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When I set out to write my second novel, A Step Part Darkness, I knew it was a lot more ambitious than my debut had been. Several elements made it more complicated: it has a dual-timeline with a separate but related mystery in each and it had an ensemble cast. Specifically, it had six main characters, each of whom would have their own POV in both timelines. When ensemble casts are good, they are so satisfying to readers, but when they are bad, they feel quite hollow, often because they’re rendered somewhat lifelessly—we’re simply told that this is the gang and that they’re bonded rather than this sentiment being earned through elbow grease. A Step Past Darkness is very deliberately an homage to Stephen King’s It—I’m a King fan and like many King fans, it’s my favorite of his books. I studied it—its structure, what worked about it, and what didn’t. One of the things I deeply admire about the book is that despite there being seven main characters, each of them felt fully realized. I used to reread that book every year when I was in high school, but a couple years ago I returned to it for more of a craft study. The way he does this is by introducing you to each character in chapters devoted to them in the first timeline in the 1950s. Yes, you are seeing how the Losers Club gets together, and the start of scary things happening, but each of those introductory chapters has deep interiority to them. You see each kid’s internal state, what they care about and what they fear, how they occupy their time and what their families are like. King naysayers, say your nays, but people who know his writing know that he cares about his characters. Particularly in It, you can feel the compassion he has for them, the tenderness with which he treats them, though this does not mean that they won’t face peril or even death. How could I do that? And how could I do that—meaning a newer author who doesn’t have the gravitas and extended publishing record to get away with a 1,000 plus page novel the way King did? I had a vague sense of what the plot of my novel would be, and I’m a strict believer in plotting out books almost to their entirety (particularly when one is under deadline), but before I even started doing that, I spent a solid month working on character. I did not write a single line of prose. Effectively forming a cast of fully realized characters and then understanding them as a group required two thorough steps. Effectively forming a cast of fully realized characters and then understanding them as a group required two thorough steps. The first was answering the question, “Who are they?” I like to think of character creation as me as the artist looking at an iceberg covered with fog. The more examine it, the more the fog rolls back. When it’s more or less completely uncovered, some of the ice is beneath the surface and some is above; I’ve done more preparatory work than what will be shown to the reader, but that works still matters. I’m a visual person—I basically see scenes of my books in my head before I write them down. I can’t “see” a person if they don’t have a face. I start by poking around the internet to find a picture of someone that feels right to me. Then for each character I go through two extensive questionnaires. One is a basic one—you could find one of these easily on the internet—that has questions like, “what are their hobbies?” and “how do they dress?” Some of these questions focus on inner psychology where some are more surface level, but in either case, I answer them in detail. Too often we are told “Jane had blonde hair and blue eyes and was beautiful.” But that doesn’t really tell us anything about what she actually seems like when she’s in a room with us. The Jane I described above could be beautiful, but painfully awkward, always walking with turned-in shoulders and her head bowed. Or she could be other worldly, a Galadriel in human form. Or she could be a down-home farmgirl with massive hands and a bawdy sense of humor you can see in her eyes. Too often we’re told “he’s the hot star quarterback.” I kind of have this character in my book: the uber-popular football player. Except I didn’t make him a quarterback because too often it seems like writers just pick quarterback because they don’t know anything about football and associate “quarterback” with “good” (the same way they use Harvard to signal smart). I researched a lot of things about football. I read books and watched documentaries. I saw how hard these kids work, often from young ages. I started to think of this character—Casey—and what it would take to be that good at football to get to the potential of being recruited by colleges. How devoted he is, how obsessed with football, but also how self-conscious, how badly he wants the approval of others. The second questionnaire I fill out is the Proust Questionnaire, which you can find online. These questions get more at philosophical questions, things like, “What is your idea of happiness?” People might even find these questions hard to answer for themselves. Sometimes I just don’t know the answer for the character, so I make it up on the spot. This is why character creation feels like an uncovering to me: I’m moving the fog away from the iceberg, making up things that feel “right” to me. This forms a sort of three-dimensional sense of them in my head that, even after I finish the questionnaire, gets increasingly more detailed as I start writing. This doesn’t mean that anything is written in stone: recently I went back to these questionnaires for A Step Past Darkness—which I initially filled out in 2021, and saw that I wrote that one character had on the floor of his bedroom both a Robert Jordan book and The Anarchist Cookbook. I laughed because that was so wrong—he would have the second book but not the first. I didn’t know that then, but I know it now. The next important thing for an ensemble cast was to consider group dynamics. We can’t just be told “they are all besties, except one is the smart one, one is the athletic one, etc.” Well, because one, we’ve just established these people as three dimensional, and two, within any group of people there are multiple different sets of tensions and minigroups. We can’t, and shouldn’t, always be given the ensemble in its entirety. One scene I loved in It was when Bev spends an afternoon hanging out with Ben, Eddie, and Stan. We don’t need all the characters there, and the dynamic changes depending on the mini-group. Say what you will about LOST, but the first season is an incredible depiction of an ensemble cast, and over the course of the show, it’s pleasing to see pairings, mini-groups, and dynamic things happening across the cast. There’s a love triangle with Jack, Kate, and Sawyer. Sawyer and Sayid have an antagonistic relationship. Kate has a natural affinity with other women on the island like Claire and Sun. If looking for successful depictions of ensemble casts and their dynamics in novels, there are a few good starting points: highly rated war novels (because they often focus on a unit of people), multigenerational sagas (with the family functioning as a unit), or epic fantasies (which often have a band of people working together). The last thing I did was consider how these two things—character and group dynamics—shift as a function of time. When I was coming up with characters, I literally drew an arc. How would this person change over time? What was their primary psychological struggle as a child, and how would that manifest in adulthood? How were they affected by the trauma of the first time point of the novel? What do they think of who they were and who they have become? I wanted the reader to feel like they went on a journey of following this group of people from teenagers to adulthood, and to feel as if they had traveled on a satisfying arc. In the best case scenario, the reader closes the book with a sad little sigh and misses the friend group they are leaving behind. *** Vera Kurian is a writer and scientist based in Washington DC. Her debut novel, NEVER SAW ME COMING (Park Row Books, 2021 was an Edgar Award nominee and was named one of the New York Times’ Best Thrillers of 2021. Her short fiction has been published in magazines such as Glimmer Train, Day One, and The Pinch. She has a PhD in Social Psychology, where she studied intergroup relations, ideology, and quantitative methods. She blogs irregularly about writing, horror movies and pop culture/terrible TV. Her new novel, A Step Past Darkness, is now available. She has extended craft articles on her Substack. View the full article

Gothic novels, those strange, melancholy reads that drip with atmosphere, have been around for over 250 years. Ever since Horace Walpole’s gloomy Castle of Otranto, readers have reveled in morbid delight when turning the pages of these books. Safe and tucked away under the eaves reading our hearts out—far from the gloomy moors, haunted castles, and asylums that often figure large in these stories—we dare to be transported to mysterious places, the unexplained, the hidden, the lost, and yes, the supernatural. Why? Because we know Things That Go Bump in the Night are imaginary. Or are they? Perhaps the best thing about these dark stories is that they might have elements of truth. I would argue that the best Gothics teach us something of ourselves. That we, too, have a dark side. In the wildly successful Netflix series Stranger Things, the dark side is called the Upside Down. It’s where the fog is thick, monsters lurk, and nightmares come to life. A creepy alternate dimension that runs parallel to the known world. Sometimes the stories are more mundane. Less horror and more, well, earthly. Yet even these tales have an inherent murkiness that makes it difficult to separate the truth from the lies, the good from the bad, the real from the imagined. In my novel The Arsenic Eater’s Wife, inspired by a real 1889 case, a young woman is accused of murdering her husband with arsenic. The protagonist, Constance Sullivan, is surrounded by people in the house who aren’t what they seem. Who can she trust? Who’s telling the truth? Adding to this stifled atmosphere is the house itself—a malevolent mansion with murky cells of rooms and corridors that disappear into darkness. Even its exterior is the color of a corpse gone cold. At one point, mold begins to grow on the ceiling of the servants’ quarters and it’s all Constance can do to not go mad. At the crux of the story is a woman who may or may not hang for murder, who may or may not be guilty. But the other players have as many secrets as Constance does and that’s where the dysphoria comes in. Who are we when we are alone with ourselves? What evil lurks around us versus what we create on our own? Here are 10 new Gothic novels that explore that darkness, a mashup of historical and contemporary, young adult and adult, debut and bestselling authors. All with that otherworldly, haunting quality that keeps Gothic readers coming back for more. A Place for Vanishing by Ann Fraistat What happens when a teen and her family move into her mother’s childhood home and the house is menacing to say the least? There are the odd stained-glass windows with depictions of strange insects and roses that bloom unusually blue. And then there are the rumors. Libby’s shocked to learn that macabre seances took place on the grounds a century before. This novel is about masks—Libby’s own and the ones she discovers in the house. Ultimately, she must reveal her true self, faults and all, if she’s to survive the sinister happenings going on around her. A modern, young adult horror with plenty of Gothic elements. The Beholders by Hester Musson An ominous house is at the heart of this novel, too. This time, it’s haunted not by the dead who’ve passed, but the living. Young Harriet arrives at Finton Hall as a new maid and soon meets her employers: the reclusive master, a politician; and his wife, the angelic-voiced Clara. Yet, there’s something not quite right about Clara, and Harriet soon begins to feel isolated with only her diary to record her frantic thoughts. What works so well in this late 19th century historical is the building sense of dread. Most sinister of all, Musson entices the reader with an opening glimpse of what’s coming: the body of a young boy being fished from the Thames with a link to Finton Hall. The Clinic by Cate Quinn As modern thrillers go, this one has it all: a remote cliffside rehab, a mysterious death, a drug addicted sister desperate to find the truth. Meg checks herself in and can’t quite believe the whispers—that her successful actress sister took her life. But can a pill popping alcoholic find out what happened? Lots of windy twists will keep the pages turning with elements of childhood trauma, lies, and paranoia mixed in to make things all the murkier. A Pair of Sharp Eyes by Kat Armstrong Fresh from the country, young Coronation arrives in Bristol looking for work. She finds instead a slave port teaming with filth, poverty, and crime. Worst still, several boys have had their throats slit. Corrie, inquisitive and strong willed, endeavors to find out who the culprit is and why. This early 18th-century-set historical novel has heady themes of racial inequality and religious injustice, sprinkled with lighter tones of romance and empathy. A debut with all the hallmarks of a series. The Devil and Mrs. Davenport by Paulette Kennedy The first day of autumn brought the fever, and with the fever came the voices. So begins Kennedy’s 1950s tale of a woman who begins to see visions when a local girl is murdered. While a parapsychologist comes to Loretta’s aid, her husband, Pete—a professor at a Bible college—refuses to believe Loretta’s fever dreams are a gift. He sees it as something far more threatening: the Devil’s work. Elements of the supernatural swim throughout the novel, bringing disquiet to a once-tranquil marriage in a small Missouri town. The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden In 1918 Irene Iven, a wounded field nurse, receives word that her brother has died fighting in Flanders. After attending a séance in which she receives an otherworldly message that her brother isn’t dead, she returns to the continent to learn what she can of his disappearance. The horrors of war are as real here as the fantastical elements: haunted trenches and an enigmatic violinist with an elixir which may keep soldiers from the brink of madness. The Road from Belhaven by Margot Livesey Lizzie Craig, growing up in her grandparents’ home in 19th century Scotland, has the gift of second sight. But these premonitions are often frightening and fail to warn her of her own rocky future. The arrival of her sister and a tumultuous first love will change Lizzie’s life forever and she must learn to navigate a world fraught with betrayals, mistakes, and treachery if she’s to survive. The Bone Hunters by Joanne Burn When young genius Ada Winters finds a set of unusual fossils buried on a hill in Lyme Regis, it’s the answer to her prayers. The discovery may just save her family from financial ruin and solidify her in the field of geology, a relatively new field in 1824. Enter Dr. Edwin Moyle, a geologist himself who finds Ada appealing but very much in the way of his own success. But just what is it Ada has unearthed, and will it bring her and Edwin fame or ruin? Never Leave, Never Lie by Thea Verdone Inside a dilapidated Victorian mansion, secrets lurk. Alek is a pianist with a haunted past who composes music with the gift of synesthesia—he can see sounds and hear colors. His partner, Ian, is a gifted contractor who sees possibilities in the grim, crumbling estate they cohabitate. For Alek, the truth about his history is far worse than his lies but disclosing it to Ian could send him packing—and Alek will never let him leave. A dark MM romance about tortured souls. The Household by Stacey Halls Urania Cottage, a home for unfortunate women (co-founded by Charles Dickens who features as a secondary character), is the center of this murky, mid-19th century historical. Its inhabitants are women who’ve fallen, been incarcerated, maltreated, or orphaned. Meanwhile, in a mansion nearby in Piccadilly, the home’s other founder, Angela Burdett-Coutts learns distressing news: her stalker of ten years has been released from prison. As the two worlds merge in unexpected ways, it’s clear freedom comes at a price. *** View the full article

It was at a small writer’s workshop in New York City when one of the instructors, Paula Munier (senior agent for Talcott Notch Literary Services and the USA Today bestselling author of the Mercy Carr mystery series) introduced a literary agent to our group of twenty. The idea was to pitch our work to the agent in hopes he might want to represent one of us. I think of pitches like the Hunger Games of publishing—survival depends on slashing your competition to bits with just a few short sentences that you hope are lethal enough to convince an agent that your book is better than the rest and worthy of publishing. Midway into my pitch, the guest agent, Adam Chromy, President of Movable Type Management interrupted and said, “No-one likes Luke.” Luke was my protagonist, an online reporter and quite frankly, as I came to learn–boring. Chromy then said that if I would write my secondary character, an obituary writer, as the protagonist, he would sign me on the spot. My jaw would have dropped if my mouth hadn’t been uttering the words, “Don’t you want to see if I can write first?” My future agent had done his homework and already knew I had made a career as a freelance writer so he was less worried about my skill than he was about my willingness to change my entire book. From the moment I began rewriting my Deadly Deadlines series about an obituary writer who solves mysteries in her Hallmark worthy small town, I recognized the opportunity my character’s profession offered. Who would be better positioned to stumble upon murder than Winter Snow, an obituary writer with deadly skills. That experience led me to take stock of some of my favorite books and I began to see a pattern in the novels I liked to read. The most memorable characters had jobs I knew little or nothing about. Whether I’m reading about a crossword puzzle author, a bookbinder, a forensic anthropologist, a bartender, or a psychiatrist, I tend to lean toward stories whose protagonists lead me down new and interesting paths. These books have main characters who are positioned to come across mystery and murder. And these are books with characters driven by their unique personalities and use their distinctive skills to solve a crime. Take A Death in Door County and Death in the Dark Woods, the first two Monster Hunter mysteries in an exciting series by Annelise Ryan, as an example. When her contract for her Maddie Winston and Helping Hands series was not renewed, Ryan wanted to find a character to write about who would give readers a taste of something they probably wouldn’t sample in their daily lives. The idea for cryptozoologist Morgan Carter was born during a conversation with her agent who “loved the idea.” Reading Ryan’s book sent me straight to google to confirm that yes, cryptozoology is a real profession. In short it is the study of animals rumored to exist—think Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster. You don’t need special education or training to start searching for “cryptids” as they are called. Ryan, however, loaded her character with scientific degrees, hands on training and a strange family history thereby giving her cryptozoologist plenty of opportunity to confirm or disprove the deaths pinned on the rumored beasts. There’s much to be learned about the not-so-unusual creatures in TM Dunn’s psychological thriller Her Father’s Daughter. It would be a spoiler to even hint at how Dunn’s loving father/daughter exterminating team use their special skills in this book. However, suffice to say, it is their interesting profession that allows them to move around in places most of us don’t usually go. Dunn came up with her idea because her father was an exterminator and she “loved listening to his stories about the people he met or the strange situations he encountered on the job.” Speaking of parents, my mother was a neat freak on steroids. When my sisters and I cleaned the room we shared, I would make them stand in the doorway with eyes closed and then the second they blinked open, they had to identify the first thing they saw. Often it was an offending hairbrush slightly askew or a crinkle in the bedspread that no-one but our mother would ever notice. Unless, of course, you are Molly Gray, the hyper-orderly housekeeper who lacks social skills in The Maid by Nina Prose. Molly’s profession, fed by her quirky personality puts her in a place where she notices everything that is amiss, whether it is an interrupted routine or a pillow out of place. Molly’s job as a maid at a large hotel positions her to notice the subtle clues a murderer has left behind. Each of the four main characters in Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club series have interesting former careers. Joyce was a nurse who can identify a possible cause of death before the coroner even arrives. Elizabeth is a no-nonsense ex-spy. Ron is a former union activist and Ibrahim a psychiatrist. These characters are thrust together in Cooper’s Chase, a retirement home. Their often-peculiar personalities and varying backgrounds make the likelihood of repeatedly finding trouble more believable. Even better, their former careers take readers down a number of interesting paths while the characters bring a variety of crime-solving skills to the table. Protagonists with distinctive professions certainly keep Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn moving at a fast clip. Four women assassins who’ve aged out of their jobs get forced back into it when their lives are threatened. InDeath Comes to Marlow by Robert Thorogood a crossword puzzle creator who likes to swim nude uses her puzzle solving skills to recognize a murder and identify the killer. The right profession creates memorable characters that readers love and can take a plot straight where it needs to go. Consider some of these additional favorites: the high-powered realtor and her single-mom daughter in Mother-Daughter Murder Night; the owner of a bar as in Cathi Stoler’s clever On the Rocks series; a forensic anthropologist in Kathy Reich’s Temperance Brennan thrillers; or a single mom struggling to make ends meet as a romance mystery writer in Elle Cosimano’s Finlay Donovan books. And hopefully an obituary writer named Winter Snow in my debut novel, The Last Word (February 2024) by Gerri Lewis. *** View the full article

We get by with a little help from our friends—right? But what if those friends don’t really have our best interests at heart? What happens when a friendship veers into enemy—or frenemy—territory, leading to secrets, betrayals, maybe even murder? My upcoming novel, Keep Your Friends Close, follows Mary and Willa, two moms who meet at a Brooklyn playground and become fast friends … for awhile, at least. Only then, Willa ghosts Mary, disappearing from her life without so much as a trace. It all comes to a head later that summer when Mary sees Willa up in the Catskills. Or she thinks she does: Willa is calling herself Annie now, and she’s got an entirely different family in tow. When Mary’s ex, George, turns up dead just a few days later and Mary becomes the prime suspect, she has no choice to turn to her former friend for help. But is Willa-slash-Annie friend or foe, confidant or just con? Mary must figure it out before she loses everything. Here are six slick thrillers that also portray the friends-to-frenemies relationship. The Other Black Girl Toiling away in the predominantly white publishing industry, of course twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is relieved to see another Black girl, Hazel, start at Wagner Books. But their friendship has hardly begun when Hazel becomes the office favorite and Nella is passed over—yet again. As Nella and Hazel grow closer, Nella begins to wonder if a series of threatening notes might be Hazel’s doing. Harris’s propulsive thriller, which reads as Get Out meets The Stepford Wives, examines themes of friendship, identity, community and white fragility like no other. Friends Like These Six college friends. One reunion weekend at a house in the Catskills. What could go wrong? When one friend goes missing and another turns up dead, the ties that bind these friends together are truly tested. Is it possible that one of them is responsible, or is someone outside of their group out to get them? McCreight’s twisty tome is an exploration of lifelong friendship and the love, history—and secrets—that holds a tight-knit group together. The Writing Retreat Imagine your favorite writer on earth, the famous and notoriously reclusive Roza Vallo, is hosting an exclusive month-long writer’s retreat at her sprawling estate. Now imagine that your former BFF and current rival, Wren, is going to be in attendance, too. Will the chance at winning a massive book contract make it worth it? Alex tells herself yes, but when one of the writers disappears in a snowstorm, she begins to realize something very evil is afoot. Is her former friend someone she can turn to as she tries to uncover the mystery, or is Wren a part of the evil at the center of this stunning tale of fame and desire? Yellowface Perhaps no modern book illustrates the danger of friends who don’t have our best interests at heart quite like R.F. Kuang’s captivating exploration of diversity, racism and cultural appropriation. June Hayward can’t get her writing career off the ground, but her pal, Athena Liu, is a literary darling. But when Athena dies choking on not-quite-cooked pancakes, June jumps at an opportunity to steal Athena’s next book and pass it off as her own. June’s every action—and excuse—will make readers gasp and cringe in equal measure, and waiting for her comeuppance keeps the pages turning in this fresh literary thriller. Age of Vice Deepti Kapoor’s crime thriller-meets-family saga set in contemporary India is lush, glamorous, corrupt and inherently readable. The main story focuses around a speeding Mercedes that jumps a curb in New Delhi leaving five people dead—and the coverup that serves to protect the rich men, and their corrupt families, at fault. But the most captivating elements of the novel are the relationships surrounding the enigmatic playboy Sunny Wadia and their descent into betrayal, from his friendship-slash-romance with journalist Neda, to his shifting loyalties to his servant Ajay, to the friends in his own social circle who he’ll happily sell out in the name of preserving his family. Delicate Condition A body-horror masterpiece and a much-needed update to Rosemary’s Baby, Delicate Condition follows Anna Alcott, an indie actress desperate to start a family. But her IVF journey is marred by strange happenings—swapped appointments and misplaced medicines, cryptic warnings and figures in the shadows. After a heartbreaking miscarriage, Anna becomes convinced that she’s actually still pregnant—but even as she feels the baby growing inside her, she begins to believe that someone is playing games with her, trying to prevent her from ever having a child—and that person might just be someone she once thought was the most trusted of friends. *** Featured image: From Rubens’ The Three Graces View the full article

It’s still early in the 2020s for number ten, so this partial list (incomplete and biased) looks at nine favorite filmed novels published across 90 years (1936 to 2016, one per decade). While the passage of time makes many movies seem historical (think Agatha Christie adaptations), I’ve stuck to a strict definition. All the novels are set years before their original publication dates. The books are still in print, and the films are available on DVD or streaming. In a sign of changing viewing habits, the last two novels are not theatrical releases but streamed series. In Murder by Lamplight, Dr. Julia Lewis and Inspector Richard Tennant meet in the 1860s, the same decade as the Victorian lovers in A.S. Byatt’s Possession (my novel/film pairing for the 1990s). Julia and Tennant are reluctant allies who put their misgivings aside to solve a series of vicious killings on London’s gaslit streets. Murder by Lamplight is published by Kensington Books and available on February 20, 2024. 1936: Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier 1939 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock The novel: In early nineteenth-century Cornwall, the orphaned Mary Yellon arrives at the sinister Jamaica Inn to live with her aunt and uncle. Mary quickly realizes that nefarious doings are afoot. Is her uncle the leader of the wreckers who lure ships onto the rocky Cornish coast, killing the survivors who stagger ashore? Or is someone else the murderous mastermind? The film: Alfred Hitchcock plays fast and loose with Daphne Du Maurier’s plot, but his atmospherics match the source’s Gothic suspense. In the film’s perpetual nighttime, tides don’t roll; they roar. Winds don’t blow; they howl. The shipwreck scenes look as if Hitchcock shot them in a bathtub, but no matter. The film features a scenery-chewing performance by Charles Laughton, a teenage Maureen O’Hara in her first starring role, and a boatload of British character actors, seasoned pros all of them. Laughton drove Hitchcock mad with his odd, mincing villain. (No spoiler here: the viewer discovers his identity in the first fifteen minutes, and the bad guy is someone else in the book.) But the famed director couldn’t fire his star because Laughton co-produced the film. It was Hitchcock’s last British movie before moving on to Hollywood to shoot Du Maurier’s Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Look for the remastered 75th anniversary version of Jamaica Inn for best viewing. Footnote: A BBC remake ran in Britain in 2016 and streams in the US on Prime Video. Jessica Finlay Brown (Lady Sybil from Downton Abbey) stars in a three-part series that proves more can be less. In this version, the title inn looks seedy, not menacing, the pace is glacial, and an American viewer needs subtitles (unprovided) to understand the mumbling Cornish accents. 1944: Dragonwyck by Anya Seton 1946 film directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz The novel: The setting is New York’s Hudson Valley in the 1840s and the mostly forgotten “anti-rent wars” that raged against the landlords. The great landowning “patroons” were like latter-day medieval lords, and tenant farmers worked their lands like serfs. Seton’s Gothic melodrama has all the elements of the genre: a naïve young woman, Miranda Wells, Nicholas Van Ryn, the handsome, brooding lord of the manor, and Dragonwyck, the secret-filled, cliff-top mansion overlooking the Hudson River. Ghosts from the past, insanity, a poisonous plant, and possible murder season the stew. The film: Gene Tierney gets top billing, but the movie belongs to Vincent Price. His Nicholas Van Ryn, handsome, haughty, haunted, and menacing, dominates every scene he’s in. The stellar supporting cast includes Walter Huston, Jessica Tandy, and Spring Byington. Usually cast in wholesome, motherly roles, Byington does a creepy turn as the strange housekeeper who knows all the family secrets. The novel and the film differ most dramatically in their endings. But this is one instance when the movie seems more faithful to Van Ryn’s character than the book’s conclusion. Footnotes: Gene Tierney and Vincent Prince shared the screen four times, most memorably in the excellent mystery Laura (1944). It also stars Clifton Webb and Dana Andrews as the tough, cynical policeman who falls in love with a dead woman’s portrait. The movie features a knock-your-socks-off surprise. Director Mankiewicz ended his career with another mystery, the cat-and-mouse Sleuth (1972), starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. 1951: The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey The Lost King (2022), directed by Stephen Frears The novel: A Daughter of Time turns up on nearly every mystery GOAT list, and Josephine Tey was a master of the British “Golden Age.” Her recurring police detective, Inspector Alan Grant, tries to solve a pair of 400-year-old murders by investigating from his hospital bed. Laid up with a broken leg and bored, Grant is persuaded by a friend to tackle one of history’s coldest cases. Did the evil King Richard III murder his young nephews to seize the crown? The novel breathed new life into “The Richard III Society,” swelling the number of “Ricardians” dedicated to proving the king’s innocence. The film: I’m cheating here. The Lost King is not a filmed version of The Daughter of Time. Instead, it tells the true story of the stubborn Ricardian who led the effort that located Richard III’s body under a Yorkshire parking lot. It stars an excellent Sally Hawkins as the dogged amateur historian Phillipa Langley. She’s determined to prove her theory in the face of scholarly skepticism. Infuriatingly, academia’s lack of cooperation doesn’t stop it from taking credit for unearthing Richard. You can stream The Lost King on Acorn and other services. Footnotes: Several other Josephine Tey novels were filmed. Alfred Hitchcock turned A Shilling for Candles (1936) into the film Young and Innocent (1937). It’s a suspenseful and charming man-on-the-run story. Stream it on Prime Video and watch for Hitchcock’s masterful tracking shot in the dance hall scene at the film’s end. And Tey’s intriguing The Franchise Affair made it onto film twice. The 1951 movie is just OK; the 1988 mini-series with Patrick Malahide and Joanna McCallum is far superior. (You can find it on YouTube.) The Franchise Affair is the only time Tey’s brilliant Inspector Grant got it wrong. 1969: The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles 1981 film directed by Karel Reisz The novel: Is it a mystery novel? Well, the reader confronts many enigmas in its pages. Who is Sarah Woodson, the “French lieutenant’s woman?” Why does she remain in Lyme Regis, staring out to sea and lingering amid the wild landscape of the undercliff? She certainly baffles and disturbs the tranquility of the newly engaged scientist, Charles Smithson. But Sarah has lied to the world about herself—and lies to Charles. Why? Where does she go after she vanishes? And what is the story’s end? Fowles wrote more than one conclusion. The film: Playwright Harold Pinter won an Academy Award for the screenplay. The movie stars Meryl Streep in the title role and Jeremy Irons as Charles Smithson. In a plot layer absent in the novel, they play modern actors Mike and Anna, the leads in a parallel story about filming the book. Watch for this “doubleness” right from the opening shot when Streep walks out of the set and into the story. The movie is gorgeous to look at, and the stars are excellent. Streep won the Academy Award for her Sarah/Anna performance, the first of three as a leading actor. Footnotes: Other works by Fowles were filmed. William Wyler directed the 1965 movie of the author’s debut novel, The Collector (1963), a thriller about a man who kidnaps an art student and holds her captive. Director William Wyler received an Academy Award nomination, his twelfth. (That’s an Academy record. He’s tied with Frank Capra for most directing wins at three.) Fowles’ second published novel also made it to film. The Magus (1968), a critical failure, stars Michael Caine and Anthony Quinn. 1978: Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett 1981 film directed by Richard Marquand The novel: This was Ken Follett’s first international bestseller. The “needle” in the title is Henry Faber, the code name of the Nazi spy in England who flashes a deadly stiletto. The reader first meets him at the start of the war, radioing troop movements back to Germany. Four years later, his story intersects with that of David and Lucy Rose, living unhappily and remotely on an island off Scotland. Faber possesses a secret vital to D-Day’s success; it’s up to Lucy to stop him from taking it to Germany. The film: Donald Sutherland nails the cold, ruthless Faber as utterly ordinary yet menacing. He may be less convincing sweeping Kate Nelligan’s Lucy off her feet. (Although four years trapped on a lonely island with her self-pitying pilot husband—sidelined after an accident—might do the trick.) The viewer must accept a reasonable quotient of hokum. For example, would one of the greatest secrets of D-Day really be guarded by a single soldier with a dog? It doesn’t matter. Once we’re on that island, the tension mounts. Watch Nelligan with Sutherland after she’s figured things out and look for the light-socket scene. Footnote: Two books later, Follett published The Key to Rebecca. In it, another Nazi spy is on the loose. This time, he’s in Egypt, and thwarting General Rommel’s conquest of North Africa is at stake. The “Rebecca” in the title—and the key to it all—is the Daphne Du Maurier novel. The story has a factual basis, and the novel was a popular and critical success. (In 1985, a great story got middling treatment in a two-part TV production.) 1980: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco 1986 film directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud The novel: First published In Italy, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose was a surprise US bestseller, a book by an Italian professor of semiotics—a discipline hard to define let alone explain. It takes place in a fourteenth-century abbey and involves accusations of heresy, a debate over the worldly vs. spiritual powers of the Church, conflicts of faith and reason, a missing Greek manuscript, and the murders of seven monks. And that’s just for starters. The plot is as complex as the monastery library’s labyrinth. Yet, the story draws you in. You follow Brother William of Baskerville, the wry and tolerant monk charged with solving the grisly murders, as he parses symbols and peels back the mystery’s layers. He even has a Dr. Watson at his side, a young novice named Adso of Melk. Brother William’s weapon in a world of superstition and fanaticism is reason. He applies logic and his powers of deduction to uncover the murderer. The film: Reviewers liked it less than viewers (a 76% Rotten Tomatoes score vs. an audience score of 85%). Sean Connery plays Brother William of Baskerville, visiting monk and Medieval Sherlock Holmes. (At one point, he tells Christian Slater’s Brother Adso that a conclusion is “elementary.”) The cinematography is excellent, and so is the monastery set. In the opening shot, it looms like a fortress in the desolate landscape, isolated and forbidding. F. Murray Abraham is memorable in the smaller role of Brother William’s nasty Vatican nemesis. But watch for Ron Perlman’s performance as the childlike ogre Brother Salvatore and the scene near the end where he sings a lullaby. Footnote: Reviewers weren’t kind to the 2019 television series starring John Turturro. The critics’ consensus on Rotten Tomatoes: “The Name of the Rose boasts fine performances, but the drama floating around its hallowed halls often feels like more work than it’s worth” (53% score). 1990: Possession by A.S. Byatt 2002 film directed by Neil LaBute The novel: This is the literary mystery on the list. Researcher Roland Michell finds two letters written to a mysterious woman by the Victorian poet Randolph Ash. Michell is seized by a desire to uncover her identity and steals the letters from the British Museum, the first of many forms of possession explored in the novel. Then he teams with a fellow scholar, Maud Bailey, an expert on the poet Christabel LaMotte, whom Roland suspects was Ash’s lover. Maud and Roland trace more letters, poems, and journals and follow the suspected lovers’ trail from London to Yorkshire and to France. Along the way, envious academics determined to possess the evidence pursue them. Were Ash and LaMotte lovers? Was there a child? If so, what happened to the baby? Is the critical evidence buried in a box in Ash’s grave? In a gentle epilogue, another mystery is solved. Possession is a witty, romantic, intellectual puzzler. The film: Director Neil LaBute cast Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart as the modern scholars and Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle as the Victorian poets. The director streamlines the complex novel, but he follows the story’s throughline. Possibly the biggest change is Roland Michell, who was transformed from an Englishman into a brash American. Watch for the Yorkshire scenes where the film crosscuts between the historical lovers on the way to their tryst and the modern researchers on the hunt. Their car passes under a railway trestle. Seconds later, a steam engine carrying the Victorian lovers rattles overhead. And the final, poignant epilogue is lovely. The film received mixed critical reception, but what can I say? Sometimes, the critics get it wrong. Footnote: Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeremy Northam share the screen in another film adaptation of an English novel: Jane Austen’s Emma (1996). Of course, it’s not a mystery, but the plot turns on hidden identities and a secret’s revelation. 2008: The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst 2013 TV-series with multiple directors The novel: Alan Furst’s The Spies of Warsaw is set in Europe in the late 1930s, a familiar Furst milieu. Intelligence officer Lt. Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier poses as a French military attaché in Warsaw, where he operates an active spy network. Undercover, Mercier observes the German military buildup at the border and struggles to awaken his superiors in Paris to the growing Nazi menace. The novel handles the obligatory genre elements well: nail-biting, cross-border journeys, shady intelligence operatives, and informants—some idealists, others blackmailed into service. It has a classic Furst hero in Mercier: a pensive man on the right side of history who still feels the taint of moral compromise. As always, there is a touch of romance: the widowed Mercier, like all Furst heroes, is very attractive to women. Best of all, the novel has the feel of its time and place. As one critic noted, it’s a world “infused with the melancholy romanticism of Casablanca.” The Spies of Warsaw recreates a moody, tension-filled Europe teetering on the brink of war. The mini-series: A line of dialog between David Tennant’s Mercier and a Polish officer-friend nails the novel’s physical and moral environments. The Pole laments the simpler world they inhabited as young army officers before the Great War. He says, “Now, everything is gray, shadows, secrets.” (When we first see Mercier dressing for a formal dinner, his uniform’s bright blue tunic and red trousers pop after scenes drained of color.) Later, we witness the adroit spy master Mercier neatly extract a pair of Soviet defectors, although not all his agents survive the double games they play. David Tennant, perfect as Mercier, receives fine support from familiar faces to watchers of British TV productions. Allan Corduner and Linda Bassett play the fleeing Russian agents. Anton Lesser is a possible anti-Nazi spy, and Julian Glover plays Mercier’s one clear-sighted ally in a mostly benighted French military. No fireworks, no melodrama, The Spies of Warsaw is excellent, old-fashioned storytelling. Footnote: The Spies of Warsaw is the tenth of fifteen books in Furst’s “Night Soldiers” series, beginning with the 1988 novel of the same name. To date, it’s the only film of a Furst novel. His most recent book is Under Occupation, published in 2019. 2016: Belgravia by Julian Fellowes 2020 series, John Alexander, Director The novel: This is the guilty pleasure pairing on my list. Julian Fellowes, better known for his screen and teleplays (Gosford Park, Downton Abbey, The Gilded Age), wrote the novel set in early Victorian England. The plot begins a generation earlier at the famous Duchess of Richmond’s ball, held on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo. Many young officers danced their last quadrilles that evening. Two families, one aristocratic and one up-and-coming middle class, share a family tragedy linked to that gathering. The full scope of their loss is unknown to both and is at the mystery’s core. The mini-series: It’s unsurprising that the production is a faithful adaptation of the novel: Julian Fellowes wrote the script. One of the series’ great pleasure is the cast of old British pros. Among them are Tom Wilkinson, Harriet Walter, Tara Fitzgerald, and Philip Glenister. A second pleasure in any mystery: the viewers think they’re in on the story’s secret, but Fellowes adds one great surprise toward the end. Footnote: Julian Fellowes’ adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s novel Doctor Thorne is another story in which the mystery of a child’s identity is the key. It will either sink or save a family’s fortune. *** View the full article

Fairy tales have always been rather grim and murderous, even before the Brothers Grimm complied their collection in 1812. “Fairytale” was a term coined by Marie-Catharine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d’Aulnoy. Also known as Comtesse d’Aulnoy. She published in French many fairytales including Finette Cindron, or Cunning Cinders (1697). A tale that is better known as Cinderella. In this rendition, Finette Cindron’s royal parents attempt to abandon their three daughters so that they cannot find their way home. Luckily, Finette Cindron’s fairy godmother has given her a string that helps the princesses find their way home. Undeterred, their mother decides to take them on an even longer journey and abandons them again. And then again until they are lost in a far off land with ogres. The Ogre and Ogress decide to use the princesses as servants until they are ready to eat them. Clever Finette manages to burn the Ogre in the oven, cut off the Ogress’s head, and escape with her two sisters. Charles Perrault’s famous, Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals: Tales of My Mother Goose was published that same year in French (1697). It included the stories: Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, Little Thumb, The Master Cat, or Puss in Boots, Riquet of the Tuft, Blue Beard, The Fairy, and Little Red Riding Hood. In the story of “Blue Beard”, he forbids his wife to open a closet door while he is gone, but her curiosity overcomes her and opens it with a key and sees that “the floor was all covered over with clotted blood, on which lay the bodies of several dead women, ranged against the walls.” His wife realizes that these were her husband’s previous wives that he married and then murdered. Despite the fact that fairy tales were grim and often violent, they were read to children in the eighteenth century to teach morals. In “Little Red Riding Hood” by Charles Perrault, Mother Goose explains that: “The Wolf, I say, for Wolves too sure there are / Of every sort, and every character.” Young ladies are warned not to trust wolfish young men who are “artful, tho’ their true designs they hide.” In Once Upon a Murder, set in 1785, Miss Tiffany Woodall is now the official librarian for the Duchess of Beaufort. She is also tasked with teaching the young duke until a suitable governess is found. A true librarian, she purchases children’s books for charge, including fairy tales. However, Tiffany is horrified to find herself in a real-life fairy tale when she discovers a dead body in front of her cottage in the woods. View the full article

I’m far from being the first ex-lawyer to turn fiction writing. While my book Prima Facie is a book of fiction that definitely focuses on the law, other lawyers don’t always deal with the law specifically. Lawyers do, however, tend to interrogate ideas and systems in their work. What is it that an ex-lawyer brings to their writing that feels so exciting? All writers are unique in their preoccupations and stories, but to my mind they seem to incorporate into their work the way lawyers are trained to think about story and information. All lawyers (and specifically criminal lawyers) are trained to go beneath the story on the surface and to reflect on how and when social systems have played roles in a story or a person’s life. Something has been either exposed or repressed—and lawyers often consider whether that is based on a cultural or social structure, or rooted in an economic or political system. It seems that ex-lawyer writers consider that ideas are for interrogation and characters should be multifaceted and real. I think one shared aspect, whether conscious or not, is the dispassionate manner in which ex-lawyers unravel strands of story and aspects of character in order to explore an overall theme or question something. As trained and practicing lawyers we were all expected to view words as powerful, persuasive and capable of changing the narrative of a person, history or even a country. I think when lawyers approach writing for fiction or non-fiction, they are completely aware of how significant their choices of worlds, words and characters are. Anna Funder, Stasiland One of my favorite lawyers-turned-writers is Anna Funder—an Australian writer who wrote an amazing book some time ago called Stasiland. She ventured into East Germany post the unification of Germany and spoke with friends, interviewed ex-Stasi officers and those who were their victims, and weaved together a non-fiction book of her journey. It was a clear unveiling of real stories of those who had endured the oppression of Eastern Germany, and also about the motivations and collusion of the Stasi officers, but so too did it include her own musings throughout of living and wandering around Germany. More recently and in a similar style Funder completed Wifedom that looks at how a famous male writer—Orwell—left his wife out of his life story and failed to credit her for the ways she assisted him in his political actions and his writing works. This book was a great read not only for the story but to see a masterful unravelling of an invisible woman’s story alongside the one that we have always been told is the main one. Georgia Blain, Between a Dog and a Wolf Another favorite and much loved Australian lawyer-turned-writer is Georgia Blain. Blain wrote both fiction and non-fiction, and while her work did not specifically look at the legal system, she also looked outside the usual stories and found voices in the spaces in between stories to elaborate on and bring to life. Suzanne Leal, The Watchful Wife Suzanne Leal, another Australia ex lawyer, writes fiction. Her latest work, The Watchful Wife, is a crime story with strong characters in which the question is posed: ‘She loves and trusts her husband, but does she know him?’ Pascal Janovjak, The Rome Zoo Translated by Stephanie Smee Stephanie Smee is an Australian ex-lawyer who has mastered the translation of books from French to English. The book she has most recently translated (to perfection) is The Rome Zoo by Pascal Janovjak. It inspires me to think that an ex-lawyer has worked so beautifully with the ideas of another writer. Chris Nyst, Millen For a book that has been inspired by a real-life by a real lawyer, try Millen by Chris Nyst. It features a flashy lawyer Eddie Moran and is inspired by a real murder case the author worked on. It’s set in outback Queensland in the aftermath of a brutal government enquiry into police corruption. *** View the full article

Just weeks after I moved from my hometown of New York City to the California Bay Area in fall 2017, I woke up to smoky skies. On my way to work at HuffPost’s office in downtown San Francisco, I passed people with scarves clenched over their mouths, N95 masks on, years before the pandemic would make this a common sight. At my desk, my throat scratching oddly, a headache blossoming between my eyes, I saw the latest reports come in: a historic blaze had torn through Sonoma and Napa, leaving fields of ash where neighborhoods once deemed at low risk for fire used to stand. I got into my car and drove north, toward a thickening cloud of ash. As I pulled into the town of Santa Rosa, two-story houses and pristine lawns slowly turned dusty and gray, trees went from leafy green to spindly, black and bare. And then: a field of black ash, as far as the eye could see. The only things that were recognizable: hollowed-out car frames, brick chimneys standing like soldiers at attention over a massacre. A few people walked around, stepping gingerly through still-hot metal. They had fled the fire in the night and come back to check on their houses, finding everything gone. One young woman called out for her cat. Another told me: “Everything that we had is charcoal.” I thanked them for sharing their stories with me, and on the drive home, I cried. I sent five hundred words to my editor, feeling inadequate, knowing I had witnessed just a fraction of the grief survivors now had to live with for the rest of their lives. And this was only one fire, in one year, in an increasingly expanding season of worsening heat, fires, storms and floods. It was a brutal introduction to the deepening climate crisis I would cover over the years for HuffPost, tracing the worsening emergency in a state I would come to love and call home. It would also plant the seeds of what would later become my first novel, A Fire So Wild. In late 2020, after covering the aftermath of the state’s deadliest fire in Paradise in 2018, the state’s largest fire in Mendocino in 2020, speaking to survivors caught between the rock of the housing crisis and the hard place of our boiling planet, a story started to take shape: Three families in Berkeley. One in a house up in the hills. Another in affordable housing down in the flats. And a couple living in their van by the shore. A wildfire slowly growing in the distance. I wrote A Fire So Wild, my new novel, as a love letter to California and a questioning of how we build meaningful lives in a world on fire. And I am far from the only author reckoning with how our human-made, greed-fueled climate crisis is shaping our lives. Here are five gut-wrenching books that will haunt and transform your perspective on our planet: Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood In this thriller, a young crew of guerrilla gardeners are trying to build an anti-capitalist community when their passionate leader Mira meets a billionaire ready to finance the operation. We follow Mira and the increasingly sketchy billionaire, as well as Mira’s friends who start to doubt her motives, as they all get entangled on a plot of land that is hiding something in its soil. C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey The world’s crops are failing and rich, delicious food is becoming a rarity. An up-and-coming chef is offered a position in a colony of the wealthy, with ingredients she hasn’t come by in years, in an opportunity that feels impossible to pass up. As she becomes embedded with the elite family running the place, she is forced to face the limits of her ethics in a degenerating world. Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves In this tense mystery, a woman arrives in rural Scotland on an important environmental mission to repopulate its land with long-gone wolves. As her team works to convince the locals that the wolves are not a danger to them, and in fact will help their land thrive, a farmer is killed. Tensions mount to a fever pitch as she tries to figure out what happened, and save the wolves. Rumaan Alam, Leave The World Behind In this short, haunting story, a family heads out of town to spend a relaxing weekend at a beach house, when a widespread blackout engulfs the city and the home’s owners arrive at the door asking to come in. As the mystery of what is happening in the broader world expands, the two families have to face their existential fears, and how much we can trust one another in a crisis. Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower In this classic of the apocalypse genre, a young climate refugee journeys north in California, fleeing the dangers of a deeply unequal society falling apart. Using her powers to feel others’ pain, she introduces people to a new religion, Earthseed, in which God is change. *** View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, A Fire So Wide (Harper) “Ruiz-Grossman’s captivating debut chronicles a wildfire’s impact on a diverse set of residents of Berkeley. . . . It’s a gripping page-turner with a surprising twist, as a set of disgruntled survivors form an unlikely alliance and take drastic action. The complex characterizations and realistic scenarios converge to deliver a satisfying punch.” –Publishers Weekly Leah Konen, Keep Your Friends Close (Putnam) “[A] fast-paced, plot-driven novel that manages to poke fun at millennial parenting and the culture of wealthy Brooklynites . . . A thrilling and unpredictable hunt for answers that pays off.” –Kirkus Reviews Jørn Lier Horst, Thomas Enger, (transl. Megan Turney), Stigma (Orenda) “Blix suffers a series of vicious assaults in Stigma, the new novel by the stellar Norwegian crime-writing duo Jorn Lier Horst and Thomas Enger … tense, brutal and fast-moving.” –Sunday Times Pascale Robert-Diard (transl. Adriana Hunter), The Little Liar (Other Press) “In a story that addresses the many different kinds of truth available for the telling, even as it asks to what purposes those truths should be used, Robert-Diard writes a fast, tight, character-driven tale that refuses the easy answers so readily available in an era of social media activism in favor of the complexity of the all-too-human natures that motivate us all. Complex, provocative, and timely.” Vera Kurian, A Step Past Darkness (Park Row) “Through flashbacks and the gang’s emotionally powerful reunion, Kurian draws readers in, invoking strong Goonies vibes. Here, as in her debut, Never Saw Me Coming, Kurian creates unforgettable characters, breathless suspense, and original plotting. A must-read for fans of C. J. Tudor and Jennifer McMahon.” –Booklist A. J. Finn, End of Story (William Morrow) “Literary magic – a mystery lover’s delight . . . Absorbing, stylish, and sparkling with quick wit . . . reminds you of something so utterly essential about a truly masterful mystery – that the end is just the beginning.” — Nita Prose Cara Hunter, All the Rage (William Morrow) “Hunter’s fourth outing with Fawley is a well-written, richly detailed fly-on-the-wall procedural; highly recommended.” –Booklist Melissa Albert, The Bad Ones (Flatiron Books) “The supernatural creep factor is extreme, and there are secrets aplenty in this compelling and eerie tale.” –Booklist Sara Shepard, Nowhere Like Home (Dutton) “Twisted friendships, toxic pasts and tangled motives—this is Sara Shepard doing what she does best!” –Ruth Ware Tammy Greenwood, The Still Point (Kensington) “A gifted storyteller, Tammy Greenwood instantly transports you to the cutthroat, brutally competitive, and beautiful world of ballet in this richly-detailed, expertly-plotted, absorbing tale of friendship, motherhood, passion, and dreams, found, lost, and found again.” –Heather Gudenkauf View the full article

Sitting majestically on the Garonne River in southwestern France, capital of the country’s Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, with approximately a million “Bordelais” (masculine) or “Bordelaises” (feminine) in its metropolitan region. A city and region of castles and wine, that likes to think of itself as the world capital of wine. And wine also happens to appear in rather a lot of Bordeaux crime novels too… So let’s start with that most Bordelais of crime fighters – the winemaker –detective. Jean-Pierre Alaux and Noël Balen’s Bordeaux region set series of crime novels now numbers 22 books (14, and counting, of which are available in English). They all feature the world-renowned winemaker turned gentleman detective Benjamin Cooker and his assistant Virgile Lanssien. While wine is a luxury to be savoured and appreciated it is also a world, so Alaux and Balen’s novels suggest, of dodgy money, deceit, death, crime, inheritance, and jealousy. The books are massively successful in France and spawned a series hit TV show too. The opening book of the series is Treachery in Bordeaux (2014). When some barrels turn at the prestigious grand cru Moniales Haut-Brion wine estate, Cooker and Virgile start to investigate. Is it negligence or sabotage? Moving through the series Cooker and Virgile encounter ingenious heists of Grand Cru, a serial killer stalking Bordeaux leaving clues that relate back to wine, feuding over inheritance of a Cognac dynasty, sabotaged vineyards. Though mostly set in Bordeaux there are side trips to Sauternes, Paris and Gascony but it’s all wine all the time with Cooker and Virgile. Read the series and you could easily qualify to be a sommelier. Patrick Hilyer’s Broke the Grape’s Joy (2012) is a little cosy crime trip into Bordeaux viticulture too. English widow, Jean Valeix, is the owner of a fabulous vineyard in the French wine village of Saint-Emilion. But her cherished chateau is struggling to sell its produce. All she needs to do to save the vineyard from bankruptcy is solve a murder. Wine is rationed and kept hidden away in cellars in Alan Massie’s terrific (I devoured them all in a long weekend) World War Two set tetralogy. Massie was a Scottish journalist who spent time in Bordeaux and wrote of its wartime history before launching into his crime-espionage blend tetralogy. The series starts with Death in Bordeaux (2010). In the spring of 1940, the mutilated body of a gay man is discovered in a street near the Bordeaux railway station. The case goes to Superintendent Lannes who sees a political motive for the murder. But the authorities are not keen he investigate it. More bodies appear as Lannes deals with the fact that his eldest son, Dominique, is at the Front, his wife, Marguerite, is depressed, and when the Battle of France breaks out, Bordeaux is filled with refugees fleeing the war. Soon Bordeaux becomes an occupied city and Lannes’ chief suspect is untouchable, protected by a relative in the Vichy government. Dark Summer in Bordeaux (2012) is set amid the grim reality of Vichy France and a series of unexplained murders. Cold Winter in Bordeaux (2013) see Lannes still trying to balance finding murderers with not being seen to collaborate too closely with the Vichy Government and occupying Germans. The tetralogy ends with End Games in Bordeaux (2015). By now it is the summer of 1944, France is in turmoil, D-Day has occurred, the Vichy regime is in its death throes. The revenge against collaborators is beginning, the Resistance on the march. Atrocities are committed on both sides, and justice is blind. Lannes searches unofficially for a missing girl and investigates cases of historic sexual abuse in Bordeaux as the war comes to its final end, Franc is liberated and all accounts must be settled. I should also mention some great Bordeaux-written and set crime that hasn’t yet been translated from French into English. It’s always frustrating to know that there are best-selling writers out there who have hit series that haven’t been translated. Bordelais Emmanuel Moynot is a graphic artist who has authored more than forty graphic novels published in France since the 1980s, including several featuring detective Nestor Burma, and based on the crime novels of Léo Malet. The stories are great and the graphic images wonderful and he’s much loved in France, Spain and Germany but nobody has picked his work up yet in English. Similarly so with the original Nestor Burma novels by Léo Malet, a popular French crime writer (he sadly died in 1996) originally from Montpelier and with a distinctly surrealist bent. Nestor Burma is a cynical anti-hero in a dozen or more novels that have become, as above, graphic novels and a couple of movies. But Malet doesn’t have an English translator. Neither does Alexander Oetker, a German writer who created Luc Verlain in a series of novels set in the Aquitaine region around Bordeaux and among the region’s beaches and vineyards. Verlain fled Bordeaux as a young man for the bright lights of Paris, but now he’s back in his hometown. There are seven Luc Verlain books, but sadly none in English (only French and German). Still, if you’re lucky, you can find the TV show Mongeville created by Jacques Santamaria. Santamaria is a prolific French radio and TV dramatist with a penchant for crime. He adapted several Guy de Maupassant and Patrick Modiano novels for French TV and created the popular French TV detective show, Mongevile. Antoine Mongeville is a former investigating judge turned investigator who works with a young police judiciaire detective on cases in and around Bordeaux. It’s on DVD or, if you’re in America, via Amazon Prime. And finally, as ever, something a little different and special, Marie NDiaye’s Vengence is Mine (2023). NDiaye is a French novelist, playwright and screenwriter with French-Senegalese heritage, a Prix Goncourt (France’s most prestigious literary prize) winner who grew up in Paris. She has written novels, short stories and, when she was just 21, Comédie classique, a 200-page novel made up of a single sentence. She left France to live in Berlin in the Sarkozy years finding him and his administration ‘monstrous’. Praise in France was fulsome for La vengeance m’appartient (originally published in French in 2021) and has also been strong for the English translation. The New York Times wrote that ‘In Vengeance Is Mine, NDiaye circles a familiar configuration of ideas: trauma and memory, class anxiety, isolation and otherness, the warped savagery of domestic life, the rupture between parents and their children.’ The heroine of the novel is Maître Susane, a quiet middle-aged lawyer living a modest existence in Bordeaux, known to all as a consummate and unflappable professional. But when Gilles Principaux shows up at her office asking her to defend his wife, who is accused of a horrific crime, Maître Susane begins to crack. One critic called the novel a blend of Elena Ferrante and Patricia Highsmith. It is definitely rather unsettling and Bordeaux provides a fantastic background. And as the rather and predictable end to this column – why not pour yourself a glass of good Bordeaux, sit by the fire and read one of the novels above? View the full article

The path from Sherlock Holmes to modern baking cozies may not seem like a direct route, but there are plenty of ways that Sherlock set the stage for our current iterations of beloved bakeshop heroines. The moment John Watson meets Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, the famous detective has taken over a university lab and is perfecting a chemical concoction for identifying the presence of blood. Holmes, a master observer, understands clearly that some results require careful composition and attention to detail. This scene being the point where we, as readers, first meet Holmes alongside Watson is important in that it shows us there is more to Holmes than simply a sharp eye and a propensity for mood swings. Sherlock respects science and chemistry, things that require sensitive balance and precision. Most aficionados of the modern whodunnit appreciate the part Sherlock Holmes played in developing the genre—even if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle probably wasn’t expecting his most popular character to spawn a whole subgenre of female amateur sleuths. It is, of course, the amateur title we often forget when we think about Holmes. He was not a police officer or doctor or psychologist. He was merely a keen observer who paid attention and noticed things. One who very much fancied himself smarter than the so-called professionals. This brings us to our modern heroines, who have plenty in common with Sherlock even if it isn’t an intentional homage. The modern cozy heroine is almost always an amateur investigator, who finds herself immersed in an investigation, usually at odds with the police. Unlike Holmes, they are typically pushed into these experiences against their will—or better judgement—whereas Holmes would lower himself to assist the police just to amuse himself. He was rarely the suspect at the center of an investigation as many of the more modern heroines find themselves to be. Modern cozy heroines, especially cozy heroines who bake, are great counterparts to the Baker Street detective. Bakers are scientists in their own right. A delightfully charming saying goes that “baking is science for hungry people” and it’s a wonderful truism. Baking, more than cooking, is a very precise process that requires focus, attention to detail, and a careful hand in mixing various concoctions. Sounds a lot like a certain sleuth wiling away his time in a university lab. Bakers are modern day magicians, much like scientists, using things as simple as flour and water to create life (if you don’t think sourdough is magical, then think again). A baker must also be able to solve mysteries in the kitchen. Why didn’t the bread rise enough? Why were the cookies flat? Why did the pie crust turn out too tough? The answer is usually as simple as a half teaspoon of baking soda, or the temperature of a room, but these seemingly unimportant details are what can make a delicious final product, or cause your baking to fall flat. Literally. A baker—much like Sherlock Holmes at a crime scene—must see what others do not, what the average eye passes over. A baker needs focus and a massive repertoire of knowledge just living in the back of their mind. Once, Holmes told Watson that he simply chose to forget things that had no importance to him, because there was only so much room in his memory, so why waste it? One must wonder if bakers simply discard their memories of historical factoids or names of presidents to better remember measuring conversions or acceptable substitutions for eggs. Another thing bakers have in common with Holmes is the remarkable allowance of time to think. Holmes lounges around his apartment with seemingly nothing to do but mull over his current cases. Bakers, meanwhile, have the freedom to let their minds wander while stand mixers whir or dough gets folded under their knuckles. There is plenty of time to consider the finer details of a murder investigation while bread is proofing or pie dough is setting in the fridge. That kind of freedom to be able to work while also letting your mind work things out certainly helps make baking one of the most ideal professions for an amateur sleuth. Of course, their hands-on access to food also explains who they are so frequently considered potential murderers when someone happens to die from poisoning. That’s just how the cookie crumbles. So while it may not seem like a natural evolution, I think it’s safe to say that our Baker Street detective would have probably enjoyed spending time in a bakery, and would certainly appreciate the way his modern amateur successors have turned their own expertise and attention towards assisting a poor police force who can’t seem to manage it on their own. There are plenty of wonderful options in the bakery cozy subgenre to delight reader’s looking for a sumptuous mystery and even more delicious food—something Doyle’s books were severely lacking. The most natural starting point is Joanne Fluke’s Hannah Swensen mysteries, and of course Ellie Alexander’s wonderful Bakeshop Mysteries have plenty of books to choose from. Jenn McKinlay’s Cupcake Bakery Mysteries, and Valerie Burns’ Baker Street Mysteries are also wonderful additions to the genre. And then for more of a twist on the expected, there’s Misha Popp’s Pies Before Guys series where our heroine Daisy might actually be doling out something a little deadly with her baked goods… but it’s okay, these guys deserve it. Certainly Sherlock Holmes, a noted master of poisons, couldn’t help but be impressed with such ingenuity. And I think he’d agree that there was room for more than one amateur sleuth to lend a measuring spoon and a sharp mind over at Baker Street if the need struck. *** View the full article

“Didn’t you once cause quite a stir by challenging heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali to a fight?” Black Belt magazine asked Jim Kelly in an interview. It was even more unbelievable than that! On December 16, 1973, UPI reported that the stars of the upcoming feature Three the Hard Way—Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, and Kelly—had challenged Ali, George Forman, and Joe Frazier to a fight. This wasn’t a publicity stunt for the still-shooting movie, nor was it a staged event for charity. This appeared to be a good, old-fashioned street challenge, woof tickets being sold to three boxing champions by two former football players and a karate expert. And what woof tickets they sold! “I just think that we’re as tough as those three dudes,” said Brown, who was being interviewed alongside Williamson and Kelly. “All [the boxers] do is talk about fighting in the ring. But how tough are they out of it?” Perhaps they’d forgotten that Ali came from Kelly’s tough hometown of Louisville, Foreman grew up in Houston’s Fifth Ward, and Frazier was a South Carolina sharecropper’s kid who moved to Philly when he was fifteen. Brown offered to fight Ali, because in the 1960s, the two sparred in practice. “He wasn’t as strong as I am,” he revealed. Kelly would fight Joe Frazier. “Fred’s got the hardest assignment with Foreman,” said Brown. “But I have no doubt we can handle ’em.” The fight never happened. Three the Hard Way did happen, however, becoming the first of three films the trio would make together. Directed by Gordon Parks Jr. and written by Eric Bercovici and Jerrold L. Ludwig, it told the story of a racist plan to put some kind of plague in the water that kills only Black people. There’s some mention of sickle cell anemia to keep things legit. It’s up to the heroes to stop this racist group whose leader looks a lot like Howard Cosell. “It took God seven days to make the earth,” says the head baddie. “It’ll take us three days to cleanse it.” The plot sounds crazy enough, but even more shocking is that the film was shot by veteran cinematographer Lucien Ballard. In his five-decade career, Ballard worked with some of the greatest directors. Josef von Sternberg used him as a camera operator on 1930’s Morocco, and he got his first cinematography credit working with von Sternberg on Crime and Punishment. Ballard also worked with Henry Hathaway (whose last film was a Blaxploitation quickie called Super Dude), Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick, and Budd Boetticher. Except for Kubrick, these directors used him multiple times. Three the Hard Way was Parks Jr.’s second collaboration with Ballard, after 1974’s Thomasine and Bushrod, Max Julien’s intriguing take on Bonnie and Clyde. Like Gordon Willis, he was hated by the cinematography branch of the Oscars. Ballard was nominated only once, for a Joan Crawford film called The Caretakers. He shot 130 films in his career, mostly made in the days when there were two chances to be nominated (black & white and color), yet the Academy repeatedly snubbed him. This despite his invention of the Obie, a light he created to hide the facial scars his then wife, Merle Oberon, received in a car accident, and his work with legend Gregg Toland on how best to shoot Jane Russell’s cleavage in Howard Hughes’s The Outlaw. Three the Hard Way was a fixture on New York City independent channels during the mid-1970s. On TV, it looked like hot garbage and was edited down to a PG-rated version. Comparatively, on the big screen, Ballard’s widescreen compositions and his ability to light different shades of Black skin correctly made the film look better than its budget suggested. Some of it is still too dark to be effective, but the old master still has an impressive trick or two up his sleeve. That plot about putting Black death in the water supplies of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Detroit is merely an excuse for Kelly, Washington, and Brown to shoot, stab, and karate-chop hundreds of people. Record producer Jimmy Lait (Brown) is in LA producing the soul group who provide the film’s soundtrack, the Impressions. An old friend who was being experimented on by White supremacists escapes from the compound where he was imprisoned. The guy seems delusional, so Jimmy doesn’t believe him. Then his friend is murdered and Jimmy’s main squeeze, Wendy (Sheila Frazier), is kidnapped. After he barely avoids being killed, Lait heads to Chicago to see his friend, Jagger Daniels (Williamson). The villains try to kill him, too. Sensing that three is a magic number, at least where heroes are concerned, the duo head to New York City to recruit Mister Keyes (Kelly), a sabom who runs a tae kwon do studio. Mister is not an honorific, it’s literally Keyes’s first name. Keyes is introduced in Kelly’s most famous scene, the one every fan fondly remembers. After crooked cops plant cocaine in the red velvet interior of his car, an angry Mister asks, “Gonna set me up?” Then he dispenses a ridiculous and exciting slow-motion ass kicking on numerous cops, none of whom are quick enough to shoot him. The trio is now complete. To get some nudity into the picture, Jagger also calls in three dominatrices, one Black, one White, and one Asian, to interrogate a witness. Three the Hard Way is too afraid to show their methods, but whatever they are, they’re fatal. Mister asks for their phone number. After much violence, the racist evil plan is foiled and Three the Hard Way ends on a freeze frame of an exploding Cadillac, as if the filmmakers suddenly ran out of money. That wouldn’t be a surprise, considering that Allied Artists, the studio that made the film, was once a Poverty Row studio called Monogram back in the days of film noir. The budget was so low that Brown did his own dangerous stunts, the most impressive of which involved using a gun that never needed to be reloaded. When Three the Hard Way opened at the DeMille in New York City on June 26, 1974, it was universally panned. Donald Mayerson of Cue magazine said, “The plot . . . is simply awful.” The Calgary Herald called it a “comic strip gone berserk” where “several white enemies catch on fire and burn picturesquely to death.” Williamson brushed off the criticism: “Most of my fans are kids in the ghetto areas and they relate to the characters I play.” Those kids weren’t writing reviews, but they were buying tickets. Three the Hard Way opened in eighth place, on its way to making $3 million at the box office, a million-dollar return on its $2 million budget. ___________________________ From BLACK CEASARS AND FOXY CLEOPATRAS: A HISTORY OF BLAXPLOITATION CINEMA. Copyright ©2024 by ODIE HENDERSON. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, ABRAMS. View the full article

During my three-year quest to rediscover a “lost lady” of detective fiction, Carolyn Wells, another mysterious woman appeared in the margins of Carolyn’s backstory. She is referred to as the “Unknown Woman,” the unidentified victim of a Victorian murder in Rahway, New Jersey, where both women are buried within walking distance of each other. Wells never wrote about her, but I have a hunch the cold case inspired Wells’s decades-long career as a mystery author. In May of 2021, I took a field trip to Wells’s hometown, checking out her former home, the building where she had once worked as a librarian, and her gravesite. It was less “research” and more communion with spirits, especially at the cemetery, where I paused in front of Wells’s austere tombstone and asked forgiveness for the biography I was then planning to undertake. Wells “always hated biography,” as she wrote in her memoir. “The writer invariably finds it necessary to plaster the subject with praises, flattery and adulation and to invest him with all the Christian graces.” My guide that day was Al Shipley, director of The Merchants and Drovers Tavern Museum, a local history museum that borders the leafy burial ground that contains Revolutionary War heroes, Declaration of Independence signer Abraham Clark, Carolyn Wells, and … the Unknown Woman. Museum programs honor and celebrate all of them, but the Unknown Woman, as one of the town’s great mysteries, is by far the most popular, Shipley told me. Every five years on the first Sunday in October, the museum presents an interactive tour led by costumed interpreters who portray the ghosts of the coroner, the undertaker, the mayor, and others involved in the story. It attracts hundreds of attendees. (The next one is in 2027.) Shipley has also written a riveting account of the unsolved murder, The Case of the Unknown Woman. So, as we left Wells’s plot, I asked him where she was – in the “back” of the cemetery, I had read, since at the time no one knew if she was “virtuous” enough to be allowed to rest among the others. We made our way to a small gravestone that reads “An Unknown Woman Found Dead.” The gravesite was decorated with a simple white cross and garish plastic flowers. It wasn’t tacky, though. It felt almost devotional in nature, a reminder not to forget this dreadful story. Photo Credit: Rebecca Rego Barry On the chilly morning on March 26, 1887, the body of a woman was found on Central Avenue, which, despite its name, was a “lonely, desolate, rarely frequented thoroughfare,” writes Shipley in his book. Her face had been pressed into the ground, her neck slit from ear to ear. Her belongings—a fur cape, an umbrella, a hat, and a basket of eggs—had been scattered about, ruling out theft, and there was no evidence of sexual assault, ruling out rape that had escalated into murder. Stranger still, no one recognized the victim. By the time someone located a bloody knife nearby, dozens of onlookers had compromised the crime scene. The police bungled around quite a bit, although, to be fair, they “had never been confronted with such a brutal crime.” Because of the nature of this grisly, Ripper-esque murder—which occurred a year and a half before Jack the Ripper’s first known crime, prompting some to later correlate them—it attracted the national news media. Rahway was overrun with reporters, detectives, and literally thousands of people who believed they would recognize the woman, or merely wanted a glimpse at the body. Many theories about the murder were advanced over several months, and still, no satisfactory conclusion was reached as to the identity of either the victim or the killer. On May 3, the town buried the woman and laid the matter to rest. As I lingered over the Unknown Woman’s grave, I did some quick math and figured that Wells would have been about twenty-five when the violence occurred—the same estimated age of the victim. Moreover, the slaying occurred only a few blocks away from the Wells home on Elm Avenue. During the investigation, a railroad agent claimed he saw a young woman leave the station and head towards Elm on the night in question, an eerie coincidence. There can be no doubt that Wells followed the news of the murder. Since she left no diary or correspondence recording her thoughts on the matter, I can only assume she felt chilled by it, particularly by her proximity, and certainly by the fact that the crime went unsolved. Is this one of the reasons she turned to writing murder mysteries? Was there something in her subconscious that drove her to write stories in which the detective always prevails? Click to view slideshow. Before she tried her hand at mysteries, Carolyn had written in several genres–children’s, poetry, young adult, humor, and anthologies–with much success, but it was the 82 detective novels she wrote between 1909 and her death in 1942 that made her a household name. She excelled at writing country house and locked-room mysteries for a decade before Agatha Christie entered the scene, before the so-called Golden Age began. By the mid-1920s, she was churning out three or more books annually. One newspaper wrote, “It would be perfectly reasonable for Carolyn Wells to claim the title of all-round literary champion of America, if not the world.” Throughout her career, Wells projected an image of herself as light, amusing, and clever, and there was certainly truth to that. But her darker thoughts manifested in the mysteries that dominated the final three decades of her life: macabre settings, bizarre deaths, and baffling crimes. She spent a lot of time thinking about clues, weapons, and crime scenes, less about character motivation (howdunits vs. whodunits). She felt the main element of a good mystery was the puzzle at its heart, “a stirring mental exercise, with just enough of the complex background of life to distinguish it from a problem in mathematics,” she wrote in The Technique of the Mystery Story (1913), an early history and how-to of the genre. Of course, the puzzle had to be solved, and that was Wells’s favorite part. Could that have been a deep-rooted psychological response to the Unknown Woman case? I suspect so. ____________________________ From THE VANISHING OF CAROLYN WELLS: INVESTIGATIONS INTO A FORGOTTEN MYSTERY AUTHOR. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, POST HILL PRESS. Copyright © 2024 by the author, REBECCA REGO BARRY. All rights reserved. View the full article

CrimeReads editors make their selections for the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Jenny Hollander, Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead (Minotaur) A young woman with an enviable media job and a seemingly perfect relationship goes into survival mode when an old classmate reappears, making a big movie about events that she would rather not be dredged up again. Hollander parcels out the truth about what really happened in their grad school days with a perfect sense of pacing and enough twists to keep readers on the edge of their seats. –DM Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, A Fire So Wild (Harper) Ruiz-Grossman’s ambitious debut is set in Berkeley, California, a city of stark divides and outsize pressure points, as a wildfire approaches. Our narrative moves between citizens on all points of the socioeconomic spectrum, tied together by themes of housing and shelter–and what it means when our most basic needs are under threat. Ruiz-Grossman brings this insightful story into focus with deft character sketches and atmospheric prose. –DM Kobby Ben Ben, No One Dies Yet (Europa) In 2019, Ghana declared a “Year of Return” and welcomed tourists from across the diaspora to visit the country. That is the backdrop for Kobby Ben Ben’s psychological thriller featuring four American tourists and their competing guides—one religious and humorless, hired to take the Americans around the official sites, and the other queer and cynical, brought in through a dating app to give the tourists a taste of Ghana’s gay underground. This may be one of my favorite novels ever. It’s so funny. It’s like Patricia Highsmith traded her self-loathing for a decent sense of humor. –MO Tracy Sierra, Nightwatching (Pamela Dorman Books/Viking) 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. –MO Jahmal Mayfield, Smoke Kings (Melville House) This book has such a great set-up. In Mayfield’s self-assured and righteously furious debut, a group of Black vigilantes is determined to exact vengeance on those who never received punishment by kidnapping their descendants and making them contribute reparations. When one of their targets turns out to be a white supremacist leader, they must martial all their cunning and resources to defeat him, and in the process, find a way to preserve their mission despite growing doubts. Mayfield’s tough, muscular prose infuses the novel with a beautiful darkness as the characters struggle in ways that will hopefully have the reader thinking too. –MO Sarah Ochs, The Resort (Sourcebooks Landmark) The dark underbelly of a renowned Thai beach resort (and party island) is explored in Ochs’ debut thriller, centered on an expat community that guards its place on the island carefully, but is soon rocked by a series of killings. Ochs brings the island party scene to vivid life, but also shows readers the other side of paradise and the cost of preserving a dream. –DM View the full article

Like little wreaths of funeral flowers, death crowns mark the passing of a loved one. But death crowns – seen as comforting to some, ominous and otherworldly to others – are not ordered up from a florist shop. Just where death crowns do come from is a mystery, and an unsettling one at that. If you’ve never seen a death crown, or angel crown for the more religiously inclined … well, that tracks. I’ve only ever seen a few and those were behind glass in an exhibit of death and funeral folklore at the Museum of Appalachia north of Knoxville. There’s no entry for death crowns in the Encyclopedia of Appalachia, which at 1,864 pages is the most authoritative source on Appalachian culture and society. Death crowns figure into my obsession with death and dying, burials and cemeteries and what happens after we give up the ghost. What are death crowns? To put it succinctly, they are tightly woven laurels of feathers, three or so inches around, that would be found in the feather pillows of the recently deceased. Sometimes they would be discovered when a survivor fluffed and smoothed the pillow of someone who had just died and felt a lump inside it. Sometimes death crowns were found when survivors cut open a feather pillow for reassurance that their loved one was heaven-bound. Hence the “angel crown” terminology. Death crowns have been reported for more than a century and a little-known belief system exists around them. Sometimes they marked a mournful celebration of a person who passed away. Other times, they were a harbinger of death. ‘As though woven by delicate gremlins’ In January 1944. the Dayton Daily News reached into the past to explore the world of death lore in an article that began by citing witches’ hexes and voodoo dolls but quickly segued to death crowns. “Mrs. Susie McIntosh, way up in the hills of Kentucky, near Irvin, decided to put a fresh tick (cover) on a pillow. The feathers floated around her as she reached her hand inside the old case. Her fingers touched something hard. Prickles of fear ran up her spine. She raked out the hard substance with a stick. “There, in her hand, as though woven by delicate gremlins, round and solid, lay a Death Crown.” Three people had died sleeping on the pillow, the woman said. In the 1950s in Knoxville, newspaper columnist Bert Vincent featured recurring items in his column in the News-Sentinel. After he wrote about death crowns or angel crowns a couple of times, people would contact him after finding others in pillows. “TWO MORE ANGEL CROWNS FOUND IN PILLOWS,” Vincent’s column reported. A woman from Big Stone Gap, Virginia, had found two angel crowns in pillows her recently deceased mother-in-law had used. Vincent was still writing about death crowns in 1963, in a column item right above a report on a 52-inch squash. “Of course, now, if you must be hard and so practical that you demand a practical explanation, it is that feathers in a pillow tend to mat when rolled on and pressed for a length of time,” he wrote. “But really, when you examine one of these crowns closely, you wonder how it could just sort of accidentally happen. The feathers are put together so perfectly that you can pick it up and handle it without losing a feather.” ‘This person would soon die’ Death folklore, although not about angel crows, is its own section of the Encyclopedia of Appalachia. From the death watch, when family and friends would stand by as a loved one approached the end of life, to the ringing of a bell and hanging of a black wreath on the door, people would prepare for death and react to death. Even the wake, which the encyclopedia credits to the Scots-Irish, my forebears, was considered a folkloric practice meant to “wake” the dead. But the wake had practical purposes as well, not only to host a gathering of loved ones but to ward off “cats, rats and insects” from getting at the corpse. But death crowns are largely unacknowledged. In the Museum of Appalachia, founded by John Rice Irwin and now a Smithsonian institution, Irwin’s collection of death crowns – alternately called angel crowns or even angel of death crowns – are alongside such grim collectibles as a horse-drawn funeral carriage and child-sized coffin. A long explanation, signed by Irwin – who died in January 2022 – noted that a death crown “indicated that the deceased person, in whose pillow it was found, had gone to heaven. Others believe that if such an object was found in the pillow of a sick person, it meant that this person would soon die.” Irwin noted that when a friend had shown him a death crown, he was embarrassed to admit he’d never heard of one. “But I found that no one else had heard of it either.” “I do not assume that this was a commonly held belief in Appalachia (although it might have been), nor do I assume that such a belief is peculiar to this region. Indeed, I’m informed that one branch of the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff has a display of angel crowns. Many people from this area, including this writer, can claim a Welsh ancestry,” he wrote. Among the several angel crowns on display at the museum is one from the pillow of William H. Rule, who died in 1968. Rule’s angel crown was the museum’s artifact of the week in August 2022. New death crowns ‘almost every night?’ Although death crowns seem like a natural folklore artifact to include in a book, especially a novel, I’ve been unable to find references to the phenomena there. There is a long-standing reference to feather crowns in news reporting. The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Dictionary of American Regional English cites the angel crown or angel wreath going as far back as 1891 editions of the Ottawa Daily Republican newspaper, which recounted a man who was “taken sick and could always hear the witches singing about him … He did not dare to sleep on a bed because he found his bed and pillows full of feather crowns.” Another man noted that feather crowns were being placed in his wife’s pillows “almost every night.” In 1964, the (Nashville) Tennessean quoted a woman who noted that in 1941, her husband had pneumonia. “But after he recovered I found a perfect feather crown in the pillow he had used during his illness. Yet this man is living and hasn’t been sick since.” The dimming of death folklore – not to mention less frequent use of feather pillows – has drastically reduced reports of death crowns. The Old Farmer’s Almanac noted that while death crowns had been interpreted as signs of impending death and an indicator that the deceased had gone to heaven, the almanac had a theory as to why angel crows were found much less frequently in modern times: fewer people were going on to their heavenly reward. View the full article

As we’ve long been proclaiming on this website, we are in a Whodunnit Renaissance. Smart, clever mystery series are popping up left and right, and they are giving us the opportunity to see many delightful actors in the role of “detective.” I’m not an actor, but even I know that performers are on the lookout for roles that feel definitive and original. Creating a detective character allows an actor to make an indelible contribution to entertainment in a way that few other genres permit. How often do we acknowledge the perfection, the irreplaceibility of performers like Peter Falk as Columbo, or Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, or Tony Shalhoub as Monk? At this rate, I predict that the role for which Daniel Craig will be best known (besides James Bond, come on) is the detective Benoit Blanc. There’s something about detectives! Put simply, they are characters like no other and everyone loves them. And we have been blessed with a flurry of new sleuths, as of late. Think Natasha Lyonne’s Charlie Cale in Poker Face! Mandy Patinkin’s Rufus Coatsworth in Death and Other Details! So many actors are playing detectives in whodunnits and howcatchems! Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez in Only Murders in the Building! We even got Tiffany Haddish and Sam Richardson sleuthing in The Afterparty, Patricia Arquette becoming a PI in High Desert. So, as long as everyone’s calling their agents asking to get them sleuth roles, I’d like to make a few suggestions. I’ve got some ideas for which of you actors should be in your own whodunnit. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list. These are things I thought of that I think would be very, very great, but there are doubtlessly many more. Okay, actors, listen up! Matt Berry Matt Berry kind of played a detective in The Year of the Rabbit, a Victorian comic caper series about family, but I think he should be turned loose on his own comic detective show, something like Toast of London but where he’s Britain’s greatest sleuth, despite being an idiot or a fop, or something like that. Larry David Look, Curb Your Enthusiasm is ending. Maybe he wants a new project. And have I got one for him! I know the trope of the irascible, cranky sleuth is a bit overdone, but no one would shock it back to life better than Larry David. He plays characters who notice details, ask questions about the little things that everyone else ignores (or is too polite to bring up), are not afraid to hound others he believes are in the wrong. Better yet, he could make it meta… it’s a show about Larry David, who, after finishing Curb Your Enthusiasm is looking for something to do and winds up becoming a detective. I’m just saying… I would watch. I think it would be pretty… pretty.. pretty good! Paul Giamatti I sung the praises of Paul Giamatti recently and I’m about to do it again. Paul is one of our very best actors, and he has proven that he can do anything. There is no role too difficult or complex for that man. He conquers all. Can you imagine how amazing he’d be if he were set loose on a detective show? That eyebrow would go WILD. Tony Leung Please, please, please can we give Tony a period, neo-noir PI show where he smokes cigarettes and pensively walks around rain-slicked streets underneath glowing streetlamps? I, personally, need him to play a dapper, melancholy detective. Mads Mikkelsen I feel like this plea writes itself. And it’s technically cheating because he played Detective Sergeant Allan Fischer in the series Rejseholdet for four years, in Denmark. But that’s okay. He can do another one. Perhaps he’s a Danish PI transplanted to an American town for reasons we don’t really know, and he feels like an outsider, and then he stumbles on a missing person’s case. Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin If these two followed up Grace and Frankie with a detective series about two longtime friends in their eighties who solve murders together, I would never leave the couch. Ayo Edebiri I, like the rest of the populace, would like to see Ayo Edebiri in everything. Every single thing. And among those many roles, I’d love it if there were a show about a college student, or maybe 20-something intern at a large company, who notices something weird and keeps digging. Maybe she pulls in her friend Kathryn Newton, idk, I’m just spitballing here. There are lots of potential avenues. And Ayo, a huge fan of David Suchet’s Poirot, would bring a certain appreciation to a project of this type, methinks. Alan Cumming Let’s allow his incredibly charming gig hosting The Traitors become a prelude to his series about a gentleman sleuth who arrives in a new locale to solve a murder. Maybe he’s very old-fashioned, quaint English village-sleuth kind of guy, and he winds up solving a crime in Silicon Valley or someplace like that. I think he’d delight in a fish-out-of-water detective comedy, personally. Jeffrey Wright Jeffrey Wight, now Oscar-nominated, is finally, finally getting his due for an entire career of fantastic performances. He is one of our most versatile and delightful actors. Can you imagine how he’d light up a detective show, maybe about a professor who stumbles on a mystery in his university, and unravels a conspiracy that puts him in hot water with the administration? Christopher Walken Do I even have to explain this one? View the full article

What really happened? That question lies at the heart of so many crime novels, and yet the answer, that very truth, can often depend on who’s telling the story and the truth they believe. Authors employ various story structures to dole out information in a way that keeps the questions coming and the answers satisfying. When those truths don’t quite mesh, conflict and tension ensue. I love stories that play with perspective, and how different people interpret the same events, so that question—what really happened?—lies at the heart of my latest novel, Who to Believe. The story takes place over the course of a single night, as a group of friends gather in the wake of a brutal murder in a small town. Each of the friends has their own take on who might have committed the crime, and, in turn, we learn how each character interprets the story for themselves. We also learn their secrets—and they have plenty of them. For this novel, I was inspired by the Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon, which lends its name to this style of storytelling (and itself is inspired by two short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa), as well as the TV show The Affair, all of which look at how stories unfold through the lens of multiple perspectives. But there are lots of fun ways to use structure to explore stories in new and reinvented ways and to answer that central question, what really happened? Here are some of my favorites. Everyone’s a suspect. They All Fall Down by Rachel Howzell Hall and Nine Lives by Peter Swanson It’s hard to write about structure without bringing Agatha Christie into the mix, especially her structural tour-de-force, And Then There Were None, the story of ten strangers packed off to a stormy island where they meet their maker one by one. The fun part of Christie’s novel was that instead of writing a traditional investigator—say Hercule Poirot or Jane Marple—the reader plays the investigator, piecing together the various threads in the plot so that in the end only the reader knows the whole truth. Several authors have given this structure their own spin over the years. Two that I thought improved on the source material were Hall with They All Fall Down, which moves the story to an island off the coast of Mexico and injects it with a dose of southern California reality television, and Swanson with Nine Lives, which manages to take the story national as the killer hunts down victims in locations all over the United States. The novel within the novel. Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz It’s hard to beat the fun of a story-within-a-story like Horowitz tackles with this novel. Here, we begin with a very meta prologue by an unnamed editor reading the manuscript for a golden age style mystery called Magpie Murders. The manuscript touches on plenty of the genre’s tropes, including a brilliant detective with a less-than-brilliant sidekick, a country manor house, a locked room murder, and quintessentially English place names like Pye Hall and, in particular, Dingle Dell, among others. The less that is said about how the prologue relates to the overall story, the better, but the structure of the story-within-the story proves to be essential to understanding the novel and solving the murder. Playing with time. Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister One of my favorite plays is called Betrayal by Harold Pinter. It begins with the end of an affair, and then moves backwards in time so that the final scene in the play takes place when the affair begins. McAllister takes a similar approach to Wrong Place Wrong Time, which begins with our protagonist, Jen, witnessing her 18-year-old son stabbing someone, a crime that results in his arrest. The next time Jen wakes, though, it’s a day earlier instead of a day later and as the novel progresses, Jen goes further and further back in time as she tries to stop the crime from happening in the first place. Like with Pinter’s play, this structure allows the reader to view events through the lens of the future, casting shadows of what’s to come over every action and choice. The Rashomon. An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears Like my novel, Who to Believe, Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerprints is a classic Roshamon, telling the same story, the murder of Robert Grove, and the subsequent trial and execution of another character, though different lenses – but talk about ambitious! Set in 17th Century Oxford, Pears uses four separate first-person accounts, a Venetian visiting Oxford, a lawyer, a priest and mathematician, and a scholar, then leaves the reader to piece together the final truth in an immensely satisfying conclusion. The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton Turton’s novel takes us back to Christie territory, as guests descend on a manor house in the English countryside for a masquerade ball. And like with a good Christie novel, a murder gets the plot started. What sets this novel apart is that the protagonist then inhabits eight different characters as the mystery of Evelyn Hardcastle’s death (and one other) slowly unfolds in turn through each of their perspectives. The midpoint reversal. I Let You Go by Claire Mackintosh Sometimes the best structural tricks are to stick to the tried and true, and to depend on your midpoint to provide the shock value of a perfect reversal. Think of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, who spends the first half of the story on a journey to the Emeral City, only to learn that her story isn’t really about finding the Wizard, but something much more complex. Many might point to Gillian Fynn’s Gone Girl as a perfect midpoint reversal, too, as that novel becomes something completely different once a major reveal comes to light. At first, Mackintosh’s novel, I Let You Go, seems to be about the search for a missing woman, one who fled to a remote seaside village after the death of the son. The story follows Jenna Grey as she tries to rebuild her life, and the two police inspectors trying to locate her. A perfectly set up secret revealed at the end the novel’s Part One sets up and entirely different story for Part 2, and provides the reader with the kind of reversal novelists dream of concocting. *** View the full article

Recently, one of my favorite authors—who I am also lucky to call a friend—published her first work of crime fiction for adults after putting out seven young adult mysteries and thrillers. I devoured Kara Thomas’s Out of the Ashes last spring, and with the upcoming release of my own debut adult thriller, The Split, after publishing five young adult thrillers myself, I was eager to talk to Kara about making the leap to the adult space after years of writing for a teen audience. I wrote—but didn’t sell—my first thriller for adults in 2017, when my first YA novel was under contract but not yet published. Writing in both spaces has always been a career goal of mine, and I had a sneaking suspicion the same was true for Kara, so I wanted to pick her brain about working in YA while also—finally!—making the move into the adult crime writing space. In the conversation that follows, Kara and I compare notes about taking on new challenges and expanding our audience at this pivotal point in both our writing careers. KIT: Hi, Kara! I’m excited for this chance to chat with you about some of our favorite topics—the crime/suspense genre, writing process, and book publishing. To start, what brought you to fiction writing in the first place? If I remember correctly, your career began with a three-book YA series with St. Martin’s. How did that come about? Were you drawn initially to the young adult age category or the mystery/thriller genre, or some of both? KARA: The funny thing is that my first attempt at fiction was not YA, nor was it a mystery! The main character was nineteen, and most literary agents I approached with the manuscript felt like there was no market for an adult book with a teenaged protagonist, but the book didn’t feel YA to them, either. I pivoted to writing a contemporary YA novel, which eventually got me my agent. That book ultimately didn’t sell, but my agent wound up approaching me with an opportunity to write a YA mystery series for a publisher. I was really excited when I saw it was a mystery series—I grew up on Nancy Drew and my mom’s copies of the Stephanie Plum novels. But I had never really considered writing my own until St. Martin’s gave me the opportunity. That’s the long way of saying that I never really set out to be a YA writer, or a mystery writer—I just set out to write, because that was the only thing I really knew how to do, and the universe kind of nudged me in a particular direction. What about you? I know that you have a background in poetry—when did you start writing fiction? KIT: That’s right, I’d been writing poetry since high school (extremely emo imitations of song lyrics, mostly) but I got serious about it in college and went on to do an MFA program in poetry a few years after graduation. I’d written some fiction along the way—a short story workshop senior year of college that I really enjoyed and several craft classes with a fiction focus as part of my MFA program—but the idea of writing anything longer than about twelve pages was so intimidating. I was in complete awe of my grad school fiction colleagues who had several novel drafts under their belts. I didn’t know anything about plotting or character development or setting, but I knew a lot about feelings, and I think that’s what steered me toward YA once I got up the nerve to attempt a novel draft. I’d been reading some incredible feelings-driven young adult novels that came out in the early 2000s, and I really connected with those protagonists. So I wrote a draft of a YA novel that, like your first, didn’t get me an agent—but I did prove to myself that I could write something novel-length that actually had a plot, and that inspired me to keep at it. My second manuscript—also a YA contemporary—got me my agent and sold to a publisher. See All the Stars (which has now been re-released in paperback as Before We Were Sorry) had a bit of a suspense drive when I began to draft, but its suspense/thriller nature really took shape during revision, encouraged by beta readers and my agent, and once I got into the groove, I found that I really loved writing suspenseful fiction. From there, all my books are squarely murder mysteries or thrillers. Back to you! After the series with St. Martin’s, you went on to publish several standalone YA mystery/thriller novels, and you have another forthcoming. But you’ve also pivoted to writing adult crime fiction recently. Out of the Ashes came out last year, and you have a second coming out in a couple months. What drew your interest to the adult market? Can you tell me a bit about what that transition has been like for you? KARA: I first had the idea for the book that would become Out of the Ashes back in 2015. At the time, I was under contract for two YA novels, so I put the idea on the back burner. I knew that the story needed to be written from the perspective of an adult character, and there was no way to age it down. I kept saying I would write it in my spare time, but I wound up publishing three YA novels and having a baby between 2016-2018. “Spare writing time” was not something I had again until 2021, when my son started preschool. Writing from an adult perspective was refreshing for me, creatively, after writing for teens for years. When I began writing, I was 19—I’m in my thirties, now, and my everyday experience is much different than what teenagers are dealing with. It’s always easier to write what you know, and for me, that was from the point of view of a woman in her thirties. At the end of a day, crafting a mystery takes a lot of planning, troubleshooting, and juggling a lot of balls—the only difference with Out of the Ashes was that my main character had a lot more agency than my teen protagonists. KIT: I’m so glad you brought up the issue of agency because when I get that question—what’s different about writing adult versus young adult fiction—I’ve found it’s the only element that really impacts my writing in a major, plot-directing kind of way. Interviewers often want to know if we need to “limit” ourselves in YA (regarding sex, or with the “dark stuff” that comes with the territory of writing thrillers) and my answer is generally no. I might approach a scene a bit differently in the two age categories, but I’ve never felt the need to tone anything down in a way that puts a damper on my writing. (Thankfully!) However! With teen protagonists, you do have to contend with the limits of adult authority—respecting it or finding ways around it—in ways that can steer the plot. When drafting The Split, it was refreshing to not have to worry about the rules and expectations of grown-ups; the sliding doors structure provided plenty of limits and challenges, and setting my main character Jane loose within that framework was a breath of fresh air! Before we go, is there anything that’s surprised you from a publishing perspective about writing for adults? Do you have any immediate or long-term career goals now that you have a foot in both age categories? KARA: Honestly, the only thing that’s surprised me about publishing a book is the reaction from readers—I saw a one-star review that simply said, “Takes the Lord’s name in vain.” I never encountered anything like that across seven YA books (which certainly take the Lord’s name in vain), so it made me laugh. In terms of career goals, I’m publishing another YA in the fall— a companion book to The Cheerleaders called The Champions, set in the same world. Ideally, I’d like to continue publishing for both audiences, but I tend to follow ideas where they take me. KIT: I think my favorite one-star review (of one of my first YA novels) said something like “this book is written for teenagers.” Sometimes I still laugh about that one. I’d also like to keep publishing for both audiences. To be mercenary about it, now that I have a kid and have given up the freelance editing work I used to take on, the dual income streams from both categories are key to my family’s financials! But beyond that, I’ve found a lot of challenge and enjoyment in writing for both sets of readers, and I’m not eager to give that up any time soon. I just finished the draft of my second adult thriller, and I’m working on the proposal for my next YA, so I’m hoping to have more coming in both spaces in the near future. (And I can’t wait to read Lost to Dune Road this spring and The Champions when it’s ready! As you know, I’m a fan of everything you write.) *** Kit Frick’s new novel, The Split, is now available from Atria Books. Kara Thomas’s new novel, Out of the Ashes, is now available from Thomas & Mercer. View the full article

I didn’t realize I’d written a crime novel until after I’d signed a book deal. How does that happen, you might ask? Surely a writer has his or her genre well and truly mapped out before they pick up the pen, right? In my case, not so much. It was only once I began whipping the manuscript into shape with my wonderful editor at Text and seeing some early ideas for cover designs that it began to dawn on me: Paper Cage, my sketch of life in small-town Aotearoa / New Zealand, was a crime novel. It would eventually find a home in the crime section of my favorite book shops back home, just before Agatha Christie and SA Cosby. It would be featured at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. And, most significantly, it would be read by scores of crime fiction aficionados. The whole experience has made me wonder: how much does genre really matter? What does it mean for a novel to be categorized in ways that might surprise the author? And finally, am I now an official Crime Writer? To answer these questions, it helps to take a step back. To the scene of the crime, if you will. I started writing the novel that would eventually become Paper Cage in a fit of homesickness. In 2020, I was coming to the end of a creative writing master’s program at the University of Kent, studying at their satellite campus in Paris. Channelling some of my frustrations at my inability to return home to my native New Zealand due to the country’s strict COVID lockdown policies, I started working on some character sketches featuring an overlooked file clerk squirreling away in a small-town police station basement. Like everything I’ve ever worked on, the project began with a search for a distinctive voice for the piece—a way for the story to communicate something only I knew. Soon, I was hearing from my protagonist, Lorraine, about all sorts of daily concerns. The biscuit selection in the staffroom, for example, or the fact that everyone else in the building expected her to be the one to fetch milk for the fridge. Cranky, forgotten, and more than a little lonely, Lorraine had plenty to tell me; and all I had to do was listen in the right way. So, I had a few sketches coming along, but they weren’t a story. Not yet. It was only when a few others in my workshop pushed me to consider what might be happening in the files Lorraine was working on that I imagined some missing children, a niece in trouble, and a too-friendly neighbour with secrets of her own. Now, I had the components of the story. I had a clock, a growing list of conflicts and grievances, and a job for Lorraine to do. A big job, as it turned out: soon, she’d be thrust into the case, using her extensive local knowledge and whānau / family connections to get to the bottom of what was really going on in Masterton. In truth, genre was the last thing on my mind. The idea that Lorraine’s story would ever make its way off my handwritten notes, into a printing press, and wind up in front of the nose of a reader besides my mum was simply too whimsical and unlikely for me to worry about. I was working on this story out of sheer joy and selfishness. And because I missed my family. Being so far away from Masterton, I found it transporting to talk to a character there. Lorraine has so many things in common with members of my immediate and extended family that working on the story was like an endless version of the best kind of Zoom call—without any awkward pauses or technical difficulties. By mapping out a set of problems for Lorraine to overcome, I gave myself a canvas to sketch out a version of my hometown and spend as much time as I wanted there: walking its summer-baked streets, hearing the pre-dawn crash of the milk tankers slicing through the main street intersections, and watching the magpies warble into the trees by the cricket pavilion. Rather than mapping out a list of scenes, chapters, or plot twists, I felt my way into the story by getting as close to Lorraine as I could, and listening to what she would want to do next. What would she want to know? Where would she go? And would she be hungry enough to stop for a pie on the way there? (The answer is yes, she would). The peculiar brew of elements in Paper Cage—racial paternalism, small-town collective surveillance, and family allegiances under strain—all came out of the cast of characters I’d been speaking to through Lorraine. That’s why it was so surprising to have my novel characterized as ‘crime fiction’, or even ‘literary crime fiction’, which I suppose is just a way of saying crime fiction that asks a little more of the reader. I think in a way I might have been kidding myself— upon giving the galley proofs to a friend of mine to read, she exclaimed: “Of course this is a crime story, you idiot. You have an open case involving serial child abductions, and your protagonist works in a police station!” As a novice writer, this is exactly the kind of candor you need from your early readers. So, now that Paper Cage is sitting on shelves in the crime section of bookstores around the world and being discussed in niche online forums, how do I feel about this happy accident? Honestly, pretty great. In hindsight, many celebrated crime or thriller stories have elements that dovetail with the things that most delight me in fiction: characters that feel like real acquaintances, sketches of places I’ve never been, relationships being tested in impossible ways, and people being pushed to discover surprising things about themselves. And sure, a good dash of the darker side of human nature that characterizes noir fiction. The fact that I’ve ended up being drawn into this genre by following the initial spark for my story, rather than deliberately considering the set of expectations people have for crime fiction, might be why Paper Cage has struck a chord with so many readers. So far, anyway. By leaning into these elements of Paper Cage, I’ve been able to better understand what makes crime fiction so popular and enduring, and why readers love spending time with stories like mine. By attending fantastic events like the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, I’m developing my understanding of how modern crime writers are subverting and playing with classic crime fiction tropes, and how authors can find their particular niche—cosy, procedural, gumshoe, or maybe even cosy-gumshoe-procedural—and delight their audience by delivering stories that satisfy and occasionally flip expectations. Now that I’m working on a sequel to Paper Cage, I’m able to see more clearly how the particular demands of crime readers—stakes, tension, forward momentum—can be satisfied while buttressing the human complexity and fallibility I love finding on the page. And now that I’m teaching a creative writing workshop of my own, I’m encouraging a new batch of talented young writers to follow the initial spark of story without hemming themselves in with considerations of genre. Or at least not until they see proposed cover designs in their inboxes. And finally, do I now consider myself an official Crime Writer? Sure. If it helps people connect with the story I’m telling, you can call me whatever you like. *** View the full article

The weather had turned dark and cold; no snow, but a pelting of quick-freezing rain that made roads impassable. Schools everywhere cancelled and I—at fifteen—was tasked with keeping the woodfire burning as our only means of heating the underground house we called home. Living in the middle of abandoned coal lands, closer to the cemetery than to town, we had no cable and no internet. I, however, rejoiced. I’d just purchased the complete collection of Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. I didn’t realize I’d also purchased entrée to the world I now primarily inhabit—one of forensic and scientific research, historical puzzles, and thick plots. I’m not the only mystery writer to make first acquaintance with the genre through Sherlock Holmes, but I wasn’t just finding my genre—I had just found my tribe. I am autistic. I’m also hyperlexic, have a memory with photographic acuity… and the social graces of an orangutan. (Note: they are socially intelligent animals, but are the only primates to live almost entirely solitary lives, so you know, it can be hard to remember the secret handshakes). I absolutely love a puzzle, but it was the behavior of Sherlock himself—in the stories and later adaptations—that kept me coming back. Whip-smart, but seemingly bad at close relationships; possessed of every special interest but oblivious to things others take for granted; has an infuriating way of inferring and finishing other people’s sentences, and is prone to the wildest impulses (I would not shoot the letter V in my wall with a revolver, but I could see whipping up a corpse or two in the pursuit of knowledge). For all of these reasons, my first—and still favorite—books are those varied collections of short stories and novellas, Study in Scarlet and Hound of the Baskervilles in particular. But as it happens, cozy-style mysteries of all sorts have been a safe haven for neurodiverse characters (and readers), from the fastidious and habitual perfectionist Hercule Poirot created by Agatha Christie—to Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe with his special interests, avoidance of social situations, and low emotional affect. And if the original creators did not intend a neurodivergent diagnosis, screenwriters for their adaptations certainly have, and representation matters. Imagine the joy upon discovering that the autistic, ADHD, or other ND character wasn’t the victim nor the villain—but the hero. It’s only right to follow up on my Sherlock Holmes obsession with my equally ambitious preoccupation with Hercule Poirot. Written as an outsider (because he is from Belgium), his position at the margins, victim of social exclusion, is something neurodivergent people share. There’s also his commitment to routine and his peccadillos about food; he is well known for having “only toast” for breakfast “which is cut into neat little squares.” In the television adaptation of Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, that routine is interrupted by a broken radiator; he’s forced to spend Christmas with disagreeable people in an unfamiliar setting when he’d rather be at home, listening to his radio and eating chocolate. (I feel you, Hercule, le même choix.) We can also identify with his feelings about environmental stimulation, in excess and absence, in Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express. Poirot and Sherlock are “head cannon” autistics, meaning they aren’t diagnosed in the confines of novel or film adaptation. Instead, readers follow clues to the detective’s motivation and behavior, even as they do for the murder at hand. Perhaps there is something in the obsessive attention to detail, or the way detectives must always look at their fellow humans at one remove, as if from the outside, that lends the genre so easily to ND representation. Either way, with today’s growing acceptance of neurodivergent people, we no longer have to play gumshoe to find autistic representation. Television adaptations have been leading the charge, of late. Hart Hansen, creator of Fox’s Bones, based lead character Dr. Temperance Brennan on a friend with ASD, or Autism Spectrum Disorder, though she is undiagnosed in the show. More recently, Astrid (Amazon Prime), Death at the End of the World, and The Bridge (FX/Hulu) present crime-solving characters who are openly neuro-divergent. Possibly the most well-known mystery book to feature autism, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time follows a fifteen-year-old protagonist self-described as “a mathematician with some behavioral difficulties,” while Sarah J Harris’s The Colour of Bee Larkham’s Murder fully announces Jasper Wishart’s ASD. (The13 year old autistic, parakeet enthusiast is both murder witness and amateur sleuth). In terms of books written by neurodivergent authors, we have the dark and engrossing Three Graves Full by Jamie Mason. She has a neurodivergent condition called aphantasia, the inability to see images in your head. More thriller than cozy, it follows a guilt-stricken main character who has committed murder, but who then finds two bodies on his property (neither of which is the right victim). And finally, there is the much lighter but oh-so-worthwhile romp, Poisoned Primrose by Dahlia Donovan, an openly autistic author. The very cozy, very British mystery gives us an “autistic, asexual, and almost forty” protagonist in Pineapple ‘Motts’ (complete with quirky characters and a cat). There aren’t yet many mysteries that are both about autistic characters and authored by neurodivergent writers, but this is changing—and I’m excited to be part of a the ground swell. I’ve gone from being that quirky, unusual (underground-living) autistic reader to a still pretty quirky and unusual autistic writer. That’s the full circle of representation. I longed for a place to see myself; now I write to provide the same sort of refuge. Allowing my protagonist Jo Jones to be unapologetically herself and to be accepted as autistic, hyperlexic, and unmasked, means somewhere, someone will see reason to live their own life out loud. Jo’s got a murder to solve before the killer strikes again, but she’s valuable for who she is and not merely for what she does. Just like Sherlock. I suppose it’s no surprise that we’ve always been at home among the Baker Street Irregulars. *** View the full article

Those of us who write series novels generally spend a lot of time thinking about our characters’ background—where do they come from, what is their education, their taste in food and music, what jobs have they held? Some writers work out entire biographies of the characters, filled with details that may never make it into a story, but that feel necessary for their creator to know. How can our characters be vivid, we wonder, how can they move and talk and appear in three dimensions, if there are parts of their history that even their author doesn’t know? Thirty years ago, I published The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, the first episode in what became the Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes series. Russell is a girl of fifteen when we first meet her, and throughout the course of the story, we learn (I learned) about where Russell came from and how she happened to be in Sussex. We hear of her family tragedy, her various relatives, her Jewishness, her academic life at Oxford and the friends she makes there—and that’s just the first book in a series that is currently hitting the #18 mark. Not all crime stories weave in the more peripheral information about the people on the pages. The traditional mystery does encourage a more thorough exploration of background, but the faster the pace, the fewer opportunities to pause and chat to the reader about childhood homes and favorite pets. Still, even a thriller writer like Lee Child takes the occasional detour into Jack Reacher’s brother, his army buddies, his past experiences. And then there’s Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes is arguably the best known character in crime fiction. The silhouette of a man with a big pipe and a deerstalker on his head (both post-Doylean details, by the way) is instantly recognized anywhere in the world. Doyle’s “Sherlockisms”—those pithy phrases such as the lack of activity from a dog in the night-time, or “Elementary, my dear Watson” (which, again, is not found in the original stories)—are used even by people who have never read a Conan Doyle story. And yet, when you go looking for actual life details about this vivid and universally-known character, searching for hints as to his experiences and history outside of those directly seen by Dr. Watson, one needs more than a magnifying glass and a dog with a sensitive nose. I know. I write Holmes as a character, and it’s startling how much I’ve had to make up. When I first began to write the Russell “memoirs” (primarily from Mary Russell’s point of view) and realized it had been too long since I read the Sherlock Holmes stories to trust my memory, I—being the trained academic I was at the time—went out to do my research. Fifty-six short stories and four novels, surely that will give me plenty of detail, right? Wrong. Oh, yes, Dr. Watson gives us tidbits about their life in Baker Street: the odd skills Holmes uses in solving crimes, his physical characteristics, his habits and violin playing and drug use and his attitudes towards women, Americans, and policemen. We even catch glimpses of the detective’s taste in music and cuisine. But when it comes to the insights one might expect from close friends, those comfortable revelations about Holmes’ family and home life in the years before he and Watson met in the St Barts laboratory, the clues are as thin on the ground as if Holmes were a man in witness protection. And the things we do learn tend to introduce more questions than they answer: –Holmes is from a family of “country squires.” (From where? Were they titled aristocrats, or simply commoners with money? Why is he now so distant from them?) –He has an older brother, Mycroft, who is something powerful and mysterious in the British government. (Indeed, Holmes says ominously, at times Mycroft is the British government. Does that mean he’s a spymaster? An extortionist? A Victorian Rupert Murdoch?) –His grandmother was “a sister of the artist Vernet,” who brought into the Holmes family “art in the blood”—that ability of artists to take note of the telling detail. (But, which of the many Vernets does he mean?) –He went to university (Oxford? Cambridge? Did he graduate, and if so, in what subject?) And these facts are about all we get. A university friend of Holmes is mentioned, but only in the context of a case the friend brings him. Neither does he explain how he came to know their extraordinarily—bizarrely, even—patient and forgiving landlady, Mrs. Hudson. What self-respecting landlady would put up with a tenant who shoots holes in the walls when he’s bored and fills his rooms with street urchins and criminals? This lack of personal detail is hardly Watson’s fault. The two men shared rooms in Baker Street for half a dozen years, embarking on countless investigations together (some of them putting Dr. Watson into personal danger) before Holmes thought to mention that he had a brother—and then, he only did so when said brother was about to appear on their doorstep. As a writer, I find it fascinating how thoroughly we know this great detective when so much about him is a complete enigma. Perhaps the modern preference for back-story gets in the way of creating a vivid sketch. Perhaps a closed book is all the more intriguing for being unread. Why do we need to know whether Sherlock Holmes’ father held a minor title, or which Oxbridge university he went to, or whether there was another brother—or half a dozen sisters with a gaggle of children who adored their weird uncle Sherlock? One thing the lack of detail creates is an itch to fill in the holes. No other fictional character has inspired such an industry of pastiches, one that began while Conan Doyle was still producing the originals. Sometimes these are tales briefly mentioned in the originals that cry out to be told, such as that of the giant rat of Sumatra (from “The Sussex Vampire”) or the mystery of the repulsive red leech (“The Golden Pince-Nez.”) Other times, writers burrow past the teasing subject of untold stories to the larger mystery of Sherlock Holmes himself. Writers like me. My first few Russell & Holmes novels found Holmes firmly in the role of supporting actor, with the focus on the development of young Mary Russell from adolescent to young woman. But at a certain point, I found myself eyeing Holmes, and wondering just how he would have developed, under the influence of this unexpected apprentice-turned-partner. Over the next few books, he began to move beyond where Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories left him, a solitary figure with little but his bees to keep him company. He grows, he reveals himself—to Russell and to us—as we come to know more about Mycroft, and that family of country squires, and even meet a son that he did not even suspect until the boy was in his twenties. Finally, I decided that it was time for those Vernets. Time to explore how the artistic impulse got into the Holmes brothers’ blood. Nothing simple, obviously—could anything about Sherlock Holmes be other than extraordinary? And perhaps some of it was information that Holmes himself didn’t know? Episodes and influences that reached far back into his life, and shaped the man he became… Time to open the pages of this notoriously closed book, Sherlock Holmes, with The Lantern’s Dance. *** View the full article

Having traveled fairly extensively in my life, I’ve garnered quite a slew of past tristes with destinations. Some I ditched after the first date—cutting a trip short as soon as I realized we weren’t compatible—others turned into more long-term connections, even prompting me to move for a few months or, in one case, over a year. But just like any list of past relationships, there’s the ‘one that got away.’ For me, that place is a tiny, secluded island in the Gulf of Thailand. If you’ve seen the 2000 film The Beach, adapted from Alex Garland’s novel of the same name, you can easily picture it: turquoise blue waters, lush mountains that erupt almost directly out of the beaches themselves, rickety huts serving up fishbowls of brightly colored drinks. It was my version of paradise, and I knew I was a goner as soon as I stepped foot off the ferry. I spent my week on that island taking advantage of everything it had to offer: racing motorbikes through the narrow hills, earning my scuba diving certification as I waved to sea turtles meters beneath the surface, and—of course—partaking in the nightly bar crawls marketed to fellow backpackers and the vibrant expat community that resided on the island. It was a few days after I arrived that I first heard about them: the murders. They were always talked about in hushed tones, always accompanied by furtive glances, as if speaking about them aloud would make them real. It was only after I did some research that I found out about the heinous crime that had happened only a year before I’d arrived on the island. Two British tourists had been found beaten to death just down the beach from where I was staying. Shortly thereafter, two Burmese immigrants were arrested and charged with the crimes, although they later claimed their confessions had been elicited through torture. But even as the news lodged in my gut, I knew I wouldn’t be changing my travel plans to depart the island early. In fact, only a day or so later, my friends and I canceled our plans to head to our next destination, choosing instead to prolong our time on the island. There was some magical pull to the place that kept me there, despite knowing the darkness that lurked—literally—around the corner. After I finally acquiesced to my pre-arranged flight bookings and dragged myself off the island, I spent several years toying with the idea of dropping everything in my life, packing up, and shipping back to Thailand, where I could make a living as scuba instructor or a bartender. Even from half a world away, the lure of the island was intoxicating. It was a paradise that had buried itself beneath my skin, one I couldn’t seem to wash off. I never did take the plunge and move to that island, but when the COVID pandemic rolled around in 2020 and I started writing to escape the confinement of my one-bedroom apartment, the first setting that popped in my head was that paradisical destination with its dark undercurrent of crime. As I searched the internet, wondering how much the island had changed in the years since I’d visited, I was appalled to learn that the dual murder that occurred shortly before I’d arrived was no longer an isolated event. Instead, publications were reporting a string of suspicious deaths and disappearances of backpackers and expats from the island. The events had become so salacious that they’d generated not only various magazine articles and blog posts, but even a podcast. The news gripped me immediately, and before I knew it, I was dragged back under the island’s waves, spending my lockdown days reliving my experience there, but this time weaving in fictional murders, writing what would become the first draft of my debut thriller, The Resort. As I wrote about the death of a resort guest that shook a Thai island very much based on the one I’d visited all those years ago, I spent a lot of time thinking of how the other resort guests, and especially the island expats, would react to that type of crime. I remembered, slightly chagrined, my own reaction to learning of the island’s murders. How quick I was to dismiss them as something that could only happen to someone else, how easy it was to convince myself I was never in danger in a place that felt so welcoming and idyllic. I couldn’t imagine how difficult it would be for someone who had made that island their home to acknowledge the darkness that lurked beneath, to recognize the danger they may have put themselves in. We all have places—like people—that we fall in love with. And, just like with people, we’re often able to overlook their red flags, even when they’re flying full mast. With The Resort, I wanted to explore how far we would go to protect those places, to keep them forever as the idealized paradise we fell in love with. Because as much as it pains me to admit this now, even knowing the dark events that occurred on that island I visited years ago, even after writing a fictionalized version of how terrible things could end up if I’d stayed, I know, if the opportunity presented itself, I would still go back in a heartbeat. * View the full article

I first saw Sliding Doors on VHS in 1999, the year after it released in theaters. I was eighteen and seeking my way back from my first real heartbreak. Mere days after an amicable split with my boyfriend, a slow drifting apart that was more bittersweet than painfully acute, he had called me up to say he was seeing someone new—my best friend. Then the pain rushed in. I slid the tape into my VCR expecting the kind of romantic comedy that would feel bad and good at the same time, like pressing on a bruise. (As it turned out, Sliding Doors was not a typical rom-com, something I’ll return to in a moment.) But it did resonate in unexpected ways. In the opening sequence of the dual-timeline film, Gwyneth Paltrow’s character Helen gets fired from her job, and in one reality, catches the train and comes home to find her boyfriend in bed with another woman. Helen’s experience didn’t precisely mirror my own, but heartbreak has a way of shimmying from a TV screen or leeching from the pages of a novel, finding its way into your soft spots. (In the other reality, Helen misses the train and her boyfriend’s mistress has left by the time she makes it home, a sequence of events that only seems to launch her down a brighter path.) Years later, when I began dreaming up the story that would become my dual-reality domestic thriller The Split, I was inspired by Sliding Doors—both the format and the dark turns taken over the course of a film most remember as a rom-com. Yes, there is a romance and the requisite miscommunication trope, and there are certainly funny moments, but the film’s billing as a romantic comedy is something I always found a bit of a mischaracterization. I’d argue Sliding Doors is a speculative drama, and indeed it was the darker moments that felt most poignant—infidelity, a mugging, miscarriage, death—along with the thought-provoking premise: can one small moment split your life in two? The dual-reality format wasn’t invented by writer-director Peter Howitt, but the film certainly popularized the concept, and following its release, “a sliding doors moment” came to mean a seemingly inconsequential moment in time with the power to alter the sequence of future events. We’ve all experienced them, haven’t we? If we’d caught that train, gone out instead of staying in, said yes instead of no…how might our lives have taken a completely different path? My own marriage is the result of a sliding doors moment. My husband almost stayed home the night of the holiday party where we were introduced. And, in a minor echo of my high school heartbreak ten years prior, if the man I’d been casually dating at the time hadn’t called me that afternoon, telling me he was seeing someone new, I wouldn’t have been open to a new relationship in the first place. Our lives are filled with these tiny coincidences, choices, doors we decide to step through or close. And while the proposition that we’re all living our own version of Sliding Doors could certainly be the stuff of a great romance—my husband and I recently celebrated our twelfth wedding anniversary, for instance!—it can just as easily be fodder for a dark and twisty thriller. As a suspense writer, this is of course the path down which my mind is predisposed to travel. In conceptualizing The Split, it felt important that my protagonist Jane’s sliding doors moment would hinge on a choice—not a coincidence. In the Peter Howitt film, Helen’s life splits in two when she either catches or misses a train in the London underground—the sliding doors that give the film its name. Her reality split is triggered by happenstance; she either successfully skirts a small child on the subway stairs in time to squeeze through the doors, or she is held up, and the doors close with Helen still on the platform. This is fitting for a rom-com (although I maintain this genre marker fails to fully capture the film) but for a thriller, I knew Jane’s reality split would need to result from a moment within her control: jump to her flighty younger sister’s rescue or put her foot down and let Esme take responsibility for herself. Jane’s response splits her life into two realities: one in which Esme comes to live with Jane in their childhood home, forcing the sisters to reckon with the darkness in their past and the distance between them now, and the other in which Esme vanishes into the night, leaving Jane tortured by regret. Throughout The Split, Jane must reckon with the consequences of her decision—and reflect on the similarly life-altering consequences of an earlier decision from her childhood, an incident that set the tone for her strained relationship with Esme in the present. At one point, she wonders if there is another Jane out there, one who made a different choice on that long-ago night… Applying the sliding doors format to a thriller was a fantastic creative challenge. Jane’s two timelines each involve a mystery, and each holds space for echoes of the other timeline—people, places, occurrences—that ripple through Jane’s two paths. A recent heartbreak. A new love. An ailing mother. A notebook. Secrets. Regrets. Without giving too much away, I’ll conclude by saying that I also owe the ultimate direction Jane’s story takes to a recent re-watch of Sliding Doors, during which I was reminded of an important lesson about split-reality narratives: a story can grow many branches, but it only has one ending. Until the next sliding doors moment comes along. *** View the full article

This month’s psychological thrillers are divided between white-knuckle tension and laugh-out-loud social commentary. Some are close to horror in their high stakes and visceral violence; others use murder as a jumping off point to explore ordinary emotions in a dramatic environment. You’ll see old favorites mixed in with new and rising voices, each worthy of your appreciation as they contribute to a subgenre at the peak of its popularity, and showing no sign of slowing down any time soon. Tracy Sierra, Nightwatching (Pamela Dorman Books/Viking) 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. Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Fortune Seller (St Martin’s) This book combines so many things I enjoy….Really, just horse girls and tarot readers, but who doesn’t want to read about horse girls and fortune tellers? In Kapelke-Dale’s delightful forthcoming novel, the elite members of Yale’s equestrian team welcome a new girl into their midst, one who comes with impeccable riding skills and a surprising talent for tarot. Not everyone is as happy with her presence, or her fortunes, as the narrator, and soon enough, murder and sabotage mar the collegiate halcyon days of the privileged characters (such a pity…). This book also fulfills my theory that people at Ivies are way too burned out from trying to get in to enjoy their time there. So glad I went to a state school (Hook ‘Em.) Kobby Ben Ben, No One Dies Yet (Europa) In 2019, Ghana declared a “Year of Return” and welcomed tourists from across the diaspora to visit the country. That is the backdrop for Kobby Ben Ben’s psychological thriller featuring four American tourists and their competing guides—one religious and humorless, hired to take the Americans around the official sits, and the other queer and cynical, brought in through a dating app to give the tourists a taste of Ghana’s gay underground. This may be one of my favorite novels ever. It’s so funny. It’s like Patricia Highsmith traded her self-loathing for a decent sense of humor. Amina Akhtar, Almost Surely Dead (Mindy’s Book Studio) A new book from Amina Akhtar is always a treat (if by treat, I mean, bitter, humorous explorations of modern ills…so I guess, like, Sour Straws as the treat specifically). In Almost Surely Dead, we go back and forth between two time frames: the days leading up to the disappearance of a seemingly ordinary woman, Dunia Ahmed, and the ongoing investigations in the months after, as Dunia becomes the subject of a true crime podcast with a bizarre hook: before she vanished, Dunia was subjected to not one murder attempt, but many. Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings (Little, Brown) A visceral, knowing exploration of human misery and the ways we fail ourselves. Also, I’ve never seen a better description of my own attitude towards dating (which should….probably worry me). In Ordinary Human Failings, set in London in 1990, a toddler is murdered, and the suspect is the 10-year-old daughter of a family that’s been cast as Irish ne’er-do-wells by the salivating tabloids. When an unscrupulous newspaper reporter puts the accused child’s family up in a hotel, he’s hoping to bleed them for lurid details to feed to the eager public, but Nolan uses these interviews as a way instead to explore how people become trapped in patterns that cannot hold, despite the best of intentions. My god, this book is good. Amanda Jayatissa, Island Witch (Berkley) Another gothic tale helping to decolonize the genre! Set in 19th-century Sri Lanka, Amanda Jayatissa’s Island Witch follows the outcast daughter of the local demon-priest as she tries to find answers in a series of a disappearances rocking her small community. Jayatissa’s novel is steeped in folkloric traditions and sumptuous landscapes for thrilling, feverish read. Vera Kurian, A Step Past Darkness (Park Row) Vera Kurian is back with another crackerjack premise; it’s the summer of 1995 and six high school students with nothing similar between them are attending a secret party in a mine when they witness a horrible crime that binds them together for life. Until twenty years later, when one of them winds up dead. I’m gonna pregame this one with I Know What You Did Last Summer.–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editor View the full article

May 1932 Charlie Chaplin was visiting Japan with a group that included his brother Sydney Chaplin, and Chaplin’s Japanese personal secretary, Toraichi Kono. Chaplin had been to Japan a decade earlier for work, when he and Fatty Arbuckle performed in a silent comedy show. This time, the purpose of the trip was purely pleasure. The group spent their time in Japan seeing traditional Japanese art, attending performances of Japanese dance, observing traditional craftsmen at work, and viewing the natural beauty of locations such as Miyanoshita and Mount Fuji. Japan’s prime minister, Tsuyoshi Inukai, had arranged for his son to take Chaplin and his party to watch a sumo wrestling match. They took a place of honor in the front row and marveled at the spectacle of the immense men in their loincloths crashing into each other. During one bout, they heard screams and commotion from an entrance above. Turning around, they saw armed soldiers pushing their way through the mass of spectators toward their seats. The soldiers looked serious and surrounded them but didn’t appear threatening. Everyone was shouting. Not understanding anything being said, the Chaplins were a bit scared, but it ultimately seemed that the soldiers were there to protect them. As they were being escorted toward the exit by the soldiers, Chaplin demanded, “Kono, what on earth is happening?” Kono said, “They say we are in danger, sir, and we need to come with them for our safety.” Chaplin saw shock on the face of their host, the young Inukai. It was the face of a young man who has just been told his father has been killed. The Chaplin party was promptly escorted back to the Imperial Hotel via taxi. As they looked out the car window, they saw soldiers running around all over the city. Prime Minister Inukai had been assassinated in an attempted coup. The prime minister’s assassins were a group of young officers from the Japanese Navy. They thought the prime minister needed to die because he didn’t believe enough in militarism and hadn’t funded the navy enough. The coup attempt went no further, and the assassins were arrested. Later, they told the court more about their goals. They wanted to start a war between Japan and the United States, immediately—believing that if they had been able to kill Charlie Chaplin, the United States would be so angry it would have caused a war to erupt between Japan and the United States. Chaplin was rattled that he had been targeted for assassination. He was also very confused, because he thought the assassins made no sense at all. He couldn’t see America fighting another country over any celebrity. But it made no sense on a more basic level. He noted that “they wanted a war with America, but I’m British. I’m not even American.” He wasn’t sure that most Japanese understood that point. It was clear that the assassins didn’t like the twin foreign influences of Hollywood movies and jazz music. They wanted the populace angry at the West, and that narrative was threatened by a wildly popular Westerner—Chaplin—coming to Japan to make people laugh. Chaplin and his party briefly remained in Japan to give further statements to the police and personally pay his condolences to the prime minister’s family before taking a ship home to Los Angeles. The assassins’ plot illustrated that, at this early date—almost a decade before Pearl Harbor—many in Japan were seeing war with America as inevitable. Strikingly, the assassins were members of the Japanese Navy. It seems the Japanese Navy—the organization that eventually led the attack against the United States at Pearl Harbor—was mentally preparing itself for war, so much so that some young officers had decided it was worth committing political assassination to help make that war happen. Another alarming sign was how much enthusiastic public support the assassins received. The court received a petition with tens of thousands of signatures to have them declared innocent. A group of youths offered the court to take the place of the assassins in the courtroom—an offer coupled with one finger of each petitioner pickled in a jar, as a demonstration of their sincerity. The light sentences the assassins eventually received were an indirect sign that Japan’s march toward war would continue, and that the government’s control over the military was not strong. Zacharias was at sea when he first heard about the incident, and it made further alarm bells go off in his head. The incident was evidence that Japanese society was taking a step forward toward the consensus that war with the United States would come—a sentiment that would snowball, little by little, until war finally broke out. Before leaving Japan, Chaplin’s mind wandered to the dinner he had with his brother Sydney and Kono the night before the assassination. During the meal, six young men entered. One sat next to Kono. There was some talk of dishonor and insult, something about ancestors and pictures painted on silk—Chaplin couldn’t quite recall. What he did remember was how scared Kono looked. Kono—tall, distinguished, well-dressed— was normally cool as a cucumber. Chaplin wondered if this incident was related to the assassination attempt. The Hiroshima-born Toraichi Kono had been hired by Chaplin fifteen years before and had driven Chaplin’s car and acted in a couple of films before Chaplin made him his personal assistant. He fit the image Chaplin wanted to project to the world. When Kono had first arrived at Chaplin’s house for a job interview, dressed in a double-breasted suit and hat, Chaplin took one look at him and exclaimed, “You are smart!” By the early 1920s, Kono was managing Chaplin’s household, bringing in Japanese maids, butlers, gardeners, and chefs. Chaplin’s reliance on Kono only increased his fondness for the Japanese. People would ask Chaplin why there were so many Japanese around, and he explained that Japanese servants were superior. For example, Japanese servants got the broom into each corner of the room, unlike their American counterparts, who merely moved the dirt around by sweeping in a circle in the middle. There was another reason Chaplin preferred Japanese servants: their loyalty and discretion. There seemed to be very little risk that Kono or his Japanese staff would talk to the press. Chaplin perceived Japanese people to be inherently loyal—much more so than Americans, who would sell someone out to the press for a few bucks. In the case of Kono, perhaps his loyalty stemmed from the fact that he was the younger son of a samurai family. Kono himself spoke excellent English, but most of the servants could not. Ambitious gossip columnists were constantly trying to bribe servants to get information on Chaplin and other actors. But it was almost impossible for them to get information from his non-English-speaking staff, who lived in the closed Japanese society in the Little Tokyo section of Los Angeles. The power of the press to bring down celebrities was terrifying to most of Hollywood. A decade earlier, Chaplin had been shocked at the media circus around his friend Fatty Arbuckle, who had been the second-biggest star in Hollywood after Chaplin. Arbuckle’s movie career was destroyed when he was accused of murder after a young woman died in his hotel room after one of his parties. Arbuckle was eventually acquitted, but it didn’t matter. His murder case had been front-page news for months, and no movie studio would give him a contract again. Chaplin was himself the victim of a media frenzy during his divorce from Lita Grey, but his career somehow survived. Lita’s accusations had been so salacious that newsboys sold pamphlets on the street describing her side of the story. The stories seemed to be exaggerated, but the basic facts of the situation were bad enough. Chaplin and Grey had gotten married when she was just sixteen. And it was worse than just that—it turned out they had gotten married because she was pregnant. Even more scandalously, the wedding had taken place in Mexico because underage marriage was legal south of the border, but was not legal in California. But somehow, Chaplin emerged from the Grey divorce as big a star as ever. To date, Chaplin had escaped a career-ending scandal through a combination of good timing and even better luck. But it seemed like it might be just a matter of time. Chaplin’s affair with Grey was not an aberration. He had a reputation for liking young teen girls. Chaplin, like many celebrities in Hollywood, had no trouble finding romantic partners, but even the most untouchable celebrities normally wouldn’t pursue sexual liaisons with minors, which risked not just scandal, but potential arrest. Chaplin’s focus was how to prevent media leaks. For that, he was able to lean on the discreet Kono and his non-English-speaking staff. There had been other close calls. A decade earlier, Chaplin had been a guest on William Randolph Hearst’s yacht when one of the other guests, a movie producer named Thomas Ince, mysteriously died. No one seemed to know how the man had died, and the other guests weren’t talking. Some of the gossip columnists wrote that it was an accidental shooting, at the hand of Hearst himself, who was really targeting Chaplin over an affair he’d had with Hearst’s paramour, Marion Davies. Kono yet again helped Chaplin make the best of a potentially disastrous situation. Amidst the confusion of the dead man on the yacht, Kono appeared at the dock after racing down from Los Angeles, collected Chaplin, and escorted him away before most of the press could appear. The official cause of death of the movie producer was that he was eating salted almonds with a peptic ulcer. Scandal handled. Chaplin kept Kono extremely busy, working him seven days a week. At first, Kono was thrilled to work for Chaplin. He had left Japan fifteen years earlier after a dispute with his father, and now he was a player in some of the most privileged circles in the entire world. He himself was a minor celebrity in Hollywood and in the smaller community of Little Tokyo. However, Chaplin was known to be detail-oriented to the point of perfectionism in his films, and he was similarly demanding on Kono around every last detail of his work. Slowly, the demands of working for Chaplin began to eat at him. At some point, he started to feel he wouldn’t be able to take the abuse anymore. ___________________________________ Excerpted from BEVERLY HILLS SPY: The Double-Agent War Hero Who Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbor by Ronald Drabkin. Copyright © 2024 by Ronald Drabkin. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. View the full article