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I’ll say it again: I actually can’t believe I found another ten crime movies that take place at Christmas. I really, really thought I had scraped the bottom of the barrel last year, rustling up things like “Psycho because there are Christmas decorations in Phoenix while Marion Crane drives away with the money.” But no, thanks to two new movies this year, I’ve assembled another list of ten. In December 2018, our editor Dwyer Murphy assembled ten thrillers that might surprise you with their holiday settings, and in December of 2019, I added ten more. And then in December of 2020, I added another ten more, and in 2021, I added another ten more, and last year I added yet another ten more. Here’s how it works: these are crime movies set during the Christmas season but which are not really, technically “Christmas movies.” I explain this EVERY year but I’ll do it again: when I make another one of these lists, these aren’t movies like Die Hard or Bad Santa or Lethal Weapon or last year’s Violent Night: famously crimey and obviously Christmassy. NO SIR. These are the movies you probably don’t really remember are even set at Christmas. PSA: If a movie isn’t on here and you think it should be, check the other five lists! There are 50 movies to check! We also have put together a list of the ten MOST obvious crime movies set at Christmas, if you are looking for the first two Die Hards or first two Home Alones. All right, I think that’s everything. For the SIXTH time (Jesus Christ), I present to you another ten more crime movies you might have forgotten take place at Christmas! American Psycho (2000) I’m actually really surprised that this one wasn’t on previous lists. But yeah, uncomfortable yuppie Christmas party amid all the murdering. Check! The Last Boy Scout (1991) It’s a Shane Black movie, so you’d assume it’d be set at Christmas. But The Last Boy Scout is one of his rare movies that seems to be subtle in setting. Still, it seems to be set at Christmas; Bruce Willis’s daughter keeps drawing pictures of a devily-St. Nick figure called “Satan Claus.” This seems to suggest that we’re approaching Yuletide? I’m gonna count it. Silent Night (2023) John Woo is back and he brought with him a controversial Christmas-set, neo-silent movie about a dad (Joel Kinnaman) who sees his young son get killed on Christmas Eve and then, while recovering from a throat injury that costs him his voice, goes after the gang responsible. This holiday, it won’t be just shepherds quaking at the sight! Remember the Night (1939) This charming Fred MacMurray-Barbara Stanwyck Christmas romantic comedy, written by the great Preston Sturges, is about an attractive lady thief who is caught shoplifting in a store during the holiday shopping rush, and the assistant district attorney prosecuting her who can’t get a jury together before Christmas so decides to *bring her with him when he goes home for the holiday.* Cheers! 3 Godfathers (1948) Okay, so, this John Ford western about three fugitive bank robbers in the old west might not seem like a Christmas movie, except ahem, it’s a version of the story of the Three Wise Men making a pilgrimage for baby Jesus. In case you doubt this, when the three bank robbers FIND A WOMAN IN LABOR AND HELP HER GIVE BIRTH, AND THEN BECOME THE BABY’S PROTECTOR AFTER SHE DIES, one of those characters literally compares the baby to Jesus and the three of them to the Magi. So. First Blood (1982) Rambo!!! Yes, it’s set at Christmas!!! And this one, the first one, is actually appropriate for this list because it’s about a guy’s personal rampage rather than a movie about a guy returning to Vietnam to kill a lot of people. (In other words, it’s a crime movie rather than a WAR CRIME MOVIE.) Meet John Doe (1941) More Barbara Stanwyck! I’m not complaining at all, but it’s crazy how many Christmas movies she starred in! Hollywood’s one-woman North Pole. Anyway, this Frank Capra movie is about a journalist who commits fraud and hires a homeless Gary Cooper to help her cover it up. On Christmas Eve! Eileen (2023) Eileen! This thriller, which is basically perfect almost all of the way through, snuck onto our radar only a few weeks ago. Anne Hathaway rocks her portrayal of a sultry, secretive psychologist at a young men’s prison in Massachusetts. She, Rebecca, is the first bright spot in a while that Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie), who works in the prison, has experienced, and it’s not long before Eileen begins to grow veeeeeery interested in her. The movie builds well and is really interesting, but a late-in-the-film monologue from Marin Ireland brings the house down. Deep Cover (1992) Yes, this incredible, early 90s Laurence Fishburne neo-noir classic centrally features Christmas: just look at this incredibly evocative, upsetting opening scene featuring a murder during Christmas time in snowy Cleveland, 1972. Eastern Promises (2007) Eastern Promises! I kind of can’t believe I forgot that this movie is set at Christmas, but hey, look at the title of this series! And it’s REALLY Christmassy! If you have any doubts, let me refer you to this article written by none other than S.A. Cosby, called “Eastern Promises or How Baby Jesus took down the Russian Mob.” Or, just watch the movie. View the full article

At its heart, Blood Betrayal is a novel about fathers and how they shape our sense of belonging. Two separate police shootings take place in the novel: that of Duante Young, a Black graffiti artist, and the killing of Mateo Ruiz, a gifted Latino musician who is shot during a drug raid. As my detectives, Inaya Rahman and Waqas Seif, dig into Duante’s life, they discover that his father’s early death unraveled him. He was angry in his grief, trying to adjust to a new life in Colorado where no memories exist of the father he cherished. Mateo Ruiz’s father, Antonio, grieves the loss of the son who was the pride of the family. Mateo was at home in his pluralist identities, grounded by the hard work and simple faith of the man who’d sacrificed to give his son a better life. Finally, the estranged father of a police officer implicated in Mateo’s death, comes to Inaya for help in clearing his son’s name. As a counterpoint to the fathers of the two young men who are killed at the beginning of the story, the fathers of my detectives Inaya Rahman and Waqas Seif, also play an important role. I connected my American detectives to their fathers’ heritage because I wanted to write about places where alienation is a fact of life, and the question of belonging is disputed. Inaya’s father came to America as a refugee from Afghanistan, a land he loves and one that holds the key to the crime that unfolds in this novel. Both as a detective and as a woman who is proud of her heritage, Inaya questions her father about a past he is reluctant to acknowledge, eager to know her family’s history. His silence creates a void of knowing. Similarly, Seif’s personal history is shrouded in mystery. We know from the first two novels in the series, that Seif’s Palestinian father was murdered abroad. The younger brothers that Seif has raised are adamant in their quest for answers about their father’s death, but Seif deliberately thwarts their plans to travel to Jerusalem, pointing out the dangers involved. Seif’s story unfolds bit by bit. In Blackwater Falls, we learn that Seif has suppressed his identity as the son of a Palestinian father, going so far as to drop his father’s surname. He’s all but renounced his faith as a Muslim, to the point that the Arabic language feels foreign in his mouth. But when he hears it spoken by a person of interest in Blackwater Falls, and then hears the call to prayer in Blood Betrayal, flickers of his past come to life, along with the pain and rage he’s worked so hard to suppress. It was important to me that Seif be allowed to own his rage as an individual with a history mired in tragedy, and as a member of a community that has suffered under decades of military occupation. A sensitivity reader on both the Blackwater novels was perturbed by the fact that I had written Seif as someone whose anger simmers beneath the surface, and then overflows, rightly wary of a characterization that suggests a one-dimensional angry Muslim male or stereotypical angry Arab. But I had planned for this in writing Seif by excavating the reasons for his rage: the murder of a father he cannot get justice for. The fact that he can only come to terms with the war against his people by denying the very gift his father bequeathed him: that of heritage. He takes his mother’s surname to spare himself the pain of witnessing the erasure and dehumanization of the Palestinian people. His struggle is not an imagined one. In recent days, cultural events that have come under attack or that have been suspended include the Palestine Writes Literature Festival at the University of Pennsylvania, an Islamic art exhibit at the Frick Pittsburgh Museum, and the Royal Ontario Museum, or ROM, censoring the work of Palestinian artists in a recent exhibit, among others. Even a Muslim Writers Festival that I have been part of organizing for the past year has sustained serious pressure to censor the creative expression of Palestinian Muslim writers. Thus, as any Palestinian would be, Seif is faced with how cheaply Palestinian life is held, day after day, year after year. As a character, he would know of the unpunished murder of the Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, at the hands of an Israeli sniper, and the subsequent attack on her funeral by IDF soldiers. Or the targeted killing of Rouzan al-Najjar, a young paramedic, during the nonviolent Great March of Return in Gaza in 2008. Or the shooting and killing of children by Israeli forces in Jenin in recent days. A father is a link to history and identity, and Seif’s identity has been challenged since the day he was born, by virtue of who he is. As the former Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, once said, “There [is] no such thing as Palestinians.” In making Seif’s rage specific to who he is as a man deeply affected by the loss of his father, I researched the issue of Israel’s detainment of the bodies of Palestinians, including children, who are alleged to have participated in attacks against Israeli forces or civilians. Many Palestinian bodies have been withheld from their loved ones after death, a practice sometimes referred to as “necroviolence”, meaning that Israel continues to exert control over Palestinians even after their death. If Seif’s father was among those whose bodies are kept either in fridges or at Israel’s “cemetery of numbers”, where the dead decompose unidentified and unprotected, Seif would be among those Palestinian families who plead for the return of their loved ones, so that funerals can be held according to the deceased’s beliefs, a right protected by international humanitarian law. Seif and his brothers would have spent their lives wondering if it was possible that their father was still alive, or alternatively tormented by the thought that his body was subjected to terrible indignities, including the possibility of his organs being harvested without his family’s consent. The fate of Seif’s father is a glimpse into the horrors associated with life as a Palestinian. The evidentiary record of the consistent and ongoing human rights violations of Palestinians is well-established by now. Three separate major human rights organizations, as well as the United Nations, have documented the apartheid laws that make life for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza intolerable. Israel’s imprisonment of Palestinian children without charge or trial is a key aspect of the Occupation, as is the indiscriminate dispossession or murder of Palestinian civilians, either by settlers or Israeli forces, without accountability for those crimes. In the present moment, we have witnessed eight weeks of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, where 2.2 million Palestinians, a majority of whom are children, have been blockaded and under siege for the past sixteen years. This prolonged bombardment of Gaza is in retaliation for the heinous attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7th yet lacks any adherence to the laws of war that distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, and that are predicated on necessity, last resort, and proportionality. The moral dilemma that is then posed is whether the appalling war crimes committed by Hamas justify a tenfold number of war crimes in response. It also presupposes that the violence began on October 7th, eliding the violence that the Occupation has meted out to Palestinians for decades, as if it is only Israeli suffering that matters. The retaliation campaign waged upon not only Hamas, but on the imprisoned civilian population of Gaza, has resulted in the loss of an estimated 16,000 Palestinian lives, about 70% of whom are women and children (statistics as reported by December 5th). According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), nearly 1.9 million people are internally displaced, which is 85% of the population. Hospitals have been bombed to the point that the healthcare system in Gaza has collapsed, more than 200 medical staff have been killed, and Palestinian journalists—those who would document the atrocities on the ground—have been killed in disproportionate numbers. Scholars of genocide and of international law have been debating whether in addition to war crimes and crimes against humanity, Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to a genocide of the Palestinian people. It seems to me that given this history and these circumstances, Seif is entitled to his rage. It seems to me that given this history and these circumstances, Seif is entitled to his rage. Writing Seif’s history as a Palestinian character into the Blackwater Falls crime series was personal for me, just as Inaya’s Pashtun roots replicate my own. With Seif, I’ve been reflecting on a lifetime’s experience of advocating for the human rights of the Palestinian people. In a recurring theme for me, my first encounter with the Palestinian struggle came through my father. When my father led family prayer, he would make dua or supplication for the people of Palestine, a people he strongly identified with because of the Indian army’s presence in Kashmir. As a man who survived the fallout from Partition, he understood what it meant for the people of Kashmir to live under the boots of a military occupation. And when as a teenager, I began to ask about him about his prayers, he had a library full of books to share with me. The Palestinian struggle for independence has crossed my path many times in my life. As an undergraduate doing research on the first Intifadah, I interviewed a professor who showed me the rubber bullets advertised as non-life-threatening by Israeli forces. The bullets had a lethal metal core that I weighed in my hand, a real-life diary of a Palestinian wound.[17] I also spent long hours in the stacks at Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, reading the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis, who wrote in his poem “Afflictions”, “Why is every atom of Palestine’s ash an open wound?” I wrote essays about the plight of Palestinians, and a media content analysis of Yasser Arafat’s speech before the UN in New York. As an undergraduate, the first poem of mine published by the university newspaper was called “Haifa Dream”; it described a longing to return to the homeland that existed before 1948. In the only creative writing class I took at university, the portfolio I submitted for my final grade was a series of poems about Palestine, inspired by Mahmoud Darwish, called “Sand and Stones.” I would later make use of an untitled poem from that collection in my novel, The Language of Secrets, a novel in which I refer to the “Nakba”, meaning the calamity of the dispossession of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948. In a final act of serendipity, I met my husband of twenty-three years at a lecture on Palestine given by Dr. Chris Giannou, the renowned Canadian war surgeon. His memoir entitled Besieged: A Doctor’s Story of Life and Death in Beirut, describes his time in the Shatila camp, site of the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon. Later, my husband would volunteer at a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, while I would go on to spend three and a half months in Ramallah, as part of a now-defunct study abroad program. The Palestine and Arabic Studies program was offered by Birzeit University, a cluster of buildings that appears against the stone-studded hills like a white rose in the desert. I lived in a hostel called Qasr Al Hamra—the Red Castle—with Palestinian girls, and spent my time learning about the Occupation, while experiencing some of its realities firsthand: the bypass roads for Israelis that wound around the West Bank, the checkpoints that abounded, the arbitrarily demolished homes of Palestinians, the memorial at Kiryat Arba that venerated a man who murdered Palestinians inside the mosque at Hebron, the routine presence of guns and soldiers, the confusion of different license plates that denoted permissible travel zones, and the confrontations between Israelis and Palestinians in the Old City that seemed less lethal back then. The hardships imposed on Palestinians by the occupying Israeli power were evident everywhere I turned. Then there was the striking wrongness of my freedom to travel the short distance from Ramallah to Jerusalem to pray at the Dome of the Rock, Canadian passport in hand, when my friends from Gaza couldn’t. I’m reminded that I taught English to three classes of students at Birzeit, bright young people who were brimming with hope for the future. An experience juxtaposed against a rock-throwing demonstration I witnessed, where I ended up choking on tear gas, while a student turned to me angrily and said, “This isn’t entertainment for foreigners. We’re fighting for our lives.” I’ve never forgotten that young man’s anger, never forgotten that I had more rights in Palestine than the Palestinians I lived with. Decades later my friend, Saeeda*, who had endured the siege of Gaza, would write to me and say, “I need to get my family out of this living hell.” I remember Gaza well. The scent of jasmine in the evenings. The muted roar of the sea. The chain link fences and the rubble, the ominous barrier that was the Erez Crossing. I also remember that young girls from Gaza City welcomed me to the now destroyed Islamic University of Gaza, where I met another Asma who was glowing with pride as she showed me her science project. The innocent joy of those girls at meeting a Muslim from another part of the world has stayed with me through the years—it pains me to this day, especially as I cannot know if those girls grew up to leave Gaza, if they died under Israeli bombs, or are imprisoned there still. This pain would be familiar to Seif, with his unanswered questions about his father’s death. For myself and for Seif, I believe that if we don’t feel anger at cruelty and injustice—at war crimes and crimes against humanity—then when are we entitled to feel it? Seif and I share the view that there cannot be peace and security for one people in the holy land without peace and security for the other. Freedom and equality cannot prevail under apartheid law. This is a truth that Seif’s father held to that Seif must wrestle with in future books, a belief that could redefine his understanding of his past. As a character, he is due a reckoning with his own history, one suggested by a poem I wrote many years ago for a friend: O homeland, o heartache, When will we meet? *** View the full article

The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the year’s best true crime books. * Jillian Lauren, Behold the Monster (Sourcebooks) This startling new book uncovers the crimes of serial killer Samuel Little. Through her many conversations with Little and meticulous research, Lauren begins to uncover the reasons why so many murders, now tied to Little, were once overlooked. The book is built out of Lauren’s long correspondence with the killer, but never sidelines the victims. Lauren’s interrogation of her own obsession with these cases adds an extra level of insight to a story that contains endless nuances, all of them artfully unfolded by a precise and powerful writer. –DM Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing (Random House) Evangelista’s deeply reported, deeply felt exposé of the so-called war on drugs conducted for years in Duterte’s Phillipines is an extraordinary work of nonfiction crime. In Some People Need Killing, which takes its title from a vigilante’s chilling remark, Evangelista takes readers through a years-long odyssey of an underworld of extrajudicial killings and mayhem, as her country staggers toward all-consuming violence under a ruthless autocrat. And yet the humanity, too, shines through, as Evangelista draws portraits of those swept up in these bigger social forces. –DM Michael Finkel, The Art Thief (Knopf) Author Michael Finkel has a knack for finding fascinating personalities and bringing them to life on the page, whether it’s a reclusive man in the woods of Maine (The Stranger in the Woods) or, as in this year’s standout nonfiction title, Europe’s most prolific art thief, Stéphane Breitwieser. Over a course of years, Breitwieser and his girlfriends stole objects from museums and churches, often walking out quite casually with the artifacts, and, rather than selling them, put them on display in a secret room for their own private appreciation. In Finkel’s telling, Breitwieser makes an intriguing defense of his actions and calls into question what we think we know about these priceless works. The Art Thief is one of the most interesting and provocative books you’ll read this year. –DM Yepoka Yeebo, Anansi’s Gold (Bloomsbury) In Yepoka Yeebo’s Anansi’s Gold, we get a portrait of an international con man who imposes himself in the middle of an imperialist legend and mines it for everything it’s worth. Following a US-backed junta and the deposing of its national leader, Ghana was long rumored to have a missing stash of gold. That’s where John Ackah Blay-Miezah came in. He spent decades criss-crossing the globe persuading ‘investors’ to inject money into his fund with the promise of a share in that legendary fortune, once it was wrestled free. His scam included powerful figures in Ghana and abroad, and set a wild trail for Yeebo to follow these years later. It makes for a gripping story of international finance and individual greed. –DM Max Marshall, Among the Bros (Harper) Marshall’s harrowing investigation into fraternity life and interstate drug trafficking stands as one of the year’s most eye-opening reads. What looks at first to be a story of campus crime turns into an epic of national corruption, with fraternity life at the core. Marshall wades into the morass through the College of Charleston, where a group of fraternity bros who started pressing and dealing their own pills soon entered into a massive conspiracy. Marshall also follows a bigger story: one where nearly every major American corporation and institution stocks its executive ranks from a fraternity culture that encourages excess and depravity. –DM Ali Winston and Darwin Bondgraham, The Riders Come Out At Night (Atria) In this searing history of police violence and civil rights activism in Oakland, two longtime investigative journalists unpack the circumstances that led to Oakland’s massive amount of police shootings and other officer misconduct over the past half century. The book also goes into the many half-hearted attempts to hold officers accountable and curb their violent behaviors. Monumental and not to be missed! –MO Harry N. MacLean, Starkweather: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree that Changed America (Counterpoint) In this deeply empathetic take on the tale of 19-year-old spree killer Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, all the assumptions made over the years about the two are questioned, and Caril Ann Fugate’s role in particular is reevaluated. When the two went on trial for the 1958 murders that made both infamous, Fugate was painted as either a murderous femme fatale or a heartless collaborator, rather than a victim of threats, domestic abuse, and terrible circumstances. MacLean rights the record and gets deep into the psychology of not only his subjects, but their claustrophobic and constrained time and place. –MO David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Doubleday) Grann is not only a meticulous researcher, but a brilliant storyteller too. In The Wager, we get a wild tale of shipwrecks, mutiny, and court marital; its lessons—about how people tell stories, and who to believe—are eerily prescient today. In 1742, 30 emaciated sailors—survivors of a ship that left England two years before and had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia—wash up on the coast of Brazil. Then, six months later, another boat lands off the coast of Chile with three castaways—and their story is very different. They claim the 30 sailors are actually mutineers. The first group accuses the new arrivals as murderous senior officers. A court martial is called to determine the truth. Grann pulls the story together from archival materials, diaries, and court documents (he even traveled to the island where the sailors were marooned), all to get to the truth. But whose truth matters most depends on who has the best story to tell. –Emily Firetog, Lit Hub deputy editor View the full article

The inspirations and concerns informing this year’s historical mysteries and thrillers may be grim, but the fiction crafted to explore them is luminous. The 1920s continue to loom large, as do their preoccupations with inequality, excess, and grief (including a great number of novels featuring seances and spiritualists, peaking post-Pandemic as a way to access historical methods of reaching loved ones as both comforting and deceitful). You’ll find multiple titles on this list split between the past and the present, or the further recesses of history spliced together with the more recent past, emphasizing that historical tales are, like all culture, an ongoing conversation of interpretation and resonance. Shannon Chakraborty, The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (Harper Voyager) Setting: Golden Age of Islam/Medieval Era Indian Ocean In this swashbuckling, fantastical adventure, set during the Golden Age of Islam, a fierce warrior and former pirate is brought out of retirement by a stubborn mother determined to free her daughter from a terrible captivity. Amina Al-Sirafi cannot refuse her, and also, is rather bored, so she sails off into the Indian Ocean to fight for justice, freedom, and one last chance of glory. A vividly imagined and wonderfully scripted tale that pays homage both to real historical events and the many legends and myths whose embellishments make life worth living. Katherine Howe, A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself (Henry Holt) Setting: Late 18th Century, Boston and the Caribbean, 1920s Boston and Florida There is no one I trust more with historical fiction than Katherine Howe, whose work always manages to capture not only the prosaic details of the past, but the lived experience of it. Howe, a lifelong sailor and an official Expert on Piracy, is particularly well-suited to telling this swashbuckling story of a young woman who disguises herself as a boy and joins the ragtag crew of a fierce gang of pirates as they search for treasure in a perfectly plotted continuation of Treasure Island. Interspersed between the pirate’s adventures (and affecting queer love story) is the story of a bored researcher in the 1920s who, together with her flapper gamine of an undergrad, head for the Florida Keys seeking the fortunes promised in the worn pages of the pirate’s memoir. Howe will continue to regale us with these colorful criminals in the Penguin Book of Pirates, to be released in the new year. Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Square of Sevens (Atria) Setting: 18th Century England In this lush gothic, a young girl who knows the art of predicting fortunes becomes ward to a kind intellectual, who raises her in safety and anonymity in 18th-century Bath. As she grows into a poised young woman, she finds herself increasingly curious about her fairy-tale origins, in which her fortune-teller father ran away with her aristocratic mother. When a chance comes to know more of her history, she takes it, even as a larger conspiracy threatens her found family. Victoria Kielland, My Men Translated by Damion Searls (Astra House) Setting: Norway and the United States, late 19th Century Nasty, brutal, and short, Victoria Kielland’s My Men features Norwegian-American lonely hearts killer Belle Gunness, who lured widowers and their children to her farm with the promise of care and inheritable land, then slaughtered both her lovers and their families. The novel frames Gunness’ murderous quest as an almost-inevitable perversion of the American Dream. Kielland’s lyrical, abstract, and visceral prose, capably translated by Damion Searls, has won acclaim in her native Norway and is a beguiling match to her terrifying subject matter. Nilima Rao, A Disappearance in Fiji (Soho) Setting: Fiji, 1914 Nilima Rao’s debut introduces my favorite new detective this year, Akal Singh, who has been banished to the colonial outpost of Fiji after an incident derailed his police career back in Hong Kong. He’s the only Indian detective on the force, and his Sikh religion and middle-class upbringing initially keep him from seeing common cause with the other Indians on the island, brought to Fiji to work the sugar cane as indentured servants and hopefully escape the depths of poverty. When Akal is assigned the case of a missing worker on a plantation, he’s at first inclined to believe that she just ran away, but as he learns more details and sees the harsh conditions under which she labored, he quickly begins to suspect foul play is afoot. A Disappearance in Fiji is that rare and perfect combination of historical detail, social criticism, engaging character portraits, and a carefully plotted mystery with no loose ends. A great start to what will hopefully become a long-running series. Brendan Slocumb, Symphony of Secrets (Anchor) Setting: New York City, 1920s Brendan Slocumb burst onto the scene with the brilliant literary mystery The Violin Conspiracy, and his follow-up is just as good. Split between the present day and 1918, the story slowly reveals how a renowned composer may have stolen all that made his music great from the autistic Black woman who was once his best friend. Like Slocumb’s debut, Symphony of Secrets uses the framework of classic detective fiction to tell a larger story of cultural appropriation and how our unequal society determines who gets to reap the benefits of talent and produce art. Anbara Salam, Hazardous Spirits (Tin House) Setting: 1920s England In this fascinating portrait of spiritualism, identity, and doubt, a young wife becomes concerned with her husband develops a focused interest in becoming a spiritual medium. Is he a fraud? Does he believe his own words? Can they preserve their place in societal hierarchy with his new-found love of a looked-down-upon profession? And how far will her love carry her along in his journey? Salam has an incredible grasp on historical details, attitudes, and mores, for a carefully wrought and emotionally compelling read. The short length of the novel belies its complexity and depth, and I hope Anbara Salam continues to craft historical novels for a long time to come. Cheryl Head, Time’s Undoing (Dutton) Setting: Alabama, 1920s and 2010s Cheryl Head turned to her own grandfather’s murder for the inspiration behind this timely tale of injustice and protest. Time’s Undoing is split between two time periods—the 1920s, when the narrator’s grandfather is murdered by a police officer in Birmingham, and the 2010s, when the narrator heads to Alabama on a journalistic assignment to connect what happened to her grandfather to ongoing issues with racist policing. She quickly finds herself up against those who would rather the truth be buried, but finds unlikely allies ready to help her fight for the truth, no matter its implications. Tara Ison, At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf (IG Publishing) Setting: WWII France In one of those amazing life twists that feels as bizarre as it is inspiring, Tara Ison, the writer of the cult hit Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead has crafted one of the best tales of collaboration ever written. In Between the Hour of Dog and Wolf, Tara Ison takes us into the mind of an adolescent Jewish girl being hidden with a French family during WWII. She spends so much time pretending to align with the ideals of the occupiers that she finds herself beginning to agree with them, in what reads as a Jewish version of Lacombe, Lucien. Perhaps it’s not such a twist—both book and film are about the ways we assume new roles when necessary to survival, whether that’s taking a job as a fashion consultant to feed siblings and putting on a batshit fashion show (a la Babysitter) or pretending to be a fascist to to protect from others knowing that you are Jewish. Okay, maybe that last comparison is a bit of a stretch, but still, everyone should read this book and also everyone should should rewatch that movie. Lev AC Rosen, The Bell in the Fog (Forge) Setting: Los Angeles, 1950s Lev Rosen’s Lavender House perfectly captured its 1950s setting while bringing queer stories to the fore. It also introduced a detective I’d follow through any number of books, Evander (Andy) Mills, so it’s great to see the private dick return for a new foray into the shadows of a repressed, but vibrant, era. In The Bell in the Fog, Rosen’s detective has set up shop above a gay bar offering investigative services to the queer community when he receives a visit from an old flame from the Navy. The ex is being blackmailed, and the further Andy digs, the more dangerous his sleuthing becomes. View the full article

On Oak Island, everybody gets up early. By dawn, with the fog turning into a drizzle, the crew is hard at work. I’ve taken refuge inside the rusted hulk of an old tank car, where I can take notes without the ink smearing. Up the hill, men cluster around a drilling rig that is pounding its way into the island’s interior. Shouts and curses echo through the fog. “Sand!” someone yells. “We’re in sand, damn it!” All around me lies the evidence of the hunt: big Ingersoll-Rand air compressors, enormous pump heads, piles of steel casing, acetylene tanks, strange infernal machines, and bright aluminum ducts snaking their way across the ground. The chill September rain is slowly coating them all. In 1909, a young law clerk named Franklin Delano Roosevelt trod this very ground with pick, shovel, and high hopes. Admiral Richard Byrd, Errol Flynn, and Vincent Astor all at one time or another took an interest. Here in Mahone Bay, about forty miles southwest of Halifax, Nova Scotia, I am at the site of the most intensive treasure hunt in history, a hunt that has lasted 193 years, cost millions of dollars, and killed six men. The raison d’être for it all is a narrow, water-filled shaft called the Money Pit—and what may be hidden in its muddy depths. To date, not one penny of treasure has been recovered. Nor does anyone know what might be buried here, who buried it, or why. The island stubbornly refuses to yield anything but the most tantalizing and infuriatingly ambiguous clues. But the Oak Island mystery may soon be solved. Triton Alliance Ltd., a group of Canadian and American investors, is making the biggest assault yet on the Money Pit. They are digging a shaft of gargantuan proportions twenty stories into the very heart of the island. In doing so, Triton will either find treasure and uncover an important archaeological site, or they will have burned up $10 million digging an empty hole. The mystery of Oak Island began in the summer of 1795, when a teenage farm boy named Daniel McGinnis decided to do a little exploring. He rowed out to Oak Island, tied up his boat, and started poking around. His story, along with those of the many who have followed, goes something like this: At the seaward end of the island, the thick forest of red oaks suddenly gave way to an old clearing, dotted with a few rotted stumps. In the center stood an ancient oak with a sawed-off limb. The limb showed evidence of rope burns and, in some versions of the tale, had an old ship’s tackle hanging from it. Directly underneath, the ground had subsided into a shallow depression. From this, a young boy could draw only one conclusion: buried pirate treasure. McGinnis returned the next day with two friends, Anthony Vaughan and John Smith, and they began digging. At two feet they struck a tier of flagstones. On pulling these up, they found themselves digging in what appeared to be an old shaft excavated in the hard glacial till, a mixture of clay, sand, gravel, and rocks. The shaft had been filled with loose dirt and they could see old pick marks in the walls. At about ten feet they hit a platform of rotten logs, the ends embedded in the clay. They eagerly ripped these up and kept going. At twenty feet they struck another platform, and yet another at thirty. With no end in sight, and no doubt their chores seriously in arrears, the three boys gave up—but only for the time being. Both McGinnis and Smith later bought land on the island, hoping eventually to reach the vast treasure that they were sure must lie at the bottom of the pit. When a well-to-do man named Simeon Lynds heard the story, he enlisted workers, including the three young men, in a new assault. Work began in 1803. At forty feet they struck another log platform. They continued to hit platforms at regular intervals, and they also encountered a layer of charcoal, a layer of putty, and a layer of fibrous material that was later identified as coconut fiber. At ninety feet they found something really exciting—a flat stone inscribed with mysterious figures. They quickly tore up the platform beneath it. Soon, water began seeping into the pit and they found themselves bailing as much as digging. As night came on, they probed the muck at the bottom of the pit with a crowbar and struck something hard at the ninety-eight-foot level. “Some supposed it was wood,” one researcher wrote later, “and others called it a chest. This circumstance put them all in good spirits and during the evening a good deal of discussion arose as to who should have the largest share of the treasure.” There would be no sharing of treasure. The next day the diggers arose to find the pit sixty feet deep in water—salt water. Bailing proved to be as futile as bailing out the ocean. This first, failed effort was only the beginning. Syndicate after syndicate was floated to get to the bottom of the pit. They dug, pumped, excavated, drilled, dynamited, trenched, cribbed, bulldozed, and blasted the island, turning the eastern end into a cratered wasteland. At some point in the early nineteenth century the original hole was nicknamed the “Money Pit,” although the only direction money seemed to go was into the pit, not out of it. In 1849 diggers built a platform over the Money Pit and cored down with a pod auger, a primitive type of drill. The drilling engineer, Jotham B. McCully, later stated that the drill struck wood at ninety-eight feet, dropped through twelve inches of space, then rattled through “twenty-two inches of metal in pieces,” struck more wood, another twenty-two inches of metal, then wood, then soil. The auger failed to bring up any metal except three links of a gold chain which, McCully theorized, “had apparently been forced from an epaulette.” Around this time, treasure hunters made another curious discovery. One day a workman was sitting alongside the cobbled beach at Smith’s Cove, a small cove five hundred feet east of the Money Pit. He noticed that as the tide ebbed, the beach “gulched forth water like a sponge being squeezed.” The crew immediately built a cofferdam around the spot and excavated the beach. To their astonishment, they discovered that the beach was a fake—that is, it had been made to look like a beach but was in fact a giant filtering and drainage system. Underneath the cobbles they found thick layers of eel grass and coconut fiber lying on top of an elaborate system of box drains. The drains led, like the five fingers of a hand, to a point opposite the Money Pit. They were, apparently, the head of a “flood trap” designed to keep the pit filled with water. The reader may well wonder how the original diggers intended to retrieve their treasures from such a death trap. Current theories, for which there is yet no evidence, are convincingly simple. Once the pirates—let us call them that for the moment—had dug the Money Pit sufficiently deep, they would have started side shafts that sloped gently back toward the surface. Treasures would have been hidden in the ends of these side tunnels, three hundred to five hundred feet away from the Money Pit but perhaps only thirty feet below the surface. The pirates would have known the direction and distance from the Money Pit, left highly visible as a decoy, to each of the treasure troves and it would have been a simple matter to dig them up. In 1897, drillers brought up more strange clues. From the 155-foot level, the drill bit carried up a half-inch-square piece of parchment with two letters written on it with a quill pen. In another hole the drill was stopped cold at 126 feet by what seemed to be an iron plate. A magnet was raked through grit brought up from the hole and it pulled out thousands of iron filings. A year later, dye dumped into the pit emerged from the seabed at Smith’s Cove, providing more evidence of a tunnel connection. But it also emerged from the South Shore Cove, establishing the existence of two flood tunnels, thus making things more complicated. Everyone assumed that whoever would go to that much trouble must have buried an enormous treasure. Around the turn of the century, fortune hunters estimated it at $10 million; by the 1930s, this had doubled; by the sixties, some people were talking about $100 million or more. Today it is pegged at $500 million to “several billion.” So what has been the problem? Why in the world hasn’t someone been able to get to the bottom of the Money Pit? ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Lost Tomb by Douglas Preston. Copyright © 2023 by Splendide Mendax, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved. View the full article

Brilliant. The NAPE drills did a job on my nervous system, for the better.

OMG no question!

They need to hear the truth, tactfully delivered, of course.

It was a very good year for movies. It seems like everyone made a movie, this year. We got new movies from veteran auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Michael Mann, Sofia Coppola, Paul Schrader, Todd Haynes, Kelly Reichardt, Christopher Nolan, Alexander Payne, Ava DuVernay, Wes Anderson, Hayao Miyazaki, Greta Gerwig, David Fincher, Frederick Weisman, Ira Sachs, Nicole Holofcener, and Rebecca Miller. We got a slate of masterpieces from new-in-town filmmakers like A.V. Rockwell, Celine Song, Nida Manzoor, Cord Jefferson, Kitty Green, Daniel Goldhaber, and Juel Taylor. We were, in a word, blessed. But we didn’t get Richard Linklater’s Hitman movie, and that’s because Netflix bought it at NYFF. Screw you, Netflix. There were a lot of TV-sequel movies, too. Luther and Monk came back, this time on film. For my money, the three best movies of the year are Oppenheimer, The Holdovers, and May December or Past Lives. That third place-spot has had a lot of occupants as I’ve attempted to refine my personal list. But the list you see before you isn’t that list: no, this is a list of the best CRIME movies of the year because this is, after all, a crime website. Okay, let’s roll. Anatomy of a Fall Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall, about a woman who may or may not have murdered her husband (by pushing him out a window in their Alpine chalet), is one of this year’s absolute best, a riveting film that will make you doubt everything, including whether our protagonist is guilty OR innocent. How to Blow Up a Pipeline Don’t sleep on How to Blow Up a Pipeline, the engrossing heist-ish thriller adaptation of Andreas Malm’s groundbreaking nonfiction book. Malm’s book argues that that peaceful protests have proven themselves ineffective in stopping the widespread annihilation of the earth and its inhabitants by climate change, and the only thing that can make any real change is property damage. The film follows a group of young people (mostly early 2os but a couple people around 30) as they band together with a specific mission: destroying a new oil pipeline that has been built in Texas. They all have different reasons for coming to this decision, but their effort will be both a symbol of resistance and a real, practical hindrance to the environmental ravaging posed by the pipeline. Killers of the Flower Moon Martin Scorsese’s epic three-and-a-half-hour film about the Osage killings of the 1920s is a truly spectacular achievement, both for the tender way in which it was made and the historical events which it helps bring to light. Filled with gorgeous cinematography and featuring an especially brilliant performance from Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon‘s best feature is how clearly invested it is in doing right by the Osage people of then and now. The Osage’s participation in the making of the film has been well-publicized, but it’s clear, when viewing the film, that Scorsese not only wants to get the historical details right without exploiting the Osage or their suffering but that he also wants to tell the story in the most respectful, collaborative way possible. The Killer The Killer, David Fincher’s hitman-centric sort-of-comedy thriller, didn’t get a wide theatrical release (really, screw you, Netflix) and that’s a shame. I had the good fortune to grab a viewing on the big screen and man, I’m so glad I did. The movie might settle on you in different ways; for example, you might be annoyed, rather than entertained, that the movie is fundamentally about a guy who messes up at his job and who then makes that everyone else’s problem. But you can’t deny that the film’s first act, a lavish sequence set in Paris, is one of the most beautiful film sequences ever made. Have you seen stills of the scenes featuring the apartment building our killer protagonist is watching? That apartment is a composite shot made up of tiny little individually-filmed soundstages all tiled together. Gorgeous. Glorious. I’m dead, and Fincher, not his slipping-up assassin antihero, killed me. They Cloned Tyrone Where was the fanfare for this fun, smart, pulpy Blacksploitation-style, Nancy-Drew-referencing whodunnit when it came out? Juel Taylor’s film, featuring scintillating performances from John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, and Teyonah Parris, also didn’t get a wide theatrical release (again, screw you, Netflix!!!) but you should really treat yourself to an at-home viewing. It’s about a motley group of Black neighbors in a depressed urban community who realize a government conspiracy is afoot. A smart and groovy time. Have I sold you on this yet? May December I don’t know if May December is a genuine crime movie but it’s sure ABOUT a crime, and based on a crime that had a true-crimey kind of cult fame. So it’s going on here, dammit. This film ALSO didn’t get didn’t get a wide theatrical release (NETFLIXXXXX!!!!!!!), but please watch it. Julianne Moore plays Gracie, a woman who was convicted, as a thirty-six-year-old, of having sex with a thirteen-year-old boy. Nearly twenty years layer, she is married to him and they have three, nearly adult kids. Gracie and Joe (Charles Melton) have weathered prison, a tabloid firestorm, and are now braving the visit from an actress (Natalie Portman) who is researching playing Gracie for a movie role. Except, and not to boil her down to merely a plot device because she is not, Elizabeth’s presence begins to expose cracks in the married couple’s ostensibly happy life together. And yes, Charles Melton is really as good as you’ve heard. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One Ah, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One, otherwise known as Mission Impossible 7, otherwise known as the movie that shook Joe Biden to his core. Tom Cruise, one of Hollywood’s most outspoken critics of computerized cop-outs and a champion of handmade, practical moviemaking and effects, as well as his best friend, director Christopher McQuarrie, have made the best installment of the franchise yet, a mind-boggling, adrenaline-fueled anti-AI fable with the greatest stunts I’ve ever seen put to film. They should have done focus group screeners of this movie with the participants strapped to blood pressure monitors. You’ll know why when you see it. Polite Society Nida Manzoor’s girl-power kung-fu fantasy was one of this year’s biggest delights, a lively, empowering, thoroughly fun movie. In it, a preteen girl in London named Ria Khan (Priya Kansara) dreams of being a stuntwoman, and finds herself putting those skills to use to rescue her older sister Lena (Ritu Arya) from her imminent marriage into a wealthy family… who might be more sinister than they let on. The Royal Hotel The Royal Hotel, the new film from director Kitty Green, flew under the radar a bit, but it’s really worth your time. (Also, no one’s really talking about how it is based very clearly on a documentary, but it is.) Anyway, it’s about Canadian backpackers Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) who wind up in the remote Australian outback, bartending at a hotel in the middle of nowhere. But, as two women (almost) all alone in the desert, they begin to feel that something is… off about the whole place. Talk about tension! My goodness. A Haunting In Venice Look, even if you don’t like Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot, you can’t deny that A Haunting in Venice was the clear best of his three Agatha Christie adaptations, an elegant supernaturally-tinged mystery loosely adapted from a lesser-known Christie novel. But visually, the film was a carnival(e) of cinematography and camerawork, a spooky, aesthetic extravaganza you don’t want to miss. Eileen Eileen! This thriller, which is basically perfect almost all of the way through, snuck onto our radar only a few weeks ago. Anne Hathaway rocks her portrayal of a sultry, secretive psychologist at a young men’s prison in Massachusetts. She, Rebecca, is the first bright spot in a while that Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie), who works in the prison, has experienced, and it’s not long before Eileen begins to grow veeeeeery interested in her. The movie builds well and is really interesting, but a late-in-the-film monologue from Marin Ireland brings the house down. View the full article

Cry first, rest later!

Note this does not include a long story pitch or short synopsis (which will sink you if you don't know how to artfully write it), but rather a single hook line (which will also sink you for the same reason). Note that comparables (at least two) are vital to your novel. Dear Mr. or Ms. (name of agent): ( Open by noting you saw a relevant deal they concluded on PM. It marks you as a true professional. ) I noted in Publishers Marketplace that you represented XYZ Title to ABC Publisher, and I am querying because I have recently completed a novel that might work for your list. You may recall that we met at the XYZ conference [if this is relevant] and thank you so much for your feedback OR manuscript request [again, if relevant]. [Next comes information about the novel--TITLE first, then genre and comps] The Great American Novel is a domestic thriller novel of 92,000 words [comparisons to other novels] comparable to Gone Girl meets Hunt for Red October. [HOOK OR LOG LINE INSERTED HERE--MUST BE EXCELLENT. IF POSSIBLE, HAVE A PROFESSIONAL REVIEW IT BECAUSE THEY CAN BE DIFFICULT TO WRITE. READ ABOUT CONFLICT AND CORE WOUNDS IN THE PRIOR LINK AND ALSO SEE THE EXAMPLES IN THIS NEXT ONE BEFORE YOU ATTEMPT IT: SAMPLE LOG LINES.] ( NOTE: if no creds below then rely on the hook ) [Professional credentials, platform, or personal background of the author] I won the XYZ novel contest. My short stories have appeared in Granta and The Atlantic. I have an MFA from Iowa. A novel of mine published by XYZ was an Amazon best-seller... OR I am an avid dog-owner and run a shelter for homeless Labradors [if relevant and important to the novel]... OR I have five million followers on TT or X. I am attaching/enclosing [note: only attach documents when the agent explicitly asks for attachments]: an outline; synopsis; sample chapter(s); press clippings about my other published works; endorsements by (1) bestselling authors, (2) celebrities, (3) experts, (4) other people who really would be useful for endorsements. [submission information] This is on a multiple submission. If you are interested in reading the entire manuscript, however, I will be happy to give you exclusivity. Best Wishes, Merilee Author

Growing-up in upper Manhattan, on 151st Street between Broadway and Riverside, I always thought of my neighborhood as Harlem or Sugar Hill. Mom, who’d lived in the area since the mid-1950s, referred to it as Hamilton Grange, named after the post office located on 146th between Broadway and Amsterdam. Decades later others, especially real estate agents, referred to that section of New York City as Hamilton Heights. Though we may not always agree on the section’s name, for certain when you get off of the subway at 145th and Broadway you’re uptown. While the community has a rich history that includes former resident Alexander Hamilton, for whom the territory was named, the many literary figures raised within those blocks including J.D. Salinger, who lived in the grand Halidon Court on 153rd Street until he was 9, and the towering apartment buildings (“pre-war,” their modern day listings read) designed by renowned architects including Emory Roth, Neville & Biggie and Mulliken & Moeller. As a writer I’ve often used the neighborhood as a locale in both essays and short fiction, weaving places, faces and literal old schools into various narratives. Having moved to 628 West 151 Street (River Cliff apartments) in 1967 when I was 4, I resided there for twenty-five years. Somewhere along my literary journey I began looking online for old pictures of the community to jog my memory. Click to view slideshow. It was while researching the area for the 2013 story “Jaguar and the Jungleland Boogie,” an adventure tale published in Black Pulp, edited by Gary Phillips, that I discovered the wondrous photography of Thaddeus Wilkerson. A turn of the century documentarian of the city, Wilkerson’s stark street photography were used for postcards that he published himself. His pictures of New York City, more than four hundred of Manhattan alone, were produced from 1909 through 1916, with the majority produced in 1910 and 1911. Born in 1872, Wilkerson, an Ohio native, was 37 when he started shooting his adopted city. His pictures have a strange quality that is reminiscent of noir. Though the genre wouldn’t launch until decades after Wilkerson’s most prolific period, his work shares the same expressionistic sensibilities. Since Wilkerson had a full-time job, I imagine taking photos began as a hobby before becoming an obsession. His views included street life, as well as various hotels, churches, municipal buildings, monuments and parks. There are few people in his pictures, making me wonder if he was shy or simply preferred shooting buildings. Each picture had the subject’s address written on the right of the image and his signature “TW” on the left. Wilkerson’s photos, much like the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, were a celebration of the rising city, a tribute to urbanism and a town on the come up. It was Wilkerson’s photo of PS. 186, one of my old schools, which made me notice him. Located on both 145th and 146th with courtyards on each side, the massive school was built in 1902 and was the handy work of American architect Charles B.J. Snyder. The school’s mailing address listed as 521 West 145th Street, it was directly across the street from Wilkerson’s apartment building at 522 West 145th; his address was printed on the back left side of each postcard. There was a spooky quality to Wilkerson’s pristine photo. He watermarked the picture, Public School 186. As though taken early on a Sunday morning, there are no people in the shot. The street too is bare, devoid of either horses or cars. The picture is so quiet you can see the silence. PS 186 was an only a few years old when the picture was taken, and the clean building had an aura of promise and ambition. I imagine Wilkerson staring out of the window at dawn as the sun rose over PS 186, being struck by the brutal beauty of the structure and wanting to capture that exquisiteness with his bulky camera. Almost sixty years later, when I started first grade at PS 186, the building was dirty. A building that I remember as dark and drafty with wrought iron staircases; in 1969 the building, with its layers of lead paint, was six years away from being condemned. I was a six-year-nerd who’d previously gone to a private Black prep academy known as the Modern School. However, because of a domestic rift between my parents, my father refused to pay the tuition and I wound-up in public school. Click to view slideshow. As a pudgy, unathletic boy, I wasn’t prepared to enter the rowdy lion’s den and felt a sense of dread from the moment I entered the courtyard. Stepping inside the building that first day, the school had a gothic appearance that reminded me of something out of a Dickens’ story. I don’t have many memories of that year, but I did make friends with a wild Spanish kid named Richie. We were buddies in class, where the young white woman teacher often had a frightened expression on her face. Thankfully, Richie also nominated himself as my bodyguard and came to my rescue when some bad asses tried to mug me in the staircase. “Leave him alone,” he screamed from the top of the stairs. My protector had juice and the other kids scattered. Those boys never bothered me again. PS 186 shut down in 1975, and abandoned for decades. In the passing years I could clearly see the crumbling brick exterior and wildlife growing out of the windows. In 1986, the beginning of the crack cocaine era in our hood, I ran into Richie on the Broadway and 145th Street coming out of the subway station. He had been released from prison a few days before. Like a lot of young men in our neighborhood in the mid-1980s, he had gotten into the drug business. “You know there’s a crew of crack fiends living in our old school,” Richie said, nodding towards PS 186. “I’ve seen them jumping over the gates. It’s crazy.” As a fan of decaying buildings in urban settings, I began visiting PS 186 often, standing on the crumbling staircase that I first climbed years before. Though I believed Richie, I never saw anybody through those broken windows. “Be careful on them steps, there’s a lot of rats under there,” a woman warned me one gloomy afternoon. After thanking her, I turned back around and continued to gaze at the trash filled courtyard. In “Jaguar and the Jungleland Boogie” I described the desolate school this way: “Once the premier shining jewel of the community, time and decay had faded it from its former splendor. Sold to a local church in 1979 with promises of making it into a Boys and Girls Club, the conversion was never completed and the school was left to rot.” Today the building, by some miracle, is still standing and has been converted into apartments. In 1970, I was sent back the Modern School for second and third grade. After I began to dread my bougie teacher Miss Wilson, who played the same classical album for the class every day at lunch and scratched my Shaft album when snatching the needle off when Isaac Hayes muttered, “Damn right.” Months later I entered fourth grade at St. Catherine of Genoa. Located at 506 West 153rd Street next door to the church and rectory, the school wasn’t yet built when Wilkerson took pictures of the same block I walked every school day for the five years. I recall our sixth grade history teacher Mr. Waters telling the class how our neighborhood was once farmland and how Alexander Hamilton settled there, hence the name. It wasn’t until the late 19th century, with the expansion of the subway system, that the area became more developed. Originally populated with German, Irish and Jewish immigrants, it wasn’t until the 1920s that Black people began to filter into the neighborhood. Still, while the nationalities changed, the landscape remained the same. In the era that I had lived there, the neighborhood was majority Black and Hispanic. It was on 153rd between Broadway and Amsterdam where I rushed to the rectory in my altar boy gear on Sunday mornings for 9 o’clock mass and where I once played football so badly that I ran the wrong way, scoring a touchdown for the other team. It was on that quiet block where I sat with my friend Raymond Torres in his father’s car listening to the radio at lunchtime and, while in seventh grade, I stood against the wall of Trinity Church Cemetery with a hammer waiting for a rumble to jump off. Though we’d gotten out of school for a half day, word had gone around earlier that Stitt, a nearby junior high known for its knuckleheads and troublemakers, wanted to jump us. While we weren’t an official gang, we were ready for whatever; in my mind there was a West Side Story/Sharks vs. Jets fantasy brewing. Everything was everything until cops from the 30th precinct, men who we knew by face from church, came to the block and made us go home. In Wilkerson’s picture we can see a horse and buggy in the background while in the foreground there is a couple standing in front of the cemetery. It was inside that boneyard where mom used to take me to feed the squirrels until the morning we ran out of nuts and was chased out by the aggressive rodents. It was also in Trinity Cemetery where a St. Catherine’s schoolmate Armando Morales was found hanging from a tree one morning. Though I didn’t know him personally, Morales’ death was a shock to our school community. Whether he was killed or committed suicide, I never knew, but the incident haunted me for years. In 2023 I fictionalized the hanging and creepy cemetery in the story “The King of Broadway” published in Rock and a Hard Place. “Constructed over a century ago, its gray stones sparkled under the sun’s glimmer,” the narrator thought. “Wild ivy scaled the walls that surrounded the vast cemetery from Broadway to Amsterdam. A rusty wrought-iron design on top was supposed to keep the riff-raff from climbing over.” Diagonally across the street from the cemetery was Halidon Court, another building that St. Catherine kids passed every day and where Raymond’s grandmother lived. We often visited his grandmother’s first floor apartment at lunchtime. She was a sweet, stout woman who had no problem feeding us as telenovelas played on in the living room. Though granny couldn’t speak English she and I somehow communicated. Halidon Court was built in 1910, and Wilkerson captured the building’s regal beauty. Though there are two figures standing in front of the building, like most of Wilkerson’s photos of apartment houses there’s a gothic sensibility in seeing these castle sized abodes perched atop of steep hills with the Hudson River in the background. There is very little biographical information on Wilkerson, and the most that I found was published in Real Photo Postcard Guide: The People’s Photography by Robert Bogdan and Todd Weseloh (2006): “Born and raised in Spring Hill (near Clarksville), Ohio, Wilkerson is one of the most collectible New York City photo postcard photographer. He was an employee of Burroughs Adding Machine Company for more than forty years.” Author Michael Henry Adams, writer of the wonderful coffee table book Harlem Lost and Found, wrote in his blog, “Wilkerson, like no-one else, focused on making compelling images of uptown Manhattan. His depictions, which once might have been regarded as quite ordinary, are an invaluable and rare record, rendered extraordinary by the dramatic way in which, even where buildings have remained the same, everyday life here has changed completely.” In a few of Wilkerson’s images the streets are deserted, as though upper Manhattan was a ghost town. The metropolis was on the rise, but some of Wilkerson’s images made it look like a small town with big buildings. Still, in other pictures we see suited men in hats alongside women clad in long dresses walking in groups up Broadway or strolling along Riverside Drive. “Wilkerson’s work and the way he captured the city reminds me of both Eugène Atget and Charles Marville,” says photographer Alice Arnold. “They’re all making city images, capturing the urban landscape as it is transformed by the forces of modernity. Wilkerson’s images are haunting, but there is also an aspirational feel to them. He made these photos to sell as picture postcards, which was a booming business in those days. But remember, in 1910 cameras were heavy, required tripods, and you only had one shot to get it right.” One of my earliest memories of childhood uptown was May 22, 1967. It was a sunny Monday morning and I, at four years old, was seated at the kitchen table having breakfast. Mom, who had just finished making eggs and sausages, was still standing by the stove when we heard a loud explosion that sounded like a bomb. “What was that? Mom screamed, turning off the stove. She quickly got me in a coat and we hurried outside. At the bottom of the hill people gathered on Riverside Drive, leaning over the granite parapet wall. Making our way onto the drive, we too looked over the wall, shocked to see two freight trains had crashed into one another. The tracks were near the Hudson, and that day we could see New Jersey clearly. There were flames coming from the diesel engines and, looking like the toys of a giant, boxcars billowing smoke were scattered across the tracks. Years later I depicted the tracks and freight trains in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine short story “The Life and Times of Big Poppa,” who came into town riding in a boxcar that he leapt from in 1944 and soon discovered the streets of Harlem. The morning of the train crash firemen and police were on the scene carrying away the dead and wounded. “This is about as bad as you will find,” Mayor John Lindsey told reporters. An N.Y.P.D. friend of mom, a uniformed cop named Alvin Ingram, approached us. “You guys don’t want to be down here,” he warned. “You don’t really want to see this.” Walking back to the corner of 151st Street I recall looking across the street at the towering buildings 740 and 745 Riverside Drive. In the shadow of those structures everything else was small. Years later I’d write an essay (“The Boogeyman Buildings” for CrimeReads) about how frigthening they were when I was a kid. Seeing Wikerson’s pictures on Michael Henry Adams website “Style & Taste” gave me some perspective of the buildings elegance in the time before crime, drugs and fire made it them an eyesore for thirty-five years. Additionally, the same could be said for Wilkerson’s picture of 601 Broadway (151st Street), another massive building that lost its luster mid 20th-century. Thaddeus Wilkerson was 71 years old when he died in New York City from a streptococcus throat infection in 1943. Though he lived a long life, his photography career seemingly only lasted for few years. Miraculously, the structures he shot are still standing. While his obituary in a Clarksville, Ohio newspaper cited that he was avid writer of letters to friends and family, there was no mention of his photographs. Thankfully Thaddeus Wilkerson’s images managed to survive the near century since they were taken. Although he hasn’t achieved the name recognition as New York City chroniclers Walker Evans, Helen Levitt or Saul Leiter, for me his photographs of the town are just as significant. ___________________________________ Thaddeus Wilkerson images can be seen on the Museum of the City of New York website. Thanks to Alice Arnold and Michael Henry Adams for their guidance. View the full article

Looking for a gift for the mystery lover who adores a smart heroine whose adventures will viscerally transport the reader somewhere else? Someone who loves the Miss Marple mysteries as much for their doilies as detection, Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski books as much for their tough protagonist as their evocation of the gritty underside of Chicago? Look no further; I’ve got recommendations that will take a reader from the gas giant Jupiter to the bike lanes of Brooklyn, all driven by ladies who could give Sam Spade a run for his money. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde Charles Yu wrote “Every book of Fforde’s seems to be a cause for celebration,” and The Eyre Affair is the book that kicked off the party. Fforde’s riotously original debut introduces us to Thursday Next, a LiteraTec Special Operative with a mind that can’t be swayed. In the book’s alternate England, literary obsession is the status quo. The debate over Shakespeare’s identity has given rise to an entire movement of door-to-door proselytizers, and the theft of the original manuscript of Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit is front-page news. Operative Next, searching for the manuscript thief, gets pulled into a mystery that takes her everywhere from her hometown of Swindon to the inside of Jane Eyre itself. Each twist and turn in the plot’s intricate path is an opportunity for Fforde to dazzle the reader with another of his imaginative ideas, from hate crimes between rival surrealist and impressionist gangs to pet dodos (resurrected from extinction through home cloning technology). His deep love of classic literature shines through every page. Perfect for bibliophiles looking for a laugh-out-loud read. Sorcery & Cecelia: or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot by Caroline Stevermer and Patricia C. Wrede This novel-in-letters is an absolute delight, a rococo confection that melts on the tongue and will melt your heart. Cecelia and Kate are best friends and cousins in a Regency England in which sorcery helped win the Napoleonic wars. Kate is off to London for her very first Season, but Cecelia has to stay home as punishment for an unladylike prank involving the abduction of a neighbor’s goat. The two exchange letters throughout a spring’s worth of hijinks, precipitated by an unscrupulous sorceress who nearly kills Kate over a mysterious chocolate pot. As the cousins dodge magical traps and work to unravel the mystery of the chocolate pot’s owner in time to save him, dresses are ordered, dance cards are filled, magical talents revealed and hearts are won. Co-written by Stevermer and Wrede in a summer of frantic letter writing (Wrede wrote Cecelia’s epistles and Stevermer Kate’s), this novel is doubly impressive for the interlocking clockwork of the plot—which the authors worked out as the book was written, neither revealing to the other what they were planning until their letters reveal it to the reader. The Verifiers by Jane Pek Claudia Lin works at a company that is definitely not a dating detective agency. Yes, Veracity verifies the details from dating-app profiles, but Claudia’s boss is insistent that the company is a “personal investments advisory firm,” not three and a half gumshoes in an office. When a client arrives with an unusual request, Claudia finds herself sucked into a rabbit hole of false identities, red herrings, and murder. An English-History double major, Claudia’s tactics as a sleuth are drawn from her beloved Inspector Yuan mystery series rather than any relevant experience. Her insights, however, come from her own keen observations of family dynamics—none more sharp or unvarnished than those of her complicated relationships with her own. Claudia is a splendid narrator, a snarky lesbian with an eye for detail who bikes the breadth and length of the city over the course of the book. From char siu in Flushing to pancakes at an all-night diner in Gowanus—from the smell of exhaust in a Brooklyn bike lane to ripples on the Hudson—the action drops the reader into a snapshot of life in the Big Apple. Pek combines a fast-moving thriller, a deeply moving family story, and a love letter to New York City into one delightful package. Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sarah Gran Claire DeWitt is the World’s Best Detective; she regularly tells people this. It’s true enough that she gets work, in spite of her sky-high fees, recent hospitalization for a nervous breakdown, and unique approach to detecting. In this first installment of the Claire DeWitt series, she’s called back to post-Katrina New Orleans to investigate the disappearance of a missing man. Her tactics are unorthodox, to say the least. A follower of mysterious French detective Jacques Silette (prone to cryptic pronouncements like “the detective will always circle around what he wants, never seeing it whole. We do not go on despite this. We go on because of it”), relevant clues in her opinion include everything from a random business card dropped on the ground to dreams of her dead mentor. She travels through a New Orleans still mutilated a year after the storm, thick with the fug of abandoned memories. In search of answers, she throws I Ching, takes drugs, gets fired—and, of course, eventually solves the case. This strange and compelling mystery would be whimsical if it weren’t for the gritty sense of loss at the center of Gran’s writing; instead, it’s something deeper and weirder, a meditation on the absurdity of imagining that anything can actually have a simple, rational explanation in a world as complex as ours. The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older Malka Older’s slim novella deftly builds a more enveloping world than many longer volumes. Set in the far future on Jupiter, her Gaslamp-on-a-gas-giant is a continual pleasure to discover—from tendrils of the planet’s yellow-orange fog sliding down twisty alleyways to the Mauzooleum, an installation of species from the long-dead Earth, to the most mouthwatering fictional scones I’ve encountered in decades. The main characters, Mossa and Pleiti, are a female Holmes-and-Watsonesque duo with history. Lovers in college, the apparent suicide of one of Pleiti’s colleagues has brought them back together after decades apart. Their will-they-won’t-they romance is surprisingly adult, which makes each notch of heat turned up in the slow burn that much more satisfying. Malka Older juggles the mystery, the worldbuilding, and the romance with ease, and even manages to build in an urgent portrait of what humanity stands to lose if we don’t get our act together to save our only planet. This lucid and entertaining read is a weighty gem in a compact package. *** View the full article

Vivian Parry, the main character of Alexis Soloski’s Here in the Dark, is a perceptive theater critic for a New York magazine. She’s tough on hammy actors, but even harder on herself. Despondent since her mother’s sudden death, Vivian is a self-proclaimed “abyss where a woman should be,” one who dulls “any genuine feeling with casual sex and serious drinking and rationed sedatives.” When a grad student asks to interview her about the life of a working critic, Vivian reluctantly agrees. Her meeting with David Adler seems unremarkable. She’s nearly forgotten the encounter when, a couple weeks later, his fiancée phones her at work. David has disappeared, the woman tells Vivian, “and you are the last person to see him.” This pulls Vivian into an increasingly complex mystery that threatens her safety and leaves her questioning her prized skills of discernment. With snappy dialogue, biting humor and a gratifying, well-earned resolution, it’s an excellent debut. Soloski, a New York Times culture reporter and critic, took a few minutes recently to discuss the real-life incident that inspired her book, what people misunderstand about critics and how she’s nothing like her protagonist. What was the spark that got you writing this book? It’s more than a decade ago now, but when I was at the Village Voice, someone called and asked to interview me about my work. I was very flattered. I was young and female and a theater critic, and these things were not very common. They’re still not incredibly common. I did the interview, and then I was told that he was missing, and that I was the last person to have seen him. The article never appeared, and I always wondered what happened. I googled his name, but it was too common a name to really come up. A fact about me is I’m pretty boring. Safe choices are in my DNA. I just wanted to write about someone who did not make safe choices, and who sort of ran toward the danger at every turn, someone who did not have good boundaries and a solid network of family and community. To take a little bit of the real experience and transmute it onto a character who made way more dangerous choices than I would. When one of Vivian’s colleagues says something stupid, she wonders if “his aggressive idiocy is a ploy.” Maybe “he’s performing just as I perform. As we all perform.” Was that an important idea as you were writing—that to some degree, our relationships are performances? I do think that we engage in—and certainly I engage in—social performance, that I am not the same person talking to you as I would be with my kids, as I am with my mom, as I might be with friends. The differences aren’t enormous because I’m a pretty sane person and a pretty happy person. I’m pretty influenced by Freud’s idea of the psychopathology of everyday life. There’s also a great Vivian Gornick essay, it’s something like, “On the street, nobody watches; everyone performs.” (Soloski’s recollection of the quote is correct; the piece was published in the New Yorker in 1996.) Her thesis is that to live in New York, you have to engage in a certain amount of social performance. Vivian has an encyclopedic knowledge of theater. Is that yours, the product of research for the book, or both? This is my joke, and like all of my jokes, it comes from a place of pain: Vivian and I are very, very different, but I needed her to have good taste, so I gave her mine. I do, for better or worse, have an encyclopedic knowledge of theater. I had a really wonderful high school drama teacher, who had the gift that some great teachers do, of seeing who kids are before they know it themselves. He knew early on that I wasn’t going to be an actress, but I loved theater. He got me reading plays. When I was a junior, I think, he gave me a book of Chekhov’s five major plays. And then when I got to Yale, I started reading my way through the shelves. A wonderful professor who’s still there, Mark Robinson, heard that there was this undergrad who was checking out every book. He gave me the reading list for the dramaturgy and dramatic criticism graduate students, and he said, I think you think you should organize your reading a little more deliberately. I followed that syllabus and then went on to do a PhD in theater at Columbia. So as different as you and your main character are, you can identify with her path—you thought maybe you’d be an actor, but you chose criticism. I did, but there’s no tragedy there (like the death of Vivian’s mother). There’s no trauma. There were three reasons. One, I wasn’t a very good actor. I have severe limitations, and I didn’t want to have an eating disorder for the rest of my life. Two, the things that I was going to have to do to my face and body to be competitive—I didn’t think that those were good. And three, I’m a nice middle-class kid and I just didn’t want to take the financial risk. Back then, journalism and academia, both of which I was pursuing, were reasonable career paths in a way that acting wasn’t. For Vivian, the two hours when she’s at the theater, watching a play and taking notes, is when she’s most alive. Do feel the same excitement when the lights go down? When the lights go down is honestly the best part. Anything could happen—this could be the greatest night of your life. And then, usually, it’s 10 minutes and I’m like, Oh, this again. And I’m fighting with my grocery list. I think of it almost as a meditative exercise. You’re fighting to keep attention, but sometimes you’re like, Wait, I do need eggs. And then you bring your attention back. In the book, you note that Beckett and P.G. Wodehouse, among many others, wrote nasty things about theater critics. What do people get wrong about critics? I mean, there are some real assholes, but most critics want to like things. All I want to do is like things! I want goosebumps up and down my arms that say, OK, this is good. I want to give myself over to something. I want that feeling of absorption, of engrossment. So I’m always hopeful, I always think this could be the night. It rarely is, but when it is, there’s nothing else like it. Your dialogue—particularly the conversations between Vivian and Justine, her closest friend—is quick and funny. Are you a note taker? When hear somebody say something on the subway or at the office, do you file it away for future use? I don’t think I am a note taker, but yeah, I love crackle. The fancy term is stichomythia—that’s Greek for really quick back and forth dialogue, like you see in my favorite Shakespeare comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, where Beatrice and Benedick are just going at it on the page. And I think you see it in the screwball comedies of the 1920s and ‘30s, some of the noir of the ‘40s and ‘50s. The gift that I have is that I do so many interviews with artists, with celebrities, and those interviews at some point have to be transcribed. There’s nothing better for having you realize how people talk, and all the ways that people talk around something. The trick is to edit out all the paralinguistic “ums” and “you knows” and “of courses,” just distill it down to something really crisp and sharp. Do you read your dialogue out loud? No one should watch me write because I do look insane. I am absolutely a mumbler. It’s one thing to read it on the page—and obviously, it’s heightened to some degree, there’s something theatrical to it—but it still has to sound plausible in the mouth. Your book ends in a way that I really like. It was obviously important for you to have an ending that meshes with, and adds nuance to, all the developments that came before. I think that there’s nothing that makes you want to throw a book at the wall more than a twist that seems out of character or out of step with the rest of the book. If there is going to be a twist, it has to feel authentic to what’s come before, and it has to feel earned. Because otherwise it’s just going to feel disgusting, and you’re going to wonder why you bothered in the first place. View the full article

If you like fiction featuring spiritualists and their brethren, then you’re in for a treat, as 2023 has brought a host of new crime novels exploring ghostly visitations and otherworldly knowledge. Some of the books below feature straight-up con artists, using the cards or a seance or two as a means to an end, while others truly believe in their own connections to the spirit world. Most of the following titles are historical fiction, clustered during the late 19th century and early 20th, but some are contemporary, speaking to both a current surge of interest in spiritualism and the tragic historical circumstances that tend to serve as a prelude for wanting to contact ghosts or read one’s future in the cards. Without death, there are no ghosts; without uncertainty, there are no futures in the cards. Without a need for comfort (and/or the ensuing risk for exploitation) these titles would not exist, or at least, certainly not be so compelling. Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Square of Sevens (Atria) In this lush gothic, a young girl who knows the art of predicting fortunes becomes ward to a kind intellectual, who raises her in safety and anonymity in 18th-century Bath. As she grows into a poised young woman, she finds herself increasingly curious about her fairy-tale origins, in which her fortune-teller father ran away with her aristocratic mother. When a chance comes to know more of her history, she takes it, even as a larger conspiracy threatens her found family. Anbara Salam, Hazardous Spirits (Tin House) In this fascinating portrait of spiritualism, identity, and doubt, a young wife becomes concerned with her husband develops a focused interest in becoming a spiritual medium. Is he a fraud? Does he believe his own words? Can they preserve their place in societal hierarchy with his new-found love of a looked-down-upon profession? And how far will her love carry her along in his journey? Salam has an incredible grasp on historical details, attitudes, and mores, for a carefully wrought and emotionally compelling read. The short length of the novel belies its complexity and depth, and I hope Anbara Salam continues to craft historical novels for a long time to come. Lucy Barker, The Other Side of Mrs. Wood (Harper) Move over, The Prestige—there’s a new Victorian-Era rivalry in town. When the most popular medium in London starts to worry about her audience getting bored, she hires a new apprentice. Unfortunately, the young woman so takes to her new profession that she begins to outshine her mentor, and a deadly, delightful game ensues. Sarah Penner, The London Seance Society (Park Row Books) Bestselling author Sarah Penner’s book is a canny romp through the Victorian zeitgeist that cemented Conan Doyle’s interests in spiritualism, a world in which science and rationalism clashed with spectacle and illusion and all of those things clashed with a preoccupation with ghosts and the occult. Anyway, it’s about a famed spiritualist and a non-believer who wind up joining forces to solve a murder… and then find themselves embroiled in a crime. Tell me you yourself wouldn’t run through quicksand to acquire this book, and I won’t believe you. –OR Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Fortune Seller (St Martin’s, forthcoming in February 2024) This book combines so many things I enjoy….Really, just horse girls and tarot readers, but who doesn’t want to read about horse girls and fortune tellers? In Kapelke-Dale’s delightful forthcoming novel, the elite members of Yale’s equestrian team welcome a new girl into their midst, one who comes with impeccable riding skills and a surprising talent for tarot. Not everyone is as happy with her presence, or her fortunes, as the narrator, and soon enough, murder and sabotage mar the collegiate halcyon days of the privileged characters (such a pity…). This book also fulfills my theory that people at Ivies are way too burned out from trying to get in to enjoy their time there. So glad I went to a state school (Hook ‘Em.) Carmella Lowkis, Spitting Gold (Atria, forthcoming in May 2024) Another Atria title on the list! And another one concerned with mystical frauds—this time, two spiritualist sisters, famed in their teen years for their convincing seances, held in the most prestigious salons and parlors of Paris. The elder sister must be coaxed out of her comfortable retirement married to a baron so the two can pull off one last con, but all is not what it seems in this lush and twist-filled tale. Spitting Gold is carefully plotted, fully characterized, and incredibly satisfying, so I must apologize to all for telling you how great it is so many months before you can actually read it. View the full article

Monk has returned! That’s right! An original Monk movie, entitled Mr. Monk’s Last Case, has just been released. And to mark this momentous release, our editor Olivia Rutigliano sat down with star Tony Shalhoub and series creator Andy Breckman, who also wrote the new film. Mr. Monk’s Last Case is now streaming on Peacock. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision, and contains spoilers for Mr. Monk’s Last Case and light spoilers for Monk. Olivia Rutigliano: Had you been planning on bringing back Monk and found that the pandemic offered a good narrative to do so… or was living through the pandemic and perhaps wondering what Monk would do all the inspiration you needed for that pairing? Andy Breckman: It’s a good question. When the series ended, I did attempt to sell some monk movies. The timing wasn’t right for a number of reasons. And so I sort of gave up on it all. But you’re absolutely right… the pandemic sort of jump-started interest in the character. Again, we did a short four minute PSA film featuring Monk and his entourage during the pandemic. And that, I think, moved the ball down the field even further. Tony Shalhoub: The reaction to the PSA was very strong. AB: There was so little negative reaction that we were thrilled. TS [laughing]: That’s what we always base it on… our bar got so low! AB [laughing]: That’s our goal! We got almost no hate mail. And that was all the green light we needed. OR: Well. regarding those other potential Monk projects… now that we’ve got the ball rolling, do you think there might be more Monk movies? It’s forebodingly-titled Mr. Monk’s Last Case. So I wonder if the question’s been answered for me already. AB: I wish you ran Peacock, frankly! That would make my life easier. We did. We left the door open at the end of this movie, and we did that very intentionally. TS: And we introduced a dog! AB: And we introduced a dog! A sick dog! A sick dog. TS: A lonely, depressed, sick dog! AB: We’re daring Peacock not to continue this. OR: You’re doing like… season two of Columbo, where he gets the elderly dog. AB: Yes! You know, Columbo had a cast of one. There was one character in Columbo, and the network told them you need someone else in your cast. And so Levinson and Link gave him a dog for season two! TS: Fantastic! AB: That was the second character. And you know what the name of that dog was in Colombo? OR: Dog! AB: Dog, yeah! TS: Wow. AB: That was Columbo trivia! OR: It’s a dream doing Columbo trivia with you guys, a dream. TS: For us too. OR: So, Mr. Shalhoub, since Monk has ended, you’ve played so many different characters. What was it like slipping back into Monk’s very familiar shoes after 14 years? TS: It was a little strange in the beginning, but I got to say, it didn’t take long once we started shooting. We mean we had a couple of table reads and things like that. And but once we started filming it, since I had all my good teammates with me… and everybody was excited about it and bringing their A-game, we folded into it quite, quite easily. AB: It was like bringing the band back together. OR: The dynamic is present… when everyone starts hugging in the airport, I was like, oh yeah, we’re back! TS: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah! OR: I thought this movie was very was different in a way. I mean, obviously the show Monk blends sadness and humor almost in every episode. And some of the episodes where Trudy is more centrally featured… those are sadder. But I thought it was a very interesting decision to lean a bit more into the sadness of Monk’s situation, especially with Molly, with the situation that befalls her. What made you choose a more tragic circumstance to reacquaint us with Monk again? AB: Well, we wanted to raise the stakes. You know, we wanted to justify coming back and making it a movie and making it a big event. And so we had to have Monk in crisis and we found a couple of pretty serious problems for him to try to overcome. TS: I remember, too, when I first read the script, the first draft, that there was a lot more of Trudy in the story. She was much more kind of present and recurring in the movie than we had ever had in prior episodes. AB: Well, there’s a reason for that… TS: Right, it was totally justified! But I was amazed! Because usually Trudy was just sprinkled in, sort of hit and run. She’d trigger a little something with Monk, and then she’d vanished again. And in this one, she kept coming and coming. And I thought, wow, this is totally new ground. Great for Melora and great for me. AB: But actually from a writer’s point of view, it was necessary, because Monk was in crisis. He had, you know, suicidal thoughts and he couldn’t discuss it with anyone else except Trudy. He couldn’t even discuss it with his shrink… or openly, candidly, with his shrink. So Trudy, played from a dramatic point of view, a very important part. TS: Yeah. Part of the narrative. OR: Do you think that Trudy is a figment of Monk’s imagination? Or is she more of an actual ghost or apparition? AB: Good question! TS: That is a good question. And we discussed it quite often. But from my point of view and as an actor (and my preference), she doesn’t exist outside of him. She doesn’t exist without him. Something in his subconscious brings her when he desperately needs her. That’s how we kind of proceeded. We agreed on that. OR: I have one final, very quick question. Is there a favorite Monk episode of yours? Because filming it was so fun or because it’s some other element that you really enjoyed? AB: Do you have a favorite? TS: Oh, I can’t… I have maybe five favorites, but there’s so many that were near and dear to me. AB: Well, you know, I have five kids and I you can’t— TS: But you do have a favorite kid. AB[laughing]: Yeah, my son Josh is my favorite. Obviously! TS [laughing]: He’s my favorite, too. AB: My answer to that is always… when you do a series, there’s no margin of error when you make a pilot. The pilot has to be cast perfectly, has to be pitch perfect and has to work on every level. And so I’m always grateful that we got the pilot close to correct, you know, because we wouldn’t have a series without it. So that’s always been my answer. View the full article

Those familiar with Game of Thrones will recognize the hallmarks of “grimdark” storytelling. In a grimdark world, morals are flexible. Dark aesthetics and gritty details dominate. Today’s hero could be tomorrow’s villain, if external circumstances change. Given the headlines of the past few years, the moral uncertainty of such stories has a “ripped from the headlines” feel that seems appropriate for our chaotic era. On their face, grimdarks are everything cozy mysteries are not. Grimdarks are gritty and explicit where cozies are saccharine and romanticized. Cozies are fluffy and escapist. Grimdarks are meaty, heavy, real. But the more time I spend reading and writing cozies, the more I think of them as tools for confronting, and reckoning with, the same (un)ethical landscapes as grimdarks. Even as I type this, I can hear the distant sizzle of frying synapses as readers try to suss out what a cozy mystery stalwart like bakery owner Hannah Swensen has in common with #teamgrimdark soldier of fortune Jamie Lannister, other than perhaps Nordic good looks and an intense love for their sisters. Hear me out. The more time I spend reading and writing cozies, the more I think of them as tools for confronting, and reckoning with, the same (un)ethical landscapes as grimdarks. Modern cozy mysteries are often dismissed as fluff, or as mere “puzzle books,” in which a writer arranges clues, suspects, and motives into what is, essentially, a novel-length Sudoku. The characters have a few lighthearted chats, maybe eat a cupcake or two. This cozy-mystery-as-puzzle line of thinking reaches its pinnacle in G.T. Karber’s wildly-successful Murdle books, a series of solve-it-yourself deduction workbooks that boil the trappings of the genre down to the barest essentials—Whodunnit? Howdunnit? Wheredunnit? There’s little focus on the whys and wherefores. (Full disclosure: I have a near-pathological Murdle addiction. I blurbed the first book and even collaborated with the author on a custom Murdle puzzle featuring the characters and settings from my Deep Dish Mystery series.) The conventional wisdom tells us that the point of a cozy mystery is that a murder happens, and then the murder gets solved. If they’re not being dismissed as glorified story problems, cozy mysteries are being accused of glossing over the realities of murder. Take a crime, slap a knitted shawl on it, accessorize it with an adorable purse dog, and you’ve got yourself a cozy, right? Here again, the comparison with grimdarks shows us the mistake of that kind of dismissal. Grimdarks are said to show too much violence, while cozies show too little. Both of these tendencies allegedly erode the ethical integrity of the reader/viewer. But, real talk—how are our puny little primate brains supposed to comprehend the horror of violence and murder? Face it? Dodge it? Whether we choose to bear witness to humanity’s worst instincts in the blood-spattered vivisection party of a grimdark world, or we instead prefer to confront murder next to a gently-crackling fire with a cup of cocoa and a fluffy cat, it’s all a feeble attempt to understand something dreadful and to control our fears. Cozy readers exercise that control by micro-dosing violence; grimdark aficionados handle it by plunging into a Olympic-sized pool of gore. The phrase “cozy mystery” itself emerged in the past few decades to describe crime stories where the gritty details are scrubbed off the page, replaced by homey elements like crafts, pets, and baking. Cozies are supposed to be a nice option for readers “who like to puzzle over a whodunit without all the bad vibes and viscera.” These books are supposedly for people seeking escape from real life and from real, complicated problems. The past century has witnessed several distinct fads in mystery writing. The traditional Christie and Sayers mysteries of the Golden Age of Crime skimmed over graphic details in a very stiff-upper-lip, keep-calm-and-carry-on way, befitting the prevailing ethos of interwar England. Poirot was squeamish about dirt and gore, and rational to a fault. Lord Peter Wimsey had money and manners to insulate him from the more unpleasant aspects of homicide. To him, sleuthing was an amusing distraction to occupy his copious leisure time. (Another full disclosure: This is not meant as a criticism. As with Murdle, I am an obsessive fan of Poirot and Wimsey.) The next crime-writing trend crested around and after World War Two, with the popularity of noir and the hard-drinking, hardboiled detective. In mysteries of that era, we see a sharp turn away from the epoch of crime solving as a gentlemen’s pastime. In noir, it becomes a blood sport, and the reader is right there, in the arena. Morals are messy and the line between good and evil becomes blurry. As one flabbergasted character in my latest book, Public Anchovy #1 observes with great distress, at the end of The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade’s ostensible “good guy” doesn’t win. Nobody does. The tumultuous era of the 60s and 70s mixed things up a bit, with crime fiction that encompassed everything from changing social norms, to nihilistic detectives, to horseracing dramas that hearkened back to the Golden Age era. In contrast to all of that, cozy mysteries are held up to exemplify a return to tradition—when men were men, whodunnits were whodunnits, and cupcakes were frosted with pink icing and rainbow sprinkles. To some extent, this is true. As other genres embraced anti-heroes and unhappy endings, cozies emerged as stalwart defenders of a moral order, a world where goodness and justice are enduring values. But this idea of cozies as a conservative corrective is an oversimplification, and thinking of cozies primarily as whodunnit puzzles or as fluffy escapism does a disservice to a genre that holds surprising moral complexity. Cozies, instead, should be viewed alongside other genres that have sought to stake out and define a new and distinct moral vision that meets the challenges of our era. Book by book, cozy writers are creating a defined moral universe. The essential conflict is between the murderer and the sleuth, but it’s not as simple as saying these are conflicts of good versus evil. Cozy crimes typically take place in small, closed settings, where the separation between the wrongdoer and the crime solver can be measured in fractions of degrees. They might work at the same café or be part of the same knitting circle. The murderers are often rational and articulate, able to explain coherent motives—motives that are rooted in legitimate grievance or adverse life circumstances, rather than psychopathy or nihilism. Cozies, like grimdarks, are products of our fractious modern world. These genres share an understanding that ordinary people are capable of both extraordinary evil and extraordinary good, and that life can drive people one direction or the other. The divergence comes in the cozy mystery’s robust embrace of a universal or innate sense of justice and a deeply-rooted belief that there are correlations between the way we live our lives, the choices we make, and the things that happen to us. In cozies, there is something called the truth, and it must be discovered. Beyond that, though, we see recognition that moral justice and legal consequence are not identical. This perhaps owes a debt to the highly-public, real-world failures of law enforcement and the justice system, but the tradition reaches back further, to sleuths like Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, who often recognized that the two are not the same. By letting the protagonist decide who to turn over to the cops and whose secrets, once uncovered, are better off reburied, cozies allow the reader to consult their own moral compass and decide which way points to true north. I don’t expect Hannah Swensen and Jamie Lannister to become BFFs anytime soon. (Although, frankly, I would pay him handsomely to solve the Norman-Hannah-Mike love triangle by any means necessary, up to and including a mercy killing.) I’m confident, however, that Hannah and Jamie both understand a fundamental truth—in the unexplored lands at the edges of our moral understanding, there be dragons, and stories exist to help us fight them. *** View the full article

The CrimeReads editors make their picks for the best noir fiction of 2023. (As is our annual tradition, we decline to define ‘noir’ even for the purposes of this exercise, because who knows, it’s just sort of a feeling, don’t you think?) * Margot Douaihy, Scorched Grace (Zando, Gillian Flynn Books) Margot Douaihy’s chain-smoking nun Sister Holiday may be the most original character you’ll come across for quite some time. Douaihy wanted to reclaim pulp tropes for a female protagonist, and I have to say, Sister Holiday is punk AF. Set in New Orleans, Scorched Grace takes place at a Catholic school where an arson attack has harmed several students. Sister Holiday, a fan of detective fiction, is ready to solve the case (or else face suspicion herself). –MO Lou Berney, Dark Ride (William Morrow) Berney‘s new novel, Dark Ride, introduces readers to an immediately unforgettable character: Hardly Reed, a twenty-one year old stoner working at an amusement park, breezing through life’s various travails when he comes across a pair of kids he suspects of being abused. When Hardly, against all odds and his own inclinations, decides to get involved and try to help the kids, he soon finds himself pitted against a local lawyer who’s also at the helm of a dangerous drug trafficking operation. Berney brings a compelling human touch to a story that grabs hold of the reader early and never lets go. –DM Scott Von Doviak, Lowdown Road (Hard Case Crime) Von Doviak’s new book is an absolutely rollicking, roaring journey across 1970s America, as two cousins with a jackpot of weed decide to pack it into their car and move it across country to the site of a daredevil feat: a motorcycle jump across Snake River Canyon. Von Doviak has the period details just right, but even more importantly he captures the uncanny, corrupt atmosphere of the Seventies in exquisite detail, all while moving an intricate plot relentlessly forward. (The cousins happen to have a big-time trafficker and the law on their tail.) This is noir that manages to be both gritty and light on its feet. You’d be hard pressed to find a more fun road trip story. –DM Laura Sims, How Can I Help You (Putnam) Laura Sims’ latest is a Highsmithian cat-and-mouse thriller featuring two librarians: Margo is hiding something, and Patricia is obsessed with discovering her secrets. A suspicious death of a patron becomes the catalyst for curiosity and a looming, explosive confrontation in this uneasy thriller. Sims’ work harkens back to the complex personality studies of mid-century psychological fiction, and pays homage to middle-aged womanhood—serial killers age too, after all.–MO Chloé Mehdi, Nothing Is Lost Translated by Howard Curtis (Europa) This pitch-dark French noir explores the aftermath of violence and the questions still unanswered in the wake of a teen’s murder by police. 11-year-old Mattia spends his days emotionally managing the adults around him, trying to keep his teachers from realizing he’s gifted, and thinking hard about the murder of 15-year-old Said during a police identity check. As he considers the life and death of Said, he puts together the larger puzzle of oppression in the heavily policed suburbs. Mehdi’s writing conjures the best of French noir, and reminds us why the French named the genre. –MO Amanda Peters, The Berry Pickers (Catapult) The Berry Pickers is a sensitive and devastating saga of families broken, children stolen, and fierce reckonings with the traumas of history. As the novel begins, a 4-year-old Mi’kmaq child goes missing, her disappearance sending her loved ones into their own private hells. We’re then introduced to a girl growing up with a paranoid mother and an aloof father, dreaming of another family and wondering at her parents’ reticence when it comes to her earliest years. The novel starts in 1962 and spans over 50 years, with an emotional climax that will leave most readers with at least a tear in their eye. –MO S.A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron Books) S.A. Cosby does Thomas Harris!! And proves that the serial killer novel is back with his cleverly plotted and socially relevant take on the hunt for a monstrous killer. Cosby goes Southern Gothic with the backstory, focusing on the sins of society and how indifference and prejudice are the true culprits behind the most terrible acts. In true Cosby fashion, the novel manages to touch on all manner of hot button topics. The novel begins with a school shooting, where a white police officer kills the shooter: a Black man who was a former student at the school, and who claims his victim, a popular teacher, was hiding a terrible secret. When the town sheriff, the first Black man elected to the post in the small Southern town, begins to investigate the teacher’s horrific acts, the townspeople are deeply resistant to the truth, and meanwhile, he’s got a showdown coming between right-wingers determined to protect a Confederate monument and the protestors who want it gone. A fast-paced book that will also have you asking deep questions about the nature of faith, All the Sinners Bleed is one of my favorite books of the year. –MO Jordan Harper, Everybody Knows (Mulholland) Harper’s Everybody Knows is noir at its absolute finest: at once perfectly in line with the long tradition of cynical, world-weary Angelenos delving into the moral abyss, and a thoroughly modern story about the city’s dominant industry and all the sins and compromises that are being covered up every day in order to keep the thing humming along. The story’s plot follows a public relations crisis, but soon enough the ‘case’ is spiraling outward to reveal something even more corrupt at the fabric of the entertainment industry. Harper approaches it all with an insider’s steely resolve, so at times it can seem like we’re reading a particularly heinous exposé, but his writing retains an air of dark poetry that only accentuates and elevates the disturbing material at hand. –DM Deepti Kapoor, Age of Vice (Riverhead) What an epic read. Deepti Kapoor’s Age of Vice is a vast take-down of the corruption of the wealthy, told from three main perspectives: a reluctant scion of an infamous family, a loyal manservant who cannot forget what he has witnessed, and a curious (but possibly corruptible) journalist. Kapoor’s genius is not only in her characterization, but also the carefulness of her plotting, setting up the convergence of characters and the real-life consequences of their moral choices with perfect interior logic and pacing. We need more stories about money, the having of it and the absence, as the world becomes increasingly economically stratified—we are in a new Gilded Age (perhaps, as Deepti Kapoor titles it, an Age of Vice) and Kapoor is an exemplary voice in exploring the woes of capitalism. –MO Eli Cranor, Ozark Dogs (Soho) Cranor’s sophomore novel is an absolutely relentless, hair-raising thriller that manages to be just as full of emotion as it is adrenaline. In a small-town in Arkansas, a young woman is kidnapped the night of the homecoming game, launching her grandfather into a mad search for the one good thing in his life and maybe the possibility of some redemption. But this is a dark, tough story and nobody gets out unscathed. Cranor has staked himself a claim as one of the premier noir writers coming up today, but with Ozark Dogs, it’s the family feeling—that ache of love, obligation, and lineage—that really draws us into the story and drives us toward the fateful end. This is Southern Noir at its finest, and Cranor is an author on a rapid rise. –DM View the full article

So there you are, sitting in a cozy café in Odense, the hometown of the great fairytale writer Hans Christian Andersen, enjoying a flaky Danish pastry and a strong coffee. As you gaze out the window at the old, charming city streets, an unsettling thought pops into your head: What sinister secrets might lurk behind the storybook scenery of rural Denmark? You’ve heard the rumors of creepy country manors, isolated islands shrouded in fog, and bone-chilling Scandinavian folklore. Suddenly that sweet Danish sausage you had for lunch is sitting like a rock in your stomach. The idyllic countryside transforms in your imagination into a haunting landscape filled with mystery, menace and murder most foul. The Inspiration: Capturing the Eerie Beauty of the Danish Countryside If you’ve ever visited the idyllic Danish countryside, you know it can seem like the perfect escape. Rolling green hills, endless beaches, quaint cottages, and charming villages make for an inviting getaway. But as any fan of Nordic Noir knows, looks can be deceiving. Just think about Nesbø’s ‘The Snowman’ taking place in the beautiful Norwegian winter or Läckberg’s idyllic Swedish town Fjällbacka. The most mesmerizing places but you probably don’t want to go there in a Nesbø or Läckberg novel! We, Sara Blædel and Mads Peder Nordbo, authors of the Danish crime thriller ‘Dissolved’, have like our Scandinavian writing neighbors attempted to captured the sinister side of small-town living. Just in Denmark, where the village of Tommerup appears peaceful at first glance, but beneath the surface lurks a darkness as unsettling as it is inescapable. By grounding our novel in an authentic setting, we wished to make its disturbing events all the more believable, and we write about real places because it gives the book more nerve, and because it’s most eerie when you can recognize reality. This verisimilitude fuels the story’s tension and horror. The basic idea is that the closer to reality we write, the easier it is for readers to put themselves in the shoes of the victims, and by rendering the recognizable strange and threatening, we have crafted a chilling crime story proving that the most frightening terrors aren’t always found in far-off fantastical worlds, but can lurk in the very places we call home. The Craft: Writing Character-Driven Horror Through Collaboration When we began plotting our character-driven thriller, we aimed to unnerve readers by bringing horror into the places they felt most at ease. What better way to do so than setting the action in Mads’s hometown, the idyllic village of Tommerup? Having grown up cycling down its cobbled lanes and gossiping with neighbors over back fences, Mads knew every detail that would make its sinister transformation believable. Meanwhile, Sara’s expertise in crafting complex yet relatable characters and airtight plot logic helped bring their spooky story to life. Through close collaboration we wove our strengths together into a seamless tale of suspense. Bouncing ideas off one another for over a year and a half, we left no sentence unscrutinized in our quest to craft an unputdownable read. The result? A creepy crime novel where we minute by minute let everything disintegrate for our characters and readers alike. In short: Our enthusiasm for scaring readers fueled us through the new, intensive and likewise living process of writing ‘Dissolved’ together. Blurring Fact and Fiction: Basing Fiction on Real Places and Events When writing crime fiction, choosing a spooky setting is key to crafting an engaging story. For ‘Dissolved’, we therefore decided to use the Danish countryside as the backdrop for the creepy goings-on. As authors familiar with the area, we were able to describe in vivid detail the locations, sounds, and smells to create an immersive experience for readers to easily visualize the idyllic surroundings and put themselves in the shoes of the characters. We hope for our readers to easily visualize the smell and scents of the countryside cycling through Tommerup, hearing the children playing in the schoolyard and the sound of the church bell ringing. Basing the story in a real place allowed us to blur the lines between fact and fiction, making the horror feel more realistic. We gave ourselves the creative freedom to adapt the setting a bit to fit our needs, enhancing the suspense and creep factor, but we mostly wrote what we felt and saw. We usually say, that when you write crime fiction, you are trying to make readers believe some evil fictional story, and that’s much easier if everything else in the story is true. Choosing Tommerup as the true setting was in short instrumental in crafting ‘Dissolved’ as an unsettling psychological thriller. It’s normally a quite cozy village yet the details of this charming village became more and more frightening as the disappearances of local victims mount, hopefully keeping readers on the edge of their seats wondering where the evil will emerge next. We know you feel safest where you know every corner. And we love luring you there so the horror can strike. Consider this your invitation to take a trip to spooky Tommerup…if you dare. The familiar has never felt so frightening. Conclusion So there you have it, a glimpse into the deliciously creepy process of crafting crime fiction as a duo in rural Denmark. While the idyllic surroundings may seem an unlikely place for murder and mayhem, the isolated landscapes are perfect for setting an ominous tone and hiding sinister acts. Collaborating on these chilling tales of mystery has been a thrilling ride, and we hope to continue conjuring up more murders, red herrings, and plot twists for our readers. The countryside holds endless inspiration if you just open your senses to the subtle details that make it the ideal backdrop for spine-tingling suspense. Consider yourself warned – you may want to lock your doors after journeying into the mysteries of the Danish countryside! View the full article

If you’d told me thirty-one years ago that the Los Angeles backpacking hostel I was living in would one day become the centerpiece of a bestselling thriller—written be me—I doubt I’d have believed you. In fact back then, at the age of 21, I’d probably have been too drunk or stoned to have been listening to you anyway. My travel thriller The Vacation, which gets its American and Canadian release this month (December) is based loosely on my own journey around America. I stayed at the hostel in question in Venice Beach for the best part of six months. Back then, it was a shabby, run down building whose best days were behind it. But it was so vibrant and full of life that it didn’t matter if the showers were missing heads, if the cockroaches outnumbered the guests or if there was no air con in the height of the Californian summer. In the mornings, I worked there as a cleaner, the afternoons were spent selling hotdogs and lemonades on the beach and by night, I’d check new guests in and old guests out. I was constantly surrounded by people from all walks of life, and from across the globe. Some of these characters or their stories have made into my book, albeit exaggerated versions. Here, I’ve chosen some of my favorite novels loosely in the same genre as mine, that effortlessly blend crime thrillers with travel. The Beach, by Alex Garland This book made a huge impact on me. Back in the 1990s, everyday life and my work as a journalist interrupted my love of reading for a number of years until that novel was released. Its island setting, its diverse roll call of characters and page-turning plot made for one of my all-time favorite books. I will readily admit The Vacation was inspired by The Beach. But I’d never be arrogant enough to think it could live up to Garland’s gem. Every Vow You Break, by Peter Swanson If Swanson rewrote the dictionary, I’d read it. Ever since The Kind Worth Killing, I have been a fan and have read all of his novels since. This psychological thriller focuses on Abigail, a new bride who marries millionaire Bruce following a whirlwind relationship. For their honeymoon, he whisks her off to an Island retreat. But not all goes according to plan when she comes face to face with a final fling she had on her hen night, who also turns out to also be a guest. Satisfying, murderous fun. The Mosquito Coast, by Paul Theroux It was my enjoyment of the 1986 film starring River Phoenix and Harrison Ford that made me want to explore the book. And what a book it is. Desperate to escape a country that doesn’t understand him, inventor Allie Fox is searching for a utopia and drags his family along for the ride. He swaps civilization for the Honduran jungle, but eventually discovers that the world he seeks is not that far removed from his own, despite the thousands of miles between them. Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch What must it be like to spend a day in the imagination of Blake Crouch? How did he even begin working out the plot of this thriller? For this pick, we are talking traveling from dimension to dimension instead of country to country. It’s the story of a physicist who finds himself in a parallel universe after being kidnapped. And the universe he ends up in is based on different choices he made when he was fifteen years younger. A truly exceptional sci-fi story. Hostage, by Clare Mackintosh Clare is one of my favorite fellow British writers. She set this book thousands of feet in the air and onboard a plane, a non-stop flight from London to Sydney, the first of its kind. However, it isn’t long after take-off when flight attendant Mina is warned that the life of her daughter is under threat if she doesn’t help someone onboard get into the plane’s cockpit. Cue nail-biting drama, will-she wont-she moments and Mackintosh’s trademark twists. The Sanatorium, by Sarah Pearse It’s hard to believe this bestseller was a debut. It’s set it in a beautiful but creepy hotel in the middle of the Swiss Alps. But it hasn’t always been a hotel. Before its conversion, it was a sanatorium. British detective Elin Warner has only travelled there because its where her estranged brother is holding his engagement party. But disaster strikes when a storm arrives, access to the hotel is cut off and her brother’s fiancée vanishes. The Talented Mr Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith There is nothing not to enjoy about this 1955 classic. Tom Ripley has been asked by the father of Dickie, an American playboy, to travel to Italy and bring his son home. But once he finds a way to worm his way into Dickie’s life, Tom discovers that neither he nor his mark are ready. And he doesn’t just want Dickie’s lifestyle, he wants to be him. Highsmith manages to make us feel pity for sociopath Tom, and root for him over the spoiled socialites. *** View the full article

Don't believe in Bigfoot, but I do believe in horror!

God, I love this post!

We had one weeks ago in New York. She scared the entire room white.

Where do the fingers point after the thumbs go wrong?

So your agent has finally found a sympathetic editor for your wondrously impatient manuscript? And they work at a major publishing house, imprint, or press. Now you think you're in tight? Whooo! Think again. The obstacle course has just begun. Your credentials and manuscript are facing the gauntlet of THE PUB BOARD! The what? A group of chair-bound editors and professional types at the press who down or up their thumbs for the stack of proposals sitting in front of them; and it varies from place to place, but more often than not, the pub board meets once a month. They include the specific editor who is a fan of your manuscript, of course, but what about other players and professions? Let's back up for a second. Pre-pub board editorial meetings can occur for the purpose of winnowing forth the absolute best proposals, thereby giving the editors a running start before sales and marketing weigh in to potentially cast doubts. And let's face it, if this group of editors don't see sufficient potential in the proposal (novel) despite the devotion of your new fan editor, your future career with this organization stops there. The Pub Board will never see it. We can verge off here into the politics of human organization, but that's a subject for your social-psyche class, or some derivation thereof. Now back to the working parts of the Pub Board. Traditional publishers will send reps from the Sales and Marketing departments to Pub Board meetings. The sales types focus on sales to major bookstores and chains like Barnes & Noble. Their jobs are on the line, like everyone else's. What if they get it wrong and a thumbs up results in a first novel that sputters to dust on the shelf? How much dust can collect before feeding the tropical fish becomes a daily pursuit? Where do the fingers point after the thumbs go wrong? In contrast, the marketing types are focused on selling the proposed novel directly to the reader. Among other things, they examine the author's platform. Is it good enough? Do they have 5,650,876 followers on social media? No? Does sales believe the bookstores might wish to stock the novel? Well, too bad. The platform isn't good enough. The thumb goes down. And like the sales type, the marketing type foresees a future of feeding the fish if too many poor decisions are made. So what does this mean in terms of fight-vs-flight decision-making? It's much easier to be negative and wax positive only when it feels like there is sufficient support and enthusiasm all around the room, and that way, you see, if things go south later on when the book flops, the fingers will point everywhere, or perhaps, not point at all. Consider, how many humans are willing to accept responsibility when their jobs are on the line? So as you might surmise, Sales and Marketing thump the heaviest fists at the table.They can be expert or inexpert, experienced or green as ivy, whatever, it does not matter. If they get fidgety over the prospect of success, gravity rules the thumb. And don't forget Accounting! Accounting figures the cost of book production, and they'll crunch the numbers on you.The more pages your novel has, the more expensive to produce. Aside from pages, the accounting types might argue that an especially fancy cover will work hard to cause the novel to remain in the red. Then guess what happens? You must keep in mind that Pub Board politics and dialogue fail to take into account such vital and earth-moving novel elements as plot, characters, and theme. I wonder why? Does anyone know? ________________________________ [url={url}]View the full article[/url]