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It’s been an amazing year for historical fiction (just like every year is an amazing year for historical fiction!), so I thought I’d round up some of the best, most richly textured tapestries of history that the fiction world has to offer. As always, I noticed a bit of a 20th century bias when putting this together, so please put older settings that you’ve enjoyed recently in the comments! As a funny note, there are not one, but two books on this list set in Los Angeles in 1981, one featuring the preppies and the other following LA’s burgeoning punk scene. There are alas no crossovers, although I imagine the characters in the punk novel could easily beat up the characters in a Bret Easton Ellis novel (although the Ellis characters would throw some witty repartee in there that would probably be just as wounding). Anyway, now you, too, can speculate on who would win that fight. Enjoy. Niklas Natt och Dag, The City Between the Bridges: 1794 (Atria) Setting: Stockholm, 1794 I adored Niklas Natt och Dag’s brilliantly cynical debut, The Wolf and the Watchman, and The City Between the Bridges is just full of filth and cynicism, the perfect combination for depicting the late 18th century and its terrible iniquities. The watchman of The Wolf and the Watchman returns to solve a new crime, this one the brutal murder of a tenant’s daughter on the eve of her wedding to a seemingly sensitive nobleman. Natt och Dag is particularly adept at savagely ripping the notion of a “civilized age” apart and showing the raw suffering underneath. As a side note, I’ve long believed that historical fiction is only to be trusted when the author is willing to describe bad smells to set the scene, and this book is full of truly disgusting odors. Sarah Penner, The London Seance Society (Park Row) Setting: Paris, 1870s I don’t know if this is at all useful to mention, but I can almost guarantee you that Arthur Conan Doyle would have run through quicksand just to get his hands on a book with this title. The good news is that it’s definitely much better than the kind of book old Conan Doyle probably would have thought it was (which is to say, a nonfiction book about people who were successfully able to contact the spirit world). No, bestselling author Sarah Penner’s book is a canny romp through the Victorian zeitgeist that cemented Conan Doyle’s interests in spiritualism, a world in which science and rationalism clashed with spectacle and illusion and all of those things clashed with a preoccupation with ghosts and the occult. Anyway, it’s about a famed spiritualist and a non-believer who wind up joining forces to solve a murder… and then find themselves embroiled in a crime. Tell me you yourself wouldn’t run through quicksand to acquire this book, and I won’t believe you. –OR Victoria Kielland, My Men Translated by Damion Searls (Astra House) Setting: Norway and the United States, late 19th Century Nasty, brutal, and short, Victoria Kielland’s My Men features Norwegian-American lonely hearts killer Belle Gunness, who lured widowers and their children to her farm with the promise of care and inheritable land, then slaughtered both her lovers and their families. The novel frames Gunness’ murderous quest as an almost-inevitable perversion of the American Dream. Kielland’s lyrical, abstract, and visceral prose, capably translated by Damion Searls, has won acclaim in her native Norway and is a beguiling match to her terrifying subject matter. ​​Katharine Beutner, Killingly (Soho Press) Setting: Massachusetts, 1897 My sister went to Mount Holyoke, which is more known for protesting the removal of midnight cookies from menu options than murder, but this historical mystery is based on the real disappearance of a student in 1897 at the famed women’s university. Beutner uses the student’s disappearance as a wider set-piece to investigate the nature of those who stand apart from the crowd, and are punished for their independence. Alex Hay, The Housekeepers (Graydon House) Turn of the century London In this delightful, turn-of-the-century-set heist novel, the death of a patriarch becomes the moment that his housekeeper sets in motion a complex plan to rob his home of every valuable inside. How will she do it? First, by assembling a team of circus performers, thieves, seamstresses, and actors, and second, by striking at the perfect time: during the hustle and bustle of a very inappropriate ball. Like the comic operettas of its time, The Housekeepers is riotous good fun! Victor LaValle, Lone Women (One World) Setting: Montana, 1915 Adelaide Henry is the last of her line, burdened with a curse that she lugs across half the continental United States from warm California to freezing Montana. There, she finds friendship, companionship, and a fresh start, but will she be able to control whatever lurks in her strangely heavy steam-trunk? Lone Women is a searing and unsettling mixture of historical detail, western imagery, and terrifying twists and turns, from an author who continues to reinvent horror with every page. Brendan Slocumb, Symphony of Secrets (Anchor) Setting: New York City, 1920s Brendan Slocumb burst onto the scene with the brilliant literary mystery The Violin Conspiracy, and his follow-up is just as good. Split between the present day and 1918, the story slowly reveals how a renowned composer may have stolen all that made his music great from the autistic Black woman who was once his best friend. Like Slocumb’s debut, Symphony of Secrets uses the framework of classic detective fiction to tell a larger story of cultural appropriation and how our unequal society determines who gets to reap the benefits of talent and produce art. Cheryl Head, Time’s Undoing (Dutton) Setting: Alabama, 1920s and 2010s Cheryl Head turned to her own grandfather’s murder for the inspiration behind this timely tale of injustice and protest. Time’s Undoing is split between two time periods—the 1920s, when the narrator’s grandfather is murdered by a police officer in Birmingham, and the 2010s, when the narrator heads to Alabama on a journalistic assignment to connect what happened to her grandfather to ongoing issues with racist policing. She quickly finds herself up against those who would rather the truth be buried, but finds unlikely allies ready to help her fight for the truth, no matter its implications. Kevin Jared Hosein, Hungry Ghosts (Ecco) Setting: Trinidad, 1940s Set in the dying colonial era, Kevin Jared Hosein’s searing debut examines race, class, and decolonization through the lens of two families, one white and wealthy, the other Black and disenfranchised, as their lives become ever more entwined after the disappearance of the white family’s patriarch. Like the best historical fiction, Hungry Ghosts is immersed in the ideas and complexities of its’ shifting time period, for a triumph of well-researched storytelling. Tara Ison, At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf (IG Publishing) Setting: WWII France In one of those amazing life twists that feels as bizarre as it is inspiring, Tara Ison, the writer of the cult hit Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead has crafted one of the best tales of collaboration ever written. In Between the Hour of Dog and Wolf, Tara Ison takes us into the mind of an adolescent Jewish girl being hidden with a French family during WWII. She spends so much time pretending to align with the ideals of the occupiers that she finds herself beginning to agree with them, in what reads as a Jewish version of Lacombe, Lucien. Perhaps it’s not such a twist—both book and film are about the ways we assume new roles when necessary to survival, whether that’s taking a job as a fashion consultant to feed siblings and putting on a batshit fashion show (a la Babysitter) or pretending to be a fascist to to protect from others knowing that you are Jewish. Okay, maybe that last comparison is a bit of a stretch, but still, everyone should read this book and also everyone should should rewatch that movie. Naomi Hirahara, Evergreen (Soho) Setting: Post-War Chicago Hirahara’s Clark and Division was one of the more accomplished crime novels in recent memory, and this year she’s following it up with Evergreen, following Aki Ito and her family as they make the journey from Chicago back to California, where they find the Japanese-American community in distress. Evergreen dives into the shadows of Boyle Heights and Little Tokyo to tell a story about one of the darker chapters of American history. With these books focused on the Japanese-American experience of post-WWII America, Hirahara has found a pivotal subject and brought her immense talents to bear. –DM Josh Weiss, Sunset Empire (Grand Central) Setting: Los Angeles, 1950s I loved Josh Weiss’s speculative alternative history noir Beat the Devils, and his follow-up, Sunset Empire, looks to be just as compelling and imaginative. The setting is fascinating, and explored with a seriousness towards in-world logic: an alternate timeline where McCarthy wins the presidential election, the war in Korea continues after years with no signs of ending, and anti-Semitism, racism, and xenophobia are at an all-time high. In the second in this series, a young Korean-American man blows up a department store in a suicide bombing probably caused by hypnosis for what I’m speculating is going to be a reverse Manchurian Candidate plotline. Meanwhile, Weiss’ policeman hero is under suspicion for the death of his ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth Short, and needs to solve both the bombing and Short’s murder before his time runs out to make a difference or clear his own name. Thomas Mallon, Up With the Sun (Knopf) Setting: Hollywood, 1950s, New York City, 1980s Dick Kallman was a real-life actor whose career was poisoned by homophobia against him and his own bad behavior, around in the 50s and 60s as an up-and-comer only to vanish in the wake of scandal and reappear in the news as a murder victim in 1980. There’s nothing more cynical than a crime novel about failed Hollywood dreams, and this novel is a perfect accompaniment to the ongoing labor fight in Hollywood. John Manuel Arias, Where There Was Fire (Flatiron) Setting: Costa Rica, 1960s and 1990s In 1968 Costa Rica, a fruit plantation burns after a family argument. Decades later, the family is still riven by their secrets. What caused the fire? What happened to the family’s patriarch? And what truths will characters learn about themselves, trapped with their thoughts and unpredictable company during an epic hurricane? Rachel Cochran, The Gulf (Harper) Setting: Texas Gulf Coast, 1970s Set in 1970s Texas in a conservative town amidst the rise of the feminist movement, The Gulf is one of several thrillers that show that the Third Coast has come into its own. The Gulf follows a young queer woman searching for answers after the murder of a powerful woman she’d admired greatly, but who was hated by most of the men in town—and her own children. A refreshing read and a strong debut from a powerful new voice. Mariana Enriquez, Our Share of Night (Hogarth) Setting: Argentina, 1970s What a strange and luminous novel. Mariana Enriquez stunned with her collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, and Our Share of Night is just as fantastic (and fantastical). Beginning in Argentina in the years of the dictatorship, Our Share of Night follows a father and son on a grief-driven road trip as they mourn the loss of the woman who united them, her dangerous (and possibly immortal) family close in pursuit. A dark vampiric noir that heralds a new era in South American horror. Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto (Doubleday) Setting: New York City, 1970s Pulitzer Prize winner Whitehead continues his journey through the history of modern New York City, this time taking on the 1970s, as the cast of characters from Harlem Shuffle get swept up in political action, civil unrest, corrupt policing, the rise of Blaxploitation culture, and more. It’s a rich backdrop for Whitehead’s powerful human dramas, and he paints a vivid portrait of people moving between the straight and the crooked world, just trying to get by. –DM Kyle Decker, This Rancid Mill (PM Press) Setting: Los Angeles, 1981 Punk rock PI!!! Like the genre that inspired it, Decker’s This Rancid Mill embodies a punk ethos of DIY, not giving a shit, social critique, and a heavy dose of sardonic humor. This Rancid Mill is set in 1981 Los Angeles, so just keep The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization: The Punk Years in the back of your mind while reading it and you’ll have the exact era captured. In fact, perhaps the best way to describe this book is, what if Darby Crash had been murdered, and what if a PI with a Mohawk straight out of SLC Punk was hired to take on the case? Bret Easton Ellis, The Shards (Knopf) Setting: Los Angeles, 1981 Bret Easton Ellis is back, this time with a new serial killer novel that brings together all the best aspects of Less Than Zero and American Psycho. It’s 1981, Missing Persons is playing on the stereo, and future writer Bret is doing bumps with his prep-school friends by the poolside, dressed sharply in Ralph Lauren, as a killer makes his way closer and closer to their wealthy enclave. Ellis’ teenage emotional truths collide with violent fictional set-pieces for an epic tale of Southern Californian sins. Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Silver Nitrate (Random House) Setting: Mexico City, 1990s Both of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s parents worked in radio, so perhaps that’s part of the inspiration behind this bonkers ode to sound engineering and the (literal magical) power of the human voice. Silver Nitrate features a sound editor and a has-been actor as they befriend an elderly icon from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, only to find themselves drawn into a vast conspiracy to harness the magic of the silver screen and bring an occult-obsessed Nazi back from the dead. This book has everything, and I could not recommend it enough! View the full article

Prophet is a mystery, a sci-fi adventure, a spy thriller, a queer romance, a military horror story, and satire about the weaponisation of nostalgia in our present cultural moment. It’s made from all the things we love, inspired by a lifetime of books, movies and tv shows, internet fanfiction and video games. We aimed to write a page-turner with a philosophical heart and a big damn love story at its core, building it from the familiar tropes that course through those media, from Bond films and spy stories to popular procedural TV mystery shows. Here are some of its literary inspirations: ANNIHILATION by Jeff VanderMeer There is something so utterly soothing about how VanderMeer brings us into the world of the Southern Reach trilogy. The rhythm and building of atmosphere, the detached cataloging of surreal and often unexplainable happenings. A deep thread of uncertainty is woven throughout, and is well-hidden by purpose-built procedural language verging on military recording of events. It’s true that not many would find this particular brand of clinical horror soothing, but I adore the soft madness of it all. If placed under a microscope, you would see that there is shared DNA in Prophet; we aimed to provide a similar lulling, yet details-based, insanity in pivotal moments. (SB) CHEW by John Layman with art by Rob Guillory Some of the best detective stories, in my opinion, revolve around a singularly remarkable person just trying to get on with their otherwise regular job. Chew does this by making Tony Chu the most boring person with an astounding talent in an extraordinary situation, namely that he is a cibopath and can gain psychic impressions from anything he eats. His love of doing things by the book and knowing the importance of paperwork in a world so wild that he finds himself embroiled in a global conspiracy that involves illegal chicken consumption, cannibalism, and Russian operatives, is so obviously woven into the DNA of Prophet. Though our protagonists don’t deal with the same cartoonish peril that Agent Chu does, the chaos they face is equally tempered with their singular talent and stark stoicism (SB) DECLARE by Tim Powers Recommended to me by a friend who’s a Professor of Early Modern French literature and thought, this huge Cold War supernatural spy thriller meshes matters of historical fact with Catholicism and pre-Islamic religion, has a big romance at its centre, and is packed with eerie scenes that linger long and disturbingly in my memory. Declare was one of the books that finally let me ditch the unhelpful genre attitudes I’d held since a child, ones that put literature in a special box and genre fiction in a less special one. It’s so accomplished and serious but at the same time enormous fun. It definitely influenced Prophet in terms of writing about a mysterious entity whose true purpose is something human minds cannot grasp but which is recruited by bad actors for their own political ends. (HM) DISPATCHES by Michael Herr Journalism screwed to such a pitch reporting the horrors of the Vietnam War that it achieves terrible and fantastic forms, like the unearthly flora of a JG Ballard story. Dispatches reads like a final confession, has the off-kilter musicality of beat literature, and it inspired Prophet in myriad ways. Its lyricism was at the forefront of my mind when we wrote the firefight-meets-acid-trip finale to our novel. But more centrally, it’s a book that questions what it means to write with fidelity to truth. Dispatches has received criticism for being a partly fictionalised account—but this seems to me to miss the point. What is truth in circumstances beyond rational imagining is a question Prophet makes much of—and what is the responsibility of the writer in trying to capture and communicate it. Dispatches is fiction and non-fiction at once, and it’s devastating either way. (HM) TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY by John le Carré This Cold War novel is a host of perfections: a plot as complex, elegant and efficient as a watch-mechanism; devastatingly sharp evocations of class and British culture; Le Carré’s ability to conjure real character and vivid atmosphere in a sentence or two; the palpable weariness of George Smiley as he moves through a professional and personal world built on an inability to trust. In Prophet, Rao’s ability to detect truth-values in any propositional statement breaks everything espionage and mystery novels are based on; it’s a conceit that came from reading books like these. Writing any kind of spy fiction, you’re working with le Carré. His voice is always there, like the cadences of the King James Bible echoing through the English literary canon. It’s also very, very fun to imagine Rao meeting Smiley, and how that conversation would have gone (badly). (HM) REDEPLOYMENT by Phil Klay There are inspiring books, and there are books that inspire and inspire me to write. Redeployment is one of them. A collection of short stories in a dozen different voices, built from Klay’s experiences serving in the Marine Corps in Iraq and a wealth of research, the collection is a masterwork of narrative sophistication, psychological precision, brutality, tragedy, and humour. It burns with the sense of bearing witness and turns a world of which readers might never have had any experience into something they feel they know. Writing Prophet required a lot of deep-diving into military non-fiction, official documents, historical papers, biographies, and internet military message boards. But without this book, I don’t think I’ve have dared to write military sci-fi at all. (HM) *** View the full article

Note: I’ve expanded the definition of ‘locked-room’ to include closed-set. AND THEN THERE WERE NONE by Agatha Christie – The original. Ten strangers receive invitations to a solitary mansion on a windswept island off the British coast. Then they begin to die off, one by one. THE WOMAN IN CABIN TEN by Ruth Ware – An excellent locked-room mystery set on a luxurious yacht. Lo Blacklock, a journalist working for a travel magazine, spends a week aboard. She sees a woman thrown overboard, yet all the passengers are accounted for? Dark and exquisitely tense. MISERY by Stephen King – A locked room, literally. I saw the film before I read the book. Both are superb. Writer Paul Sheldon (author of the Misery Chastain novels) crashes his car during a blizzard. Annie Wilkes, a nurse who seemingly misunderstands the Hippocratic Oath, takes him home to look after him. What follows is legendary and it is incredibly claustrophobic. AN UNWANTED GUEST by Shari Lapena – I love the Catskills setting of this thriller. Living in rural Sweden, in an isolated forest, I felt every page of this. The storm in the novel cuts off Wi-Fi and phone signals, as well as electricity. Then the unthinkable happens. In moments like this, when there is no outside help, you get to know the characters very well and very fast. THE LOCKED ROOM by Elly Griffiths – A book in the fantastic Ruth Galloway series, the locked room element of this book comes by way of the pandemic lockdowns of 2020. Ruth and Nelson investigate a series of murder-suicides connected to a fascinating archaeological find. HOSTAGE by Clare Mackintosh – If you want unbearable tension in a thriller, find one set on a plane up in the air. This exhilarating novel is not only a locked-in suspense novel set on the first non-stop flight from London to Sydney, it’s also a ‘what would you do?’ story to test yourself. IN THE MORNING I’LL BE GONE by Adrian McKinty – If you haven’t read the Sean Duffy books yet… why not? One of my favourite series, these detective novels have it all: atmospheric tension (they are set in Belfast during The Troubles), humour, warmth, and superb writing. SNOW BLIND by Ragnar Jonasson – An isolated fishing village in northern Iceland, a rookie policeman out of his depth, and a series of heinous crimes in the snowy fjords. Chilling and eerie. A DANGEROUS CROSSING by Rachel Rhys – A sumptuous thriller set in 1939 aboard a luxury liner. This is a character-driven novel packed full of intrigue, secrets, and enticing locations. SHUTTER ISLAND by Dennis Lehane – I am a passionate fan of Lehane’s work. Shutter Island is famous for its twist (which is flawless) but it stands up well to re-reading. The gothic atmosphere (excellent storms), and isolated island combine to set the perfect stage for this gripping story. *** View the full article

At its best, religion can help and encourage. At its worst, it can be used to manipulate, control and abuse. Such is the case in my upcoming thriller In a Quiet Town. The story centers around Tatum whose husband Shane is the lead pastor of the only church in their small town. On the outside, they appear to be the perfect couple, but things are not as idyllic as they seem. Years earlier, Shane all but disowned their adult daughter Adrienne, destroying the relationship between she and Tatum. Now, Tatum is determined to reconnect with her daughter. She sneaks out every Wednesday evening to meet up with her, until one night Adrienne disappears. As Tatum desperately searches for her daughter – despite no one in town believing her that anything sinister has happened – we see how toxic this church and this town really is. Here are five other novels exploring toxic religion. The Last Housewife by Ashley Winstead This chilling novel follows Shay as she searches for answers in the death of her former college roommate Laurel. After hearing about Laurel’s death on a true-crime podcast hosted by her high school friend Jamie, she flies from Dallas, where she lives with her husband, to New York to solve the mystery. It’s clear from the start that old demons are waiting for her there. As the story unfolds, we learn about Don, a man who manipulated, controlled, and abused Shay and her friends back when they were in college. Delving deeper into the investigation means going undercover into a cult that is more dangerous and sinister than she could have imagined. While this story is about a cult rather than a traditional religion or church, I felt it fit this list as it explores similar themes such as the patriarchy, gender roles, the expectations men put on women and the need to conform to fit in. Lay Your Body Down by Amy Suiter Clarke Del Walker returns to her hometown after her former boyfriend Lars is killed. Returning means facing her religious trauma surrounding the mega-church that seemingly runs the town. Told in three alternating timelines and points of view – Del in the present and past, and blog posts written by Lars’ wife Eve — the reader is given glimpses into the patriarchal nature of Pastor Rick and his church. As someone who was raised in church, I thought the depiction of putting forth a “joyful” outward appearance while struggling on the inside was so relatable and well done. This story is haunting and will stick with you long after the last page has been turned. This Might Hurt by Stephanie Wrobel Natalie hasn’t heard from her sister Kit for more than six months, not since she left to go to a “self-improvement” retreat in Wisewood. Now Natalie has received a strange, threatening email and she’s headed to Wisewood to find her sister. When she arrives, it’s clear Wisewood is more sinister than she could have imagined. I loved this premise and this story. It’s told from three alternating perspectives – Kit, Natalie and a mysterious third person. The novel explores how cults can identify, prey upon, manipulate and control vulnerable people. The Mothers by Britt Bennett Nadia is seventeen years old, lives in San Diego and attends a church called the Upper Room. After Nadia’s mother commits suicide, she strikes up a relationship with a boy named Luke who is her pastor’s son and a hometown football hero. “The Mothers” are a group of elderly women who attend the church. While this story is about Nadia’s life from her teenage years and beyond, much of it is told from the perspective of “the mothers.” The Upper Room serves as an additional character in the book and many of the choices made – good and bad – stem from the church. The hypocrisy in some of those choices is spotlighted, as are the ways they affect the trajectory of Nadia’s life. This is a gritty coming-of-age tale, I won’t soon forget. All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers Margot Davies returns to her hometown to care for her Uncle Luke who is suffering from dementia, right around the time a young girl goes missing. This new case brings up haunting similarities to the murder of Margot’s childhood neighbor January. Margot becomes obsessed with solving January’s cold case. While this story isn’t largely about religious toxicity, the theme does run subtly in the background in this small town. Judgments, misogyny, and unfair assumptions are rampant throughout this story and many of them have hindered the investigation into January’s death. The eerie similarities to a real-life true crime case make this a fun mysterious read. *** View the full article

William Friedkin, the Oscar-winning director of the masterpieces The French Connection and The Exorcist has died at the age of 87. Born in Chicago on August 29, 1935 to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, Friedkin worked on documentary film crews and TV shows in the 1960s, rising to prominence in the early 1970s among a generation of creative and resourceful young filmmakers who would create the New Hollywood movement. He directed a handful of highly theatrical films in the late 60s and early 70s—musicals or adaptations of stage plays. But it was The French Connection, his gritty, low-budget neonoir set in present-day New York City, that catapulted him to the big-time. The film was written by Ernest Tidyman, based on Robin Moore’s book of the same name from 1969. Made on a budget of $1.5 million and produced by Fox, the only studio that didn’t reject it, The French Connection was shot documentary-style on location. It is noteworthy (among its incredible performances) for featuring a heart-pounding car chase through the streets of New York, which, thanks to Friedkin’s vérité style, feels immersive and hyper-realistic. Nominated for eight Oscars and the winner of five, it completely reworked the cop thriller and remains one of the most important crime films of all time. Following the phenomenal success of The French Connection, Friedkin directed The Exorcist. The 1973 adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel of the same name, it is long considered the greatest horror movie ever made. The Exorcist was nominated for ten Oscars. It is impossible to overstate its impact on the horror genre or on cinema, writ large. In 1973, along with Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich, he started a production company in association with Paramount called The Director’s Company. Due to various disagreements, it had a short lifespan, but produced three seminal films, Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon (1973), Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), and Bogdanovich’s controversial Daisy Miller (1974). Throughout his long and inventive career, Friedkin directed many fascinating films, including a a $22 million remake of the Henri-Georges Clouzot 1953 thriller The Wages of Fear called Sorcerer (1977), which bombed after competing at the box office with Star Wars, a film that The Director’s Company passed on producing. Several subsequent films were less successful at the box-office: The Brink’s Job (1978), the cult classic Cruising (1980), and Deal of the Century (1983). In 1985, to great success, Friedkin released The French Connection‘s descendant-of-sorts, the classic neonoir To Live and Die in L.A, and, in 1987, the critical darling serial-killer movie Rampage (1987). In 1998, he directed the impressive cable remake of Twelve Angry Men. Friedkin’s accomplishments were manifold, and his legacy is one of intense artistic perseverance in the face of tawdry commercial concerns. It’s a tragedy that many of his fascinating middle-period films were neglected or maligned; Friedkin’s box-office failures are more interesting than many directors’ successes. And yet, if for some absurd reason there is only one film for which Friedkin will be remembered, it will be The Exorcist. Friedkin wanted the film to have the gravitas of a domestic drama, while also featuring moments of horror that were both believable and unforgettable. In an era of wildly inventive practical special effects, Friedkin’s ingenious direction (like lowering the set temperatures so that cast members’ breath could be visible to the camera during the exorcism scenes) elevated the film’s tone to serious levels of terror and dread. It was a new kind of movie. Rumors of production accidents and deaths only further shrouded it in a layer of mystery, as if making the film had stirred the attentions of an occult realm like none had before. Yes indeed, Friedkin’s film was so effective in its depiction of the supernatural that it was ascribed with the power to not only reach but also rumble an otherworldly astral domain. Friedkin continued directing projects for film and TV through the aughts and teens of the 21st century. His last film, for some time, was the 2017 documentary The Devil and Father Amorth, about repeated exorcisms of an Italian woman in the remote village of Alatr. But in 2022, he returned to direct a film adaptation of Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. That, his final film, will premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2023. View the full article

Yepoka Yeebo’s rigorously researched, beautifully written first book takes its title from a folk story familiar to generations of Ghanaian children. The fictional Anansi, she writes, “is a trickster” who “uses stories to deceive.” In Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World, the title role goes to a voluble con man named John Ackah Blay-Miezah. Even as he was served prison time in the U.S. and Ghana, Blay-Miezah carried out “one of the largest frauds of the twentieth century.” Blay-Miezah’s Oman Ghana Trust Fund—Oman, in this case, means “our nation,” not the Middle Eastern country—was founded on a lie. From the 1970s until his death in 1992, the unsuccessful Ghanaian presidential candidate trumpeted his supposed access to vast riches held in a Swiss bank. He’d be getting ahold of the money any day, he told backers, but in the meantime, he needed money to travel frequently, overcome bureaucratic snags and stay in posh hotels alongside other power players. Promising twentyfold returns to private investors and big public works projects in Ghana, Blay-Miezah, with help from accomplices in America and Europe, extracted countless millions from American and Ghanaian “businessmen and lawyers,” Yeebo writes. And “accountants, insurance salesmen, at least one cop, and a lady who sold tickets from a shop in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel” in Philadelphia, where he lived for part of the 1960s. Also among the duped: ex-U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, who served federal time for his role in the Watergate scandal. Mitchell isn’t the book’s only prominent figure. Shirley Temple Black, among the biggest-ever child film stars, was by the 1970s America’s ambassador to Ghana, and in diplomatic cables sent to Washington, she described some of Blay-Miezah’s exploits. Ed Bradley, the 60 Minutes correspondent, plays an important role, too. His reporting helped expose Blay-Miezah. Yeebo, who lives in Accra, Ghana and London, spoke to me from the latter recently. Kevin Canfield: Your book covers events that occurred in the 20th century, but you first heard of your subject in a very 21st century way. Yepoka Yeebo: My mom sent me a WhatsApp message. It was 2016—it was an election year in Ghana, and the government had just thrown a whole bunch of new small parties off the ballot for not meeting all the requirements to register properly, so people were talking about the precedent for that. The biggest example anyone could think of was when Blay-Miezah was running for president (in the late 1970s, when his party was barred). So they aired the 60 Minutes segment a bunch of times in Ghana, and the clips of that were going around. KC: So you started looking into it. YY: Yeah, I think the first batch of information I found was the diplomatic cables, and the fact that it was Shirley Temple Black—it was just utterly absurd. KC: At that point, you were just personally curious? Did you think you’d write a book? YY: I was personally curious. I started digging around. The cables helped because that meant there was a trail to some other places. I went to the British Library and just started looking through these papers from around the same years as the cables. One of the newspapers from Ghana had a front page story, and there was John Blay-Miezah, looking really poised, like he was not in any way shape or form under arrest (which he was). That’s the point where I realized that there’s something here. He had this élan. He just looks so unfazed by the proceedings. KC: What was it about his way of carrying himself that enabled him to pull this off for so long? YY: I have been trying to figure this out for the longest time. I think it helped that he was an immensely charming person. He played everything cool. He hid aspects of his personality or his intelligence, so people would not necessarily underestimate him, but not quite know that they were dealing with somebody that tricky and complex. KC: A guy who can really read a room. YY: Perfectly. Just trying to play everybody. I talked to people who personally knew him. He just remembered details that other people forgot. He remembered for ages that one woman was wearing a very expensive men’s watch when they first met. KC: This is in the book—he brought it up months later, just dropped it into a conversation. YY: Yeah, just casually. It would come off as almost supernatural, and that helps with selling the mystique and the secret money and the gold. KC: This seems like an important skill to have when you’re lying all the time. YY: Yes, and also to be able to keep what is happening straight. And to just have a tiny bit more information than the person that you’re speaking to. KC: Your reporting goes into detail about how he refined this part of his personality. Whether he was working as a busboy at a swanky club in Philadelphia or doing prison time, he was learning what “power looked like,” is how you put it. YY: He was like a chameleon. Wherever he went, he’d throw on a new personality like a cloak. He would be absolutely fine getting suits made on Savile Row, but also absolutely fine in prison in Accra. KC: When I was reading the book, I kept thinking: OK, this is the part where if I were him, I’d just throw up from sheer nervousness about all the lies. YY: Right? I think eventually it started getting to him, especially when the ‘80s kicked in and he was sort of dealing with increasingly dangerous people (leaders of a military junta in Ghana). His health started to suffer. He also started to believe his own lies. He was absolutely sure that some way, somehow, he would find enough money to placate everyone. But towards the end, he was sort of anxious and cut off from his family and friends. KC: During the colonial period, until Ghana secured its independence in 1957, Britain, as you write, “siphoned off” tens of millions of dollars from Ghana. Did this pave the way for a lie like Blay-Miezah’s? YY: Absolutely, because you have to destroy every institution to successfully colonize a country, and if your primary reason for being there is to take stuff out, you can’t really create new institutions. Everything that used to work as a power structure in Ghana had been attenuated or entirely destroyed. It warped people’s sense of Ghana, and the way people there viewed themselves. And so there was just this immense vacuum, and there’s only so much that could be done to fill it. And we just will never know how much was truly siphoned off by the British. KC: So the vastness of it all—the impossibility of quantifying the crimes of colonialism—makes lies like Blay-Miezah’s seem plausible. YY: Completely plausible. KC: Why did people fall for this, and how did he keep it going for so long? You write about an academic study of cult members who’ve given so much mentally that, as one of them says, they “can’t afford to doubt.” So is that it: a lot of Blay-Miezah’s marks were just in too deep financially or emotionally? YY: I think everybody has something that they cling to, a belief that’s quite clearly not correct. I think that’s actually pretty common. It’s hard to overestimate the extent to which this took over people’s lives. They would be running around in Oman Ghana Trust Fund t-shirts, they would be organizing meetups and investors’ meetings, they would be planning their entire lives around the windfall. One of the most fascinating things I found out—I was talking to Barry Rider, who was the chief commercial fraud officer at the Commonwealth Commercial Crime Unit in London. He said people looking for quick money would invest in something shaky because enough of the time the money came through. KC: Giving people hope in a case like this. Toward the end of the book, you write that he was selling a racist caricature of “darkest Africa,” with its “untold wealth” there for the taking. So he’s working with the tools that colonialists used. YY: He was saying exactly what people would assume about a country like Ghana if they had seen a Time magazine piece about it. He told investors: There’s all this secret wealth, and people will just hand it to you. You come from a more developed country and it’s yours for the taking. KC: I just want to close by mentioning your impressive reporting. You spent tons of time in archives, libraries, doing interviews on three continents. Am I missing anything? YY: Archives, libraries, courthouses. Meeting with people whose byline I’d found. There was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose office was just basically gigantic filing cabinets. He had literally everything from his work on Blay-Miezah—his actual notes from (Blay-Miezah’s criminal) trial on like yellow legal pad. There was a lawyer in Accra who had a copy of one of Blay-Miezah’s passports. People keep spectacular amounts of information. View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Lisa Jewell, None of This Is True (Atria) “Lisa Jewell is on top-form with this pitch-black fever dream of a book – darker, twistier and more compelling than ever.” –Ruth Ware Will Dean, The Last One (Atria/Emily Bestler) “A true adrenaline rush, The Last One by Will Dean will have you trembling with anticipation from the very first page.” –Bella Media Halley Sutton, The Hurricane Blonde (Putnam) “Is a tragic death the only way to cement one’s legacy in Hollywood? Halley Sutton delivers a twisty rumination of this question.” –PopSugar Adrian McKinty, The Detective Up Late (Blackstone) “There’s an ambivalence about almost every aspect of the book, including Duffy himself. He’s a Catholic in the RUC, a man out of sync. The Troubles weave in and out of the narratives, reminding us of what an extreme time it was. These are crime novels that are unafraid to explore the complications of living at a time when which church you went to could be enough to get you killed.” –The Guardian UK Amber Garza, In a Quiet Town (MIRA) “Turn[ing] a familiar suburban setting into a deliciously chilling landscape… Garza once again proves she’s a master of twisted relationships.” –Ashley Winstead Allison Brennan, North of Nowhere (Minotaur) “This wilderness adventure is Ozark meets Succession in Big Sky country, and I could not put it down. Blazingly written, this compelling tale of family dynamics and gorgeous settings is full of relentless action and unending heart. What a terrific book.” –Hank Phillippi Ryan Rhys Bowen, The Paris Assignment (Lake Union) “Rhys Bowen’s multitude of fans will love The Paris Assignment, a story of love and war, of bitterness and brutality, of bravery and forgiveness, woven together with a rich sense of time and place, and characters only a master storyteller could create.” –Jacqueline Winspear Kiersten White, Mister Magic (Random House) “Mister Magic is a propulsive, exciting, often genuinely scary, endlessly compelling mystery. Imagine a trip through Twin Peaks by way of Stranger Things and Stephen King’s It.” –Terry Miles Gytha Lodge, A Killer in the Family (Random House) “Heartfelt family drama and thundering suspense elevate the ripped-from-the-headlines plot. This continues Lodge’s winning streak.” –Publishers Weekly Jennifer McAdam, Devil’s Coin (William Morrow) “Swayed by the enigmatic business tycoon Dr. Ruja Ignatova, [McAdam] didn’t realize she was giving her money to one of the world’s most sinister scams. . . . A poignant dive into the rabbit hole of financial fraud and mysterious scammers.” –Kirkus Reviews View the full article

August brings with it a tense, twisty crop of compelling new thrillers exploring the ways our most intimate relationships can go terribly awry—or become the shield we need to cover up our worst transgressions. From terrible teachers, to even worse friends, to all kinds of family, the types of connections explored in the novels below are the kind that are so ordinary that their wrongness can easily be ignored, but domesticity has always been the provenance of danger, and these psychological thrillers remind us that those closest to us are also the ones who hurt us the most. (Angie Kim’s thriller is the outlier here. That family’s going to be alright. I won’t say more lest I spoil it.) Anyway, read these on those last days of summer vacation for a nice reminder that most families could be much, much worse. Catherine Chidgey, Pet (Europa) Damn this book is good. Pet is at once a brilliant coming-of-age thriller and a sharp dissection of racism and misogyny in 1980s New Zealand (apologies, a previous version of this post had the setting as Australia). When a new teacher comes to town, every girl in class is swooning over her glamor and vying to be her favorite, even when the competition for affection tears lifelong friendships apart. Meanwhile, someone’s been stealing things in the classroom. Little things, but they’re greatly missed. And someone will have to take the blame, because for every pet, there’s a scapegoat. –MO 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 Jesse Q. Sutanto, I’m Not Done With You Yet (Berkley) Man, does Jesse Q. Sutano know how to plot a novel! By God. You know when novels start out by showing how their protagonists have it all: great career, attractive and successful spouses, beautiful homes? This starts out with the complete opposite premise! Jane’s books don’t really sell, she’s got a bland marriage, and she’s stuck paying a mortgage for a house she barely likes. She misses Thalia, a friend from her past; her best friend, her soulmate, whom she hasn’t seen since the horrible, bloody night one decade earlier. Now, though, Thalia has written a book–a book that seems like it could be about that fateful moment, a book that is poised to rocket to #1. And so Jane heads to the book launch, to see her old friend again. Because she’s not done with Thalia. And Thalia, clearly, is not done with her. I told you! What a premise! –OR Una Mannion, Tell Me What I Am (Harper) In Una Mannion’s beautiful, elegiac new psychological thriller, a girl named Ruby grows up with a mercurial father, a man her aunt Nessa has always suspected of killing Ruby’s mother. In alternating chapters told by Ruby and Nessa, Mannion slowly unspools a dark tale of control, abuse, and secrets. Perfectly plotted and gorgeously written, this novel is not one to be missed. –MO Lisa Jewell, None of This Is True (Atria) Lisa Jewell pens yet another dark and twisty psychological thriller, this time, about true crime podcasts, interlopers, and discovering that you’re in the kind of story you once read for entertainment. Imagine if Dead to Me were much, much creepier. –OR Angie Kim, Happiness Falls (Hogarth) Angie Kim once again combines an intense character study with a searching mystery, this time after her narrator’s husband disappears, and police are interested in quickly pinning it on her nonverbal son. Kim uses the parallel investigations of police and family to explore the complex dynamics of interracial marriage, Asian and biracial identity in America, and the nuances of raising a child with special needs. You’ll want to savor every word as Kim plunges the depths of human action and finds love at the center. –MO Mindy Mejia, To Catch a Storm (Atlantic Monthly Press) In Mejia’s latest (the launch of a new series), an atmospheric physicist with a husband gone missing teams up with an unlikely partner—a self-declared psychic detective. The pair begin a mad dash around Iowa, fighting the elements, fleeing authorities, and wrestling with doubt and skepticism along the way. Mejia brings out the tension perfectly and crafts a thriller that will drive readers barreling forward. –DM View the full article

There’s a lot of Irish female crime-writers. Liz Nugent, Jane Casey, Andrea Mara, Andrea Carter, Amanda Cassidy, Catherine Kirwan, Sam Blake—to name just half of the Irish crew who assembled in a town in the north of England last month for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival or ‘Harrogate’ to its friends. We met at the entrance to the Old Swan Hotel, festival HQ and the spot where Agatha Christie hid out for eleven days back in 1926, to take a group photo. I count fourteen faces in it, but that wasn’t even all the Irish female crime-writers at that particular festival, let alone sitting on the bookshelves today. Ireland is a country of five million people, about the same size as the state of Indiana, with a relatively low crime rate. So why are there so many Irish crime writers and why are the vast majority of them female? This is a question we’re often asked in interviews, during the Q&A at literary festivals and by our puzzled friends and relatives. In the beginning, I offered vague, wishy-washy theories, just to have something to say besides, ‘Um, I dunno…?’ We’re writing the books we want to read and the people who study such things tell us that more women than men read crime, so it makes sense that more women than men would write it, too. It’s compensation for the fact that for decades, the genre seemed dominated by male writers, many of whom relegated their main female character to the cold, rigid body missing most if not all of her clothes and lying at the feet of the male detective (with a male partner, reporting to a male superior) in their opening scenes. Tana French doing it so amazingly well encouraged the rest of us. But none of those really explained why. I wasn’t even convincing myself with those answers. Enter Liz Nugent, whose latest novel Strange Sally Diamond spent over two months at no.1 in the Irish bestseller charts. Liz will tell you that she didn’t realise she was writing a crime novel when she submitted her debut, Unravelling Oliver, to publishers, and I believe her. But she did us all a huge favour when she wrote an article called ‘The Gothic Horrors of 1980s Ireland: The Crimes and Hypocrisies that Inspired a Generation of Women’ for this very website back in 2018. I’d recommend that you read it for yourself but, in brief, it described how in the 1980s, many of the stories that dominated the Irish news had a common theme: bad things were happening to women, and those women were not able to tell their own stories. We were our country’s second-class citizens, imprisoned by a society still in the Catholic church’s stranglehold—but also, as the decade wore on, starting to rail against this. The ‘veil began to fall and we saw the truth,’ Liz wrote, warning that, ‘you’re never going to shut us up now.’ I was born in 1982, so all I was watching on TV in the 80s were She-Ra: Princess of Power, Care Bears and Transformers. But it got me thinking. A decade later, when I was old enough to first become aware of the headlines on our nightly news, what were they reporting? What was happening to women in Ireland as I hurtled towards my adolescence, desperate to hurry up and become one? The first woman to disappear was a twenty-six-year-old American who’d moved from Long Island, New York to Sandymount, Dublin. Annie McCarrick was recorded on CCTV in her local bank on March 26, 1993 – the last confirmed sighting of her, despite reports that she’d made it to Enniskerry, a picture-postcard village in the Wicklow Mountains, where she’d told friends she intended to go walking. In July of the same year, thirty-nine-year-old Eva Brennan left a family lunch in Terenure, Dublin, after an argument, and was never seen again. Imelda Keenan, twenty-two, was last seen crossing a road in Waterford city in the middle of a day in January 1994. Josephine ‘JoJo’ Dullard was twenty-one on November 9, 1995 when she called a friend from a phone-box in Moone, Co. Kildare, shortly before midnight, to explain that she was hitching her way home after missing a bus. JoJo ended the call by saying she had to go, she’d got a ride. Fiona Pender, twenty-five and seven months pregnant, disappeared on August 23, 1996. Ciara Breen, seventeen, February 13, 1997. Fiona Sinnott, nineteen, February 8, 1998. Deirdre Jacob, eighteen, July 28, 1998. Deirdre was last seen by passing motorists just steps away from her family home, but she never made it inside. Eight women gone from the face of the earth in five years, although there is no official tally and no hard evidence that these cases are connected. The media dubbed it Ireland’s Vanishing Triangle, wilfully ignoring the fact that if you plotted the black holes that swallowed up these women on a map, it would make a sort of parallelogram. Now, the front pages of the papers my parents brought into our home were dominated by the official photos, the ones carefully chosen by the family because – you’d presume –they were the most up to date, most closely resembled what these women looked like the last time they were seen. We watched eerie re-enactments on TV and listened to heart-breaking interviews with their families. Eventually there’d be books, documentaries, podcasts and, coming soon, a TV drama. But there were never any answers. The worst horror of all this was something we couldn’t have known then, and wouldn’t have imagined: that three decades later, we still don’t know what happened to any of those women and no one has ever been charged in connection with their disappearances. When I, aged eleven, started paying attention to the news, the news was that the women in my country were disappearing and no one would or could do anything about it. You could take one of us and get away with it. No one would stop you. No one, terrifyingly, would even see you do it. This felt like a stark contrast to my childhood, when the plotlines of the made-for-American-TV true-crime movies I was oddly and age-inappropriately obsessed with felt like science fiction to me. Things like that didn’t happen here, we said. Mostly, it was true. But by the time I turned eighteen, we couldn’t say that anymore. So maybe that is why there are so many Irish female crime writers, at least of my generation. While we were growing up, a faceless phantom snatched multiple women and no one did anything about it at all. Not one body was ever found. Whoever was responsible continues to get away with it. The families of Ireland’s missing women still wait for answers; some have died waiting. I’m convinced I once heard the great Irish writer Edna O’Brien say that she wrote as a way to grieve for what she read in the headlines. Maybe the Irish female crime-writers my age are writing to rectify what we remember reading in them as teenagers. In our books, we create worlds in which no one gets away with taking us from them. We let people find the lost. We provide the answers for ourselves. *** View the full article

Fictional characters are immortal, their creators, not so much. Authorial death be damned: fans, both longtime and new, often want more. And the truth is, in excavating crime fiction’s O.G.’s there are more cases to solve, more dirty deeds to dig up and more gimlets to drink before the day is done. To The Second Murderer, Mina brings Philip Marlowe’s congenital truth telling, his disregard for convention, and his acceptance that he is a man not of the times. In contrasting Marlowe to the other lost souls one character says “they’re broken. You’re sad.” Equipped with his intrinsic integrity, Marlowe can live with that. Like the Second Murderer in Macbeth, “I am one/whom the vile blows and buffets of the world/have so incensed that I am reckless what/I do to spite the world. Nancie Clare: So what’s a nice Scottish lass from Glasgow doing channeling an American-born, English-educated, sometime poet who, after he lost his job with an oil company during the Depression at age 44, turned to writing detective fiction in Los Angeles? Denise Mina: Well, he lost his job, and I think it’s fair to say, because of his alcoholism and we [in Glasgow] are the hell mouth of the alcoholic diaspora in Scotland. So who else could properly write about Chandler’s Marlowe <laugh>? We know so much about alcoholism now that you can actually trace his illness progressing as his books go on and he becomes more bitter, irate and opinionated. At the time it must have just seemed really baffling, like what’s he on about? But Chandler for me has always felt very familiar because I just love his writing so much. And I also love P.G. Woodhouse, I dunno if you know this, but PG Woodhouse was the same school as Chandler, and they had the same English master and they’re both masters of the simile and the metaphor. That’s really strikingly what they’re both known for. And they had the same English master at school! I think there must have been a lot of word play. So, Chandler has never felt strange. Nancie Clare: What is it about Marlowe that continues to fascinate readers? In fact, the entire crime fiction universe, not just readers, but viewers? Denise Mina: He’s a working-class guy, which, you know, in Scotland was huge because if you ever saw working class people represented in literature, they were kind of stupid or they were servants or they were delivering bad news. And Marlowe was a very clever guy. He was self-educated. He quoted Shakespeare. [In fact, the title of the book comes from] a Shakespeare scene Chandler mentions in Farewell, My Lovely and was a potential title for a book in a list in his notebooks. He was working things out, which is the most human of all emotions. But more than that, he had his own value system that he was living. It wasn’t that he wanted to get rich, and it wasn’t that he wanted to get the gal, it was that he was trying to live with integrity. And I think that’s why he endures. Earlier detectives didn’t really have that. Sherlock Holmes wanted to show off. And Marlowe didn’t really try and have the big puzzle element. It was less that you wanted to solve the mystery than that you wanted to be in the company of Marlowe. Nancie Clare: There’ve been a few authors who’ve taken up the mantle of Chandler and continuing Marlowe’s story. You’re the first woman. Do you think that the gender of the writer makes a difference? Because I’ll be honest, I thought your Marlowe was more on point that John Banville’s. Denise Mina: Oh, well that’s very kind of you. I do think that in this instance, the gender of the writer does make a difference. I think, as a woman—or if a queer writer who’s not me took it on—they would see the blind spots. Now, I think one of the things about later Chandler is this awful performance of masculinity that feels very wrong. He’s asking women if they want to be raped. He’s punching men and they’re falling over. I like early Marlowe when he’s comfortable with his flaws and his weaknesses. There’s a much softer Marlowe in there and a much more likable Marlowe. If you look at Marlowe at the beginning of his inception, he was much more malleable. He was much more willing to laugh at himself. He didn’t have to be homophobic. He didn’t have to be racist. He didn’t have to have that bizarre chauvinist attitude to women. And I think that might be something women are more familiar with than men. Nobody really likes that guy who knows everything. Nancie Clare: You are an unambiguous feminist; did you have any qualms channeling Raymond Chandler given his penchant (as you noted more so in later works) for toxic masculinity? Denise Mina: No. No qualms. Changing that toxicity is the reason I started writing crime fiction twenty five years ago. It feels triumphant! Nancie Clare: I have to ask—and you touched on this in your answer to the previous question, but were you surprised at the depth of racism, antisemitism, and homophobia, that there was then, especially given that Los Angeles was literally and figuratively the end of the line? The place to which you escaped to be reinvented. You captured it perfectly, I think, when you wrote “freight trains from all over America delivered fruit and flowers and flour and milk, and all the lost men cut loose. It was the final stop for the terminally confused and hopeless alcoholics running from trouble. They got here and found there was nowhere left to run. They’d gone all the way west they could.” What did you think about the juxtaposition of Los Angeles being the place people came to escape with the fact that the first thing they did was reinvent the place from which they escaped? Denise Mina: I come from Scots Irish family, and that’s exactly what we did here. We’re like 20 miles from the coast of Northern Ireland, and basically we recreated all the prejudice and hate that we’d been running from. I think people do that wherever they go. It’s an old adage that you can run, but you always take yourself with you. So wherever white people go there too goes antisemitism and racism. People bring their prejudices with them. What I was amazed at actually was the history of Skid Row and the history of unhoused people in LA and how consistent that is. That may be the most consistent thing about Los Angeles. Apart from, you know, the heat and the presence of earthquakes. Nancie Clare: You mentioned that Philip Marlowe a complex guy. And early Philip Marlowe was maybe a more complex guy than later Philip Marlowe. He probably drinks too much, and he doesn’t have the proper respect for law and order [air quotes] and propriety. But he’s the last decent man in a corrupted world. In The Second Murderer, you’ve included two hoteliers—and I use that term in the loosest possible sense—who make observations about Marlowe. Marlowe notes of one, “he looked me up and down and had me pegged as a tragic romantic. The thought made him smile and not in a kind way.” After passing out drunk in the lobby of a boarding house, the manager, Sunshine, says to Marlowe about the other men who slept in the lobby, ”they’re broken. You are sad. Different thing.” That nails Marlowe. Denise Mina: Sunshine was a real person! There was an Egyptian woman who ran a boarding house down on Skid Row at that time. And there was also a German beer hall! Nancie Clare: The German beer hall. Did you know about that? Denise Mina: Yeah! Did you? Yeah. God, you know, that German guy would’ve known the people who had come over here. Maybe asking why had they fled? What was it like for him be living in L.A. knowing that the war was coming? I did far too much research. My plan was to come over and drive around in an Oldsmobile because the driving is so important. Basically, the whole alibi rests on whether or not you could get up a hill in one of those old cars. It’s something I’d still love to do. Jay Leno actually posts videos of himself driving these old cars. I was reduced to just watching him in an Oldsmobile over and over again to try and get a flavor of it. Nancie Clare: I’m going to go out on the limb and say that the Montgomery’s, the family that hires Marlowe to find their errant daughter, is based on the Doheny family. And that the mansion at the top of the hill, is Greystone Mansion. Which is still here, by the way. Denise Mina: You’re completely right. You’re absolutely spot on! Yeah. Nancie Clare: This may be a softer, earlier Marlowe, but he’s still full of misguided beliefs. For example, his misogyny. You mentioned that he’s not quite as misogynistic in this story as he later became, but it still costs him a love interest in The Second Murderer, doesn’t it? Denise Mina: Yeah. You know, he never has sex in the Chandler books. He barely kisses women, but he is very fervently interested in women, which I think might reflect Chandler’s romantic attitudes, having been at a boys’ school. Marlowe’s fascinated by women, but he does find it very difficult to connect, and he really likes to be alone. And I thought, well, that’s quite an interesting dynamic actually, for someone who craves connection and craves justice and decency, but actually doesn’t see it very many places. I included Anne Riordan, the cop’s daughter who helps Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely [Chandler’s second novel] in The Second Murderer because I thought she was a good match for Marlowe. What a shame. You know, she’s financially independent, she’s good looking, she’s a bit older. She doesn’t want kids. And you could see that he respects and likes her, but he just couldn’t make the leap. She was clearly interested in him. She had asked to work in his office, and he said “no.” What if he allowed himself to harbor those hopes? What would that do to him? And I don’t know if it would take him anywhere good. Nancie Clare: Well, it didn’t, in this book. It didn’t necessarily take him someplace bad, just to more sadness, maybe. We should talk a little bit about the story. It is set up like many Marlowe stories: Marlowe is called to look for somebody, a missing woman. But what he finds is complicated and he—and the journey to discovery—is filled with more than just the location of the missing person. I thought you did a terrific job setting it up, getting Marlowe to where he needs to go, and then having the floor drop out beneath him, literally and figuratively. Can you talk a little bit about how you built the story? Denise Mina: Actually, I paid a lot of attention to Chandler and like yourself. I’m a bit of a nerd, Nancie! I did lots of things like working out visuals of what a Chandler book that I love looks like. Where are the beat points? What is the rhythm of it? What are the size of the chapters? I even did like a little sort of morse code dash of his sentence structure because his sentence structure is much shorter than mine would be. His average words per book I think is about 75,000 to 80,000, whereas I would tend to go to 90,00 to 95,000. I wanted it to feel like Chandler as much as possible. I think you always bring your own voice to it, but I looked at his beat points, and he does always have a point—it’s a kind of moment-of-death—where he really doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s just following the next lead, and there’s a point where he doubles backs on himself. I was trying to recreate all those things. And then with the B-story—which is the Pasco Pete story about a bunch of old cowboys. I added the Pasco Pete story line to give a more familiar structure to the book. And that’s where a lot of Chandler books get lost, right? He gets really lost in the story. You know, Marlowe goes off to Monterrey for no apparent reason and then gets drunk in a hotel room. And you can see Chandler as a writer thinking, I don’t know what to do now. What the B-story does is you’re saying to the reader, look, I know what I’m doing, and this is gonna pay off. If you stay with me during the lost moments, this will be all right. The B-story is a sort of an amuse bouche for the reader to get them to trust you. But the rest of it is as rambling and happenstance as Chandler, because actually Marlowe is brave and he’s quite reckless; he doesn’t really bring another skillset to the situation. It’s just his intrepidness that that helps him solve most of the crimes. He’s not Colombo, he’s not psychic. He doesn’t understand forensic science. He can only tell the truth. That’s the only thing he can do. And he says that in the book to his clients, he’s not gonna lie to them. I took a lot of elements of Chandler that I really loved and tried to apply them to the story, and that’s where the story structure came from. You really want to honor the readers who love that character as well. Nancie Clare: There are queer characters in The Second Murderer— and we’re not gonna mention who they are—who run the gamut from sympathetic to pathological. Was writing from that archaic point of view challenging for you? Because you’re definitely not homophobic, but you had to integrate a little bit of Marlowe’s hesitancy. I’m thinking of Jimmy the One, while he isn’t a major character, he’s just brilliant, one of these gems that is included in the book. Jimmy the One is an incredibly handsome man who is gay, out, and doesn’t care who knows it. Denise Mina: I have to tell you Nancie, Jimmy the One was a real Glasgow guy, and he was called Jimmy the One because he was the one out gay guy in Glasgow. The gay community in L.A. was probably all built around someone like Jimmy the One, because very often those pockets of tolerance formed around one or two individuals who just wear who they are and flatly refused to be closeted, shamed or belittled. And that was Glasgow’s Jimmy the One, who died a few years ago. The whole book really is a sort of hymn to Jimmy the One. He loved movies and he loved musicals. And I know that for the next 15 years, gay guys in Glasgow will be coming up to me and saying, “thank you for putting Jimmy the One in that book, cuz that’s who Jimmy the One would’ve been in his dreams. Jimmy the One would’ve been a handsome guy who wore a bellhop uniform and lived in California and kept being discovered and then dropped because of his dirty doings <laugh>.” Nancie Clare: Something that keeps coming to mind when I think of Philip Marlowe and the golden age of detective fiction in Southern California, is the idea of redemption in general and the idea of redemption for Philip Marlowe in particular. He’s looking for is redemption, and we don’t know what from. Denise Mina: I think you’re spot on there. I think about Graham Greene watching Pépé le Moko, set in Algeria, about a gangster who’s hiding in the Alhambra. And at the end it’s very obvious the gangster gives his life for the women he loves. Graham Greene was this very serious literary writer. And he said when he saw that film, he knew that crime fiction could be about redemption and about finding your soul and about resolving really fundamental spiritual concerns. And that’s when he started writing his “entertainments” as he called them, his stooping to low art forms. But I think that with Marlowe, it is very, very pronounced that what he’s always trying is have integrity. And maybe that is a real-world form of redemption that he’s trying to be true to himself. But I think it is also about class. The offers of money are there. Marlowe could abandon the dislikable low people and join the jet set, but he doesn’t. I think for Marlowe to remain faithful to the people he is in among—and the people that he identifies with—that is a form of redemption. I think that’s absolutely right. I think a lot of crime fiction is about the restoration of order, but these days, people are much more skeptical about propaganda and about underpinning the status quo, which is quite problematic. And suddenly the veil has fallen off lots of people’s eyes and the restoration of order is the cops killing somebody because they suspect them of a crime. So a lot of crime novels finish with the police killing someone because they’re sure he’s a serial killer. How can they know that? Nancie Clare: The introduction of moral ambiguity into crime fiction is probably not a bad thing. You mentioned Ian Fleming and Bond can be so obnoxious. It’s a spy thriller. But, you know, the idea that he could be judge and jury is, I don’t think it works in sort of in the long term, whereas moral ambiguity might, Marlowe can’t quite be morally ambiguous, but he understands it, Denise Mina: He accepts that he’s more rigid than the world he lives in. And I think that’s what’s interesting about him is that he knows that he lives in a morally fluid world. *** View the full article

Noir, both fiction and film, is built on a foundation of fear, and no fear grips us quite like the specter of our world ending at any second in a white-hot blast of nuclear fire. The Cold War had barely started when noir began using nuclear paranoia as a theme and a plot point—sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes as overtly as a shockwave destroying a town. Here are four movies and one book that exemplify the facets of what we might call “nuke noir.” Notorious (1946) Alfred Hitchcock began work on “Notorious” in 1944, more than a year before the first nuclear explosion at New Mexico’s Trinity Site officially kicked off the nuclear age. As pre-production on the film progressed into 1945, the director, who was interested in the theory behind a nuclear weapon, had the foresight to focus the script’s plot on uranium ore hidden in wine bottles by a group of escaped Nazis in Rio de Janeiro. At the time, Hitchcock had no idea about American scientists’ work on a nuke, but his interest nonetheless earned him some special attention by the government. “When I went out to visit Dr [Robert Andrews] Millikan at Caltech with the writer Ben Hecht, we said, ‘Dr. Millikan, how big would an atom bomb be?’ and then he spent an hour telling us how impossible the whole thing was,” he said later, according to a transcript of a 1969 television interview. “But, I was told afterwards that I was under surveillance by the FBI for three months.” As Hitchcock also acknowledged during that interview, the uranium ore could have been substituted for virtually anything else (diamonds, perhaps, or gold dust) and it wouldn’t have overly impacted the overall plot. Nonetheless, its presence adds a note of nuclear paranoia to what’s otherwise a well-mannered, often subtle thriller. Stray Dog (1949) Arguably Akira Kurosawa’s most notable crime drama, “Stray Dog” is a sweaty, twitchy crawl through Tokyo’s post-war underworld. Toshiro Mifune plays a detective whose pistol is snatched from his pocket on a trolly in the opening moments; as with all the best noirs, the situation escalates out of control, with a final standoff in a shadowy, misty forest that’s reminiscent of the samurai face-offs in Kurosawa’s later films. “Stray Dog” and other Kurosawa noirs like “Drunken Angel” (1948) don’t deal with nuclear bombs directly, but they take place in a Japan still shuddering from the aftereffects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kurosawa constantly struggled against censors who were anxious to limit any overt critique of the American occupation, and yet he still managed to slip in imagery that hints at the war’s impact on the survivors. The consequences of a nuclear weapon aren’t just physical; the psychological and societal damage ripples for decades after the dust settles. Split Second (1953) As plots go, “Split Second” walks well-trodden ground: a set of bank robbers take hostages and hole up in an abandoned town. For much of its runtime, it plays like a 1950s drive-in version of “The Petrified Forest” (1936; Bogart, twitchy and armed) or a dozen similar films. But when the characters learn that the federal government intends to vaporize the town in a nuke test, it adds the ultimate ticking clock to the proceedings. As you might expect, the climax plays more like a disaster movie, with a hefty undertone of existential dread: when confronted with the prospect of fiery annihilation, does anything—even love or justice—really matter? The film’s director, Dick Powell, was a noir regular famous for playing Philip Marlowe in “Murder, My Sweet” (1941). He also directed “The Conqueror” (1956), the much-derided Genghis Khan biopic (starring John Wayne!) that was filmed downwind of a government nuclear testing site. Over the years, there’s been a fair bit of controversy over whether the site’s fallout contributed to Powell, Wayne, and other cast and crew dying of cancer. Whatever the case, it’s a spooky coincidence that a director who made a noir film featuring a nuclear test would possibly die as a result of filming another movie near a nuclear test site. Kiss Me Deadly (1955) Directed by Robert Aldrich (whose career included some all-time classics like “The Dirty Dozen” and “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”), “Kiss Me Deadly” is notable for two things. First, it’s very loosely based on one of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels; Ralph Meeker does a solid job translating Hammer’s vicious, somewhat wry mannerisms to the screen. Second, it hums with the Cold War tension that swept the country during the 1950s: everyone’s in pursuit of a mysterious box linked to a shadowy government project—a box that burns whoever touches it. With a different MacGuffin in place of the box, “Kiss Me Deadly” might have been a competently directed but ultimately forgettable noir thriller. But as the action reaches a crescendo, one character decides to open the box, unleashing a minor apocalypse that plays like a memorable warning to anyone who feels a bit too blasé about the consequences of fiddling with the atom. (For film buffs, there’s another element worth your attention: some of the final shots seem like they could have influenced both the iconic suitcase opening in Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” and the climax of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”) The Passenger (2022) Let’s switch it up and offer a book: “The Passenger,” part one of Cormac McCarthy’s final two-volume opus, which you can argue is a noir thriller in literary robes. On the surface, the book centers on a salvage diver, Bobby Western, who finds himself pursued by shadowy figures after exploring a small passenger plane that crash-landed in the Gulf of Mexico. As Western flees his pursuers, we learn that his father was involved in constructing the first atomic bombs at Los Alamos, and the novel digresses at several points into discussions of physics (and physicists) and the moral consequences of using nukes. “Auschwitz and Hiroshima,” Western muses, were “the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West.” His father’s work in unleashing nuclear horrors may have sealed the fate of Western’s family, as well; the moral fallout wrecks Western and his sister, leading to their respective dissolutions. View the full article

I grew up with Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, both on the page and the screen. Raymond Chandler had an early and enduring influence on my writing; my novel The Exiled, published with Mulholland Books in 2016 under the name Christopher Charles, was intended in part as an homage to the noir master. I was ecstatic to see it hit the shelves, especially under the aegis of a Little, Brown imprint, but my ecstasy was short lived. The novel didn’t sell a lick, and a TV deal that seemed an all-but-sure thing fell through. Literary post-mortem is an inexact science; there could, of course, have been any number of factors contributing to the book’s poor sales, but one of those factors was most definitely genre. By now, I have gathered enough empirical and anecdotal evidence to suggest that hardboiled detectives—private and salaried—are fading from the mainstream American literary scene. A quick glance at Amazon’s top-ten “hardboiled mystery” category, for example, reveals a list of self-published titles. Unless you are a long-established writer with a long-established series (Ian Rankin, for example), it is difficult to get a police procedural or gumshoe novel past editors at any of the major American publishing houses. At the same time, the reading public’s appetite for mystery and crime fiction is as bottomless as ever. Switch over to the “thrillers” category on Amazon, and you’ll find that best-selling phenoms like Lisa Jewell, Alice Feeney, Riley Sager, and Alex Michaelides—just to name a few—are all published by Big-Five imprints. What’s striking to me is how structurally similar many of these authors’ books are to the work of Chandler and Hammett. The protagonists find themselves isolated and often ostracized in their quest for the truth. The difference is that, in the psychological thriller, the quest has become twofold: the ordinary citizen turned amateur sleuth (the 21st-century Marlowe) must solve both an actual mystery and a related personal trauma whose clues are buried in their unconscious. And the only way to unlock the unconscious is to revisit the past. Missing persons and murder: these “thrillers” are, at their core, mysteries. They may not feature Phillip Marlowe wading through the moral muck of 1940s Los Angeles in order to purge the city of some larger evil—but they are whodunits. Instead of Marlowe or Spade, the detectives are versions of you and me, and the cases they’re solving are anchored in personal trauma. Often, the trauma itself is the real mystery, and the reward for solving it is healing, or at least closure. While part of me mourns the demise of Marlowe and Spade, I’m also excited and energized by a genre that uses elements of the traditional detective story to explore more complex, psychological mysteries. Trauma-as-mystery is a crime fiction subcategory with boundless potential, and I hope to have done it justice in my forthcoming novel, Not by Blood. Without further ado, here are five titles—four recent, one already a classic—that I believe fit the trauma-mystery bill. Happy reading! Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn A journalist returns to her hometown to report on the murder of a young girl and ends up simultaneously investigating her own dark childhood. Published in 2006, Flynn’s “classic” is the likely progenitor for other titles on this list. Reptile Memoirs, Silje Ulstein In her debut thriller, Ulstein writes convincingly from multiple point of views: a young woman, a middle-aged woman, a sixty-year-old man, and, yes, a snake. This is Nordic Noir, but it’s also a psychological thriller with the emphasis on ‘psychological’: Ulstein has a lot to say about how her characters’ lives are shaped by trauma. Reptile Memoirs was, for me, a 2022 thriller-of-the-year contender. What Have We Done, Alex Finlay Five children from a group home grow up to be a rock star, a federal judge, a reality TV host, a billionaire business mogul, and a stay-at-home mom. They found themselves in the group home for different (traumatic) reasons, but, once there, formed a lifelong bond. A few decades later, someone is trying to kill them, one by one. The great themes of the psychological thriller—tragic pasts, double lives, secrets that refuse to stay buried—are all here, held together by a razor-sharp plot and breakneck pacing. Before She Finds Me, Heather Chavez A public tragedy—a school shooting—turns out not to be as random as it first appeared. College professor Julia Bennett suspects that her daughter, who survived the shooting, was in fact the intended target. While hunting for the person or persons responsible, Bennett is forced to confront the traumatic event that defined her childhood. Black-Eyed Susans, Julia Heaberlin How’s this for childhood trauma: Tessa, a sixteen-year-old girl, is found buried alive in a pit of human bones. The pit was dug in a field of black-eyed susans. Twenty years later, Tessa, now a grown-up single mother, finds a patch of black-eyed susans growing in her yard. The serial killer, it seems, has returned—which raises all sorts of questions given that someone has already been convicted for the murders. Someone Tessa testified against. Did she send the wrong person to prison? The answer is hidden deep in a past she’d rather not revisit. *** View the full article

It is fair to say true crime is having more than a “moment.” According to a recent YouGov poll, a third of Americans consume true crime at least once a week with shows on Netflix regularly trending in its top ten. While on TikTok, the hashtag #truecrime has nearly 20 billion views. True crime is not simply the largest subcategory of documentaries, it is also growing at a faster rate than all other genres. With the explosion of public interest and the emergence of true crime into the mainstream, what are the responsibilities of authors and program makers when fictionalizing or dramatizing real-life cases? How do we ensure we do not become titillating in our re-telling? How do we interrogate the perpetrator’s drivers and background without shifting the light away from the victims? How do we guard against being exploitative or insensitive to those left behind? And how do we give killers a human face without glorifying them? Or worse perhaps, depict a handsome and charming murderer like Bundy without falling into the trap of over sexualizing him? My latest novel, Truly, Darkly, Deeply—which was very much inspired by true crime and was an instant Sunday Times bestseller in the UK (possibly again demonstrating the appeal of the genre)—investigates the relationship between a charismatic serial killer and a young girl who was integral to his conviction who, twenty years after his incarceration, still can’t be sure whether he’s actually guilty. Truly, Darkly, Deeply is a dual timeline narrative. We see child Sophie interacting with her mother’s boyfriend, Matty Melgren, in the buildup to the string of murders he will ultimately be convicted for. And we see grown-up Sophie grappling with the questions that have haunted her whole adult life: Is Melgren really a killer? Were the clues there all along? Or is hindsight superimposing warnings were before there were none? A serial killer’s legacy explored through the eyes of a child in his life draws on a number of real-life cases—such as “BTK” Dennis Rader, the “Green River Killer” Gary Ridgway, and Ted Bundy—who all maintained apparently regular family lives yet managed to conceal their “activities” from their wives and children. In other words, men who managed to hide their proclivities behind a mask of normalcy. The book taps into my fascination with the criminal psyche. What intrigues me just as much as the mentality of evil is how serialists are able to dupe those close to them, that it is possible to share your life with one without ever suspecting it. Much has been written from the perspective of the serial killer’s wife, but it struck me that very little has been penned from the viewpoint of a child. I wanted to understand that relationship and its legacy without in any way celebrating “the killer” while also as looking at what it means to be a monster—and to love one. This meant portraying the human side of a serial killer, which of course presents something of an ethical dilemma. After all, is presenting a serialist as “not all bad” a step toward empathizing and therefore forgiving him? I don’t think so! Portraying a killer as multifaceted is about painting a realistic picture. No one is purely good or evil. Everyone is the hero of their own story and only Disney villains go around twirling their mustaches and saying “Mwah ha ha . . .” And isn’t a killer who is kind to a child and has a penchant for Baskin Robbins ice cream and a silly sense of humor, more rather than less disturbing than a cartoon character we can’t relate to? It is comforting to believe evil has a face, that we would recognize it if we stumbled into its path. But the women who flocked to the courthouse every day to watch Ted Bundy’s trial and told reporters they didn’t think he was guilty because he didn’t “look like a killer” show that the worst people are often the ones who appear most human. Bundy certainly appeared that way—a man who murdered 30 people across the United States but was able to blend in so well, no-one ever suspected him. If the best crime fiction doesn’t just entertain but also holds a candle up to society, is it not important to portray crimes and killers as realistically as possible? Filmmakers have been criticized for sexualizing Bundy via the movie, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, in which Hollywood pretty boy Zac Efron was given the role of Bundy. The argument is that casting a heartthrob as an infamous killer undermines our instinct to condemn him. It is seen as an affront to his victims. A disservice. But I believe that NOT portraying him as good-looking and charming would be the true disservice to the reality of who Bundy was and how he was able to fool those closest to him. Jeffrey Dahmer is yet another example of a killer that television makers have been lambasted for portraying as handsome. In the Netflix show, Dahmer–Monster, we see actor Evan Peters doing weights and revealing his rather muscular abdomen glistening with sweat. Is that wrong? After all, both Bundy and Dahmer used their looks to draw in their targets—as does my character, Matty Melgren. Adult Sophie talks about the issue of sexualizing a killer. Like Bundy, there is a movie made about Melgren where the producers get stick for casting such a handsome actor. But Sophie wonders, wouldn’t playing down his attractiveness be an insult to the women he killed? After all, if Matty had a socially awkward “troll,” he would not have been able to lure his prey the way he did and get them to trust him. Leaving that aspect out of any narrative wouldn’t only be inaccurate; it would also fail to explain why their victims were taken in by them. And indeed, in a society so preoccupied with physicality—why in similar circumstances, any of us might have been too. In Truly, Darkly, Deeply, I have drawn a perpetrator who is handsome and charming. I am not trying to glorify “the killer,” but rather I am aiming to show the ripple effects of his crimes and why he was able to dupe both his victims and those close to him. In doing so, I hope I have created a novel that explores the impact of serial killers on those left behind, the reality of how they were able to do what they did—without in any way celebrating the monster. *** View the full article

In TV, film, and books, both on our screens and on our bedside tables, con artists are rife. This year alone, four novels (“The Guest,” “Counterfeit,” “Scammer,” and my own “Sun Damage”) feature grifters as central characters. A slew of new TV shows, such as “The Dropout,” “Fyre,” “Inventing Anna,” and “The Tindler Swindler,” have emerged. Even the second season of “White Lotus” centres around a scammer. What is it about con artists that consistently captivates us? And how has our perception of grifters evolved in the realm of social media? From “The Sting” via David Mamet’s “House of Games” to the long-running BBC drama “Hustle,” it’s the tradecraft that draws us in. The bluffs, double-bluffs, tricks, and twists, along with the ‘in’ language, “the mark”, “the set up”, “the tats” and “smacks”, turn crime into a theatrical spectacle. Observing a con artist is like watching a magician perform, clever and audacious, fun and intellectually satisfying. (See Sandra Bullock shamelessly navigating Bergdorf Goodman’s makeup department in “Ocean’s 8.”) The more intricate the scheme and the greater the display of manipulative skill, the more the viewer is on the edge of their seat, trying to anticipate the next move. In “Hustle,” a complex scam executed by a mismatched London gang often appears to go awry, only for the final scenes to reveal that the apparent misstep was part of the plan. This double twist adds to the relief as the viewer realises they, too, were conned. Vera Tobin, a professor of cognitive science, suggests that real-life scammer Samantha Azzopardi, who deceitfully gained entry into Cambridge, worked like “a human page-turner.” She would lure people in with small confidences, test their vulnerability with bigger ones, and continue to surprise with twists and turns. If this is how it unfolds in reality, it is even more compelling in literature, where the con artist serves as an ideal unreliable narrator. In the early pages of Graham Winston’s “Marnie” (1961) or Emma Cline’s “The Guest” (2023), it’s the peculiarities that catch your attention (from the former: “everything I put on was new”). Moral ambiguity is evoked, as we encounter someone who may seem charming, sexy, or charismatic on the surface, but through their internal monologue, we know to be manipulative. It becomes a dual game of cat and mouse, where the con uses psychological tricks to exploit their victims’ weaknesses and vanities, while the reader is constantly trying to “read into things” to navigate their own path. Can the main character ever be trusted? Are they conning me too? In “The Guest,” written in the third person, we piece together Alex’s unravelling from the reactions of others. Winston takes a slower and more intricate approach, delving deep into the title character’s damaged perspective on men and sex. In a world where we negotiate the possibility of cyber-cons on a regular basis, it’s a cathartic process. The fascination surrounding Anna Delvey, the fake heiress, who has become the subject of memoirs, documentaries, art, and pop shows, reveals much about our collective psyche. She appeared to be living the high life, frequenting top-tier restaurants and luxurious hotels, projecting an image of a perfect existence. However, when it was revealed to be smoke and mirrors (in the art show, one work, titled “Send Bitcoin,” portrays her in a red dress with her back turned to us in front of a computer), the discovery is both shocking and satisfying. On a daily basis, flicking through Instagram, say, we deal with a million tiny issues of trust and deception. Are they really that happy? Is there a filter? Is that picture faked? Life is uncertain these days. We seem to know so much about people – news and images at the touch of a button – and yet also less than we ever did. The rich heiress who it turns out is nothing of the sort, is like a snake in the grass, slipping into the places we might dream about – the posh hotels and best restaurants and most exclusive bars – and by doing so reveals them as somehow shallow. It turns out, if we are clever enough, they can be all ours for the taking. *** View the full article

It’s a small bugbear of mine that gothic and horror are so often lumped together as the same genre. Many would argue that gothic is a subgenre of horror, but as a reader and writer of gothic fiction, I would have to disagree. There is, of course, a blurring of the lines between the two, as is the case in most genres, but they are quite distinct in the reaction they instill in the reader. According to the Cambridge University Dictionary the definition of horror is to ‘create a strong feeling of fear and shock,’ for gothic—once you get past all the bits about Gothic architecture and Gothic tribes of yore—it says ‘writing or films in which strange things happen in frightening places.’ Neither definition is terribly helpful. Both genres have a long and varied history in literature. Horror has been around since the year dot, setting its roots down in folklore around the world. And for centuries, horror was at its purest, feeding into our human fears of monsters, that shiver in the dark, and all those nasty things that preyed on us that we couldn’t explain. There isn’t a culture or civilization that doesn’t have dark and nasty creatures that steal out of the night to terrify clawless, fangless humans. But as we advanced and started explaining away our fears with science and new technologies, and we no longer lived cheek-by-jowl with the monsters of the night, we never truly lost our fears of the unknown. It was in the eighteenth century, in the age of Romanticism, that the lines of horror began to blur. Now that we no longer truly believed in vampires and werewolves, writers began to explore what we still didn’t know, what we couldn’t explain, drawing on our past fears to create fears for the more assured, modern humans who still wanted that oddly perverse human trait: to be frightened. These new stories set out to make us feel the horror we’d lost with the advances of civilization, framing our new fears of the unexplainable within a social scaffold, to toy with our obsessions of death – the one real great unknown left – but with a touch of romance to shock and titillate the more jaded sensibilities of the modern reader of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. And so a new subgenre was born, gothic horror. In its infancy, gothic literature was seen almost as satire, extravagant and indulgent, that appealed largely to women and was therefore considered inferior. These stories were often written by women for women, who used the supernatural to reveal their frustration of their enforced domestic role in society, their second-class status, their enforced subservience in a world built by men for men. It’s therefore not surprising that gothic books in the form of penny dreadfuls were seen as less than, an inferior second to male-written horror. Roll on a couple of hundred years to the present, and the boundaries between gothic and horror, while still blurred, have firmed into distinct genres. Yet horror is still primarily written by men, and gothic is still written largely by women. More recently, and to my delight, there has been a slight shift in gothic to modern gothic. It still isn’t a term used as often as I’d like to describe the works of gothic writers today, but it is appropriate for our age of readers that still loves the gothic genre with its gloom and romance, but brings stories with a modern twist that’s more in keeping with our modern lived experiences, providing a more relevant social commentary. As I delved deeper and looked hard at the books of horror and gothic I’ve read, it came to me that perhaps the divide is still more gender-based than I’d realized. Look at the most famous horror writers of more recent times—Stephen King, Grady Hendrix, HP Lovecraft, Dean Koontz with only a couple of woman authors to even things marginally, such as Anne Rice and Shirley Jackson (although I personally think Jackson fits very firmly in the gothic mould – again those blurring of lines). Yet when we look at the gothic authors, we get a more varied view of the authors of the past couple of centuries: Ann Radcliffe, Emily Bronte, Daphne du Maurier, Henry James, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allen Poe. A number of these authors fall into both categories. Interestingly, Shirley Jackson doesn’t feature often on gothic lists, considered primarily horror. But I was more interested in gothic written today and was not very surprised that they were almost all exclusively written by women such as Diane Setterfield, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Laura Purcell, Kate Morton, Catriona Ward and more. Again, not surprisingly, all these authors are still more likely to be classified as horror. Like all genres horror and gothic have tropes. For horror it’s supernatural, terrifying monsters of all forms who are, of course, super evil and hard to kill, isolated settings, a sinister castle, manor or similar, a brave but stupid hero/heroine who will definitely go into that dark room with echoing noises, cults and ancient curses that have terrified the local population for centuries, technology that suddenly and mysteriously stops working, suspicious, invariably creepy neighbors, and most importantly, the requirement to scare the shit out of the reader with shocking twists and turns, life and death situations where there can only be one survivor. Additionally, in horror there is always a resolution at the end of the story when the monster is destroyed and the horror is resolved. Gothic fiction tropes are more nuanced with some overlap: the isolated setting with a dilapidated castle or similar, an antisocial character who stubbornly remains in said dilapidated castle or similar, a long-suffering, but loyal servant who walks the dark halls and keeps their master/mistress’ secrets, atmospheric writing, unsolved mysteries that still touch the living, the suggestion of something supernatural that is often never seen but felt, foreboding suspense, intense emotion, a damsel in distress and the reclusive hero who will save her or needs to be saved which always leads to romance. Furthermore, in gothic fiction, while the mystery is resolved by the end, it is often not the end of the story but assumes a lingering emotional impact for the characters’ lives for years to come. Interestingly, the only clear overlap of the tropes is the isolated setting, often with a dilapidated castle or similar, the rest is a blurring of the lines once again. For me, what really defines horror from gothic is the style of writing and the atmosphere, the way the writing makes me feel. Horror’s main objective is to disturb the reader, to scare, and to repulse. Ann Radcliffe put it quite perfectly, when in 1826, she said, ‘Whereas terror is a feeling of dread that takes place before an event happens, horror is a feeling of revulsion or disgust after the event has happened.’ The horror writer wants to provoke emotion or a physical, toe-curling, fearful reaction in the reader. The monsters are often physical manifestations that are a genuine threat to life, a fight between good and evil (humans always being the good guys). The language is often graphic and gory, it does not generally dabble in purple prose and pretty imagery but goes for the visceral punch in the gut with baldly painted narratives. Gothic is subtler, it doesn’t grab you by the throat to terrify you. Gothic is a gentle creep of dread. It uses supernatural monsters as a device, shining a light on the monster within, the monsters humans, sadly, so often are. Often the supernatural elements are ambiguous, more a suggestion, a superstition, a claustrophobic alertness, that prickle of the nape that something is watching. It focuses more on the domestic scene, dealing with the tragedies and unsolved mysteries of the past that still haunt the living. It frequently highlights male abuse and control women have endured that still resonate in today’s society. The language used is quite different to horror, liberally sprinkled with purple prose, and dark, moody imagery (Gothic writers love mist!), the castles, manors etc. are often a personality in their own right, the tragedies of the past leaching from their walls. Gothic stories are often told in dual timelines, stories within stories, tragedies inherited, haunting each generation. So while there may be a blurring of the tropes of gothic and horror, they should be distinct genres because of the very different ways they make a reader feel. We do readers a disservice by placing gothic and horror in the same category. It leads to expectations that won’t be fulfilled and thereby damages the reader’s enjoyment of the book. There are readers of horror who will be disappointed when they read a book classified erroneously as horror that doesn’t give them the thrills and chills they’d expect of a horror, but the gentler menace of gothic. And there are those readers who hate horror, but would probably love the quieter creep, the more human element and atmospheric writing of gothic. *** View the full article

More than once, I’ve found myself sitting around with other parents of no-longer-small children, all of us telling stories in hushed voices about the times our kids went missing. It goes without saying that we only tell these stories because we are past the point where we might be tempting fate, because our children are older now and our fears for them are of a different sort. And of course we can only recount these tales because, in the end, they had happy endings; the children were returned to us. My husband and I once lost the oldest of our three children in a busy Washington, D.C. hotel during Barack Obama’s inauguration. Then an always-on-the-go three-year-old, our son sprinted ahead of us into a waiting elevator, threw us a devilish glance, and pushed a button. We watched in horror as the doors closed before we could reach him. Clutching our other son, an infant, and carrying the boys’ stroller, we ran down the stairs to the lobby, but when the elevator doors opened, our little explorer wasn’t there. For fifteen awful minutes, we couldn’t find him. Then suddenly, he appeared with a hotel security guard who’d found him on an upper floor. He’d been riding the elevators, having an adventure. As terrifying as that was, it was the disappearance of our younger son when he was two that still gives me chills. He had been playing quietly on his own in our rural backyard while I fed his infant sister and when I went to check on him a few minutes later, he wasn’t where I’d left him. At first, I walked calmly around the yard and then into the house, calling his name. I checked outside again. Inside again. I couldn’t find him anywhere. I called for my husband and our older son to search too but there was no sign of him in the yard or in our woods. After twenty minutes, I started to panic in earnest and rushed down to the swimming hole near our house. I was relieved to see the clear surface of the water unbroken and went back and checked our barns and outbuildings. He just . . . wasn’t anywhere. All the awful possibilities swirled in my head. Terrified, the minutes ticking by, we were about to call the police when my husband shouted to tell me he’d found our son. He’d crawled into the very back of a deep closet and fallen fast asleep. He woke up bewildered by our frantic voices and desperate hugs. Thirteen years later, my memories of that hour or so of dawning fear haven’t lost much of their sharpness. Until now, I had never written a mystery about a missing child. As crime writers, I think we are always exorcising our fears on the page, but I didn’t have enough distance to write about this one. As I got farther and farther from that stage of early parenthood though, I started to think about a missing toddler mystery for my series detective, homicide investigator and mother Maggie D’arcy, to solve. When she and her partner respond to a crime scene, it’s Maggie, with her parental intuition, who realizes that the young model found murdered in her Dublin apartment had a toddler — and that the little girl is missing. Maggie and her colleagues know they are racing against the clock to find the little girl, but her disappearance becomes more and more confounding the harder they look. I can’t say that writing a novel featuring the hunt for a missing child took away the power of some of my own worst moments as a parent, but I found it rewarding to mine this deep vein of love and pain and urgency for my fiction. Here are some of the richest and most chilling crime stories and novels about the disappearances of young children (I could have made an equally long list of novels featuring the disappearances of teenagers): The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly by Agatha Christie This early Hercule Poirot story has such a great set-up: a man named Marcus Waverly consults Poirot because he has received multiple anonymous warnings that his young child will be kidnapped. Despite layers of precautions, the child is taken and Poirot is called in to find out what happened. The solution is classic Christie, as is the circle of suspects in the Waverly house. Bunny Lake is Missing by Merriam Modell, writing as Evelyn Piper This 1957 novel was new to me and I was glad to have the chance to experience its surreal strangeness and mid-century paranoia. Single mother Blanche Lake goes to retrieve her three-year-old daughter, Felicia, nicknamed Bunny, from her first day of nursery school and discovers that not only is her daughter not there, but that the staff claim never to have seen her at all. Blanche’s odyssey around New York looking for Bunny is laced with anxiety and judgment about unwed mothers and women in the workplace. The novel has the feel of a noir film — it ended up being adapted for the screen by Otto Preminger in 1965 — and offers a Cold War-era spin on a thriller about a gaslit woman. Where Are the Children by Mary Higgins Clark The urtext of multiple point-of-view missing child thrillers, Mary Higgins Clark’s 1975 blockbuster both launched her crime fiction career and a subgenre. Re-reading this suspense classic after many years, I was struck by how many of the hallmarks of contemporary psychological suspense are here: the mother with a tragic past, the creepy abductor, his identity obscured and his point-of-view chapters creating rising dramatic tension; the true crime afficionado neighbor; the climactic final scene. The story of Nancy Harmon and her kidnapped children Missy and Michael recently got an update, with a sequel penned by bestselling thriller writer Alafair Burke called Where Are the Children Now? No More Dying Then by Ruth Rendell I’ve been re-reading from my Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine shelf recently and I found this 1972 Inspector Wexford novel as dark and tense as I’d remembered. Wexford’s colleague Mike Burden is deep in grief for his dead wife when he becomes entangled with the mother of a missing five-year-old boy. The disappearance of another child looms in the background and Wexford diligently follows all the leads while a compromised Burden sets off on an increasingly disastrous path toward a solution. Gone Baby Gone by Dennis Lehane This gut punch of a novel is the fourth installment in Lehane’s Patrick Kenzie/Angie Gennaro noirish private eye series. When Kenzie and Gennaro are hired to look into the disappearance of four-year-old Amanda McCready, they find themselves in very dark places as they consider what might have happened to Amanda, and in very murky moral territory as they consider what to do with the information they find. It wasn’t the last time Lehane would write about missing children. In Mystic River, the kidnapping of eleven-year-old Dave Boyle in 1975 sets in motion a tragic series of events that Lehane explores on a tragic, Shakespearean scale. His excellent new novel, Small Mercies, is also about a missing daughter and the lengths to which a mother will go to find her. Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke I love everything Attica Locke has written and the two (so far) novels in her series featuring Black Texas Ranger Darren Mathews are both triumphs of characterization, setting, and plotting. In Heaven, My Home, Mathews is tasked with finding the missing son of a white supremacist. Locke draws Mathews as a conflicted, angry, skilled, and compassionate investigator, who wants to find the boy despite his father’s monstrousness. The solution is heartbreaking and surprising and as always, Locke makes you feel like you’ve been to her settings along Caddo Lake and breathed the humid, unsettled East Texas air. The Child Finder by Rene Denfeld Denfeld’s dreamy, icy tale of a woman who was herself a missing child and now uses her skill and intuition to find other lost children is suffused with fairy tale influences and atmosphere to spare. Years after a five-year-old child goes missing in the Oregon wilderness while looking for a Christmas tree with her family, Naomi Cottle is hired by the girl’s parents. As Naomi searches for the little girl, she is visited by her own confused memories of what happened to her while she was missing years before. I loved how Denfeld’s novel connects a missing child narrative to the many missing children in fairy tales and folklore. Rose Gold by Walter Mosley The central missing person in Mosley’s thirteenth Easy Rawlins mystery is actually a college student named Rosemary Goldsmith, the daughter of a weapons manufacturer. But in a strikingly affecting subplot, Mosley also tracks down a five-year-old boy abducted while his mother grieves her dead husband. Mosley’s depiction of the mother’s exhausted terror is especially well-done, and the answers he finds strike a satisfying note. No one Saw a Thing by Andrea Mara The premise of Irish crime writer Mara’s nail-biting new novel is a nightmare most parents have probably imagined once or twice. On a busy London train platform, Sive, visiting from her home in Dublin, is separated from her two young daughters when she looks down at her phone for a moment and the train doors close. (I felt this scenario vividly — see above.) She motions to them to get off at the next stop but when she gets there, the older girl isn’t there and no one has seen her. The plotting is twisty and puzzling and goes back to events in the past in Sive’s husband’s circle of housemates and friends. Mara captures Sive’s desperation so completely that you can’t put the book down until you find out what’s happened to the girl. *** View the full article

When it comes to fraught, intense bonds, it’s hard to top the twisted ties between some mothers and daughters. For my new thriller, Gone Tonight (On-sale August 1), I wrote about a mother and daughter who are isolated in their little family of two— which is just the way Ruth, the mother, likes it. She wants to keep 24-year-old Catherine by her side because a menace is closing in. But is the danger coming from the outside, or from one of them? A thin, jagged line separates maternal protection from unhealthy control. There are no blueprints or hard-and-fast rules for where it lies—every family gets to chart its own emotional topography—but when it is crossed, daughters immediately sense it. The deeper a mother travels into the territory of control, the more immense the repercussions on her relationship with her children, and it’s something I explore in Gone Tonight. Ruth has created a fortress around her and her daughter Catherine that no one can penetrate. She insists they move frequently. She has a tracking app on Catherine’s phone. But now, Catherine is ready to fly the nest, and begin a life that isn’t entwined with her mother’s. And Ruth will do anything to keep that from happening… If you’re like me and can’t get enough of creepy, scary or just plain strange mother-daughter stories, here are a few more I think you’ll love. Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon Teenager Madeline Whittier has a terrifying, rare disease—she’s basically allergic to the world. She can’t leave her house or interact with anyone other than her mother and her nurse. Then one day, a new family moves in across the street. From her window, Madeline finds herself looking into the ocean-blue eyes of a boy who will change everything for her. But Madeline’s mother is desperate to keep her daughter locked in the safety of their home. She’ll do anything to protect her girl. The twists in this book are absolutely wild—I tore through the pages in a day. I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy Being a child actor seems hard enough. Add in an overbearing stage mom and it’s a perfect recipe for dysfunction. In her raw, shocking memoir, actress Jeanette McCurdy of iCarly fame reveals how her mother controlled her life, restricting her calories, giving her showers well into her teenage years, and reading her diaries. Part of what’s so stunning about this true story is how well McCurdy, a real survivor, has emerged from her disturbing upbringing. Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage This book kept me up at night – that’s right, I was completely terrified by the story of a little girl who wants more than anything to live alone with her father. And that means getting rid of her mother. Told from the points of view of both mother and child, you know something terrible is coming, because if seven-year-old Hannah has her way, one of them has to go. And her mother is starting to feel the same way. Tell Me Everything by Minka Kelly Minka Kelly starred on the hit show “Friday Night Lights,” playing a privileged cheerleader. But in real life, her story couldn’t be more different. In her memoir, Kelly reveals the dark underside of her seemingly glossy life: She was raised by a single mom who worked as a stripper and struggled with addiction, and Kelly lived in storage units and strange apartments, and sometimes endured watching her mother be abused. Their bond was complex, and part of what makes this book so riveting is the way Kelly describes it in unflinching detail. The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave This isn’t your typical mother-daughter story, but I had to include it because the relationship is so beautifully crafted. Hannah Hall’s new husband Owen has a teenage daughter from a previous marriage—and despite Hannah’s best efforts, her stepdaughter completely rejects her. That is, until Owen goes missing and the two women who love him most team up together to find answers. The scare factor in this book comes from the outside, but the inner heart is the story of the slowly developing relationship between Hannah and her new stepdaughter, Baily. *** View the full article

Whether it’s Felix Unger and Oscar Madison or Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, we love a good odd couple. Watching two opposite personalities clash while they try to reach a common goal is one of life’s finer reading pleasures. Crime fiction lovers in particular have a banquet of unlikely teams to root for, whether they are law enforcement, private investigators, or amateur sleuths. The Lou Norton Series by Rachel Howzell Hall LAPD Homicide Detective Elouise ‘Lou’ Norton serves the ever-changing border of gentrifying Los Angeles. In the first book of this outstanding series, Land of Shadows, Lou is assigned a new partner, Colin Taggert, and the two couldn’t be more different. Colin is white, naïve, and fresh from the comparatively bucolic Colorado Springs police department. Black, street-smart native Angeleno Lou has no time for it. She tries to ignore her new partner, but soon realizes she’ll need every resource she can get to investigate the dark side of Los Angeles. The Ruth Galloway series by Elly Griffiths In Crossing Places, the first book in the series, forensic archeologist Dr. Ruth Galloway examines a skeleton suspected of being the body of a missing child. Galloway lives alone at the edge of the desolate Saltmarsh, her lifestyle and academic goals in complete opposition to brash, impatient DCI Harry Nelson. The one thing they have in common, though, is that their lives both revolve around death. Working together to solve the case of the missing child is awkward at first, but Galloway and Nelson’s differences make them a formidable investigative duo. Detective by Day Mysteries by Kellye Garrett Dayna Anderson doesn’t set out to solve a murder. All the semi-famous, mega-broke actress wants is to help her parents keep their house, and the reward money from a hit-and-run is too much to resist. Aubrey S. Adams-Parker, an eccentric ex-cop, represents the opposite of Hollywood types, and his passion for private investigation sets him up as Dayna’s rival to solve the hit-and-run. The two bump heads often enough for Dayna to realize that Aubrey might also make the perfect investigative partner. The Mace Reid K-9 Mysteries by Jeffrey B. Burton Mason “Mace” Reid is a down-to-earth guy with a quick sense of humor and an encyclopedic knowledge of all things canine. He’s a dog trainer who specializes in HRD—human remains detection—and at the beginning of The Finders, he meets his most gifted pupil imaginable. Vira, a golden retriever puppy, survived an attempt on her life and was rescued by the Chicago PD at nine weeks old. She quickly becomes a preternaturally talented cadaver dog, trained to smell death. Mace is shocked though, when he realizes that not only can Vira find a victim buried in the ground but also a killer lurking in the crowd. Dead Boy Detectives by the DC Comics Vertigo Imprint created by Neil Gaiman In 1916, Edwin Paine was murdered at his boarding school. After decades of torture he escaped hell and returned to earth, trying to protect student Charles Rowland from being murdered as well. He’s unsuccessful, but Rowland’s ghost decides to join Paine and the two become supernatural detectives in the afterlife. The unlikely duo turned into an unlikely trio when they meet Crystal, a girl with a gift for technology and a link to the undead. The Dead Boy Detectives originated in the Sandman comics, spun off into their own series, and are currently set to become a series on Netflix. The Lincoln Rhyme Series by Jeffrey Deaver Lincoln Rhyme was the premier criminologist in the New York City police department until an accident at a crime scene left him paralyzed. Three years later, he’s shut himself off from society and determined to end his life, until someone begins a killing spree around the city, leaving clues that only Rhyme can decipher. He recruits unwilling, temperamental Officer Amelia Sachs to be his crime scene technician. She’s transferring to a desk job and has no interest in forensics, but her growing concern for the victims draws her into the investigation and into the isolated Rhyme’s life. To Catch a Storm by Mindy Mejia When Jonah Kendrick, psychic detective, tells scientist Eve Roth, “I have certain parapsychological abilities to see things at a distance,” she promptly shoves him out of her house with a baseball bat and replies that the only way to see things at a distance is with a telescope. Eve is trained to measure the world in terms of concrete, replicable data, but her husband has gone missing and the police think she had something to do with it. She doesn’t believe Jonah when he claims to have dreamt about Eve’s husband, bound and bleeding in a barn, but Jonah might be the only person who can help Eve find him. Bonus entry: Odd Partners: An Anthology. Edited by Ann Perry. This Mystery Writers of America-sponsored anthology features nineteen original stories about unlikely detective duos solving intriguing cases. Edited by New York Times bestselling author Anne Perry, contributing authors include Jacqueline Winspear, Jeffery Deaver, Allison Brennan, Robert Dugoni, Charles Todd, and many more. The ultimate fix to satisfy all your unlikely partner reading needs! * View the full article

I have always wanted to be the Final Girl. I am the kind of person who delights in her own fear. There is something cathartic about the aftermath of terror, when you make your way to the end, and the credits roll. With a unique giddiness, I’d giggle, grinning into the screen until it went black. My skin would crawl and I the adrenaline of the jump scares would settle to a pleasant rush. I’d revel for a moment or two. This was excellent. This was everything. This…and then…I’d have notes. What would I have done differently? I’d think to myself. Never as the creator or the director, but as a character, placed into the world, dropped into the story. There was often an entire host of things I would’ve done differently. Don’t go in there, don’t separate from your friends, don’t turn your back to the open basement door, grab that knife-that baseball bat-that shovel while you still can. In my own mind, I would be the ultimate Final Girl, ready to triumph over the evil that had spent the entire movie terrorizing that tiny seaside town with nary a motive. And so I have always wanted to be her. The thing about being a child—a Black girl, at that—and loving horror movies is that you see very little of yourself on the screen. As an adult, I don’t always need to seek out representation of myself in the media I consume. But as a child, it is something I lived for. Every time, I saw someone that looked like me, living fantastical lives, I would feel an elation that was unmatched. But again, there have always been few Final Girls that look like me. When I conceptualized Their Vicious Games, I knew with immediacy what and who my Final Girl would be. Adina Walker, my Final Girl, is sometimes unlikable, sometimes stupid, and often stubborn to a fault. She is flawed in a way that Final Girls are only now allowed to be. She’s also Black. Adina exists in a story where the evil is the richest man in New England, and his motive is power he already retains. My Final Girl, for much of the novel, craved that power that he held. Adina Walker, at first, does not run away from the terror. She runs towards it. She’s a different sort of Final Girl. But, that doesn’t mean I shunned all of her predecessors. In fact, there are a few Final Girls that helped make my Adina the sum of her parts. While I have a special adoration for all Final Girls, there is one that has always stood above all the rest for me, and we’ll start with her: the incomparable Sidney Prescott. Sidney Prescott, the long-term protagonist of the Scream franchise, is a personal favorite of mine. Her arc throughout the franchise is consistent. She is someone who went from girlhood to womanhood during a time that was steeped in trauma, due to her mother’s untimely murder and her own subsequent torment at the hands of Ghostface. Rather than this being shied away from, within the narrative, both Sidney’s pain and triumph serve as the emotional backbone of the franchise. Each installment depicts this arc thoroughly, from Sidney retreating into herself during Scream 2 and Scream 3, and emerging into her own at the end of the third film and displaying it in both Scream 4 and Scream 5. This emotional arc is important to see. The consequences of what Ghostface does to Sidney is important to see. It is this idea of consequences that heavily features in Their Vicious Games. Every action causes a reaction, and while crafting Adina’s character, I thought heavily about the consequences of her own actions both before the start of the novel and by the end. No one remains unaffected by what occurs in the book. There is a mark left on everyone, even the tertiary characters, just as each Ghostface left a mark on Sydney—her very absence in Scream 6 speaks to not only the trauma she’s experienced but also the healing that she has done. (This hypothesis will of course be ruined when Neve Campbell is paid an acceptable rate for her talent and returns for Scream 7.) When continuing to craft the character arc for Adina Walker, my mind often went to the Final Girl at the center of one of my main inspirations for the novel, Ready or Not. The film is about a young woman named Grace with little outside support marrying into the extremely wealthy Le Domas family. As a newlywed and hungry to be accepted within their ranks, Grace is forced to play a deadly game of hide and seek. To win, she must survive until dawn. While Grace’s character is not rooted in suburbia like Adina, she is from the working class, which distinctly puts her in opposition of her wealthier in-laws, much like Adina and her potential in-laws. As I thought heavily about not only Adina’s character but also shaping the overall story, I thought about the well of untapped potential of the film. While Ready or Not deeply discusses class, I’ve always thought that it’s impossible to discuss class without discussing racism and gender. This is where Adina Walker lives—at the intersections of these topics—while still carrying at least a tiny bit of the tenacity and brittle rage that grows within Grace as the narrative carries her forward in the film. The final Final Girl that helped guide the growth and inspiration behind Adina Walker and the story at large, is much more rooted in reality than Sidney Prescott and Grace le Domas—Hannah Brown of The Bachelor franchise. Now, hear me out. You may be under the impression that The Bachelor franchise is simply reality television. You would be wrong. It is deeply rooted in a horrifying scenario—20-25 single women/men competing for the attentions of a single person, all while existing in the unbearable living conditions of the Bachelor Mansion, a residence that is notably and often in a state of disrepair. They are meant to endure group dates, one-on-one dates, hometown dates, and “Fantasy Suite” dates, all while performing a narrative for the camera and the supposed object of their affections. This alone sounds horrifying, but then one must take into account how heavily produced The Bachelor and its offshoots are. When I say ‘produced’, I mean this as a physical act. The drama and character arts are created (produced, remember) by people whose sole job is to generate good TV. In reality shows, good television means having contestants that typify to consistent archetypes (examples being the lawyer, the single mom, the Christian virgin, and the villain). Who these people are in real life doesn’t matter. All that matters is “the almighty edit”, and of these many, many people that have endured, few have risen above the character crafted in the edit. One such person is Hannah Brown. Hannah Brown, before her stint as the titular Bachelorette of The Bachelorette season 15, placed top seven in the 23rd season of The Bachelor. Her casting as the Bachelorette didn’t come as a surprise. After all, she had received the ultimate Bachelorette edit—depicted as a bubbly, kind, if placid young woman. Hannah rose from her season of The Bachelor and returned much like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 as a different woman. Full of depth and pathos, Hannah Brown went through her season, battling misogyny and dodging kisses from multiple frogs at every turn. As Brown emerged from her cesspool of a season, she emerged as the most followed person in franchise history (as of July 16, Brown possesses 2.7 million followers on Instagram), commanding a beloved following of what is colloquially known as Bachelor Nation. Not only is she beloved, she emerged from the franchise beau-less and is dating someone privately. This is a win. She is the Final Girl of her franchise, emerging from the other side, without needing to reach back to the franchise for relevancy. This is the sort of ending that I wanted to create for Adina, an endurance that I find Hannah Brown embodies wholly. Adina Walker walks in the footsteps of her predecessors. She’s too stubborn to die, too furious to give up, and has heart that some of her companions lack. She falters, but never gives up. And when she looks past what’s in front of her, she’s smart and uses what she’s got to win. She doesn’t let her villains pass Go. She endures, and pain is part of her pathology. It is also her catharsis. In that way, she mirrors the Final Girls that came before her. In other ways, she differs. I have always wanted to be the Final Girl, but I have found few that look like me. I imagine that there are other Black girls that wish they had a Final Girl that feels like Sidney Prescott or Grace le Domas or even Hannah Brown. Now, I imagine that all they have to do is reads the words that I’ve written to find her. *** View the full article

After writing what many consider the most frightening book ever published and then scripting the scariest movie ever made, William Peter Blatty spent the rest of his life trying to convince people that The Exorcist was not a horror story but a supernatural detective thriller about the mystery of faith. The film enjoys its 50th anniversary this year. As a student at Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown University in the late 1940s, Blatty heard of a supposed possession that had taken place in nearby Mt. Rainier Maryland (actually Cottage City, Maryland) in which a young boy had been freed from the grip of the Devil by a local priest. “Here, at last,” Blatty would later write, “was tangible evidence of transcendence. If there were demons, there were angels and probably a God and a life everlasting.” Years later, as a Hollywood scribe (A Shot in the Dark, John Goldfarb Please Come Home), when the market for his comedy scripts dried up, he decided to sequester himself to produce a novel that would harken back to his Catholic upbringing about the existence of God. The result was The Exorcist (1971). The novel did not, of course, explode like pea soup from Blatty’s churning mind. It took time. He knew that his primary narrative was the possession and exorcism of a little girl–he made the victim a girl to differentiate her from the actual boy–by a priest who had lost his faith and would, by engaging the demon with God’s guidance, have it restored. But he needed something more worldly so the reader would have a story, not a pulpitry. Once he decided that the possessed girl would murder the obnoxious film director, Burke Dennings, it hit Blatty that the reader’s surrogate would be the detective investigating the crime. Now he had to invent one. Over the years he had made character sketches for a menschy police detective around whom he wanted to build a mystery. This was Lieutenant William Kinderman, long before Peter Falk’s Colombo, as Blatty was thereafter at pains to point out. Once, in the margins of a book called Satan by Frank Sheed, he had handwritten, “Detective—Mental Clearance Sale.” This gelled years later into Kinderman. “I think it was in 1963,” he would write in The Exorcist from Novel to Screen (1974), “the notion of possession as the basic subject matter of a novel crystallized and firmed.” Like all good mysteries there are several storylines running through The Exorcist: the murder, the possession, the nature of faith, the rivalry between the demon Pazuzu and his old enemy Father Merrin, and who will finish directing “Crash Course,” the movie Dennings was directing when he was killed (left unresolved). Kinderman, working both diligently and annoyingly, investigates how Dennings might have fallen or been pushed from the bedroom window and down the Hitchcock Steps, that 97-stair flight that runs from Prospect Street to Canal Road in Georgetown. He had to learn how paint chips from little Regan’s bird sculpture got to the base of the steps; where Karl, actress Chris MacNeil’s butler, was going late at night and why had he been exonerated after stealing drugs from his previous employer; who defaced the religious statues at Dahlgren Chapel in a matter akin to Satanists; why did Father Karras once write a paper on witchcraft; and might Reagan have used some of the marijuana he suspects Chris has been smoking? Blatty created enough red herrings to stock a fishmonger, yet kept all the threads in the air because exorcisms and homicide investigations are separate enterprises. Not all of the herrings made it into the 1973 movie. The two main plotlines don’t even come together until the very end of the story (by now it’s too late for a spoiler alert, so keep reading) when Kinderman knocks on the door of the MacNeill home just as Karras is daring the demon to “come into me” upstairs. Although his arrival looks like a coincidence, Kinderman is actually there to arrest Regan for the murder of Burke Dennings. He has no idea of all else that has been going on in the little girl’s life, and one can only imagine what he thinks when he ascends to Reagan’s bedroom to find Father Merrin dead, Reagan un-possessed and in tears, and then looks out the window to see Father Dyer giving Father Karras last rites on the cold pavement of Canal Street. The most profound mystery, however, is never solved: the existence of God. While Blatty posits that, if there’s a devil, there must be a god, a logician would argue that this is the same as saying if there are apples, there must be oranges. It’s a false equivalency. Perhaps Blatty pondered this when he wrote the sequel to The Exorcist, Legion, in 1983. In Legion, Lieutenant Kinderman has become friends with Father Dyer, just as he had been with Damien Karras. The two men discuss the existence of evil in the world; Kinderman is an agnostic Jew and Dyer, of course, is a faithful Catholic. When Dyer is murdered by a serial killer who, by all explanations, was executed years ago, Kinderman must discover not only the identity of the new killer but how the old dead killer is somehow reaching out from the grave. When Father Karris miraculously appears in the form of a jailed murderer, all of Kinderman’s bets are off, an so are the reader’s. The novel attracted attention but did not assume the same sales status as The Exorcist. The film that Blatty directed from it (The Exorcist III, 1990) suffered studio interference and was recut. But it already began with one strike against it: in the film The Exorcist Kinderman and Dyer never meet, so how could they be friends in The Exorcist III? In fact, Kinderman and Dyer had met in the original film, only it was in footage that never made it into the final cut: after Chris and Regan leave at the end of the story, Father Dyer watches them go and Kinderman approaches him as he once did Karras offering him free movie passes. This “Louie, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship” Casablanca-like ending was nixed by director William Friedkin as being one story beat too many. When he gave in years later and sought to add it to a video re-release of The Exorcist, however, the Warner Bros. archivists couldn’t find the old dialogue tracks and, by then, actor Lee J. Cobb, who played Kinderman, had passed, so it couldn’t be restored. For Exorcist III, George C. Scott took over Kinderman. While the plot was not as linear as The Exorcist, Legion offers a more powerful argument for the existence of a god for whom self-sacrifice is a virtue of religious faith. (This theme is propounded more strongly in Blatty’s 1978 work The Ninth Configuration.) As with The Exorcist, much of the dialogue in Legion revolves around a restatement of philosopher David Hume’s test of logic summarized by asking, If God is all-powerful, then why does evil exist; if He is not all powerful, then why is he called God? In his many interviews over the years, William Peter Blatty spoke of “the mystery of faith.” It is a provocative, even challenging phrase. Mysteries either have a solution or they do not. Their solutions come from evidence and reason, but the evidence must be persuasive and the reasoning infallible. Using solid detective work, Blatty’s creation, Lt. Kinderman, solved two mysteries of the flesh only to remain baffled by the mysteries of the spirit. By gripping the minds of his readers and viewers, Blatty hoped to do more than capture their minds, he wanted to fill their souls. __________ Adapted from THE EXORCIST LEGACY: 50 YEARS OF FEAR by Nat Segaloff. Copyright ©2023 by Nat Segaloff. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Citadel Press. All rights reserved. View the full article

I’ve always loved snakes. Don’t know why. My sisters didn’t. My sisters feared snakes. Which is irrational, as there aren’t any snakes in the UK. Well, that’s not entirely true—we do have the non-venomous grass snake (Natrix helvetica) and smooth snake (Coronella austriaca), and the ever-so-slightly venomous adder (Vipera berus), but they’re so rare and so secretive, you never see them. And on the odd occasions they do come out to bask, people crowd them like they’ve seen fucking Bigfoot. But I digress. For reasons unknown, ever since I can remember, I was obsessed with an animal I’d never seen. I had books on keeping them as pets (‘Never gonna happen,’ my mother said), I watched every documentary I could, and I talked about little else. In 1984 I joined the British Army (aged 16), and I still hadn’t seen a snake. Not even in a zoo. They were still this fascinating, almost mythical animal. I trained as an armourer for two and a half years (the military equivalent of a gunsmith), only because the army didn’t want snake handlers. I got posted to Germany (about the same number of snakes as the UK) and I did my army thing. But then, the most wonderful thing happened—during a posting back to the UK my unit was rotated to Belize for a tour. I was finally going to the same part of the world where snakes lived. And not just half a dozen snakes. Belize had sixty species. Sixty. Including my favorite at the time, the boa constrictor. I was off to Belize for six months. And what a six months I had. My unit was posted to Salamanca Camp, the smallest, most inaccessible military camp in the whole country. It was a twelve-hour drive from the airport, ten hours of which was along barely accessible mud roads. The camp itself was half a dozen huts, a helicopter landing zone (also the football pitch) and the mud road in and out. It was considered the worst place to be in Belize as there was nothing to do. No beaches, no idyllic islands, no interesting towns or villages to visit. It was a jungle camp in every sense of the word. I didn’t think it was the worst place to be, though. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Whenever I could, I was out in the jungle lifting rocks, rooting through leaf piles, climbing trees, annoying the shit out of the local flora and fauna. How I didn’t get bitten, I’ll never know. I don’t know what species the first snake I saw was. It was whip-thin and basking on an old dirt track I was jogging along. It figure-eighted its way back into the jungle as soon as it saw me, so I had no chance of catching it. I reckon it was a speckled racer (Drymobius margaritiferus) as it was black with blue and yellow markings, and they’re known for frequenting forest edges, even roads. Whatever it was, it was a huge moment in my life. A genuine thrill. Over the next six months I saw many snakes—boa constrictors by the dozen (and I never once got tired of them), eyelash vipers (look, don’t touch), milksnakes, coral snakes (another look, don’t touch snake), whip snakes, hog-nosed vipers, cat-eyed snakes, countless others I failed to identify. I even had a close encounter with the dreaded fer-de-lance (Bothrops asper), dubbed the ultimate pit viper due to its large size, large fangs, large venom yield and highly aggressive nature, and the only snake that had a page to itself in our pre-deployment briefing pack. It was entwined amongst the leg-press weights on the multigym, no doubt waiting to bite me on the ankles. Luckily, I was so used to watching out for snakes by then, I saw it immediately. Nice try, Mr Fer-de-lance. I returned to the UK, tired, tanned and happy, my obsession with snakes barely sated. I spent a few more years in the army then decided it was time to do something different—I chose social work, with specialisms in criminal justice and substance abuse (after qualifying I would go on to be a probation officer for 16 years). By this time, the UK market was wising up to the fact that there was money to be made from selling snakes as pets. And in even better news, there was brilliant reptile shop within walking distance of my student digs in Newcastle (a city in the far north of England). I walked into that reptile shop and immediately felt at home. Like I was Norm walking into Cheers. I could have stayed for hours talking to the customers and staff. I did stay and talk to the customers and staff for hours. Eventually, with the sun setting and the shop closing, I left with a handmade vivarium, a heat mat, a water bowl and other accessories, and, in an old pillowcase, a beautiful three-foot-long corn snake. Oh, and twenty frozen mice. Mustn’t forget about the frozen mice. I didn’t watch TV that week. I barely read. I tinkered with ‘Snakey’s’ (yeah, yeah, yeah, bite me) driftwood, I changed his substrate, and I freshened his water. And then, in what would become our Friday night ritual, I fed him a mouse. With me about six inches from his head, I watched as he unhooked his jaws and swallowed the thing whole. And the whole thing was kinda perfect. Everything I’d hoped it would be and more. Spin forwards a couple of years. I have a medium sized collection now. Nothing too difficult to keep, mainly North American colubrids—half a dozen corn snakes, a breeding pair of gopher snakes, a beautiful milksnake, some kingsnakes (I had a desert kingsnake which bit me every time I picked it up. Every. Single. Time.), a western hognose and a royal python. It was getting to be an expensive hobby, though. The snakes, their food, the substrate and the additional vivariums. Our heating bill increased. A hundred other little things that amounted to too much. I was still a student social worker. I barely had a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. I had to make a decision: reduce or increase my collection. Reducing it would make my hobby affordable; increasing it might allow me to make a little money and offset the larger expenses. And if I scaled up, I might even make enough to afford my dream snake—which at the time was a green tree python. It didn’t seem like a hard decision at all. Three or four years pass. I’m a full-time probation officer. I have 100 breeding pairs of corn snakes. I understand snake genetics. I can predict what two snakes’ offspring will look like (there are charts) and I know how to exploit valuable mutations. I’m now one of the biggest private reptile breeders in the country. I supply hatchlings to most of the shops in the north of England and the south of Scotland. I’m selling surplus stock to the wholesalers, the guys who supply the big chains. I’m making more than enough money to pay for my hobby. It’s worked out exactly as I’d hoped. Until one Friday night (which is still feeding night) I realize something—I’m not enjoying it anymore. Probably haven’t for a while. Friday night feeding and Saturday morning cleaning has become a chore, not a joy. I’m beginning to resent it. Which is the exact opposite of what I set out to do. Even though I have the money to buy a green tree python, I no longer have the time or energy to care for a green tree python. So I did what I never thought I’d do—I sold every snake I had. Apart from Snakey; I couldn’t get rid of that guy. He was there at the start and he was there at the end, and by the time he shuffled off to that great vivarium in the sky, he’d reminded me why I’d loved snakes since I was a little boy. It’s because they’re perfectly evolved killing machines. They’re the great white sharks of the jungle. Of the deserts and plains. Of the woods and swamps. In many aspects, snakes are a lot like Ben Koenig. He’s an apex predator. He knows how to stay hidden. You won’t know he’s there, but . . . when it’s the right time to strike you sure will. And just like a snake, you’ll find he’s just as deadly, just as merciless. Just as fearless . . . *** View the full article

I knew when I gave my heroine, Junie Lagarde, a hearing loss, my secret would be out. It was going to be blatantly obvious that I knew exactly what hearing loss is like, because I live it. But I felt compelled to write about it. To dispel the notion that hearing tech is perfect—it’s not. To let the world know there is a reason people hate wearing hearing aids, which are about as comfortable as wearing baggy panty hose all day. I think we can all agree this is not comfortable at all. And I was simply fed up with the stigma of hearing loss, not to mention this would give me chance to deliver a sexy, daring, firing-on-all-cylinders character to the 48 million Americans who suffer from hearing loss. (There are even two times a year devoted to us: April is “Deaf History Month” and “Deaf Awareness Month” is September!) Giving my heroine a hearing loss also gave me several delicious opportunities to ramp up the tension. After all, I’ve written a thriller. Did she hear that? Does she know someone is stalking her? I live in the Distillery District of my southern city, and my favorite place to write is a Ukrainian coffee shop in an old bourbon warehouse. It was there I handed off my hereditary cookie bite hearing loss to Junie. Junie and I can hear acutely at the top and bottom frequencies of sound, and have severe to moderate issues with everything in between. Which is most conversations. Junie Lagarde handles her hearing loss with a matter of fact confidence and a lot of edge. If she needs help she asks for it. And it did not occur to me until I wrote it that … I could do the same. I had reason to worry. Every single person I know with a hearing loss gets told with great irritation they are loud. And when people said that to me it stirred up memories of old cartoons and sit coms where people with a hearing loss were feebleminded (not true) asked you to repeat things (true), wore giant hearing aids (nope, they’re invisible) said Ehhhhhh (never) and talked really loud (I’ve done that since I was born). The first time someone told Junie she was too loud, she gave them a menacing look. She asked them if they were the noise police and if so please show her their badge. I laughed out loud while I wrote it. Now I knew what to say. And so, like most toddlers, I learned to use my words, because nobody can read your mind. I let people know that turning up the volume of my hearing aids was unlikely to solve the problem — it only meant the refrigerator and the washing machine would be amplified for my hearing pleasure. Would they turn off the television or the music if they wanted me to hear what they said? They did. Nobody minded. Nobody cared. More than a few told me about their own hearing loss, and I advised them on what to do. I found the younger people were, the kinder. My coffee shop is full of college students, immigrants in expat huddles, and me at the wobbly table no one else wants. It is huge with a high ceiling and music playing and I could never hear when they said my order was up. So I told them I had a hearing loss, and here is the terrible thing that happened—the staff started bringing me my coffee because they knew there was no chance I’d hear them, and I would be so wrapped up in the writing I was likely to forget I ordered it anyway. And I realized that the stigma of hearing loss came from me. And once I got over it, so, it seemed, did the rest of the world. At the end of the day, Junie and I both savor the sudden quiet that settles when we take our hearing aids out, how the world goes peaceful and soft. June has her hearing dog Leo, and I have my hearing dog Leah, to howl sweetly and alert to the sound of sirens or alarms, people at the door or walking up behind us, packages delivered, strangers lurking around the house . . . and to guard us fiercely through the night. And now that Junie has brought me out in the open . . . I have given my Leah her own service dog vest. She is very proud. Like Junie, the first thing I hear in the morning is birdsong, so loud it wakes me up before the sun. And like Junie, I fall asleep to the sound of trains barreling along the tracks, and the thrilling forlorn wail of their horns that makes me want to pack a bag and my dog and go with them. We’ll do that in the sequel. *** View the full article

My mother was a private eye. She was petite and elegant, she could shoot and drive, and she was a crack investigator. She was born in Paris in 1933 to an American banker and a Connecticut socialite and lived there until the Germans drove them out. She arrived in Manhattan speaking only French, and all she wanted to do was return to France and fight in the French Resistance. She was seven. Everywhere she went in New York City she would listen to groups of people talking and try to make out from their tone and gestures who was a Nazi spy. She had the investigative bent early on. Once she had kids she got her P.I. license. About a week later the FBI called. They wondered if she could help them track down the perpetrator of a large fraud on the Bank of New York. They thought they knew with whom he kept contact, and they didn’t have an agent who could mix with the silk stocking set in Greenwich, Connecticut. Mom was thrilled. It took her about an hour and a half to track him down. She thought she recognized the surname and she pulled out the Social Register to confirm and called her aunt. It turned out that Aunt Maribel played tennis with his aunt in Woodstock, Vermont. So my mother called the old dowager. Mom had done her research and she said she was an old flame of Franklin’s and had his 10th Mountain Division dog tags and she thought he might want them back. Could mom send them? The aunt tittered and said that she had had a beau like that once, too—”Every girl should have one, shouldn’t they?”—and she gave mom the address where he was staying. Mom climbed into her fifteen year old Volvo wagon and drove up to southern Connecticut. She parked on a hill above a fancy horse property with white rail fences and a big clapboard house and pulled out her opera glasses. (Later she would use Swarovski compact binoculars but these worked just fine.) After a while a man came out of the back door. He matched the description and he climbed into a gold-colored Mercedes coup and drove up the road. Mom tailed him and she claims they had a car chase through the back roads of Darien. She was a very skilled driver so I don’t doubt her. After about twenty minutes the man pulled over. It was a lonely country road and I guess his curiosity got the better of him: who was this little woman in a beat up wagon who could barely see over the steering wheel but seemed, in silhouette, well-coiffed? Mom pulled up behind him and got out. Click click on the pavement went her Italian pumps, jingle jingle went the gold bangles on her wrists. Warily he rolled down his window. “Franklin,” my mom said, “What you’re doing is wrong. It’s not good for you, it’s not good for your family, and you need make this right. What we’re going to do is: I’m going to follow you back to where you’re staying, and then we’re both going to drive together down to the Bank of New York and you’re going to settle this thing.” And he did! My mother’s moral authority is inarguable. They called the bank and drove down to Manhattan and Mom said that when the special agents put the cuffs on him, Franklin looked so crestfallen and brokenhearted that she never wanted to do perp cases again. She decided she would reunite birth families. Caro Watkins Heller and her partner Pete Beveridge reunited over a hundred birth families. These are mostly very cold cases, and often the names and places given are wrong, and so the investigative work is tough. They did it pro bono for people who could never afford a P.I. But I often wonder if she completely gave up that other life. She was gone a lot. The bookshelf above her bed was not only stuffed with Dick Francis and Agatha Christie novels, there were manuals on surveillance, firearms, breaking and entering. I know she had developed another identity—she said it was for fun—complete with credit cards and driver’s license, and when we opened her safe after she died we found eight handguns, speed loaders, ankle holsters, pen recorders, and wigs. My little mother was a certified badass. I miss her a lot. I grew up and became an author and wrote a novel based on her life called Celine. Mom is in there, as written. I write in a lot of genres, but if sometimes I write crime thrillers you can see why. *** View the full article

The CrimeReads editors make their picks for the best new fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. Naomi Hirahara, Evergreen (Soho) Hirahara’s Clark and Division was one of the more accomplished crime novels in recent memory, and this year she’s following it up with Evergreen, following Aki Ito and her family as they make the journey from Chicago back to California, where they find the Japanese-American community in distress. Evergreen dives into the shadows of Boyle Heights and Little Tokyo to tell a story about one of the darker chapters of American history. With these books focused on the Japanese-American experience of post-WWII America, Hirahara has found a pivotal subject and brought her immense talents to bear. –DM Catherine Chidgey, Pet (Europa) Damn this book is good. Pet is at once a brilliant coming-of-age thriller and a sharp dissection of racism and misogyny in 1980s New Zealand (apologies, a previous version of this post had the setting as Australia). When a new teacher comes to town, every girl in class is swooning over her glamor and vying to be her favorite, even when the competition for affection tears lifelong friendships apart. Meanwhile, someone’s been stealing things in the classroom. Little things, but they’re greatly missed. And someone will have to take the blame, because for every pet, there’s a scapegoat. –MO Mindy Mejia, To Catch a Storm (Atlantic Monthly Press) In Mejia’s latest (the launch of a new series), an atmospheric physicist with a husband gone missing teams up with an unlikely partner—a self-declared psychic detective. The pair begin a mad dash around Iowa, fighting the elements, fleeing authorities, and wrestling with doubt and skepticism along the way. Mejia brings out the tension perfectly and crafts a thriller that will drive readers barreling forward. –DM Denise Mina, The Second Murderer: A Philip Marlowe Novel (Mulholland) The Second Murderer is the latest in the strange afterlife of one Philip Marlowe, and it represents a return to form for the series, the most interesting iteration since Lawrence Osborne took a crack at it with Only to Sleep. Mina has obviously made a close study of Chandler’s particular brand of poetics, while still bringing her own enviable style to the story, which traverses high and low Los Angeles of the period. Mina also brings a critical eye to Marlowe in the best sense possible: understanding him in his core. His weaknesses are on display, but so is the deep strain of romanticism underpinning this seemingly immortal literary character. –DM Christine Mangan, The Continental Affair (Flatiron) Mangan has quickly made a name for herself as a purveyor of international mystery with a dash of glamor. Sure enough, The Continental Affair brings us onto a train from Belgrade to Istanbul and into a story that will hop from one lushly recreated locale to the next. A woman on that train is holding a good sum of money; a man on the same train has been sent to collect it. Their stories will take readers down a gauntlet of rich settings and haunting back stories. –DM Jesse Q. Sutanto, I’m Not Done With You Yet (Berkley) Man, does Jesse Q. Sutano know how to plot a novel! By God. You know when novels start out by showing how their protagonists have it all: great career, attractive and successful spouses, beautiful homes? This starts out with the complete opposite premise! Jane’s books don’t really sell, she’s got a bland marriage, and she’s stuck paying a mortgage for a house she barely likes. She misses Thalia, a friend from her past; her best friend, her soulmate, whom she hasn’t seen since the horrible, bloody night one decade earlier. Now, though, Thalia has written a book–a book that seems like it could be about that fateful moment, a book that is poised to rocket to #1. And so Jane heads to the book launch, to see her old friend again. Because she’s not done with Thalia. And Thalia, clearly, is not done with her. I told you! What a premise! –OR 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 David Joy, Those We Thought We Know (Putnam) Joy is back this year with a new novel about a small mountain town in North Carolina and a pair of crimes that resonate through the community. The story follows an artist from Atlanta looking to explore her family roots and the investigation into a presumed vagrant who turns out to be a Klansman on a mission. Joy weaves the stories together and comes out the other side with a richly-layered vision of a small town living through the broader crises of a divided nation increasingly enamored with violence. –DM Stephen Kearse, Liquid Snakes (Soft Skull) This book has the best tagline: “What if toxic pollutants traveled up the socioeconomic ladder rather than down it?” Kearse weaves together two main stories: a Black biochemist-turned-coffee-shop-owner in mourning for his stillborn daughter, dead because of toxic chemicals leaking into Black neighborhoods, and crafting a toxic revenge plan, and two Black epidemiologists investigating the mysterious death of a high school girl. Liquid Snakes is a compelling dystopian novel that rewards careful reading and uses the structure of a criminal investigation to channel righteous anger and explore weighty questions. –MO 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

Sometimes secret codes can be the poignant echoes of languages that have been suppressed by conquering powers. There are words and phrases and cadences that have been smothered by oppressors and, as such, can be used by their original speakers in the spirit of defiance. This was the case for the languages spoken by the many tribes of the Native Americans in the early years of the twentieth century, whose lives and cultures had been decimated by the swarming colonialists taking over the whole of North America. The new rulers of the west decreed that the children of Native Americans should be turned away from the old tongues. They were enrolled in boarding schools far from their own homes to be educated out of old family ways. Yet somehow the languages survived. And out of this cruelly implacable conquest came a rather beautiful cryptography development in the Second World War. Languages such as Navajo and Comanche were suddenly called into fresh life during the war years when they were needed to communicate secrets. These were tongues that the Japanese would not have the first idea about. The languages were used in substitution ciphers, one word standing for a particular letter. And in faster moving theatres of war, the languages would be spoken as they were when they were formed – a swift and brilliant means of conveying messages and intelligence. Sometimes the poetry of these crushed languages even found fresh flowering. The men who became the ‘code talkers’ found themselves at the heart of the conflict and their contribution was invaluable. The idea had been around since the Great War. And indeed, in the inter-war years, as the Nazis ascended to power in Germany, they too took an interest in the possibility that the languages of the Native Americans offered (there is a suggestion that Goebbels considered these peoples ‘Aryan’). A few German linguists were assigned the task of immersing themselves in Comanche, both to get a feel for it and also to see what code possibilities presented themselves. Some, posing as graduate students, came specifically to the States to try to discreetly find ways of studying it. Yet with bitter irony, it turned out that there was little written material for them to draw from. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century erasure of these native languages was so thorough that there was no literature to be found on them. The Comanche people had, among themselves, managed to keep the traditions and the language alive, but there was little for the outside world to see. A further bitter irony was that the American government had good reason to be grateful that these and other native tongues had not been so thoroughly exterminated as intended. And fortunately, some of the young Native Americans who had been through those obligatory government boarding schools to turn them away from their old traditions were perfectly enthusiastic about throwing their skills into the conflict that was coming. Some of the traditions that the US authorities had sought to stamp out were warrior rites of passage. The young Comanches and other Native Americans had never forgotten them and here was an opportunity to offer their courage on their own terms, with skills that only they possessed. When America was finally pulled into the war in December 1941, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the code talkers were swiftly assembled. Indeed, some had been brought together a year earlier. As an example, a company of two dozen Choctaw speakers from Oklahoma had been mustered and they had been put through the rigorous training of signals intelligence. Together they worked to contrive a brand-new code that would employ the Choctaw language, while at the same time keeping the meanings opaque. Because of new modern technology, there were some English terms that had no equivalent in Choctaw – and the result was an outbreak of delightful (and cryptic) similes. For instance, they would make references to ‘sewing machine guns’, and mighty ‘turtles’, all under the direction of ‘Crazy White Man’. Even if enemy interceptors picked up these terms unencoded and managed to translate them from the Choctaw, what could they have made of them in any event? ‘Turtles’ referred to tanks and ‘sewing machine guns’ were in fact machine guns. And Hitler would have been displeased to hear that he was the ‘Crazy White Man’. The brilliance of the code talkers was to reach its height in the summer of 1944, and in the bitter final battles beyond as the Nazis were finally vanquished. Teams of Choctaw speakers, Comanche speakers and Hopi speakers were among the thousands who, with grace and courage, crossed from England to France on 6 June 1944 – D-Day. At the start of the desperate battle for the soul of Europe, the code talkers proved brilliantly agile and dexterous in getting vital intelligence over to units moving across all sorts of terrain. With radios, headphones and field transmitters, these signals operatives were on those deadly beaches as the landing parties were attacked, moving through countryside infested with a still venomous enemy, and as they spread out through France, Luxembourg and Belgium, their exquisite languages formed an indispensable web of unbreakable communication. The hazards all these men faced were akin to those that the agents of the Special Operations Executive were also challenged with. There were gun battles, mortar attacks and the constant threat of injure, capture or death. Even so, through all of this, the code talkers provided incredibly fast, on-the-ground intelligence. The commanding officers in several platoons were profoundly impressed with their lateral-thinking recruits. As with all matters cryptanalytical, the tragedy of the story of the code talkers is that the brilliant work they did, and the courageous feats they pulled off, had to remain a secret for many years afterwards. Who knew if such secret codes might be needed again? Therefore many of the code talkers had to wait a great many years before they got the full public recognition and the praise that they deserved. There were post-war instances where Comanche men, now demobilised and back in the US, took part in traditional celebration dances where the cloud of war could be ceremonially dispelled from their heads. Happily, their story could finally be told and even now there are branches of the US military that periodically honour this brave fleet of code-carriers. After all the bitter years of violence and suppression in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Native Americans were harried and dispossessed, this at least is a small recognition of the richness of the culture that the United States had once sought to wipe from the land. ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Hidden History of Code Breaking: The Secret World of Cyphers, Uncrackable Codes, and Elusive Encryptions by Sinclair McKay. Published by Pegasus Books, August 2023. View the full article