Admin_99
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Why are imaginary friends so creepy? What is it that’s so unsettling about the sight of a child confidently babbling away to thin air?
Stephen King wrote, “The root of all human fear is a closed door, slightly ajar.” The things we can’t see that are almost always more frightening than those we can. The idea of a threat that the child can see but the adults around him can’t is recurrent in the horror genre because it’s so effective: think The Others, The Sixth Sense
My debut novel, The Woman Outside My Door, owes a lot to horror. It’s situated firmly in the psychological thriller and domestic noir genres, with themes of mental health, motherhood, and homemaking and dark threads of danger needling throughout. But despite the novel belonging on the psychological suspense shelf, my love of horror found its way onto the page. The Woman Outside My Door has a ghostly, Gothic feel that it wouldn’t have if I hadn’t grown up binge-reading Stephen King and watching movies like The Orphanage and The Shining over and over again.
There is so much about I adore about ghost stories. The dramatic, evocative settings, the big Gothic houses, the isolated locations and things-that-go-bump-in-the-night. The compulsive uncertainty—is there or isn’t there?—that’s introduced with the first creak in an empty corridor. If you’re watching a horror movie, you already know there is, by virtue of the story having been billed in that genre, but we watch anyway, the same way we watch romances for the will they, won’t they storyline even though we already know the answer. In The Woman Outside My Door, I introduce an is there or isn’t there question in the opening pages that isn’t answered until the very end—is there or isn’t there an “old lady” in the park who has been talking to seven-year-old Cody? It was only after I finished the book that I realised I’d been unconsciously echoing that ghost story structure.
One reason children make such fantastically frightening literary devices is their tendency toward bald statements. There’s a moment in Jordan Peele’s brilliantly clever second horror film, Us, that scared me half to death the first time I saw it. A young boy, Jason, approaches his parents just after lights-out and says to them, “There’s a family in our garden.”
Why is this so unsettling? Why is it so much more effective to have Jason deliver this line than any other member of the family? It was an undeniably excellent artistic choice, because neither the adults nor Jason’s teenage sister would ever describe what they saw in such a manner. An adult might say, “There are people in the garden.” An adult might add, “We should call the police.” But Jason doesn’t jump to that. Children don’t interpret what they see; they report it. There’s a family in our garden. There’s no analysis of the situation, no attempt to rephrase it into something that makes more sense. The end result is the kind of stark statement that make adults uncomfortable.
In the first chapter of The Woman Outside My Door, Cody’s mother catches him eating a lollipop and asks where he got it. He tells her, “The old lady gave it to me.” When she presses him, “What old lady?”, he replies simply, “The old lady in the bushes.” This was the first scene that formed in my head. I heard the conversational tone in which Cody delivered the line that made his mother turn cold. I saw the icy park where they stood, the deserted playground, the frost-tipped branches. I saw Cody pop the lollipop into his mouth and run off toward the playground, unaware that what he had said had shaken his mother to her core. Right from the beginning, Cody’s innocence and powers of imagination were core facets of the plot.
I’ve always been more frightened by the things that happen just off-screen. That which can be seen can be confronted. But the unknown—what’s behind that door? What was that sound?—can’t be faced head-on. Using children as a plot device allows us to play around with this. Kids see a slightly different world. We can’t always be sure whether they are reporting on something that happened in reality or on TV, if it was described to them by a classmate or even happened in a dream. There’s a family in our garden. The old lady gave it to me. What’s really there?
There is a scene in The Others in which Nicole Kidman’s character notices her daughter’s hand, playing with a toy, is not the smooth-skinned hand of a small child but the wrinkled hand of an old woman. The tension of that moment, as she crept up behind the small figure that sang in her daughter’s voice, stayed with me for a long time. The anticipation of the approach. A closed door, slightly ajar.
I didn’t intend, when I sat down to write The Woman Outside My Door, to use horror movie tropes to create a spooky psychological thriller. It was during the editing process that I became aware of how overtly eerie some of the scenes were, how creeping the sense of danger. That was when I realised that all the time spent re-reading Gothic novels and watching horror movies had all been part of a puzzle I didn’t know I was putting together, and it had all added up to this.
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Although I’ve produced a book or two a year for the past thirty years it’s a truth still to tell that publishers continue to struggle to slot my output into a specific genre. You might ask what is a genre other than a label made up for the purposes of marketing and easy introduction. It rarely encapsulates everything that goes on in a book, is used simply to make a sale quicker and more achievable, and I guess there’s nothing wrong with that.
However, doesn’t it leave us wondering what we might be missing if we “never read crime” or we “scorn romance” or “wouldn’t go near science-fiction”? I can’t imagine there’s an author alive whose only real concern when writing a book is to be true to the story. Trying to make things conform to a given genre is constricting in a way no self-respecting writer would ever allow. True, the main character might be a detective, or a lawyer, or a British redcoat at the time of the Revolution, but that is never where he or she begins and ends.
Fortunately my books have managed to find their way through to the shelves in spite of not settling into recognized genres, often because someone has just decided to slot it into one that fits at least some of the story. I guess this isn’t a bad way to go, at least it’s out there and even if it isn’t in the category you think it should be in, going cross-genre can be an extremely effective way of reaching readers who might not otherwise pick up “that sort of book.”
The most uplifting reviews I receive are those that say ‘I’ve never read this author before; the story was nothing like I expected—definitely going to read more.’ (This can often have more to do with the jackets than the genre, but that’s for another time.) These comments usually follow me writing for a publication such as this one, with crime not being my natural home even though it features large in many of my books. However, I wouldn’t call myself a crime-writer for the simple reason that I see people, situations, stories as so much more than the act that pins them to a single misdeed, even if it is murder.
I believe it’s hugely important for new writers, especially, to be brave enough to write as expansively and truthfully as their fertile imaginations will allow. Trying to conform is only ever going to be restrictive. What matters is understanding that story is always king and characters are there to serve in the most effective way possible, while genre doesn’t really come into it until the creative process is over.
Below is a short list of books and authors who, for me, fall into a cross-genre, or even genre-less category. Some you will know because they are primarily marketed in a favoured genre, others you might not, because they have been published under other labels.
The Bernie Gunther series of books by Phillip Kerr are, for me, classic examples of cross-genre fiction. Gunther might be a big, burly German detective, making the stories fit easily into crime, but they are also gripping historical tales, sexily-romantic and the comedy is laugh out loud. (For Audio fans Jeff Harding’s narrations of these books are in a performance league of their own.)
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. The author’s ambition here was to create a “symphony” of five novels, but she only completed two before she was arrested by the Nazis, taken to Auschwitz and never came back. Her daughters found the manuscripts many years later and they were published as a single book although they tell two very different stories. The first is of war time horror told with wonderfully wry observation of the escape from Paris, and the second is a haunting and extremely subtly told love story.
The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett is a series of six books that weave through every genre ever known and perhaps creates a few of its own. The writing is unusual, unique even, the settings are spectacular in an historical sense, and the stories of crime, treason, horror, supernatural forces and cunning are like nothing I’ve read before or since. They also tell one of the most powerful love stories I’ve ever read.
The Expanse novels by James SA Corey are gripping sci-fi but also profound, political novels. One of the things that struck me the most is the character of Marco Inaros, who is an incredibly dangerous man in a way that has a great bearing on the current mess we are in in the U.K. and the US. He’s a person who is completely incapable of admitting that he’s made a mistake or taking blame for anything; there is no such thing as objective truth as far as he’s concerned…
Daphne du Maurier—can you imagine which genre she’d fit into were she first being published today? Most likely she’d end up in “literature” which is fine, but not fertile ground for new authors. Her works are so full of darkness and mystery, immorality, the most sinister of crimes and some terrifying mind games. And let’s not forget the romance.
Jodi Piccoult is often lumped into the categories of “Commercial Fiction” or “Women’s Fiction” almost derogatory terms these days that set books up as fast and easy reads of a throwaway nature. On the other hand, being seeded into these genres can help to get more copies out there and build an author’s name going forward, although it’s debatable whether the author goes on to acquire the reputation they deserve. Piccoult often allows her detailed research to get in the way of the story, but there’s no doubt that she covers just about every genre, even including fantasy, and the quality of her writing is far more literary than is generally recognized.
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks.
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Christina McDonald, Do No Harm
(Gallery Books)“McDonald offers a painful look at two hot-button topics: the desperate opioid crisis, and a system that allows the cost of cancer pharmaceuticals to extend far beyond the reach of so many. Is what Emma does an unforgivable betrayal of her medical oath, her husband, and herself? It will be up to the reader to decide if the ends justify the means.”
–BooklistCharles Finch, An Extravagant Death
(Minotaur)“Lenox’s latest adventure has humanity, heart, and humor; it offers a captivating glimpse of America’s richest citizens in the late 1800s; it delivers a gripping and cleverly plotted mystery; and, of course, Lenox remains a thoroughly charming lead character. A pleasure to read on every level.”
–BooklistAndrew Mayne, Black Coral
(Thomas & Mercer)“Mayne’s portrayal of the Everglades ecosystem and its inhabitants serves as a fascinating backdrop for the detective work. Readers will hope the spunky Sloan returns soon.”
–Publishers WeeklyRio Youers, Lola on Fire
(William Morrow)“[A] rocket-fueled crime thriller . . . . Fans of full-throttled cinematic action-fests of the Long Kiss Goodnight variety are in for a treat.”
–Publishers WeeklyJohn Marrs, The Minders
(Berkley)“This page-turner never sacrifices the characters’ humanity for the sake of plot. Marrs has definitely upped his game.”
–Publishers WeeklyHelen Cooper, The Downstairs Neighbor
(Putnam)“[A] heart-pounding debut…Even avid suspense readers won’t be able to predict all the twists. Cooper is off to a strong start.”
–Publishers WeeklyJ. A. Jance, Missing and Endangered
(William Morrow)“Fans of police procedurals with a Southwestern flair will love Joanna’s determination to manage marriage, motherhood, and policing in this 19th ‘Joanna Brady’ book.”
–Library JournalMark Greaney, Relentless
(Berkley)“Vivid action scenes…this is still a must for espionage thriller fans.”
–Publishers WeeklyHope Adams, Dangerous Women
(Berkley)“A historical episode artfully adapted in a bleak tale that offers glimmers of hope for women discarded by society.”
–Kirkus ReviewsCharles Todd, A Fatal Lie
(William Morrow)“This is a series, written by a mother-and-son team under the Charles Todd pseudonym, that shows no signs of slowing down. As always, this one combines crisp plotting with stylish prose. Ideal for historical-mystery devotees.”
–Booklist -
It’s February 6, 1960, about five in the afternoon. Darkness is falling. The Chevy Bel Airs and Ford Thunderbirds maneuvering their wide bodies off of Walnut Street onto Main are snapping on their headlights, making a sheen against the wet pavement. Saturday night is coming. Pippy diFalco is limping across Main Street. The weather is sleety, temperature in the high thirties.
Pippy is a small man wearing a big overcoat. He has an open face, puppyish eyes, shows lots of teeth when he smiles—kind of a goofy expression, which gives an impression of innocence. But that’s misleading. People say there was always something else going on. “Nice guy,” his onetime partner told me, “but not a nice guy.”
Pippy was what you would call a creature of habit. He left his home in the morning—he lived with his wife and infant son in an apartment in Morrellville, one of the oldest sections of town, a neighborhood of steelworkers’ houses and lots and lots of churches—and drove along the river. On his right rose a steep, wooded hill, at the top of which the town’s rich families had their homes. On his left he passed one of the four steel-mill plants that powered the town’s rise in the twentieth century. Today they are as silent as Greek ruins, but in Pippy’s time they incessantly poured smoke out of their high, skinny stacks. Every day the smoke put a fresh red-gray coat of dust on all the cars in town, which nobody minded wiping off because if the mills were churning, so was the town.
Johnstown had just peaked as a small industrial powerhouse. The population of 53,000 was already on the decline (it hit its apex of 67,000 in 1920), but good blue-collar jobs were still plentiful, and there were lots of managerial and professional types as well. Today the city is largely hollowed out, with neighborhoods of boarded-up houses and a population less than a third of what it once was. In Pippy’s time it rocked: shift workers crowding into the mill gates, the trolley cars full, housewives browsing the downtown storefronts.
He crossed the river and entered downtown. If he chose to follow Washington Street he would have driven past the public library and the big squat rectangular box of the Penn Traffic department store, its display windows showing lady mannequins stiff but elegant in sheath dresses. He found a place to park on Vine Street and limped down to the Acme supermarket on Market Street. He bought the same thing every day: a loaf of bread, a half pound of sliced bologna, a small pot of mustard. Then he headed up to Main Street, turned left, and came to a stop in front of the ticket booth of the Embassy Theater. Today the marquee said operation petticoat. The 11:45 a.m. show flickered into the mostly empty hall: Cary Grant and Tony Curtis, bright in Eastman Color, were officers on a navy sub who had to contend with “five nurses who just had to be squeezed in!” as the trailer screamed over a sexy flash from the horn section.
Sometime after the picture started, Pippy’s stomach would have been rumbling. His routine was to pull out a pocketknife, use it to spread the mustard, peel off a few slices of bologna and start eating his sandwich. He’d do the same thing later for an early dinner, watching shows in succession if it was a double bill, or, in this case, the same one over and over. Pippy wasn’t a movie buff; he was just killing time. Sometimes he had to leave the theater and walk around outside a bit, to stretch his legs, fill his lungs with air. But doing that meant he had to pay again to get back in, so he didn’t do it often; when it came to hoarding money, Pippy had great fortitude. Money was Pippy’s elixir. In his pocket as he sat in the Embassy was a thick roll of bills. Nobody knows exactly how much he carried that day, but the man who many people think killed him later that night told me with cheerful certainty that Pippy had “two pocketfuls of hundreds” on him. Pippy was famous for his cash rolls. People say he typically toted $3,000 in cash as he made his rounds, a pretty fabulous sum in 1960.
He left the theater for good around five p.m., ready to start his real day.
So here he was now, making his way across Main Street. He had taken shrapnel in the war, and ever since, despite wearing a corrective shoe, he’d had the limp, which made work not so easy, given what he did, but he did it anyway because it was what he knew, and because he relished it.
He was called Pippy from childhood: a nickname for Giuseppe, the Italian form of Joseph.
The sign on the building across the street said city cigar. Its name was both descriptive and deceptive. Cigars were nominally on offer, but its location, two doors from city hall, a handsome structure of rough-cut sandstone blocks on the corner of Main and Market, was crucial to its purpose.
My research takes us this far, brings me right to the front door of City Cigar, the headquarters of the mob back when it flourished in my hometown. But while City Cigar was an important stop on Pippy’s itinerary, I’m not entirely sure he went inside that night. Was he maybe avoiding the place just then?
If he did pull open that door, on his left would have been the shelves of cigars and cigarettes and a rack of newspapers: the Racing Form and the local daily, the Tribune-Democrat (the day’s headlines: “U.S. Answers Soviet Threat” . . . “Not Running, Johnson Says”). On the right side was a little lunch counter, run by Anthony Bongiovanni—Nino, everyone called him. Was Nino standing there, skinny guy with thick eyebrows and a shock of black hair, arms folded across his apron, looking him up and down? Nino wasn’t so fond of Pippy. Nino was thirty-one: eager, methodical, loyal. He was a cook, which was all he ever wanted to be, and this was a good gig, and he didn’t want anyone to mess it up. Pippy was forty-five, and he liked to be liked, but over the years he’d crossed a lot of people, including, lately, the two men who were both of their bosses.
One of those men might have been right there at the counter, where he liked to perch on a stool. His name was Joe Regino, but everyone called him Little Joe. You said it with respect. Little Joe ran the town. He was born fifty-three years earlier in southern Italy, emigrated with his parents, and grew up on the mean streets of Philadelphia. He got involved in the mafia before most Americans had heard the word. His first arrest, in 1928, was for armed robbery. Later he did time for counterfeiting. As the mob was expanding, he was offered control of Johnstown, with its population of hardworking, hardscrabble immigrants—German, Polish, Welsh, Irish, Italian. So he made his way across the state, married a local woman named Millie Shorto and befriended her brother, Russell or Russ, who became his closest ally. He made Johnstown his home and his world. He was a strikingly small, soft-spoken, unfailingly polite man who favored double-breasted suits and loyalty.
Little Joe was my great-uncle. I’m told I was around him somewhat when I was very young, but I don’t remember. What I’ve learned about him comes mostly from cross-referencing FBI files—which list “highway robbery” among his achievements, a crime I had thought went out with the stagecoach—with family reflections: “He had the sweetest disposition. . . . He was very quiet. . . . Uncle Joe helped everybody.”
Let’s assume that Pippy diFalco, after leaving the movie theater, had some brief interaction with Little Joe out front and then went in back. We’ll follow him, pushing open the swinging door. We’re met by smoke: a light cloud of it hovering in the center of the long room. The furniture consists of ten pool tables, one billiard table and several pinball machines. At this time of day you’d have maybe half the tables occupied: office workers, municipal employees from city hall, a few lawyers. All men, of course. Pool halls were as common as Laundromats in mid-twentieth-century America; Johnstown had half a dozen within a few blocks of City Cigar. But this one was a little different. The low rumble of the players’ chatter was spiced not only by the bright clack of ivory balls but by the constant chicka-chicka of the ticker-tape machine. It sat out right in the open, at the end of the counter that ran along the left side of the room, chucking out sports scores.
And here, in his natural environment, overseeing the landscape of green felt and blue smoke, invariably dressed in suit and tie and with a Lucky Strike in the corner of his mouth, I locate the object of my search. He was of medium height, bearish in build, and had a handsome, wide face and squinting, suspicious eyes. I’ve always thought he looked a bit like Babe Ruth. Russell Shorto went by Russ. “Hiya, Russ.” “Russ, we got a problem.” He was forty-six years old and at the height of his success—or rather, just past it. In fact, not long before, he had been cut out of the business by his brother-in-law. My grandfather was Little Joe’s second-in-command; the two men had built the mob franchise in town together; they were close. But Russ had a drinking problem, which had gotten so bad that Little Joe decided he had to let him go. Later, though, Joe had relented, given him a second chance. So Russ was now on a kind of probation. He needed to steady himself. He needed to make sure things went smoothly.
Despite his flaws, he had a talent for organization. Russ was largely responsible for having capitalized on the little steel town’s postwar boom by building an operation that generated what one knowledgeable person estimated at $40 million over the fifteen years since the war’s end (about $370 million today), a portion of which was sent off weekly to “the boys” in Pittsburgh. From there another portion supposedly was sent on to New York.
Gambling was the heart of Russ and Little Joe’s operation. Before there were legal, state-run lotteries, when even tossing a pair of dice against a wall and betting on the numbers that came up was considered immoral and a threat to public health, gambling was what the mob was all about. It was illegal—yet, in the glow and relative prosperity of the postwar era, people were crazy for the possibilities it offered, the giddy thrill of turning a bit of pocket money into sudden wealth. Gallup surveys in the 1950s showed that more than half the country’s population gambled on a regular basis. The mob—Russ and Little Joe—provided a service; a public utility, as many saw it.
In Johnstown, City Cigar was the center of things. The place itself was a hive of legitimate commercial activity: eight-ball was in its heyday, and there was a regular ebb and flow from the lunchtime rush to late at night.
The centerpiece of the Johnstown operation was something Russ created not long after the war, a cleverly named entity called the G.I. Bank, which sounded like a bedrock institution, something that supported the returning troops, but was simply a numbers game that half the town played. Like a lot of other local books around the country, the G.I. Bank took its winners from the closing numbers of the New York Stock Exchange. That made for a virtually tamper-proof system that encouraged bettors’ trust.
There were other games. “Tip seals,” a tear-off game much like today’s scratch-off lotteries, brought in millions in revenue. There were organized card games and craps games throughout the city, some of which had pots that got into the thousands of dollars.
Then there were the legitimate, or semi-legitimate, enterprises. They owned, wholly or with partners, diners, restaurants, pool halls, and bars.
I don’t imagine for a minute that the situation in Johnstown was unique. What Little Joe and Russ created in the period from the end of the Second World War to 1960 was mirrored in smallish cities across the country. New York and Chicago drew the attention of journalists and politicians, and therefore of the public, but the mob spread itself across the map like a corporation opening branch offices. In Pennsylvania, besides big operations in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, there were Little Joes and Russes in Scranton, Reading, Braddock, New Kensington, Sharon, McKeesport, Penn Hills, Allentown, Wilkes-Barre, Greensburg, Monessen, Pittston, and Altoona. In 1957, when the FBI began to try to get a handle on the scope of things, it identified mob activity in such unlikely places as Anchorage, Alaska, and Butte, Montana. Bosses communicated, cooperated, and vied for power with one another in a continent-wide network.
In Johnstown, Russ oversaw much of the activity, but his particular area of focus was the sports book. It’s not like he was a dyed-in-the-wool fan (an old bookie set me straight on this: “Russ could give a fuck about sports”), but his way with numbers, his ability to set the odds, which required great precision, made him especially suited to sports-related gambling. He managed the bookies who took bets on baseball, football, basketball, horse-racing, and prizefights.
This is what brought Russ into regular contact with Pippy diFalco. Pippy booked sports. He had a regular route and regular customers, who knew where he would be at what time, and City Cigar was a part of that schedule. But lately Pippy had been light in his payments. Russ and Little Joe tolerated a certain amount of this. As Pippy’s onetime partner told me, “They knew that in a business full of cheats you gotta give guys some leeway.” They themselves were surely shortchanging the bosses in Pittsburgh, just as Pittsburgh was doing it to New York. Russ was something of a first-class cheat himself, especially with cards; he had probably gotten in his 10,000 hours of practice—false shuffles, second dealing, dealing from the bottom of the deck—before he was old enough to drive.
So: it took one to know one. Either Pippy had taken too much liberty this time or too many people had become aware of it. That’s why I think it’s possible that Pippy was avoiding City Cigar just then. Then again, if he had skipped his regular stop at the pool hall, wouldn’t that have sent a pretty nervy signal? He was just a guy, just a sap with a game leg and a stupid grin and a wad of bills in his pocket; he was in no position to give the mob the finger. So maybe he came in to offer an explanation of his situation.
If they talked, what did Russ say? What kind of threat might he have made? Russ carried a gun at all times, but I have no indication that he ever used it, and there didn’t seem to be a reason for anyone to fear for his life—not in Johnstown in 1960. “It was an innocent time,” more than one guy told me. But he and Little Joe knew how to use muscle. “If a bookie ran out on Little Joe, he’d call me,” one former enforcer told me from his nursing-home bed. “I’d go beat the guy up—get the money. Maybe I’d bring a .48 to scare him. Minor shit.”
So maybe we can go out on a limb and assume that Russ threatened Pippy that if he didn’t start making up for lost time, he would send somebody after him. One guy in particular they used for muscle—a guy called Rip, tall, lean and vicious, with blond hair and horn-rimmed glasses—would have been just the guy to put a healthy scare into Pippy. Once before, in a dispute over money, Rip had beat Pippy up, beat him real bad. Maybe, as that evening got under way, Pippy had the image of Rip in his mind.
Eventually, then, on this February evening in 1960, Pippy went off on his rounds. He probably headed east down Main Street, passing the one-square-block of Central Park on the left and Woolworth’s on the right, turned left at Clinton Street, past Coney Island Lunch, “world famous” (locally) for its chili dogs, and made his way to the Clinton Street Pool Room. It, too, was controlled by Little Joe and Russ. The same activities went on here, but whereas City Cigar was a leisure center favored by city officials, lawyers, and other elites, Clinton Street was a working man’s hangout. There was a counter where you placed bets, and spittoons at intervals. It was looser and louder than City Cigar.
Pippy presumably met clients that evening at the Clinton Street Pool Room. He passed a little time with Frank Filia, my mom’s cousin, the guy who got me started on this project during a four-hour chat session at his hangout, Panera Bread. By this time Frank had been working for the manager, Yank Croco, for nine years as a numbers runner and as counter man in the pool hall. Frank performed with the George Arcurio Orchestra on weekends and was building a name in town as a crooner. He was also an artist: in his spare time behind the betting counter he liked to make sketches of the regulars. When I asked, during a follow-up to our first Panera Bread session, what some of the people from his youth looked like, he picked up a stack of cocktail napkins and spontaneously re-created a few:
Click to view slideshow.Frank told me he had been feeling a little uneasy around Pippy around this time. Everyone, it seemed, knew that Pippy was welching on the mob. Or maybe that’s all hindsight.
Night came on. Nowadays if you venture to downtown Johnstown on a February evening you’ll find yourself in a rustbelt ghost town, but in 1960 the streets got lively even in winter. People headed to Hilda’s Tavern, where on this night the Harmony Tones were playing. The Gautier Club, a strip joint right above the Clinton Street Pool Room, was hosting its All-Star Floor Show and Orchestra, plus comedian Allen Drew. Back at City Cigar, the place filled up with men and smoke. It got rowdy; floor men stood ready to break up fights (one told me he had kept a broken cue stick on hand, and used it frequently). Even in bad weather, the opposite corner of the street outside, called Wolves’ Corner, was alive. Guys hung out there and whistled at broads, hoping for something to happen.
Midnight came. The sleet stopped; the streets glistened. At two o’clock the bars emptied. Then it got quiet.
Two doors down from City Cigar, the top floor of a three-story building became an illegal after-hours joint on weekends called the Recreation Club. It wasn’t much: a jukebox, two sofas, a little bar with its lineup of offerings: Kessler Whiskey, Walker’s Gin, Mogen David wine. Tacked to the wall was a board listing football and basketball scores. You had to be known to get in. It was seedy, smelling of old carpet and cheap wine, but it could get packed.
Pippy showed up here sometime after two, with a woman nobody had seen before. He was a married man with a two-year-old son at home, but everyone—including his wife, Barbara—knew he had a weakness for ladies. He didn’t have much going for him in terms of natural attractions, which was a likely explanation for the otherwise unnecessarily large wad of cash. People noted it that night, the flash of the bankroll, and the grin. Making an impression. Eventually he left, with the mystery woman on his arm.
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When you think of the 19th Century English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, you don’t necessarily think of suspense. Rather, he brings to mind the agricultural world of the southwestern counties of England, where most of his novels are set, and the harsh social circumstances (to put it mildly) of his characters. He’s renowned for his lyrical writing style, the romantic and pastoral elements of his books, and his commentary on the moral, social, philosophical and religious values of his time. But when I re-read one of my favourites, his 1891 novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles, it struck me that Hardy is also a master of suspense. And I felt compelled to start taking notes.
Perhaps this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. As the novelist David Lodge points out in his collection of fascinating articles, The Art of Fiction, Hardy’s earlier novel A Pair of Blue Eyes features a cliff-hanger in the most literal sense. The character Henry Knight slips while trying to retrieve his hat, and ends up clinging to a cliff face while the young woman he is secretly engaged to, Elfride, disappears to (we presume) find help. Hardy prolongs the suspense by describing in detail what Knight sees and thinks as he dangles there. At one point, he realises he is looking into the eyes of a fossilised creature in the rock: he stares the long-dead thing in the face as he wonders whether he himself is about to die. By the time Elfride returns, the reader is as desperate as Knight to know where she has been, what she will do, and whether he will survive.
This scene, as well as containing some very Victorian ruminations on geology, prehistory and the wildness of nature, is infused with tension, danger, bad omens and sinister imagery. These are used to clever effect throughout Tess of the D’Urbervilles, too—along with a range of other suspense devices, which I only fully noticed when I re-read it at the same time as I was writing the first draft of my novel, The Downstairs Neighbor.
Tess is an innocent young woman who, feeling responsible for her family’s poverty, takes a job in the grand house of a rich lady to whom she has been led to believe she is connected by name and ancestry. Tess is seduced and raped by the lady’s son, Alec D’Urberville, and becomes pregnant. Later, as she tries to put the trauma behind her, Tess falls in love with a gentleman farmer, Angel Clare, but their marriage falls apart when he learns of her past. The tension builds as Angel goes abroad and Alec closes in on Tess again, driving her towards the act that will seal her fate.
With my novelist’s hat on, I found myself wondering whether Hardy was a careful planner or an ardent editor. Because when you re-read Tess, you realise it’s peppered with chilling clues to Tess’s eventual ending. The early scene in which Tess accidentally causes the death of her family’s horse (a catalyst for the events that follow) is described with horrifying beauty: “The huge pool of blood in front of her was already assuming the iridescence of coagulation; and when the sun rose a hundred prismatic hues were reflected from it.” More than that, though, we’re told, “Tess regarded herself in the light of a murderess” – an early, subtle foreshadowing of what is to come. Later in the story, she passes a man in a field, painting Bible quotations onto a fence, including: “THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT—” The last word is omitted as the painter sees her and stops his work. It’s as if Hardy is pulling back from completing the clue, while knowing the reader can fill in the blank.
I once took a class on writing crime and suspense fiction, taught brilliantly by the author Lucie Whitehouse, and I remember one of her simple pieces of advice: ‘Unsettle your reader.’ And Hardy certainly does this; he heightens our unease to almost unbearable levels in the build-up to Tess’s life-changing encounter with Alec D’Urberville. Tess pricks her chin on the roses Alec gives her, endures a dangerous ride in his horse and cart, and eats blood-red strawberries straight from his hand, at his insistence. Even Tess’s mother, who hopes Alec will marry Tess and save their family, feels a shiver of misgiving as she sends her daughter off into his arms. How can the reader not feel the same?
After Tess leaves the D’Urberville mansion, Hardy employs another suspenseful device, this time structural. He leaps forward in time by a few months, but initially withholds information about what has happened in the interim. We re-approach Tess as if from a distance, observing her back in her home village, working in the fields—and then, on her break, a baby is brought to her for breastfeeding. It’s a jarring moment of realisation for the reader. A plot twist dropped into our laps while we’re still playing catch-up with the story.
Hardy does it again later in the novel, this time combining it with an agonising switch in perspective. Tess is now married to her true love, Angel Clare, but he has gone to Brazil and Alec D’Urberville has reappeared in her life. Hardy puts Tess in a situation of grave potential danger (and according to the great Patricia Highsmith, the essence of suspense fiction is “the threat of violent physical action and danger”), alone with Alec in the creepy D’Urberville family tomb. It’s a heart-stopping moment when Tess realises she isn’t alone; that one of the figures she thought was an entombed ancestor is actually the breathing shape of her pursuer. Abandoning her there at the end of the chapter, Hardy hops forward by a month, and into the perspective of a minor character. An old friend of Tess’s learns of Angel’s return to the country but has heard nothing of Tess. Next, we move into Angel’s perspective as he tries to track down his wife, and all the time we are wondering and worrying about our heroine who is off the page. We have more of an inkling about where she might be than Angel does, and every clue he uncovers during his search increases our fear for her.
These kind of storytelling devices are fascinating to me. Hardy makes very deliberate decisions about when to leave or enter different characters’ perspectives; when to close a chapter or a ‘Phase’ (part); when to cut quickly between events happening in parallel and when to make his reader wait. Many of these choices are made in the name of suspense, and to give maximum impact to his most important plot twists. And isn’t that exactly what the most page-turning thrillers do?
The climax of the book is, for me, his pièce de resistance. On first reading it, I was moved and horrified by the tragedy of it all, by the timing of Angel and Tess being reunited just too late. On re-reading it, though, I took greater notice of Hardy’s storytelling choices for ultimate effect. Not least, the genius move of narrating the moment Tess finally snaps from the point of view of an irrelevant character, the landlady of the lodgings in which she and Alec are staying. Through this stranger’s eyes—and literally through a keyhole—we see fragments of Tess and Alec’s final argument. Then, as the landlady returns downstairs (and after a few pages of prolonged suspense, complete with creaking floorboards and a glimpse of Tess running from the house), we get one of the most unforgettable moments of the book. The landlady sees a red stain spreading across the ceiling above her, with “the appearance of a gigantic ace of hearts.” This scene could be straight out of a Hitchcock movie. It’s somehow even more arresting than if we had seen Tess stab Alec first-hand.
Perhaps it was no wonder that Hardy’s climactic scene struck a chord with me at the time of my re-reading. My novel The Downstairs Neighbor, which I was then in the thick of writing, already included lots of scenes in which the residents of a shared building hear and see disturbing fragments of each other’s lives. Tess served as an unexpected reminder of how much potential there is to manipulate perspective and narrative in that kind of set-up. As I wrote subsequent drafts, I gave extra thought as to how I might crank up the unease in my fictional neighbourhood; make my readers worry about characters even when they were out of sight; or use ‘through-the-keyhole’ type moments to confuse and intrigue. You may spot one scene, in particular, which owes a debt to Hardy’s masterclass in suspense—though there is no blood seeping through the ceiling, not literally anyway.
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When Putnam and the Ludlum Estates asked me to write The Treadstone Resurrection, all I knew was that it was a spinoff series that drilled deeper into the shadowy world of Operation Treadstone.
For those unfamiliar with the Ludlum Universe, Operation Treadstone was the covert CIA program that took Jason Bourne and turned him into a genetically modified assassin. A man capable of killing without hesitation or remorse. My contribution was to create a new hero. A protagonist who’d give readers a Bourne-like experience, but not a Bourne rip-off.
At first glance, it seemed pretty straightforward. In fact, as I began developing my protagonist, a former Treadstone operative named Adam Hayes, I told myself that not having Jason Bourne hanging around would make my life easier.
Turns out, that was total bullshit.
You see what I didn’t know at the time was that iconic characters like Jason Bourne cast long shadows. Really long shadows. And no matter what kind of literary sleight of hand I employed, it seemed that Adam Hayes just never measured up. Either he wasn’t smart enough or fast enough or cool enough. I wasn’t sure. But one thing was certain: Adam Hayes was being eclipsed by a man who wasn’t even in the damn book.
The first problem I encountered was straight out of Character Development 101. Mainly, an author needs to create a likeable protagonist. Now, I’m not saying your hero needs to be a choir boy or the kind of person who helps old ladies across the street, but they’ve got to have some sort of moral compass. Only problem was that removing a man’s moral compass was pretty much Operation Treadstone’s bread and butter.
The best approach was the one Ludlum took in The Bourne Identity, when Bourne developed amnesia after being shot in the head. I mean, how good is that? Not only can he not remember being a cold-blooded killer, but you as the reader are immediately sympathetic because the poor guy can’t even remember his name.
Thanks a lot, buddy.
I spent days trying to write my way out of this problem, and when that didn’t work; I went back to the source material. Then I spent another couple of days re-reading the books and re-watching the movies, desperately searching for a solution. When that didn’t work, I knew there was only one thing left to do—start drinking.
I was about halfway through the bottle and my thoughts were wandering around my brain like a dog off a leash when out of nowhere I remembered this article about Carl Jacobi, a German mathematician who believed the best way to clarify your thinking was to restate math problems in inverse form.
Now, I suck at math, so how you restate a math problem in reverse is beyond me, but I got the concept. All this time I’d been trying to out-think Robert Ludlum, create a protagonist who was stronger or smarter than Bourne, but this is not the way. I knew that now, and after jotting my findings on a Post-It Note, it was off to bed.
The next morning when I began writing it was with the idea that whatever Bourne was, Hayes would be the opposite. If Bourne couldn’t remember, then Hayes couldn’t forget. If Bourne was a loner, then Hayes would have a family, but perhaps most important of all, if Jason Bourne was a scalpel then my job was to make Adam Hayes a sledgehammer.
In the end both Jason Bourne and Robert Ludlum are icons for a reason. Mainly because when The Bourne Identity came out in 1980, books like that weren’t even popular. It wasn’t until after the books came out that audiences realized what they’d been missing. The same is true for the big screen. Don’t believe me? Fine, go back and watch The Bourne Identity and Die Another Day, both released in 2002. Then go watch Casino Royale the next Bond movie released in 2006 to see how the 007 franchise was rebranded to match the hyper-realism of the Bourne films.
When you’re done with your film comparison, go pick up a copy of The Treadstone Exile and find out why neither James Bond or Jason Bourne want to meet Adam Hayes in a dark alley.
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The Man Who Didn’t Fly, first published in 1955, is a highly successful novel by an author of distinction whose crime writing career came to a sudden and rather mysterious end when she was at the peak of her powers.
The central puzzle in the story is unorthodox. A plane is engulfed in fire and crashes in the Irish Sea. The wreckage can’t be found. A pilot and three men were on board and their bodies are missing. But four passengers had arranged to go on the flight and none of them can be found. So who was the man who didn’t fly, and what has happened to him? This is such an original mystery that I don’t want to say much more about the plot, for fear of spoiling readers’ enjoyment.
The novel was a strong contender for the very first Gold Dagger Award for best novel of the year given by the Crime Writers’ Association (in those early days of the CWA, the award was known as the Crossed Red Herring Award). In the event, it was pipped by The Little Walls, written by Winston (Poldark) Graham, while Ngaio Marsh’s Scales of Justice and Lee Howard’s Blind Date were also shortlisted. A couple of years later, the novel was again a runner-up, this time to Charlotte Armstrong’s A Dram of Poison, for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award for best novel.
In other words, this was the first book to be shortlisted for the premier crime novel awards in both Britain and the U.S. Julian Symons included the novel in his The Hundred Best Crime Stories, a list compiled in 1958 for the Sunday Times and also published separately, in which he described Bennett as “the wittiest of recent crime novelists, but in other respects the most unpredictable.” As if that were not enough of an achievement, the story was adapted for television in America in 1958, with a cast including the young William Shatner, later to find fame as Captain Kirk in Star Trek, trying out his version of a British accent. Given the success of the book on both sides of the Atlantic, it’s sobering to consider that it has been out of print for a quarter of a century.
Margot Miller was born in Lenzie, Scotland, in 1912, and at the age of fifteen, she emigrated with her family to Australia. In the early 1930s, she spent some time in New Zealand, working on a sheep farm. Much later, she used her first-hand experience of the massive 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake for her mainstream novel That Summer’s Earthquake, set on a sheep farm and published in 1964. She took a job as a copywriter in Sydney, Australia, and moved back to London at the age of twenty-three, where she continued to work in advertising. During the Spanish Civil War, she went to Spain as part of the first British Medical Unit. There she met Richard Bennett, her future husband, who shared her left-wing political sympathies. The Bennetts had four children together.
Margot’s first novel, Time to Change Hats, was published in June 1945 but very clearly set in wartime, with references to the Home Guard and a rural English village invaded by evacuees. She and her two older children had themselves been evacuated, to a village in Cornwall. Her publishers described the book as “a story of drink, a cow, and the fine art of murder.” After the long years of war, they promised readers: “If you are tired of murder in the raw, here is murder in a comedy.” Bennett set the tone in her dedication (“To My Creditors”) as well as in the first line: “It is difficult to become a private detective; the only recognized way is to be a friend of the corpse.”
The narrator is John Davies, who finds his friends disobliging until Della Mortimer responds with a note saying: “I have not been murdered, but may be. A woman called Death has been leaving visiting cards.” This makes for a pleasing start to a story, and the book was well received in Britain and the U.S., although Bennett later commented, with some justice, that her attempt to “try the novelty of combining comedy with the obligatory murder” resulted in the book being too long.
Davies returned in Away Went the Little Fish, published the following year. This mystery displayed Bennett’s developing talent, but she promptly abandoned Davies, and she did not produce another crime novel for another six years. The Widow of Bath was undoubtedly worth the wait. Her skills as a crime writer had matured in the interim and the story blended first-rate characterization with a strong mystery puzzle. Bennett was, like all good writers, self-critical, and she observed that it “had an entirely plausible and novel plot, but it was low on comedy and had too many twists.” This success was followed by Farewell Crown and Good-Bye King, a book written with the accomplishment that marks all her fiction, albeit pivoting on a plot twist that is pleasing but perhaps too easily guessed.
Bennett felt that her last two mystery novels, this one and Someone from the Past were her best. After her near-miss with The Man Who Didn’t Fly, in 1958 she succeeded in winning the Crossed Red Herring Award (it was renamed the Gold Dagger in 1960) with Someone from the Past. The next year, 1959, she was also elected to membership of the Detection Club. She had reached the pinnacle of her profession. But that, as far as crime writing was concerned, was it. Astonishingly, she never published another mystery novel, an extreme example of a crime writer going out at the top.
She had reached the pinnacle of her profession. But that, as far as crime writing was concerned, was it.Instead, she concentrated mainly on writing for film and television. Women Screenwriters: an International Guide describes her as a writer of B-movies, only two of which were actually produced, the comedies The Crowning Touch and The Man Who Liked Funerals. She adapted The Widow of Bath for television and wrote scripts for popular series such as the medical soap opera Emergency Ward 10 and Maigret. Her last known writing credits were in 1968. She wrote scripts for Honey Lane, a cockney forerunner of EastEnders, and a science fiction novel, The Furious Masters, which made less impact than her previous venture into sci-fi, The Long Way Back, published fourteen years earlier.
Why did this gifted and versatile author, who lived until 1980, first give up crime writing, and then apparently stop writing for publication altogether in her mid-fifties? It’s a puzzle to rival anything in her books, and I’m very grateful to Veronica Maughan for casting light on Bennett’s life and career. It seems that Bennett found screenwriting more lucrative than producing novels at a time when she was also raising a family, and that in the 1960s she became increasingly committed to political campaigning. She was closely associated with CND and Amnesty International and in 1964 published The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation, a book which (like her forays into science fiction) reflected her anxieties about nuclear proliferation.
This volume includes a bonus for Bennett fans in the form of a little-known short story, “No Bath for the Browns,” which first appeared in Lilliput in November 1945 and then in the U.S. in The Mysterious Traveler seven years later; I’m indebted to Jamie Sturgeon for supplying me with this information and a copy of the story.
It was thanks to Julian Symons’s Bloody Murder that I first became aware of The Man Who Didn’t Fly, and when I finally tracked a copy down in a library, I enjoyed reading it. Some years later, I was invited to write an introduction to a reprint published in 1993 by Chivers Press in conjunction with the CWA, and again the story entertained me. So this is, strangely, the second time I’ve written an introduction for a reprint of this novel—although I’ve tried to avoid repeating myself! My hope is that other readers will share my enthusiasm for an author who, despite a regrettably slender output, ranks high among British crime novelists of the post-war era.
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The headline pretty much says it all—after three decades of reviewing an incredibly wide variety of crime novels, Marilyn Stasio has retired from writing the New York Times Book Review’s crime column, although she will still contribute occasional reviews to the newspaper.
Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita and frequent contributor to national publications as well as editor of a number of landmark anthologies, is the natural choice to succeed Stasio—Pamela Paul of the NYT calls her the “the most obvious suspect” and we couldn’t agree more. We won’t be seeing her Crime Lady newsletter as much anymore, but we’re looking forward to reading her column—the first one’s up today!
Weinman continues a long tradition of New York Times crime columnists stretching back to the original tastemaker, Anthony Boucher, for whom the mystery world’s largest convention is named.
Check out some of Sarah Weinman’s columns for CrimeReads here.
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I love the show Moonlighting, but everyone loves Moonlighting. To see Moonlighting is, in fact, to love it, though if you didn’t watch it when it aired, from 1985 to 1989 on ABC, there’s a chance you may never have seen it. None of its five seasons are available in digital versions, for purchase or subscription streaming. The handful of DVD editions produced in the early 2000s are out of print. The only way to watch it now is via a mélange of YouTube clips, or to get your hands on those rare physical copies (which is what I did, via many stressful eBay auctions, tortured soul that I am). The eventual obscurity of this show is, as far as I’m concerned, a crisis. Moonlighting, an hour-long mystery series which ran on Tuesday nights, is about the unlikely pairing of a tough, Type-A former model (played by Cybill Shepherd) and a scrappy, motormouth PI (a then-unknown Bruce Willis), who team up to run a detective agency. It is endlessly entertaining. It is full of energy and pathos, of lust and tension, of joy and laughter—a firecracker of a program whose antics feel not only amusing, but also, in a way, moving. Watching it, you can’t help but find it special.
I confess that I didn’t watch Moonlighting when it aired, not having been born until a few years after it ended. But Moonlighting is a timeless, nostalgic show—initially owing much of its personality to Golden Age Hollywood’s screwball comedies and noirs, plus assorted odds and ends from other film and television genres. As the seasons went on, Moonlighting began to experiment with form and aesthetics. There were referential acknowledgements of the camera, extended dance sequences, and one Zeffirelli-esque Shakespearean episode spoken (almost) entirely in iambic pentameter. Moonlighting gave Bruce Willis his start. It gave Cybill Shepherd her comeback. There were glittering evening gowns, big-budget and high-flying climaxes, and zinging banter slung so deftly that you might have forgotten you weren’t watching Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant. There was chemistry so palpable and powerful it’s a wonder why every TV set in America didn’t burst into flames every week.
The story of Moonlighting itself—that is, making Moonlighting—is no less fiery. There were real-life feuds, backstage fireworks, and an always-behind production schedule that promised more episodes than were ever delivered. According to crew members, sometimes scenes would be filmed for an episode that needed to air that night. One crew member remembers handing in a full episode to the studio a half hour before its air time. In the show’s final seasons, its two lead actors became less involved; Cybill Shepherd because she was pregnant, and Bruce Willis because he had made it big. After becoming the (singing) spokesperson for Seagrams Wine Coolers, Willis became an action star in 1988’s surprise hit Die Hard, and thus became extremely unavailable for Moonlighting commitments. To sustain itself, the show began to spotlight its minor characters, two agency employees named Agnes DiPesto (Allyce Beasley) and Herbert Viola (Curtis Armstrong), who, while adorable and charming, didn’t supply the romantic voltage that drew viewers to the show in the first place. But by the time it was cancelled in 1989, after the behind-the-scenes problems had completely engulfed the actual process of making it, it had still accomplished something vanguard, and brought something new and wonderful to television.
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It’s impossible to say all the ways in which Moonlighting influenced television that came after it. Its wacky breaking-the-fourth wall, mile-a-minute jokes, throwaway references that not all audience members might even understand place it in a lineage of television’s smartest, most sophisticated situation comedies. And its particular, zany take on the “lighthearted detective show” gambit was new, too—whenever I watch a show like Psych, I am overcome by the debt owed to Moonlighting. But Moonlighting’s impact was also extremely personal. One of these days I’ll launch an essay contest, a “what Moonlighting means to me” sort of deal. It made an enormous impact. The television critic Howard Rosenberg, who had panned the show upon its release, wrote a correction a few weeks later to apologize for not having understood Moonlighting and to confirm that he had since seen the light. After its startling first season, it had become such an enormous sensation that (according to people who were alive in the 80s) Moonlighting became the ubiquitous conversation topic on Wednesday mornings at work. Two years after it aired, sixty million viewers tuned in to watch the protagonists finally hook up, in a passionate (edgy for prime-time) sex-scene that involved destroying every nearby prop. (Anyone who wants to read about this, more in-depth, should pre-order Scott Ryan’s official book on the series, which is due out in June 2021.)
It’s funny, because the circumstances in which I first saw Moonlighting (on YouTube, in 2014, after my mom had recommended it) were almost relatively meaningless to me. I watched it almost in a vacuum—devoid of any advertisements, hype, the strange (plot-spoiling) TV trailers that were ubiquitous on ABC before its premiere on March 3rd. And yet I was entranced. Not that I ever mind watching something that is a relic of its own era of production, but I didn’t need any context to connect with what I was watching. Moonlighting didn’t feel like a product of the 80s so much as an accumulation of the entire entertainment world that came before it—a world that I already loved.
Moonlighting is about two people, two complete opposites, with absolutely no romantic history, who nonetheless build a rich romantic history for themselves—one scrapped together from a long archive of mainstream pop culture.Moonlighting is about two people, two complete opposites, with absolutely no romantic history, who nonetheless build a rich romantic history for themselves—one scrapped together from a long archive of mainstream pop culture. Our protagonists, Maddie Hayes and David Addison, are “moonlighting” in that neither one of them has any (figurative) business in literally operating a detective business, but they are also “moonlighting” in a more abstract sense, slipping in and out of various love stories… borrowing the best elements from a great syllabus of romances, from William Shakespeare to Howard Hawks to Raymond Chandler, giving themselves the opportunity to enjoy falling in love over and over, in all these many styles and moods.
So often, Moonlighting is a string of fantasies. The show dreamily wonders what its characters would look like—how they would spar, how the sparks would fly—in other aesthetics, and so blinks them there. No greater example of this occurred than when writers Debra Frank and Carl Sautter wrote them an episode shot entirely on real black-and-white film stock entitled “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice.” The show’s creator Glenn Gordon Caron had been informed by the studio to record it in color and have the picture altered later, but he insisted it needed to be recorded on the genuine material from the era they were capturing. The episode, which you can watch in full on YouTube, is marvelously grainy, with dipping, swooping shadows, by cinematographer Gerald Perry Finnerman. Looking at it, it’s nearly impossible to tell that it was made forty-five years after Humphrey Bogart played Sam Spade.
And, emphasizing its investment in film history is its best cameo: the episode is presented to the audience with an introduction from an elderly Orson Welles, who informs the audience (in color) that their screens are going to play the episode in black-and-white, and assures them that the “monochromic, monophonic” transformation they will witness twelve minutes into the broadcast is not a malfunction on the part of their sets. The writing team noted that when Welles recorded his scene, the stage had filled with crew members, quietly, respectfully watching the master at work. Welles would die exactly one week later. It was the last thing he made that would air during his lifetime. It was his last performance.
“The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice” isn’t really a mystery (it’s two dream sequences, one for Maddie and one for David, that imagine outcomes of a cold case from 1946). That’s fine, because Moonlighting isn’t really a detective show, anyway. Yes, there are cases, but just enough. The detective agency is the pretense, and frequently, this shows. Its creator, the twenty-six-year-old Caron, had been given an opportunity to develop some pilots for ABC, and Moonlighting was his third. He had been specifically instructed to write a “boy-girl detective show,” a rote genre which Caron despised. He had written some episodes of Remington Steele (a more traditional mystery show that ran from 1982-1987 and starred a young Pierce Brosnan as a thief who pretends to be a detective to work with a cool lady PI, I KNOW), but didn’t have much experience with the genre. Moreover, he had little interest in writing something that felt so formulaic. But the more he protested, the more leeway the studio gave him. He would later say (in the interview on one of my Moonlighting DVDs) that Moonlighting appeared to break so many rules (of the detective show format, of television in general) because he had never actually known “what the rules were.”
Make no mistake, Moonlighting is about the central relationship between Maddie and David, and the precise nature of this relationship is ultimately the central mystery. When will they realize they are soulmates? Do they already know? From the moment the two meet, their personalities chafe and clash. The theme song, with lyrics written and vocals provided by Al Jarreau, refers to them as “moon” and “sun”—two strong, elemental antipodes cosmically, perhaps even magnetically drawn to one another (I don’t remember eighth grade earth science, bear with me). Maddie is a no-nonsense former model (famous for being the “Blue Moon Shampoo girl”) whose business managers have just (legally) robbed her of her life savings. But she discovers that she owns several businesses (including a detective agency) as tax write-offs. She shuts them down, but when she arrives at the last one, the City of Angels Detective Agency, she can’t manage to do it. That’s because its proprietor, the loud, constantly-quipping wiseass gumshoe David Addison begs her to go into business with him, to turn the company around. A series of misadventures, which leads them to a treasure hunt for hidden Nazi diamonds, ultimately convinces the reluctant Maddie of their compatibility, or at least viability. It’s clear (to everyone) that they, fire and ice, will fall passionately in love. The fun is watching the ardor stall for as long as possible.
Moonlighting is about the central relationship between Maddie and David, and the precise nature of this relationship is ultimately the central mystery.Cybill Shepherd notes, in an interview, that this tension was maintained because she and Bruce Willis were “never lovers” in real life, though by all accounts, mutual attraction was there. Caron had to promise the studio that the relationship would not become romantic right off the bat, in the two-hour pilot, mostly because the executives (who were skeptical about the ever-so-slightly-crass Willis) could not believe that he would ever conceivably be the object of affection for someone as polished as Shepherd. But Caron thought the tension between a sloppier huckster of a man and an elegant woman was essential for the gambit—if he had been making a film version, Caron said, he would have cast Bill Murray and Jessica Lange.
Caron was sure that Shepherd and Willis would have sparkling chemistry, despite not actually having seen them act together (Shepherd, who had signed onto the part after seeing a mere half a script, was terrified that she might be replaced if she did a screen test, so she refused—though she needn’t have worried, because Caron wrote the part with her in mind). Caron’s intuition was on the money: they were a perfect match. (Willis jokes that the real screen test was in the elevator ride on the first day of shooting, where he met Shepherd in person and he wouldn’t stop flirting with her.) Eventually, their mutual interest turned to competitiveness and ire; they wound up fighting before every single (scripted) fight scene. But their friction only seemed to fuel their onscreen dynamic. Back before production had even begun, when Shepherd had read Caron’s script, she excitedly told him that he had inadvertently written “a Hawksian comedy,” and obligatorily within that, a kind of glamorous, witty female leading role bursting with vim and fizzing with repartee. An ardent fan of screwball comedies, she had always dreamed of a part like this.
Maddie Hayes is fierce; she suffers no fools, and this is rotten luck for David most of the time. Maddie’s contribution to the comedy comes from her transformation—her acceptance of and eventual participation in the cockamamie circumstances in which she finds herself and which are often David’s fault—as much as her conviction. She bosses David around because she is serious, but she isn’t so serious that she winds up doing all the (emotional, or literal) labor. David, who appears at times to be an immature clod, is hopelessly clever and relentlessly brave. He’ll jump in the path of a shooter, or leap on top of a moving train. Maddie is brave, too—though she’s more calculating than her partner. In the pilot episode, she scales a level of Los Angeles’s Empire clock tower in a pencil skirt and heels, as calmly as if she’s ascending a staircase at a gala, wearing one of her fabulous gowns.
It’s noteworthy, also, how both of these actors become so funny in their comic parts—Shepherd for her glowering glances and cranky intonations, Bruce Willis for his sound effects and willingness to loudly burst into song (or trill into a harmonica) at a moment’s notice. (Because of all his riveting shenanigans in Moonlighting, I find that Willis’s subsequent, totalizing career as an action star is a bit of a shame, because it has suppressed the roles he might have taken that allow him to be a total ham, and he’s so, so good at that). But, as I’ve said, the funniest part of the show is the rapier-raillery, a volley of puns and cracks so crackling that you’ll rewind your Moonlighting DVD three times to catch everything (or record it with your iPhone and text it to all your group chats, ahem).
Moonlighting’s charms superseded the familiar “battle of the sexes” framework it naturally employed. Though Maddie and David were obviously in love the whole time, the forestalling of their relationship led to them establishing a dependable, beautiful friendship. They were partners, neither with the professional upper-hand nor greater industrial know-how. They were resourceful, kooky, ride-or-die friends. Best friends.
Crew members—writers and other artists—noted that the atmosphere on the show was especially friendly and loving. In part because of Caron’s freewheeling showrunning, which allowed writers to have fun with their scripts and even make obscure jests that audience members might not understand, it became Moonlighting’s ethos that the team wasn’t writing a show to please anyone, least of all network executives—they were doing it to make the kind of show they, themselves, wanted to watch. Caron wound up going to bat for his strange (and often big-budget) production countless times, promising skeptical executives that whatever unconventional turn the show would take, would wind up enormously successful.
Key to the soul of Moonlighting is the knowledge that it is a pastiche,that it is meta. But its reflexivity isn’t merely a gag, it reflects a particular investment. In a show that is so much about teamwork, friendship, love (and also, conversely, “winging it” while shooting for the stars), it became increasingly meaningful to illuminate the relationship between the performers and the crew—that everyone on set was “in” on a joke together, that behind the effortless, dueling bon mots were teams of laughing writers. No episode emphasizes this more than Season Two’s Christmas episode, in which the camera pulls away from David and Maddie to reveal an entire soundstage packed with staffers.
Crew members had received last-minute notice to come to the studio that day, and bring their spouses and children, to make an ensemble appearance. As the camera pulls out away from the two stars, revealing the village it took to make Moonlighting possible, everyone starts to sing, together. The song is the carol “Noel.” Actress Allyce Beasley, who plays the agency’s rhyming secretary Agnes, says of this moment that “there was a feeling in the air you could almost touch,” for its being “so tender and so sweet.” The show’s theme song promises a unification of “moonlighting strangers who met on the way,” and here was a room full of them, once unknown to one another, and now a passionate group of friends. Besides that this scene was formally innovative, it was also sentimental. It was loving. Indeed, as other crew members noted, “every day” making Moonlighting “was special.”
I wish so badly that Moonlighting were accessible via some sort of streaming platform (really, ABC, we are in a *pandemic*… now is the time to do it… it will make so many people furiously gleeful, I promise). I don’t often write essays so bereft of thesis statements—rather, essays in which my thesis statement is really just an adulation or a recommendation. But it seems silly to try to dig far into Moonlight analytically when no one else can feasibly watch it. Instead, this essay serves to ask you to remember it, to try to revisit it, or to do what you can to meet it for the first time. Moonlighting is a show about loving movies. It is a show about loving form, and genre, and history. It is a show, such a niche show, that was made to simply be fun, to make fun with friends and the people you come to love. And for all these reasons, it is nothing short of magic.
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The Valentine’s Day love note from a secret admirer has an evil twin—the “vinegar valentine” from a hidden hater. When mass-produced valentines replaced handmade ones in the Victorian era, satirical valentines were as available as sentimental ones. Vinegar valentines, ancestors of poison pen letters and trolls’ tweets, ridiculed their recipients and sometimes drove them to suicide or assault.
Sending cards with poems of love and friendship to mark Valentine’s Day became common in the 18th century. This practice grew out of an earlier tradition of gift-exchange between lovers on that day. In pre-Victorian England, valentines were handmade and resembled today’s cards in their depiction of flowers or other symbols of love along with sentimental verses. To avoid triteness, poetically-challenged men and women had to resort to annual pamphlets like Every Lady’s Own Valentine Writer, in Prose and Verse for the Year 1794.
Nineteenth century advances in printing and paper production took away the burden of composition, brought inexpensive cards to the market, and spread the custom of sending paper tokens of affection. After 1840, when Great Britain established the Uniform Penny Post system, sending cards became cheap, fast, and anonymous. That, along with the rise in literacy, pushed the annual number of Valentine’s Day cards sent in Great Britain from an estimated 200,000 in the 1820s to nearly eight times that many in the 1870s.
Some of that growth came from card vendors’ introduction of mocking valentines, which could go to neighbors, relatives, and colleagues in all classes and walks of life. Those cards were also available across the Atlantic. The 1847 catalog of A. S. Jordan, an American importer of British valentines, listed cards not only in such traditional categories as Romantic, Courting, and Matrimonial but also Caricature, Spiteful, Lampooning, and even Suicidal. Many people couldn’t resist putting curare on Cupid’s arrow. According to estimates, half of all valentines sent in the United States by the mid-19th century were the spiteful kind. Usually, they were printed on a single side of flimsy paper, not on folded card stock. It was cheaper to insult than to praise.
Vinegar valentines married humorous images to caustic sentiments. The typical format was a caricature of the recipient and a short verse at the bottom. Sometimes women sent anti-valentines to men who were pursuing them. In one, a woman is shown holding a huge lemon inscribed with “To my Valentine.” She extends the lemon to a miniscule man in the lower corner of the card. The verse reads: Tis a lemon that I hand you / And bid you now “skidoo” / Because I love another— / There is no chance for you! Likewise men sent vinegar valentines to damsels who’d dared turn them down or to women they were throwing over.
Even in the absence of a personal relationship, women received valentines mocking them for behavior that would drive away men. Cards derided women for frowning and also for smiling too much. A card with a finely dressed woman in an elaborate hat and a skirt made of peacock feathers reads: Proud beauty you’d best lay aside, / Your nonsense and your peacock pride, / Or none will have the pluck to say, / “Fair lady will you name the day.”
Other valentines condemned women for not dressing well enough. An illustration of an unkempt woman with a stack of books under one arm is accompanied by these words: Pray do you ever mend your clothes / Or comb your hair? Well, I suppose / You’ve got no time, for people say / You’re reading novels all the day.
Phrases like “people say” and “everyone knows” often appear in the mocking valentines. The sender thereby proclaims he is speaking on behalf of the larger community, not out of his own malice. As the women’s suffrage movement grew, so did the number of valentines lampooning women who fought for the right to vote. One of these reads: The vote from me you will not get / I don’t want a preaching suffragette.
Men were also the butt of vinegar valentines. They were criticized for drunkenness, vanity, stinginess, and stupidity. Some vinegar valentines didn’t even bother with poetry, but chided in prose: Everyone thinks you an ignorant lout or Don’t borrow money from your friends. Pitch in and earn it for yourself.
Cruel valentines poked fun at people’s physical characteristics or misfortunes, including their age, excessive weight, or widowed status. The most malicious cards suggested suicide to the recipient. The image on one of them depicts an oncoming train with the verse: Oh miserable lonely wretch! / Despised by all who know you; / Haste, haste, your days to end—this sketch / The quickest way will show you!
Vinegar Valentine’s card, c1875.
Though many sentimental valentines from the 19th century have survived, offensive valentines are rare, presumably because offended recipients burned or trashed them. Some had even stronger reactions to them. In 1847 a New York City woman overdosed on laudanum after receiving a nasty valentine from a man who’d led her to believe she was his love interest. In 1885 a London evening newspaper, the Pall Mall Gazette, reported that a man was charged with attempting to murder his wife: “The pair lived apart, and on St. Valentine’s Day she sent him an offensive valentine. In his anger he purchased a revolver, and meeting his wife last night shot her in the neck. The woman lies in the hospital in a critical condition.” Reports appeared in newspapers of fighting and physical assaults resulting from a vinegar valentine’s “scurrilous lampoons” (Dundee Courier and Argus 1877).
Because of public revulsion, these valentines became less common in the latter part of the century in England. Their popularity declined a few decades later in the United States, about the time when the poison pen letter became the chosen instrument of verbal abuse. Instead of the stock verses of the valentine, the letter allowed for customized venom. In another CrimeReads article, Curtis Evans explores the rash of poison pen letters during this period: The Poison Pen Letter: The Early 20th Century’s Strangest Crime Wave.
Fast forward to our century, when the cyberbully and the troll personify the spirit behind vinegar valentines. Hate springs eternal.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
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As we all know, the worst thing to happen to mainstream American cinema in the 21st century was the near-total abandonment of that most compelling and enigmatic of subgenres: the erotic thriller.
While there have been a few notable additions to the canon over the past two decades (In the Cut, Unfaithful, Gone Girl, When the Bough Breaks…em… The Boy Next Door) the sweaty heyday of the erotic thriller has been over for some time now. Its Golden Age was actually quite a lengthy period, beginning (I would argue) in earnest in 1981 with Bob Rafelson’s remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice and ending in 1996 with the Wachowskis’ Bound. (I will also accept 1998’s Wild Things as an end point, for those of you who prefer a messier climax to your cinematic eras).
What exactly counts as an erotic thriller? I am so glad you asked. Let’s start by clarifying what is does not count. A suspenseful movie, of any stripe, with a graphic sex scene or two thrown in for good measure is not (necessarily) an erotic thriller, for the same reason a soft core porn movie (do these still exist? I truly hope so) with an unusually complicated dramatic plot is not an erotic thriller. A film can be erotic, and thrilling, and still not qualify as an erotic thriller. For instance, I would argue that Terminator is both erotic and thrilling, but it’s not an erotic thriller. Ditto The Piano and Desperado and Queen and Slim and a thousand more.
So how do I know if what I’m watching is an erotic thriller and not just a thrilling piece of erotica or a movie about a killer robot who travels back in time to stop Sarah Connor from having sex with Kyle Reese in a Los Angeles motel room?
Well, broadly speaking, an erotic thriller is a movie in which forbidden/illicit romance or sexual fantasy is central to the core dramatic conflict of the narrative. If the protagonists of a film destroy themselves (physically, morally, spiritually), and one another, because of their insatiable carnal desires, well, there’s a good chance that film is an erotic thriller. (Think of Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, Body of Evidence, Sea of Love, The Last Seduction.) The best of them also make pretty liberal use of melodrama, pay homage to the classic tropes of film noir (femme fatales, double-crossing, chain-smoking, con artists, convoluted plotting, et cetera) and are, at least in their more lurid moments, knowingly over the top. Thunderstorms soundtrack ecstatic lovemaking, expensive-looking clothes are ripped from heaving bodies, spouses are unceremoniously dispatched with blunt household objects, innocent family pets are slain, post-coital treacheries abound.
Now, there are many gloriously unbridled erotic thrillers that you can, and should, seek out for your own
titillationedification (many of them starring Michael Douglas and/or directed by Adrian Lyne), but if you’re a newcomer to the genre, why wouldn’t you begin with the very best, the perfect exemplar of the form, the throbbing loins from which so many lusty imitators have sprung? I speak of course of Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 neo-noir morality tale of sex and betrayal in a Floridian coastal town: Body Heat.Partially inspired by the 1944 film Double Indemnity (itself an adaptation of James M. Cain’s 1943 novella of the same name), Body Heat—which Kasdan wanted to have “the intricate structure of a dream, the density of a good novel, and the texture of recognizable people in extraordinary circumstances”—is a hallucinatory masterpiece of pure filth. It’s the story of Ned Racine (William Hurt, sporting one of cinema’s great pornographic mustaches), a bored small-time lawyer and amiable womanizer who spends his days shooting the breeze (or lack thereof) with his exuberant prosecuting attorney pal, Peter Lowenstein (a tap-dancing Ted Danson), and his nights picking up cocktail waitresses on the Miranda Beach boardwalk. It’s on one of those lazily prowling nights that Ned catches the eye of Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner, in her very first role), a breathy, Bacallian beauty married to a wealthy-but-domineering older man (Richard Crenna, aka Colonel Trautman from the Rambo movies). Ned and Matty engage in some delightfully R-rated banter over snow cones, fall into bed together, and, before you can say “we can’t go on like this,” come up with a plan to murder Matty’s shitty husband.
Even if you took a censor’s machete to the sex scenes, Body Heat would still be a top drawer noir (albeit a rather brief one). The script is dynamite, the third act twists are twisty, the lush cinematography and Sax n’ Synth (n’ wind chime) soundtrack combine to create a palpable mood of languid, sleazy peril. The supporting roles—from Danson’s ebullient-but-concerned lawyer foil to Micky Rourke’s sweetly loyal ex-con—are remarkably well-developed. And then there’s the sweat. Everyone in this film sweats constantly, vigorously, and visibly, regardless of setting, situation, or time of day. The denizens of Miranda Beach, a town suffering through both a merciless heatwave and an epidemic of broken air conditioners, are bathed in sweat 24/7. It beads from their foreheads in courtrooms, stains the backs and armpits of their linen suits in diners, coats every inch of their skin as they stare through the black distance at an old hotel engulfed in flames. They even sweat while reclining naked in bathtubs full of ice water. They’ve all very hot, and very bothered, and none more so than Matty and Ned.
Matty: My temperature runs a couple of degrees high, around a hundred. I don’t mind. It’s the engine or something.
Ned: Maybe you need a tune up.
Matty: Don’t tell me. You have just the right tool.Every time Hurt and Turner appear on screen together, clothed or otherwise, the titular heat could melt steel beams. Right from the jump they’ve got the kind of uninhibited, almost vulgar chemistry of two people who know exactly where things are headed. They’re wolfish with one another’s bodies, they way they eye and salivate and ultimately devour. Even the manner in which they run their fingers over one another’s torsos in the spent aftermath calls to mind apex predators idly licking wounds sustained in a tussle. The looming specter of Matty’s mob-affiliated husband finding out doesn’t deter them. Being caught in flagrante by Matty’s horrified niece can’t cool their jets. The (extremely justified) suspicions of the entire town aren’t enough to put even an temporary kibosh on their nocturnal sexcapades. It’s not love, not really. It’s lust, hot-blooded and unquenchable and doomed.
The below scene, perhaps more than any other committed to celluloid, encapsulates what makes erotic thrillers—at their sexy, explosive, ludicrous best—so damn entertaining. In the minutes preceding, Ned has invited himself over to listen to Matty’s collection of wind chimes (classic move), reiterated his debauched intentions, and been shown the door. What Ned does next, well, watch for yourself and then tell me you don’t want to spend two sultry hours drifting through this iconic American fever dream.
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These are dark days for romance. Even if you are the type who usually buys into the schmaltzy hullaballoo of Valentine’s Day, you’re probably not feeling too lovey-dovey this year (and if you are, what the hell is wrong with you?) With the pandemic still raging and date-night hotspots shuttered, many of you will no doubt settle in to watch a movie at home, probably one all about love and romance, through which you can pine and swoon and live vicariously.
But all that’s likely to do is make the current day reality more bitter. So, instead of watching some cheap, over-lit Hallmark movie or Vaseline-lensed classic, why not embrace the darkness by indulging in something mean, sour and bloody?
To quote Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield, and these 10 films present romance as a war of attrition.
Double Indemnity (1944)
I wanted to stick to lesser known films for most of this list, but you simply can’t leave out THE great film noir romance of all time. The moment amoral insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) lays eyes on the slinky ankle chain worn by bored housewife Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwick), he knows they’re both toast. This doesn’t stop him from engaging in a torrid affair with her, nor going along with a plan to murder her husband and pocket the insurance money. Walter is doomed from the start, but he’s no simple sap—even though Phyllis is using him, it’s obvious that the heat they conduct is very real. It’s so real, in fact, that it can’t help but burn both of them down in the end.
Duel in the Sun (1946)
The first film that Martin Scorsese remembers seeing—and the one that made him realize he wanted to make films—this lush Technicolor western melodrama from King Vidor stars Jennifer Jones as the beautiful Pearl, a half white, half Native American girl taken in by her extended family after her father murders her mother in a fit of jealous rage. Her life doesn’t get any easier once she’s living with amongst her wealthy rancher cousins, as a ‘love’ triangle develops between herself and the family’s two grown scions of the family, conscientious lawyer Jesse (Joseph Cotton) and sociopathic scoundrel Lewt (Gregory Peck, who was even better at playing bastards than he was at playing heroes). It’s Lewt that declares Pearl as his own, jealously killing anyone who attempts to come between them. Although she despises him for his evil, abusive ways, she can’t help but love him back. This leads to a final desert gun battle between man and woman that was way ahead of its time in 1946 and which has lost none of its bloody, mythic power since.
The Night Porter (1974)
Italian director Liliana Cavani’s film about the doomed rekindling of a sadomasochistic affair between a concentration camp survivor (Charlotte Rampling) and a former SS officer (Dirk Bogarde) was initially derided as exploitation and even pornography, but it has since been recognized as a provocative masterpiece that gives full weight to personal and historical trauma of the Nazi regime, while conveying the complex psychological toll that fascism takes on both its victims and perpetrators. In her essay for the Criterion Collection, professor and author Gaetana Marrone explains that the “transgressive couple” at the film’s center represent predetermined roles assigned to them by power; their strength is to accept them.”
Natural Enemies (1979)
A Manhattan magazine editor (the recently departed Hal Holbrook) wakes up one morning and decides that he is going to murder his entire family and himself. He then spends his last day on Earth indulging his frustrated sexual appetites and recounting—to anyone who will listen—the long, painful dissolution of his marriage (which he uses to try to justify his homicidal fantasies). Back home, his clinically depressed wife (Louise Fletcher) starts to piece together his plan. This leads to an emotional confrontation between the two in which she reveals that, in spite of all the emotional turmoil they’ve gone through—and despite the very real danger he poses to her and their children—she still loves him. Is this enough to avert tragedy? Well, it is a ‘70s drama—and a particularly disturbing one, even by that era’s standards—so you can probably guess the answer.
Bad Timing (1980)
Nic Roeg’s Vienna-set mystery charts the tumultuous relationship between a neurotic, controlling psychiatrist (Art Garfunkel—yes, that Art Garfunkel) and his free-spirited lover (Theresa Russell), who’s just tried to commit suicide. The film’s promotional material dubbed it a ‘Terrifying Love Story’, while its own distributor called it “a sick film for sick people.” The latter description may be debatable, but the former is entirely accurate, as this dizzying tale of obsession, control and guilt builds to one of the most horrifying revelations in all of cinema.
Possession (1981)
Where even to begin this begin with this surreal arthouse nightmare—my personal favorite film of all time—from exiled Polish director Andrzej Zulawski? An emotional howl into the void following the collapse of his own marriage, Zulawski’s film tells the story of a British spy (Sam Neill) who returns to his estranged family in West Berlin only to discover that his wife (Isabelle Adjani, giving the greatest performance in all of horror) is planning to leave him for a mysterious lover. As husband and wife are driven into a state of mutual psychosis by their shared love and hate of one another—a psychosis that manifests through restaurant-clearing brawls, massive car wrecks, self-mutilation, murder and possibly even nuclear Armageddon—it becomes increasingly clear that there are powerful, inhuman forces behind it all.
The Hot Spot (1990)
An early entry in the 90’s noir resurgence, Dennis Hopper’s adaptation of Charles William’s ‘50’s pulp novel Hell Hath No Fury sees a would-be bank robber (Don Johnson) settle in to a dusty Texas ghost town and pose as a used car salesman while he plots a grand heist. Before he even gets settled in his cheap motel, he’s fallen into a love triangle with a kind, virginal co-worker (Jennifer Connelly) and his boss’s cruel, oversexed wife (Virginia Madsen). All the time, Johnson’s character struggles to retain some semblance of morality, pining for salvation through the love of a good woman even as he gives his body over an evil hellcat he knows will destroy him. The film plays with and subverts the well-worn Virgin/Whore trope by ultimately sending our anti-hero off into the sunset with the woman he despises, but also recognizes as his true soulmate.
The Living End (1992)
Stepping away from breeder couples for a moment, we come to the debut feature from indie iconoclast Greg Araki, a radical queer spin on the lovers-on-the-run genre. Here, said lovers are a pair of HIV-positive gay men—a slacker film critic (Craig Gilmore) and a hunky homicidal drifter (Mike Dytri)—who meet by chance after the latter kills three gay bashers in self-defense. When he later murders yet another homophobe and a cop, the two embark on a road trip to New York, although their combative nature and violently opposed worldviews—one attempts to find some meaning in life, while the other is more than happy to embrace the random chaos of the universe—make it so that they don’t get far.
Szamanka (1996)
We return to Andzrej Zulawski, just as he returned to his native Poland five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, for this visceral and hallucinatory tale about strangers—a brutish anthropology professor (Bugoslaw Linda) and a mysterious young student known only as The Italian (Iwona Petry)—who find themselves in a sadomasochistic affair, one that kicks off randomly but which quickly becomes literally all-consuming. A spiritual successor to Zulawski’s Possession, Szamanka (She-Shaman) mostly brooked comparisons to Last Tango in Paris upon its release. This is understandable, given its similar premise and graphic sexual content, but it’s a far more transgressive and extreme examination of sex and gender roles, thanks in large part to the script from Polish author and feminist Manuela Gretkowska.
In the Cut (2003)
Directed by Jane Campion and adapted from Susana Moore’s novel of the same name, In the Cut is a by turns dreamy and gruesome story of love, infatuation, misogyny and murder. Meg Ryan stars as an introverted New York college professor and potential police witness who falls into a passionate (and surprisingly kinky) affair with a gruff homicide detective (Mark Ruffalo). Even as the tryst leads to a sexual awakening, she begins to suspect her new lover—sensitive one moment, frighteningly aggressive the next—may in fact be the person responsible for decapitating several women throughout the city.
There are a handful of films from the past two decades that knowingly subvert the tropes of classic noir and psychological/erotic thrillers—Gone Girl is an obvious example—but this one is the strangest and most beguiling for the way it filters the romantic partner/potential killer premise—a favorite of Hitchcock’s—through a fairy tale lens and female gaze. While the film has its cult of admirers and champions, it deserves to be far better known, and there’s no better time to discover or rediscover it than this Valentine’s Day.
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There’s another long weekend coming up in the U.S. With a large portion of the country currently under snow, lockdown, or both, and what with the President’s Day mattress sales not what they used to be, how’s a body supposed to spend its time? I’d recommend traveling vicariously to Paris to hang out with a master of disguise and gentleman thief. Or going to Brazil, if you like folkloric mystery. Or possibly Barcelona, circa 1960. What I’m saying is don’t despair, you have options, and most of them are on Netflix. Here are a few recommendations for your long weekend international thriller binge.
If you’ve always want to visit Paris with a gentleman thief…
Lupin
Seasons: 1
Stream On: NetflixIf you haven’t already watched Netflix’s breakout hit, this weekend would probably be a good time to catch up on a series a good portion of the world has lately enjoyed. The mixture of breezy caper vibes, surprisingly powerful backstory, and embedded social critique will push you through several episodes in a go, and if that’s not enough, Omar Sy’s charisma should do the rest. This is one of the more innovative, welcome takes on classic mystery to come around in quite a while.
If you’ve ever wondered how the heroin trade works in Spain…
Hache
Seasons: 2
Stream On: NetflixSo the first question you have to ask yourself is this: do I want to spend the weekend in 1960s Barcelona? If the answer is yes, then Hache, newly released on Netflix, is your best mode of transportation / time travel. It’s primarily a lush and gritty period piece (a rare combo) with a cool setting. Beyond that, if you want more, it’s about a sex worker who gets caught up with a heroin kingpin and climbs the ranks of his outfit. Are you going to find some of that depiction troubling? Probably. But again, this is Barcelona. Book it.
If you’re into folklore and also Brazilian people…
Invisible City
Seasons: 1
Stream On: NetflixLike a few other shows that have come around lately, Invisible City is based on the premise that a culture’s folk and fairy tales are, essentially, real. Only in Invisible City, those folktales are based in Brazilian culture, so for at least this viewer, there’s kind of a pleasant buzz of disorientation. It’s hard to know what’s going on, what’s a reference and what’s not, if you’re not steeped in the culture, but that gives the series an entertaining adventure aspect. The plotline is this: an environmental officer with a mysterious past comes across a new crime that warps his sense of reality and leads him into the realization that a bunch of mythical creatures are running around our dimension, seen but unseen. A murder investigation leads him that interstitial world. It’s pretty gritty at times, with a dash of whimsy.
If at this point you think even Canada would be exotic…
Tin Star
Seasons: 3
Stream On: Amazon PrimeTin Star, which is that Tim Roth-in-Canada thriller you’re always coming across on Amazon, just released its third and final season, which has been dubbed Tin Star: Liverpool, and that about sums it up. For a finale, the show traded in arguably one of its best assets, the backdrop of the Canadian Rockies, but in exchange for some pretty interesting Liverpool scenes. If you’re coming to this new, just focus on Roth. He’s giving a big performance, one that sometimes isn’t equaled by the show around him, which has some strange tonal shifts, but if you just want some intense acting and vivid scenery, Tin Star might be what you want this weekend. And for Liverpool fans, the new season may be better than watching the team spiral out of its title defense.
If you went to Paris and thought, this place needs more catacombs…
Balthazar
Seasons: 3
Stream On: Acorn TVIf you’re in the mood for something kind of suave and French and you’re not tired of semi-procedurals about forensic pathologists, or you are but you don’t really care and you just want to visit Paris, then boy have I got the show for you. Balthazar just dropped its third season in the US, and it’s a pretty enjoyable binge watch, with some nice buddy-investigator rapport at the center of the story.
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Vienna was giving Norah the cold shoulder. When she’d visited with Alex in the summer, she’d been enchanted; it had seemed to her a city with a mind of its own, unlike anywhere she’d been before. That felt like light years ago.
Everything seemed so bleak—a Munchian vision of a city; a dark, urban forest, warped and menacing. The gloom pervaded Norah’s empty at and the dingy streets. Passers-by stared grimly at their phones; melancholy coated everything like a film of grease. And it was fucking freezing.
Norah bought an Austrian paper, a German paper and a packet of cigarettes in the newsagent’s across the road, and sat down with them in the corner bistro. By the time she took her first sip of coffee, the shock of memory aroused in her by Theresa had subsided a little, and she could turn her mind to the day ahead.
Although Norah’s job wouldn’t officially begin for two weeks, her new boss had asked her to go and meet him that morning. They’d talked at length on the phone, but this would be their first real meeting,
and Norah was looking forward to it; she couldn’t wait to get back to work, even if she was a little nervous. She knew she was a good journalist; she’d won prizes for some of her features, and there had even been attempts to headhunt her. But all that had been before what she secretly thought of as the disaster. Coming after that, the job offer from Vienna had seemed too good to be true; she was almost afraid it would turn out to be a cruel joke.
Mira Singh, the publisher, had rung her in person. Norah’s feature on women soldiers in Afghanistan had caught her interest; she’d gone on to read all Norah’s latest work and been impressed by her keen eye and her choice of topics. Mira was involved in setting up a new weekly magazine in Vienna and wanted Norah on board. The idea, she explained, was to forget about trying to keep up with the internet and publish an old-school high-quality magazine headed by an out- standing team of editors and filled with well-researched articles by prestigious writers.
It sounded perfect to Norah. Where was the catch? Did Mira realise Norah was lumbered with a lawsuit? Mira only said that she’d read the article in question. She was looking for a woman with attitude and thought she’d found one in Norah. Not wanting to sound overeager, Norah had asked for a day to think it over. Then she’d accepted. What else could she have done?
And here she was.
The magazine offices were in the touristy part of town, not far from St Stephen’s Cathedral, on one of those big shopping streets lined with fast-food outlets and clothing chains that sell more or less the same things the world over. Norah knew the area from one of her previous visits to Vienna; it was packed from early till late with tourists and those who lived off them. There were tour groups on their way to the cathedral, con artists, buskers, teenagers taking selfies on their phones, and here and there an exasperated local who actually wanted to get somewhere. And there were beggars and homeless people, their calls echoing through the streets like the cries of ghosts. The living shuddered at their voices, but pretended not to hear them.
Some years ago, Norah had wanted to write a feature on homeless minors, but hadn’t been able to persuade her boss. Maybe it was time to give it another go. She lit a cigarette and walked down the street, thinking hard. Her tongue probed a molar that was throbbing dully, as if the tooth couldn’t make up its mind whether or not to ache properly. That was the last thing she needed. She wanted to go to the shops that evening, not the dentist.
Outside H&M, a nondescript girl was sitting cuddled up to an Alsatian with a sign in front of her. I’m hungry. Early twenties at most, reddish-brown hair under a black beanie, military parka, chewed fingernails. Next came a man of sixty-odd with finely drawn features behind a pair of glasses, and then a guy with blond dreads—presumably the local psycho—who sat there, mumbling away to himself and scrounging off the passers-by, occasionally turning on a passing woman and hurling obscene abuse at her with astonishing inventive- ness and persistence.
Then Norah saw the woman—an elderly woman, with striking wrinkles and clear, bright blue eyes. The kind of face that won photographers prizes, if they were lucky enough to spot it in a remote mountain village.
She wasn’t sitting or kneeling on the ground like the other beggars, nor was she at the edge of the street. She was standing right in the middle of the pedestrian precinct with a small brass dish in her hand, apparently unfazed by the milling crowd. It was incredible. This woman—a good six foot, Norah guessed—stood in everybody’s way, and yet nobody bumped into her; the bustle of the city washed over her like water lapping a river island. Now and then a couple of coins chinked in the dish, but she didn’t say thank you, she just stood there motionless—upright and forbidding in the steady ow of people. A rock, a black tower. Only her eyes moved. Norah wondered what story she had to tell.
Sebastian Berger, Norah’s new boss, was a tall, strongly built man in his fifties, with still-dark hair combed back off his face. He was wearing jeans and a tweed jacket that made him look rather donnish. What really struck Norah, though, was his expression. It said, You are not the way I imagined you. But she was used to that. With her ne- featured face and petite figure, she was regularly mistaken for the rookie, even now, in her mid-thirties. When she’d had photos taken for the various web portals where her writer’s pro le was posted— photos that Sebastian Berger had presumably seen—she’d deliberately worn dark clothes and a serious expression, and then chosen the pictures that made her look the most grown-up. In real life, of course, such tricks were no use to her, and she’d realised early in her career that if she wanted to be respected, she had to be tougher than most, and work harder. Berger, to his credit, soon regained his stride. He offered Norah coffee and they resumed the conversation they’d begun on the phone about potential topics for articles. When Norah took the lift down two hours later, her mind was whirling with ideas. It felt good to be going back to work.
Outside, it had warmed up a little. Norah had planned to go and get Austrian number plates for her car and, if that didn’t take all day, to look for some furniture afterwards. She unbuttoned the grey winter coat she was wearing over a black woollen dress. It was mild, almost springlike; the sun shone in a deep blue sky. All was brightness in this city. No shadows anywhere. She paused for a moment to watch the crowds of people ploughing their way down the pedestrian precinct, lured out by the glorious weather.
Norah soaked it all in: shoppers, tourists, police, neon signs, pigeons, cigarette ends, paper cups, the smell of deep-frying, the clatter of heels. A man touting roses, the distant clip-clop of hoofs from the tourist carriages, fountains, balloon-sellers, ice-cream cones and popcorn, smartphone zombies and con artists. She could feel herself being swallowed up and tried to get along more quickly, but it was useless; an enormous tour group even pushed her back a little. Norah abandoned all politeness and began to elbow her way through, holding the bag with the vehicle papers close to her body. She dodged a rickshaw cyclist who, for reasons best known to himself, seemed to think it a good idea to chauffeur his passengers through this mayhem. Then she realised that her phone was ringing. She shed it out of her bag and gave a start when she saw the screen. Alex. They hadn’t spoken since Norah had moved out—she’d stayed in a hotel for a few weeks before coming to Vienna, and neither of them had made any attempt to get in touch. Norah stared at the screen, feeling cold. Should she pick up or wait for her voicemail to kick in? Then it was too late; Alex had given up. Norah slid her phone into her coat pocket and raised her eyes.
The old woman she had seen begging earlier was standing right in front of her, so tall that Norah had to look up at her. She reached into her bag and pulled out her wallet to put a few euros in her dish.
‘You bring death,’ the woman said, her husky voice calm.
Norah frowned. ‘What did you say?’
The woman seemed not to hear.
‘Flowers wither,’ she said. ‘Clocks stop. Birds fall dead from the sky.’
Her grave stare was still fixed on Norah. Her hair was darker, her eyes brighter and her wrinkles deeper than Norah had realised. The pale turquoise of her irises was flecked with specks of red, like the tiny particles of blood in the yolk of an egg.
It suddenly occurred to Norah that the woman was mentally ill.
‘On February 11 you will kill a man called Arthur Grimm in the Prater,’ the woman continued. ‘With good reason. And of your own free will.’
Norah didn’t know what to say. She had just opened her mouth to speak when someone or something rammed into her from behind, making her stumble and drop the papers she was carrying. A few loose sheets slipped to the ground and she stooped to pick them up.
By the time she had straightened back up, the woman had vanished. Norah looked about her in bewilderment. A group of Chinese tourists shoved past her, then a young couple with a pram. Where had she gone? Desperately scanning the street, Norah pushed her way between two football fans in Rapid Vienna scarves. The woman was so tall she ought to have stood out above the crowd, but she was nowhere to be seen; it was as if the earth had swallowed her up. Shame, thought Norah, she looked like a woman with a tale to tell.
But it had been slightly unnerving.
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Thirty years ago, July
“Come on, Erik!” Josh’s sneakers disappeared over a mussel-encrusted rock ridge left exposed by the low tide. His voice echoed behind him. “We have to get there and back again before the tide turns!”
Like Erik didn’t know that. He pulled himself up the ridge, puffing, and saw Josh’s tracks in the dark sand, the strides long, the toes dug in. He was running.
Bastard. Erik savored the forbidden word in his mind and even thought about saying it out loud. No one was around to hear, or wash out his mouth with soap, or spank him, or send him to bed without his supper. Which his mother lost no opportunity to do because she thought he was too fat.
Instead, with a heavy sigh, he hoisted himself up over the ridge of rocks covered in barnacles, mussels, and kelp, and slid down the other side to land in the damp black sand on his backside. The edge of a mussel shell had caught his finger.
The wound was bleeding sluggishly, dripping down from his hand. He knew better than to say anything, but he heard Josh laughing, and looked up to see the other boy vanish around the next ridge of rock, his excited voice lingering after him. “Wait till you see, Erik! It is the coolest thing ever!”
It was low tide on an already broad, gently sloping beach that was half sand and half mud, with a narrow section of tumbled gravel between sand and goose grass. The beach stretched down to a glassy calm of sun-washed blue. This side of the bay was backed by two bluffs, one at water’s edge and another miles inland. Both were made of glacial silt that had spent epochs washing down Cook Inlet to pack down and pile up, interrupted by seams of black coal. On the other side of the Bay the bright teeth of the mountains gnawed at the lighter blue of the sky. Behind them the summer sun was setting somewhere behind Redoubt, turning the sky toward the pale twilight that passed for night during summer in Alaska. The tide was about to turn and the mud bloomed with a thousand spurts of water, the razor clams digging in beneath the incoming edge of the water. The salt air stung his nostrils and Erik drank it in with every labored breath, watching the shadows lengthen and the light fade. Even at the age of ten he understood that he lived in a beautiful place, and was grateful for it.
“Erik!”
Josh’s scream jerked him around in a circle and yanked him into motion up the beach without volition or thought.
“Erik! Help!”
Erik had never heard Josh’s voice sound like that, a high, thin edge of fear that knifed right through him.
“No, don’t—Erik, help, Erik, no don’t please don’t Erik help!”
There was the sound of a thunk, exactly like a cleaver coming down on a roast when they butchered out their yearly moose, and Josh was cut off in mid scream.
“I’m coming, Josh! I’m coming!” He tried to run faster but the sand gave way beneath his feet and it was like postholing through deep snow. He rounded the outcropping of black rock, gasping, his chest heaving, his heart pounding so loudly in his ears he couldn’t hear anything else but it. “Josh! Josh! Josh—”
There was movement to his left from behind the outcropping and as he started to turn his head to see what it was there was another thud and a kind of explosion of white light followed by a feeling of falling down a deep, dark hole, down, down, down…
And then nothing.
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There is no one to whom a blue dress has meant more to his career than author Walter Mosley, with the possible exception of his biggest fan, President Bill Clinton.
Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress had been critically acclaimed prior to Clinton telling the world Mosley was one of his favorite writers. But after Clinton’s endorsement, Mosley’s books traveled from bookstore mystery shelves in the back of the store, to storefront windows and entryway co-op tables in less time than it takes to complete a book signing.
Not since President John Kennedy sang the praises of Ian Fleming, the father of James Bond, has an author’s work been jumpstarted so successfully. And Mosley started at a younger age and had a much longer writing career to build on that slightly delayed initial success.
Clinton even invited Mosley to dine at the White House after reading Devil in a Blue Dress.
It is hard to believe the New York Times bestselling author (his latest is Blood Grove, out this month) never intended to become a writer. For the first half of his life, he was a computer programmer and business consultant, and making damn good money at it. Writing? He hadn’t given it much thought since he was a child.
And then he hit 34.
He’d always considered life’s possibilities. He grew up in Southern California where, he says, “you’re always told you can do anything you want.” Some people actually believed that. Walter Mosley sure did. So, when his computer programming career went emotionally wanting, he thought about what he’d like to do—not with the rest of his life—but with the next phase of his life. Possibilities, remember.
And then it came to him—a single line of prose straight out of the blue (“blue” being the operative word for this new beginning): “On hot sticky days in southern Louisiana the fire ants swarmed.”
He liked it, thought it had a rhythm, potential, and of course, possibilities. For what, he had no clue, but it stuck with him and suddenly sparked a passion he hadn’t felt since he was a child. “The sentence popped into my head and I said, ‘Oh, I can do that.’ I think it has something to do with being from California.”
He suddenly wanted to write fiction.
While it may have taken him 34 years to find his muse, he’d always been the type to take a chance. After all, a guy who can do anything has the personality to take a lot of chances in life. “I think there’s a lot more freedom in our lives than we know. I think it is a scary thing to say, ‘I’m going to leave where I am and go somewhere else.’”
He graduated from West Los Angeles’ Hamilton High School and then took a year to tour Europe. He later moved across the country from his southern California home to attend Goddard College in Vermont to “get as far away as possible from where I was from.”
His impression of Goddard? “If most schools are liberal arts, it was radical arts.”
He dropped out to become a computer programmer and later received a degree from Johnston State College in Vermont. From there he went to graduate school at the University of Massachusetts, studying political theory, but left without a doctorate. It was then back to Boston as a computer programmer, but he encountered racial hostility.
“Boston back then was so racist, it was unbelievable, so I went to New York…I loved it.”
There, he programmed computers for an insurance company before becoming a consultant for Mobile Oil.
“I never liked being a programmer. I didn’t hate it…It occurred to me over time, I would like to be able to start and complete a short story…that was my goal.”
He attended The Writer’s Workshop, run by poet Phil Schulz. “He had this class in his house in Greenwich Village. I was learning more and more about writing…Then I went to City College, because there’s a graduate creative writers’ program there.”
He published a short story, but his instructor, famed Irish author Edna O’Brien, looked at his work and urged him to go big and write a novel.
He followed her advice and wrote a novella, Gone Fishin’. “People looked at that and said, ‘Who’s going to read this?’…Everyone turned it down. They said it was not commercial. What they meant was white people don’t read black writers.”
“It wasn’t that my first manuscript wasn’t’ publishable,” Mosley says, “it’s just that publishing couldn’t imagine it at that time.”
Years later, after he was famous, he decided not to take an advance so Black Classic Press, a small independent Baltimore publisher run by former Black Panther Paul Coates, could publish Gone Fishin’. The book that wasn’t commercial sold well.
While he was still attending the City College Creative Writing Program in Harlem, Mosley began writing his first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress. He was still working two to three days a week as a consultant and writing the remainder of the week. Novelist Frederic Tuten, his mentor who also was in charge of the writing program, gave Mosley’s manuscript to his agent, Gloria Loomis. She loved it.
“She gave me notes and it made me think of all of these other things.” Mosley rewrote it. When he finished, he went back to consulting with Mobil Oil while Loomis circulated the manuscript among publishers and quickly realized it was in demand, so she put it up for auction. W.W. Norton Publishing called Mosley at work and offered him a two-book contract. The next day the Norton folks took Mosley to lunch. The following day Mosley called his boss at Mobil Oil. Before he could say a word, his boss broke in. “Walter, we know. You quit. Good for you.”
Mosley called his Dad to tell him the news. “My father was just flabbergasted. He said, ‘really? You did it!’ It was probably my happiest moment.”
“This is the best time of your life,” Tuten told him. “This is the time when everything is experimentation and growth and advancing.”
“He was right,” Mosley says. “It’s not about getting a job and the right title. It’s about doing something I love just because I love it. That was a great moment. And I’m still thankful for it.”
While it took him only a few months to write his first published novel, it had taken him more than three decades to get there. “I always say it’s really good to come to it later. Writing is so much about experience…Music, interpretation, painting, writing. You have to believe what you’re writing. For so many people who are really young, you haven’t had that much experience yet.”
But it’s also about writing talent, and just picking up Devil in a Blue Dress and reading the first few pages clearly shows Mosley is a superlative wordsmith. He always listened to stories growing up. “My father was a great storyteller. It’s kind of a performance thing. When I was at City College, I always took a poetry workshop. I’m not a good poet, but poetry teaches you everything, especially rhythm,” he says. “Most people who write prose don’t pay as close attention to language.”
Mosley sure does. Look at the second paragraph of chapter one of Devil in a Blue Dress: “I had spent five years with white men, and women, from Africa to Italy, through Paris, and into the Fatherland itself. I ate with them and slept with them, and I killed enough blue-eyed young men to know that they were just as afraid to die as I was.”
To this day, Mosley regularly attends poetry readings. “It’s possible that there will be something in there I learned. It wasn’t a conscious thing. I just love writing…The fact I found writing, is so wonderful.”
And yet he’s not a fanatic about reading everything he possibly can to become a better writer. “I don’t believe that at all,” he says.
What he does believe in is taking chances. After he experienced success, he went to the president of City College with an idea: create a two-year publishing course for minorities. “I was arguing, it’s so white.”
“Racism, like sexism,” he says, “is first and foremost in the pocketbook. Publishing is changing a little bit, but it’s still very bad. There are too few people of color…People just don’t pay attention to you until they have to. When it’s about to cost you money or influence, you change.”
You could say he literally helped to begin to change the complexion of publishing, helping more skilled people of color to enter the business. He is not afraid to take a stand. When PEN-International, the worldwide organization for poets, essayists and novelists, balked at hiring people of color, he quit the organization.
“Poets, Essayists and Novelists was all white people, at least the U.S. version,” Mosley says. “I said the next person we hire has to be a person of color. Their lawyer said that would be racism. They said the first qualified would be hired.”
In 2002, he walked away from PEN. For good.
And while racism bothers him, “I’m not going to allow my life to fall apart because of it…I’m not going to spend my time twisting my guts around.”
His Dad once told him, “Walter look, if you want to do as well as the white man at work, you’ve got to come in a half hour earlier and leave a half hour later. If you want to do better, you’ve got to come in an hour earlier and leave an hour earlier.”
“I said to my Dad that’s not fair. He says, ‘that’s right.’”
“If you’re Black in America, you just see America so much more clearly than others see it because you’re in that battle all the time…I know their history better than they know it because I know my part of history and they don’t believe it.”
Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, his most famous protagonist, navigates the color line separating black and white cultures in Los Angeles. Mosley began his first published novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, with Easy being hired by a white man to find a woman who frequents Black jazz clubs—places white men feared to go. Mosley used Easy to bridge the divide, which gave him a great opportunity to explore racism with his protagonist. But he didn’t stop there. Easy doesn’t account for even half of Mosley’s books, most of which explore social issues wrapped around a good story.
And while he tackles long-standing, difficult racial issues in his work, his first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, took him just over two months to write, it was grabbed by the first agent who saw it and it was swiftly snatched up at auction. Like his most famous protagonist, Walter Mosley made it all look Easy.
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Devil In a Blue Dress
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Start to Finish: 2 ½ months
I want to be a writer: 34
Age When First Published: 38
Experience: “Gone Fishin‘” manuscript, short stories, computer programmer
Writing Time: Two months and two weeks
Agents Contacted: 1
Agent Search: Novelist Frederic Tuten submitted to his agent.
First Novel Agent: Gloria Loomis
First submission to publisher: 1989
Time to Sell Novel: Two weeks (auction)
First Novel Editor: Gerry Howard
First Novel Publisher: W.W. Norton
Inspiration: “Emile Zola, told history of France in novels, I wanted to do that for black people in California. You don’t exist in history unless someone writes fiction about you.”
Advice to Writers: “Write every day. Write every day. Write every day. You’ll discover things as you write and work with the unconscious. If you don’t write every day, you drift away from the unconscious. Don’t give up. The writers who fail are the writers who gave up. Everybody else, sooner or later, something is going to work.”
Web Page: WalterMosley.com
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Like this? Read the chapters on Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Tess Gerritsen, Steve Berry, David Morrell, Gayle Lynds, Scott Turow, Lawrence Block, and Randy Wayne White.
—From “My First Time,” an anthology in progress by Rick Pullen. rickpullen.com
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In December of 1927, Al Capone treated his family to a Christmas vacation in Los Angeles. Some years earlier, Capone had sent one of his minions, “Handsome Johnny” Rosselli, to Hollywood to form relationships with movie industry movers and shakers, and develop “business opportunities” for the Chicago mob. Rosselli found plenty of opportunity, so Capone decided it was worth a personal visit to check it out for himself. Shortly after he arrived, he was paid a visit at his hotel by the Los Angeles chief of police, who told him he had twelve hours to get out of town. Al packed up and left.
The powers-that-were in Southern California didn’t want the Chicago Outfit sticking its nose into their business. They already had plenty of their own home-grown graft and weren’t interested in splitting the profits. Hollywood vice was already well organized by a group of local businessmen and corrupt elected officials who called themselves the Committee.
Hollywood and the movie industry didn’t start out as a den of vice. In fact, in the early days of cinema, at the dawn of the twentieth century, independent filmmakers left the East Coast and moved west specifically to get away from shake-down artists—namely Thomas Edison—who had no scruples about sending enforcers to smash the cameras of filmmakers who refused to pay exorbitant licensing fees. Once the independents reached California, they discovered a wide-open society and great weather, and set about making sleepy little Hollywood into a one-industry town.
Early Hollywood filmmakers were a Bohemian lot, artistic, experimental, and open minded. By the late 1910s, the movies had become big business, and some of the most successful screenwriters, directors, and producers of the time were women. Opportunity abounded for anybody who could deliver the goods. Studios could hardly make movies fast enough to meet the demand of thousands of theaters in big towns and small, all over the country. Money flowed like a tsunami into Hollywood. The small studios raked in the profits and quickly became big studios, run by extremely powerful, extremely rich men.
Lots of money equals lots of power. Power corrupts, they say, and absolute power… well, you know. And after Congress passed the 18th Amendment in 1919, Prohibition became not only the law, but a fantastic business opportunity. Movies were a gold mine, but the real money was to be made in the service industries—booze, drugs, gambling, and prostitution.
Movies were a gold mine, but the real money was to be made in the service industries—booze, drugs, gambling, and prostitution.The Committee ran Capone out of town, but Handsome Johnny stayed on in Hollywood. He loved the movies and was so good-looking he could work as an actor by day and bootlegger at night. Johnny went into business with a rum-runner named Tony “the Hat” Cornero. Tony Cornero wasn’t part of the Chicago or East Coast mobs. He was a local with an entrepreneurial streak and a shaky grip on morality. Tony owned a fleet of ships he used to haul whisky from Canada. In December of 1926, he was arrested at the Mexican border while trying to enter the US with a load of rum and was sentenced to two years in prison. While being transported to jail, Cornero escaped the guards and jumped off the train, finally making it to Europe, where he spent a few years in hiding. He returned voluntarily to the U.S. in 1929 to serve out his sentence. Upon his release in 1931, he got out of the liquor “importing” business and into even more profitable and equally illegal gambling. He opened a series of popular gambling ships anchored along the California coast, three miles offshore in international waters, outside of U.S. jurisdiction. Instead of using power boats to haul Canadian whiskey from his ships to buyers on shore, he now used them to ferry gamblers to his offshore casinos.
Prostitution was another big business in Los Angeles. By the 1920s most of it was run by the “Syndicate,” a group of men who gained control by greasing all the right palms in city government and law enforcement. These enterprising types managed to centralize and organize the L.A. sex business, taking over the brothels one by one, hiring a series of high-profile madams, and rotating the girls (whom they recruited by promising a life of riches and glamour) between houses.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the infamous Madam Lee Francis ran one of the more popular brothels out of an apartment complex on Sunset Strip, catering to the Hollywood elite of both sexes. Some of the larger studios paid Lee a retainer so their stars could avail themselves of her services at their leisure. Spencer Tracey and Tallulah Bankhead were two of of her best clients. Lee spent nearly half her business earnings paying off the cops, thus guaranteeing a phone call to tip her off before a raid. She’d then clear out the girls and their big-name clients, and when the vice squad showed up and found nobody to arrest, she’d invite them in for caviar and Champaign.
Lee’s successor as Hollywood’s Uber-Madam was a woman called Anne Forrester. Like Lee Francis, Anne enjoyed the protection of Los Angeles mayor Frank Shaw. Elected in 1933 and recalled in 1938, Shaw holds the dubious honor of being most corrupt mayor in Los Angeles history. The LAPD Central Vice Squad was run by the mayor’s brother, who was on the take and great pals with—who else?—Johnny Roselli. Anyone who didn’t pay up was visited by an associate of James E. Davis, Los Angeles Chief of Police from 1926-1931, and again from 1933-1939. “Two Gun Davis” formed a fifty-man “Gun Squad” to clean up L.A. (i.e. get rid of mobsters from out-of-town). Davis and his squad members were as criminal as the criminals. His philosophy was, “Bring them in dead, not alive.”
Madam Anne knew better than to rely exclusively on the protection of the LAPD worthies. As insurance she kept a “little black book” containing the names and proclivities of all her customers, in case she needed to blackmail someone powerful. It didn’t quite work. In 1938, a couple of her girls ratted her out to an honest vice cop and Anne spent five years in prison.
The big studios got bigger, richer, and eventually so powerful the moguls came to the all-too-familiar realization they could do whatever they wanted and suffer no consequences.
Actors and crew were treated like horses. The big money-makers were handled like prize racehorses until they quit winning, then they were treated the same as all the other contract players, like work horses. If an actor was too tired to work eighteen-hour days, somebody on the studio payroll provided a little pick-me-up. But then he couldn’t sleep so somebody gave him something to help him relax. When an actress couldn’t wake up and be ready to work at five o’clock in the morning, the studio’s pet doctor gave her a shot to get her going. After a while she couldn’t do without it.
Starlets and good-looking young men were sometimes lent out by the studios to “entertain” visiting dignitaries. The screenplay for 1997s Academy Award-winner LA Confidential, starring Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger, was inspired by real-life police corruption, tabloid sensationalism, and the true story of a Louis B. Mayer-funded, Golden Age Hollywood brothel which offered its clients girls who resembled big stars like Carole Lombarde or Barbara Stanwyck, often with the aid of plastic surgery.
As far as the movie-going public was concerned, the Depression turned mobsters into romantic antiheroes, much like in Westerns. Americans have always loved the lone wolf, going his own way in defiance of the establishment. Never mind that reality is infinitely uglier than fiction. Hollywood’s love of crime movies started in the 1920s and 30s with early talkies such as Paul Muni’s Scarface, Edward G. Robinson’s Little Caesar, and Jimmy Cagney in Public Enemy, culminating in works of art like The Godfather in 1972. But even the Mafia couldn’t compete with the big studios when it came to vice and corruption. In the end, Hollywood out-mobbed the mob.
And what about Handsome Johnny Rosselli, aka “Johnny Hollywood?” He went to prison, of course. When he got out in 1941, he returned to Hollywood, where he co-produced a couple of gangster films. Once you’re in the Mafia, though, you can’t get out. In 1976, after he’d lived a long life of crime, an oil drum containing Johnny’s dismembered remains was fished out of the Atlantic. Word in the underworld is he committed suicide.
***
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In the summer of 2014, two teenage girls, Padma and Lalli, became the subject of rumors in their small village. Then they went missing. And hours later, they were found dead.
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To the Shakyas, the threshold of a police station could feel as insurmountable as a fortress wall. The Indian police were known for their dismissive attitude towards the poor. They were meant to serve and protect, but they were just as likely to kill. The roughly shaven, khaki-clad men of the local force had the most terrifying reputation of all. ‘UP police ka koi bharosa nahin,’ it was said. You never know with the UP police.
There was plenty of truth to this notion. Around 2005, children from a slum in Noida started to disappear. The slum dwellers, who worked for the wealthy occupants of the city’s towering apartment blocks, repeatedly went to the police and begged them to intervene. To one distraught mother an officer said, ‘Why do you people have so many children if you can’t look after them?’ Scrutinizing the photograph of her missing twenty-year-old daughter, he declared, ‘She looks so beautiful. She probably eloped.’
Missing person cases continued to stream in, but by many accounts the police refused to take them seriously.
Then in 2006, officials found seventeen chopped-up bodies, including those of several children, in a sewer behind the home of a wealthy businessman who lived near the slum. The clothes of the missing young woman were also found there. The gruesome details made headlines, and only because of this was the case even investigated in the first place. The killers—the businessman and his domestic help—had gone undetected for years, most likely because they had chosen their victims from among the city’s poor.
Since police stations were evaluated on the number of cases they solved, officers had an incentive to open only those with a chance of success. Solving the mystery of a missing child required time, manpower and resources—things that the police were generally short of. Between 2012 and 2014, the police filed FIRs—First Information Reports—in less than 60 per cent of such cases. This negligence contributed to an epidemic of missing and exploited children, many of them trafficked within and outside the country.
In the year that Padma and Lalli went missing, 12,361 people were kidnapped and abducted in Uttar Pradesh, accounting for 16 per cent of all such crimes in India. Across the country, one child went missing every eight minutes, said Kailash Satyarthi, who went on to jointly win the Nobel Peace Prize with Malala Yousafzai. And these were just the reported cases.
The economist Abhijit Banerjee, who later also jointly won a Nobel Prize for his approach to alleviating global poverty, explained that ‘parents may be reluctant to report children who ran away as a result of abuse, sexual and otherwise.’ He added that this was likely ‘rampant’. In fact, some parents sold their children or deliberately allowed unwanted daughters to stray in busy marketplaces. No one reported them missing, and so, no one looked for them.
Even in a tiny village like Katra where everyone was of the same social class, the Shakya family believed that the police would still take sides. They would choose to favour the person of their caste. And told that the culprit was Yadav, they would most likely wave away the Shakyas, being Yadavs themselves. ‘Raat gayi toh baat gayi,’ they would say, grunting back to sleep. The night has concluded and so has the incident.
‘It was easy to ask why we didn’t immediately go to the chowki,’ Jeevan Lal would later complain. Time was scarce and he preferred not to waste it on a thankless task.
There was, however, another reason that Padma’s father held back.
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In my new novel, A History of What Comes Next, ninety-nine generations of mothers and daughters insert themselves into history to nudge us towards the stars. They’re quite strong, incredibly smart, and, when cornered, very deadly. I knew from the start I wanted them to be ruthless at times, but they’re still, undeniably, the heroes of the book, which begged the question: How far can I take this? Can they wipe out a village? Is there such a thing as too bad?
One of the first books to really, really knock my socks off was Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos. These people are bad bad. They don’t murder anyone but they lie, they cheat, they destroy each other’s lives and they enjoy every minute of it. The Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont are about as evil as you can imagine, with barely a relatable trait other than, perhaps, the fact that they long for love and approval of people as evil as they are. We like watching them because they’re really good at being bad. Villain protagonists aren’t so frequent but there are still plenty: You, by Caroline Kepnes, the Villains series by V.E. Schwab, Gone Girl, The Joker or any just about movie with Robert De Niro. These characters can do pretty much whatever they want because, well, they’re villains, which, unfortunately, isn’t what I wanted my characters to be.
I knew I had some leeway. There are very few genuinely good characters anymore. Character depth is pretty synonymous with some degree of moral ambiguity and there’d be very little room for a Dr. Quinn-type character on TV nowadays. Dr. House is a complete asshole. Even the Good Doctor ends up hurting the people around him. Some of this isn’t new. Action heroes have always gotten away with a truckload of toxic masculinity. Early James Bond is straight up creepy but I don’t know many people who’d like their daughter to date the new one. Nerd characters were always forgiven a good amount of misogyny. They still are. Fortunately, we’ve found some new and better ways to be bad, and there are things we readily accepted from characters not that long that are super cringy a couple decades later. There’s also been some democratization of badness in the last few years and women get to do bad things too. For one thing, they get to drink a lot. Jessica Jones, Sharp Objects, Girl on the Train, etc. I’d be curious to know how many books, films or TV shows in recent years had a self-loathing alcoholic as a protagonist. All this to say we’re more than fine with our heroes being tortured souls and making questionable choices, we’ve come to expect it. But there are to be limits. Maybe.
Theft is obviously fine. There’s the steal-from-the-rich-give-to-the-poor Robin Hood type hero, sure, but there are also plenty who just like to steal things. Butch Cassidy, Arsène Lupin, Thomas Crown, El Professor. Everyone loves a good thief. I tried to find some common redeeming quality that makes them all likeable but there doesn’t seem to be one. They just have to be good at stealing. It’s very similar to Les Liaisons Dangereuses in this way. We like talent more than we like morality.
But how about murder? That should, at the very least, make us pause. I’ll narrow it down a bit and ignore the entire revenge genre. Leaving a trail of bodies because someone wronged you is evidently fine and makes you hero material in the eyes of most. That’s true in books: The Iliad?, Carrie, True Grit, and especially on screen: Death Wish, Kill Bill, The Crow, Taken, John Wick, the list is as long as the body count. Ironically, most of these still manage to have a “happy” ending. While we’re at it, let’s ignore superheroes as well since pretty much all of them are technically criminals, if not mass murderers.
Can a hero kill someone they don’t know from Adam? That’s probably the wrong question. Cops do that all the time. There are fictional cops with zero arrests in their career because they killed every suspect. Setting aside cops and vigilantes, can the hero commit murder? Many murders?
One of the things that helped me answer that question was Dexter. He’s an interesting case because at first glance he looks like a villain protagonist, but he’s different from, say, Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. He’s a serial killer, a terrible father, a bad boyfriend, but the audience cares for him, somehow. It helps that he “mostly” kills bad people, but we forgive him for the occasional slip up and we certainly don’t want him to get caught. He has this “code” his father gave him, which helps sell him as a character, but in the end, I think we like Dexter because he chooses to be “good” despite his nature, to be better than what the universe intended him to be. It’s the choice, I think, the effort, that we respond to. I wasn’t writing serial killers, obviously, but I really liked the idea of them being aware of their dark side and making a conscious decision to be stronger than it.
So, can a hero be too bad? Yes, probably. I can’t quite imagine a hero committing sex crimes or beating their children every day but there might some book or movie out there to prove me wrong. I would hope not but I’d be lying if I said it would surprise me. I think either of these things would prevent any reasonable person from connecting with a character, but we, as an audience seem willing to forgive the most horrible deeds under the right conditions. I wonder what those are.
I suppose it helps if there’s a “good” reason for doing the bad thing. We’ve already established that revenge is a good enough motive for a hundred cold-blooded murders. Some version of the Trolley Problem would also do the trick. Kill one person to save a hundred, kill a hundred to save a million. Think of the poor guy behind the closing door of a flooding submarine. And if you’re trying to save everyone, then I suppose everything is fair game. Maybe the character couldn’t help it. It happens. Jean Grey loses it and wipes out a planet. Oops. Power incontinence is a common enough trope in the superhero genre. Trauma can also explain why someone couldn’t control themselves. Childhood trauma, war trauma. Sympathy for what the character went through goes a long way. It will, of course, help if they experience remorse. That’s where the self-loathing comes in. We’ll let the most dreadful things fly if the character feels bad about it. That said, I don’t think any one of these things are necessary. We’ve seen enough “good” people doing really bad things that if we judge the character’s motivations as worthwhile even in the slightest way, and they exhibit an ounce of humanity, we’re willing to forgive just about anything, including, I bet, the unfortunate demise of a very, very small village.
***
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There was a moment during the 2012 Utøya terror trial when I realized I had caused pain to a man who did not deserve it. He was speaking in the Oslo courthouse; he had lost a loved one in the attacks a year before. I was there as a British journalist, trying, as we all were, to understand how one man could murder 77 people one summer’s afternoon in the safest country in the world.
As the witness testified about his loneliness and grief in the aftermath of the attacks, the man who had murdered his wife stared at him, unblinking and unrepentant. The witness reached the end of his testimony. He turned and looked out towards the public. “There’s been a lot of talk recently about how awful the people of my area are. I want to say that the support I have received has been amazing, and that I don’t recognize the depiction.”
I didn’t mean you, I wanted to say. It’s not about people like you. I had written an article—Is Ullern the Worst Place to Live in Norway?—for a tiny English-language internet newspaper. But what I was describing—the snobbishness and selfishness my wife and I experienced in our suburb ten minutes from the Centre of Oslo—had struck a chord. Yes, there were good people there, living quiet and decent lives, but the persona the area projected was vulgar, money-obsessed, and the opposite of what we expected. Norwegians began to share the article with each other, and it quickly went viral. It seemed the rest of the country felt the same way about Ullern as we did. But then, here was this man, and I had added to his grief by writing my article. It was a sobering moment. Because I did not mean him, or the friends and neighbors who supported him through his ordeal.
And now, as we near the tenth anniversary of the attacks, I have written a novel with roots in those same traumatic events, and I know that I risk opening old wounds. Although the island in my novel Love and Other Lies is not the island of Utøya, and although the Curtis family in my novel is invented, I can’t simply kick sand over those roots and hope that no one will notice. I felt compelled to write a book about what happens when a peaceful society meets an act of extreme violence, and there really isn’t a country that represents that more clearly than Norway. The book had to be set here.
On the afternoon of 22nd July 2011, a white supremacist set off a bomb at a government building in central Oslo. His bomb killed eight people and drew a massive police response. The terrorist slipped from the scene, drove for half an hour, and took the ferry to the island of Utøya. On the island was a camp for the youth wing of the Norwegian Labor Party. There this man shot dead sixty-nine people, many of them under eighteen. It was the worst spree killing by a single gunman, ever. His youngest victim was fourteen. This was not a random attack. The terrorist wrong-footed the police, sending them towards the bomb and away from the island. He targeted children, because they were the coming political generation. He dressed as a policeman so they would trust him. This would be a horrific attack in any society. In a country of five million people, it was devastating.
So why write about it at all? Why not avoid the very real danger of causing hurt to the people who least deserve it? Well, for a start, the attack felt close. A year before, drunk and belligerent in an Oslo bar, this same man had threatened to kill some female friends of mine after one of them refused his advances. The women wrote the incident off—just another sexually rejected man venting his frustrations. They could not possibly have known what he would go on to do. One of those women was my wife.
My wife and I were in Oslo together on the day of the attacks. We heard the bomb go off. I really did look at her and say ‘Thunder’, stupid as that sounds. Within minutes we knew it was something more than thunder. Friends had all the windows blown out along one side of their apartment. Another friend lost the hearing in one ear. Islamic terrorism, people agreed. No one believed then that a white man from the wealthiest part of the city could be responsible.
It was our wedding anniversary that day; in the evening we went out because you don’t let terrorists win. And after the police arrested the perpetrator, I remember a friend in a bar arguing that the man in custody could not truly be Norwegian, that he had to be a well-integrated Chechen. But he was white, and a Christian, and believed he was starting a race war.
I was surprised at how angry the attacks made me. Norway was my wife’s country; it wasn’t mine. I had been living a double life before the attacks, working and paying tax in the UK, seeing my Norwegian family in Oslo every other weekend. When we talked about our future, I pictured London. But the attacks, and the anger I felt, revealed something I had not noticed before: a sense of belonging that had quietly grown over time.
Something valuable, beyond the obvious, was attacked on that day. I was angry at the deliberate targeting of children; angry too at the man’s lack of repentance, at his calculated use of the courtroom as a stage to promote his agenda. “I have been called a child-murderer,” he would go on to say at his trial. “I want to point out that the average age of those I killed was above eighteen.” And I was angry at this assault on Scandinavian values, because the terrorist took that most fundamental of Norwegian virtues, trust, and turned it against the country. I quit my job in London. I applied for leave to remain in Norway. A year later I was covering the trial as a journalist.
For some, using a real traumatic event as the basis for fiction is wrong. Entertainment from pain; grief tourism—those are the charges, and they are legitimate concerns. I write about the effect of violence, and how it changes individuals, and families, and societies. That’s something I’m more comfortable doing in fiction, because we can never truly know the mind of a radicalized individual. But radicalization presents a more prosaic problem too; because it happens on the internet these days, it is inherently undramatic. A novel can take the radicalization process off the internet and out into the world.
The two definitive nonfiction accounts of the attacks are One of Us by Åsne Seierstad and A Norwegian Tragedy by Aage Borchrevink. Seierstad speculates in places on things we cannot know—that a terrorist thinks while planning his act, for example—and of course a writer should speculate. This was after all a new form of terrorism, in which the aim is for the terrorist to survive, so that he may use the courtroom as a stage from which to publicize his act. I wanted to go further, to speculate more than Seierstad does. Not so much about the terrorist, because stripped of their guns such people’s single-mindedness is inherently boring, but about the process by which ordinary people become radicalized in what looks from outside like the perfect society.
I spent weeks in that courtroom in Oslo, watching the man who killed other people’s loved ones. He was strangely unreadable, though he told us what he did, and what he thought about what he did, and he told us his reasons for doing it. This man was not sorry for the pain he had caused. He was certain that he had done the right thing. When allowed to speak freely he complained that white Norwegians were underrepresented in the Eurovision Song Contest. And when people in the court began openly to laugh at him, he reminded them that he had murdered their children. That’s a moment I cannot shake. The effect of it stays with you long after the trial has ended. It feels wrong to be able to return to your own family at the end of the day in court, knowing that other people there cannot.
That is what happened in Norway ten years ago. It doesn’t stop at Norway, because men like this man are everywhere. We see the seeds of low-level radicalization in the Capitol riots, in unshaven militias who believe an election was stolen. Even as we hope that the radicalization ends there, we can be certain that it does not, that there are plots to cause violence similar in scale to the Norway attacks. Extremists are ridiculous and unthreatening—until the moment where they become a credible threat.
Novels present realities that nonfiction cannot. They dissect and rearrange the world to make visible the invisible. That is what I have tried to do, at least, with the Curtis family and their encounter with terrorism. Will Love and Other Lies cause pain? That is not my intention, of course, but all writers know that intention and effect are two very different things. What I hope is that I have written a compelling thriller that asks a couple of important questions: What do we do with people who would cheerfully murder our children, who smile as they tell us that it is for some greater good? I can never fully answer that question now, though I know what I used to think before the attacks. And the second question is tightly bound to the first: radicalization is a long, slow process, so why don’t we see these people before it’s too late?
These questions and their answers don’t belong only to journalism and to non-fiction; they belong every bit as much in fiction.
*
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Your phone vibrates in your pocket.
You dig it out, distracted from whatever you were doing before. It’s a text from a number you don’t recognize, or a friend request from someone you don’t know—but they seem to know you.
How does it feel?
It’s a perfectly innocuous situation, after all. Messages go astray all the time, wires not quite literally crossed, but close. And who among us hasn’t had to reply “sorry—who’s this?” to a friend’s change of number—themselves, perhaps, on the run from a person they’d rather not hear from again?
Still—it’s a distinct sensation, receiving a message like this: a strange admixture of curiosity and anxiety. A tug in the chest: a longing to know. The mystery will linger in the back of your mind until it’s solved.
Of course, in most cases, the solution’s an innocuous one: it’s the work colleague you got stuck with at the Christmas party (back when parties were still a thing), or the long-lost relative with whom you share nothing but a family tree.
But… What if it’s not?
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We’re so used to the digital, these days, that it passes almost without notice. You’re probably reading this, after all, on a mobile phone, tablet, or laptop. Maybe you got here through a link you clicked on your Facebook or Twitter timeline, tucked in between the posts and chatter of strangers and friends.
If you’re under, say, twenty-five, you’ve always lived in a world like this. If you’re older… Well, chances are that by now, you’re used to it. For most of us, our digital devices are so familiar, they’re almost an extension of ourselves.
In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, they’ve even become—temporarily, at least—our only way of communicating with our family and friends: our de facto homes-inside-our-homes, the best approximation of those social spaces we’ve lost.
But for all that this new technology gives, there’s also the sense of our personal spaces—the physical homes we inhabit—seeming always invaded by others, both strangers and not.But for all that this new technology gives, there’s also the sense of our personal spaces—the physical homes we inhabit—seeming always invaded by others, both strangers and not. They wander through, startling us with questions as we brew our morning coffee; scanning our living rooms while we’re on Zoom; liking our family photos as we crawl into bed. Our daily lives are interrupted constantly by apparitions: by the voices and figures of people who simply are not there.
This is not, however, a state of being sprung entirely from the pandemic—nor is it unique to fiction. In her 2014 essay “Return of the Gothic: Digital Anxiety in the Domestic Sphere,” critic Melissa Gronlund observed similarities between recent work in the visual arts. She suggests that artists using “the Gothic tropes of the uncanny, the undead, and intrusions into the home” in their work are searching for “a way to wrestle with daunting, ongoing questions prompted by current technological shifts: How has the internet affected our sense of self? Our interaction with others? The structures of family and kinship?”
Writers of crime and psychological suspense have been treading similar ground over recent years—intertwining the domestic and the digital to compelling (and bestselling) effect. I’d argue, in fact, that the recent boom in “domestic noir”—featuring novels which, like the Gothic novels of centuries past, found themselves marketed to and appreciated by women, first (while declared “the mere trash of the circulating library” by those anxious to show their more “highbrow” credentials)—might be read equally as leaning towards something we might instead call a “digital Gothic.”
Take, for instance, Friend Request by Laura Marshall (2017)—in which the protagonist is added on Facebook by a woman who’s been dead for twenty-five years. Or You Let Me In by Lucy Clarke (2018), in which an author lets out her house on Airbnb, only to find a distinct chill in the air—and the feeling she’s being watched—on her return. Or Ellery Lloyd’s forthcoming People Like Her (2021)—in which a family’s lives are upended by a mysterious (and vengeful) reader of their popular parenting blog.
In each of these books, there’s an element of the uncanny—in once-familiar devices, platforms and spaces turning sinister, or taboo. Once-treasured homes turn eerie, if not outright terrifying; friends and strangers return from the dead, seeking revenge.
And yet there is, in the end, always a rational explanation: a figure behind the curtain, a man behind the ghost. It’s in this respect that there’s a debt to the “explained supernatural” perfected by Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe—in which situations which seem somehow other-worldly are eventually revealed to have logical, material explanations.
Or at least… So we think.
This is what intrigued me, writing Possession—in which a psychiatrist living in a remote English village finds herself “haunted” by the murder of her husband a decade ago. She hears his voice, both in her mind, and on the true crime podcast looking for justice for the man convicted of the crime. She’s stalked by people she can’t see: the podcast’s listeners, who blame her for her husband’s death. And she’s offered a job at an abandoned Victorian asylum, soon to be refurbished into a luxurious treatment facility—but on the grounds of Hawkwood House, things aren’t quite what they seem.
There’s an element of the supernatural there—but there are also questions of mental illness, and the impact of constant digital intrusions, and online abuse. It seemed to me, when I set out to write that book, that I wasn’t alone in experiencing something like ambivalence towards being online—and the urge to pin that haunted feeling down onto the page.
Now, of course—however many months we are into the pandemic, having long lost count of the days—it seems as though a life lived offline is less likely than ever. What this means for crime fiction, I couldn’t say for sure—but I’m optimistic. I’d wager even more creative plots; more ghosts sneaking in through the digital. More doppelgangers, more isolation; more trees tapping fingers on locked windows and doors.
And as someone who likes to be scared… I can’t wait.
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“…because the past was always around her and might return at any time. It prowled the world searching for her, and she knew it was growing angrier at every passing day.” ― Nicholas Sparks
What if…? The two most provocative words in the English language and the inspiration for countless novels. What if… you needed to leave your life—flee, disappear, run faster than something or someone that was chasing you? My first novel, Hush Little Baby, and my latest novel, Hadley & Grace, explore this familiar trope. The first was inspired by a friend who fled an abusive marriage. The second was inspired by one of the greatest women-on-the-run stories ever, Thelma and Louise. Below are six other novels about women trying to outrun their past:
Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half (Riverhead Books)
Probably the most popular current woman-on-the-run novel is Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half. Twin sisters, Desiree and Stella, run away at sixteen determined to leave their pasts behind. One sister embraces her roots and chooses to live as a black woman, while the other continues her journey as white passing. But bloodlines have a way of remaining entwined, and it’s only a matter of times before the two sisters lives intersect and both are forced to reconcile their choices as well as their relationship. You may be able run from your past, but you cannot change it. This is a multilayered story that delves deep into identity and the extent to which we are able to truly transform.
Barbara O’Neal, When We Believed in Mermaids (Lake Union)
When we believed in Mermaids by Barbara O’Neal is another story about wanting to put a troubled past behind. Fifteen years ago, Josie Bianci died… or so her family believed. Until one day, Josie’s sister, Kit, sees a fleeting image on television of a woman identical to her sister. Kit follows the trail to New Zealand hoping to put her own demons to rest. And when she finds her sister, alive and living a life entirely removed from the one she left behind, past and present collide, and Kit and Josie are forced to face a choice of how much they are willing to risk by facing the truth for the sake of reclaiming their relationship. A stunning story full of secrets, betrayal, loss, forgiveness, and redemption.
Nicholas Sparks, Safe Haven (Grand Central)
While Safe Haven by Nicholas Sparks was written ten years ago, it’s so well known—both the novel and the movie—I felt it should be included in this list. The novel is a classic story about a woman fleeing in fear for her life. Katie married young believing she was in love, but the marriage quickly turned violent. After years of abuse, she escapes, settling in a small remote town in North Carolina where she hopes her husband will never find her. But the past has a cruel way of catching up, and when the danger grows close, Katie needs to decide between running again or taking a second chance on love and standing down the devil. Heartrending and powerful, Safe Haven walks the fine line between romance and suspense as only Nicolas Sparks can.
Nancy Price, Sleeping with the Enemy (Celadon)
Similar to Safe Haven, Sleeping with the Enemy by Nancy Price is the quintessential woman-on-the-run story. This powerful thriller follows Sara Burney, a battered wife, as she plots a masterful escape from her controlling, brutal husband, Martin, by faking her own death. Believing she pulled it off, Sara (now Laura) begins to build a new life. But one wrong move—a visit to her ailing mother—causes things unravel. Heart pounding, this story barrels along at a breakneck pace and never lets up.
Anna Quindlen, Black and Blue (Delta)Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen rounds out the trio of abused wives running from their abusive husbands. Each day, Beth looks at her ten-year-old son and reminds herself that he is the reason she needed to leave. The bruises have healed, but the fear of Bobby catching up with them remains. He always said he would never let her go, and despite how careful she’s been, she knows, it’s only a matter of time before he catches them. Anna Quindlen has a gift for making the reader believe her stories are real, and Black and Blue is no exception. This chilling story stayed with me long after I finished reading it.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (Crown)Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is my favorite woman-on-the-run story, mostly for how original it is. Amy Dunne has gone missing, and Nick Dunne, her husband, is the prime suspect. Evidence against him mounts as an annual wedding anniversary treasure hunt turns up a slew of clues—an affair between Nick and one of his students; the shocking revelation that Amy is pregnant; and a diary that divulges Amy’s growing isolation and her fear that Nick is going to kill her. But… what if? This twisty, turny novel is too good to give away, but it puts a whole new spin on the classic cat-and-mouse chase.
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Greetings from the Great White North, where days are Hobbesian: nasty, brutish and short. The tides have turned as isolation continues and instead of seeing a bunch of writers complaining on social media about not being able to read, I’ve seen anecdotal evidence that people are reading more than they did in the before times. This does make your local book critic smile on the inside.
I’m here to help you on your quest for escape and/or entertainment that doesn’t involve bingeing (a word I am coming to loathe) or a YouTube tutorial—actually, tutorials, since who stops at just one? I am hooked on bullet journal videos, which are fascinating glimpses into how people think about and structure time. But you haven’t come to CrimeReads for my pithy observations on the way we live now, you came to find out about the best psychological thrillers coming out this month. Let’s go.
Christina McDonald, Do No Harm (Gallery Books)
Remember the opioid crisis? You know the one. It decimated lives and shattered communities, leaving broken people to feed their vicious habits. When the history of the 2020s is written opioids—though still devastating—will be on the other side of the COVID line which delineates this decade. Do No Harm is a cross between Breaking Bad and Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. A child has a rare and expensive disease. A mother who is also a doctor slides into the world of opioids, dealing drugs to fund her son’s treatment. Wrinkle: her husband is a police detective and much more familiar with the world our protagonist is trying to navigate.
Sarah Langan, Good Neighbors (Atria)
Langan’s sharply observed novel is a study of mob mentality with a healthy dose of dry humor and, of course, a generous side dish of murder. In a small suburban community—there is a map with each character’s house number and residence—secrets and gossip abound. Langan combines found documents like the map and newspaper accounts of the Maple Street Murders with scenes that propel the reader forward and keep them guessing. A delicious suburban noir for the Alison Gaylin-Laura Lippman-Megan Abbott crowd.
Alison Wisdom, We Can Only Save Ourselves (Harper)
Wisdom’s debut is a psychological thriller about a teenage girl who disappears—have I lost you yet? Okay, good. So Alice Lange, model student and all-around teen dream who has more than enough votes to be homecoming queen twice over, flees her stifling small town with a charismatic and sinister drifter (are drifters ever not sinister?) named Wesley. Alice ends up in a Manson-esque situation with Wesley and four other young women all living in the same house. But there can only be one queen, and the tension between the women quickly escalates until things get ugly.
Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides (Ecco)
Maria and Eulabee are the undisputed experts on their (pre-tech boom) San Francisco neighborhood, Sea Cliff—they know its homes, their residents, the beaches, and all of the gossip. One morning while walking to their tony girls’ school they witness a terrible scene, but they disagree about what happened. This rift is made deeper when Maria, um, disappears, shaking Sea Cliff up and leaving Eulabee with some serious therapy in her future.
Ben McPherson, Love and Other Lies (William Morrow)
I am just going to say it: a girl disappears in Love and Other Lies. She is the daughter of happily married Carl and Elsa, the eldest of their three children. But wait, we are not in suburbia! We are in Norway, and there was a shooting at a summer camp the girl was attending. The family doesn’t take it well: Vee, the younger daughter, definitely isn’t telling her parents everything. And Carl and Elsa begin to doubt each other, putting their marriage and family in jeopardy.
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Outside the small village where we live stands a white chapel. It’s a strange building, not typical of the area. Square and plain. No spire or stained-glass windows. More fitted perhaps to a dusty Midwest town in the US (perhaps with an old couple standing outside, holding a pitchfork!)
Rows of crooked and ancient graves tip and tilt in the overgrown graveyard and at the top of the steep slope is a tall stone memorial. The inscription on it reads:
“Protestant Martyrs Memorial.
Erected to the memory of Richard Woodman and George Stevens of Warbleton,
Margery Thomas and James Morris her son of Cade Street, Heathfield
who with six others, were burned to death at Lewes
by the Roman Catholics June 22 1577.
Because they dared to worship God as the word of God directs.
The noble army of martyrs praise thee o God.”
There are more of these memorials in other churchyards in other small villages around the Sussex area, all commemorating men and women who were horrifically burnt at the stake during the period of 1553-1557, known at the ‘Marian Persecutions’.
When Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII came to the throne in England in 1553 she was pressured to abandon her unshakable Catholic views. Instead, to re-enforce them she had no fewer than 288 Protestants burned as ‘heretics. Seventeen of these martyrs were burned in the small Sussex town of Lewes, just a thirty-minute drive from where my family and I now live.
Mary’s persecution of the Protestants earned her the name of ‘Bloody Mary’. Hundreds of Protestants were arrested and forced to languish in appalling conditions in jail while waiting examination or execution. Among them were eminent Christians such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, several Bishops and dozens of clergymen and scholars.
Towards the end of 1554 four men were arrested by the High Sheriff of Sussex in Black Lion Street, Lewes for daring to read from the Bible. After forced confessions were signed, they were taken by their persecutors to Lewes town centre to be burned outside the Old Star Inn where the Town Hall now stands. On the 6th of June 1556 three more Protestants were taken to their flaming deaths in Lewes.
Despite these deaths, Bonner, the Bishop of London was not convinced that the heretics were being persuaded back to the Roman faith. So, he arranged the largest bonfire of humans the town, or indeed the country, had ever seen.
Ten Protestants: Richard Woodman, George Stevens, Alexander Hosman, William Mainard, Thomasina Wood, Margery Morris, James Morris, Denis Burges, Ann Ashdon and Mary Groves were all burned at the stake.
Such was the conviction of the Protestants’ faith, they would not recant their deeply held beliefs—that Jesus Christ was the head of the church, and it was inconceivable that the Roman Catholic Church should put the Pope at the head of the Christian faith. It was only when Mary’s reign came to an end in 1558 that they were able to return to open worship.
Since the nineteenth century, the Lewes bonfire societies have annually remembered the martyrdom. The memory of the Lewes martyrs is celebrated with an annual torchlight procession and many bonfire societies in the area carry seventeen flaming torches every November 5th. The sight of the huge processions, participants dressed in historical clothes, carrying flaming torches (even the children) is something to behold.
Click to view slideshow.In my new novel, The Burning Girls, the flaming torches of the Lewes procession have been replaced by ‘Blair Witch’ like twig dolls which the villagers of Chapel Croft make every year to commemorate the two youngest martyrs burnt at the stake. The Burning Girls are cast into the fire in their memory. The ghosts of the two girls are also supposed to haunt the old chapel, appearing to those in trouble, forewarning of bad events to come.
When Reverend Jack Brooks and daughter Flo arrive at Chapel Croft, they find themselves confronting ghosts of the villages dark and bloody past both literally and metaphorically. As they investigate the village’s history, they realise that the deaths of two young martyrs are somehow entwined with the disappearance of two teenage girls in the 1990s and the apparent suicide of the previous vicar.
I have always been a huge fan of gothic and folk horror. The Wicker Man is one of my favourite films. So, when I moved to Sussex with my own family two years ago, I immediately felt drawn to the strange white chapel on the village’s outskirts and its macabre monument. I knew I had to write about it.
The Burning Girls mixes real historical events with a fictional mystery, a dose of horror, plenty of oddball characters and good old-fashioned small-town paranoia. I hope it satisfies those who enjoy some creepy chills and those who like to untwist a knotty mystery.
I should probably say that the villagers where we live are nothing like the characters in the book and we’ve made some lovely friends in this small community. However, several times a week, I pass the old chapel on my morning run and something about it still makes the hairs rise on the back of my neck.
Perhaps the ghosts of the past are never too far away after all.
Photographs courtesy of C.J. Tudor.
Vinegar Valentine’s card, c1875.
What to Read and Watch Next If You’re Finding Yourself Oddly Fascinated by the Idea of Cults
in Crime Reads - Suspense, Thrillers, Crime, Gun!
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Ever wondered if you could be tempted by a cult? If the current viewing and reading choices are anything to go by, probably. From strictly religious, to New Age and downright bizarre, cults represent that fascinatingly dark side of devotion. And we never tire of wondering: what causes seemingly ordinary people to give up their wealth, their bodies, and sometimes even their lives to group of strangers? With life being more isolating than ever, it is perhaps not surprising we’re more drawn than ever to peeking inside extreme groups, promising a simpler, decision-free life.
My own interest is strictly professional, of course. Researching my book, Black Widows, cast me deep into the world of fundamentalist Latter-Day Sainthood, and by proxy, religious cults. Every faith has its dark side and with its not-too-ancient history of scriptured polygamy, the LDS (Mormon) church is well-known for extremist off-shoots where members take several wives and elect to live off grid. In my novel, one such husband is believed to have been murdered by his wife—but which? But one thing I discovered in my research is real-life cults are stranger by far. Here are some of the best films, documentaries, and books I turned to for behind-the-scenes examinations of cults:
Wild Wild Country on Netflix
This real-life documentary has more twists and turns than a Dan Brown novel. In 1970s India, a benevolently smiling guru has begun attracting a large following. Word gets out on the Californian hippy trail subscribe and the group starts their own form of therapeutic free expression. But that’s where the clichés end. As the cult grows, so does the income. The group gains enough wealth to move to backwater America and builds their own city, complete with police force, housing, and infrastructure. If this wasn’t strange enough, the local one-horse town fights back, taking issue with the mass arrivals of red-clothed devotees passing through their locale. Wordwide news coverage follows, with the guru taking second fiddle to his media-savvy second in command, who quickly gains a large measure of power for herself. With the townspeople digging their heels, and the devotees willing to give their lives to their guru, things turn ugly fast. It’s compelling watching.
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood’s incredible sci-fi meets character novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, was a massive hit on its release, and one of my all-time favorite novels. The sequel picks up fifteen years after the Handmaid’s Tale and is every bit as gripping at the original. Atwood claims that every shocking scene from the book has been inspired by a real-event, and you believe her. There’s a strong nod to several real-life religious dictatorships which sprung up almost overnight in the Middle East, and to a great extent, Atwood’s gripping tale seems cautionary and humbling. The religion and location is irrelevant. Wherever faith is used as an excuse for subjugating women, freedom is at stake.
My Scientology Movie on HBO
Documentary-maker Louis Theroux is famous for treading dangerous ground and asking questions where no other presenters dare. But this documentary sees him exposed to the truly terrifying consequences of digging beneath the surface of scientology. In his quest to find answers, Theroux and his film crew are followed, intimidated, and threatened by Scientologists who take exception to his investigative style. It’s a compelling glimpse behind the mask of modern religion, and a frightening insight into how quickly wealth and power can be amassed by an organization promising secrets and salvation. Perhaps most poignant are the interviews with ex-members, struggling to put their lives back together after years of abuse and gas-lighting. Theroux adeptly shows how very ordinary people can be recruited at their lowest point, and quickly find themselves unable to leave.
The Silence
This scary horror flick brings a new meaning to predatory cults. Based on the dystopian book of the same name, The Silence presents a terrifying world filled with monsters who hunt and kill humans using sound. Throw into the action one of the most frightening cults in popular imagination–a tongueless sect who aim to recruit others into their silent world – and you have the makings of a relentless tense movie. A deaf heroine takes the lead, hunted by the cult leaders and monsters alike.
Sons of Perdition on BBC
The fundamental Mormon cult that operated for generations, has given endless inspiration to documentary and movie makers. It was one of the major inspirations behind my novel, Black Widows, and I’ve been hard pushed to find a favorite from the many media forms the exposure of the cult took.
Out in the wilds of Texas, a ranch becomes a town, as more and more fundamentalist Mormons birth countless children in strained polygamist marriage arrangements. Things turn even darker when corrupt leader Warren Jeffs takes the helm, and uses his power to build his own personal harem of underage ‘brides’ to serve his every need.
Many victims have written their accounts of escaping this cult, and there are too many good books to count. A movie fictionalizes Jeff’s dramatic escape and life on the run before his eventual arrest. But this documentary, showing life for not only the daughters, but the sons who escaped the hell of cult life, is one of the best.
Bikram on Netflix
This fascinating account shows how Bikram Choudhury duped America. If you’re going to tell a lie, make it so big, no-one would ever doubt you. This was the philosophy behind the famous yoga-teacher’s international success, which lasted decades. Claiming he had earned his green card treating Richard Nixon, and boasting a fictional celebrity client-base, the “guru’ was never questioned. It was only after many years of cult-like following, that claims of harassment, assault and rape began to emerge. An incredible insight into a cult with a difference, where people pay tens of thousands to train fourteen hours a day in 40 degree heat.
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