisa finds herself in a new school during her senior year, stuck with a nasty stepmother (Carla Gugino) and gleeful stepsister Taffy (Liza Soberano). Aside from Taffy, though, she is generally alone. She rarely speaks. She silently crushes on a brooding literary boy named Michael (Henry Eikenberry), spends Saturdays doing tailoring repairs at a dry cleaner’s, and generally recuses herself from family outings. The only place where she is able to relax is in this cemetery; she makes friends (as much as one can), with a tombstone, a weather-beaten bust of a young man who died during the Victorian era. There, she takes etchings of the grave, reads out loud, and gives the bust a rosary which had once belonged to her mother. But one night, during a freak storm, a bolt of lightning brings the owner of Lisa’s favorite grave to life. And he (Cole Sprouse), mud-caked, decaying, bloated, full of insects, and missing quite a few body parts, comes to find her. What develops is an entertaining comedy, part zombie movie, part romantic comedy, part goth-girl bildungsroman. Basically, Lisa has to try to figure out how to hide her new undead friend from her family and schoolmates. Until, that is, she and The Creature wind up with a dead body on their hands and realize that they can harvest parts to put him back together again, with help from Lisa’s stitching skills and a broken tanning bed with the power to electrocute. Visually, the film is stunning; the production design and cinematography glow in foggy, neon neo-gothic. The word “Frankenstein” in the film’s title might reflect the film’s methodology as much as content; it is, ultimately, a composite of many different kinds of things from many different movies and eras and horror-phenomena, all knitted together into a movie. But as it goes along, it does find an identity of its own. This is helped by the fabulous performance of Newton, absolutely nailing her character’s vibes from underneath a cloud of Elsa Lanchester-meets-Heathers Chandler hair. Magnetically quirky and always sympathetic, her Lisa conveys fathoms of genuineness amid a movie full of appropriate genre and period (it’s the 80s) artificiality. And Sprouse, by the way, is charming as the grunting-but-lovelorn corpse. But the most interesting character in the film is ultimately Taffy, Lisa’s new stepsister, played to lovable earnestness by Soberano. In movies like this, where everything is exaggerated, it’s essential that the supporting characters remain cartoonish; real-world concerns and questions aren’t supposed to creep in. The loveliness of her character reflects the biggest issue with the film, which is that it teeters too far into sincere humanity. You want to root for Lisa and The Creature to start harvesting body parts so that they can make him complete without feeling guilty about how this might psychologically affect others (the way you can, for example, root for the murderous inamorati, Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, in Heathers). And yet, Taffy’s richness does just that; it adds porosity to the neat, airtight little coffin that preserves the film’s dynamics. And you don’t want airholes in something like that! You don’t want the outside atmosphere to seep in, or it will speed up decay and ruin things. Just because Lisa Frankenstein is missing a few limbs (actually, when you think about it, it’s that it has a few too many limbs), doesn’t mean that it’s not a wonderful time. As a horror comedy, it is a bit underdeveloped in places and overdeveloped in others. But as a work of literary-historical allusion and even reclamation, Lisa Frankenstein is tremendous. I was delighted—delighted, I tell you—at how the dynamics of Mary Shelley’s biography were worked into the Frankenstein story. As both Dr. Frankenstein and Mary, with her eventual lover as both a Percy figure and The Creature, Lisa Frankenstein reshuffles the details of Shelley’s own life to give her legacy a kind of romantic fulfillment. Smartly responding to its source text, it braids together themes of isolation, motherly loss, romantic love, carnality, desire, and death. Shelley’s opus reflects the attitudes about herself and her own life; Frankenstein is a tragedy about a monstrous child who ruins the life of his parent, who learns everything he can and traverses the world in an attempt to find meaning and never does. Percy Shelley, the man Mary brought into her world when she was a teenager, the one she hoped would take her away from her heartbreaking domestic situation, would come to her abysmally; he left his young wife and children to be with her, had affairs with others, including her stepsister, drove a wedge between her and her family. In Lisa Frankenstein, these details are moved elsewhere into the narrative, allowing the Romantic-era man who pledges his love to our Mary-stand-in to embody other qualities: namely, an undying devotedness to her. Which is fun and sweet. In other words, Lisa Frankenstein is mostly a delight, a smart and earnest film whose heart beats for the texts that inspired it while also standing on its own two feet, even if it limps a little on its way. View the full article

When it finally happens, they’re too nervous to enjoy the upcoming crash. This is what they wanted, the onset of symptoms. It’s like meeting someone new. There’s fear there, folding into every action. They worry and they wonder what might happen. Olivia wakes up around 7 in the morning feeling dehydrated. She rushes into the kitchen, shouting Will’s name until he stirs, roused to notice. “I think it’s happening!” Will seems jealous, “Really?” The thermometer hangs in her mouth. “Here, your turn,” Olivia says, handing him the thermometer. “99.7F.” He feels fine but uses it anyway. Beep, the verdict is… 98.4F. “It might take more time for you,” she says, trying to make him feel better. “Everyone’s immune system is different.” “Yeah,” he says. He opens the fridge and pours himself some orange juice. “Tell me what you’re feeling.” “I feel like I’m hungover, basically.” She thinks about how to better describe it. “There’s a slight throbbing, might be the onset of a headache. My mouth is dry, my nose feels itchy. Everything feels like it’s been rundown, you know?” “I do,” he nods. He downs half the glass and then looks out the window. There’s the ever-present worry that the landlord might be back today. Someone walks by and looks in the direction of the window. Will closes the curtains, afraid of being spotted. “You should go back to bed. It’s easier to feel the symptoms that way.” She seems to agree, taking two painkillers. “Just in case.” It’s not that they don’t want to feel the pain. It’s in many ways pleasant, especially when it’s so all-consuming that they can think of nothing else. It’s more like they take medicine because it’s all part of the charade. Her headache will pierce through the veil that the dosage will temporarily provide. Popping those pills, it gets her excited. She comes alive, a skip in her step, as she walks into the other room. Will remains in the kitchen, brooding with disappointment. He picks at the fresh scab on his arm, a trace from the other night’s syringe party. Because there’s not much else to do, Will lays down on the couch. He stares at the television screen, not bothering to turn the device on. * He falls asleep and wakes up gagging. Dehydration. Onset symptoms. His heart skips. There it is! There it is! He induces a cough, playing sick, and Olivia walks back into the room. “Oh my god!” He smiles, “Dry mouth, dizzy.” Naming the symptoms, it becomes clear that this one is Gregory. Their crash is on the horizon, and he gets in the same bed as her, the two of them taking their temperature again. The number has climbed, 100.5F and 99.6F respectively. There’s a palpable sense of comfort, knowing that they will soon be sick enough to fade into an unconscious haze. Theirs is a discussion entirely about keeping each other abreast of every feeling. “I feel warm, and then I feel so cold. Freezing. It’s getting worse too, not quite chills yet, but soon. I can feel the fever climbing. My voice also seems off right?” “Right,” he says. “There’s a little congestion.” Excerpt continues below cover reveal. “Tell me what you’re feeling.” She extends her arm, a mere inch away from touching his skin, but stops short. It’s a gesture that’s made to say, I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. He nestles around her, spooning her increasingly sweaty body. “Headache. It’s dull right now but I can feel it getting worse.” He seems to know what she’ll ask next. “I’m not going to take any painkillers.” “It helps,” she says. “Makes you feel the ache from a different angle.” “Naw, Gregory won’t get the satisfaction,” he jokes. “Ouch, I just felt a pain in my temples.” “Your body is going to be very busy fighting Gregory off. I bet you’ll have full body aches.” “Do you think we’ll get any nausea?” “Maybe,” he says. “I’m hoping we come out in a rash.” Her eyes light up, “Have you ever?” “No,” he says. “You’d think I would at some point. I can’t recall a crash where my skin showed the full extent of the attack.” “That’s so crazy,” she yawns. “Go, sleep,” he says. “What time is it?” He looks over at the clock on the bedside table, “Not even 11AM yet.” She’s already fading. He sings to her, a light melody, something made up. Her breath slows, becomes heavy. Asleep, he aims to do the same. He sings to himself, staring up at the ceiling. It’ll happen soon. Gregory will give them a hellish few days. * She wakes up screaming. Will’s entire body jolts, springing to action immediately. “What? What is it?!” Olivia doesn’t say anything, instead massaging her forehead. Headache has cut through the dosage. He notices the sheets are damp. She’s sweating profusely, her clothes equally damp. “Damn you’re really burning up.” The thermometer is back in her mouth, revealing that she is reaching 102F. “The crash,” he says. Olivia can barely speak, “Fever, aches, chills, splitting headache, dry mouth… nightmares.” “Enjoy it,” he says. He still exhibits just one symptom, headache. Tears well up and she tries to stand up. “Don’t.” “I need to…” She strips off her clothes, revealing her entire body. Will doesn’t even notice, “Back to bed. You’re probably hitting the peak.” He’ll notice it later, when he’s wide awake, watching her sleep. Her back will reveal a pattern of tiny red dots. There it is, worth the wait. A rash. By then, he will feel the fever beginning to mount. Where she felt cold, his entire body will be on fire. He’ll be unable to stay awake. Both asleep, they’ll stay in bed until well after nightfall. * They don’t have much of an appetite. At some point, she pisses herself. The complete loss of bladder control is something new. Will helps her out of bed. The circular pool of dampness is unmistakable. The same could be said for the smell. The atmosphere of the apartment has been tarnished, a sensation of complete unease coursing through every corner. This is the site of a tragedy unfolding and they are the stars. This is the site of a tragedy unfolding and they are the stars. He has begun to sweat, his shirt wet around the armpits. He takes off his clothes too. Knotted into his chest hair is a fragment of a potato chip. When was the last time he showered? They lay side by side on the couch, the television turned on to a random channel. “My body is confused,” she says, her hand going south, between her legs. “I’m wet.” He looks down at his own genitalia, limp and unaroused. “I wonder what that means.” “I don’t know,” she groans. “But this is new.” The rash has spread across much of her body. He points to her chest, “Do they itch or hurt?” She shakes her head, eyes closed. Gregory is sapping all her strength. “No. They don’t hurt or itch at all. They seem to be just for show.” Another groan. “My head, ugh it’s pounding.” “Mine too,” he says. They remain on the couch, in and out of fever induced sleep. * By nightfall, they are already beginning to tire of Gregory. The spasms don’t last very long. The aching joints and body parts leave them both around the same time. Their fever remains, much like the rash. “You’re right. It’s for show,” he says, inspecting his arm. She sighs, “Yeah.” He starts itching the rash, hoping to aggravate it, make the most out of something that should have been more menacing. She seems to follow his lead, scratching her back. Really getting in there too, her fingernails leaving thin red streaks, cuts that would make anyone wince. Olivia breaks the skin, smearing blood across her back. Congestion settles in, though absent is a cough. He snorts and swallows, but this is nothing like the others. It’s barely cause for any lost senses. Around this time, they begin to inspect the crash itself, and what it has become. Kind of like a review, they talk about which symptoms remain. “I still have a fever, some congestion,” he says. “The rash,” she adds. “There’s that too.” “Gregory has been an afternoon,” he muses. “But it’s now evening and I’m starting to feel a bit different.” “Me too,” she says. You can hear the disappointment in her voice. “Incubation didn’t take long at all. But it’s also a quick crash.” “I know,” he frowns. “I would have hoped it would have been longer.” “This is the part I always hate,” she says. She stands up and does a few stretches. He stares at the TV. “I’m always hoping it’ll be the next one. The biggest crash… but then we get a string of minor strains, things that could never last longer than a few days tops. You could say I’m starting to get a little frustrated.” “It’s this part,” she says. “Right now, when I feel so light, like nothing at all can stop me. I know this is it, this is the delusion. It makes me feel so confident and so happy, but really what’s happening is that I’m getting over Gregory. The details are the first to go, especially the particulars of the crash itself. They start to fade out and soon I’ll feel everything. It’ll feel the way it felt before. So many times before.” Will crosses his arms, sinking into the couch, “You know what I’m going to say next, don’t you?” “Ugh,” she stomps her foot. “No, not tonight.” “We’re going out. Tomorrow.” Olivia isn’t happy with the reality of their situation and decides to take a shower. Will remains seated on the couch; something on television catches his eye, the playback of a movie he’s seen before. A man with nothing left to lose goes searching for the people that ruined his life. “Isn’t it always that way,” he says to nobody, to himself. __________________________________ From THE BODY HARVEST. Used with the permission of the publisher, CLASH. Copyright © 2024 by Michael J. Seidlinger. View the full article

This year’s crop of excellent upcoming horror novels includes folk horror, wilderness thrillers, slashers in space, serial killers in the city, and a wide variety of supernatural entities. There’s plenty of queer romance and some well-earned queer vengeance. The gothic continues to reign supreme, but splattergore makes a respectably bloody showing. Amusingly, there are also two different novels on this list about Americans renting haunted Italian villas…I know, the list is going up in February, but I included January titles anyway. Jenny Kiefer, This Wretched Valley (Quirk, January 16) A group of climbers heads to a remote valley to scale an impossible cliff in this tense wilderness horror. Of course, things do not turn out as planned, as Jenny Kiefer takes us through a litany of nature’s terrors and man’s folly, including some white knuckle scenes of rock climbing without ropes. Christopher Golden, The House of Last Resort (St Martin’s, January 30) This is the first of two haunted house in Italy novels on this list! In the latest high-concept horror from the reliably terrifying Christopher Golden, a couple working remotely move to Italy and buy a cool house with a dark backstory. They probably deserve what’s coming to them in terms of expats and housing shortages, honestly…Although the town they move to is suffering severe population decline (attributed to the lure of the city, rather than the body count of the local ghosts). Tracy Sierra, Nightwatching (Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, February 6) Tracy Sierra has done the impossible: changed my mind about the home invasion thriller. In Nightwatching, a young widow is shocked one night to find an intruder in her home, and spends several desperate hours using all her wit and wiles to protect her children and find a way to seek help. While much of the story is about the night itself, just as gripping is what happens afterwards. Kirsten Bakis, King Nyx (Liveright, February 27) The first novel from Kirsten Bakis in 25 years! In King Nyx, set during the height of the Spanish Influenza, a sensible woman of a certain age and her flighty yet devoted husband head to a remote island. They’re looking forwards to a stay at the manse of an eccentric robber baron; her husband is hoping to finish his magnum opus on meteorological anomalies (rains of fish, frogs, blood, etc), and Bakis’ narrator simply wishes to get some rest. Upon arrival, however, they find out that multiple girls have gone missing from the rehabilitation home/workhouse also located on the island, and they must isolate in quarantine for at least two weeks before they even meet with their mysterious benefactor. There are neighbors in quarantine as well, also on the island for an intellectual retreat, and Bakis’ narrator soon teams up with the kindred spirit next door to understand what’s going on. Bakis’ symbolism is particularly on point, with a creepy garden, a beautiful set of parakeets, and automata aplenty. Future students will highlight the crap out of this book. Gwendolyn Kiste, The Haunting of Velkwood (Saga, March 5) Kiste wowed me with her psychedelic take on classic gothic heroines, Reluctant Immortals, and her new novel is just as eloquent in defending women’s rights to determine their own fate (and follow their own hearts). In The Haunting of Velkwood, a neighborhood that appears to have vanished is the subject of a new documentary on unexplained phenomena. Only three of the original residents escaped the town, and now, the film crew wants them to go back in. But the documentarians don’t understand that what these three left behind is dangerous, dormant, and wants to see them pay for what they did before they left…Eerie and evocative! Jennifer Thorne, Diavola (Tor Nightfire, March 26) I was a big fan of Jennifer Thorne’s folk horror Lute so I devoured her new book, and what a fabulous read it was. Diavola takes place mostly in a Tuscan villa where a family has gathered to dine, drink, and bicker; meanwhile, the villa’s ghosts grow hungry, and ready to punish those who disturb their rest. Diavola is an evocative gothic with a hilarious sense of petty family dynamics, and I enjoyed every word. Stephen Graham Jones, Angel of Indian Lake (Saga, March 26) Finally, we get the conclusion to Stephen Graham Jones’ era-defining Indian Lake trilogy with The Angel of Indian Lake. I am in awe of how good these books are, and the third certainly lives up to the well-deserved hype. Stephen Graham Jones also has another novel coming later this year that I’m just as excited for: I Was a Teenage Slasher, to be published by Saga on July 16. S.A. Barnes, Ghost Station (Tor Nightfire, April 9) S.A. Barnes is quickly gaining a reputation for her claustrophobic and oh-so-creepy space horror. I first came to her work through last year’s Dead Silence, which took a salvage crew to the haunted remains of a Titanic-inspired luxury space cruiser. Her new novel, Ghost Station, features a psychologist in a lonely outpost desperate to prevent an outbreak of a murderous and mysterious condition among the secretive crew. I’m waiting to read this one until the next time I’m on a plane—the recycled air and potential for terrifying disaster really adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the experience… Liz Kerin, First Light (Tor Nightfire, April 23) In this sequel to Liz Kerin’s emotional vampire horror Night’s Edge, Kerin’s heroine is finally rid of her toxic, abusive mother, and ready to go after the monster who made her mother that way. Kerin is skillful at depicting monstrosity as a metaphor for addiction and domestic violence, and showing the contradictions between loving impulses and engrained bad behavior. Johanna van Veen, My Darling Dreadful Thing (Poisoned Pen Press, May 14) Another gothic take on spiritualism, and a novel one! Johanna van Veen’s haunting debut follows a young woman and her hungry spirit companion as they leave behind a life of swindling seances for a new friendship (and budding romance) with an heiress in possession of her own otherworldly companion. What do these two women and their companions want? What will they do now that they have met each other? And what will those surrounding do in order to assuage their jealous suspicions? E. K. Sathue, Youthjuice (Hell’s Hundred, June 4) In the first release from Hell’s Hundred, the new horror imprint from Soho Press, E. K. Sathue’s main character earns all the press release’s comparisons to Patrick Bateman. Just a run-of-the-mill sociopath at first, the narrator soon gets sucked into the murderous enterprise of a wellness company with an incredibly suspicious number of missing former interns and a CEO who appears to bathe in blood. This book makes me glad that I interned at an archive…Although I did go on a serum buying spree about half-way through reading it. Gretchen Felker-Martin, Cuckoo (Tor Nightfire, June 11) Gretchen Felker-Martin forever won my heart with her splattterpunk horror novel Manhunt, and now she’s done it again with a queer conversion camp thriller that is truly terrifying to read. Felker-Martin writes with sensitivity and righteous fury about the many torments the teenage characters are forced to endure in the name of heteronormativity, and the stakes are ever higher as the kids begin to realize that even those who leave the camp are no longer themselves—and many will not leave at all. Felker-Martin excels at creeping out readers with her off-kilter descriptions and gory details, and I wouldn’t open this one up while eating. Also quick shoutout to one of the only authors out there with consistently sympathetic fat characters who also get to have sex. Thank you, Gretchen! Paul Tremblay, Horror Movie (William Morrow, June 11) The “books about cursed productions” trend continues, as horror maestro Paul Tremblay takes us onto the set of the shot-for-remake of a legendary cult classic that never made it to the screen. Horror Movie is narrated by the actor who played the monstrous object of derision known as “The Thin Kid” in the first production, and has agreed to reprise the role in the remake. We’re not sure if we can trust his recollections, but his disturbing account provides plenty of fodder to condemn both the original film and the remake. Monika Kim, The Eyes are the Best Part (Erewhon Books, June 25) In this darkly funny psychological horror, a college student must protect her mother and her sister from her mother’s creepy new boyfriend. Like all the other men in their lives, he’s trying to reduce their humanness into stereotypes about doll-like, submissive Asian women, and Kim’s protagonist is certainly not going to let him get away with it. She’s also spending a lot of time having intense dreams about eating bright blue eyes, standing over her sleeping enemies and fantasizing their demise, and generally losing touch with reality in a way that pays plenty of dividends by the novel’s end. John Fram, No Road Home (Atria, July 23) A wealthy preacher’s compound is the setting for this gothic parable from the author of The Bright Lands. The narrator of No Road Home, newly wedded to the beautiful scion of a megachurch pastor, is visiting his wife’s family for the first time when a storm closes them off from the rest of the world just as their patriarch is found dead. Even before the disturbing demise, Fram’s hero is already having second thoughts about the marriage: her relatives keep making snide remarks about his gender nonconforming son, it turns out his wife only married him to unlock her own inheritance, every family member appears to be keeping secrets, and someone’s been painting threatening messages warning of vengeance to come. Oh, and there’s also a ghost and some very disturbing paintings… View the full article

Research is an important part of the writer’s life — especially for writers like me who haven’t worked in any of my characters professions. My general rule-of-thumb is if a fact is plot critical, I will strive to get that detail right. Such as, if a body is discovered in the woods, I won’t describe it as skeletal unless the environment and time passage would result in a skeleton. Or if the killer uses a poison, I need to at least understand how that poison works, the symptoms, and how quickly it can kill someone. But research is not just about forensic details — albeit, they are important in crime fiction. Research is also about people and society. Some is subjective — as a mom of five, I have a different life experience than someone who doesn’t have children; I also have a different experience from mothers today or my grandmother’s generation. This is why reading widely and talking to not only friends but strangers helps to create believable characters — I want to understand people and why they do what they do. Real people in the real world help me create realistic people in my fictional world. Sometimes, I need to do a deep dive into a subject that I think I know about, but barely understand. For The Missing Witness, that was the homeless crisis. First, The Missing Witness is crime fiction — LAPD Detective Kara Quinn returns to Los Angeles after being on loan to the FBI for eight months in order to testify against a human trafficker who she’d arrested. But when Chen, the trafficker, is killed on his way to court, Kara not only needs to find out why, but locate a whistleblower who is now in grave danger. When I started writing this book, all I knew was the set-up about Kara and Chen. Everything else came organically as I wrote. After Chen was killed, I needed a good reason for his murder. So I thought about what had to happen for him to be successful in his illegal business — he brought in Chinese women and forced them to work in his factory. After talking to a friend of mine who works in local government, I realized he must have bribed people. Inspectors. Politicians. Cops. Then an idea started to form. I just needed a backbone for the graft and corruption that led to his murder. I have read widely about the homeless crisis, specifically on the west coast. I have my own opinions about the situation. I embraced an article I read that discussed the different types of homeless people — from the temporarily homeless to the chronically homeless, from the drug addicts to the mentally ill — and what might be done to help them. I’ve read about harm reduction and housing first and homeless vets and drug addiction, specifically the growing fentanyl crisis. I think most of us have read a little about a lot of different things, and we generally gravitate toward articles and theories that we are predisposed to believe, and disregard those that are in opposition to our beliefs. Once I decided I needed a specific graft and corruption scheme as the motivation for Chen’s murder, I started thinking about the way governments and non-profits fund homeless programs. I read an in-depth article by investigative reporter Katy Grimes in Sacramento that explained how some non-profits operate. One entity applies for a government grant to provide a service to the homeless population. That entity has two principles who each take a six-figure salary, then disperse the remaining money to another non-profit that is run by someone taking a six-figure salary who then disperses the money to other non-profits. There is virtually no accountability or transparency in these programs. They report their expenditures and because there are no strings to the money (a failure of the government grant program), they haven’t committed a crime. Another article I read showed the astronomical cost per unit to build housing for the homeless — in Los Angeles, one project exceeded one million dollars per unit! People are literally dying on the streets. They don’t need a million dollar condo. They need shelter. These articles, and more, confirmed my beliefs of the waste and fraud in the homeless funding programs. Then I started looking into the people who are homeless, and the obstacles in their way. Before, I was jaded. We all see panhandlers. We see people sleeping under tarps at bus stops, in tents by the side of the road, taking over parks and paths. We see people clearly high, others talking to themselves, others looking vacant and lost. I blamed them. I was of the mindset that the choices they made in their life put them in this position and if they wanted to, they could get a job and support themselves. The state of California and local governments spend billions of dollars every year to provide shelter, food, and resources for the homeless, and if these people didn’t want to take the help, that was their fault. I was done — after billions of dollars, these people were still living on the streets, in garbage and squalor. Homeless crimes are up — as victims and perpetrators. They needed to “get their act together.” I considered most of the homeless “druggies” and didn’t have much sympathy for their plight especially knowing that there were options for them — they just had to try. Then I talked to social worker Kevin Dahlgren who has three decades of experience working with the homeless. I connected with him through his X (Twitter) page because he posted short videos of interviews with people who were homeless. (He now has a substack blog where he writes in depth about his experiences working with the homeless: https://truthonthestreets.substack.com). I wanted to understand why homelessness has increased even though we’ve spent billions of dollars every year to fix the problem. Kevin talked to me for hours about what he sees every day. Kevin confirmed what I understood about the funding, the lack of accountability and transparency (much of which ended up in The Missing Witness as the backbone to the corruption.) But Kevin also talked about why people are homeless and why most of the programs in place fail. Kevin believes in “empowering, not enabling” the people who live on the streets. That means finding out where they are right now — why are they homeless? Do they need drug counseling? Mental health treatment? He has worked with women who aren’t addicts but on the street because they left an abusive spouse. Too often government programs are cumbersome and it’s hard to figure out how to use the resources. For example, one homeless man Kevin worked with was desperate to get clean, but all the shelters had people using drugs next to him and he couldn’t resist. He wanted a place to sober up, but he was severely dyslexic and couldn’t read the forms to apply for a bed — and the government employee who handed him the forms wouldn’t read them to him. So he walked away. And yes, there are people who don’t want to stop using drugs, and recognize they can’t keep a job if they’re high. Addiction and untreated mental illness are rampant among the homeless population. Many female addicts exchange sex for drugs. They talk about it as if this is just how it is and they expect nothing more. These stories and more have shifted my perspective on how I view the homeless. Some people are temporarily homeless and they’re the easiest to help — they need a helping hand to get them into housing, job training, etc. Some people are harder to get off the streets. But if the billions of dollars the government is spending isn’t used to help people on a case-by-case basis — if employees won’t read forms to a man who wants help but can’t read — then the system has failed. After all this research for my book, I realized my thoughts and beliefs about the homeless shifted. I realized that I had looked at the homeless as one entity, instead of individuals. Now, I no longer lump them into a single group. I no longer look at them as a mass, but as unique human beings who each have a story. The only way we can truly fix the homeless crisis and bring it back to manageable levels is to fund programs that actually address each problem and give these people real options. Government doesn’t need more money — they need to spend their money on programs that work. As Kevin says, we need to empower these individuals to get off the streets, get clean, and become self-sufficient. We shouldn’t enable them to continue behavior that will certainly put them in an early grave. I write fiction and my primary goal is to entertain my readers. I don’t endeavor to stand on a soap box and talk about issues I care about. But sometimes, there’s a topic that comes up that resonates so strongly, that I can’t help but write about it. So in The Missing Witness I used the very real homeless crisis — and the waste and fraud that seem to be built into the system — as the backbone for what I hope is a thrilling mystery. *** View the full article

Writing a long-running series is a challenging undertaking. With each new book, the goal is to stretch the boundaries, to keep expanding the possibilities for the characters – and do that without breaking the rules of the series. Because every series has rules. Some of them are small but important – they tell us who these characters are. For example, old-school cop Harry Bosch is not going to suddenly give up classic jazz and start listening to Taylor Swift. Joe Pickett won’t take off his cowboy hat and put on a beret. Other rules are baked in so deeply that to break them is to break the entire series. Jack Reacher settling down and having kids? Not gonna happen. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache moving to Tucson to sell real estate? Uh, no. Every once in a while, though, a series writer wants to step outside the box, color outside the lines – in other words, break some rules. That’s exactly how I felt when starting my eighth Peter Ash novel, The Price You Pay. I wanted to create something outside the bounds of what I’d done previously, something that would push my characters farther than I’d ever pushed them before – and also make me push myself as a writer. I did this by reversing the roles of the main character, Peter Ash, and his best friend, the semi-retired career criminal Lewis. Instead of Peter meeting someone in trouble, and calling on Lewis when things get rough, this time it’s Lewis in trouble, needing Peter’s help. This dynamic allowed me to dig deeply into Lewis’s mysterious past, bringing up long-buried secrets that will threaten everyone they care about. This not only raises the stakes in an entirely new and personal way, it also allows readers to see Lewis as they never have before. Before I began writing, however, I went back to four long-running series to see how some of my favorite authors have pushed their own boundaries. As it turned out, the books I found were not only some of my favorites in each series, they’re also standouts in excellence that showcase how series writers can really shine by breaking their own rules. Robert Crais – The Watchman (Elvis Cole and Joe Pike #11) The first books in this excellent series were focused on Elvis Cole. Joe Pike had a strong and distinctive presence, but the early novels were primarily from Elvis’s point of view. L.A. Requiem was a departure from that model, featuring combined first- and third-person points of view, and it rocketed Crais into the very top tier of crime writers. I loved L.A. Requiem, but for me, the book that really redefined the series was The Watchman. For my money, it’s the first true Joe Pike book. I already knew Crais had serious chops, but this book really knocked my socks off, even on my third read. The voice and tone are entirely different from the early Elvis novels, and Crais puts the reader in Joe Pike’s head and heart in an utterly convincing way. After this book, the series was never the same – in the best way. Lawrence Block, 8 Million Ways to Die and When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (Matthew Scudder #5 and #6) Of all the writers who have influenced me over the years, when I mention Lawrence Block, he somehow seems to have the least name recognition. Which I don’t understand at all, because Block’s Matthew Scudder series, about an alcoholic ex-cop who works as an unlicensed investigator, is one of the absolute best crimes series out there, racking up many awards and landing on best-seller lists. It’s also a master class in the long arc of character development, as Scudder starts low, slips down to rock bottom, and eventually pulls himself into sobriety. In addition to tight and compelling stories, the writing about alcohol and addiction feels utterly real and compelling without being overblown or melodramatic. (One of Block’s primary talents is a kind of elegant understatement.) The first few books are, for me, a bit more workmanlike, but soon Block’s writing begins to soar – and he writes two out-of-the box books in a row. The first, 8 Million Ways to Die, ends with Scudder introducing himself at an AA meeting, which changes the entire course of the series. Then Block writes When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, a gritty story set more than a decade earlier, when Scudder’s addiction is raging out of control, and the reader gets to see what Scudder’s life might be like again, if he can’t keep himself sober – which raises the stakes of every novel that follows. Simply put, I can’t recommend these books, and this series, more highly. Lee Child – The Enemy (Jack Reacher #8) In Lee Child’s outstanding Jack Reacher series, the first seven books have Reacher, an ex-army loner, bulldozing his way through the present-day world as a civilian, although in several books Reacher does have a limited connection to law enforcement. In The Enemy, however, Child goes back to 1989 to show us Reacher’s life as the unit commander of the 110th Special Investigations Unit. And Child reaps the rewards of this simple yet elegant choice. Although it is mentioned often in earlier books, readers had never really seen Reacher at work with the Special Investigators. Child also gives us Reacher’s real-time take on the Army, military life, and the chain of command. This combination deepens the reader’s understanding of the character and the series by showing the forces that shaped him and his choices later in life. More than anything, though, this move into the past puts readers on notice that this series will go wherever Child wants to take us – and we’ll happily go along for the ride. Robert Parker, A Catskill Eagle (Spenser #12) Parker’s Spenser series is legendary, especially the early books, which were truly groundbreaking in their characters and subject matter. In form, however, they stuck pretty close to the traditional private eye novel, recognizable from books by Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald – perhaps because Parker’s Ph.D. thesis was principally about these three authors. In true P.I. fashion, Spenser’s cases were almost never about his own problems, but about his clients’. A Catskill Eagle, however, was the exception that proved the rule. When the book opens, Spenser is estranged from his girlfriend, Susan Silverman, who has gotten herself into trouble. The entire novel is about Spenser’s love for Susan and his search for her – in effect, Spenser is his own client, something we hadn’t yet seen in a Parker book, and rarely saw after that. Whenever I talk to Parker fans, this book almost always comes up as a standout. For me, it’s the best in the series. *** View the full article

Relaunching a famous series is always a dicey proposition, especially if a new set of creatives are taking over for the original author. Think of all the writers tasked with writing new James Bond or Jason Bourne novels—it’s easy to replicate a prose style, harder to capture the original spirit while evolving it in compelling ways. With a television series like “True Detective,” which recently launched its fourth season with an all-new showrunner and writers, the stakes are doubly high, given a rabid fanbase and the relatively short time since the show’s previous iterations. Does the new season succeed? Issa López, the showrunner who wrote or co-wrote all the latest episodes, wisely takes much of what made the show’s first three seasons work so well, while tweaking other elements so it becomes her own beast. The action is set in the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska, which sits in darkness for much of the winter; a group of scientists disappear from a nearby research station, only to be rediscovered on the tundra, frozen into a gruesome sculpture. As local police chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) tries to solve the case, she crosses paths with state trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis); the two share a secret, bloody history. Both are constantly at odds with their fellow officers, and half the town seems haunted by ghosts real and metaphorical. In contrast to previous seasons, which largely hinted at supernatural elements, this season is all-in on the mystical and occult: a murder victim’s body part mysteriously reappears after six years, a man in a coma shouts messages seemingly from the great beyond, and an invisible force likes tossing oranges in the dark. Judged on its own, those supernatural elements bring this season more in alignment with Arctic and Antarctic horror flicks such as “The Thing” and “30 Days of Night.” The genre-blending doesn’t work for everyone; as Joyce Carol Oates tweeted: “’True Detective’ commingling genres: mystery/crime/detection with horror/gothic/surreal. this merging is always to the detriment of the detective story since a police investigation depends upon scientific principles; once you introduce the supernatural, the story is in free fall.” But then again, the series has never been shy about toying with the definition of a police procedural. Dark History The first season of “True Detective” was a freak of nature. You had an actor on a professional hot streak (Matthew McConaughey) who had enormous chemistry with his co-star (Woody Harrelson); a writer (Nic Pizzolatto) who’d tooled with the story as a possible novel before transforming it into a six-part screenplay, giving the narrative a singular voice; and a director (Cary Fukunaga) with a flair for visuals, including one very memorable tracking shot. That alchemy translated into awards, huge ratings, a major place in the cultural firmament. The plot’s central element—the pursuit of a serial killer—might have been standard-issue, but there was something exciting about McConaughey as Detective Rust Cohle and his anti-natalist ranting, along with the tight bond he builds with Harrelson’s Detective Marty Hart, a good ol’ boy who isn’t very good at all under the surface. When was the last time you watched a series where the most memorable parts were two guys arguing about philosophy during long car rides? It’s always a tricky proposition to guess a writer’s intentions, but after the soaring success of the show’s first season, it seemed like Pizzolatto was emboldened to take on the Mount Everest of crime fiction: epic California noir. As a writer, if you get this particular subgenre right, you stand on the peak alongside “Chinatown,” James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet, “Heat,” and other masterpieces; if you get it wrong, everyone derides your work as hacky pastiche. The second season of “True Detective” follows four characters (three morally wounded cops and a gangster trying to go legit) as they tackle rot and corruption in the industrial city of Vinci, on the edge of Los Angeles. Upon its debut in 2015, many of the show’s critics were unkind; a spirited debate raged online as to whether Pizzolatto had delivered a turd or something great. (I think there’s a lot to like in those eight episodes, but there’s a roughness to it—potentially a consequence of a rushed production schedule and multiple directors.) Which brings us to the show’s third season, starring Mahershala Ali as Ozarks detective Wayne Hays across three (!) timelines. It’s something of a return to the first season’s framework: a haunted detective obsessed for decades with a single case; a macabre mystery involving powerful men; and a complicated, chatty relationship between Hays and his cop partner, Roland West (a wry Stephen Dorff). It received favorable reviews, more for the characters than the central mystery, but it didn’t win the accolades of the first season. Which Brings Us… …back to Alaska, and Danvers and Navarro standing before all those frozen corpses. Throughout the years and different showrunners, “True Detective” remains the most distinctively spooky show on television. But here’s the thing about this season versus the ones written by Pizzolatto, particularly season three: López really makes things move. There are moments of introspection, but every episode is a chain reaction of cliffhangers, deaths, and twists. Not all of it sticks, but in a weird way, that also works in the story’s favor: at its best, it plays much more like an old-school, weirdo pulp novel than Pizzolatto’s efforts, which tried for a much more meditative, literary take on the old genre tropes. And whatever your feelings about the supernatural elements (Hi, Joyce!), there’s a proud tradition of procedurals and crime fiction melding with horror. In the mid-20th century, the feverish pulp ecosystem produced magazines like “Strange Detective Stories” and “Strange Romance” that tried to synthesize elements of both; and those, in turn, were the spiritual forefathers of books like William Hjortsberg’s “Falling Angel,” eventually made into the movie “Angel Heart.” López is just playing out a longstanding thread. Even if the horror elements have been dialed to eleven, though, this edition of “True Detective” tones down the philosophical musings that marked the previous seasons; these cops don’t have time for any of that. For much of the season, Foster’s Danvers and Reis’s Navarro largely pursue their investigation on separate tracks, and their main car conversation—that staple of previous seasons—is more funny than existential or revealing. It’s a smart move to avoid echoing Pizzolatto’s most famous writerly trick, because it gives López more leeway to shape “True Detective” in fresh ways. It’s fun to watch something familiar mutating into new form. View the full article

I hadn’t planned to go anywhere that night. Tara made mac and cheese on the stove and I watched Octonauts with Mason until she called us in for dinner. It was just the three of us: me, my son, and his grandma. Mason’s dad, Roman, was in the city, and Tara’s fiancé, John, was working late. We finished eating and I washed the dishes while Mason and Tara built Lego spaceships in the living room. I opened a beer and scrolled through my phone. When I heard Tara say, “Time for bed,” I met them at the bottom of the stairs. “I’ll do bedtime,” I offered. “I want Gerty to do bedtime,” said Mason, touching Tara’s leg. “Mommy can do tonight,” Tara said. “No.” I wasn’t going to make him say more. I knelt and opened my arms. “Can I have a good night?” Mason gave me a big hug, both arms. “Good night, Mommy,” he said. He kissed me on the cheek. “Sweet dreams, baby. I love you.” “I love you, too.” I watched them walk up the stairs, his rejection scratching at my heart. In the kitchen, I finished my beer and was about to open another when the text came in. What else did I have to do? It was eight o’clock on a summer Friday night. Why not distract myself from the fact that my child loved his grandmother more than he loved me? It wouldn’t always be like this, I told myself as I put on my new sandals. The ones I bought because I knew Roman thought ankle straps were sexy. Soon, everything would be different. * Roman answered the call reluctantly. He was hungover and hungry and squinting into the sunlight as he sat in traffic on the Palisades headed north from Manhattan. “I’m so glad you picked up!” said Daniel. “Ash is an hour late and she’s not answering her phone. Can you tell her to get her ass in here? I’ve got to pick up my mom.” “I’m not home,” he said. “I left early.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. He’d left yesterday and was just now driving back. Daniel could be a gossip, and he didn’t need the whole town wondering why he hadn’t slept at home last night. “Are you sure she’s on?” Roman asked. His longtime girlfriend and the mother of his four-year-old son, Ashley Lillian, rarely worked at the local coffee shop anymore, though the owner did occasionally ask her to cover shifts. “She’s supposed to fill in for Bobby and train this new girl. I guess it was last-minute. But it’s not like her to forget.” If Ashley had forgotten her shift, or slept through it, she had probably been out the night before. She’d been going out more the last few months. Not that he could judge: he’d vomited in a trash can outside a Starbucks on Lexington Avenue this morning. “I don’t know what to tell you, man,” Roman said. “You could go by the house.” Koffee was on the town’s main street and the Grady house, where Roman and Ashley and Mason lived with Roman’s mom, Tara, and her fiancé, was barely a quarter-mile east toward the Hudson River. “I don’t think I can leave the new girl alone.” “I’ll be home in a half hour, forty-five minutes.” Daniel sighed dramatically. “Tell Ash I said she’s too old for this shit.” Roman hung up. He checked the GPS—blood red for the next three miles. The app indicated an accident. He pressed his fingers to his eyes. The air conditioning in his 2007 Accord was spotty, blowing cold out of one vent, hot out of the other three. They’d paid $600 to have it fixed two years ago, and he wasn’t going to do that again. He inched forward, surrounded by city couples and families with kids and dogs in their rented Smart cars, mountain bikes or kayaks attached to the roof racks. They were all headed out to enjoy their summer weekend in the mountains or on the river. They were smiling. At least some of them were. He felt like ass, but looking at those weekenders Roman Grady decided that he was going to do his best to enjoy his family this weekend, too. Tonight was the monthly town-sponsored outdoor movie. They’d all go with a picnic. They’d watch the fireworks and carry Mason home to bed, asleep. He texted Ashley: you up? call daniel He added a goofy face emoji. Ashley had been prickly and distracted lately, and instead of allowing her the space to work out whatever needed working out, he’d used it as an excuse to be exasperated. On Thursday night, he picked a fight while she put the dishes in the dishwasher and he prepped coffee for the morning. “Did you forget to get half-and-half?” He knew she had. It wasn’t in the fridge. “Was it on the list?” Ashley was in charge of grocery shopping, which had been challenging lately because her car was acting up. “I don’t know,” he said, though probably he’d forgotten to add it to the little notepad on the counter. “You have to put it on the list.” “You didn’t see we were out?” “I don’t drink half-and-half.” “Yeah, but you look in the fridge.” His heart withered in his chest as he thought about her disregard. She doesn’t see me. She doesn’t know me. She doesn’t love me. Ashley said nothing, which enraged him. He’d lived with this woman since he was a teenager and she knew he drank his coffee with half-and-half every morning, but she couldn’t be bothered to check if there was a carton in the refrigerator door before she went shopping? She checked for Mason’s snacks; she checked for Tara’s tea; she checked for John’s fucking energy drinks. His heart withered in his chest as he thought about her disregard. She doesn’t see me. She doesn’t know me. She doesn’t love me. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “I’m just saying that it would be great if you remembered what I like to drink. And if I forget to put it on the list, when you pass it in the store, you could pick it up.” She met his eyes. Roman was ready to have it out. He was ready to defend his grievance. But all she said was, “Okay.” Thinking about it now, he cringed. He’d been an asshole. He would apologize and he would make it up to her. As the traffic cleared and he passed the Bear Mountain Bridge, headed up the mountain, he felt ready to make real changes. * Connor was hammering at the roof when Roman finally got home. Classic rock trickled weakly down from a speaker balanced on the gutter. Roman’s grandparents bought the circa-1875 house in the 1980s and when they died—in a car accident when Roman was seven—Tara inherited it. Eight years ago, when Roman left for college, his mom had taken out a small loan, gathered some handy friends, and created a suite on the first floor to use as an Airbnb. But she should have spent the money shoring up the house. Two weeks ago, the ceiling in the suite collapsed and his mom had to refund $800 to the couple who’d had it booked in order to save her “superhost” designation. Tara’s fiancé, John, was in charge of fixing the ceiling and the leak that had felled it in time for the mother-daughter pair who were scheduled to arrive next weekend. John was a handyman. He’d worked construction crews in his twenties and thirties, and after his divorce started picking up freelance jobs. John could do everything from carpentry to drywall to tile, but he’d had to enlist his friend Connor for a couple days while he finished a job for a client up in New Paltz. Roman parked along the curb. With Connor’s tools and the detritus he’d dropped spread across the lawn, their house showed its age. The porch needed sweeping, the hanging flower needed water, the shutters needed straightening, and the whole thing needed paint. Ashley’s PT Cruiser was in the driveway but his mom’s car was gone. Tara must have taken Mason on some outing. Bang bang bang. Connor’s hammer echoed down the street. How could Ash sleep through this? He entered through the kitchen door and called for her. “Hello?” Was it possible Ashley crashed somewhere else last night? Bang bang bang. Roman opened the refrigerator and drank from the carton of milk. He grabbed a cheese stick and walked up the stairs to the third floor. Technically, Mason lived in the apartment upstairs with Roman and Ashley, but their kitchen was an afterthought, and the family mostly ate meals downstairs together with Tara and John. Roman often worked evenings. He was the sole reporter for the local paper—the Adamsville Advocate, circulation 8,000—and he covered meetings and retirements and dedications and graduations in three towns over a ten-mile radius. Tara, whom Mason called “Gerty”—the “g” sound for Grandma and “tee” for Tara—had Roman at nineteen years old, so she was just forty-four when Ashley gave birth to her grandson in the middle of Covid lockdown: April 12, 2020. None of the family was allowed in the hospital, and there were complications. When Ash and the newborn finally came home, she was barely recovered, and Tara became the boy’s caretaker. Roman peeled off the plastic wrapper and pulled down a string of white cheese, pleased with the symmetry of the strip. He folded it into his mouth. If Ash was here and not in a terrible mood, he’d walk to work with her and get a free bagel. “Ash?” He pushed open their bedroom door. The bed was empty, coverlet tossed over the pillows. Her toothbrush was dry in the bathroom. Roman went back to the refrigerator downstairs and the first thing he saw this time was a jar of strawberry jam. His son’s favorite meal these days was “jammich,” and damn if that didn’t sound good. He spread a thick layer between two slices of bread, and as the banging on the roof started up again, he called his mom. The call went to voicemail. Tara had a whole life on Facebook, but was fastidious about not using her phone around Mason, or while she was driving. He texted: call me pls Roman’s phone rang. Daniel again. “Is she on her way?” “She’s not here,” said Roman. “I’m sorry, dude, she must have forgotten. Maybe her phone is dead. I’ll have her call as soon as I see her.” Roman stepped back outside to check on the progress of the roof, and his phone rang again. This time it was his boss, Larry Mullins, the sixty-eight-year-old editor, publisher, and opinion columnist of the Advocate. “Hi, Larry.” “Did you forget about the bench?” Shit. Yes, he’d forgotten that he was supposed to cover the unveiling of a plaque on a bench in the town park that morning. “They’re waiting for you to start,” said Larry. It was the curse of working at a small-town paper: pretty much every event was important enough to cover, and yet almost nothing was so important they couldn’t wait for the reporter. “This is our bread and butter, kid,” said Larry. “You definitely can’t be making podcasts if you can’t remember the important stuff.” Roman knew better than to try to create some Mason-centered emergency as an excuse. Larry didn’t care. Although his boss had to pretend to embrace the family-friendly nature of the town whose newspaper he ran, privately he was a man with a heart as atrophied as his calf muscles. Recently Roman had asked if he could watch the live stream of a school board meeting instead of attending in person so he could take Mason to gymnastics class. Larry almost laughed: he’s got two moms, doesn’t he? Thinking back, Roman marveled at Larry’s ability to cut straight to the throbbing heart of the situation. Crudely articulating Roman’s silent, chronic fear: the boy doesn’t need me. “I’m on my way.” __________________________________ From I DREAMED OF FALLING, forthcoming from Minotaur in September 2024. Used with the permission of the publisher. Copyright © 2024 by Julia Dahl. View the full article

I Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2024) opens almost exactly the same way Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005) closes, with two cornered spies and lovers deciding to quit running and fight the world together. There is one difference: in Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane’s reimagining of Doug Liman’s film, our couple is immediately gunned down. They’re not the stars of this show, and this is not that movie. After bottling the 2005 cult classic (?), stuffing it with a rag, and flicking the lighter, this new take on the movie that launched Brangelina proceeds to invert the original’s basic formula in almost every way. Specific where the film was broad, biting where the original was cuddly—if Liman’s fun-but-flawed movie was a mere sketch of a relationship powered by pyrotechnics, then Glover and Sloane’s is a pointillist portrait of a flawed-but-fun relationship, shaded in and accelerated by gunpowder. It’s not a total departure; the show still takes many of its story beats and thematic cues from its source material. But it finds a new angle on old problems, ultimately using the Trojan horse of a fizzy spy caper to look with forensic intensity at both versions’ core target: marriage. In doing so, the show is certainly less afraid than the movie to bloody its titular ampersand, but its rare honesty and willingness to get ugly takes all that blood and paints a truer picture of a relationship with it—something a little closer to Ingmar Bergman than Ian Fleming. * The Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie version of this story is fairly straightforward: playing married spies who each think they’re wedded to an unknowing civilian (until their competing spy agencies task them with killing each other), Pitt and Jolie practically incinerate the screen as they subsequently seduce, shoot at, and support their future off-screen partner. The core tension of the movie revolves around the huge, glaring secret they’re both harboring, but once their eyes are opened, the conflict mostly falls away. Because they’re both spies, their shared revelation easily paves the way for radical honesty, and it only takes a few scenes of combat-as-courtship for them to arrive at the obvious conclusion that they can simply be a spy duo. Problem solved, honesty unlocked, marriage saved. We probably could’ve guessed that Donald Glover’s pass at that idea wouldn’t be so linear, especially since this version was originally pitched as a collaboration between multi-hyphenate auteurs, with Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge set to co-create the show with Glover and Sloane (a writer and producer on Glover’s Atlanta). Waller-Bridge eventually dropped out due to “creative differences” and was replaced by Pen15’s (terrific) Maya Erskine, but the final product retains the thorny complexity of its initial pairing’s promise. While the movie had the light pretense of using its high concept to jokily expose the truth about marriage, its real identity was easily unmasked as relational escapism. In their otherworldly beauty and deceptively simple (if violent) problems, Pitt and Jolie sold us a fantasy: what if my partner’s secrets were exactly the same as mine, and we could just rip off the band-aid and live happily (if dangerously) ever after? The show, meanwhile, starts at the end. Glover’s John and Erskine’s Jane know their situation from the jump, when they’re matched as a “married” duo by the faceless spy agency they work for. Sure, they don’t know all that much about each other’s past, nor even each other’s real name, but they know that they’re both spies, and that they’re partnered up regardless of any feelings they will or won’t catch. And yes, the show’s admittedly high concept puts the two of them in some fantastical spots, but their fears and struggles remain recognizable. The secrets these Smiths will have to overcome if they want their marriage or their partnership to survive are smaller than Pitt’s and Jolie’s, but less binary; far from fantasy, they’ll be fighting in the hard trenches of real relationship work. It’s a little less “What would life be like as sexy superspies?” and a little more “What if I had to marry and work with my randomly assigned post-grad roommate?” Both the idiosyncrasy and the relatabilty of that concept are a blast to watch play out, even if the aftershocks can be brutal. In the beginning, their actual work is surprisingly simple, which is mirrored by the show’s structure. Not unlike Poker Face’s recent return to a classic television format, Mr. and Mrs. Smith builds its story episodically, centering each episode around a one-off mission the Smiths receive from their dystopically anonymous boss, “Mr. Hihi” (he begins his text message assignments with the incongruous greeting, “Hi hi”). These missions are comically vague (“find the highest bidder at a silent auction and dose him with truth serum”), usually feature at least one splashy guest star (John Turturro, Parker Posey, Ron Perlman, and Michaela Coel, to name a few), and are often excuses for the show to take us to classically exotic spy locales (ski resorts, jungles, Lake Como). But whereas Poker Face’s episodic mysteries could mostly be taken on their own or even out of order, Mr. and Mrs. Smith uses its intermittent structure in the same way Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage did, to trace the arc of a relationship—toward each other, apart, around the world, and back together. In addition to being pegged to a mission, each episode aligns with a significant relationship milestone (“Second Date,” “First Vacation,” “Do You Want Kids?,” “Infidelity”), and we watch as this randomly assigned cover marriage predictably morphs into the real thing. Lest these spies appear too much like us, Glover and Erskine imbue their Smiths with an edge befitting their unique profession, coloring their (in many ways) naturalistic relationship with the heightened specifics of their situation. As they darkly joke to another pair of Smiths, they had to kill someone together before they were comfortable consummating their marriage, and they had to stare down death-by-child-soldier before anyone could say “I love you.” That’s part of the show’s tricky tightrope walk between the fanciful issues no real couple would face (“No one is forcing you to stay together, no one is holding a gun to your head,” a therapist tells them, even though that’s their exact situation with Mr. Hihi) and the heavy impasses that would be just as inescapable in any relationship (one person wants kids and the other doesn’t, one person wants to get more serious about work and the other doesn’t). For all the fun the show has, it’s committed to pushing past the honeymoon phase, dwelling in the hardest corners of partnership and taking a hammer (or a submachine gun) to its very foundation. A lot of shows purport to do similar things—even if a lot of spy thrillers don’t—but rarely do they achieve such vicarious feeling. The writing is so sharp, and the performances from Glover and Erskine are so lived in, that the characters’ emotions bleed from the screen. Some of the biggest laughs in an often funny series come not from complicated set-ups but from the little bits of relational humor that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever been with anyone: laughing in bed at an inside joke, or teasing each other for something no one but you even knows about. Ditto the hard stuff; most of the shots taken are verbal and direct hits, so much so that the tougher late-season episodes can leave you feeling like you’ve just had a game-changing fight with your partner. It’s not always an easy watch (or an easy sit), but that kind of emotional third wheeling with a fictional relationship is just about the best you could hope for from a show built around one. * “When people can see the cameras, they tend to behave inorganically,” says one character after being caught surreptitiously filming our couple. Well, that’s not the case here; despite the increasingly intense hijinx, Glover and Erskine lead a cast of surpassingly organic actors, all doing expert-level wetwork in the tonal twilight zone of a comic spy-thriller/relationship-drama. It helps when the people behind the cameras are equally laser-precise, and the show bears the marks of its directors’ greatness—starting with Glover’s longtime collaborator, Hiro Murai. Directing the first two episodes, Murai sets the show’s visual tone by continuing the clean, grainy look he brought to Atlanta and Glover’s “This Is America” music video. His action work also echoes his direction on Bill Hader’s Barry, rendering violence in staccato, matter-of-fact bursts that counterintuitively play cooler than if they were trying harder to seem cool. With the exception of an explosive Italian getaway, this iteration of the Smiths probably won’t sate the most thrill-starved viewers, as it’s mostly content to let its action punctuate the relationship that always takes primacy. But when it does hit, it hits hard. The Atlanta connections extend beyond Glover, Sloane, and Murai. Every one of Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s other directors (Christian Sprenger, Amy Seimetz, Glover himself) previously worked on the hit comedy, with the exception of Karena Evans—who directed Glover in a SZA music video in 2018. And yet, despite carrying over some stylistic tendencies and a general creative cohesion, Mr. and Mrs. Smith signals a greater departure from the stubbornly surreal Atlanta; compared to that groundbreaking show’s structural and thematic ambition, this one is practically Cheers. Still, despite its commercial trappings (Mr. and Mrs. Smith is currently streaming on Amazon Prime), it remains on a fascinatingly offbeat wavelength, using some of the “no-idea-what’s-coming-next” WTF-ness of Atlanta’s wildest episodes to build and sustain tension during the Smiths’ mysterious missions. The carte blanche nature of that mission-oriented structure also allows the show to prod and examine the couple’s evolving partnership with each episode, often placing them across from targets that convincingly reflect their own problems, present and future. First, there’s John Turturro’s malignant billionaire, who—double-dosed on truth serum, so you know he’s not lying—tells John and Jane that they got into this life not for the money, but because they were lonely. Then, when they’re tasked with surveilling another couple’s crumbling marriage just as their own relationship is burgeoning, the Smiths are forced to confront the scary possibility of what could be awaiting them at the other end of romance’s long parabola. One episode later, they’re faced with the opposite: the intimidatingly cool and obnoxiously happy older couple that makes you question the solidity of your own foundation. In all these scenarios, John and Jane ultimately turn against whoever is undermining their relationship, and toward each other—even if some of the questions provoked by their missions merit investigation. At their most ill-advised, these us-against-the-world rally points can feel like transparent justifications for avoiding harder truths. But they also circle one of the show’s most romantic ideas: that sometimes the logic and reason of should’s and shouldn’t’s can be overridden by simply, defiantly choosing one another—something Sarah Paulson’s therapist reminds our couple that they’re continuing to do, consciously or not, even when their relationship reaches a breaking point. (Shortly, they burn her house down.) And it does reach a breaking point, or several. Despite the shared spectacle, 2024’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith exists in a much realer world than 2005’s, and its spies have more complicated and conflicting personalities than simply “sexy-but-sloppy” and “sexy-but-stubborn.” Jane is capable and commanding, but she can also be cold—to the point of self-admitted sociopathy. That proves to be a tough match for mama’s boy John, whose charm and warmth can curdle into egotism and neediness. The show amplifies these seemingly irreconcilable contradictions with a chorus of similar romantic paradoxes. A divorced neighbor (Paul Dano) tells John that he doesn’t want to be with his ex… but being alone isn’t better. John’s mom (played by Glover’s real mother) acknowledges that Jane’s natural coldness makes it difficult for her to make John feel safe like he needs… but she also says that he understands complicated people. Crucially, a third party tells Jane that John wonders whether the couple is even compatible… but that he wants to be with Jane, even incompatibly. Still, their mutual yearning can only bridge the divide between them for so long, and as the secrets and incompatibilities continue to accrete, the back half of the show becomes somewhat of a bummer. If there’s a criticism to be made, it’s that we’re not necessarily shown enough of why John and Jane love each other. With large time-jumps between episodes, we’re often picking up at the end of what’s clearly been a good period of their relationship, right as it rolls into problem territory. It’s a bit like that old wisdom that if you tell your friends when you fight with your partner but not when you make up, they’re only getting the negative part of the picture. But then again, much of the show’s interesting tension lies in the fact that they didn’t pick each other—they just fell in love with the person that was picked for them. They’re also spies, which requires a certain level of callousness that inevitably spills over to their relationship. But even if we’re privy to more of the verbal gunfights than the seasons of bliss, we do see a lot of how they love each other. Amidst the sparring, we see them flirt, and hold hands, and trade compliments, and care for each other. Sometimes the “how” is the “why,” which recalls another old adage: you may like someone “because,” but you love them “although.” Even if their resolutions aren’t always the healthiest in a vacuum (often putting someone or something else in their mutual crosshairs, instead of each other), they find ways to make the best of their extreme circumstances, working their way to unexpected catharsis. Sharing a lakeside cigarette during a mission, they exchange the vows that their lack of a real wedding precluded. “I vow to never kill you,” John says. “I like that,” says Jane. No couple should have to make that promise, but because murder is an occupational hazard for this one, the declaration is somehow sweet. It also becomes heartbreakingly relevant as their relationship nears its endgame. After a season of trying to make it work, a series of last straws and Mr. Hihi-instigated misunderstandings finally push this John and Jane to their own version of Pitt and Jolie’s iconic mid-movie showdown. After chasing each other around lower Manhattan and eventually shooting up their once-gorgeous brownstone, our couple arrives at a sublime solution for all their partnership-eroding secrets and lies: Chekov’s truth serum. In a chaotically romantic act of mutually assured destruction (or maybe rehabilitation?), John and Jane get high on their own supply and soon find themselves lying on their ruined floor, having taken a circuitous route to the radical honesty Pitt and Jolie so easily achieved, but having arrived there all the same. It all comes out: the real reasons they both chose this unorthodox profession, the real truths behind their combative lies, the real pains behind their deepest fears. Having literally torn down all the walls between them, they find the shared foundation of a love that somehow survived all the fireworks. As they deliriously rattle off all the things they love (or lovingly hate) about each other, the prospect of building a new home atop the rubble is suddenly, movingly possible. Right on cue, Mr. Hihi’s assassins arrive to permanently clean up the Smiths’ mess, giving them one more chance to team up against the world. They make it to temporary safety, but John is wounded in the effort. As the pair sit and wait for their last shot at escape, they make plans for the shared future that might be bleeding out on their safe room floor. The show cuts to black just as they make a go of it, denying us a traditionally satisfying ending but offering one final romantic paradox to leave us longing along with these maybe-doomed lovers. They’re Schrödinger’s Happy Couple, which—the show seems to suggest—might be the secret of all happy couples. It’s easy to imagine a version of this show that eschews these realistically unanswerable questions for easy answers and breezy spy fun—after all, Doug Liman already made one in 2005. But you have to give Glover and Sloane credit for engaging with the kinds of issues that don’t (or can’t) perfectly resolve; between the heart-racing explosions and the heart-aching therapy-couch fights, it’s the latter that will stick with you after the smoke clears. “The longing hurt so bad,” Jane tells John as they hash through the wreckage of their relationship with chemical honesty. “It was fake,” he says. “Yeah, but the sadness, that’s real.” Inconceivably—given the initial unreality of their relationship—the love that’s blossomed between the fault lines is real, too. Across eight entertaining and emotionally turbulent hours, we’ve witnessed two people who might be better off without each other slowly realize that they’d rather be dead than apart. What could be more romantic than that? 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During his lifetime the American theater director, drama teacher, attorney and amateur magician Henning Cunningham Nelms published but two detective novels under his pseudonym Hake Talbot: The Hangman’s Handyman (1942) and Rim of the Pit (1944). (Sadly his initial essay in the crime genre, written around 1940 and titled The Affair of the Half-Witness, never found a publisher and now seems unlikely ever to be recovered.) The Hangman’s Handyman was, like Rim of the Pit, well-reviewed at the time of its publication, yet the former novel faded soon enough from the memory even of mystery aficionados. However, Rim of the Pit clung tenaciously to fame by its gruesome horned fingernails as an inarguable classic of “impossible crime” mystery, i.e., a mystery where it appears that there is no rational explanation for how the dastardly deeds came to be committed (as in the case of a murder in a locked room). “In short,” impossible crime authority Douglas G. Greene has written, “the stories are constructed around events that seem impossible in an ordered universe.” Over the years Rim of the Pit has been reprinted five times in the United States—in 1945 as the lead item in the pulp Thrilling Mystery Novel Magazine; in 1947 as a Dell mapback (with a map and floor plan on the back based on the author’s own sketches); in 1965 in Bantam’s World’s Great Novels of Detection series with an introduction by noted American mystery critic Anthony Boucher (author of his own locked room mysteries); in 1985 as an IPL Crime Classic with an introduction by the aforementioned Douglas G. Greene, biographer of locked room mystery master John Dickson Carr; and in 2009 by Ramble House, a dedicated connoisseur of the outré in mystery. Continuing the roughly two decade cycle, Rim of the Pit has now reappeared in 2023, nearly eighty years after its original publication, under the auspices of Mysterious Press. Henning Cunningham Nelms was born on November 30, 1900 in Baltimore, Maryland, one of two children of native Virginian John Henning Nelms and his wife Mary Rosalie Cunningham, daughter of a New York commission merchant. John Henning Nelms was deemed a man of marked ability, in his twenties having been elected several times as mayor of his home town of Smithfield, located about twenty-five miles from historic Jamestown in the southeastern corner of Virginia, and served as a state attorney. A year after his son’s birth, John Henning Nelms abandoned his lucrative corporate law practice, through which he was earning an average of $10,000 a year (about $330,000 today), in order to study for the ministry. He enrolled at Bishop’s College, Lennoxville, Quebec (about forty miles from the US border) and three years later was ordained into the priesthood in 1904 by the Anglican Bishop of Quebec. (This experience likely served as inspiration for the French-Canadian background of Rim of the Pit.) After serving for four years as rector of St. Matthew’s Church, Philadelphia (during which time the number of communicants more than doubled), Nelms was called to take the helm at the affluent Church of the Ascension in Washington, D. C., housed in a striking Victorian Gothic structure. Here he served for over a dozen years until 1921, as his son Henning transitioned from adolescence to young adulthood. A precocious youth, Henning attended Washington, DC’s St. Alban’s School, one of the nation’s most prestigious prep schools for boys, and at the age of fifteen enrolled at the city’s George Washington University, making him the youngest student up to that time who had ever matriculated at that noted institution of learning. The “boy,” the GWU newspaper, The Hatchet, noted wryly at the time, in actuality stood six feet tall, weighed 170 pounds and was a member of the football squad. The school yearbook, The Cherry Tree, dubbed Henning (or “Cunning” as he was nicknamed) the “baby giant of the school” and avowed that he “would have made a splendid ad for some patented baby’s food.” Noting as well his passion for protracted intellectual debate, the yearbook drolly added that Henning’s “favorite pastime was mauling and rehashing some long, drawn-out question with Prof. Croissant in lieu of answering the question asked.” Following in his father’s early professional footsteps, Henning, after graduating with a BA from GWU in 1920, received a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Virginia two years later. Yet, also like his father, the young man had another vocational interest that came to the fore. Suggestive of this, Henning, while a student at UVA, put his strapping physique to good use in the school’s centennial pageant play, playing Gorman, “a workman of great stature.” After a stint as a sailor on a merchantman (again putting his physique to good use), Nelms settled down to practicing law in Washington, DC during the Twenties, yet he had a dashing gay side as well, like his more diminutive native Pennsylvanian contemporary John Dickson Carr. At the height of the Jazz Age in 1925, a year after the death of his father, Henning and his girlfriend Mary Kennedy—daughter of a prominent DC builder and realtor, an amateur horsewoman and a student at elite Bryn Mawr College in nearby Pennsylvania—were voted “best fox-trotting couple” at a prominent Virginia masquerade party, with his costume of Harlequin receiving additional commendation. (This costume choice, incidentally, recalls the 1923 Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot short story “The Affair at the Victory Ball,” Christie having been rather obsessed throughout her life with the mysterious harlequinade, as evinced in this story and her tales about a certain enigmatic individual named Harley Quin.) Two years later saw the wedding of Henning and Mary, who had just graduated from Bryn Mawr. The couple soon departed Washington, D. C. for New Haven, Connecticut, where Henning studied theater at Yale University under noted playwriting professor George Pierce Baker, whose students included Eugene O’Neill and Thomas Wolfe. After being awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale in 1931, Henning—a genial, square-jawed pipe smoker—became director of the community theater at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. His tenure lasted for six years, during which time he and Mary made a great hit with the local populace. Perhaps his most ambitious production during his time in Harrisburg was a staging of Russian author Maxim Gorky’s play The Lower Depths at the Jewish Community Center. Gamely Henning insisted to potential playgoers in the Harrisburg Telegraph that while the Russians had acquired a worldwide “reputation for morbid gloom” and Gorky was deemed “the most morbid and gloomy of the lot,” he contrarily did not find the play so: “[I]t is too vivid…and in a way more cheerful than ‘Grand Hotel’ for the people in ‘Grand Hotel’ were at the top and hopeless while the people in ‘The Lower Depths’ are at the bottom but very few of them have given up the struggle.” After departing Harrisburg in 1937, Henning later successively served for three years as director of the Little Theater at Houston, Texas; for two years as head of the drama department at Middlebury College at Middlebury, Vermont; and for a single year as director of the Springfield Civic Theater at Springfield, Ohio. In 1943 Henning and Mary with their young adopted son, Peter Gordon Hendrick, returned to Harrisburg for a nostalgic visit and later settled at a farm near Alexandria, Virginia, where Henning worked on his mystery masterpiece, Rim of the Pit, along with a burlesque melodrama, Only an Orphan Girl (1944), which for decades proved a popular piece for play productions in community theaters, colleges and high schools. (He seems to have missed service in the Second World War, owing perhaps to the severe burning to his left leg which he suffered in 1932 during a kerosene fire in his workshop.) Over the course of his varied career in the theater, Henning authored several books about stage production and directed no fewer than seventy-two plays. Additionally, the author, an amateur magician, was active in the Society of American Magicians and the International Brotherhood of Magicians, organizations which served both professionals and amateurs. Later in his life Henning published Magic and Showmanship: A Handbook for Conjurors, a textbook on the philosophy, psychology and techniques behind the presentation of stage magic. Concerning this tome and its connection to Henning’s mystery writing, author Steven Steinbock, a crime writer and amateur magician himself, perceptively observed, in an article on Henning Nelms published in Mysteries Unlocked, a 2014 collection of essays in honor of Douglas G. Greene which I had the privilege of editing: As Nelms observes in Magic and Showmanship: “The magic of drama is infinitely more powerful than the magic of trickery. It is as available to the conjurer as it is to the actor. The only difference is that actors take it for granted, whereas few conjurers are even aware that it exists.” Most of Magic and Showmanship is an elaboration of this point, a manual on using all resources to create the magic of drama. As a storyteller, Nelms applied these same principles to his fiction. Henning “Cunning” Nelms, who even with his small published output of mystery fiction (just two novels and a pair short stories, one of the latter of which was never published during his lifetime) was one of the mystery genre’s greatest “showmen,” died from cardiac arrest at the age of eighty-five at his home in Arlington, Virginia on May 23, 1986, his wife Mary having predeceased him. Later in his life he rather resembled the elderly Boris Karloff, a fitting circumstance for an author of macabre mysteries. Before his demise Henning had the satisfaction of seeing Rim of the Pit brought back into print yet again, with due acknowledgement from Douglas G. Greene of its author’s place in the history of mystery fiction. “No tale provides more challenges to the reader than Rim of the Pit,” avowed Greene. Just half a dozen years earlier, a panel of eighteen authorities, including Greene himself, Frederic Dannay of Ellery Queen fame, Howard Haycraft, Jacques Barzun, Robert Adey, Bill Pronzini, Marvin Lachman and Jon L. Breen, were polled by the late, great impossible crime writer Edward D. Hoch for his fiction anthology All But Impossible! on the greatest impossible crime novels. This most distinguished group of crime writers and critics selected Rim of the Pit as the second best of all time, right after John Dickson Carr’s landmark locked room mystery The Three Coffins and ahead of Carr’s classics The Crooked Hinge and The Judas Window, not to mention those old impossible chestnuts Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room and Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery. It was another single honor for Henning. In 1986, the year of Henning’s death, Bill Pronzini, in his book 1001 Midnights: The Aficionado’s Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction, wrote admiringly of Rim of the Pit: “Even Carr at his most inventive could not have crammed more baffling and uncanny elements into one novel, convinced the reader that at least some of them must be of supernatural origin, and then proceeded to explain each rationally and plausibly.” Forty-two years earlier, when Rim of the Pit was first published, Anthony Boucher started this resounding chorus of high praise, avowing that the author “belongs among the very few [including John Dickson Carr, Clayton Rawson and Melville Davisson Post], who can build a horrifying and supernatural situation and then explain it without letdown. Whether you want eerie thrills or brilliant jiggery-pokery, this is your dish.” The master himself, John Dickson Carr, urged, in a review of the 1965 edition of Pit in his “Mystery-fancier Recommends” column in Harper’s Magazine: “Rim of the Pit is a beauty. Don’t argue with it; read it.” **** As a crime writer Henning Nelms practiced what he preached as a dramatist and magician—he transmuted clever monkey tricks into compelling melodrama, like the Master himself, John Dickson Carr, and Henning’s fellow Virginian (well, West Virginian), Melville Davisson Post, to whose memory Henning dedicated Rim of the Pit. Both Handyman and Pit drip—bloodily, of course—with dramatic atmosphere, as reviewers at the time observed. Writing up The Hangman’s Handyman in the New York Times Book Review, Kay Irvin declared: This is a humdinger of a story by a new master of ingenuity. Hake Talbot seems headed for a place in the John Dickson Carr class.” And, indeed, the novel is a feast of the macabre, the mysterious and the highly puzzling with its cavalcade of such elements as these: a house party on a creepy isolated island off the North Carolina coast; a bizarre death seemingly resulting from the uttering of an ancient family curse; a suddenly putrefying corpse (in the manner of the Edgar Allan Poe story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” a copy of which just happens to be on the spot); a murderous supernatural menace from the sea (“Undines….elementals….subhuman and…pretty horrible”); and, of course, slaying shenanigans in a locked room. Some people today avow that they prefer this superbly weird mystery tale to its successor Rim of the Pit, but to my mind Handyman is more of a warmup act, as it were, to Pit, the latter of which masterfully perfects all of the disparate elements in its predecessor. In Rim of the Pit, Henning again employs the classic setting of the country house party, but the setting and atmospherics are stronger and the telling relentless. (There are no longueurs.) Both novels are cut to a similar pattern, including a series amateur detective–roguish, devil-may-care gambler Rogan Kincaid—a couple of attractive young women and assorted believers and non-believers in the paranormal phenomena that proceeds diabolically to envelop them. In Pit nine individuals have gathered at a house named Cabrioun in the Great North Woods of upper New England in order to conduct a séance to summon to the material plane the spirit of the late French Canadian businessman Grimaud Desanat, dead the last fourteen years after having gotten lost in the wilds of the Hudson Bay country (“Hell’s icebox”) during an ill-starred winter hunting trip. (Rogan Kincaid is literally along at Cabrioun for the ride.) But the séance, conducted by Grimaud’s mediumistic ex-wife (since unhappily remarried), goes horrifically wrong, seeming to set loose among the terrified party the malign spirit of the dead Grimaud, seeking to exact some grim and awful vengeance though the agency of demonic possession. Also on the scene is a mixed blood French-Canadian/Algonquian hunting guide who speaks fearfully (and phonetically) of the mythological evil spirits known as windigos/wendigos. Before long you too may end up believing that some insatiable foul flying fiend lately emerged from the pit is responsible for the bloody carnage at Cabrioun! Writing about his adored literary idol Melville Davisson Post (of whom Steven Steinbock has observed “Post’s stories exhibit a metaphysical depth in which rationality is superimposed on theology without negating or eclipsing it. In this sense Post was seen as America’s answer to G. K. Chesterton.”), Hake Talbot observed: He was not content to make the reader wonder about “who.” He also raised the questions about “how,” “why,” and “what.” In his best stories, he even succeeded in raising doubts about “whether;” the situations were so fantastic that a rational well-motivated explanation seems impossible. Nevertheless, Post always supplies it – sometimes even maintaining the suspense until what is literally the last word. . . . In my own writing, I have tried to emulate him. . . . I have tried to write stories in which the interest is not only in “who” but also in “why,” “how,” and “what.” I even hope that, occasionally, I may have led you to wonder about the “whether.” In the discussions about rationality and the supernatural one finds in both The Hangman’s Handyman and Rim of the Pit, one gets a sense of precocious young “Cunning” Nelms around a century ago gleefully challenging his professors’ dogma during his college days at George Washington University and the University of Virginia, just as he likely did with his own minster father. (Indeed, Professor Ambler, one of the house party guests in Rim of the Pit, holds a position at Henning’s alma mater UVA.) The cunning “Hake Talbot” may well have you believing in the supernatural too, dear reader, only to pull the rug out from under your feet at the last moment with the dexterity of a master showman. Or does he? Read it and see! But first make sure to weave a circle round you thrice, for Henning Nelms on horrors and deceptions hath fed; and drunk the wine of impossibility. View the full article

Thirty years ago, the first Mary Russell book (do not call it a Sherlock Holmes book, or, for heaven’s sake, a pastiche), was published. It was a cause for celebration then, and a cause for celebration now, especially with the 18th book, The Lantern’s Dance, now on our doorstep. Let’s take a closer look. It was in 1987 that the thirty-five-year-old Laurie Richardson King sat down at the kitchen table in the farmhouse she’d help build herself, and picked up a fountain pen. She’d spent years roaming the world with her husband, Noel, from the far Pacific to South America to India to Israel. She held both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in religion, and would undoubtedly have gone on to a doctorate, but Noel was thirty years older than she and nearing retirement age, and they had two small children in school, and…it would have been irresponsible. As she sat at the table, she was thinking about a recent PBS series she’d been watching about Sherlock Holmes. It had irritated her a bit. Everybody was always so impressed by Holmes’ intellect and intuition, but, really, what was the latter but the instinct mothers used every day? People spoke condescendingly about “women’s intuition,” but when men had it, it was considered something so special. What if you took all the ingredients that made up Holmes, she wondered, and poured them into a woman of the period? What would that look like? And what if the woman was actually just a girl – raw, troubled, scarred by trauma, but possessed of extraordinary eyes, wits, skill, and determination – and she was put in Holmes’ path (or, more accurately, he in hers)? King pulled the pad forward and began to write: “I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him….My first awareness that there was another soul in the universe was when a male throat cleared itself loudly not four feet from me. The Latin text flew into the air, followed closely by an Anglo-Saxon oath. Heart pounding, I hastily pulled together what dignity I could and glared down through my spectacles at this figure hunched up at my feet: a gaunt, graying man in his fifties wearing a cloth cap, ancient tweed greatcoat, and decent shoes, with a threadbare Army rucksack on the ground beside him. A tramp perhaps, who had left the rest of his possessions stashed beneath a bush. Or an Eccentric…. “’What on earth are you doing?’ I demanded.” (The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, 1994). And so was born Mary Russell, half-American, half-British, keenly Jewish, orphan, scholar, and budding feminist; a girl haunted by nightmares of the car crash that killed her mother, father, and brother; and determined to find purpose as an ambulance driver in the Great War that was raging in 1915. First, though, she wanted to take one final ramble across the Downs, and it is there that she stumbles upon a man who, unbeknownst to her, at 54 and retired for 17 years, has become so overwhelmed by “a soul-grinding boredom and a pervading sense of uselessness” (“Beekeeping for Beginners, Mary Russell’s War, 2016) that he is actively considering suicide. Instead, he is accosted by this girl dressed as a boy, who, to his amazement, makes him laugh, and, to his even greater amazement, turns out to have acute skills of observation and deduction. It sparks something in him. This will be his purpose now: to hone her, train her, help her fulfill her true potential. She in turn becomes a willing student, her lessons continuing even after she goes off to Oxford, and she comes to regard him as “my friend and mentor, my tutor, sparring partner and comrade-in-arms,” although “arguments were a part of life with Holmes – a week without a knockdown, drag-out fight was an insipid week indeed” (A Monstrous Regiment of Women, 1995). The cases in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice start small – a mysterious illness, a series of burglaries – but then a visiting American Senator’s daughter is kidnapped. Russell rescues the girl, but the reverberations are dramatic. An implacable new enemy has been made. Holmes is nearly killed by a bomb, Russell barely avoids another bomb, bullets whistle through their window. They must flee England to regroup, and when they return, after an extraordinary adventure in Palestine that we don’t even read about until the fifth book, O Jerusalem (1999), they defeat their enemy, but it is clear to Russell that two things have changed. One is that Holmes is now prepared to treat her, not as an apprentice, but as “his complete, full, and unequivocal equal.” The other is that she has developed a definite taste for “the sharp exhilaration of danger and the demands of an uncomfortable way of life…a pure, hot passion for freedom.” And there is another change as well. It has been more than five and a half years since they first met. She is a woman now, and they have bonded over many perilous investigations. They share “a rabidly independent nature, an impatience with lesser minds, total unconventionality,” and yet now, she realizes, “Holmes was a part of me. Because of my age when we met, neither of us had erected our normal defenses, and by the time I came to womanhood, it was too late. He had already let me under his guard, and I him” (A Monstrous Regiment of Women). After narrowly escaping death, they share a first kiss, and then look at one another. “You do realize how potentially disastrous this whole thing is,” says Holmes. “I am old and set in my ways. I will give you little affection and a great deal of irritation, though heaven knows you’re aware of how difficult I can be.” “Holmes, is this a proposal of marriage?” It is. The next time we see them, in A Letter of Mary (1996), it is two years later, and they have undergone other perilous undertakings, some of which we are treated to in subsequent books. We don’t see the wedding (though if you want to read a riotous description of it, seek out the short story, “The Marriage of Mary Russell” in King’s short story collection, Mary Russell’s War), nor do we witness their honeymoon, thank God. But from then on, they are one unit, even though as Holmes says in A Letter to Mary, “I still find it difficult to accustom myself to being half of a creature with two brains and four eyes.” One unit, however, doesn’t mean they are always together. Many of the books find them operating on separate tracks. In Locked Rooms (2005), set in San Francisco, Russell is forced, finally, to confront the dark secrets and nightmares of her own past, while Holmes investigates what really happened to her parents. In Garment of Shadows (2012), Russell wakes up in Morocco, with blood on her hands, soldiers at the door, and no memory of who she is or why she is there, while Holmes searches frantically for her. In the electrifying double-header The Language of Bees (2009) and The God of the Hive (2010), Holmes and Russell go separately on the run, wanted by the police, hunted by enemies, communicating only by coded messages, while guarding precious human cargo. In the new book, The Lantern’s Dance (2024), it is Holmes who must chase down the reality of his own parentage, while an injured Russell decodes an astonishing tale of blackmail, murder, and obsession found in a trunk. Kidnapped in England, beaten bloody in Pakistan, bound to an altar for human sacrifice in India, ambushed by gunfire in Morocco, imprisoned in a coffin in Roumania, isolated midair over Scotland – “We flew through the morning, a trapped woman, a sleeping child, and a pilot slowly bleeding to death at the controls” (The God of the Hive) – from 1918 to 1925, there is barely a respite for Holmes and Russell. But they do have their fun. Their disguises are many. Hindu magicians, Bedouins, Buddhist pilgrims, workmen, cab drivers, beggars, station attendants – whatever the case requires: “Once he dressed me as a lady of the evening,” reminisces Russell. “Another time I wore a water-butt…A barrel under a drainpipe. A very damp and draughty disguise” (Justice Hall, 2002). Surprising people pop up. At any point, you might encounter Lawrence of Arabia, Pablo Picasso, Dashiell Hammett, Prince Hirohito, Cole Porter, Zelda Fitzgerald, Queen Marie of Roumania, an “odd man named Tolkien,” Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, or Lord Peter Wimsey. You’ll also encounter more familiar Holmesian characters, but with a decidedly different slant, Mrs. Hudson, for instance, is a revelation. In the blockbuster The Murder of Mary Russell (2016), King gives us Hudson’s full and shocking backstory as a grifter and conwoman in England and Australia, until the day she is brought up short by a young man seeking reparations for her misdeeds, “a grey-eyed devil,” who offers her a path to penance, “and more acting than you could dream of.” He is leasing a house in Baker Street, she will be the landlady, and he will be the tenant, “although I fear, Mrs. Hudson, that you will find me a most troublesome tenant.” For 46 years, Mrs. Hudson plays the part, first in London, then in Sussex, until the day she returns home to a pool of blood on the floor, a missing Mary Russell, and the certain knowledge that her past has finally caught up with her. While Holmes sprints flat-out to find Russell, Clarissa Hudson knows it’s time to summon up some of her old skills if they’re to get to the bottom of this, skills that will serve her well both here and in the subsequent Riviera Gold (2020) – although even then, she’ll keep some secrets, even from Sherlock: “You know, when it comes to women, Mr. Holmes has always been just the teensiest bit naïve.” Mycroft is here, too, of course, corpulent, pale, “an enigmatic and occasionally alarming figure whose authority with His Majesty’s government was as immense as it was undefined” (O Jerusalem). It amuses him to think of himself as a glorified accountant, “though it was quite literally true: He kept accounts….He accounted for political trends in Europe and military expenditures in Africa; he took into account religious leaders in India, technological developments in America, and border clashes in South America….He kept accounts of the ten thousand threads that went to make up the tapestry of world stability” (A Letter of Mary). Mycroft is forever sending Russell and Holmes to help with those accounts. The trip to Palestine is at his behest, to India, to Roumania, to Morocco. Seldom are the missions quite what they seem, and the couple are starting to get fed up with his deceptions: “The next time Mycroft asks us to do something,” says Russell, “we really must say no.” And with good reason. Mycroft is hiding a secret himself. In God of the Hive, we find out what it is. It almost gets them all killed. Other familiar names pop up as well: Billy, the stalwart of the Baker Street Irregulars, whose origins intersect surprisingly with those of Clarissa Hudson; Watson, glimpsed only occasionally, though Russell feels sorry for him: “It occurred to me that Holmes was well accustomed to deceiving this man, because he was not gifted with the ability to lie, and thus quite simply could not be trusted to act a part. For the first time I became aware of how that knowledge must have pained him, how saddened he must have been over the years at his failure, as he would have seen it, his inability to serve his friend save by unwittingly being manipulated by Holmes’ cleverer mind” (The Beekeeper’s Apprentice). Irene Adler. Yes, her presence is felt as well. I won’t tell you how, you’ll have to discover it for yourself. But it’s spectacular. And there’s one name you might not know. It’s that of Mary’s Uncle Jake, “the black sheep, the family rogue, whose exploits filled my childhood with admonitions over the dire and delicious consequences of misbehavior….The cautionary tales about Jake’s near-disasters had quite the opposite effect on my impressionable mind; namely the temptation to follow in his footsteps became irresistible” (“Mary’s Christmas,” Mary Russell’s War). It is Uncle Jake who gave an eleven-year-old Russell the gift she carries with her forever after: a slim piece of wickedly sharp steel with a rosewood handle and straps to fasten it to her ankle. She has used that knife many times, and to great effect, not least of all after she has subdued a foul-mouthed armed thug in The Language of Bees, tied his hands and legs, and rolled him up in a carpet. Then she kneels beside him, shows him the red-stained knife – “a thin, shiny blade edged with scarlet” – then slowly licks it clean, pats her lips delicately, and slides it back into its scabbard. “’You shouldn’t have cursed,’ I told him.” It’s paint, not blood. But nobody messes with Mary Russell. Someone else I suspect nobody messes with? Uncle Jake. We’ll all find out next year, 2025, promises Laurie R. King, when he comes back into Mary Russell’s life in the next installment. *** As you’ve seen from all of the above, King likes to play with her chronology, teasing events, then skipping them entirely, until coming back to them with a bang in a later book. It seems like the actions of a meticulous planner, someone who knows just what kind of arc she wants, and plots it out accordingly. You would be wrong. “I’m not the kind of writer who creates meticulous plans – for a book, or a series, or indeed a life,” she’s said. “I’m more the ‘organic’ kind, who finds an interesting seed and plants it to see what will grow. “This does not mean my books aren’t written to a very definite plan. As I’m writing, I can always feel when the story is going the way it’s meant to, and when it’s threatening to veer away. But where other writers work out their plan externally, on a sheet of paper, or a white board or Post-Its or what-have-you, for a writer like me, the outline lives in the darkest corners of the brain, doled out in bits and pieces as they’re needed. Usually greeted with cries of ‘Aha’ and ‘Oh, I see now’ and ‘Hey, what if I then….’ “This…method (may we call it that?) looks haphazard to the outside world. It’s undisciplined. Muddled. Amateur. And though I’ll admit that when I am deep in the throes of a tricky re-write, the second draft where a novel emerges out of a rough 300-page set of notes, it can feel a bit like struggling to bring a riot of anarchists to order. However, even at the most obstinate places, I never really doubt that the back of my head knows exactly where it’s going. “At any rate, that’s my story and I’m sticking with it.” It’s a technique that mirrors her life in many ways. Her father, “a man with itchy feet,” moved them around so much that it wasn’t until she was in high school that she entered the same school in September that she’d been in the previous June. She was, she confesses, “socially inept, physically awkward, excruciatingly shy, and always an outsider,” so books became her companions and inspiration. She can remember, in the first or second grade, composing a story about a small creature that lived under a hill, each line illustrated “with small, precise drawings of mysterious figures and round red doors set into grassy hillsides.” Unfortunately, she spent so much time on the drawings, she never finished the text. “Thus, the writer’s first lesson: Finish the story.” The family never had much money, and there was no way, she said, that they could afford putting her through college. In the end, she “more or less backed into university, when the aunt with whom I lived after finishing high school insisted I keep myself busy by enrolling in junior college.” There, she encountered a professor who introduced her to logic, philosophy, and religious studies, which in turn led her to the University of California, Santa Cruz’s program in religion, and finally, seven years later, (she had to work her way through) she had her BA. Her master’s also took seven years, split up by work, marriage, travel, children, and house renovation. Her husband, Noel King, a former professor of hers, was “far better with a concordance than a circular saw,” and so she immersed herself in the world of “Skil saws, framing hammers, paintbrushes, and electrical drills. How-To books spring up like mushrooms beside my volumes of textual criticism and feminist theology. I became, quite literally, a home-maker.” And then, at thirty-five, her children at school, and wondering what to do with her time, she sat down at that kitchen table and began to write. The core of the book, 280 pages, took her 28 days. Then she rewrote it, and then, not quite knowing what to do with it, she started another, which would ultimately become the third book in the series, A Letter of Mary. And then…she wrote yet a third, not a Russell book, but the story of a lesbian SFPD homicide inspector named Kate Martinelli. Meanwhile, she’d started sending out the first book, then titled The Segregation of the Queen, to publishers, to no avail, and finally realized she could either write or send, but not both. She looked in the back of Writer’s Digest and found five agencies in San Francisco, and wrote to each of them, enclosing chapters of Queen and the Martinelli. The first agency said their client list was full. The second said they liked one, but not the other. The third liked the other, but not the one. The fourth said they’d read both books if she sent them $385 – for each. The fifth was a woman named Linda Allen. “I would love to represent you,” she wrote back, “but I have some problems with these two manuscripts.” She outlined the work she felt they needed, and noted, “The characters in either one of these books could develop into protagonists for a series. Do you agree?” Laurie did. She reworked them both – and it was the police novel, A Grave Talent, that Linda Allen sold first. It was published in 1993. The Russell, now titled The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, followed the next year. It rather confused people. Were they actually by the same woman? They were so different! The first was a hard-driving third-person mystery; the second was a first-person period romp with more than a dash of humor. Yes, the publisher had to explain, the author was indeed the same, and for a while, the two series alternated, with a vigorous scattering of stand-alones thrown in along the way – at one point, her publisher’s sales and marketing departments threw up their hands and simply proclaimed, “Laurie R. King’s Next Book is Always a Mystery.” Two weeks after Beekeeper’s publication, King’s editor informed her that A Grave Talent had been nominated for the Edgar award for first novel. When she got to the banquet, she was stunned to hear her book announced as the winner. “The only thing I’d ever won in my life was a box of brandied cherries at a community Bingo game, a prize quickly confiscated by my parents, as I was only ten at the time.” It then won the John Creasey New Blood Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association. Both series, as well as the stand-alone Folly (2001), have since gone on to win the Agatha, Macavity, Nero, and Lamda awards, and been a finalist for a slew of others, and her co-edited guide, How To Write a Mystery (2021), won the Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity. And the plaudits continued. In 2022, she won the title of Grand Master from the Mystery Writers of America for her body of work. In 1997, she won an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, her old seminary. It’s hard to decide which must have pleased her most. I guess we’ll have to ask her. ___________________________________ The Essential King ___________________________________ With any prolific author, readers are likely to have particular favorites, which may not be the same as anyone else’s. Your list is likely to be just as good as mine – but here are the ones I recommend. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1994) “The first thing I want the reader to know is that I had nothing to do with this book you have in your hand. Yes, I write mystery novels, but even a novelist’s fevered imagination has its limits, and mine would reach those limits long before it came up with the farfetched idea of Sherlock Holmes taking on a smart-mouthed, half-American, fifteen-year-old feminist sidekick. I mean, really.” This is the opening premise for the series: that a UPS truck barreled down King’s driveway, delivering a trunk filled with garments, objects, and manuscripts, each of the latter bound with narrow purple ribbon and sealed with wax, stamped R. We’ll learn in Mary Russell’s War how King came to be picked, but in the meantime Beekeeper is an excellent introduction to the characters, settings, and style of the entire series, not to mention the kind of rip-roaring adventures that will ensue. The interplay between Russell and Holmes as their relationship evolves over the course of the novel’s four years from mentor and student to something much more complex is entirely credible, and the climactic events are dramatic indeed: “It burst upon us like a storm, it beat at us and flung us about and threatened our lives, our sanity, and the surprisingly fragile thing that existed between Holmes and myself.” That may sound like hyperbole, but just wait till you get there. O Jerusalem (1999) “She is a jewel, that city, small and brilliant and hard, and as dangerous as any valuable thing can be.” Russell and Holmes are about to find that out the hard way. The Jerusalem of 1919 is a maelstrom, explains a British spymaster: “The French want it, the Arabs think it’s theirs, the Jews believe they were promised it, the British hold it, and General Allenby spends all the hours God gives him driving from Dan to Beersheva, calming arguments among the factions.” “While you hear the rumor of distant wolves,” notes Holmes. Disguised as Bedouin men, Russell and Holmes are paired up with two of Mycroft’s agents, a pair of Arab cutthroats who deeply distrust them. “You are an old man and she is a girl,” they say, not unreasonably. Over the next six weeks, mutual trust will have to be gained or it’s very likely none of them will survive. They very nearly don’t anyway. All around them is death and treachery, and as the tensions rise to the breaking point, the fate of the entire Middle East is in their hands. It’s a good thing Russell knows how to use that knife. She’s going to need it. An added enticement for the reader: King is brilliant in conjuring up the sights, sounds, and smells of both the city and the desert. You’ll feel like you’re walking down those streets yourself, that you’re breathing in the desert air. Great descriptive work. Locked Rooms (2005) “Holmes was intensely aware of the physical sensation of her arm on his. He generally was aware of her presence, that sturdy physicality wrapped around a magnificent brain and the stoutest of hearts. One flaw alone had he found in this incomparable hard diamond of a woman, an imperfection that had long puzzled him, and cost him no small amount of sleep…. “Fear had kept him silent….It had felt at times like watching a child’s block-tower continue to grow and wondering when it would topple and crash.” It is 1924, ten years since the car crash that killed Mary Russell’s family and filled her sleep with nightmares – dreams of flying objects, a faceless man, a locked room. She knows she inadvertently caused the fatal accident, and will never get over that guilt, but what does all the rest of this mean? They are in San Francisco now to settle her estate, but there is nothing settling about the revelations that keep coming her way. The sudden deaths of two family servants. The office break-in that causes the death of her former psychiatrist. That man in the street – was he pointing a pistol at her? Soon, the narrative splits into two parts, as Russell continues to delve into these mysteries, while Holmes, with the help of a most unexpected local colleague named Hammett, pursues a much deeper question: Why can Russell not see that the crash that killed her family was not an accident – but murder? What follows is as much a psychological thriller as a murder mystery, the events of three timelines and two separate investigations colliding into a shocking finale for Russell: “I wanted to murder him. Then and there, I wanted to gut him and leave him bleeding his life out on the street, for what he had done…..I could almost taste the glory of revenge.” This one’s a workout, and for both Russell and Holmes, nothing will ever be the same. ___________________________________ Book Bonus: Kate Martinelli ___________________________________ There’s a reason the Martinelli books hit the crime fiction world like a bombshell. They’re intelligent, intricate, deeply felt, psychologically acute, and filled with smart, thoughtful characters just trying to do their best in a violent and often bewildering world. Kate is a SFPD detective newly appointed to homicide, sharp, perceptive, and with all her defenses up. First of all, she’s a woman in a heavily masculine world: “She must be tough but not coarse, friendly but not obsequious, unaggressive but ready without a moment’s hesitation to hurl into a violent confrontation.” Second, she’s a lesbian, but in the first book, A Grave Talent (1993), decidedly not out: “I can’t take the risk….How long before the looks and remarks start, before I start drawing all the real hard-core shit jobs, before I’m on call and someone refuses to deal with me because I’m that lez in the department and I might have AIDS.” It isn’t until the end of Grave, when her housemate and lover Lee Cooper is shot and critically injured, with a very long recovery period ahead, that she realizes she has no choice. Everyone will know who she is. Her boss is Al Hawkin, smart, gruff, thickset, graying, and obsessed with his work; his wife, who is now gone, “had found him dismal company.” When he’s first assigned Martinelli, he hates it – “Christ Almighty…some nut is out there killing little girls….and you assign me some Madonna in uniform who was probably writing parking tickets until last week” – but he gradually changes his tune: “She doesn’t chatter. A person can think around her. Perhaps she wouldn’t be such a burden as he’d originally thought.” Together, they navigate cases that all too often cross the boundary between the professional and the personal. There’s Lee’s crippling in A Grave Talent. In With Child (1996), Kate takes a trip with Jules, the precocious preteen daughter of Al’s new wife, and the girl disappears, possibly taken by a serial killer. In Night Work (2000), a feminist vigilante group committing acts of revenge around the city may have taken matters way too far – and Lee’s good friend and ex-lover Roz may be one of the ones involved. In the novella Beginnings (2019), someone close to Kate asks about Kate’s kid sister, who died in a car crash, rumored a suicide, in the 1980s. Digging into it now, she finds something much darker. Meanwhile, we follow the arc of her relationship with Lee. Kate took five months of desk duty after Lee’s crippling, and the adjustment is hard for both of them. At the end of the second book, To Play the Fool (1995), Lee, in her wheelchair, leaves to rethink everything, and in With Child, Kate is drinking heavily and angrily wrestling with the fact that Lee’s been away for months. It isn’t until Night Work that we see Lee is back – “Kate did not yet know just what her lover had become, or what their relationship would become. All she knew was that Lee still chose to be with her; the rest of it would find its way” – and in the final pages of the last book, The Art of Detection (2006), Kate is ambushed by a surprise stop at City Hall, where an even bigger surprise awaits. “Roz thought,” says a friend, “that you and Lee might like to be among the first legally married lesbians in San Francisco.” Their three-year-old daughter squeals with joy. A happy ending all around. Oh, and that last book? It could have been titled When Worlds Collide. It centers around the murder of a Sherlock Holmes fanatic named Philip Gilbert, his fellow Sherlockians, and a hundred-year-old manuscript purportedly by Holmes himself when he was in San Francisco, about an investigation that eerily echoes the details of the murder before Martinelli now: a case within a case. It’s a bit head-spinning, even for her. At one point late in the book, Kate says to Al: “ ‘I hope you’re not going to tell me Philip Gilbert was killed by a poison unknown to science.’ “He peered over the top of his reading glasses. ‘Had a bit too much of this detective story business, have we?” “ ‘Bunch of loonies, all of them.’ “He nodded thoughtfully. ‘An attitude I always find productive.’” ___________________________________ Book Bonus II: Everything Else ___________________________________ As noted above, King is also the author of several other novels, and they’re all worthy. Two of them, Touchstone (2007) and The Bones of Paris (2013), take place in Europe between the wars, and feature Bennett Grey, a human lie detector psychologically shattered by the Great War, and Harris Stuyvesant, an American Bureau of Investigation agent who enlists his help (and falls in love with Grey’s sister, Sarah). The books are strong, evocative, and full of period detail. I also have a slight weakness for Paris because it includes a cameo by the real-life Black nightclub impresario Bricktop, who knew everybody who was anybody in Jazz Age Paris, and whose memoir I published in 1983. I even had the pleasure of meeting her, a tiny, 89-year-old woman living in New York City, whose parting words to me were, “Now, don’t you go sleeping in any strange beds, honey!” There’re also these five: A Darker Place (1999) centers on a woman who infiltrates a dangerous religious cult for very personal reasons; Folly (2001) is a mystery/thriller blend about a woman building a house on a tiny island (cue King’s construction skills!) and simultaneously being stalked; Keeping Watch (2003), an offshoot of Folly, features a damaged Vietnam vet who rescues victims from abusive families, but finds his last case to be singularly dangerous; Lockdown (2017) revolves around the many lives and secrets ricocheting around a middle school’s Career Day – and the heavily armed man driving there; and Back to the Garden (2022) is a novel about a grand estate, the troubled commune that once lived there, the fifty-year-old skeleton found on its grounds, and a serial killer. Of these, my favorite is the last one, mostly because of its central character, Raquel Laing, a SFPD cold case investigator with great detective skills and approximately zero social aptitude. In fact, that’s why she is in this unit – her mentor has assigned her to it because it’s the best way to use her abilities without ruffling feathers, and that way he can keep an eye on her. The name of that mentor? Al Hawkin, Martinelli’s old partner, now “retired” to Cold Cases! He’s obviously used to brilliant, difficult women on his beat, but Laing will certainly test him. Late in the book, she finds herself musing, “Here’s the cliff Al told you not to go near, let’s step off it and take his reputation with us, shall we?” Other LRK books include Califia’s Daughter (2004), a science fiction novel published under the pseudonym Leigh Richards; several Sherlock Holmes story anthologies co-edited with Leslie S. Klinger; and a number of nonfiction works, most notably three on crime and thriller writing, two of them co-edited with Michelle Spring, and the third, the aforementioned How To Write a Mystery, with Lee Child. ___________________________________ Meta Bonus ___________________________________ (Russell being introduced around a table of Bohemian artists) “ ‘Ronnie’s a writer. He’s going to change the face of literature in this century, taking it well past Lawrence.’ “ ‘D. H.,’ Ronnie clarified, looking smug. “I nodded solemnly, and gave way to an unkind impulse. ‘Are you published yet?’ “ ‘The publishing world is run by Philistines and capitalists,’ he growled.” (The Language of Bees) ___________________________________ (Holmes, infuriated by an article by Arthur Conan Doyle gullibly endorsing a girl’s recent “photographs” of fairies in her garden) “ ‘I am not a man much given to violence,’ he began, calmly enough, ‘but I declare that if that man Doyle came before me today, I should be hard-pressed to avoid trouncing him.… It is difficult enough to surmount Watson’s apparently endless blather in order to have my voice heard as a scientist, but now, when people hear my name, all they will think of is that disgusting, dreamy-eyed little girl and her preposterous paper cutouts. I knew the man was limited, but I did not even suspect he was insane!’ “ ‘Oh, well, Holmes.’ I drawled into his climbing voice, ‘look on the bright side….Now the British Public will assume that Sherlock Holmes is as much a fairy tale as those photographs and will stop plaguing you. I’d say the man’s done you a great service.’ I smiled brightly.” (A Monstrous Regiment of Women) ___________________________________ (Queen Marie of Roumania speaking to Russell) “ ‘I was pleased, while in London this summer, to discover a number of new detective-story writers. A woman named Christie seems most promising – do you know her? No? She’s quite clever.’” (Russell with the Queen’s daughter, Ileana) “’Your mother says you like detective stories.’ ‘I do. They’re so clever, people like Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown. However, I have to tell you, my heart belongs to Bulldog Drummond,’ said the future Queen. “ ‘Good choice.’ “ ‘Though one does wish there were some girls in those stories. I tell Mother she ought to write tales where girls get into adventures, rather than fairy stories and romances, but she just says that nobody would believe them. Girls never get to have any adventures, do they?’ “ ‘Oh, you’d be surprised.’” (Castle Shade) ___________________________________ Meta Bonus II: Dashiell Hammett ___________________________________ “Hammett’s eyes fell at last to the cigarette his fingers had made. He ran a tongue along the edge, pressed it, and as he lit a match his eyes came back to Holmes’. ‘You’re that Holmes, aren’t you? The detective?’ “ ‘I am, yes.’ “ ‘I always thought….’ “ ‘That I was a fictional character?’ “ ‘That maybe there’d been some…exaggerations.’ “Holmes laughed aloud. ‘One of the inadvertent side-effects of Watson’s florid writing style coupled with Conan Doyle’s name is that Sherlock Holmes tends to be either wildly overestimated, or the other extreme, dismissed entirely as something of a joke. It used to infuriate me – Doyle’s a dangerously gullible lunatic – but apart from the blow to my ego, it’s actually remarkably convenient.’ “ ‘You don’t say,’ Hammett responded, clearly taken aback at the idea of the flesh-and-blood man seated in his living-room being considered a piece of fiction. And no doubt wondering how he would feel, were someone to do the same to him.” (Holmes has just been told that a band of his Irregulars has arrived) “His face lighted with joy, and as he galloped down the corridor towards the lift he cried, ‘Come, Russell, the game’s afoot!’ “Hammett, catching up his coat and walking beside me with more decorum, looked at me askance. ‘He actually says that?” “ ‘Only to annoy me.’” (Locked Rooms) View the full article

I don’t want to kill again. It’s just too stressful. My first major kill was of a family: father and two daughters drowned in a flash flood. I got a lot of flack for that from friends and family members with small children, all of whom seemed to take it personally. Next, there was the ex-lover of a main character who died along with his wife in a fluke car accident—decapitation—that was far too bloody, I think, for the story. In general, I’ve killed off at least one character in nearly everything I’ve ever written. I mean nothing malicious by it. My latest killing, however, in my novel Dixon, Descending has shattered me. Partly because I truly love the character I killed off, and partly because I’ve been writing and revising this novel—that is, killing and rekilling my character—for nearly 15 years. I’m a bit chagrined to say, but that is the longest relationship with a man that I’ve had to date, and the old saying is right: Breaking up is hard to do. Well, killing off, is. It was hard enough to write his death the first time. I was holed up in a woodland cottage that led to a startling view of Mt. Rainier, which appeared ghostlike mid-sky each afternoon. My characters were ascending Mt. Everest, and my view of Mt. Rainier made me feel like their comrade. I hunkered into their journey and then its sorrowful aftermath and wrote breathlessly, actually panting and trembling. I completed the first draft weeping. That was more than 10 years ago, and I have to say, I have been emotional each time I’ve read that death in revision. Every time. You see, the thing about killing off a character—especially one you love—is that you will have to do it over and over as you write and revise a novel, and it will never, ever become less fraught. In fact, it shouldn’t. No one ever told me that. I liken it to having committed any infraction of rules that plagues you, so that you continually relive it, breaking it open for reinspection to see if it holds true to a current vision of yourself. At essence, that’s what revision asks the writer to do. We must re-enter the world we have created and question everything. We must re-engage, relive, reimagine, re-kill, over and again. It’s a lower-order form of suffering, but a form of suffering nonetheless. I admit, I think about loss far too often; it has shaped much of my life. When I write, I can’t help but examine how each death will affect a particular character. What will they learn? How will they survive? It’s been easier to fixate on that kind of aftermath in much of what I’ve written previously. Maybe I have not loved the dead enough until now. Or perhaps, I just haven’t lived with the dying for as long. Killing off a fully realized character tests a story in a way unlike any other. It draws attention to itself, but the writer has to ask: does it draw energy away from or toward the story? Some deaths can render the story superfluous by contrast, or simply suck all the remaining energy out of a story. At its best, a character’s death should arrest some lines of story movement but create clearer narrative paths—ones of heightened tension—for other parts of the story. I see death acting as a pinball lever, shooting a story from one path onto another and opening a new world of consequences for the characters and for the story arc. That new thrust can be as exciting for the reader as for the writer, carrying along with it a dizzying array of emotional realities: regret, relief, hubris, grief, joy, fear. The basic question about whether to kill off a character, then, is no different than the question about any narrative choice: does it work? Can it work? But there’s another question to be asked as well: Is the value to the story higher than the emotional cost to the writer? Because there is a cost to killing off characters, especially ones you love. I found myself bargaining—“what if I killed off someone else instead?”—rethinking the very premise of the story, wondering if perhaps I didn’t have the intestinal fortitude. But I had created a world and a set of circumstances that required the outcome I was dreading, and I had to answer to my story. That is the great challenge, I think, in maturing as a writer: rising to the occasion of our stories. It’s so easy to want to shield our characters from real harm, to want to soften the blows to their lives. But stories are about people in trouble, as we’re repeatedly told, and there’s no greater trouble than dying. So the death of a character becomes illuminating, pushes a plot forward, complicates things in all the positive ways writers are encouraged to create. What about the writer’s grief? Good writing creates a “hook-to-the-heart,” as Alice McDermott would say. My juiciest memories of reading involve curling up in bed, a book propped against my chest. I am engaged in the intimacy between myself and the implied nakedness of the character in the text. I long for that as a reader, yet as a writer, I understand it comes at a price. Those moments when writing strips you to the bone, when you finish writing a scene that has become so emotionally truthful that you leave the house a little bloodied, wondering whether the world notices that layer of skin that’s been sloughed away from you. Should it be such a sacrifice to write? How can it not? We give ourselves over to our characters. We nurture and sustain those who would not exist without us. It is a profound spiritual act to create fiction, an inherently hopeful act: Here, world, is something of myself that I want you to care for. Of course it costs us. I wasn’t being mean or methodical in killing off my character. It was simply what the story dictated, and yet, part of me cannot forgive myself for it, for what it means for the other characters, for what it means for me. And each time I sit down, broken-hearted, to re-engage with that actual death, I wish for a different outcome. And each time that scene seers into me, I know it is doing its job. If there’s any theme to writing that I could share with an unsuspecting budding writer, it’s just that: It will break your heart. It’s supposed to. *** View the full article

I grew up reading a combination of crime (both true and fictional), horror, and satisfyingly dense, meaty literary fiction about families by the likes of Dickens, Jonathan Franzen and Elizabeth Jane Howard. In some ways, though stylistically divergent, I feel that all these genres fed a similar impulse in me, which was to challenge the apparent impossibility of comprehending the mind of another. The early, salacious true crime books about serial killers which I devoured in private as an adolescent were infinitely compelling because they revealed instincts and desires which were so far removed from my own as to be not just ghastly but instructive also, insofar as they warned me how little could be assumed about the interiority of those around me. The family narratives I so loved achieved something similar in that they opened up a network of dynamics which almost by definitional necessity is private—part of the deal with a nuclear family as we tend to know it is that the family is a hidden system which outsiders can’t be a part of or witness in totality. The books I am recommending here combine the best of crime writing with the most reflective and thoughtful expositions of family dynamics. In my own sophomore novel, Ordinary Human Failings, I have tried to emulate them by using the framework of a dreadful crime to look deeply into one family’s private lives; after a ten year old girl, Lucy Green, is suspected of murdering a toddler on her London housing estate in 1990, an ambitious young tabloid hack senses a scoop and sequesters the troubled Green family in a hotel, plying them with booze and trying to unlock their secrets. What we find is not the stereotypical sensationalized narrative he hopes for but rather the endlessly complex reality of intergenerational trauma, shame, repression, secrets—as well as love, grief and hope. Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn This is in a sense a difficult book to recommend. Unquestionably one of the more incisive, brilliantly written and sensitive works of crime non-fiction I have ever come across, it is also so upsetting and appalling that it leaves you feeling you have learned some unfamiliar, crucial truths but in doing so have had your spirit degraded. Burn writes about the notorious British serial killing couple Fred and Rosemary West, who perpetuated rape, torture, kidnapping and murder upon members of their own family and strangers. Written to be as un-sensational as possible under the circumstances, nevertheless the sheer scale and depth of the couple’s depravity is chastening for the reader, not least because of what it suggests about a society which produced people capable of such deeds. The same society was then able to ignore their wickedness for decades, missing many opportunities to halt it. What marks Happy Like Murderers out for me as a work of true genius is that it upends the secrecy of the family unit and questions the wisdom of allowing ourselves to turn away from others with privacy as our excuse. It also looks at the world of brutal poverty and sexual abuse both Fred and Rose emerged from themselves, viciousness begetting viciousness. This is an almost haunted feeling work, but one which easily holds its own alongside The Executioner’s Song and In Cold Blood as a work of exceptional literary and journalistic merit. Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane I went through a slightly manic phase of reading all of Dennis Lehane’s novels last year and was amazed at how many of them are relentlessly excellent. I could write for years about his body of work, but found something especially moving about his most recent stand alone novel Small Mercies, which follows tough Irish Southie broad Mary Pat into an increasingly malevolent 1970’s Boston to find her missing and much loved seventeen year old daughter Jules. This is the era of busing protests, and even as Mary Pat is driven half mad by her desperation and fury about Jules’ disappearance, she is unable to ignore the poisonous prejudice and hatred that pervades her world. This is no glib morality tale of a white woman reckoning neatly with racism; her own intolerances are not the least of those she has to confront. Lehane is always able to write efficient, inventive page turners but where Small Mercies sets itself apart is its unsparing but not unsympathetic portrait of Mary Pat, the dissolution of her family, and what becomes of a person once they lose everything they have to lose. The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by Emmanuel Carrere French writer Emmanuel Carrere also writes unsettling, slender works of fiction like Class Trip (in which a young boy’s school trip is disjointed by the strange behavior of his father and the disappearance of a local child), but this work of nonfiction is his masterpiece. Jean-Claude Romand, a doctor for the World Health Organisation, survived a fire in 1993 which killed his wife and children. Soon afterwards, his parents are discovered shot to death at their home. Romand’s story begins to unravel and soon it becomes clear that not only had Romand killed his entire family, but that his preceding life had been nothing but elaborate and carefully defended fantasy. He had never graduated from college, fabricating a long career which had never begun, and maintained the lie through borrowing money and receiving investments from family and friends. When they begin to call back in their capital and his facade is at threat of discovery, he feels he has no choice but to kill his family. It’s an extraordinary enough story from the bare facts, but Carrere’s precise and spare prose and reflexive self-inquiry elevate it to a work of real genius. In direct response to Capote omitting his own participation in the events he recounts in In Cold Blood, Carrere inserts his own communications and perspectives and his disquiet upon learning the details of the tragedy. For me, as well as the initial tragedy of so many innocent lives being taken, the notion of never allowing yourself to be truly seen by those closest to you for a single moment is a haunting one. I often think of a detail Carrere recounts about how Romand would spend his time: driving off to “work” in the morning and then sitting in a car park idling, checking the newspapers, staring into space, the banality and the waste of life. Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth Like her countryman Karl Ove Knausgaard, Vigdis Hjorth wrote a literary sensation which drew her a good deal of real-life familial discord and public controversy. Bergljot, the book’s narrator, has long since been estranged from her parents and siblings, but is reluctantly drawn back to them when a dispute breaks out about the inheritance of summer houses following her father’s death. She wishes to make no claim upon the properties, but with battling relatives imploring her to take their side and settle the dispute, is forced to engage once more with a family she has cut out for her own survival and sanity. The abuse, ignored allegations and cloying manipulation of 23 years that broke them apart come to the fore, and this time must be dealt with for good. Hjorth is one of the great stylists of her time, and employs a kind of immaculate restraint which invites comparison to Ibsen. Her style is never better used than here in Will and Testament, where its reserve and precision serve to mimic the effects of familial trauma and abuse. Night Of The Hunter by Davis Grubb Though the film adaptation starring Robert Mitchum is justly feted, the novel Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb has been somewhat underappreciated in recent years. A shame, as it is not only a mercilessly tight thriller but also a moving portrait of sibling bonds and the world children occupy which they cannot share with adults no matter how they may try. Based partially on the real serial killer Harry Power who lured his victims through lonely hearts advertisements and killed a widow and her two children, Night of The Hunter tells the story of the chilling ex-con Preacher who tricks the Willa Harper, the widow of his former cellmate into marrying him, chasing a large sum of money the now-dead cellmate had concealed with his family. He fools everyone except Harper’s son who sees the true darkness behind Preacher’s bombastic piety. A classic gothic chase story on one hand, it’s equally as astute on the difficulty of communicating freely within a fractured family. *** View the full article

Three East 236th Street is a trim little house on the eastern border of the park, just north of where the old Mosholu Parkway once emerged from the woods. In the winter of 1931, a middle-aged man named Emanuel Kamna lived there with his wife, in-laws, and two daughters. He had enlisted with the National Guard in his twenties and never left the military. He’d patrolled the Mexican border during the Pancho Villa Expedition and survived the shell-shredded trenches of Flanders during the Great War. After returning from Europe with an honorable discharge, he found work at the Kingsbridge Armory, just south of the park, where he earned $7 a day maintaining guns and rifles for the National Guard’s 27th Division. The wages were modest, but he was lucky to have a job. These were the early days of the Great Depression, before shantytowns mushroomed in the parks, when bankers and merchants still spoke wistfully about an imminent improvement in business conditions. But the unemployment rate was closing on 20 percent, and the breadlines grew longer with each passing day. The shock of the stock market crash had been replaced by a deepening sense of malaise. The armory was three miles from Kamna’s house, an hour’s walk with a pleasant stretch through the park. On February 26, 1931, he was crossing the Mosholu Parkway just before 7:00 a.m. when he saw it—the white glove caught on a bramble beside the roadway, just hanging there as if someone had left it to dry. Then he looked down into the gully and saw its owner. He had encountered enough corpses to recognize death. He saw it in the contortion of her neck, the hands folded neatly together as if smoothing out her dress, the eyes wide open. He lingered for a moment but did not approach. Instead, he turned back to the road and held up his arm to hail an automobile. A delivery truck from the Tidewater Oil Company rumbled to a stop. Kamna told the driver what he’d seen, and they drove out of the park in search of a phone. By the time the news hit the press later that day, the story had gotten mangled. The truck driver was credited with finding the body while walking to work. Kamna returned to the armory and faded into obscurity. But the news of his gruesome discovery blazed on without him as the mysterious murder ignited New York’s collective imagination. Like a wildfire in a windstorm, it flared in unexpected directions, leaping from tree to tree until it scorched vast territories far from the original spark. By the time the conflagration burned out in 1932, the mayor had resigned in disgrace, and Tammany Hall, the fearsome political machine that had ruled New York City for a century, lay a smoldering ruin. Then, amid the ashes and rubble, a modern metropolis took root and reached for the sky. *** Inspector Henry Engelbert Bruckman didn’t look much like the chiseled heroes of detective films. His face was full and fleshy, with a soft chin that faded into his neck and an incongruously sharp nose. Congenital bags under his eyes made him look gloomy and fatigued. He was tough, though, six-foot-two and solid. As a rookie, he’d distinguished himself by knocking out five members of the Hudson Dusters gang in “one of the liveliest street fights ever seen in Greenwich Village.” Yet his superiors were more impressed by his “quick, incisive mind,” “amazingly retentive memory,” and “uncanny eye for detail.” His detective work was meticulous, characterized by dogged fact-finding rather than swift leaps of intuition. Faced with a challenging case, he would spend long hours searching for clues and fitting them into position like puzzle pieces until a picture emerged from the mosaic. He was one of the rare police officers of the era who won promotions for competence rather than political fealty. High-level hiring decisions were usually determined by the Tammany Hall bosses, who prized loyalty over independence. Bruckman’s colleague, Inspector Lewis Valentine, had been demoted after he annoyed Tammany leaders by arresting well-connected gamblers. Bruckman wasn’t a crusader like Valentine; he kept his head down and avoided politics. But he was honest, diligent, and tenacious. Raised in a tenement house in Yorkville on the Upper East Side of Manhattan by parents who were German immigrants, he spent twenty-five years on the force, methodically passing the required civil-service exams and climbing the ranks to become Bronx Borough Inspector at the age of forty-five, despite having only an eighth-grade education. Bruckman’s ascent coincided with a revolution in organized crime. The Hudson Dusters gang was old-school, an unruly crew of Irish hoodlums reminiscent of the nineteenth-century ruffians portrayed in Gangs of New York. When Bruckman scrapped with the Dusters in 1905, they were already headed toward oblivion, soon to be supplanted by a new breed of gangster. A few of the Dusters played poker in the prop room of Oscar Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre. They were often joined by an awkward, pale-faced teenager who spoke little but carried a roll of bills that grew thicker over the course of the night. Sometimes he lent money to his fellow gamblers at steep rates. Within a few years, the teenager, Arnold Rothstein, had become one of New York’s richest men. In addition to playing high-stakes poker, he waged hundreds of thousands of dollars on horse races and usually won. He bet on baseball, too, and was blamed for fixing the 1919 World Series, though his role in the scandal is a matter of dispute. Gambling was only one of his many revenue streams, however. He was also a bookmaker and a loan shark. He underwrote bail bonds, financed nightclubs and casinos, arranged police protection for criminal operations, and supplied thugs-for-hire to participate in violent labor strikes—as either strikers or strikebreakers, depending on who was paying. Known as “The Brain,” “The Bankroll,” and “The Man Uptown,” he had dealings with almost every major criminal and corrupt politician in New York City. “Rothstein’s main function was organization,” wrote biographer Leo Katcher. “He provided money and manpower and protection. He arranged corruption—for a price. And, if things went wrong, Rothstein was ready to provide bail and attorneys. He put crime on a corporate basis when the proceeds of crime became large enough to warrant it.” After the Volstead Act outlawed the sale of liquor in the United States in 1920, Rothstein swooped into the bootlegging business. He established a whiskey-smuggling operation from Canada—across Lake Ontario and down the Hudson River—and soon added overseas routes from Britain and Cuba. He also financed local bootleggers and provided them with trucks and drivers in return for a cut of the proceeds. Smuggling and bootlegging were highly profitable—a case of Scotch could be purchased for $75 in London and sold for $300 in New York—but the business was risky. Rothstein mitigated interference from authorities through bribes and political favors, but hijacking became a constant threat. A truck full of expensive liquor was an attractive target for bandits, and victimized bootleggers had no legal recourse to recover their stolen contraband. To protect his merchandise, Rothstein hired one of his labor-strike thugs, a former Hudson Duster named Jack Diamond. Skinny and pale, with brooding eyebrows and hard, gray eyes, Diamond was a dashing publicity hound who favored a chinchilla coat, white silk scarf, and wide-brimmed, white felt hat. People called him “Legs,” possibly because of his youthful prowess as a truck bouncer—a petty thief who pilfered packages from delivery trucks and sprinted away. By the time he reached his twenties, Diamond was stealing entire trucks. He was vicious, cunning, and unencumbered by sentiment or conscience, a man well-suited for the violence of the Prohibition Era. Arnold Rothstein hired Legs and his brother Eddie to ride shotgun on his delivery trucks for $7.50 a day and didn’t object when they moonlighted by hijacking his competitors. In 1921, Legs Diamond asked Rothstein to help him start his own bootlegging operation. Rothstein, who preferred to let others do the dirty work, agreed to provide financing, legal services, and protection from the cops. With his support, Legs established a well-organized crime gang with rackets all over town, including burglary, hijacking, bootlegging, and narcotics. Some of the most notorious gangsters of the era got their start under Diamond, including Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Arthur Flegenheimer, better known as Dutch Schultz. Unlike the clannish Hudson Dusters, they had diverse ethnic backgrounds. The Diamond brothers were second-generation Irish immigrants raised in Philadelphia and Brooklyn. Schultz was an Austrian Jew from Yorkville. Luciano was born in Sicily and grew up on the Lower East Side. “Diamond was the organizer of the first really modern mob in New York,” recalled Schultz’s lawyer, “Dixie” Davis. “As distinguished from the old loosely knit gangs, the mob was a compact business organization with a payroll of gunmen who worked for a boss.” The Diamond mob was short-lived, however. Legs was a difficult boss: cruel and capricious, prone to explosive rages, and devoid of loyalty. When his minions split to start their own operations, brutal turf wars ensued. Diamond allied with a bellicose Brooklyn rum runner named Vannie Higgins to shut out his erstwhile protégé, Dutch Schultz. Meanwhile, Lucky Luciano went to work for Mafia boss Joe Masseria during the brutal Castellammarese War, which pitted the Italian crime families against each other. Flush with money, equipped with shotguns and modern submachine guns, the mobsters battled for power, profit, and vengeance. “Prohibition has brought into existence an organization of crime and criminal such as no other country on the face of the globe has ever known,” observed actuarial scientist Frederick Hoffman in 1930. “Gangsters and gunmen are being killed almost day after day, forming a not inconsiderable item in the large number of homicidal deaths.” Arnold Rothstein was one of the statistics, gunned down during a business meeting at the glamorous Park Central Hotel in 1928, allegedly over a gambling debt. When a detective asked him who’d done it as he lay dying in the hospital, he put a trembling finger to his lips and whispered, “You know me better than that, Paddy.” Two years later, hit men busted into Jack Diamond’s suite at the Monticello Hotel near Central Park and drilled him with five bullets—reportedly payback by Vannie Higgins after Legs double-crossed him. After they left him for dead, he swigged two shots of whiskey, stumbled out of his room in his red silk pajamas, and collapsed in the hallway. Fifty-one gangsters had already been killed that year, and the surgeon expected him to join their ranks, but Diamond, who had survived two previous shootings, pulled through again. “His ability to recover from what ambulance surgeons always declare at first to be fatal wounds have made him the clay pigeon of the underworld,” marveled the New York Herald Tribune. Vannie Higgins, who was in Montreal to negotiate a bootlegging deal, sent Legs a sardonic telegram, “Better luck next time, old pal.” But like Rothstein, Diamond confounded the police by refusing to name the shooters, dismissing all questions with a shake of the head and a twisted smile. ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age, by Michael Wolraich. Copyright 2024. Published by Union Square & Co. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. View the full article

The Athenian General Alcibiades, a former student of Socrates, determines that he should reopen the road to the Temple of Eleusis and guard the sacred procession. The Spartans, however, still occupy the road, blocking the way from Athens to the temple of Eleusis… This endeavor to reopen the route will not be without risk for Alcibiades; the Spartan soldiers of King Agis are quartered there and are still under orders to execute Alcibiades on sight… [During his time in Sparta, Alcibiades had impregnated King Agis’s wife, Queen Timaea. King Agis has a very personal reason to unleash his Spartan army on Alcibiades.] On the morning of the sacred procession from Athens to Eleusis (which is about 14-mile walk), Alcibiades stations sentries on the heights and sends out an advance guard. Alcibiades, aboard his impressive steed, leads his soldiers to join the crowd of eager initiates, priests, and other officials gathered by the Eleusinion, a small satellite sanctuary located on the slopes of the Athenian Acropolis. (You can visit the ruins of the sanctuary to this day.) The high priest Theodorus delivers an invocation to the throng. Callias stands by his side along with the other priests of Eleusis. He warily eyes Alcibiades. Callias and Alcibiades are “half” brothers and the hate each other. Alcibiades had once plotted to murder Callias to get his wealthy estate, and likely killed Callias’ sister. Callias had responded by charging Alcibiades with a religious crime and convicting him to death in absentia. Alcibiades fled Athens and advised the Spartans to attack Athens by first capturing Callias’ silver mines. These two have history. The initiates recite the prayers. Alcibiades has his soldiers form a protective wall around them. Callias instinctively bristles. Alcibiades makes a gesture, and the procession officially begins, moving out slowly and solemnly along the Panathenaic Way, with the initiates chanting the customary verses. The rhythm of the songs and the coordinated footfalls of the march are almost hypnotic. As they travel, Alcibiades keeps a close eye on the surroundings; Callias keeps a close eye on him. So devout is the bearing of Alcibiades that he seems more like a high priest than a general. We do not know if the priests were impressed or threatened by the spectacle of Alcibiades as a sincere devotee. Surely some did not believe it at all: the man is a chameleon. The procession passes out of the city gates and through the cemetery, which is thematic given that they are making a symbolic journey to the realm of the dead. They slowly climb Mount Aegaleo and look down on the fertile Thriasio plain. The road they are to follow across the plain appears as a thin ribbon, passing by, there in the distance, a Spartan fortification. Slowly the procession marches on, down into the plain, and approaches the Spartan stronghold. Alcibiades prepares for a field battle and moves his men into position. He has unspoken hopes that the Spartans will bring the fight so he can slay them in full view of the Athenian procession. A military victory with civilian witnesses would be a rare political opportunity. The procession slows down. All eyes are on the Spartan fort. The Athenian soldiers draw their spears and swords and cautiously edge forward. Alcibiades proudly, even defiantly, picks up the pace. The time has come; he rides his horse right up to the Spartan walls. But the Spartans do not engage. They remain safely tucked away inside, ominously silent. The Spartans are disciplined. Alcibiades respects them for it. Puzzled, Alcibiades leads the procession onward. The initiates are relieved that they were not subject to an armed conflict and hail praises to Alcibiades. But Alcibiades, glancing back, is concerned. Maybe the Spartans are waiting to attack them on the return trip. Maybe they were just watching to see how he arranged his troops, so they could devise a more effective attack when he comes back through. He leaves scouts to keep a distant eye on the Spartans. How would the Spartans react to the formation that he showed them? What would be their counter? How can he counter their counter? The procession makes it to the temple of Eleusis, and the initiates begin the process of ritual bathing and spiritual purification as they prepare for the rites. Alcibiades and his officers huddle to the side and discuss defensive alignments for the return trip. When night comes, the initiates drink the sacred elixir of the goddesses and file into the temple. Alcibiades and his army stand guard outside. The rites proceed in their usual manner. In the morning, the exhausted but uplifted initiates spill out of the temple. They have earned an eternal afterlife in heaven, but how soon will they meet it? Alcibiades gathers the initiates and organizes them for the return trip to Athens. The soldiers encircle the procession once again, and Alcibiades leads them forward. The Spartans will certainly bring resistance this time. Alcibiades is ready. When they draw within sight of the Spartans, Alcibiades deploys his troops. His soldiers are alert, focused, and ready for action. The Spartan fortification is again eerily quiet. The Athenians press on. The advance guard passes through without resistance. The encircled initiates, led by Alcibiades, pass through, then the rear guard. The Spartans do not show themselves. Alcibiades looks back and wonders what Sparta is up to. Did Callias somehow negotiate a deal using his station as proxenus to Sparta? Alcibiades looks at Callias, but Callias does not return his gaze. He considers the possibility that Callias has robbed him of a chance at victory. Regardless, the initiates sing that Alcibiades has defeated the Spartans without even drawing his sword. The Spartans have been twice humbled by the mere threat of Alcibiades. The road to Eleusis is open, and Alcibiades is a hero. The army is exalted in spirit and feels itself invincible under his command. The people are so captivated by his leadership that they are filled with an amazing passion for him to be their tyrant. (A tyrant is, of course, a person with sole political power, which, when matched with his sole military power as autocrat, would make Alcibiades more like a king than a general.)… What Alcibiades thinks about the idea of being named tyrant is unknown, but it frightens many of Athens’s most influential citizens. Perhaps Callias most of all: imagine the sort of dread that would be triggered by the thought of a psychopath being given the power of a tyrant, particularly since this would-be tyrant has already profaned your religion, stolen your money, punched your father, possibly murdered your sister, and certainly plotted your own assassination. Anyone, but especially Callias, must have grave concerns about what Alcibiades would do with unchecked power. Callias had grown up with Alcibiades, they were “half” brother after all, and he knew him better than anyone else, knew his nature and his malevolence. There is no word on Socrates’s feelings about the chatter of Alcibiades being named tyrant, but Socrates’s perspective on tyrants in general is well recorded by Plato. To Socrates, the flaw of democracy is its vulnerability to tyrants. The populace—the mob, as he calls them—are gullible and can easily fall under the spell of a charismatic leader. Alcibiades certainly fits the bill. In Socrates’s estimation, the tyrant first appears as a protector. The people have something they fear, either inside or outside of the state, either real or imagined, from which the tyrant claims he can guard them. He will make them the “victors.” The people flock to him of their own accord, for he pays them in lies, lies they want to hear, lies they want to believe. They are “superior”; they are “true patriots.” His favorite tools are false accusations and unleashing his mob against the “threat.” In time, the tyrant erases any and all opposition, “with unholy tongue and lips tasting the blood of his fellow citizens.” He and his supporters are empowered by the purge, “and the more detestable his actions . . . the greater devotion he requires from his followers.” These words are as true in the modern world as they were in ancient Athens. Many countries today still struggle with this structural defect of democracy: the majority of the populace in a democracy may elect a tyrant, who will invariably disassemble the democracy that elected him—a democracy can make a tyrant, but a tyrant can unmake a democracy. The weak portion of the populace yearns to be strong, so they attach themselves to a strong man; such is the allure of the bully, the appeal of the despot, the attraction of the tyrant. Ancient Athens is where democracy first began and first fell, and so can teach us lessons that are, unfortunately, still applicable. But for Socrates, the would-be tyrant is Alcibiades, who is, at least partially, one of Socrates’s own making. Alcibiades had once before caused Athens to take down its democracy based on his outrageous lie and install an oligarchy that sparked a civil war. And he wasn’t even in Athens at the time. Now he’s in Athens and well positioned to take down Athens’s democracy once again… ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Shadows of Socrates: The Heresy War, and Treachery Behind the Trial of Socrates, by Matt Gatton. Copyright 2024. Published by Pegasus Books. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. View the full article

I once heard a joke that went something like: A man tells God, “I think my role should be to protect my family.” God says, “Great! Since infection is one of the most common risks to children, that means you’ll sanitize your kids’ bottles, change their diapers, find a pediatrician, schedule and take them to doctor’s appointments, be sure to wash—” and the man interrupts, “No, no, no, I didn’t mean protect like that.” My debut thriller, Nightwatching, begins with a scenario in line with what the man in the joke was clearly imagining: a bump in the night. An intruder in the house. A parent forced to protect and defend. But the unnamed heroine’s husband is absent, leaving her home alone with her young children. Purely by chance she’s awake in the middle of the night tucking her son back into bed when she sees the intruder, whose location separates her from her car, from where her phone sits on a bedside table and a gun is secured in her bedroom. A blizzard prevents any opportunity to successfully flee from her isolated house with barefoot children in tow. In marked contrast to the stranger’s strength and size, the mother is slight. She has no special physical skills or training. This conceit of an everywoman plunged into an action movie scenario, forced to protect her home and children, allows Nightwatching to explore questions of how we define strength, who among us receives the benefit of the doubt, what characteristics we elevate, and why our responses to these issues are so often inextricably tangled with gender. The joke elicits a sardonic laugh or an eyeroll because we’re all aware that the tasks ‘God’ lists—mundane logistical planning and chores—are utterly necessary to protect children. But we also know that as so often happens when a task is dull, daily, unpaid, and especially when it deals with childrearing, this particular type of protection is traditionally classified as feminine. We understand the man is instead picturing his role as action hero—Bruce Willis crawling through a vent in Die Hard to rescue his wife, Liam Neeson tracking down his daughter in Taken, or even the female corollary, the “mama bear” of urban legend who surges with so much adrenalin she’s able to lift a wrecked car off her pinned child. Just like the man in the joke, frequently our default reaction when we hear the word “protect” is to picture a daring last-minute rescue or a violent act. “A man’s home is his castle” isn’t just a pithy phrase, but has been codified into law everywhere from 17th century England into the present day United States, where many jurisdictions’ castle doctrine permits deadly force against an intruder. Because men (of course, not all men, not always, and not by all definitions) are often physically stronger than the others they share a life with, it seems logical that in the event that some kind of physical confrontation becomes necessary to protect, they would take it on. So in part, this myopic understanding of “protection” makes sense. Of course the man isn’t interested in the endlessly repetitive and dull protective chores. Who is? It’s far easier to sit back and imagine yourself as a heroic barrier against theoretical danger than to do even one of the very real and unpleasant tasks ‘God’ sets out in the joke—changing a diaper five times a day for two to three years, for example. On top of which, from sports to movies, society elevates the importance of physical strength and skill to the point that it can appear to be on par with, or even superior to, moral virtue, sacrifice, or intellectual merit. Stories of physical defense and rescue are memorably interesting and even entertaining, especially because the vast majority of the time in a civil society, they remain on screen or in imagination. In contrast, getting a toddler safely clipped into a well-researched and properly-installed car seat and then driving at the speed limit? Not exactly compelling or a situation where you try to picture how you’d perform — though absurdly more likely to happen in real life, and more likely to protect a child than any physical altercation. Superior fighting strength is not an asset on the heroine’s table in Nightwatching. With a gun locked in a safe and kept separate from ammunition (as it always must and should be in a home with children), there’s no weapon to give her an advantage. Yet the mother has other, less celebrated, strengths. Her smaller size, her children’s small size, may be a liability in a physical fight, but help them hide from the intruder. The mother, simply by being the primary parent in her household, understands who her children are and how to help them cope with their awful situation. Her familiarity with every inch of her house—written into her bones after overnight trips in the dark to nurse, give a bottle, change wet sheets, tuck a child back in after a nightmare, the endlessly recurring, exhausting type of daily “protective” tasks that so often fall to mothers — allows her to track the intruder’s movements. As a mother, as a woman, she has also had to accept and experience pain and physical sacrifice as an expected, almost routine, part of adult life. She identifies the intruder and understands the gravity of the threat he poses because of a nearly universal skill among those who present as women, one born out of awareness of physical vulnerability: before her ordeal she recognized subtle signs of potential danger in a stranger; ideas her husband dismissed as emotional and paranoid. Well aware she is physically outmatched, all these characteristics, along with intelligence, patience, emotional maturity, and an ability to plan ahead, must come into play if she wants to see herself and her children safely through the night. But Nightwatching’s heroine, unlike the one person army or invincible hero of traditional action fare, also experiences immense fear of the unknown, of pain, and struggles with her own physical and emotional reaction to those fears. She is plagued by insecurities and uncertainty, forcing readers to cope with the ways these issues may impact her reliability. Does the mother understand what’s happening, and what she’s doing? Does acknowledging her weaknesses make her weak? Has her past trauma permanently impacted her stability? Is she filled with self-doubt because she knows she’s done something wrong? If she’s not at some kind of fault, why does she blame herself for her situation, revisiting all she could have done better or differently? Is she a “good” mother at all? Or has she failed her children already, and irrevocably? After all, she’s unnamed not just because she could be anyone, but because like anyone outside the confines of our own consciousness, she remains a stranger to us. And maybe, just maybe, we judge female strangers, particularly mothers, with a uniquely critical eye. Maybe more than that, each woman judges herself most mercilessly of all. *** View the full article

Authenticity is a big issue in literature. Who wants to read a fake? Nadie. Nobody! Now, when discussing English texts, the topic of authenticity tends to focus on how to express in this language events or dialogues that happen in another. My previous piece, “Writing with an Accent,” was precisely about how I used a foreign language (Spanish) to preserve authenticity without compromising understanding in my novel Death under the Perseids, which takes place in Havana. But I have also encountered the opposite problem—how to write realistic-sounding scenes from the point of view of an American character, considering that I am not American myself and English isn’t my first language. Here, the catch is that my readers are likely to detect any awkward dialogue and unrealistic situations. After all, they are reading a text in their own language. They know perfectly well what sounds right and what doesn’t. My most recent novel, Last Seen in Havana, a sequel to Death under the Perseids, is written in alternating chapters that move between the late ’80s and a week in 2020. The ones that happen in 2020 are written in the first person, narrated by Mercedes, a Cuban woman living in the United States. Mercedes goes back to Havana in search of her mother, who disappeared twenty-seven years ago. Writing Mercedes’s chapters in the first person was easy because my circumstances are quite similar to hers. I often sprinkle my dialogues with words in Spanish, like my character does: Some of my friend’s predictions had turned out to be accurate, but in the most twisted way conceivable. “To unlock the past, present and future,” she whispered. “So mote it be.” “Mote un carajo.” That’s what I do, going back and forth between the two languages without even noticing it. Dude, that’s, like, not sounding cool The other chapters follow Mercedes’s mother, Sarah, a young San Diegan who lived in Cuba from 1986 to 1989. When I began writing the novel, these chapters were told in the first person too. In letters to her friend Rob, she describes her marriage to a Cuban Army officer, their life together, and the birth of their daughter Mercedes. The problem was that the narrator’s voice didn’t convince me. No matter how many “likes” and “dudes” I threw in, it still sounded forced. Fake! I felt as if I were wearing a mask, the mask of an American, which wasn’t thick enough to conceal my true (Cuban) face. I finally decided to take off the mask, changing the first-person narrator to a third person limited point of view. That allowed me to show Sarah’s understanding—and often misunderstanding—of the Cuban life and culture of the ’80s while keeping my distance and using a neutral language: Sarah had been looking forward to the May Day parade. It felt like a dream to be at Revolution Square, surrounded by so many people who breathed the socialist ideals she used to admire from afar. Now she was in the thick of it! She went with Joaquín, Lo, Pepe and other members of their CDR. A special vehicle was available to take Miramar neighbors to the Plaza de la Revolución. They had been told to be at a designated spot by nine-thirty, and when the group arrived, a clean, large bus was already waiting for them. By the time they got to the square, hundreds of people were already gathered there. It felt odd that they weren’t demanding higher wages or protesting this or that, which was Sarah’s idea of an International Workers’ Day march. They were simply showing their commitment to the revolution, and she liked the celebratory mood. A word about dialogue When the entire conversation is supposed to happen in Spanish, I always wonder if I should use this language at all in the English text. Wouldn’t it be redundant or worse, unnatural? In Sarah’s chapters, since the story is told from her point of view, Spanish is used only when it says something about the way the words sound to her: “Let’s go to an actividad de mi cuadra alegre y bonita!” Dolores said. “What’s that?” Sarah asked. All the syllables had merged together in Dolores’s mouth and she hadn’t understood a thing. “You’ll see! Come with me!” It turned out to be a street cleaning event where neighbors got together to make the block look “cheerful and beautiful.” They picked up trash, swept the sidewalks and planted flowers in public areas. Here, I introduced the concept of “actividad”—a word that was frequently used in Cuba in the ’80s to describe community-organized events. The English equivalent “activity” would have been misleading. The other side of the coin In Sarah’s chapters, I made sure that readers knew when she used English words, since, again, the dialogue was supposed to happen entirely in Spanish: When Sarah approached a hotel employee and asked about a surfboard, the man shook his head furiously. “No, compañera, no!” His voice sounded tainted with fear. “We don’t have that. These activities are forbidden here!” “But, dude!” She said it in English, without thinking. The employee gave her a blank look. I’m already considering how to deal with all that if were to translate the book into Spanish. . . The most challenging part about adopting the voice of a character whose background differed so much from my own was attempting to wear the narrator’s mask. Taking it off freed me, allowing me to reveal the character’s feelings and experiences without forcefully stepping into her shoes. There is a limit to “authenticity,” and the novel got stronger when I found and respected it. *** View the full article

William Randolph Hearst was among the most important American titans Churchill hoped to add to his network. His twenty-eight newspapers reached 10 percent of the American population on weekdays, 20 percent on Sundays, and dominated West Coast markets, giving him an enormous influence on American public opinion and, by extension, the nation’s politics. He owned the outlets to which most statesmen sought and needed access, and he had the money to pay them well for their literary output—in 1931 he paid Benito Mussolini $1,500 for each of twelve articles. His newspapers ran articles by Eleanor Roosevelt, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, and a series of pieces compiled by Shaw to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Beethoven’s death. Because Hearst was losing ground to some competitors, he decided to add to his papers a “March of Events” column, featuring “noted writers” on “world topics.” He could and did pay top dollar to such as Mussolini, Lloyd George, Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering, and Churchill. In short, Hearst met both of Churchill’s criteria for entry into the Churchill American network—handsome commissions and politically alert audiences to be persuaded of his policy views. And a proprietor interested in world politics. And an introduction to new links: Hearst’s many friends and colleagues. One biographer notes, “Hearst employed the power of the media to set the national political agenda . . .” Just the sort of publisher that would appeal to Churchill, even though the views favored by “the Chief,” as Hearst was known by those who worked for him, did not coincide with his own. Hearst also had the advantage of being not only a press baron but also one of Hollywood’s moguls, a man pursued by celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin, and by others ready and able to provide venues at which Churchill could conveniently meet the rich, famous, and merely entertaining, extending his network into movieland. There was some overlap with the financial worlds of New York and San Francisco, the latter the city from which the Troupe was traveling, but Hearst largely traveled in different cultural and financial circles. Churchill’s relationship with the film industry did not begin when he arrived at San Simeon, and did not end when he returned to Britain in 1929. He had an early fascination with the media. In 1899, when he was to cover the impending war in South Africa for the London Morning Post, he proposed taking along a film operator to make a film of the war, but abandoned the plan when told an American company already was on the way to do just that. Later, in 1927, when Churchill was chancellor of the exchequer preparing his second budget, the Cinematograph Films Act was introduced to protect British and British Empire filmmakers from Hollywood films. This was to be accomplished by a tax on the profits of American filmmakers, and a quota on American films. He said at the time that he had learned from news reports that “25 millions [sic] a year is taken out of this country by American Film Producers.” Whether Churchill expected any problem from the fact that he had included in his budgets a tax on profits from American films, and subjected them to quotas to protect Britain’s domestic film industry, we do not know. He might have countered by pointing out that as chancellor he had overridden officials who wanted to tax American citizens temporarily resident in Britain, explaining that he did not want to discourage visits by wealthy Americans who spent substantial sums in the “sporting counties.” In the event, UK restrictions on American films did not dampen the extraordinarily warm reception Winston received from owners of Hollywood studios and California’s governor. In his usual disarming manner, Churchill told his California hosts, “I have only one regret, only one pang which racks my bosom, and that is that I have never been here before.” Hearst’s San Simeon Castle was situated on 240,000 acres overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was constructed by a man who, at age ten on a tour of England with his mother, saw Windsor Castle and told her, “I would like to live there.” Churchill, who had seen great houses in his day, described San Simeon in a letter to Clemmie, “The whole place is astonishing . . . oriental hospitalities.” He could not fail to be impressed by the 68,500-square-foot, Mediterranean Revival–style castle, even though its mere 115 rooms were fewer than the 187 in the house in which he was born, Blenheim Palace. The California castle had thirty-eight bedrooms and forty bathrooms. Blenheim is situated on 2,000 acres with pleasant views. San Simeon, reported an awed Randolph in his diary, sits on 300 square miles, 35 along the sea, and Casa Grande, the main house was “chock full of works of art obtained from Europe. They are insured for 16 million dollars.” Winston characterized them as “not vy [sic] discriminating,” while Johnny noted, “Inside the building were copies of tapestries at Blenheim. . . . Hearst’s swimming pool was the only item which did not seem to be copied from anything. It was probably original.” He was wrong. The Roman Pool, indoors, designed to have heated water, was “like the caldaria of Roman baths.” As for the Neptune Pool, outside, “a residential adaptation of beaux arts display architecture. If the lords of the Roman Empire were transported from their villas to the Neptune pool, they would feel right at home.” Churchill had no difficulty settling into his four-day visit at San Simeon. Churchill had been published in Hearst’s Cosmopolitan magazine since 1924 (continuing through at least 1931), and had met Hearst in 1928, probably on one of the latter’s tours of Europe. Hearst and his acknowledged mistress, Marion Davies, were fine hosts, and Winston had no problem with the fact that Hearst openly lived with Davies when in California and with his wife, Millicent—a Catholic who would not consider divorce and with whom he had five sons—when in New York. He described the situation to Clemmie as “two magnificent establishments, two charming wives; complete indifference to public opinion . . .” Churchill was also relaxed about the relationship between General Eisenhower and his “attractive [American] driver,” Kay Summersby. He always included Miss Summersby with any dinner invitation to Ike, and when going to Ike’s he asked that Summersby be seated at his table. Churchill is quoted as saying, “Now tell Kay to come . . . I want to see her.” At a later visit to Davies’s beach house, called “Ocean House,” Randolph also found the arrangement acceptable. Davies, he wrote, is “delightfully stimulating.” And Winston admired the many butterflies, asking Johnny to “collect all the species in sight but I refused.” Studying butterflies was one of Churchill’s endearing, lifelong hobbies. Johnny and Randolph “were butterfly-chasing . . . paying court to several of the charming women guests,” which might explain his churlish refusal to collect the real thing. Guests at Hearst’s Castle were required to assemble for cocktails, two-per-person limit, promptly at seven, with dinner following whenever Hearst and Davies, hostess of his West Coast events, appeared. The dinners were lavish, followed by games played or entertainment by the guests, and then a move to the private theater for the showing of a prerelease film to those guests who chose not to go to bed until after their hosts had ascended the elevator to their private quarters. The routine included transport for departing guests. “The train that takes guests away leaves after midnight, and the one that brings new guests arrives early in the morning, so you have dinner with one lot of people and come down to breakfast the next morning to find an entirely new crowd.” Because Davies was an alcoholic, no alcoholic beverages were allowed in the bedrooms and waiters were instructed to stop serving anyone who seemed to be drinking to excess. “The wine flowed like glue.” Winston found time to paint, which created an amusing incident, told to W. A. Swanberg by Hearst’s personal attorney, John Francis Neylan. A meeting between client and counsel was interrupted by an excited maid screaming, “Mr. Churchill is fainting. He wants some turpentine.” Hearst and Neylan, the story goes, rushed to the terrace, where Churchill was “placidly . . . puffing at a cigar as he painted a landscape. It turned out that he had asked a gardener for turpentine to thin his oils, and when the gardener relayed his message to the maid she thought he had said Mr. Churchill was fainting, not painting.” On September 18 the boss at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Louis B. Mayer, joined Hearst in sponsoring a luncheon for Churchill at the MGM Studio, with a welcoming address by Governor C. C. Young. Jack, Johnny, and Randolph came along to share in the festivities. The New York Daily News dubbed it “the big feed . . . [with] more than a hundred leading citizens of Los Angeles, to say nothing of pretty chorus girls and movie stars [who] will try to make the visiting Britisher feel at home.” More important to Churchill, almost anyone who mattered in Los Angeles financial and entertainment circles was on the list of some 200 attendees published by the press, a very impressive listing. As part of the entertainment Lawrence Tibbett sang “The Road to Mandalay,” with words by Rudyard Kipling and no doubt familiar to Churchill. Later the song was memorably recorded by Frank Sinatra. View the full article

For more than three decades I have worked in prisons, in secure units in hospitals, and in the community, acting in both assessment and treatment roles and working with female and male patients. I initially trained in clinical psychology, using treatment models including cognitive behavioral therapy (a talking therapy that focuses on identifying and altering harmful patterns of behavior and thinking patterns) and the psychodynamic approach, which seeks to help an individual access and then understand their unconscious thoughts and feelings. But the vast majority of my work has been in the field of forensic psychotherapy, which brings the psychoanalytic approach into the field of criminality, using psychodynamic techniques to probe the motivations and meaning of a person’s criminal actions. Many years of this work have shown me that this can genuinely help people to recognize unconscious influences in their lives that explain their actions. Moreover, this understanding can provide a solid foundation from which to treat, and to some degree resolve, these issues. In the best case, this can allow people who had been suffering intolerable and overwhelming emotions to control previously untamed impulses and regain some stability in their lives. In this forensic work, I have been most occupied by the crimes and violence of women. Female violence is a subject whose nature is frequently misunderstood and whose importance is too often disregarded. For many in society, from the media to some areas of the medical and legal professions, the reality of women’s violence is a truth too uncomfortable to take seriously: a taboo that offends the idealized notion of women as sources of love, nurture, and care. That mothers sometimes harm, or even kill, their children is simply too shocking for many to engage with, as is the idea that women in caring roles could sexually assault or otherwise mistreat minors. Even to consider these things implicitly threatens our social fabric, bringing the shock of maternal abuse and female cruelty into comfortable lives in which the idea of the loving, caring family is so central. Our preconceptions about female violence are deeply embedded in history and culture. Stereotypes of vengeful women fill the pages of our oldest literature: the dangerous seductress, exemplified by the biblical tale of Judith beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes while he sleeps in his tent; the spurned wife driven to murderous rage in Greek tragedy, from Clytemnestra stabbing a helpless Agamemnon in the bath to Medea, so blinded by anger at Jason’s betrayal that she kills not only his new wife but her own children. Our depictions of violent women in the modern world are no less extreme. Women such as Dee Dee Blanchard, Lisa Montgomery, Aileen Wuornos, Myra Hindley, and Andrea Yates all became figures of tabloid revulsion, treated as outcasts not just from society but from womanhood itself. They were monsters, angels of death, manifestations of pure evil: made into demons who could be kept at a safe distance from the ideals they threatened. The indelible images of these women in the public mind, staring grimly from newspaper front pages, show that society has no villain like a woman who kills. Women involved with sexual offenders, like Ghislaine Maxwell, are also hate figures. They show how the idealization of womanhood in general, and motherhood in particular, can quickly turn to denigration and disgust against those who subvert it. My work has consistently shown me that the truth is both more complex and more troubling than these caricatures allow. Some of the women who kill, abuse, and commit violent acts can be deemed sociopathic or psychopathic, but many are not. Often, they have been subjected to shocking abuse by their own parents, carers, partners, or family members. Many are suffering from severe mental illness or psychological harm as a result of that abuse. For some, the desperate search for the love and nurture that they have been denied their whole lives leads them toward violent partners, pregnancies in which they invest impossible hopes, and the revival of trauma manifested in acts of violence that mirror those they once suffered. These women are not the inhuman monsters of tabloid myth. They are not a species apart, driven by a madness or evil we could never hope to understand. They are not, in fact, so different from the vast majority of us, for their crimes are often the cruel result of the emotions we all share—the longing to love and be loved, the frustration and fear of parenthood, the corrosion of shame and self-loathing—brutally twisted through the prism of personal experience of violence and abuse. The tragedy of these crimes is that in trying to escape the horror of their own childhoods, many are condemned to reenact and repeat what they themselves suffered. Others, their perspective shattered by mental illness, commit violent crimes in the belief that they are helping the person they will so brutally, even lethally, harm. But overwhelmingly, the violent women I have known are not beyond the pale of empathy or understanding, hard as this can sometimes be to achieve. I have devoted much of my career to working with women who commit unspeakable acts of cruelty and abuse and studying the violence that women do—a subject that deserves and demands to be better understood. While only 5 percent of the prison population in the United Kingdom, and 10 percent in the United States, are women, and an even smaller percentage of those are violent, we know that female violence often goes underground, occurring in the private and domestic realm in ways that may never come to light. That lack of visibility is then compounded by the public attitude toward the women whose crimes are revealed, one that wishes either to vilify violent women or, just as dangerously, to patronize them by deeming them incapable of a crime considered outside the realm of womanhood and motherhood. Women, this attitude holds, will engage in violence, particularly sexual violence, only under male coercion. These stereotypes, which I have seen expressed by professionals in both the legal and the medical spheres, carry a human cost. Opportunities for rehabilitation are lost when violent and abusive women are regarded as evil villains and treated as criminals beyond help, while the chance to protect future victims is missed when their potential abusers pass unnoticed, because they fit no one’s image of what a murderer or child abuser should look like. Our state of ignorance and denial about female violence is one that does harm to both its perpetrators and its victims. ___________________________________ Excerpted From IF LOVE COULD KILL by Anna Motz, published by Knopf, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Bear One Holdings, LLC. Featured image: Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria View the full article

When the fine folks of Boston think about organized crime in their fair city, if they think about the subject at all, they think of Whitey Bulger. Or maybe Johnny Depp playing Whitey Bulger. They think of the Patriarca crime family, also called the Boston Mafia, most of whose members are dead or in jail. They think of thugs they’ve seen in movies, guys whose last names end in vowels, wearing tracksuits and stocking caps as they unload boxes from a hijacked truck. What they don’t think about is Carson Newman and Newman Enterprises. Carson Newman doesn’t wear tracksuits. He wears suits made by Dior that retail for five grand. His headquarters occupies the entire thirty-fifth floor of the Prudential Tower; he doesn’t work out of the back room of a bar. He doesn’t have a consigliere. He retains a white-shoe law firm with four hundred lawyers whose partners are all WASPs. He’ll never go to jail for tax evasion like Al Capone, because his accountants help him evade paying taxes without breaking the law. There have been several years when Carson didn’t pay any federal income tax at all, and he didn’t commit a crime by not doing so. Carson’s father had owned commercial property all over the Northeast—office buildings, shopping malls, apartments occupied mostly by low-income families—and when he passed away, Carson inherited these. So Carson didn’t exactly pull himself up by his bootstraps, but to his credit, he significantly expanded his father’s real estate empire. In addition to acquiring more properties, he became a builder. He quickly learned that being a builder was a risky, complicated business where the chance of failure was extremely high. Something as simple as a four-story apartment building or a shopping mall could take years to construct; skyscrapers, football stadiums, and golf courses could take a decade or more. It took months to line up the financing. It took ages to acquire the land and obtain the necessary permits and do the environmental impact studies needed to demolish existing structures and erect new ones. And there was always some group that was determined to stop whatever you were trying to build, and it would stage protests and bombard you with lawsuits. And by the time you paid off the bankers and the union laborers and the lawyers and the architects and the engineers, a builder was just as likely to end up in the red as in the black. Twice, Carson had to declare bankruptcy—not that it affected his lifestyle—and had to regroup. But no one called Carson Newman a gangster; nobody called him Godfather or the don. Carson soon learned that bribing the right people for permits was faster and cheaper than following the prescribed process. Blackmailing a city councilman who had a predilection for girls still in their teens was helpful when a zoning ordinance needed to be changed. And if he had stubborn, unreasonable tenants that he needed to vacate a space so it could be renovated and rented for a higher rate, there were people who could be hired to persuade them to move. Lawyers, not gunmen, became his foot soldiers. He sued his opponents and countersued whoever sued him, and he usually won because his adversaries rarely had the resources to endure legal battles that could stretch out for years. What Carson also learned was that he had to take a different approach when it came to politicians. Politicians could either pave the way for success or become major roadblocks, and simply donating to their campaigns and socializing with them often didn’t produce the right results. So in addition to the lawyers and the accountants that he employed, Carson put a lobbyist on his payroll who helped him put politicians on his payroll. But no one called Carson Newman a gangster; nobody called him Godfather or the don. At the age of fifty-six, Carson was worth several billion dollars. He had a lovely, cultured wife who was five years younger than he was. She had raised his two attractive children and now sat on the boards of various charities. He had a twenty-seven-year-old mistress who resided in an apartment he owned in Boston. He owned a restaurant he’d named after his daughter that charged forty bucks for a salad. He owned a mansion in Brookline, a town house in the Back Bay within strolling distance of Fenway, where he had box seats, and vacation places on Cape Cod and in Naples, Florida. He was a member of The Country Club, where a membership reportedly went for as much as half a million dollars. Yes, Carson was on top of the world—and he was not about to let some nobody employed by John Mahoney topple him from his perch. __________________________________ Mike Lawson is a former senior civilian executive for the US Navy. He is the Edgar Award-nominated author of more than fifteen novels starring Joe DeMarco and three novels with his protagonist Kay Hamilton. From Kingpin. Used with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic. Copyright © 2020 by Mike Lawson. View the full article