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I recently reread Donna Tartt’s Dark Academia classic The Secret History—published 30 years ago this month—for the first time since I was a young identity-less Classics student myself. On the whole, I found the book as enjoyable as I remember (and was also struck by the degree of the homage in Tana French’s The Likeness). One thing I noticed on this read that did not occur to me once the last time is just how little fun the group is, even at the novel’s beginning. Here’s an early description: All of them, to me, seemed highly unapproachable. But I watched them with interest whenever I happened to see them: Francis, stooping to talk to a cat on a doorstep; Henry dashing past at the wheel of a little white car, with Julian in the passenger’s seat; Bunny leaning out of an upstairs window to yell something at the twins on the lawn below. Slowly, more information came my way. Francis Abernathy was from Boston and, from most accounts, quite wealthy. Henry, too, was said to be wealthy; what’s more, he was a linguistic genius. He spoke a number of languages, ancient and modern, and had published a translation of Anacreon, with commentary, when he was only eighteen. (I found this out from Georges Laforgue, who was otherwise sour and reticent on the topic; later I discovered that Henry, during his freshman year, had embarrassed Laforgue badly in front of the entire literature faculty during the question-and-answer period of his annual lecture on Racine.) The twins had an apartment off campus, and were from somewhere down south. And Bunny Corcoran had a habit of playing John Philip Sousa march tunes in his room, at full volume, late at night. Listen, I get it—rich people who are also sort of mean to you can be very appealing. The initial attraction completely checks out. It’s what happens after Richard gains tenuous entry to the group that seems—to my mid-thirties sensibilities, anyway—less convincing. Richard’s first real social encounter with a member of the a group is his disastrous lunch with Bunny, wherein Bunny tries to stick him with the check. Bunny sucks, but this is by design. The real problem is, they all kind of suck. Here’s Tartt’s description of Richard’s first dinner with the five of them: Much of the talk centered around events to which I was not privy, and even Charles’s kind parenthetical remarks of explanation did not help much to clarify it. Henry and Francis argued interminably about how far apart the soldiers in a Roman legion had stood: shoulder to shoulder (as Francis said) or (as Henry maintained) three or four feet apart. This led into an even longer argument—hard to follow and, to me, intensely boring—about whether Hesiod’s primordial Chaos was simply empty space or chaos in the modern sense of the word. Oh my God, Richard! Come on, man—even Cloke Rayburn must be better than these people. At least his drugs are actual drugs, not just three days of fasting. Granted, things get better when Richard starts spending more time with the group, but that much better. “I was surprised by how easily they managed to incorporate me into their cyclical, Byzantine existence,” Richard says. Sounds… fun! He and and Charles go on drives together, and he has a crush on Camilla, and they all have elaborate picnics, and Bunny continues to suck. These do sound like friends I would have enjoyed in college, to be fair—and maybe even now. (Granted, Henry does save Richard’s life, which does tend to strengthen one’s loyalty.) Still, the whole “voluntarily and even eagerly becoming an accessory after-the-fact to one murder and actual accomplice to another” thing did leave me wanting the group to be just slightly more fun. If only because while the others at least got to experience an honest-to-gods Bacchanal before their academia went full Dark, and all Richard got were endless lectures about the Ancients and a few picnics. Maybe everyone else at Benningt-, er, Hampden, really was obnoxious enough that this rendering of the group constitutes wish fulfillment. Or maybe this is simply a novel best enjoyed by someone younger, for whom recklessness comes as easily as devotion. (Though in fairness, I dropped ancient Greek my second semester in college. I simply couldn’t hack it.) View the full article

Long before the doors opened, a crowd gathered outside the theater. Noisily, they bustled in, country folk and urban dandies alike, to find themselves good seats. The old mansion’s walls reverberated with their footsteps on the hardwood floors, spirited greetings, idle gossip, and talk of politics. The playhouse had once been the country home of Aaron Burr, who nearly thirty years earlier returned across the Hudson River to his Richmond Hill estate from the New Jersey palisades after his notorious duel with Alexander Hamilton. As Burr’s fortunes waned and the growing city encroached from the south and east, John Jacob Astor purchased the mansion, lifted it and rolled it a few blocks closer to the center of Manhattan, and converted it into the Richmond Hill Theatre. Earlier the same summer a teen-aged Walt Whitman had described feeling mesmerized by the dark green curtain of a New York theater. Transfixed when it lifted, with “quick and graceful leaps, like the hopping of a rabbit,” Whitman knew that behind the drapery lay a “world of heroes and heroines, and loves, and murders, and plots, and hopes.” As the Richmond Hill’s curtain rose this September night, a cotton factory at sunrise came into view. Young women conversed as they commenced their work, beginning the night’s feature, Sarah Maria Cornell: or, The Fall River Murder. Surely the audience erupted as Matilda Flynn entered as the title character. Playing opposite drama’s biggest male stars the previous autumn in New York, the twenty- something actress found herself now headlining a company full of amateurs and unknowns. As Sarah Maria Cornell, she breaks into the factory-floor gossip of her co- workers: “Good morning sisters. I have been a lazy girl; you have got ahead of me.” “What detained you Sarah? You are not usually behind us at work.” “I have had such a dreadful dream . . .” As Cornell relays her premonition that she will die a violent death at the hands of another, the girls gather around, occasionally interrupting her to remind the audience that, no matter her fate, Cornell is a “good, virtuous, and industrious” woman. And so an onstage whirlwind began, carrying the audience from a cotton mill with its “factory girls” to a farmhouse of guileless Yankees—familiar stock characters— to an isolated, wooded glade where a camp meeting and a Methodist minister evoked chaos, sex, violence, ambition, and greed, before drawing to a close at a haystack with the killing foretold in the play’s title. Click to view slideshow. None of this surprised the Richmond Hill audience. Entering the theater, they passed enormous posters depicting in graphic detail the scene of a man strangling a woman. They had seen similar images in handbills plastered on street corners, with smaller versions adorning their playbills. They knew the characters and the story before the curtain rose because it mirrored a real- life drama that played out in newspapers for months in 1833. By summer’s end, the factory girl and the preacher had become cultural celebrities, immortalized in at least two plays and in songs about the affair that were performed in Broadway revues for months on end. Young America had little experience yet with a phenomenon that would one day be a defining feature of popular culture in the United States: sensational criminal cases that garnered the label “crime of the century”— no matter how frequently such crimes occurred. Here was the nation’s first spectacular trial, and Americans couldn’t get enough of it. Theatergoers had come that evening— and would return night after night— to experience a scandal performed in accelerated time. When theatergoers purchased a ticket in the 1830s, they expected a smorgasbord of entertainment— Shakespeare plays, farces, a medley of popular songs, circus stunts, equestrian troupes— sometimes all on the same night. Or they might be hoping for a melodrama, a play depicting a morally polarized universe of good and evil, of innocent virtue and depraved villainy. Audiences sought out melodramas because, as Herman Melville observed, they wanted performances that offered “more reality than real life itself can show.” Yet in Cornell’s story, real life itself resounded with the unmistakable qualities of melodrama. Passion, virtue, seduction, a vulnerable young woman, a hypocritical villain, dark plotting, and irrepressible urges to speak incessantly in order to leave nothing unsaid, all were on full view in this scandalous murder case. Still, Sarah Maria Cornell at the Richmond Hill was not a typical melodrama. It borrowed from comedies and Gothic horror, and most important, its virtuous heroine neither triumphed over nor escaped from her villainous, seducing foe. Instead, this protagonist met her demise through rape and murder. The real-life demise of Sarah Maria Cornell and all that followed illuminate the very essence of a transformative moment in history, unveiling what anthropologists call a social drama. Such a drama begins when normal and peaceful means of redressing a crime fail to satisfy longings for more complete explanations. Social dramas prompt two questions: Why did this happen? and What does it tell us about who we are? An ensuing scandal reveals deep cleavages emanating from the struggle to come to grips with a world seeming to change before one’s very eyes. Public fascination with the crime exceeds the bounds of normal curiosity surrounding everyday gossip and news. In search for answers people look to cherished beliefs about politics, religion, and family. They turn to familiar stories and plots to make sense of human actions and their repercussions. Collectively, they participate in an enveloping drama that, in turn, transforms the world they sought to comprehend. Audiences flocked to the theater or purchased popular reading about the factory girl and the preacher so they could take part in a scandal rich in personal meaning. In the stories of the saga’s key characters they saw the experiences of their neighbors and families, sensing keenly that issues that mattered in their own changing lives were being played out in a legal thriller. They understood that women in a new workplace called the factory had uncharted opportunities to live independent lives, but they could also be exposed to sexual threats and to rumors and gossip, threatening their livelihoods and reputations. They knew too the disparity of power brandished in sexual violence and its double standard of culpability. Long before organized movements to confront sexual harassment and sexual violence, Americans understood and explained these real dramas with their own ideas about vulnerability and coercion. Those who were captivated by this story sensed too what was at stake when evangelical religion began to take center stage in their culture and politics. At a dizzying pace, religious beliefs and personal identities were becoming intertwined with the economic marketplace and partisan politics of a young democracy. Even if they couldn’t foresee the long history of a politics that construed personal choices and a changing society as contests over moral values, Americans knew the cultural battles exposed by such a scandalous case. They sensed especially that fast- changing new forms of communication— an explosion of new print media— mirrored the incessant movement of individuals into new communities and new professions. If this shocking tale of a preacher and a factory girl constitutes a social drama, it is a drama with a multitude of narrators, scripts, and performers— a contest over stories and storytelling. Stories reveal what mattered most to people in the past; how they lived their lives; how they explained their own actions and the behavior of friends, neighbors, and strangers; and how they communicated their most deeply prized values. Stories expose as well how little people understood the historical transformations that shaped their personal lives, their society, and their culture. Murder in a Mill Town is a tale in which violence and storytelling expose the personal histories of two complicated people whose lives intersected amid an ever- changing world that each of them tried to embrace but could not control. Although they lived in an exceptional time, they were not themselves exceptional human beings. Their personal histories survive as narratives of ordinary people whose experiences embodied the spirit of a new world taking shape right before their own— and our— eyes. ___________________________________ Excerpted from Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime That Captivated a Nation, by Bruce Dorsey. Published by Oxford University Press, USA. Copyright 2023. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. View the full article

I am not the kind of writer who finds every plot twist, detail of setting, and character description in my imagination. I am like a magpie when it comes to developing a story, shamelessly borrowing from and building on whatever I see and hear. Here’s an example. As I was beginning to work on the 14th book in the Key West food critic mystery series (no title yet, but coming next summer), I had an email from a fan. She said: “I recently finished your new book and enjoyed it very much. Especially the part where you talked about the hippies living down in the Keys in the past. I was one of those people that ended up down there in 1978.” Immediately I was interested in her story, wondering how I could manage a book with two timelines, an old story from the 70s, probably with a murder, and a current story with one of those former hippies returning to the Keys to figure out what really happened. I asked my reader if I could build on part of her story for my next novel and she agreed. In the end, the book won’t look much like her experience, but her email definitely jumpstarted my story. I know I’m not the only mystery writer who finds plot twists, settings, and even characters in bits of real life. For Deborah Crombie, a one paragraph story in the Dallas Morning News caught her eye. A couple renovating a house in west Texas had found a baby in their wall. Not a newborn, but an infant about a year old. That little story nagged at her. Why would someone do such a terrible thing? And why had no one noticed a missing child? That germ of an idea became part of the plot of her novel, Water Like a Stone, in which her detective’s sister, a contractor, finds an infant walled into the old stone barn she’s restoring on the banks of the Shropshire Union Canal in Cheshire. The idea for Hank Phillippi Ryan’s The House Guest germinated from the experience of an acquaintance—she’d said goodbye to her husband every morning as she went off to her office. His next big deal was always around the corner, and the next big sale was always about to happen, and she was incredibly supportive. After a few years, the police arrived at the door. And arrested him. Turned out the husband had never been to work at all! The job was imaginary. Hank said: “Now, that’s not what happens in The House Guest at all. Not at all. But it made me wonder: how well do we know the people who are sleeping next to us? The very ones we trust the most? Could they be doing something we have no idea about? My pal got me thinking about how even a smart person can be completely fooled.” Barbara Ross recently spoke about Hidden Beneath, number eleven in her Maine Clambake Mystery Series, at the Boothbay Harbor Memorial Library in Maine. Because Boothbay Harbor residents know their town is the model for series’ fictional Busman’s Harbor, the most popular question at the event was, “Who is this character really?” There’s only one character in the books who is based on someone both local and real, and that’s Gus, a restauranteur so curmudgeonly that he only serves food to people he knows and people who arrive with people he knows. Yes, there really was a Gus and that really was his policy. His restaurant was in the aptly named Cozy Harbor (or inaptly named, in Gus’s case). Barbara’s mother-in-law, who owned a Bed & Breakfast in Boothbay Harbor, once snuck her accountant and his wife into Gus’s place claiming they were her cousins. Barbara said, “I didn’t really know the late Gus, which made it easy to create a fictional person inspired by him, but who wasn’t him. I wanted to preserve the kind of Maine character who is disappearing in my books.” Sarah Stewart Taylor’s second Maggie D’arcy mystery, A Distant Grave, opens with the discovery of the body of an Irish aid worker on a Long Island beach. Maggie eventually uncovers his identity and his role at the NGO he runs in Dublin. A few years before writing that book, Sarah read an article about international aid workers and was fascinated by the character portraits in the piece. The people profiled in the article talked frankly about the PTSD they experienced from their work, and also about the concrete satisfaction they got from helping people in need with the most basic things necessary for survival. Some found themselves “addicted” to the work and had had trouble adjusting to other kinds of jobs or to regular domestic life. Sarah said, “My mind started turning with all of the possibilities for getting a dedicated aid worker into a dangerous situation — not out in the field, but once he’d returned. Those fragmented thoughts became the basis for A Distant Grave.” And that’s both the magic and the secret of the mystery fiction writer. While everyone else is watching or reading or listening to things in the real world and thinking ‘how interesting,’ or ‘that’s a shame,’ or ‘I could never do that,’ the writer is thinking ‘how can I use that,’ or ‘that would make a perfect murder motive,’ or every writer’s best tool, ‘what if?’ *** View the full article

The CrimeReads editors make their picks for best new fiction in the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Angie Kim, Happiness Falls (Hogarth) Angie Kim once again combines an intense character study with a searching mystery, this time after her narrator’s husband disappears, and police are interested in quickly pinning it on her nonverbal son. Kim uses the parallel investigations of police and family to explore the complex dynamics of interracial marriage, Asian and biracial identity in America, and the nuances of raising a child with special needs. You’ll want to savor every word as Kim plunges the depths of human action and finds love at the center.–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 Eliza Clark, Penance (Harper) Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts stunned me with its grotesque grand guignol violence and reversal of the male gaze, and Penance is just as good, although somewhat kinder to its characters. Penance is a take on the infamous Slenderman case (a real-life case linked to the undiagnosed schizophrenia of one attempted murderer and the folie a deux madness that gripped both her and her friend), but with different motivations for the killers. When three high school girls murder their rival, the world is quick to condemn them for their monstrosity, but as we read the novel, we see that they are monsters made, not monsters born. Of particular note is a scene in which one traumatized character tortures her Sims. I then went down a rabbit hole of how people torture their Sims and…wow. –MO Tod Goldberg, Gangsters Don’t Die (Counterpoint) Goldberg’s Gangsterland series has been one of the standouts in the world of crime fiction in recent years, and now the trilogy is coming to a conclusion with the publication of Gangsters Don’t Die. Sal Cupertino, the hit man on the lam, posing as a rabbi, is one of the more original figures you’ll come across, and now he’s making one last desperate gambit to get his life back. You won’t want to miss these books, so if you haven’t already, brush up on your Goldberg. –DM 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. –MO Mick Herron, The Secret Hours (Soho Crime) Mick Herron, whose Slow Horses series has lately elevated him to the upper echelons of spy novelists, has a new standalone thriller out this month, and it’s a formidable book, revisiting three decades of MI5 misadventures and zeroing in on one scandal in 1994 Berlin that casts the agency’s late Cold War history in a new light. Herron brings a le Carré setup (spies investigating spies) to this exemplary thriller that’s equal parts acerbic and illuminating. –DM Laura Picklesimer, Kill For Love (Unnamed Press) The bored college fifth-year narrating Kill For Love has always been good at suppressing her appetites—you can see it in her carefully counted calories, svelte figure, and attempts to mask her sociopathy from her sisters. But when she kills a man in the act of coitus one night—then devours a meal of greasy meat for the first time in years—she realizes she’s found the one hunger impossible to ignore. Of particular note is how Picklesimer’s language reverses the male gaze as her killer objectifies the frat bros around her and tries to keep from mauling their drunken flesh. –MO Juan Cárdenas (transl. Lizzie Davis), The Devil of the Provinces (Coffee House) A strange, meditative work, The Devil in the Provinces follows a biologist back to his hometown in Colombia as he looks after his mother and is drawn into the mysteries surrounding his brother’s murder. The novel balances a compelling crime story with a willingness to delve into the unexplained phenomena of a life coming untethered. –DM Joyce Carol Oates (ed.), A Darker Shade of Noir (Akashic) Yes, this isn’t a novel, but we’re bending the rules a bit to include it in this round-up because it’s a standout work of fiction and because it’s just such a provocative and incisive collection. Edited by Joyce Carol Oates, the book’s contributor list is a marvel in itself: Margaret Atwood, Tananarive Due, Joyce Carol Oates, Megan Abbott, Aimee Bender, Cassandra Khaw, Lisa Lim, Elizabeth Hand, Valerie Martin, Raven Leilani, Sheila Kohler, Joanna Margaret, Lisa Tuttle, Aimee LaBrie, and Yumi Dineen Shiroma. Prepare yourself for some truly unsettling stories. –DM Carissa Orlando, The September House (Berkley) Carissa Orlando’s The September House uses hauntings as a brilliant metaphor for abuse, and what people can get used to, as well as a prescient comment on the tight housing market. Orlando’s narrator loves her home, and if she needs to ignore some ghostly children, be served tea by a taciturn housekeeper with a gaping face wound, and scrub the blood off the walls once a season, then so be it. Her husband isn’t so good at tolerating the house, but then, she’s learned how to tolerate much more from his treatment of her than she ever expected. When her daughter comes to stay, and her husband goes missing, it’s up to Orlando to continue saying “everything’s fine” for far too long. But the ghost in the basement may finally spur her to action…I found myself cheering at the end of this book, and I really hope it gets picked up as a Ryan Murphy production (post-writers’ strike, that is). –MO View the full article

Several times a year I'll receive an email from a memoir writer wanting to know if attending one of our writer events is worth it. The answer is always a mixed bag depending on several factors; however, for purposes of meaningful sample, I've decided to include a recent response to a concerned memoir writer who inquired about the potential of the Write to Pitch Conference to support her ambitions and assist in promoting her life story. Dear Madeline, You appear to desire real honesty, so I'll take a chance and provide you with that. As you read what I have to say, keep in mind that I respect memoir writers for having the courage to tell their stories I quite understand your trepidation regarding the conference in New York. The brutal truth is that memoir rarely sells at any writer conference, and for similar reasons. The writers are usually not even quasi-famous (thereby disabling marketing attempts to sell the book at least partially on the basis of the author's background). The memoirs in question almost never have valid marketing hooks (according to marketing), i.e., they're not high concept. Much of memoir subject matter inevitably falls into categories already tapped out (according to marketing, for example, cancer recovery, bad family, marriage horrors, parental abuse and alcoholism, career drama, growing up in poverty, growing up in poverty with cancer, etc). In addition, many memoir writers can be very resistant to editorial direction as compared to fiction writers (yes, it's true--I've seen it myself more than once)., thus running up the dreaded narcissist red flag. As the messenger of this brutal truth, I know that editors and agents are very wary as a result of the above. Writers who display even the slightest sensitivity during pitch sessions are often coddled and falsely encouraged just to avoid the potential of drama. No one wants to be seen as "unkind." On the flip side, we've had oversensitive memoir writers attend and later complain that the professionals they pitched really didn't take memoir in the first place, but the dark truth was that the editors or agents didn't wish to offend the writer (because memoir is so personal), and therefore behaved as if memoir just wasn't viable for them, unfortunately using boilerplate excuses (rather like those found in responses to query letters--won't work for our list, etc.). The truth is these same professionals would certainly get excited if they actually saw sufficient reason to pitch the project at an editorial meeting without raising severe doubts on the part of marketing. Memoirs that have sold at Algonkian Writer Conference events all had high-concept marketing hooks, and in general, an aura of uniqueness about them. There may be exceptions to this circumstance, of course. I hope this helps. Best, Michael ________________________________[url={url}]View the full article[/url]

I didn’t know what to expect from a novel called Miami Purity. Was it about nuns, or one of those creepy abstinence-only pledges for teens? I had no idea that the novel was a neo-noir cult classic, one that Megan Abbott in her introduction lauds for “its audacious and subversive play with a tradition it clearly both savors and lays bare.” Nor was I prepared for the voice of Sherri Parlay—former stripper, recovering good-time girl, and one of the horniest women in the history of American fiction—who bursts on to the scene declaring, “Hank was drunk and he slugged me—it wasn’t the first time—and I picked up the radio and caught him across the forehead with it.” I should have had more faith in Alex Segura, the acclaimed writer of Secret Identity (which was nominated for the Lefty, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry Awards and won the LA Times Book Prize), as well as many other works. I wanted to talk to Alex not only because I love his work, but also because he’s an unabashed fan of the genre, with a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of both the past and present of crime fiction. Not only was Miami Purity more interesting—and much dirtier—than I expected, but it’s written with an ease, a fearlessness, and a sharp wit that I know will bring me back to re-read it again and again. Why did you choose Miami Purity by Vicki Hendricks? So many reasons. For one thing, I think it’s a very tightly written book. It’s fairly short, and it’s unabashedly a very sexy book, and Hendricks is a really descriptive and evocative writer. It’s kind of the Venn diagram of things that interest me: Miami, noir, complicated protagonists. It was also one of the first crime novels where I saw my hometown described accurately. How do you define the term noir, and what in this novel feels particularly noir-ish to you? I’m so happy that you asked that question, because it’s something that I’m a real stickler about. I think that over time, noir has become kind of a catch-all marketing term, but I think of it as something very specific. It’s where a character is painted into a corner by their own design, like their own mistakes or choices have put them in an impossible situation. And it’s usually relating to some kind of primal urge. It’s not like a plan that goes awry; it’s that they’ve made a mistake based on lust or greed or vengeance. They’ve chosen poorly, and now must pay the consequences. And that’s the story. And the thing about noir is that there’s never a tidy resolution. You don’t get the happy ending where they kind of ride off into the sunset; it’s usually pretty bad. Miami Purity is very much a noir, a neo-noir, in that bad things happen to people because they make bad choices. And I find those kinds of stories fascinating because it feels like real life, where few things are tidy, and few things are resolved easily. I love that. Sometimes when I think about crime subgenres, I want to define them in terms of externals, or questions of narrative technique. But you’re talking about an existential definition. Yeah, it’s not so much a plot thing. It’s not like a thriller, where you go in expecting certain elements, or a PI novel, where you obviously have to have a PI and very specific tropes, inverted or not. Noir is a feeling, it’s a vibe, it’s about the gray areas of life. What I love about Megan Abbott’s books is she takes the elements of noir and transports them into the most unlikely places: cheerleading, science, gymnastics, dance. And often she has these female protagonists at odds with each other, which flips the script on the tropes in a really good way. And I think you see the DNA of that in books like Miami Purity. I’d never heard of this novel before you suggested it, and my first thought was What a weird title. I love what Hendricks does with the setting of the dry cleaners, though, and it does so much work in the novel in terms of plot, theme, etc. Can you talk about that setting? It’s just such a great like workman-like setting. It feels very blue collar, but also a little decrepit. It seems like things are about to fall apart for everybody there. Like everyone is on the brink of something bad. And yet they’re cleaning and purifying, and that irony works so beautifully. Yeah, the idea that they’re purifying your clothes or purifying anything when you have these sordid schemers working there, it’s pretty wild. Crime writers are always trying to come up with fresh and original ways to kill someone. Without giving any spoilers, I thought Hendricks did a particularly good job with this. Is this something you’ve ever struggled with in your own work? Yeah, you want to make it memorable. There’s not a lot of bloodshed in Secret Identity, but for the Pete Fernandez novels, which are more action-oriented PI stories, I definitely try to make the death as interesting and memorable as possible, because that’s part of the fun. For me, usually, it’s more the surprise of the death that I think about—like, which character is the reader just assuming will live? In Silent City, my debut, I blew up one of Pete’s closest friends in the first half of the book, and people still ask me about it. You want to remind the reader that everyone is risking their life. You mentioned you know that you love the novel partly because of the way it evokes Miami. Can you say more about that? I think a lot of people presume that Miami is a lot like Miami Vice, or some kind of cool tropical paradise, when it’s really much more complicated and nuanced than that. Miami is a sprawling, diverse city that has lots of interesting nooks and crannies in terms of neighborhoods and cultures. The fact that it’s this very combustible place that’s painted over with a shiny tropical coating is really fascinating to me, and something I think about a lot in my work, and also in my life. You visualize it as this beautiful oasis of paradise, but there’s a dark undercurrent there that this novel taps into in a way that I haven’t seen in other Miami novels. It shows you the cracks in the veneer, and the dangerous stuff happening beneath it. You mentioned the sex scenes earlier. There are a lot of them, and they’re pretty explicit. What do you think Hendricks’s intention was there? I think she was challenging the perception of what was expected of female writers at the time. I think she went a long way toward showing that it’s okay for anyone to write these kinds of scenes, especially when it’s relevant to the book and adds to the tone and the vibe of the story. It just makes the book that much more noir and lurid and evocative. She also has a great command of description and her prose is just wonderful, so it becomes a really hypnotic experience. That’s good context, and it’s interesting to think about how that aspect of the novel flips the script on some of those noir tropes. Sherry’s not at all a femme fatale—she’s someone with her own appetites and her own desires, and she’s acting those out rather than reacting to other people. Exactly. Sometimes we think of the femme fatale as this emotionless viper out to get what she wants, and Sherry’s definitely not like that. She’s got feelings and conflicts and she also has a sex drive, and so she feels like a very developed, three-dimensional person. You just want to keep reading this story so you can keep hanging out with her. The minute you meet her, she feels alive. I really loved the ending, which was such a tone shift from the rest of the book—it’s so quiet and almost elegiac. It’s kind of a left turn, but in a very effective way. I had a similar reaction. As a reader, I appreciate it when writers take risks and don’t do the safe thing or the tidy thing. I read a book recently that I won’t name, but I was having a great time reading it, and then it ended how I expected it to end and that was fine. But then it made me a kind of bummed me out that there was no surprise, no leveling up—the credits just rolled and everything happened as expected. This book does the opposite, and kind of subverts your expectations for it—definitely levels up, because it has a subtle tonal shift, and also goes in a direction that, at least for me, I didn’t see coming. That’s really pleasant to me as a reader, because it keeps you on your toes. And it felt more in tune with what noir is—more primal and less meticulously plotted and precise. To me, if everything had been tied up with a nice little bow, it would have been easier to leave the novel behind. But I know it’s one of those stories that will haunt me, because there’s some ambiguity there and some questions left unanswered. It’s something I try to keep in mind in my own work, that not every thread has to be resolved, because that’s how it works in the real world. Readers are smart. They will pick up what you’re trying to do and will appreciate the risks you take as a writer. Not every reader wants the generic, store-brand of story. I always hope that risks and surprises are appreciated. But at the end of the day, we’re our first readers, and our goal should be to entertain ourselves. That’s my mission usually: what book do I want to read? How would I appreciate it rolling out? Odds are, if you enjoy your story, there’ll be plenty of others that do, too. So, yeah, not everything has to be tied up. Maybe there are some questions that are put to rest, but there are always a few stragglers too. In this novel, we’re watching these messed up, complicated people that are bumping into each other and doing bad things to each other, and that’s how life is sometimes. It’s gray, messy, and not at all organized. Is there anything else you’d like to say about the impact it’s had on your work? Yeah, talking about it now has clarified some things for me. At the end, you feel like you’re wanting more, but not in the way where the story feels incomplete. That’s a testament to character and a testament to realistic, sharp writing and great dialogue. And also she taps into the vices and the dark thoughts that we all have, and very rarely speak out or share or maybe even put on the page. Sometimes as writers we want to be cautious and safe, and this novel is a really good reminder not to do that. Dig deep and shine a light on those dark thoughts, because you’re not alone and people will be drawn to them. View the full article

What pop culture figure of the 1970s had his own board game, guest-starred on “The Six Million Dollar Man” and terrorized backwoods campers with his screams in the night and his skunky smell? You know him, you love him … Bigfoot. In the 1970s, Bigfoot was a pop culture thing that kids were unduly worried about, like quicksand and the Bermuda Triangle. A genre of movies and TV shows sprang up around the legend and it persists to this day. I even had a brush with the Bigfoot legend a couple of decades ago – not with Bigfoot, I should add, but with Bigfoot hoaxers, which are as much a part of the Bigfoot mythos as the sometimes-amiable, sometimes brutal cryptid himself. And you can’t discount the tourism that has grown up around Bigfoot, including festivals and exhibits and museums. Bigfoot is a part of our lives and always will be. But maybe you’re one of those who are thinking, what the hell is Bigfoot? The backwoods legend through the years Bigfoot is the hairy dude walking in front of some trees in that gif you’ve seen so many times. What? You need to know more? Bigfoot is a tall, hairy, smelly ape-like yet human-like creature that’s classified, by Bigfoot researchers, as a cryptid, a class of mythological beings like the Loch Ness monster: They’re creatures that don’t exist except in the tales of people with unsettling encounters, cryptid devotees, hoaxers and popular culture. Bigfoot specifically is among a brotherhood of ape-like cryptids that include the Skunk Ape, Yeti, the Abominable Snowman and your various swamp monsters. The legend of these creatures has been present in and civilizations all around the globe for hundreds and hundreds of years. It was in the past 500 years that Western society began to take notice. A search of newspaper archives turns up plenty of references to the term “Bigfoot” from the early 1800s, including references to Bigfoot Lake in Wisconsin in August 1836. The lake was likely named after a Potawatomi tribe leader who was legendary for the size of his feet. In the early 1800s in Wisconsin, there were, surprisingly, a few people whose last name was Bigfoot. But the most interesting of early newspaper references to a Bigfoot – even if not by that name – is a reference to an unidentified creature in a 1780 article in the American Daily Advertiser in Philadelphia. The article, “Account of a wild man seen in the Pyrenees,” noted, “This man … was very tall, covered with hair like a bear, nimble … of a gay humour and, in all appearance a mild character.” He liked to spook sheep and laugh heartily. There’s no mention of the word Bigfoot proper in the article. In July 1920, a newspaper in Kane, Pennsylvania recounted reports of a “monster ape” in the woods that frightened people near the Ohio River. The creature blocked a road that people were walking on. No reports of hearty laughter, though. Expeditions to extreme mountain ranges like the Himalayas brought back what were purported to be photographs of Yeti tracks (from Eric Shipton’s 1951 expedition) and alleged Yeti skin and fur (Renowned explorer Edmund Hillary’s 1952 expedition). “In the 1950s and early 1960s, the world was in the grip of Yeti mania,” Atlas Obscura wrote in 2022 in a piece printed in Mother Jones. Hillary set out, in 1960 and 1961, to chart more of the Himalayas and, as a side quest, to get some evidence about the Yeti. Among those on the expedition was Marlin Perkins, director of the Lincoln Park Zoo, who would later be best known as the host of the TV nature series “Wild Kingdom.” The Sherpa people in Nepal believed there were not one but three distinct types of Yeti. One was the traditional eight-foot-tall, hairy creature with claws, another was man-sized and another was “a sad-faced, dwarf-sized beast” known as the Thelma. The group didn’t find Yeti of any kind but did find footprints in the snow made by feet that, if they were measured for shoes, would wear size 11 or even as large as 15. Hillary dismissed the footprints, suggesting they were the tracks of snow leopards or wolves enlarged as the snow melted. He later said that he could not consider the existence of the Yeti as “more than a fascinating fairy tale” among the native people of the area. But Bigfoot, Yeti, Sasquatch, the Abominable Snowman and their kind could not be extinguished from the public’s imagination. Proponents of the theory that the creatures existed spent the next several years mounting expeditions and giving talks in every locale. “It appears we have one right here in Northern California,” a columnist wrote in the Siskiyou (California) Daily News in March 1961. “The difference is that our man is known by the name Bigfoot.” An article for the History Collection website notes that Northern California was where the Bigfoot name came from. Back in 1958, construction workers were unnerved by huge tracks and feats of strength like moving 450-pound oil barrels. One of the crew bosses coined the nickname “Bigfoot,” which caught on and became synonymous with the American version of the Yeti. By the time the crew members admitted, in 2002, that they had created the Bigfoot tracks, the legend had long since become a part of popular culture. The existence of Bigfoot had become even more a fervent belief after 1967, when a film crew that included Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin captured footage that has become familiar all over the world: A large, ape-like creature that walked like a man. It’s an image and footage that’s been part of the national consciousness ever since and parodied many times, including in the 2003 movie “Elf,” when Will Farrell’s title character is captured on film in Central Park. Bigfoot in pop culture reached its peak in the 1970s. ‘Boggy Creek’ and ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ You don’t fight the Six-Million Dollar Man and escape the notice of the nation’s television viewers. At least you didn’t in 1976, when the two-part episode “The Secret of Bigfoot” aired on the ABC TV series “The Six Million Dollar Man.” Steve Austin, the bionic government agent, goes in search of an answer to strange goings-on in the woods. Austin, played by Lee Majors, runs into Bigfoot, played by professional wrestler and actor (“The Princess Bride”) Andre the Giant. Bigfoot returned in later episodes, as played by Ted “Lurch” Cassidy, but the fearsome appearance of the creature – strong and hairy and fangs and glowing eyes – inspired nightmares in younger viewers. Even before those memorable episodes, Bigfoot-type creatures had appeared in movies and TV shows. Later, in 1987, the family comedy “Harry and the Hendersons” depicted Bigfoot as a curious, smiling giant only too happy to be accepted into a family. It was a long way from what’s probably the best-known film about Bigfoot. “The Legend of Boggy Creek” was released in 1972 and unspooled on drive-in movie screens for years to follow. The film, a pseudo-docudrama, was made on a shoestring budget by director Charles B. Pierce depicted the “legend” of the Fouke Monster in rural Arkansas. The very fact of its limited budget worked to Pierce’s advantage. The film’s monster was little seen but its eerie cries were haunting. Likewise, the “The Legend of Boggy Creek” advertising campaign was ingenious. The movie was largely sold through local TV and radio commercials and the poster for the film, showing the silhouette of a creature loping through a swamp, is one of the best movie posters ever created because it accomplishes what it is intended to do: make young moviegoers ready to shell out a couple of bucks, including the cost of popcorn, to see the movie. (Pierce would go on to direct an equally legendary exploitation picture, “The Town That Dreaded Sundown,” in 1976.) Bigfoot was featured not only in other movies and TV shows but books and boardgames, including “The Bigfoot Game” from 1987. And, of course, there were Bigfoot action figures and toys drawn from “The Six Million Dollar Man” and other shows, including one that inexplicably has Bigfoot on something resembling … a scooter? Bigfoot hoaxes à la mode I had my own brush with Bigfoot. Actually, my own brush with Bigfoot hoaxers. It was the summer of 2008 and cable TV news outlets and newspapers around the world reported that two Georgia men, Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, were in possession of a supposed Bigfoot carcass, which they kept in a chest freezer. Another man, a Bigfoot researcher named Steve Kulls, had tested the carcass and said it was a fake. The testing was done, according to news accounts, in Muncie, Indiana, my hometown and the city where I was in my second decade as a newspaper reporter who covered government and politics with a side of weird stories about killer clowns and UFOs. Now, considering that the first half of the Steven Spielberg UFO movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” took place – but was not filmed – in Muncie, it should not have been a surprise that my city had at some point become embroiled in a Bigfoot controversy. It’s like that episode of “The Simpsons” in which Homer gets a bucket stuck on his head and Bart remarks that it was surprising only in that it took so long to happen. Over the course of a few days, I tracked down leads on the reports and wrote a few articles. I quickly found that a man living in one of the rural communities around Muncie had filed a police complaint in Clayton County, Georgia, alleging that he was hoodwinked out of $50,000 by two men. Whitton and Dyer were not named as the scammers in an Atlanta Journal Constitution article, but Whitton and Dyer were later identified as the two men, who said they were just playing a joke when they claimed to have Bigfoot’s corpse in a chest freezer. The Muncie man in my area had apparently brokered a deal between Whitton and Dyer and Tom Biscardi, a Bigfoot hunter. The Bigfoot remains were transported in that chest freezer from Georgia to California via a quick stop in Muncie. Of course. Within a few days of the initial reports, Bigfoot researcher Kulls had determined the sasquatch corpse was just a gorilla costume stuffed with animal entrails. By the time I interviewed the local man who had claimed he had lost $50,000 to the hoaxers, he had clammed up tighter than the lid on Bigfoot’s chest freezer. “I don’t know anything about Bigfoot,” he told me. “I don’t have an opinion on Bigfoot.” He was one of the few Americans who didn’t have an opinion about Bigfoot. Just like there are patriotic festivals and biscuit festivals and every type of festival that can be imagined by tourism officials, there are Bigfoot festivals and attractions and tours. A surprising number of them, actually. And while Bigfoot is the centerpiece of these festivals, they can be about anything the organizers want. The Smoky Mountain Bigfoot Festival, held May 6, featured a Bigfoot 5K run, chainsaw carvings, vendors and food trucks and celebrities like Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, the wild-haired writer and UFO expert from History Channel shows like “Ancient Aliens.” Why do we care about Bigfoot? Someone with a philosophical bent would say that the Yeti, Sasquatch, Abominable Snowman and Bigfoot represent our wildest natures. I think it’s likely that the appeal is a mix of our love for the mysterious, the unknown and unknowable, as well as our love for the pop culture figures of our childhood, whether battling the Six Million Dollar Man or shouting out unknowable sentiments from deep in a Southern swamp or a Northwestern forest. View the full article

A twitching curtain conceals a pair of prying eyes. A friendly smile belies a litany of terrible sins. And eventually, someone is going to find a dead body on their well-manicured lawn. The small town is a mainstay of cozy mysteries, and for good reason. Readers flock to the genre precisely because of the juxtaposition between violence and placidity. There’s something undeniably compelling about a quaint and wholesome façade that conceals the darkest of human impulses. No matter how grim things get, though, we know that our small town will have returned to its charming self by the end of the book—until the next murder, at least. In the best mysteries, these towns are the axis around which the entire story spins. Their residents, usually an offbeat and varied bunch, provide a human dimension that brings home the true horror of the evil in their midst. In the hands of gifted storytellers, however, the towns themselves often become characters in their own right, complete with moods, quirks, and histories. While these fictional locales have evolved and changed along with the genre itself, they still retain the mingled eccentricity and intimacy that makes them such wonderful settings for a good mystery. Here are some of my favorites. Though Agatha Christie certainly wouldn’t have called it “quirky,” the prototypical village of this type is St. Mary Mead, home to the formidable Jane Marple. A lifetime of studying her neighbors has not only provided her with an uncanny intuition about human nature, but also taught her that even the most idyllic of settings can harbor dark and terrible secrets. In Christie’s gleeful recitation of the myriad sins committed by the good people of St. Mary Mead, it’s easy to spot her pointed skepticism about the virtuous and genteel façade of respectable Britishness that she delighted in skewering. Indeed, while reading yet another of Ms. Marple’s tangential anecdotes, one is left to wonder if there’s anyone in her village who isn’t an adulterer, a thief, a murderer, or possibly all three. Along similar lines is the fictional village of Carsely, home to M.C. Beaton’s amateur sleuth, Agatha Raisin. Nestled in the Cotswolds, Carsely has its share of eccentric residents as well as a surprising number of murders. Unlike Jane Marple, however, Agatha Raisin hasn’t spent her entire life observing the not-so-secret foibles of her charming neighbors—she moves to Carsely from London at the age of 53, drawn there by childhood memories of the Cotswolds and a romanticized imagining of the English countryside. She finds more than she bargained for, however, when she enters the village’s quiche competition and watches the judge drop dead after tasting her entry. Though she’s an outsider, Agatha solves the mystery with the help of some friendly locals, and over the course of future books we watch her become an indispensable part of village life. Carsely exemplifies what we all hope to find in a good cozy mystery: community and belonging, enlivened by the occasional dead body. Though not a town in the strictest sense of the word, the upscale retirement village of Cooper’s Chase certainly checks all the boxes. Quirky residents? Definitely. Dark secrets? Absolutely. Murder? Repeatedly. Richard Osman’s bestselling Thursday Murder Club series, about a group of senior citizens who band together to solve dastardly crimes, might make the squeamish reconsider their plans to retire to such a community. More than anything, though, Osman’s books celebrate the families that can be found in the most unexpected of circumstances—even if those circumstances involve a few brutal deaths. As the authorship of cozy mysteries has both deepened and widened, the small and unusual towns at the heart of these stories have become notably more diverse. Mia Manansala’s Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mysteries, set in Shady Palms, Illinois, is as warmly inclusive as Lila Macapagal’s gossiping Filipino aunties, who offer advice to anyone and everyone whether they asked for it or not. Shady Palms presents an idealized vision of small-town America where different identities and backgrounds coexist in a general harmony disrupted occasionally by sudden and mysterious deaths, and I always love dropping by for a visit. Themes of family and belonging also lie at the heart of Vivien Chien’s Noodle Shop Mysteries. When Lana Lee returns to the Ho-Lee Noodle House, run by her parents, she finds herself contending with not only their expectations for her, but also the lively and occasionally acrimonious relationships that surround the Asia Village shopping plaza in Cleveland. It makes for a dish as rich and sumptuous as the food described so lovingly by Chien in her books, and it’s this tightly-knit community that keeps me coming back for more. North of the border, the quintessential Canadian village is Three Pines, home to Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. Author Louise Penny presents this charming Quebecois hamlet as a rustic haven filled with memorable characters who endure the long winters with the help of crackling fires, good wine, and the goodwill of their neighbors. Penny is a masterful storyteller who brings Three Pines to vibrant life, and even when her books take Gamache to other locales, readers know that he’ll always return to the beautiful little town and its cast of colorful residents. On the other side of the country lies the seaside village of Crescent Cove, the setting for my own debut mystery. Situated on the eastern shore of Vancouver Island and surrounded by stunning natural beauty, this small town harbors some big secrets. As a queer writer, I wanted Crescent Cove to be unabashedly diverse, where all kinds of quirky and interesting people live alongside one another without comment or prejudice. When readers visit my little hamlet on the sea, they’re immersed in a place where everyone is welcome…until they wind up dead, that is. The towns at the heart of so many cozy mysteries demonstrate both the very best and the very worst of us—our capacity to shape peaceful idylls and also to destroy them from within. It’s their oddities and quirks, however, that transform them from passive backdrops to characters in their own right. Come for the quaint storefronts, stay for the murder, and visit again soon! *** View the full article

True crime writers hold the state of Texas in special regard, not so much for the volume, or even variety, of newsworthy crimes committed there, but for the often strange character of Texas lawbreakers, their quirks, their gruesome excesses and the sometimes striking originality of their offenses. “Texas doesn’t have more crime than other places,” the late Mike Cochran, an Associated Press reporter and true crime author (Texas vs. Davis: The Only Complete Account of the Bizarre Thomas Cullen Davis Murder Case and others) in Ft. Worth, used to say. “We just do it better.” Here’s a representative, though hardly exhaustive, look at what Cochran meant. * In 1991, Wanda Webb Holloway thought she might advance her middle-school daughter’s chances of making the cheerleading team if Verna Heath, a rival contestant’s mother, could be eliminated. So, the Channelview (near Houston) housewife contacted a former brother-in-law for help, but instead found herself accused of soliciting a murder. Evidence at trial included a voice recording of Mrs. Holloway offering her own diamond earrings as compensation for the job. The “Pom Pom Mom,” as Holloway was known in the press, pleaded no contest and accepted a plea deal in court. She spent just six months in prison, and also settled a civil suit, paying $70,000 to Verna Heath and her husband, $30,000 to their children and $50,000 for legal expenses. Holloway was later portrayed in separate TV movies by the actresses Holly Hunter and Lesley Ann Warren. A book about the case, Mother Love, Deadly Love, by Anne McDonald Maier, a lawyer and People correspondent, released in 1992. * Considerably grittier than Wanda Holloway’s bizarre folly are the still-unsolved “Texarkana Moonlight Murders” of early 1946. There were four night-time gunshot attacks in all—three in remote lovers’ lanes and a fourth at a farmhouse. Five of the eight victims died from their bloody wounds. The subject of a lurid cult film, “The Town that Dreaded Sundown,” and closely examined by writer James Presley in his book, The Phantom Killer, the mysterious slayings terrified the Texarkana citizenry and baffled detectives, including most prominently “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullus, a noted Texas Rangers investigator of the day. Texarkanians carried around searing lifelong memories of The Phantom Killer’s spring of terror. Among them was another well-known Texan, Dr. James Grigson, a folksy forensic psychiatrist who was 14 at the time of the crimes. Grigson discussed the case often throughout his career. A “courtroom terror of death-penalty foes,” as writer Ron Rosenbaum described him in a 1990 Vanity Fair profile, Grigson falsely assured jurors during the penalty phase of hundreds of Texas homicide prosecutions that he could tell without fail if a convicted killer might murder again should he somehow escape, or be released, thus threatening the community all over again. As it turned out, in a great majority of cases in which Grigson’s opinion was consulted, his pronouncements from the witness stand persuaded jurors on his say-so that the best penalty for the defendant was the death penalty, and they would vote thumbs down accordingly. “Dr. Death” as he was known throughout Texas, was reprimanded twice by the American Psychiatric Association and then expelled for unethical conduct. * Henry Lee Lucas for a time back in the 1980s successfully promulgated a patent untruth, that he had murdered more than 600 victims, making Lucas the most prolific serial killer in history. Then Hugh Aynesworth and Jim Henderson, Dallas Times Herald reporters, revealed that the one-eyed drifter with an IQ south of 70 had fabricated the confessions, selling the Texas Rangers and an army of police investigators from around the country, and abroad, on a global murder spree that never occurred. In one memorable exchange, Lucas told Aynesworth that he’d even killed victims in Japan. When the reporter asked Henry Lee how he got across the Pacific Ocean he said that he drove. The Lucas hoax was among the more egregious, and embarrassing, fiascos in US law enforcement history. Any police detective should have known it was impossible that Lucas and his sometime partner, the adoring Ottis Toole, could have committed a fraction of the homicides to which they readily confessed. The Confession Killer, a mini-series documentary treatment on the case, has attracted large audiences on Netflix. * Of course, Texas has produced some real serial killers, as well, including a bloodthirsty psychopath named Kenneth McDuff. Born in 1946 in tiny Rosebud, Texas, about 60 miles south of Waco, McDuff was a self-described murderer and rapist by his teen years. At 18 he was convicted of multiple burglaries, but spent just a year in prison before being released. In August of 1966, McDuff participated in the triple murder of three teenagers; two boys whom he shot in the trunk of their car, and a girl whom he repeatedly raped and then choked to death with a broom handle. Though sentenced to the electric chair as Dr. Grigson likely would have approved, McDuff nevertheless was released again in 1989. “Twenty-one years after he should have died in the electric chair,” wrote the late Gary Cartwright in a Texas Monthly piece, “Kenneth McDuff was back on the streets, as cocky and mean and dangerous as ever.” He was almost immediately sent back to prison for a parole violation, then released again in December of 1990. Cartwright wrote that McDuff committed at least six more abductions and torture-murders of women until he was arrested in May of 1992 for the final time in Kansas City, Missouri. Gary M. Lavergne wrote Bad Boy: The True Story of Kenneth Allen McDuff, the Most Notorious Serial Killer in Texas History. McDuff was executed by lethal injection at Texas’s Huntsville prison in November of 1998 at age 52. * As Betty Lou Beets (née Dunevant) told the story, she lived a very hard life. Betty was rendered deaf by the measles at age three. Her father—as well as other men, she said—sexually abused her. Her emotionally-unstable mother was institutionalized when Betty was 12, leaving her alone to raise two younger siblings. Unsurprisingly, Betty sometimes could be disagreeable. In 1953 at age 15, she married Robert Franklin Branson, the first of her five husbands. They had five children before Branson abandoned her in 1969. She married Husband #2, Billy York Lane, in 1970. During one of their frequent marital set-to’s, Lane broke her nose, and she shot him. An attempted murder charge was dropped after Lane admitted threatening to kill Betty. They divorced in in 1972. In 1978 Betty married Husband #3, Ronnie C. Threlkeld. A year later, she unsuccessfully attempted to run over Threlkeld, who, along Billy Lane later testified against her. She shot her fourth husband, Doyle Wayne Baker, then buried him in a garage. She also shot husband #5, Jimmy Don Beets. According to testimony from one of her sons, Betty salted Beets’ fishing boat with his heart medicine, leading police to three unsuccessful weeks of dragging a lake bottom for his body. In fact, she’d buried Jimmy Don in a defunct wishing well. She pleaded not guilty at her 1985 trial for his murder, insisting that two of her kids committed the crime. The jury didn’t believe her, and sentenced Beets to death October 11 of that year. The conviction was overturned on appeal, then reinstated three years later. After a decade of unsuccessful appeals, Beets was sentenced again to death in November of 1989. Her case then wound through the Federal courts for another ten years before she received a lethal injection at Huntsville in February of 2000. Betty declined a final meal and did not make a confession or any other statement. After a tumultuous life and long years in prison, she had no fight left, and offered no resistance in the death chamber as she was being strapped on the gurney. “She really didn’t have no expression on her face at all,” a son by her first husband told CBS reporter Hattie Kauffman. Find more about Betty in Buried Memories: The Bloody Crimes and Execution of the Texas Black Widow by Irene Pence. * Few of the folks in Carthage, Texas, believed that Bernhardt (“Bernie”) Tiede II was capable of murder, although just as few were apt to mourn the mortician’s late companion, Marjorie Nugent. The unlikely twosome met in in March of 1990 in Carthage, a cozy burg of several thousand residents set deep in the East Texas Piney Woods, about 20 miles west of the Louisiana border. Tiede, at the time was the very popular assistant director of the Hawthorne Funeral Home in town. “He was especially empathetic with the older ladies who had just lost their husbands,” Skip Hollandsworth wrote of Tiede in Texas Monthly. “He led them weeping to a sofa in the parlor, handed them handkerchiefs, quoted from comforting scripture, and stood close to them at the interment, always prepared to catch them in case they fainted.” Richest among Carthage’s wealthy widows was Marjorie Nugent, whom Bernie came to know in the process of helping Marjorie bury her late husband, R.L. “Rod” Nugent, a retired oilman and major investor in the First National Bank of Carthage. Bernie was then 31. Mrs. Nugent was 75. Tiede had first come to Carthage 1985, and immediately plunged into the town’s daily life. He happily ran errands and performed others favors for the community’s considerable elderly population. He taught Sunday school and from time to time delivered the Sunday sermon at the Methodist Church. He also was a tenor soloist the church choir. “With that nice tenor voice of his,” one Carthage widow told Hollandsworth, “I just knew that Bernie could sing me right into heaven.” Tiede enthusiastically supported the music and drama departments at local Panola College, sharing an encyclopedic knowledge of show tunes with the college kids he directed in several amateur theatricals. “He brought a lot of compassion to Carthage,” said Paula Carter, a counselor at the high school. “He was very quick to shake hands and ask you how you were doing. He would drop everything to talk to you and see what he could do. He sewed curtains for people who needed them, and helped others with their tax returns.” Bernie took a particular interest in Marjorie Nugent. Though opinion in town differed whether Marjorie was simply a bit crotchety – no surprise at her age – or a genuinely nasty old witch, consensus was that though a town native, Nugent did not mix well with fellow Carthaginians, or even with members of her own family, for that matter. “According to most locals, “Hollandsworth wrote, “she acted as if she was too good for Carthage. It was said that when she made an appearance at the bank, she sat in a chair in the lobby and barely nodded at people.” Bernie Tiede didn’t seem to mind. He later said he was at first deeply sympathetic toward the widow, stirred by her obvious loneliness as she stood by her husband’s casket during his funeral. Others have suggested that Tiede also was interested in her $10 million bank account. Whatever Bernie’s motives, he and Marjorie soon were seen together around town, often holding hands. They began traveling together; first around the U.S. and later to Europe, the Middle East and Asia. She revised her will and named Bernie her sole heir. “The money was a lure, OK?” Bernie later told Marjorie’s nephew, Joe Rhodes, who wrote a first-person piece about her for The New York Times Magazine. “I was also afraid to leave her. She could be very vindictive. I’d seen that.” Then one day in November, 1996, Marjorie Nugent vanished. At first, few people wondered about her whereabouts. In time, however, the inquiries grew more insistent until August of 1997 when the local authorities invited her son, Rod, from Amarillo to come search his mother’s property. That’s when Rod and his daughter found Marjorie where Bernie left her, wrapped in a sheet and stuffed in a large freezer, resting above a frozen flounder, and tucked beneath some Marie Callender chicken pot pies. In order to safely transport Marjorie’s corpse by pick-up truck 160 miles to Dallas for autopsy, deputies loaded a generator into the vehicle’s bed to keep her frozen. Once she thawed, the medical examiner found four .22 caliber bullet holes in her back. The case received considerable national attention. Carlton Stowers, a two-time Edgar Allan Poe Award winner from the Mystery Writers of America, covered Tiede’s story for People magazine. CBS devoted a 48 Hours feature segment on him. Skip Hollandsworth wrote a long piece for Texas Monthly, entitled “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas,” and also received a co-screenwriting credit for the 2011 dark comedic movie, Bernie, directed by Richard Linklater. The film starred Jack Black as a roly-poly small-town mortician fatally entangled with Marjorie Nugent, a rich and cranky, 81-year-old widow played by Shirley MacLaine. Bernie was too popular locally for Danny Buck Davidson (played by Matthew McConaughey in the movie) to seat a jury, so the trial was moved two counties away where jurors convicted Bernie of first-degree murder, and sentenced to 50 years in prison. Then in May of 2014 Bernie was temporarily released on information developed by his lawyer, Jodi Cole, that he had been sexually abused as a child by an uncle. Appearing on Tiede’s behalf, forensic psychiatrist Richard Pesikoff endorsed a defense contention that Bernie had suffered a dissociative episode the day he killed Marjorie. For the next two years, he was permitted to live in Richard Linklater’s garage apartment. Then in a 2016 resentencing hearing he was given a prison term of 99 to life. As of this writing he is eligible to be considered for parole in 2029. *** View the full article

A look at the best reviewed fiction from June, July, and August. * Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto (Doubleday) “Crook Manifesto is a dazzling treatise, a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game. There’s an element of crime here, certainly, but as in Whitehead’s previous books, genre isn’t the point. Here he uses the crime novel as a lens to investigate the mechanics of a singular neighborhood at a particular tipping point in time. He has it right: the music, the energy, the painful calculus of loss. Structured into three time periods — 1971, 1973 and finally the year of America’s bicentennial celebration, 1976 — Crook Manifesto gleefully detonates its satire upon this world while getting to the heart of the place and its people … Whitehead bends language. He makes sinuous the sounds of a city and its denizens pushing against the boundaries. He can be mordantly funny.” –Walter Mosley (New York Times Book Review) Maud Ventura (transl. Emma Ramadan), My Husband (Harpervia) “Ventura does an excellent job of slowly escalating the narrator’s neuroses … And yet the book, while disturbing, is also very funny … Will have you thinking hard about the meaning of love.” –Laurie Hertzel (Star-Tribune) Dwyer Murphy, The Stolen Coast (Viking) “If you, like me, lament the absence in modern-day Hollywood of the whip-smart neo-noir thrillers that flourished in the 1990s…then I have great news for you. It comes in the form of Dwyer Murphy’s second novel, The Stolen Coast, which offers all the abundant pleasures of those films, and more. Of course, many of those movies, like After Dark, My Sweet and Out of Sight, were themselves based on classic noir novels, and Murphy’s follow-up to his strong debut, An Honest Living, makes a convincing case for inclusion on that shelf. It’s a twisty, enthralling heist yarn, sure, but what strikes you most is the confidence … The significant delights in “The Stolen Coast” lie not so much in how it all unfolds or unravels but in the dance between this intoxicating pair: their sly words, their weighted glances and their worthless promises.” –Adam Sternbergh (New York Times Book Review) S.A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron) “Cosby worked the outlaw side of the crime/suspense genre. In this new one he’s written a crackling good police procedural … Cosby delivers a fine climax. Then, in an epilogue, he serves up a final treat that’s worth the whole trip. So: a well-told novel of crime and detection. There are plenty of them on the market. What sets this one apart, what gives it both grit and texture, is its unerring depiction of small-town rural life and the uneasy (and sometimes violent) interactions between Charon’s white and Black citizens … Cosby keeps his eye on the story and the pedal to the metal … I found Cosby’s detail work fresh and exhilarating. Without resorting to country music clichés, he gets everything right … It’s a far better novel than Cosby’s earlier books; his confidence as a writer has increased as he climbs the learning curve of his trade.” –Stephen King (New York Times Book Review) Beatriz Williams, The Beach at Summerly (William Morrow) “There are few more skilled practitioners of the craft of summer fiction than Beatriz Williams. Her latest is both a spy thriller and a Romeo and Juliet tale of would-be lovers torn apart by fate and circumstance … Enriched by fascinating historical details and an espionage theme … Williams has crafted a layered narrative celebrating a heroine who embodies verve, pluck and courage. Ultimately The Beach at Summerly is an ode to a season and a feeling. If our summers past represent a paradise lost, as selves that once were, or might have been, then in Williams’s pages we may briefly recapture the delicious freedom we used to feel when the days became longer and warmer, and we were young and in love.” –Leigh Haber (New York Times Book Review) Catherine Chidgey, Pet (Europa Editions) “Chidgey’s examination of sexual politics is ruthless … The novel hums with the low-level fever of adolescent boredom and betrayal … Chidgey’s grasp of the slipperiness and self-delusion of memory – from Justine as an increasingly unreliable narrator, to her father’s later dementia – is faultless.” –Catherine Taylor (Guardian) Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant (Knopf) “An expertly paced psychological thriller … Seeing Aidan through the eyes of people who view him benignly, even lovingly, we feel the danger in each of this monster’s relationships and the ways in which people are blinded to it … In less capable hands, so many points of view could have felt messy and confusing; but Michallon makes deft use of this structure to build momentum toward a white-knuckle climax.” –Jac Jemc (New York Times Book Review) Kate Collins, A Good House for Children (Mariner) ‘It has a little bit of all things not very nice that make up a page-turning popular novel, without resorting to moral simplicity or predictability … [Collins] evokes her characters and scenes deftly. Not only that, but the whole thrust and purpose of the book add up so well, issues are handled with such lightness of touch, that this reads like a novelist in her prime, rather than a beginner.” –Lucy Sweeney Byrne (The Irish Times) Chandler Baker, Cutting Teeth (Flatiron) “Both a searing social commentary on female friendships, community ties and modern motherhood, and a riveting murder mystery, Cutting Teeth is delightfully weird, jaw-droppingly brilliant and wickedly funny.” –Rebecca Munro (Bookreporter) Colin Walsh, Kala (Doubleday) “A master class in building suspense … Walsh manages a deft balance between adolescent angst and ecstasy — discoveries bringing horror, sorrow and joy — and the more deliberate, often elegiac reflections of adulthood, reckoning with the promises of the past … With revelation upon revelation, their ordinariness seems all the more mysterious, and this first-time novelist all the more masterly at writing in such an original voice.” –Ellen Akins (Washington Post) View the full article

A look at the best reviewed fiction from June, July, and August. * Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto (Doubleday) “Crook Manifesto is a dazzling treatise, a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game. There’s an element of crime here, certainly, but as in Whitehead’s previous books, genre isn’t the point. Here he uses the crime novel as a lens to investigate the mechanics of a singular neighborhood at a particular tipping point in time. He has it right: the music, the energy, the painful calculus of loss. Structured into three time periods — 1971, 1973 and finally the year of America’s bicentennial celebration, 1976 — Crook Manifesto gleefully detonates its satire upon this world while getting to the heart of the place and its people … Whitehead bends language. He makes sinuous the sounds of a city and its denizens pushing against the boundaries. He can be mordantly funny.” –Walter Mosley (New York Times Book Review) Maud Ventura (transl. Emma Ramadan), My Husband (Harpervia) “Ventura does an excellent job of slowly escalating the narrator’s neuroses … And yet the book, while disturbing, is also very funny … Will have you thinking hard about the meaning of love.” –Laurie Hertzel (Star-Tribune) Dwyer Murphy, The Stolen Coast (Viking) “If you, like me, lament the absence in modern-day Hollywood of the whip-smart neo-noir thrillers that flourished in the 1990s…then I have great news for you. It comes in the form of Dwyer Murphy’s second novel, The Stolen Coast, which offers all the abundant pleasures of those films, and more. Of course, many of those movies, like After Dark, My Sweet and Out of Sight, were themselves based on classic noir novels, and Murphy’s follow-up to his strong debut, An Honest Living, makes a convincing case for inclusion on that shelf. It’s a twisty, enthralling heist yarn, sure, but what strikes you most is the confidence … The significant delights in “The Stolen Coast” lie not so much in how it all unfolds or unravels but in the dance between this intoxicating pair: their sly words, their weighted glances and their worthless promises.” –Adam Sternbergh (New York Times Book Review) S.A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron) “Cosby worked the outlaw side of the crime/suspense genre. In this new one he’s written a crackling good police procedural … Cosby delivers a fine climax. Then, in an epilogue, he serves up a final treat that’s worth the whole trip. So: a well-told novel of crime and detection. There are plenty of them on the market. What sets this one apart, what gives it both grit and texture, is its unerring depiction of small-town rural life and the uneasy (and sometimes violent) interactions between Charon’s white and Black citizens … Cosby keeps his eye on the story and the pedal to the metal … I found Cosby’s detail work fresh and exhilarating. Without resorting to country music clichés, he gets everything right … It’s a far better novel than Cosby’s earlier books; his confidence as a writer has increased as he climbs the learning curve of his trade.” –Stephen King (New York Times Book Review) Beatriz Williams, The Beach at Summerly (William Morrow) “There are few more skilled practitioners of the craft of summer fiction than Beatriz Williams. Her latest is both a spy thriller and a Romeo and Juliet tale of would-be lovers torn apart by fate and circumstance … Enriched by fascinating historical details and an espionage theme … Williams has crafted a layered narrative celebrating a heroine who embodies verve, pluck and courage. Ultimately The Beach at Summerly is an ode to a season and a feeling. If our summers past represent a paradise lost, as selves that once were, or might have been, then in Williams’s pages we may briefly recapture the delicious freedom we used to feel when the days became longer and warmer, and we were young and in love.” –Leigh Haber (New York Times Book Review) Catherine Chidgey, Pet (Europa Editions) “Chidgey’s examination of sexual politics is ruthless … The novel hums with the low-level fever of adolescent boredom and betrayal … Chidgey’s grasp of the slipperiness and self-delusion of memory – from Justine as an increasingly unreliable narrator, to her father’s later dementia – is faultless.” –Catherine Taylor (Guardian) Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant (Knopf) “An expertly paced psychological thriller … Seeing Aidan through the eyes of people who view him benignly, even lovingly, we feel the danger in each of this monster’s relationships and the ways in which people are blinded to it … In less capable hands, so many points of view could have felt messy and confusing; but Michallon makes deft use of this structure to build momentum toward a white-knuckle climax.” –Jac Jemc (New York Times Book Review) Kate Collins, A Good House for Children (Mariner) ‘It has a little bit of all things not very nice that make up a page-turning popular novel, without resorting to moral simplicity or predictability … [Collins] evokes her characters and scenes deftly. Not only that, but the whole thrust and purpose of the book add up so well, issues are handled with such lightness of touch, that this reads like a novelist in her prime, rather than a beginner.” –Lucy Sweeney Byrne (The Irish Times) Chandler Baker, Cutting Teeth (Flatiron) “Both a searing social commentary on female friendships, community ties and modern motherhood, and a riveting murder mystery, Cutting Teeth is delightfully weird, jaw-droppingly brilliant and wickedly funny.” –Rebecca Munro (Bookreporter) Colin Walsh, Kala (Doubleday) “A master class in building suspense … Walsh manages a deft balance between adolescent angst and ecstasy — discoveries bringing horror, sorrow and joy — and the more deliberate, often elegiac reflections of adulthood, reckoning with the promises of the past … With revelation upon revelation, their ordinariness seems all the more mysterious, and this first-time novelist all the more masterly at writing in such an original voice.” –Ellen Akins (Washington Post) View the full article

After J.D. Salinger published his story “Hapworth 12, 1924” in The New Yorker in 1965, he decided to stop publishing his works. Although he had resigned from his nearly twenty-year-long stint in the literary spotlight, retreating to a home in Cornish, New Hampshire, and beginning a reclusive lifestyle, he assured The New York Times in a rare interview in 1974, that “publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” Salinger’s most famous novel, The Catcher in the Rye, has sold more than 65 million copies. His self-imposed exile was hardly acceptable to many among the throngs of readers longing for his next words, and, eventually, after years devoid of Salinger’s stories, some jilted readers turned Salinger’s inexplicable silence into the contemptible, self-imposed exile of a man who believed himself above the rest, with many attempting to do whatever they could to draw him, and the unpublished works he seemed to be hoarding, back into the public eye. When these endeavors, some of which resulted in unauthorized adaptations of both his books and his own persona, came to light, occasionally exploding into unprecedented legal battles, the ever-resisting Salinger was regarded sort of as a cantankerous ghost of an author—a once welcome houseguest rattling dusty chains at the unassuming newcomers he thought were messing around with things he left behind. Thus, Salinger’s public legacy, a gnarled mess of copyright enforcement designs, First Amendment controversies, and the persistent desire to be left alone by the press, is one of America’s most unique. Yet his belief that total ownership is not relinquished with public publication, as well as his radical enforcement of copyright law and reliance on the right to privacy, revolutionized the role of the “author” in modern culture, and consequently helped preserve both his identity and his works as masterful and mythic American originals. Though he led a shrouded life, there are aspects of Salinger’s life that remain indisputable facts, even through the monasticism and mystery, and Kenneth Slawenski, the diligent biographer (and manager of the Salinger fan website deadcaulfields.com for nearly a decade) released his own clear chronology of Salinger’s life shortly after the writer’s death in 2010 at the age of 91. In this biography, J.D. Salinger: A Life Raised High (later renamed J.D. Salinger: A Life), Slawenski details the private life of Salinger as much as he can—usually referring to historical and public documents. Copyright protections can stop a work from being copied, pirated, poached. It can’t stop it from being misunderstood. As he details Salinger’s personal life with very public records, Slawenski paints a vivid picture of Salinger without attempting to violate the privacy he desired in his later years, particularly detailing the relationship Salinger had to the character Holden Caulfield, as influenced by his attempts The Catcher in the Rye, as well as the stories about Holden that he had written for himself during the war. Slawenski draws a deep comparison between these two figures (the writer and his creation), perhaps extrapolating better than any other biographer the sensitivity and sincerity of the most famous recluse of in the twentieth century. Salinger was particularly sensitive to appropriation. “Suppose you had a coat you liked,” he told the Times in 1974, “and somebody went into your closet and stole it. That’s how I feel.” Decades before Slawenski, in 1986, Ian Hamilton, a popular British author and a literary critic for The London Sunday Times, had attempted to write his own biography of J.D. Salinger. Salinger refused to grant permission, but Hamilton wrote it anyway, relying on many of Salinger’s letters that belonged to collections in the libraries at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Texas. Salinger then sued for damages on the grounds of copyright infringement, unfair competition, and breach of contract, and the case went to court in 1987. Hamilton argued that his use of Salinger’s personal letters was legitimate under the copyright policy of Fair Use, which legally allows the incorporation of works within others under certain circumstances. Hamilton believed that the use of the letters fell under the “criticism, scholarship, and research” category permitted under Fair Use, and therefore that his utilization was permissible, while Salinger argued that, as the letters were unpublished when Hamilton used them (although Salinger registered them for copyright protection during the beginning of the case), a defense under Fair Use would be invalid, since the policy really referred to published works. The case was settled using the four principles of Fair Use. Factoring in Hamilton’s transformative utilization of the letters, the fact that letters were unpublished, the large amount of text taken, and the fact that any reproductions and interpretations of Salinger’s letters might interfere with the library traffic aimed at viewing the originals (Hamilton reproduced the “most interesting” parts of their contents) it was decided that Hamilton’s actions were not protected under Fair Use. Salinger’s copyright suit extended beyond this, though—at various points in the text, it is clear that Hamilton blurred paraphrases and quotes from these letters, mimicking Salinger’s style when recounting. According to the case brief, upon cross-examination, Hamilton explained that he used Salinger’s style to prevent using “a pedestrian sentence I didn’t want to put my name to.” The court declared that, When dealing with copyrighted expression, a biographer (or any other copier) may frequently have to content himself with reporting only the fact of what his subject did, even if he thereby pens a “pedestrian,” sentence. The copier is not at liberty to avoid “pedestrian” reportage by appropriating his subject’s literary devices (Salinger v. Random House, [24]). Salinger was declared the winner, and Hamilton’s mimicking biography was invalidated. In this moment, both Salinger’s rights and his individual voice were vindicated. However, several years later, Hamilton came out with another book, In Search of J.D. Salinger. In this self-justificatory, first-person biographical narrative, Hamilton analyzes the Salinger he had just encountered at court, and does not responsibly detail Salinger for biographical purposes preferring to drag down to human level the aloof literary deity who had fought desperately to keep his elevated, and inaccessible status. And he succeeds—Hamilton’s memoir is exceedingly subjective, influenced by his own legal frustrations and the rather cartoonishly Caulfield-esque desire to tell his audience a sort of truth. “Obviously Seymour Glass is Salinger in disguise.” Hamilton writes, comparing Salinger to another lovable, suicidal teenager, this time from Seymour. “Its evident Salinger has a saint complex. He wants to be a saint. The trouble is, he doesn’t have a saintly personality—quite the opposite—he is egotistical, ill tempered, unforgiving. But he wants to be a saint because saints are above the humans, they are unstoppably superior.” Hamilton is the proponent of this view of Salinger—a haughty relic frozen in time. Despite his hammy, albeit sleazy, approach, Ian Hamilton helped build Salinger’s famous persona. He turned an introvert into an outsider, a writer into a caricature.The case gave Salinger threateningly nitpicky reputation he would wear for the rest of his life—he verdict raised opposition because it seemed to infringe upon the First Amendment right to free speech, by censoring what people could reproduce in their own writing. However, Salinger’s lawyers argued, Salinger’s First Amendment rights had actually been trod upon, as, by publishing Salinger’s words without permission, Hamilton had infringed upon Salinger’s right not to speak. * In 1982, the writer W.P. Kinsella included a characterized version of Salinger in the 1982 novel Shoeless Joe, a story about an Iowa farmer who is encouraged by mystical voices to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield so the spirits of the eight scandalized baseball players could play ball again. When this literary Salinger learns about the baseball ghosts, he is delighted, and agrees to help the protagonist. Salinger the writer, however, was not amused with this harmless addition to Shoeless Joe. In a 2010 interview with McLean’s John Geddes, Kinsella mentioned, “his lawyers wrote my publisher’s lawyers saying he was outraged and offended to be portrayed in the novel and they would be very unhappy if it were transferred to other media.” Kinsella was careful in his construction of the character: “He was pretty much an imagined Salinger,” he said later “apart from being a recluse. I made sure to make him a nice character so that he couldn’t sue me.” Although Shoeless Joe is more of a commentary on the magic of American pop culture (baseball meets its match in the grown-up Catcher in the Rye), it does express Salinger as a character, instead of a person with a right to privacy. Shoeless Joe book was adapted into the film Field of Dreams in 1988. It starred Kevin Costner, James Earl Jones, Amy Madigan, Ray Liotta, a youg Gaby Hoffman, and the legendary Burt Lancaster (in his last feature film performance). The film was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Writer/director Phil Alden Robinson removed Jerry from the story, replacing him with a similar but distinct enough character named Terry: Terence Mann (James Earl Jones), a major force in the 60s literary scene, author of the perennial classic The Boat Rocker, now a recluse. Ray is instructed, by the voice he hears in his cornfield, to find the writer Terrence Mann and take him to a baseball game. In 1988, headline reading “GOTCHA CATHER,” along with a black-and-white photo of a shocked, silver-haired, sixty-nine-year-old Salinger, appeared on the cover of the New York Post. Paparazzi photographer Paul Adao had jumped out at Salinger and taken the candid in Salinger’s town of Cornish, and the canted photo shows the elderly man attempting to punch the camera out of the photographer’s hands. Myles Weber suggests that it inspired Don DeLillo’s Pen/Faulkner Award-winning 1991 novel Mao ii, which is about an reclusive writer’s inability to shake his fame. However, not everyone received the photo with this same sympathy; the photo is the worst violation of privacy the author could have experienced—goofy, and disrespectful in its physical transformation of a rarely-seen, celebrated author into a kooky old hermit, or, given the title, an old Holden Caulfield. In the late 1990’s, however, two works were released which also challenged Salinger’s privatization of his life. The writer Joyce Maynard, who, at age nineteen, dropped out of Yale to live with the twice-divorced Salinger in 1972. In 1998, she published a memoir about her time with him called If You Really Want to Hear About It about it. In 2000, the long-suffering daughter of J.D. Salinger and his second wife (Claire Douglas, who also dropped out of college at age nineteen, in 1954, to live with him) published her own memoir, Dream Catcher, about her relationship with her father. Both books, with titles punning on The Catcher in the Rye (in a similar tradition to Hamilton’s Holden-heavy biography), reveal intimate details of Salinger life. Critics of Maynard’s book called hers opportunistic, especially considering she auctioned off her personal letters from Salinger shortly after the publication of her book. (They were bought by Peter Norton, who immediately returned them to Salinger.) But Maynard’s story as revealing another important facet of Salinger, a creepy side—that he was an older man obsessed with young girls. Margaret’s book, published while her father was still alive, should be the most accurate representation of her father thus far. However, her tale conjures up a lost soul, an ex-soldier, and an antisocial wanderer, and seems to be, at least in the tradition of her father’s prose, a kind of epic catharsis. Margaret justifies the publication of her book on the grounds that she has the First Amendment right to share her own story—which just happens to be influenced by her father. However, shortly after it’s publication, Salinger’s son Matt (the caretaker of his estate), published an open letter in The New York Observer, discrediting his sister’s account on the basis that she was unwell. “Of course, I can’t say with any authority that she is consciously making anything up. I just know that I grew up in a very different house, with two very different parents from those my sister describes,” Salinger explained, going on to claim, “she remembers a father who couldn’t ‘tie his own shoe-laces’ and I remember a man who helped me learn how to tie mine, and even-specifically-how to close off the end of a lace again once the plastic had worn away.” Words like Matt Salinger’s words are rare, in that they respectfully acknowledge Salinger’s personal desire for solitude. More importantly, they, in a rich, J.D.-esque tone, serve to remind audiences of a deeper Salinger, one who, as noted by Dennis L. O’Connor, wrote about the sadness of anti-Semitism, the horror of war, and the crime of sexual exploitation, the importance of spirituality, the wonderfulness of children, and “the importance of human dignity.” Though Salinger, himself, was adapted often, his works faced this fate even more. According to Myles Weber’s “Reading Salinger’s Silence,” it is not uncommon for writers to long for solitude—Katherine Anne Porter, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo all chose lives outside the spotlight but, unlike Salinger, they also chose to keep publishing. In addition, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye uniquely defined a generation, so his case is closer to that of the equally dormant Harper Lee, author of the 1960 Pulitzer-Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird. In the 1993 edition of the novel, Harper Lee explained her unique silence in its short introduction: “Mockingbird still says what it has to say.” Lee’s refusal to publish is still distinct from Salinger’s, largely because she handed over the film rights to her masterpiece within two years of publication. Until the Times interview in 1974, Salinger’s perspective on his rights to his works were, according to Weber, “I have my reasons.” He also adamantly refused to sell film rights. “The Catcher in the Rye” he explains in a letter, “Is a very novelistic novel. There are readymade ‘scenes’—only a fool would deny that—but, for me, the weight of the book is in the narrator’s voice, the non-stop peculiarities of it.” According to Weber, the main reason for Salinger’s onslaught of fan-driven literary boosterism is that only Salinger understood why he stopped publishing—and it’s because people don’t understand that he stopped. However, the more Salinger’s fans tried to bring him back, the more he grew frustrated, and grew more antisocial. In 1977, Esquire magazine published an anonymous short story called “For Rupert—With No Promises” written with the intent of making it seem as if he had begun to publish again. As it turned out, Esquire’s fiction editor, Gordon Lish, wrote the story. He claimed, “If Salinger was not going to write stories, someone had to write them for him.” Ironically, Gordon Lish was the recipient of Don DeLillo’s dedication in Mao ii, the story allegedly inspired by Salinger’s desire for solitude. * On December 8, 1980, an ex-mental patient named Mark David Chapman shot world famous musician John Lennon to “stimulate the reading of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.” A few weeks after his arrest, he sent note to the New York Times, explaining his motives. He says that he desired to “’stimulate the reading of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye,’” and “’if you were able to view the actual copy of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ that was taken from me on the night of Dec. 8, you would find in it the handwritten words ‘This is my statement.’’” According to his note, Chapman identified with the novel’s protagonist, Holden, who, in the book’s conclusion, is institutionalized and brokenhearted. Chapmam said, ”My wish is for all of you to someday read ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’ All of my efforts will now be devoted toward this goal, for this extraordinary book holds many answers. My true hope is that in wanting to find these answers you will read ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’ At his trial, he read out loud the novel’s titular passage, about Holden’s wanting to catch children from falling off a cliff as they played. In Daniel Stashower’s remarkable study, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Holden: Speculations on a Murder,” he suggests that Holden Caulfield and Mark Chapman were faced with the same crisis: an assault on innocence. Holden Caulfield could not find a way to preserve innocence forever and was forced to entertain the notion of growing up. If I am correct in my speculation, Chapman found a way. Taking as a model the only character in The Catcher in the Rye who achieved perpetual innocence, Chapman found his course clear. For John Lennon’s innocence – which was essential to Chapman’s man’s own spiritual well-being—to remain intact, Lennon himself would have to die. Only then could his innocence, like [Holden’s deceased brother] Allie’s, be preserved forever. Salinger’s themes, through the plight of Holden, are angsty, endearing, and easily relatable; the book, which finds new (mostly teenage) fans each year would not have needed Chapman’s help garnering publicity, but, this unfortunate linkage of the text to his action, presented a real-life association Salinger neither intended nor wanted: Holden’s appeal to frustrated, unwell, incel-trending young men. In 1981, following the attempted assassination of then-president Ronald Regan by John Hinckley Jr., police found a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in his hotel room. In 1989, the actress Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered in her apartment by her stalker, Robert John Bardo, who was reported as carrying a copy of the novel when he broke into her home. Stephen Whitfield notes that a commentary on the appropriation of Catcher by mentally ill young men can be found in John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation from 1990. The troubled young protagonist, Paul, who lies to a wealthy New York Family to ingratiate himself into their home, discusses Catcher with his new family, reading the play as “…a touching story, comic because the boy wants to do so much and can’t do anything. Hates all phoniness and only lies to others. Wants everyone to like him, is only hateful, and is completely self-involved. In other words, a pretty accurate picture of a male adolescent. And what alarms me about the book-not the book so much as the aura about it-is this: The book is primarily about paralysis.The boy can’t function. And at the end, before he can run away and start a new life, it starts to rain and he folds….” Stashower notes, of the popular misreadings of Catcher, “Simply put, it appears Chapman misread The Catcher in the Rye. He took the ‘catcher’ passage to be the novel’s solution, when in fact it is the crisis. No one who has read The Catcher in the Rye will argue that Holden Caulfield was a seriously disturbed sixteen-year-old. He wanders through New York with a genuine desire, to quote an old Beatles tune, to “take a sad song and make it better,” but he doesn’t know how to begin. As a result he develops an all-purpose, self-protective cynicism… Holden Caulfield wants to stop reality. He wants to keep the children in the rye field from growing up. But growing up is the natural order of things. It cannot be stopped.” Meaningful critical interventions, aside, The Catcher in the Rye became cursed by such misreadings, such real-life appropriatations. Copyright protections can stop a work from being copied, pirated, poached. It can’t stop it from being misunderstood. * Perhaps after this flurry of horiffic, real-life infringements, the legacy of Catcher began to wear on its creator. In 2009, Salinger encountered a different kind of brazen opportunism in the Swedish writer Fredrik Colting, who published an unauthorized sequel to Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye in 2009, under the pseudonym J.D. California. As Salinger had consistently renewed the copyright on The Catcher in the Rye, his estate sued Colting for copyright infringement. The unauthorized sequel, Coming Through the Rye: 60 Years Later, tells the story of “Mr. C,” a 76-year-old Holden Caulfield, who escapes from his nursing home and travels back to New York City to recapture his forgotten youth, before he meets none other than J.D. Salinger, his creator, who has magically brought Holden to life, so he can kill him and finally be rid of his annoying legacy. By 2009, Salinger was ninety years old and completely deaf. The court evaluated 60 Years Later as a Fair Use case. While the book transformed the original, the new work took far too much (including the “heart”) from the original, and, it might destroy the market for authorized sequel. (For those interested, pages 6-7 of the affidavit signed during the case by literary agent Phyllis Westburg detail Salinger’s specific contractual appropriation/adaptation rights). The court declared Salinger the winner of the dispute. Although this second decision was extremely reminiscent of the 1986 decision, which many feared rattled too close to the First Amendment, Salinger was within the right. According to “Copyright for Functional Expression,” by Lloyd L. Weinreb and published in the Harvard Law Review, an author of a work automatically has copyright over their works, even if it is has not been formally approved, and regardless of the personality of the author. Coulting, and many others, violated that basic principle. Although it does increase his miserly image, Salinger’s reinforcement of this right is justified. However, Salinger’s militant enforcement of law to protect his own personal interests also set negative precedents. For example, the verdict in Salinger v. Random House, which had prevented the copying of unpublished materials, made it impossible for the University of Maryland to legally microfilm their deteriorating collection of personal papers bequeathed to the library by Katherine Anne Porter. Therefore, at the time, it was both impossible and illegal for the University of Maryland to perform a necessary procedure to save some of their highly valuable documents. The laws towards unpublished works have since changed, but this instance indicates absurd and unexpected social ramifications of national verdict that Salinger had only sought for his personal vindication. Although the circumstance involving the University of Maryland is tied to a copyright decision that Salinger unluckily and coincidentally spurred, Salinger has reacted with surprising zeal against innocent adaptations, as well. In 1998, for example, Salinger threatened to sue the Lincoln Center Film Society if they screened an Iranian film called “Pari,” based loosely on Franny and Zooey, and directed by Dariush Mehrjui, who did not want any compensation for showing the film in America, preferring to give the film to the United States as a peaceful “cultural exchange” (McKinley, The New York Times). In this case, Salinger’s desire for privacy boarders on inappropriate and obsessive—refusing to overlook a slight infringement in the name of the global peace he, a World War II veteran, allegedly desired badly. Salinger’s ultimate legacy will be preserved by his estate—which is currently run by his widow, Colleen Salinger, and his son, Matt. Matt Salinger has already sent a bill through the New Hampshire legislature that would allow commercial use of one’s identity to be inheritable after death. The bill, which Salinger had hoped would prevent the sale of popular merchandise (t-shirts, hats, mugs, etc) with the Paul Adao photo (as well as the ubiquitous 1950 black-and-white photograph by Lotte Jacobi) on them, was vetoed on the grounds that, it would “inhibit constitutionally protected speech and result in needless litigation to judicially establish what should have been made explicit in this bill,” according to New Hampshire Governor Lynch (Ramer, The Huffington Post). History has come full circle—Salinger’s legacy has once again been tied to restrictions of the First Amendment. The estate has not resisted the publication of Slewenski’s biography, perhaps because Slewinski clearly wants little from Salinger or his estate, and prefers to present the facts, allowing them, and not yet another interpretation of the man, to speak for themselves. Salinger’s tradition has already begun to change, simply because his static identity had changed—he died. Both Myles Weber and Ian Hamilton suggest that Salinger had already created his own posthumous identity by retreating into solitude so early into his career. Therefore, Salinger’s real death brought about his public rebirth. For example, fifty letters that Salinger had exchanged with his English friend Donald Hartog from their meeting in 1938 through the 1980’s, which had clandestinely been possessed by University of East Anglia since Hartog’s death in 2007, were being made available to the public to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Salinger’s death. In these letters, Salinger discusses average things with his friend (such as his love for Burger King Whoppers and his favorite tennis player Tim Henman). Salinger’s death is slowly unfurling his humanity (Gabbatt, The Guardian). The last book published by J.D. Salinger, a 1963 collection of stories called Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour—an Introduction, has a curious, and similarly human, dedication. “If,” Salinger briefly states, “there is an amateur reader still left in the world—or anybody who just reads and runs—I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children” (p.ii). It is hard to imagine, however, that this anxious and extant idealist who, with the dedication in Seymour, entrusted his most autobiographical work simply to anyone who cared enough to read it, is the same man accused of being a strange, old version of his own characters, in the words of Weber, “a fledgling actor in his adolescence… now sinking his teeth into the role of a lifetime, that of a reclusive artist,” and, in the words of Hamilton, “an egotistical, ill-tempered, unforgiving man… who wants so badly to be canonized.” Salinger was well aware of his inadvertent public persona; in the 1974 Times interview, he stated, “I pay for this kind of attitude. I’m known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I’m doing is trying to protect myself and my work.” In other words, before his death in 2010, Salinger became the ghost in the machine of American literature, embodying the battle between preservation attempts of his exterior works, and therefore the maintenance of their immortality, and the need for self-preservation and an undisturbed, peaceful human existence. And a battle it was, indeed. View the full article

CrimeReads is pleased to host the cover reveal for Blessed Water, Margot Douaihy’s second novel to feature the chainsmoking, tattooed, lesbian, celibate, nun detective Sister Holiday, set in New Orleans and featuring another signature combination of the metaphysical and the mysterious. Douaihy was kind enough to answer a few questions about her most unusual detective to accompany the cover reveal. Blessed Water is forthcoming in March from Zando Books. Can you tell us a bit about Blessed Water and Sister Holiday’s journey to becoming a detective? Margot Douaihy: I wrote Blessed Water as a blistering, breakneck sequel to Scorched Grace, the first book in the Sister Holiday Mystery series with Gillian Flynn Books/Zando. While Scorched Grace plays with fire, Blessed Water dives into the deep end. It’s a ticking-clock mystery told in three suspenseful acts—Good Friday, Saturday, and Easter Sunday. The second in the series is an ode to submerging, rebirth, the blood oath of siblings, and the strange blessing of trust. I love when a fiction series sets the stage for a broader arc. Each book should complicate the established characters, tear apart tropes and hurl the protagonist into new predicaments and new danger (physical and emotional). I was determined to make Blessed Water a super-fast ripper that reads like its own dizzying storm; its sinister rain harmonizes with the incineration of Scorched Grace. The story opens again with Sister Holiday, who remains a punk, chain-smoking nun. But she’s also apprenticing Riveaux at the newly formed Redemption Detective Agency, one step closer to her dream of becoming a private eye. (She inhabits the role of the amateur sleuth in Scorched Grace.) Holiday’s twinned obsessions—sleuthing and religious service—feed her relentless quest for meaning in a broken world. When Sister Holiday sets out to meet their first client, she finds the mutilated body of a priest floating in the swollen Mississippi River. Sister Holiday feels called on by God to hunt down the murderer and keep her community safe. Evolving the devil-may-care swaggering PI lineage of pulp classics, Sister Holiday is as devout as she is rebellious. I tried to write this sleuth with enough specificity, grit, laser focus, and bad judgment to sustain tension. Interview continues below cover reveal. What was the genesis of your complicated heroine? Sister Holiday may be an unexpected lone wolf, but she’s born from the hardboiled tradition. I wanted to create a badass sleuth character who defies conventions. The first-person liturgical intensity, moral ambiguity, and hardboiled wisecracks give the narration a distinctive cadence. I’m also really passionate about the reparative potential of crime fiction, so I offer Blessed Water as a queer alternative to the ‘copaganda’ toxicity I’m frankly sick of reading. I love crime fiction that holds space for social comment, so Blessed Water is rippling with critiques of things Sister Holiday and I hate: sexism, white supremacy, homophobia, and institutional corruption. All within tight plotting, a fast pace, and a frantic, desperate dance with time. What did you want to explore about religion, mystery, and the “endless search for answers”? To invoke Hegel and Madonna, life is a mystery. I view religion as a batch of stories and a net of interpretive frameworks—fables, cautionary tales—offering guidance, solace, strict laws, and roadmaps, depending on who you ask. The very same religion can soothe, empower, and hurt people. Religion has been routinely weaponized to subjugate, beating people into submission whilst justifying atrocious behavior. I was raised Maronite Catholic, and it’s been a profound influence in my life, but I haven’t practiced regularly in years. Would I be offered Holy Communion in my home church since I’m an out lesbian? Doubt it. But I haven’t checked. Sister Holiday is a kink-positive, proudly gay woman (“a dyke David to the patriarchy’s Goliath”). She is also a faithful Sister of the Sublime Blood who chooses celibacy. The choice and the dialectic—the yes and—are crucial. I wanted to narrativize queer futurity and reframe what sexual identity could mean for a virile sleuth character. There’s a history of nun-mystics who yoked ecstasy and worship. And art. In my sleuth series, the whodunnits mirror Holiday’s questions about love, happiness, and redemption. The queer sex of her narrative past is also an expression of kinetic worship, communion, and joy. Sister Holiday is constantly scanning the world, looking for clues, patterns, signs—anything to make the contradictions of her life fit. She has a taste for vice and she believes in resurrection. Sister Holiday is a full mood. Why don’t we have more religious characters in fiction (especially reformed sinners such as Sister Holiday)? Good question. We do have the existential woe of Pastor Sidney Chambers in James Runcie’s Grantchester Mysteries and the moral compass of GK Chesterton’s Father Brown series, among others. But we don’t have a ton of religious characters in crime fiction. Perhaps it is because some denominations are shrinking (at least in the US), so they are less present in pop culture and the mass consciousness. When I was a kid, growing up in Scranton, PA, everyone I knew attended church or a worship service. Now, hardly anyone I know attends. There also might be a dearth of religious characters because institutions have wrought so much damage. It’s painful. From the atrocities of Residential Schools to the horrific laundries in Ireland, the Catholic Church has exploited marginalized communities. People of color and LGBTQ people have been immeasurably harmed. My books bear witness to it all. Religion is a third rail, but that’s exactly why I want to touch it. No one “owns” religion. Everyone has a personal, nuanced relationship with their faith. If we don’t start talking more candidly about religion and taking more creative risks in our art, I fear we might cede more ground to the tyrants. I have lost count of the readers who have DM’d me or approached me at Scorched Grace readings to share how Sister Holiday has helped them heal their Catholic trauma. I’m so stunned and grateful for that! I love when queer readers share their experiences. Sister Holiday helped me heal too. Every time I walk by a church now, I don’t feel the onset of a panic attack, I simply wonder what kind of mischief our punk nun might be up to in there. Why did you decide to place Sister Holiday in New Orleans? What draws people to the city so strongly? The narrative toggles back and forth from New York to New Orleans, two different urban environments, but both with seedy underbellies, alleyways, secret societies, hardscrabble pockets, and entrenched corruption. New Orleans is one hell of a survivor. The city is also steeped in queer history and Black excellence. I set my series there because of its understory and its radical potential. The city’s mix of French, Spanish, African, and Creole influences is profound, not to mention its intertwined spiritual and religious roots, from ghost stories to Catholicism to voodoo. When I lived in New Orleans, from 2008 to 2010, I frequently walked by an abandoned convent and imagined the history inside those crumbling walls. To quote Sister Holiday, “They say if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. But New Orleans is the crucible. The home of miracles and curses.” For anyone keen on reading great stories set in New Orleans, check out books by Jesymn Ward, Greg Herren, and J.M. Redmann, Eleanor Taylor Bland, Barbara Neely, James Lee Burke, Kwei Quartey, Kalamu ya Salaam, and Alaina Urquhart, just to name a few. Will Sister Holiday be appearing in more novels after this one? Why did you decide to stick with the character for more adventures (I’m certainly happy you did)? Absolutely. Sister Holiday’s ride has just begun. Scorched Grace was a riff on the anti-redemption arc. I won’t give Blessed Water away, but let’s just say, it’s about the genuine agony of rebirth. This character has deep wounds, needs, and she’s figuring herself out as she investigates each new mystery. More than anything, Sister Holiday has a ravenous will to live, stare down the storm, and cannonball into the unknown. *** View the full article

I first noticed something wrong with dad one Sunday during a visit. We were watching a football game. I sat on the couch, and he crooked one leg over the padded arm of an easy chair. I don’t recall discussing the game or who was playing. But he suddenly asked a question that hit like a bolt from the blue. “Is it three downs or four?” Dad and I had watched football together for more than 40 years. He knew teams had four downs, but I could see he wasn’t kidding. At that time, he was in his mid-seventies, a former truck driver, a star baseball player back in high school, a U.S. Marine who came home from Okinawa after World War II. He was a quiet and kind man who enjoyed reading history. After that day, I began researching dementia, its causes and effects, what to expect, how to deal. One aspect bothered me more than others: how dementia can lead to aggression or uncontrolled rage. My father was not a violent man. I had seldom heard him raise his voice. I couldn’t imagine seeing him angry. Years later, I returned to the subject of dementia in my debut novel, Fadeaway Joe. The main character is Joe Pendergast, who is unlike my father in every possible way. Joe is a career criminal, a bouncer, a professional tough guy and a collector of bad debts. Diagnosed with early-stage dementia, he’s been cast aside by his boss, Maxie Smith, as someone no longer useful to the criminal organization. Being abandoned by Maxie hurts worse than a sucker punch. Joe’s devotion to Maxie bordered on brotherly love. For 40 years, Joe fetched his boss’s dry cleaning, mixed his drinks and cleaned up his various messes. Joe broke bones for Maxie. He left men dying in ditches. Now cast aside, Joe moves back to his old neighborhood. He begins operating a food truck to make ends meet, and contemplates vengeance against his old boss. With his diagnosis, he knows the clock is ticking. He needs a plan that’s more nuanced than “fire guns, kill Maxie and go out in a blaze of glory.” Two impressive women intervene to complicate his plans. The first is 22-year-old Paula Jessup. She’s street-smart and homeless, on the run from labor traffickers. Paula needs shelter and protection, the kind Joe can provide. Then there’s his new neighbor, Donna, a fortyish real estate agent who is kind, curious and tends to over-share. Both women witness Joe’s tendency toward casual and calculated acts of violence. Depending on how much money you owe, he can dislocate your thumb or break it. He’s always in control. This is evident when he encounters a couple of hoods looking for Paula. They stumble away from his front door, leaving trails of blood. Donna sees it from next door and runs over to ask why he flew into a rage. His answer: “That’s not rage, Donna. That’s practice.” But as his dementia progresses, Joe experiences bouts of uncontrolled rage. It gives the story a chilling edge because he no longer has guardrails. His well-honed penchant for violence is now out of control. Why do those who suffer from dementia experience bouts of rage, aggression and anger? According to the Alzheimer’s Association, several factors can come into play. A busy or loud environment can result in the person being overstimulated. Some patients function better at certain parts of the day. The caregiver might ask too many questions or give unclear instructions, resulting in frustration. Early in the story, Joe is researching Paula’s background online, trying to determine if he can trust her. It is late at night and he’s tired. When Donna sees lights on at his house, she walks into his backyard. (Not the best idea, to be fair.) A sleep-deprived Joe sees her and thinks he’s back in Maxie’s bar, working the door as a bouncer, and this strange woman is trying to get past him. He greets her with a loaded gun. Donna, aware of Joe’s diagnosis, carefully talks him down. In the second instance, Joe has just discovered an old girlfriend has betrayed him. He’s driving with Paula in the passenger seat. By this time, he and Paula have become friends. They have an odd rapport, this young woman and old man. She begins teasing him about the old girlfriend, unaware that it’s a sore spot. Joe suddenly lashes out with a closed fist, bloodying her nose. It’s a minor injury, but in some ways scarier than beating up those two hoods at the front door. But dementia isn’t just about rage and aggression. It lights a fuse of uncertain length. At what point does Joe end up in a nursing home, or worse? He doesn’t know. He wants vengeance against Maxie before that happens. Then again, is revenge his highest goal? Joe sees something of himself in Paula, a tough young woman whose fortunes are at a crossroads. He becomes reflective about his life. He considers the choices he’s made (almost all bad) and knows he has left a trail of pain, fear and broken bones. Perhaps his final act can be setting Paula on a new path, not simply protecting her until he’s no longer able. The narrative turns on this concept and leads to a more productive conclusion. Violent, but still productive. When my dad’s diagnosis was confirmed, I began asking him about his earlier life, filling in gaps he seldom talked about his war service, how he met my mom, his early days as a railroad engineer and his heady days playing baseball. Those moments meant a lot. Joe shares similar moments with Paula once their friendship matures, and it seems equally satisfying. I was so pleased when author Rob Hart reviewed this book and commented that it is “the kind of noir I love: smart, tight, and just the right amount of gritty before giving way to the depths of human connection.” For crime writers, something as devastating as dementia allows you to dig deeper into a character. It’s painful and scary, but it is also rewarding. *** View the full article

Two old friends currently visiting, one from London and the other from Berlin, are making serious inroads into my chicken coop for the soft-boiled eggs they now consume each morning. They cannot get over their surprise at the deep yellow colour, or the variety of size and shapes that my hens, of various breeds, deliver. Most of all, they are surprised when I tell them they are eating second-hand leftovers because when it comes to the diet of free chickens in the French countryside, anything goes. All plums, pears and apples that get bruised, when they fall to the ground before I can pick them, go to the chickens. And so do all potato peelings, onion skins, tops and tails of carrots, cucumber skins, melon rinds and seeds, fat trimmings off the ham, barbecued ribs with some shreds of meat still attached, cheese rinds, stalks of mushrooms, orange peel and apple cores. Stale bread is soaked first but they devour that, too. We went down the other evening to our village’s weekly night market, where about five hundred people gathered at the tables and benches in the square by the rover, with a space for dancing later, and all around the rim were the food stalls. They offered Thai food, the German pizzas called Flammkuechen, Caribbean food from Guadeloupe, Indian vegetarian curries, flame-grilled hamburgers, ice creams, apple tarts, dozens of different cheeses – and all the classic French country food. This includes roast beef, lamb, pork and duck, fresh-grilled fish and prawns along with flash-fried foie gras, pommes frites, huge tomato and cucumber salads. What my friends had not expected was that, once we had eaten, I pulled out the two large heavy-duty plastic bags that I keep for these occasions and went along all the rows of benches looking for leftovers. I asked politely for any déchets, or rubbish, explaining that it was ‘pour mes poules.’ Among the French this causes little surprise but the Dutch and British and German tourists are usually startled by this request. But they soon enter into the spirit of the thing and start loading the bread crusts, cold french fries, remnants of salads and churros and melted ice creams and everything imaginable that is edible into the sacks. When the evening is over, I empty the heavier of the two bags into the main chicken coop where the mature females live with their cockerel, Macron, named for the French President. (The last cock was called Sarko, for President Sarkozy, and he came with four wives. The pretty one was named for his wife, Carla Bruni. The second one was the bully, always the first to eat, so we called her Margaret Thatcher. The third never stopped clucking, so she became Hillary Clinton and the fourth laid the most eggs so she became Angela Merkel.) The second bag is emptied into the smaller coop, that is at once the maternity ward, nursery and kindergarten for the new newborn and young chickens who will eventually be moved into the big girls’ coop. It is also home to two motherly old hens and a couple of pheasants who found their way in by accident. But that’s another story. By the time we wake up in the morning, the heaped piles of leftovers have all gone but the hens and chickens still want their morning feed of cracked maize. And in return they leave the finest eggs we have ever tasted, white and brown, speckled and uniform, round or oval in shape, but each with the glorious sunshine-golden yolk that feels like the richest food of all. *** View the full article

When I sat down to write a murder mystery set in Harlem, from my desk in London, I somehow felt a familiarity with this neighbourhood across the Atlantic. I’ve visited Harlem in person before, but most often I’ve travelled there through the pages of some of my favourite novels. There’s a rich history to Harlem that is explored through the vision of great authors. It also strikes me that many of the social issues that are discussed in these novels are still with us, even when they were originally written eighty or ninety years ago. These are some of my favourite books that capture the essence of Harlem and combine it with compelling stories and vivid characters that will stay with you long after you close the cover. Jazz – Toni Morrison Jazz has one of literature’s most memorable openings. After Joe, a fifty something year old salesman, shoots dead his teenage lover, his wife Violet goes to the funeral ready to cut her dead rival’s face. It begins with the aftermath of this crime, but the novel is wide-ranging. From how Joe and Violet came to New York, through his affair and the events that led him to murder, Morrison shows the history of Jazz Age Harlem through these vividly realised characters. Harlem Shuffle – Colson Whitehead Ray Carney is a family man and, as far as most people know, a hard-working furniture salesman. If he occasionally strays into petty criminality, it’s only to relieve the pressure of keeping his family in the style they’re accustomed to. His disapproving in-laws, who make it clear he will never be good enough for their daughter, don’t help matters. Harlem Shuffle, set in the 1960s, and its recent sequel Crook Manifesto, set in the early 1970s, follow Ray’s struggle to keep the two parts of his life separate, stay alive and out of jail, and maintain the lifestyle that his wife deserves. If Beale Street Could Talk – James Baldwin Tish is nineteen years old and pregnant. Her fiancé, Fonny, is in jail, wrongly accused of rape. This is a love story more than anything else, telling the story of how Tish and Fonny got together. It still feels different to read novels so focused on Black families and love. Although the central events deal with the fallout of Fonny’s altercation with a cop, ending up in him being framed for the rape of a local woman, there’s a lot of optimism too. The families of the couple are supportive, even though they don’t always get along (which adds a touch of comic relief). What strikes me most strongly about this book is that it was written and is set in the early 1970s and yet it feels as though it could have been written today. Not much has changed. Dead Dead Girls – Nekesa Afia The first in the Harlem Renaissance Mystery series, Afia’s heroine is Louise Lloyd, a former kidnapping victim who became famous for rescuing several other girls who’d all been taken by the same man. Ten years later, Louise is partially estranged from her strict father, working days in a Harlem café and spending her nights dancing and drinking in an infamous speakeasy with her friends. When a girl turns up dead, left in the doorway of the café where Louise works, she realises that the past might have caught up with her… This is a fun read, evocative of 1920s Harlem with its speakeasies and colourful characters. Louise Lloyd is a girl who doesn’t stick to the rules but still feels of her time. Down These Mean Streets – Piri Thomas Originally published in 1967, Thomas’s memoir brings the Spanish Harlem of the 1940s and 50s to life. Thomas was the son of Cuban and Puerto Rican parents but his darker skin, in comparison to that of his siblings, often led to him being seen as Black. Struggling to fit in with his family after they move to Long Island, a place where Piri alone stuck out, he took the decision to ditch school and move back to Harlem where the need for quick money led him into a life of petty crime and eventually to jail. There’s a fascinating look into racial politics of that time, especially in discussions between Piri and his Black friends. Like so many memoirs focused on young men, there is a light heartedness to the book, even when portraying hard times. There are some outdated views, especially in attitudes towards women, but as a coming-of-age tale, Thomas’s story is fascinating. The Conjure-Man Dies – Rudolph Fisher Touted as the first detective novel written by an African American author and featuring an all-Black cast of characters. His detecting duo are Perry Dart, one of Harlem’s ten Black detectives, and Dr John Archer. When N’Gana Frimbo, a conjure-man, or psychic, is found dead in his consulting room, Dart is brought in to investigate. With a waiting room of Frimbo’s clients who were all apparently present and yet saw nothing, Dart has to rely on Dr Archer’s medical expertise and early forensic techniques to work out what on earth happened. Rudolph Fisher was a physician and radiologist as well as a writer, and his knowledge of this field adds an interesting layer to a deviously plotted tale. The Street – Ann Petry Petry’s 1946 novel was the first by an African American woman to sell over a million copies and for good reason. Lutie Johnson is a single mother after leaving her cheating husband. Settling in Harlem, in a tenement building that she hates but that is all she can afford, Lutie sets out to build a new life for herself and her eight-year-old son. Part social commentary, Petry’s novel takes up many of the elements you’d expect from a crime novel: the creepy building superintendent who lusts after Lutie; the predatory bandleader who has his own plans for her. By delving into their lives in more detail, Petry stops these characters from becoming the usual stereotypes. This is a rich novel full of life but there’s an irresistible tension that arises as the inevitable tragedy unfolds on the page. *** –Featured image: Harlem Tenement in Summer, 1935 (via NYPL / Unsplash) View the full article

Coming of age in the 1970s I was an aficionado of all things visual: from comic books on newsstand racks to paintings on museum walls to paperback covers on the shelves of my favorite bookstores. Gazing at the beautifully painted covers in the science fiction and fantasy sections, it wasn’t long before I became a fan of various cover artists including Frank Frazetta, Leo & Diane Dillon, Jeff Jones and numerous others. Though considered commercial art, many of the illustrators were as visionary as Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dalí, and deserved to be taken seriously. Decades later I stumbled across the wonderful site 70s Sci-Fi Art, a Tumblr curated by writer Adam Rowe that transported me back to those years of discovering brave new illustration styles. After years of spreading the images through his site and social media, Rowe has recently compiled the innovative book Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 70s (Abrams Books). In addition to the full-color reproductions, Rowe’s book contains interviews, critical evaluations and an introduction by legendary science fiction artist Vincent Di Fate. For fans of the genre, this tome offers the perfect yesteryear view of a speculative tomorrow. Michael Gonzales: Although I’ve been a fan of science fiction art since I was teenager in the 1970s, I learned so much from your book. What was it about that era of science fiction and fantasy art that originally reeled you in? Adam Rowe: There’s just something impossible to put my finger on about the art styles and subject matters that were popular at the time. The art always uses analog materials, but often feels sharp and sleek thanks to tools like airbrushes. And the imagination behind the subject matter is so refreshing: So many modern mainstream science fiction visuals in film or TV center on dull, militarized spaceships, as opposed to wild concepts like cities in bubbles or a crowd of humanoid cat aliens. Plus, I’m a sucker for the bold color choices that defined sci-fi covers during this period. I just saw a Paul Lehr illustration of an orange planet with a purple ring yesterday and was simply in awe. What were a few of your challenges in assembling this book? Were you able to reproduce from original paintings? Any artists who fell through the cracks? In a lot of cases, the artists or their families were able to provide large, high quality scans of the original artworks. More than a few times, I was able to find original scans from Heritage Auctions, an auction house that uploads very nice scans of every artwork they auction off. Quite a few times I had to make do with book cover scans themselves, although I was able to pay a graphic designer to edit others. Though you highlight the major sci-fi/fantasy magazines that featured these paintings, you also featured the little-known zine Galileo. I loved that publication; the first issue I bought was the one with the Jeffrey Catherine Jones wraparound painting. How did you discover it? I had seen its covers on the internet for years, but once I tried learning a little more about it, I really thought Galileo had a better story behind it than the more well-known magazines like Analog or Asimov’s. It rose to prominence, bought out another well-known magazine Galaxy, and then overextended itself and folded, all within a handful of years in the late ‘70s. I wanted to explore what the world of science fiction magazines was like in the 1970s, and all the drama inherent to that rise and fall made Galileo the most intriguing entry point. One artist I loved growing-up, but never knew his name until reading your book, was Dean Ellis. His burning city cover for Samuel R. Delany’s masterwork Dhalgren was one of the most iconic of that era. What artists did you discover while on this journey that you included in the book? I had already been collecting art from almost all the artists on my Tumblr blog since 2013, but in the process of writing this, I developed a deeper appreciation for many artists. John Schoenherr is a big one; His eye for composition and naturalism is just stunning, so there’s a lot to absorb on any of his covers. Getting to see hi-res scans of many artists brings out a lot of detail that can be harder to notice online, too: I remember really enjoying the tiny details that Angus McKie includes in his artworks. He loves to throw in whimsical plants and animals on an alien planet or random numbers and symbols on a space station. Click to view slideshow. Tell me about your relationship with Vincent Di Fate, a legendary artist who also wrote the book’s introduction. What was your pitch to get him involved? Did he give you any advice about putting the book together? Fairly quickly after deciding to write a pitch for this book, I realized there was a great art collection that already covered a lot of the same ground: Di Fate’s Infinite Worlds, 1997. It covers over a century of science fiction art, so it’s not the exact subject as mine, but I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed my collection. I also talked to Grady Hendrix, an author who co-wrote the 70s and 80s horror fiction celebration Paperbacks From Hell in 2017 (a big inspiration for the format and tone of Worlds Beyond Time). Hendrix told me that talking to Di Fate had helped him understand the publishing industry better, and recommended I talk to him for my book. I interviewed Di Fate a few times while writing the book, and his knowledge of science fiction art history was immensely helpful – I learned a lot. He told me about one of the most interesting shifts in ‘70s science fiction cover art history, the fact that cover art trends shifted away from surrealism and towards representational art in 1971, when two influential editors led the charge: Donald A. Wollheim left Ace Books to start DAW Books in 1971, the same year Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey started the Del Rey imprint within Ballantine. So, when I was looking for someone to write the foreword, Di Fate was my first choice. I’m thankful he agreed! Growing-up I was a big fan of writer Harlan Ellison, who for most of that decade used Leo and Diane Dillon to illustrate his covers; did other writers have similar relationships with their cover artists? Were writers able to choose who visualized their work? It varied a lot, but well-known authors definitely were able to at least recommend the artists they preferred. Frank Herbert loved John Shoenherr’s work for Dune and would work with him whenever possible, for instance. I believe publishers were the orchestrators for the more well known author-artist team-ups. This is because using the same artist for the same author establishes a visual continuity that helps the audience know what to expect. A few that come to mind are the Dean Ellis covers of Ray Bradbury titles for Bantam Books in the 1960s, and Frank Frazetta’s 1967 reprint covers for the Robert E. Howard’s Conan series (the latter of which helped to launch fantasy as a paperback genre). Within the world of illustration science fiction covers paid the least, but many of the artists worked in the genre for decades. What do you think were their motivations? Love of the game! Frank R Paul is an influential pulp artist who worked from the 1920s to the 1960s, but worked his day job in architectural design the whole time. It’s pretty clear he just loved the imaginative genre. And many of these artists are big science fiction fans, showing up at conventions and doing fan art in their spare time. Incidentally, I don’t think the prices have improved much over the years, and opportunities may have dried up. Paul has said that he wasn’t paid much in “the early days,” just $50 for a cover, but if you adjust that for inflation, it’s about $800, which is the highest that DC or Marvel tend to pay for a cover (at least according to a 2017 survey). We can clearly see the changes in art styles from the 1950s to the 1970s, but have there been any drastic leaps since then? Is new millennium art that much different from 40 years ago? I think the biggest change since the push for representational art in 1971 was the steady adaptation of digital tools over the 1990s. Book covers are ultimately about marketing, and so they have to stay fresh. Once digital art was the new way to do things, the industry started to shift away from the science fiction art styles that had defined the 1970s and 1980s. The publishing industry began consolidating around that decade as well, and so they I really enjoyed the “Star Wars Before Star Wars” section, because it showed how much George Lucas, and filmmakers in general, were inspired by these artists. What were some of your other art to film (or television) swipes you discovered? Marvel has leaned into the 70s sci-fi aesthetic for their cosmic space movies. Thor: Ragnarok even had actual Jack Kirby art as wallpaper in some scenes, along with very Chris Foss looking spaceship designs, and Foss was hired to work on Guardians of the Galaxy as well. And the new Dune movies have more than a few shots that seem inspired by John Schoenherr’s illustrations, although I have not confirmed that. Probably the biggest influence is in video games – many of the imaginative artists today who would have done covers in the 70s are concept artists for video games. Are there any other art book subjects you’d like to tackle? Definitely! There are plenty of individual artists who deserve their own collections – Paul Lehr, John Schoenherr, and Dean Ellis are all on that list. But I also love plenty of related-but-different art eras. The ’60s pulp art of men’s adventure magazines is full of Nazis and sharks getting punched in their faces; the retro computer art of the ’80s and ’90s had an odd fascination with fantasy tropes. And I’m continuing to document plenty of 70s sci-fi art history on my email newsletter, so I might have the material I need to do a second volume of Worlds Behind Time if the opportunity ever opens up. –Featured image: from Ron Miller’s cover art for Galileo Magazine January 1978 View the full article

Teens on vacation with their big, messy families. Teens on vacation without their families. What could go wrong? In two words, a lot. “An idyllic vacation takes a dark and deadly turn” is one of my favorite thriller sub-genres, and this longstanding literary tradition has made its mark in YA over the past few years. The genre is all about escape: the vacation itself, and the thrilling story that unfolds from a picture-perfect beginning. The vast majority of teens never take the kind of luxe or parent-free vacation imagined in these thrillers. I was lucky to take several memorable family trips as a teen, but we were not a posh resort or private island family, and I was definitely never allowed to go it alone with friends, perhaps with good reason judging by the fates of these characters! But I fantasized about lavish escapes, and about the adult luxury of traveling with friends, and these thrillers deliver on those promises. They also deliver the thrills, perhaps making us grateful for our boring family car trips and endless afternoons by the pool with screaming cousins and spotty Wi-Fi. My fifth YA thriller, The Reunion, follows four teens during a weeklong family reunion at a fancy resort in Cancún, Mexico. The cabanas are luxurious, the ocean views are sparkling, the food and (non-alcoholic) drinks are limitless. But when dark family secrets bubble to the surface, tensions flare, and someone isn’t going to make it home from this vacation alive. If you’re longing to escape into a book where an initially alluring getaway veers drastically sideways, here are five more YA thrillers to keep you company by the pool (or to enjoy on the safety of your staycation): Dangerous Girls by Abigail Haas This was my first foray into the deadly vacation sub-genre, and it remains one of my favorite YA thrillers of all time. With shades of the Natalee Holloway disappearance and Meredith Kercher murder, this ripped-from-the-headlines thriller takes place on a very boozy spring break trip to sunny Aruba. Vacation vibes are cut short for Anna and her friends when a member of their group is found brutally murdered—and all eyes are on Anna. With Malice by Eileen Cook Another true-crime-inspired thriller sparked by the Meredith Kercher case, With Malice opens with the abrupt conclusion to Jill’s senior trip to Italy—a fatal accident that left a close friend dead and Jill seriously injured. Battling amnesia and trying to regain her thin grip on reality, Jill finds herself in the hands of a lawyer and a PR team, far from the once-in-a-lifetime Italian adventure she began six weeks ago, and smack in the center of a murder investigation. Family of Liars by e. lockhart This prequel to modern classic We Were Liars goes back in time to the Beechwood Island of 1987—another summer, another deadly mystery. This time, we follow Carrie Lennox Taft Sinclair through her seventeenth summer vacationing with her large, wealthy, and broken family on their private island off Martha’s Vineyard. As the summer unfolds, confidences are betrayed, mistakes are made, and the truth about the very dark past kept tightly under lock and key by this earlier generation of Sinclairs comes to light. Summer’s Edge by Dana Mele A summer at the lake house isn’t the same without Emily, who died there one year ago. Now the house has been rebuilt—to a T—and Emily’s friends have returned to honor her memory. But the house—a mansion, really, on the Adirondack’s Lake George—is haunted by Emily’s memory, or perhaps simply haunted. And as the reunion plays out, it becomes clear that the house is unsettled, and someone wants revenge. That Weekend by Kara Thomas A prom weekend getaway with her best friends goes horribly wrong for Claire, who wakes up covered in blood and stranded on a hiking trail on Bobcat Mountain in New York’s Catskills. She began the trip on Friday with her two best friends—ditching prom, and the cover trip to Fire Island, to go on a secret adventure—but now they’re gone, and Claire is alone and very confused. Claire’s memory slowly returns, and with it, the dark truth. *** View the full article

Feeling an itch to cool down in the (literally) lower temperatures of yesteryear? Look no further than the list below, featuring 9 upcoming works of historical fiction, each speaking to the anxieties of the present through the lens of the past. Notably present on the list below are quite a few lovable con artists and criminals (because this is a crime fiction site) but also because crime has always been the dark mirror of capitalism, and we are living in a new era of unfettered accumulation in which the con artist is king, and the sucker is merely to be pitied. We especially saw this in last year’s biggest historical novel, Trust, and the books below should please any fans of that magnum opus. Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Square of Sevens (Atria, September 5) Setting: Bath and London, 1730s and 40s 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 of 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. Katherine Howe, A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself (Henry Holt, November 21) 18th Century Caribbean I’m going to be very honest—you had me at “pyrates,” Katherine Howe. But the book gets even better than that. It’s the story of Marian Beresford, a professor in the 1930s who comes across an account of a young woman living in eighteenth century Boston who disguises herself as a boy and joins a pirate crew, in hopes to track down a treasure in the Caribbean. But as she comes to identify with the woman—Hannah—she also suspects that she might have been hiding something. Shiver. Me. Timbers. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Associate Editor Elizabeth Crook, The Madstone (Little, Brown, November 7) Setting: Texas, 1868 Elizabeth Crook is already a household name in Texas, but The Madstone should establish her as a national figure, evoking the works of Charles Portis and Larry McMurtry as we go on a harrowing (and sometimes humorous) ride through 1868 Texas. The Madstone follows a young German Texan (the German settlers in Texas were staunchly pro-Union) as he travels across Texas trying to shepherd a woman and her young child to safety, and find his own way to maturity and understanding the world around him. Anbara Salam, Hazardous Spirits (Tin House, October 17) Setting: England, 1920s This charming, evocative, and very well-researched book about Evelyn Hazard, a young woman in 1920s Edinburgh whose husband claims he can communicate with the dead, and the madness that ensues from their getting sucked into the wildly eccentric Spiritualist movement. Unsure if her husband is a fraud or if the entire metaphysical world she has come to know is a lie, Evelyn must guard herself and her life, especially after things begin to unravel and secrets come to light. If you need me, I will be reading this in bed with a flashlight. –OR Aden Polydoros, Wrath Becomes Her (Inkyard, October 10) Setting: Poland, 1940s In this gorgeously written, brutally powerful take on the Golem legend, a teenage girl is killed in the Holocaust and brought back by her father as a clay creature, seeking vengeance. Her violence is effective, but soon channeled for more than vengeance, and she must take a stand against those who would exploit her for evil. Lev AC Rosen, The Bell in the Fog (Forge, October 10) 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. Amanda Peters, The Berry Pickers (Catapult, October 31) Maine and Massachusetts, 1960s-2010s 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. Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women (S&S/MarySue Rucci) Setting: Florida Panhandle, 1970s Jessica Knoll is a careful writer, and this, her third novel, is a perfect match for her cold dissection of social mores and her fierce rage at misogyny. Knoll takes on the story of Ted Bundy, told from the perspective of a student who survives a horrific attack on a sorority house. She then must fight to preserve her sisters’ dignity and get the truths of their last moments as the world around them fetishizes their killer and attempts to make jokes of their deaths. Some may claim that the crime genre is rift with misogyny; those people have not read Jessica Knoll. She tears apart the restrictive world of women’s roles and lays bare the purpose of such hobbles: to keep women from making a scene, to keep them from seeking justice, and most of all, to keep them from seeking their own lives. Lee Matthew Goldberg, The Great Gimmelmans (Level Best Books, November 14) Setting: 1980s Eastern Seaboard (and then some California) Sometimes, desperation can unveil new skills—at least, that’s what happens to the Gimmelman family after they lose their money in the Crash of 87 and find themselves surprisingly good at recouping their finances in a rather risky way. Specifically, robbing banks. Lee Matthew Goldberg has crafted an uproarious send-off of American capitalism in its greediest decade, and created a lovable bunch of outlaws to boot. View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Angie Kim, Happiness Falls (Hogarth) “Brilliant . . . amazing . . . the claim that a book will change your life often seems like exaggeration. Here the potential is real.” –Kirkus Reviews Louise Hare, Harlem After Midnight (Berkley) “An elegant, clever murder mystery. This is evocative historical crime fiction at its best with an intelligent, classy voice. Utterly fabulous!” –Victoria Dowd Alice Feeney, Good Bad Girl (Flatiron) “This well-written, fast-paced novel is full of Feeney’s trademark twists and turns. Fans of the author and those who enjoy psychological thrillers will want to check it out.” –Library Journal Martin Walker, A Chateau Under Siege (Knopf) “Lovers of clever mysteries, social and political history, stunning scenery, excellent cuisine, and the very best of French wines, have enjoyed sharing the past fifteen years with the smart, likeable Bruno in Walker’s exceptionally entertaining novels.” –Lancashire Post Leonie Swann (transl. Amy Bojang), The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp (Soho) “‘The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp,’ translated from the German by Amy Bojang, operates in its own skewed universe. Fans of the ‘Thursday Murder Club’ books will find much to like here.” –Sarah Weinman, The New York Times Carl Shuker, A Mistake (Counterpoint) We are reminded of why we turn to narrative in the first place—our need to know what happened and our very human, if misguided, compulsion to fashion the messiness into a discernible, knowable story.” –Maggie Trapp, The Washington Post Lucy Clarke, The Hike (Putnam) “The strengths of the novel lie in the knife-sharp tension of the first half as well as the beautifully nuanced friendship of the four main characters. While there is danger and tragedy aplenty, hope and loyalty also abound.” –Kirkus Reviews Daniel Hecht, The Body Below (Blackstone) “A soulful, improbable, and ultimately cathartic plunge into the depths.” –Kirkus Reviews Karin Smirnoff (transl. Sarah Death), The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons (Knopf) “Propulsive . . . Smirnoff adds new maturity and depth to the two leads, offers several jaw-dropping plot twists . . . Fans will find it a worthy addition to the series.” –Publishers Weekly Michael Melgaard, Not That Kind of Place (House of Anansi) “Not That Kind of Place utterly captivates … David’s journey to understanding is low-key, almost laconic, but this approach only adds power to the narrative, leaving it to the reader to carry the weight of his new understanding. It’s a brilliant approach and a brilliant novel.” –Quill & Quire View the full article

The first book I ever got lost in was Sebastian Lybeck’s “Latte and the Magical Waterstone”, a rather obscure Finnish children’s classic. I had borrowed it from the school library, carried it around proudly in my little leather satchel for most of the day, and once I had returned home, promptly disappeared into it all afternoon. When I finally remerged, something in me had changed. I felt happy and bereft at the same time, full of clarity but also a bit dazed. It was my first true reading adventure, and it made me understand what a wondrous thing a story can be. The hero of the book was a hedgehog, brave and bristly, upright and determined in his quest to reclaim the mysterious waterstone and save the forest from drought. Being a hedgehog was fun. The book had a lot of things I still love in stories: mystery, suspense, friendship and adventure. The fact that the protagonist was only ten inches long and probably infested with fleas didn’t faze me in the slightest. As children, we seem to morph quite easily, flowing in and out of other minds in a natural, uncomplicated way, and consequently children’s literature is teeming with critters. However, once we grow up, the stream of literary creatures starts to dwindle. They still exist, of course, poured into metaphors, symbols, allegories and portents. Rarely do they get to be themselves. After all, writing and reading is an exclusively human business. I always felt this is a bit of a shame. For me, experiencing the world from another vantage point is at the heart of what makes reading such a compelling journey. No other medium allows you to immerse yourself in quite the same way. Squatting in someone else’s mind—if only for the length of a story—is something that fascinates me endlessly. It is exciting. It is fun. It truly broadens your horizon and makes you discover the world from a different angle. And when you are about to embark on a journey, why not make it an adventure? Why restrict yourself to the well-trodden path of human experience? I at least never lost my weakness for books with an animal angle and always felt exhilarated when I came across a good one: The classic that is “Watership Down”. Bernard Werber’s “Les Fourmis”, a mind-boggling and very clever ant extravaganza. The rather mystical mole saga “Duncton Wood”. At about the same time I discovered the nostalgic world of the Whodunnit, and Agatha Christie’s trusty mysteries quickly became firm favourites. I liked how they explore the abyss underneath the flowers and chintz, and how they pitch the human mind against a set of riddles. So simple, but so effective. In my exploration of the genre, I stumbled upon Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, mainly because it is generally described as the first example of a classic detective story. It is certainly that, featuring a brilliant investigator, his slightly awed friend and a seemingly impossible set of circumstances. It is also the first story I came across where (spoiler alert) an animal is the perpetrator. The murders that had been carried out in a locked room with freakish strength turned out to be not the deed of a human criminal but of a terrified and confused orangutan. So, if an animal could be the culprit of a murder mystery, why not make one a detective for good measure? Why not indeed? Once my interest had been piqued, I quickly found a few compelling examples of the animal murder mystery subset, and a fair number of them featured cats, most mentionable Akif Pirinçci’s “Felidae” and Rita Mae Brown’s Mrs. Murphy Mysteries. Cats are clearly the fictional animal sleuths of choice, and you can see why. They share our spaces and are part of our everyday lives, they often take a dim view of human activity, and they keep their own counsel. Did I enjoy my first animal sleuthing reads? Absolutely. I loved how they infused the mystery plot with a sense of a double reality, opening up a parallel world trodden by velvety paws and giving the familiar murder mystery genre new color and interest. Still, I could not shake the feeling that some opportunities were missed here: the sleuthing felines might have sported tails and claws, but they weren’t really animals. They had a soft spot for Mahler, worried about their figure and dabbled in genetics—all things I was fairly certain no upstanding feline would ever contemplate. In short: they were humans in disguise. To be clear: any fictional depiction of animal consciousness will by necessity be anthropomorphized, if only for the fact that it uses words and is aimed at humans. It will always be an attempt at translation, a thought experiment, inviting the readers to suspend their disbelief and push the boundaries of their imagination. But I couldn’t help feeling that those boundaries could have been pushed a little further. When I wrote my first book, the sheep murder mystery “Three Bags Full”, I knew early on what I wanted: sheep that were convincing investigators—and convincing sheep. While ruminating their shepherd’s sudden and violent departure from the pasture of the living, they should keep their ovine priorities: grass, safety and flocking together. Detective work was always going to be a side hustle. I thoroughly enjoyed writing from a sheep’s point of view (POV). Once begun it was shockingly—almost embarrassingly— intuitive. (I still have a visceral reaction when I come across a luscious green field of grass.) However, the biggest surprise for me was how well the sheep POV worked in the context of a murder mystery. For me at least the two turned out to be a natural fit. For one there was no need for trench coats and deerstalkers—my sheep heroes naturally blended into the landscape and were the most inconspicuous investigators I could possibly have wished for. But the synergies ran a lot deeper than that: the sheep might have suited the mystery story, but the mystery story also suited the sheep. Almost everybody knows how a murder mystery works. It is a dependable, utterly familiar structure, and this very familiarity allowed me to push the animal POV a little further. The frame of a crime story serves as a reference point that helps to anchor the readers once they find themselves in unchartered creature territory. It is a steadfast setting that makes the initial strangeness of an animal POV more accessible. The animal gaze also is a way of stepping back a little (or a lot), of observing human ploys and foibles from the vantage point of the ultimate outsider. And after all, isn’t this what every good detective should do? Naturally, this innocent and rather skewed gaze also offers a lot of opportunity for humor—and in my book humor is the perfect counterpoint to suspense. Comic relief—it’s a classic for a reason. I have now published six novels. Not all of them are exclusively from an animal point of view—in fact, the latest ones seem to feature a rather unnerving number of humans—but each single one of them has an animal angle. After the sheep came fleas, a parrot, a tortoise and a youthful boa constrictor. In my latest book “The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp”, Hettie, the trusty household tortoise, plays a small but pivotal role. Hettie is not only an unimpressed and acerbic observer of the elderly protagonists’ struggle to solve a murder while hiding another, she also serves as a projection screen for my plucky investigators’ hopes and dreams, and ultimately becomes a catalyst for the solution to the crime. Her stoic reptilian presence adds another facet to the human tale and encourages the reader to look at the plot—and the world—with fresh eyes. For me this lies at the core of what reading—and writing—can be: a constant invitation to discover and rediscover the world, to break through set ideas and preconceptions, and ideally tap into a sense of wonder, if only for a sentence or two. It is at this point that animal POV and murder mystery conveniently converge. They both are an invitation: Look closer. Look again. Nothing is quite as it seems. The world is not discovered yet. *** View the full article

Toulouse – aka Ville Rose – France’s fourth largest city sits on the banks of the Garonne River. On anyone’s liveability index Toulouse has to be pretty high – a nice old town, great public transport, a hi-tech centre (Airbus etc) and all in the South of France. Less than 500,000 people on the city proper, a million so in the surrounding area. A university town and a UNESCO World Heritage site. It’s also home to the Polars du Sud literary festival and a couple of specialist bookshops dealing in crime, thrillers, and graphic novels. And, naturally, there’s some local crime fiction. From the 1970s onwards, the “néopolar”, or “new crime novel” was all the rage in France and Toulouse was one of its homes. However, some of Toulouse’s best néopolar authors are not in English translation…yet. Pascal Dessaint whose 1999 thriller Du bruit sous le silence is set in the world of rugby (played enthusiastically in the area). Dessaint has won a bunch of French crime writing prizes, been translated into a number of European languages and Arabic, but not unfortunately into English. The same is true of Josiane Saint-Laurent, a Toulouse born writer who worked as a painter and medical assistant at the Toulouse University Hospital before turning to crime writing in retirement. She is the author of three detective novels, the last two of which feature Captain Lise Candel, assigned to the SRPJ’s Families Brigade in the Ville Rose. And, perhaps most maddeningly, there are yet to be English translations of the work of Christophe Guillaumot, whose La chance du perdant (2017) follows an investigation through the back streets of Toulouse. If you hadn’t already noticed this is a plea to get these three authors in translation…please. However, we do have author Bernard Minier, who grew up in south-west France, in the foothills of the Pyrenees before going to university in Toulouse. He now lives near Paris, but his character, Commandant Martin Servaz, is a Toulouse city cop. The Servaz novels did really well in France – well enough to get a lot of translations and a Netflix series named after the first book in the series, The Frozen Dead (2014). On a winter morning, in a small town nestled in the Pyrenees, a group of workers discover the headless body of a horse, hanging suspended from a frozen cliff. When DNA from one of the most notorious inmates of a nearby asylum is found on the corpse the case takes a darker turn…and then first human victim is found. Servaz returns in A Song for Drowned Souls (2015). Marsac is another quiet town in the Pyrenees (a stone’s throw from Toulouse), best known for its elite university. But when one of the professors is found drowned in her bath, it becomes clear that the tranquil surface is a lie. Commandant Servaz is assigned the case and finds it has very personal dimensions for him. Servaz returns in Don’t Turn Out the Lights (2016). Servaz is faced with his nemesis, the psychopath Julian Hirtmann and finds himself in a clinic for depressed cops. One day, he receives a key card to a hotel room in the mail; the room where an artist committed suicide a year earlier. Someone wants Servaz back on his feet and investigating. And finally, in Night (2019) – a No.1 bestseller in France – Servaz leaves his normal turf and heads to Norway to hunt Julian Hirtmann. A Scottish author who moved to France, Peter May’s The Enzo Files features, Enzo Macleod, formerly one of Scotland’s top forensic scientists, in his early fifties, half-Scottish, half-Italian. He now works as a university professor in Toulouse. The six books in the series jump around France, from Paris to the West and invariably at some point back to Toulouse. The series starts with Extraordinary People (2006) through The Critic (2007), Blacklight Blue (2008), Freezeframe (2010), to Blowback (2011). After May was picked up by Riverrun (part of Quercus) the Enzo Files were reissued and he added to more – Cast Iron (2017) and The Night Gate (2021), the latter set in the autumn of 2020 as France enters Covid lockdown. A few other Toulouse-set crime novels: Prix Goncourt-winner Pierre Lemaitre has had great success in France and in translation with the Commandant Camille Verhoeven series. In book 2, Alex (which won the UK’s Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in 2013) Verhœven is running against time to find Alex Prevost who is kidnapped, savagely beaten, and suspended from the ceiling of an abandoned warehouse in a wooden cage. Though the series is set largely in Paris, there is a subplot around the murder of a hotel owner in Toulouse. Belgian author Didier Daeninckx is not much read outside France, but when it was first published his Murder in Memoriam (1984) was a cult hit, controversial in more conservative French circles, and much discussed in European crime writing circles. The novel is set against the backdrop of a demonstration in Paris in 1961, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Algerians at the hands of the police – an event based on many similar and largely covered up demonstrations and police killings in Paris at the time. In Daeninckx’s fictional telling of this event a young French history teacher is also mysteriously killed during this demonstration. Twenty years later his son is murdered in Toulouse while on holiday with his girlfriend. To find the connection between the murders, Inspector Cadin must delve into the secret history and devastating compromises of wartime politics. A brief side trip of fifty or so miles from Toulouse to nearby Carcassone, famous for its medieval citadel, La Cité, with numerous watchtowers and double-walled fortifications and a 12th-century castle within the Cité. This is the setting Jack Duval’s The Man from Carcassonne (2020). The novel, a multiple murder tale, splits the action between Carcassone, Toulouse and Paris And finally, a classic – The Return of Martin Guerre was the smash hit European film of 1982. Directed by Daniel Vigne, starring Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye, it was based on a case of imposture in 16th century France. Martin Guerre leaves his young wife in a small French village to go fight in a war, and to travel. Eight or nine years later, in 1560, Martin returns, initially acknowledged by his wife, family, and friends because he knows the intimate details of his former life. But others doubt his true identity. No spoilers but the trial was in Toulouse, the climactic height of the movie. The book inspired a study by a Princeton historian of early modern France, Natalie Zemon Davis, who also advised on the film and helped with the screenplay. Her book, The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) was translated into 22 languages and is still an incredible tale. So, as you can see, Toulouse has got some history – in fact when you include Carcassonne and the Pyrenees this is a beautiful and almost overwhelmingly historic area of France….and it’s got its fair share of crime novels too. View the full article

Second life is a term many shooting survivors use to illustrate the ripple effects or the aftermath of gun violence. This means there is no going back. The life that existed prior to trauma fades as a new one slowly emerges, unfolding with each new day. Hearing their stories of healing, forgiveness, and resilience gave me hope that one day I’d be free from my own trauma, and my body might someday learn to live beyond fear, anger, and distress. My empathy connected me to survivors on a deeper level. During interviews, I quickly learned the most intimate details of their lives, shortly after learning their names. The subject of our conversations immediately took me from stranger to secret keeper and often elevated the relationship to something that felt more like friendship. But as my desire to know more about their grief deepened, so did theirs. When I began working with Joe Samaha, whose daughter, Reema, was murdered at Virginia Tech in 2007, I was pregnant with my own daughter, Lily, the first for me and my husband. As Joe and I spoke, I became flooded by guilt. His daughter’s life had ended, and my daughter’s life was about to begin. Joe spoke of Reema as if she were still alive. You are a beautiful dancer, he would pause to tell her. And other whispers like This is not the end of our journey. It’s just the beginning. Married to his wife, Mona, in 1982, the couple had three children: Omar, Randa, and Reema. Since the Virginia Tech tragedy, Joe and Mona have established scholarships and funds, including the Angel Fund, in memory of Reema. She’s always been my angel, he says. My father and I had been falling away from each other for years. When I was a little girl, he’d watch me and my sister while my mom worked nights in Passaic. He used to make us popcorn and I’d love watching him pour the kernels into the hot stockpot wide-eyed as the popped corn overflowed onto the stove. He was creative too, making stair sleds as he called them (a sheet of wax paper taped underneath a bath towel). He’d send me down, the carpet slick from wax and I’d scream and giggle, looking back as he cheered me on. As Joe and I spoke, I became flooded by guilt. His daughter’s life had ended, and my daughter’s life was about to begin. Though, most days I hid from him, fearing I’d push one of his many buttons. Everything had to be in its place, even me. I couldn’t talk to him because I was afraid of saying something wrong. Anything could be a trigger: chipped paint on the wall, an unexpected bill, a towel not folded correctly. When I was seven years old, he blamed me for a leak in the ceiling. He asked Were you so fat that you needed to move the showerhead to wash yourself down after I said not to! As a punishment, he kept me in my room for three days, sliding me meals under the door like I was a prisoner. One night I met him on my way to the bathroom. We stood nose to nose, the vein in his neck pulsed, his breath was hot and his face unshaved. “I am a mongoose, and you are a snake,” he said. I didn’t know then that better fathers existed, I only knew the kind of father I had. Two days before Reema’s death in 2007, Joe told me she performed for the Contemporary Dance Ensemble at Virginia Tech. “She was beautiful,” he told me, “Inside and out.” A few hours after our interview, Joe emailed me photos of Reema. I sobbed as I studied them. In one image, Reema is dancing. She floats out of the blackness, Joe’s angel in a white skater dress, her long arms, and legs spread out like wings over the glossy stage. And in another, a family vacation photo, she stands with her brother, sister, and her parents. In this one, her long brown wavy hair drapes over her shoulders. She’s wearing a jean skirt paired with a white graphic t-shirt. She looks happy. So does Joe. They are smiling as bright as a rainbow, arms around each other’s waists. They look like they’ve never had a fight. My therapist cautioned me before I took on this project, saying, “the intersection of grief between you and your subjects is inevitable. You will be open to each other’s suffering.” I was prepared for second-hand suffering, but I wasn’t expecting longing. At 39, I desired the kind of fatherly love I’d never had, the kind of love Joe could no longer show his daughter. Joe once asked how I got into this kind of work. His soft, tender voice made me feel less nervous, open, even trusting. He seemed like the kind of father Reema could have told anything to. “I started having more interest in trauma after I was raped at 22.” There was once a time when I couldn’t say rape without a heaving heart and sweaty palms, but now I find comfort in its truth. It wasn’t until years after my rape that I realized I made it. I’m still here. And I wasn’t going to be silent. I was going to talk about what happened to me. I was going to share my story even if no one cared to listen. I was remaking my place in the world, retaliating against the boundary my suffering had imposed on me. Both of us breathed a heavy sigh. “Did you tell your parents?” Joe asked. My anxiety started to rise so I went quiet. This was something I learned as a little girl. It was better to be silent than worry about saying the wrong thing. Before my rape, I was just a normal girl in my twenties living up those wild nights in New York City. Leaving my apartment in Montclair, New Jersey to catch the 11 pm train so I could headbang to the live bands at Otto’s Shrunken Head and take the L train across town to Brooklyn to meet up with friends. I’d travel back to Montclair alone in the very early hours of the morning. I felt untouchable. Nothing like this could ever happen to me. But after my rape, I was scared hopeless, my mind filled with suicidal ideations. I never told my father I was raped. “I only told my mother and my sister.” “Why not your father?” he inquired. I believed my father would blame me for what happened, it was what he’d always done. “I think you should tell him,” Joe said. “Even if it hurts.” I stayed awake many nights thinking of those pictures of Joe and Reema, wishing I could share that kind of smile with my father, wondering if it was possible to learn to love him while he was still alive. There are many fathers willing to shoulder the weight of a daughter’s pain. Once I knew this, I craved it. I thought about Joe, about Reema, about my father, imagining a quiet conversation about our pain, a coming together of our most heinous memories. I realized this whole time I’d been wanting a father I can’t have. That my father is not Joe. He would never be. And that’s OK. Now I know those kinds of fathers abound in unexpected places. They are vivid like a dream, come out of nowhere like remembering a word once forgotten. There is no one father, but many, a community of them here, ready, and willing to listen to a daughter’s secret pain. My father and I recently spoke for the first time in seven months. I didn’t tell him about the acts of violence against me. I didn’t share my rage and anger about the abuse I endured as a child. Instead, we planned a visit. Will you bring Lily, he messaged me, hoping to meet his granddaughter. Even though I wanted to keep her from him, protect her from his mistakes. She has a right to know her grandfather. I wrote back, I will. This is what Joe did for me. He returned my hope. I’m not sure what the future will bring for my father and me, or for that matter, what it will bring for my own daughter. Maybe my father will be a better man to Lily than he was to me. Or maybe her own father will be enough. We can never go back to what we were: the mongoose and the snake. But my father and I have the chance to be a family despite the weight of our shared trauma. And it’s in this exchange of hope that makes what we lost, found. Even if it’s a future unknown, a life second to the one I’ve lived. I have to take that chance. View the full article

Agatha Miller was born on September 15, 1890, in Torquay, England. By her own account, she “had a very happy childhood.” By 18, she had written her first short story and begun work on Snow upon the Desert, her first novel. She never sold it, but she never stopped writing. At age 24, she met and married Archibald Christie, a British military officer. During the Great War, he fought overseas, and she worked in the Torquay Red Cross Hospital, first as a nurse and later as a dispenser in the pharmacy. Here, she formed a lifelong fascination with poisons, which guided her through many murders over the next 60 years. A fan of detective novels—which had begun in 1841 with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe, featuring French detective Auguste Dupin—and of Arthur Conan Doyle’s subsequent Sherlock Holmes stories, Christie wrote The Mysterious Affair at Styles, her first detective novel, in 1916 at age 26. Like Hercule Poirot, who appears in her first detective novel, Christie loved good food, but this collection of recipes doesn’t examine what she ate and drank herself. Rather, it examines the different ways she incorporates various meals, dishes, drinks, and ingredients into her novels. Occasionally she wields food as a weapon, but more often meals serve as plot devices. In her stories, food develops characters or invokes settings, whether familiar or foreign. Through 33 novels and more than 50 short stories, Poirot, with his sensitive but particular stomach, pursues gastronomic pleasure, regardless of the body count. You can do the same—evoking your favourite characters, scenes, or settings—by creating these dishes in your own kitchen. The food mentioned in the Christie canon always fascinated me, a lifelong devotee of detective fiction and a cooking enthusiast. I deduced—correctly, it seems—that others around the world must be as curious as I about marrows and marmalade, seedcake and lemon squash . . . and could the recipe for Mrs. MacDonald’s Salmon Cream in Aunt Ada’s desk really be made? This book looks at how Christie uses food in her novels, whether to advance plots or define characters, and examines the ingredients, the marmalades and marrows, that feature in them. After eliminating impossibly expert-level fare, I created a recipe for each novel that would prove easy enough for most home cooks and best represent the milieu of the novel. I scoured a variety of vintage cookbooks and other sources, including pestering family, friends, and neighbours for ideas and recipes, all of which I recreated and tested in my own kitchen. All the recipes obey their moments in time, following the standards of their respective eras. For Entrecôte à la Merlinville-sur-Mer (The Murder on the Links, 1923), the steak fries in lots of butter on the stovetop, but for Grilled Steak at the Golden Palm (A Caribbean Mystery, 1964), the recipe calls for marinade and an outdoor grill, each according to the place and style of its setting. I decided on dishes central to plots or characters, and most recipes are both traditionally British and local to their settings, such as Welsh Cakes for Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? or Fresh Windsor Soup, a common wartime stew featured in the postwar novel Taken at the Flood. But sometimes I’ve selected something decidedly un-British. For The Secret Adversary, I chose Pêche Melba, Tuppence Cowley’s favourite dessert, which Auguste Escoffier, chef at the Savoy in London, created in honour of Australian opera singer Nellie Melba. Greek Rice Pilaf, another non-English dish, represents the murder victim’s home country in Crooked House. Death Comes as the End takes place in ancient Egypt, and for that novel I found an ancient recipe for Tiger Nut Sweets, still made today. The Christie Estate hasn’t authorized this book, and all recipes are my own. I hope they will deepen your understanding of how Christie uses food in her books and allow you to appreciate her work in a new way. Bon appétit, mes amis. * DEVON BOILED POTATOES “I hope lunch will be satisfactory. There is cold ham and cold tongue, and I’ve boiled some potatoes.” —THOMAS ROGERS, And Then There Were None, 1939 serves 4 Christie claimed that this novel was the hardest for her to write. It became her best-selling novel and the best-selling mystery of all time, with more than 100 million copies sold. Most critics and fans consider it her masterpiece. An unknown host lures 10 strangers to an island off the coast of Devon, and the deteriorating quality of their meals heightens the tension. At first, the food and drink provide goodwill, but after two guests die, meals decline in sustenance and goodwill. (“Eight little Soldier Boys travelling in Devon; / One said he’d stay there, and then there were seven.”) By the time half of the guests have died, the survivors meet in the kitchen and eat from tins, standing up. Boiled potatoes lie exactly halfway between comfort food and bare bones. Use whole potatoes of the same size so they cook evenly. 1 pound (450 grams) small potatoes 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted ½ teaspoon sea salt 1. In a large pot over medium heat, add the potatoes and cover them with cold water by 1 inch (2.5 centimetres). 2. Add half the salt and bring to a boil. Cook, uncovered, until tender, about 8–15 minutes. If too much water boils off, add a little more. 3. After 8 minutes, poke the potatoes with a skewer. When it moves easily through the center, they’re done. 4. Drain the potatoes and place in a serving bowl. 5. Drizzle the potatoes with the melted butter, season with the remaining salt, toss gently, and serve. * LITERARY LUNCHEON MERINGUES “Mrs. Oliver arrived at the last course of the grand luncheon with a sigh of satisfaction as she toyed with the remains of the meringue on her plate. She was particularly fond of meringues and it was a delicious last course in a very delicious luncheon.” —from Elephants Can Remember, 1972 yields 24 In the chronologically final novel to feature both Poirot and Mrs. Oliver, Christie revisits her feelings about literary luncheons. Mrs. Oliver always declines invitations to them: “What a mistake for an author to emerge from her secret fastness,” said the fictitious crime writer in Mrs. McGinty’s Dead. But this time Mrs. Oliver does go, enjoying the speakers, her luncheon companion, and the food very much—especially these French meringues. 4 large eggs, room temperature 1 pinch fine salt 1 cup (200 grams) superfine (caster) sugar ½ teaspoon vanilla extract 1. Preheat the oven to 250°F (120°C). 2. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. 3. Carefully separate the egg whites from the yolks. 4. With a stand mixer fitted with a medium bowl and a whisk attachment, whisk together the egg whites and salt on medium-high speed until soft peaks form. 5. Gradually add the sugar, 1 tablespoon at a time, while continuing to whisk. Continue until all the sugar has dissolved. 6. Add in the vanilla extract and whisk on high for 3–5 more minutes, until the mixture stiffens. 7. Spoon a heaping tablespoon of the meringue mixture on the lined baking sheets. Repeat with the rest of the mixture. 8. Decrease the heat to 200°F (90°C) and bake the meringues for 1 hour 30 minutes. 9. Turn the oven off and leave the meringues inside it overnight, or at least 8 hours, to cool completely. 10. Store them in an airtight tin for up to 1 week. ________________________ Excerpted from Recipes for Murder by Karen Pierce, copyright © 2023, reprinted by permission of Countryman Press, an imprint of W. W. Norton & Co., Inc. Recipes for Murder has not been prepared, approved, or licensed by Agatha Christie Limited, RLJ Entertainment, or any individual or entity associated with Agatha Christie or her successors. View the full article

With the exception of a string of Francis Coppola films in the first half of the 1970s, it’s hard to imagine stronger, back-to-back, and couldn’t-be-more-different films than two directed by William Friedkin in 1971 and 1973, “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist.” The former is one of the seminal crime films of the gritty 1970s and the latter is one of the great prestige thrillers of all time, all the stronger for Friedkin’s willingness to not shy away from the horror and scares often unseen in big-studio releases. (Projectile vomiting has not played into many Oscar nominees.) Friedkin, who died Aug. 7 at the age of 87, had a long career, from early TV work to a handful of offbeat choices in the 1990s and 2000s. But Friedkin made a fascinating triptych of films in the decade-plus that followed “The Exorcist.” “Sorcerer,” released in 1977, “Cruising,” released in 1980 and “To Live and Die in L.A.,” from 1985, are in their own ways as strong, varied and intriguing as “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist.” They were not universally praised. “Sorcerer” was judged a bomb when it came out, in the weeks following “Star Wars,” and “Cruising” was hotly protested by both sides of the debate about depictions of homosexuality in the movies. “To Live and Die in L.A.” debuted at the box office behind “Death Wish 3,” and was panned by many critics aside from Roger Ebert. It’s safe to say, though, that the films have earned increasingly favorable reputations in the years after their release. Friedkin, reportedly a difficult man at times but one few deny was a film auteur, would have little use for praise from the likes of me and even less for the thought of posthumous laurels. Nevertheless, there’s no doubt in my mind that his career didn’t peak with his two early-1970s classics. These three later films prove that. The title worked against ‘Sorcerer’ If anything, “Sorcerer” and “Cruising” did not benefit from the marketing campaigns to sell them to moviegoers – and in “Sorcerer,” specifically, the film’s very title did a disservice to Friedkin. When “Sorcerer” opened on June 24, 1977, two big factors contributed to the reception it received: Audiences knew Friedkin for “The Exorcist” and the title of the new film carried unfortunate echoes – and unfortunate comparisons. The second hurdle for “Sorcerer” is that it debuted in theaters about a month after George Lucas’ “Star Wars.” If you were not alive and going to movies in 1977, it might be hard to imagine how “Star Wars” dominated the movie industry at that time. The science-fiction adventure made a ton of money, of course; that’s well known. But lesser known among people accustomed to the way the business operates today is that “Star Wars” and the biggest hits stayed in theaters for months, even a year. In 1980, I saw “The Empire Strikes Back” in an Indianapolis movie theater that had screened “Star Wars” for a solid year. Add to that is the fact that movie theaters themselves were still early in their metamorphosis from single-screen or double-screen theaters to multi-screen theaters. That meant that the longer a movie stuck to screens, the fewer screens were available for other films. It’s not like “Sorcerer” couldn’t get into theaters, but it unspooled on fewer screens because so many were tied up by “Star Wars” and other releases like, ironically, “Exorcist II: The Heretic,” a sequel to Friedkin’s film but not directed by Friedkin. “Sorcerer” grossed just over $12 million. That’s less than the $28 million for Disney’s “Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo,” which opened in some theaters on the same day, “Smokey and the Bandit,” released in late May to make $127 million, and “Star Wars,” which made more than $700 million in its initial release and subsequent reissues. Other movies besides “Sorcerer” sucked up all the box office like sponges. Dynamite and desperation “Sorcerer” didn’t have great commercial success and it didn’t have great critical success. Many nationally followed critics didn’t like it. Roger Ebert did, as did Vincent Canby of The New York Times. But many critics did not. “Sorcerer,” an adaptation of George’s Arnaud 1950 French novel “The Salary of Fear” – previously made into the 1953 film “The Wages of Fear” – is something of a masterpiece, but it expects viewers to meet it halfway. The first dozen or so minutes of the film, set in Mexico, Israel and France, are without English-language dialogue, something apparently so off-putting for American audiences that Universal and Paramount, the studios that teamed to release the film, urged moviegoers to please consider giving the movie a shot and advised that the bulk of the film did have English dialogue, really, honestly. The globe-hopping nature of the first several sequences no doubt left some wondering when the plot about this dangerous shipment of dynamite, under the care of “Jaws” and “French Connection” star Roy Scheider, would actually begin. The answer: The heart of the plot, the transportation of the very unstable explosives over 200 miles of rough and dangerous roads in South America, begins after about an hour. In the meantime, we get to know Scheider’s character, Jackie Scanlon, a New York City criminal who robs a Catholic church under the protection of the Mafia. The scheme goes disastrously wrong and Scanlon flees the United States for South America and, under the name Juan Dominguez, works at menial jobs in an effort to stay below the radar. Dominguez/Scanlon isn’t the only person lying low: Bruno Crèmer plays Serrano, an investment banker from Paris avoiding the law; Francisco Rabal as Nilo, an assassin from Mexico, and Amidou as Martinez, an Arab bomber. All find themselves in a small village, trying to maintain a low profile. But the four, desperate for money and a potential way out, accept a job from Corlette (the always watchable Ramon Bieri), who works for an oil company and needs drivers to deliver dynamite that will be used to blow out a remote oil well fire. The hitch: The dynamite is old and deteriorating, which means it is “sweating” nitroglycerin and explodes very easily. In two trucks, the four must transport the explosives through the jungle, over collapsing bridges, around swamps and somehow through a huge fallen tree that blocks the way. Not to mention the local bandits they must survive. Friedkin had an incredible eye for locations and performers. Scheider and the mob guys who want to kill him present a symphony of craggy faces. The gritty New York and New Jersey locales make an effective contrast with the glamorous European settings. A bride with a black eye in a church ceremony tells a story with a single shot. And the scenes set in South America drip with sweat. The scene that some moviegoers came to see, as the trucks transporting dynamite must cross an impossibly rickety rope-and-plank bridge in a torrential downpour, remains a white-knuckle experience. It’s very nearly equaled by a later hurdle, as the transporters must carefully, carefully use some of the dynamite to clear a huge fallen tree that blocks the barely-there road. The human side of the journey isn’t forgotten. Scheider exults when he’s certain his compatriots’ truck won’t get across the bridge. As he celebrates the possibility of being paid double shares for delivering his portion of the dynamite, there are real echoes of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and what greed does to people. “Sorcerer” takes its title from a name painted on one of the trucks. Also painted on a truck: a crude drawing of a devil-like demon. Maybe Friedkin was teasing moviegoers with thoughts of “The Exorcist.” Death haunts the NYC gay community in ‘Cruising’ “Taxi Driver” opened in cinemas in 1976, just four years before “Cruising,” and Friedkin’s 1980 film gives off huge Travis Bickle vibes in its opening scene, as two cops in a patrol car angrily talk about New York City and, in particular, the gay men cruising a neighborhood for partners. The cops then roust and rape two men in drag. “Cruising” feels raw and it is. Friedkin based his screenplay on Gerald Walker’s 1970 novel, but there are echoes not only of “Taxi Driver” but also the Son of Sam killings in NYC in 1976 and 1977. The city was on edge and gay men were – and always had been – targeted for violence. And keep in mind, Friedkin’s film feels prescient now because it predated by a year some of the earliest medical studies to publicly acknowledge the virus that would later be identified as HIV/AIDS. It wasn’t until August 1981, a year and a half after “Cruising” opened, that writer Larry Kramer first began calling attention to the epidemic. Friedkin’s camera itself cruises through leather bars full of Lou Reed lookalikes and other striking men, clad in jeans and chaps, kissing and more. Friedkin doesn’t show a lot of emotional detachment here, letting shots play out that no doubt gave some straight moviegoers consternation. There’s such a feeling of apprehension that any man we see could be a victim or a killer. The scenes of the killer luring men to their bloody and violent deaths in shady parks and shadier rent-by-the-hour hotels are filled with real feelings of dread. “Cruising” is a thriller and a horror movie that’s far more effective than all the “Friday the 13th” outings. Pacino’s young cop, Steve Burns, is recruited by Captain Edelson (Paul Sorvino) to go undercover and “cruise” the leather bars. Why? Because he’s the right physical type and matches the previous victims, including a college professor. Pacino plays Burns as an inexperienced officer who sees a chance to rise through the ranks to detective. But there’s something else there, too: As Burns goes deeper into the cruising scene, he finds himself becoming part of the scene. This worries him, and he tells his girlfriend, Nancy (played by Karen Allen, after “Animal House” but before “Raiders of the Lost Ark”), “There’s a lot about me you don’t know.” He later pleads with her, “Don’t let me lose you.” It’s telling – and again, predictive of HIV/AIDS – that there’s no confidence among the city’s gay community that the police will, or even want to, catch the killer. There are a couple of moments of what might be considered levity in “Cruising,” especially when police employ a huge dude wearing only a cowboy hat and jockstrap to silently enter an interrogation room and slap Burns and a suspect out of their chairs, then exit. But most of the movie is dead serious, as befitting the subject matter. Watching the movie now, “Cruising” feels not only dread-filled but instructive on police attitudes and the feelings of the city’s gay community. And oh my god, what a cast of actors in supporting roles: Don Scardino, Joe Spinell, Ed O’Neil, James Remar, William Russ, Jay Acovone and Powers Booth as the salesclerk who matter-of-factly instructs Burns on the proper choice of bandanas for his back jeans pocket. Friedkin and his casting directors ably demonstrated their eye for talent. “Cruising” is sometimes stigmatized for its very much “of the time” attitude. The next landmark film in Friedkin’s mid-career triptych finds that attitude a strong point. To live and drive against traffic in L.A. When my friends and I saw “To Live and Die in L.A.’ in theaters in 1985, we found it a riveting thriller that was slicker than any 1970s film but played some of the same gritty and downbeat noir notes. In my irreverent memory, though, one scene lives: Star William Peterson, who plays win-at-all-odds Treasury agent Richard Chance, takes informant and girlfriend Ruth Lanier (Darlanne Fluegel) to bed. Peterson is backlit in a manner that puts his anatomy right out there. My friend Brian leaned over to me in the theater and whispered, “Now there’s something you don’t see every day.” (That’s true, of course; the way movies have always put women’s bodies on display but not men’s bodies is a subject for another time, however.) But that’s “To Live and Die in L.A.” in a nutshell: Friedkin took big chances with the film, which is paced and cut like contemporary-to-the-time entertainment such as “Miami Vice” and MTV but doesn’t give an inch to leave audiences feeling good about its heroes or villains. In case you don’t have this film on a regular rewatch schedule like I do, a quick recap: Treasury agents in the Los Angeles area try to get a line on Rick Masters, an artist and master counterfeiter of American currency. Masters makes fake bills that are convincing enough that people beat a path to the door of his swanky pad to purchase it and redistribute it. Chance is particularly driven to bring down Masters, but fellow agents Vukovich (John Pankow, a good and interesting casting choice given his sitcom background) and Jimmy Hart (Michael Greene, exuding authority and “I’m close to retirement” vibes) also take chances to bust Masters. But no one takes more chances than Chance. After Masters and his pals kill an agent, Chance plays every angle to get close to the criminal. That involves squeezing everyone with a connection to Masters, including a hapless mule played by John Turturro. The movie spends a lot of time with Masters as he moves through the underground, circulating his bills to contacts (the great 1980s tough guy Steve James) and taking revenge on double-crossers. Again, Friedkin has an incredible cast, including all those mentioned as well as Debra Feuer, Dean Stockwell and Robert Downey Sr. Friedkin purportedly made “TLADILA” in the city’s bleakest and seediest locales, particularly industrial areas where the background is filled with oil tanks or barges instead of glamorous sights. The movie is one of bravura set pieces, none more famous than a car chase that rivals the one Friedkin staged in “The French Connection,” as Peterson and Pankow, who seriously eff up virtually every scheme they try, lead a chase down a freeway against the flow of traffic. But other random moments of bloody violence, especially the climactic shootout that turns the narrative upside down, linger with me going on 40 years after I first saw them. So does the soundtrack by Wang Chung. In the wake of Friedkin’s death, it’s been instructive to see snippets of interviews in which he talked about his films, including these three slightly-lesser-known films – and how could any films not be lesser known than “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist?” The director was always himself – argumentative and dismissive and wildly entertaining – and plainly proud to be remembered for so many great films. View the full article