Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers.
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Admin_99
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Like Kara, I also don’t write sex scenes. I tried once and failed spectacularly. After listening to Jenna Moreci’s advice I understand why! If you plan to write a sex scene, I wholeheartedly encourage you to watch this video. Jenna outlines ten tips to help writers with sex scenes and provides practical how-to advice. [MORE BELOW] -
Delivered with a display of abstracted and theatrical gravitas, his speech staged itself in noble fashion, puttering out with proper pauses and plenty of sincere expression. I'm unclear as to what "honesty" actually meant in the context of reinventing his writing life, unless he meant that projecting himself into a first person narrator was an act of honesty? Overall though, I would not recommend this to anyone. Just not enough substance. Course, if you're a big Gaiman fan you might marvel at his lordship's demeanor and penchant for pithy pronouncement. - Michael -
Her name is Meg LaTorre. Her self-published novel can be found here: The Cyborg Tinkerer (1) (The Curious Case of the Cyborg Circus): LaTorre, Meg: 9781734601800: Amazon.com: Books -
These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand.
—Ernie Pyle, war correspondent
Between the abduction and cannibal-mutilation murder of Grace Budd by Albert Fish in 1928 and the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, “the Black Dahlia,” in 1947, a generation of future “epidemic era” serial killers was born, including Juan Corona (1934), Angelo Buono (1934), Charles Manson(1934), Joseph Kallinger (1935), Henry Lee Lucas (1936), Carroll Edward Cole (1938), Jerry Brudos (1939), Dean Corll (1939), Patrick Kearney (1939), Robert Hansen (1939), Lawrence Bittaker (1940), John Wayne Gacy (1942), Rodney Alcala (1943), Gary Heidnik (1943), Arthur Shawcross (1945), Dennis Rader (1945), Robert Rhoades (1945), Chris Wilder (1945), Randy Kraft (1945), Manuel Moore (1945), Paul Knowles (1946), Ted Bundy (1946), Richard Cottingham (1946), Gerald Gallego (1946), Gerard Schaefer (1946), William Bonin (1947), Ottis Toole (1947), John N. Collins (1947), Herbert Baumeister (1947) and Herbert Mullin (1947).
They were followed by the births of Edmund Kemper (1948), Douglas Clark (1948), Gary Ridgway (1949), Robert Berdella (1949), Richard Chase (1950), William Suff (1950), Randy Woodfield (1950), Joseph Franklin (1950), Gerald Stano (1951), Kenneth Bianchi (1951), Gary Schaefer (1951), Robert Yates (1952), David Berkowitz (1953), Carl Eugene Watts (1953), Robin Gecht (1953), David Gore (1953), Bobby Joe Long (1953), Danny Rolling (1954), Keith Jesperson (1955), Alton Coleman (1955), Wayne Williams (1958), Joel Rifkin (1959), Anthony Sowell (1959), Richard Ramirez (1960), Charles Ng (1960) and Jeffrey Dahmer (1960).
The vast majority of these children would not begin their serial killing until they were in their late twenties or early thirties in the 1970s and 1980s, with the exception of Edmund Kemper, who first killed in 1964, Patrick Kearney who began killing in 1965, John N. Collins in 1967, Richard Cottingham in 1967 (perhaps even as early as 1963) and Jerry Brudos in 1968.
In trying to explain the surge of serial murders from the 1970s to the 1990s, we often invoke the epoch in which the serial killings happened. From the cultural and sexual revolutions of the 1960s and the wanton hedonism of the 1970s to the cruel Reaganomics callousness of the 1980s and the rapacious greed of the 1990s, we argued that somehow serial killing was a product of the violent times in which the killing happened. But that was only half the story.
Psychopathology is first shaped in childhood, so to understand surge-era serial killers of the 1970s and 1980s, we actually need to look back some twenty or thirty years earlier, to the eras in which they were steeped as children in the 1940s and 1950s. I’ve already described the process of basic “scripting” of transgressive fantasies. The direction these “scripts” take and how people are chosen for the role of victim in them has a complex structure pinning it all together.
***
In explaining surges of serial murder, criminologist Steven Egger argues, it was not that there were more serial killers but that there were more available victims whose worth was discounted and devalued by society. Egger maintains that society perceives certain categories of murder victims as “less-dead” than others, such as sex workers, homeless transients, drug addicts, the mentally ill, runaway youths, senior citizens, minorities, Indigenous women and the inner-city poor; these victims are all perceived as less-dead than, say, a white college girl from a middle-class suburb or an innocent fair-haired child. Sometimes the disappearance of these victims is not even reported. Criminologists label them the “missing missing.”
Egger writes:
“The victims of serial killers, viewed when alive as a devalued strata of humanity, become ‘less-dead’ (since for many they were less-alive before their death and now they become the ‘never-were’) and their demise becomes the elimination of sores or blemishes cleansed by those who dare to wash away these undesirable elements.”
We popularly regard serial killers as disconnected outcasts, as those who reject societal norms, but more often the opposite is true. In killing prostitutes, Jack the Ripper, for example, was targeting the women that Victorian society chose for its most vehement disdain and scorn. Gary Ridgway, “the Green River Killer,” who was convicted for the murder of forty-nine women, mostly sex workers, said he thought he was doing the police a favor, because they themselves could not deal with the problem of prostitution. As Angus McLaren observed in his study of Victorian-era serial killer Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, who murdered at least five victims (prostitutes and unmarried women coming to him seeking abortions), Cream’s murders “were determined largely by the society that produced them.”
The serial killer, according to McLaren, rather than being an outcast, is “likely best understood not so much as an ‘outlaw’ as an ‘oversocialized’ individual who saw himself simply carrying out sentences that society at large leveled.” Social critic Mark Seltzer suggests that serial killers today are fed and nurtured by a “wound culture,” “the public fascination with torn and open bodies and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound,” to which serial killers respond with their own homicidal contributions in a process that Seltzer calls “mimetic compulsion.”
Or, as the late Robert Kennedy once put it more simply, “Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.”
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Prior to the First World War (1914–1918), American society was relatively disciplined and cohesively structured between the upper, middle and working classes, between rural and urban, and between white and people of color. The privileges and burdens, the rights and responsibilities of each class of Americans, aside from that of industrial labor, were rarely challenged, questioned or crossed before the Great War. In the way that medieval Europeans with passive Christian forbearance lived their place in society from birth to death as divine destiny, Americans settled into their place in the social hierarchy on the basis of Horatio Alger’s “rags-to-riches” promise that with hard work and prayer, anyone can rise in the American class hierarchy to something spectacularly better than what they were born into. Most Americans quietly settled for moderately better, and did so, and that was what made America great.
World War I and its aftermath changed all that. It challenged the notion that duty and sacrifice would be rewarded with real change. A “Lost Generation” of disillusioned and shell-shocked American men returned from the horrors of a “war to end all wars” that did nothing of the sort.
In October 1929, it all crashed on Wall Street, wiping out billions of dollars of wealth in what became known as the Great Depression. By 1933, the unemployment rate in the United States was an astonishing 25 percent. Making matters worse in the Midwest, an environmental disaster in the form of the Dust Bowl uprooted millions of families from their homes and farms. All this without a “social safety net” of welfare, food stamps or public housing. Men raised and socialized for generations into their role as family patriarchs and breadwinners suddenly found themselves helpless and broken, shivering in a soup kitchen line just to eat.
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That battered generation of young men who matured over the 1930s was now sent into what was going to be history’s most lethal and brutal war, sometimes referred to as the “last good war” because of the unambiguous evil of the enemy we fought.
In December 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Nazi Germany declared war on the United States, dragging it into World War II. Some 16.5 million men (61 percent of American males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six) were mobilized into the military and deployed in Europe, the Pacific or on wartime duty at home. Their average age was twenty-six.
About 990,000 of them would see combat, and 405,000 were killed. Nothing in their experience at home prepared them for what they were going to see in this war, a primitive war of total kill-or-be-killed annihilation culminating with two thermonuclear detonations that in several nanoseconds incinerated 120,000 men, women and children. Winston Churchill said it best: “The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age.”
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The familiar term PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—would appear only the 1980s in the wake of the Vietnam War, but during World War II the terms “combat stress reaction” (CSR), “battle fatigue” or “battle neurosis” were rolled up into a general statistical term: “neuropsychiatric casualty.” Of American ground combat troops deployed in World War II, an astonishing 37 percent were discharged and sent home as neuropsychiatric casualties. It just wasn’t often reported or talked about. America preferred to see their sons coming home less a leg or arm than “crazy in the head.” Hometown newspapers would euphemistically report on returning “wounded” or “casualty” figures without specifying the nature of the “wound” or “casualty.”
Returning World War II veterans did not have the current diagnosis of PTSD to take comfort in. “Combat psychoneurosis” sounded shamefully “psycho,” and most wanted to just go home and forget about everything they had seen and endured. Our returning soldiers were patted on the back and told they did their duty in a just cause, were given medals and a parade and tossed a GI Bill and then sent home to suck it up in sullen silence in the privacy of their own trauma. They couldn’t even talk to their families about it. Nobody wanted to hear it . . . at least not the truth. Our traumatized fathers and grandfathers were forever trapped in silence, like prehistoric life preserved in transparent amber as “the greatest generation any society has ever produced,” a term journalist Tom Brokaw coined in his 1998 book, The Greatest Generation.
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It wasn’t just the war over there that affected people. There was a seismic shift in popular culture at home that took a darker and more paranoid turn. In his disturbing study of postwar America, The Noir Forties: The American People from Victory to Cold War, historian Richard Lingeman describes an era of anxiety and dread rather than the optimistic Norman Rockwell impression that we have of happy-to-be-home soldiers and optimistic baby-boom years. After describing the mass arrivals in 1947 of hundreds of thousands of coffins from Europe and the Pacific (the war dead had been temporarily interred overseas, and families had the option to leave them there in military cemeteries or have them shipped home for reburial), Lingemen describes how Hollywood launched a new genre of brutally violent and cynical crime movies, the so-called red meat movies that French film critics would later dub “film noir.” Lingemen writes that the typical film noir was “peopled with recognizable contemporary American types who spoke of death in callous, calculating language and shot with dark chiaroscuro lighting, told an unedifying tabloid-style story of greed, lust, and murder. . . .”
It wasn’t just the war over there that affected people. There was a seismic shift in popular culture at home that took a darker and more paranoid turn.It was something the New York Times pondered in the last days of the war, describing a crop of “homicidal films” either just released or in production, like Double Indemnity, Murder, My Sweet, Conflict, Laura, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Lady in the Lake, Blue Dahlia, Serenade and The Big Sleep.
Hollywood says the moviegoer is getting this type of story because he likes it, and psychologists explain that he likes because it serves as a violent escape in tune with the violence of the times, a cathartic for pent-up emotions. . . . The average moviegoer has become calloused to death, hardened to homicide and more capable of understanding a murderer’s motive. After watching a newsreel showing the horrors of a German concentration camp, the movie fan, they say, feels no shock, no remorse, no moral repugnance when the screen villain puts a bullet through his wife’s head or shoves her off a cliff and runs away with his voluptuous next-door neighbor.
The femme fatale was now raised to iconic heights, starring in the film noir as a greedy, narcissistic, bored, oversexed female often plotting to do away with her poor husband. An article in the New York Times in 1946 entitled “The American Woman? Not for This GI” gave voice to the thousands of frustrated veterans coming home to find women transformed:
Being nice is almost a lost art among American women. They elbow their way through crowds, swipe your seat at bars and bump and push their way around regardless. Their idea of equality is to enjoy all the rights men are supposed to have with none of the responsibilities. . . . The business amazon would not fit into the feminine pattern in France or Italy. . . . They are mainly interested in the rather fundamental business of getting married, having children and making the best homes their means or condition will allow. They feel that they can best attain their goals by being easy on the eyes and nerves of their menfolk. . . . Despite the terrible beating many women in Europe have taken, I heard few complaints from them and rarely met one, either young or old, whose courtesy and desire to please left anything wanting.
***
Cave drawings, myths, popular lore, folk and fairy tales, fables and literature often reflect the hidden unspoken yearnings and deep, dark fears and hates in a society, as well as its traumas and triumphs. In the limited three-TV-channel-plus-Hollywood-movies world of postwar American popular culture, without cable and satellite TV, without video, without video games, DVDs, the Internet or Netflix, guys read mainstream magazines, comics and paperbacks for entertainment. Other than movies, radio and later TV, there wasn’t much of anything else in the way of popular narrative entertainment.
What entertained and came to obsess some boys of Ted Bundy’s and John Wayne Gacy’s generation, and their fathers, were dozens of men’s adventure magazines like Argosy, Saga, True, Stag, Male, Man’s Adventure, True Adventure, Man’s Action and True Men.
From the 1940s to the 1970s, these magazines often presented salaciously exaggerated accounts of wartime Nazi rape atrocities. The magazine covers featured garish images of bound and battered women with headlines like SOFT NUDES FOR THE NAZIS’ DOKTOR HORROR; HITLER’S HIDEOUS HAREM OF AGONY; GRISLY RITES OF HITLER’S MONSTER FLESH STRIPPER; HOW THE NAZIS FED TANYA SEX DRUGS; CRYPT IN HELL FOR HITLER’S PASSION SLAVES.
Even today, nearly seventy years after the war, the Nazis and their psychosexual sadistic cruelty remain a major theme in our popular culture and imagination, from Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, The Night Porter and Seven Beauties to the more recent Inglourious Basterds and The Reader.
The adventure magazines were known as the “sweats” for the luridly colored cover illustrations of male torturers and female victims glistening with sweat, an effect enhanced by casein paints and acrylics used by the cover artists. These magazines featured not only a gamut of Nazi and Japanese atrocities but sweaty cannibal stories based in the South Seas and Africa; Middle East harem rape scenarios; and eventually Cold War, Korean War and Vietnam War vice and torture themes.
Parallel to the “sweats” was a genre of grotesque crime tabloids like the National Enquirer (before it turned to celebrity gossip) and titles like Midnight, Exploiter, Globe, Flash and Examiner and true-detective magazines that mixed staged bondage photos with horrific crime scene photos and tales of sex, death and mutilation, with headlines like 39 STAB WOUNDS WAS ALL THE NAKED STRIPPER WORE; HE KILLED HER MOTHER AND THEN FORCED HER TO COMMIT UNNATURAL SEX ACTS; I LIKE TO SEE NUDE WOMEN LYING IN BLOOD; SEX MONSTERS! THE SLUT HITCHHIKER’S LAST RIDE TO DOOM; RAPE ME BUT DON’T KILL ME.
All these hundreds of magazines had one thing in common: their covers featured a photograph of a professional model posing as a bound victim (detective magazines) or a lurid painted illustration of a bound victim (men’s adventure magazines). Either way, she was inevitably scantily clad or her dress was in disarray or tatters, her skirt hiked up to expose her thighs or stockings, her breasts straining under the thin material of her torn clothing, her bronzed flesh glowing with a fine sheen of perspiration, often with bound legs or legs spread open, tied up in a torture chamber, in a basement, on the floor, on a bed, on the ground outside; tied to a chair, a table, a rack, a sacrificial pole; in a cage or suspended from a dungeon ceiling next to red-hot pokers and branding irons heating on glowing coals, turning on a roasting spit to be cooked by lusty cannibals, strapped spread-eagle on surgical tables for mad Nazi scientists to probe and mutilate. The woman’s face is contorted in fear and submission, sometimes gazing out from the magazine cover toward the male reader, as if she was the reader’s victim, his personal slave who could be possessed for the price of the magazine.
Norm Eastman, one of the cover artists for those magazines in the 1950s, recalled in 2003, “I often wondered why they stuck with the torture themes so much. That must have been where they were heavy with sales. I really was kind of ashamed of painting them, though I am not sure they did any harm. It did seem like a weird thing to do.”
Women in these blatantly misogynistic publications were portrayed in only two biblically paraphilic ways: either as captives bound and forced into sex against their will or as sexually aggressive, bare-shouldered women with a cigarette dangling from their lips, subject to punishment or death for their evil-minded sexuality. In this paraphilic world of the “sweats,” women were either a sacred Madonna defiled or a profligate whore punished; there were no other options available.
These magazines were not squirreled away behind counters or in adult bookstores or limited to some subculture; they were as mainstream as apple pie. Some had monthly circulations of over two million copies at their height and were openly sold everywhere: on newsstands; in grocery stores, candy stores, supermarkets; on drugstore magazine racks, right next to Time, Life, National Geographic, Popular Mechanics and Ladies’ Home Journal. They would be found lying around anywhere and everywhere men and their sons gathered, in workshops, barbershops, auto shop waiting rooms, mail rooms, locker rooms and factory lunchrooms. At their peak, there were over a hundred monthly adventure and true-detective magazine titles, available to all ages.
All this in a country where it is still taboo to show even a glimpse of a bare female breast or buttock on television.
These men’s magazines, along with true-detective magazines, would increasingly be cited as favorite childhood and adolescent reading by “golden age” serial killers.
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I’ve always loved, and been comforted by, television, but I have found myself turning to it more and more, as I’m sure many of you have, during the past year. Nothing can make the stresses, exhaustions, or sadnesses of the pandemic go away for good, but television *can* make the days move faster, which is all that we can ask for. Escapism. That’s what I want. Well, actually, what I really want is for my brilliant mother and her amazing close friend (love you, Aunt Chris!) to write and star in a show about two super clever, beautiful, sixty-ish-year-old women who run a PI business together. But if that can’t happen, I want to watch something similar.
See, lately, I’ve found that my appetite for television has narrowed. Normally, in my downtime, when I’m trying to relax, I like genial, erudite sitcoms of any decade, lighthearted or comical mysteries with no traumatizing imagery, shows where smart con artists fleece the rich for the good of humankind, and anything involving Baby Yoda. Nothing upsetting. No serial killers. No sex crime. No violence against women. No true crime. No abductions or torture. You get the picture.
But recently, I’ve been craving something even more specific: I only want to watch clever mysteries with high production value and women-heavy casts. Maybe it’s just because everything else is demoralizing that I have no interest whatsoever in watching “genius” male detectives do their thing, since this is tedious enough during normal life and I have no patience left. But, by and large, even more than usual, I find myself wanting specifically to watch genius women detectives. To be clear, I don’t want to watch just anything in this genre just because it features women (there is plenty of crap out there pretending to be feminist for its prominent featuring of women… Ocean’s 8 cough cough). And I don’t want the show to use “feminism” to gloss over or excuse various atrocities perpetrated or problematic policies, either. Here, I should clarify that I don’t want to watch genius women “cops.” i just want to watch someone who looks remotely like me waltz into a crime scene in a really nice coat, inspect a few items on the floor, and go on to solve a puzzle with alacrity and dexterity that surpasses everyone else in the vicinity, especially the police. I should add that corporate feminism makes me cringe, so I’m not trying to hit you over the head with the vibes from the “strong female lead” Netflix category from a few years back. This isn’t some “you go girl”-tinted scheme to get you to buy or click on stuff. I just want to watch cool women being cool, OKAY?
So, what are the parameters? First off, no men. Or, really few men. I really, really don’t want to watch a genius male detective have a female sidekick, even if she’s smart or the casting is vanguard (my apologies, Dr. Joan Watson). Now, the woman detective in the show I watch can have a male sidekick, but I’d prefer if the partner were a woman. I want to watch someone whose successes mean something extra-personal to me. Second, these are fun shows, not super-dark or terrifying shows. No Happy Valley or SVU. The goal here is to be able to sleep at night. (Ideally, in the gorgeous patterned pajamas Yûko Takeuchi wears in Miss Sherlock, but we can’t have it all. I checked. They’re sold out.)
I ranked them on a scale, not in terms of quality, but from HARDCORE to COZY, to help you pick a winning series. The list should feel increasingly soporific as you scroll down.
Veronica Mars
Am I actually putting Veronica Mars, a show everyone knows about, on this list? Yes, just in case. This gritty but fun neo-noir series (just renewed, many years later!) about a teenage outcast (Kristen Bell) solving the murder of her best friend (Amanda Seyfried), and helping out her PI father (Enrico Colantoni), is definitely one you should have under your belt.
(Available to stream on Hulu)
Riviera
You know what’s pretty enjoyable? Riviera. In which the universally-beloved Julia Stiles stars as Georgina a wealthy, newly-married art-curator who discovers after her billionaire husband is killed (his yacht explodes!) that his entire financial empire was built on really shady stuff. Our EIC Dwyer Murphy has been recommending it for months, and I decided to give it a whirl. As expected, Julia Stiles decides to figure out what this is all about, partly for her self, partly to protect their family. Sometimes it can get fairly rote, but the aesthetic is so compelling, I almost don’t care. (The setting is “glitzy European waterfronts,” if you haven’t guessed.) Normally, I really don’t love shows about rich people being rich, but I miss Europe. Plus, I do really like splashy, big budget shows full of intrigue and competent, resourceful amateur sleuths.
(Available to stream on YouTube TV)
The Flight Attendant
I had a LOT fun watching The Flight Attendant, HBO’s high-flying new series based on the novel by Chris Bohjalian). Cassie (Kaley Cuoco) is an alcoholic, carousing flight-attendant who, after one date with a handsome traveler, wakes up in a trendy Bangkock hotel room next to his (very) dead body. Terrified she’ll be blamed for the crime, she decides to wings her own amateur investigation into what really happened. Zosia Mamet plays her concerned lawyer best friend with the utmost realness. My favorite appearance is by Scottish character actress Michelle Gomez, whose face I have frequently called “a carnival of sarcasm.” She is a mysterious assassin hot on Cassie’s trail as she walks unknowingly into dangerous international intrigue.
(Available to stream on HBO Max)
Stumptown
Although Stumptown, the rainy adaptation of Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth’s comic book series of the same name, is NEITHER cozy, nor precisely lighthearted, I’m sticking it on here because it’s a focused, non-traumatizing story about a strong woman who chips away at local corruption and greed, using her PI license and some light body combat. Dex Perios (Cobue Smulders) is a wry ex-marine with a broken heart and a drinking problem who winds up becoming a PI in Portland. I like how this show emphasizes the actual process of acquiring one’s PI credentials, as well as Dex’s closet of VERY nice coats. Plus, as I’ve said before, it productively represents its disabled characters, and features Native actors in complex, weighty roles.
(Available to stream on Hulu)
Miss Sherlock
My favorite series as of late, HBO Asia’s sleek Miss Sherlock, is one of the best Holmesian adaptations I’ve ever seen. This modern, female, Japanese reboot borrows just enough from its source material to inspire a totally new story. And it’s great fun. Dr. Wato Tachibana (who, with her honorific title, is called “Wato-san,” which is amazing) returns to Tokyo from medical volunteer work in Syria to witness the strange murder of her mentor, a traumatic event which leads her to meet a strange consulting detective, a mysterious, elegant woman who goes by the name “Sherlock” and who has tremendous powers of observation (Yûko Takeuchi). They wind up collaborating on the case, and ultimately living together. But this isn’t the chummy partnership of Holmes-and-Watson you’ve come to know; more than simply being motivated to solve crimes by boredom, this Sherlock is motivated solely by her own pleasure. A bossy, self-directed, antisocial, cranky, often whiny genius, Takeuchi’s Sherlock loves dressing up in expensive, funky clothes to sit in her apartment all day, just as much as she loves cracking impossible puzzles (and grins with excitement whenever the plot thickens). She’s even a little mean to Wato (Shihori Kanjiya), who, on the other hand, is shy, sympathetic, and sensitive—dealing with her own demons, PTSD that has begun to rage since her return to Japan. Their friendship becomes more like a sisterhood—fraught, frustrated, turbulent, triumphant.
(Available to stream on HBO Max)
Year of the Rabbit
The boisterous series Year of the Rabbit has more men in its core crime-solving team than is ideal for this list, but Susan Wokoma’s Mabel is such a good detective, and the surrounding men are wholly daffy that it’s clear they’re not taking away her spotlight. Mabel is a Black female detective living in London during the Victorian era. She has the skills, and the connections (she’s the Police Chief’s adopted daughter), but she still has countless odds stacked against her, when it comes to getting the appropriate credit and compensation for what she’s capable of. Still, Mabel is undaunted.
(Watch on Amazon with Topic)
Vera
The phenomenally talented Brenda Blethyn shines in Vera, a detective show set in Northumberland, about a crotchety, sarcastic, messy, but brilliant female DCI named Vera Stanhope. We’ve seen the archetype plenty of times, but not enough in female characters. And Blethyn is so good, she makes the whole thing feel brand-new. This is the only show with a cop at its helm, and I’m making the exception because Vera is so condescending towards the police, it’s a wonder why she isn’t a PI.
(Available to stream on Acorn and Amazon Prime, with Acorn)
Teenage Bounty Hunters
I’ll never stop championing Teenage Bounty Hunters, which is both amazing and tragically cancelled. Created by Kathleen Jordan, this critically-beloved sleeper hit is the story of 16-year-old twin sisters Blair and Sterling (Anjelica Bette Fellini and Maddie Phillips) who begin an after-school side-hustle working for a middle-aged bounty hunter (Kadeem Hardison) who maybe can’t run as fast as he used to. Blair is super fast and Sterling is an ace with a gun. But between chasing bad guys and high-school problems, they find a lot of difficult stuff to deal with. Set in the affluent Atlanta suburbs, this is a smart, sincere show that is just as also in asking questions about who profits from arrests, and prison, in general. Which it is able to do *very* effectively for its setting in the deep South, real Trump territory. The show has a lot to say about race, class, and sexuality, particularly whiteness (and Southern white womanhood). But it’s also just an endearing romp. Maybe there’s too much high school-related self-discovery and drama than “mystery-solving,” PER SE, for it to be on this list, but you should overlook this. You’ll thank me later.
(Available to stream on Netflix)
The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries
There are only five episodes of The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries, which is a SHAME, because they are eminently delightful. The legendary Diana Rigg plays the wealthy, meddlesome, brassy Mrs. Bradley, a passionate suffragette who suffers no fools, and loves to solve crimes. Again, there are too few episodes (WHY!?), but they will charm and entertain you. And few actors can spellbind an audience quite like Rigg.
(Available to stream on Amazon Prime and Britbox)
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (Netflix)
The grand-dame of all female-led murder mystery shows has to be the Roaring-20s-set Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, about a very game, cunning flapper named Phyrne Fisher (Essie Davis) who has just inherited a vast fortune and lives in an enormous house in Melbourne. She lives with a crew of skilled factotums, and loves to solve mysteries, to the consternation (and eventual fascination) of the local police chief. There’s a mysterious amount of really fake-looking CGI, and sometimes the fabulous costumes look a biiiiiit too “costume-party” than totally believable, but it’s hard not to love watching a very confident woman doing whatever she wants. Also, a high point is that Phryne’s best friend is an out-lesbian doctor, who wears pants! I WISH 20s America could handle stuff like that. This show is delightful to the very last drop. (Be warned, the show tries to be all dark in Season 1 by weaving in a plot about Phyrne’s sister being kidnapped and murdered as a child. It is upsetting. But once this arc is over, the series settles into something vastly more relaxing).
(Available to stream on Acorn and Amazon Prime, with Acorn)
Murder, She Wrote
Don’t forget the great-grand dame all female-led murder mystery shows, which needs no introduction on this website.
(Stream on Philo, whatever that is)
Death Comes to Pemberly
Elizabeth Bennett is our detective protagonist in Death Comes to Pemberly, based on the adaptation of P.D. James’s late-career fanfiction of the same name. Elizabeth and Darcy have been married for a few years and all is blissful at Pemberly until the original novel’s entire cast shows up… and then there is a murder!
(Available to stream on Netflix)
Frankie Drake Mysteries
I haven’t watched much of the Frankie Drake Mysteries, but they seem very soothing, in a Miss Fisher kind of way. Frankie Drake (Lauren Lee Smith) is a pants-wearing Private Eye who opens an office in 1920s Toronto with an aim of helping the downtrodden. She and her glamorous partner Trudy Clarke (Chantel Riley) remain undaunted by even the most treacherous-seeming of circumstances. Plus they have help in their crime-solving from Flo (Sharon Matthews) at the morgue, and Mary (Rebecca Liddard) at the police station. I find myself being not-totally-convinced by the aesthetic (it looks a BUNCH more like a costume party than Miss Fisher does) but it’s a nice time if you want to flop on your couch and watch women supporting one another, especially at a historical moment crucial in the history of women’s social and political advancement.
(Available to stream on Amazon Prime and Thirteen Passport)
Agatha Raisin
Agatha Raisin is so quirky and cute and full of sneaking around and meddling. It’s fresh and perky without being cloying. Agatha Raisin (the brilliantly-talented Ashley Jensen) is a PR consultant-turned-amateur detectives who solves murders in the Cotswolds. TELEVISION SUNSHINE, I TELL YOU.
(Available to stream on Acorn and Amazon Prime, with Acorn)
Marple
There are LOTS of adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories, and I recommend all of them. But right now, I’m going to recommend this recent adaptation, which stars both Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie starred in the title role. (Nothing too formally funky… McEwan was cast from 2004 to 2007, and McKenzie from 2008 to 2013). If you like watching women-who-are-underestimated-for-their-gender-and-age turn out to get the better of everyone, LOOK NO FURTHER.
(Available to stream on Acorn and Amazon Prime, with Acorn)
Rosemary & Thyme
This show is especially soothing for its preponderance of beautiful foliage. Rosemary Boxer and Laura Thyme are just two professional gardeners who wind up feeling a bit bereft and alone: Rosemary is newly single after her husband leaves her for another woman, while Laura is laid off from her job as a university lecturer specializing in horticulture. But it’s fine, because they have each other, and a burgeoning hobby for solving crimes. There’s nothing like investigating a murder to put the rose back in one’s cheeks.
(Available to stream on BritBox, or Amazon)
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Some people are great at movie trivia. Some know all the U.S. state capitals. Me? I’m a walking encyclopedia of famous authors who have committed crimes. (Yes, I’m as much fun at parties as I sound. Invite me, post-COVID.)
This niche interest started when I began reading about the sixteenth-century English poet Christopher “Kit” Marlowe for a college literature class. Usually, the bios of classic British authors are pretty easy to skim: went to Oxford and/or Cambridge, moved to London, published some writing, racked up debts, died eventually. Now, to be fair, all of these facts are also true for Marlowe. But that’s leaving out the good parts.
There’s the 1589 arrest for murder. The dramatic seven-year career in international espionage. The 1592 arrest for counterfeiting money. The other 1592 arrest, that one for brawling. The 1593 arrest for atheism. The threatened 1593 arrest for sedition, which only didn’t happen because Marlowe was stabbed first.
As a longtime fan of crime fiction and historical crime fiction in particular, Kit’s biography was like catnip for me. I went deep down the research rabbit hole and never looked back. One result of this research is my first novel, A Tip for the Hangman. The book takes the covert and criminal activities in Marlowe’s life and reshapes them as a spy thriller, complete with secret codes and international missions. I hope it’s as much fun for others to read as it was for me to write, because I had a blast.
The other result? Tell me that a canonized author committed a weird crime, and you have my complete and undivided attention.
More literary icons have been criminals than your high school English teacher might have led you to believe. Take Marlowe’s contemporary, Ben Jonson, who stabbed an actor in a street brawl. That’s right: Jonson, England’s first poet laureate, got his start by murdering a man in a swordfight. He barely escaped death by hanging for the crime, calling on an obscure legal precedent that said the executioner couldn’t hang a man who could speak Latin.
Then there’s Samuel Pepys, whose extraordinarily detailed seventeenth-century diaries are one of the most-often-cited primary sources of the English Restoration. More interesting—to me—is the fact that Pepys was arrested for high treason not once, not twice, but three separate times. And while none of these charges stuck, he did spend time under lock and key in the Tower of London for a different, equally splashy crime: piracy.
(Where is my ten-part miniseries about Pirate Captain Samuel Pepys, Netflix? Must I do everything myself?)
Robert Louis Stevenson, of Treasure Island fame, was arrested twice: once under suspicion of being a German spy, and once for a snowball fight that got out of hand. The French surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire was briefly—though wrongly—arrested for stealing the Mona Lisa. Thomas Malory, author of Le Mort d’Arthur, was most likely a notorious outlaw convicted of robbery, cattle theft, extortion, attempted murder, and church robbery.
There’s something about this list of canonized secret criminals that delights me to my core. We’re all used to the archetype of the stay-at-home author who sits by the fire with a cup of tea and composes grisly murder mysteries. I’m a broadly law-abiding writer myself, with little but a handful of parking tickets to my name. I have no desire to turn to murder, art theft, or piracy in my spare time—but these men did, and I find myself yearning to figure out why.
I also love the sheer rebellious pleasure of putting the fun back in classic lit. Every one of us could tell the story of a “great” book we hated entirely because we were forced to write a timed essay on it in English class. Knowing the salacious backstories of the men behind the canon re-genres those books, in a way. It feels like taking the dusty classics off the shelf and slapping a new, more colorful jacket on them—one that’s just as much mystery, thriller, or true crime as it is literary fiction.
As an author of historical fiction, criminal authors have one more powerful draw: we have access to their writings, and all the psychological insight that can yield. Sorry, Roland Barthes: when I’m writing biographical historical fiction about writers, “death of the author” is off the table. To write A Tip for the Hangman, I dove into Marlowe’s work and let my interpretive brain run wild. How much of the notoriously bloody Tamburlaine the Great reflected Marlowe’s own thoughts on revenge and justice? What can we learn about his espionage tactics from The Massacre at Paris? There’s no way to know for sure, but from a crime writer’s point of view, it’s too much fun not to speculate.
There’s a narrow line to walk here, of course. Some authors have committed crimes that seem endearing with a few centuries of distance: piracy, treason, espionage, getting entangled in a counterfeiting operation in the Netherlands. Other crimes are of a different stripe entirely: the kind that makes it difficult or distasteful to engage with the author at all. Take William S. Burroughs, for instance, who murdered his second wife and barely served time for it. Or Ezra Pound, modernist poet and notorious fascist collaborator during World War II. Or any number of writers through the ages who use the authority of their position to sexually harass or assault those with less power.
Beyond that, the phenomenon of the criminal author is almost entirely a function of white male privilege. The canon has only opened to women and people of color in the last century, if not the last few decades, so it’s no surprise the writers I’ve mentioned above are all white men. And it’s impossible to imagine a person of color committing any of the crimes I’ve described and escaping as lightly as these men did. Race, gender, nationality, class, religion—all the complicated facets of identity are deeply at play here, and it’s naïve and dangerous to pretend they’re not.
Just like any time the “bad boy” trope rears its head, it’s worthwhile to think about what behaviors it’s tacitly condoning, and at what point it starts to become a problem. Everyone will need to locate and draw their own line in the sand. For me, it’s a question of feel: as a woman of Jewish heritage, the anti-Semitism in Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta is something I can look beyond for a good story; Pound’s chummy relationship with Mussolini is not.
Still, these caveats won’t dissuade me from luxuriating in the study of classic literature’s strangest criminals. The grist it provides for the fiction mill is unparalleled. It’s one of the best ways I’ve ever found to turn the marble busts of Literature’s Great Writers back into real people: human beings who made terrible choices, took risks that didn’t pan out, and maybe dabbled in piracy of a weekend.
And let me tell you, knowing all this would definitely have made tenth-grade English more fun.
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My first encounter with the Russian mob occurred two-and-a-half years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in Istanbul. My new husband and I had traveled to Turkey and spent a week in a gloriously historic neighborhood, the Blue Mosque visible from our hotel windows. On our second night, we wandered across Galata Bridge, descended the steps to the waterfront, and chose a restaurant with a perfect view of the Golden Horn. Docked directly in front of this restaurant and sporting the tricolor Russian Federation flag floated a gigantic but peeling cruise ship, the name “Odessa” painted under a red star on its side. A single Russian family occupied nearly every table inside the restaurant—a man, his wife, his parents, her parents, multiple siblings, children, nieces, and nephews. They appeared to have been sitting for hours, the dishes before them already of the sweet and evening-snack variety.
We ate our kebabs while I tried to eavesdrop surreptitiously, even as we ourselves attracted quizzical glances. Back then, the only tattooed people in Russia were criminals, mostly men who had served time in Soviet prisons. Their tattoos, as in many underworld societies, had (still have) specific meanings. The reason we drew attention was that I was very obviously of Russian heritage and my husband, who could pass for Russian if he kept silent, had tattoos. As curious as we were about this party, so were they about us. Only when I got up to use the ladies’ did I realize everyone thought I was yet another Eastern European woman taking advantage of the newly opened borders to escape poverty and ply her wares on the shores of the Bosphorus, perhaps with her pimp. (A man followed me and made this assumption abundantly clear).
We stayed as late as we reasonably could, but the Russians were still eating. Much like a family on Thanksgiving who grows peckish a few hours after dinner, they requested fresh platters of kebobs and pilaf while their dolled-up children ran between the servers’ legs.
Throughout this entire evening, the family and various young men from neighboring tables paid homage to the man sitting at the head of the longest table. They asked him questions, and he would debate and answer. Then they’d drink a toast. Or they handed him something and he would pat them on the shoulder. Then they’d drink a toast.
Right before we called it a night, the man retrieved a softball-sized roll of US dollar bills, peeled off a couple hundreds and handed them to a waiter. The rest of the bills in that eye-popping roll were also hundreds.
Back in our hotel later that evening, I spotted two of the young men from the restaurant in the lobby, and the next night we bought them drinks, probing them for details. What we had witnessed would have been straight-up commerce in any capitalist country. But since the man with the wad of cash hailed from a county that only recently stopped punishing private enterprise with prison sentences, and still had no idea how to conduct itself capitalistically, the party we had inadvertently crashed was tied up with the criminal underworld. The young men confessed that their ultimate dream was to climb the mafia hierarchy and come to America.
Their cruise ship sailed from Odessa to Istanbul every few months, then the boss would send them and many others to buy everything in sight. Back in Russia, the cheap Turkish goods sold for huge profits. Russian money being worth nothing, this commerce was almost exclusively conducted in US dollars.
The reliance on dollars was not new and had evolved decades earlier when the black market began to flourish in the Soviet Union. Despite Stalin’s savage regime and the relentless hunt for “spekulants” (people who bought and sold goods on the black market), and “valuta” (foreign currency), absolutely everyone in the Soviet Union, at one point or another, bought or sold something on the black market. Even my father, who prided himself on being financially naïve, bought matzoh for us on the DL, because there was no other way to buy it. Other things that appeared in our household on the DL: bananas, caviar, pink patent-leather shoes for me, watercolor paints. There was probably more, but I was a child and not privy.
Private enterprise was underground yet universal in the USSR, often criminally organized, sometimes not. With an increase in foreign tourism in the 1950s, resourceful young men could be found circling tour groups, whispering, “For sale? For sale?” Anything a tourist had could translate into profit: blue jeans (of course), but also chewing gum, records, cassette tapes, books, shoes, underwear, cosmetics. Literally everything from the West was worth money. This buying and selling of all things foreign became known as “fartsa” (from “for sale”) and the men churning this commerce were called “fartsovschiks”. It was highly illegal, very dangerous, but the thrill was irresistible. It wasn’t just the money. It was the excitement of laying hands on a Beatles album or tasting a stick of Juicy Fruit. It wasn’t just that commerce itself was forbidden, but western music, food, clothes, magazines—for with those came foreign ideas. And those ideas proved deadly to a totalitarian state.
This underground commerce bubbled under the control of loosely connected criminal brotherhoods known as Bratvas. Regular citizens did their own bartering, but the more organized efforts belonged to Vors (Thieves), officially known as Vory v Zakone, or Thieves-In-Law. These Vors served time in prisons, received their specialized tattoos, and eventually were the cause for the bemused glances my husband received at a mob-dominated restaurant at the foot of Galata Bridge.
In the 1970s and ‘80s the Soviet Union relaxed its borders for citizens of non-Russian nationalities, resulting in a quarter of a million Jews rushing to leave while the leaving was good. An astonishing number of those immigrants settled in Brooklyn, in Brighton Beach, a community that had already been Jewish for half a century. I’ve read speculation that the Soviet Union opened its borders to rid itself of its criminal element, but plenty of criminals remained behind. A connection between the old world and new ensued, only to strengthen after the fall of communism in 1991.
Brighton Beach, or Little Odessa as it came to be known, very quickly birthed a robust criminal brotherhood of its own. Here, they were often of Jewish, Ukrainian, and Georgian descent, soon joined by men from the far-flung Soviet republics. Meanwhile, the disintegrated ex-Soviet state had many desirable commodities to sell and a power structure having more in common with the underworld than a First World democratic state should. Arms (including nuclear), planes, tanks, anything that wasn’t nailed down was soon for sale on the global black market.
The Vors were not at all averse to working with other criminal organizations. In 1997, a Vor nicknamed Tarzan plotted to sell a Soviet diesel submarine to a Colombian cartel for the purpose of smuggling cocaine. More recently, a 2017 racketeering case against the Shulaya gang out of Brighton Beach was so wide ranging in scope the indictment listed 33 defendants and spanned the continental US. The indictment details, among other things: violence, extortion, the operation of illegal gambling businesses, casino fraud, identity theft, credit card fraud, and trafficking of stolen goods. There is also prostitution, slot machine hacking, drug trafficking, a murder-for-hire plot, a plot to have a female member of the enterprise seduce victims, then chloroform (!) and rob them. They stole 10,000 lbs. of chocolate from container ships. Did I mention the kidnappings or the money laundering—using a fraudulent vodka export-import business (what else?).
Speaking of money laundering, I’ll end on one more personal experience. The last time I visited my family in Moscow, we had to exchange money. Being cautious Western tourists, we decided to do this at a bank. The bank was guarded by visibly armed men. When we finally made our way into the lobby, we were told that the bank would not take our dollars, though it would happily sell dollars to us for rubles at a laughably worthless rate. We gave up and descended into the metro, where pop-up kiosks exchanged money unofficially. There too, the clerk refused to accept our bills because some had markings or creases. Frustrated, we turned around, only to have the woman behind us in line shrug and say she’d buy our dollars because she would, quote, “have to give it to the gangsters, anyway.”
The Russian mob is local and global, multi-lingual, technologically advanced, but not against using low-tech, brutal techniques. Its members are atheist, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian, their culture a greater bond than their religious differences. As an organization, it has existed since the eighteenth century and has adapted and thrived through every historical upheaval.
As with all criminal organizations, it is filled with bad people doing awful things. But it’s the demented quality of their undertakings that makes it such outrageously great fiction fodder.
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When Taryn Cornick’s sister was killed, she was carrying a book. People don’t usually take books when out on a run, but Beatrice must have planned to stop, perhaps at the Pale Lady, where she was often seen tucked in a corner, reading, a pencil behind her ear.
The book in the bag still strapped to Beatrice’s body when Timothy Webber bundled her into the boot of his car was the blockbuster of that year, 2003, a novel about tantalising, epoch‑spanning conspiracies. Beatrice enjoyed those books, perhaps because they were often set in libraries.
The Cornick girls loved libraries, most of all the one at Princes Gate, which belonged to their grandfather, James Northover. Beatrice was seventeen and Taryn thirteen when their grandfather died. The family had to give up the debt‑encumbered house—though Grandma Ruth stayed on in the gatehouse while she continued at her vet’s practice. It was Grandma Ruth whom Beatrice was visiting when Webber found her.
Beatrice and Taryn’s parents were separated. Basil Cornick was in New Zealand, playing the bluff fellow in a fantasy epic. Addy Cornick had been struggling with illness and was dispiriting company. Taryn would spend some of her holidays with her mother, then stay with friends. She never went near Princes Gate, because she couldn’t cope with the changes. A farm conglomerate had taken over the estate. The new owners left the last of the wetlands intact, and the plantation forest with its kernel, a copse of ancient oaks. But the stone walls were dis‑ mantled to make long fields with nothing to impede the big harvesting machines—not walls, or drainage ditches, or the hawthorn hedges the foxes had followed.
The library had already gone, broken up before the sale. James Northover’s books passed into the hands of the owners of antiquarian bookshops, except a few long‑coveted items that went to his collector friends, perhaps including the ancient scroll box known as ‘The Fire‑ starter’, because it was said to have survived no fewer than five fires in famous libraries.
So, the book bumping against Beatrice’s shoulder blades as she took her last steps was one of those set in old museums and libraries. A book with a light in its long perspective, like the light of a grail. A book with scholarly heroes and hidden treasure.
Beatrice was running in her baggy sweats and bouncing backpack. It was autumn, and there was a light mist. The road between St Cynog’s Cross and the village of Princes Gate Magna was thickly covered in fallen leaves, its surface amber but for two black streaks where the leaves had been chewed up and tossed aside by the tyres of passing cars. The road was quiet. Beatrice wasn’t wearing headphones. She moved off onto the verge when she heard the car. The mist began to sparkle, and the reflectors on Beatrice’s shoes flashed as the headlights caught them.
Whenever a restless night summoned her sister—her grey sweats and swinging ponytail—Taryn never found herself on that road. She was always in the car. In the driver’s seat. She was the murderer, Timothy Webber. Taryn thought this might have been because she had spent so much time wondering why Webber had done it. Wondering how anyone does a thing like that.
The trial was held a year after Beatrice died. Taryn attended and became familiar with every detail of what happened—or, at least, what was known.
Webber’s car hadn’t clipped Beatrice because she wasn’t far enough off the road. The police photographs showed a curved tyre track in the black mud. They showed how far he had swerved to catch her. There were no skid marks, because he’d braked already, reducing speed not to pass safely but to hit Beatrice hard enough, he hoped, to subdue her. His car cracked Beatrice’s pelvis, and a roadside oak her skull. He stopped, got out, and scooped Beatrice up from where she lay in the lap of some tree roots. He put her in his boot.
Webber’s lawyers let him take the stand, perhaps hoping his fecklessness would convince the jury that his actions lacked malice. He told the kind of feeble story kids concoct when they’re caught out. He said he put Ms Cornick in his trunk to take her to hospital. But—the prosecution asked—wouldn’t most people place an injured person in the back seat, or not move her at all and wait to flag down the next car?
Webber said he’d been too afraid to wait for someone to come along. It was a quiet road. He wasn’t carrying a phone. It would probably have all gone better for him, he said, if he’d just driven off and had to face a charge of hit‑and‑run instead of this one. ‘But I couldn’t do that.’ He screwed up his mouth in an expression of apology. ‘Why I put her in my trunk rather than my back seat must have been because she’d soiled herself and was a bit of a mess.’
The jury moaned in anger.
Timothy Webber had been charged with manslaughter, not murder, because, the prosecutor explained to Beatrice’s family, it was very difficult to prove intent. The police didn’t want to risk him getting off altogether. Webber wasn’t a bad character on paper. He had a job. He was an honest and reliable worker. He had no criminal record. He had friends and family. He hadn’t been equipped for an abduction, wasn’t carrying rope or duct tape. He hadn’t lined his boot with plastic. He made no attempt to conceal anything, leaving Beatrice’s thrown shoe where it lay, on the road, pointing back the way she’d come. He ran her down, but it was difficult to prove conclusively that it wasn’t an accident. He may have bundled her into his boot and driven off, but in the end, all he had done was take her another two miles in the direction he’d been going, before performing a U‑turn to drive to his sister’s house. His sister called an ambulance. She said to the paramedics, then to the police, ‘Tim just isn’t very bright.’
Beatrice was dead when the ambulance arrived.
Taryn wanted to know what it had been like for her sister, locked in the dark of Webber’s car boot. After the trial, a medical intern friend took a copy of the coroner’s report to his colleague and arranged a meeting so the neurologist could tell Taryn how it might have been.
‘It’s unlikely your sister regained consciousness after the impact,’ said the neurologist. ‘She had a skull fracture, compression fractures in two cervical vertebrae, and the crucial thing, a brain stem injury. It was the swelling in your sister’s brain stem that killed her—through uncontrollable blood pressure and disruptions to the normal rhythms of her heart. If you’re wondering whether she suffered, she almost certainly knew nothing from the moment the car ran into her.’ The neurologist’s look said it all—how he respected Taryn’s need to know. How this was all he could tell her. How he knew it could never be enough.
What he said helped Taryn believe what the jury had believed—that Webber wasn’t a killer with a plan. He hadn’t stalked her sister, and he wasn’t prepared. He’d only nurtured a fantasy, then surrendered to an impulse. He pulled the wheel to the left. He picked Beatrice up. But she’d soiled herself and wasn’t what he had wanted—a woman thrown down, stunned and helpless. It all went wrong for Webber. He hadn’t felt what he’d hoped to feel, or gotten to do what he’d dreamed of doing, and he couldn’t cope with any of it. And, because he didn’t follow through and rape the woman he’d injured and abducted, maybe that was why he was able to stubbornly insist on his innocence. He hadn’t meant to hurt Beatrice and was indignant that anyone would suggest he had.
He just ran into her, then panicked. ‘I was upset,’ he said—almost as if he expected the court to kiss him better.
Webber was convicted of the charge of manslaughter and sentenced to six years. Five with good behaviour.
I’ll be twenty‑five then, Taryn thought. She hoped five years would be long enough for her to move on—as people put it, not seeming to under‑ stand how she was always on the move, even in her dreams, driving along the amber road as the mist began to sparkle.
As it was it took most of that time for Taryn even to learn to hide her rage. She wanted to keep her friends—not that they were much use to her now, but she understood that they might be one day. In time she’d feel human again, and part of some civil world.
To starve her rage, Taryn stopped talking about Beatrice, not just about what had happened—everything. There were stories she would tell about her childhood where she and her mother and father, grand‑ mother and grandfather would be there, in the room of the story, with a ghostly absence, the now unmentionable Beatrice. Taryn couldn’t separate her sister from her death, from the mark on the oak at the fringe of the forest. In Taryn’s memory, her sister was a tender wound, Beatrice’s whole life stained with the blood she had shed inside her own head. Taryn was angry—burned and pitted by anger like acid. Other things came with the anger: fearlessness, recklessness, chilliness, insolence.
When Taryn met her husband, Alan Palfreyman, she wasn’t after a man of any sort, let alone a rich one. She only wanted something to eat, a glass of wine, a comfortable place to sit. She’d been caught in Frankfurt Airport by a cancelled flight on a budget airline. She’d had a holiday in Greece, on a beach she went to only at dusk, because the sun was fierce and her skin very fair. She was on her way home—sea salt still powdering her faintly mauve‑shaded white skin; salt in her hair too, so
that it was curling and almost black in its thicknesses. Taryn was superficially tired and very hungry, so she staked out the first‑class lounges and shamelessly followed one man, a self‑contained individual whose passing glance had registered not exactly interest but passive admiration, as if she were a fine watch and he had enough watches. Taryn fol‑ lowed him up the escalator, and when he was showing his membership card to the woman at the front desk of a hushed and scented lounge, and that woman was saying, ‘Good afternoon, Mr Palfreyman,’ Taryn gently slipped her arm through his and said, ‘Mr Palfreyman and guest.’
Alan looked at her in surprise but consented. ‘And guest.’ And they were through, arm in arm.
Taryn was twenty‑three when she married, the same age Beatrice had been when she died. Webber had three years of his sentence left to run—if he was serving the full sentence. Taryn’s mother had gone. Addy Cornick had been battling breast cancer for years and was in remission when Beatrice was killed. Shortly before Webber’s trial Taryn’s mother had one of her twice yearly check‑ups. Taryn went with her mother for the follow‑up appointment. When Addy Cornick’s oncologist told her she was still in remission she wept, not with relief, but bitterly, like someone who has had the worst possible news. She wiped her eyes and shrank in her chair, saying to herself, over and over, ‘Do I have to keep doing this?’ Meaning, ‘Must I go on living?’ Then, once the trial was over, Addy lost ground. She gave up. She seemed to be in a hurry to leave the world before her daughter’s killer returned to it.
For much of that period Taryn’s father was in New Zealand. Basil Cornick had a role in what he invariably referred to as ‘a juicy fantasy franchise’. It made him a lot of money, though the lonely interactions with imaginary friends and foes in front of a green screen almost robbed him of his lifelong joy in acting. Taryn’s father returned for her wed‑ ding. He gave her away. He also gave a speech and got the guests to raise their glasses to Beatrice: ‘My elder girl, who was tragically taken from us by violence, four years ago.’
Taryn carefully avoided looking at her husband. He knew she’d had a sister, and that Beatrice was dead. But she’d only told him that Bea was hit by a car. Perhaps, when her father was making his overly informative toast, she should have met Alan’s eyes so he’d at least see her wondering what he might be thinking. Taryn had, after all, wanted to share her life. To at least have a roost, as if she were a solitary ocean‑going bird looking for somewhere solid to set down, no matter how bare and exposed it might be.
On her wedding night Alan was still a little under the shadow of the loneliness he’d felt as he sat, his face stiff with shock, hearing his bride’s rather off‑putting actor father outline the appalling story of her sister’s murder. The speech had been so strange, somewhere between sentimental and perfunctory. Sitting with his bride on a splendid hotel bed, that loneliness wasn’t a thing Alan could recall in its horrible purity. He re‑ fused it, because he loved Taryn, the mysterious woman with wounds so deep she hid them from him. He hadn’t yet begun to think, Who am I to her that she hides a thing like that from me? Alan Palfreyman thought too well of himself for that.
Once they were finally alone, Alan took Taryn’s face between his hands and looked into her eyes. ‘You’re so sad, Taryn, and haunted, and out of step with others.’
Even Taryn could see this was true. She was always studying the world, not rapt or curious, but patient and dutiful, as if the world was something she’d paid good money to see. She was studying it now too— in the shape of Alan’s tender, troubled face. She was listening to the whisper of his smooth palm on the skin of her jaw, as he gazed at her and said, ‘Who are you, Taryn?’
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Personally and overall, I found this vid by Sanderson to be the most useful and pragmatic of all the vids reviewed so far--precisely the kind of advice I would expect from a truly successful author. My takeaways as follows:
- The concept of "borrowing" or getting story ideas, entire structure, or themes from other books or films can't hurt and might actually lead to publication; but I maintain you step carefully. The concept may already be overdone, a stale trope.
- His advised method of transposing the "structure" of one type of genre novel onto another can be productive--reminiscent of Italian writers in the old days transposing Japanese samurai scripts into spaghetti westerns. Another good example is the transposing of BATTLE ROYALE into THE HUNGER GAMES (different genre? debatable).
- Helpful to note plot points and/or scenes that successful stories have in common.
- Concept of "interviewing" your character to learn about them, is a very good one. Ask them questions, get in their heads, role play.
- Asking what character wants and needs, and how they're different.
- Careful with choice of primary protagonist viewpoint. The story needs to be personal to the viewpoint character.
- Partitioning a novel into three basic part: PROMISE, PROGRESS, PAYOFF. Yes, very basic, but helpful for new writers.
- Finally, his idea for "mind priming" before you hit the paper is a good one, e.g., you consider the ways in which you can make an important scene very visual and thrilling, and you roll it around in your head like a lozenge under the tongue. You savor it and play with it.
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The fifth-floor hallway was darker than reported, and there was an awkward dogleg near the stairwell that their local recon hadn’t bothered to map; it smelled of garlic, mold, and dry rot even though the hotel was billed as a Byzantine five-star. A milky Mediterranean twilight bled faint from hidden recesses along the ceiling, enough to cast a glow but not overly expose the shadow gliding through the shadows toward its target.
A woman, unremarkable, if a little boxy, hip to shoulder. Here on business, you might think, not worth a second look. Black slacks, T-shirt and unstructured blazer, wireless earpiece, and Zero Halliburton briefcase.
She approached a doorway with a curious surfeit of caution, stepping to one side of it while preparing to knock. But then she hesitated, stared uncertainly at the brass digits fixed to the door— six two seven—and was momentarily unable to make sense of them. A voice in her earpiece hissed, “What’s wrong?”
She shook her head, forgetting that the voice couldn’t see her; she glanced across the hallway at the next doorway, momentarily paralyzed with doubt.
“Suite number,” she murmured, with a calm she didn’t feel. “Double-check for me?” “Seriously?” In her earpiece, an annoyed whisper: “Shit, man, did you fucking forget it?” She didn’t answer him but felt her cheeks flush hot because yeah, she had.
“Stand by.”
She waited as papers rustled on the other end of her comm, a clock in her head ticking away precious seconds that she knew, from long experience, she’d regret losing however this went down, at which point a door across the hall but just behind her—six two six—opened to reveal the naked, pale, middle-aged Chinese American asset she’d been sent to retrieve, a towel wrapped around his waist and a frown on his face. Their eyes locked.
There’s the plan that you make going in, and then there’s what really happens—the shit storm.
Rarely do they align. “Can I help you?”
No. It was supposed to be the other way around. But on the love-tossed bed in the room behind the towel man, a pretty, naked woman was reaching to a side table and a big black Glock that surely had been stowed in its drawer for a contingency just like this one.
The woman in the hallway felt the familiar slowing of time she often experienced at the initiation of conflict. The clarity, the narrowing of focus, her pulse in her neck, a slight dissociation, as if she were watching what was unfolding rather than actively participating in it.
She was across the corridor and falling to the side and away from the six-two-six doorway, her arm wrapped around and pulling the towel man down with her as bullets from the naked woman’s gun splintered the jamb, slipped hot past their faces, and blistered plaster off the wall opposite. She felt them tear into the tactical vest under her T-shirt and bang off the metal briefcase she had raised as a shield. The narrow corridor came alive: voices, Turkish, other doors flung wide, a volley of panicked gunfire as red tracer dots from short-stock automatics searched the gloaming for her. The towel man was shrieking. She felt the warm wetness where a bullet had grazed her neck,
just below her ear.
Stress, but no panic. She whispered evenly, “Stay with me, Scott, okay?” Their Halliburton shield burst open, she lost her grip on it, and bullets tore the cash bundles inside into a flurry of pale confetti that smelled like burned rice.
She hit the floor hard. The stun grenade that exploded next was too close to her, with a roar of blinding light she’d been unprepared for.
The three-op backup who had rolled into position beyond her waited for sight lines to clear so they could cut the Turks down with little fanfare.
Close your eyes. Cover your ears. With the asset in her arms, she had been unable to follow any operational protocol. A searing scree deafened her. Curled around her man, protective, blood leaking from her neck wound, she felt dizzy, head filled with glue, and sensed a lateral movement.
The naked woman. Glock in her outstretched hand aimed point-blank down at the asset.
His dad body wasn’t as heavy as she expected. Or maybe it was simply the adrenaline of fear. She levered him safely to one side, rotated while pulling the sidearm from her hip—took a breath— and aimed center mass before tapping the trigger twice.
The naked woman dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Shredded bills and bits from the broken briefcase were still wafting down on them. No more than eleven seconds had passed. It had happened so fast that the spray of the overhead sprinklers triggered by the stun grenade only now began to rain.
Her thinking was splintered and unreliable; her eyes felt fried, the hallway even thicker with the smoke and the mist. She struggled to sit up. The naked woman lay dewy and unmoving on the threadbare carpet, ivory skin between augmented breasts ruined by the two puckered puncture wounds where the bullets had made entry.
There was movement around her. She heard but couldn’t understand the voices, as if she were underwater, but when her hand found his shoulder, she felt the pounding of the sobbing towel man’s heart.
“Let’s get you home,” she heard herself murmur.
There were hands under her arms then, and she stood, finding her balance; the rank lukewarm water that ran down her upturned face felt heaven sent. The backup team got their trembling towel- clad asset to his feet and trundled both of them to the emergency stairwell and away.
Her own pulse was steady, stubborn; she’d survived.
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One morning, not long after my first novel, Finding Jake, was published, I walked my kids to the bus stop. As I stood just outside a pod of my neighbors, watching our kids roll away, one of the dads stepped up to me. Understand, the exchange was nothing but friendly. Conversational, even. But it was the beginning.
“We really enjoyed your book,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said, my eyes lowering, a little embarrassed by the attention.
“Yeah,” he said, staring at me. “It was really cool to read a story with so many familiar details.”
I didn’t get it at first. Social interactions have always confused me to some degree. The nuances lost until I have time to think about it. When he continued, I picked up my first hint.
“My wife really found it… interesting.”
I slipped out of the conversation and went home. Later that day, I ran into another neighbor as we walked our dogs. I saw the hunger in her eyes as she approached.
“(Name withheld for my own safety) is mad at you,” she said.
She was talking about the wife of the man I had spoken to that morning. I had a sense of where this was going, but I had to ask.
“Why?”
“What you wrote in your book about her,” she said.
I took the time to explain myself, knowing this conversation would get back to her. Regardless, we didn’t get their Christmas card that year, or any year since….
Writing books is truly a great job. The commute is nonexistent. The schedule is fairly flexible. The physical strain is no worse than a bout of carpal tunnel syndrome. But there is a dark side. A very true and personal danger. One someone should have put in the job description. An occupational hazard that should come with a warning label. When you write dark stories, particularly one about a serial killer, people certainly start looking at you a little differently.
Just for background, here are the topics covered in each of my four published novels—a school shooting, domestic terrorism, alcoholism and abuse, and my newest book due out in February, Let Her Lie, a serial killer. If you lived next door to me and you read any of the four, you might give me the side-eye. You might install a camera outside your house, surreptitiously pointed in my direction. You might not invite me into the carpool for our daughters’ dance class. And, I guess, I can’t blame you.
The question is simple. How can a normal person come up with stuff like that? If they can, they must think about it. And if they think about it, how far is that from actually dabbling, really? Right? Sometimes I imagine my neighbors practicing the interview they will give to the local news station when the truth comes out. When I’m finally caught.
Maybe that would make a good book. The author next door acting out his darkest fantasies. Like a domestic Basic Instinct. But it’s just not believable. I’m pretty much a softy. I don’t like setting mouse traps. If I accidentally walk out of the grocery store and notice I have something under the cart that I forgot to pay for, I head back in. I even hold doors for the elderly, as hard as that may be to believe.
So how did this happen? Why do people I know come up to me with a sheepish laugh and ask how I come up with such dark ideas? How did I scare all of the people around me? It’s simple. Just as people see me in my stories, they see themselves in my characters. If I’m writing about real people, I can’t be making up everything else, right?
I’ve provided this exact explanation so many times. To my mom after she got upset with me because of the father character in my novel, The Perfect Plan. To my son’s teacher after the cover of Finding Jake came out looking eerily like him. And at almost every festival or event I’ve attended when an audience member comments on my newest book being a little more “disturbing” than my last. The short answer is, I make it all up.
In reality, this misunderstanding, in my opinion, all comes down to the conception of a character. My life is pretty boring. Certainly not something that would make a plot for a novel. And, I apologize in advance, the people in my life aren’t much more thrilling. But I do something that causes this confusion. When I start a book, I have a character in mind. This person is utterly and completely fictional. This person has to do some crazy things, survive life and death situations, to get to the end of the story. Like I said, this person is absolutely no one I know.
Then I start writing. It is the little details that pop up. I might set a scene at someone’s house, even. Or my character might find his/her self in a real-life situation. These mundane moments anchor a story. Give it a sense of reality. And I blatantly steal them from my real life. In my first book, I included a play date that pretty much happened. In my most recent book, my main character struggles with a sense of purpose that might be my own. These descriptions, or actions, or settings cause most of my agita. For those around me recognize them. And when they do, they identify with that character. They think I wrote them into the story. But I’ve never done that. Every character I’ve written is their own person. And no character I’ve written has a single person as their basis.
Back to the story that began this discussion. What, you might ask, made my neighbor think I wrote about her? What made her so angry that she has yet to forgive me? It’s a delicate answer, but I’ll do my best. In my first book, one of the main character’s neighbors has a physical attribute. Or, more specifically, an augmented physical attribute. From what I’ve come to understand, my neighbor has a similar… augmentation. A fact that I was blissfully unaware of until that fateful day. And the absolute truth, though I’ve tried not to say it for fear of offending her or anyone, I never thought of her once while writing that book.
So, to that neighbor, and to all those that I’ve frightened, let me leave you with one plea. Please consider that the imagination we try to cultivate and grow in our children might well be alive in some adults. They are, after all, just stories. Stories that I hope prompt a discussion about the state of society and culture.
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks.
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Mick Herron, Slough House
(Soho)“Herron has certainly devised the most completely realised espionage universe since that peopled by George Smiley.”
–The Times (UK)Ben McPherson, Love and Other Lies
(William Morrow)“McPherson dramatically highlights the tensions between Norway’s native and immigrant populations as the plot builds to a devastating conclusion. This powerful, thought-provoking novel deserves a wide readership.”
–Publishers WeeklyAlex Tresniowski, The Rope: A True Story of Murder, Heroism, and the Dawn of the NAACP
(Simon & Schuster)“This suspenseful, well-written true-crime tale will be an eye-opener for anyone who assumes that after Reconstruction, lynching remained a serious threat only in the South. High-velocity historical true crime.”
–Kirkus ReviewMichael Koryta, Never Far Away
(Mulholland)“Well-developed characters enhance the high-octane plot. Fans of nail-biting suspense will be in heaven.”
–Publishers WeeklyLinda Castillo, A Simple Murder
(Minotaur)“Murder in Amish country has a certain added frisson, and Castillo’s the master of the genre.”
–PeopleEmilya Naymark, Hide in Place
(Crooked Lane)“An original, satisfying roller-coaster ride for domestic suspense fans.”
–Publishers WeeklyC.J. Tudor, The Burning Girls
(Ballantine Books)“Tudor . . . strikes again with another thriller filled with twists and turns right up to the mind-bending ending.”
–Library JournalAlison Epstein, A Tip for the Hangman
(Doubleday)“[T]hrilling and romantic . . . Epstein successfully evokes both the beauty and the brutality of 16th-century England.”
–Historical Novel SocietyBryan Reardon, Let Her Lie
(Crooked Lane)“A virtuoso exercise for serious players determined to keep playing each other to the bitter end.”
–Kirkus ReviewsLucy Atkins, Magpie Lane
(Quercus)“Lucy Atkins excels at creating highly intelligent, slightly eccentric outsiders. I was completely immersed… and preoccupied, and appalled, by such credible characters. I loved it.”
–Sarah Vaughan -
Though often described as an island Malta actually comprises three inhabited islands, Malta, Gozo and Comino. Few archipelagos can have been fought over as much—invaded, occupied, bombed and put under siege—than Malta. Phoenicians and Carthaginians, Romans, Greeks, Arabs, the Knights of St John, Normans, Aragonese, French, the British and the Nazis. As so often geography is destiny for Malta, sitting at a crossroads in the Mediterranean equidistant between southern Europe and north Africa. The Maltese language reveals its cosmopolitan history—Maltese borrows from Sicilian, Arabic, a little French influence, and a bit of English thrown in too. Now part of the European Union, Malta’s economy relies on tourism as much as anything these days. The Maltese flag includes the Cross of St George medal, awarded to the entire island by Great Britain’s King George VI for Malta’s resistance to the Nazis in World War Two.
Talking of World War Two, Mark Mills’s The Information Officer (2009) is set in the Summer of 1942 as the people of Malta suffer daily bombing raids by the Nazis. Max Chadwick’s job as the information officer is to ensure the news the islanders receive everyday maintains their morale. When Max is given proof suggesting a British officer is murdering local women in the capital Valletta, he must take on the case and investigate to prevent a collapse of pro-British sentiment on the island that could lose the Mediterranean for the Allies.
Moving to contemporary Malta the author Paul Vincent Lee relocated from (the distinctly colder) Glasgow to Malta and began to writing the locally-set Inspector Thea Spiteri series. In the first book in a trilogy The Maltese Orphans (2014) it is Malta in 2014, and Pulizija (the National Police Force of Malta) Inspector Thea Spiteri is at a crossroads in her life, and career. Then a child’s abduction from a crowded beach gives Thea the opportunity to concentrate her mind on what she does best: solving crimes. Thea returns in The Maltese Dahlia (2015) attempting to get to the bottom of a series of child abductions on Malta. In the final book in the trilogy, The Maltese Hunter (2016) a body is found floating in Malta’s famous Blue Lagoon. To complicate matter Thea finds the CIA on her patch and resonances of a bizarre tale that involves the assassination of JFK.
Roseanne Dingli is a Maltese born author and the country regularly appears in her work. Death in Malta (2012) sees disillusioned and depressed failing writer Gregory Worthington arriving in Malta to sample village life and ending up investigating the disappearance of little Censinu Mifsud, a ten year-old boy who was never found.
A few more crime novels that drop in on Malta:
- AJ Quinnell’s (the penname of novelist Philip Nicholson) Man on Fire was reworked as a movie and moved to Mexico City by Denzel Washington and Tony Scott, but the original 1980 novel moves between Italy, Marseille and Gozo. This was Quennell’s first John Creasy novel featuring his American hero who served in the French Foreign Legion. From Gozo Creasy launches a war on the mafia.
- Ann Crew’s A Murder in Malta (2014) is the first in her Elspeth Duff Mystery series. Elspeth is pretty and fashionable, Cambridge-educated and is the chief security advisor to Lord Kennington. In her first outing she is called in to untangle the truth of a terrorist threat at the Kennington Valletta hotel in Malta, owned by her aristocratic boss. Elspeth has to solve a series of crimes against a range of rather luxurious backgrounds on Malta and Gozo.
- Another series taking a trip to Malta is Lyn Hamilton’s The Maltese Goddess (1999) featuring her character, the Canadian archaeologist and antiques dealer Lara McClintoch. A dead body stuffed inside an antique chest and another impaled on an ancient knight’s sword? Lara has the skills to investigate, along with a visiting Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer.
- Federico Chini’s novel The Sea of Forgotten Memories (2011) is set in 1980 in Malta. The tragic death of a fisherman sparks an investigation that harks back to the past. To understand the present, one has to look at the past. But the past is never what it seems.
- Malta-born John Naudi has written a number of books set on Malta, but the crime novel City of Shadows (2018) is perhaps his best known internationally. The novel sees a British police constable, Archibald Whitlock, sent to the Maltese islands in the nineteenth century to help with solving a series of grisly murders haunting Valletta’s ancient Strada Stretta district of alleyways. At the same time, local Dominican friar Lorenzo Testaferrata answers the Lord’s call and goes to great lengths to save his flock from a terrible fate.
For readers of true crime there are a number of books dealing with the horrific assassination of Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017. Caruana Galizia focused on official corruption in Malta and ties between local gambling interests, organised crime and money laundering. She became internationally known for her linking of senior Maltese politicians with the Panama Papers scandal. In October 2017 Caruana Galizia was killed in a massive car bomb near her home. Since then, and various arrests and trials, a number of books looking both at Caruana Galizia’s life and work, as well as the assassination itself, have been published. These include Carlo Bonini, Manuel Delia and the BBC correspondent John Sweeney’s Murder on the Malta Express: Who killed Daphne Caruana Galizia? (2019). Carlo Bonini, a staff writer at the Italian national daily, La Repubblica, has also written in more depth about Caruana Galizia’s investigative reporting and links between mafia organisations, online gambling businesses and Malta in Murder Island (2020)
There are a few Maltese crime writers that deserve to, but haven’t, been translated into English yet. Local author Mark Camilleri’s novel Prima Facie (2010) is often recommended but unavailable in English unfortunately. Perhaps publishers see Malta as too small to attract much attention but it is a major holiday destination and so much other European crime fiction has been translated surely Malta deserves closer examination.
And, you’ll notice I managed to get to the end without mentioning Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930) because, of course, nobody goes to Malta in that book, brilliant as it is.
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It’s hard to overstate the anticipation that greeted the impending release of the novel Hannibal in 1999. Fans of its prequel, The Silence of the Lambs, had waited 11 years to find out what would happen next to FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling and cannibalistic psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter. The publisher ordered a first print run of more than a million copies; the manuscript was kept under tight security, lest anyone leak the fate of one of literature’s most infamous villains.
But when the book finally hit stores, and those legions of The Silence of the Lambs fans finally had a chance to see how Harris played out the entwined fates of Lecter and Starling, the collective reaction wasn’t excitement or satiation—it was outright revulsion. Imagine sitting down to what you think is a gourmet meal, only for your host to offer you a plate with your best friend’s head on it. Disgust quickly turned to outrage.
At the heart of that reaction was Starling’s fate. Much of Hannibal follows an expected plot arc. Following his bloody escape at the end of The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter is living under a false name in Florence. When Starling’s FBI career suffers in the wake of a botched raid, he sends her a letter of sympathy (or at least as sympathetic as a psychopath can get), which reignites the international manhunt for him. Meanwhile, one of Lecter’s victims, alive but severely disfigured, plots to have the good doctor captured and fed to a herd of wild boars.
Whereas the police procedural of The Silence of the Lambs is punctuated by moments of bright gore, Hannibal goes full-on Grand Guignol, featuring everything from disembowelment at a famous Italian landmark to death by moray eel. The tone is aggressively cynical about the human race, and the bloodshed is showy, theatrical—especially at the end, when Lecter captures Starling, brainwashes her, and then serves her a meal composed of her worst enemy’s brains. Then they travel the world together, spotted last at an opera in Buenos Aires.
For a generation who viewed Starling as a hero, that ending was a betrayal. She was not only deprived of agency, but helped the monstrous Lecter cannibalize another human being. The controversy over the ending threatened to disrupt the making of the inevitable movie; Hollywood executives tend to get nervous when asked to spend tens of millions of dollars on a production with a weird, downbeat conclusion.
Two years later, when the cinematic adaptation hit theaters, the ending was changed so that Lecter and Starling don’t run off together; instead, Lecter traps Starling, confesses his (unrequited) love, and then runs off into the darkness as the police close in. Anthony Hopkins returned for his signature role, but Jodie Foster didn’t, replaced by Julianne Moore. Jonathan Demme, who’d directed the first film, also refused to come back, leaving the chair open for Ridley Scott.
In a 2005 interview with Total Film, Foster explained her decision to not star in Hannibal in a particularly circuitous way: “Clarice meant so much to Jonathan [Demme] and I, she really did, and I know it sounds kind of strange to say but there was no way that either of us could really trample on her.” She hated Starling’s fate in the book, in other words, to the point where she was willing to sacrifice what would have surely been an insanely lucrative payday.
But what if the ending of Hannibal (the novel) isn’t a cruel disaster? What if Harris was trying something thematically bold, only for a significant portion of his audience to miss the point?
For starters, the Lecter of Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs is utterly different from the one stalking through the pages of Hannibal. The murderous gourmand of the first two novels is an all-seeing Oracle of sorts, despite having spent years trapped in a box; he brags that the world’s smartest psychiatrists seem unable to define him. “Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling,” he says at one point. “I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences. You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism.”
In Hannibal, however, Lecter is revealed as much a creature of trauma and conditioning as anyone else, his cannibalistic impulses stemming from watching his sister eaten by a roving band of Nazis during World War II. Given such a backstory, and with his choice of prey narrowed to the “free-range rude,” Lecter morphs from the almost Satanic force of the previous novels to a dapper anti-hero with some unusual dietary habits, a serial killer you can root for—that is, until he decides to capture Starling and wipe her consciousness from the face of reality.
Thomas Harris hasn’t given many interviews in the past 40 years, and the few times he’s gone on the record, he’s revealed precious little about his writing process aside from allowing his characters to “decide events according to their natures.” What’s clear from the little information out there, though, is that he’s a very meticulous writer. If he spends two books carefully constructing a particular version of a character, and then uses a third book to undermine the foundations of that character, it’s a deliberate choice, not sloppiness.
Remember that, while millions of readers loved (and continue to love) Starling, the fevered fanbase around Lecter himself has also endured for decades, long before Mads Mikkelsen’s performance in the Hannibal television show redefined the character as an utterly pretentious sex symbol (and the subject of endless memes and gifs). But celebrity has as many downsides for fictional characters as it does for actual people. In the years between The Silence of the Lambs and its sequel, Lecter warped in the heat of the pop-culture firmament, transformed into the subject of jokes, parodies, homages. He was defanged and overexposed, like so many other creatures—Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, Jason Voorhees.
Harris might have wanted to regrow Lecter’s teeth. In order to do that, the author spends the first two-thirds of “Hannibal” giving the audience exactly what they think they want: The anti-hero who kills anyone who deserves it, who has a plan for getting out of trouble, who lives in a bubble of impeccable taste. Then comes the turn, that moment when the silver dome is lifted to reveal the true nature of the meal: Starling is captured, her mind consumed, and Lecter has done something arguably more chilling than mere murder.
Harris could have gone the predictable route, which would have resulted in a forgettable denouement. Starling dying wouldn’t have provoked quite the same reaction from the audience (although it might have sparked collective rage); Lecter dying would have rendered the book a typical thriller. But in coopting Sterling, Harris produced perhaps the only ending that could trigger that level of repulsion—and reboot Hannibal the character as a figure of fear. It’s a masterpiece, or at least a hard stab at one.
He who sups with the Devil needs a long spoon, to paraphrase Chaucer; if you fall in love with a cannibal, prepare to have your heart eaten out.
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SEE ALSO:
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Okay, everyone, it’s time to rank Prison Escape Movies.
What are the parameters? The criteria for this category seem straightforward, but might involve even more hair-splitting than usual, so please read the guidelines, or what we’ll have here is… failure to communicate.
First of all, not every movie that features a prison escape or escaped prisoners is a Prison Escape Movie. To be on this list, a movie must centrally feature the escape, both tonally and practically, emphasizing the conditions that create the need for the escape, the process of planning and strategizing the escape, the actual escape, being on the run or pursued or recaptured, and/or a general atmosphere of fear, fascism, paranoia, and injustice.
One of the most important aspects of the Prison Escape Movie is an emphasis on the oppression and abjection promoted by the prison, as well as within the broken justice system that relies on carceral institutions. Chiefly, in a Prison Escape Movie, the prisoners attempt to extricate themselves for another chance at freedom, because freedom is absolutely worth the risks of being captured.
Even though there is a wealth of great prison break television out there, from Escape at Dannemora to Lupin to—hear me out—White Collar, this list is only for movies. They can be TV movies, though.
So, I’ll say this again… a movie with a big prison escape scene might not cause the film to qualify if the prison escape scene isn’t there to represent or underscore SOME existing themes of tyranny, fascism, subjugation, poverty, disenfranchisement, or inequality. Despite that one sequence, The Silence of the Lambs is not a Prison Escape Movie. It’s impossible for that movie to be more in favor of prison. Absolutely does not qualify. Neither does the 1966 Blake Edwards comedy The Great Race, even though Natalie Wood and Peter Falk bust out of prison together to save Jack Lemmon, who has stolen the identity of a Hapsburg prince. It’s a great movie, but the prison escape is merely a small comic interlude.
Actually, Silence brings me to another point: movies where the villain gets himself captured/relocated on purpose, and then breaks out of his container (such as Skyfall) do not count. Don’t count. And they will spend a night… in the box. The special-edition DVD box they each live in, on my shelf. Because I’m not taking them out to watch them and put them on this list.
Anyway, here goes. As always, we’re counting from worst to best.
Escape Plan, dir. Mikael Håfström (2013)
Sylvester Stallone plays a “structural-security authority” (lol) who is the victim of a conspiracy that causes him to get locked away in the world’s most top-secret prison. And he has to use his skills to escape, obviously. Arnold Schwarzenegger is in this movie as well, which also feels obvious, somehow. He plays another convict, and they decide to work together. Sly’s clear excitement about working with his friends is by far the best part of this otherwise terrible movie. Interestingly, though, this was the first movie my boyfriend suggested when I mentioned that I was putting together a ranking of prison escape movies, so I don’t know what that says about him. But it does say something.
Con Air, dir. Simon West (1997)
Few years are lived to the fullest the way Nicolas Cage lived in 1997. Con Air AND Face/Off? Incredible. He plays “newly paroled ex-con and former U.S. Ranger Cameron Poe” (quoting from IMDB because I really like the concision; well done guys) who is bound for a new life of freedom. But his prisoner transport plane… is hijacked by the other prisoners! This film features an amazing all-star cast, including John Cusack, John Malkovich, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, Dave Chappelle, and Danny Trejo, and I hope they were all paid a ton of money.
Face/Off, dir. John Woo (1997)
Face/Off gets props right off the bat for its incredibly punny title, and loses points for most everything else. Still, I do appreciate the balls-to-the-walls commitment to its cockamamie gambit, which involves John Travolta and Nicolas Cage as an FBI agent and terrorist/murderer (respectively), who wind up *surgically switching faces* in order to thwart a terrorist plot and get revenge (for Travolta) and also get more revenge (for Cage). Amazingly, this was actually the second movie my boyfriend suggested when I told him I was putting together a ranking of prison escape movies, and when I responded to say I had already placed it third-from-the-bottom on my list, I swear it broke his heart a little. (Looking into this.) (UPDATE: He says that while Escape Plan is just plain bad, Face/Off has a lot of interesting nuance. “It just really goes for it.” Which cannot be denied.)
Life, dir. Ted Demme (1997)
Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence star in this Prohibition-era buddy comedy (set in prison) about two strangers who wind up becoming the best of friends. I’m not going to tell you any more, or why it’s on this list, because that actually might spoil things. But it qualifies, okay? Fun fact: it also has an Academy Award nomination, for best makeup. (Here’s to you, Rick Baker, popping up in the least expected places.)
The Next Three Days, dir. Paul Haggis (2010)
Elizabeth Banks and Russell Crowe are a normal married couple, until one of them gets arrested for murder and thrown in prison. It’s the wife, which is a cool twist. Why have I said that? Well, read this comprehensive list and think about how many *other* female prison break stories there are. (In case you want it spoiled for you, the only other female jailbreak movie on this list is Chicken Run, so thanks very much, Hollywood.) (FOOTNOTE: I’d have thought Harley Quinn at least would have had something to contribute to this patriarchal pantheon, but zilch.) Anyway, after years go by and she’s not proven innocent by her final appeal, Russell Crowe decides his best move is just to bust her out.
Escape from Pretoria, dir. Francis Annan (2020)
I had virtually no idea that this film, which stars Daniel Radcliffe, was released last year, though knowledge of its existence probably would not have made my 2020 any better. Set during South Africa in 1979, it is the (true) story of two prisoners who attempt a daring escape. My only thoughts about it are that Daniel Radcliffe seems like a nice guy.
Bronson, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn (2008)
Tom Hardy stars as Michael Peterson, known as “Charles Bronson”—a former bare-knuckle boxer who became known as Britain’s most dangerous criminal, for orchestrating many violent escape attempts, many of which involved taking hostages. Given his preferred nickname, you’d think his crime would be identify theft, but no.
Papillon, dir. Michael Noer (2017)
Who the hell is going around, remaking Papillon? There are so many things to do these days, and “remake Papillon” isn’t one of those things. Think about this: Papillon was remade before a woman ever directed a superhero film. Papillon was remade before a nonwhite Asian woman ever won an acting Oscar (I say “nonwhite” because Wikipedia insists Natalie Portman is Asian, because she was born in Israel). I can’t wrap my head around the fact that this was made. Were the producers just rich and bored? Guys, if you simply *need something to do,* my TV series about a female writer for a crime website who solves mysteries on the side needs a green light. Or, if you’re still committed to doing something “small potatoes,” I have a whole IKEA shelf that I need assembled and I need somebody to bring my compost to the nearest farmer’s market, since they shut down the one near me. Hit me up, so I can help you manage your time better.
Victory, dir. John Huston (1983)
For some reason, John Huston directed this film about a group of sporty Allied soldiers in a POW camp who are challenged by the head guard (Max von Sydow) to play a propagandistic soccer match against the Nazi team. They accept, plotting to use the game as a cover for a mass escape. Sylvester Stallone plays an American soldier who plots the exodus. It’s a quirky movie, but the best part is that you get to watch Michael Caine play soccer. And you know what? He’s not bad.
The Defiant Ones, dir. David Lowell Rich (1986)
Again with the superfluous remakes! I don’t know why, but The Defiant Ones was remade in the 80s with Carl Weathers and Robert Urich. It didn’t really need to be redone, but it was. It’s not bad. I like Carl Weathers.
Stir Crazy, dir. Sidney Poitier (1980)
Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder are two best friends (wearing, at one point, matching Woodpecker costumes) wrongfully convicted of robbing a bank, who are determined to bust out of jail together. But actually, things don’t turn out so bad after the Warden learns that Gene Wilder is good at bronco-riding. There’s a competition coming up, after all.
Holes, dir. Andrew Davis (2003)
It’s not nearly as good as the book Holes, though, what in this life IS as good as the book Holes (it starts with the incredible line “there is no lake at Camp Green Lake” and only gets better from there). This star-studded, earnest film adaptation of Louis Sachar’s classic novel tells of unlucky preteen Stanley Yelnats (Shia LeBeouf), who is wrongly convicted of theft and sentenced to serve out his time at a boys’ delinquent camp known as Camp Green Lake. It’s in the desert. Each day, every day, the boys have to dig a single, giant hole. They don’t know why, but they’re told by their guardian Mr. Sir (Jon Voight) that “it builds character.” Stanley, or as he’s known to the rest of the boys, “Caveman,” winds up befriending the camp’s pariah, a boy called “Zero” (Khleo Thomas). And together, they wind up fleeing from the camp, hiking through the dessert and inadvertently undoing the curse that has plagued Stanley’s family for generations. Also, all the actors who played the Camp Green Lake residents recorded a song for the film, and it played on Radio Disney like four times every hour in the early aughts. I discovered recently that I still know all the words.
Von Ryan’s Express, dir. Mark Robson (1965)
I’ve never been *super* sure why Frank Sinatra got cast in so many movies as a badass renegade (or tap dancer) but in Von Ryan’s Express, inhabiting a role clearly more suited for Lee Marvin, he plays an American POW who leads a bunch of British prisoners on a daring escape from a German prison camp in Italy.
The Count of Monte Cristo, dir. Rowland V. Lee (1934)
There are a million adaptations of The Count of Monte Cristo, and thankfully most of them are TV series, so I don’t have to watch them all for this list. Don’t get me wrong, I like The Count of Monte Cristo! I like it a lot and always have, since first cracking open my 700-page copy of the Dumas novel on the bleachers during seventh-grade gym class (no idea how I was allowed to do that). But there are three versions of that tale on this list alone! That’s a lot! Anyway, in this Depression-Era film adaptation, Robert Donat stars as Edmond Dantes, a merchant sailor who winds up wrongfully imprisoned after his best friend Fernand tricks him into delivering a letter from Napoleon Bonaparte. He is incarcerated at the Chateau d’If, without trial, while Fernand tells Edmond’s love that Edmond has died. And then he marries her! Twenty years later, Edmond makes his escape and dons a new identity to get revenge. Wouldn’t you? (This version is in last place among the three for its completely bonkers art direction and costume design…why does this Napoleonic French escape story often look like it takes place in the antebellum South?)
The Count of Monte Cristo, dir. Kevin Reynolds (2002)
This most medium version of the three Monte Cristos on this list, *sandwiched* (get it?) between the two others, stars Jim Caviezel as our falsely-accused Edmond, Guy Pearce as Fernand, and a nineteen-year-old Henry Cavill as the son Fernand had with Edmond’s former love Mercedes. Which is cute.
The Count of Monte Cristo, dir. David Greene (1975)
This best (and by that, please read: campiest) of the Monte Cristo adaptations stars Richard Chamberlain in a very Richard Chamberlain performance as Edmond and a middle-aged TONY CURTIS in a very middle-aged-Tony-Curtis performance as Fernand. It’s got a swinging, real 70s cast, including Louis Jourdan, Trevor Howard, Donald Pleasence, and Kate Nelligan. I’ve never been drunk, but I imagine it would be very fun to be drunk while watching this movie.
The Escapist, dir. Rupert Wyatt The Escapist (2008)
The great Brian Cox leads an all-star cast in this Anglo-Irish Sundance release about an elderly inmate serving a lifelong prison sentence. He decides to break out of prison after Frank’s roommate (Dominic Cooper) becomes the target of the inmates’ dangerous ringleader Rizza (Damian Lewis). Notable for its interesting formal presentations (which has drawn comparisons to the nineteenth-century Ambrose Bierce short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”), as well as its intriguing, twisty third act.
Midnight Express, dir. Alan Parker (1978)
In this story, screen-written by a young Oliver Stone, an American college student is apprehended while attempting to smuggle some hash out of Turkey in 1970. But when he attempts to run away from the authorities, he is thrown into a prison, lorded over by a cruel warden, with no hope of extradition. Making friends with the band of prisoners in there for similar petty crimes (including Randy Quaid and John Hurt, there’s an odd couple for you), he learns that the only real way he’ll ever get home is to “catch the midnight express.” Which means, of course, “break out.”
The Defiant Ones, dir. Stanley Kramer (1958)
Not to be confused with that movie about Dr. Dre, The Defiant Ones is one of those well-meaning, old-school commentaries about American race relations that ascribes racial tensions to “mutual hatred” much more than raging, systemic white supremacy, but anyway, Tony Curtis and Sydney Poitier play two escaped convicts who are chained to one another as they make their way to freedom. And they hate each other, but the more time they spend with each other, the more they discover the other’s mutual humanity and treat one another with mutual respect. (Which is kind of (kind of) the movie equivalent of when the elementary school principal tells the bully-kid and the bullied-kid to shake hands and both say they’re sorry so everyone can move on with their day, but about racism in America. And with better acting.)
The Old Man and the Gun, dir. David Lowery (2018)
I was charmed by this film, the wholesome, reflective story of real-life serial prison escapee and lifelong bank robber Forrest Tucker, based on David Grann’s New Yorker profile on the man himself. Robert Redford is heartbreaking and wonderful as our restless, septuagenarian criminal protagonist (a kindly man who robs banks politely and without violence of any kind). There isn’t one giant prison escape sequence in here, but a nostalgic montage of sepia-tinted prison escapes stitched from footage from Redford’s career of movies (it’s possible to read the whole film as a tender homage to Redford’s whole career of playing nice guys and shady-but-still-nice guys).
Abashiri Prison, dir. Teruo Ishii (1965)
In Abashiri Prison (Abashiri Bangaichi in Japanese), Shinichi (Ken Takakura), who is almost done serving his three-year prison sentence, winds up handcuffed to a dangerous convict named Gunda during Gunda’s escape from the jail and journey through the snowy wilderness surrounding the prison.
Runaway Train, dir. Andrey Konchalovskiy (1985)
My brilliant mother called me to remind me to include this movie, in which Jon Voight and Eric Roberts are two escaped convicts in Alaska hiding out in a stopped train, which suddenly starts accelerating after an accident. And nobody’s driving, and there are no brakes. GASP!
Escape From New York, dir. John Carpenter (1981)
Friend-of-CrimeReads Mike Gonzales reminded me that John Carpenter’s classic Escape from New York is a prison escape movie, and he’s absolutely correct, not only because it has the tone of one, but also because it’s literally about a future in which the island of Manhattan has become a maximum security prison, and somehow, I forgot that whole part. But everything is okay—I re-watched it! Kurt Russell (in his prime) is Snake Plissken, the bank robber sent in to bust out the U.S. President (Donald Pleasence), after he crash-lands there. Making this film even more fun it that it stars Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, and Harry Dean Stanton, and that there must have been a mistake in the script because everybody keeps calling NYC’s 59th St Bridge the “69th St Bridge.”
Chicken Run, dir. Peter Lord and Nick Park (2000)
This plasticine classic from Aardman Animation is one of the few films on this list that kids can (maybe) watch. (Parents, know what you’re getting into: I saw it on VHS in the second grade and it would have made me a vegetarian on the spot had Babe not already planted those seeds.) In the film (which pastiches The Great Escape), several hens living on a farm run by cruel humans discover an opportunity to escape their confines after a slick rooster falls out of the sky into their pen. It seems like he can fly… and if he can teach them, he’s their ticket out. Probably. (The audience, though, and not the chickens, have a sense that he will disappoint them through the knowledge that this rooster is voiced by Mel Gibson, who is of course one of humanity’s greatest disappointments.)
King of Devil’s Island, dir. Marius Holst (2010)
The only way a prison escape movie can become more evil than simply by being about prison is to have the inmates be children. King of Devil’s Island is based on a true story, and that makes it all the worse. On Norway’s Bastoy Island is a home for delinquent boys, where the residents are used as cheap labor by sadistic guards and officials of the “school.” When a new, older boy arrives, though, he brings with him an escape plan, and for the first time, hope.
O Brother Where Art Thou?, dir. Joel Coen (and Ethan Coen) (2000)
O Brother Where Art Thou? is possibly a bit less of a prison escape movie than a musical retelling of The Odyssey set in the American South, but it tells the story of three prisoners (George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson) who escape from a chain gang and try to make it back home. Along the way, they wind up becoming incidental celebrities for making a hit recording of the song “Man of Constant Sorrow,” which is neat. T-Bone Burnett does the music, and you can TELL, because it’s one of the best and most thoughtful soundtracks around. Fun fact: the title comes from the 1941 Preston Sturges movie Sullivan’s Travels (O Brother Where Art Thou? is the name of the gritty drama our director-protagonist is trying to make, despite that the studio just wants him to make comedies). “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns.” And it does!
Stalag 17, dir. Billy Wilder (1953)
William Holden won his Academy Award for his portrayal of Sgt. J.J. Sefton in this dramedy about a cool-customer American POW who winds up having to ferret out which of his fellow inmates has been ratting out American escape attempts to the German command. Everyone else suspects him, and though he has no problem wheeling and dealing with the guards. But he definitely isn’t the mole.
Escape from Sobibor, dir. Jack Gold (1987)
Escape from Sobibor, starring Alan Arkin and Rutger Hauer, is based on the true story of the mass uprising and escape of prisoners in Sobibor’s Nazi death camp. Three hundred of the camp’s six-hundred prisoners managed to escape (though up to seventy were later captured), making it the most successful rebellion by Jewish concentration camp prisoners.
Rescue Dawn, dir. Werner Herzog (2007)
Rescue Dawn is an excellent film from German director, and noted Baby Yoda enthusiast, Werner Herzog. He directs Christian Bale as Dieter Dengler, a German-American US Navy pilot whose plane is shot down in a raid over Laos in 1965. Found and arrested by local townsfolk, he is tortured and sent to a prison camp, where he gets to know several prisoners and quickly plans to escape, but not all the inmates support his scheme. Aside from being a gripping, searing film, directed with the utmost gravity by Herzog, it also features a surprising, heavy performance by Steve Zahn.
Logan Lucky, dir. Steven Soderbergh
Rather like one of the race cars featured prominently in this film’s second act, Logan Lucky is a neat, compartmentalized, hurtling movie that carefully maneuvers through breakneck swerves and twists. It’s half-heist, half-prison escape, about three siblings (Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, and Riley Keough) who want to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway during a NASCAR race. But to do it, they’ll need a pro safecracker to help. But the guy they want (Daniel Craig, doing another weird southern drawl) is currently serving a prison sentence (which makes for an amazing alibi, if they can actually bust him out). And they know a guy, and his name is Joe Bang. Bonus: Daniel Craig’s safecracking/explosives-expert is named Joe Bang, which is what Dickens would have named him, had he somehow lived to become a Hollywood screenwriter.
Out of Sight, dir. Steven Soderbergh (1998)
I’ve discussed the merits of the highly multifaceted Out of Sight elsewhere on this site, and here I go again. Stephen Soderbergh directs this dark, sexy, sad love story between George Clooney (PEAK 90s Clooney), a bank robber who escapes from prison, and J-Lo (PEAK 90s J-Lo), a U.S. Marshal whom he winds up having to kidnap in order to make his getaway. He, in hiding, and she, captive, spend their meet-cute together in the trunk of a car, and their chemistry is pretty unreal. Clearly into one another, but knowing they are on opposite sides of the law, this opens a passionate pursuit story like no other.
The Grand Budapest Hotel, dir, Wes Anderson (2014)
The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson’s most pastel film, is perfect at capturing so many different aesthetics of Weimar-Era Eastern Europe, including a prison escape sequence which is somehow as droll as it is nerve-racking.
Down By Law, dir. Jim Jarmusch (1983)
My elderly high school Driver’s Ed teacher introduced me to the films of Jim Jarmusch, and it changed my life (I’ll never forget you, Mr. Fisher!). Technically, he told me to watch Mystery Train and said nothing about Down By Law, but it doesn’t matter—whenever I watch a Jarmusch movie I think of him. Anyway, Down by Law is a very folksy, gravelly, and frequently funny film about two very lazy men (Tom Waits and John Lurie) who are framed for a crime they didn’t commit and sent to jail. But in prison, they wind up meeting an eccentric and very Italian murderer (Roberto Benigni), through whose limited command of English he informs them that he knows how to escape. It’s great.
Brute Force, dir. Jules Dassin (1947)
Because it’s more about conflict within a prison, I almost forgot to include this classic (which is weird, because I *own* the Criterion DVD), about a prisoner (Burt Lancaster) who rebels against the sadistic, manipulative, and tyrannical warden (Hume Cronyn) in charge of the jail, but thankfully our pal Mike Gonzales noticed its absence and reminded me. There is an escape in it! I swear, it counts.
Le Trou, dir. Jacques Becker (1960)
Le Trou (which means “the hole” in French, setting the mood pretttttty perfectly) is a real prisoner’s dilemma of a prison escape movie, about four inmates who invite a newcomer into their longstanding escape plan, only to ignite a slow fuse of insecurity, mistrust, and fear.
Toy Story 3, dir. Lee Unkrich (2010)
Unbelievably, Toy Story 3 is a prison escape movie, and I’m not just saying that to make some sort of hot take. It is. It is a truth universally acknowledged. And it’s a great one, not to mention full of Cool Hand Luke references.
I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, dir. Mervyn LeRoy (1932)
I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is a very depressing movie from Hollywood’s first few talkie years, about an aimless WWI veteran (Paul Muni) who winds up ruining his entire life after robbing a bank—for which he gets sent to prison, is assigned to a chain gang, and escapes, only to find that, even when he’s free, he really has no future.
Escape from Alcatraz, dir. Don Siegel (1979)
Grrr, it’s Clint Eastwood as a genius criminal plotting to escape from the most difficult place to escape from, in this classic film, based on J. Campbell Bruce’s novel of the same name (which is, in turn, based on a real escape from Alcatraz in 1962). A classic. Also, Patrick McGoohan (who was really good at playing villains after his stint in The Prisoner, amirite) is the Warden who doesn’t think Clint can do it. We’ll just see about that.
The Shawshank Redemption, dir. Frank Darabont (1994)
I imagine I’m going to get a lot of choleric messages from men incensed by my placing The Shawshank Redemption at #7 but, whatever, it’s at #7. Based on a short story by Stephen King, The Shawshank Redemption is the beautiful and often gut-wrenching story about a wrongfully imprisoned man, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), and the friend he makes while in jail, “Red” Redding (Morgan Freeman), who bond over common acts of love and decency during very many long years. Until Andy finally escapes, with some help from Rita Hayworth.
Papillon, dir. Franklin J. Schaffner (1973)
God, Papillon. This very upsetting, moving film adapts Henri Charrière’s memoir of the same name, chronicling his time spent in the Devil’s Island penal colony in French Guyana. Steve McQueen plays Charrière (or “Papillon,” as he’s known, because of his butterfly tattoo), a man wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to a life of hard labor. Dustin Hoffman is Louis Dega, convicted embezzler, who becomes Papillon’s most trusted friend, and who helps him plot his escape. This movie is rough (be prepared to close your eyes if you’re not a huge fan of bugs), but it’s also pretty breathtaking. Also nauseating (bugs). But breathtaking, too!
La Grande Illusion, dir. Jean Renoir (1937)
Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, the somber, sobering story of a multi-national, cross-class assemblage of officers in a POW camp during World War I (several of whom plot to escape), is widely considered one of the greatest cinematic masterpieces ever made. It features career performances from Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay, and Erich von Stroheim, as well as a fascinating meditation on class solidarity.
The Fugitive, dir. Andrew Davis (1993)
Okay, so, technically in The Fugitive, the wrongfully-convicted Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) does not *break out of prison* so much as run away after several prisoners hijack their transport bus and attempt to escape, but the stakes are the same. Kimble is on death row for the murder of his wife, which he absolutely did not commit, and is determined to clear his name, running like hell and changing his identity and doing everything he can to avoid capture by the jeans-wearing human bloodhound of U.S. Marshall, Samuel Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones, in an incredibly well-deserved Oscar-winning performance). I love this movie so much. Sam Gerard may not care, but I do.
Cool Hand Luke, dir. Stuart Rosenberg (1967)
There’s nothing quite like Cool Hand Luke, a stirring, multi-layered film about an “original” of a man named Luke Jackson (Paul Newman), who is sentenced to two years in a rural Southern prison (for the minor, anti-Capitalist crime of decapitating parking meters) and who completely refuses to conform to the warden’s behavioral rules, peacefully rebelling against petty tyranny and giving all the other prisoners hope. And he tries to escape too, or it wouldn’t be on this list, now would it? (Also, shoutout to my dad, who loves a lot of movies on this list, but definitely loves this movie the most. Thanks, in part, to both him and this movie, for teaching me never to back down against a bully.)
A Man Escaped, dir. Robert Bresson (1956)
Robert Bresson’s harrowing prison escape drama (which has a much longer title in French: Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut, which means “An inmate condemned to die has escaped, or the wind blows where it will”) will send your blood pressure through the roof. It follows an imprisoned French Resistance fighter, Lt. Fontaine (François Leterrier), who, terrified and weak, attempts to escape from a Nazi camp during WWII to avoid his inevitable death sentence.
The Great Escape, dir. John Sturges (1963)
The Great Escape, a based-on-a-true-events, three-hour-long epic about a group of Allied(/Antifa) prisoners who attempt a gigantic escape from a Nazi POW camp, has everything—and everyone! Steve McQueen! James Garner! Donald Pleasence! Richard Attenborough! Charles Bronson! James Coburn! A pre-Illya/definitely-pre-Ducky David McCallum! The soundtrack is amazing. The stunts are so awesome. Plus, it has one of the biggest nail-biter plots in film history. Also, everyone in this film is so goddamn cool.
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Abigail Dean, Girl A
(Viking)I know it’s only February, but Girl A already looks to be one of biggest books of the year. In this powerful story of trauma, abuse, and long-delayed reckonings, the survivors of horrific family abuse must reconnect after the death of their mother. The siblings are still fractured by the alliances and betrayals of their childhood, and each is damaged—and attempting to heal—in their own way. A bleak and powerful tour-de-force that raises complex questions of responsibility and truth, Girl A is not to be missed. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor
Walter Mosley, Blood Grove
(Mulholland)Mosley’s latest, Blood Grove, may just be one of the best novels in an already iconic detective series. A new client, a Vietnam vet with a mysterious story about a possible murder in an orange grove, sets Easy Rawlins down a dark path of SoCal washouts and suffering veterans. Meanwhile Easy’s own family life is undergoing new tensions, when his adopted daughter’s birth father shows up on the scene. Mosley manages to unfurl a genuinely captivating plot that travels a dark odyssey through the subcultures of 1969 LA, while also adding poignant new depth to the stories of long-running characters. Blood Grove is as satisfying as noir gets. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief
Cynthia Pelayo, The Children of Chicago
(Agora)Wow, this novel is scary. It’s about a serial killer known as “the Pied Piper” (cool, I’ll never sleep again) who kills children. Detective Lauren Medina lost her sister to him years before, and now he’s back. And she’s determined not to miss her chance to lead him to his doom. –Olivia Rutligliano, CrimeReads Assistant Editor
Nalini Singh, Quiet In Her Bones
(Berkley)Kiwi crime writer Nalini Singh thrilled the international crime scene with her sunburnt noir A Madness of Sunshine, and her latest work is just as stunning. In a wealthy New Zealand enclave, Aarav Rai, stuck in his father’s home while recuperating after a car accident, couldn’t be more miserable, even before the discovery of his long-missing mother’s corpse. While he should rest (especially given his medications), he’s not going to give his foggy mind a break until he discovers what really happened 10 years before. Full of twists, turns, and genuine emotion, Quiet in Her Bones cements Singh’s place in the modern pantheon of suspense. –MO
Catie Disabato, U Up?
(Melville House)I adored Catie Disabato’s wildly playful debut The Ghost Network, detailing a fan’s obsessive quest to locate a missing pop star named Molly Metropolis, rumored to have vanished into a lost section of the Chicago train system. In Disabato’s long-awaited followup, U Up?, the Very Online and very traumatized Eve can see ghosts, and one of them—her best friend, Miggy—keeps up from the other side by texting. A lot. Eve’s other best friend is missing on the anniversary of Miggy’s death, and Eve must confront her fears, her ex-girlfriends, and many, many ghosts, as she winds through the vibrant LA queer scene, refreshing her Instagram and delving deep into her soul in search of a terrible truth. –MO
Paul Vidich, The Mercenary
(Pegasus)Paul Vidich has staked himself a claim as one of the foremost espionage novelists working today, and he’s back this year with The Mercenary, an insightful and thought-provoking story about the attempted exfiltration of a KGB man from 1980s Moscow. Vidich’s characters are always rich, well-developed, and just on the border of unknowable, a perfect balance of shifting identity and allegiance. In short, this promises to be one of the year’s premier spy novels. –DM
Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife
(Tor)In The Echo Wife, a scientist renowned for her skills in cloning finds out that her husband has been cheating on her—with her clone. When the clone kills the husband, the scientist has to cover it up, or else the investigation might ruin her reputation and cause the community to question the efficacy of her research. She’s also got a certain level of sympathy for her genetic twin; her husband’s clumsy attempt to grow the perfect wife hobbled his creation and made her miserable. Innumerable plot twists ensue, leading to a perfect set-piece of an ending. –MO
Amy Gentry, Bad Habits
(HMH)A triumphant convention dissolves into a personal nightmare as a literature professor finds herself confronted by past demons and fis orced to acknowledge some uncomfortable truths. In her graduate student days, she’d been a member of an elite interdisciplinary school known as “The Program,” led by a charismatic and ruthless academic with access to a coveted research grant used to pit students against each other. I dub this one “academic gothic.” –MO
Jane Harper, The Survivors
(Flatiron)When Kieran Elliott returns to the coastal town where he grew up, he is consumed by guilt and fear about the tragedy that took place there, years before—the event that drove him away from his family, friends, neighbors. But when a body washes up onshore, it causes him to confront the past that has been haunting him for so long. -OR
Tod Goldberg, The Low Desert
(Counterpoint)Tod Goldberg is the literary offspring of Elmore Leonard and Charles Portis, which means he’s smart, deep, and profoundly funny. The Low Desert, set in Goldberg’s Gangsterland universe, is a story collection that the publisher describes as equal parts Raymond Carver and Elmore Leonard (but I’d rather mention Charles Portis again). The Low Desert features Goldberg’s hit-man-turned-rabbi Sal Cupertine and a cast of tangentially related characters as they each face alienation, ambiguity, and uncertainty. –MO
Sarah Pearse, The Sanatorium
(Pamela Dorman Books)Sarah Pearse’s atmospheric thriller involves a naive hotelier destroyed by his own hubris when he attempts to turn the ruins of a sanatorium into a swanky new destination for travelers. First, his architect vanishes. Then, the staff start disappearing. And then, an avalanche traps the rest of the staff, to be picked off one by one. Lucky for the rest of the hotel’s trapped denizens, there’s a British cop visiting, and she’s determined to hunt down the attacker, even as the weather rages outside and threatens to obliterate the entire cast in one fell swoop. –MO
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It’s a difficult time to write police procedurals. Or at least it should be.
The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests against police racism and the acquiescence or outright participation by some cops in the attack on the Capitol (and elsewhere turning a blind eye to neo-Nazi extremists) should be a wakeup call: the comforting world of police procedurals, a world that so many of us absolutely love and that some of us enjoy writing within, has been built on a shaky foundation.
Add other realities that have too long been with us and have tended to be invisible in many books: individual and systemic sexism and homophobia that has led to far too much sexual harassment and, in some cases, organized police repression. The historic role of police in doing the dirty work for employers by breaking up labor strikes and environmental protests. The militarization of police forces in recent years.
As a writer of a recent crossover novel—police procedural meets near-future mystery meets political thriller—and now at work on the first sequel, it’s a challenge I better take seriously. And as a white writer and a male writer and a straight writer, I need to think about realities that may have been invisible to me. I say this not as an act of collective guilt or penance, but with a responsibility we all share to understand the world we live in and our place within it.
Oh yeah. And to do all this while writing fun, exciting, page-turning stories.
This absolutely should not mean that our beloved police procedurals should become thinly-disguised non-fiction tracts. I want to read (and write) stories that do things that non-fiction cannot, in particular send me into a world that is utterly imaginary but feels real, that does not feel like I’m doing homework, and in which decency and good guys win more often than not.
There are different strategies mystery writers use to pull this off.
The most straightforward is to write detective novels instead. The beating heart of each book by the great Walter Mosley, for example, is individual and community resilience in the face of institutionalized racism. Perhaps not police procedurals, since the cops are obstacles as often as not, but the structure is very much the same: a crime or injustice is committed, the detective figures it out, and some sort of justice is done.
There’s another response, particularly in many of my favorite police procedurals with women protagonists (and usually written by women): protagonists and victims face individual sexism and homophobia (and in some cases racism). The focus shifts away from institutionalized to individual experiences, but the sexism and racism is so ubiquitous that the reader, like the protagonist, is forced to confront these realities.
I chose a different approach in The Last Exit. Because it’s set in Washington DC in 2033, I can show elements of transformation. Part of my back story is a massive uprising in the mid-2020s against police brutality. A bit different from Black Lives Matter in that it was a joint effort by Black activists, women’s and other community groups, trade unions, and anti-racist rogues in the police department itself. This successful uprising led to sweeping changes in policy and police practices. (I should add: this was written in 2018 and I’m glad I was off by a few years although responses within police departments are still the exception rather than the rule.)
And although my protagonist Jen Lu still faces forms of sexism and racism both inside and outside the force, I situate her as the norm and no longer an outsider because of who she is. Ditto with her partner who happens to be gay and her captain who happens to be Black. In other words, I don’t have to preach about the need for gender or racial equality in the ranks; rather, I make such things the norm. At the same time, given this is only a dozen years away—and a neo-Nazi makes an appearance on the first page—there are still battles to fight.
Creating these different realities where racism and sexism still exit, but where there is also progress and strong movements of change, gives me space just to tell a good story.
What else? We need to create police characters who defy the code of silence, step across the thin blue line, and stand up against individual cops and policing practices that perpetuate institutionalized injustice. I know from my own work doing anti-sexist and anti-racist diversity and inclusion training with police that this remains a major barrier to change. Too many cops are scared to speak out.
We need more police procedurals where officers question their mandate. And here it gets very tricky. A police officer who arrested civil rights/lunch counter protesters in Durham, North Carolina where I lived as a kid in the 1960s was abiding by the law. Same is true for the cops who break up a rally to stop environmental degradation or who escort scabs across picket lines or protect neo-Nazis who have a permit to hold a rally. But there are parts of their job that we, as citizens and readers, and they, as fictional police officers, have a responsibility to at least question.
Even when issues of racism, sexism, homophobia, and repression of peaceful protest aren’t the center of the story, the realities of our world mean that they should be present within the story worlds we create. That won’t make police procedurals less fun or less gripping, but it will give them greater resonance and verisimilitude.
That’s what it means to write police procedurals in the age of Black Lives Matter, the attack on the capital, and so much more.
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I was born an only child, and to my sorrow remained so. Growing up I longed for a brother or sister, someone I could connect with in a special way. All my life I’ve been searching, but that connection remains a mystery to me, a fascinating puzzle I’ve yet to resolve. Which is why in my novels I try to peel back the layers of the particular closeness between siblings. And yet, as I’ve discovered to my great surprise, many siblings are not close. In fact, a bitter enmity has arisen between them, something that, again, I cannot understand. To me, having a sibling is so precious I can’t fathom how people could throw it away as if it was yesterday’s paper.
And, like yesterday’s paper, that rancor, or that love, originates in childhood, even if it doesn’t bloom until adulthood. These powerful emotions, often misunderstood, sometimes willfully so, are my meat and potatoes when I sit down to write. The human psyche complicated, often housing conflicting emotions—how can we love and hate the same person? And yet we do. The conflict is universal. It’s part of the human condition.
Herewith, are five novels I’ve read and loved, that deal with what life is like for two sisters, in different countries, with different values, and even in different time periods. But one thing connects them all: they are presented to us in three thrilling dimensions with all their frailties, their unresolved desires, and their bitter-sweet experiences intact.
Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino
Deservedly famous in her native Japan, Natsuo Kirino remains mostly undiscovered here in America. Ostensibly a crime novel, this is more the psychological pain inflicted on one sister, the unnamed narrator by her gorgeous sister, Yuriko. The two girls are in Q High School and the pressures on teenagers in this setting is starkly laid out, as is every other aspect of Japanese culture on which the book touches. The narrator comes to hate her sister, her family, and everyone around her, isolating herself. On the other hand, Yuriko discovers the effect she has on young men and decides to make her living as a prostitute. The depiction of that life on the nighttime streets of Tokyo is harrowing. When Yuriko and her streetwalker friend are both murdered in the same gruesome fashion, the narrator puts aside her hatred for her sister. In the process, she discovers Yuriko’s journal. The rigidness of Japanese society, limiting the ability of women to navigate it successfully is just as trenchant as the revelations of the bond between the two sisters and how that changes the narrator’s life for good.
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
If there is one theme running through pretty much every novel about sisters it’s the divergent paths each of them takes. How could it not be otherwise? Brit Bennett’s brilliant spin on the theme begins with twin sisters who live in a very unusual town in Louisiana. All the inhabitants are Black, but exceptionally light-skinned. Years after watching their father lynched by a white mob, the twins, having had a bellyful of their hometown, run away to New Orleans. They are 16. Even so, Stella gets involved with a man and disappears. Desiree marries an abusive Black man and finally leaves him in D.C, returning to their hometown. Meanwhile, Stella sort of falls into passing as white, marries into a typical white upper middleclass life where both her husband and neighbors take for granted that she, too, is white. The story unspools from there. Only years later, Stella’s truth is accidentally discovered by Desiree’s son. Every page of this book is a marvel, and a keenly observed dissection of American life from the 1940s to the 1990s in both Black and white America.
Sisters by Daisy Johnson
Two sisters, born eight months apart, move with their mother into a run-down seaside house, after an undefined, but hinted at, event at the children’s school. But the book isn’t about what happened, but what occurred before and after. The older sister, September, is more than a bully, she’s a sadist. July, by contrast, is a masochist, completing a dangerous circle. Their mother is so filled with grief (unexplained until near the end of the book) she can’t even look at her daughters’ faces, spending most of her time shut up in her bedroom. Creepy things in and around the house start to occur, but this isn’t that kind of horror story. It’s an altogether different kind of horror story that is more real, more gripping, and far more unsettling than ghosts or ghouls could ever be. Peering inside the minds of sisters tied by a horrendous umbilical was never so chilling.
Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld
A near-perfect novel of family, growing up, child-rearing, and, of course, the ties that bind two sisters who have psychic powers. Not that this is a fantasy novel; not at all. Kate decides to bury her power and lead a normal life, while Vi becomes a professional psychic. This all takes place in Sittenfeld’s beloved St. Louis, and the benign, midwestern setting does much to highlight the two sisters and the divergent paths they decide to take. In glowing, burnish, understated prose, Sittenfeld allows both her expertly drawn protagonists the room to grow, fall apart, and come together. A beautiful novel with vivid insights into the vicissitudes of American married life, friendships, both child and adult, and the meaning of sisterhood.
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Received wisdom is that Jane Austen’s Emma is the Ur-novel when it comes to women in fiction, changing the landscape of fiction as a whole with this willful heroine. But in the end Emma is a novel of manners. No matter how willful Emma is she still operates more or less within the conventions of her time. Little Women is my Ur-novel, the one I come back to time and again to read about and enjoy the story of four sisters, Meg, Beth, Amy, and Jo. Especially Jo. In one way or another, she is the touchstone for all my female characters, who exist and operate, as Jo does, outside the confines of society’s conventions, signaled by Jo taking the masculine contraction of her name, Josephine. They march, as Jo does, to the beat of their own individual drum. She rejects the conventional marriage approved of by her mother, leaves home, and lives in a boardinghouse in New York City. Since it’s likely the novel is either autobiographical or partly so, Jo is a writer. Her first novel is edited so severely by the publisher no critic can make sense of it. In the end, after receiving an inheritance, she settles down, opens a school for boys, and dreams of writing again.
Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis
So I’m going to stretch the guidelines of my remit for this column a bit for this sixth book. I do so because Cantoras is so extraordinary, so overlooked, so magnificent that it demanded inclusion here. The five queer women who inhabit this book, this world fully, live in the worst of times, mainly 1977 Uruguay, when a brutal military dictatorship is in power, having crushed the last remnants of dissent. These five brave and fierce women are thrust headlong into this nightmare scenario, not without frightening consequences for being young, unmarried, and worst of all in the eyes of both their parents and the junta, queer. And yet they persevere through every hardship, every diabolical situation, becoming not only sometimes lovers, but mostly fast friends, and then, family to each other. Sisters in every sense of the word. This is a novel not to be missed.
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On 2/1/2021 at 10:47 AM, elisehartkipness said:
And you don’t need to do all your research at once. But if you are working on characters and someone suggests you stop and reread Winesburg, Ohio (thank you Michael Neff
) then you should.
First of all, you're welcome Elise!
My reactions to this video are mixed. Yes, understand and "love" your characters so the plot won't feel dry. Sure thing!
Not sure to what extent he means "characters have to be in control"... He really doesn't explain it. That sounds like a possible flight of ruinous pantsing fancy, but not necessarily. He should have clarified. As such, it's not helpful.
Referring to bowel movements and chewing gum as a form of "writing" even when you're walking through the grocery store looking for prune juice and buying your tickets to Hoboken using your iPhone while thinking about that crossword puzzle that's stumping you sitting beside the open jar of blackberry jam you forgot to seal before driving to the store to look for prune juice... No wait. I'm confused. None of these things are "writing."
Is he really high on espresso?
Plan and/or sketch scenes in advance? Good advice!
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Black History Month only lasts for a paltry few weeks, but you can (and should) read Black mystery authors all year long! Here is a month-by-month breakdown of upcoming works, so no one has an excuse to ever plead ignorance again when it comes to diversifying their reading lists. The following list includes a wide variety of subgenres, including cozies, crime fiction, legal thrillers, international thrillers, psychological thrillers, detective novels, historical fiction, romans noirs, urban fiction, and even some YA, because (unsurprisingly) there’s as much variety in crime fiction by Black authors as there is in the genre at large. This list is intended as both a resource and a reminder: there’s tons of good stuff out there. So let’s all get to reading it.
(We’ll be updating and redistributing this guide throughout the year, so feel free to let us know about more books we should add to the list.)
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JANUARY
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Kwei Quartey, Sleep Well, My Lady
(Soho Crime)“Smooth prose complements the well-wrought plot. This distinctive detective series deserves a long run.”
–Publisher’s Weekly, Starred ReviewValerie Wilson Wesley, A Glimmer of Death
(Kensington)“The creator of Newark private eye Tamara Hayle dials back the wisecracks and bumps up the paranormal hints to launch a new series featuring a widowed African American realtor whose workplace is a hot mess.”
–Kirkus ReviewsRudolph Fisher, The Conjure-man Dies
(Collins Crime Club)
Reissue“As far as crime fiction goes, The Conjure-Man Dies gets down and dirty in a style more in the American hardboiled fashion than the British country house fashion. And it does seem likely that Fisher, besides reading Agatha Christie, read Dashiell Hammett and other early hardboiled writers.”
–L.A. Review of BooksV.M. Burns, A Tourist’s Guide to Murder
(Kensington)“Colorful characters and just enough mystery trivia boost the fast-moving plot. Cozy fans are sure to have fun.”
–Publisher’s WeeklyMelanie Raabe, The Shadow
Translated by Imogen Taylor
(House of Anansi)“Raabe’s previous novels, The Trap and The Stranger Upstairs, have earned her an international reputation as a master of suspense and tension, and The Shadow proves she has no shortage of twisty, brilliant, page-turning ideas to send a shiver down readers’ spines.”
–Open BookPamela N. Harris, When You Look Like Us
(Quill Tree Books)“Harris unapologetically gives voice to the grief that a community can feel when the law fails them, as well as their need to, instead, rely on the hope, love, and power they bring to one another. The strength and endurance of the Black family reverberate throughout this achingly honest debut.”
–Publishers Weekly______________________
FEBRUARY
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Walter Mosley, Blood Grove
(Mulholland Books)“Mosley does a fine job highlighting a world of Black survivors who know how difficult their struggle remains, every day of every decade. This marvelous series is as relevant as ever.”
–Publishers WeeklyDelia C. Pitts, Murder My Past
(Bookbaby)“Rook is a modern, hard-boiled antihero; as the story carries on, he demonstrates ability, humility, decency, and respect and concern for Harlem and its inhabitants…”
–Kirkus Reviews______________________
MARCH
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Femi Kayode, The Lightseekers
(Mulholland)“Femi Kayode’s debut novel about an investigative psychologist’s quest to uncover the truth behind the mob killing of three university students is an original and fast-paced thriller which masterfully explores the smoldering historical tensions underpinning modern-day Nigeria, the role of social media, and the complexities of family, friendship and belonging.”
—Lauren Wilkinson, Edgar Award-winning author of American SpyAbby Collette, A Game of Cones
(Berkley)“Cozy readers will look forward to the further adventures of Win and friends.”
–Publishers WeeklyShelly Ellis, The Three Mrs. Greys
(Kensington/Dafina)“The first book of Shelly Ellis’s new series is saucy, wicked, and a whole lot of fun! The Three Mrs. Greys is a thriller wrapped around three sexy love stories. The wives all have distinct voices, personalities, and agendas. I can’t wait to see what Ellis does with this story in the next book!”
–Samantha Downing, International bestselling author of My Lovely Wife and He Started ItNadine Matheson, The Jigsaw Man (Hanover Square)
“A deliciously dark cat-and-mouse thriller that pits the best new detective in fiction against a truly menacing killer”
–Kia Abdullah, author of Take It Back______________________
APRIL
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Sifiso Mzobe, Young Blood
(Catalyst Press)“This debut novel is a compelling journey through the underbelly of the streets of Umlazi Township, Durban, and marks the arrival of a fresh new voice on the South African literary scene.”
–Mbali Vilakazi, Cape TimesKiki Swinson, Public Enemy #1
(Kensington)“Edgy street fiction with an extra dose of suspense…”
–MadameNoireKarla Holloway, Gone Missing in Harlem
(Triquarterly Books)Holloway brings her period, place, and people alive and provides as a bonus a most unexpected culprit.”
–Kirkus ReviewsCate Holahan, Her Three Lives
(Grand Central Publishing)“Her Three Lives is a page-turned filled with betrayal and surprises. Cate Holahan just keeps getting better and better. Read her.” –Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author.
Noel Obiora, A Past That Breathes
Rare Bird Books“Noel Obiora’s debut, A Past that Breathes, pits two untested criminal lawyers against each other, entangling them in danger, passion, twists and turns right to the end. The trial challenges not only the lawyers and the jury, but also the reader to examine how crimes, suspects and motives look different through the lens of racial bias.”
–Susan Henderson, author of The Flicker of Old Dreams______________________
MAY
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Stephen Mack Jones, Dead of Winter
(Soho Crime)“Like Walter Mosley and Joe Ide, Jones builds a raucous and endearing cast of characters from his inner-city setting, fusing neighborhood camaraderie with streetwise know-how and head-banging action. This is a fine thriller in the grand hard-boiled tradition, but it’s also a sensitive, multifaceted portrait of race in America.”
–Booklist, Starred ReviewStacey Abrams, While Justice Sleeps
(Doubleday)“Stacey Abrams is a true novelist, and While Justice Sleeps is a first-class legal thriller, favorably compared to many of the best, starting with The Pelican Brief, which it brings to mind. It’s fast-paced and full of surprises—a terrific read.”
–Scott Turow, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Presumed Innocent and The Last TrialRivers Solomon, Sorrowland
(MCD)“Sorrowland delivers! Black Power cults. Government conspiracies. Post-Human transformations. A mother willing to defy everything and everyone—even nature itself—to protect her family. Rivers Solomon has once again created an engrossing, emotional, and original read with pages that demand to be turned. The writing is visceral and soul-clenching. The characters–bold, creative, and memorable. The action, heart-stopping. This is imaginative storytelling at its finest. Once I started, I could not put down Sorrowland until I reached the end. And then I wanted more!”
–P. Djèlí Clark, author of Ring Shout______________________
JUNE
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Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl
(Atria)“A thrilling, edgier Devil Wears Prada that explores privilege and racism.”
–The Washington PostNekesa Afia, Dead Dead Girls
(Berkley)“The start of an exciting new historical mystery series set during the Harlem Renaissance from debut author Nekesa Afia”
-From the publisher______________________
JULY
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S.A. Cosby, Razorblade Tears
(Flatiron)“A fast-paced, fresh take on noir…”
—New York TimesShanora Williams, The Perfect Ruin
(Dafina)“You’re going to pick a side, make no mistake. And then you won’t put it down until you know the truth. A shocking, sensual thriller with sharp twists.”
–Tarryn Fisher, New York Times bestselling author of The Wives
Charlotte Carter, Rhode Island Red
(Vintage Crime)
Reissue“Rereading the out-of-print Rhode Island Red twenty-one years after it was published, I was struck with how perfectly Carter captured pre-gentrification New York City, when young artists could still afford to live by themselves in Manhattan, dive bars thrived, and interlopers weren’t walking on the wrong side of the sidewalks with their dogs and baby carriages.”
–Michael Gonzales______________________
AUGUST
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Rachel Howzell Hall, These Toxic Things
(Thomas and Mercer)“It’s a feat to keep high humor and crushing sorrow in plausible equilibrium in a mystery novel, and few writers are as adept at it as Rachel Howzell Hall.”
–Washington PostAya de Leon, Queen of Urban Prophecy
(Dafina)“De León brings feminism, racial equality, and page-turning entertainment”
–Booklist______________________
SEPTEMBER
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Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle
(Doubleday)“[Whitehead] is a splendidly talented writer, with more range than any other American novelist currently working—he can be funny, lyrical, satirical, earnest—whatever is needed by the work.”
–George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo -
As an undergraduate in the 1980s I took a class on Ernest Hemingway taught by poet Donald Junkins. Late in the semester, Junkins invited a bunch of us over to his house to watch a Hemingway documentary. The video opened with some stock footage of Hemingway: There he was aboard a deep-sea fishing vessel; here alongside a trophy animal; there with a bottle of booze; here with a woman, and so forth. The narrator commenced the video with a bravura the producers must have imagined fitting for the masculine writer. “Hemingway,” he announced, “Fighter. Hunter. Fisherman. Drinker. Lover.” I must admit, it sounded promising to me at the time. But from the back of the room Junkins boomed out, punching the words, “How about writer? How about that?” I remember this keenly because it introduced me to something I’ve thought about ever since, that is, the ways in which artists are portrayed after death, when they’re helpless to counter the narratives of their personal lives, their foibles, their private moments. Nowadays, I cringe when someone tells me about how this dead writer behaved badly, or how that late director did x, y, and z scandalous things. I’ll answer, “Yeah . . . but, like, what about the book he wrote?”
It’s not a new story, and of course there’s much of interest in a personal biography outside an artist’s work. There’s also great value in examining the intersection of work and private life. But a danger arises when personal narratives about artists threaten to subsume the work, when commentators favor titillating copy over engagement with the art.
It definitely happens with Hemingway, still today, and it does, too, with the late Zoë Lund, screenwriter.
Let me say something at the outset. Yes, it’s true, Zoë Lund embraced heroin. You can hardly read a piece about her that doesn’t mention it, nor one that doesn’t reference her sexiness, her lithe form, or her New York hipness, for that matter. Of course, the European press does a better job with her, as does former husband Robert Lund, who thankfully foregrounds Zoë’s copious artistic production on his website. But much of the material on Zoë Lund still suffers from a fascination with her drug use and her good looks. So, yes, I understand that Zoë Lund used heroin, and even that its effects have in certain ways shaped her art. But the full horizon of her intellectual and artistic capabilities has little to do with heroin use. On the contrary, Lund was always an intellectual, an aesthete, an artist, heroin user or not. She was, in fact, a fantastic writer, a fact that gets lost in treatments of her work more often than not. In a reconsideration of her most celebrated work, then, maybe we can examine Zoë Lund, the writer, as Donald Junkins would have us do.
Lund is best known for the screenplay of Bad Lieutenant (1992), a film she co-wrote with director Abel Ferrara. The film is legendary in crime and cult movie circles, and equally celebrated amongst art film adherents. Should anyone need a thumbnail synopsis, the story goes like this: A nun has been raped, and a New York City cop (Harvey Keitel) tries to solve the case, more for the reward money than anything else. He goes about the entire film drugging, drinking, gambling, and stealing his way further into trouble. But like the saintly nun who forgives her rapists, the Lieutenant undergoes a psychic and spiritual transformation. In the end, he achieves a Christ-like martyrdom through a gesture of supreme sacrifice.
Officially Lund received co-writing credit with Ferrara, though many agree that she wrote the script on her own. Even Ferrara says as much in places. Still, more than a few have countered this claim, and others have amended it, pointing out either that the script was incredibly short, and thus somehow incomplete, or that the film was scripted by Lund but fleshed out by others. In the aggregate—and there are too many sources and claims to note separately—the nitpicking amounts to a trivialization of Lund’s work. What’s much more important, I think, is to look at what Lund herself said about screenwriting. Actually, part of the problem in recognizing Lund as the sole author of the script, aside from the fact that she can no longer advocate for herself, is that commentators haven’t considered the very notion of screenwriting as Lund uniquely conceived of it.
To wit, Lund likely never intended to write a verbatim script for the film, something she could have done easily had she desired. Nearly everyone, Ferrara included, acknowledges that she was a prolific writer, and that she typically added all sorts of detail to the scenes and characters she wrote. “Zoë could write 150 pages,” says Ferrara. But to all accounts, she delivered only a 65-page script for Bad Lieutenant. This was intentional, I believe, part and parcel of her technique for just such a film. Lund envisioned Bad Lieutenant as what she termed an “organic” work, one in which the thin script would encourage actors, directors, cinematographers, and especially the writer to evolve the material as it’s filmed. Consider a case in point. In a short piece about the unconventional screenwriting, Lund details some problems with scenes involving the Lieutenant and his two mistresses. Because the shoots weren’t working, she scripted two additional scenes with an entirely new character, a sort of junkie-philosopher whom she plays herself. She wrote the scenes “spontaneously,” she says, and turned the excision of the original material into something artful, something better than what had existed previously. What results is an artistic transformation few writers could pull off, a feat involving a kind of dance between scenes and characters, some now gone and others newly present. It’s daring work, in fact, that which requires incredible talent and vision. Lund writes:
“My character took over the salient material from the now-absent mistresses, and then, gained a life of her own. I added an entirely new element to those scenes that had nothing to do with the old mistresses. This profound content was conceived spontaneously, as I thought about this new character, and of the as-yet-unmet needs of the film as a whole. In sum, I believe that the elimination of the mistress scenes, and the addition of my character, created a better film. It’s a perfect example of how a spontaneous and creative attitude at every stage of production can solve most any problem. Of course, the most dire problems may end up being positive developments.”
Importantly, the spontaneity Lund cites should not be regarded as some form of “winging it.” Rather, such improvisation (her term) should be understood as a crucial element in what she calls the “dialectical process” of filmmaking, something that occurs naturally in the evolution of a narrative like Bad Lieutenant. Often, she explains, “one is obliged to turn a loss into a discovery.” It’s true that some of the press on Bad Lieutenant references the on-set improvisation of the actors and the director’s free-wheeling style. Rarely, though, are Lund or her methodology discussed at any length.
Throughout Bad Lieutenant, Lund’s intelligent writing pushes the film toward its conclusion, drawing it ever-closer to its courageous and fullest artistic realization. Specifically, it’s through the nun’s confession scene and the “vampire speech” that Lund’s abilities shine. Here the Lieutenant really begins to understand what he can achieve through atonement, through complete and utter sacrifice. First comes the nun’s scene. In a confession that the Lieutenant overhears, the nun refuses to name her rapists to the priest, explaining that Jesus would want her to love the “good boys” who violated her, even though they did not love her. It’s this act of forgiveness that moves the Lieutenant toward his own transformation, closer to his ultimate, cleansing act. He walks out of the church even as the nun continues with her confessor. In a note on this scene Lund writes, “LT can’t help but start up. As if the NUN knew he was there and cried out to him. Asked him to complete her mission.” Again, though, it’s Lund’s method that figures so crucially in the success of the scene as it operates in the film as a whole. She’s careful to point out that she wrote the scene spontaneously: “[S]cenes such as the nun’s confession [. . .] were absolutely spontaneous [. . .] I made use of all my talents and my experience as an actress. This nun was a kind of saint, and I write all that as if I were inside the head of a saint, acting out everything, as if it were some kind of profound improvisation.” (It’s interesting to note how Lund’s experience as an actor also informs her writing—more of her dialectical process at work.)
Then, in the “vampire speech” that follows, the Lieutenant is pushed even further. The junkie-philosopher character returns to the story to describe the unique suffering of the heroin addict who, unlike a vampire, must feed off his own body. Of course, it’s a metaphor for the suffering of those fated to make some sacrifice, to “give crazy,” as the character says, like the nun does in her act of forgiveness. Here, too, the script was entirely improvised, and yet it’s absolutely crucial to the larger message of the film, and integral to the transcendent, artistic zenith achieved in the final scenes. Lund notes that she wrote the speech just five minutes before the scene was shot. It becomes the thematic companion to the nun’s confession, indispensable without it, and vice versa. The junkie tells the Lieutenant, whom she has just shot up with heroin:
“Vampires have it easy. They Feed on others. We have to feed on ourselves. We have to eat away at ourselves ‘til there’s nothing left but appetite [. . .] We have to give, and give, and give crazy. ‘Cause a gift that makes sense ain’t worth it. Jesus said ‘seventy times seven.’” They’ll never understand why you did it. They’ll just forget about you tomorrow. But you gotta do it.”
The speech, Lund writes, “propels the LT onward.” He’s now coming to a full understanding of what’s required of him: forgiveness and sacrifice. Jesus advised that we must forgive those who sin against us, “seventy times seven” times if need be. It’s a hard truth for the Lieutenant, but as the junkie-philosopher says, for those in his position there is no choice: “You gotta do it.”
In the final scenes, both Passionate with a capital P and grittily urban, the Lieutenant gets high with the two rapists, gives them $30,000 in drug money that could have saved him, and sets the “good boys” free—a gift that leads to his death, but also to his apotheosis. And it’s all been developed through Lund’s dialectical/improvisational method, writing that moves the story toward what is needed. More than other screenwriters, Lund was able to intuit certain things about characters and story; she could spontaneously identify a narrative need and create art on the spot. Throughout Bad Lieutenant, her writing continually awes us. There are cringe-worthy scenes of incredible pathos alongside ones of religious ecstasy, ugly scenes alongside precious ones. But it all works together to create a unified artistic whole.
We should begin to think of her work, then, not as the product of someone who “loved heroin,” or as the surprising (!) work of an “exquisite beauty,” but as a piece of art created in a spirit of intentional improvisation and artistic courage. And if we examine the technique Lund embraced, we arrive at a finer appreciation of what she achieved and how she has managed to do it. Hopefully, too, we’ll gain a greater appreciation for Lund herself, for the writer Zoë Lund. Though it’s unlikely many people know it, Lund wrote several unproduced scripts and developed lengthy ideas for others. She completed a novel (yet unpublished), wrote poems, and acted in a host of films before her death in 1999. She was involved in many ongoing art projects, and yes, it would be great to see some of them realized. But as she herself was fond of saying, “That which is not yet, but ought to be, is more real than that which merely is.”
Perhaps it’s best just to think of what might have been (or what should be).
In a telling piece she wrote about Bad Lieutenant, Lund notes how the story continually evolved on the set, with her frequent re-writes and emendations. On the one hand, she laments the fact that no final script existed at wrap time because so much was not written down. The script girl, she says, should go back over the film and create a document, post facto. “Then,” she writes, “the script as actually implemented will truly exist in its entirety. This will be very fulfilling to me, as I feel my work of art exists nowhere on paper. I don’t grieve too much, however, for it lives on film.”
Indeed, it does.
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Of King’s epics, many fans rate The Stand as the best. Others might point to the haunted house story to end all haunted house stories, The Shining.
But for me, Misery—especially in the form of its outstanding William Goldman film adaptation—is his greatest story of all.
With Misery, Stephen King plays the game straight up with no chaser. There are no ghosts, no telepathic children, no Randall Flagg on his evil way to town.
(*Warning: Spoiler Alerts ahead*)
In Misery, there are only two very real seeming people who are pitted against each other. In one corner, there is a romance writer named Paul Sheldon, and in the other is a nurse named Annie Wilkes who is his murderous and unstable number one fan.
In all of cinema, it is very difficult to find more delightful psychological tension than in the beginning when Paul wakes up from the crash to find himself bedridden in Annie’s house.
Because at first, Paul believes her story that the snowstorm has knocked out the phones and has prevented her from taking him to the hospital.
This plausible lie makes Paul initially genuinely grateful and therefore happy to play at being the famous brilliant author for his slightly kooky yet undeniably heroic lifesaver of a number one fan.
Soon, though, Paul realizes that something is not right. Yet he can’t let on. Being under the power of a dangerous seeming loon, Paul is savvy enough to know that saying something like “Let me go, you nut!” will only bring down who-the-hell-knows-what upon him.
But Annie is no dope either. She knows that he knows that she’s nuts and also knows that he can’t say it. This delights her.
In these scenes what is said plays in direct contrast to what is known by the expressions within each character’s eyes.
Suddenly, the simple exchange of banalities transforms into what it really is and has been from the beginning: a deadly game of cat and mouse.
But even this dramatic brilliance is only an appetizer to the reason why this story resounds and will continue to resound as an all-time classic.
Physically broken and stuck in the fell clutches of his unstable lunatic number one fan, Paul Sheldon first believes that he has one advantage. Annie, at unpredictable times, truly does seem to adore him.
Taking advantage of this fangirl fantasy, Paul works his natural charms in a delightfully cringy offer of a date night between them where he plans to drug her and to escape.
But an errant clumsy move by Annie spoils these plans.
After this, stuck even deeper into Annie’s pit of horror, Paul thinks that he’s done for.
But he soon realizes he has one more incredible ace up his sleeve after all.
Annie actually alludes to Paul’s real advantage in their battle in the beginning when she says, “I love you, Paul. Your mind, I mean.”
Annie does love Paul’s mind or more rightly, Paul’s imagination.
And it is only in tapping into this imagination and writing the best Misery novel ever that Paul has any hope of escaping.
It is here at this point in the story where the story expands from a mere brilliant display of psychological suspense into something more profound.
From the very beginnings of our Western culture, the mysterious human imagination has always been associated with love.
The Ancient Greeks actually personified the imagination as a loving female goddess known as the Muse.
“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man…” goes the famous first line of Homer’s The Odyssey.
And it is to this same loving Muse that Paul Sheldon finally comes, battered and broken, to make his appeal for help in order to find his way out of his situation.
The Greeks weren’t the only ones who associated the imagination with love and divinity.
St. Thomas Aquinas and the luminary genius, William Blake, both saw the human imagination as a divine form of Christian love.
When viewed from this perspective, the deep profundity of Misery becomes suddenly apparent in the following way.
Before the beginning of the story, we come to learn that Paul was a famous romance writer.
Or in other words, one could say he had love in his life.
But as the story begins, we see that Paul, like the Prodigal Son in Jesus’s parable, has turned his back on this love in his life to write a more worldly vulgar novel about foul-mouthed slum kids.
The allusion by Paul that he himself was a slum kid points to the fact that his new work (that Annie ends up making him burn in one of the film’s most powerful scenes) is a childish regressive egotistical artistic misstep backwards rather than forwards for Paul.
When Annie says, “It lacks nobility, Paul,” she actually has a point.
Annie—whose evil blackened soul’s one tiny light was Paul’s romantic creations—is from her perspective rightly horrified to find that Paul, the keeper of her dark life’s one lighthouse, has not only decided to quit this loving task but has killed off the series!
Seen in this way, crazy Annie symbolizes the true error of Paul’s decision when he, like the Prodigal Son, flees from a life filled with love. For where does the Prodigal Son in the parable also find himself when he departs from love? Wallowing among the pigs!
That is why, cast down among the pigs like the Prodigal Son, Paul, too, must decide to turn away from the error of his ways and head back home to give the love he ran away from another shot by writing the best romantic Misery novel of all.
In doing so, Paul comes to fully learn the truism that it is love that lies at the core of creative art.
For it is only when Paul comes into true communion with his captor, only when he puts aside his fear and hatred of Annie and sees her as a person that he must selflessly serve to please and to delight that he comes to find the hidden secret of love, that it unlocks and unleashes true human power.
In essence, in order for Paul to escape, he must erase his ego. He must in a sense forgive Annie, at least temporarily, and compassionately put himself in Annie’s shoes. He must at least for a moment commit to Jesus’s most difficult call for human beings to “turn the other cheek.”
For only by ignoring his bodily suffering and unjust treatment to bask in the shining light of his compassionate loving imagination can Paul come up with the real magic talisman that slays the dragon.
When this happens, Annie cannot resist Paul’s genuinely selfless service to her and so lets her guard down just enough for Paul to finally get the upper hand and to escape.
Even the story within a story that Paul must write for Annie shows the profound theme.
For like Paul, Misery, too, is resurrected both the series and the title character.
The proof of Paul’s higher transformative triumph through love can also be gleaned at the end of the story when we find Paul back in New York eighteen months later with his agent heralding the release of his newest work.
The Higher Education of J Phillip Stone.
What is this higher education?
At the beginning, Paul thought love was a cheap childish annoying joke.
In response to this, he decided to write something egotistical and vulgar and low rent.
But as both Annie and the story show, this was the wrong move.
Like Goldilocks, he first sees flowery romance writing that he himself doesn’t enjoy as the too hot porridge of Thou Shalt obligation and total selflessness.
In response to this with his slum kid vulgar novel, he has opted again wrongly for what is too selfish and cold.
What his ordeal with Annie teaches him is that key to a happy human life is not to view it as a black-and-white, either/or choice between all day pleasing others or all day pleasing ourselves.
On the contrary, it is those who realize that one has the power to actively adjust these two halves of the self to meet the circumstances of the changing world around them who come into contact with wisdom.
In the end, Paul Sheldon’s true higher education and growth is seen when he doesn’t even care that he has finally gotten the attention of critics.
He has risen above both annoying obligation and cold selfishness. He is the master now of both worlds.
When we view the ending in this way, another biblical story—the story of St. Paul—is clearly paralleled in Paul Sheldon’s ordeal.
St. Paul also is on the wrong road (of violently persecuting Christians) when he suffers a devastating injury (incurred when he is introduced to his savior, Jesus.)
Like Paul Sheldon, his namesake, St. Paul, also is bedridden for a time after coming into contact with God who is love.
Once the knowledge of true love slowly takes full hold, as in Paul Sheldon’s case, the scales of the Saint’s folly fall from his eyes and he, too, is transformed.
The profound point of Misery can even be seen in its almost ironic title.
That with love—in this case the love that powers creative art—even the depths of true human misery can be transformed.
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When I was in college, I lived in a house with five other girls. Next door to us lived six more boys. Behind us lived my roommate’s boyfriend and his five roommates, and across the parking lot we all shared lived my boyfriend and his five roommates. Then, in a small house bumping up against the corner of the parking lot, were locals: a slight, older man, his wife, and a pack of chickens who wandered among our houses and escorted us to our doorsteps. Our lives were messy and intertwined, even with the man and his chickens, but also glorious, defined by the rare kind of effortless intimacy that can only be temporary, unable to sustain itself for too long without splintering. In my debut novel, We Can Only Save Ourselves, Alice Lange, the teen queen of her idyllic neighborhood, runs off with a stranger named Wesley, who presides over a bungalow of young women like Alice, all restless and eager to live a more authentic life together. They quickly adopt Alice into their home and their lives, but as time goes on, tension among the girls mount and the shine of togetherness begins to fade until the relationships in the house threaten to implode. In honor of Alice and anyone who has ever had a bad roommate (or been the bad roommate), here are a few great reads about communal living:
The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell
This novel starts with one family in a house. Then there’s one more, and one more still, and though there is more than enough room in the beautiful, airy manse of Cheyne Walk, the house begins to feel crowded and claustrophobic, as David, the patriarch of the last family to arrive, flexes his control over the house’s inhabitants, making dark demands from everyone. Finally, by the time all is said and done, three members of this makeshift community will be found dead in an apparent suicide pact, their bodies in strange black clothing and a baby left abandoned in her crib. Everyone else has disappeared. Jewell traps her characters in a labyrinth of secrets and resentment and longing, creating just about the worst living situation you can imagine.
The Likeness by Tana French
Here is another big old house with lots of secrets, but here, French allows us to see its inhabitants from both an insider and outsider’s point of view, managing to both invite us in and keep us wary of everyone we meet, as Detective Cassie Maddox goes undercover to solve the murder of a girl who lived in the house—a girl who looked just like her and went by the name Cassie herself once used as an alias, Lexie Madison. Cassie, who has long searched for a place to belong, finds herself both on guard amidst her new roommates but also drawn into the insular, intimate world they’ve created for themselves. But soon the closeness, both emotionally and physically, takes a toll on them all as Cassie gets closer to uncovering who killed Lexie and why—and as her housemates begin to suspect something isn’t quite right with “Lexie.”
Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller
In this delicious, simmering novel, Frances Jellico, a young woman grieving the loss of her mother, moves into a crumbling manor house in England to study the architecture of the house’s gardens. But she isn’t alone—the handsome Peter and his glamorous lover Cara are there, too, sharing the bedroom below Frances’. Frances is attracted to Peter’s quiet thoughtfulness and to Cara’s wildness, and to her surprise, Peter and Cara feel a pull to Frances as well, drawing her into their tumultuous relationship. Their days are spent in languid pleasure, but soon it becomes apparent Peter and Cara are hiding something; as the summer continues, the lazy, decadent hours they pass together become spoiled, each moment among the three like an overripe piece of fruit left out in the sun, ready to split open and reveal the darkness inside.
Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas
Set deep in the woods of Pennsylvania, Catherine House is an elite, experimental school that guarantees its students future success and excellence, as long as they give themselves over to the school for three years spent in complete isolation from the outside world; all that exists for its students is Catherine House and what it holds: their studies, their teachers, their classmates. The school building itself is marked by shabby glamour, and within its walls, the students work hard, exploring esoteric academic concentrations, but play hard too. Yet Ines, a new student at Catherine House, holds Catherine House and her classmates at a remove, relying on her sweet, strange roommate Baby for friendship, until she is given no choice but to fully commit to her new life in Catherine House. But when she does, her life becomes enmeshed with her classmates and with the strange rituals they perform, and the sense of belonging blinds Ines to the darkness of Catherine House. Thomas conjures an intoxicating, unsettling dream of a book in which we understand Ines’ seduction by the school while simultaneously fearing for its students. We wonder if there is anyone she can trust and experience the same dread we might feel walking down a dark hallway in a strange house.
They Did Bad Things by Lauren A. Forry
It’s 2015, and five former housemates find themselves surprisingly reunited at an isolated, dilapidated mansion off the coast of Scotland. They’ve been lured there by various promises—of a romantic getaway, a celebratory vacation, a chance for rehabilitation—but the real purpose of their reunion is much more devious. Because twenty years ago, when they were young college students, there was a sixth housemate, who died under mysterious circumstances. His death was ruled accidental, but the other five knew that whatever happened to Callum wasn’t an accident, that someone in the house killed him—and now it appears their mystery host knows that too and is determined to make the murderer pay. Forry gathers a disparate group of roommates who don’t even like each other and yet manage to intrude on one another’s lives in every way, proving that sometimes love isn’t the thing that keeps us together and that hatred, resentment, and jealousy can bind us just as tightly.
The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
Men are the danger in Mackintosh’s dystopian debut novel—sisters Grace, Lia, and Sky are sequestered on an island with their family, while on the mainland, violent men wreak havoc. They’ve grown up hearing the stories from their parents. But on the island they are protected by their father King, who has designed therapies and rituals to give them strength and keep them safe. Mackintosh imbues the atmosphere with such dread and unease that a disturbing irony emerges as we become increasingly aware something is sinister is happening, while the girls remain oblivious to any other kind of life. Things only get worse when King disappears, and three strange men wash up ashore. The girls are both drawn to the men and frightened of them, creating a tense, charged dynamic within the group, until it becomes clear the island cannot be home for them all.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kathy lives at Hailsham, a boarding school that focuses on producing well-rounded students, and while there’s a big twist I won’t spoil about Hailsham’s true purpose, there is plenty of interpersonal drama to keep you reading regardless. Kathy and her two best friends, fellow Hailsham students Tommy and Ruth, create a tragic love triangle in which everyone’s worst impulses are on display. But at the same time, their friendship is true and deep, their affection for one another as genuine as their disappointment with and jealousy of one another. Ishiguro crafts a beautiful, heartbreaking narrative about the power of friendship in the face of mortality.
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) then you should.
The Four Types of Time Travel (And What They Say About Ourselves and the World Around Us)
in Crime Reads - Suspense, Thrillers, Crime, Gun!
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Time travel is a genre unto itself, one that spans sci-fi, mystery, fantasy, history and more. But there are distinct categories of time travel narratives, each with its own set of rules—and each with a different baked-in outlook.
Getting to a taxonomy of time travel stories, the first question is—who or what is actually time-traveling? Because while the first stories we think of involve spaceships and Deloreans, the oldest time travel stories are stories about…
1. SEEING THE FUTURE
In these stories, it is actually INFORMATION that travels through time. And this might be the most scientifically plausible form of time travel, one that is already happening all the time on the quantum level.
Visions of the future have shown up in literature and mythology for millennia, it’s just that we used to call them prophecy. But the fundamental storytelling device has changed little, even as it evolved with the times, manifesting in various communication technologies. Characters connect to the future through newspapers (the film It Happened Tomorrow, which inspired the show Early Edition), letters (The Lake House), radio (Frequency), photography (Time Lapse) and now, the Internet (my own recent novel The Future Is Yours, the reason I’m interested in sorting all this out.)
All these stories of peering forward in time differentiate into two categories on the basis of one crucial question: If you see the future, can you change it?
1A: Stories of Inevitable Foresight
These are stories where the future can be seen—but ultimately, what you see can’t be stopped.
The archetype for this form is one of the oldest works of dramatic literature in the Western canon—Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, where the titular king is warned by the seer Tiresias that he will murder his father and wed his mother… and despite his best efforts to the contrary, he ends up inadvertently doing just that (and then gouges his eyes out for good measure).
Stories of inevitable prediction speak to one of our deepest fears: that we have no free will, no agency, no power to control our fate. A glimpse of the future, foreknowledge of what’s to come, only ends up causing the events we aim to prevent.
Sound depressing? Maybe that’s why it’s a theme that spoke to sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, author of Minority Report— which is, for all its superficial differences, a story very similar to Oedipus Rex. It features a trio of precogs who dream of future-murders, and a cop assigned to prevent such killings—until he finds himself accused of one himself.
Dick was a pessimist about the prospect of free will, and in his story (spoiler alert!) his character ends up going through with the predicted murder. But perhaps unsurprisingly, when Steven Spielberg got hold of the same material, the outcome changed, and Tom Cruise’s version of the character was able to alter his destiny. How? Sheer force of movie-star charisma mostly. Which brings us to—
1B: Stories of Preventable Foresight
Other stories of seeing the future treat altering the timeline as quite evitable. In fact, the very act of viewing what’s ahead empowers the individual to change things, and prevent the foreseen events from coming to pass. That’s how Early Edition worked, with Kyla Chandler given the thankless daily task of averting tragedies only he could foresee.
But the prototype for this story form can be traced at least to 1843, in A Christmas Carol. Yes, even Dickens wrote some timey-wimey shenanigans; what else are the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Yet To Come? And when Scrooge beholds the pitiful sight of Tiny Tim dead, and his own neglected grave, he is promised a chance to rewrite the narrative if he can merely change his ways.
Which means that Dickens was much more of an optimist than Sophocles or Philip K. Dick. Being able to see the future and change it, whether through an epiphany or a magical newspaper, is the sort of world most of us want to believe in… whether that’s the way things actually work or not.
But in other types of stories, it’s not only information that travels through time. Many stories concern people getting to do so too—and the way authors treat those journeys says just as much about who they are and how they view the world.
2. TRAVELING TO THE FUTURE
One of the clearest progenitors of the time travel narrative, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, is about a man zipping off into the distant future. But the world he encounters—one full of peaceful Eloi and belligerent Morlocks—is so disconnected from our own, it’s hard to know why it’s not simply a story about aliens on another planet.
This points to a problem with time-travel forward. The future feels so unknowable, it often ends up being less interesting than we’d expect. That’s why some “travel into the future” stories make our present the future of the characters—like Time After Time, which features Jack the Ripper fleeing 1890’s London and winding up (via a time-machine that belongs to H.G. Wells) in 1970’s San Francisco (it’s as ridiculous as it sounds, and well worth a watch). But this plot device is really no different from the fish-out-of-water Rip Van Winkle premise, dressed up with technology.
Perhaps this is why “travel into the future” has perhaps been used most effectively as a last-minute twist ending, as in the original Planet of the Apes.
In other words—time-travel into the future is just not that special… maybe because we’re doing it all the time, at a consistent rate of 60 minutes per hour. And given that our own lifetimes have witnessed such seismic changes in technology and society, do we really need to imagine a cosmic leap forward to see things that will blow our minds?
That’s why the most interesting physical-time-travel stories have focused on…
3. TRAVELING TO THE PAST
Some of these stories are just touristy jaunts that don’t bother with the ramifications of intervening in history (like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court). Which is fine and well, but more interesting are stories that grapple with the question: Can we alter the past? And by implication… can we alter our own present? Which breaks the category down into two distinct groups…
3A: Changing History
Perhaps the most intuitive mode of time travel is where characters travel to the past, and in doing so, alter the present they left behind. Back to the Future is probably the most popular of all. It’s fun to meet your teenage parents, but if you mess things up, you risk erasing yourself from existence. So then you have to… fight off your mom’s sexual advances and help your dad save her from getting raped? (Yeah, I didn’t really get how messed-up that was as a kid either…) Fix the past, fix the present, life goes on.
Of course, beyond just keeping your parents married and yourself in the family portrait, what people dream of is using time travel to fix history, the easiest go-to being the plot to kill baby Hitler. But in the massive time travel canon, it’s almost exclusively villains who try to rewrite the past. Very few stories feature heroes changing history for the better. Butterfly effects are almost always negative, and even the most well-intentioned time travel plans (like saving Kennedy from assassination in Stephen King’s 11/22/63) result in horrible misfortune for the world (catastrophic earthquakes in that case, for, ya know, reasons).
All of which points to the fact that on some profound level, as much as our minds love playing with the possibilities of altering the timeline, we are deeply attached to the one we have, and innately suspicious of any effort to correct it. Which is why we have…
3B: Immutable Timelines
Stories where characters find themselves fundamentally incapable of altering history, regardless of their level of intervention. 12 Monkeys (and the French film it’s based on, La Jetee) tells the story of a time traveler seeking to prevent an apocalyptic manmade plague. He ultimately fails and realizes, too late, that as a child he witnessed the death of himself, as an older time traveler. The ending is incredibly satisfying—despite the fact that it’s profoundly fatalistic, suggestive of a world in which not even high-tech time-bending can save the human race from killing itself.
A less fatalistic example of this approach to time-rules is found in Avengers:Endgame, in which the characters travel to various moments throughout Marvel history to steal Infinity Stones (think Oceans 11 with a lot of fan-service). Smart Hulk (yes, seriously) gives the stipulation that history will “heal” itself of their interventions, preserving the timeline. On its face, this sounds like a lame gimme of a screenwriting rule — but turns out, it’s actually reasonably well-supported by recent experiments on quantum time travel. Science and sci-fi both point to the same idea: we can’t change the past.
4. TIME LOOPS
Which brings us to the final category—the pinnacle of unalterability—stories where a character is stuck reliving the same day again and again. The prototype here is the 1993 comedy Groundhog Day. The formula it set out brilliantly has been replicated in other genres, including but not limited to YA melodrama (Before I Fall), slasher-horror (Happy Death Day), sci-fi action with aliens (Edge of Tomorrow), sci-fi action without aliens (Source Code, ARQ), episodic existential-dramedy (Russian Doll) and then circling all the way back to comedy again in last year’s Palm Springs.
These films don’t merely share a high-concept, they all have essentially the same theme: life doesn’t change until you change. Which would seem to make them remarkably unoriginal, if not for the surprising fact that they’re ALL good. (Seriously, I’ll go to bat for Before I Fall). No doubt there are some bad time-loop movies that I missed, but the fact that one hyper-specific premise has resulted in so many excellent movies points to the fact that there is a deep, resonant truth to the notion of being trapped in time.
Of course, this is only a partial taxonomy of time travel, but even this incomplete catalogue points to a few key takeaways. Most time travel stories are cautionary tales. Attempting to meddle with history is punished; defying prophecy is futile; the best we can do is pull a Marty McFly and close the Pandora’s box we opened in the first place. These stories, for all their far-flung leaps through space and time, are ultimately about how, if we want to change our lived reality, we need to start with ourselves.
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