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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

The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers. * Jamison Shea, I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me (Henry Holt) In this ballet horror novel, a young ballerina is given a chance at power after a star of the company takes her under her wing. But all power comes at a cost, and this power derives from an ancient source with its own agenda. I’m not sure what it is about dance that lends itself so well to horror—think Black Swan or Suspiria—but add this one to the list of stories that take the bloody feet and brutal precision of the dance world and turn them into visceral horror. –MO Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window (Simon and Schuster) The Lookback Window is a powerful debut with a clarity of voice and mission to be much admired. It follows the story of Dylan, the victim of sex-trafficking, now afforded an opportunity to sue the perpetrator, but first he goes on a dark journey of self-exploration. Kyle Dillon Hertz writes with tremendous fire and artistry. –DM Nigar Alam, Under the Tamarind Tree (Putnam) Alam’s debut spans decades and generations in an epic mystery emanating out of one fateful night in Karachi in 1964, following the reverberations altering so many lives. Alam handles the sprawling, ambitious material with enviable dexterity, and brings out a story that’s full of texture and humanity. –DM Ken Jaworowski, Small Town Sins (Henry Holt) In a tough Pennsylvania town on the precipice, three lives and three stories barrel toward calamity in this debut novel from Ken Jaworowski. Small Town Sins gives us a portrait of modern America in all its dark complexity, as Jaworowski brings insight and empathy to his characters’ struggles, while always maintaining the story’s strong momentum. –DM View the full article

Danya Kukafka is the nationally bestselling author of Girl in Snow and Notes on an Execution. I first met Danya a few months back at the Edgars. It was a brief, two-ships-passing-in-the-night sort of moment. Danya had just had her picture taken in front of the Poe-themed backdrop, and I was next in line. We smiled. We nodded. That was it. But then, a few hours later, Danya was up on stage, giving a supremely moving speech as she accepted the Edgar for “Best Novel.” I was already a huge fan of her sophomore book Notes on an Execution (seriously, if you haven’t read this, it’s a genre-bending, transcendent masterpiece), but that speech, the message she delivered — it made me even more curious. I wanted to know how this woman thought, how she worked, where she worked, if she’d had to sell her soul to write such inventive prose. I was not disappointed, but I was at little spooked, especially at first… Eli Cranor: The door behind you, it just swung shut. Did you see that? Danya Kukafka: Yeah, we have ghosts. This house was built in 1914. EC: There’s really nobody back there? DK: Nope. Just me and my dog. EC: A haunted house. Okay, yeah. That makes sense, but it’s not the best segue into the start of this interview. Anyway, I like to begin these things by asking how you got started writing. DK: Do you remember the show, Reading Rainbow? EC: Of course. DK: Well, I submitted a book to them when I was in third grade. I really wanted to win that contest, but I didn’t. After that, I was constantly writing. I wrote three novels in high school. I queried agents. I got a couple of requests for manuscripts. I remember I went and shook my dad awake. I was like, “Dad! Dad! Look! The agent wants to read my book.” And he was like, “What?” Thankfully, all those agents passed. Those books were not meant to be published. So, yeah, I wrote three books before Girl In Snow was picked up. That whole experience showed me I could get to the end of a story. I realized I could do it, that I wanted to do it over and over again. All of that practicing and whittling away at it, was really helpful for me. EC: And you were in the publishing world pretty early, right? Like before your first book came out? DK: I went to NYU. I was in New York. I was doing internships with publishing houses from the time I started college and all the way through. So, yeah, I’ve always been doing book publishing alongside my writing, and I still am. I now work as a literary agent for Trellis Literary Management. EC: Have you ever wanted to just write full time and leave the industry side of things behind? DK: I did leave publishing to write Notes on an Execution, and that was the most miserable I’ve ever been. EC: Miserable? Why? DK: There were a couple of different factors. My first book performed pretty well, but not like crazy well. There was a lot of pressure on whether I’d be able to sell a second book. How much money would I make on the second book? How well would it do after the track of the first one? Writing a second book is uniquely difficult. I’m on my third now, and I’m like, Oh, this is a breeze. Or I guess I should say it’s emotionally easier. It feels easier because it’s not that huge can-you-do-it-again pressure. Anyway, I knew I had to write a second book, so I quit my publishing job. I was working as an editor at Penguin Random House. I didn’t want to always wonder what it would’ve been like to write full time. My husband got into law school. We moved from New York to Seattle. I didn’t really know anybody. I came out here and was like, I’m gonna write my second book! And then proceeded to just punch myself in the face for at least a year. I wrote a draft of a book. I gave it to my agent. She hated it. Told me to basically throw it out, which I did. This was about six months into writing full time. That was horrific. I’d put everything into this thing, but it wasn’t working. I didn’t have any other alternatives, so I started over. And it was that second draft that ended up becoming Notes on an Execution. EC: Jesus . . . DK: Right? After that, I’ve slowly worked my way into becoming a literary agent. It’s much more flexible than my editorial career. Agenting, strangely enough, has turned out to be the solution. EC: That’s so interesting. There’s really something to be said for having a counterweight. Like something to balance out your writing life and your life life. DK: Yeah. For me, it’s more of an emotional counterweight than anything else. Just like knowing that my writing can still be fun. Not everything is riding on it. I still have my other career. I have people who count on me. I have calls to take and important meetings. It’s not just me banging my head against the wall. I mean, I can bang my head against the wall when I want. I’ve left that space open for myself, but it doesn’t have to happen like it did for my second novel. EC: And there’s only so many hours in a day, right? So many creative hours, especially. DK: That was my exact problem. I would sit there for four hours in the morning. I’d hit a wall, be totally exhausted, look up and be like, Oh my god! My husband didn’t get home from school for another five hours. I didn’t even have a dog yet. What was I supposed to do with myself? I felt like I was using sixty percent of my brain. EC: Let’s get into your process. You get that first seed of an idea, what do you do? DK: I just think about it for like years. I just keep sitting on it and letting it grow. What’s weird, I don’t think I’ve ever thrown out an idea. If it’s not working, I just twist it, then twist it some more, until it’s almost unrecognizable, but it always comes from the same thing. EC: Do you have an idea bank? I have a spot on my wall where I write “Novel Ideas,” and then let them kinda fight it out to see which one I’ll go for next. DK: It doesn’t really work that way for me. I only ever have one idea at a time. I have absolutely no idea what will come after this book I’m working on now. I think I have to finish it first. Like, my brain has to move on from the current project. EC: Okay, so now you’re past the gestation period. You’ve got your idea, and you’re going to start writing. What’s your first step there? DK: I just kind of puke it out . . . EC: No outline? DK: No, I try to be extremely free with myself. I call it my “Zero Draft.” It’s not even a first draft. It’s actual word vomit. I don’t even go back and read it. EC: Do you finish it? Is the structure there, the total arc of the narrative? DK: It depends. For the book I’m working on now, I wrote the zero draft all the way to the end, but it was really short. Thirty-thousand words or something. It was super skeletal, but I got through it. Relatedly, the thing I got to the end of has very few parallels to the draft I have now. It’s trash, but it’s necessary. EC: Do you work on a computer? DK: I go back and forth. If I have no fucking idea what I’m going to write, I’ll sit down with a notebook and pen. It just feels better. I always go back and transcribe whatever I’ve written straight into Scrivner when I’m done. EC: Scrivner. Really? You’re the first author I’ve had on here that’s mentioned that. DK: Oh my gosh. I live and die by Scrivner. EC: Why? DK: You can see the whole book without having to scroll through the whole book. Especially for that zero draft, you can see these early plot points and how they’re arranged in the shape of the book. You feel like you’re in a bird’s eye even when you’re in the draft. EC: This is really interesting to me. I’m somewhat of a pen/pad enthusiast. I’ve always thought about how that part of the process changes the end result. And now that you’ve got me thinking about software like Scrivner, I can’t help but question how it changes the story. DK: Well, I can say this: Scrivner changes my visual understanding of my book. I can read over my whole book in like an hour if I want to. I’m not actually reading it, but the way that software is set up, I can see it. It’s almost like a sculpture. I can see every scene, every chapter, all outlined on the sidebar. I can even move them around if needed. When I put it in Word, it’s a different story. It’s just an endless scroll. EC: Damn . . . DK: Yeah. EC: I feel like I’ve been over here playing with rocks. DK: I’m telling you. Once you figure it out, you can’t go back. EC: It kinda scares me, though. Like any new technology, I guess. For me, I have all these old superstitions, these ways that have worked. But every time I talk with another author, I learn something new. Something always changes. Speaking of which, what are the things that have stayed the same for you over the years? DK: My process journal, which is deranged. They’re just black Moleskins. No lines. I filled up three of them for Notes. I make these black boxes for the hours where I was writing. I do an entry for each day. I write down what’s working, what’s not working, and what comes next. EC: How does that help you? DK: You know that quote about how writing a novel is like driving at night, you can only see as far as the headlights shine but you can get the whole way there? With a process journal, I feel like you can see as far the headlights shine and you can see everything behind you at any given moment. Which I think is so helpful. There are also sessions when you’re just cutting stuff and moving things around, you know, tinkering all day, but you still sat down for some hours and did the work. You should get credit for that. EC: Outside of your process journal, are there other rituals you use to get you into the writing headspace? DK: The journal is huge. The minute I open the cover, the writing session has begun. My emails are turned off. I have my headphones on… EC: What are you listening to? DK: I listen to music that makes me feel like my characters. That is very important for me. I’ll listen to the same song forever. For Notes on an Execution, I listened to the same Bon Iver song on repeat for like two years. It was disgusting. I also will light a little candle on my desk sometimes. But most important for me is knitting. I’m always knitting while I write. EC: So, like, you pause, and you’re thinking, and your hands are . . . DK: I open my document. I’m reading over a scene. I’m knitting while I read over the scene. I write some. I stop and I think about it. I knit some. I write some more. I don’t even notice usually when I switch from knitting to writing. My hands are just moving and my brain is working, and then it’s like, Okay, that’s what you’re going to write next. I know this is like so specific and crazy. EC: No, those knitting needles are literally the exact reason I wanted to do this column. When did you first start the knitting thing? DK: Right around the time I began edits for Notes on an Execution. It was during COVID. I was revising and knitting and then it just bled over into my writing time too. EC: What time of day do you write? DK: Morning. I’ll get to my desk as early as I can make myself, which is usually around eight. I’ll triage all my agency emails. Anything that needs to be urgently handled, I’ll handle. EC: So you do look at email before you sit down? DK: I have to, yeah. Especially since I’m on West Coast Time and that’s like noon for a lot of people. If I have longer things I need to attend to, I’ll jot them down then put my headphones on and get to writing. I try to aim for an hour or two every day. Sometimes, I’ll do an evening, which is nice. My husband cooks dinner, does all the cleaning, walks the dog, while I sit up here with a glass of wine and write. Just one glass, though, or it doesn’t work. Recently, I started implementing a “Full Friday.” I totally clear my calendar for these days. I’ll do three hours in the morning. Lunch. Three hours in the afternoon. Dinner. Then three hours at night. I find that that almost feels like a writing retreat. I’m just totally in it. EC: What was the reason behind you wanting to start those “Full Fridays?” DK: So, the draft I’m working on for book three right now—I knew what I needed to do, but my hour or two a day just didn’t feel like enough. I just needed to get through to the end of that draft. I ended up also going away for a weekend with my dog. I wrote for the whole forty-eight hours. It was amazing. I wanted to replicate that feeling, without having to book an Airbnb every time. EC: While you’re drafting, are you working every day? DK: Pretty much. I did just take two months off while my agent was reading my draft. I’m back at it now, but it’s slow going. The goal is every day, though. I’ve learned to not beat myself up too much about it. A friend of mine once said you have to take the pulse of the manuscript every day, and by taking the pulse, you keep the book alive. EC: Okay, after you get the first draft ready to share, who do you send it to? DK: My husband and my agent. They read pretty early and pretty often. My husband gives me so much support. He’ll make small notes, but generally, he likes almost every draft. My agent read a hundred-page chunk of this book I’m working on now, and then we totally scrapped it. We had one character that was working, so I went with that and made it through another thirty-thousand words, but I couldn’t get to the end. Then we had a four-hour-long call and I went off and wrote the ending in like two months. It still wasn’t there, though. My agent ended up making this huge murder wall in her office, trying to get the timeline nailed down. EC: That’s an agent. And you’re an agent. I’ve never had an agent on for Shop Talk, but I know there’s some craft involved in agenting as well. Are you that hands-on with your clients? DK: I’m definitely an editorial agent. My background is in editing. For me, that’s where I like to be. That’s why I take someone on. I want to work on that book. I want to sell it of course, and future books, and shape that author’s career, but for me so much comes back to editing. I will say my agent and I have a very unconventional relationship. We met when I was nineteen and she was twenty-two. I was her first client. And now, I’m agent at the same agency where she is. So, yeah, we’re kind of unique. I will say most authors have that sort of relationship with editors, not agents. EC: Once y’all get the book where you want it, do you have a final step before you send it off to copyedit? DK: I read it out loud. It’s like an eight-to-ten-hour process. EC: Are you reading alone? Or do you read to anyone? DK: My dog. He’s asleep under the desk now. He knows a lot about book publishing, more than most humans, actually. EC: Do you do any reading before you sit down to write? Any particular books? DK: I like craft books. They help me get in the right headspace. There’s a new one called Refuse to be Done by Matt Bell. I really like that one. There’s another one called Writing Down the Bones. It’s old, but it’s just little segments that are perfect to get you in the right mindset. EC: A lot of folks who read this column are aspiring novelists. What’s your best advice for those who are just starting to write? DK: I’ve had people call me out for this because I have a writing career, but really, the process is the point. The sitting down and the writing of it—that’s the point. You’re always going to have a thing you want if you’re thinking about external gratification. There’s always something. You just want to get to the end of this chapter. You want an agent, a second book deal, a bigger advance . . . You can focus on those things, but they won’t get you anywhere. The only way to feel satisfied with writing is to enjoy the actual process of writing. No, not even enjoy it. I don’t like it a lot of the time, but I consider it an act of mediation, of preservation, self-care, whatever you want to call it. Religion even, in a certain way. Thinking about it as thing you must do for the sake of doing rather than a means to an end—that is the absolute key. EC: Yeah, it’s a worthy, if painful, enterprise. Which brings me to my last question. Why do you write? DK: God. That is a crazy question. Okay, well . . . I write because I have to? Yeah, it’s the only way I feel like myself. Even these last few months where I’ve been waiting on my agent to read and not writing, I’ve felt disconnected. Almost like disassociated in some ways. Writing is the deep stuff of you, right? It’s the only way I know how to touch that. I’d be a shell without it. I don’t have any larger or loftier reason, though. I’m not trying to do good in the world. If it does do good in the world, great. I love to hear when I impact readers. To see that that’s an outcome of it is beyond thrilling. But it’s very hard to go into such a tedious, arduous process with that as a goal. It’s kind of all navel gazing anyway, right? Yeah. We are navel gazing. We’re just telling a little story from our little brains. There’s no reason to do that unless it’s for you. View the full article

No pain, no gain! A common refrain, and the quintessential mantra of those who hustle. While you’ve probably seen this couplet superimposed over dozens of muscular athletes wielding barbells like feathers, there are much smaller, quieter examples of pain as the pathway to a different type of success: healing. Very few people can put in an intense workout and escape the painful bodily backlash the next day, and the process of healing is no different. Trauma hurts and so does banishing it. I write about trauma because I am intrigued by how much our pain shapes us, and by the overall resilience of the human spirit. While the biggest examples of this are usually seen in news stories of miraculous survival, it’s not necessary to go through a life-changing event in order to be hurt. Core memories can be created by something as simple as a painful word spoken by someone you love, filed to a point sharp enough to poke at you your entire life. There is no such thing as a trauma-free life; we are all the result of our reaction to pain and our ability to deal with it. But when it comes to severe trauma, the consequences of avoidance can be devastating. Some people are able to break the cycle of abuse by appreciating the pain it caused them. They strive not to hurt someone else the way they were hurt—even though they might want to. But in far, far more cases, another adage is true: hurt people hurt people. Many people who have endured severe pain feel entitled to inflict it on others—they may enjoy it. In recent years, bullying has extended way beyond the playground, and we have the videos to prove it: three-minute snippets of miserable people inflicting misery on others. While I find damaged characters the most compelling to write about, one troubling aspect of doing so is that in order to show their growth and their arc, you have to keep hurting them: again and again and again. And that’s because retraumatization—facing your demons when they show up—is a major part of healing. In my new novel, Before You Found Me, my goal was two portray two characters with extremely traumatic backgrounds, and to craft a unique pathway to healing for each, demonstrating how personal and painstaking the journey can be. There’s Rowan, a twenty-two-year old woman who narrowly escaped death at the hands of her ex-fiancé, and Gabriel, an eleven-year-old boy who has spent the last three years held captive in a basement by his grieving father. Fresh off her own trauma, Rowan discovers Gabriel trapped in his basement: beaten, starved, and convinced he deserved nothing more. With an all-too-intimate understanding of the failures of the legal system, Rowan acts in haste and desperation, snatching Gabriel from the dark and taking him halfway across the country for a fresh start; a beautiful, pain-free life for both of them. I wanted to create arcs that demonstrated the importance of support, but also showed the strides the characters took to change their own lives. Being young, naïve, and damaged herself, Rowan is deeply flawed, yet heroic in her actions. After abducting him, Rowan bubble-wraps Gabriel into a new life, leading him toward a real future on a path lined with bright and shiny things. She showers him with the comforts he’s long been denied, offers endless support and golden opportunities—anything that will stop him from looking behind him. Spoiler Alert: It doesn’t work. In an effort to avoid retraumautizing Gabriel, Rowan denied him the opportunity to process his anger and grief and truly heal. No pain, no gain, right? A major part of the healing process involves learning how to acknowledge and work through trauma rather than repressing it or acting out. Because she is young, hurt, and vulnerable herself, only a tiny part of Rowan realizes this—so tiny it’s easy to ignore. In developing traumatized characters, there is no standard blueprint to follow. Trauma usually has a domino effect, with one event often leading to another. Relying on the commonalities of fear and anxiety is impossible because trauma does not affect people in the same way—it’s deeply personal. But one shared trait is the ability to mask trauma and seek out distractions. While this can look like healing, it’s just the opposite. Trauma is like a sponge, and ignoring it is like sticking that sponge in a glass of water. It’s only going to get bigger. The fact that so many people choose to do just this is a huge testament to the pain of retraumatization. When you choose to face your demons, you do so prepared to fight. But when your demons suddenly face you, it’s all too easy to be overcome. Like trauma, we all have flaws in our thinking, and my favorite flaw is an overflowing heart. A person who feels so deeply for another that they’re willing to sacrifice their own safety, their own happiness, their own life, for the benefit of someone else. That’s what I found in Rowan. But the best of intentions aren’t always so, and in writing this book, I discovered that right alongside my characters. It was important for me to allow them to confront their own demons on their own terms because no matter how much it hurt, they came out far stronger on the other side. *** View the full article

I love crime fiction for its versatility, how it can incorporate well-realized characters, a wide range of tones and styles, and social commentary all within propulsive plots. A crime sets up an immediate conflict: a wrong is committed, and someone tries to address it and restore order. Crime fiction can include a wide range of stakes, from “Who stole Grandma’s award-winning pie recipe?” to “How do we catch the Pigface serial killer?” It offers a window into the dark recesses of the human soul while also celebrating the better angels of our nature. As a genre, it’s one of the most accommodating forms of storytelling. That being said, when I look at the crime novels on my shelf, the majority of them focus on male protagonists. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that—Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is an iconic private eye, and Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko is my favorite investigator in literature. But all too often, women in crime fiction are relegated to the role of femme fatale or sidekick or victim in need of rescue. In Never Turn Back, my first Faulkner Family Thriller book, I introduce Susannah Faulkner, the sister of that book’s protagonist, Ethan. Both are victims of a violent home invasion that leaves them orphaned as children, and while Ethan grows up with a job and a house and a “normal” life, Suzie becomes a wild and dangerous young woman. Early on, though, Suzie refused to remain a side character, and as I dug deeper into her character, she became the protagonist and narrator of the next two books in the series. Can I do this? I remember asking myself as I set out to write Suzie Faulkner. Can I, a middle-aged heterosexual guy, write a strong, engaging, sexually fluid female character in her twenties? Fortunately, I am lucky enough to have lots of strong women in my life, and they and the women in the crime novels below inspire me to create powerful, complicated, and compelling female characters in my own fiction. Cop Town by Karin Slaughter (2014) Slaughter’s standalone is set in 1970s Atlanta. Kate Murphy is a brand-new police officer on a force that recently hired women but doesn’t want them there; being an attractive blond makes her harassment worse. On the surface Kate seems like a pretty, rich girl playing cop, and before her first day is over she wants to quit. But she is also a recent widow and Jewish, both of which deepen her character and her fortitude—most of her white male co-workers are misogynistic racists who are also suspicious of Jews, and an openly antisemitic cop killer roams the city streets. Kate gets partnered with Maggie Lawson, whose brother and uncle are also cops, although unhappy that Maggie wants to continue the family tradition. Both women must contend with colleagues who despise their presence, the aforementioned cop killer, and a shifting social and cultural landscape. Details like the uniforms the women are given—all deliberately too big, even the shoes—ground the story in a gritty realism. Cop Town is as much about Kate and Maggie’s growth and acceptance of themselves as police officers as it is a gripping thriller, and Kate’s journey especially makes for compelling reading. Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper (2023) Mae Pruett is a “black bag” publicist for LA’s elite; when they have problems, they call her to make them go away. A trifle world-weary, Mae recognizes some of her clients are scumbags but willingly cleans up their crises for a paycheck and the prestige her successes bring. When her boss is gunned down in what seems to be a random attack, Mae investigates on her own and runs into a conglomeration of personal assistants, lawyers, crooked cops, fixers, social media influencers, and private security thugs—the retinue of today’s rich and powerful. The more Mae descends into the underbelly of a world she thought she knew, the more depravity she uncovers, and she is forced to come to a reckoning with her own conscience. Mae is not immediately likable as a character, but having a ringside seat to her realization that she needs to save her own life, both figuratively and literally, is enthralling. This is a thrill ride that does not let up. Gods of Howl Mountain by Taylor Brown (2018) If Raymond Price, Charles Frazier, and Cormac McCarthy had written a crime novel set in 1950s North Carolina, they might have written this. The protagonist, Rory Docherty, is a bootlegger dodging both federal agents and rival whiskey-runners while haunted by his service in the Korean War, which left him with a wooden leg. Rory is a compelling protagonist, but the standout character is his grandmother, Granny May, a former prostitute turned folk healer. In an atmospheric world of moonshiners, snake healers, and corrupt sheriffs, Granny May is a formidable presence, forging her own way in a violent world that is not bereft of hope. She also gets some of the best lines: “‘Christ’s father let him die on that cross,’ she said. ‘I understand why he done it.’ She leaned closer, whispering: ‘But Christ never had no granny like me.’” Twentymile by C. Matthew Smith (2021) Smith’s debut novel is, on the surface, a thriller. Tsula Walker, a special agent with the National Park Service’s Investigative Services Branch, is assigned a case concerning the death of a wildlife biologist inside Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Soon a villain is revealed, Harlan Miles, whose family was forced off their farmland in the 1930s when the federal government sought to create the park. Harlan is a great antagonist, not least because his grievances have some merit. But Tsula, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, has her own complicated perspective on the park land that was taken from her ancestors. Smith examines the troubled history of the park and the very nature of land ownership, all within the taut confines of an atmospheric thriller. Tsula is a fresh, dynamic character, and Smith writes her with grace and strength. ___________________________________ Additional Reading: Strong Women in Crime Fiction ___________________________________ No Home for Killers by E. A. Aymar Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley Burying the Honeysuckle Girls by Emily Carpenter The Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Faye In the Woods by Tara French She Rides Shotgun by Jordan Harper Things We Do in the Dark by Jennifer Hillier Never Have I Ever by Joshilyn Jackson The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King Like Lions by Brian Panowich Don’t Talk to Strangers by Amanda Kyle Williams Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell *** View the full article

Novels, I’ve found in my writing experience, come out of ideas that won’t be denied. They surface from the mind like something primeval climbing out of muck. Once they’re out there, wet and dripping, there’s no putting them back under the black tar. My novel about an apocalyptic cult, Minor Prophets, came out of me that way, a piece at a time, first a head, then a tail, then a confused monstrosity of parts. I had just moved to Chicago after a lifetime spent on the east coast. One rainy night the first week my husband and I arrived, lost in our new city, carrying shopping bags of home goods back from a Target on the Near North Side, we passed a grassy field, a square of wild unkempt emptiness with no place in the middle of a city. In the middle of the field, a small white church, leaning and ramshackle, its classic black steeple stabbing into the night sky, forbidding and haunted and strange. FOR SALE, the sign read. CHURCH. We were lost, and this church stood, a ruined beacon, dubious sanctuary. Here is the novel, though I didn’t know it yet. Here was the American story that would suck me in, obsess me, haunt me, endanger me. Every novel is a dangerous seduction for its writer. I’m a writer who has always been fascinated by the dark side of religious institutions, about women and power and spirituality, about the transcendence of spiritual experience mixed with doubt, abuse, and dread. As I wrote Minor Prophets, I tried to penetrate the darkness at the heart of religious extremism, the frightening tenderness in its sweet core of belief. There’s something so appealing, so relatable, about a cult member’s search for transcendence and immortality. And there’s a fine line between that quest and total destruction. I’m as susceptible as anyone else. Lonely in a new city, missing my mother, who died several years before of cancer, but went to college in Chicago, I felt occasionally like I was touching secret, sacred places from her life. I walked by the lake and wandered up and down the city’s broad, wind-blasted avenues, wondering where she might have visited. I was still struggling to understand how it could be possible that she was gone, how the world could keep turning in such an unimaginable aftermath. I did not know who I was without her. Another moment that lurched out of the muck:: I was flipping through tv channels late at night and stumbled across a reality survival show. Can you last in the wilderness of Alaska? A team of newcomers with minimal survival training is set loose in the interior. They’ve been hunting, and have made their first kill, but it’s a porcupine, and the novice survivalists are at a loss, unsure of how to cut it open. Finally, they do, and the guts — all those warm pulsing parts of the animal who was alive just moments ago — bulge out. Someone cuts out the bladder and holds it up. It’s full, and glowing yellow with the light behind it. Something odd and organic and real, saintly and soiled at once. I didn’t know what it meant, but II was electrified by this vision of life and death in its brutal, biological reality. In my novel, a girl skins a porcupine in the first chapter. And then she walks into the kitchen, where her mother is assisting another woman with a secret abortion. Life and death, its fine bloody line. In those years in Chicago, I listened to Glynn Washington’s excellent podcast on the Heaven’s Gate cult (called Heaven’s Gate). With well-researched, unsensational detail, he builds the story of this doomed group and their ultimate destination, a mass suicide in a rented mansion in San Diego. An excellent storyteller, Washington takes the time to linger on the odd little details: their fondness for Star Trek (one member writes “39 to beam up” in their signout book), their matching unisex bowl cuts, the almost tender way each member is paired with another and served a spoonful of apple sauce laced with phenobarbitol. Cults, I’ve learned, have a uniquely American history. While they’ve popped up around the world, no other country or culture has produced so many new and fringe religions in contemporary history. There are the Mormons, the Spiritualists, the survivalists and preppers: Manson’s Family and David Koresh’s Branch Davidians, Jim Jones’ Temple and Stephen Gaskin’s Farm. In my novel, the protagonist surfs through online support groups for survivors of cults like these, learning how much they had in common: thought control, coercive sex, child marriage, anti-abortion dogma, the promise of death a poisoned drink away. American culture has always been open to the idea of re-invention; the authority and tradition of top-down religion has been rejected by so many, but then there’s a void left to fill. American culture has always been open to the idea of re-invention; the authority and tradition of top-down religion has been rejected by so many, but then there’s a void left to fill. New Age and fundamentalist Christian cults are eerily similar in their conservatism, how they police the body and promise liberation in the same breath. Heaven’s Gate banned sex and many of its members castrated themselves. The Farm banned birth control. Koresh’s Branch Davidians were strictly celibate except for its leader, who married any girl his God told him to marry. I read books and listened to radio shows about them all, taking notes, telling anyone who would listen the most disturbing things I learned. What was the common link, the toxic thread? If I could just find it, I thought, I’d know what story I needed to tell. I can see how it was becoming an obsession. Maybe for novelists, each book is its own cult religion. I looked up the original farewell videos of the Heaven’s Gate members on Youtube. These macabre documents are nineties-style suicide notes, filmed on stuttering VHS tapes. The members of the cult come on in pairs, sitting in plastic lawn chairs against a verdant green garden. They laugh sheepishly, they refer to their own bodies as “their vehicles.” They have learned to view themselves as beings of spirit and air, completely separate from these bodies that in a matter of hours, they will shed. The videos are cheesy, like old home movies, and they’re terrifying. I’m finding that cults share a nearly inevitable slide toward end-of-the-world thinking. Most cults don’t begin with thought police, isolation, mass death. They’re subtle, they tell a compelling story that we can’t turn away from. They start with a flyer in a community center basement, a blocky web 1.0 site, a mysterious, provocative, charismatic leader. The leader promises many things: focus and beauty and the hidden secrets of the bible. A secret way to connect with a higher truth. TLiving a life without B.S., giving yourselfto a true and pure principle. If the message comes at a crisis point in someone’s life, then that person is vulnerable. If we’re lonely, if we’re hurting, if we’ve always longed for some greater sense of connection and belonging, we are vulnerable. It can take over the lives of rocket scientists and philosophers and PhD’s. Education is not always protective; I’m surprised to learn in my research that engineers and mathematicians are particularly prone to falling for end-of-the-world ideologies, perhaps because they like solving puzzles and cracking codes, and they believe they can understand secret knowledge that others cannot. Isaac Newton spent the last decades of his life consumed with the idea that he could calculate the end times by studying the Bible. Genius can lead us down rabbit holes. Cultlike thinking is something that can enter anyone’s life, depending on the time, the place, the circumstances. It can spread like a whisper in your ear, or a disease. It can promise you that there’s a special place where you belong when you feel alone in your grief, or offer the tantalizing promise that death is not the permanent blank wall you thought it was. I can see, now, why I had to write this story. Why faith of any kind can offer such seductive comfort if you’re grieving. It’s 2015, then 2016, the height of election season. My husband and I take road trips north to Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula to hike in the woods. As we head out of Chicago and travel deeper into rural farmland, the Trump signs in yards, leaning against old barns or jutting proudly out into the road, grow larger and larger, looming in our vision. They seem ominous, a whiff of doom in the air. I’m discovering, along with many Americans, that there is more than one country, more than one narrative of American life. For urban dwellers like me, the election results are a rude awakening: there is a dark vein of extremism that has always been there as part of our shared story, and now it’s rising. In my novel, a girl grows up in a militant, apocalyptic organization in the woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Her father, the cult leader, has fashioned her into a prophet for the group, and she, needing his love and acceptance, performs and prophesies. But while many cult novels focus on the simplistic explanation of “brainwashing”, I wanted to understand what makes believers fall in love. If I was going to write this novel truly and honestly, I couldn’t come at it from a position of contempt. I needed to imagine my way into a room full of praying people, into the body of a child speaking in tongues. I had to acknowledge the ecstasy and beauty of belonging. My girl protagonist is a victim of her father’s manipulations, but she’s also a recruiter, a manipulator all her own. If she’s going to escape this world, she will have to grapple with her own complicity. For most of a year I watched my mother die, and I saw the tender, focused care she received from her hospice nurses. These men and women came to our house nearly every day, listening to her needs and working to make her last weeks and months meaningful. While watching them care for her, I begin to learn that hospice care is about radically re-envisioning the goals of medicine. A good hospice caretaker must step into the terrifying moment of after: after a diagnosis is terminal, after it feels like the doctors have given up on you, after the goals of cure are no longer a possibility. Instead, a good hospice nurse navigates the search for new meaning: to dig value out of every day, after a personal apocalypse has occurred. in so many of the cults I’ve studied, it is women’s bodies that are the battlefields upon which wars are waged. In the present-day storyline of my novel, the girl protagonist is working as a hospice nurse in Chicago, navigating her messy escape from the cult and struggling to live in the outside world. Part of her journey is with her dying patients, witnessing the very private journey they must go on. The end of the world, as it turns out, is a personal experience, not only a global one. We all have our personal apocalypse to journey through. And for the living left behind, it’s a question of figuring out how to live in the aftermath. That was the critical final piece of my novel: I realized I was writing about what happened when the world you’d been planning for didn’t materialize. What happens when the world doesn’t end, and you must go on, feeling your way through one day and the next? When my mother died, our usual hospice nurse was not available. Instead, a stranger came to our house, did not remove her sneakers, marched up to the bedroom and checked my mother’s pulse. “Oh yes. She’s in heaven now,” she declared. I felt a wild surge of anger: my mother was resolutely non-religious, and never used language about heaven, God, or angels. This pronouncement, this promise made, felt like a lie, told in the silence left behind her passing. I can still taste the anger of that moment, now more than ten years ago. And that’s another element of Minor Prophets, the missing piece of my obsession: that in so many of the cults I’ve studied, it is women’s bodies that are the battlefields upon which wars are waged. They’re the weapons, the tools, endlessly manipulated and coerced, nearly always silent in the stories that emerge in the aftermath. Their untold stories flash across my brain: women in long dresses, holding children, peering into the cameras of outsiders with wariness of wild animals; women presented with impossible choices; girls told to worship, girls told to obey, girls denied the interpretation of their own story; women alone in rooms with powerful men; women searching for some kind of revelation, wanting their own transcendence. Women looking hopefully upward, seeking a god, finding only a human face staring back. *** View the full article

My current series revolves around the Locard Institute, its forensic science focus made of equal parts research, training, and private investigation for clients who need/can afford it. The Locard does not exist, alas. I invented and designed it for flexibility in plotting—but CSI schools are real enough. As labs are accredited and techs are certified, a certain amount of continuing education credits are required to maintain those standings. Forensic training classes might last from a morning to a week. Students include cops, fingerprint analysts, drug lab techs or death investigators with experience anywhere from a few months to a few decades. Most any professional employee would find the idea familiar. Doctors travel to learn new surgical techniques. Civil engineers practice laying out a planned community. Personnel from Personnel must keep up on EEOC-compliant employee application forms. Supply managers must learn how to do inventory via a tablet app. The process is also familiar. Training flyers arrive at your work email or your boss leaves one on your desk. The HR department has to give you the okay to travel, pay the tuition and make you sign three forms in order to be trusted with the company credit card—after first giving you the sharpest of looks, as if it’s her personal financial future at stake if you return without an itemized receipt from McDonald’s. Where CSI schools differ is in the subject matter. And the execution. In Basic Bloodstain Pattern Interpretation we spent days experimenting with horse blood (donated by living horses) by dripping it from pipettes while walking, while running. We soaked sponges in it, covered the walls and floor with reams of brown paper, and hit the sponges with hammers, baseball bats and latex-enclosed fists. We hung the sponges downfield and shot them. We soaked weapons and tools in it and swung them around. Sure, all that could have been explained in a PowerPoint presentation, but would we have retained it? And would a slide show have been as much fun? (Funny story: Of course, classroom instruction doesn’t always translate to reality, just as that supply manager might find the handy tablet app is not so handy when on a loading dock in a snowstorm while wearing heavy gloves. In the Basic Bloodstain class we worked with paper covered walls and the floor—flat surfaces at a ninety-degree angle. In the Advanced class, they might throw in a small end table. Wall, floor, table. Flat, level surfaces. At this point I was technically a bloodstain pattern expert so when we had a brutal stabbing inside a garage, my boss called me in to do my stuff. I burst onto the scene with enthusiasm—and stopped. The garage was half storage facility and half man cave, with a flat screen, couch, coffee table, fan, gun safe, tool bench, tool cabinet along the walls and the entire center filled waist-high with an impassable mountain of boxes, empty luggage, old bikes, pool toys, lawn care equipment, and who knows what else because we saw no reason to excavate down to the box of P90X DVDs. Blood covered a good portion of the floor, but thrashing had shoved the couch and the table and the flat-screen so that I didn’t know if the patterns had been deposited before or after movement, skewing angle determination. I turned to my boss. “Where’s my wall, floor, table? I could do that!”) At a ‘buried body’ class we examined (happily, didn’t have to exhume it, since it was there for the semester-long community college class) the grave of a small pig. The college teacher had placed it on a small island in the middle of a campus pond, to keep the odor from disturbing the students studying less smelly things like accounting or computer science. I can’t say I learned a lot about how to conceal a clandestine grave because a few of us spent the time instead observing a fish make a nest in the surrounding waters. It would scoop up sand in its mouth, take it to the edge of its crater, and spit it over the berm, creating a perfectly round circle. Sorry, but this model of determination was a little more interesting than the migration pattern of maggots. In Crime Scene Reconstruction, we used colored string to lay a grid along a section of lawn and here’s-the-gas-line-don’t-dig flags to mark where tossed bullet casings lay. (Again, didn’t work quite so well in a house that qualified for an episode of Hoarders where the ground is anything but level.) We also observed qualified personnel fire bullets into vehicles to demonstrate how to tell the bullet’s direction of travel. Picture an oval swimming pool with a zero-entry slope at one end. That will be the bullet’s first contact with the vehicle. The other end, where the metal is a little bunched up into a hole, is where the bullet finally built up enough metal to deflect it into puncturing the door or roof or hood. Cracks in the windows will crater, with the larger diameter on the exit side of the glass. In regular window glass, cracks will form in spider-legs, emanating outward in a line from the hole, but will also form in concentric circles around the hole. If you examine the edge of the broken pieces you can tell which side of the glass the bullet entered from the stress marks. But if two shots are close enough together for their cracks to intersect, you can tell which came first—cracks will end in existing cracks. If the lines from hole B end in lines from hole A, B came first. Meanwhile, back at where the shooter is standing, casings fly from his automatic pistol and scatter, bounce and roll across the sidewalk. They do not land in the same place. In other words, in those episodes of CSI where they calculate exactly where the casing went as it was ejected from the gun is so much applesauce. Sometimes, our courses are purely classroom instruction. I recently spent two days listening to FBI latent print examiners go over the current thinking in how to word court testimony explaining fingerprint analysis, identifications, and eliminations. You may have heard rumblings in the past dozen years about how fingerprints ‘don’t work any more’ or ‘have no basis in science’ and so on. That is more of that applesauce, but, there is a very real need to standardize how it is documented, supported, and explained to a jury. The Organization of Scientific Area Committees for Forensic Science, begun by DOJ and now administered by NIST, is attempting to do just that, not only for fingerprints but for all forensic disciplines. They create a set of standards for training examiners, for quality control, for writing reports, for testimony, and then publish the drafts so anyone who wants to, such as me, can submit questions or suggestions for improvement, which they will consider and perhaps implement. Then they will send out another draft, and the refining continues. The process is necessary, wonderful, intelligent, responsible and democratic…and glacially slow. Technology, of course, changes daily and at an ever increasing pace. I just spent three days at work learning how to use a new alternate light source. It looks like a small tablet with a big ole camera lens attached, and that’s pretty much what it is. Except the camera also has a light source that can deliver wavelengths from bright white to the ROYGBIV stuff to ultraviolet to infrared. And has built-in filters in the necessary colors to enhance or block the wavelengths as necessary. And has a camera that can capture the resulting surface image and offload same via USB or Bluetooth. And has preset programs that have made it largely idiot-proof. Are you looking for blood on a purple sweater? It will give you the five top combinations of light and filter with a touch of a fingertip. Searching for gunshot residue on a multicolored backpack? Tap, tap, and click. I can’t describe what a wonder this thing is, especially for someone like me who has never been able to really comprehend light theory or remember what color filter goes with what wavelength and why. Sometimes the stuff you see on CSI isn’t really applesauce. So, yes, CSIs really go to school, and quite often. That part of the Locard Insitute series isn’t fiction. Walk into any forensic continuing ed class as the attendees will span all ages, genders, races and locations. Some people might be there because they needs the CEUs, or because they’re newbies to the field and need all the stuff they didn’t get in college. Sometimes they’ve been in the field for years but recently had other duties added to their lab. Sometimes they just want to get out of town for a week on their agency’s dime. But what would happen, I asked myself, if one of them moonlighted as a serial killer? Could they resist the temptation to ply their trade in the midst of those trained to catch serial killers? Could any psychopath resist that challenge? The answer, as you’ll see, is no. *** View the full article

The Southern California stretch of the PCT that sits between Warner Springs and the Anza Trailhead runs forty-one desolate miles between two rural highways, State Routes 79 and 74. Despite the long views of barren ridges, the meanderings through fields of strange boulders, and the occasional funky cactus, this isn’t the most scenic section, but it was a convenient place for a trail hopeful named Eric Trockman, who lived in nearby Temecula, to test out his equipment for three days before he began his PCT thru-hike for real. On February 20, 2015, four days after the contentious call between Chris and Min, Trockman hiked north from Warner Springs. Eighteen miles later, his calves feeling sore, he came across something “a little peculiar.” Another hiker’s stuff—a yellow and silver ground pad, a blue sleeping bag, a backpack, a tarp, and a pair of trekking poles—was lying next to the trail, as if the owner might return at any moment. Trockman assumed the hiker must be out looking for water or going to the bathroom or trying to find cell service. But, in case there was more to it than that, he snapped a picture of the gear with his phone. The photo recorded the time and date of this fateful encounter: February 20, 2015, at 2:15 p.m. After he got home, Trockman logged online and clicked his way to PCT Class of 2015, a Facebook group of about three thousand members that consisted of that year’s thru-hikers (and their fans). Trockman had posted a handful of tips in the past (even advising fellow hikers that “Loose stuff in the pack is annoying, get more Ziplocs/stuff sacks”), but he learned as much from the group as he shared with them. On the twenty-fifth, however, Trockman read an unsettling post that reminded him of the abandoned gear he’d seen a few days earlier. A 2015 PCT hiker had gone missing. The lost man was twenty-eight, the same age as Trockman, and he’d disappeared from the same section Eric had hiked—except Chris Sylvia had walked it in the opposite direction. Trockman shared his photo of the abandoned gear in the Facebook thread and provided his name and phone number to search and rescue, but no one interviewed him about what he’d seen until I called two years later. When I first spoke to Trockman over the phone, he told me he felt guilty about this. Perhaps he should have made more of a fuss when he first saw Chris Sylvia’s belongings. “Hikers find weird stuff all the time!” I reassured him. “You took a picture. That’s more than I might have done, and I’m a former law enforcement officer.” A few weeks before I called Trockman, I came across a Reddit post published in February 2017 by Chris Sylvia’s oldest sibling. Still haunted by the TV series episode on Sylvia that never aired, I’d kept tabs on the case and was saddened to see that little progress— if any—had been made in finding the lost hiker. “This month my brother will have been missing for two years” is how Joshua Sylvia introduced a thread he had created on the second anniversary of his brother’s disappearance. In an attempt to stir up interest in the case, Joshua made himself available to answer any questions a would-be sleuth might have. “Hopefully the chance of him being a John Doe isn’t too high. I was able to track down his dental records. And DNA was taken from our mom.” I winced. That’s so heartbreaking. Then, as I scrolled through the entire thread, I came across this comment: “I was contacted not long ago about a pilot that is being put together for A&E about missing hikers,” Sylvia’s brother informed the Redditors. “If all goes according to plan, my mother and I should be getting flown to California this summer.” Reading this stirred something in me. Joshua had misplaced his hope for resolution on Hollywood attention, but because I’d been involved in the project’s early development, I knew the television producers had since moved on. I surmised that no one had informed the family of this outcome, so a few days later, I contacted Joshua to let him know the show wasn’t happening. Then I called his mother, Nancy Warman, who thanked me for taking an interest in her son’s disappearance, and I made that promise to get her some answers. Six weeks later, on November 6, 2017, I was at the Paradise Valley Café near Anza, California, waiting for Eric Trockman to join me for breakfast. He arrived looking every bit the part of a veteran PCT thru-hiker—wearing modern khaki attire, a neatly trimmed beard, and an agreeable disposition. After a brief greeting, I cut to the chase (“I want to know more about the gear!”) and shoved my coffee out of the way so I could spread out a topographical map on the table between us. Then I pointed to the Anza Trailhead on State Route 74, one mile east of us. From there, I moved my finger southbound along a dashed line representing the PCT. When I hit Chihuahua Valley Road, I stopped. “Is this where you found it?” “Yes,” Trockman confirmed. “About a four-minute walk south of that road.” After I finished my brandied French toast, we left the Paradise Valley Café and headed to the spot where Trockman last saw Chris Sylvia’s gear. Once we were in the vicinity, we consulted a color copy of the photo he’d taken that I’d printed out and brought along until we located a unique rock verifying the exact location. Across the trail, I noticed a small cross constructed from reclaimed wood and rusty nails. The unnamed rustic memorial had since collapsed. I picked it up and hammered it back into the ground with a stone. Our experience as thru-hikers led Trockman and me to the same conclusion. The Sylvia gear site was not a camping spot. With its lack of shade, rocky surface, and awkward angle, it wasn’t even a tempting location for a long break. What the site did offer, however, was an advantageous view of Chihuahua Valley Road. You could watch a vehicle coming from a mile or more away and have time to trot back to the trail before the car passed. Even so, this hitchhiking method would test one’s patience. We only saw one other car on that road the entire time we were there. We climbed a hill behind the gear site to check for cell service. To our east, the Anza-Borrego Desert stretched out below the PCT, which meandered high above ridges covered with shrubs typical of California chaparral, a semiarid landscape of chamise and manzanita that grow thick and scratchy but rarely higher than your head. At the top, we could see for miles in every direction. The PCT was identifiable as was Chihuahua Valley Road and other landmarks. Unable to find cell service, we reconnected with the trail and hiked south. A five-minute walk from the gear site brought us to a handmade sign welcoming hikers to a hostel known as Mike’s Place. Years ago, Mike Herrera bought a patch of land on an isolated ridge east of the PCT and built himself a man-cave getaway. A big fan of the trail and its hikers, Herrera invited the travelers to fill up their canteens from a water tank on his property. He also encouraged them to camp on his homesite. This act of charity had earned Mike the title of “trail angel”—a generous person who supports a thru-hiker’s journey in various ways, such as by giving them free rides, food, or lodging. Up to a hundred backpackers visited his hostel each day during peak hiking season. To handle the demand, Herrera had hired caretakers to live at his compound. His hospitality was genuine, but his hostel had a mixed reputation, causing some to avoid it. As one hiker told me, “I don’t stop at Mike’s; it’s too much of a party atmosphere.” At the sign, we turned off the PCT and continued to the compound past the metal water tank. Red plastic cups in the bushes hinted at the vibe—part desert rat, part rowdy frat house. On the back patio of the ranch-style home, the caretaker, a guy in his thirties with a shaved head and a bushy goatee, catered to three young women thru-hiking south. When Eric and I joined them, the caretaker greeted us. “What brings the two of you here?” It was apparent by our gear—or lack thereof—that we weren’t thru-hiking. “I’m looking into the case of the young man who went missing from the trail near here,” I answered. “Do you know anything about it?” “And what do you know about it?” The caretaker’s hostility made me flinch. “I’m working with the family, and I know his gear was found less than a ten-minute walk from here . . .” “He didn’t make it here.” The abrupt certainty of this statement made me apprehensive. To soften the tension, I introduced myself and mentioned Chris Sylvia’s family would be grateful for any help he could provide. The caretaker identified himself as Josh McCoy. When I asked to see the 2015 trail register (a logbook in which hikers write the dates they passed through a particular site), McCoy got up from his plastic chair, pulled a dusty composition notebook from an outdoor shelf, and handed it to me. “This register begins in April,” I said, flipping through the pages. “I need to see the one from February and March.” “Are any pages torn out of it?” Again, McCoy’s tone seemed to be accusing me of something. Damn, this guy is as suspicious of me as I am of him. “No, it’s intact. There must be an earlier one.” McCoy denied there were any more trail registers for 2015. I doubted this, but prying information out of McCoy was like shucking oysters with a nail file. Everything came out in sharp bits. Apparently, Chris’s toiletries had not been in the pack. Mountain lions had been heard howling right around the same time he’d disappeared. Search and Rescue had based their operations at Mike’s Place. The scent dogs had searched everywhere. McCoy himself had checked every nook and cranny, but the only thing he’d found was a blue denim jacket with a fake wool liner. I made note of his description of the jacket, but I believed McCoy had more info to give. “You must know this area better than anyone,” I said. “Do you have a theory?” “Hmm…” Obviously, a scenario came to mind, but before he could utter it, McCoy pressed his lips together, effectively clamping his mouth shut. With body language so startlingly closed off, this guy seemed increasingly dubious. At that same moment, some new visitors arrived, and McCoy left us alone on the porch to greet them. While Trockman distracted the female thru-hikers with small talk, I walked over to where McCoy had retrieved the trail register, pulled out all the notebooks, and scanned the dates. I knew it! There was a register with entries dated in late February and early March 2015. I snapped pictures of those pages with my cell phone and quietly returned the notebooks to the shelf. We left soon after. On the drive back to Trockman’s car, I asked him what he thought about my exchange with the caretaker. I’d been too direct in my questioning, he said, “but that guy was definitely hiding something.” Back at my rental cabin in Warner Springs, I mulled over the day’s events. Perhaps McCoy had sensed the authoritative park ranger that would forever be a part of me. That’s what the encounter with him had felt like—all those times I’d stood in front of some sketchy-looking dude who would rather chew nails than talk to a woman in uniform. But on the trail, perhaps more than anywhere, appearances can be deceiving. There’s a term seasoned trail experts use—“hiker trash”—that refers to how the uninitiated often confuse weather-beaten, disheveled, skinny-as-a-rail thru-hikers with more worrisome types like ne’er-do-wells, escaped convicts, and meth addicts. It’s a taxonomic challenge, not unlike separating a poisonous mushroom from a batch of edible ones, but as experienced hikers will tell you, tiny details can help you distinguish friend from foe on the trail. Here’s a hint: pay close attention to the things they carry. Needing an unbiased sounding board for my theories, I called my husband, a former Secret Service agent who was now a Special Agent in Charge for the United States Forest Service. I’d met Kent Delbon in 1993, back when we were both law enforcement rangers at Yosemite. Working together had stoked our early romance, but Kent was now holed up at our Denver apartment while I was out alone in the backiest-backwoods of Southern California. Always the more sensible one, Kent reminded me there was no cell service at Mike’s Place. “Returning to a remote locale to interrogate a potential suspect without backup could be dangerous,” he warned. “Like Clarice Starling down-in-the-basement dangerous?” I joked. “Exactly.” But my husband knew better than to talk me out of going back. I had promised Chris’s mother I’d get her some answers, and I couldn’t stand not knowing what made McCoy clam up. I sighed. “On this case, I need to think less like a cop and more like a hiker.” The next morning, I stopped at a local grocery store on the way to Mike’s Place, where I purchased a case of beer, some Red Bull, Oreo cookies, a huge jar of peanuts, and a bottle of Jack Daniels. It was ten thirty a.m. when I arrived at the remote outpost and knocked on the back door. Twice. No answer. I peered through a dirty window and detected no movement within the shadowy interior, so I poked around the compound instead. About fifty yards from the house sat an ancient wood shack and two dilapidated RVs only a cold, wet thru-hiker or the Unabomber wouldn’t mind calling home. I explored the campers looking for clues, or some flash of insight, and found none. I walked around to the front of the main house. A wisp of smoke rose from a metal pipe on the roof. Someone was inside. As I stepped onto the porch, I spotted a dark figure moving on the other side of the screen door. “Josh?” I called out. “It’s Andrea, from yesterday. I brought some trail magic [free food] for the hikers.” “Hi, come on in.” McCoy pushed the door open with one hand. In the other, he held a steaming beverage. “Have a seat.” For a man cave in the desert, McCoy’s living space was cozy. Stuffing emerged from the arms of thrift store furniture positioned to face a window with a pleasing view of the chamise-studded ridgeline between Mike’s Place and the PCT. I sat down while my host threw a stick on a tiny fire burning inside a wood stove. “Can I make you a cup of tea?” he asked. “Sure. Hey, I’m sorry for bugging you, but I have a few more questions.” McCoy looked me in the eye. “I want to help,” he started, apologizing for yesterday. “I want the family to have closure, but I was worried our conversation would scare the lady hikers.” “No problem,” I said, softening. “I’m sorry, too. I should have picked a better time for us to talk.” McCoy’s little fire warmed the fall chill, and his manner toward me felt much more like that of a gracious host. In a sweet way. Not in an overly-charming-because-I’ve-got-to-win-you-over way. I felt completely safe and completely foolish for being suspicious of him. McCoy had a prickly side and, as I later learned, a deep-seated distrust of authority. But I now understood why many thru-hikers enjoyed this cluttered retreat managed by trail angels in the rough. Once the mood had eased a bit, I laid out on McCoy’s coffee table a trail map, some photographs, and my notebook. I then showed him a picture on my phone that I’d pulled off Chris Sylvia’s Facebook page. In it, Chris wore a brown fleece hoodie with fake wool lining. Was this the coat McCoy found at the bottom of a dry waterfall? “Nope, it was definitely a blue denim jacket.” Remembering our tense encounter the day before, I pressed McCoy to tell me why he was so certain Chris hadn’t stopped at Mike’s Place. He admitted that he couldn’t have known for sure if Chris visited in February 2015 because he didn’t start work at Mike’s until months later. Next, we talked theories. Maybe Chris walked off the trail despondent over his breakup with Elizabeth Henle. Or he skipped town and flew to Costa Rica. Perhaps, while looking for water or a cell signal, he got lost and fell or died of exposure—or, because his toiletries were rumored not to have been found in his pack, a mountain lion attacked him while he was relieving himself. Hey, maybe he joined a cult. Yeah, right. We both laughed at that idea. Then McCoy offered another idea, one so real and scary it had made him clamp his lips shut yesterday to avoid frightening the lady hikers. Now that it was only the two of us, McCoy confided in me. The sunny skies and isolation along this section of the PCT had attracted a specific category of entrepreneur: guys who grew illicit crops and had business practices that often turned violent. I assured McCoy I’d look into it. McCoy welcomed me to stay at Mike’s Place for as long as I liked, but I was eager to search some before it got dark. McCoy unloaded my bribe—trail magic—from my rental Jeep. “The hikers are going to love this.” He smiled, eyeing the beer. Back at the Sylvia gear site, I studied a ridge to the south—an enticement for further exploration. But once I stepped off trail to ascend the rocky slope, the thick brush fought back. I’ve endured enough cross-country travel through a variety of landscapes, vegetation, and weather conditions to have a sense of scale on the matter. Walking uphill through the scrub to peek under dozens of granite boulders ranked seven out of ten in terms of painful aggravation. What kind of person would spend more than fifteen minutes pushing through the brittle chamise and eye-poking shrubs to reach the top of this ridge? An escaped fugitive trying to avoid cops and hounds? Possibly. A suicidal person looking for a cliff? I doubted it. A bored young man wanting to pass time while waiting for a ride? No way. Pushing through the brush on these ridges was so horrendous I concluded that neither mountain lion nor maniac could drag a hiker’s body ten yards through this crap without leaving behind a boatload of evidence. I punished myself for over an hour before deciding to search elsewhere. I drove down and parked where a drainage hit the road. A mile walk up the dry creek brought me underneath the trail where Eric Trockman had spotted Chris’s gear. Drainages have a way of collecting our debris, but this one was nearly pristine. I saw no sign of human existence, other than a few rusty parts from an ancient power line and a shiny Mylar balloon that had floated in from who knows where. That evening, I returned to my one-room rental cabin in Warner Springs, poured myself a glass of California red purchased at the only store in town—a local quick mart/gas station—and opened my laptop. Part of my process in attempting to track down Chris Sylvia was to study similar cases to try to find patterns and overlaps. The circumstances behind Louise Teagarden’s disappearance in the late 1950s and the delayed recovery of her remains seemed relevant because she also went missing from the PCT corridor, approximately ten trail miles north from where Chris began his hike. Although it took thirty years for hikers to stumble upon her body, I imagined I’d do a quicker job of finding Chris. During my time with the NPS, I had taken part in a variety of search operations—searches for lost hikers, downed aircraft, flash flood victims, swimmers who went underwater, homicidal fugitives from justice, and suicidal subjects. Some of these people were located days, weeks, or months after they disappeared. A few were found by accident. But every case I worked was eventually resolved. As a professional searcher, I was taught to view a missing hiker case as a “Classic Mystery” in which we must look for clues as earnestly as we search for our subject, because people do not disappear into thin air. Something is left behind—we sometimes just have to work harder to find it. Or so I believed. In Managing the Lost Person Incident, a reference text for search professionals published by the National Association for Search and Rescue (NASAR), a lost person is defined as “a known individual in an unknown location, whose safety may be threatened.” Typically, at the beginning of a search, a missing person’s identity is known, but their personality and habits might not be. That’s why, in a wellmanaged search effort, someone is assigned the role of “investigator” and the search investigator’s first duty is to interview friends, relatives, and peers of the lost person. While gathering information for a “subject profile,” the investigator develops a deeper understanding of the missing individual and, at least in theory, this helps us predict their behavior so that we can best determine where to search for them. While researching other missing hiker cases for clues that might help me find Chris, two disappearances grabbed my attention: Kris Fowler and David O’Sullivan, the other men who had vanished from the PCT shortly after Chris. As I dove into the reports of their last known whereabouts, the mysterious circumstances surrounding their cases took hold of me. It was nearly midnight by the time I closed my laptop and slid into the warm bed inside my Warner Springs cabin. Above me the blades of a ceiling fan whooshed, spinning round and round like my thoughts as I ruminated over all three of the PCT Missing. What on earth had they been doing? And what in the heck were they thinking before they went off everyone’s radar? ___________________________________ Excerpted from TRAIL OF THE LOST: The Relentless Search to Bring Home the Missing Hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail by Andrea Lankford. Copyright © 2023. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. View the full article

We all love a tradition, don’t we? Whether it’s been passed down to us or we’ve adopted it ourselves, traditions bond us as families, friends or communities. They give us a warm, cosy feeling that we are part of something bigger, doing what others have done long before us, letting us pleasingly sink into a long line of ancestors and future offspring. We are safe in numbers, in tradition; the rules are set and all we have to do is play our part. And traditions are fun, right? Just good old-fashioned innocent fun. Well, that’s what I thought, too, until I actually dug into some of America and Britain’s most heart-warming traditions and followed their history all the way back to their completely bizarre roots. In the US and Europe, we take a lot of our everyday habits and seasonal traditions to be universal, and harmless, but on closer inspection it turns out we are doing some very strange stuff on the daily! Let’s start with an easy one: the simple handshake. I mean, do I know what I’m actually doing when I shake hands with someone? I think I, like most people, had the vague knowledge that handshaking had something to do with demonstrating peaceful intent, reassuring my new acquaintance that I didn’t have a massive weapon hidden behind my back ready to finish them off as soon as I got close enough. But what I didn’t know about shaking hands is that the gesture has been in use for at least 3000 years —first evidenced in a 9th Century BCE relief that depicts the then King of Assyria forging an alliance with the King of Babylon. It was a gesture used to seal political, constitutional, bonds. You see, handshakes aren’t just polite, they are promises; they are used in oath making. Perhaps something to think about the next time you meet a realtor or a car dealer. But in this day and age what exactly are we promising with a handshake? Perhaps in a sense we are making the same promise as those ancient kings: I will enter into a state of trust with you as long as you also maintain that bond. Perhaps odd that you would need to express that sentiment, for example, at the start of a business lunch, but then you would notice if someone left you hanging, wouldn’t you? At first being left hanging might seem funny, idiosyncratic, but then afterwards we might reassess. We might even begin to fixate on the interaction, slightly distrust the person or ourselves and just straight-up ask ourselves: but why the hell didn’t they just shake hands? What are they trying to prove? Which leads me to conclude that a handshake is as important now as it ever was because our innocent little social tics are signals, signals to others that — whether we ourselves understand them, or not — we agree to play together by ancient rules. We will care, we will protect, we will respect, or fear, or love. And sure, your entire heart and soul might not be behind that handshake with Craig from Marketing, but the act itself is enough. You are signalling that you will give Craig the same treatment you would give a king — and so what if it is only goodwill in deed and not in thought. At the end of the day, deed is all most people really need from you. Traditions, habits and customs are the secret sauce that holds our days and society together. They are more about our willingness to play the game than anything else, they are gestures that reveal we know the rules and we promise to play fair only to the extent everyone else does. While researching my latest novel, The Family Game, set around the holiday season and its vast array of customs, I fell down a rabbit hole of tradition: the family and the seasonal varieties. Questions followed hard and fast on the back of each other: why do we bring trees inside, who is Santa, how does a Roman Catholic Saint have flying reindeer, and elves, is there a naughty list, and what’s all this about lumps of coal? My Christmas list goes on… Let’s start with the trees. Christmas trees are evergreens and, at least to the non-horticulturalist, appear to never die. Pagan cultures often used evergreen as protection to banish the devil or death itself from their homes due to the fact its branches appeared to possess immortal or resurrective properties. The tradition of having a full tree in the house stems from Germany where devout Christians would set up Paradise Trees in their homes. These Garden of Eden inspired trees (of Adam and Eve fame) would be festooned with apples and wafers, in a nod to both the tree of Knowledge and the Eucharist. Though the wafers latterly became cookies. Queen Victoria’s Husband, Prince Albert, is often credited with having introduced the Christmas tree to British culture, but Albert, the prototypical Manic Pixie Dream boy, and introducer of lots of other fun stuff as well as being quite the whizz in the sack (nine kids?!), was not the first German spouse to drag a tree into a royal British Sitting room. The first recorded use of a Christmas tree, at least in an official setting, appears to be by Queen Charlotte, the German wife of George III, who requested an evergreen tree be erected and decorated at Queen’s Lodge, Windsor, in December 1800, nineteen years before Albert was even born. Though I do concede that Albert, being very much the Harry Styles of the 1800s, would invariably have given the trend more traction when he got behind it half a century later. In terms of the Christmas tree making its way into American living rooms, the tradition of decorating a seasonal tree had of course travelled across to America with the earliest Germany settlers, but it wasn’t until Albert’s adoption that the Christmas tree really hit the big time and became a festive (and often, entirely secular) must have. But what about the flying reindeer, I hear you scream, go back to that bit? How did a fusty old dead saint get hooked up with a jaunty red suit and a gang of flying mammals? Well let’s tackle the big man first: St. Nic. So, here are the facts: Father Christmas was in reality a 4th Century bishop from Myra (now Turkey) and he got his reputation for leaving gifts in children’s houses after hearing that a man (he didn’t know) couldn’t afford to settle dowries for his three daughters. In order to prevent said daughters from being forced into prostitution, apparently the alternative to marriage at the time, St. Nicholas (just Nicholas back then I’d imagine) snuck over to the man’s house and threw a big bag of gold coins through their open window. So far so Christmas stocking filler, right?! Anyway, Nicholas came back to the family’s house three nights in a row throwing a bag of coins every time, and on the final night the father of the girls caught Nicholas in the act, and overcome with gratitude, showered him with thanks. Nicholas told him not to make too much of a fuss about the whole thing or tell anyone what a lovely guy he was as it would only spoil it – and then, after a bit, the Catholic church made him a saint. St. Nicholas’s feast became a new calendar fixture, every early December, encouraging people to give small token gifts to good children and twigs or coal to bad ones. And the red suit? Well, that was his Bishop outfit, though obviously the pointy hat appears to have flopped slightly over time. But what about the airborne reindeer, I hear you still screaming? Ok, so here’s where things get a little confused: in Northern European mythology the Norse God Thor rode about in a chariot pulled by two flying goats, but here’s my point—Thor is translated as ‘Donar’ in German. Sound familiar? Not much is available in terms of connecting the dots here—which seems to imply that a lot of the Santa Claus myth has developed through the oral tradition—the first written mention of the reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh being in a poem from 1821. But the reindeer aren’t flying in that they’re just reindeer. Then in 1891 the US government, in connection with the Sami people of Northern Norway, brought over 539 reindeer and 418 sleds in a one-off project to introduce reindeer husbandry to Alaska and teach local Inuit people to herd and breed the animals. Reindeer numbers soared and to promote the sale of furs and meat in the US, the company responsible, in collaboration with Macy’s department store, began staging an annual Christmas parade featuring Santa Claus and teams of Sami and Alaskan herders driving teams of reindeer – linking the two together visually for the first time. But then when did they start flying??? Oh, that? That was just some copywriter working for a toy store who had to come up with a free Christmas giveaway colouring book for children. And Rudolph the flying reindeer was born. But don’t be disappointed, there’s still a lot of magic in all this, I promise, and a lot more, weird, macabre, old stuff…like Krampus (the 9ft devil monster who accompanies Santa everywhere?!), and hessian sacks that bundle you up to hell, and magic evergreen rods that banish the devil, and of course leaving your shoes out on the 5th December. But to find out about all that juicy, weird, very unsettling stuff you’ll have to grab a paperback copy of my new book. Oops, I’ve only gone and made it too commercial, haven’t I? *** View the full article

From the earliest days, Hollywood and its overseas competitors and wannabes were addicted to Chinatown. In tandem with Limehouse fiction, Fu Manchu series, and Charlie Chan mysteries, the so-called China flicks—or, ahem, yellow flicks—exploited the stereotypical eerie ambience of Chinatown as the cinematic obbligato. With its exotically clad citizenry, crooked alleys, curio shops, opium dens, gambling parlors, brothels, hidden warrens, trapdoors, and an occasional flying dagger in the dark, Chinatown, whether in realist street scenes or carved out of cardboard and fantasy, appeared readymade for film noir. In some ways one may say that Thomas Edison, who had made a short reel titled Chinese Laundry Scene in 1895, followed in 1898 by a technically more experimental Dancing Chinamen—Marionettes, was a trailblazer of Chinatown Noir. The latter film, consisting of just one scene in which two marionettes dance on strings pulled by an invisible hand, presents strangely multijointed bodies that seem to be able to perform physically impossible feats. Edison’s competitor at American Mutoscope and Biograph made Chinese Rubbernecks in 1903, a film that shows a Chinese laundryman grabbing the head of his coworker and pulling it until the neck stretches across the screen and then springs back. Such a feat, created with dummies, reflects cinematic fantasies about the supposedly robotic Chinese physique and anticipates the kind of techno-Orientalist portrayals, for instance, of Fu Manchu more or less as a mind-controlling, soul-snatching cyborg. Rising from the steam and starch of her father’s laundry in Los Angeles, Anna May Wong (1905-1961) entered early Hollywood when many films were saturated with noirish Chinatown imagery. As I have pointed out in my book, Daughter of the Dragon, in those years when film technology was still in its infancy, the fascination with Chinatown became comingled with the very nature of cinema with its intention to capture reality on the one hand and to “shock and awe” on the other. A passing glance at the titles of those Chinese-themed pictures made close to Wong’s Hollywood debut reveals how eagerly the producers had exploited popular fantasies of turn-of-the-century Chinatown: The Chinese Lily (1914), The Yellow Traffic (1914), The War of the Tongs (1917), Mystic Faces (1918), and City of Dim Faces (1918). Wong first appeared in the 1919 film The Red Lantern, starring Alla Nazimova, the First Lady of the Silent Screen who coined the term, “sewing circle,” a discreet code for a gathering of lesbian and bisexual thespians. In the film, released in the same year as the other star-studded China flick, Broken Blossom (directed by D. W. Griffith), Wong was an uncredited extra as a lantern-carrier whose face remains unrecognizable in the crowd. From that unceremonious beginning Wong would rise to become a global star, one that redefined the genre of Chinatown Noir. Some critics may have dismissed her as a willing participant in the concoction and perpetuation of Chinese stereotypes, but that assessment overlooks the insurmountable hurdles she had to overcome and the extraordinary talent and tenacity she had demonstrated as a star coolie, if you will, surviving and thriving in Hollywood’s proverbial Dream Factory. A stark departure from all the yellowface actors ranging from Nazimova to Mary Pickford, Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck, and Luise Rainer, and frustratingly denied lead roles due to racist restrictions of Hollywood, Wong brought authenticity and nuance to her roles while trying to remain true to herself and to her heritage, undermining the stereotypes that threatened to define her. Looking back at her astonishing career, which boasts of over sixty films, a dozen stage plays, several television series, and countless vaudeville skits, I would recommend to my fellow mystery aficionados a prime-cut selection of what I consider to be quintessential Anna May Wong movies by which she left an indelible mark on Chinatown Noir: Piccadilly (1929) A swan song of the silent era, Piccadilly was written by the bestselling British author Arnold Bennett and directed by the German auteur E. A. Dupont. A British film somewhat freed from straitlaced Hollywood but by no means devoid of racial bigotry, Piccadilly was a feast for the eye as it cast Wong in her most provocatively erotic and seductive role. The story involves Shosho (Wong), a scullery maid who snatches a job as the dancing star at the fashionable Piccadilly Club from Mabel Greenfield (Gilda Gray), a blonde whose Charleston routines begin to get stale. Using her erotic and youthful charm, Shosho also steals Mabel’s place in the heart of the club owner, Valentine Wilmot. In the final seduction scene, Shosho takes Wilmot back to her flat in Limehouse. Full of kitschy, derivative bric-a-brac like goldfish, pagoda lanterns, a Buddha portrait, and looming shadows of a dragon, the exotic décor suggests a den of an Oriental seductress ready to ensnare her unsuspecting prey. Appearing behind a diaphanous screen, Shosho has slipped into a braless sequined dress dangling on two thin straps, plus a matching embroidered veil. Not surprisingly, she lures Wilmot into her web. In the end, Shosho was shot dead by Jim, her jealous Chinese lover. Daughter of the Dragon (1931) Adapted from a Fu Manchu novel by Sax Rohmer, Daughter of the Dragon was vintage Anna May Wong. Teaming up with two of the biggest stars for Asian roles of the period—Warner Oland (my favorite Charlie Chan impersonator; see my book Charlie Chan) and Sessue Hayakawa, Wong played the lead as Ling Moy, the daughter of the “insidious Chinaman.” While in Piccadilly Shosho was just a simple, unabashed hedonist, at best a seductress with no malice, only ambition for career success, in Daughter of the Dragon Ling Moy was more cyborg than human, who in Rohmer’s potent racial imagination possesses “the uncanny power which Homer gave to Circe, of stealing men’s souls.” Inheriting the family’s mantle upon Fu Manchu’s death, she turns into a “man-daughter,” a monstrous female figure, who, like Lady Macbeth, cloaks an almost masculine pride in her ability to double-cross and to execute a murderous plot. Wong’s apotheosis as a dragon lady in this film may have drawn the ire of some racially sensitive viewers and historians, but Daughter of the Dragon is a perfect example of how talented artists, working within constraints—a virtual form of footbinding, if you will—both exploited and exploded the stereotypes cast by the film industry. Accentuated by a combination of highly stylized dialogues, flashy costumes, exotic sets, and theatrical actions, what Wong achieved with the dragon-lady persona was sharing with her audiences the thrill of being part of what might be deeply shameful, an almost illicit pleasure, exposing the stereotype as a cinematic construction rather than simple mimesis. Shanghai Express (1932) As a China flick, Shanghai Express was part of the enduring Hollywood tradition of casting a white actress, yellowface or not, in the exotic setting of faraway China. It is true that Josef von Sternberg’s classic was a star vehicle, not for Wong, but for his own “discovery” and new German import, Marlene Dietrich. Carrying a motley cast of passengers, including a notorious China “coaster,” Shanghai Lily (Dietrich), and a reformed Chinese prostitute Hui Fei (Wong), Sternbger’s hand-painted Shanghai Express chugs precariously through the maelstrom of wartime China. Using a Chinese-character clock as a timekeeper, the story unfolds like a murder mystery that has to be solved by a supersleuth before the train reaches its destination. The railroad journey might have set a good tempo for the plot, but the Austrian auteur was never known to be a zippy storyteller. Sternberg was far more interested in making love to his star with the camera. Every time Dietrich’s character appears on-screen, she is almost always shot full frame, as if every gesture, look, or word was loaded with significance. Under special butterfly lighting, Dietrich’s face glows in the dark like a silver moon, her wispy hair taking on lively thickness and incredible sheen. Even Ayn Rand, the patron saint of libertarianism, claimed that rarely had any time so impressed her as Shanghai Express, and when pressed for a reason, Rand spoke of the scene that was unforgettable to her: “The way the wind blown through the fur-piece around Marlene’s shoulder when she sits on the back platform of the train!” Next to the aura of the Blonde Venus, Wong held her ground remarkably well, as her character commands a force field of her own in the film. While Shanghai Lily prances around like a dressage mare in heat, Hui Fei plays solitaire and smokes cigarettes alone, minding her own business. Shanghai Lily may speak some clever lines, such as “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily,” but it is Hui Fei who delivers the most hardboiled quips in the film, rendered in Wong’s sultry voice with the steely firmness of Fu Manchu’s daughter. After she kills the degenerate warlord Henry Chang (Warner Oland), Shanghai Lily says, “I don’t’ know if I ought to be grateful to you or not.” Speaking like a gun moll in a classic noir, Hui Fei replies, “It’s of no consequence. I didn’t do it for you. Death cancels his debt to me.” In this China saga, with all its guns, armies, and imperial powers, no one has the power or will to change the course of history, except for Hui Fei, the lowly prostitute, who has the courage to take down a supervillain to settle a personal account. In other words, Wong’s character is the real engine driving the Shanghai Express. Daughter of Shanghai (1938) Dubbed the “Anna May Wong story” by studio insiders at Paramount, Daughter of Shanghai was released in 1938 when China was in the headlines every day after a full-scale Japanese invasion. In the film Wong played Lan Ying, the daughter of a San Francisco Chinatown importer. After the murder of her father, Lan Ying becomes a detective on the trail of smugglers, traveling as far as the Caribbean and occasionally having to don men’s clothes. Because of the intensity of the action involved, the director, Robert Florey, asked Wong to trim her long fingernails. For a dozen years, she had diligently cultivated the stiletto tips of her slender fingers and protected them against breakage by wearing gold guards. Like Mary Pickford’s golden ringlets or Veronica Lake’s peek-a-boo cascade, these gilded cuticle attachments had served to exoticize her presence. Yet, for the sake of making her character more believable in the film, the proverbial dragon’s daughter sacrificed her nails. In the context of all of her sacrifices—she had died, as Wong once put it, a thousand times deaths on-screen—it is worth noting that Daughter of Shanghai was the first film in which her character is given a happy, romantic ending, although it was, of course, with an Asian man. In her star vehicle, Wong paired with the Korean American actor Philip Ahn, who played a federal agent, Kim Lee. The combined factors that Wong and Ahn were chums from high school and that Kim Lee proposes marriage to Lan Ying at the end of the film spurred the Hollywood rumor mill into wild speculations that the two Asian American actors were romantically involved, unaware that Ahn was, quite possibly, gay. In more likelihood these two actors, living in an era when homoeroticism was taboo, were using each other as a proverbial “beard.” In an industry where being “outed” as a homosexual could easily doom one’s career, these two already marginalized Asian actors faced double jeopardy and would have to tread even more carefully in a pre-Stonewall world. *** View the full article