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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Hank Phillippi Ryan, One Wrong Word (Forge) “Smart, propulsive, and unique…One Wrong Word grabbed me on the first page and didn’t let go. Ryan never fails to amaze me.” –Mary Kubica Nick Petrie, The Price You Pay (Putnam) “Petrie shows off his action-writing chops with a series of vivid, remarkably clear firefights and, in between, pauses to recover.” –Booklist Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz (Scribner) “A richly entertaining take on the crime story, and a country that might’ve been.” –Kirkus Mike Lawson, Kingpin (Atlantic Monthly) “Assured prose matches the two capable protagonists: the crafty DeMarco and the relentless, brilliant Emma. This is perhaps Lawson’s best in the series to date.” –Publishers Weekly Jahmal Mayfield, Smoke Kings (Melville House) “Provocative… Mayfield examines the issue of prejudice and justice from all sides… (a) chilling debut thriller.” –LA Times Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings (Little Brown) “A subtle, accomplished and lyrical study of familial and intergenerational despair, a quiet book about quiet lives… an excellent novel: politically astute, furious and compassionate… a genuine achievement.” –Keiran Goddard, The Guardian David Downing, Union Station (Soho) “Union Station is a first-rate espionage novel. Taut, intelligent, enthralling.” –William Boyd Jenny Hollander, Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead (Minotaur) “As twisty a thriller as you’re likely to read this year, a propulsive dive into the dark secrets we keep buried, even from ourselves, and the lengths to which we will go to keep it there.” — BookTrib Jonathan Kellerman, The Ghost Orchid (Ballantine) “[Jonathan] Kellerman delivers clever twists alongside the lived-in banter between his leads that sets this series apart. It’s both a treat for longtime fans and a great entry point for newcomers.” –Publishers Weekly Amy Hayes, The Year of the Locust (Atria/Emily Bestler) “An absolutely brilliant, tension-filled, tour de force. This novel scared the sh*t out of me!” –Brad Thor View the full article

German storyteller Ivar Leon Menger has written and directed award-winning short films and advertisements before creating epic radio plays as a show runner with Audible. His debut novel, What Mother Won’t Tell Me, has now been released in the United States for the first time. Literary critic and scholar Thomas Scholz has covered Menger’s work for more than a decade. Talking about What Mother Won’t Tell Me, they discuss the appeal of villains and antagonists, how a thriller can resemble a fairy tale, and why Ivar Leon Menger chose writing his second novel over directing his own movie. Thomas Scholz: Ivar, your first novel is being released this week in the USA, and in Germany, your third novel is coming out this year. You’ve just signed a contract for a short story. So, you’re busy writing. What do you find appealing about the old-fashioned medium of text? Ivar Leon Menger: That’s a difficult question. I’ve always enjoyed telling stories since I was a child, usually scary stories to friends who stayed over at my place. It’s appealing to tell stories. And I’m quite free in text. But what I like about books is that I write pure text, you read it, and immediately your imagination kicks in. TS: The scary element is something that runs through all your stories. IVM: Yes, indeed. The dark side has actually intrigued me since my childhood. I started laying Tarot cards at ten years old, played with Ouija boards at twelve. I always wanted to know what’s on the other side, what happens after death, if ghosts exist. Even in James Bond movies, the villain always interested me more than Bond. In the end, I was always sad when James Bond managed to save the world in the last seven seconds because I wanted to know what would happen if the villain implemented his plan. But that’s never shown. TS: So, without revealing too much about What Mother Won’t Tell Me – are we much closer to evil throughout the text than we initially believe? IVM: Actually, this is the fundamental motif in all my stories. It’s something I only realized very, very late. They are always cat-and-mouse games. The protagonists don’t even realize that they have been trapped right from the start. This is a common thread that runs through all my stories. That there is actually no way out from the beginning. TS: We’ve been talking about “all your stories” the whole time, even though your first novels are just now being published. However, you didn’t start your career as an author with novels, but have told stories in many other mediums. You’ve directed and written films, you’ve written and produced radio plays, but originally your career started in advertising. IVM: I studied graphic design and after graduating, I actually wanted to make films. But my father said he wouldn’t finance a second degree and that I should start working. But I was determined to get into filmmaking. That’s when I knew: Okay, I’ve learned about visuals, but I need to learn about writing. So, I applied at the German office of “Ted Bates,” an American advertising agency, and worked as a copywriter there for five years. I wrote a lot of dialogues for commercials and radio spots. During this time, I made my first short film. I was lucky that it won the award for best German short film at the Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale) right away. After that, I quit and spent five years making commercials and short films. TS: What kind of short film did you make? IVM: Formally, they were actually all chamber plays. The first short film, for example, takes place in an apartment and revolves around a phone call. Someone gets a call in the evening from a supposed suicidal person. The protagonist tries to dissuade him from committing suicide, until at the end he finds out that his interlocutor has just killed someone and therefore doesn’t want to live anymore. In the end, the twist is that the murderer simply hit the redial button on the phone. It turns out that the murder victim is the protagonist’s girlfriend. TS: You’ve written and directed films, where many authors actually want to go, but then you switched to radio plays. IVM: Because I realized that making films takes a very long time. With Audible, I had the opportunity to produce my series ideas and stories faster, with a large cast of great voice actors. I had music, I had sound effects. I could do everything like in a film—except for the visual part—and managed to write and direct three seasons of ten hours each in three years. I couldn’t make a series for Netflix that quickly. TS: Why did you switch from film and radio plays to novels? IVM: In a book, I can describe images. I can delve into the characters, describe their feelings. I can describe what they smell and see. Film can’t convey internal motivation as well or as directly as a book. TS: Was there a specific reason for this transition? IVM: The switch to literature was triggered by the pandemic. I was supposed to write a feature film for Netflix. Then the lockdown came, and filming stopped. But I still had the idea for the screenplay. So, I told myself: “Now I’ll write a book for the first time.” Because I never thought I could write a novel before. Writing dialogue was no problem for me. I’ve done it for years for advertising and film. But novels are a whole different form of writing. I then wrote one page every day. Because it took me about six hours for one page. But after a year, I had 365 pages. And that’s how the first book was created. And then everything took its course. My debut, What Mother Won’t Tell Me, was sought after by five major publishers in Germany. There was a bidding war. I could choose which publisher to go with. It was a very, very fortunate coincidence and I ended up with dtv, one of Germany’s most renowned publishing houses. TS: And now your thriller is being published in the US. In the beginning of your novel writing, when you invested so much time per page, did you feel that you were getting closer to the material and your characters? IVM: Absolutely, because I only wrote one page a day. I dealt intensively with the material and thus ideas for the next pages came to me. I only had the final twist in mind, nothing else. Then I write like Stephen King, just letting it flow. But I have to admit, from the third act on, I plot every chapter to make sure I can lead up to the climax. TS: Many elements in your thriller are reminiscent of fairy tales. Was that planned, or did it evolve organically? IVM: It actually evolved organically. The setting with father, mother, and two children on a lonely island in the middle of a lake surrounded by woods triggered it. Perhaps it awakened those quintessentially German tales in me, like those of the Brothers Grimm. On the other side of the lake, you have the proverbial big bad wolves. Only while writing did I realize that Juno, the protagonist, lives very analogously on the island. Then I thought: “She reads from an old fairy tale book.” From there, I gradually developed the parallels of my story to traditional fairy tales. In Germany, my book is now being read as literature in several schools. The students compare my fairy tale-themed thriller with the classic Grimm’s fairy tales. It’s not a young adult book, though. TS: But it has a teenage protagonist. Was it a challenge for you to write from the perspective of this teenager? IVM: The novel is written in the first person, and it’s always said to be very difficult for beginners because you put so much of yourself into the character. But what could be more distant to me than a 16-year-old girl? Therefore, I could really slip into a role while writing. It was easier than if I had written a detective in his late forties, similar to me. Then probably a lot of myself would have flowed into the character. TS: The film rights for What Mother Won’t Tell Me have already been sold? IVM: Currently, we’re developing an eight-episode miniseries with a team of screenwriters. It’s very exciting because each episode is told from the perspective of a different island resident. TS: You could write the screenplay yourself. IVM: I am too close to the material. I was actually asked if I wanted to write the book as a feature film and direct it myself. But I feel so comfortable as a writer that I’d rather put a creative team on it and give them complete freedom to make a good film, or a good series out of my book. I don’t need a one-to-one adaptation of my novel. My favorite example is Stephen King’s “The Shining,” which he did not like in Stanley Kubrick’s version at all. But I love it. I see Kubrick’s and King’s “The Shining” as two different works. I don’t need a one-to-one adaptation of a book. The book already exists. TS: Your first novel is now being released in the USA. The third one is being released this year in Germany. I know you’re already working on the fourth, and at the same time, you’re working on the short story. Will you stay absolutely loyal to literature now, or might you return to another medium at some point? IVM: My desire is to stay very loyal to literature for now because I feel comfortable here. TS: You’ve had the fortune of working with editors twice. Once with the German and now with the American. How do the two experiences compare? IVM: They are very similar. The collaboration with the editors at Poisoned Pen Press was excellent. They engaged deeply with my material and adapted it to the American book market. That was exceptional. I didn’t have that experience with other countries it was also translated into, like France, Czech Republic, Greece, and many more, where my manuscript was simply translated, and the finished book was sent to me. This additional work has paid off. My translator is from Great Britain, so the British translation had to be transferred into American English. TS: That must have also involved preserving the mix of thriller and fairy tale—no easy feat. Is your second novel also a mix? IVM: Actually, no. It’s set in Berlin, in the big city. From the lonely island in the forest, I move to the bustling metropolis of Berlin. The story is about a young actress being stalked. When a murder occurs, the police don’t believe her. So she decides to slip into the most dangerous role of her life, that of the lover of the stalker, to prove his guilt. So a completely different theme. And the third novel, which is coming out this summer in Germany, is set again in a small village. There, 13-year-old boys have been disappearing for several years. A former detective reopens the case and tries to solve the disappearance of the children privately. TS: I’m curious in which languages this novel will be published. For now, I wish you all the best for your debut in the USA. IVM: Thank you! I’m excited for this new chapter! *** View the full article

The megalopolis of Chennai Formerly known as Madras, and capital of Tamil-Nadu, the most southerly state of India on the Coromandel Coast. India’s sixth biggest city with over 12 million people. Home to terrific hot curries, and also known as India’s healthiest and safest city – not that that means there’s no decent crime writing. Before we get into modern Chennai, first a little old Madras. Brian Stoddart is a writer of fiction and non-fiction based in Queenstown, New Zealand but who has written extensively on India and south Asia. A Madras Miasma (2014) was the first in a series of four books set in 1920s Chennai featuring Superintendent Chris Le Fanu, who happens to unfortunately be allergic to the sight of blood. The British are slowly losing the grip on the subcontinent, empire is petering out but that doesn’t mean that a nasty murder doesn’t have political overtones. Superintendent Le Fanu is called in to find out who killed a respectable young British girl and dumped her in a canal, her veins clogged with morphine. Immediately the case is a quagmire of Raj politics, rebellion and criminal activity. Le Fanu returns in The Pallampur Predicament (2014) to a Madras in the midst of a British crackdown on independence activists, Gandhi’s peace movement and British secret agents, any one of whom could have been the murderers of an an Indian Rajah. In the third book, A Straits Settlement (2016) Le Fanu, now promoted to Inspector-General of Police, is faced with the case of a murdered senior Indian Civil Service officer and is drawn into the murky worlds of indentured labour recruitment and antiquities theft and the old British colony of the Straits Settlement (essentially what is now Malaysia, Singapore and a few other islands). And finally, A Greater God (2018) with Le Fanu back in Madras, a city in chaos as Muslims and policemen are killed by independence revolutionaries. PJ Thurbin writes the Ralph Chalmers Mysteries Book (30 or so altogether), number 18 of which is called Murder in Madras (2016). Professor Ralph Chalmers is a Professor of International Business who ends up investigating mysteries. Here he encounters a wave of gold and diamond smuggling sweeping the Indian subcontinent. Colonel Stigart of MI6 enlists Ralph’s help in an investigation. Enough novels set back in colonial times, how about modern Chennai! Hyderabad writer Sriram Chellaopilla’s A Useful Death (2019) starts with the death of aspiring actress Priya. It’s a suicide, but rumour has it that the son of politician and former Telugu-movie superstar (the movies out of South India’s “Tollywood” with movies in the Telugu language) drove her to it. Just another film-industry scandal? Or something bigger. Partha is hired to investigate. Why won’t such a powerful father defend his son? Is there an intra-family war? Whose interests are playing out in the media and on social media? A twisty tale. Chital Mehta is the author of The Chennai Killings (2019). Inspector Vikram Rathi can’t sleep. His sister’s brutal murder haunts him. And now he must investigate the recent murder of a young woman in Chennai that takes Vikram on a journey of buried secrets, complicating his already messed up life. Single named author, Rangarajan, is based in Chennai, and is an academic and a political advisor, so his 2021 book A Madras Mystery is filled with lots of insider information and descriptions on Chennai’s political world. A string of abductions from various parts of the city sends tremors amongst the ruling class in Tamil Nadu. The State is embroiled in caste clashes and only a few months are left for the general elections and top politicians are jockeying for cabinet positions. Indian Police Service officer Ashwin investigates but can’t be sure if the kidnappings are about money, political influence, personal animosities or to destroy Chennai? Chennai-based writer Usha Narayanan has written a host of romance and mythological fiction, as well as one murder book – but it’s a good one. The Madras Mangler (2014) sees a psychopath comes to town, killing girls and dumping their bodies in the rivers. The killer is smart, dangerous and very angry and is now being hunted by Vir Pradyumna, a criminologist from New York. Ruthless politicians, bumbling cops, beer barons and cyber criminals all appear, and (as this is an Indian novel) there’s a climactic scene at an India-Australia cricket match. In Sriram Tawker’s The Madras Murder (2023), pharmaceutical empire boss, Rajeev Mehta is poised to become the company’s next chairman. But then unexpectedly commits suicide. His impending wedding adds to the mystery surrounding his tragic and sudden death. Assigned to solve this enigma is Ilamaaran, a determined Deputy Superintendent of Police known for his sharp instincts. The Madras Murder is expected to be the first in a series of books featuring Deputy Superintendent Ilamaaran. Chennai, as a massive city, naturally has its fair share of true crime cases. CB-CID – A Retrospect, 1906 -2010 (2011) was written by Chennai’s Chief Minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi (who died in 2018). It contains a host of Chennai crimes including the sensational Maniyachi murder case of 1911, the Visa Oosi series of murders of 1972, 1980s serial murderer Auto Shankar and more. The book also covers fraud, communal violence and white-collar crimes too. And finally a couple of very different books from GV Subba Rao, who studied creative writing in London and writes cinema screenplays as well as a couple of novels. No Murder Tonight (2014) is a hard novel to describe but takes place on one Chennai night as a host of different forces come together – Santosh, an engineer turned political assassin; Maria, an aspiring pilot turned spy; Swapna, a medical student turned highest-priced bordello madam; Sandeep and Amit, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officers turned commandos; Shyam Agarwal, an industrialist turned conspirator; and Chennai’s Power Minister, Salem Palaniswamy whose lust for power and money corrupts everyone. There’s a bunch of money around they’d all like it and most are willing to commit murder to get it. Subba Rao followed up No Murder Tonight with The Missed Beat (2018), featuring Dr. Raj Kumar, an eminent cardiologist whose daughter is kidnapped unleashing a rollercoaster ride all apparently based on real life events. View the full article

In my new novel Sleeping With Friends, a woman wakes from a coma with only her memories of movies to guide her through the mystery of her injury. Writing it, I discovered that films live in the same half-remembered place as our dreams. But films are also made by real people, like Marianne Rendón. A mesmerizing and fearless performer, her screen debut was in the black comedy series Imposters in 2017. The following year she played Susan Atkins alongside Matt Smith in Charlie Says, from American Psycho’s directing and writing team of Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner. Marianne was most recently featured in the series In the Dark, and Scott Z. Burns’ Extrapolations. As I’ve gotten to work with Marianne, I’ve grown to understand we have the same interest in the unspoken corners of human nature. Sitting down to talk this month, we were also able to shed light on the many places where writing and acting processes overlap. (Our talk via Zoom was moderated by my screenwriting partner, Brian J. Davis.) Brian J Davis: You’re two of the nicest people in New York City! But you are truly drawn to characters who exist in the gray areas. Emily Schultz: I have that experience all the time where people meet me and they think I’m a nice person and then they read my writing! Marianne Rendón: That makes me think immediately of Mary Harron because if you’ve met her, she’s just such a delightful and elegant person, but she does these intense films. But I think a lot of the characters I end up playing become places for me to express my rage. If you think of the Hedda Gabler archetype—brilliant women that were stifled in all these different ways. It makes me also think about women in my ancestry who were gifted artists that never really got to make that their life. So I feel like some of it is inherited. BJD: I’m really fascinated by that answer, because this dovetails to Emily’s most infamous novel, The Blondes. Both of you—in different ways—want to access what women don’t historically have access to: explosive expression. ES: Rage is a big issue for me and in my work. The last two thriller novels that I’ve written—Sleeping with Friends and Little Threats—are both about acts of violence that come from places of explosive rage and you wouldn’t expect it from that person. But it’s so interesting that you bring up rage because I think that I struggle a lot with my temper in my day-to-day life. BJD: I want to defend Emily for a moment and say her anger is nothing compared to say, the average baby-man on a film set, for one example. ES: Exactly. As Marianne was saying, there are such different standards for women. So people are always surprised that what I write is as dark as it is. But people are also surprised when they find out that I play soccer. Which I do that because I need a physical outlet so that I don’t become a person who’s eaten up by repressed anger, which is a very feminine issue! I think one of the reasons that we are drawn to dark stories is that there are so many things that—as we go through life—we’re not allowed to discuss. In a darker story, you kind of open it all up and there’s room to examine those things. BJD: There are pleasures going to these places for the both of you? MR: It’s not always fun. When I have to go through really emotional experiences with a character, I need a lot a lot of rest! I played this character in the Athol Fugard play A Lesson from Aloes, about a woman going through electroshock therapy in the early ’60s in a very remote part of South Africa. And she was just entirely alone and it still breaks my heart. I’m sure that happened to so many women. And I would rehearse and just go home and be in bed for hours. With playing Susan Atkins in Charlie Says…she didn’t have much to say. There was so much that I could create that was not verbal. And so much of it was in her body and there was something so scary about her silence. BJD: You and the entire cast took all these infamous characters away from caricature. Did you want to talk a little more about your process for Charlie Says? MR: My process was to really understand what her life was. Her terrible upbringing. Then I also loved that Sadie was kind of like the rebel of the women. She had to challenge authority to get attention. That’s how she knew how to get it. And I think maybe in some ways that’s how Manson and she were alike. ES: We definitely want to put it out there that Charlie Says is a subtly devastating masterpiece that everyone should go and revisit now. MR: What I loved was how Guinevere and Mary really turned it away from another repetition of Helter Skelter. BJD: Both you and Emily seem to want to go into the stories that ask why? It is the most difficult of the W’s. ES: It’s much more impressive to me that Marianne can play a real figure, whereas when I’m writing I get to play with all of it: the character building, and the why, because what I’m creating is from the ground up. BJD: Has there ever been a time when a character just instantly opened up to either of you? MR: I think with Jules on Imposters, part of what made her so fun was she had a very specific rhythm and it was so fast. You learn so much about the person by their rhythm—and that’s how playwrights often work—and it was just keyed into how much a wreck she was. So it was pretty clear to me who Jules was from the start. ES: For me, the character of Gerry from Little Threats comes out of a book tour story. A distant relative insisted I stay at their home during a stop. I’m like, “Okay, saves on a hotel.” But I arrived in a middle of a family crisis. And I really knew none of these people. His son had been fired from a job and this sense of shame about his son was radiating from him. So this character whose child’s destiny was his own just appeared—an American king. But to go back to you, Marianne, about needing rest after being in character. After I’m sitting in front of my computer, imagining that character and kind of willing them into existence, I get extremely hyper afterwards. I have to find a way to calm down or to stop thinking like that character. And as I move from one book to another, and one character to another, I have to do that—I have to forget that Kennedy from Little Threats exists and move into Agnes in Sleeping With Friends. MR: What I admire so much about writers is that they have to be so disciplined and crafting this thing because it could go so many different ways. We also have tools as actors to clear out at the end of the day, if you feel affected. ES: Please share with the writers! We need it. MR: I had this amazing teacher at Juilliard who’s very much a mother figure to me, Carolyn Serota. She would do these rituals for the end of your run, including a meditative visualization where you “light your character in flames, with love, and watch them burn.” ES: That’s so perfect! A part of me thinks that we come to this material because in stories, whether it’s film or whether it’s a book, we’re looking for what ethical choices are the characters going make, and what their flawed choices are, because we want to believe that what we do matters, right? BJD: I’d like to turn this talk about choices towards Little Threats. Emily, you came to a dead stop in writing Little Threats when you got to the part where you’re about to be in the POV of the person who really committed this horrible crime. You were hesitant about being inside that mind. The advice I gave you at the time was to find out what their justifications were. It’s the key to understanding why humans do what they do. MR: I come across this in my personal life. I’ll be psychoanalyzing people in my life, as I would a character in writing where I’m like, “Yeah, but they’re coming from this angle.” While Bruce, my fiancé, is like, “They fucking suck.” I mean, you can always just say that! ES: As artists, the dangerous part is we probably all have a high tolerance for eccentric behavior. MR: My best friend was just telling me I have really high tolerance for people. It’s also part of why we become storytellers too. ES: That openness allows the darkness in, which can also carry the truth with it. MR: Even in my childhood I was drawn to the darker fairytale material. The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth. BJD: You’re listing off Emily’s childhood VHS collection right now. ES: Maybe we were drawn to stories that have an incredible amount of struggle. Not the easy fairytales. BJD: So what I’m hearing is both of you want to do a Jim Henson Company movie? [Both Emily and Marianne] Yes! MR: I just want to waltz with David Bowie with his codpiece and big hair. BJD: One thing I’m a big fan of is when characters are changed—or revealed—by other characters. Going back to Imposters, I feel Jules was drawn into moral complication by her relationship with Maddie. MR: I think that’s even more true with In the Dark. The character I played on that series becomes the whole theme of the show. No one can escape Murphy and everyone becomes pulled into her vortex of destruction, including my character. It was this interesting combination of “I’m the villain” but I’m also the moral authority—the protagonist is this immoral character and the villain is the person who’s actually just trying. It’s similar to Skylar in Breaking Bad. ES: When you look at actual crime, you see that a lot. And it certainly goes back to Charlie Says as well. A person who may never have done something evil, meets the exact wrong person, and then they walk into it together. That’s very real to life, and also just good storytelling. MR: I feel like that is where stories are born, right? That’s where you start the play or the screenplay. Where the character thinks their life is this one thing and then these strange happenstance elements occur all at once. And that’s very apropos of Little Threats, right? ES: I think especially so. Little Threats begins at an ending. Kennedy has already served time— for a murder that she probably didn’t commit. And even in Sleeping with Friends, which is much lighter in tone than Little Threats, the crime has already happened and they have to help Mia piece it together because her memory is gone. I like starting after the fact and then going backwards, which I hope is what makes it enjoyable for the reader too, because we’re unraveling what happened in a way that is closer to real time. MR: You were talking about choices earlier and sometimes I feel very paralyzed by choices—how many different ways I can play something. Bruce always says, “Just make a choice. Something, and then you’ll see.” And sometimes it’s strong, but wrong, but at least you’re not like playing this middle ground/wishy-washy area. How do you feel about choice, Emily? Are you ever paralyzed trying to go forward? ES: It gets harder when you’re doing new drafts of something. Right now, I’m working on a sequel to Sleeping with Friends and I’m having to make some big changes and it can get really sluggish to re-make the choices, but for the most part, I think the choice is the exciting part. I like to write characters that are not like me, and they end up making choices that are different than what I would make. MR: One question I’d like to talk about is why are we drawn to true crime? Why do women especially love true crime? ES: I’ve always thought it’s because it’s a cautionary tale. And we’re trying to learn from it so that we can protect ourselves. MR: I think it’s more perverse than that. I think, for whatever cortisol high we’re running after, it is a fix. BJD: You see it as a mediated terror in a way? True crime is safe way to imagine something terrible? MR: It’s not even terror, it’s just stimulation. ES: For me, there’s also the desire to solve something, even if it’s already been solved. The joy of putting it together in our minds. I have had dreams where I’m solving crimes, which is weird. BJD: I would also say that Marianne is not wrong that there is that perverse thrill element that has to be acknowledged. MR: Then with acting, there’s the question of why we would want to play these people? I can’t imagine someone being like, “I want to play Medea.” Why do you want to go there? BJD: Would you play Medea? MR: The person I really want to play is Anne Sexton. This goes back to rage, and how she unleashed so much of her rage in her poetry. I imagine if Anne Sexton was born in 1990 and not when she was, she might be alive. I just think that there’s so much more in conversation about these real dark subjects, as we’re talking about now. *** View the full article

Each of us has a private Jane Austen. I'm channeling mine now.

The eternal question.

Lately, I’ve been in the mood to watch Throne of Blood, the Japanese jidaigeki film directed by Akira Kurosawa. Maybe it’s the wind or the chill in the air or the mysterious fog enveloping Manhattan, but I’ve been longing to be transported, eerily transfixed in the way that Throne of Blood can transport and transfix. Released in Japan in 1957 and released in the United States in 1961, Throne of Blood is based on Macbeth, setting the events in feudal Japan rather than its temporal counterpart in Scotland. The first man to appear onscreen in the film does not look like a man after he dismounts his frantic horse and thrusts himself against the giant doors of Spider’s Web Castle. He brings urgent news about the front led by Commanders Washizu (Toshiro Mifune) and Miki (Minoru Chiaki), and, flailing against the door, the long feathers protruding from his armor splaying in the squally wind, he resembles a tiny, desperate spider, small and unimportant even though his mission is paramount. The rest of the film turns the purpose of this tiny opening scene into a theme; through a language of insignificance, recurring visual patterns, re-imagined aesthetics, and completely rewritten dialogue, Kurosawa builds on Macbeth’s preoccupation with both the natural world and the nature of existence to further stress the ephemerality, and indeed, the ethereality, of the human lifetime and the meaninglessness of human accomplishment. Kurosawa begins to discredit human prowess in the very next scene, by contrasting stagnant human life with nature’s continuous flow. In this scene, the first time either Washizu or Miki (the Macbeth and Banquo characters, respectively) appear onscreen, they are riding horses through pouring rain in nearby Spider’s Web Forest on a journey home from a victorious battle, but they keep riding in circles through the woods, much to their confusion. The wood spirit they encounter later in the same scene is spinning thread, another repetitive cyclical movement. In this simple scene, Kurosawa has immediately introduced a concern with cycles; nature doubles back on itself often, to move further, a concept which impatient humans cannot understand, so they are left behind as life moves on. Kurosawa accompanies this visual illumination of the life’s repetition with a blatant explanation. When Washizu and Miki encounter the witchy wood spirit (Chieko Naniwa), she is singing softly about what she calls “the life of man.” She moans, “A man lives but as briefly as a flower.” This confuses her regal spectators, especially when she says they are “destined all too soon to decay into the stink of flesh. Humanity strives all its days to sear its own flesh in the flames of base desire.” In this lament (which outfits Macbeth just as equally as it fits Throne of Blood) she reinforces that each man lives and dies, while nature only lives on, but she also contrasts the life cycle of nature with the cycle of human death and suffering. Washizu and his fellow warriors (even his supposedly dainty wife) are obsessed with moving ahead in life, regardless that it might lead to the shortening of others’ lives. In Macbeth, life is compared to a “brief candle, a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour on the stage and then is heard from no more” and “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Both stories make the case that human life is too short to contribute to a cycle of death that is already imminent and will undoubtedly arrive earlier than expected. In this early scene in Throne of Blood, Washizu has not entertained thoughts of committing murder to fulfill the prophecy he has just heard, as is the case with Macbeth, but he has already slaughtered for his country, and therefore contributed to the cycle of death. “All that awaits man at the end of his travails,” the spirit adds, “is the stench of rotting flesh that will yet blossom into flower, its foul odor rendered into sweet perfume” (Kurosawa). Men need to die in order for new life to be created—the anonymity of human death contributes to earth’s vitality, even though human life is shortened in the process. After the wood spirit vanishes, Washizu and Miki stumble upon gigantic piles of tangled human bones—Kurosawa frames these heaps of decomposing people even after the horrified Washizu and Miki walk away, as a resonating reminder that humans are unidentifiable in death, and regardless of accomplishments in life, they will only be able to make positive contributions by rotting. The wood spirit does not merely degrade human existence with the biological boons of ultimate decomposition but debases human accomplishment by saying that all creatures are equally insignificant. “Men’s lives are as meaningless,” she murmurs, as the soldiers dismount their horses and approach her hut, “as the lives of insects.” Now that they have dismounted their skittish and reluctant horses, they, much like the spidery messenger in the opening shot, are dwarfed by their surroundings—the trees. Furthermore, the padded armor worn by Washizu and Miki appears crunchy, iridescent, and darkly reminiscent of beetle skin. When men in Throne of Blood are riding horses—controlling another life form, let’s say—they are superior, and can be seen as men. But on the ground, awkwardly moving in their thick, shell-like armor, they are debased, and they become bugs. Kurosawa’s design to turn humans into vermin is particularly noticeable in this scene, as Washizu and Miki are stuck in a spider’s web—or rather, Spider’s Web Forest. The phrase “spider’s web,” uttered four times in a single conversation between Washizu and Miki in this scene, is an invention of screenwriters Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto, Ryuzo Kikushima and Akira Kurosawa—nowhere in the text Macbeth are spiders even mentioned. Miki explains that the forest protects Spider’s Web Castle, “stretching out like a spider’s web,” so presumably, the castle was named because of its proximity to the forest, but the fact that there are two sticky spider’s webs in the film presents an interesting take on the many ways a creature can be trapped (Kurosawa). Spider’s Web Forest will not release Washizu, as it is under the power of its own mysterious natural order and the prophetic wood spirit. But Washizu is also trapped by Spider’s Web Castle—once he realizes that such a grand and symbolic home could be his own, he grows obsessed with his potential power, and becomes trapped by his own greed. He becomes stuck to both webs, so much so that he will eventually die because of them—he will be shot by his own army in Spider’s Web Castle when the opposing army charges, disguised as trees using branches from Spider’s Web Forest. Throne of Blood bases its main theme—the pointlessness of unique human existence—on an exploration of Macbeth’s awareness of the cycles of revenge, greed, murder, and fate, but it also translates the play’s few aesthetic requirements to film to strengthen its argument. The prophecy scenes in Macbeth are dank, foggy, and spooky; and so is this prophecy scene in Throne of Blood. “When shall we meet again?” asks the first witch, in the opening lines of the play. “In thunder, lightning, and in rain?” Later they cackle, “fair is foul, and foul is fair, hover through fog and filthy air.” The twin scene in Throne of Blood, in which Washizu and Miki stumble upon the spinning forest spirit, features rain, thunder, lightning, and looming fog. Washizu and Miki comment on the inclement weather just as Macbeth and Banquo do, and this foreshadows the sinister tones both works assume. However, Kurosawa’s implementation of identical aesthetics also maintains his motif of diminished human existence not only is the weather so powerful that it is uncontrollable by even the most powerful men. This is a source of frustration for Washizu, who, when he is wet and lost in his own woods, shoots an arrow at the trees as if it will remedy his situation. But more importantly, the wetness it makes their bodies difficult to perceive; among the sheets of rain and fog, Washizu and Miki are barely discernible in the middle of it all. Throne of Blood, created over three hundred years after Macbeth and halfway across the world, conveys the same timeless warning against human sin, allowing Macbeth to be reborn in a cycle of its own. The story has been rewritten, the language has been changed, the setting has been relocated, and the mechanics have been entirely reinterpreted, but the tortured soul of the play—reverberating with warnings against avarice and violence, capturing the frightful minuteness of mortal existence, and existentially questioning the point of a short, human life—is still very much alive. View the full article

I first met Katie Gutierrez at the Edgar Awards ceremony in the spring of 2023. I was impressed by her honesty and her kindness. I didn’t know much about her work at that point. I had no clue her debut novel, More Than You’ll Ever Know, had been selected as a Good Morning America Book Club Pick that June. I didn’t know she’d written for Time, or been nominated for a National Magazine Award. I just knew Katie was good people. It wasn’t until I read More Than You’ll Ever Know that I began to understand just how talented Katie really is. Her lines are tight, her characters three-dimensional. On a structure level, Katie’s books are sprawling and experimental in all the best ways. Which led me to wonder how in the heck had she pulled off such complicated, veteran moves? After completing this interview, I realized the answer was simple: Katie Gutierrez works really damn hard at her craft. Eli Cranor: Give me a recap of your journey. The early days. The query trenches. The agent. The whole come-up story, in a couple sentences. No pressure. Katie Guiterrez: Yikes, okay: wanted to be a writer, always. Fell into journalism when my college internship at People magazine turned into my first post-grad job, then into freelancing when the Austin bureau suddenly closed six months later. Spent the next 10 years (including three getting my MFA) writing for whoever would pay me—community newspapers, niche magazines, white papers, copywriting—and editing books from job ads I found on Craigslist, which turned into a full-time gig with a boutique storytelling company. I edited about 70 books, mostly nonfiction, over five years, and co-wrote seven or eight. In 2015 I left that job, which I loved, to try to write my own novel. Queried in 2017 and received five offers of representation within three weeks—but that book didn’t sell on submission. I started More Than You’ll Ever Know to take my mind off the anxiety of being on sub, wrote the first draft over 18 months—including a difficult pregnancy and sleepless newborn months—then edited it with my agent for the next 18 months, over a second difficult pregnancy and right up to the weekend I delivered. We went on submission on Friday, September 11, 2020, one week after I gave birth. By the next week I had calls with multiple editors, which I took from bed, with my newborn attached to my boobs. The book sold in a pre-empt to Penguin Michael Joseph in the U.K. that Tuesday, then to William Morrow in a pre-empt that Friday, exactly one week after we went on sub. I still get a ridiculous grin when I think about the whole thing. And this was more than a few sentences, sorry. EC: Apology accepted. Those extra lines were so worth it. Do you write every day? KG: Not even close. When life is “normal,” I’m ecstatic if I can write three mornings a week. My kids are five and three, and my three-year-old was sick constantly over the fall. Recently I’ve been going through a health crisis myself and haven’t written in over a month. On days I can’t write, or the session is cut short, I still try to connect with the project somehow: reading/studying a novel that feels in conversation with the book, or listening to a writing podcast (I like “The Shit No One Tells You About Writing”) while cleaning, or reading interviews like this! When I was hospitalized in December, I took copious notes on all my nurses, because two of my characters are nurses. Also, I love to dedicate the time as I’m falling asleep to letting my mind wander around the book. It’s almost like lucid dreaming. I’ve solved so many problems this way, or heard a character’s voice in such clarity that I suddenly know them, or experienced a sentence or paragraph rolling across my mind that’s ends up in the final draft. The little things add up, and staying in a creative space matters, even if I’m not actively writing. EC: That pre-sleep thing is for real. Pure magic. When you’re working, do you aim for a daily word count? KG: Before kids, I used to hold myself to a daily word count. Then my daughter was born and writing sessions became a race against the clock: I’d put her down to nap, make coffee, sit at my desk with the baby monitor, and write until she woke up. Aside from when my husband had her, I wrote and edited most of More Than You’ll Ever Know that way. At first, I tried to impose word goals, but I always fell short and then felt bad about myself. Now it’s the time itself that matters. And it also depends on the project and what phase it’s in. If I’m drafting, maybe I’ll write 500 words, maybe 1,000, maybe I’ll edit half a chapter and actually delete words, maybe I’ll fall down a research rabbit hole and write one sentence. It’s all forward motion. EC: What are the tools of your trade? Do you write using a laptop, a pen, a typewriter? KG: I would love to be a typewriter girl; maybe one day. When I was fifteen, though, and working on a novel, my parents bought me an IMB ThinkPad, a bulky black laptop with a satisfyingly deep keyboard and a velvety red TrackPoint right in the center. I carried it with me everywhere, like a purse dog. Ever since then, I’ve written on laptops. I draft on Scrivener—I love its ability to give me a bird’s eye view of the project, chapter by chapter, scene by scene. I can split screen between two chapters or POVs, or a chapter and my research, and if I start to get lost, I can return to my cork board outline. If I’m feeling too much pressure at the laptop, I use my reMarkable paper tablet, which my husband gave me for Christmas a few years ago. I freewrite by hand, then click to convert the handwritten notes to digital across the app, so I can put it directly into Scrivener for editing. It feels like a huge hack for me! EC: Definitely a cool hack. My interview with Danya Kukafka got me to try Scrivener, but alas, I’m still just a pen and pad guy. When do you write? KG: I write when I can’t see or hear my children. Ha! Babies are famously sedentary, so it wasn’t as hard to write while keeping an eye on them (though I thought it was at the time), but young kids, have relentless and usually very loud demands. It’s much harder to slide into the creative slipstream, so if I need to work while multitasking with them, I handle more administrative things, like emails. But writing, for me, now, has to be done away from them. Ideally, I’d write from 9:30 to 1:30 every day—the hours, theoretically, they’re both in school—but as I’ve mentioned, that doesn’t always pan out. Sometimes, if I’m feeling particularly desperate, I’ll write at night, after they’re in bed. I love sitting in bed with my laptop, dim light, and a glass of wine. But then I’m wired and can’t sleep and I’m a mess the next day, so, sadly, I’m usually a daytime writer. EC: Do you have any rituals you return to that get you in the mood to write? KG: This is so quotidian, I feel like the least interesting writer in the world, but I like to clean up the kitchen before I sit down to write. By then three hours have passed since I woke up, and in theory I’ve just returned from dropping my second child off at preschool. Physically cleaning the breakfast mess is like clearing space in my brain, a divider between the time of day I belong to others and the hours I belong only to myself and the work. After that, I make my second cup of coffee—the first is medicinal, the second for pleasure—and sit down. A quiet room, natural light, and a fresh, hot cup of coffee: these are my ideal conditions. EC: Do you outline your novels? Just dive straight in? Or do some combination of the two? KG: I always start with a hook—some situation that’s gripped me—and the characters. In the past I’ve loved using Proust’s questionnaire, a parlor game that Proust supposedly believed would reveal the essence of a person if every question were answered honestly. This time around I’ve tried Lisa Cron’s Story Genius method, which centers around finding characters’ “misbeliefs,” origin scenes, and turning points, and I’ve found it difficult and very helpful. My friend Sara Sligar, author of the excellent Take Me Apart and upcoming Vantage Point (get excited because it’s brilliant), also introduced our writing group to using Enneagrams to help drill further into characters’ psychology, and that’s been staggeringly useful. I’ll usually write between 20-40 pages per lead character. The plot gradually emerges during this work. Once that happens, I write a 20-page-ish synopsis—which is a horrible, masochistic exercise but also, I regret to inform you, incredibly useful to me. Then I like to use Scrivener’s cork board (digital index cards) to jot down any scenes that came up while I was working on the characters and synopsis, and arrange those into a loose outline. I’ve tried using beat sheets to wrap my head around pacing, but that usually messes me up; it makes me feel like I’m trying to squeeze the story into predetermined fence posts when the story’s not a fence, it’s—I don’t know—a parachute. Something that doesn’t fit into fence posts. Plus, I love to play with structure, and so much of that requires experimentation. So while I like to have some idea of where the story is heading before I start writing, I also need to be open. That’s the fun of it, right? EC: Amen. The fun, for me, is in the writing. Always. When you’re done with the first draft, what does your revision process look like? KG: My general process is this: once I have a full draft, I convert it to Word and print it out. I edit by hand, then in Word, unless there are deep structural edits or more of a rewrite, in which case it’s back to Scrivener. Once I’m editing with others, say my agent or editor, then it stays on Word unless I need to privately move back over to Scrivener, then copy/paste into the existing tracked Word doc. As needed, I’ll print the whole thing out again and go by hand. I always prefer reading on paper over screen, and I love the tactile sense of editing by pen versus Track Changes. The process for each novel so far has variations, though. The novel I wrote in 2015, I sent to a few trusted readers—both writers and non-writers—and then edited for several months before querying. With More Than You’ll Ever Know, I already had my agent, Hillary Jacobson. I sent her my synopsis, then the first 200 pages. My first complete draft was 600 pages, and I couldn’t do that to her or anyone else, so I revised it myself, with a major restructure and cuts, and got it down to a slim 450. My sister and my friend May Cobb read it then (my sister had been reading all along). I revised again. Then I sent it to Hillary, thinking it was in good condition. Cue the start of about a dozen rounds of revision with her before we submitted it in 2020. After that, I edited it with my U.S. and U.K. editors for another year. After More Than You’ll Ever Know was published and I started working on my second contracted novel, I had so many voices in my head post-publication that I wanted to work completely solo until I had a draft worth sharing. Two years and three false starts, each varying between 50-100 pages, later, I’ve scrapped that draft and moved onto a new project. So I don’t think attempting to write in a silo worked for me. This time, with the new project, I’ll share pages and/or brainstorm with my cherished writers’ group, my sister, and my agent and editor at various touchpoints. I’ll let you know how it goes! EC: Please do! Do you read certain books for inspiration prior to writing? If so, what are they? Do they change from manuscript to manuscript? KG: I read books for inspiration all throughout the writing process, and the ones I turn to change based on what I’m working through. If I’m struggling with pacing, I’ll read a thriller. If I’m thematically dealing with a subject, say motherhood, I might read another book that approaches a similar theme in a totally different genre. Two writers I return to over and over for inspiration are Luis Alberto Urrea and Jesmyn Ward. Reading their work always reminds me what the novel can do. EC: Best advice for writers just starting out, especially when it comes to the actual act of writing/developing the habits necessary to craft an entire novel. KG: Read anything that gets you excited, keeps you up at night, thrills you with a sentence. Read within and outside your genre—read for the joy of it, but also study why those books, or single chapters, scenes, paragraphs, or sentences in those books, work. Make friends with other writers—Twitter used to be my place for this, but online or local workshops/classes might be another great option—and get the in the habit of reading each other’s work and learning how to give and, importantly, receive helpful feedback. Check out craft books from the library if classes aren’t financially feasible. As far as a writing practice, the most important thing is that it’s sustainable. Is it 20 minutes a day using a timer? Great! Is it from 10 p.m. to midnight once the kids are in bed? Do that. Is it three hours every Saturday morning? Perfect. Writing is an art, but as you said, it’s also a habit. The only way it’ll stick is if it fits into your life. Prioritize it, protect it, but also be gentle with yourself when life gets in the way, as it always will. EC: Finally, why do you write? KG: Elizabeth Bishop wrote that “What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.” That last phrase has stuck with me for fifteen years, because it encompasses the best state of writing fiction for me—when everything else disappears, including myself, in the creation and discovery of a story. I’ve been addicted to that feeling since I wrote my first story at eight years old. Writing fiction is a compulsion for me, a necessary part of my existence. Without it I feel hollowed out of the good stuff, like a shallower participant of life. When I write nonfiction, I often write essays in direct, immediate, and passionate response to current events or events in my own life, and the features I most love (mostly for Texas Highways) connect me to my state and my culture in ways that feel very fulfilling. Writing nonfiction has influenced my fiction writing, too. It’s made me more exacting and concise. I hope to avoid another 600-page first draft. View the full article

In an early scene in the first episode of “Slow Horses,” the British spy thriller series streaming on Apple TV+, a stack of newspapers is delivered to the run-down Slough House office of MI5, the British intelligence agency. The print papers seem as obsolete as the cast-off, screw-up agents who have been sentenced to this out-of-favor outpost by author Mick Herron, who wrote the books the series is based on. The agents couldn’t have cared less about the newspapers. On the other hand, I was thrilled. As a longtime newspaper reporter and editor, who started writing for Indiana newspapers when I was in high school, there’s something about seeing print newspapers figure, in ways large and small, into the narratives of fiction. I love spotting shots of print papers in movies and TV. “Slow Horses” almost certainly meant to echo the out-of-the-mainstream status of Slough House with the prominent delivery of the dead tree editions of the news. But it prompted me to think about the role print newspapers have played in my life and our popular culture. There’s the movie device of spinning front-page headlines that’s been used in dramas and comedies. And almost everyone understands what the newspaper printing and sorting process looks like, with copy after copy of the latest edition running through pressroom machinery around, up and down and overhead, just waiting for someone to yell, “Stop the presses!” In movies and TV shows set in the past, when old-timey telephones – rotary phones, phones hanging on a wall, those in a phonebooth – appear on screen, it’s an easy joke in my household to facetiously exclaim, “What are those things?” It’s my newspaper background that has me feeling nostalgic when I spot a print newspaper, however. I don’t shout out “WHAT IS THAT?” in mock tones of confusion, even though for years now I haven’t gotten delivery of the print edition of the newspapers I subscribe to. Instead, when I see those print newspapers, I feel warmly nostalgic for something that was part of my life years before I wrote. Clippings of the Planet of the Apes When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, I was already a movie fan – a growing-up period previously recounted for CrimeReads – and turned for my fix to one of the two daily newspapers my parents subscribed to. A budding journalist even then – although I wouldn’t know it for a few more years – I cut from newspapers articles and interviews and movie reviews and pasted them in construction-paper scrapbooks, emulating magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland. A big part of my obsession with the intersection of movies and newspapers was the movie theater ads in newspapers back then, in the 1960s and 1970s. I still remember going to the drugstore and buying a real big-city newspaper on Fridays because of the huge ads for films like “2001: A Space Odyssey.” I still have, buried somewhere, one of my few remaining scrapbooks and an ad I clipped out for an all-night drive-in marathon of all five “Planet of the Apes” movies. (I went to that “Ape-athon,” too.) Based on the number of nostalgia groups I see on Facebook reposting old newspaper ads, I wasn’t alone in my interest. But the clipping of newspaper articles and ads isn’t something that carries over into screenshots of printouts of modern-day news stories. Because there’s something magical about print, and I think it’s a holdover from the days when print was the way we got our news – or at least it was the only way that counted. Or perhaps it is the most photogenic way for modern-day filmmakers to pluck our nostalgia. It was probably in more than one episode of “The West Wing” that the wily but likable Washington Post reporter Danny Concannon had broken some big story and Sam and Josh huddled in a hallway, worried about the repercussions on President Jed Bartlet when the story came out. The president’s loyal staff took solace in the fact that the latest edition of WaPo hadn’t been printed yet; the story was only online so far, so few people had seen it, they reasoned. Of course, things are now reversed. It would be folly to try to cite all the great film and TV placements of newspapers and 72-point newspaper headlines; there are just too many, and there are plenty of articles and social media accounts that do so. But a few: The dueling headlines prepared for “Citizen Kane” and the election run of newspaper mogul Charles Foster Kane are very nearly the pinnacle of such uses and are terrifyingly prescient, as two headlines are prepared for the first edition in print after election results are known: KANE ELECTED or FRAUD AT POLLS. That tactic sounds strangely familiar today. That was an example of the “either or” headlines that played into other films, including stories of the end of the world – or not, as signaled by the front-page headline chosen. WHERE IS THE MERRY WIDOW MURDERER? asks a headline in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt,” an unduly overlooked masterpiece. The headline propels the plot, as Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotton) scrambles to hide newspapers from his family but can’t outsmart his niece and namesake Charlie (Teresa Wright). Probably the funniest use of a print newspaper front page came in 1981’s “The Great Muppet Caper,” which announces, IDENTICAL TWINS JOIN CHRONICLE STAFF. The surface level joke is that Kermit and Fozzie don’t look like identical twins, but below the surface lies a great joke about how self-obsessed and self-referential newspapers are about their staffs. But it’s the look of print newspapers and the role they play in our lives and movies that fascinates. Bad news on the doorstep This year, I binged “The Crown” for the first time in preparation for watching the final season and was struck by the presence of print newspapers throughout the history of Elizabeth’s reign. The Windsors certainly tuned in radio and TV at times, notably the Apollo moon landing. But to my eye, the daily delivery of British newspapers – in print, and even after news became available online – was the most notable signal of how Elizabeth and the family consumed news, including the latest, often unflattering portrayals and public opinion of the royal family. On quite another level, the newspapers where I worked, first The Muncie Evening Press and later The Star Press, also broke a lot of bad news: murder, malfeasance and political scandal. Nowhere was our news consumed more avidly than in local government offices of the mayors, judges and officials we covered. For quite a few years, reporters delivered, twice a day, free copies of the two newspapers to the local government offices, where they were eagerly consumed. The practice, which came to an end even before all news went online, not only informed our sources but gave us a deft entry to those offices. For decades – a couple of them during my time – the newspapers were printed locally, on presses operated by skilled workers who, on their lunch hour, sat in their cars in a parking lot across the street and drank. We sometimes wondered how some of these folks didn’t lose any fingers in the machinery after they drank their lunch. But they were professionals, shrugging off the dangers of tons of equipment running at high speed. Not that they wouldn’t have ducked into the covered escape hatch at one end of the pressroom if those huge presses decided to blow apart. Being in the same building complex as the presses where our newspapers were printed gave all of us, for a time, the opportunity to pick up the print product while it was still fresh and the ink would be smudged by our fingers. It was heaven for a print fan. All these years later, my only regret is that I never got to rush in and shout, “Stop the presses!” View the full article

One of the joys of writing historical fiction is that you get to meet so many interesting people. And I don’t mean other writers, I mean you get to meet people from history—and not only meet them, but recreate them too, and give them your words and introduce them to readers of today. In my Irregular series of books, I took the hero Wiggins from fiction (he was a street-kid assistant of Sherlock Holmes from the Conan Doyle stories), grew him up but then placed him in real history. He does still interact with Holmes but most of the people he interacts with were real. In his latest adventure, Spy Hunter, he becomes entangled with Mata Hari – the ‘exotic’ dancer executed for spying in 1916—just the latest in a long line of colorful characters that peopled the Europe and America of the early twentieth century. Mata Hari was a legend in her own life-time, a self-styled exotic dancer supposedly trained in India, she used a combination of potent perfume, revealing costumes and a powerful personal charisma to beguile first the music and dance halls of Europe and then the ever-more exclusive salons of the rich. This was the self-created legend, but behind that façade lay a sadder more prosaic truth. Born Margaretha Zelle in the Netherlands, she married an army captain and went with him to Indonesia, then a Dutch colony. The marriage was unhappy, and Margaretha was mistreated physically and emotionally. By the time she divorced, she’d almost certainly contracted syphilis from her husband. This didn’t stop her remarkable rise in the dance halls of France and beyond, bringing an artistic and semi-respectable sheen to the previously disreputable pastime of ogling women while they danced with little on. Her death, too, became the stuff of legend when she was (probably falsely) convicted of spying against France and executed by firing squad. Almost immediately, stories of the dancer-spy made their way into print and onto the big screen, starring the likes of Greta Garbo and Zsa Zsa Gabor. While the extent of Mata’s spying is open to debate, the same cannot be said for the two upper-class idiots Wiggins meets in his second adventure, The Red Ribbon. Captain Bernard Trench and Lieutenant Vivian Brandon were a pair of Royal Marines officers who fancied a bit of amateur spying in their down time. Inspired by the Erskine Childers book The Riddle of the Sands, the dynamic duo secured official funding to take a jaunt over the channel, scoping out German coastal defences in 1910. This involved taking notes, sketches and, of course, photographs. Taking photographs of naval bases, that is. At night. With a flash. Of course, these bumbling fools—more Jonny English than James Bond—were caught, despite Wiggins’s best efforts. They spent the next three years in prison, a rarely remarked upon embarrassment for the British Secret Service. Many of the other characters Wiggins meets are not so harmless. In the first two books, he falls in with an anarchist gang led by Peter the Painter—a semi-mythical figure of the East End of London, a Latvian, supposedly behind a slew of terrorism in 1909/10 but never actually caught. Even his very existence is sometimes disputed, unlike his friend Yakov Peters—who was acquitted at the Old Bailey in 1911 for his role in the gang murders, and went on to become deputy head of the Cheka, the first incarnation of Communist Russia’s secret police. It is on the streets of New York in 1912 where Wiggins comes across some of the most colorful characters of his adventures so far. Not only do they have names like Gyp the Blood, Lefty Louie and Big Jack Zelig—these people actually lived up to those names. Gyp and Lefty were two ‘stick men,’ assassins in the employ of Zelig, who terrorized the stuss joints and saloons of Manhattan. Zelig, a tall man with a small hat, lorded it over the Lower East Side until he, too, met a grisly end—shot in the back of the head as he rode north on the 2nd Avenue streetcar. And it’s not just the gangsters that provided the outsized criminal behavior. Lieutenant Charles Becker of the NYPD, a man mountain and head of a crime squad that patrolled midtown between 23rd and 42nd Streets between 5th and 7th Avenues. The area was known either as the ‘Tenderloin’ because of the rich pickings for anyone on the graft, or more luridly Satan’s Circus to reformers who wanted to clean up the vice capital of America. Becker was convicted of procuring the services of Gyp the Blood, Lefty Louie and Zelig to commit the murder of Herman Rosenthal outside the Hotel Metropole in 1912. It took three years, but eventually Becker went to the electric chair in Sing-Sing as the first— and so far only—American cop to be executed for murder. Even if you don’t build whole narratives around real-life figures, it can be fun as a writer to drop in the famous and not so famous characters as little cameos. Winston Churchill appears in the three of the books, not as the portly, cigar-wielding older man who led Britain in World War Two, but the younger, prematurely balding, hyper ambitious, rather petulant thruster who was big in the Liberal government before being disgraced after the failed military campaign in Gallipoli (and crossing back to the Conservative party.) I’ve given walk-on roles to Kennington native Charlie Chaplin, before he made it in the movies and to Captain ‘Titus’ Oates aboard the Terra Nova, on his way to accompany Scott to their deaths at the South Pole. At one point, Wiggins is rescued by a very capable, indeed inspirational, lesbian called Rose Schneidermann who, in addition to being a powerful trade unionist and suffragist, when on to co-found the American Civil Liberties Union. Not only figures of history, but writers too make an appearance. Perhaps my favourite scene of all the Irregular novels has Damon Runyon—known only as ‘Baseball’ in The Year of the Gun—introduce Wiggins to Arnold Rothstein, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. Runyon is my favourite short story writer, and I loved imagining what he might have sounded like as a younger man (based on the language of his stories.) I managed to squeeze in another of my writing inspirations into the same book, the aforementioned Erskine Childers— referred to only as the ‘Civ’, a nod to his job as a civil servant. I wrote about Childers for Crime Reads, but suffice to say that not only was his writing a key moment in spy and adventure fiction, but he also had a crazy life of action, subterfuge and ultimate tragedy—a life that ended, like Mata Hari’s, at the hands of a firing squad. Finally, as someone who ripped a character from classic fiction and placed him in the real world for a whole series of books, I cannot resist doing it every now and then with other fictional characters. In addition to Wiggins, there’s Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson of course—as older men. In my first book, The Irregular, I also gave a walk-on role to the gentleman thief Raffles and his duffer side-kick Bunny (created, incidentally, by Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law.) In my latest book, Spy Hunter, there’s even a role for the chief of the Brussels police, a small man who is very particular about his moustaches and who likes to refer to his brain as the little grey cells. Now, you don’t have to be a great detective to work that one out. *** View the full article

“Whatever happens, don’t be a hero.” Trance’s opening close-up is of a Rembrandt: not only the artist’s painting Storm on the Sea of Galilee but, as the narrator alleges, a cameo the painter included of himself within its pastels. Ostensibly at the stern of the beleaguered vessel, Rembrandt glares out at us from the oil, incredulous at the disciples’ plight before us: a self-portrait within a Biblical illustration that, like our guide in the film, breaks any semblance of art’s ‘fourth wall.’ The painting, the artist’s only seascape, was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 and has never been recovered. Our narrating auctioneer Simon, played by James McAvoy, mourns the bygone era of brazen art thefts that successfully thieved Galilee, a rarity now given the standard protections to which he is currently assigned (Ukrainian ex-naval commandos surveil the London auction house’s perimeter with him). The painting at the center of the film’s main art heist, however, is a Goya; that artist’s cameo-less Witches in the Air which thieves led by Franck (Vincent Cassel) attempt to burglarize in a rare, contemporary display of the old-fashioned way. When Simon is hit hard in the process, his previous resourcefulness and command now muddled amnesia, the cronies enlist the services of London hypnotist Elizabeth Lamb (played by Rosario Dawson) to resurrect his injured consciousness and relocate the painting. They now face not only an ocean of modern security systems and technologies designed to protect the art, aptly described as protocol “in the event of an event,” but the even murkier depths of Simon’s subconscious – and theirs. So begins the story of Danny Boyle’s Trance, the English director’s crime thriller that premiered a decade ago at 2013’s South by Southwest. Since I saw the film in its brief theatrical run, Trance was admittedly a lapse of my own memory until a 2018 auction wherein Banksy famously triggered a $1.4 million painting to shred itself upon an announcement of its sale. Videos of the disintegration, naturally, sent social media into a frenzy and had me recalling the film’s ending in which the characters’ quarry burns over credits. Would Banksy agree with Simon’s view that art robberies are more opaque; that at least the ‘stick ‘em up’ criminals of yesteryear were somehow more honest criminals than today’s raiders armed with numbered paddles? I went into my sophomore screening only recalling the film as a treatise on art when treated as an asset; yet, in one of memory’s many tricks, what I experienced was almost an entirely different film: a psychological noir, with spins on character archetypes that called for reappraisal. Boyle was certainly not the first filmmaker interested in bringing the subconscious to screen. 1920’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the German expressionist movement’s ballad of a crazed somnambulist, arguably ushered the very first movie twist into Hollywood’s beginnings. A veteran of the silent era himself, Alfred Hitchcock blurred the line between psychological and criminal with Spellbound and even enlisted surrealist Salvador Dali to design the film’s suspenseful dream sequence. And by the turn of the decade, Christopher Nolan ushered in what we now consider the mind-bending zeitgeist of Inception (Boyle used the blockbuster as an example to secure funding for Trance). Boyle was, simply put, at the top of his game when he tackled Trance: a few years off from an Academy Award victory for Slumdog Millionaire, he put the project on hold after principal photography concluded to helm the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics in London. Yet he opted here to make an English thriller so small-scale that it could easily be mistaken as a director’s debut. Sensibilities from his oeuvre are at full display: Simon leaning from a ledge when sharing his history of gambling addiction appropriately recalls the frenetic zombie POVs of 28 Days Later, followed shortly by a henchman’s nightmarish memory of being buried alive that echoes the claustrophobia of 127 Hours. One hardly needs a degree in art history to notice the Trainspotting and Sunshine director’s expert use of color: a green abode for Franck, who believes all humans are inherently greedy, versus the orange for Elizabeth’s quarters that provides a safe haven for Simon. Yet Trance is most compelling when, like any good Baroque, it depicts portraits of real-life Londoners’ surviving the circumstances of their noir by whatever means necessary. Simon’s cautionary words at the beginning do little to prevent the robbery itself but do eventually ring true to his morally questionable background: “whatever happens, don’t be a hero.” We sympathize with the Rembrandt-loving Simon as at the beginning: our preserver of the fine arts, after all, is brutally beaten then tortured by Franck’s gang. Yet we learn Simon is indeed the criminal; in fact, a serial abuser and egotistical control-freak who approaches every relationship with the betrothal of an artist to his creation. Take, for instance, the ripped pages of Simon’s art catalog we thought to be torn in a home invasion. Those pages were of Goya’s The Naked Maja, angrily torn by a lover following Simon’s lamentation of the painter‘s decision to illustrate pubic hair on his female subject, decrying it as the end of art’s ability to capture infallibility and perfection. The woman subsequently shaves to satisfy him. Given his legacy and stature, one easily forgets that Rembrandt was the artist’s first name. After seeing Simon’s true colors, his opening reference to the artist could very well be casual: he haughtily considers himself on a first-name basis with the Dutch painter – in the same company, the same sentence. Later, Simon now memoryless and amid the search for the painting, sleeps with his therapist Elizabeth. She emerges from her bedroom in a full-frontal, shaven. It is Boyle’s high-octane version of the “Scene d’amour’” scene from Vertigo; substitute Bernard Herrmann’s strings with a Moby track and, like Jimmy Stewart’s Scotty, Simon witnesses his product exactly the way he wanted. Whereas Scotty was designing his Madeline in a vain attempt to capture a ghost, Simon appears to be experiencing the product of his preferences for the very first time. Boyle, by way of Hitchcock, brings the audience to the crossroads of art and mind. Yet it is revealed, in perhaps the film’s most detrimental twist, that Elizabeth was the lover in Simon’s prior relationship: she is the orchestrator of our art heist as a means of avenging her previous objectification and thereby switches the power dynamic of painter-subject when crossing into her territory. Like Simon, Elizabeth begins the film as our guide to the art of psychology…and just as our perception of him changes, so does our perception of her as the story’s femme fatale. All previous indicators of Simon’s free will and self-preservation to be nothing but ruses. Hers, however, are full-fledged means to ends; for instance, sleeping with Franck to discover the location of his gun. Interestingly, she defines “forgetting” as keeping secrets from one’s self and diagnoses Simon’s prolonged memory lapse as an inability to admit his violent nature. The henchmen later implore her to define what exactly “killed” means, their own moral codes now at her whim. Dawson is excellent in these scenes and it is a shame that Boyle relegates her to a gratuitous rape scene midway through the film: in every scene before and after, she aptly channels Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon with command and desire cloaked in innocence. She moreover harbors a complexion that declares all the men in her life and practice have lied, cheated, and manipulated to get what they want – and questions, who is to say she can’t as well? Simon’s abuse becomes more physical and it is later revealed that he is a cold-blooded killer and murdered a woman in a psychopathic rage, thinking her to be Elizabeth. Elizabeth claims victory, securing Witches in the Air. No one in Trance is worth rooting for, but Elizabeth, our personified ‘witch in the air,’ come the closest. Ten years later, I was surprised by how little in Trance had aged. “Have you ever killed someone?” met with a heavy’s reply, “well, yeah, in Iraq” is an exchange showing characters that have not quite begun to question the justified war of the prior decade. Instead, that very disillusionment can be found more so in their actions: like the noirs the film emulates, the collective trance left by wartime and recession that provokes them to raid art halls. Unlike Simon and Elizabeth, the hard-boiled villain Frank abhors self-reflection: when inquired “what is a person?” he shuns it and anything even bordering on metaphysical with, “not my line of work.” He naturally cares little for the art he steals, the most excitement derived instead from the occasional goal on television. Characters’ worship of technology will prove a common theme throughout the film, with their obsession with and overreliance on 1st generation iPads. The pivotal sequence in which Simon retrieves his memory, for instance, is completed via a simple tap of an application. The inverse occurs in the denouement, with ambiguity as to whether or not a Franck will click an ancient-looking app called “Trance.” Both scenes may be laughable now amid the launch of the iPhone 15, but with artificial intelligence’s uncanny ability to resurrect Goya and Rembrandt and forge their life’s work, a tap on a screen that unlocks visions is a prescient inclusion. As a James Bond fan, I wonder beyond tabloid speculation what exactly Boyle and co-writer John Hodges had planned for their unproduced No Time to Die, described as “crazy, madcap.” I’m curious if it would be anything like Trance, a film that masterfully intersects the veneer and sophistication of one subject matter with the absurdity and psychosis of another. The 2013 movie is by no means perfect; it can be a frustrating viewing experience with some, as described, gratuitous scenes. It can be admired, however, for its profound performances along with Rick Smith’s musical score that nicely builds transcendent reveals (even if you don’t quite know what is going on in them). Trance’s dream rules, or lack thereof, allow for an exhibit of grisly images: yes, a half-decapitated man pleading with Simon to believe him is silly—but aren’t all images of dreamlike certainty once we awake? Across all the Cezannes and Caravaggios, all the Rembrandts and Goyas (both paintings and people), the most complex canvas will always be the minds of the artists themselves, their paintings only scratching the surface of their egos, Simon, Elizabeth. Franck: victims trapped in their own trances, asking themselves the immortal question: do you want to fight or forget? View the full article

In fiction, architecture has the ability to both contrive a novel’s setting and to participate as a character. When I began work on my novel A Brutal Design, it was Brutalism—a fitfully popular architectural style born in the 1950s and characterized by hulking, exposed concrete—that presented itself as the right architecture for my novel. But the more I researched the movement, the further my aspiration evolved: I didn’t only want to populate my novel with Brutalist designs; I wanted to write a Brutalist novel. No other architecture is better suited to mirror the internal contradiction of character, the wrestling, the irreconcilability between who we are and who we aspire to be. No other movement produced work that is as stunning as it is grotesque. And no other movement contains within itself such an ocean between intent and result. Brutalism is the worst version of the most beautiful thing. A character walks through a vaulted cement lobby and feels the sheer weight and immensity of building around herself; she has no choice but to react to it; and you have no choice but to learn something new about her. Brutalism shouldn’t be the de facto style of the buildings that decorate a novel’s urban environments; there is a time and place for buildings-as-characters that not all novels require. But I do believe that Brutalist offers a complexity that is reflective of the complexity of a decent novel. The best fiction contradicts itself. The best fiction towers into the sky while continuously struggling against relentless decay. A Brutalist building is a tension continuously on the verge of resolution. Many of my favorite stories are characterized by dissonance, about how they do or do not resolve tension. A Brutalist building is a tension continuously on the verge of resolution. They are unsatisfying propositions. Yes, we want novels to satisfy us, but we just as often want them a little ambiguous, too. Not in the sense of did she, or did she not, commit the act, but in the sense that a good story invites us to bring our own prejudices and predilections into its dream. Our subjective vision of the world intermixes messily with the neatness of a novel. Whether she did or did not commit the act is irrelevant; what matters is how it makes us feel. Brutalism was born out of the critical need to rebuild Europe after the mass infrastructural damage of World War II and to do so with limited resources and money. Concrete and brick were readily available but further refinement of these materials was cost-prohibitive and so they remained raw. This rawness became a principal feature. These buildings were erected to satisfy enormous need as quickly and equitably as possible. They represent socialist values: the raw material and exposed beams and supports became emblems of transparency, a celebration of the working class and the hands that set the concrete. One of Brutalism’s most significant inspirations is Le Corbusier’s 1952 Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. This landmark building is full-service, high-density housing, in which there is a shopping district, medical facilities, and a kindergarten. A practical application of utopian belief, a kind of hermetic equity, in which the unhoused masses could find everything they needed within the walls of their building. This is a sealed universe: a dream of community delineated by walls. It is a story, full of characters and rich in setting. As a symptom of modernism, Brutalism is aspirational. It is utopian fantasy incarnate, a future-focused philosophy of concrete. This is why Brutalist buildings have always been closely associated with totalitarianism, which is utopia greatly distorted. Nazi architect Albert Speer or the architects of Mussolini’s Italy hybridized modernist techniques with neoclassicism, creating a landscape of domineering structures intended not only to intimidate a populace, but to cleave a line through the epochs: the world was dark before fascism, but these proud buildings suggest that things are brightening. Though the fetishized and reviled Brutalist architecture of Europe and the Former Soviet Union postdates fascism, it nevertheless owes its existence to that totalitarian aesthetics. In this way, Brutalism never stood a chance; the association with fascism was too strong, the style too similar, the historical period too proximal. Like so many dreams of a better tomorrow, Brutalism was destined to fail. The fact is that Mussolini and Le Corbusier are two sides of the same coin. For Hitler and Mussolini, the architectural division between past and future was the division between weakness and strength. The Brutalists, too, wanted to create a new history, but they were largely intent on knocking down the wall between unequal and equal. And yet: not for nothing did Le Corbusier idealize Nazi antisemitism and approve of Vichy anti-Jewish laws. Or consider American architect Philip Johnson, former director of MoMA’s architecture department, inaugural winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, and virulent Nazi propagandist. This is no bug of Brutalism that it should attract fascists; fascists are utopianists, but utopia isn’t always for everyone. This association between fascism and modernism can be very hard to break, which is a large part of why Brutalism was never embraced. Indeed, the association was done no favors by the widespread use of Brutalism in institutional and social service buildings throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s: bus depots, government offices, blocks of affordable housing, schools, libraries. These places are weather-beaten now and in disrepair. They are despised not only for their style but because they represent an unkept promise. The government buildings house inert bureaucrats and plutocrats who have been toxified by greed. The transportation depots and libraries house amenities hobbled by budget cuts, eternally relegated to the lowest priority. Brutalism is a hope dashed. You stand in the shadow of a Brutalist building and you feel the stirring of what could have been. But also: you are experiencing a sense of the sublime. *We think of the sublime as something exquisitely pleasant or beautiful. We use the word to describe a wine or piece of meat or an aria. In fact, the sublime refers traditionally to vertiginousness, a feeling of powerlessness and puny humanity in the face of overwhelming vastness. The German Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer insisted that the sublime was, in part, the “transcending of our own individuality.” He wrote that the sense of the sublime “arises through the consciousness of the vanishing nothingness of our own body in the presence of a vastness which…itself exists only in our idea, and of which we are as knowing subject…” Schopenhauer was elucidating ideas of the sublime that had originated with Immanuel Kant. For Kant, there were three kinds of sublime, but for our purposes, we’re only concerned with one: the “terrifying sublime.” He wrote that the sublime “must always be large; simple; long,” a feeling that can be “accompanied with some dread or even melancholy.” The feeling of the sublime is both “a feeling of displeasure arising from the inadequacy of imagination” to remain reasonable and rational, and “a simultaneous awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgment of the inadequacy of sense.” We stand in the shadow of a Brutalist structure and, if we’re lucky, we’re given the privilege of losing ourselves. The structure overwhelms us: the contradiction of its concrete, its utopian failure, its massiveness, uniformity, associative nearness to evil. We become lost and hopeless, terrified by the harsh reality of a complex thing. Put your character face to face with a Brutalist structure and see how she reacts. She is on her way from plot point to plot point when, suddenly, she is confronted by a Brutalist structure. Its frank heaviness steals her breath away. Time slows. What goes through her mind? People under duress reveal very true parts of themselves. You learn how she reacts to being so close but so far from perfection. Brutalism is a tease. Great fiction teases its reader. We are teased by the hope of understanding, by an aphoristic moral, by the promise of entertainment, diversion. We’re teased by the hope of conclusion. A novel has to be complex to satisfy all of these hopes without succumbing to cliché. Duma—the experimental settlement at the heart of my novel—needed Brutalism. Zelnik, an architecture student, wants to see himself represented in the buildings he designs, in the same way that what we see in the world is a reflection of our own minds. I felt that only Brutalism would work as the reflection of his character. Only Brutalism was sufficiently difficult. A Brutal Design was partially written in Brutalist buildings. Being in those spaces helped me access Zelnik’s spiritual hopelessness. Entering these buildings boxed me into the same liminal space that my characters inhabit, between belief and nihilism or horror and delight. I was inspired when the building’s unwavering dejection of me contradicted its prayer for harmony. I wanted to swoon with despair but fall to my knees in supplication. A central question of my book is whether Zelnik will find his missing Uncle. He is plagued by an uncertainty that I hope drags the reader through the sand till the end. Writing the novel in Brutalist spaces made that uncertainty real—the uncertainty between modernism and fascism, or finding and never finding. Zelink’s search for his uncle was based on an episode from my family history, but it was also based on the tension and tease of Brutalism. At some point you realize that knowing what happens in a novel is a luxury. Some writers indulge, others refrain. A Brutalist novel does both. *** View the full article

When asked what it was like to publish her first novel, bestselling author Lisa Gardner immediately replies, “Which time?” After all, Gardner started her career at seventeen, writing category romances before breaking out big ten years later with her first thriller—the career her publishers prefer her to highlight. “I met Tess Gerritsen when my debut thriller The Perfect Husband was launched. I remember her laughing and telling me in her experience, suspense publishers would prefer it if the romance books never happened. ‘Only in publishing,’ Gerritsen said, ‘can you become a virgin again.’” So, how did Gardner sell her first, first book? “I was 17 and didn’t know any better,” says the bestselling author. “I wanted to see if I could write a book, and low and behold, I did.” But the idea of publishing her romance novel didn’t cross her mind. Finishing it was enough. Yet her friends in her dorm at the University of Pennsylvania urged her to publish. She sent it to Harlequin, and the editor who reviewed it happened to be an alumna. “It made her curious, which is why she pulled mine from the slush pile…Then I spent two years waiting for someone to read it.” Finally, Gardner received a 20-page, single-spaced revision letter outlining everything she needed to change, “which actually was good. That’s how I learned to write.” “I had dreams I’d sell my first novel and buy a Mercedes,” Gardner says. “I sold my first novel and could only afford a new computer.” “I published my first novel and learned a lot. They didn’t pay you much,” she says. The reason, she explains, is she was writing stories in a small category of the much larger romance genre. Her publisher encouraged her to use the pseudonym Alicia Scott, which Gardner later learned wasn’t a good idea. “They owned the pseudonym…Ignorance is bliss, but that’s a double-edged sword. I didn’t know how daunting this would be…I probably should have talked to a lawyer.” At her father’s urging, after graduation from Penn, she went on the career hunt circuit. “I got a job my father approved of. A cubicle, benefits, panty hose—all the comforts of a business life.” She worked a twelve-hour day at her benefits/panty hose corporate consulting job and then wrote late in the evening and into the next morning. “Within two years I realized I hated it. What I wanted to be when I grew up was a full-time novelist. So, then I got serious.” She first joined a writer’s group—the New England Chapter of Romance Writers of America. Up to this point, she didn’t know a single novelist. She immediately began picking their brains. “Why don’t you have an agent?” many asked. “You took a pen name, and do you know they own that? That was really stupid of you.” As she continued to write romance in her spare time, she began to understand she could never make a living in her genre. “I’d have to write five books a year…So, as I make these revelations, I understand I really need an agent. I really have a business problem. I really don’t know how to make a living at this.” “That’s how I started my publishing education.” “A few of my fellow authors helped me get an agent.” Several knew Damaris Rowland, who was previously an editor at Dell and was looking to become an agent and build a list of authors. When you’re looking, Gardner says, “find an agent with no clients.” Rowland read her romance novels and said her sex scenes were okay, “but your violence is exquisite. You need to write thrillers.” At the time, Tess Gerritsen had just sold Harvest and romance authors Sandra Brown and Nora Roberts were moving into thrillers. “Like any good agent, mine saw a path and asked why I wasn’t writing thrillers?” At first, Gardner worried about the research that would go into such a novel. “Then I realized I was a research analyst. Research is research…I made the mental leap.” But she hedged her bets and decided to write romantic suspense. “I didn’t know it, but I would write a domestic thriller. That was less of a stretch than a hard-boiled detective.” She decided she’d have to quit her consulting gig and work full-time at writing if she were going to write a thriller. “In every career, you reach a moment when you have to take a leap of faith.” But there was a catch. She was under contract with Harlequin’s Silhouette Intimate Moments to write five more category romances. She’d give herself a year. “I’d saved money and I was getting paid for these romance novels, but it was lean. I counted my pennies every week.” Fortunately for her, both parents were accountants and had taught her cashflow. But even cashflow has its limitations. If there’s no cash, there’s no flow. She labored on her novels, working mornings on her contract romances and afternoons on her thriller. To pay her rent she eventually became a part-time customer service rep for a cellular phone company. “This is the only time in my career I’ve ever written multiple books at the same time and I don’t know how I did it…It was crazy.” She finally turned in her thriller manuscript and her agent told her it was good enough and conducted what Gardner describes as a “modest” three-day auction. Bantam stroked a check, and her advance was “three times larger than what I’d made on all of my romance novels.” Soon, she received what she describes as a “two-day phone call” from her new editor. Gardner equates it to the 20-page revision letter she received for her first romance novel. “She totally ripped my novel apart.” Characters were changed, new plot-lines added, and a lot of material eliminated. The book needed to be bigger, her editor told her. “It was a challenging time. It felt like whatever I did, that it wasn’t good enough …I ate a lot of brownies, and soon I got a lot bigger during this time.” When completed, Bantam wanted to title it “Redemption” and created a cover that de Guzman complained was just plain awful. After all of her work, Gardner realized her novel was not being packaged for success. “I’m beginning to believe my father was right. That job with benefits was looking really good right now.” Then one of the sales directors at Bantam read her manuscript. “This is really good,” she said. “We can sell this, but you have to give it a new cover and title.” The Perfect Husband emerged, and the cover of a burning wedding gown quickly appeared. The cover was so good, the New York Times wrote about it—not Gardner, she laughs, but the book jacket. “That cover, with the embossed flames, is still considered iconic in the industry. So, I guess that’s one of the secrets to success—get a really gorgeous cover!” “All of a sudden they are printing hundreds of thousands of copies,” Gardner says. “It was wild. Yep, a mere decade later I’d become an overnight success!” The year the Perfect Husband was published is the same year Gardner got married. “A lot of people said, ‘Oh, he must be the perfect husband.’ Given that the perfect husband was a serial killer, it wasn’t the perfect compliment.” Gardner says she learned a lot about making a living in publishing during her tenure with romance novels and later her shift into bigger thrillers. “I think romance novels teach you how to write about character.” To be successful in this business, she says, “you need to accept you’re a small business owner. You need to know marketing and that all roads eventually lead back to the author. If you’re not ready to wear all of those hats, this will be a frustrating business for you.” ___________________________________ The Perfect Husband ___________________________________ Start to Finish: 3 years I want to be a writer: 6 Decided to write a novel: 17 Experience: romance novels, research analyst Agents Contacted: one, friends helped Agent Rejections: 0 First Novel Agent: Damaris Rowland First Thriller Novel Editor: Beth de Guzman First Novel Publisher: Bantam Age when published: 20 first romance novel, 27 first thriller Inspiration: A big source was my 104-year-old grandmother. She worked hard and was an English teacher. Website: LisaGardner.com Advice to Writers: Read and write a lot of different things. Play around. It’s how you find your voice. There’s a lot of value in me in starting in romance. It enabled my career to explode when it came to thrillers. People stay too much in their lane these days. Like this? Read the chapters on Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Tess Gerritsen, Steve Berry, David Morrell, Gayle Lynds, Scott Turow, Lawrence Block, Randy Wayne White, Walter Mosley, Tom Straw. Michael Koryta, Harlan Coben, Jenny Milchman, James Grady, David Corbett. Robert Dugoni, David Baldacci, Steven James, Laura Lippman, Karen Dionne, Jon Land, S.A. Cosby, Diana Gabaldon, Tosca Lee, D.P. Lyle, James Patterson, Jeneva Rose, Jeffery Deaver, Joseph Finder, and Patricia Cornwell. View the full article

Crime fiction sometimes seems like a solo sport: one man or woman coming up against the forces of confusion and chaos and fighting through them to identify a solution. We start in disorder and end in (some version of) order. At least that was my assumption, before I read Chester Himes. A native of Missouri, Himes spent his most productive years in France, where he began writing hardboiled detective fiction set in Harlem. In some ways, this was a practical decision—Himes had failed to find success writing screenplays and traditional literary fiction—but it also enabled him to explore a community that hadn’t been represented in crime fiction to that date. Like the other novels in the Harlem Detective series, A Rage in Harlem is full of outrageous characters and over-the-top situations, but also a strong and deeply felt sense of place. I can’t think of a better guide to Himes’s work than Naomi Hirahara, author of the Edgar Award-winning Mas Arai series and the Japantown Mystery Series, Clark and Division and Evergreen, as well as many other works. Like Himes’s, Hirahara’s work is grounded in the history and experience of a specific community, explored with love, humor, and understanding. In this crime fiction, solutions aren’t always apparent, and endings aren’t always tied up with a bow. The reader closes the novel with the sense that the characters will keep living their lives, in some parallel reality to our own. Why did you choose A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes? When you asked me to do the interview, I thought, “What crime novel really helped me when I was writing my debut mystery?,” and A Rage in Harlem immediately came to mind. My first novel, which is called The Summer of the Big Bachi, actually didn’t start off as a mystery. I was writing it very intuitively, and then I came across A Rage in Harlem. There was something about it that was so pungent and so freeing, and I really needed that. My first novel is about a gardener in a very isolated community, the Japanese American community in southern California, and something about how Chester Himes wrote about community just resonated with me. A lot of classic crime writers like Raymond Chandler have that lone investigator moving through a dark world and trying to root out the evil on their own, but I liked that Chester Himes was writing about lots of people. There was a connection there, and it enabled me to write with more abandon. I don’t necessarily have the same style of humor that he has, but I appreciated the characters so much. They all had different motives, they were all incredibly flawed, but you still rooted for them, and that’s something that I wanted to incorporate in my own work. I’m really interested in the two adjectives you used to describe A Rage in Harlem: pungent and freeing. Could you talk a little bit more about that? In that Mas Arai series, which spans seven books, I was going for something that smelled really strong. Sometimes when we write we think more in terms of our vision or hearing, but to me, to get a true kind of sensory personality of a place and a people, I think you need that pungency. I appreciate that kind of writing that’s beautifully constructed, like it was made by a Swiss clockmaker, but I also like something that doesn’t necessarily have that same kind of preciseness or maybe laboriousness. In that first book, I needed to just trust myself, because I didn’t really know what I was doing in terms of craft. I needed to remember that we’re all storytellers in our regular lives, and I had to lean on that. The novel opens in the point of view of a man named Jackson, living in Harlem in the forties with his girlfriend Imabelle. Jackson has found a man who promises to “raise” his ten-dollar bills into hundred-dollar bills through a chemical process activated by heat, but when they try it, the oven blows up and a man claiming to be a U.S. marshal bursts into Jackson’s apartment. It’s only the beginning of a tale of bad luck and near-misses where the only constant is Jackson’s naivete and his steadfast love for Imabelle. What did you think of him as a main character? I really love Jackson. In my own writing, I tend to gravitate toward the every-person, or maybe even the antihero. Death of a Salesman made a big impact on me, because Miller selects a character who seems perfectly average, or maybe even below average, and finds a way to shape that life so it can interest a person who is very much outside of that lived experience. If you look at Jackson, he’s really the purest character in the whole book. Even the minister has ulterior motives. Jackson is just such a human character to me. He’s looking for money all through the novel, and he’s finally able to amass this money that he can pay off his debts and get out of trouble. But then he goes to the craps table and loses it all. We all do things from time to time knowing that we shouldn’t go there, we shouldn’t do that, but we’re somehow ensnared by the possibilities. A lot of crime and mystery writing is about people making those kinds of bad decisions, so I’m actually very much enchanted by Jackson. Jackson believes in Imabelle implicitly, but the reader soon becomes aware that she’s teamed up with a group of men to double-cross him. Imabelle is clearly an opportunist, but given the world she lives in, one can hardly blame her for looking out for herself. Do you think Himes expects the reader to sympathize with her? I sympathize with her. I mean, she’s definitely conniving, but I think Himes is sympathetic to women in general. In his personal life, when he couldn’t make it in the US and went off to France, it was a woman editor that gave him the idea to start writing crime fiction. It wasn’t necessarily a genre that he had in his heart. To be perfectly honest, he started to write these New York novels for commercial reasons. With Imabelle, I think he wants to give us a sense of the violence and subjugation that a woman like this would have lived in. The options were just so limited in terms of what a young woman could do to survive, and I appreciate her wiles. And then there’s the fact that Jackson adores her so much. For a writer, that’s a technique that’s kind of handy: if you have a character that isn’t immediately likable, but then you have a very sympathetic character that is totally devoted to him or her, that can make you feel more positively toward them. If Jackson’s going to adore her so much, we’re going to root for her as well. One of the most interesting characters is Jackson’s twin brother Goldy, a heroin addict who spends most of his time dressed as a nun, selling tickets to heaven to Harlemites. Goldy is part of a community of what the book calls “female impersonators.” It’s not clear from the text whether they’re transgender or simply making a living as best they can, but it suggests a flexible attitude toward gender that might seem surprising given the time. What did you think of Goldy as a character? I love Goldy. I’m sure he’s probably everyone’s favorite character who encounters this book. I think what Goldy represents—what is true of so many of these characters—is this idea that what you see is not really what you get. In a sense they all have secret identities, and here’s Goldie pretending he’s a nun. It’s a little bit absurd, and even though that’s not part of my style, I appreciate it in other writers. The descriptions of the setting were one of my favorite parts of the book. The novel abounds in great, heartbreaking details, like the giant dogs kept by pimps in apartments so small that the dogs need to be chained at all times. Himes clearly knew this neighborhood inside and out and loved writing about it. What did you think of that aspect, and how do you think about setting in your work? I think that’s so important. When outsiders think of Harlem at that time, they might think of nefarious activities, but the book is really about connections between people: family connections, romance, love. In spite of all the crime that takes place in the novel, he also wants to get into the essence of human experience in terms of those connections, and that’s what I want to do in my books as well. I’m exploring the erasure of people of color from history, specifically Japanese Americans. In Clark and Division, the characters are forced to leave their home in southern California and move into a camp, and then they have to move again. I like giving characters life in those kinds of situations, so you can see that these were real people and not just figures in a history book. Like Jackson in A Rage in Harlem, they’re looking for love, they’re looking for a better future. They have aspirations, even though they’re taking place against this background of criminal behavior. Those kinds of locations are very intriguing to me. Some of that may be personal—I’ve ended up writing a lot about gambling dens, and my father loved to play poker in the back of gas stations and to go to Vegas. I’m not necessarily a gambler myself, but I like being around the fringes and watching people and their excitement. There’s constant action in that kind of setting that is also present in A Rage in Harlem. The the detectives who play a minor role in this novel, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, are more central characters in the other novels in the series. Have you read any of the later novels? I have, but I have to say A Rage in Harlem is my favorite. The names Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson give you a clue about what kind of law enforcement they are, and you’re not quite sure if you’re rooting for them all the time. Because Jackson is the center of A Rage in Harlem and has that innocence and purity, it just appeals to me the most. Without giving any spoilers, you could say that this novel has a kind of circular structure, and we end with the impression that things are going to go on very much as they were. What do you think Himes was trying to say with the ending? It’s interesting, because it’s so different than a middle-class or even an immigrant view of the world. In those communities, people tend to believe that things are going to progressively get better, but In Jackson’s community, things are just going to stay on pretty much the same. It says something about the strength and the durability of the characters that in spite of this cycle they can live life with such as zest. They don’t give up, and they’re not passive. And I think that’s the beauty of our genre too. Crime fiction requires motion; the characters can’t just stay frozen in trauma. They have agency, and sometimes that means making the wrong decision. With Imabelle, she’s frightened and scared at the end of the book, but she still seems like a woman to contend with. She commands respect in her world, and I like that. Is there anything else you’ve learned from this novel that you might apply to your own work? I’d say that Chester Himes is always present in my work. He actually wrote his first novel in the home of a Japanese American woman journalist who rented the house to him when she was sent to a camp during World War II. When I found that out, I felt like there was a real connection between us. View the full article

When I was nineteen and a college junior, I spent what was supposed to be an exotic, sultry, educational summer semester in Madrid. But my long-term boyfriend back home and I had recently broken up, and instead of being excited by my new surroundings, I was miserable. All I wanted to do was to talk to him. If I could just hear his voice, I told anyone who’d listen. If I could tell him I loved him, and hear him say the same in return, everything would be okay. This was in 1989, before cell phones were ubiquitous, and that summer every one of the Telefónica de España’s public pay phones I tried were out of order. One night toward the end of our trip, some classmates and I found ourselves at a terraza somewhere in the central district. We dragged our chairs into a circle, drank cold beer, and talked. Night descended and the circle grew wider as more people joined us. Everyone was friendly and animated. Everyone but me, that is. I was droning to my friend Kelly about wanting to call this boy back home. “I know how you can make a phone call.” I swiveled to my right, and a man I didn’t know smiled at me. “We can go now if you want. It’s like a two-minute walk.” Kelly put a warning hand on my arm. “It’ll be fine,” I said to her, too eager to worry. I followed Michael—that was his name, he introduced himself as we threaded through the other chairs–out to the street. He was a few paces ahead; I was floating behind, lost in preparation for the call I was about to make. Then he stopped at a car parked on the street and unlocked it. “Get in,” he said. Wait. “I thought you said we could walk.” He shrugged. “I underestimated.” He sounded tired. “If you want to go, get in. It’ll be faster this way.” I remembered that it was I who was putting him out, not the other way around. I got in. As he pushed a button to lock the doors, he looked intently at me. He was sweating and his eyes were dilated, and I knew: I’d made a terrible, terrible mistake. He squealed out of the parking space and began a high-speed race out of downtown Madrid, dodging cars and running lights. It was strangely quiet: he didn’t honk or turn on the stereo or speak. I could hear my heart banging inside my head. Untold minutes later, he exited the freeway and pulled into an abandoned-looking warehouse district. There was graffiti on metal shutters, trashcans, broken lights above entryways. He parked in front of one of the buildings and killed the ignition. I turned to Michael, ready to plead for my life, but as soon as I did, he flashed a switchblade and pressed its flat side against my throat. He licked his lips and said, “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to slit your pretty neck and then fuck you in it. And when I’m good and done, I’m going to leave you here to die. Nobody will find you. And nobody will find me.” What happened next was a blur fueled by my determination not to let him kill me. I kicked, slapped, hit, screamed. He did the same to me. I have no idea how long it lasted, but somehow—miraculously—I eventually got away from him with only a few cuts and bruises, a ripped shirt, and a nightmare that would last the rest of my life. That I made it back to Madrid from such a godforsaken episode is another miracle. When I did, I told only one person: Kelly, the friend I’d been with earlier that night. Not the police, not the school, not my mother, nobody. The one bag I didn’t unpack after returning to Houston a few days later was the one that contained the memory of my attack. I stashed it in the recesses of my mind and did my best to forget about it. I was so intent on burying the terror, shame, pain, and humiliation associated with that night, in fact, that I also forgot where and with whom I’d lived in Spain, what classes I’d taken, the name of that terraza, even Kelly’s surname. But although I thought I’d hidden the truth from myself—and others—something as traumatic as that doesn’t just magically disappear. It’s the kind of story that lives deep inside your bones. The kind that will surface on occasion, without preamble, until you can stuff it back down again. If you can stuff it back down. In May 2021, I’d just completed the manuscript that would become A Gracious Neighbor and was waiting, as I do, for the Universe to deliver my next book idea. My daughter was nineteen, the same age I was when I was attacked, and was preparing to drive cross-country to come home for the summer. My suppressed memory returned and refused to be ignored. I thought about how strong and capable, and yet how vulnerable and exposed my precious girl would be during her trip. I couldn’t stop thinking about the vagaries of violence and victimhood, safety and security, guilt and grief—mine, of course, and others’. It was time, the Universe and I decided, to deal with Madrid in the most therapeutic way I know: by fictionalizing it. The psychic burden would’ve been too great if I’d written the story as memoir. Besides, the gaps in my memory would’ve made it impossible. The thought of telling it in the first person POV made me nauseated, as did the idea of bringing in too many familiar details. I needed some emotional distance from those traumatic hours, and so I gave them to a character named Paula. All she and I share is a birthday, a home state, and one really shitty night in 1989. I wrote the hardest part first. I’m not typically precious about where and how I work, but in this case, I wanted my family to be home but not likely to interrupt me, to be outside in case I needed to suddenly run for my life, and to be a little drunk. Once my cocktail kicked in, I opened a new document on my laptop and, with trembling hands, put Paula through absolute hell. To my surprise, reimagining the events of that night through her perspective wasn’t as harrowing as I’d expected. In fact, it was liberating. Not only did seeing it on the page diminish some of its shadowy power, I felt great tenderness toward Paula. She felt, as I always had, liable for what her assailant did to her. She’d ignored her friend’s concern and gone willingly to her own would-be execution. But, thirty-two years later, as a mother and a self-defense instructor, I knew what happened to Paula was not her fault. And if she wasn’t responsible for her attack, then…I wasn’t responsible for mine. Once the manuscript was finished, I decided to find my friend Kelly. I may have forgotten her last name, but I never forgot that she’d worried about me that night, that she’d waited at that terraza for me for hours. I wanted to thank her for that kindness, because when I finally made it back, seeing her made me believe that somehow, I was going to be okay. After many dead ends, a clever friend suggested I go through my alma mater’s online yearbooks and do a search on “Kelly.” And there she was, with her big 80s hair and even bigger smile. I found her social media profile; she’s now married with two young adult children, her hair streaked with gray, her smile as great as ever. My desire to hug her was overwhelming. When we finally got to talk on the phone, she said very gently, “I knew right away why you reached out to me. That night has stayed with me, too.” The aphorism “sunlight is the best antiseptic” is apropos to this story. Writing The Young of Other Animals and then talking about it with Kelly felt like I’d dragged a heavy trunk out of my mental attic, pried the lid open, and let the sunlight do its thing. I can’t say that I wish I’d done it decades earlier; if I’d talked about it from the beginning, I don’t know if I’d have become a fighter—figuratively and literally—or taught hundreds of women how to protect themselves from similar situations. In our post Me Too era, it may seem like it’s easier for assault survivors to share their stories, that authorities are less likely to blame the preyed-upon for the predation against them. Yet statistics suggest otherwise: while one in six American will be the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime, only 25 out of every 1,000 rapists will end up in prison—in part because many victims fear retribution or shaming. Even if nobody were to read The Young of Other Animals, the book that grew out of this story, releasing myself from the negative feelings I’d held onto for three decades made the writing of it entirely worthwhile. Yet I do hope others will read it, and that they will find it worthwhile, too. And if they’re bearing a great psychic burden for trespasses against them, perhaps they’ll be inspired to tell someone—anyone—so they don’t have to carry it alone. *** View the full article

Bess I lost him. I let go of his hand to retie my laces and I lost him. My foot was loose in my shoe, I wasn’t about to waste time taking it off, and I couldn’t be falling over now. Damn laces. I could have sworn I’d tied a double knot before leaving. If Benedict were here, he’d have said I wasn’t paying attention, he’d have been clear I wasn’t doing things right, meaning his way. The only way, in his eyes. Oh, sure. He can think that all he likes, but there’ll always be as many ways to do things as there’s people on earth. Never mind that: How long has it been since I let go of his hand? One minute? Two? When I stood up, he wasn’t there anymore. I swung my arms all around to try to grab him, I called his name, I yelled as loud as I could, but all I got back was the whistling wind. I already had a mouth full of snow and my head was spinning. I lost him and I can’t ever go back home. He wouldn’t understand, he doesn’t have all the facts. If he’d asked the right questions, if I’d answered him truthfully, he’d never have trusted me with the boy. He decided not to say a thing, keep up the charade, believe that I could do what he was asking me to do. And here all I’m doing is making things worse, adding to this hell. As if I could help it. Benedict Come to think of it, I’d say I could tell something was off. A bit like when you get the feeling a bug’s buzzing by your ear, maybe. You swat at it, but it turns out it’s an alarm, the alarm in your head, quiet as can be. It won’t make you jump, there’s just enough to keep you from a good night’s sleep, though. So I didn’t sleep much and I bolted awake. Did I have a feeling right then, or was it only the draft coming in from below? I couldn’t guess. I was so tired after those days checking the traps, stowing equipment, and getting ready before the bad weather comes. I’ve always been fond of storms—right before them, especially, when you’ve got to gear up for everything, seal all the gaps, haul in enough wood to last a few days, and hunker down as best as you can. And then, once the storm’s come, I just curl up with the CB radio sputtering, a hot mug of coffee to warm my hands, and a fire kicking up a fuss, what with the snow and the wind coming down the chimney. I hear the house groaning and shifting like an old man. Sometimes I get it in my head it’s talking to me, the way it likely talked to my old folks and their own old folks before them, generations and generations all the way back to the very first Mayer who put down roots here, on land no tree could grow on, to prove that he knew something nature didn’t. The house’s still standing and I’m nice and warm inside, like a diamond in a box. Problem is, I’m all alone. When I came downstairs, the door was wide-open and the snow was already blowing in by the shovelful. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I yelled out for Bess, asked her why she didn’t shut the damn door, shouted that we’d all be dead of cold no thanks to her, but I got no answer. And then I saw the little boy’s boots weren’t there and that their jackets weren’t hanging on the rack. Then I knew she’d gone out with him, never mind that even a girl as different as her ought to know that you never go outside when the blizzard’s at its worst. Cole You listening, God? I swear to you I’ll never drink another drop. Whatever that bastard gave me is killing my head. “Rotgut” doesn’t even begin to cover it. No feeling left in my throat, and my stomach’s an unholy mess. That stuff will make a nun out of you, and I don’t even have the getup for that. I was barely out of the bathroom, no thanks to the shits from the booze, when I heard someone hammering at the door. No good Christian would be outside in weather of this sort, so I bundled myself up as best as I could and grabbed my gun. No telling what could be running around in those woods. I hollered, “Who is it?” as if a bear could shout back, but there was too much wind out there to hear a thing. The pounding only got worse. Well, no choice now. I turned the lock, got the door open with my foot, and stuck the barrel through just in case. “Don’t you shoot, Cole. It’s me.” Benedict. I’d know that deep, booming voice anywhere. He was covered in snow—it was on his shoulders like some two-bit general’s epaulets—and he already had white-tipped eyelashes with bits of frost hanging off them like some stripper all done up. I’m only saying that because I saw a picture of one in a magazine at Clifford’s. A pretty face with little drops at the ends of her big fake lashes that made her look like a silly life-size doll. Some men must like that. Benedict shoved his way in and got the door shut behind him. Didn’t even pull off his hat. He was leaning on the wall, running his hand over his face. Looked like he’d just seen a ghost. “Bess and the kid are gone. They’re out there.” Them? Out in the storm? The idea was so wild I let out a guffaw. “Now, now, Benedict, that’s an awful long way you’ve come just for a joke.” He shot back, “You think I’d go outside in this weather for a laugh?” I took a good look at his face and I could tell he was dead serious. Well, damn. If it was true, then they really were in the shit. The kid’s all of ten years old, that pipsqueak, and the woman wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. So I asked him: “Well, what do you want me to do about it?” I didn’t like the sound of what he said next one bit: “What do you think? You and me are going to go find them.” That right there was worse than Clifford’s hooch. It almost made me want to take another swig. Freeman I couldn’t sleep a wink with this storm. The wind’s blowing so hard around the house that I don’t see how it’s still standing. There’s the gusts coming in on one side and the snow heaping up on the other that’s got the walls in a vise. Lord knows how I’ll make my way out when it’s all past. The first time I weathered a storm here, it was two days before I could get outside. There was a good five feet of snow in front of the door, and those window shutters I’d been foolish enough to shut weren’t opening. “Rookie mistake,” Benedict said later on. I might be an old man, but I still had to climb up to the attic and come down through the dormer with a rope. That wasn’t easy going. I popped my shoulder out on the way down, and I still had to shovel snow with my good arm before I could find something to keep the other one where it belonged. This time I decided I’d clear as much as I could around the house, maybe that’d be enough. Staying alive isn’t something you can just figure out as you go. Where I come from, nobody has to wonder if snow’s going to shut them in. There’s no snow, not one flake, and if I had the choice, with these joints of mine, I’d sooner be there than in this place. The cold, the damp—that’s no good for this old body. That’d really be something, to have lived through everything I did only to die now, rotting like a moldy old branch. What am I doing here, anyhow? I reckon if He’s bent on us meeting and on me being buried at the end of the world, then He has His reasons for it. He knows I’m a sinner, but if God in all His mercy has a plan for me, then I’ll wait on the answers. I’m frozen, and I’ll still wait as long as I have to. Lord knows, I don’t have much say in the matter. Bess I don’t see a thing. The snow’s swirling all over the ground, and when I look up, the whole sky is full of specks. The air’s got no color to it, like every single tint’s gone, like all the world’s been watered down. I wish I’d listened when Benedict was trying to tell the kid how blizzards work. Maybe I’d have known what to do, other than not going out, but what’s done is done. I’ve got my back to the wind. I’m leaning against what I reckon’s a rock. Unless it’s a bear hibernating . . . Oh, that’d take care of things. I can’t even decide what to do next, but if I don’t get a move on, I’ll end up a snowman. I’m not as stupid as that. I know how much of a mess I’m in. I need to keep going, find the kid, or head home to get Benedict. But if he sees that the kid’s lost, he’ll go right to pieces. I can’t go back, I can’t tell him what happened: that’s too much. He’s got both feet on the ground, but some things will knock even men like him for a loop. Anyway, I can’t leave the kid all on his own. Which way do I even go? Straight ahead, I guess. That’s what he must have done. Kids can be stupid sometimes, do things without thinking, just by instinct, even a little genius like him. So if I don’t think, I’ll just walk straight ahead. That’s got to be the best thing to do. Benedict Cole’s taking his sweet time getting ready. He’s dragging his feet. Can’t really blame him, though. Who’d want to go out in this weather? Living here’s hard enough when there’s no snow, but in the worst of a storm you’re in the belly of the beast—that’s what Freeman says. I didn’t go by his place. He’s too old and his eyes aren’t that good. What he came here for, I can’t even guess. I let out a guffaw when he showed up two years ago with his van and his brand-new gear. Like one of those retirees who comes up to have himself a good time. Living here, though, in a quiet corner like this, all alone—that’s not really something you hear about around these parts. And he’s the only Black man for miles. He sticks out just as much as Bess did when she settled here in a miniskirt and those white cowboy boots of hers. For his age he’s in better shape than those boozers Clifford or Cole ever would be, but still he didn’t look one bit like a guy here to get a taste of the wild. I figured he wouldn’t last the winter in his mittens and his beanie hat. He was always tight-lipped about what he’d done before coming here, apart from being drafted for Vietnam. Maybe that’s how he stuck through the first winter. We didn’t help him then. Around here, we’ll help out our fellow men, but we’re not going out of our way for a stranger. I did lend him a hand the first time he had to change the drive belt on his snowmachine, though. He’d bought it off of Clifford, just as crooked as always. Some things it’s wisest not to buy used here. If someone’s getting rid of it, there’s a good reason why. It broke down so many times that Freeman had to go through every page of the manual that Clifford gave him. He’d never taken it out of its shrink-wrap. Makes me wonder if he knew how to read. Freeman took the whole machine apart, and after he’d put it back together, it worked even better than my own—not that that’s saying much. Anyone could see Clifford wasn’t all too happy. That crook thought he’d pulled a fast one on Freeman by selling him a dud, but the joke was on him. And that was when I finally saw that, for an old man, Freeman was awfully resourceful. When he banged up his shoulder, he turned up at my door, wasn’t even moaning, just asked if I could take him to see a doctor because he couldn’t drive on his own. I wasn’t all that keen on driving a good fifty miles to the free clinic, but I took him anyway. He’d gotten through his first winter here; nature wasn’t going to get one over on him. Maybe, in a way, it’d made its peace with him. I can’t say as much of Bess, or the kid. One day she said that it was a real laugh, the two of them around these parts. That was her way of saying what everyone was thinking: the two of them had no business being here. I don’t know if nature’s taken a liking to them or if it’s going to spit them out alive or dead. All I know is it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have brought them here. I know I promised the kid’s mother that I’d keep him with me, but I shouldn’t have. And now I’m out in a blizzard, looking for a kid and a girl in the middle of nowhere. Cole One thing I’ll say: I had no desire to go out there. Only an idiot would do that. Sure, I wasn’t hinting as much to Benedict, but odds are they’re already frozen dead or at the bottom of one of those crevasses in the ground by the lake, or worse. It’s been a long winter, and some of the animals out there have an awful lot of teeth. I even let Clifford know over the CB radio and he said not his problem, not sticking his head outside in this weather. No surprise there, although I figured he wouldn’t mind finding the girl, if not the kid. I tried my darndest to drag my feet. I rummaged around for my warmest socks and also those fancy little silk liners that old Magnus always told me to put on first, even if they’d been darned so many times that it was only by the grace of God they didn’t fall apart. Course, we’d still end up frozen worse than Eskimos. Benedict was waiting on me, leaning on the doorframe. He looked like he’d aged ten years in a split second. Knowing they were out there had to be the worst thing he could imagine, and he was one to know. Men caught in spring runoff, crushed flat by the tree they were chopping, found stiff like twigs in ditches—he’d seen more’n his fair share when he was little and the sawmill was still there. A kid and a pretty woman lost in a blizzard, though? Best as I can recollect, no such thing’s happened before. And Benedict knew just why. ’Cause there’s no sense in that, and everyone here’s got some sense to them, because each thing you do costs you and Mother Nature never goes easy on you. That’s the deal you get. You want to live here? Clean air, big game, plenty of fish? Full freedom, nobody to answer to, maybe not even a soul in sight for weeks on end? You can live here on your own, all on your own. The day you find yourself face-to-face with a grizzly or your rig won’t start when you’re miles from your place, though, you got to accept that nobody’s there to help you, nobody but yourself. That’s not something that damn girl can get in her head. I finally found those socks. I grabbed two dozen cartridges for the rifle. Benedict had his with him, too, and I was going to open the door when I remembered Clifford’s hooch. Not a bad thing to bring on such a harebrained expedition, that. This way I won’t even feel the worst of this mess. Bess It’s a real struggle to keep moving no matter what, and I’m not sure it’s getting me anywhere. There’s moments, out here in the snow, when I could swear I saw something move, but the second I look again, it’s gone. This damn snow won’t just come straight down like nice, normal rain. So I don’t lose my head, I try to remember California, the beaches our parents took us to every Sunday after church, all four of us by the ocean, having sandwiches and playing cards and the sun making us sleepy. I can’t make myself feel that heat anymore. Around here, even in the summer, the sun doesn’t even warm your bones. Just makes you think you’re warm, but you’re never actually warm. You never think you’re baking in the sun. Sometimes I dream about the Pacific: those long rolling waves, the salt on my skin, and the spray in my hair. All there is here is fresh water, gallons and gallons of it, lakes and rivers and streams and brooks and falls. Water, water everywhere, all the time: ice floes, snowmelt, crystal clear or muddy in the spring. And cold, always cold. Nothing you’d ever want to skinny-dip in. I’d give anything to sunbathe on the beach again, listen to the waves crashing on the sand. It’s funny: I can still remember the coconut smell of the sunscreen Mommy put on when I was little so she could tan and not burn her milky skin. She was so pretty back then, like a movie star. We weren’t all that well-off, but she was always elegant. She was a small woman with the looks and the stomach of a fifties film star. Daddy was so in love with her that he said even Rita Hayworth didn’t have anything on her. I didn’t get what he was saying about some old actress who died the year I was born, but Mommy seemed to really like the sound of that. Both Cassandra and he were blond, almost white-haired—that was the Scandinavian side showing. And I’d gotten Mommy’s red hair, like a real Irish American. It was a burden, but everyone always knew who we were from a mile off. “Look who it is: that’s Elizabeth Morgensen and her mother.” When I was a teen, I was so scared I’d end up a bad copy of her. I didn’t have my boobs yet and my hips were as skinny as a boy’s. I wasn’t anything close to a sex symbol, not even an old one. Then her hair went gray overnight. She tied it in a long, faded braid and it was stained yellow at the end from nicotine. She was always dressing to be seen, and then, snap, she let herself go. Why hang on to bits of cloth or tubes of lipstick when what mattered most was gone? I always did my best to forget the dead, and now I was trying to forget that side of her too. And then I gave up just like her, but in my own way. I guess all we had in common was our looks. But I still can’t shake her. The kid’s out there, and Lord knows I’ve got to save him. I can’t make the same mistake twice. __________________________________ From BLIZZARD. Used with the permission of the publisher, ABRAMS. Copyright © 2023 by Marie Vingtras, translation copyright © 2024 by Jeffrey Zuckerman. View the full article

Which of us didn’t wish, as a child, that we might be invisible for the day? What fun we might have had: eavesdropping on the adults, sneaking into rooms where we weren’t usually welcome, standing behind teachers as they wrote questions for the next day’s test. I never did get to click my fingers, disappear from sight and walk unseen into Buckingham Palace but, now in my fifties, I have finally become invisible, just as my older female friends always promised I would. The sister heroines of my novel, The Excitements, are ninety-something WW2 veterans Penny and Josephine Williamson. Thanks to their age, both are well used to being overlooked (and patronized) but, rather than bemoan her fading from view, 97-year-old Penny uses the fact that nobody particularly notices her to great advantage. She’s a jewel thief and a very successful one at that. After all, who would believe such a sweet little old lady could ever be ripping them off? Extraordinary as the thought of a jewel thief well past retirement age might seem, the fictional trope actually has a number of real-life precedents. There are plenty of examples of women who have pulled off the most audacious crimes using only their advancing years—and perhaps the fact that they are female—as a disguise that renders them practically unseen. ‘Diamond Doris’ Payne began her career as a jewel thief in the 1940s, posing as a wealthy young heiress as she bamboozled jewellers all over the United States. Her method relied on not seeming like the kind of person who needed to steal anything. She’d have jewellers show her dozens of jewels at the same time, keep them distracted with small talk while she pocketed one or two, then hope that nobody wouldn’t miss the gems until she’d made her getaway. In the 1970s, she used this method to steal a 10-carat diamond ring valued at some $500,000 from a jeweller in Monte Carlo. Though she was arrested and held for nine months, the ring was never recovered. Payne was always one step ahead of the police. She was prolific, using at least thirty aliases and stealing gems all over the world. In the 1980s, she managed to escape custody by faking an illness that required a hospital visit, making a dash for freedom while she was supposed to be languishing on a ward. Payne was still tormenting the luxury goods salespeople of the United States well into her eighties. She stole a $22,500 diamond ring at the age of 83. For that she was sentenced to two years in prison, but released after only three months. Though her sentence also required that she not go near a jewellery store again, she’s believed to have lifted a ring worth more than $30,000 dollars from a store in North Carolina less than two years later, aged 85. Payne claims to have retired now but when she was asked if she regretted her life of crime, she said, ‘I don’t regret being a jewel thief. Do I regret being caught? Yes?’ Doris Payne is such a legend, that her life has been made into a movie. But even her $500,000 Monte Carlo heist raised small change compared to a heist pulled off by sixty-year-old Lulu Lakatos in 2016. Posing as a gem expert, Romanian-born Lakatos made an appointment at the Mayfair branch of high-end London jeweller Boodles, claiming to have been sent to value seven gemstones on behalf of a wealthy Russian buyer. In the store’s ultra-secure vault, a member of staff showed Lakatos the gemstones, which were kept in a padlocked pouch. Somehow, in a matter of minutes, Lakatos managed to slip the pouch into her handbag, swapping it for an identical pouch full of distinctly un-precious pebbles. No-one noticed the switch until the following day, by which time Lakatos had passed the diamonds on to an international criminal gang. At her trial, Lakatos was unkindly described by the Boodles chairman as ‘most unattractive’ and ‘dowdy and plump’. Found guilty, she was sentenced to five years in prison and required to compensate the jeweller for the diamonds, which have never been found. She was ordered to hand over everything she had to her name, which was, at the time she was arrested, less than £250. It wasn’t the first time Lakatos had pulled off such a stunt. In a previous incident she managed to switch an envelope full of pieces of plain paper for an envelope containing $400,000.00. Unattractive as the Boodles chairman claimed she was, there was obviously something quite distracting about her. Perhaps the chairman nailed it when he claimed that the only thing he could recall about her appearance was her ‘enormous boobs’. The wider picture of criminal activity in old age is far more poignant than thrilling. Japan was among the first countries to notice an uplift in theft by the elderly—particularly elderly women—while overall crime rates were dropping. An investigation into the motives of those arrested revealed a cohort of senior citizens so battered by the cost of living that going to jail seemed like a good way to escape the problem of ever spiralling bills. Shoplifting was the perfect crime, with no violence required but the promise of a short custodial sentence in the warm as ‘punishment’. With the cost-of-living crisis, similar stories are becoming more common in the United Kingdom and the United States, though it’s doubtful that many elderly criminals in the UK or US are hoping to end up in prison for the winter. More likely they’re just hoping to shave something off their grocery bills. It’s a far cry from the glamour of Diamond Doris or the daring of Lulu Lakatos. But the antics of Payne and Lakatos do show us one thing: we underestimate older women at our cost. Ignored and unremarkable—at least in terms of appearance—some of them are busy taking advantage of the fact that they don’t stand out. It seems that in the right circumstances, the invisibility younger women are taught to dread, might turn out to be a super-power. *** View the full article